The Bamboo Stalk

1

1My name is José. In the Philippines it’s pronounced the English way, with an h sound at the start. In Arabic, rather like in Spanish, it begins with a kh sound. In Portuguese, though it’s written the same way, it opens with a j, as in Joseph. All these versions are completely different from my name here in Kuwait, where I’m known as Isa.

How did that come about? I didn’t chose my name so I wouldn’t know. All I know is that the whole world has agreed to disagree about it.

When I was growing up in the Philippines, my mother didn’t want to call me by the name my father chose when I was born. Although it’s the Arabic equivalent of Jesus and she’s a Christian, it’s still an Arabic name and isa is the Filipino word for the number one. I suppose it would sound funny if people called me a number instead of a name.

My mother called me José after the Philippine national hero José Rizal, who was a doctor and writer in the nineteenth century. Without Rizal the people wouldn’t have risen up to throw out the Spanish occupiers, but the uprising had to wait till after he was executed.

José or Isa, whatever. There’s no great need to talk about my problem with names or how I acquired them, because my problem isn’t really with names but with what lies behind them.

When I was growing up in the Philippines, the neighbours and others who knew me didn’t call me by either of my real names. They had never heard of a country called Kuwait, so they just called me ‘the Arab’. In fact I don’t look anything like an Arab, except that my moustache and beard do grow fast. The image common in the Philippines is that Arabs are hairy, and cruel as well, and the stereotype usually includes a beard of some shape or length.

In Kuwait, on the other hand, the first thing I lost was my nickname ‘the Arab’, along with my other names and titles, though I later acquired a new nickname: ‘the Filipino’.

If only I could have been ‘the Filipino’ in the Philippines, or ‘the Arab’ in Kuwait! If only the word ‘if’ could change things, or if . . . but there’s no need to go into that now.

I wasn’t the only person in the Philippines born to a Kuwaiti father. Plenty of Filipina women have had children by Kuwaiti men, or other Gulf men, and even other Arabs. The women worked as maids in houses in the Arab world or messed around with tourists from Arab countries who came seeking pleasure at a price that only someone in dire need would accept. Some people engage in vice to satisfy their natural urges; others, due to poverty, engage in vice to fill their stomachs. In many cases the outcome is fatherless children.

Many young women in the Philippines are treated like paper handkerchiefs. Strange men blow their noses on them, throw them on the ground and walk away. Those handkerchiefs then give rise to creatures whose fathers are unknown. Sometimes we can tell who the fathers are by the appearance of their children, and some of the children have no qualms about admitting they don’t know who their fathers are. But I had something that set me apart from those whose fathers were unknown: my father had promised my mother that he would take me back to where I was meant to be, to the country that had produced him and to which he belonged, so that I too could belong, and live as all those who shared his nationality lived, in comfort and peace for the rest of my days.