Finding sacrality in the city

Responding to Pagpapa(-)alam: To Wish You Well, So You Know by Cecilia Lim

Responding to Pagpapa(-)alam: To Wish You Well, So You Know, 2022 (Film still)

The opening scene of Cecilia Lim’s audiovisual poem, Pagpapa(-)alam: To Wish You Well, So You Know shows a care worker helping their elderly patient walk down a street. It is an image that feels hopeful; the future reflected in the present. Tenderly shot in Queens, New York, and captioned in three languages, Tagalog, Spanish and Bangla, the three and a half minutes that follow juxtaposes images of women from these communities cooking, caring and praying for each other. My favourite description of this sacred place is ‘‘where plants and human migrants practise reciprocal relation and women and femme survivors care for elder Ammi and Aunty, in everyday ceremony of practical reverence’’. In the film, the words are layered over images of women picking up litter, care workers, a food worker serving tamales, and an older woman praying with rosary beads in the park. I was struck by the words, ‘‘everyday ceremony of practical reverence’’, a reminder that faith is not shaped by theory, books or religious leaders, but by the love we carry forward for ourselves and others.

When I was growing up in Wales, practising Hinduism in my family and community was fixed on rituals, temple visits and a sense that you had to have a strong loyalty to your religious community. As a child and young adult, I was caught in the conflict between the religion I knew and the values and beliefs I was beginning to form, that meant I could no longer show up authentically in this religious space. Often, I couldn’t articulate what was wrong, but I knew deep down that a religion and a religious community should be encouraging feminism, anti-capitalism and building community beyond religious affiliations. And so, I had to rely on the love I had for myself to find a way to practise Hinduism that felt right to me and aligned with my values.

When I watched Pagpapa(-)alam: To Wish You Well, So You Know, I was reminded of this: that if you ascribe to a set of values, then you must practise them, otherwise you are just preaching theories. In the film, love and faith are not superficial, they are not built by religious affiliations or selfish favours, but by the depth of how we care for others so they can have dignified lives. For me, these women are the torch bearers of how we should practise faith. They show us that faith is something that helps us build our own capacity to care for others, particularly when they are older. Our elders then become our ancestors, and in turn watch over and care for us. Lim reminds us of this in the line, ‘‘whatever we have been given, is supposed to be given away again’. In this life cycle, love is received and given and not taken for granted.

In Pagpapa(-)alam: To Wish You Well, So You Know, this reciprocal relationship is not only between humans, but humans and nature, too. Although, these days, ‘nature’ has become synonymous for places where non-humans reside, and the city is seen to have little ecological values, Lim is able to perfectly bridge these binaries and it’s refreshing to watch.

The country is often seen as a place where new age spiritualists go, following in the footsteps of prophets and revolutionaries from both Eastern and Abrahamic traditions. The city is the irreconcilable destination. It’s a place a person goes to lose themselves, not find. However, it’s often forgotten that these prophets spent the majority of their time in cities, caring for others and showing others how to do the same, building community. Eco-fascism centres around the belief that humans are the cause of ecological disasters and as such should maintain a lifestyle that is strictly separate from non-human species. It has drawn the countryside and the city into these beliefs, and in European countries, white supremacists will blame ecological problems on immigration, cultures that eat meat and ‘overpopulation’. These strict and violent binaries mean the city – inhabited by working class people and immigrants – is not seen to hold any ecological value or benefit to the environment, but the countryside does (of course, here we’re talking about rural spaces not inhabited by working class people). In these images, the countryside is an ‘untouched’ space, where non-human life is seen to thrive because it is not interacted upon by humans.

But Lim portrays the city as the sacred place it is for so many in her community, a place where people support ‘‘sacred conversation to bridge, repair and restore kapwa, interconnection – a shared lifeforce between all’’.

These words stir the sound of trumpets. There is a sense of euphoria. But where we may have expected a transition to a more rural landscape, instead we continue through the city. It’s bursting with human and non-human life; people dancing and exercising, bees pollinating, mushrooms growing on trees and my favourite, a wild field outside of a tennis court. These images are joined together by the sounds of drums, images of workers protesting and signs that read ‘‘women workers should be paid our labour’s worth’’ and ‘‘remember and rise’’, the latter written in several different languages representing the different communities who live in Queens. The city thrives because human and non-human species are interconnected and practise a relationship where they benefit from each other’s existence and presence. We are reminded that love shapes how we build our communities and cities, so that everyone is able to live a dignified life: bees are able to pollinate, humans are paid fairly and cared for when they are no longer able to work.

And after the credits ended, and I was no longer in Queens, I could only think of the Cornel West quote: ‘‘Justice is what love looks like in public’’.