i’ve been writing a ninoy book for a year now. working title: The life and the death of Ninoy Aquino / A timeline 1932 -1983.
i only meant to come up with a simpler shorter version of EDSA Uno (2013) upon the request of high school teachers. maybe four slim volumes, one per day, that students could pass around. and a first volume, of course, to quickly introduce the main players—marcos and imelda, ninoy and cory, enrile and ramos—setting the stage for february 1986 and People Power.
it was easy enough coming up with quick factual timelines of ferdinand’s and imelda’s lives, the milestones pre-EDSA being well-documented and pretty much public knowledge, never mind the marcos revisionism. the opposite is true, however, of ninoy’s life.
except for the broad strokes—major milestones marking the road to martyrdom at age 50—much of ninoy’s narrative has yet to be told from beginning to end in one go, particularly where it clarifies his radical relations with the left that had marcos tagging him a communist sympathizer; where it delves into the pain of imprisonment and the military trial that convicted him to death; and where it tells of ninoy’s last three years, what he was up to in America, and why he decided to come home when he did.
Like Marcos, the 50-year-old Aquino was a complex, contradictory figure who was in flesh-and-blood quite different from the devotee of Gandhian non-violence into which some sectors of the Philippine opposition are now converting him for their own political ends. But of one thing there is no dispute: Aquino was a profoundly courageous man. It was this streak of stubborn courage that earned him a death sentence in 1977, after five years of imprisonment had failed to extract from him a pledge of allegiance to Marcos. And it was this courage, wedded to a driving ambition and a deep concern for the strategic interests of his class, that propelled Aquino toward his appointment with history that dog-day afternoon of 21 August. ~ Walden Bello (1984)
going on four decades later, ninoy is being dismissed as just another ambitious politician who came home from exile and died on the tarmac, and so he became a hero, because he died on the tarmac. and what about daw his non-record as a senator—twice elected and not a single law attributed to him. and who daw cares about EDSA now, now that the marcoses are back anyway, and the color yellow has lost its glow, no thanks to the color-blind who choose to see red instead.
meanwhile a young academic has played up ninoy’s role in the birthing of the CPP/NPA brand (as though ka dante and joma would not have met but for ninoy); he has also expressed serious doubt in ninoy’s denial that he was ever a communist because daw ninoy did not live to define his terms.
thing is, ninoy did, define his terms, in Testament from a Prison Cell (1984) and it’s surprising that the young scholar seemed to not know of this primary source. well, maybe it’s cory’s fault. post-EDSA, ninoy’s political views were never spoken about, much less discussed, or ever referred to for guidance. i suppose because cory had her hands full fending off rightist pretenders to the throne; better to play it by ear than to invoke ninoy, because then they’d have pounced and screamed “communist!” too.
in fact ninoy was no communist, no anti-imperialist, for sure. but he admitted to being a keen student of theoretical marxism, following every twist and turn of local communists, reading practically all the published works of local reds, and interviewing communist intellectuals for first-hand information every chance he got. in fact, he was a christian social democrat who sought to “harmonize political freedom with social and economic equality, taking the best of the primary conflicting systems—communism and capitalism.” [Testament from a Prison Cell 30-31]
and so a book on ninoy muna, for the record. nothing quick or sketchy, rather more detailed than usual, in a timeline format that is reader-friendly and easy to add to, delete from, or re-arrange for fine-tuning.
it starts with a quick run through grandfather servillano’s and father benigno’s stories, because patterns repeat. whenever possible, i let ninoy tell his own story while accommodating too the voices of family and friends, critics and enemies, and local and global media through the years.
sources are cited religiously in tracking his climb and claim to national consciousness as well as his politics and worldview as it evolved from magsaysay to marcos times and from imprisonment in fort bonifacio to exile in america, until he decided it was time to go back home, face death in manila, than be run over, accidentally or not, by a boston taxicab.
happy ninoy aquino day!