With all its allusions to unrequited revolutions, bolos and tattered flags, or death by diaspora, we are still at a loss for words in finding its true meaning.
Love of country perhaps begins with out sense of place.
It reaches far beyond the coffeetable images of our town feistas, the text messages of our digital journal, the textbook definitions of nationalism, and even way beyond the borders of this lonely planet called nostalgia.
It is easy to get carried away by national symbols like flags, anthems, monuments and shrines as literal expressions of love of country.
But is it red, white and true?
Not to worry, fellow travelers, the muse is with us.
In the same romantic way that love goes beyond mere symbols of affection, so does love of country teach us to remember the meaning behind the symbols.
Through the celebration of fiestas, the understanding of our past, the return to our scenic roots, we express love of country, recreating, reliving, reaffirming memories of home.
To know what love of country is, and how we can embody it, we must take this long journey within.
And going within is a cartography of desire, and desire is a fruit of love, and by extension, love of country.
What is within all of us, within our collective consciousness, must be mapped out, because after all, it is primarily a country. It’s consequently, our selves we are conquering.
Love of country is, to borrow from the expat critic Caroline Hau, “a necessary fiction,” a story we need to create in and from our depths.
And this story is the nation itself.
We struggle to love our country. We struggle to define who we are. It is crucial—not to mention heroic—that we write the narrative of the nation.
Our heroes today need not shed blood or tear cedulas to write this nation’s story.
There are certainly many ways to make sense of our love of country, as there are many ways to love our country. And all begin by retracing our way back home.
Our desire to take root in the country, while in a foreign land, emerges from the knowledge and wisdom we have of our heartlands.
Returning home is a testimony to this desire to understand our selves as a people rooted in the land.
It is love of country to keep looking back to our roots. Carlos Bulosan found his great longing for the country he left while searching for America in his heart. In America too, Bienvenido Lumbera, National Artist for Literature, found home by writing that subject called the “Filipino”.
As we rewrite the story of our nation, new heroes—those who represent our collective aspirations and achievements—are born.
Manny Pacquiao is a hero to all of us. The world stops every moment he brings down any one of his foes in the ring. He unifies us in a way that has never been done in history. But after each fight—symbolic of his own love of country—he never fails to come home.
We also have a hero in Charice, the heartbreak kid slowly turning into America’s newest sweetheart. She sings to an international audience but always brings a Filipino soul to each performance.
The Filipino-American Symphony Orchestra, too, will embark on its own heroic journey: that of bringing harmony in the community. It is the very first Filipino symphony orchestra organized in the United States.
Love of country embodies all our ways of seeing, our ways of believing, our ways of locating ourselves in the world.
Our country’s story is in our verses, in the vitality of the tunes of our reed flutes and our kulintangs.
Our story is in the balikbayan coming home. And this return signals what Leonard Casper wrote in his introduction to Bienvenido Santos’ Scent of Apples: “a return of the Philippines to the man, whether or not a return to the Philippines is ever managed.”
To speak of love of country in the contemporary world is to recognize the patriotism embodied by our Filipino expatriates.
The heart is, after all, the cradle of memories, that wherever the Filipino expatriate finds himself or herself, the country remains nestled in the heart.
To love our country is to remember the communities, the families, the hometowns.
To love our country is to understand that through the symbols of our culture—the pasalubong, the kapeng barako, Original Pilipino Music, adobo—we express love for this community, and a longing for all things Filipino, all things that remind us of home.
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