Narrative of the Pier

Introduction

• As the words trace its way on paper,

• And as the narrative of the Pier begins,

• I begin to see and understand them…

• For we share the same story.

Our development story always begin with the lines:

• Since we are poor, we are in dire need of mechanisms and support systems to uplift our status and go towards the direction of progress.

• But who sets the premise for our story of development?

• Who has shaped and formed our development paradigm?

• Is this shaped development working for the Girls of Matnog?

• Is this development shape working for us?

I Speak Of The Familiar Narrative

The Philippines as a postcolonial nation who have already established its independence for more than fifty years still “live within the legacy and aftermath of postcolonialism” (McEwan, 2009). Admittedly, much of our ways of development have been adopted from our colonizers. As we continually celebrate our independence, in the attempt to move away from the familiar ways of progress and development that have been shaped for us, we only find ourselves subjected to the original sin that is responsible for the severing of connections: the “copy” (Schwarz, 1992; Szeman & Kaposy, 2011). We re-construct our development but revisions of this so-called development life resemble how the colonizers have created their own development. As we “copy” their development, we elicit more negative effects in the attempt to template ourselves to that of the colonized nation. And, we see our nation’s demise because this copied development life effect “social fissure between our culture that is unrelated to [our] surroundings and production that does not spring from the depths of our life” (Schwarz, 1992; Cultural Theory). Moving towards the direction of rampant urbanization, that which is a prevailing vision of the Philippines, we then become copyright infringers of urban development and imitate what is theirs, (Western thought and knowledge on development), when theirs is never our story, our narrative and discourse of development. In this imitation of such development agenda carries within it a culture of poverty that becomes more severe and varied as our spaces change and people change. The tendency to produce uneven development becomes more pronounced as coping becomes more difficult for other groups to partake of development that is presented in the urban project.