An Avatar in the Real World 152.0

Cameron’s fantasy and Ben Okri’s reality

James Cameron’s film treatment of Avatar is a visual delight!

Yet the plot itself is as old as man – one nation uses superior technology to attempt economic expansion by conquest and the other is saved by a parachuting messiah – for this movie, a cryonics-delivered American, ex-marine.

The war technology could well be the Hittite chariots against nomad infantry, the drafted commoner musketmen versus Saigo Takamori’s samurais swords, or the German Panzer tanks against Polish mounted cavalry. The concept of Gaia as a living, mother earth has been around for some time, too!

More subtle, in its effects, was Col. Miles Quaritch’s tactic to bomb the Tree of Souls to create a huge hole in the Na’vi’s (and Gaia’s) DNA. And Jake Sully’s response to use the legend of the red Leonopteryx to unite the locals against the colonizers.

The movie ended with the good winning over the evil corporate colonizers.

The reality, as Ben Okri plaintively paints in his poem Lament of the Images, is more realistically the contrary. The protagonist with stronger firepower wins!

The poem is one of my favorites and is the first in his book, An African Elegy. Okri was born in Nigeria and won the 1991 Booker Prize for his book, The Famished Road.

Like him, I do not condemn the good things that come with modernity.

What he does condemn in the parts I quote below, is the violence that purposely destroyed the images – masks, painted bones, and molten kings. The images that were so important for the people to connect among themselves.

… they burned what
They could not
Understand.

… They burned them in alien piety.

The loss of the images destroyed the means for social cohesion and the ability of the community to work together. It is apparent that Okri blames the subsequent African failed states to those who burned the images.

The land
Has almost
Forgotten
To chant its ancient songs
Ceased to reconnect
The land of spirits.

The violence can be very bloody like in most of Africa or less so as in the Philippines (with the exception of Balangiga for which, to give the Americans credit, Gen. Jack ‘Howling’ Smith was court-martialed). I do not begrudge the Spanish our Christian religion or the Americans the English language and a government based on checks-and-balances. The more insidious effect of colonization was the adulteration of a cultural core so necessary for a people to work together for their own benefit.

If Col. Quaritch had succeeded to bomb the Tree of Souls, he would have more than instilled fear which his rather simple-minded character was just focused on. He would have also destroyed most of that which bonds the Na’vi’s together.

Ben Okri ends the Lament of the Images on a hopeful note.

The makers of Images
Dwell with us still
We must listen
To their speech
Re-learn their
Songs
Recharge their psychic
Interspaces
Of our dying
Age
Or live dumb
And blind
Devoid of old
Song
Divorced from
The great dreams
Of the magic and fearful
Universe.

There is no need to change the good that we already have. But there is a need to actively find the Filipino soul.

I am sure it is not violent, corrupt and materialistic as we see in the news every day.

It is able to cooperate as needed as the zanjera for irrigation in Ilocos Norte shows and the communities’ response to various calamities.

It is innovative as our ability to meld modern mobile phone technology with microfinance as Ayala and PLDT are doing and to build a leading industry like carrageenan, ship manning and medical care (as written elsewhere in SYNTHESiST).

It is intelligent and connected to the world as my next post on Dr. Khryss Cristobal and his success in medical education at the Ateneo de Zamboanga School of Medicine. From1998, 90% of the graduates passed the board exams and 90% of the doctors have stayed in the community; an innovation others are eager to learn from.

If that soul is gathered together and strengthened – maybe by a white messiah like Jake Sully using a red Leonopteryx myth (don’t be dense, that’s tongue-in-cheek) – and is able, on a day to day basis rather than in spurts of people’s power, to work steadily and in a maagap way for a common purpose. Then we are able to move forward and progress collectively as indicated by our individual talents.

Then Ben Okri’s Lament for all of us has meaning. Then Avatar can also mean something beyond the sophistication of its glorious presentation and technology.