Maria Evita R. Igot

3LIT

12 May 2015

Alienation

“He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.”

(F. Scott Fitzgerald). Beginning the early 1970s the Philippine government embarked on

labor export as a development strategy to deal with its debt crisis, largely a consequence

of structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Labor export has since become a major feature of globalization in the Philippines. This

article argues that Philippine labor export in the context of globalization creates sites of

and resistance to alienation. It examines the different forms of alienation that Filipino

migrant domestic workers — who comprise the bulk of Philippine export labor —

experience, drawing on qualitative/ethnographic data from fieldwork conducted in Hong

Kong, Taiwan, Vancouver, Rome, and Chicago. Viewing alienation as adialectic, the

article examines various forms of alienation—familial alienation, commodification of

migrant/export labor, political and cultural alienation — and discusses the different ways

that migrant domestic workers deal with them. Situating its analysis within the

interlocking aspects of experience-context-resistance, the article shows how these forms

of alienation are structurally/contextually produced and contested, with careful sensitivity

to the complexity in tackling the root causes of alienation in the context of neoliberal

globalization (Ligaya Lindio-McGovern).

Charlie Veric’s “UNHAPPIER” depicts how some of the Overseas Filipino

workers struggles with when they work over a foreign country, how one of them feels the

emptiness after all the hours of work. When they are left alone missing their home

country. How one feels lost in a big place where everywhere you look seems so

unfamiliar. How each day passes by one wish that it would the day when they’ll get to go

home to their families here in the Philippines. Wherein, they don’t have to live with

people that they don’t feel at home with. With “unhappier” you can almost feel the

sadness and wanting to escape one’s situation. Alienation is the state of being alienated,

withdrawn, or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection

(Dictionary).

Through the course of discussing a number of European Literary selection the

theme present in Veric’s poem is alienation, which has the same theme of Franz Kafka’s

“The Metamorphosis”. In the Philippine context, Charlie Veric’s “Unhappier shows the

veracity on how it is to be an OFW. The struggles, loneliness one goes through to be able

to support their family. That feeling of unhappiness isolates or alienates you from

everyone else. Its moves you far away with others. It is like being in a room full with

people but feeling you are some place else. It is like Christmas season but you feel like it

is all souls day. Alienation could also be in a form of feelings. How everyone else around

you feels the same but not you. It sets you apart from everyone else.

Unhappier also displays the product of unhappiness, “about her patients

committing suicide one after the other from Thanksgiving to New Year;” (Histories).

Great depression caused by insurmountable state of being unhappy with your current

state can cause that person to end his/her life. Since we, Filipinos practice close family

ties, its easier for us to be unhappy, even to the thought of us leaving our loved ones in

our homeland. “people dying in the darkest hours”(Histories), loneliness creeps in during

the night, when all is there is silence and all you have is that longing feeling to be with

you family all at once. Or the violence an OFW experiences from their employers that

makes them feel like wild animals in a forest that needed to be tamed. As they are

sexually, emotionally, physically abuse beyond imagination in the likes of Flor

Contemplation, who was framed for murder by her employer for killing another Filipina

maid. Alienation and isolation, brutal, racist treatment and other dehumanized conditions

that makes them feel unhappy and miserable enough to sometimes commit suicide just to

be able to escape the reality that they are in. One may only wish that one might not have

to go through all these to be able to provide decent living for their families and one can

only hope for fair justice. We live in a cruel world wherein humanity seems to be so

degraded.

Works Cited

Ligaya Lindio-McGovern. tandfonline. n.d. 08 May 2015.

<http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14672710410001676043?journalCode=rcr

a20>.

Dictionary.n.d. 08 May2015. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/alienation>.

San Juan.Ej.n.d. 08 May 2015. <https://philcsc.wordpress.com/page/26/>.

Goodreads. goodreads. n.d. 08 May 2015.

<https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/alienation>.