No Closure Yet Nor Goodbye To All That

By Elmer Ordonez

The disaster/tragedy in Mindanao struck about two weeks after Rony V. Diaz and other writers sounded the alarums about the apocalyptic effects of climate change at the Philippine PEN national conference early this month.

Many factors contributed to the rampaging floods that engulfed whole communities in Cagayan de Oro, Iligan City, and other parts of Mindanao along Typhoon Sendong’s path– something unheard of in the past. Among these factors are the results of global warming such as unseasonable or unpredictable weather conditions. Man-made factors such as such as burning of fossil fuels increasing carbon emissions that get to the atmosphere, deforestation as a result of logging and mining (legal or illegal) — depletion of natural resources that have disturbed the ecological balance. The wiping out of communities built on sandbars on mouths of rivers, riverbanks, under bridges reflect lack of government control of housing sites either due to corruption or political expediency (informal settlers can vote). Deficient warning systems also contributed in large measure to many dead, injured, and missing. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources has urged local governments to follow the geo-hazard map in urban planning. They also need to enforce the total log ban

We like to say that Typhoon Sendong disaster is a wake-up call. Didn’t we say this after Typhoon Ondong hit Marikina Valley/Greater Manila in 2009. There were other wake-up calls like the Bataan and Ormoc landslides and floods years ago. As Pete Seeger would sing, “When will we ever learn?”

Other notable events of 2011:

1) The case of electoral sabotage against the former President and her election commissioner. This should lead to prosecutions of more corrupt poll and military officers involved in the 2004 and 2007 elections as brought out in congressional investigations.

2) The impeachment of a chief justice whose “midnight appointment” by the former president he is close to has left a bad taste in the mouth of the incoming president who decided to take his oath of office with an associate justice instead. His sentiments for impeachment are shared by more than two thirds in the House of Representatives including militant party-list members.

3) The charging of retired general Jovito Palparan (lionized by the GMA Palace but called “berdugo” by many) and several other army officers for the kidnapping of two U.P. female student activists in 2006. Palparan was stopped by immigration in Clark International Airport as he tried to leave for Singapore, and has since disappeared evading arrest under court warrant. Palparan had left a lurid trail of human rights violations such as summary executions, torture. rape, forced disappearances of activists in the regions where he was assigned as military commander. He is now a fugitive belying his promise that he would not resist arrest. His successful escape would frustrate the hopes of victims of human rights violations for justice and for the end of the culture of impunity among violators under past and present administrations. Reports from the countryside are that the supposedly new “Operation Bayanihan” has spawned fresh human rights violations. Palace claims of “zero political prisoners” are contradicted by detainees like Alan Jazmines and Ericson Acosta (both poets); the latter recently went on hunger strike together with more than 300 political prisoners who were all charged with criminal offenses. Under unrescinded Marcos decrees, it is a standard way of denying the existence of political prisoners by simply having the military or police concoct charges of criminal offenses such as illegal possession of firearms or explosives, robbery, or murder against persons who otherwise are just liable for rebellion or sedition.

It is notable that the electoral sabotage and impeachment cases are basically manifestations of the rifts between ruling elite factions. This is not to deny the gravity and significance of the cases. Historically, rival ruling elites have a way of coming to terms. They may fight tooth and nail in the struggle for power but ultimately they do not annihilate each other. This was true during the time of Osmena, Quezon, Laurel and Roxas. Ninoy Aquino’s assassination need not have happened if Marcos, his frat brod, was not incapacitated at the time.(At least this is what their brods think.) Joseph Estrada, convicted of plunder, was pardoned by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

I still hope that the laudable though belated moves of the President and his Justice Secretary Lelia de Lima in pursuing the cases against GMA, Renato Corona, and Jovito Palparan would result in some reforms in government. We do need some relief before another set of self-serving oligarchs take over in 2016.

 ***

I started the “The Other View” in 2004 in the Sunday Times Magazine, writing on culture, education and the arts, but my column was transferred to the editorial page of the Saturday paper. I continued writing on the original topics but extended my views to include politics and governance.

As intimated in the last several columns, I need to take a break to attend to a deeply personal matter. As circumstances permit I will be writing pieces now and then.

Happy New Year!

Family memory as fine history

By Alfred Yuson

If there’s one book that has impressed me overmuch with its conceptualization and execution, read ambition and fine writing, it’s Revolutionary Routes: Five Stories of Incarceration, Exile, Murder and Betrayal in Tayabas Province, 1891-1980 by Angela Stuart-Santiago.

The exemplary work is based on the memoirs in Spanish of Concepcion Herrera Vda. De Umali, as translated into English by Concepcion Umali Stuart.

That it’s a history book should not intimidate our usual readers, for there are lessons to be learned here: basically how an author can transmute extant material that may have only been originally of interest to family, clan, tribe or province into a nation’s pure gold.

I’d be very disappointed if it doesn’t grab a book award next year for its category, or even when ranged against all other titles produced this past year.

The foreword alone by the eminent Reynaldo C. Ileto attests to its importance:

“Revolutionary Routes is more than a family history across three generations. Author Angela Stuart Santiago has deftly woven together the memoirs, clippings, correspondence and other traces of her family’s past into a micro-history that spans the late 19th century up to the 1950s. While this book is rooted in the specific experiences of a family that lived in Tiaong and its adjoining towns in southwestern Tayabas (now Quezon) province, it also tells us much, from the ground up, about everyday life in the countryside under the shadow of successive imperial and national regimes. This book can also be read as a modern history of the Philippines.”

Indeed, deft has been the handling of material that turns precious only through projection and extension into what it may also or all mean, like poetry. And no, it isn’t simply interpretation or “deconstruction” at work here, but a loving, inspired, and often brilliant retelling that gathers both kinds of force — centripetal and centrifugal — to whip up the fervor of candor, imagination, personal mythos, narrative construct — yes, that very telling tapestry of all things cerebrated and celebrated — often accompanied by a Cheshire cat’s grin.

Fast takes:

“Señor (Rafael) Palma continued to relay to Conchita’s maestras the course that the revolution was taking, such as the attacks and advances in some provinces, towns, and the outskirts of the capital. By then the action was in Cavite where Emilio Aguinaldo was proving to be a knight in shining armor. And Jose Rizal was back in Fort Santiago, accused of treason and complicity in the evolution.”

Follow an excerpt from a young Palma’s recollection, then the author’s interspersed dialogue with this voice, as it does with other voices, such as that of the child Conchita:

“We did not hear the shots but we did wake up when we heard drums and shouting. We ran to the windows and saw a town crier flanked by two soldiers. He was striking a drum hanging from his neck, announcing at the top of his voice: ‘Ngayong umaga babarilin si Dr. Jose Rizal!’ (Dr. Jose Rizal will be executed this morning!) This was repeated every 10 minutes all over the streets of Tondo, probably in all the streets of Manila.”

Forward to the Spanish-American-Filipino contretemps of triangulation, with the home turf of Tayabas as scene, and the author providing a compressed picture show:

“Life was organized so that anytime the war’s wounded, sick, and hungry walked in, there would be food and medical treatment available. Every night, six men came to pound two sacks of palay and six women to air and clean the one cavan of rice produced for consumption the next day. Adjacent to the corral where the carabaos rested at night was another enclosure where farmers stacked the hay and grass for feed and also where the cooks broiled meats. Sometimes, as many as two hundred barbecue sticks with five pieces of meat on each stick would be cooking at one time.”

Conchita is made to “weigh in”:

“Several times we gave refuge and food to our soldiers who with courage and fervor sustained the war against the Americans bent on forcibly taking over the Republic. The Battalion Banahaw had its quarters here, and a company led by Captain Norberto Mayo of Lipa, and two other battalions.”

Why, this is fascinating storytelling, with many voices, of past and present, immersed in conversation, and the reader simply eavesdropping in sustained delight. And what we’ve quoted is only from the third chapter, on “Isidro, the Revolutionary,” which follows “Family Secrets” and “Paula, the Peasant.” Characters are introduced and allowed entry, if peripherally for some, into the dialogue.

The rest of the chapters are titled “Tomas, the Lawyer”; “Crisostomo, the Guerilla”; “Narciso, the Congressman”; and “Family & Country.” Thus do the five stories of incarceration, exile, murder, and betrayal (and then some: the back stories involving romance, gossip, farming rice and coconut, generational torch-passing, etc.) unfold and provoke an ear to be better pressed against memory’s “dear filial roar” of nation-building.

This is how history ought to be shared, or okay, dispensed or taught, in schools and hearths and homes. Not just by applying the now over-trendy “out of the box” mode, but by throwing out the box altogether. And allowing all of the gift items that come prancing through the family door equal, individual entry. And have them dance together in the moveable feast of a ballroom, enclosed or rustic, that spells clan party.

These convergent narratives aren’t just an airing of skeletons in aparadors and tocadors, but an orchestrated jangling of memory as of those nights of street caroling, from house to house, provincial boundaries go hang (as a mobile that could fascinate and bode well for the occupant of a rocking baby’s crib.) And we are all taught how a nation we’ve become, or are becoming, in more ways than one.

The book is published independently, that is, by StuartSantiago Publishing, Mandaluyong City and Pulang Lupa Foundation, Brgy. Lumingon, Tiaong, Quezon. And for the most part, made available through direct purchase. Check out www.revolutionaryroutesbook.com. You’d do well to curl up with this book through cloudy Christmas.

Author, author! Bravo, Angela Stuart-Santiago!

Reflections on Christmas

By Elmer Ordonez

THE season readily evokes thoughts of family, of being together, sharing food on the table, and most important of all love for each other expressed with gifts, hugs and other ways. Yuletide is indeed meant for the family. Hence, the President declares a truce from fighting (though called a “sham” by the NDF) to enable both soldier and rebel to be with family. During the First World War, guns were silenced on Christmas Eve, and in some instances soldiers sang carols answered by those in the opposite trench with their own versions, or they would meet across no man’s land, greet each other and share drink or food. British and German soldiers even played a game of football during the lull in fighting. Would that our brothers on both sides, if the powers that be will it, reach the stage of a permanent ceasefire and peace agreement.

During Yuletide, thoughts turn to family or loved ones. It was thus on Christmas 1943 that we wondered about Father who had not been heard from since he was arrested by the Kempeitai early that year. To escape capture ourselves, the rest of the family hid in Sisa, Sampaloc, in the home of my mother’s sister —anxiously waiting for any news about Father and an older brother with the guerrillas in Laguna. On Christmas Eve, with a simple noche buena, Aunt Pilar mused that she missed “peacetime” celebrations but somehow she felt it, the spirit of Christmas, under enemy occupation in 1943. We prayed for the missing ones and the safety of both families, ours and Aunt Pilar’s family who sheltered us.

In early 1944 we learned somehow that Father was in Muntinlupa, sentenced to 20 years imprisonment by a Japanese military court for “terrorism.” From a dungeon in Fort Santiago where he spent Christmas 1943, he was moved (before Muntinlupa) to Bilibid in Manila where he shared cells with General Vicente Lim, Fr. (later Cardinal) Rufino Santos, and Raul Manglapus who were also involved in underground activity. My brother in Laguna survived and continued soldiering until he was killed in battle in 1953. He was 29. Father was liberated by ROTC guerrillas in February 1945, mustered in the army as major (retaining is guerrilla rank), and after his discharge, he resumed teaching till he passed away in 1963.

This Christmas, with my own family (complete with the arrival of the youngest son from Montreal), we pray for a painless and serene passage of our beloved who has accepted her fate. Brought up as a theosophist by her father, she has remained firm in her Buddhist beliefs.

***

Christmas is for remembering, of stock-taking before the onset of the New Year, and for looking into the future.

Sunday last began the series of reunions of the expanded family (including many balikbayans), this time marking birthdays of three members of the immediate family. After the potluck lunch, photos and albums were passed around for remembering things past. A photo taken in 1969 showing six pretty sisters in their early prime and hair done as of the period, was retaken with all six, now with grey/white hair, still good-looking after 42 years, posing again for posterity. Courtships and weddings were recalled, with much hilarity and laughter.

At this time, I have realized how much I have to put in order. The children, seeing my chaotic library room, decided they would hire a librarian to classify the books. Thus I am reassured that my literary holdings would not be sold by lot to some heritage or antiquarian bookshop. My wife’s formidable library of art books (separately kept in shelves in the large bedroom) and her visual arts collection are not to leave the house under any circumstances. What to do with things I have accumulated over the years is another matter. I also need to move stuff to the UP library archives.

Early on, my wife and I had thought of leaving a last will and testament, and recently, instructions on what to do on the last day.

This Monday morning, my wife walked by herself to the porch outside the bedroom, and sat on an armchair sunning herself. I joined her bringing with me The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She turned the pages to her two favorites, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. She was pensive after rereading their poems, and then commented, smiling, that the poets were obsessed with departure. She knew by heart some of the poems.

Fictionist Greg Brillantes, speaking at the wake years ago of Raven SV Epistola, said in effect that the usual way of expressing departure was to ride into the sunset whereas a religious that he knew said, actually it was riding into the sunrise.

From Elenita and myself, seasons greetings and best wishes to all.

sendong & the president

finally read the looong statement of the president in tagalog, then too the english version, and i’ve been sitting here since, trying to figure out why it doesn’t work for me, why it’s too much and too little at the same time.  i suppose because not all the carefully worded promises and reminders, not the most efficient task force looking into the why’s and who’s and how’s, will better equip us (not soon enough, anyway) in this age of climate change to prevent a sendong or an ondoy from again and again wreaking wanton disaster and death anywhere on these our widely populated but environmentally degraded and deforested islands.

“hearing” the president wondering why illegal logging hasn’t stopped despite his order, why people won’t evacuate despite warnings, why people even build and live in risky areas, why rescuers have to risk their own lives to save people who refused to heed warnings — these do not inspire confidence that the president despite his super-powers is anywhere near to coming up with ways of mitigating the devastating effects of future sendongs.

the 70 percent who approve of his presidency are quick to make excuses for him, of course.  it’s a humongous problem, the roots of which go back to previous presidencies and policies before his time.  he cannot be blamed for the sorry state of the environment, much less of the messed up values that govern our lives.  and, yeah, he should not be criticized for christmas-partying with the psg that provides security for him and his sisters.

and totoo naman, okay lang mag-party ang presidente nuong sunday, if only on saturday, the moment he was informed of the magnitude of the disaster, he had come out on nationwide tv with a simple presidential message, of grief and mourning, assuring us of his concern and exhorting us all to work with government in addressing the needs of the victims.  as it turned out, we didn’t need exhorting to help out, but we did need to see, to know, that our president was with us.