Portrait of the Overseas Filipino as Artist
TOMAS F. CONCEPCION 1933 – 2012
“A New Generation of Heroes” was the title of his maiden speech in the House of Representatives to which he had been appointed as sectoral rep by then President Ramos. After that speech, hardly anyone ever again referred to Filipinos abroad as “OCW’s” – Overseas Contract Workers – but always now as “OFW’s” – accent on Filipino.
And another phrase, the Filipino “Diaspora,” also entered many writers’ everyday vocabulary. Tomas Fernandez Concepcion, the Congressman who uttered them as the representative of overseas Filipinos, passed on quietly end-May 2012, in Tarquinia, Italy at the age of seventy-eight.
The Gardener (R) with Tomas (L) at his villa in Tarquinia
A few years back, on the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo’s masterpiece – the Vatican – as a tribute to his idol, Tomas presented large-scale paintings, prints and bronzes, here in his homeland. He was already well known for one-man and group-exhibits all over Europe and the USA.The year before, this gardener visited his garden and “castle” in Tarquinia, an hour outside modern-day Rome and ogled his art works in via. I had first met the artist in Rome in the late seventies and recruited him to be the Movement for a Free Philippines’ point man in Italy – a job he did so very well all through the eighties till the time he helped install the first Christian Democratic President of the Philippines in 1992.
In exile, the late Sultan Rashid Lucman once took time out to explain to me that Tom Concepcion, the artist and activist, close friend of Italian Prime
Former Prime Minister of Italy Giulio Andreotti receiving the bronze bust gift of sculptor Tomas Concepcion
Minister G. Andreotti, did his clan very proud because Tom was true-blue Maranaw royalty, a direct descendant of Sultan Q’udarat on the mother side. Q’udarat, of course, was the legendary Muslim leader who ruled Maguindanao from 1611 to 1671 – in other words, most of the 17th century – defeating the Spaniards in 1642, concluding a Peace Treaty in 1645, and going back to war against the treaty-breaking Spaniards from 1656 onwards.
Tom left for the U.S. early, at age 17, and majored in Painting and Theater Design at the San Francisco State College. This background enabled him to join the Warwick Theaters in New England as their Set Designer, from where he later moved on to neighboring Montreal Canada to further his studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. From there he traveled to Europe to tour museums, finally settling in Italy where he setup a thriving studio. As Philippine artist in Roma, like Juan Luna a century earlier, he was recognized by the high and the mighty, the bold and the beautiful and in the process discovered his Philippine-ness and a deep political sense.
Tom went through the agony and the ecstasy of being both artist and activist. The Philippine Diaspora made him run right smack into the old Latin concept of exilium or exile, which denoted, he later told the Philippine Congress, “prolonged absence from one’s country imposed by authority or other circumstances as a punitive measure. Among early peoples it was a means of punishment: to be deprived of the comfort and protection of one’s group, family, tribe or nation. The Greeks, and later the Romans, practiced it to punish either political or criminal offenses and in lieu of the death penalty, correctly believing that exile is a kind of death. The Anglo-Saxons did the same thing and produced what we now call Australia,” Tom would say with an impish smile.
Taking his oath of office; with former Speaker Jose De Venecia swearing him in as the first Sectoral Representative for Overseas Workers
Describing his constituency in that first privileged speech twenty-one years ago, Tom said: “Many of you who have traveled a lot are not unfamiliar with them and the social costs they bear of working abroad: loneliness, separation from families, physical and psychological abuse by some employers, culture shocks from foreign societies, legal shocks from foreign governments, lack of respect and attention from their own government officials, and remarks of contempt or condescension from more wealthy Filipino tourists who tend to look down on them as desperate wage-earners.”
For, indeed, “many of the Filipinos you meet at the Statue Square in Hong Kong were yesterday’s highly respected elementary school teachers in your towns but who now must earn their keep cleaning the toilets of middle-class Hong Kong residents whose forebears a few generations back were amahs of the grandparents of those same Filipinas.”
OFW Sectoral Rep. Tomas F. Concepcion at his office at the House of Representatives -9th Congress
Tom said “some of you may correctly point out that there is nothing new in this. From the time of the Galleon Trade across the Pacific more than 300 years ago, Filipinos had already started moving outward…the great railway infrastructure which finally united the American states in a physical sense was established in great part by overseas Filipino workers …the agro-industrial development of Guam, Hawaii and California was accomplished on the bent backs of Filipino migrant workers. Those we now revere as national heroes for their leadership of the propaganda movement that made the Filipino nation were themselves exiles and overseas Filipino workers in Madrid, and all over Europe. And they were great achievers in their various professions, such as Juan Luna whose fame as artist was unquestionable at that time.”
Every year, he told the House of Representatives then, “more than half a million of our countrymen become part of the Diaspora. The seven seas of Planet Earth throb with ships manned by some 300,000 Filipino merchant marines. And the demand for these maritime workers keeps increasing by leaps and bounds. One does not exaggerate, Mr. Speaker, in saying that in these times all accidents and disasters of either natural or human causes anywhere are most likely to affect some individuals of Filipino nationality – because, finally, Filipinos have now become familiar faces all over the earth.”
“Mr. Speaker,” the OFW Congressman said, “I submit it would not be wrong if anyone calls our present-day OFW’s ‘exiles’ – voluntary economic exiles. ‘Voluntary’, because no vested authority imposed their prolonged absence from home as a punitive measure. ‘Economic exiles’, nonetheless, because they were, for the most part, forced outward by economic circumstances and structures which would have meant an economic death for their families and loved ones had they not decided to struggle for survival and a better economic life.”
Tom pursued these basic concepts, borrowing in great part from Joseph Campbell of Columbia University: “And that is why we can also speak of a new heroic generation composed of these OFW’s. Throughout human history and mythology, the standard path of the hero follows the pattern of three distinguishable moments: the moment of separation or severance from his accustomed world; the moment of penetration to some source of power; and thirdly, the moment of a life-enhancing return. Whether presented in the vast images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks and the Romans, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the hero’s path follows this pattern – Aeneas to Rome, Ulysses to the Greeks, Moses to the Jews, or universal heroes like Gautama Buddha, Jesus the Christ, and Mohammad the Prophet who bring a message to the entire world. Or you have the OFW who leaves his home, goes out to the unknown regions of the world, and returns to enhance the life of his family and folk – to return with new knowledge, broader outlook, and greater awareness of self-identity and more strongly independent spirit of development.”
Photo by Brian Mobbs
Tom the activist had always been all artist and poet but he also showed profound economic sense, as when he said then that “so much talk about foreign loans and foreign investments translates into reality only with tremendous difficulties…we should rather tap domestic savings to finance investment growth with the necessary consequence of economic growth. The money holdings of OFW’s can constitute the most significant chunk of our gross national savings, IF, and only if we could, as we must, find effective ways to channel these savings from savers to investors.” And, Tom, we wonder, is this about to happen now? Where you have decided to go to now may give you more power to rain more blessings on this country you loved so much, so dearly, wherever you were.
FINIS
-Charles Avila – The Gardener
The Gardener’s Tales