Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Brecht: KALAYAAN ANG KANIN NG BAYAN



Narito ang isa pang tula ni Bertolt Brecht na nabanggit ko sa huli kong post. Hinalaw ko ito, o in-adapt, sa halip na tuwirang isinalin. Ang salin nito sa Ingles ay tungkol sa hustisya sa halip na kalayaan, at may pamagat na “The Bread of the People” (“Das Brot des Volkes” sa orihinal na Aleman).

Bago siya nagretiro bilang Supreme Court chief justice, binanggit ni Hilario Davide ang tula ni Brecht sa isang talumpating binigkas sa isang international judicial conference. Sabi ni Davide: “Verily, good government depends upon a good judiciary…. Through networking in judicial reform, we shall make justice the strong foundation for national, regional, and even global progress, prosperity, and stability. We will make [justice] the bread of the people, in the words of Bertolt Brecht.”

For the full text of the Manila Bulletin news report on Davide’s speech, go to: <http://www.mb.com.ph/issues/2005/11/29/MAIN2005112950428.html>


Kalayaan ang kanin ng bayan

Halaw kay Bertolt Brecht


Kalayaan ang kanin ng bayan.
Kung minsan ito’y marami, kung minsan ay kulang;
kung minsan ay masarap, kung minsan ay walang lasa.
Kung kulang ang kanin, laganap ang gutom;
kung walang lasa, laganap ang ligalig.

Kung ang kanin ay isinaing
mula sa bigas na luma, bukbukin, mabato
at hindi inalisan ng palay,
hindi iyan dapat ihain sa tao.
Bagay lang diyan ay gawing kaning-baboy.

Sinaing, sinangag, sampurado,
lugaw, ampaw, pinipig, biko, aroskaldo--
kahit ano ang gawin mo sa bigas,
kung niluto nang walang pagmamahal sa kakain,
hindi mabubusog, hindi masisiyahan ang kakain.

Kung masarap ang kanin,
kahit walang ulam, kahit walang mapagdildilang asin,
puwede nang pagtiyagaan.

Kung kailangan ang kanin araw-araw,
kailangan din ang kalayaan
at hindi lamang tatlong beses sa isang araw.
Panahon man ng tagtuyot o panahong masagana,
kailangan ang kanin ng kalayaan.
At ang dapat magsaing
ay mismong ang bayang kakain.

Bigyan ang bayan ng kanin ng kalayaan
araw-araw,
masarap, marami, araw-araw.

--Halaw ni Jose F. Lacaba

Nalathala sa kalipunan kong Sa Panahon ng Ligalig: Tula, Awit, Halaw (Anvil Publishing, 1991). Out of print na rin ang librong ito.

Ang pinagbatayan ko ng aking halaw ay ang tekstong nasa librong Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim with the cooperation of Erich Fried. The book lists a group of translators on the contents page, but does not specify who translated which poem.

Narito ang unang stanza ng saling Ingles:

THE BREAD OF THE PEOPLE
By Bertolt Brecht

Justice is the bread of the people.
Sometimes it is plentiful, sometimes it is scarce.
Sometimes it tastes good, sometimes it tastes bad.
When the bread is scarce, there is hunger.
When the bread is bad, there is discontent.

The full text of the English translation can be read here: <http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~yeldane/brecht.htm>.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Brecht: SA MGA IPAPANGANAK SA HINAHARAP

The closing film of the recent Active Vista filmfest, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, was Signos, a 40-minute super-8 documentary made circa 1985 by the Concerned Artists of the Philippines. Although the filmfest flyers describe this as a film “by Mike de Leon,” the film itself, in its end credits, attributes authorship to a collective body: “Pelikula nina Mike de Leon, Jose F. Lacaba, Sylvia Mayuga, Ricardo Lee, Ding Achacoso, Joe Cuaresma, Lito Tiongson, Jovy Zarate.”

I got to see Signos again on DVD, just a few days before the Active Vista filmfest, and about 23 years after the documentary was made. I must confess I can no longer remember what exactly my contribution to the project was, but I guess, on the basis of the film itself, that it consisted primarily of my translation of a Bertolt Brecht poem, “Sa mga Ipapanganak sa Hinaharap,” which was used as a voice-over in lieu of a narration. The poem reader is not credited in the film, but I understand that the voice heard in various sequences belongs to Peping Almojuela, who, along with Mike de Leon, is credited as my co-writer on Sister Stella L.

Coincidentally, just a few days before the Active Vista screening of Signos, I had been asked to read my translation of this same poem at a small gathering sponsored by the Institute of Political Studies, a nongovernment organization. My reading of that translation—along with “Kalayaan ang Kanin ng Bayan,” my adaptation, or halaw, of another Brecht poem—served as the front act for a talk on Brecht given by David Adamson, a stage actor and Brecht specialist from Australia.

Here's the poem, originally titled
“An die Nachgeborenen” in German, and variously translated into English as “To Posterity” and “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake.”


Sa mga ipapanganak sa hinaharap

Ni Bertolt Brecht


Talagang madilim itong aking panahon.
Ang pagsasabi ng tapat ay katangahan. Ang makinis na noo
Ay tanda ng walang pakiramdam. Ang tumatawa
Ay hindi pa nakakarinig
Sa masamang balita.

Ano bang panahon ito, na
Ang mag-usap tungkol sa punongkahoy ay halos isang krimen
Pagkat ito’y pananahimik tungkol sa napakaraming kabuktutan!
Ang isang iyon na kampanteng tumatawid ng kalye
Ay hindi kaya nakalimot na sa kanyang mga kaibigang
Nagigipit?

Totoo: kumikita pa rin ako.
Pero maniwala kayo: aksidente lang ito. Wala
Akong ginawa na nagbibigay sa akin ng karapatang magpakabusog.
Nagkataon lang na hindi ako ginalaw. (Pag ubos na ang suwerte ko,
Lagot ako.)

Sabi nila: Kumain at uminom! Pasalamat at meron!
Pero paano ako makakakain at makakainom, kung
Ang pagkain ko’y inagaw sa nagugutom at
Ang tubig ko’y pag-aari ng namamatay sa uhaw?
Pero kumakain ako’t umiinom.

Gusto ko ring maging matalino.
Sa mga lumang libro mababasa kung ano ang katalinuhan:
Ang umiwas sa gulo ng mundo at mamuhay sa maikling panahon
Nang walang pangamba,
Huwag maging marahas,
Gantihan ng kabutihan ang kasamaan,
Maging manhid sa mga pagnanasa--
Iyan ay itinuturing na katalinuhan.
Lahat ng ito’y hindi ko magagawa:
Talagang madilim itong aking panahon.


II

Dumating ako sa lunsod sa panahon ng kaguluhan
Nang laganap ang gutom.
Naratnan ko ang mga tao sa panahon ng himagsikan
At naghimagsik akong kasama nila.
Sa gayon lumipas ang panahong
Kaloob sa akin sa daigdig.

Kumain ako sa pagitan ng mga labanan.
Natulog ako sa pagitan ng mga mamamatay-tao.
Ang pag-ibig ay binale-wala ko
At ang kalikasan ay hindi ko pinagtiyagaan.
Sa gayon lumipas ang panahong
Kaloob sa akin sa daigdig.

Mga kalye’y patungong kumunoy noong aking panahon.
Isinuplong ako sa berdugo ng aking pananalita.
Wala akong gaanong magawa. Pero kung wala ako,
Napapanatag ang mga naghahari: umasa ako diyan.
Sa gayon lumipas ang panahong
Kaloob sa akin sa daigdig.

Kulang ang lakas. Ang patutunguhan
Ay malayong-malayo,
Malinaw na natatanaw pero malamang
Na hindi ko mararating.
Sa gayon lumipas ang panahong
Kaloob sa akin sa daigdig.


III

Kayong lilitaw mula sa baha
Na lumunod sa amin,
Kung pag-uusapan ninyo ang aming mga kahinaan,
Isipin
Din ang madilim na panahon
Na inyong natakasan.

Pagkat kami, na mas madalas magpalit ng bayan kaysa sapatos,
Ay dumaan sa tunggalian ng mga uri, nanlulumo
Kung may pambubusabos lamang at walang paghihimagsik.

At alam na alam namin:
Pati ang galit sa kaapihan
Ay nakakasira ng mukha.
Pati ang ngitngit sa pambubusabos
Ay nagpapagaspang ng boses. Ay, kami
Na nagmithing magpunla ng pakikipagkaibigan
Ay hindi naging mapagkaibigan.

Pero kayo, pagdating sa wakas ng panahong
Ang tao ay matulungin sa kapwa-tao,
Sa paggunita sa amin
Ay maging mapagpasensiya.

--Salin sa Pilipino ni Jose F. Lacaba

Mula sa kalipunang Sa Daigdig ng Kontradiksiyon: Mga Salingwika (Anvil Publishing, Maynila, 1991).

Ang ginawa kong salin sa Pilipino ay batay sa ilang saling Ingles na hindi ko na maalala kung sino-sino ang gumawa, pero nakinabang din ako sa ilang mungkahi at impormasyon na ibinigay ni Mike de Leon. Nag-aral sa Germany si Mike, at noong panahon iyon (baka hanggang ngayon) ay matatas siya sa German.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

NOTES ON BAKYA

Having just dusted off an old article on movies, critics, and the bakya crowd, I decided to dust off an even older article on the phenomenon known as bakya. This somewhat dated article was obviously inspired by Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp,” as well as Dwight Macdonald’s essays on masscult and midcult.


Notes on Bakya
Being an Apologia of Sorts for Filipino Masscult.

by Jose F. Lacaba
(Philippines Free Press, January 31, 1970)

LET’S BEGIN with a little quiz. Identify the following:

a) “Mardy”
b) Orasyon na naman
c) Nora Cabaltera Villamayor
d) Pilyo, nguni’t clean fun
e) Ricky Na, Tirso Pa

If you don’t even get one answer right, you are, if not a foreigner, either a hopeless bourgeois or an incurable egghead. But if you guess that (a) “Mardy” is an Eddie Peregrina top tune and the title of one of his movies; (b) Orasyon na naman is the standard opening line of Johnny de Leon’s afternoon radio program, Lundagin Mo, Baby; (c) Nora Cabaltera Villamayor is the real name of Nora Aunor; (d) Pilyo, nguni’t clean fun is the slogan of Pogi; Ricky Na, Tirso Pa is the movie that brings together for the first time those real-life first cousins, Ricky Belmonte and Tirso Cruz III, congratulations: you are true connoisseur of bakya.

Bakya, in case you don’t know, literally means the wooden slippers worn in lieu of shoes by the poor in the barrios. The meaning of the word has so expanded that bakya is now also a description of a style and a sensibility--the style of popular culture, the sensibility of what Dwight Macdonald derisively labels “masscult.” Thus, bakya now means anything that is cheap, gauche, naive, provincial, and terribly popular; and in this sense it is used more as an adjective than as a noun.

The term bakya crowd came first. Director Lamberto V. Avellana is said to have coined the phrase in his rage against an audience that failed, or refused, to appreciate his award-winning movies. For a long time after that, bakya crowd was the shibboleth on the lips of every movie director who cranked out low-budget quickies for mass consumption. They were not to blame if their works could not be classified as art, the directors said; their audience was made up of morons indifferent, if not entirely hostile, to “prestige” or “quality” pictures. The bakya crowd became the favorite whipping boy of those critics who, while shying away from Tagalog movies as a rule, never ceased to bewail the absence of Tagalog movies that could compare with wholesome Hollywood hokum like Ten Commandments and Sound of Music.

That the so-called bakya crowd could recognize excellence if it was presented to them on their own terms, in movies without pretensions to “prestige,” became apparent with the popularity of the Joseph Estrada proletarian potboilers. The advent of bomba carried the bakya crowd even farther. The bomba phenomenon may be seen in two ways: as a symptom of decaying morals or, because it implies adult entertainment, as a sign of growing up. The very words are significant; from the bakya, symbol of the backward barrio, to the bomba, symbol of 20th-century power, was a long way to go, and the distance seemed to indicate that the bakya crowd was on the way out.

Then, toward the late ’60s, along came the word bakya, divorced now from “crowd” and no longer limited to movies. Its use probably began on the campus, particularly of exclusive schools, where naturally the inhabitants heaped additional layers of odium and ridicule on the word.

In its present meaning, bakya is whatever isn’t in with the In Crowd, whatever is non-mod or non-hip. Its antithesis is class, also used as an adjective, meaning classy, stylish, elegant, sophisticated, fashionable, expensive. Tagalog movies in general are bakya, and so are the moviehouses that show them; Hollywood movies are usually class, and suburban theaters like Rizal and New Frontier particularly so. Turo-turo restaurants are utterly bakya; the eating places of the big hotels like Hilton or Savoy are the height of class. The poor man’s idea of elegance in dress--something shiny or frilly or riddled with eyelets for a girl, a single-color scheme (otherwise known as ternong-terno kung magdamit: light-brown shirt, dark-brown pants, light-brown socks, dark-brown shoes) for a boy--is derided as bakya; dressing like an Amboy, or American boy, that is, Esquire-mod or plastic-hippie style, is class. The early Elvis hairdo, a high-rise fluff buttressed by pounds of greasy kid stuff, is bakya, and the way Tom Jones sideburns have been expropriated by the politicians they will probably end up being bakya, too; the 50-peso Iper haircut is definitely class. Pleats and cuffs on trousers if seen today are simply unbelievable, but very tight pants and colorful plaids should be bakya by now; what’s class is the bellbottom and the “straight cut.”

Top tunes are particularly susceptible to the charge of being bakya. In fact, the word is most often used in this context: “Bakyang-bakya naman yang kinakanta mo.” What’s bakya is usually the new syrupy ballad which sounds as if it had been written for Neil Sedaka or Joni James: “I Only Live To Love You,” “One Day Soon,” “It Hurts To Say Goodbye,” all Eddie Peregrina hits. There are some songs, however, that start out as the exclusive property of the In Crowd but become bakya by getting to be too popular; e.g., the Beatles’ “Obladi-Oblada” and Sinatra’s “My Way.” (The great performers are like Shakespeare; their appeal extends from the eggheads to the groundlings.) American folk songs, Bob Dylan, the Doors, by having a limited appeal, are indubitably class.

Bakya, then, suggests the class distinctions in Philippine society, and class here is used in its ordinary English sense. It’s usually what the urban and rural poor enjoy, embrace, support, and idolize which falls under the category of bakya. It is usually the upper classes who employ the epithet with a sneer, with condescension, with a tremendous feeling of superiority. The class distinctions are suggested in the joke: “Class nga, low class naman.”

This feeling of superiority manifests itself in the many jokes about a bakya idol, Ricky Belmonte. Practically all these Ricky Belmonte jokes--called belmontisms in certain quarters--involve malapropism or Filipino English; and probably 99 per cent of them are apocryphal, made up by the kind of people who use Tagalog only with the maids. Since many belmontisms have seen print without a word of protest from Belmonte, a few samples here would do no harm.

The supposed Ricky Belmonte on seeing the chandeliers at the Cultural Center: “Wow , what beautiful chamberlains!” To a fan: “Would you like my mimeograph?” To a waiter in a crowded, smoke-filled restaurant: “Please open the door. I’m getting sophisticated.” On being offered a glass of wine, after a companion has replied, I’m afraid not: “Me, I’m not afraid.” At the dinner table: “Please pass the salt. My hands cannot arrive.” On seeing a black cat pass by: “That’s a bad ointment.” After singing a song that has met with appreciative applause: “Thanks for the clap.”

Remember the joke about Ramon Magsaysay? Told that high prices were due to the law of supply and demand, he is supposed to have ordered: “Repeal that law!” And there is the story about Joseph Estrada when, as mayor of San Juan, he raided a monte joint. In warning the operators of the joint, he is said to have solemnly declared, meaning to say he meant business, “I mean monkey business.” Belmonte should find consolation in the thought that he is not the only bakya idol whose knowledge of English has been mocked. Indeed, his brand of English, which local linguists will recognize as a species of Filipino English, may be one reason his bakya fans take to him. They speak the same language; they understand him; they identify with him; they can see themselves in him. They are not bothered by belmontisms, just as they couldn’t care less if Eddie Peregrina commits tautology when he sings, in “Mardy”: “Though I can’t but I have to forget you.” Of course, they are also willing to accept a perfumed accent and reasonably correct grammar: Helen Gamboa and Jeanne Young are stars. The noteworthy thing here is that the bakya does not put such a high premium on perfect English--there are things that are important beyond all that fiddle.

This brings up another quality of bakya: the preference for things native. The imported is never bakya (though perhaps Italian westerns and Chinese swordsman epics are perilously close to it); the local often is. Colonial mentality is not necessarily involved here, since many items in the bakya canon are slavish imitations of foreign fads and heroes. There is no way of telling which is more colonially minded, the audience of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or the audience of Omar Cassidy and the Sandalyas Kid; the bakya crowd is more likely to go for Chiquito in Che-Charon than for Omar Sharif in Che, but that does not make the bakya crowd more nationalistic. Still, the fact is that the sensibility here called bakya tends to favor something which is one’s own, though it be ersatz, and to reject something entirely alien, though it be the original. Kapitan Kidlat may be just a little brown Captain Marvel and Darna nothing more than a xerox copy of Wonder Woman, but at least they speak a native tongue, they fly over nipa huts and bamboo groves. In this sense, it is not wrong to say that, however fantastic they may be, however remote from reality, Kapitan Kidlat, Darna, and other such bakya figures are closer to the Philippine experience than anything directly obtained from abroad. The image of the Filipino can still be, somehow, discerned in the distortions of our local cowboys, samurais, and secret agents.

Curiously enough, recognition abroad can change the status of bakya. The Reycard Duet was the quintessence of bakya when it was still appearing at the Clover, but after Rey and Carding returned from Las Vegas, complete with endorsements from Elvis Presley and Sammy Davis Jr., they became good enough for the Hilton, though they had not changed one bit in style or repertoire. On things local, the taste of the In Crowd lags behind that of the bakya crowd, which is quick to recognize and support native talent. The bakya crowd, however, might in the end not enjoy the fruits of what it has nourished. When the rich take up the heroes of the poor, they become too expensive for the poor to appreciate.

The class distinctions exposed by the word bakya point to another truth, and it’s this: bakya is a social condition--the condition of the majority of Filipinos. To be poor is to be bakya; what sociologists call cultural deprivation brings about the bad taste of masscult. It is the children of the proletariat and the peasantry who buy the postcard-size photographs of Vilma Santos and Edgar Mortiz from the improvised stands on the sidewalks of Quiapo; the children of the privileged, in the exercise of “good taste,” get their giant posters of David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave from bookshops or fancy boutiques where Charlie Brown T-shirts are also sold. And the difference between these two species of picture collectors is simply money, its abundance and its absence. To make fun of the devotees of bakya is therefore to make fun of poverty--the poverty that deprives a person of the financial and educational resources needed to free himself from the bondage of bad taste.

It may be argued that many who have acquired the necessary money--the noveau riche, the parvenu--do not cease to be purveyors of bad taste, remain bakya at heart. True enough. But even if at heart they are really bakya, in appearance they are not. A Mustang and a Pierre Cardin shirt and a speech-clinic accent have magical properties: they confer an aura of class and remove the stigma of bakya, and unless their possessors spout belmontisms like “No more rice, thank you--I’m fed up,” they can easily join the In Crowd in the society page-columns. Then they can afford to be snobbish and supercilious; they too can sneer with impunity at the culture of the bakya.

This alone should put us on our guard. For clearly it is not the true artists and intellectuals who mock bakya culture; they usually have great tolerance (and sometimes even genuine affection) for it. But the mockers are themselves strangers to true culture, and if they despise Ricky Na, Tirso Pa, it is not because they prefer movies by Godard; if they turn their backs on Tagalog komiks, it is not because they would rather read Finnegans Wake. As a matter of fact, they are hostile to true art as they are to bakya.

Leslie Fiedler, in a disquisition on comic books, makes a point that applies to our subject:

“The problem posed by popular culture is finally, then, a problem of class distinction in a democratic society. What is at stake is the refusal of cultural equality by a large part of the population. It is misleading to think of popular culture as the product of a conspiracy of profiteers against the rest of us. This venerable notion of an eternally oppressed and deprived but innocent people is precisely what the rise of mass culture challenges. Much of what upper-class egalitarians dreamed for him, the ordinary man does not want--especially literacy…

“The middlebrow reacts with equal fury to an art that baffles his understanding and to one which refuses to aspire to his level. The first reminds him that he has not yet, after all, arrived (and indeed, may never make it); the second suggests to him a condition to which he might easily relapse, one perhaps that might have made him happier with less effort (and here exacerbated puritanism is joined to baffled egalitarianism)--even suggests what his state may appear like to those a notch above. Since he cannot on his own terms explain to himself why anyone should choose any level but the highest (that is, his own), the failure of the vulgar seems to him the product of mere ignorance and laziness--a crime! And the rejection by the advanced artist of his canons strikes him as a finicking excess, a pointless and unforgivable snobbism. Both, that is, suggest the intolerable notion of a hierarchy of values, the possibility of cultural classes in a democratic state; and before this, puzzled and enraged, he can only call a cop. The fear of the vulgar is the obverse of the fear of excellence, and both are aspects of the fear of difference: symptoms of a drive for conformity on the level of the timid, sentimental, and mindless-bodiless genteel.”

The connoisseurs of bakya, if they are at all aware of their bakya-ness, need not be ashamed of their affections. One thing they can do if they would proclaim their difference, if they would take pride in being outsiders to the exclusivist culture of the In Crowd, is to use a term of reproach, bakya, as a badge of honor--the way their forebears used the word Indio.


Postscript, 2008: The Ricky Belmonte jokes of the late 1960s would later resurface as Alma Moreno jokes, Melanie Marquez jokes, and Erap jokes. Erap would use those jokes to his own advantage, even publishing an entire collection of them during his campaign for the presidency. I have no doubt at all that those jokes helped him become President Joseph Estrada.

MOVIES, CRITICS, AND THE BAKYA CROWD

Cover of the VHS of Orapronobis,
released in France as Les Insoumis

and in the U.S. as Fight for Us

The recent Active Vista film festival--at Robinsons Galleria IndieSine, from November 26 to December 2, 2008--had, as opening film, Lino Brocka’s Orapronobis (a.k.a. Les Insoumis, a.k.a. Fight for Us) and, as one of the closing films, Signos, a 40-minute documentary made by a Concerned Artists of the Philippines team led by Mike de Leon. As the screenwriter of Orapronobis, and as a member of the team that worked on Signos, I must confess that I was pretty flattered to have served as some kind of parenthesis for the filmfest.

After the Orapronobis screening, I got introduced to an Australian writer and occasional filmmaker named Andrew Leavold, who’s doing--believe it--a documentary called The Search for Weng Weng. Yup, it’s about the late Weng Weng, the diminutive actor who in the 1980s played a Pinoy James Bond code-named Agent 3 1/2, Agent 00, and Agent 007 1/2 in various movies. Check out Andrew’s fantastic blog: <http://andrewleavold.blogspot.com/>.

Newspaper ad of a 1981 Weng Weng movie,
from the Video 48 website:

http://video48.blogspot.com/search/label/WENG-WENG

Hearing Andrew talk about his unbelievable love affair with Pinoy B movies reminded me of an old article I had written back in the late 1970s, so I dug it up and dusted it off and sent him a copy. Here it is.


Movies, Critics, and the Bakya Crowd
by Jose F. Lacaba

(From AAP Liham, Vol. 3 No. 4, March 1979. AAP is the Art Association of the Philippines.)


The term bakya crowd was coined back in the Fifties by a prestigious director to describe the mass audience which, he felt, was incapable of appreciating the merits of his award-winning films. These days we can’t use the term with the same cavalier attitude that attended its coining. Largely as a result of current attacks on elitism, we can no longer contemptuously dismiss that large chunk of the population encompassed by the term bakya crowd; and the word bakya itself, like indio before it, is fast becoming a badge of honor in certain circles.

Still, the opprobrium once attached to the term has not been entirely eradicated. Traces of it may be detected, for instance, in a movie critic’s recent witticism: “There’s no such thing as a bakya crowd. There are only bakya producers.”

That the term bakya in its extended meaning has both pejorative and acceptable connotations indicates the ambivalence of our attitude toward the crowd called bakya. When you come right down to it, bakya crowd is synonymous with masa, and nowadays everybody pays lip service to the masses. We cannot afford to look down upon them as a social class or a political force. But the masses as patrons of culture? The idea seems preposterous.

We may profess to find some of the forms and aspects of mass culture charming, particularly if, as in the case of the moro-moro and the sinakulo, these are virtually extinct or are threatened with extinction. But confronted by forms of mass culture that are alive and current--radio soap operas, television variety shows, komiks, the general run of Tagalog movies--we are bewildered and appalled.

Our attitude toward Tagalog movies is instructive.

The local movie industry, where the term bakya crowd originated, classifies Tagalog movies into two major categories. In the lingo of the industry, they are either commercial (also known as bakya) or hindi commercial (also known as pang-FAMAS).

The commercial movie is anything aimed frankly at the box office. The producer’s intention here is primarily to make a profit, and though the intention does not always succeed, it dictates what type of movie is to be made, how it is to be made, who its stars will be, etc. For this reason, the commercial movie prefers tried-and-true formulas to innovation and experiment, sticks to genres or follows trends proven to have box-office pull, and generally provides escapist entertainment.

The noncommercial movie--sometimes referred to as prestige picture, quality picture, or art film--has aims more ambitious than mere profit and more serious than mere entertainment. Those who indulge intermittently in its production are either incurable romantics with noble intentions and boundless optimism, or thoughtful veterans who have made a lot of money on commercial flicks and feel it’s time to try for a FAMAS statuette or two.

A few films that fall under this category have turned out to be sleepers--that is, unexpected commercial successes. Lino Brocka’s Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang is a notable example. But such movies are rare, very rare, exceptions. As a rule the noncommercial movie is box-office poison, however much it may blow the minds of critics.


The Popular Nerve

There’s a joke in local movie circles that it’s a bad thing to be praised by the critics. A rave review is supposed to spell death at the box office. The joke smells of sour grapes, and the industry obviously does not take it seriously. The truth is that producers are dimly aware of both the potential and the actual power of critics, as indicated by the fact that they occasionally threaten to withdraw movie ads when reviews get too nasty, and liberally quote the critics in those same movie ads when the reviews happen to be favorable.

Still, there’s a bit of truth in the joke. Those of us who care about the “art of film” and are at the same time interested in Filipino movies do tend to favor the noncommercial variety. The movies made expressly for the mass audience usually leave us cold--or even arouse the killer instinct in us, so that we feel an urge to tear those movies to pieces and hold up to ridicule the people who have inflicted such banalities on us.

Our reaction is understandable. Though commercial Tagalog movies have been made that exhibit a modicum of sense and a measure of technical finesse, the bulk of this particular commodity is indeed so shoddy, so inept of craftsmanship and inane of content, that we are justified in our contempt.

But our reaction reveals as much about ourselves as it does about the movies we react against. It is, in part, a reflection of the extent of our alienation from the mass of Filipinos who make up the bakya crowd. We cannot appreciate mass culture, we cannot even view it with sympathy and understanding, because we have been conditioned--by our social origins, our educational background, our cultural orientation--to regard as inane and inept whatever does not measure up to our exalted notions of art and culture.

This is particularly true of the movies. As a result of ongoing re-evaluations in the field of drama, for instance, and also because of the influence of the tourist industry, we have learned to regard with equanimity the presence of Castilian knights and Roman centurions in folk theater. We can even accept the anachronism and unintended comedy of a sinakulo Christ wearing a wrist watch and rubber shoes on his way to Calvary. But Filipino cowboys and samurais on our movie screens! The very idea insults our intelligence.

Part of the reason for this may be that film is a 20th-century medium, and we expect more from it than from folk theater. But we tend to forget that the social and historical conditions that gave rise to Philippine folk theater still exist in the country in this seventh decade of the 20th century. This explains why the creators and patrons of folk theater are still very much around, dictating the shape and content not only of vanishing theatrical forms but also of the very much alive “art form of the 20th century.” Thus, the peasant mind, still befogged by feudal miasma, makes possible the anting-anting movies of Ramon Revilla.

The point here is that there is a bakya crowd--or rather, since the term can be both offensive and misleading, there is a mass audience out there whose tastes and cultural level are different from ours, whose very conception of culture does not coincide with ours.

In other words, the existence and proliferation of bakya movies is not solely the fault of bakya producers, although they certainly bear a great part of the blame. The bakya movie exists because there is an audience for it, because it is popular. And it is popular because it provides escapist entertainment, besides allowing moviegoers to forget the oppressiveness of daily living, besides helping to take their minds off inflation and poverty and the immediate problems that beset them, and also--paradoxical as this may seem--because it touches something vital in the popular nerve.


The Formalist Tradition

In his essay “An Approach to the Filipino Film,” literary and film critic Bienvenido Lumbera points out that a major concern of the film student in evaluating a Filipino movie should be “the centrality of content.”

Elaborating on this point, Lumbera writes: “What does the film say about man in a society in ferment? How does it view the problems that confront man in his struggle against nature and men who seek to exploit him? This is not to insist that every film make a philosophical statement or engage in social analysis. This is simply to remind the directors that filmmaking in an underdeveloped country should be primarily a way of saying, not making magic with picture machines.”

Those of us who are interested in Filipino films tend to forget the point raised by Lumbera. We have been nurtured in the formalist tradition of the New Criticism in literature, and we carry our biases into our study of the movies. Just as we are inclined to scrutinize a poem or novel textually, without reference to its social and historical context, so too we analyze a movie in terms of how it is constructed (“breathtaking photography,” “expert editing,” etc.) instead of what it is saying.

When we do pay attention to content, we labor under the misconception that only the good artistic movie has something to say--or at least something to say that deserves consideration. We think that the commercial movie, and especially the badly made commercial movie, has nothing to say, or that what it has to say is beneath contempt.

To the mass audience, the opposite is true. Serious films like Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag and Nunal sa Tubig, though made with intelligence and care, may make no sense to the bakya crowd. This is so not only because these movies deal with subject matter and use techniques that are new and unfamiliar in Tagalog movies, but also because the problems they tackle are of no interest to the mass of Filipinos living today. Alienation, dehumanization, existential despair, and the absurdity of the human condition may loom large in the minds of middle-class intellectuals, but these could well be of little concern to the uprooted provincianos or the coastal villagers who are ostensibly the subjects of these films.

On the other hand, out-and-out commercial movies may have something vital and basic to say to the mass audience--and in terms it can easily grasp. The standard Fernando Poe Jr. movie, for instance, deals with themes that appeal to the popular imagination and express certain popular aspirations. It is often set in some never-never land with no basis in history or present reality, a fact that turns off the critics; yet this setting, no more fantastic than the symbolic Albania of Florante at Laura, does not make the thesis of the typical Poe movie any less valid.

The Poe character is usually a patient, long-suffering individual who, when his patience has been stretched to the limit by the violence of his oppressors, is not averse to using fists and guns to defend or avenge himself. It is a character the Filipino peasant, likewise blessed with legendary patience, may find easier to identify with than the extremely simple-minded peasant anti-hero of Ganito Kami Noon... Paano Kayo Ngayon?

The war epics that used to be a Poe staple are likewise closer in spirit to the folk conception of wartime history than the critically acclaimed Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos. The guerrillas in the Poe epics were often too superheroic to be credible, but they did not depart from the popular image of the guerrilla as a freedom fighter resisting foreign invasion. In Tatlong Taon, the guerrillas are either horrifying grotesques or naive USAFFE types fighting America’s war in the Pacific, and the only Japanese we see is an officer who, though he rapes a village girl, still comes out looking as cute and lovable as Christopher de Leon. No doubt there were bad Filipino guerrillas and good Japanese officers during the war, but to tip the balance in favor of the latter, as Tatlong Taon unwittingly does, goes against the popular grain.


The Human Condition

One strong quality of the Poe character is that he is incapable of wallowing in despair. He may be assailed by doubts, but in the end he always gets over his doubts and goes into action. Unlike the Rafael Roco Jr. character in Lunes, Martes, Miyerkules, Huwebes, Biyernes, Sabado, Linggo, who ends up accepting things as they are, the Poe character believes in the necessity of struggle, operating on the assumption that the human condition presents much to protest against but nothing to despair about. Thus, the Poe movie always ends on a note of hope. Perhaps the hope is illusory, and then again, perhaps it could be a stimulant for the downtrodden.

This extended disquisition on the Poe movie is not meant to be a denigration of films like Ganito, Tatlong Taon, or Lunes. Nor is this an argument for swallowing--hook, line, and sinker--the phenomenon of mass culture as it exists today. We need not justify what is blatantly opportunistic and exploitative in commercial movies.

What we are driving at here is simply that commercial movies made for the bakya crowd, for the mass audience, are as deserving of serious study as the works of noncommercial film artists. They are as worthy of critical exploration as the films we hail as masterpieces.

As movie critic Pauline Kael notes in her essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” whether a movie is good or bad is sometimes of less interest than why so many people respond to it the way they do.

“Sometimes,” Kael writes, “bad movies are more important than good ones just because of those unresolved elements that make them such a mess. They may get something going on around us that the moviemakers felt or shared and expressed in a confused way. Rebel without a Cause was a pretty terrible movie but it reflected (and possibly caused) more cultural changes than many a good one. And conceivably it’s part of the function of a movie critic to know and indicate the difference between a bad movie that doesn’t much matter because it’s so much like other bad movies and a bad movie that matters (like The Chase or The Wild Ones) because it affects people strongly in new, different ways. And if it is said that this is sociology, not aesthetics, the answer is that an aesthetician who gave his time to criticism of current movies would have to be an awful fool. Movie criticism to be of any use whatever must go beyond formal analysis.”

Sunday, November 30, 2008

ANG MGA WALANG PANGALAN

Nahilingan akong basahin ang lumang tulang ito sa isang programa sa Bantayog ng mga Bayani, Quezon City, noong Setyembre 21, 2008, bilang paggunita sa ika-36 na anibersaryo ng deklarasyon ng batas militar, o martial law.

Ang tula ay alay kay Leonor Alay-ay, drayber ng lider-manggagawa at abugadong si Rolando Olalia. Pinaslang si Olalia noong Nobyembre 13, 1986, siyam na buwan pagkaraan ng pag-aalsa sa EDSA na nagpabagsak sa rehimeng militar ni Ferdinand Marcos. Kasama niyang pinaslang ang kanyang drayber, na ni hindi pinangalanan sa ilang ulat, tulad ng report na ito ng Time Magazine noong Nobyembre 24, 1986: "On Thursday the stabbed and bullet-riddled bodies of Rolando Olalia, the president of the People's Party and the leader of the country's largest labor federation, and his driver were found beside a Manila highway."

Bagamat si Lando Olalia ang personal kong kakilala, naisipan kong sumulat ng tula tungkol sa hindi ko nakilalang si Leonor Alay-ay at tungkol sa iba pang katulad niyang hindi nakilala sa pangalan, at hanggang ngayon ay hindi kinikilala sa mga parangal para sa mga bayani at martir na nagbuwis ng buhay noong panahon ng batas militar. Alam kong hindi mamasamain ni Ka Lando na siya, ang bida sa mga diyaryo noong panahong iyon, ay hindi bida sa tulang ito.


Ang mga walang pangalan
Alay kay Leonor Alay-ay, drayber


Nalalaman na lamang natin
ang kanilang mga pangalan
kung sila’y wala na.
Subalit habang nabubuhay,
sila’y walang mga pangalan,
walang mukhang madaling tandaan.
Hindi sila naiimbitang
magtalumpati sa liwasan,
hindi inilalathala ng pahayagan
ang kanilang mga larawan,
at kung makasalubong mo sa daan,
kahit anong pamada ang gamit nila
ay hindi ka mapapalingon.

Sila’y walang mga pangalan,
walang mukhang madaling tandaan,
subalit sila ang nagpapatakbo
sa motor ng kilusang mapagpalaya.
Sila ang mga paang nagmartsa
sa mga kalsadang nababakuran
ng alambreng tinik,
sila ang mga bisig na nagwagayway
ng mga bandila ng pakikibaka
sa harap ng batuta at bala,
sila ang mga kamaong
nagtaas ng nagliliyab na sulo
sa madilim na gabi ng diktadura,
sila ang mga tinig na sumigaw
ng “Katarungan! Kalayaan!”
at umawit ng “Bayan Ko”
sa himig na naghihimagsik.
Sa EDSA sa isang buwan ng Pebrero,
sila ang nagdala ng mga anak
at nagbaon ng mga sanwits
at humarap sa mga tangke
nang walang armas kundi dasal,
habang nasa loob ng kampo,
nagkakanlong, ang mga opisyal
na armado ng Uzi.

Wala silang mga pangalan,
walang mukhang madaling tandaan,
itong mga karaniwang mamamayan,
pambala ng kanyon at kakaning-itik,
na matiyagang kumilos at
tahimik na nagbuklod-buklod at
magiting na lumaban
kahit kinakalambre ng nerbiyos,
kahit kumakabog ang dibdib.

Wala silang mga pangalan,
walang mukhang madaling tandaan,
subalit sila’y
naglingkod sa sambayanan
kahit hindi kinukunan ng litrato,
kahit hindi sinasabitan ng medalya,
kahit hindi hinaharap ng pangulo.
Sila’y naglingkod sa sambayanan,
walang hinahangad
na luwalhati o gantimpala
kundi kaunting kanin at ulam,
kaunting pagkakakitaan,
bubong na hindi pinapasok ng ulan,
damit na hindi gula-gulanit,
ang layang lumakad
sa kalsada tuwing gabi
nang hindi sinusutsutan ng pulis
para bulatlatin ang laman ng bag,
isang bukas na may pag-asa’t aliwalas
para sa sarili at sa mga anak,
isang buhay na marangal
kahit walang pangalan,
kahit walang mukhang madaling tandaan.


--Jose F. Lacaba

Mula sa kalipunang Sa Panahon ng Ligalig (Anvil Publishing, Maynila, 1991). Out of print na ang librong ito.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Carabao English

A language website, Grant Barrett's Double-Tongued Dictionary, which tracks new additions to the English language, recently took note of a term we take for granted in our neck of the woods: "carabao English." Here's the entry.

Double-Tongued Dictionary Catchwords & Commentary

Link to Double-Tongued Dictionary

carabao English

Posted: 30 Oct 2008 01:41 PM CDT

carabao English n. Whenever you hear a non-native English speaker, a Filipino specifically, uttering broken “carabao” English, or a version you are not used to hearing, please reserve your criticism. —“World has more than one English” by Eric Ariel Salas in South Dakota State University Collegian (Brookings, South Dakota) Oct. 29, 2008. Categories: English, Philippines—More information about carabao English and related words at Double-Tongued Dictionary.

© 1999-2008 by Grant Barrett, Double-Tongued Dictionary, New York City.

-------------------------------

This gives me an excuse to trot out a couple of old columns of mine. I mentioned "Carabao English," a.k.a. "Bamboo English," twice in a language column I wrote more than a decade ago. The column was called "Carabeef Lengua"--literally, carabao-meat tongue, a play on beef lengua or lengua estofada, which is how stew made from ox-tongue appears on Philippine menus.

Unfortunately, this was before we had the Web in the Philippines, and I lost my clipping of the first column while transferring from apartment to townhouse, so I still need to research the actual date of publication.

That language column has since transmogrified into "Showbiz Lengua," which still appears in the glossy monthly entertainment magazine YES! My book publisher has been after me to put together my "Lengua" columns in book form, but I happen to be a great procrastinator, so... Maybe next year... maybe next year...

Below are the two columns where the phrase "Carabao English" gets mentioned. [The parts enclosed in brackets are 2008 additions and will probably appear as endnotes in the book, for the benefit of non-Filipino readers.]


FROM: “Carabeef Lengua,” The Manila Chronicle, 1994 ???
Written under the pen name Felix Culpa

What to watch (out) for

THIS being the inaugural column, a little introduction is in order.

This is going to be a column on language—primarily, the foreign language this column is written in. From time to time I might touch on aspects of another language with which I have more than a nodding acquaintance, namely, Tagalog; but for the most part I will be making sundry notes and comments on English.

Now I am not a native speaker of English. I was an English major in college, I have been speaking and hearing the language all my life (which is nearly half a century), and as writer, editor and translator these past 30 years I have made a living out of what I know of the language. But English is, has been, and always will be a second language.

So what gives me the right to make like William Safire or Jean Edades? Nothing. [The late Jean Edades was an American professor married to a famous Filipino painter. She wrote a daily language column in the 1960s and 1970s.)

Am I then, in launching this column, being presumptuous? Yes.

The only thing I can say in my defense is that I am a very, very insecure wordsmith. That sense of insecurity works in my favor. I am never sure if I am getting the nuance or the idiom right, so I keep looking things up in dictionaries and in manuals of style and usage.

Another point in my defense is that I intend to concern myself mostly with Filipino English, including its poor country cousins, Carabao English and Bamboo English. On this variety of English I suppose I can set myself up as some kind of authority. As we say in these parts: hindi naman walang K. [Note, 2008: In essence: not that I don’t have a right to speak.]

These days there are linguists who argue that English is no longer just one language. The more orthodox view is that English is a single language with a variety of dialects. British English and American English are “superdialects,” and all other varieties fall into either one of these two categories. According to this theory, Filipino English—along with Canadian English—can be classed with American English.

But state-of-the-art linguists, I am told, now speak of “Englishes.” The analogy here, I suppose, is with the Romance languages—French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, among others—that are all descended from Latin but now have separate identities. According to this theory, Filipino English is now a separate language, like Australian English.

Those who take the newer view probably belong to the school of descriptive, or anti-prescriptive, linguists and lexicographers. That means they don’t believe it’s their job to prescribe standards of correctness in matters of grammar, syntax, usage, idiom, and pronunciation. Their job is simply to describe, document, record the shape of the language at any given time.

As the permissive school sees it, in language there is no right or wrong, only appropriate and inappropriate. Whatever is, is right. If enough people use ain’t, then ain’t is a word that exists, a word that is usable and acceptable in certain contexts, whatever the purists might say. If enough people use alibi loosely and informally as a synonym for excuse, then alibi will come to mean excuse and not be limited to its strict, formal, original meaning as “the defense by an accused person that he was elsewhere at the time the offense with which he is charged was committed.”

Myself, I tend to vacillate between the permissive and the conservative schools of thought. At times I can be flexible and liberal. More often I find myself on the side of the hecklers, hooting off the stage all instances of careless, awkward, inelegant, patently ludicrous, and linguistically incorrect writing.

Poets worry when words “slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision.” Their concern impels them “to purify the dialect of the tribe.” I think even journalists, and especially editors, should exhibit the same scrupulous regard for language.

This column, as its title suggests, accepts the notion that there is such a thing as Filipino English, associated with American English by the accident of history, yet in many ways distinct from it. Thus, I will not look too harshly on words like aggrupation and fiscalize. These are not to be found in any standard dictionary of the English language, whether British or American, but they have come into Filipino English by way of the Spanish agrupacíon and fiscalizar. [Note, 2008: Agrupacion, group, aggregation. Fiscalizar, to prosecute, to criticize in a public forum, such as Congress.]

At the same time, this column will operate on the assumption that English is English, whatever its permutations in various parts of the globe. Which means that English has internal mechanisms that must be respected by Filipinos using it as a vehicle for communication.

So, if a sidewalk toy vendor puts up a sign like the one I saw a few Christmases ago—FREE GIFT RAPING—I will go prescriptive and rap the hand that scrawled the misspelling.

And when the Ateneo de Manila University, formerly famed for its Arrneow accent, now comes out with a brochure saying WATCH OUT FOR THE OPENING OF ALIWW IN 1995!— ALIWW being the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings—I will go ballistic and remind the copywriter that you watch for, or wait expectantly, for something that could be pleasurable (“Watch for our coming attractions!”), but you watch out for, or are on guard against, something that could be dangerous or threatening (“Watch out for falling bricks!”).

Now I shall take my leave, while watching out for the raps and brickbats that are sure to come my way.




FROM: “Carabeef Lengua,” Sunday Times Magazine, 1995 May 1
Using my regular byline, Jose F. Lacaba

Babble dabbler

THIS COLUMN originally debuted in another publication, under a pen name. I have discarded the pen name for two reasons. The first is purely mercenary: it has been impressed upon me that the real name carries a certain cachet that translates into extra cash. I was going to say I forgot the second, but that is a hoary joke. Still, it bears repeating: I forgot the second.

I must publicly acknowledge a moral debt to Celin Cristobal, whose idea it was for me to do a language column. The title of the column itself, however, is mine. I take full responsibility for it and hereby exercise my inalienable right to it. At any rate, I am sure Celin will forgive me if I now rehash my original inaugural column.

This column is called “Carabeef Lengua” because it is concerned with the hybrid tongue that we have developed in these parts. This little lengua, this slip of a tongue, is recognizably English, but in many ways it has as much relation to the original as carabeef has to beef.

Carabeef, or carabao meat, is a word that is not to be found in any of my nine or so English dictionaries lying around the house. But, hey, we all know what it means, right? And we all know that the word exists—the dictionaries just don’t know that yet. It exists as a word in Filipino English. It has a life, in spite of what language purists might say.

Myself, I’m no language purist. I’m not even a linguist or a language maven. I’m just your run-of-the-mill, bush-league language loony, a pop philologist, a garden-variety grammarian, a workaday wordwatcher, a babble dabbler. I have no credentials to offer, except that I majored in English back in college—and dropped out after the first semester of my senior year.

Half of the time these days, I find myself being swayed by the school of descriptivist or permissive linguists and lexicographers. These people rail against what they call the “hypercorrectness” of the opposing prescriptivist school. They don’t believe it’s the job of linguists and lexicographers to prescribe standards of correctness in matters of grammar, syntax, usage, idiom, and pronunciation. Their job is simply to describe, document, record the shape of the language at any given time.

As the permissive school sees it, in language there is no right or wrong, only appropriate and inappropriate. Whatever is, is right. If enough people use ain’t, then ain’t is a word that exists, a word that is usable and acceptable in certain contexts.

Taking the permissive concept one step farther, I am not unduly exercised by the existence and persistence of filanglicisms (if I may be allowed to coin a term) such as aggrupation and fiscalize and oppositor, not to mention chicken relleno [stuffed chicken] and bananacue [bananas rolled in sugar, deep-fried, and served on a barbecue stick; these are a variety of bananas that need to be cooked to be eaten] and, of course, carabeef.

As I was saying before I digressed, I am no language purist. Or I try not to be—half of the time. The other half of the time, however, I vacillate. Along with T.S. Eliot, I worry when words “slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision,” and even if I have given up writing poetry in English I still sometimes hunger “to purify the dialect of the tribe.”

That is why I tend to stick to the rules of the language as they have been handed down to us by native speakers, from the Thomasites [American schoolteachers who came to the Philippines at the end of the Filipino-American War, after American troops crushed the Philippine Revolution] to Strunk and White to William Safire. In fact—like many users of ESL and EFL (the initials mean English as a Second Language and English as a Foreign Language, terms that native speakers use to put us down)—I can be more popish than the Pope, more safirish that Safire.

So, you can’t get me to use media in the singular—although I have learned to tolerate it in other people’s prose ever since I learned from the permissive Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage that the singular media, like the singular agenda and stamina, is gaining in respectability and is viewed “without great alarm” by perfectly respectable native-speaking linguists. “You should remember,” the WDEU reminds me, “that media and medium are English words, even if naturalized, and are no longer subject to the rules of Latin.”

Also, in my own writing you can’t make me blur the distinction between ensure and insure, between convince and persuade—even if the otherwise helpful Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (“Helping Learners with Real English”) assures me that insure in the sense of ensure is acceptable in American English, and that convince can now be used in the sense of persuade. Interestingly enough, Collins has the following example for the newly acceptable sense of convince: “a massive attempt to convince Filipinos to boycott the polls.”

Which makes me wonder if Filipino English is making inroads into real English.

Filipino English—with its poor country cousins, Carabao English and Bamboo English—has become a recognized variety of English. You will find an entry on “Philippine English” in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (edited by Tom McArthur, Oxford University Press, 1992).

As the title of this column suggests, I accept the notion that there is such a thing as Filipino English, associated with American English by the accident of history, yet in many ways distinct from it.

Still, this column will operate on the assumption that English is English, whatever its permutations in this part of the globe, and that it has internal mechanisms that must be respected by Filipinos using it as a vehicle for communication.

Which means that if you deal on words, or if you presume to dictate upon me, or if you hold that English remains to be an infuriating language—and 90 percent of this country’s English-speaking population, including a slew of journalists, insist on perpetuating such unidiomatic locutions—you will find me going into hypercorrect mode, heckling and hooting off the stage all instances of careless, awkward, inelegant, patently ludicrous, and linguistically incorrect writing.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

TULAAN SA TREN 2: "Awit sa Ilog Pateros"

Ito ang ikalawang tula ko na ginamit sa proyektong Tulaan sa Tren. Ang nagrekord naman nito ay ang young star na si Matt Evans.

Kung hindi ako nagkakamali ay nasa kolehiyo pa ako nang sulatin ko ito, bandang 1963 o 1964. Ang Pateros noon ay isa pang munisipalidad sa probinsiya ng Rizal. Ngayon ay bahagi na ito ng Metro Manila, at hindi mo na makikita ang Ilog Pateros sa kakapalan ng waterlily na tumatakip sa tubig. (Ako naman, natuto ring lumangoy--noong may asawa't anak na ako. Sa dagat at swimming pool na ako natuto.)


AWIT SA ILOG PATEROS


Tagailog ay di natutong lumangoy:
sa hiya’y matinis itong aking taghoy.
O Ilog Pateros, agos na marahan,
ang paliwanag ko ay iyong pakinggan.

Oo, kung umagang bagong gising tayo,
ginto kang gayuma sa mga tulad ko,
at sa hapon naman, paghimlay ng araw,
ang lambong mo’y pilak na nakasisilaw.

Pero sa pagitan ng umaga’t gabi,
ano ang iyong maipagmamalaki?
Putik kang malapot, tahanan ng suso,
lubluban ng kalabaw, tinta ka’t tanso.

Waterliling ugat ay makutong buhok,
bituka’t atay ng dagang nabubulok,
naglalahong bula ng sabong panlaba,
tae ng tao at tambak na basura--

ito at iba pa, O Ilog Pateros,
ay dalang lagi ng marahan mong agos.
At akong bata pa’y masyadong pihikan,
aasahan bang matuto ng languyan?

-- Jose F. Lacaba

Tulad ng tulang “Ang mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran ni Juan de la Cruz,” ito’y unang nalathala sa kalipunang Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran: Mga Tulang Nahalungkat sa Bukbuking Baul (Kabbala, 1979; ikalawang edisyon, Office of Research and Publications, Ateneo de Manila University, 1996). Muli rin itong nalathala sa kalipunang Kung Baga sa Bigas: Mga Piling Tula (University of the Philippines Press, unang limbag, 2002; ikalawang limbag, 2005).

TULAAN SA TREN: "Kagila-gilalas"


Isa sa mga poster ng TULAAN SA TREN:
Chin-Chin Gutierrez, binabasa ang
EDAD MEDYA, kalipunan ng mga tula ni Jose F. Lacaba


Kung nakakasakay kayo nitong mga nakaraang buwan sa linyang Santolan (Pasig)-Divisoria ng LRT, maaaring narinig ninyo sa public-address system—sa istasyon at sa loob ng tren mismo—ang ilang tula sa Pilipino at Ingles na binabasa ng mga celebrity. Maaaring nabasa rin ninyo ang ilang excerpts, o siniping linya ng mga tulang iyon, na nakaimprenta sa maliliit na poster na nakapaskel sa loob ng tren.

Bahagi ito ng proyektong tinatawag na Tulaan sa Tren, na inilunsad noong Agosto 9, 2008, ng National Book Development Board (NBDB) at ng Light Rail Transit Authority (LRTA). Layunin ng proyekto na ilapit ang panulaang Pilipino sa publikong sumasakay sa tren. Ayon kay Attorney Andrea Pasion-Flores, NBDB executive director: “We hope that not a few of the people who experience the poems realize that Philippine literature is something we can all be proud of, and that they will look up the authors, whose works we featured, to discover more treasures.”

Kabilang sa mga celebrity na nagrekording ng mga tula sina Edu Manzano, Miriam Quiambao, Nikki Gil, Matt Evans, Lyn Ching-Pascual, Romnick Sarmienta, Rhea Santos, Christine Bersola-Babao, Chin-Chin Gutierrez, and Harlene Bautista.

Kabilang naman sa humigit-kumulang sa 33 makatang may tulang nasali sa proyekto sina Nick Joaquin, Rio Alma, Bienvenido Lumbera, Gemino H. Abad, Amado V. Hernandez, Danton Remoto, Emmanuel Torres, Federico Licsi Espino Jr., Jesus Manuel Santiago, Lamberto Antonio, Marjorie Evasco, Rogelio Mangahas, Teo Antonio, Vim Nadera, at Marra PL. Lanot. Kasama din siyempre si Jose F. Lacaba, na sa list of authors (arranged alphabetically by first name) ay napagitnann nina Jose Corazon de Jesus, sa isang banda, at nina Jose Garcia Villa at Jose Rizal, sa kabilang banda.

Narito ang isa sa mga tula kong kasali sa Tulaan sa Tren, binasa ni Romnick Sarmenta. Nang humingi ang NBDB ng permiso na isali ang tulang ito, tinanong ko sila sa email: “Are you sure you want ‘Kagila-gilalas’? For one thing, it's a long poem, and I’m not sure it will fit into your train posters. For another thing, it contains the word ‘libog,’ so it might not be considered for general patronage, and the LRT might get into trouble with pro-censorship groups.”

Excerpts nga lang ng tula ang inilabas sa posters, pero, in fairness, nirekord nila ang buong tula, kasama ang salitang “libog.”


ANG MGA KAGILA-GILALAS
NA PAKIKIPAGSAPALARAN
NI JUAN DE LA CRUZ

Isang gabing madilim
puno ng pangambang sumakay sa bus
si Juan de la Cruz
pusturang-pustura
kahit walang laman ang bulsa
BAWAL MANIGARILYO BOSS
sabi ng konduktora
at minura
si Juan de la Cruz.

Pusturang-pustura
kahit walang laman ang bulsa
nilakad ni Juan de la Cruz
ang buong Avenida
BAWAL PUMARADA
sabi ng kalsada
BAWAL UMIHI DITO
sabi ng bakod
kaya napagod
si Juan de la Cruz.

Nang abutan ng gutom
si Juan de la Cruz
tumapat sa Ma Mon Luk
inamoy ang mami siopao
hanggang sa mabusog.
Nagdaan sa Sine Dalisay
tinitigan ang retrato ni Chichay
PASSES NOT HONORED TODAY
sabi ng takilyera
tawa nang tawa.

Dumalaw sa Kongreso
si Juan de la Cruz
MAG-INGAT SA ASO
sabi ng diputado.
Nagtuloy sa Malakanyang
wala namang dalang kamanyang
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
sabi ng hardinero
sabi ng sundalo
kay Juan de la Cruz.

Nang dapuan ng libog
si Juan de la Cruz
namasyal sa Culiculi
at nahulog sa pusali
parang espadang bali-bali
YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD BUT WE NEED CASH
sabi ng bugaw
sabay higop ng sabaw.

Pusturang-pustura
kahit walang laman ang bulsa
naglibot sa Dewey
si Juan de la Cruz
PAN-AM BAYSIDE SAVOY THEY SATISFY
sabi ng neon.
Humikab ang dagat na parang leon
masarap sanang tumalon pero
BAWAL MAGTAPON NG BASURA
sabi ng alon.

Nagbalik sa Quiapo
si Juan de la Cruz
at medyo kinakabahan
pumasok sa simbahan
IN GOD WE TRUST
sabi ng obispo
ALL OTHERS PAY CASH.

Nang wala nang malunok
si Juan de la Cruz
dala-dala'y gulok
gula-gulanit na ang damit
wala pa ring laman ang bulsa
umakyat
sa Arayat
ang namayat
na si Juan de la Cruz.
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE
sabi ng PC
at sinisi
ang walanghiyang kabataan
kung bakit sinulsulan
ang isang tahimik na mamamayan
na tulad ni Juan de la Cruz.

---Jose F. Lacaba

Unang nalathala ang tulang ito sa kalipunang Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran: Mga Tulang Nahalungkat sa Bukbuking Baul (Kabbala, 1979; ikalawang edisyon, Office of Research and Publications, Ateneo de Manila University, 1996). Muling nalathala sa kalipunang Kung Baga sa Bigas: Mga Piling Tula (University of the Philippines Press, unang limbag, 2002; ikalawang limbag, 2005).

Sunday, September 28, 2008

BALANGIGA

The bells of Balangiga in Fort D.A. Russell, Wyoming, U.S.A., circa 1910
From: www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/russellbells.html


Today, September 28, 2008, is the 107th anniversary of the Battle of Balangiga, known to American historians in the past as the Balangiga massacre and to Filipinos today as the Balangiga Victory, one of the few Filipino victories in the Philippine-American War.

Early in 2002, after the celebration of the centennial year of that historic event in Balangiga, Samar, I was commissioned by film director Chito Roño, who is from Samar, to write a screenplay about the Balangiga incident. This was the time when there was a campaign to recover the bells of the Balangiga church that American soldiers had carted off to Wyoming, U.S.A., in the wake of the incident in Balangiga and the subsequent retaliatory devastation of Samar.

Chito, with whom I had earlier worked on the film Eskapo (about the escape of Geny Lopez and Serge Osmeña from a martial-law prison during the Marcos dictatorship), provided me with a lot of research materials on Balangiga and got me in touch with Prof. Rolando Borrinaga, the historical expert on the subject. I subsequently submitted a storyline (synopsis), a sequence treatment (which is how Filipino filmmakers used to refer to a scene-by-scene breakdown of the proposed script), and a first-draft screenplay, which I finished writing in October of 2002.

I would learn later that Butch Dalisay had also done a screenplay on the same subject for director Gil Portes.

Ours was supposed to be a Robin Padilla project, and I was told that Robin was studying arnis in preparation for his role as Valeriano Abanador, the hero of Balangiga. Partly because of budgetary problems, partly because of a falling-out between the director and the possible producer, the project got shelved. Other producers and directors have expressed an interest in my first-draft screenplay, but even in these days of relatively inexpensive digital filmmaking, the budget for a period film and war epic requiring American actors and period costumes remains daunting. So I guess the screenplay of BALANGIGA will have to remain in the realm where dream projects decompose.

For all it’s worth, here’s the storyline that I wrote.


BALANGIGA


Storyline
by
Jose F. Lacaba


SEPTEMBER 28, THE PRESENT. Church bells are ringing. In an annual ritual, residents of the town of Balangiga, on Samar island, reenact a century-old incident that put their small town in the history books. It is an incident that American military chroniclers once labeled the Balangiga Massacre, but one that Filipino historians are beginning to call the Battle of Balangiga, or the Balangiga Victory. In documentary footage, we see Filipino men dressed in women's clothes reenacting an attack on American soldiers. ...

September 28, the year 1901. We see the attack as it must have happened. Residents of Balangiga, reinforced by revolutionists from neighboring towns, attack a company of American soldiers in this remote outpost of Empire. The attack occurs at dawn, when the colonial troops are having breakfast; the Filipinos have the element of surprise and overwhelming numbers on their side. But the Filipinos are armed only with bolos and arnis sticks; and the Americans, after their initial shock, are soon evening up the score with Krag rifles and machine guns. ...

In the heat of battle we see some of the protagonists of our story. Two Filipino boys ringing the church bells. Captain Thomas Connell running toward the sea, bolos sticking out of his back, bolomen at his heels. Lieutenant Edward Bumpus dead in a rocking chair, a clump of letters on his lap, blood oozing from his head. Town mayor Pedro Abayan leading the attack on the convent. Francisco, Connell's Filipino houseboy, cowering beneath the convent window. Private Adolf Gamlin firing away from a secure position. Two young Filipino men attempting to hoist down the American flag and being shot down. Casiana "Doday Sana" Nacionales waving her rosary and urging the attackers on. And Valeriano "Valé" Abanador surveying the scene dispassionately, trying to conceal the mixture of rage and sorrow in his heart.

We go back further in time. It is 1899, and Valé is in a Cavite dockyard with fellow martial-arts enthusiasts, going through the motions of an arnis exercise. He learns from some dockhands that an American sentry has shot a Filipino revolutionary soldier in San Juan. Although nobody in the dockyard knows it yet, the Filipino-American War has begun.

We next see Valé in a large baloto (a kind of boat) in the open sea, looking out at the unique formation of islands and islets that the boat must pass through on its way to Balangiga. Back in his hometown, Valé talks to close friends and relatives about life in Manila--and about the new conflict with the new colonizers, the Amerikano. We learn that he joined the Katipunan in Manila (or is it Cavite?).

Soon he is invited to a secret meeting in the house of Pedro Abayan. Here, Captain Eugenio Daza, who is the Revolution's top commander in this part of Samar, updates the gathering on developments in their area of operation. Samar and Leyte have been placed by President Emilio Aguinaldo under the politico-military command of General Vicente Lukban. a Bicolano who is married to a Samareña. The Revolution needs all the help it can get--funds, food, weapons, intelligence information.

In the sala of the Abayan house, while the all-male meeting is going on in a bedroom, a group of women that includes Casiana "Doday Sana" Nacionales is going through the motions of choir practice. The women are covering up for the men's semi-clandestine activity.

Under the auspices of the revolutionary government, an election is held in Balangiga. Among those elected are Abayan, as presidente (town mayor), and Abanador, as "delegate of police" in charge of military intelligence. Both men, incidentally, are related to Daza. In the days that follow, the town officials raise more than 532 pesos, a princely sum in those days, in taxes and war contributions for the Revolution.

The parish priest, Father Donato Guimbaolibot, is aware of what is going on in his town. He's unhappy about the fact that Lukban is a Freemason who has been making things difficult for Catholic priests in other Samar and Leyte towns. But the priest is also a patriot who took part in the movement for the Filipinization of the clergy during the Spanish era, and he is wary of the new Protestant colonizers. He thus tolerates the activities of his lay preachers, Abayan and Daday Sona, who are none too subtly using their parish positions to solicit support for the Revolution.

Meanwhile, Balangiga's fishermen have been coming home with rumors that American troops, currently stationed in the Samar town of Basay, may soon be sending a contingent to Balangiga.

On August 11, 1901, the rumors come true. Company C, an 80-man force commanded by Captain Thomas Connell, arrives in Balangiga on board the rickety boat Liskum. With him are two other American officers--the company doctor, Major Richard Griswold, and and an indefatigable letter writer, First Lieutenant Edward Bumpus. Two Filipinos are also with Company C--Connell's houseboy, Francisco, and an interpreter whom everyone refers to as Lieutenant Macabebe.

Trying to hide their apprehensions, the Balangigan-ons welcome the American troops with cheers and the ringing of church bells. But their apprehensions only intensify with the actions of the occupation troops, who take over the convent and some choice houses and turn these into barracks and officers' quarters, without paying rent. Connell's personality further aggravates the situation. An Irish Catholic, he gets along with Father Guimbaolibot, with whom he plays chess. But he antagonizes most everyone else with his brusque methods and insensitiveness to the local culture.

One of Connell's first official acts is to demand that the whole town take an oath of allegiance to the United States. Father Guimbaolibot, Abayan, and Valé Abanador protest on behalf of the people, but finally decide that the better part of valor at this time is to comply.

Connell then orders all of Balangiga's able-bodied men over 18 to clear up the jungle surrounding the town--a military measure to deprive Filipino guerrillas of possible hiding places. Ostensibly as a health measure, he also orders the cleaning up of the ground underneath the residents' nipa huts, where rural folk traditionally keep and feed their pigs and chickens. To top it all, he compels all these men, after each day's cleaning, to stay inside large tents within sight of the American garrison. There are no beds or chairs inside the tents. Balangiga's men are forced to stand, sit, or squat the whole night, and the women and children have to bring them food.

Some friendships are made, despite the inevitably uneasy relationship between colonizer and colonized. Valé plays chess with Major Griswold and tries to teach the intricacies of arnis, a martial art, to Private Adolf Gamlin, and Sergeant Frank Betron seems to be displaying a romantic interest in the spinster Doday Sana. The cook organizes the neighborhood boys into a baseball team, and Francisco the houseboy is befriended by the church bell ringers.

But boredom and homesickness and perhaps colonizer's guilt begin to take their toll on the American soldiers. Less than a month after coming to Balangiga, Private William Denton disappears, leaving his shoes on the banks of the river, and only later is it discovered that he has defected to the Filipino side. Not long after, Private Schechterle goes crazy and blows his brains out with his Krag. Other soldiers become overly fond of the local coconut wine known as tuba and become rambunctious when drunk. Two drunken soldiers start being too free and easy with the woman tending the store that sells tuba, and end up being beaten up by the menfolk.

It is in the midst of this volatile situation that another secret meeting is held in the house of Pedro Abayan, with Daza and Valé among those in attendance. Plans are made and plans are junked and plans are changed, but finally, on September 28, 1901, the battle plan goes into operation. Valé's battlecry and the ringing of the church bells signal the start of an attack that causes the bloody death of more than half of Company C and the unceremonious retreat by sea of the survivors.

In the unequal battle between Krag and bolo, the casualty count among the Filipinos is even larger, but clearly this is a victory for the people of Balangiga and the army of the Revolution--a brief shining moment of liberation.

It is also a pyrrhic victory. In retaliation for their defeat at Balangiga, American occupation troops under the command of Colonel Jacob "Jake" Smith turn the entire province of Samar into a "howling wilderness." For three bloody months, from October 1901 to January 1902, they wage a kill-and-burn campaign, and any male who is over the age of 10 and capable of carrying a bolo is mercilessly killed. In a symbolic gesture, Colonel Smith's forces cart off, as part of the war booty, the church bells that tolled to signal the attack in the town of Balangiga.

Eventually, General Vicente Lukban is captured, and with his capture Valé Abanador, Pedro Abayan, and Eugenio Daza are forced at different times to surrender. After the population of Samar has been cut down by nearly half, a more liberal colonial policy allows these revolutionists to hold positions in the colonial government. But the ideals of liberation and independence that they fought for do not see fruition until the Stars and Stripes are finally hoisted down from the last remaining American military bases in the late 1980s.

To this day, however, more than a century later, Balangiga's church bells are kept on display at the Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, U.S.A., hostage to a historic grudge fight. The Wyoming state government refuses to give them up despite countless appeals and petitions calling for a return to the Philippines of the freedom bells of Balangiga.


THE END

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Remembering martial law

I wrote the following memories of martial law for a column I used to write for Philippine Graphic weekly magazine. It came out in a September 1995 issue. If memory serves, the unnamed friend mentioned in this column is lawyer Rene Saguisag. September 21, 2008, being the 36th anniversary of the declaration of martial rule, I thought this would be a good time for a "lest we forget" and "never again" reprint.


OFFHAND
Jose F. Lacaba


The way it was


When word got around a few years ago that a class suit was going to be filed against the Marcoses, I took note of it more as a news item than as a personal issue. I virtually ignored the forms that had come in the mail, asking me to recount the torture I had undergone under martial rule.

One week before the deadline for the submission of the depositions of torture victims, a friend called and asked why I hadn't submitted mine. My friend said that, if not enough depositions were submitted to the Hawaii court, the Marcoses would be proven right in their contention that they were not world-class torturers and executioners, and they would be justified in asking for a dismissal of the case.

What needed to be done, my friend pointed out, was not primarily to get financial reparation for the harm that had been done to us, but to prove to the world that the Marcos regime had indeed been guilty of widespread and systematic torture and extrajudicial executions. If the class suit said there were around 10,000 victims of human-rights violations under Marcos, then it needed to get as close to 10,000 depositions as it could.

My friend's arguments persuaded me to write the following account, which was submitted along with the requisite forms just a few days before the deadline set by the court for the submission of depositions:

***

At dawn of April 25, 1974, on the second year of martial law, I was awakened by shouts of: "Open up! We are the authorities!" I looked out and saw that the house was surrounded by armed men taking cover behind jeeps and cars that had their headlights on.

As soon as I opened the door, the first man who came in shoved the barrel of his rifle into my stomach. Then somebody spun me around and forced me to lie face down on the floor. In that position, I was stepped on, kicked in the ribs, hit in the back and on the back of the head with rifle butts.

After the house had been searched and my two house companions were in custody, someone who acted as though he was in command (I would learn later that he was a first lieutenant, but not the head of the raiding party) dragged me into the bathroom and asked if there was a tunnel underneath us. I couldn't help giving a short laugh, struck by the absurdity of the question. Angered by my response, he gave me a sudden blow in the chest with his closed fist. The lieutenant was an Arnold Schwarzenegger pumping-iron type, and at that time I was a 111-pound weakling. That single punch sent me reeling against the bathroom's tiled wall.

The sun was up when we were taken in separate cars to Camp Crame in Quezon City, to the headquarters of the 5th Constabulary Security Unit (5CSU). After some routine questioning and filling up of forms in the office, I was taken to the back, the troops' sleeping quarters. Constabulary officers and enlisted men--including a buck private who was himself under detention, for murder--took turns making me a punching bag.

Mostly I was pummelled with fists in the chest and the stomach. I was seated on the edge of a steel cot. My tormentors and interrogators sat in chairs or stood before me, hitting me each time a question was asked or an answer was unsatisfactory. Troopers passing by, on their way to their lockers or wherever, felt free to hit my nape or the back of my head with open palms or karate chops.

At one point I was made to half-squat with arms outstretched. One of my torturers then took a broom and slowly, methodically beat my shins with the broom's wooden handle. Although he seemed to be hitting me with very little force, the cumulative effect of the beating caused my shins to swell and made it sore and sensitive for a few days.

At another point I was made to lie down with the back of my head resting on the edge of one steel cot, both my feet resting on the edge of another cot, my arms straight at my sides, and my stiffened body hanging in midair. This was the torture they called higa sa hangin (lying down in air), also known as the San Juanico Bridge, named after the country's longest bridge, built during martial law and dedicated by Marcos to his wife Imelda.

"Lying down in air" is difficult enough, since you have to contend with the pull of gravity. But even before gravity could take its toll, somebody standing close by would give me a kick in the stomach and bring my body down to the floor. The steel cot scraped skin off my nape as I slid down.

I was forced to "lie down in air" twice. The third time I simply refused to get up. I stayed crumpled on the floor and said, "You may as well just kill me. Go ahead and kill me." That was when the torture stopped for the day.

I had been continuously tortured for about eight hours. Incredibly enough, we even had a lunch break. I forced myself to finish up the horrid prison food on the aluminum army tray that they placed before me, hoping that when they resumed hitting me in the stomach I would throw up in their faces. I never did.

I can no longer remember the exact sequence of events, but in the days that followed, during the fortnight when we were incommunicado and our families went desperately from camp to camp looking for us, I experienced various other forms of harassment and torture.

Once, while a deposition was being taken, the sergeant conducting the interrogation suddenly kicked me in the chest. We were both seated in one corner of the 5CSU office, face to face, and I insisted on answering only questions pertaining to myself, refusing to answer those that would implicate other people. After the nth "I prefer not to answer that question," he raised his booted foot and gave me a kick in the chest that sent the chair on which I was seated skidding clear across the room. When the chair hit the wall, I fell to the floor.

On another occasion, a lieutenant reviewing my deposition made me stand in front of an air conditioner going full blast while he interrogated me. And he smiled when he saw that I was shivering uncontrollably.

On still another occasion, another lieutenant ordered me to close my eyes in the course of an interrogation. A hand that I assumed to be the lieutenant's then slapped my closed eyes and my nape repeatedly, almost rhythmically.

Once, the detained soldier who had been one of my torturers on my first day took me out of the cramped prison cell that I shared with about 30 other political prisoners. He gave me a tongue-lashing for having poked fun at his rather unusual name. While he was spewing saliva in my face, his fellow soldiers gave me a few jabs in the ribs.

One day I was led out of the small prison cell, handcuffed, and made to board a jeep with three or four of the men who had tortured me on my first day. I thought for sure this was it, they were going to take me to wherever their killing fields were and blow my brains out. Instead, we went to a military hospital, the V. Luna in Quezon City. I recognized the place because it was there that my father, a war veteran, had died of cancer about a dozen years earlier.

It now seemed to me that my torturers were humane after all, that they would have me treated for the bruises on my nape and shins. But as soon as we were inside a doctor's clinic in one of the wards, I was blindfolded with my own snot-splattered handkerchief, made to lie down on the examination table, and injected with what I would later surmise to be a "truth serum." In a couple of minutes I felt like I had downed half a case of beer. My head swam, and my body seemed to float. Once again the third degree began. I can remember talking drunkenly and trying to give misleading answers that would still somehow sound credible to my interrogators.

I don't know how long the interrogation took before I finally lost consciousness. It was dark when I was roused from sleep, taken to the jeep, and brought back to my prison cell. They had to half-carry me all the way. My legs felt like jelly, and I didn't seem to have any control over any part of my body, although I kept mumbling my own mantra: "Mind over matter, mind over matter..." The mantra didn't work.

About two weeks after my arrest, I was taken to the office of the lieutenant who had slapped my closed eyes. He said my wife and my mother were in the other room. They had finally found my place of detention. But the lieutenant said he would only allow me to see them if I would name one name and give one address of a person involved in the underground resistance. "Have pity on your wife and your mother," he said. "They would very much like to see you." After a few moments of agonizing, I said I couldn't do it. He eventually let my wife and my mother come in and talk to me for about ten minutes, but not after subjecting them for a much longer time to the mental torture of knowing I was just in the other room and fearing they would not be allowed to see me.

I was detained without charges for close to two years. In the first six months of detention, I was made to wash cars and clean the enlisted men's incredibly filthy latrines. Halfway through my detention I experienced a recurrence of the pulmonary tuberculosis of which I had already been cured before martial law. I had to be confined for about a month at the Quezon Institute, a hospital that specializes in tuberculosis cases. Three shifts of prison guards kept me company.

***

On the basis of close to 10,000 depositions similar, I suppose, to the one above, the Hawaii court declared the Marcoses guilty of human rights violations and ordered them to pay a billion plus, in dollars, as reparation to the claimants in the class suit.

It was, I thought, primarily a moral victory. I joked about what I would do with the loot, but I didn't really believe there was any way the government or the Marcoses would give a billion plus, in dollars, to victims of human-rights violations, quite a number of whom remain not only nonconformist but also active, militant, even dissident.

Today the papers tell me that a deal is being worked out: if the Marcoses and the government agree to pay 100 million dollars, the claimants will drop all charges against the Marcoses. This is supposed to be a win-win-win solution.

I don't know what to think. I have friends among both those who defend and those who denounce the deal, and I don't know what to think. I could be a million dollars richer, but if the Marcoses are absolved of their crimes against humanity, then what I wrote about how I was tortured would turn out to be a lie, a figment of my overheated imagination.

1995.09.25