By MARLEN RONQUILLO  

… For journalism that still cherishes the critical role that obituaries play in informing the broader world about those who recently passed away and what their deaths mean, the recent passing of Jose Maria Sison at 83 in the Netherlands would have produced journalism at its best and most exploratory form. The reason is whether you have the political persuasion of retired General Parlade/Lorraine Badoy or that of Luis Jalandoni, it is undeniable that Mr. Sison is one of the most consequential Filipinos of the 20th century. There is no Right-Left debate on this because it is a settled issue.

Jose Maria Sison or Joma presumably must have been inspired by Jose Marti and Fidel Castro. The struggle he led, though, did not have the success of the Cuban version and is currently swimming against the current in a broader world that has lost its appetite for armed revolution as a means of seizing state power.

In some corners, Joma is demonized and cursed, blamed for a long-running communist insurgency that has caused many deaths, much anguish and the nation’s seeming economic paralysis. We still remember the names Mr. Duterte called him, with the accompanying expletives. A national villain like no other Mr. Sison was to the former president.

In some quarters, Joma is hailed as the founding father of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), which has bannered the fight for national liberation since the 1960s.

Even the so-called rejectionists, who left the CPP after a fallout with Mr. Sison over his supposedly ideological rigidity, have ambivalent sentiments about him. They vilify and deify him at the same time, but they in no way have diminished the outsized role that he played in influencing the life of our nation. Note that he was the intellectual father of the longest-running communist insurgency in the world. The old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas was a moribund organization still tied to the apron strings of the dour Soviet Politburo when Joma cut ties, then repudiated the old guards called the Lavaites in 1969 and aligned the new party’s fight with a fresher formulation called MLMTT (Marx-Lenin-Mao Tse Tung) thought. In that year, Mao’s China was still a communist experiment 20 years after its triumphal march to Beijing by a coalition led by peasants who “encircled the city from the countryside.”

The 21st century has been tragic to Mr. Sison. Leftists who rejected his call for ideological purity asked him, some in disrespectful tones, to “read Gramsci instead of Lenin.” From a peak of 25,000 in the 1980s, the NPA supposedly is down to just about 2,000 fighters today. Marxists guerrillas elsewhere have either made peace with their governments or been rendered irrelevant. Former role models, Russia and China, are now dismissed as part of an “arc of authoritarianism,” not true Marxist nations.

But even those negativities cannot downplay the consequential life of Mr. Sison. A man with a sense of history would have merited obituaries that trace his roots as part of a landowning clan in Ilocos Sur, his university days, his poetry, and his decision to turn his back on his class origin to lead a Marxist, Leninist and Maoist revolution.

The obits should critique his two books on Philippine society with the thesis that it was decadent, bankrupt and beyond reform whose salvation lies in armed struggle. With “US imperialism” now more of a shibboleth than the scourge of former colonies like the Philippines, they should ask if the two books still serve their purpose amid new revolutionary conditions.

A second look at the doctrine encircling the city from the countryside deserves to be part of the obituaries.

Meanwhile, the country’s literary figures should appraise Mr. Sison’s poetry in their obits for him

Of course, expansive coverage of his demise will not come. TikTok seems to have canceled what is left of the country’s sense of history. When that dries up, a nation loses interest in the death of a man who mattered, hate him or love him.

I never wanted to write about obituaries this holiday season, but this piece about Jose Maria Sison has to be written. Merry Chtristmas, Pilipinas.

JOSE MARIA SISON

Sometimes, the heart yearns
For mangoes where there are apples,
For orchids where there are tulips,
For warmth, where it is cold,
For mountainous islands,
Where there is flatland.
Far less than the home,
And the flow of kith and kin,
Unfamiliar and now familiar
Things and places trigger
The pain of sundered relations,
Of losses by delays and default.
Direct dialing, fax machines,
Computer discs and video cassettes
And visitors on jumbo jets,
Fail to close the gap
Between rehearsed appearances
And the unrehearsed life at home.
There are colleagues and friends
That make a strange land loveable.
But they have their routines,
Their own lives to live,
Beyond the comprehension
And pertinence of the stranger.
Those who seek to rob the exile
Of home, kith and kin,
Of life, limb and liberty
Are the loudest to mock at him
Who is helplessly at sea,
Uprooted from his soil.
The well-purposed exile continues
To fight for his motherland
Against those who banished him,
The unwelcomed exploiters of his people,
And is certain that he is at home
In his own country and the world.

March 30, 1994