Boracay Island: Postcards from the Past and Present

A verbal montage by Maffi Deparis and Ivery del Campo

An aircraft cuts across steely skies over molten silver that is the sea.

This is no postcard photo. None of these are. There is none of the brilliant blue of the summer sky, and the water a mirror of it, bordered by the blinding white of the sand and the blinds that are the rows of palms. There is none of that transparency, and that blindness, that one finds in postcards.

This is, after all, the monsoon season, never pictured in postcards. The tourist lean season is the industrial peak season, when infrastructure is built/destroyed/repaired/replaced behind curtains of tarpaulin, beneath skies low and heavy with rain. When the beach is draped with mist and screened with mesh to diffuse the onslaught of the wind. When sand flies into your eyes, into your drink, and pricks your skin.

When the floury sand of the postcard beach flows back into the sea, white-capped and stirred by the wind, thickened to consistency not unlike the silver coating of a mirror on its back and its refusal to reflect the sky.

Not postcards. Rather, mercurial images of demolitions and constructions, arrivals and departures, of metal and concrete, as well as of sand, wind, and water in the drama of…