Serendipity (St. Scho in the ’60s)

Serendipity was originally published in Daughters True, St. Scho’s centennial offering, which won the National Book Award 2007.

I was five when I entered St. Scho and sixteen when I left for U.P. Diliman. After twelve years of convent schooling and nuns hovering, it was great to be free at last! After all this was in the mid-sixties, when the youth (in America and Europe and colonies like ours) were questioning social convent(ion)s and testing limits, and the U.P. campus was an exciting place to be, inside the classroom, down in the basement cafeteria, out on the steps, and over at the parking lot.

But looking back on high school now, forty years later, I see that the sixties spirit was in St. Scho, too, sneaking past the Benedictine sisters at odd moments and rousing us to moments of mischief that we remember with glee. Like decorating the ladies’ room ceiling with wads of toilet paper (each wad had to be just wet enough and thrown upwards with a certain force and flick of wrist—a creative skill!). And playing pranks on each other behind closed doors – while we changed from gym suits to uniforms after P.E. a kamison might start flying around the room, and the owner would chase it to shrieks and cheers that one day got so loud it brought the nuns running. Another time some of us got caught drinking smuggled Coke, again while dressing behind closed doors, and our PE teacher got so mad she lost it, so to speak, and the nuns had to step in. When we were seniors, despite rules that bangs should not touch the eyebrows and hemlines should touch the floor when kneeling, some bangs got longer and longer, and some skirts shorter and shorter. Until one day someone’s bangs got snipped away and another’s hemline was ripped down, and finally we got the message.

Fortunately or not, such episodes were few and far-between. Mostly we were resigned to our fate, no escape from books and exams, not if we wanted to keep up, and keep moving on to the next level.

***

What I didn’t know then that I know now is how significant a time high school was pala in terms of starting me off as a writer. I didn’t think then that I could really write – I could never come up with a decent plot for a short story, and my best efforts at poetry were pathetic, without rhythm or rhyme. But our class teacher in fourth year, Sister Mary Sylvester Marpa, who was also the high school principal, assigned me the task of writing high school news for the college paper, and there was no saying no, so I learned how to write news; then I tried my hand at a gossip column, and that was fun, and a big hit with the girls. Still, I didn’t take up english or literature or journalism in U.P. I took up psychology instead, thinking I could get into counselling, or go on to medicine and become a psychiatrist. But as it turned out, by the time I was 30 I was writing feature articles and a TV review column for a weekly magazine; by 40 I was also writing for television, stage, documentary video and film; by 50, I was writing political commentary and had published two history books on EDSA – a chronology in English and a critical essay in Filipino.

Sister Sylvester was right, I could write. But I suppose that first I needed those psych courses to give me a scientific handle on things. Also I needed to be exposed to the culture of U.P. which turned me on naturally to the nationalist cause. Next I married a musician who travelled a lot, and it was while I was bringing up our babies and watching too much TV that I finally started writing critiques of local television and showbiz culture for a weekly magazine. As it happened, this led to all kinds of writing gigs, many of them cause-oriented, that took me deep into national concerns (the deplorable state of the environment, the failure of development programs, widespread poverty, the oppression of women, the foreign debt, the diaspora…) and St. Scho receded from my consciousness, a past life that seemed barely relevant in the real world.

Or so I thought. In the late ‘80s I was doing research for a docu script (“Kiss Maria Clara Goodbye”) for the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women when I stumbled on the definitive historical essay on the high status of Filipino women in pre-colonial times. It was written by the national chairperson (1986 – 2004) of the activist women’s alliance GABRIELA, who was also a St. Scho nun, no other than Sister Mary John Mananzan, now Mother Prioress, who taught us religion and history in the sixties.

I was impressed no end by the scholarly work and thrilled by her passionate advocacy of women’s rights. It was like a jolt of electricity reconnecting me to my St. Scho roots and affirming my politics, telling me in no uncertain terms that the nuns, too, had evolved, and that we were moved by the same feminist nationalist cause.

I have since kept track of Mother Mary John through the world wide web, every time exulting in St. Scho’s commitment to academic excellence and social responsibility, and celebrating every inch won in the struggle for social, economic and political salvation in ‘a land where injustice and oppression abide.’

It’s great to be a Scholastican in these interesting times.

Angela Stuart-Santiago
High School Class ’66
April 2006

CODE-NGO, Fake NGO

Opinion Today May 18, 2002

This is to comment on the CODE-NGO / PEACe bonds issue and Today’s bad news (May 7 issue, frontpage) that the “good fortune” of CODE-NGO is “alsopossible for other NGOs.”

The “good fortune” of CODE-NGO is as much about the Camacho connection and the Arroyo government’s debtor mentality (so what else is new) as it is about CODE-NGO and whether it deserves to call itself an NGO in the light of its strikingly profitable relationship with government.

What’s in a name? In this case, plenty. Historically and ideologically, “non-governmental” in NGO means precisely that: not governmental, or distinct / different from government, and, even, critical of government (from Macapagal to Arroyo) for economic policies and development programs that over the decades have not brought the promised prosperity but instead have wrought widespread and worsening poverty along with environmental decay.

NGOs did not just crop up with the Aquino administration, as many columnists and the new breed of NGOs such as CODE-NGO seem to think. NGOs have been around since the martial law period when they were known as cause-oriented groups. Their leaders and members were mostly activists and oppositionists who, rather than collaborate with the dictator, went underground, but not to jointhe armed revolution and die for Joma Sison, rather, to do grassroots work, stepping in to deliver basic services where government was absent or to compensate for failed development programs, and help ease rising poverty in the countryside.

Unlike social workers of the fifties and sixties who were into dole-outs (that is, the immediate if short-term relief of food, water, clothing, and health needs of poor communities), cause-oriented groups of the seventies (who were either hippies or activists in the sixties) were into long-term goals – they did not want just to dole out fish, as a Chinese sage advised, they wanted to teach people how to fish – and they were guided by ecological principles, in step with the global movement for environmental protection.

Also, Filipino NGOs tried to get to the root of the problem of poverty. How can a country so rich in natural resources fail to feed, shelter, and nurture its people? Research by thinktanks revealed that the rising poverty (20 million “poorest of the poor” then, 40 million now) was / is the consequence of years, decades, of rampant logging and dynamite fishing, mining and quarrying – among other destructive commercial operations sanctioned by the government for the benefit of the local elite and multinational corporations – that continue to destroy our archipelago’s ecological systems and deprive increasing millions of kaingin farmers and fisherfolk and indigenous tribes of vital resources and life-support systems.

Do-gooders indeed, NGOs started out spending their own money (and later the money of like-minded donor friends and foundations) for the cause of the poor. Without thought of personal monetary gain, NGOs shelled out for consciousness-raising workshops, community organizing, networking, and livelihood projects meant to empower people in communities to become the stewards of their own environment and the engines of their own development. The peaceful revolution of 1986 which saw the ouster of the martial law government was a combined effort of these activists in “rainbow coalition” with leftists and Coryistas. At least this is what I gathered from the sidelines in1984 to 2001, as editor of the journals and papers of the late environmentalist and original NGO volunteer Maximo “Junie” Kalaw on NGOs and the movement for sustainable development.

With the ousting of the dictator in 1986 and the rise of environmental criteria in the public realm, NGOs multiplied even more rapidly, as did NGO funding from many international aid groups eager to help the fledgling Aquino administration. Unfortunately, much of the money came with strings attached. Too soon Kalaw was saying no to millions of dollars in U.S. aid. and being accused of blocking development.

The particular aid package had two components: $20 million for NGO environmental projects, and $75 million for government to create a National Resource Management Program that would more efficiently open up the forestry sector to more foreign investors. For Kalaw, going along with the two-handed scheme would have meant that Haribon Foundation (the first and largest environmental NGO) and Green-Forum Philippines (the largest umbrella organization of NGOs in the eighties), both of which he led, not only would be condoning government’s unsustainable development strategies; worse, it would mean changing identity from a purely non-government to a government organization (GO) or, at best, NGO ng GO, or NGONGO, how freaky.

The same conflicted situation obtains in the case of CODE-NGO’s Peace bonds. Certainly it was a remarkably creative capitalist coup, the way Marissa Camacho et al, using their connections, managed to exploit the government treasury and the banking system to make more than a billion pesos out of thin air for poverty alleviation. But there is nothing heroic or evolutionary about it because it changes nothing in the long-term. Bottom line is, it is just another two-handed scheme of the rich – helping the poor and, at the same time, shafting them by helping get government even more deeply into debt that eventually the poor will be made to pay. Fact is, the rich in this country, including the church, have long been mired in (as Kalaw put it) “the internal contradiction of donating to the poor with one hand and contributing to their poverty with the other.”

But had the intrepid Camacho spared government and fixed her sights instead on the ruling class (her own class) for funding – had she worked on the richest of the rich families, the oligarchy that pushes government around and controls the country’s resources – now THAT would have been really radical. And had she managed to convincethem, NGO-style (like, you know, consciousness-raising), that there is simply no two ways about it: one way or another, it’s time to share the wealth, if not by paying higher wages and investing in the domestic economy, at the very least by coughing up substantial sums to NGOs for poverty alleviation (also known as damage control), now THAT would have been awesome and she would deserve canonization – Santa Marissa, patron saint of NGO volunteers, heroine of the poor, mabuhay ka!

Unfortunately it’s not going to happen. Not while the civil society movement is disparaged and dismissed as “uncivil” and/or “evil” by Erap forces. And surely not until the NGOs that lead the civil society movement get their act together and get back not only on the non-government but on the non-profit non-elitist track.

Junie 2001

Last Christmas when Junie phoned for an astrological reading of his year to come, I warned him that he was likely to get sick again if he didn’t take a long break asap from what otherwise promised to be a year full of stress, the kind that cancer feeds on. He said hindi puwede, he had commitments that could not be put off, work that he could not delegate, but yes, he would take care, he would try not to take on too much at a time, he would ask for help, he would relax and meditate a lot.

The last time I saw him was two months later, towards the end of February, when he was home for a couple of days on his way to, or was it on his way back from, Japan for a conference. He dropped off a 5-page resume of his environmental advocacy work, 1971-2000, for editing. He looked great, walking tall as always, a little grayer in the hair, a little more lined in the face, a little slimmer in the waist, but still sexy, and still obsessed with sustainable development. For a change, he asked me at once how much I wanted for the job. For a change, before I had seen how much work it would need, I said I would do it for nothing.

In June I heard the bad news via email from Patty A; she had seen him in London, the cancer had recurred. “He sounded fine, still full of dreams. He is trying to put things in order, wants to merge PIAF and the Maximo Kalaw Foundation, get an active working board to run it. But he looked very weak and had lost a lot of weight. He’s been to Madrid for treatment in an alternative clinic, now he’s back in New York after recovering some strength from the treatment. He will see how his health fares before making any decisions on chemotherapy. Hopefully he is recovering. I shall let him know you asked.”

In July Junie phoned from New York, asking me to look at a draft manuscript that he would send by email, and would a month be time enough for editing? When he called again the next day, I said it would make a nice slim volume to go with his first book Exploring Soul  & Society, but I would need the help of Jorge Arago (with whom I edited the first one) and Junie exclaimed, naku, kung si Jorge it might take a year! Why, I had to ask, how much time are the doctors giving you? A year to a year and a half at most. And at least? Six months or so. Aray. A lot of pain? Yes. Aray. In a month then, I promised.

Junie was not a writer, but he was a thinker and a seeker who kept up with the latest in spiritual and political discourse. Not only did he have his own ideas about how to effectively and appropriately address the critical problems of our times, particularly the problem of extricating the great majority of humans from poverty, he had first-hand experience of and insights on the obstacles in the way of change. He had much to say, and over the years he had learned to write, high-brow activist stuff, visions of an alternative wholistic future, written in the developmental jargon of the UN, for the powers-that-be who could / would lead the world to sustainable new highs.

Junie had been hoping to make it to Johannesburg, South Africa on September 2002 for the UN Summit for Sustainable Development. In the manuscript titled Making Sustainability Work / Ten Years after the Rio Earth Summit – A Personal Assessment, he goes over the ground covered since Rio ’92, tracking the initiatives of governments and business groups as well as NGOs and people’s organizations over the last decade, distilling lessons learned that will help us in the struggle ahead for a sustainable future as one human family and one earth community. Writing it he prepared for Johannesburg – he meant to be there, if not in body then in word and in spirit. Immortal Junie.

*

On the most fundamental level, as I see it, sustainable development depends on how any one person fulfills the critical obligations that spell the difference between a life lived according to the new paradigm I’ve tried to flesh out in this slim volume and a life lived, wittingly or unwittingly, in opposition to it.

*

Whether as producer or consumer, as one who contributes to the build-up or clean-up of waste, or in the choice of lifestyle that goes with one’s personality, income, and ambitions, one cannot avoid micro interior “summits” and the meaningful participation in it of the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the individual and governance by the soul.

*

I have often reflected on how to be in the postmodern world with integrity, responsibility, and accountability. As I wrote in the introduction to my book Exploring Soul and Society (1997), I have used a framework for wholeness called Kabuoan – a framework that affirms for Filipinos their multi-level identity, a coherent ecology of values, and a transformative process of change in the inner and outer dimensions of personal and social life.

*

Soul-work has acquired a certain currency or vogue. It is a sign of the growing reaction to crass materialism and consumption, what now is called “Affluenza,” a product of our market-oriented and -driven development activities and our search for meaning in our lives, communities, and species.

*

All of the cosmological and spiritual systems that I have come across taught their truth in a system of interrelated parts and different levels of wholeness – as above, so below – so that it was unthinkable to imagine a sustainable global system without sustainable local and national sub-systems.

*

Sustainable development requires the nurturing of relationships though they be located in diametrically opposed perspectives, or across the great divide that we are prone to see between such as private and public, ecology and economy, people and nature, autonomy and codependency. It requires the preservation of sacred relationship values as material and form evolve. It is concerned with practical concerns, such as how to keep community values as we move from small village dwellings to condominiums in mega-cities.

*

Change begins with the Self. It seems to me that there is not much else over which we exercise near-total control apart from our own selves, which thus suggests the proper locus for authentic change.

*

I felt that to be without duplicity in the way I think, feel, and act must needs be the essence of the integrity of my being if I were to continue to have the freedom to move on to the truth of the next moment in my life’s journey. I found such a state to be essential in doing advocacy work, for it enables one to say what one feels without fear or without being beholden to anyone except to the truth.

Censorship Blues

Inquirer Commentary January 9 & 10, 2000

Early in 1999 Pinoy society’s moral guardians were out in full force trying to stop government from executing the convicted child rapist Leo Echegaray on the grounds that to take his life, no matter how grave his crime, was not only wicked and immoral, it would also not deter would-be rapists from raping. At year’s end, the same people were screaming for Armida Siguion-Reyna’s head and demanding that the citizenry be spared (deprived of) the pleasure of sexy movies because said pleasures are obscene and incite viewers to rape.

In effect, these sanctimonious ones are saying that to prevent the incidence of rape, they would not execute the rapist; instead they would clamp down on media, entertainment, and the arts, and forbid the public exhibition and broadcast of all sexually arousing material. Yes, they would take it out, not on the guilty rapist, but on the innocent public, that’s us, who are all potential rapists daw. Isn’t that pathetic?

In fact, studies do not show any causal relation between pornography and rape. Not even hard-core pornographic films, much less the boldest of Pinoy boldies, can be said to drive adult viewers to commit rape and, columnist Michael Tan is right, it is “not only dishonest but dangerous” of Sonny Alvarez, Manoling Morato, and their cohorts in the religious and showbiz communities to claim such because it leaves the real causes of rape untouched. In fact, sexual crimes are rooted in sexual abuse or (the extreme opposite) in sexual repression in childhood and/or adolescence, not in pornography. In fact, when pornography was legalized in Denmark, the incidence of rape fell.

Maybe the dishonesty is not deliberate. Maybe the likes of Morato and Alvarez are simply ill-informed, or maybe they’re unimpressed by facts, guided as they are by politics and religion, which are matters of trickery and faith. Not surprisingly, their ecumenical chorus line of bishops and priests, pastors and ministers, Ettas and Coneys don’t know, and aren’t behaving, any better. Clearly the dishonesty does not bother them, never mind that it violates their churches’ eighth commandment, the sixth comes first, it’s okay to lie or “bear false witness” when it is to defend against sex. Talk about double standards of morality.

I think they’re simply hysterical, as in, emotionally overwrought, so they’re not thinking straight, much less talking sense. This is what being confronted with sex does to people who are sexually hung-up, repressed by the outdated Christian notion that it is for married couples only, behind closed doors, and that otherwise all sex, including the display and patronage of sex in cinema and television, is evil and leads to hell.

Whether they know it or not, like it or not, ready or not, times have changed,­ yes, even in our basket case of a mental colony. At the very least, we know more about sex than our parents did at our age, thanks to the liberalizing effects of mass media as well as of the sexual revolution that brought AIDS to America and inevitably to our shores, raising sexual consciousness like never before. As a result, moralists worldwide are down to a noisy minority; but of course it doesn’t seem so around here, given how Catholic kuno the majority is and therefore silent, nay, inarticulate, on the joys and intricacies of sex.

Factor in as well the fourteen long years of dictatorship—when the dumbing of the Filipino began, when we let Marcos do all the thinking for us, and we not only lost our critical faculties, we also lost track of and fell behind the rest of the developing thinking world—and no wonder that we have media practitioners who are so behind the times, they can’t see beyond the surface of things and naively mistake the moralist din for the sentiment of the majority. And so, with only sales/ratings in mind, they gleefully religiously relay and echo, without criticism, the concerns of anti-“pornography” advocates about malaswa films, obviously blissfully ignorant, not only of what’s pornography and what’s not, but also of the implications of film censorship on the rest of the media (now, the movies; next, the newspapers? TV? advertising? fashion? the internet?).

And what about the anti-Armida columnist who wants to know why our National Artists and leading academicians and intellectuals are silent on the so-called clamor for censorship. How distressing to need to explain that artists and intellectuals are, first and foremost, free spirits and naturally they’re rooting for Armida’s MTRCB on the matter of classifying rather than censoring films, thereby upholding the democratic freedoms of expression and choice. The last thing any true artist or thinker would abide is censorship.

Even the few newspaper columnists and TV talkshow hosts (among them Kris Aquino, thank Ninoy!) who have spoken up against censorship are hard put defending sex in films and most have such a low opinion of Filipino movies, they won’t even concede that any of it qualifies as art. In a late-night talkshow the hosts asked why bomba movies appeal and why they keep coming back, only to admit at the end of an hour’s talk with some movie directors and movie patrons that they have no answers.

I would refer them to the same US Supreme Court ruling cited by the MTRCB that cautions against censorship of sex in art and literature: “Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages; it is one of the vital problems of human interest and public concern.”

Sexy movies appeal and bold movies keep coming back because we are not only thinking creatures, we are also sexual creatures, endlessly fascinated and drawn by (once awakened to) the pleasures and pains of sex. And why not? Sex is the natural in us, and, like nature, it has a way of intruding, erupting, into consciousness, whether we’re up to it or not. In the words of my favorite (anti-feminist) feminist intellectual and art critic Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae, 1995): “Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.”

Society is precisely our defense against nature and its excesses and while society’s guardians cannot be faulted for being paranoid about sex, they can and must be faulted for insulting our intelligence (threatening horny ones with hellfire and eternal damnation when AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea as well as unwanted pregnancies are more frightening) and denying us Pinoy adults the option to confront and learn about our sexual nature both through sex education and exposure to the arts, the better to make sense of and come to terms with the whole (and not just fractions) of our selves.

Sex education in school and “parental guidance” at home are crucial, not just for the facts (as opposed to the myths) of it, but also for passing on a sense of control over the sexual urge (mind over matter) and a sense of it as creative energy that can be harnessed and channeled to enhance other aspects of the personality and other activities of the body-mind.

But even all that would not be enough, dry data never are. “Wet and wild” (as a ’60s softdrink commercial went) is more like it, and other than from first-hand experience, we can only get a sense of that kind of sex from the arts, cinema in particular, which comes closest, literally, to the flesh, visually capturing sex’s passion and convulsions for our delectation, turning us all into voyeurs and affirming the universality of our sexualcondition. It’s normal to be horny.

The question for the MTRCB and the film industry is where to draw the line between the bold and the pornographic. It used to be easy to tell one from the other: in bold films the sex was secondary, occasional and subordinate to the story; in porno it’s all nudity and sex with no story worth remarking. But now we have stories about sex that justify more sex than usual and so verge on the pornographic yet sizzle with social relevance—these are the ones that keep the MTRCB on its toes and drive the moralists really crazy. Again, I think the latter’s fears are unfounded.

As long as we stay away from pornography and as long as we strictly enforce the “For Adults Only” rule for bold movies, I think that generally there is little danger of these films inciting civilized viewers to rape. No doubt some adults walk out of the moviehouse feeling hot and hoping for some real exchange of fluids with a significant other as soon as, but I think it is just as true that the very experience of being turned on by sexy scenes can be pleasure enough, a kind of pleasure that peaks with the hottest sequence and declines, or is resolved, along with the storyline. By movie’s end, it can all be just food for the imagination, filed away with other reference images that inform one’s private sex life, for retrieval at the appropriate or opportune time.

Pinoy cinema may not measure up to Hollywood standards but that is not to say that our films do not serve the same ends or are socially irrelevant productions and do not qualify as art. To my mind, every movie, bold and not-bold, is a work of art, the product of creative thought and technology, and whether it’s worthwhile or not, successful or not, is a matter of taste, which is diverse and inconstant, and not for any one person or agency to dictate.

But I do agree with film critics who deplore the mediocrity of Pinoy films. Mostly I find the stories wanting in depth and vision, and trailers promising more than they deliver. Some of the “super-bold” movies that so scandalized the noisy minority were more boring than shocking and none of them, to my mind, deserved a second viewing, not even just for the erotic scenes (unlike Peque Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights). Nonetheless, they have a place, as we all (“moral terrorists,” as Carlitos Siguion-Reyna calls them, included) have a place, in the scheme of things, if only as reflections of a process of transition from censorship to self-regulation.

If Armida and the MTRCB can be faulted for anything, it would be for failing to anticipate, one, that the film industry would, after so much repression, first test the limits of liberalization—thus quickly progressing from Scorpio Nights 2 to Sutla, stopping only when the moral terrorists’ howl peaked to hysterical heights—and two, that theater owners and video pirates would think of profits first and children last.

Filmmakers will just have to be more creative in using the space, no matter how limited, that Armida has opened up for them. Limits, financial or “moral,” aren’t necessarily dead ends; they can also push artists to look elsewhere, change course, go deeper, beyond appearances (there’s more to sex, and life, than meets the eye), and still manage to appeal to the market.

To Armida’s credit, she has survived the crisis with aplomb, giving in a little here and there without giving up the cause. To the film industry’s credit, producers and directors have cut down on the sex, even if reluctantly, which is as it should be. The Moon in Scorpio, sign of sex, death, and rebirth, on the first day of Y2K presages more sex rather than less. No doubt the new millennium will see filmmakers continuing to test the limits of the MTRCB (Armida or not), and the Board continuing to debate on where to draw the line between “enough” sex and “too much” sex, and the moral terrorists continuing to harass us all.