ABSTRACT
Filipino writer Nick Joaquín was notorious for his favorite thesis, which he expounded on in his extensive oeuvre: that the Philippines was borne out of the encounter between the archipelago and the Spanish conquistadors. Just as passionately criticized as it was defended, Joaquín’s stance reflects the complexities attendant on the Philippines’ negotiation of its relationship to its colonial legacies, having been occupied for more than 400 years. This chapter examines Joaquín’s examination of colonial cultural legacies in the Philippines as an unasked-for inheritance that has yet been formative to the nation’s identity in his play, “A Portrait of The Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes” (1950). Joaquin’s simultaneous critique of legacies of domination and recuperation of the Philippines’ cultural inheritance is given form in the titular painting, an ambivalent re-interpretation of the myth of Aeneas by the patriarch of the family, Don Lorenzo, as well as through the conversations surrounding the painting by the various visitors to the family in the course of the play. I argue that through the Don’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino and its evocation through ekphrasis, Joaquín not only gives form to the moral dilemma confronting the Filipino community in their negotiation of their culture but also models a process in which culture is transformed from a site of power, domination, and fragmentation into one of community and exchange.
