Ka Pete

PADRE TENTORIO, PADRE FAVALI

2012-01-29T15:47:00.000+08:00

Nitong nakaraang taon—Oktubre 17, 2011, to be exact—isangparing Italyano ang binaril at pinatay ng di pa kilalang salarin sa Arakan,North Cotabato. Ang pari, si Padre Fausto Tentorio, ay kura paroko ng Arakan atmiyembro ng grupong misyonerong PIME, o Il Pontificio Istituto Missioni Estere(Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions).

Si Padre Tentorio ang ikatlong paring PIME na pinatay saMindanao. Noong 1992, pinatay naman sa Zamboanga ng di rin kilalang salarin siPadre Salvatore Carzedda. Nauna sa kanilang dalawa si Padre Tullio Favali, napinatay sa Tulunan, North Cotabato, noong Abril 11, 1985. Kilala at 23 taonding nakulong ang pumatay kay Padre Favali: si Norberto Manero Jr., lider ngisang kulto at ng grupong vigilante na Civilian Home Defense Force (CHDF).

Nang lumabas ang balita tungkol sa pagpatay kay PadreTentorio noong isang taon, naisipan kong halungkatin ang dalawang kolum nasinulat ko noon tungkol kay Padre Tullio Favali. (Tulio ang baybay sa maraming ulat, at pati na rin sa unakong kolum, pero Tullio ang nasawebsite ng PIME, www.pime.org, kaya Tullio ang baybay na ginamit ko sa mga reprint na ito.)

1985

Mula sa kolum kong “Sa Madaling Salita,” Mr. & Ms.Magazine, June 1985

(Wala akong clipping nito, pero sa carbon copy ng akingmakinilyadong manuskrito ay may ganitong tala sa dulo: 850620. Ibig sabihin,natapos kong sulatin ang kolum noong 1985 Hunyo 20.)

MALAGIM NA POSTKARD

Kung mababanggit ang salitang “postkard,” ang unangmaiisip ay mga larawan ng magagandang tanawing panturista. Pero kamakailan aymay nagbigay sa akin ng postkard na kakaiba. Ang nakalarawan ay isang malagimat nakapanghihilakbot na eksena mula sa kanayunang Pilipino—ang nakadapangbangkay ni Padre Tullio Favali, ang paring Italyano na pinatay sa HilagangKotabato noong Abril 11.

De-kolor ang postkard, at kung mahina ang sikmura mo ayhindi mo matatagalang tumingin dito. Nakaharap sa kamera ang sabog na bungo niPadre Tullio. Maitim na ang natuyong dugong umagos mula sa ulo at kumalat sakalsada, pero ang mismong ulo ay mapulang-mapula pa. Ewan kung ang pulang iyonay dugo o nawakaak na laman ng bungo ng pari.

May kasamang mga brochure at liham ang ibinigay saaking postkard. Sinasariwa sa babasahing ito ang nangyari kay Padre Tullionoong araw na patayin siya.

Huwebes ng hapon noon, at kababalik lamang ng paringItalyano mula sa piyesta sa isang baryo ng Tulunan, Hilagang Kotabato. Si PadreTullio ang kura paroko ng Tulunan. Kabilang siya sa ordeng PIME, mga inisyalsna mula sa mga salitang Italyano, na kung tatagalugin ay Pontipikal naInstituto para sa mga Misyon sa Ibang Bansa. Siya’y 38 anyos noon, at hindi panakakaapat na taon sa pagkapari. Dalawang taon pa lamang siyang namamalagi saPilipinas.

Pagdating niya sa kanyang kumbento sa Tulunan, maynakita siyang liham mula sa isang pamilyang humihingi ng tulong. Ayon sa liham,kasalukuyang nasa Baranggay La Esperanza ang isang grupo ng Civilian HomeDefense Force (CHDF). Nagkaroon diumano ng kaunting putukan, isang residenteang nasugatan, at namamayani sa mga oras na iyon ang matinding takot atpag-aagam-agam.

Muling lumabas ang misyonerong Italyano at sumakay sakanyang motorsiklo. Nagpunta siya sa bahay ng nagpadala ng liham. Habangnaroon, napansin niyang nagliliyab ang kanyang motorsiklo. Nakapaligid samotorsiklo ang ilang miyembro ng CHDF. Ayon sa mga saksing nakapanayam ng isangfact-finding mission ng Philippine Conference on Human Rights (PCHR), ang mgaCHDF ang sumunog sa sasakyan ng pari.

Lumabas ng bahay si Padre Tullio para kausapin ang mgananunog. Papalapit pa lamang siya ay pinaputukan na siya ng isa sa mga armadongCHDF. Umikot ang katawan ng pari at bumagsak sa lupa. Pagbagsak niya’ypinaputukan na naman siya. Sumabog ang bungo niya, kumalat ang utak.

Sa Baranggay La Esperanza nagwakas ang anumang mgapangarap ni Padre Tullio. Tinapak-tapakan ang kanyang lugmok na katawan,sinipa-sipa. Nagkantahan at naghiyawan sa tuwa ang mga bumaril. Pagkatapos,dalawa sa mga mamamatay-tao ang nasaksihang lumapit sa bangkay. Ipinasok nilaang kanilang mga kamay sa sumabog na bungo at dinukot ang utak na naiwan saloob ng bungo. Ipinagparangalan nila ito sa taong-bayan.

Alas singko ng hapon nang barilin si Padre Tullio.Walang makalapit sa kanyang bangkay habang naroon ang mga CHDF. Alas otso na nggabi nang dumating ang isa pang pari ng Tulunan para bendisyunan ang bangkay.May kasama siyang mga pulis at sundalo.

Ayon sa mga saksi, ang pumatay kay Padre Tullio ay angCHDF na pinamumunuan ni Norberto Manero Jr. alyas Kumander Bucay. Kabilang sagrupo ang dalawa niyang kapatid, si Edilberto alyas Kumander Baliling at siElpidio. Sina Norberto at Edilberto ang sinasabing dumukot sa utak ng pari.

Sa Kotabato ay kilala sa kalupitan ang pamilya Manero,ayon sa PCHR. Noon lamang Enero 1984, pinatay ng padre de pamilya ang isa paniyang anak, si Noel, pagkat diumano’y “hindi na ito masuheto.” Kung sa mismongmiyembro ng pamilya ay nagawa iyon, mas lalo pa sa ibang tao. May mga apidabitna nagsasabing ang mga Manero ay maraming pinatay na Muslim at Kristiyano—atpagkatapos ay niluto nila at kinain ang laman at laman-loob ng kanilang mgabiktima!

Naniniwala ang mga Manero at ang kanilang mga kabig naang kanibalismo ay nagbibigay sa kanila ng milagrosong kapangyarihan.

Kakila-kilabot isipin na sa mga panahong ito, sa isangbansang Kristiyano at sibilisado kuno, ay mayroon pang nagaganap na ganitongsinauna at panatikong kalupitan.

Lalong kakila-kilabot isipin na hanggang ngayon aynakakawala pa ang mga taong ito, gayong maraming testigo sa kanilang mgakarima-rimarin na gawain.

At lalong kakila-kilabot isipin na ang dahilan kungkaya hindi pa sila nahuhuli at ibinibilanggo ay sapagkat sadyang ginagamitsila’t pinakikinabangan ng naghaharing rehimen. Sa halip na parusahan ay binibigyanpa sila ng militar ng mga medalya at armas.

Si Presidente Marcos mismo ay nagbigay ng di-direktangpagkilala at bendisyon sa mga sekta at kultong katulad ng grupo nina Manero. Sapakikipag-usap kina Almirante William Crowe at Embahador Stephen Bosworth ngEstados Unidos, sinabi ni Marcos na “ang kampanya ng gobyerno laban sainsureksiyon ay sumusulong dahil sa suportang ibinibigay ng iba’t ibang sektaat kultistang lumalaban sa Bagong Hukbong Bayan (NPA).”

Isang bagay ang malinaw sa pangungusap na iyan, ayon saJustice and Peace Commission ng Association of Major Religious Superiors in thePhilipines: alam ni Marcos na may gayong mga panatikong grupo “pero ang mgaiyon ay itinuturing niyang kaalyado.”

Kakila-kilabot isipin na sa isang banda ay haloskinikilala ng gobyerno ang mga kultistang pumapatay ng mga paring Italyano atPilipino, habang sa kabilang banda ay tinutustusan nito ang pamasahe atpanggastos ng mga pari’t madreng Pilipino sa pagpunta sa Italya para panoorinang parpuputong sa isang bagong kardinal na Pilipino.

Mapulang dugo ang pinabulwak sa sumabog na bungo ngisang pari ilang buwan lamang bago sinuotan ng pulang sombrero ang isang bagongkardinal.

Ang unang pangyayari ay hindi inaaksiyunan ng gobyerno,pero ang ikalawa’y sinusuuban ng insenso at hosana ng pinakamatataas na opisyalng gobyerno.

Kakila-kilabot isipin.

2001

Mula sa kolum kong “Kung sa Bagay,” Pinoy Times, 2001 Abril 2

SI MANERO, SI MORATO AT ANG MGA MANANG

NAGWARNING sa akin ang isang kaibigan. Dapat daw akong mag-ingat,dahil tumakas sa kulungan si Norberto Manero.

Palagay ko’y hindi naman ako kilala ni Manero, perobaka naaalaala niya ang Orapronobis. Sanasabing pelikula, na dinirihe ni Lino Brocka, ang kontrabida ay isangnagngangalang Kumander Kontra, lider ng isang kultong inarmasan ng gobyernopara labanan ang mga rebeldeng komunista. Sa simulang-simula pa lamang ngpelikula, pinatay ni Kontra ang isang pari at kinain ang utak nito.

Kaya ako winarningan ng kaibigan ko ay dahil ako angscriptwriter ng pelikula. Nagkataon pa na ang gumanap na Kontra ay si BembolRoco, na kalbo ring tulad ni Manero.

Wala sa script na kalbo si Kontra, at ang pangalan nggrupo ni Manero ay hindi naman Orapronobis kundi Ilaga. Ang Orapronobis aylikhang-isip lamang na batay sa iba’t ibang armadong kulto na tulad ng Ilaga,Tadtad, at Alsa Masa.

Pero aaminin ko na ang pambungad na mga eksena sapelikula ay batay sa totoong nangyari kay Padre Tullio Favali, isangmisyonerong Italyano sa Mindanaw. Dahil sa karumal-dumal na krimeng ito kungkaya dinakip at ikinulong si Manero.

Nang ipalabas ang Orapronobis sa Cannes Film Festival (sa titulong Pranses na LesInsoumis, o “Ang Mga Hindi Nagagapi”),katakot-takot na batikos ang agad na inabot nito mula kina Manoling Morato atCecile Guidote-Alvarez.

Kesyo bakit daw natin kailangang “iladlad ang atingmaruming kumot” sa ibang bansa. Bagamat halos walang sex (hindi ipinakita angpaggahasa ni Kontra sa tauhang ginagampanan ni Gina Alajar), sobra naman dawang violence. At hindi naman daw totoo na may kanibalismo sa Pilipinas.

Malaya pang gagala-gala si Manero noon, at ayawmaniwala nina Morato na may isang katulad ni Manero na literal na kumakain nglaman.

Kung tutuusin, matimpi pa nga ang pelikula. Maskahindik-hindik ang katotohanan. Hindi lamang komunista kundi pati Muslim angnaging biktima nina Manero. Ang tanda ko, nilitson nila nang buhay ang isangbuntis na Muslim, at pagkatapos ay pinulutan ang sanggol sa sinapupunan nito.

Sa ano’t anuman, hindi inisyuhan ni Morato, chairmannoon ng Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, ng permit toexhibit ang Orapronobis. Hanggangngayon, hindi pa ito naipapalabas sa komersiyal na sinehan sa Pilipinas.

Ngayon ay malaya na namang gagala-gala si Manero, atminsan pa’y isang pelikula ang dahilan para manggalaiti sa galit sina Manolingat Cecile at marami pang ibang manang, kabilang na ang ilang manang nanakasutana at may kornita.

Kakatwa na ang pagsensor sa Orapronobis ay nangyari pagkatapos ng People Power 1, at ngayon,pagkatapos ng People Power 2, Live Show naman ang sinensor. Bakit kaya ginigipit ang kalayaan sa pamamahayagpagkatapos na malagay sa poder ang isang pamahalaang nakinabang sa malayangpamamahayag? At bakit pelikula ang unang pinag-iinitan?

Ewan ko. Basta ako, mas takot ako kay Morato kaysa kayManero. Noong nasa MTRCB pa ako, ang sigaw ni Morato sa isang rali ay dapat dawgahasain kaming mga taga-MTRCB. Kaya lagi kong binabantayan ang aking likod.Nginangatngat na nga ng mga manang ang aking utak ay baka madale pa ako sapuwit.

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

NOTE:

Noong panahong sulatin ko ang ikalawang kolum, maynatanggap akong email mula sa isang TV reporter. Sabi niya: “kwentuhan mo namanako kay manero and orapronobis. do u really think regal films bought therights?”

Eto ang naging sagot ko:

The Orapronobis group headed by Bembol Roco in the movie wasa composite. My working title was Tadtad,which was the name of an actual group; but we decided to use a fictional namebecause we didn’t want Tadtad members going out and throwing homemade bombsinto movie theaters.

The opening sequence of Orapronobis was based on the Fr. Favali case. I think it wasjust a coincidence that Bembol and “Kumander Bucay” Manero are both bald.Bembol’s getup, with his head covered by a tubaw, was partly based on photos ofAlsa Masa leaders.

Incidentally, I picked up some details of the Favali killingfrom an interview that Mike de Leon did with Fr. Peter Geremiah, Manero’soriginal target. I published an abridged version of the interview in Midweek magazine. I don’t recall how Mike got to interviewFr. Geremiah—this may have been for the Super-8 documentary we made for theConcerned Artists of the Philippines.

Mike and I were earlier developing another project alsoentitled Orapronobis, but that otherproject was about student filmmakers and a sexually oriented Banahaw-type cult.He shelved this project after its storyline had been approved by the ECP(Marichu Maceda submitted the storyline without Mike’s knowledge orpermission), and we did Sister Stella L. instead. [ECP is the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines.]

Did Regal buy the rights to the film? This is news to me,but if true, it’s good news. Orapronobishas never been shown commercially because Manoling Morato’s MTRCB withheld theexhibition permit on technical grounds—there was no import permit and noPhilippine distributor for a foreign-produced movie. (It was entirely financedby Pathe, then a subsidiary of Cannon Films. Viva was the distributor forCannon films, but it decided not to distribute Orapronobis because it didn’t want its other movies to get intotrouble with Manoling.)

Orapronobis gotattacked by the same gang that was active in the recent anti-MTRCB brouhahabecause they claimed the movie presented a bad image of the country. They saidthe cannibalism was a figment of our (Lino’s and my) imagination.

Ano ang nangyari?

2011-12-27T12:09:00.004+08:00

Binabalikan ko sana ang blog na ito na matagal ko nang hindi nadadagdagan ng post. Me na-click yata akong mali, dahil biglang nawala ang lahat ng links sa mga blog na dati kong sinusundan. Hindi ko na ma-undo.

Sa ano't anuman, plano kong balikan ang blog na ito sa darating na taon. New Year's resolution iyan. Promise. At pag-aaralan ko uli kung paano ibabalik ang mga link ng mga blog na dati kong sinusundan.

Lumang kolum: E.T. Atbp.

2011-07-30T17:26:00.002+08:00

Halos tatlong dekada na ang nakararaan mula nang sulatin ko ang kolum na ito.

E.T. Atbp.

Nang ipalabas dito ang E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial), hindi nagtagal ay may gumawa ng pelikulang Tagalog na pinamagatang E.T. (Estong Tutong). May pumansin din na E.T. ang inisyal nina Eugene Torre, Elizabeth Taylor, atbp. Kamakailan, may narinig akong bagong pakahulugan sa E.T.—Engot na, Tiyope pa.

Mahilig tayong magbigay ng mga bagong pakahulugan sa mga kilalang inisyal. Ang PNB (Philippine National Bank) noong araw ay Patabain Nating Baboy, ang PAL (Philippine Air Lines) hanggang kamakailan ay Plane Always Late, at ang MIFF (Manila International Film Festival) nitong taong ito, dahil sa pagtatanghal ng mga pelikulang bomba, ay naging Manila International Fighting Fish.

May mas grabe pang pakahulugan sa MIFF, pero kung isusulat ko rito’y baka ako ma-PCO. Ito namang PCO o Presidential Commitment Order ay bago pa lamang, kaya wala pang pabirong pakahulugan. Pero may suspetsa akong ang talagang pinagmulan ng mga inisyal na iyan ay Patahian ng Cadena Orig.

Ewan ko kung ano ang uso ngayon sa kampus, pero noong kapanahunan namin ay may mga palokong kahulugan ang mga inisyal ng mga unibersidad. Ang MLQ ay Mga Loko sa Quiapo; ang FEU ay For Ever Useless; ang UST ay Utot Sabay Tae. Taga-UP ang naringgan ko ng mga kantiyaw na ito, pero hindi niya pinatawad ang sarili. Ang ibig sabihin naman daw ng UP ay Useless People.

Noong panahong iyon ay buhay pa ang istasyong pantelebisyon na ABS. Pero ang ABS ay bisyo rin—Alak-Babae-Sugal.

Sa mga opisina, ang empleyadong may field work ay kailangang magpaalam na ang paglabas niya sa oras ng trabaho ay OB o Official Business. Kadalasan, ang OB ay nagiging Owi Bahay.

Sa Estados Unidos, eksplosibo ang buhay ng mga kababayan nating expired na ang visa o walang green card. Sila’y TNT—Tago Nang Tago.

Papuntang Puerto Azul nitong nakaraang summer, may nadaanan kaming malaking lote na punong-puno ng mga kakatwang estruktura na yari sa yero at hollow blocks. “Parang maliliit na kasilyas sa probinsiya,” pansin ng isang kasamahan namin sa bus, “pero bakit ang dami-dami?” Sagot ng isa pa: “Siguro’y iyan ang kanilang KKK project—Kanya-Kanyang Kubeta.”

Noong isang taon, nag-interbiyu ako ng iba’t ibang klaseng madre kaugnay ng isang script. Nalaman ko sa isang aktibistang madre na ang tawag sa mga konserbatibong pari (iyong walang inaatupag kundi mga tradisyonal na gawaing ispiritwal) ay KBL—mga paring Kasal-Binyag-Libing.

Ayon sa isang kolum sa magasing Who, ang pakahulugan daw sa NPA na ibinigay ng isang paring taga-Banaue ay New Pastoral Approach. Ayon naman sa isang madreng galing sa Mindanaw, ang tawag daw sa NPA doon ay Nice People Around.

Noong araw, ayaw na ayaw gamitin ng militar ang terminong NPA. Ang ginagamit nila noon ay MAMAO, na ang ibig sabihin daw ay Military Arm, Mao Tsetung Thought.

Ang mga inisyal ng multinasyonal na Colgate-Palmolive Philippines ay kapareho ng sa Communist Party of the Philippines.

Sa Quezon City, ang mga tomador na mahilig sa pulutang inihaw ay may paboritong istambayan na kung tawagin nila’y IBP. Hindi Interim Batasang Pambansa ang beer garden na iyon, kundi Ihaw-Balot Plaza.

Jose F. Lacaba

“Sa Madaling Salita”

Mr. & Ms. Magazine

July 19, 1983

P.S. 2011.
Ang bida sa pelikulang E.T. (Estong Tutong) ay ang yumaong komedyanteng si Chiquito. Ang orihinal na kahulugan ng KBL (baka hindi na alam ng mga post-martial-law babies) ay Kilusang Bagong Lipunan, ang partido ng naghaharing rehimeng militar noong panahong iyon. Ang KKK, na Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galang na Katipunan noong panahon ni Andres Bonifacio, ay nangangahulugan daw ngayon na Kakampi, Kaklase, Kabarilan o kaya'y Kamag-anak, Kaklase, Kaibigan. Ito raw ang mga inaappoint ni Presidente Noynoy Aquino sa matataas na posisyon sa gobyerno, ayon sa mga kontra-PNoy. Sagot naman ng mga pro-PNoy, ang KKK ay daglat o abbreviation ng Kongresista, Kasama, Kabiyahe, ibig sabihin, ang mga karantso ng dating Presidente Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, na hakot niya tuwing pupunta siya sa ibang bansa noong siya pa ang nasa Malakanyang.

A FATHER'S LETTER

2011-06-19T00:32:00.000+08:00

Since it’s Father’s Day today, I’m reprinting a piece that I wrote for my now-defunct column “Matter of Fact” (Manila Times, November 16, 1996).

Son & Father, circa 1976

LETTER TO MY SON

TODAY, as I write this, you turn 25. I feel terribly old.

When I was 25, I married your mother, and a few days before I turned 26, you came along. I remember breaking out into a rash after coming home from the hospital the day you were born. It looked like chicken pox, but the doctor said it was just some kind of strong allergic reaction, perhaps brought on by the terror and excitement of becoming a first-time father.

You’ve had a pretty tough time. When you were a two-month-old fetus in your mother’s womb, she had to have part of her ovaries removed because of a spreading tumor, and you survived on the almost daily injections that your mother had to get in order to replace whatever it was that her ovaries used to secrete.

I wasn’t such a bad father in the first few months of your life on earth. I woke up in the middle of the night to mix your formula and sing you to sleep, and I put up with your milky vomit on my shoulder, and I even cleaned up your poo-poo. Greater love than this no father has, that he clean up his son’s poo-poo, gingerly wiping it off the little baby ass with a wet cotton ball.

But before your first birthday, a giant asshole declared martial law, forcing me to abandon both my marital and paternal duties. When we next saw each other, I was in the underground resistance, and it wasn’t an easy thing to take you out to play in the yard or the community playground. And then after that I was just someone behind bars that you visited once a week for nearly two years, and who brainwashed you into replying, when anyone asked where your father was: “Ikinulong ni Marcos.”

So you will understand why, when I finally got out, I was so disoriented, and such a grouch. I easily got angry with you for little things, such as insisting on watching Voltes V instead of joining your mother and me at the dinner table, or wanting to eat nothing but hot dogs. I never really hit you, but I can remember your tears and your terrified screams when I hit the floor beside you with my belt.

You must understand that I had no role model as a father. My own father, though he was caring and really worked to the bone for his family, was employed in the big city and came home to our small town only on irregular weekends. Once he took me and my brother to the local moviehouse to see Gunfight at the OK Corral. I remember that vividly because it was the only movie we ever saw together.

When I was 13, my father died. As the eldest child, I was like a father to my five younger siblings, but that’s not really the same as having a child of your own, being a real father. When you were little, I read Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, but I can’t seem to remember what I learned from it. All I can remember, for some strange reason, is that Spock opposed the Vietnam war, and he had the same name as this alien character in Star Trek.

Should I have given you condoms when you entered your teens? Should I have had long discussions with you on the nature of imperialism and the military-industrial complex? Should I have fought with the teacher who treated you unfairly or confronted the bully who roughed you up when you decided not to go through with your fraternity application?

Basically, I left you alone. I was bewildered when you joined Bible studies with Christian fundamentalists, nervous when you joined your first protest demonstration, proud when you became president of the College of Arts and Letters student council, amazed that you have taken up mountaineering as a hobby. But basically I left you to your own devices.

That was because I didn’t really know what to do.

When you went to college, I didn’t tell you what course to take. In high school you loved to draw, and I had hoped you would go into fine arts. But you chose to join your mother and me in “this damned profession of writing, where one has to use one’s brains all the time,” to use Ezra Pound’s apt description.

It’s a difficult enough profession as it is, since it can’t give you too many of life’s creature comforts, but it’s doubly tough for you because of the name you carry: Kris Lanot Lacaba. People are always asking how you’re related to the writing Lanots and the writing Lacabas. I can see how that can be such a drag.

Now you’re 25, and I guess your mother and I should congratulate ourselves because you turned out the way you did. You didn’t get into drugs, and you didn’t get into fights, and you eat vegetables, and as far as I know you haven’t got any girl pregnant.

Still, I can’t help thinking that I still don’t know how to go about fathering and parenting. There are many areas of our lives that are closed off to each other, and I don’t know if that’s the way things should be for fathers and sons.

We talk about a lot of things—movies, poetry, green jokes—but somehow we hesitate to talk about things that would force each of us to reveal messy emotions and embarrassing fears and our deepest loves and joys. I don’t know if your being a secretive Scorpio and my being a tactless Sagittarius has something to do with that.

But you’re flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, and I guess that still counts for something in this world. I know that, if I’m too drunk to drive, I can count on you to drive me home, and you know you can depend on me to answer the phone for you when you’re expecting a call but you need to take a crap.

“Matter of Fact”

Manila Times

November 16, 1996

TULANG PAMBATA: FOR ADULTS ONLY?

2011-05-31T12:17:00.000+08:00

TULANG PAMBATA: FOR ADULTS ONLY?

Ano ang talagang ginawa nina Jack at Jill nang umakyat sila sa burol?

Kapilyuhan, ayon sa isang eksperto sa folklore.

Hindi inosenteng pag-igib ng tubig ang ginawa nina Jack at Jill, paliwanag ni Norman Iles. Sa orihinal daw, si Jill at hindi si Jack ang natumba, at dahil dito’y “nabasag ang kanyang korona.” Itong huling prase ay katumbas pala ng ating kawikaang “nabasag ang banga.” Sa madaling salita, nawala ang pagkabirhen ni Jill.

“Ang mga awiting pambata ay lubhang bastos at seksuwal sa nilalaman, at ang mga ito’y sinensor ng Establisimyento at ng Simbahan sa paglipas ng panahon,” sabi ni Iles. Kasalukuyan siyang nagsusulat ng librong may pamagat na Nursery Rhymes Restored to Their Adult Originals.

Sa interpretasyon ni Iles, si Little Miss Muffet ay isang nakahubad na nagpapaaraw, at ang gagambang bumulabog sa kanya ay isang namboboso. Ang “London Bridge Is Falling Down” ay tungkol naman daw sa nararamdaman matapos makipagtalik, samantalang ang “Rub-A-Dub-Dub Three Maids [o Men] in a Tub” ay tungkol sa isang orgy.

Dahil sa mga pahayag ni Iles, hindi tuloy ako mapagkakatulog. Aba, biruin mong ilang milyong kabataan natin ang kino-corrupt ng mga tula’t awiting pambata! Dapat siguro’y mayroon din ditong lupon sa sensura na magkaklasipika kung aling tula’t awiting pambata ang for general patronage o for adults only.

Habang pabiling-biling sa aking higaan ay napag-isip-isip ko ang ating mga katutubong tugmang pambata. Mahalay at malaswa rin kaya ang mga ito?

Walang dudang bastos ang “Sitsiritsit, Alibangbang.” Ito’y tungkol sa babae sa lansangan na kung gumiri ay parang tandang. Mayroon pa itong dagdag na saknong na sa kabutihang-palad ay hindi na karaniwang kinakanta:

Ang babae sa Navotas,

May botitos, walang medyas…

Ang babae sa Makati,

May medyas, walang panty…

Sa iba pang mga tugmang pambata, mukhang disimulado na ang kabastusan, tulad ng nangyari sa “Jack and Jill.” Siguro’y may naganap nang sensura sa paglipas ng panahon, o baka nakalimutan na natin ang kahulugan ng mga orihinal na talinghaga.

Kung maniniwala ka kay Iles o kung likas na marumi ang isip mo, hindi ka mahihirapang maghanap ng pilyong kahulugan sa tulang ito:

Isa, dalawa, tatlo,

Ang tatay mong kalbo,

Umakyat sa mabolo,

Inabot ng bagyo.

Apat, lima, anim,

Ang tatay mong duling,

Nanghuli ng pating

Sa balong malalim.

Ano pa ba iyan kung hindi paglalarawan ng aktong seksuwal? Ang pagbibilang at ang mismong ritmo ng tula ay nagpapahiwatig ng gawaing hindi dapat ipaalam sa mga bata. Ang “ulong kalbo” at “balong malalim” ay tila may maruming konotasyon. Gayundin ang “mabolo”—ito’y isang bungang-kahoy, pero ang orihinal na bigkas dito’y “mabulo,” na nangangahulugang “mabalahibo.”

Kung sinimulan mo na ang ganitong pagsusuri, tiyak na makakadiskubre ka ng mga phallic symbol sa kung saan-saan.

Nariyan ang “talong” at “mani” at “patani” sa “Bahay-Kubo.”

Nariyan ang “kutsilyo de almasen” at “sipit na namimilipit” sa “Pen Pen de Sarapen.” Idagdag mo pa ang “sarap” na bahagi ng salitang “sarapen.”

Nariyan din ang “baril” at “sundang” sa “Ako’y Ibigin Mo, Lalaking Matapang.” Baka nga ang “pito” at “siyam” sa awiting-bayang ito ay hindi tumutukoy sa dami ng baril at sundang, kundi sa haba, sa pulgada. At may isang pinggang pansit na kalaban ang lalaking matapang—hindi kaya ito ang mabulo sa bukana ng balong malalim?

Ewan ko, pero hindi ako magtataka kung iyon na nga.

Salamat na lang at kolonyal ang sistema ng ating edukasyon. Kung hindi, baka ituro pa sa ating mga eskuwelahan ang mga katutubong tula’t awiting pambata. Baka kung anong imoralidad pa ang matutuhan ng ating mga anak.

Iyan namang nursery rhymes sa Ingles—wala namang nakakaintindi niyan, kaya okey lang. Ang dapat na lang gawin ay ipagbawal ang libro ni Iles, kung sakaling matapos niyang sulatin.

Mula sa kolum na

“Sa Madaling Salita”

ni Jose F. Lacaba

Mr. & Ms. Magazine

1983 August 23

P.S. 2011: Ang libro ni Norman Iles ay nalathala noong 1986 ng Robert Hale Ltd. (London, UK) sa ilalim ng pamagat na Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: Nursery Rhymes and Carols Restored to Their Adult Originals (o …Restored to Their Original Meanings, ayon sa ibang mga website).

Ka Pete: Tula: KAPARIS NG KAWAYAN, KAPARIS NG KALABAW

2011-04-01T18:08:00.000+08:00

KAPARIS NG KAWAYAN, KAPARIS NG KALABAW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtYOr0YnGyc

Tula: KAPARIS NG KAWAYAN, KAPARIS NG KALABAW

2011-02-28T23:52:00.001+08:00

Kaparis ng Kawayan, Kaparis ng Kalabaw

Ang Pilipino'y kaparis ng kawayan,

nakikisayaw sa hangin, nakikisayaw:

kung saan ang ihip

doon ang hilig,

kaya hindi siya nabubuwal, hindi nabubuwal.

Di tulad ng punong niyog,

ayaw yumuko, ayaw lumuhod,

kaya siya nabubuwal, nabubuwal.

Iyan ang sabi-sabi,

ewan lang kung totoo.

Pero kung totoo ang sabi-sabi,

lagot tayo!

Ang Pilipino'y kaparis ng kalabaw,

napakahaba ng pasensiya, napakahaba:

kung hinahagupit

walang imik,

kaya hindi siya pinapatay, hindi pinapatay.

Di tulad ng baboy-damo,

ayaw sumuko, ayaw patalo,

kaya siya pinapatay, pinapatay.

Iyan ang sabi-sabi,

ewan lang kung totoo.

Pero kung totoo ang sabi-sabi,

lagot tayo!

--Jose F. Lacaba

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

Sinulat para sa

BATUBATO SA LANGIT

Mga Titik para sa Isang Sarsuwelang

Binalak sa Panahon ng Diktadura

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

Mula sa kalipunang

Sa Panahon ng Ligalig

(Anvil Publishing, 1991)

ASYANO

2011-01-29T21:29:00.000+08:00

A recent “Pinoy Kasi” column by Michael Tan, “Intsik” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 28, 2011), reminded me of a paper I wrote back in 2008 for a “literature forum for writers of Asia,” on the subject of “Asia, from Extinction to Formation.” That writers’ conference, held in the last week of May 2008 in Pohang POSCO, South Korea, was sponsored by the Seoul-based quarterly journal Asia: Magazine of Asian Literature, with the POSCO TJ Park Foundation as co-sponsor.

This is the paper I wrote for that conference. It was published in the Spring 2009 issue of Asia: Magazine of Asian Literature (Vol. 12), with the above-the-title kicker “What It Means to Live as a Writer in Asia.”

Asyano
By Jose F. Lacaba

My country, the Philippines, is geographically situated in Asia. That makes me, not only a Filipino, but also an Asian—or, as we say in my native tongue, Asyano. I am both Filipino and Asyano.

My facial features and the color of my skin advertise my Asyano origins to the rest of the world. Although Mexicans in the telenovelas shown on Philippine television look like Filipinos to us, I don’t recall ever having been mistaken for Latino. In Europe and the United States, I am invariably seen as Asyano, even if the exact country of origin remains an unknown factor: I have often been asked if I am Chinese, or Indonesian, or Malaysian, or Thai.

In fact, I do have a bit of Chinese blood. My great-grandmother on my mother’s side was pure Chinese. Her family name was Quiogue—that’s spelled in the Spanish way, but it sounds unmistakably Chinese. Many Filipinos, like me, are of mixed race, mestizos of Spanish, or American, or Arab, or Chinese ancestry, and lately, of Japanese and Korean ancestry as well.

So my compatriots and I are, to repeat, both Filipino and Asyano. But I have a confession to make. Though I am Asyano by virtue of geography and bloodline, my country’s colonial history and the continuing economic, political, and sociocultural dominance of former colonizers in our daily lives, plus the educational system that shaped me, have all but cut me off from my Asian roots. And I am not alone in this predicament.

We have, in my country, a joke in the form of a riddle, which is at the same time sociopolitical commentary in disguise: “What’s brown on the outside and white on the inside?” The literal answer to the riddle is: coconut. But at the same time we see the native coconut as a self-criticial metaphor for ourselves, for what we have become: we may be brown-skinned Asians on the outside, but on the inside, in our minds and even in our hearts, we continue to carry the baggage of our colonial past. We have what we call a “colonial mentality.”

This means, in the concrete, that while we are nominally an independent republic, we remain in many ways a colony, a protectorate, an adjunct of our most influential former colonial master, the United States.

So our government continues to conduct its affairs in the language of the colonizer: executive orders, congressional laws, and court rulings are written in English, or what passes for English. As consumers, we often belittle the output of our native economy, referring to it as “local,” meaning, shoddy and inferior, compared with goods that we call “stateside,” that is, imported from the U.S.A., even if “imported from the U.S.A.” these days does not necessarily mean “made in U.S.A.” Our educational system is still debating the merits and demerits of bilingualism, and there are highly placed officials in government who want to revert to the exclusive use of English as medium of instruction. In the sociocultural arena, Hollywood movies are still seen as superior to the productions of our own film industry, whether mainstream or indie; bookstores are stocked with U.S. bestsellers and trade books, while books by Filipino authors are relegated to an exotic section called Filipiniana; and the prestigious print publications are still English-language newspapers and magazines.

I am, of course, being unduly harsh. I have put myself in the role of the pessimist who sees the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. In truth, times have changed.

Today, we no longer have U.S. military bases on Philippine soil, even if we still have U.S. troops operating in the field in the guise of “visiting forces.” Primetime newscasts on the top-rating free channels are now primarily conducted in Filipino and in other Philippine languages, although you can still catch English-language newscasts on cable channels. As a part-time professorial lecturer at the state-owned University of the Philippines, I can teach in a combination of Tagalog and English, that linguistic hybrid that we call Taglish, even if the textbooks and reference materials that my students use are in English.

I belong to a generation that was once required to observe an English-only rule on campus and in classrooms, and we were fined if we were caught speaking in a Philippine language. But it was this same generation, the generation that came of age in the Sixties, that eventually rebelled against the prevailing colonial mentality and took up the banner of nationalism. It is no exaggeration to say that this generation’s efforts contributed to the political climate that led to the pullout of U.S. bases and the institution of the still-controversial bilingual policy of education, among other notable achievements.

One of the side effects of the nationalist movement was my personal decision to stop writing poetry in English, to write poetry exclusively in Filipino. I also used Filipino when I went into occasional scriptwriting for cinema and television. But at the same time, to earn a decent regular income, I continued—and still continue—to use English in my writing and editing work as a journalist.

I struggle on a daily basis with these contradictions. I live uncomfortably with these contradictions.

This brings me back to the personal contradiction I mentioned earlier. In addition to being Filipino, I am, to repeat, Asyano by virtue of geography and bloodline. And yet, as a writer, I must shamefacedly admit that my knowledge of Asian traditions and cultures is minimal.

In the early Sixties, as a college student enrolled in the humanities, I was exposed to the Japanese haiku and the Malayan pantun in poetry, and to the ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Then, in the mid-Sixties, when I was already working as a reporter, the international political situation led many of my generation—writers, artists, cultural workers, and journalists included—to turn to Vietnam and China for inspiration. Poets, myself included, worked on translations of the poetry of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, in the search for a new poetics, for different metaphors and rhythms that could adequately deal with the agonies and guilt feelings of those tumultuous times.

Yet these past efforts to recognize my Asian-ness were in the nature of wading in shallow waters, not an immersion. I remained, in effect, submerged in the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Anglo-American tradition, the tradition I inherited as a result of my schooling and my own private reading.

We are meeting here today in a time of great devastation and unbearable torment in Asia. An earthquake in China, a cyclone in Burma, tsunamis in India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, and supertyphoons in my own country, the Philippines—the atmospheric upheavals are matched by the turbulence in the political sphere, perpetually shaken by protest marches, coup attempts, suicide bombings, massacres, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, ruthless terrorist attacks, equally ruthless counter-terrorist attacks by invading armies, and never-ending charges and counter-charges of graft and corruption, of exploitation and oppression.

But I am a senior citizen now, old and gray and full of sleep, and coping with gout and skin allergies and bronchitis and adult-onset asthma, not to mention erectile dysfunction. While I keep reminding myself that I should not allow my sense of outrage to grow old along with me, I find myself unable to shake my sleeping muse out of her stupor, long enough to bring Asia and its discontents into my verse.

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden once wrote. “It survives / In the valley of its saying where executives / Would never want to tamper; it flows south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”

On the other hand, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, we may not be able to do much with literature as our weapon, but without it the rulers would sleep more soundly.

For poetry and literature to survive and to disturb the sleep of rulers, they need a place in which to grow. And for Asia to occupy a significant place in our poetry and literature, they need Asian fields on which to thrive.

The co-sponsor of our conference today, Asia: Magazine of Asian Literature, has been providing an outlet for the publication of Asian literary works. Writers’ conferences such as this one are also helpful because they provide a forum for us to share ideas and experiences, and perhaps even to air grievances, real or imagined.

But perhaps we also need a specifically Asian literary festival similar to the Osian’s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, a literary festival in which we can be exposed, not to academic disquisitions, but to poetry and fiction and drama.

Perhaps we need a literary contest similar to the Asian Games, a literary contest for Asian writers dealing with Asian themes.

And certainly we need programs of translation that will make sense of the Babel of tongues in which we speak and write, programs of translation that will make our books and our literature accessible not only to English-speaking elites, but also to readers in our native tongues. Soap operas and telenovelas from Korea and Taiwan, known in the Philippines as Koreanovelas and Chinovelas, along with anime from Japan, won a wide following among Filipino televiewers after they were dubbed in Tagalog. Could a similar translation process achieve similar results for our poetry and fiction and drama?

Well, we can dream, can’t we? And dreams can make things happen.

I hope I will still be around when they happen, so that I can tell my unborn grandchildren that, unlike me and my generation, they can become not only Asyano on the outside but also Asyano on the inside.

THE X IN XMAS

2010-12-24T11:10:00.000+08:00

This first came out in my "Showbiz Lengua" column in the December 2004 issue of YES! Magazine. It is now in my book Showbiz Lengua: Chika & Chismax about Chuvachuchu (Anvil Publishing, 2009), a compilation of the YES! language columns.

The X in Xmas

By Jose F. Lacaba

In show business, X spells sex.

X-rated was originally a classification for movies with content considered unsuitable for minors, such as frontal nudity and extreme violence. (Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight was X-rated when it first came out.) But the term eventually attached itself to hardcore pornography, movies with extreme close-ups of genitals and explicit sex, showing actual penetration, not just a simulation. Movies with lots and lots of explicit sex, especially the gross and kinky variety, went on to bill themselves as XXX, or triple X.

In comic books that eventually crossed over to movie screens, the X-Men were mutants with superhuman abilities, feared and hated by a world of humans that they are sworn to protect. And the X-Files in the long-running TV series dealt with unexplained phenomena and unidentified flying objects.

In algebra, x is the unknown quantity. In test papers, x is the mark the teacher gives to a wrong answer. And in documents requiring a signature, X is what you write in place of a name if you’re a “no read, no write” person.

In other words, x is a synonym for smutty, strange, or stupid.

Which is why there’s sometimes a big brouhaha about the X in Xmas. “Bring Christ back into Christmas!” goes the cry.

I have news for these conscientious complainants: X also stands for Christ.

Xmas is not something invented by space-saving headline writers and attention-catching advertising executives. “Since the sixteenth century Xmas has been used in English as an abbreviation for Christmas,” according to Webster’s Word Histories (Merriam-Webster, 1989).

As members of fratricidal Greek-letter societies probably know, in the Greek alphabet the letter chi, the first letter in Christos, is written as x.

That’s where the X in Xmas came from.

“In Latin manuscripts,” Webster’s Word Histories goes on, “Christus was often abbreviated by using the first two letters of Greek Christos, chi (X) and rho (P). This abbreviation is prominent, for example, on the beautiful chi-ro pages of early medieval illuminated manuscripts like The Book of Kells and The Lindisfarne Gospels. When chi and rho are superimposed upon each other a symbol for Christ is formed which has had wide currency through the centuries of the Christian era. This symbol is known variously as a Chi-Rho, chrismon, or Christogram.”

Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Merriam-Webster, 1994) adds that, through the centuries, words like Christian, Christianity, christened, and Christopher were also written as Xtian, Xtianity, Xstened, and Xpofer.

So you can be sure that, this month, Xpofer de Leon will be sending Xmas cards to his Xtian friends.

THE NEW SOUND: BURGIS GOES BAKYA

2010-12-03T18:03:00.000+08:00

What we now know as OPM, or Original Pilipino Music, didn't have that name yet at the time I wrote this 1978 article.

This was part of a New Year special section, “Ring in the New, but Don’t Ring out the Old,” in the short-lived and now-defunct monthly art-and-culture magazine The Review, which I edited. Other articles in the section: “The New Poetry: Verse as Public Speech” by Virgilio S. Almario, “The New Painting: Return to the Native” by Alice Guillermo, and “Don’t Toot that Torotot” by Gil Quito, about the need to put up an archive for Filipino films.

THE NEW SOUND: BURGIS GOES BAKYA

By Jose F. Lacaba

The Review, January 1978 (Vol. 1, No. 5)

Something’s happening on the Philippine pop music scene. You only have to turn your radio on to be aware of it.

Not too long ago, the airwaves were almost completely dominated by the popular music of the West, specifically Britain and America. Most radio stations never bothered to include Filipino songs in their programming, and even the stations that featured local performers generally preferred those performers who sang versions of the latest pop tunes from abroad.

Today, Tagalog songs are getting more air time, and you can hear them even on those stations manned by disc jockeys with the phoniest American accents this side of the Pacific.

The radio stations’ current interest in local songs is partly due to a recent Broadcast Media Council directive requiring them to play a minimum of two Filipino records per hour. But the BMC directive is really more an effect than a cause. Even before it was issued, a number of stations that formerly played nothing but foreign records were already paying attention to local songs.

More than the BMC edict, the tremendous popularity of the songs accounts for the air time they’re getting. Tagalog songs are topping the hit charts, and at the record stores, singles and long-playing albums by Filipino performers are outselling the imports.

The songs themselves are of fairly recent vintage, and they’re different in many ways from the kundimans your mother used to sing while cooking sinigang. They have a different beat, a different rhythm, and they’re sung in a different style by a new galaxy of recording stars and superstars, unheard of barely five years ago but now household names and targets of BIR investigations.

Backing up the singing idols is a new breed of composers, arrangers, lyricists, and record producers, a few of whom are also performing artists. Thanks to this new breed, a whole new repertoire of local pop songs—enough to fill up more than one special issue of Jingle Chordbook Magazine—has come into existence.

It is these new pop songs that constitute the New Sound in Philippine popular music.

A grab-bag of forms

The New Sound is not a single homogenous sound as distinctive as, say, the Mersey Sound of the early Beatles or the Motown Sound of the black soul singers. Rather, it is a grab-bag of various sounds and styles, of many forms and sundry names.

“Pinoy rock” or “Pinoy rock-and-rhythm” and “the Manila Sound” are among the best-known varieties. We also have a “Pinoy jazz,” a “Pinoy samba,” and Pinoy knows what else. Being new and still lacking a distinct identity, the New Sound does not even have a name of its own, a native name, something as immediately recognizable as the Brazilian bossa nova or the Jamaican reggae.

All varieties of the New Sound fall under three categories: original compositions; translations and adaptations; and new interpretations of local pop standards.

The original compositions usually have Tagalog lyrics (Mike Hanopol’s Buhay Musikero), but a few are in English (the Apo Hiking Society’s Songwriter) or in a combination of English and Tagalog (the Hotdog’s Manila).

The acknowledged pioneer in this category is the now disbanded Juan de la Cruz Band, whose LP Ang Himig Natin signalled the birth of “Pinoy rock” in the early Seventies. The group’s brand of hard rock attracted a cult following among teenagers with hippie tendencies (and even among jeepney drivers), but it wasn’t until the Hotdog came along that the New Sound hit the big time.

The Hotdog broke into the hit charts with Ikaw ang Miss Universe ng Buhay Ko and followed this up with the even more wildly successful Pers Lab. The songs were soft rock; the group described them as “revolutionalized kundimans.” In contrast to the Juan de la Cruz, whose psychedelic visions and occasional social commentary were expressed in surprisingly formal Tagalog (“Ang himig natin, ating awitin”), the Hotdog used a more contemporary, more slangy Manila Tagalog.

This was the beginning of the Manila Sound. The Hotdog spawned a host of imitators whose irrepressible Taglish and even raunchier slang caused the Broadcast Media Council to ban their songs from the airlanes. Of the groups that followed the Hotdog’s lead, only Cinderella (T.L. Ako sa Iyo; Bato sa Buhangin) has survived.

Translations and adaptations of foreign songs (the latter use only the tunes) came in the wake of original compositions. They gained respectability when poet and stage director Rolando Tinio put Tagalog lyrics to such songs as The Lady Is a Tramp (transformed into Ako’y Bakyang-Bakya) for Celeste Legaspi to sing.

When Rico J. Puno added humorous Tagalog annotations to his renditions of foreign songs (“Namamasyal pa sa Luneta / Nang walang pera” in The Way We Were), he won instant superstardom. Hajji Alejandro went the same route with Tag-araw, an adaptation of the Bee Gees’ Charade.

Interpretations of old pop songs became part of the New Sound after the New Minstrels successfully resurrected Mike Velarde Jr.’s relatively obscure Buhat, although it should be noted that much earlier, in the late Sixties, the campus crowd had done a similar job with the same composer’s Lahat ng Araw. Revivals are now as much a part of the repertoire of Rico Puno and Didith Reyes as originals.

A matter of style

What’s new about the New Sound, what makes it different from the old, is largely a matter of style. This is not to say that the style is original, because even the original compositions are highly derivative.

“The New Sound is basically Western,” Jim Paredes of the Apo Hiking Society admits. “Our influences are foreign. Our musical roots are colonial.”

Still, the New Sound is new in the sense that its foreign influences are new to Philippine pop music.

The New Sound is really the sound of rock, soul, jazz, American folk, the samba, and the bossa nova. But whereas these western forms used to be imported lock, stock, and barrel—that is, with words and music and even styling intact—today an attempt is being made to introduce their beat and rhythm into the body of local pop music, to make them a part of our musical idiom.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this attempt. Foreign influences are not necessarily harmful. They can also serve as a catalyst for change, as singer and voice teacher Aurelio Estanislao points out: “Kung baga sa biology, ito’y parang hybrid vigor. Masarap din iyong merong konting genes na nanggagaling sa labas.”

The history of Philippine pop music is in fact also a history of foreign influences. Even our folk songs, as recognizably Filipino as adobo, betray a Spanish influence, judging from the presence of Spanish-derived words in their lyrics (sibuyas and kamatis in Bahay Kubo, for instance). Estanislao points out that the compositions of Mike Velarde Jr., including Ikaw and Dahil sa Iyo, which have almost attained the status of folk songs, show definite traces of Broadway.

Memorable Tagalog songs have resulted from the introduction into Philippine pop music of such foreign influences as the boogie (Ikaw Kasi), rock and roll (Hahabol-habol), the yodel songs (Pitong Gatang).

Whether the attempt made by the New Sound practitioners to introduce new foreign influences into Philippine pop music will succeed, whether rock and soul and the rest will eventually be assimilated or rejected, is a question only the future can answer.

A question of audience

Another thing worth noting about the New Sound is that its popularity extends beyond the traditional audience of the Filipino song.

In the fairly recent past, the homegrown product was something to be derided as fit only for peasants and domestics, for the so-called bakya crowd. Moreover, it was primarily a middle-aged proclivity, since even the younger segments of the “bakya crowd” shrieked over idols—Nora Aunor, Victor Wood, Eddie Peregrina—who rose to fame by singing in English (although, to be fair, these singers later added Tagalog songs to their repertoire).

The New Sound, however, appeals not only to the kanto boy feeding coins into the jukebox at the corner store but also to the junior executive feeding tapes into the cassette deck of his air-conditioned car. And the New Sound is championed by the young more than the old or the middle-aged, who probably wouldn’t trade in Ric Manrique or the Mabuhay Singers for Rico Puno or Banyuhay.

Like the new Tagalog movies, the New Sound has enlarged the audience of Philippine pop music to include a social class (predominantly burgis) and an age level (mostly under 35) which previously worshipped only at the shrine of the Stateside, the ‘Tatê, the Amboy.

There is no denying that the rise of nationalist and populist sentiments in the late Sixties and early Seventies has been a factor in the birth and spread of the New Sound. The very names of the rock bands of that period—Juan de la Cruz, Anak-Bayan, Sangkatutak, Apolinario Mabini Hiking Society (shortened later to Apo Hiking Society on orders of the Constabulary’s Office of Civil Relations)—clearly reflected the spirit of the times.

In general, the denunciation of colonial control over all aspects of the national life, culture included, coupled with the attacks on elitism, created widespread guilt and caused a great deal of soul-searching among Filipino intellectuals. This explains the revival of interest in the long-standing questions of “national identity” and “the Filipino soul.” It also explains why, for instance, burgis has become a term of reproach—or at any rate of something to be apologetic about—and why bakya has become almost a badge of honor, as in Ako’y Bakyang-Bakya.

What’s happening on the cultural front may be seen as partly a sincere attempt by certain burgis intellectuals to assuage their guilt and respond to the needs of the times, partly a calculated effort by the dominant culture to coopt nationalist and populist sentiments.

Not surprisingly, many of the practitioners of the New Sound have burgis backgrounds. They grew up in comfortable suburban homes, studied in (or dropped out of) exclusive schools, and speak impeccable English. They even sing Tagalog with an American accent—a fact that particularly annoys Aurelio Estanislao.

“Iyang mga pumuputok na T at D, iyang mga short A, wala niyan sa ating wika, maski na sa anumang dialect natin,” says Estanislao. “Iyang ‘Ekaow eng eking…,” iyang mga ‘Sa pag-MA-MA-hal mo…’ wala tayo niyan. PAG-ma-ma-HAL, iyan ang mas angkop. Ang nagsasalita lamang ng pag-MA-MA-hal e iyang mga nanagalog diyan sa Ateneo at Maryknoll.”

Still, the fact that our young songwriters and performers are now making an effort to express themselves in their native tongue is already an encouraging development. It is reflective of a general trend whose manifestations include, in literature, the shift made by many young writers from English to Pilipino and, in the visual arts, the move made by many young painters away from abstraction and towards a more realistic portrayal of the country’s physical and social landscape.

Like their young counterparts in the other arts, the New Sound practitioners are trying to come to terms with their Filipino-ness (although, judging from their persistent use of the word Pinoy instead of the more dignified Pilipino or Filipino, they’re not yet quite comfortable in this role), and at the same time they’re trying to reach out to the great mass of Filipinos once scorned as bakya.

Jose “Boboy” Garrovillo, also of the Apo Hiking Society, articulates this in reflecting on the Juan dela Cruz: “Their medium was Western. Rock sila, hindi ba? But they tried to make it Filipino by using Tagalog lyrics. How else could they bring it to the people?”

A problem with content

One thing about the new sound remains old—and that is the content of the songs.

The practitioners of the New Sound, observes Tinio, “are imitating a sound, a music, but they’re not writing new sense into this sound. The sensibility is still rural. They’re groping towards a more urban sensibility in song—as the Bagay poets did in poetry—but they’re not there yet.”

As Estanislao puts it: “Sa musika, hanggang ngayon e romantic pa tayo. Iyakan tayo nang iyakan. Lahat e luha, pasakit, hinagpis, pighati.”

The Juan de la Cruz tried to break away from the persistent preoccupation of local pop songs with the subject of love, particularly the unrequited kind, but the Manila Sound brought it back with a vengeance.

It is true the Manila Sound generally treats the subject with humor and a generous helping of irony. “Taghiyawat sa ilong” in Pers Lab is certainly several generations removed from “Wari ko ba, sinta, ako’y mamamatay / Kung di ikaw ang kapiling habang buhay” in Ang Tangi Kong Pag-ibig.

Many of the New Sound songs, moreover, make few references to Diyos and langit, two of the most overused words in local pop songs, and clearly a reflection of what Tinio calls a rural—basically feudal—sensibility.

Still, the ironic treatment of love isn’t really new: Hahabol-habol and many songs of the Fifties did it before. Likewise, feudal values continue to crop up in the new songs. Kapalaran presents a very real social problem in the simplest terms (“Bakit ba ganyan ang buhay ng tao, / Mayro’ng mayaman, may api sa mundo”), but answers its own question with a typically feudal explanation: that’s luck, fate, kapalaran. Even Bakit Ako Mahihiya?, with its superficially defiant Women’s Lib tone, speaks of a man’s love as “ang tanging aliw ng buhay ko.”

For all its shortcomings, however—or perhaps precisely because of these shortcomings—the New Sound is in its own way an accurate reflection of the present social situation.

The feudal content of the lyrics, the colonial origins of the tunes, give us a clear picture of how far we still have to go, in this seventh decade of the 20th century.

Commenting on the Western orientation of the New Sound, Jim Paredes says: “I think that’s what we are. Our music reflects what we are. Right now, even if we’re going original, meron pa ring traces ng colonial. What do we suppose we should do, cry over it?”

No, of course, we shouldn’t cry over the present situation. But neither should we glory in it, neither should we accept it as a permanent, immutable condition.

BALANGIGA: The Unproduced Screenplay

2010-11-30T00:02:00.000+08:00

Noong Setyembre 28, 2008, ika-107 anibersaryo ng Labanan sa Balangiga, ipinost ko sa blog na ito ang storyline ng Balangiga, isang dulang pampelikula na sinulat ko noon pang 2002. Nitong nakaraang Hulyo 2010, ang dulang pampelikulang iyan ay nanalo ng unang gantimpala sa kaSAYSAYan Historical Scriptwriting Contest na inisponsor ng Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP).

Narito ang press release ng FDCP tungkol sa mga nagwagi sa timpalak:

***

FDCP kaSAYSAYan Historical Scriptwriting Contest Awarding

July 20, 2010

The Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP) awarded the winning scripts of its ‘kaSAYSAYan’ Historical Scriptwriting contest on Monday, July 19, 2010 at the FDCP office.

After an overwhelming response from all over the Philippines and the world, and a gruelling deliberation, only the most brilliant three were named winners.

It was a toss-up between first and second place, but ultimately, “Balangiga” by Jose F. Lacaba took top spot for its sheer brilliance and polish as a full-length screenplay, and Floy Quintos’ impressive “Nan Hudhud Hi Apo Ilyam (Apo Ilyam’s Hudhud)” won second prize. Meanwhile, the “Hollywood-ready” script by Eduardo Rocha and the late Henry Francia (represented by his nephew, Amos), “The Whirlwinds of Dust: The Fall of Antonio Luna” bagged third place.

Apart from these, the judges were impressed with Arnel Mardoquio’s “Mangulayon”, granting it a Special Mention prize for its fresh subject matter and for being a worthy story heralding Mindanao, and being only one of two scripts that represented the Islamic region, geographically speaking.

Meanwhile, out of the scripts that made it to the short list, 20 were set in Luzon, 9 in Visayas, 3 in Spain, 1 in the USA, and 1 in the afterlife. The most common subjects, on the other hand, were the Katipunan and bio-pics or historical places, the Filipino-American war, WWII, and the Japanese occupation. All the 46 entries form a very impressive pool of historical literature and FDCP is willing to assist producers or film enthusiasts who may want to coordinate for projects with the writers/ creators of these scripts.

A deciding body of distinguished educators and industry greats was pooled to determine the winning scripts. Sen. Edgardo Angara headed the Board of Judges, with director-screenwriter Doy del Mundo, screenwriter Roy Iglesias, film archivist Teddy Co, and newspaper columnist Bum Tenorio as members.

Besides their cash prizes, there is a possibility that the winning scripts may be developed into film.

The project was launched in February 2010 in preparation for the year 2011’s being a marker for several notable events in Philippine history, such as Jose Rizal’s 150th birthday, the country’s 65th year of independence from America, and the People Power Revolution’s 25th anniversary.

The contest aimed to find the most captivating yet unknown story, in the form of a full-length screenplay, using Filipino natural history as a springboard.

***

Kung interesado kayong basahin ang dulang pampelikulang Balangiga, pumunta lang sa jokojun.com, ang website ng pamangkin kong si Junjun Lacaba Malillin. Diyan ay puwedeng i-download ang pdf file ng script. Narito ang link:

http://www.jokojun.com/?q=balangiga

At the awarding ceremonies for the kaSAYSAYan scriptwriting contest

Front row: Floy Quintos, Pete Lacaba, Eduardo Rocha.

Back (L-R): Roy Iglesias, Christine Dayrit (project head of the kaSAYSAYan scriptwriting contest), Teddy Co, Marinella Suzara (then FDCP executive director), Digna Santiago (then executive director of the Philippine Film Export Services Office), and Amos Francia (representing his uncle, the late Henry Francia).

SHOWBIZ LENGUA: BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

2010-11-22T13:25:00.000+08:00

Here’s the introductory piece in my book Showbiz Lengua: Chika and Chismax about Chuvachuchu (Anvil Publishing, 2010), the compilation of 68 columns that I wrote for YES! Magazine from 2003 to 2009.

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

ONCE UPON A TIME I had a language column on Pinoy English called “Carabeef Lengua.” The column “Showbiz Lengua,” which appears in YES! Magazine, a glossy showbiz monthly, focuses this time around on the language of Pinoy showbiz—the fascinating, exasperating, continually evolving lingo of the entertainment industry.

I don’t claim to be a linguist or a lexicographer. I just happen to be a diligent consulter of dictionaries. In fact, as soon as I wrote that last sentence, I checked out my Merriam-Webster to see if the word consulter is in it. I am glad to report that it is. In the process, I learned that there is such a word as consultor, which has been in use since 1611 and means “one who consults or advises; especially: an adviser to a Roman Catholic bishop, provincial, or sacred congregation.”

In other words, a consulter is a receiver, one who consults, like a consultee; whereas a consultor is a giver, one who provides consultation, like a consultant.

That’s how I describe myself in my calling card: Editorial Consultant. Which is why friends of mine who are highly paid editors often text me with questions like: “wats d korek spelling, glamor or glamour?” And without a second thought I text back: “both. bt glamour w U s preferd coz it looks more glamorous.” Before I can even receive a message of “tnx,” I am texting again: “note that glamorous s always spelld wo U. ü”

Such consultation is often given gratis et amore to friends who know my cellphone number, but I expect them to pay for my drinks the next time we meet. And when they read this, I hope they will also consider gifting me with prepaid cellphone cards.

As I was about to say before I started to ramble, strict grammarians chide us for using words that are not in a dictionary by claiming that the words in question do not exist: “The word aggrupation does not exist!” My own position on this issue is that, the moment someone uses a word, whether wrongly or wrongheadedly, it comes into existence. The question is whether the word is to be found in any dictionary.

Now the problem with showbiz lingo is that it consists of words that usually have no dictionary existence. Take the word chuvachuchu, for instance, about which I was reminded when I learned that Jolina Magdangal has a restaurant called Chuva-Chicha.

But I have filled up my allotted space, and the discussion of chuvachuchu and chicha and their cognates (achuchu, chukchak, chika, chismax, chuchuwa, chuwariwariwap, chuwap, chuchu, chibog, chichería, chicharon) will have to wait until next month.

First published in YES! Magazine, March 2003

You’ll have to get a copy of the book to read the other 67 columns in Showbiz Lengua: Chika and Chismax about Chuvachuchu. The book costs P295 and is available at National Bookstore branches in the Philippines. Last I looked, it wasn’t on Amazon.com. I don’t know if it will ever get there.

SHOWBIZ LENGUA: THE BOOK

2010-11-19T00:18:00.001+08:00

Showbiz Lengua: Chika & Chismax about Chuvachuchu (Anvil Publishing), a compilation of the columns that I write for the monthly YES! Magazine, is now off the press, and available at National Book Store, at P295.

Here's what reviewers say:

... it’s not a dictionary, but a collection of ruminations on contemporary language (riffs on riffs).

And the author is Jose F. Lacaba a.k.a Ka Pete of Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran, the screenplays of Bayan Ko: Kapit Sa Patalim, Sister Stella L and others, and the Showbiz Lengua column in Yes! magazine.

Ka Pete ponders the etymology and usage of taray, kikay, krung-krung, carry-carry, kaposh, and other “words that usually have no dictionary existence” that have crept into everyday Filipino speech anyway.

You need this book to explain why we sound like this today.

--JESSICA ZAFRA

“Ka Pete, chumuchorva! Pagsa-Safire, kinarir! Plangak!”

Jessica Rules the Universe website

October 6, 2010

You can read the full review here:

http://www.jessicarulestheuniverse.com/2010/10/06/ka-pete-chumuchorva-pagsa-safire-kinarir-plangak/

“I don’t claim to be a linguist or a lexicographer,” Lacaba writes in the first entry of his new collection, Showbiz Lengua: Chika & Chismax about Chuvachuchu (Anvil, 2010). “I just happen to be a diligent consulter of dictionaries.” Self-effacing as that might sound, it isn’t that easy. It’s apparent to the reader that Lacaba is not just referring to a trusted set of tomes and reference books that he has referred to with unwavering devotion since the late Sixties. Reading the book, a collection of columns the author has so far written for the popular showbiz monthly, Yes!, one gets the impression that he’s actually very open-minded if not indiscriminate in finding sources for the definitions and uses of language, consulting and referencing books, newspapers, tabloids, and the Internet in his columns. In this regard, Lacaba is no snob. He who wrote the now-classic “Notes on Bakya” certainly can’t be accused of cultural elitism. Lacaba’s stated diligence in finding the meanings of words can be described as—to use a term discussed in the book—kinarir.

In a 2005 column that he titles “Spokening,” Lacaba cites the question on a televised debate show, “Kailangan ba ang perfect English para umunlad ang bansa?” That question,” he writes, “was not about adequate English, or competent English, or even excellent English, but about perfect English….And the survey showed an overwhelming majority of texters saying: Yes!

“Oh wow! If the informal, that is, survey results are indicative of the thinking of the general population, then this country is doomed, starting with showbiz linguists.”

It is at this point that the younger Lacaba of the Free Press and the elder statesman of Filipino literature today meet and converse…

Lacaba’s writings on language, first in his column for the Manila Times, “Carabeef Lengua” and now for Yes! in “Showbiz Lengua” are as revelatory. It is a celebration—albeit a cautious one—of being Filipino, of the virtues of being part of a so-called mongrel race in an increasingly blurry world. But more than that, they are enjoyable reads that appeal not only because they entertain but also instruct. Again, to refer to the author’s earlier essay, he writes that because of pop culture in the form of movies and comic books, he seldom had difficulty in “communicating with people born and bred in a different dialect.” With his new collection, he continues to explore that fascinating terrain of Filipino culture, transmitting back to us a comprehensive reportage on a truly and happily alien species: ourselves.

--ERWIN ROMULO

“English—Pinoy Showbiz Style”

Philippines Free Press

Posted on October 5, 2010

You can read the full review here:

http://www.philippinesfreepress.com.ph/10-2010/english—pinoy-showbiz-style/

…long-time fans of Jose “Pete” Lacaba will find Showbiz Lengua a highly amusing, though quite surprising detour from his earlier books like “Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran” (1979), “Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage” (1982), “Sa Panahon ng Ligalig” (1983), “Sa Daigdig ng Kontradiksiyon” (1992), “Edad Medya” (2000), and “Kung Baga sa Bigas” (2002).

Except for “Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage,” a compilation of on-the-spot reports on the First Quarter Storm that in 1982 won the National Book Award for nonfiction, all the other books are collections of Lacaba’s poems.

For the first four decades of his writing life, Lacaba’s works mostly focused on social and political contradictions that hounded Philippine society. Prolific and versatile, he spun poems and wove commentary, even put lyrics to music and wrote searing screenplays that gave meaning to powerful films like Angela Markado (1983), Sister Stella L. (1984), Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (1984), Orapronobis (1989), Eskapo (1995), Segurista (1996), Bagong Bayani (1996), and Rizal sa Dapitan (1997).

And just when everyone expected that Lacaba, now in his ’60s and an established icon of Philippine cinema and literature, was about to retire from doing social commentary, he turns around and practically does a Madonna, reinventing himself as “El Lenguador,” a tongue-in-cheek expert of words and phrases commonly used by Philippine showbiz denizens.

Why show business? Well, it could be because the entertainment business has been Lacaba’s immediate milieu for some years now. As executive editor of Summit Media’s YES!magazine, he most probably gets to read all the interesting and controversial happenings in the entertainment industry before everyone else.

Long exposure to showbiz talk has perhaps tickled his imagination to the point that he had to write about it. The result: Pithy discourses providing amusing insights on why Korean star Sandara Park is a “krung-krung;” what happens when someone thinks “kinakarir mo ang BF niya;” and how to say “sobra!” as one gets swamped by intense emotion…

Definitely, Showbiz Lengua is not a trivial pursuit to be dismissed by serious students of the fast-evolving Pinoybiz language.

Should the book be highly recommended? Well, if only for the almost scholarly effort to put rhyme, reason, humor, and fun to what many dismiss as mere kaartehan or kakikayan I’d say, “Plangak!”

--PSYCHE ROXAS-MENDOZA

“The Book of Lengua”

Philippines Graphic

Posted on October 11, 2010

You can read the full review here:

http://philippinesgraphic.com/?p=650

“Chuvachuchu," “Jologs," “Krung-krung" at “Kikay." Ilan lang ‘yan sa mga nakaaaliw na salita na madalas nating marinig sa mga showbiz personalities… na malamang ginagamit mo rin paminsan-minsan. Pero kagaya ka ba ng manunulat na si Pete Lacaba na nagtatanong kung saan nga bang lupalop nahugot ang mga salitang ito?

Karaniwang sa mga bading at mga personalidad sa showbiz natin naririnig ang mga kakaibang salitang ito, na noong una ay iilan lang siguro ang nakakaintindi. Pero sa paglipas ng panahon, naging karaniwan na ito sa ating pandinig at tila nagbago na rin ang kahulugan.

Ano nga ba itong “chuvachuchu" na parang nagtataboy lang ng aso? Ang “Krung-krung" ay tunog ba ng “ring" ng lumang telepono na pa-ikot pa noon ang dial? At itong “Kikay," hindi ba parang tunog ng maselang bahagi ng katawan ng babae?

Sa librong ‘Showbiz Lengua: Chika & Chismax about Chuvachuchu’ na akda ni Pete Lacaba, hinimay niya ang ilang “posibilidad" na pinanggalingan ng mga showbiz o gay lingo na ito. Isinama na rin niya ang iba pang “pinausong" salita na ang kahulugan ay hindi mo makikita sa mga diksyunaryo sa Filipino o sa mga translator sa Internet.

Pero paalala ni Lacaba sa kanyang libro: “Don’t ask me for lexicographic proof. My assertions here are based purely on chika, chismax and chukchak."

--FIDEL R. JIMENEZ

“Mga chika, chismax, at chukchak ni Pete Lacaba”

GMANews.TV

Posted on October 22, 2010

You can read the full review here:

http://www.gmanews.tv/story/204050/mga-chika-chismax-at-chukchak-ni-pete-lacaba

… Showbiz Lengua by Jose "Pete" Lacaba, our only certified word maven, a multi-lingual one at that, since he dwells with much expertise and panache not only on English word usage but, as shown in this collection of columns done for the monthly entertainment YES! Magazine which he helps edit, mostly on new additions to our Filipino and regional languages, plus a lot of chuvaspeak.

Published by Anvil, the book's full title is Showbiz Lengua: Chika & Chismax about Chuvachuchu. And there's no one else who can give us the rundown on such chic chump change of lilting language (possibly patois) than Ka Pete, who sagely scours dictionaries, interrogates area experts (as part of cultural research), and indulges in his own educated guesswork to fill us in on delightful new additions to our Pinoyspeak…

It makes for thoroughly enjoyable reading, this book. Trust Pete to entertain and enlighten you to the chuva max.

--KRIP YUSON

“New Filipiniana titles” (in his column “Kripotkin”)

Philippine Star

Nov. 1, 2010

You can read the full review here:

http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=625951&publicationSubCategoryId=79

GALLEON QUEST

2010-10-11T11:31:00.008+08:00

The Galeon Andalucia at Pier 13, Manila.
Cellphone photo by Marra PL. Lanot.

October 8, 2010, was celebrated as the Día del Galeón, or Day of the Galleon. It was the very first celebration of the Unesco-declared Día del Galeón, and the celebration was held in the Philippines, which was supposed to be the host of something called the “International Día del Galeón Festival 2010: Connecting Continents.”

I learned about the event only the day before from a Philippine Daily Inquirer report, which came out the day after the Galeón Andalucia, a replica of a 17th-century Spanish galleon, sailed into Philippine waters and docked at Pier 13 of Manila’s South Harbor. The ship was supposed to be open to the public for boarding and viewing on October 8 and 9, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I could not join my wife, Marra PL. Lanot, when she decided to take a look at the Galeón Andalucia and take a few pictures with her Nokia cellphone.

So I decided instead to dig up an article I wrote 20 years ago, when a travel magazine assigned me to check out a report that a life-size replica of a Spanish galleon was being built somewhere in Cebu, and to use that galleon as the peg for a travel feature on Cebu. I wonder whatever happened to that envisioned Galeón Cebu, which was to be named the Infanta Filipina. I read somewhere, not too long ago, that it was the project of a group headed by or including Inquirer lifestyle columnist Cory Quirino, but the only information I could get about that, from a cursory googling, comes from “Then & Now,” Norma Japitana’s entertainment column in the Philippine Star.

In her column posted on philstar.com on September 19, 2010, Norma J reprinted something she had originally written in 1990, the same year I wrote my travel article. “Andy Williams came and got a standing ovation because he made us remember The Shadow of Your Smile, Our Love is Here to Stay and Days of Wine and Roses,” Norma J wrote on June 26, 1990. “The fact that he came to help build the Spanish Galleon of Cory Quirino’s group made it more worthwhile.”

Anyway, for all it’s worth, and in belated commemoration of Día del Galeón, here’s slightly revised version of the piece I wrote back in 1990. It first appeared in Continental Airlines’ Pacific Travelogue 1990, published in Honolulu by EastWest Magazine Co. Ltd.

Marra at the helm of the Galeon Andalucia.

Photo by a volunteer tour guide, using Marra's cellphone.

GALLEON QUEST

On the road in Cebu, “an island in the Pacific.”

By JOSE F. LACABA

ON THE LATE-AFTERNOON flight from Manila to Cebu, I found myself seated beside a young white Anglo-Saxon blonde, whom I naturally took to be a scuba-diving backpacker out to explore the island’s fabled coral reefs. But when I asked where she was from, she said, “Cebu,” and started speaking in Cebuano to prove it. She turned out to be the Cebu-born daughter of British nationals; her father was an official in the copper mines. Cebu springs such surprises on the unwary visitor.

I was on my way to Cebu, a Philippine province 587 kilometers south of Manila, to take a look at a galleon in the making. There, I was told, a project had been launched to build a life-size replica of Spain’s ancient sailing ship. Originally made for war and subsequently used for commerce, the galleon in its planned reincarnation was to be equipped with state-of-the-art technology and modern-day conveniences for the benefit of the ocean-cruising tourist trade: the Love Boat in 16th-century raiment.

My seatmate on the plane had heard of the project but didn’t know exactly where in Cebu the galleon was being built. She was not the only one in the dark. I asked around almost as soon as I hit the ground, and nobody could direct me to the proper shipyard or to a city office. The local tourism unit provided handouts with a lot of useful information (for instance: the Japanese accounted for the most number of foreign tourists to Cebu, with 37,538 in 1988, followed by the Hongkong Chinese, 17,173, and the Americans, 13,947), but there was no mention of a galleon. It was still a drawing-board concept; it was not yet a tourist draw.

Killing time and following up some leads, I went around Cebu City, the provincial capital. I had earlier enjoyed a panoramic view of the Queen City of the South (as it bills itself) from the Cebu Plaza, the plush mountainside hotel in which I was billeted courtesy of the Department of Tourism. A closeup showed a feverish construction boom, which in a few years will radically alter the face of the metropolis. For the moment, however, it still retained a good deal of its Old World charm. This was particularly noticeable in Fort San Pedro, the country’s oldest and smallest Spanish-built stone fort, which houses the tourism office, and in Casa Gorordo, one of the few Spanish houses in Cebu to have survived the bombing of the last world war. Both places have been converted into museums where the elegant relics of a bygone era are on permanent display.

While having a sandwich at a place called Balls Burger, I watched the passing parade. No longer much in evidence were the leisurely tartanillas, Cebu’s unique horse-drawn rigs, and once the chief form of public transport for prole and gentry alike. In their place were other aspirants for the title of King of the Road: the motorized tricycle, basically a motorcycle with a sidecar that can carry up to 15 passengers, to the astonishment of the motorcyles’ Japanese makers; the trisikad, a bicycle with a sidecar, its name being a bilingual pun combining tricyle and sikad (Cebuano for “kick”); the jeepney, a national symbol; and the meterless taxicab. With taxis you stated your destination, the driver named a price, you haggled if you could, and only when the two of you had agreed on the fare were you allowed to get in. Since I didn’t know my way around and didn’t speak Cebuano, taxis proved more convenient than Rent-a-Car, and the drivers, eager to show off their fluency in Manila Tagalog, were a rich source of local lore about the sexual habits of Cebu’s politicians. But they knew nothing about the galleon.

By this time I was about to give up on the galleon and had decided to look into the better-known attractions of Cebu, a place advertised in travel posters in Europe as “an island in the Pacific.” (The catchphrase prompted at least one official of the central government to criticize this apparent effort to dissociate gentle Cebu from the rest of the rowdy country.) Luckily I visited an old friend in Liloan, a small town about an hour’s ride from Cebu City, famed for its flaky otap and crunchy rosquillo biscuits, and for having produced nationally known beauty queens and movie stars. My friend introduced me to a guy who shall hereinafter be referred to as Pardy.

Pardy is the kind of colorful character every travel writer should try bumping into. A man darkened by sun and sea, with an overflowing belly reminiscent of the Chinese Buddha’s, he was given to atrocious puns like: “The police, they are up to some police-ness again.” He gave me a calling card on which he is described as having “no phone, no address, no money, no job, no prospects,” with the added information that he “specializes in underwater demolition, revolution, gunrunning, bootlegging, civil wars, smuggling, orgies, prayer meetings and church socials.” And he said he could take me to the shipyard where the galleon was being built. We shook hands on that.

BRIGHT AND EARLY the next morning Pardy came to pick me up at my hotel in a battered Toyota driven by his sidekick, improbably named Marlon. Actually, he should have been named Evel Knievel. He had no qualms about overtaking cars which were in the process of overtaking other cars, even if we happened to be negotiating hairpin turns on heartbreak hills. My balls, as the Tagalog saying goes, climbed up to my throat.

I had told Pardy the galleon wasn’t my only goal; I was also interested in getting a sampling of what Cebu had to offer to tourists. He now informed me we would first visit Moalboal and stay there overnight. From one of the handouts I had picked up at the tourist office, I would later learn that Moalboal is a town on the southwest coast, 89 kilometers from Cebu City. Pardy told me it was a place frequented by scuba divers and snorkelers who go for off-the-beaten-path vacations.

On the east coast the ride was a smooth one. Somewhere along the way I espied a signboard above the door of a nipa hut saying, “Welcome to Hare Krishna Paradise,” and in town after town, billboards announced “cock derbies” sponsored by “cockers’ clubs.” I was reminded of a story told of the Cebuano as gambler. It seems that churchgoing cockfighters often went to communion just so they could pocket the eucharistic hosts, which they would later feed to their fighting cocks. With the kind of faith that moves mountains, they believed bread that had been transformed into the body of Christ had the miraculous power of making cocks strong and victorious in battle.

We got off the beaten path as soon we started to cross over to the western side, by way of a gravelly mountain road with no railings to obstruct our view of heart-pounding ravines. We roared through a market area, all bustle and excitement, pungent with the myriad smells of peasant commodities being sold or exchanged: goats, pigs, cows, carabaos, salt, corn grits, firewood. After what felt like an eternity, we came down to a breathtaking view of the sea, so clear and shallow you could see the white sand shining underneath. It was this wading-depth coastline that gave the island its original native name, Sugbo, meaning, “to walk in the water.”

We bumped on, noting that long stretches of the west-coast road were being cemented, which means smoother sailing in the future for accidental tourists. Three hours after we left Cebu City, we were on the dirt road leading to Moalboal’s beach. We passed an empty, solitary structure bearing the sign “Moalboal Tourist Sports Complex”--actually a cockpit--and then suddenly we were at the end of the road, an oasis of cottages and bamboo pavilions with names like Paradise Inn and Eve’s Kiosk. A number of one-room “schools” offered to teach scuba diving in eight easy lessons, and rented out the necessary outfits and equipment. It wasn’t tourist season, but there must have been more than two dozen white men and women in the place, in swimwear, scuba gear, or regulation tees and shorts.

After a sumptuous lunch of steamed crabs and grilled fish, fresh out of the sea, and washed down with San Miguel beer, we took a siesta. I thought I would wake up with aching muscles and joints, but didn’t. We had another beer at Eve’s Kiosk, and got a briefing from Eve herself. She showed us an old brochure, with faded colored pictures, describing a “mysterious underwater cave” in the “quaint little diving island of Moalboal, beautiful and unexplored.” The brochure called on the reader to “discover the secrets of the Philippine seas” by making a “descent to darkening depths,” with its “kaleidoscope of colors” and “structured cave-like coral walls [that] pulsate with tropical marine life.”

Fired by the promotional prose, we hied ourselves to a diving school. There was a speedboat scheduled to take scuba-diving students and enthusiasts to a nearby island where, the shop attendant assured me, the deep blue offered fabulous sights. But my landlubber instincts--which have instilled in my bones a deathly fear of any body of water that goes deeper than my neck--had taken over. I settled for snorkel and flippers, which together could be rented for 15 pesos per hour.

I stayed close to shore, avoiding the sudden drop in the sandbank. But even here there was enough “pulsating tropical marine life” to dazzle this first-time snorkeler. The Jackson Pollock permutations of coral, the multifarious species of tropical fish, dappled, candy-striped, of various shapes and sizes--I had seen these in aquaria before, but there was nothing like seeing them underwater, being surrounded by them, floating with them. For the first time in my life I saw a live starfish of lapis-lazuli blue. The haze of aquamarine before my goggled eyes and the sound of my own breathing contributed to the eerie beauty of it all. It gave me an inkling of what made scuba divers rave about Cebu, and made me rue my own fear of the deep.

THE NEXT DAY we left Moalboal, but not before getting a full tank from a hut that sold gasoline stored in liter-sized Coke bottles. The gasoline seller wore a T-shirt that said: “Don’t shoot journalists.”

We were back in Cebu City at noon, but had lunch in the next town, Mandaue, in an improvised outdoor restaurant that served succulent barbecued chicken with puso, rice served in little triangular packs of coconut leaves, in which they had been steamed. Afterwards we proceeded to the island of Mactan.

Connected to the main island by a bridge almost a kilometer long, Mactan is the first and last place that the plane-borne visitor to Cebu sees, because it is the site of the international airport. It is also famous for many other things: its world-class beach resorts, its distinctive limestone (known in the Philippines as Mactan stone), its guitars, and the historical fact that Ferdinand Magellan’s 16th-century dream of circumnavigating the globe ended here, when he was killed on the beach by the warriors of the native chieftain Lapulapu.

We looked around for guitar-makers and learned they were all to be found in two barrios, Maribago and Abuno. No one seemed to know the reason for this concentration of skills. Perhaps there was a forest in these barrios once, but now all the wood used for the making of the guitar, such as Philippine mahogany and pinewood, come from Mindanao. We found our way to Lilang’s, reputedly the largest guitar and handicrafts factory in Abuno. In one of the workshops, export-quality classical guitars were being made by an assembly line of twelve men, specialists in various aspects of the craft, from the cutting of the wood to the varnishing of the finished guitar. In an adjoining showroom, a Japanese couple examined samples of the native 14-string mandolin called banduria, and shelves full of ukuleles decorated with painted palm trees flanking the word Hawaii.

Less than a kilometer from Lilang’s was the backyard workshop of a 67-year-old artisan named Angel, who said he had been making guitars since he was 10 years old. His three brothers also made guitars, and their two the sisters sold them. They had learned the craft from their parents, but now none of Angel’s children seemed interested in carrying on the family tradition, and his apprentices were the children of his neighbors. A couple of assistants helped him, but he did all the major tasks himself, seated on a log outside the door of his workshed, his bare feet touching ground, while stray dogs drifted in and out, and tethered fighting cocks crowed ceaselessly. At the time of our visit he was at work on a bajo de arco, a double bass, commissioned by the priest of a nearby parish.

A visit to Mactan, Pardy said, would not be complete without paying homage to Lapulapu, revered as the first Philippine hero to oppose foreign invasion. Off we went to his seaside monument, in what is now Lapulapu City. It was a sign of native ambivalence toward the conquistador that right behind the impressive Lapulapu statue was an obelisk in honor of Magellan and of glorias españolas, Spanish glories. Lapulapu’s heroic proportions, moreover, prompted Pardy’s comment that Mactan’s pride looked more like an American Indian brave than a Malayan warrior.

On the beach nearby was a boat-building community. Some workmen were putting the finishing touches to a catamaran, commissioned by European tourists; others were carving a banca, the Philippine canoe, out of a large log. That reminded me of the galleon I had come to Cebu to look for.

CEBU is well-equipped for the 90-million-dollar galleon project. It has modern shipyards and a shipbuilding tradition, and Cebu-based companies currently control 90 percent of the country’s inter-island shipping. Historically, it was among the first of the Philippines’ 7,000 islands to witness the coming of Magellan’s three surviving ships in 1521, although its role in the later galleon trade is not particularly clear.

At least once a year for 250 years, from 1565 to 1815, the Manila Galleon plied the seas between the Philippines and Mexico, carrying silk and spices to the West and bringing back silver coins and soldiers of fortune. Cebu does not seem to have had a share in the profit and the glory. The definitive book on the subject, William Lytle Schurz’s The Manila Galleon (E.P. Dutton, 1939), does not include Cebu in its list of places where galleons were constructed; but the Encyclopedia Britannica (1981) notes that the island suffered “extensive timber cutting for the building of Spanish galleons on the historic Manila-Acapulco route.”

Pardy, who when I first met him seemed absolutely sure where the galleon was being built, now spoke with less certainty. He had heard it was in one of the shipyards in Consolacion, the town between Mandaue and Liloan, but he didn’t really know which. Fortunately, his first guess was the correct one. The impassable road, made for Land Rovers and 10-wheeler trucks, shook our nerves and rattled our bones, but after several detours and endless questioning of pedestrians, we reached Santiago Shipyard--named, appropriately enough, after Spain’s patron saint.

Still hanging outside a temporary prefab in the shipyard were streamers put up during the launching ceremonies. One welcomed national and provincial dignitaries. Another proclaimed: “La Infanta Filipina Keel-Laying Project, date July 29, 1989. Voyage of discovery, 1992. Seville World’s Fair, the Barcelona Olympic Games and the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World. The Philippines’ official representative in these historic world events.”

At that moment the Infanta Filipina, the Philippine Princess, was nothing more than four massive pieces of planed hardwood which had been towed from the province of Surigao, in Mindanao, and were now joined together end to end for a total length of 200 feet: the keel. Attached to it was an actual-size model of the prow. Inside the prefab, tacked to one wall, were the blueprints prepared by naval architects and marine engineers, providing a graphic preview of the shape of things to come.

At that moment the 20th-century galleon was still a dream, but not an inglorious one. On the way back to the city, I thought of Magellan’s guide and slave, christened Enrique. Described in the chronicles of the voyage as Malay, Enrique was most probably Cebuano, since he could speak the language of Sugbo and was able to act as interpreter; and if indeed he was Cebuano, then he was most certainly the first person to circumnavigate the globe, since he had come full circle when Magellan’s ships brought him back to his native land.

Despite the rough ride, I fell asleep and had a dream, and in my dream I saw Enrique on the deck of the Infanta Filipina, Pardy and Marlon and Eve and Angel beside him, with a white Anglo-Saxon blonde as guide, all setting out on a voyage to discover the Old World, to find what lay beyond the dazzling shadows of Cebu.

Tula: DALAW SA HIROSHIMA

2010-09-11T20:43:00.004+08:00

Noong taong 2000, buwan ng Pebrero, kami ng kabiyak kong si Marra PL. Lanot ay nagpunta sa Japan bilang lecturers sa ika-9 na Takeshi Kaiko Memorial Asian Writers’ Lecture Series. Ang lecture series ay ipinangalan kay Takeshi Kaiko (1930-1989), isang kilalang nobelistang Hapones. Ang aming lecture series, na pinamagatang “Writers as Citizens: The Perspectives of Marra PL. Lanot and Jose F. Lacaba,” ay inisponsor ng Japan Foundation Asia Center.

Actually, poetry reading tour ang ginawa namin, at ang lectures ay pumasok na lang sa open forum pagkatapos naming magbasa ng mga tula namin sa Pilipino, na isinalin sa Hapon.

Ang mga siyudad na bahagi ng poetry reading tour ay Tokyo, Osaka, at Hiroshima. Dito sa huli, sa siyudad na hinulugan ng bomba atomika noong Ikalawang Digmaang Pandaigdig, ipinasyal kami sa Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, at isa sa hindi ko malimutang display sa museo ay ang hagdang bato na may nakatatak na anino. Sa website ng museo, ito ang nakasulat na paliwanag tungkol sa aninong iyon:

http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/outline/index.php?l=E&id=31

Damage by the Heat Rays

Human shadow etched in stone

“These stone steps led up to the entrance to the Sumitomo Bank Hiroshima Branch, 260 meters from the hypocenter. The intense atomic heat rays turned the surface of the stone white, except for a part in the middle where someone was sitting. The person sitting on the steps waiting for the bank to open received the full force of the heat rays directly from the front and undoubtedly died on the spot.”

Mula sa

http://www.culture24.org.uk/history+%26+heritage/war+%26+conflict/world+war+two/art14898

Pag-uwi namin sa Pilipinas ay nasulat ko ang tulang ito, na dapat ay ipinost ko noon pang Agosto 6, ika-65 na anibersaryo ng pagbomba sa Hiroshima.

Dalaw sa Hiroshima

Ang gunita ay isang aninong

nakatatak sa hagdang bato

sa lunsod ng Hiroshima.

Ang lalaking pinagmulan ng anino’y

agad na naging alabok sa kinauupuan

nang bumagsak ang bomba sa Hiroshima.

Pero naiwan ang kanyang anino, nakadikit

sa inupuang bahagi ng namuting hagdang bato

sa guho ng Hiroshima.

Ang gunita ay isang digmaang

nagwakas na nang ako’y ipanganak

tatlong buwan pagkaraan ng Hiroshima.

Pero hanggang ngayo’y nakatatak ang digmaan

sa utak ng bayan ko, kalahating siglo pagkaraan

ng malupit, mahabang gabi na mistulang Hiroshima.

Sa loob ng Museo sa Alaala ng Kapayapaan

sa bagong lunsod ng Hiroshima,

nagkiskis ang dalawang batong-buháy na gunita

at nagliyab sa lalamunan ko ang poot at awa.

Sa labas ng museo, nag-alay kami ng aking kabiyak

ng tahimik na dalangin at bulaklak.

Sa aming ulunan, palutang-lutang ang mga uwak.

--Jose F. Lacaba

SECOND MANDATE

2010-07-31T23:35:00.002+08:00

This article was first published in the January 10, 1970, issue of the Philippines Free Press. After Noynoy Aquino’s inauguration, it was reprinted in the July 10, 2010, issue of the same magazine.

Once again, I have Free Press associate editor Ricky S. Torre to thank for digging up this archaeological piece. The reprint carries this introduction:

Right before the First Quarter Storm (40th anniversary this year) and Pete Lacaba’s now-lapidary chronicle of that episode in the Philippines’ modern history, there was this prologue. Ferdinand Marcos had just won in an unprecedented reelection that should have been welcomed with national euphoria. Yet even during the presidential campaign of 1969, there was already a prevailing exhaustion over the political system as wielded by their leaders and the electorate—compounded by the recurrent unrest, alongside the antiestablishment protest movement worldwide.

Although not as much in circulation as “Notes on Bakya,” “The Clash of ’69,” the reportage on FQS and “Prometheus Unbound,” among other highlights of the Lacaba catalogue, “Second Mandate” was and still remains just as significant for (besides its humor) its keen poetic sense of the flavor and spirit of an era: the late Sixties-early Seventies, as it happened primarily in the storyville that is the city of Manila. We reprint this piece, not in any strained and baseless attempt to draw parallels with today’s scene, but simply to present a fine example of journalism as one-take literature. Our gratitude to Pete Lacaba for his permission to reprint this article.—Ed.

SECOND MANDATE

Or, can Spiro Agnew forget the Marcos inauguration and find his way back to The Affluent Society?

By Jose F. Lacaba
(Philippines Free Press, January 10, 1970)

AUSTERITY was the order of the day, but assassination was the talk of the town.

The advance ballyhoo promised that, for once, the program for Inauguration Day would be “brief and austere.” The parade would be a worm compared with the snakes of previous inaugurations; civic participation had been scrapped and military display, normally lasting a full two hours, had been cut down to 40 minutes. Even words and saliva were affected by the general parsimony: reelected President Ferdinand Marcos would deliver “possibly the shortest inaugural address in the Republic’s history.” Afterwards, there would be the traditional dinner for the guests from across the seas, headed by no less than Spiro T. Agnew, household word and Vice-President of the United States of America; but there was to be no expense for Spiro in a waste of shame, the dinner would be not as before—lavish, extravagant, ostentatious—but simple and frugal. Probably limited to two courses: salabat for soup and pinakbet for viand. After the most expensive elections in Philippine history, the Ilocano in Marcos had come out.

Though austerity dictated the veto on custom and ceremony, the fear of assassination demanded that there be no skimping on security. Astrologers and soothsayers are said to have warned the President that he would be killed during his second term, and there was a great deal of talk about Oswalds and Sirhans before Inauguration Day, talk that Malacañang encouraged with its disclosure that a Huk liquidation squad was out to get Marcos. No expense was spared, therefore, to secure the President from suicidal assassins. A helicopter hovered over the Luneta to the end, the navy patrolled the bay, machine guns were perched atop the Independence Grandstand (what were they there for? would they have fired at the crowd if one crackpot had drawn a pistol?), walkie-talkies were everywhere, and the fuzz was as thick as flies in mango season. Uniformed policemen of Manila and suburbs lined the streets, Malacañang guards in barong Tagalog were deployed on the grandstand, constabulary troopers lolled behind it, Special Forces men crouched on the roof, NBI agents skulked around, motorcycle cops raced up and down the boulevard, Metrocom cars were parked at street corners, helmeted members of riot squads gripped their rattan sticks, four or five rows of soldiers in civvies manned the front lines of the sparse crowd, “a modest crowd of unenthusiastic spectators” (Chronicle), “smaller than the usual crowd that packs the park during national holidays” (Times), “perhaps the smallest crowd since the Philippines became independent” (Bulletin)—everybody was there, including, of course, Spiro’s Secret Service complement, on the lookout for an effete corps of impudent snobs brandishing Molotov cocktails.

Only a “fanatical fool” would have dared “penetrate the security cordon,” Brigadier General Vicente Raval of the Philippine Constabulary was quoted as saying, and he explained why: “He would never get past the security line; he would nevertheless emerge alive.” (Figure that out, if you can, and if you can’t, put it down as one of the best and most cryptic non sequiturs of the past decade.)

It was cold on the morning of Inauguration Day, hot towards noon, and uncertain weather all the way. Sun alternated with clouds and shadows, and even while the sun shone, brief showers fell, brief and austere. Umuulan, umaaraw, nanganganak ang bakulaw. Umaaraw, umuulan, nanganganak ang tikbalang. Out in the park the little children played, called by their parents when they wandered too far afield, calling after the balloonman, far and whee; and were utterly oblivious of the occasion, unmindful of Rizal, whose day it was, and even more unaware that at that very moment another hero, the country’s most decorated war hero, was on his way to his second inauguration.

There was earlier a question about the proper way for Ferdinand Marcos to go to his inauguration. No postwar Philippine president had ever been reelected, as the press daily reminded us, and so a thing like this had never happened before. Usually, there was an incoming president to go to Malacañang and there was an outgoing president to receive him and then accompany him to the Independence Grandstand, like a father giving away a bride. When the bride is without a father, what must be done? Ferdinand Marcos came accompanied by his son.

And, of course, by his senior aide, Brigadier General Hans Menzi, resplendent in a white uniform with all braids, badges, and accoutrements in place. Ferdinand Marcos, his hair slick-and-span as usual, was in a barong Tagalog, and so was Ferdinand Marcos Jr., better known as Bongbong, who had gotten rid of his crewcut and now sported a mod hairstyle, hair down low over his forehead, à la early-Beatles. Together, the father, the son, and Hans Menzi set forth from Malacañang, surrounded by scads of security men, to receive, in formal ceremony, what had been bestowed in November: a second mandate.

When they arrived at the grandstand, everybody else was there. Vice-President Fernando Lopez was there, grinning happily and now slouching towards the President to be the first to shake hands; he had himself, when he arrived, shaken hands with all the foreign and local dignitaries within reach, except Rufino Cardinal Santos, whose hand he kissed. Spiro Agnew, whose seat was right behind the President’s, was there, looking like a slim, squint-eyed panda. American astronaut Eugene Cernan was inconspicuous, but the dailies swear he was there. (When you come to think of it, do you have a distinct picture in your mind of the face of any astronaut, cosmonaut, or space explorer besides Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Even John Glenn is difficult to visualize; astronauts all look alike, and they are the faceless heroes of the age.) Gil J. Puyat, Senate President as of this writing, was there, and so was Jose B. Laurel Jr., Speaker as of this writing, his white hair absent from the dome but becomingly long at the nape. Chief Justice Roberto Concepcion wore the black robes of his office, Secretary-General Carlos P. Romulo acted as master of ceremonies, Executive Secretary Ernesto Maceda beamed in the background, Congressman Floro Crisologo was in a white (ramie?) suit, the kind our austerity-conscious grandfathers used to wear when they had their pictures taken. A host of lesser VIPs was there, too, and there was even a small group of whites in top hat and tails, looking like fugitives from a Broadway musical.

Never forget the women. Mrs. Imelda Marcos was there, and the Misses Imee and Irene, dressed in what, from a distance, looked like identical ternos. (“Signs of austere times?” went a society page item “…Mrs. Marcos wore a strikingly simple terno and single pearl earring. No jewelry.” The terno “had a wide front panel of rich hand embroidery reportedly taken from a gown she had worn at the first inauguration of the President in 1965.”) Mrs. Mariquit Lopez was only a little less austere. (She “also picked a jusi terno, slightly embroidered more than that of the First Lady. She also wore a gold bracelet, a single pearl pendant and a pearl ring in addition to pearl earrings.”) And the Blue Ladies were conspicuously in attendance—the bakya crowd among them down on the ground, in a corner behind the platform crammed with TV cameras and technicians, and therefore unable to see a thing; and the bluebloods among them up on the grandstand, occupying the space reserved for, but disdained as too distant by, the press. You could tell they were the blueblooded Blue Meanies by the lift of their eyebrows, the color of their skins and the austerity of their hairdos. The bakya crowd Blues, meanwhile, had to be resourceful; every now and then a couple of them would slip past the snarling policemen and get closer to the action, mingling with the press photographers, all the while giggling and chattering like schoolgirls on a holiday.

“Ang ganda talaga ni Imelda, ano?”

“Naku, si Ramil O, ’ando’n pala si Ramil Rodriguez!”

“Alin ba d’yan ’yung astor… ’yung nagpunta sa buwan?”

“Si Agno, hindi ko makita si Agno.”

“Sabi ko na sa ’yo mag-high heels ka, ayaw mong makinig.”

After the solemn preliminaries—21-gun salute, national anthem, invocation—came the small parade. No need to bore you with the gaudy details. Suffice it to say that the parade boldly gave the lie to the charge that the country has fallen victim to a creeping militarism. Militarism isn’t creeping in this country, it’s marching proudly, head held high, chest out, stomach in, and a finger on the trigger. The Special Forces and the Philcag contingent weren’t cringing nor hiding their heads in shame because of the controversy that swirled about them; they even got more applause than the PMA cadets, and it is reported that when the Philcag passed by, Agnew stood up as a gesture of respect. Note also that whoever prepared the program, when they decided that austerity called for a shortened parade, kept the soldiers and kicked out the civilians. Civic participations would have been a bore, of course, but the choice of what to exhibit on Inauguration Day sent tiny chills down the spine as one watched the parade of men and armaments unreel. Garrison state, anyone?

Throughout the parade, Ferdinand Marcos and Fernando Lopez stood on the proscenium (or whatever they call it) of the grandstand stage, each in his fashion. Marcos was ramrod straight, a true military man, saluting smartly when the colors passed by. Lopez had the sick look of a man who has been forced to forego his morning ablutions, if you know what I mean, and when the colors passed by he had his hand over his heart as if his heart was itchy. Obviously, the Vice-President was bored by the whole affair. While Marcos struck a heroic pose from the beginning and stuck to it to the end, squinting into the sun like Clint Eastwood without the slim cigar, a premature monument if ever there was one, Lopez couldn’t keep still. He scratched his nape, scratched his crotch, scratched his ears, picked his nose, rubbed his fingernails, folded his arms, dropped them to his sides, held his hands together before him, dropped them to his sides, held his hands together behind him, dropped them to his sides, stared morosely around, scowled, tried to hide his scowl by puckering his lips, and probably wished he were splashing around in his swimming pool. He was at least very human, which made him rather endearing. Besides, this was his third time to review a parade as Vice-President; he expected no surprises.

Happily for Mr. Lopez, it was all over in about the time it would have taken Barbra Streisand to finish “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “When the Parade Passes By.” As a matter of fact, it was over so soon that the program committee found itself with time on its hands. Things had gone so smoothly the program had rushed ahead of schedule. A little time had to be killed before the Vice-President could take his oath of office at 11:55 a.m. This—not para magpalapad ng papel, as it seemed at the time—was the reason why the mixed choir and the Manila Symphony Orchestra that had already sung “Lupang Hinirang” and the “Marcos March” or something, now burst into an unscheduled singing of “Dahil sa Iyo.” Naturally the First Lady, delighted, joined in the singing.

When the singing stopped, it was time for the swearing in. The oaths of office, administered by the Chief Justice, were in Pilipino. Lopez and his Ilonggo accent struggled manfully, but charmingly, through his oath. The President, as if to reinforce his heroic image, recited his from memory. Ako, si Ferdinand Marcos, ay nanunumpa, etc., etc. Patnubayan nawa ako ng Panginoon. Historical footnote: it was the first time the two highest officials in the land said their oaths of office in Pilipino.

Like the bright grade-school kid who knows the capital of every province in the country and can recite “Psalm of Life” at the drop of a hint, Ferdinand Marcos is something of a showoff, and he showed off superbly in his inaugural address, which again he delivered from memory. His memory is terrific but, as even so loyal a partisan as J.V. Cruz noted, “the President looked far more concerned with making sure that his memory did not fail him than with the substance of what he was saying.” I used to be a school orator myself and I know that, after the rigorous rehearsals, once you get on the stage you’re no longer aware of what you’re saying, and you won’t even care, so long as you enunciate the practiced syllables clearly and remember when to raise your voice, when to lower it, when to pause, when to make a gesture, when to take a few steps forward, and when to give the audience a long piercing look (when you can’t remember the next word that will cue you on the next sentence and the rest of the speech). Marcos delivering his inaugural address reminded me of my high-school days; he looked like an earnest Voice of Democracy contestant in the elimination rounds taking great care not to muff his lines. In fact, he ended his speech like a VOD contestant: “The wave of the future is not totalitarianism but democracy.”

The inaugural address itself sounded like a high-school declamation piece. It was entitled “To Transform the Nation—Transform Ourselves” (even granting that titles need not be complete sentences, isn’t there something grammatically fishy here? We Must Transform Ourselves? Let Us Transform Ourselves?), and it contained such gems of sophomoric oratory as “…in the inexorable march of history no tears are shed for the fallen, no sympathies wasted on the weak….” Besides being studded with high-sounding clichés (“billowing fields of green,” “faint of heart,” “in this spot of the universe, a people strong and free”) and pious platitudes (“we labored to transform this nation into the very finest among God’s nations”), it sounded like a parody of the John F. Kennedy speeches, especially in passages such as: “…cross the frontier of the new decade…”, “Now in all humility we inform all Asia that we know the nature and quality of our tenuous peace; and that it is also a demanding peace…”, “I ask not sacrifice from the self-sacrificing…”, “Let not this generation pass without seeking to learn anew that in this great meeting place of eastern wisdom and western advance…”, “…seek not from government what you cannot find in yourself….”

Rumor has it that Mr. Marcos discarded all the drafts submitted by his speechwriters and labored over a draft of his own. It is not hard to believe the rumor.

The speech begins with the kind of high-flown literary Tagalog even the serialized novels and the movie tearjerkers are beginning to abandon: “Ang aking dinatnan ay isang pamahalaang nasa bingit ng kapahamakan at pagkariwara, isang pamahalaang nag-udyok ng takot bago ito nagbigay ng pag-asa; sakbibi ng pag-aatubili, hinamak ng kawalang-tiwala sa sarili, lugami ang kanyang kabuhayan, hungkag ang kanyang kaban,” etc., etc. That isn’t even constructed the way a Tagalog sentence should be constructed, and the reason is that it is a transliteration of what follows next in English: “We found a government on the brink of disaster and collapse, a government that prompted fear before it inspired hope; plagued by indecision, scorned by self-doubt, its economy despoiled, its treasury plundered,” etc., etc. If the same thing was going to be said in English all over again, what was the point of saying it in Pilipino? To impress Spiro Agnew?

He may have been impressed by what Mr. Marcos said next.

The President demanded “sacrifice” and “self-discipline” from the powerful and the privileged, demanded of society that it “chastise the profligate rich who waste the nation’s substance—including its foreign exchange reserves—in personal comforts and luxuries,” and made it clear that under his administration, “wealth, position or power will not purchase privilege; wealth and power shall not outrage the conscience of our people.”

The beginning of a new decade, said the President, called for a lot of new things: “new national habits, nothing less than a new social and official morality”; “a new ethic” with which “we will surmount most of the grave problems we are confronting now”; “a new heart, a new spirit that springs out of the belief that while our dangers are many, and our resources few, there is no problem that cannot be surmounted given but the will and courage.” Under this new morality, “any act of extravagance in government will be considered not only as an offense to good morals but an act punishable with dismissal from office.”

The President promised to set the example.

“I pledge a leadership of the severest quality in integrity, morality and discipline.”

(The day after his inauguration, “moved,” he said, “by the strongest desire and the purest will to set the example of self-denial and self-sacrifice for all our people,” the President decided to give away “all my worldly possessions so that they may serve the greater needs of the greater number of our people.” All his properties, “by a general instrument of transfer,” were to go “to the Filipino people through a foundation to be organized and to be known as the Ferdinand E. Marcos Foundation,” the purpose of which was to advance “the cause of education, science, technology and the arts.” As Gene Magsaysay would say, no comment—not yet.)

After the inaugural address, the President and his family went back home to Malacañang, where they signed the registry book again, as they had done the first time they moved into the place.

“Glad to be back,” Ferdinand Marcos reportedly wrote.

And Bongbong: “Me next, I hope.”

Nobody got assassinated, but Metrocom men, according to a news report, “arrested two men they said were loitering near the grandstand on suspicion they were on an assassination mission.” One man was said to have a tear-gas gun; the other wore a PC lieutenant-colonel’s uniform and brown civilian shoes. They were taken to Camp Crame.

LIFE AS ERPAT

2010-06-21T14:49:00.003+08:00

Yesterday being Father’s Day, I am bringing back an old article I wrote when my now-39-year-old son was only three months old.

LIFE AS ERPAT

In times like these, to paraphrase Brecht, a conversation about trees is almost a crime—because it includes a silence about so many misdeeds.

So here I am again, back on the beat after a year at the desk, back with a vengeance, or is it off on another ego trip, at any rate eager to prove to one and all that neither domestic bliss nor the kiss of cooptation has blunted the sense of rage—and what is the first thing I do? Something tantamount to starting a conversation about trees. It’s better than talking about the many varieties of wine, or sunset on Manila Bay, or Image and Archetype in the Poetry of Rolando Carbonell; but fatherhood is still an unlikely topic, however you look at it, for anyone who wants to announce a new lease on his writing life, I mean, in this day and age, when the wit and urbanity of the so-called familiar essay are a drag, an anachronism, if not the equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns, can any reader be bowled over by a light piece, written off the top of one’s head, on the subject of fatherhood?

If I weren’t the author of this article, I probably wouldn’t even bother to proofread it.

But this is, in case you haven’t noticed, our Valentine’s Day issue and an occasional (“belonging or suitable to some special occasion”—Funk & Wagnalls) article was called for, something connected, however remotely, with love. I chose fatherhood.

I chose fatherhood for the plain and simple reason that I became the father of a six-pound, twenty-and-a-half-inch baby boy last November, and I feel I can at least fill up a page or two of this issue with the bits and pieces of nonsense and common sense that I have picked up since then.

The very first thing I learned was to disabuse my mind of the many comic-book notions of fatherhood that the petty-bourgeois mind has absorbed in all the years of cultural conditioning by Hollywood and Reader’s Digest. We all have this picture of the worried father restlessly pacing a waiting-room floor littered with cigarette butts. I never did get around to that. Like Macduff, my boy was not of woman born but was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d, and so there simply was no time for this father to make like a smoke-belching PUB. In the time it took me to finish a stick of regular-sized Marlboro Red, a new Lacaba came howling into this wicked world , another helpless creature to be sapped with Original Sin by the Almighty.

The next frame in our comic-book consciousness shows the doctor coming out of the delivery room, peeling off his surgical gloves, while over his head hovers a balloon on which is written: “Congratulations! It’s a baby.” In my case, when the nurse wheeled out a kind of pram from which arose tremendous howls of protest, the doctors (there were two) remained in the delivery room to calibrate the Mrs. with fourteen stitches. I didn’t see where the pram was wheeled into, I couldn’t see the bundle of flesh and bone responsible for all the caterwauling, and none of my anguished importunings could make the nurse reveal the secrets of the delivery room. Was it boy, girl, or what, was all I wanted to know; and all she would say was, “Wait for the doctors.” It made me wonder if my baby’s gender was classified information (had my baby perhaps disclosed who blasted Plaza Miranda with fragmentation grenades?) or whether the heart between the nurse’s ribs was a transplant from a United Fruit banana. I mean, there oughta be a law against keeping first-time fathers in suspense.

Well, it turned out to be a boy, which is supposed to be a rarity in these days of Women’s Lib. Seems that nine out of ten babies being born today is a potential Makibaka activist, and only one is a potential male chauvinist, so that the arrival of a boy has the same effect on earth that the return of a lost sheep has in heaven.

Happiest of all were half the relatives who had won their bets. When the baby was still a fetus in the sinapupunan, everybody had turned Delphic oracle. Some predicted it would be a boy because the mother’s features had grown sharp, others were certain it would be a girl because the mother hadn’t lost her looks; boy because it kicked like vodka, girl because it leaned to the right of the womb; boy because the mother always stepped with left feet first, girl because she stepped any which way; boy because the mother’s neck and armpits had grown slightly darker, girl because the mother was paler than usual. Nobody bothered to see if the father had lost a tooth or grown prey to constipation. The only thing the father was sure of was that his child wouldn’t be a tuta.

So we got a boy, and suddenly a whole new world opened up. Yesterday, I was just padre de familia to a brood of younger brothers and sisters and a widowed mother. Now, I was an honest-to-goodness erpat myself. It was a thought to give one pause, and mythopoeic visions ran through my mind—you know, all that business about Oedipus and the slaying of the father.

But more mundane matters soon banished all fancied terrors from my mind. The Delphic oracles had metamorphosed into Dr. Spocks and were liberal with advice on baby and child care. You don’t want to spoil him, said an aunt, so unless it’s feeding time don’t pick him up, however pitifully he cries. You don’t want him to get gas pains, said another aunt, so be sure to pacify him the moment he cries. If you want a baby girl next time around, said still another aunt, you might try changing places in bed when you go to sleep: ikaw naman ngayon sa kanan…

Sleep, however, among other things, was a luxury we would have very little of in the days to come. Two years ago, I was vice-president of a labor union which counted among its demands a paternity leave of a week or two, if I remember right. The demand was laughed to scorn by Management, and since most of the Union officers were then bachelors, there was nothing we could do but blush in the face of derision. I know now that the demand was not only reasonable but absolutely necessary, and it can be mocked and made fun of only by the rich, by those few who can afford to have their babies cared for day and night by governess, nursemaid, amah, or yaya.

I am by no means destitute, and there is a maid to wash bottles and diapers, a refrigerator to store prepared formula in. I don’t even keep office hours. And yet I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the baby came. I can just imagine how difficult things are for the typical working-class father who has to put in eight hours of backbreaking physical labor a day, and then goes home at night to a baby who wakes up and wails once or twice in three hours, complaining of a wet diaper or asking to be fed. He’s lucky if the mother has ample milk in her breasts at all times. If not, he must, with superhuman effort, shake off the grogginess in his head, pick up his tired body, and prepare the baby’s formula or change its diapers. Sure, the wife usually has a major share in this task, but in the first few months after birth, and especially if she has had a cesarian, he cannot expect her to do everything all by herself. And the day after each night when he can only sleep in snatches, he has to go back to work, back to the infernal factory, to the emotionless machines, to the foreman who bawls him out for being sleepy on the job. “If conditions make the human being,” it has been said, “we ought to make the conditions human”—and the paternity leave, no less than the maternity leave, is one of those things that make the conditions human, though of course it’s bound to affect profits.

Not only has fatherhood aroused one’s social conscience, it has pricked one’s national pride. This article has taken an unexpected turn, but one might as well pursue the topic to its logical conclusion. All roads, after all, lead to economics: “mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.” Man may not live by bread alone, but he cannot live without something to put into his stomach.

So, once you get to be a father, you cannot help but reflect on, if not accept, the truth of the activist charge that the national economy is in foreign hands. The higher up on the social scale you go, the more you are likely to realize just how great imperialist control of the economy is. I look around at all the “necessities” that I, like any good burgis father, provide my child with, and I see nothing but foreign, mostly American, labels. On the recommendation of doctors, relatives, and friends, all of whom have been brought up within a colonial social structure, the baby subsists on Mead-Johnson’s Enfamil (“closest to mother’s milk”), obtains his vitamins from Mead-Johnsons Poly-Vi-Sol and United American Tiki-Tiki, is helped out in his bowel movements by Glycerin suppositories, wears Curity Diapers, is bathed with Ivory soap, and smells of Johnson’s Baby Powder, Johnson’s Baby Oil, Johnson’s Baby Lotion, and Johnson’s Baby Cologne, which are supplemented by Fissan Baby Powder, a German product. He used to take his formula from Freflo bottles, British-made and of transparent plastic, which cracked after a month of use, and so we shifted to Sanifeed, also of transparent plastic and apparently of local manufacture; these last have the advantage of wide mouths which make formula-preparing a bit easier, but they leak and the nipples that go with them either have no holes or have holes so big the formula flows like tap water, choking the baby; friends who have had babies of their own are therefore suggesting another shift, this time to Evenflo, which they say enjoys the recommendation of Good Housekeeping or something.

Erpat, fancying himself a nationalist of sorts, ends up in a quandary: the imported is definitely better than the local, so where does that put his nationalism? How is one to have pride in things Filipino when things Filipino are so shoddy? The same realization has led many others to despair of the nationalist alternative altogether, and has given rise to the reactionary conviction that it is silly to protest against all those abstract isms, since the fault begins with the Filipino, who is his own worst enemy. Before blaming others, so the argument goes, let us first blame ourselves. If we are enslaved, it is because we have allowed ourselves to be enslaved.

It’s an argument that negates our own history, which is a history of resistance, of uprisings, insurrections, revolts, all brutally and ruthlessly suppressed. It is an argument, moreover, that confuses effect for cause, that sees the weaknesses of the Filipino as the cause of all his misfortunes, without bothering to inquire into the historical circumstances that have given rise to those weaknesses. Rizal has already demolished, for good, a similar argument in the essay, “The Indolence of the Filipino,” the point of which is that we do not blame ourselves first, because what we are has been shaped by others, by our conquerors.

The thing is to understand why the imported is better than the local, why there is a general lack of national and social progress. The imported is better than the local because the imported will never allow the local to improve and develop; to allow that would be to lose a profitable market for the imported. In other words, the colonizer will never allow the colonized to achieve progress, because such progress can only be to the detriment of the colonizer, just as the progress of the many will unavoidably, inevitably cut into, and if not entirely abolish, the wealth of the few. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

Once you grasp this truth—unless you are so hopelessly mired in cynicism that you see no solution to anything, or have privileges to protect and therefore instinctively reject any solution that will sweep away those privileges—then it is possible to advance. Once you see that the misery of so many Filipinos is not foreordained but a result of backwardness of the national economy, and once you understand the reason for this backwardness, the conclusion is inescapable: it is not enough to feel a sense of outrage at the sight of so much misery; it is necessary to join in the fight against the abuses of such misery. And you must be prepared to share in the misery, the better to eradicate it.

To get back to our point of departure, you must be prepared—and be willing—to do away with the imported even if the only alternative is to put up with the local, because only by rejecting the imported is it possible for the local to improve and cease to be shoddy. You must be prepared—and be willing—to accept inferior locally made substitutes to come into existence. In the same way, you must be prepared to assume the condition of a peasant if you want to help in the betterment of the peasant’s lot. The idea is to be ready to sacrifice personal (including familial) comfort and ease for the sake of the greater good, now and in the future.

I can almost hear the cynics sneering: here’s another one of those propagandists for paradise, in love with abstractions more than with life itself, championing humanity to the neglect of the human. Some other time, I will narrate the stories of some workers I know, members of our union, men and women of flesh and blood, whose sufferings and aspirations are abstractions only to those who are not even aware that these men and women exist. For the moment, I must be content with generalities.

All too often, those who prate about the quality of human life, those who proclaim their devotion to what is true, human, and abiding, mistake the pimples of their sensitive petty-burgeois souls for the more mundane concerns of the great mass of their fellowmen, whose “anguish” is usually tied up with painfully concrete realities – how to stretch eight pesos a day in order to feed a family of six three times a day, and have enough to spare for the rent, the light, the water, and a new pair of shoes for the school-age kid. I think particularly of Camus, that exquisite existentialist, the humane observer who was so caught up in the contemplation of the eternal verities that when his countrymen in Algeria rose up in revolt, on the very concrete issues of “bread and the land” (in the words of Frantz Fanon), he was taken by surprise, and ended up rejecting, repudiating, virtually condemning his people’s struggle, which didn’t fit his definition of what was true, human, and abiding. “Neither victim nor executioner” was his personal slogan; but he failed to realize that, by refusing to be a victim, or even simply to speak up for the victim, he had aligned himself with the executioner.

I have gone off on quite a tangent, I am afraid, and now I must get back to my son. All I can offer him now, besides his daily dose of imperialist milk, are a few words of advice. Let him always remember that there is “plenty to protest against but nothing to despair about.” For despair, which is the other face of cynicism, “is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”

Asia-Philippines Leader

February 11, 1972

DISCOVERING RIZAL

2010-06-19T17:38:00.003+08:00

From the Philippines Free Press, June 12, 2010.
Artwork by Danilo Dalena.

Thanks to Ricky S. Torre, associate editor of the Philippines Free Press, I rediscovered this old article of mine that I had almost forgotten I wrote. This first came out in the magazine’s issue of January 11, 1969, and Ricky thought of reprinting it in this year’s June 12 issue, in time for Jose Rizal’s 139th birth anniversary.

DISCOVERING RIZAL

He’s alive and well and living in the minds and hearts of men!

By Jose F. Lacaba

THIS doesn’t seem to be the right time—it’s either too early or rather late, depending on how you look at it—to be writing about the Pride of the Malay Race, especially for a periodical that feeds on the topical. The proper time for pieces of this sort is either early June or late December, which is when they do appear, in horrifying profusion, in every single organ of the Philippines press, without exception; it’s a ritual gesture, the publication of these pieces, like putting out pictorials on flagellants during Holy Week, a ritual propitiation to the gods of the season, and more often than not a pointless exercise in homiletics.

Why, then, write on José Rizal at all, and at so late a date?

The lateness cannot be helped, and will have to be blamed on deadlines and human imperfection; had I known early last month what was to happen on December 30, 1968, the 72nd anniversary of the national hero’s death, I would have lost no time putting down the events on paper; but, alas, I have not my subject’s gift of prophecy, and must be content with dwelling on what’s past. At any rate, Rizal is a man for all seasons; let us not confine all talk of him to the day he was born and the day he was killed. That is the way of politicians.

As to why write on Rizal at all, that is the subject of this dissertation, which should properly be titled, as in grade school compositions, What Rizal Means To Me.

“Like most Filipinos,” Leon Ma. Guerrero writes in a preface to his biography of the hero, “I was told about Rizal as a child, and to me, like to most, he remained only a name.” So it was with me, with the difference that the name was mine, too; the first name, that is. I was named after my father, who is not alive to say if he was named after the hero. Anyway, there it was: José Rizal was my tocayo, and I was not too happy about it. Sometime in grade school, in a subject then (and I believe still) called “social studies,” we were told that one of the hero’s early nicknames was Uté. I remember it, even if I have not found the information corroborated by my meager readings, because for the rest of the school year it was to become the sobriquet by which I was teased and tormented by my classmates. They had been happy enough, until then, to play with the sound of my surname, which yielded such abominations as kalabaw and kabag; now even my first name became a joke. Uté: it had such a repulsive sound; with one letter added, it became a dirty word, and this must be the reason my classmates took such a delight in it. If Rizal remained a name to me, he was a name to be wary of, if not to hate.

The situation was not helped any by an unruly forelock that kept falling in a curl a few inches above my right eye, the exact shape and position of that famous forelock that captivated Josephine Bracken. In later years, before pounds of pomade and years of conditioning raised and flattened my less distinguished forelock, it would be called a Gilopez Kabayao curl, which I found even less flattering. But this was before that accomplished violinist gained fame, and there was this snaky, sneaky lock of hair, and everybody pointed to it as evidence that I was trying my best to look like Rizal. I don’t know why being compared with the Great Malayan annoyed me, but it did, terribly. Rizal was a traumatic experience. Small wonder that I grew indifferent, if not outwardly hostile, to anything that had to do with the man whose statue I would see every day in the town plaza beyond the school walls.

But there was no escaping Rizal. I think it was about the time I became Uté that I read his two novels, in Tagalog, for those were the only copies we had at home, abbreviated, expurgated versions for school use, with a set of questions at the end of each chapter to serve as “study aids.” I was to learn later, in high school, from our religion teacher, that it was forbidden for good Catholic boys to read the Noli and the Fili, they were “bad,” irreligious, and incalculably harmful to youthful morals; and having read the emasculated versions, and not knowing they were emasculated, I could not see why. I do not remember if the prohibition, as prohibitions are wont to do, enticed me to take a second look at the old moth-eaten paperback translations we had. Maybe not; the books stayed in the varnished aparador where they were kept with the Katon and the Pasión and Martir sa Golgota.

And now I must make a somewhat embarrassed confession: in high school I took part in an oratorical contest on Rizal, and won it. It was sponsored by the Knights of Rizal—that was the first time I learned such an organization existed—and was, if I remember right, supposed to be a nationwide tilt. But first, there was an elimination contest to determine who would represent the province of Rizal in the semifinals. I was picked, by the principal, to represent our school. An English teacher was assigned to write the speech; for some reason or other, he chose, from the list of topics suggested by the Knights, the formidable subject of “Rizal and Economic Nationalism.” What solemn pseudo-profundities I mouthed then I am glad I have forgotten, but I was well coached in public speaking, or so the judges must have thought, because they gave me the prize and sent me off as the province of Rizal’s representative to the semifinals in San Pablo City, where, to the disappointment of my mentors and to my immense relief, I merely placed second, making me ineligible to vie for the top prize, a university scholarship or something.

The point of this little tale is that, though no authority on Rizal, economics, or nationalism, and in fact thinking of myself as an antagonist of sorts of the hero whose name I bore, I could invoke his name and his words with a clear conscience, and well enough to impress the judges. This is the way Rizal is invoked to this day in millions of speeches and articles, unthinkingly, as a mere occasion for rhetoric. I must have made an effort, in memorizing my speech, to understand what I was saying; but, onstage, all that mattered was the elegant enunciation, the emphatic gestures, the studied pauses. More than once I lost track of my text; then I would walk slowly to one corner of the stage, or stare with supreme insolence at the hushed audience, while I desperately racked my brains for what came next. When the words finally came, they exploded in the silence with a strength and a force worthy of Cicero. Thus was Rizal won.

I like to think that my blithe disregard for the matter of my speech was an unconscious projection of my lack of respect for the national hero. The secret iconoclast, that was me. I even wrote little verses, in Tagalog, in which I professed to find some contemptible motives behind certain well-publicized acts of Rizal. Like that story about the slipper that fell into the lake. What made us all so sure he didn’t deliberately drop it, and then throw in its partner on some noble pretext, so his parents would buy him a new pair? Things like that—in meter and rhyme. Remember it was a high-school kid, fed up with all the adulatory anecdotes, doing these take-offs in verse. I even had something on his real reason for marrying Josephine—and you can imagine my surprise on learning, much much later, that what I suspected in my boyhood nastiness about Joe and his dear Miss J was true after all!

My quarrel with Rizal was not to end in high school; it only diminished in intensity, for which I have the university to thank. Though it prided itself on being the hero’s alma mater, it was not insistent about its honors, as far as I can remember. My first year in college was the year of the Rizal centennial; there was an exhibition, precisely of what I cannot recall, except that the prize exhibit was the statue of the Sacred Heart Rizal had carved as a student. It made no impression on me. That was the year I was discovering modern art, and so, of course, Rizal was hopelessly corny. And then Rizal was a one-unit course in senior year; I am told his Life and Works are worth three units now, but in my day one unit was all they were good for, and this single unit I didn’t even get. I didn’t write the term paper on Rizal which was practically the only requirement for the course. The result was a grade of “incomplete,” which, unless the grading system has been radically revised, must have with the lapse of time become a shameful 5.

I have gone into this disgraceful history of My Life with the Father of the Country because it is, I think, in many ways, typical. I was not alone of my generation to consider Rizal irrelevant: he was nothing more than the monument on every town plaza of the archipelago. He could even be a pest. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it was easy for adolescents to denigrate the man in whose name our elders exhorted us to nobility and patriotism. It can be irritating to be perpetually referred to as “the fair hope of the fatherland.”

It was my generation, the generation that came of age in the early part of this decade, that was most profoundly affected, whether consciously or not, by the intellectual movement in the ’50s to downgrade Rizal in favor of Bonifacio. Did it start in the ’50s? I do not know my history; what I know is that it was in college that I began to be aware of the myth that Rizal is an American-made hero, chosen by a colonial master as a safer symbol than the revolutionary likes of Bonifacio and Aguinaldo. Where or how I picked up this theory I cannot tell; it was in the air, and it seeped into my generation’s consciousness by osmosis, secretly coloring our outlook and shaping prejudices. In the age of Marx and the proletariat, Bonifacio the Great Plebeian, the man from the masses, was the supreme hero.

In the mid ’60s, Bonifacio, too, got demythologized: he was a failure, said the icon smashers, he had won none of his battles, and he virtually invited liquidation by his high-handedness in Cavite. And that was that. It was no time for heroes. But no, this time it was Aguinaldo’s turn to be resurrected and saved from oblivion. June 12 became Independence Day, and after a little initial skepticism we gloried in the change; many of my contemporaries began writing poems and short stories, for their school organs, about The Revolution, The Republic, The General—always spelled with those respectful capital letters. As an earlier generation had been obsessed with recreating Rizal in their existential image, so, enamored with the romance of The Revolution, we took The General into our hearts, the young Emilio, dashing in his rayadillo, on horseback, and doing his best to make life difficult for the hated Yankee. It all fitted in with the new nationalism of a generation too young to remember MacArthur’s “I Shall Return,” but old enough to be painfully aware of parity and military bases. Aguinaldo, as much as Claro M. Recto, was the hero of the moment.

But now, it seems, Rizal is back with a vengeance.

I may just be imagining this; perhaps Rizal never really left the national consciousness, and only my willful blindness prevented me from realizing the fact. What I see as a sudden interest in Rizal could be just my sudden interest in the subject, my discovery of Rizal. All along, I thought he was as dead as the Spanish regime in the Philippines. Now it turns out, and permit me to announce my modest discovery: Rizal is alive and well and living in the minds and hearts of men!

I made the discovery last Rizal Day, December 30, 1968.

It all began when I was given this assignment, to cover the Rizal Day celebration. The National Historical Commission had lined up a series of lectures, one in the morning in Calamba, by Austin Coates, another in the afternoon in Fort Santiago, by Leon Ma. Guerrero, and a third that same afternoon in Dapitan, by Armando J. Malay. In the evening, in Fort Santiago, the Philippine Educational Theater Association was to present a dramatization of “Elias and Salome,” the chapter that had to be deleted from the original edition of the Noli. I didn’t have to go to Calamba, really, because Coates had written a biography of the hero—Rizal: Philippine Nationalist and Martyr (Oxford University Press)—and all I had to do was read that; but out of sheer curiosity, and because I had never been to Calamba, I decided to go there. If it was at all possible to go to Dapitan and be in Fort Santiago at the same time, I would have gone to Dapitan, too.

The Calamba lecture was at nine, and at 5:30 a.m., by a supreme effort of the will, since I had gone to bed at two a.m., I was up and raring to go. Did I expect any earth-shaking revelation in the town where the hero was born? There was none. Mr. Coates, son of the well-known composer Eric Coates, and a genial, voluble Englishman whom the Historical Commission had somehow knighted (he was “Sir Austin” in the invitations), spoke on the Ultimo Adios. It was a brief talk, scholarly without being stuffy, about how a fairly accurate biography of Rizal could be deduced from the lines of the poem. The small-town folk and the scattering of Manila visitors who had come to listen may have been expecting the usual platitudes as they sat there under the heat of the sun, in the yard of the reconstructed Rizal house; how they received the talk, which seemed more suited for a classroom or a gathering of scholars, is uncertain, but they must surely have been impressed by Mr. Coates, who did not have a prepared speech, but spoke with the facility of one born to the language.

The Coates lecture was a salutary departure from the usual run of Rizal Day addresses, and it mattered little if it got across or not. The amazing thing, to me, was that there were so many people at the Rizal shrine, who were not there under compulsion. I had not realized Rizal was still so popular. When we arrived, there was this small group of men, women, and children, peasants by the look of them, in front of the wreath-surrounded marker, singing what sounded like a long Tagalog epic or dirge about Rizal and what he had done for his country; it sounded like a secular Pasión, and some of the old women, as they sang, were weeping! I couldn’t believe it. Somebody said they were members of the Iglesia Watawat ng Lahi, a sect that worships Rizal as a second Messiah, but the Watawat bishop we would meet later would deny it. A municipal official hushed up the singers when it was time for the program to begin; the leader of the group then laid down their own floral offering, calachuchi stuck to a banana-stalk cross, accompanied by a card that said: “Alay sa Sagrada Familia ni Gat Jose Rizal.”

In the Rizal house, we were to see other women kneeling outside the room where, according to a bronze sign, Rizal was born. They were weeping, too. A strange sight, but stranger still was the community formed by the members of the Watahat ng Lahi. After his talk, Coates led the way to Lecheria Hill, where lived the bulk of the Watawat brethren. Atop the hill was a statue of Rizal, a dynamic Rizal, facing west and moving purposefully forward; and a few meters away from the monument was the wooden chapel consecrated to the martyred hero. Portraits of Burgos and Bonifacio flanked the main altar, over which there was a huge painting, obviously by a folk artist, of Rizal being crowned by angels under a triangle from which stared an open eye, the eye of the Lord. “This is historically accurate, you know,” said Coates, pointing to the pictures of Burgos and Bonifacio. “The precursor who inspired Rizal, and the follower inspired by Rizal.”

The visitors from the city had a brief chat with the sect’s head bishop, Luis F. Fabregar, who handed out calling cards. National Library Director Serafin Quiason, who came for the talk and tagged along to Lecheria Hill, requested for any written records the Watawat might have, for the National Library’s files. But there was not much time for a longer conversation with the bishop. Soon we were all on our way back to Manila.

At 4:30 p.m., I was in Fort Santiago for the Guerrero lecture, “Rizal and the Faustian Generation.” Again, the surprising thing was the attendance. Who would have imagined that a talk on Rizal would command an SRO audience? There was an even bigger crowd outside the enclosure where the talk was held. A crush of sightseers packed the building that housed the cell where the hero spent the last night of his life. Even if they had come only to promenade in a beautiful park, they could not help but be exposed to history, they could not help but learn about Rizal.

Part of the crowd that came for the lecture may have been lured there by the renown of the speaker, a celebrity in his own right, especially since Bangkok. If they expected to be bowled over by the eloquence that put the Malaysians to rout, they must have been sorely disappointed. The Guerrero who spoke on the Faustian generation kept mumbling, and lowering his voice to the point of unintelligibility at climactic moments.

Guerrero began his address with a summary of a play that he said he had sometimes thought of writing “in my more mischievous moments.” The play would be called “Rizal Runs for President”—a hilarious, but ultimately tragic, account of how the hero would fare in local politics. “What,” Guerrero asked at the end of his political fable, “is the point of this frivolous fantastication? Am I suggesting that not even the honors and storied glories of Rizal could survive the hazards and rigors of a Philippine election? Or am I perhaps trying to say that Rizal is no longer relevant to this day and age, that he has nothing to say to us?”

What, in the first place, had Rizal to say to his day and age? “Endure, work, and wait for the hand of God.”

“One wonders,” said Guerrero, “how acceptable this message is to a generation that I would describe as Faustian, Faustian partly in the sense that it has sold its soul and thrust aside spiritual values in the race for riches and success, but Faustian also in its other sense of a discontent with the human condition, a restless search for a meaningful life, its anomie.

“Rizal can hardly be a hero to a generation that will not suffer gladly, will not work for nothing, and only half believes in divine intervention or even interest in human affairs. It must have some significance that young Filipino intellectuals seldom, to my knowledge at least, quote Rizal or look upon him as an exemplar.”

But simply because Rizal “shrank from the proclamation of independence and the recourse to arms, because he was an intellectual elitist, skeptical of the instinctive wisdom of the common people, because he was silent on social justice,” was no reason to discard Rizal as a national hero. “The relevance of heroes to other generations should not, after all, be assessed on the basis of what they said or did in some specific and unrepeatable historical situation,” said Guerrero. And “the value, the usability, the relevance of heroes is to be found in a quintessential elan, quite separate from the dross of historical circumstance, a capacity to inspire in quite a different crisis, what succeeding generations have discovered again and again in the compassion and inflexible resolution of Gandhi and Lincoln, the broad vision of Bolivar, Nelson’s dash and Wellington’s imperturbability, the loyalty of the forty ronin [a ronin is an outcast samurai; the reference must be to something in Japanese history], the faith of Isabella and Philip, the moral courage of José Rizal.”

In “his uncertainties, his disconformity and discontent, his anger,” Guerrero concluded, “Rizal is for the young.” He would never have become President. “But he is as durable a hero as we are ever likely to get.”

And so I thought, too, after December 30, 1968. My curiosity now thoroughly piqued, I began the education in Rizal that I had never had. I read the Noli and the Fili, this time in Guerrero’s English translation, and found them fascinating, entrancing, funny, exciting, powerful. I went on to a recently released book, Rizal: Contrary Essays, edited by Petronilo Bn. Daroy and Dolores S. Feria, which is fitfully interesting but on the whole a disappointment. It begins with Unamuno’s perceptive essay on Rizal as the Tagalog Hamlet and ends with a perfectly abstruse piece on “Rizal and the Human Condition” by Epifanio San Juan Jr. Feria contributes a stimulating study of the parallelism in the writings of Rizal and Mark Twain; S.P. Lopez and Carmen Guerrero Nakpil are represented by two essays that sparked the Maria Clara controversy in the 1930s; and Recto’s well-known essay on “Rizal the Realist and Bonifacio the Idealist,” which I had more than once heard of before, gets reprinted (it was originally written in Tagalog, according to the introduction, and I cannot believe this English translation is Recto’s, it is so wretched).

My reading jag extended to two of the more recent biographies of the hero: Guerrero’s The First Filipino and Coates’s Rizal: Philippine Nationalist and Martyr. Both are extremely readable and percipient, but I prefer Guerrero’s. Coates’s is hagiography: his Rizal is almost too perfect to be true; but since his book is for an international audience that must be informed of the existence of an extraordinary, but relatively unknown, Asian, he may be forgiven his enthusiasm. Guerrero’s Rizal seems to me more human, and a Filipino may be forgiven for preferring a biography that places the hero more solidly in the context of Philippine history.

The Coates biography, incidentally, is sure to revive one of the more persistent controversies on Rizal, and this is the question of whether or not he retracted the night before his execution. Coates’s position may not please either side in the controversy. He holds that there was no retraction, and supports his theory with some shrewd deductions. In the course of his argument, he accuses the Jesuits of perpetrating, and perpetuating, a fraud, which is how he brands Balaguer’s account of Rizal’s last hours. What the anti-retractionists may not find to their liking is Coates’s contention that, though Rizal may not have retracted, he remained a deeply religious man to the hour of his death. In fact, Coates uses this as an argument against retraction: “in terms of true religion it would be difficult to say precisely what he had to retract.”

Guerrero’s position is that the inflexibility of Rizal’s views cannot be used as an argument against retraction: “The rationalist will not be convinced by the arguments that failed to convince Rizal. But no one can assert that Rizal could not have humbled himself or that he would not have cancelled with a stroke of the pen the convictions of his scholarship until he himself stands on the brink of eternity, and, beating the feeble wings of human reason, wonders if they will carry him safely across.”

The question of Rizal’s retraction is one of the things about his life in which I have little interest, so I leave the disputations to those with the stomach for it. Discovering Rizal was troublesome enough for me.

----------

First published in the Philippines Free Press, January 11, 1969. Reprinted in the Philippines Free Press, June 12, 2010.

St. Martha's Duckyard

2010-06-18T08:01:00.003+08:00

Noong 1988, humigit-kumulang sa 25 taon pagkaraang sulatin ko ang tulang “Awit sa Ilog Pateros,” sinulat ko naman ang isang maikling artikulo tungkol sa Pateros para sa isang magasing wala na ngayon, ang National Midweek. Ako pa ang editor ng magasin nang lumabas ang artikulo sa isyung may petsang Abril 27, 1988.

Ang sumusunod ay isang slightly revised version na nalathala sa antolohiyang Writing Home: Nineteen Writers Remember Their Hometowns, edited by Ruel S. de Vera (Anvil Publishing, 2002).

ST. MARTHA’S DUCKYARD

TOURISTS often have to pass some kind of native test to prove that when in Rome they are quite capable of doing whatever repulsive thing the Romans can do. For political tourists in Manila, the test these days is climbing Smokey Mountain; but for the general run of squeamish visitors the usual test is still eating balut.

Balut is what my mother’s hometown, Pateros, is known for. Pateros is Spanish for duck raisers or duck farmers or duckers, if there’s such a word. It was formerly part of Rizal province; now it’s part of Metro Manila; but it’s such a small town the local joke is that, from the poblacion, when you turn one corner you’re in Pasig, when you turn the opposite corner you’re in Taguig, and when you cross the bridge you’re in Fort Bonifacio, Makati.

Among neighboring towns Pateros is known not only for balut, which we normally pronounce and spell as balot, but also for its bright felt-covered slippers, known as alfombra (which the local gentry wore even to church and formal occasions), its cenaculo, and its Holy Week processions. Pateros still has all those attractions, but these days the balutans, or balut factories, have to import all their duck eggs from Laguna. That’s because virtually all the duck farms are gone, and that’s because there’s virtually nothing left of the Pateros River.

For more than a decade now this tributary of the Pasig River has been dying a slow death from the poisons and chemical wastes and the garbage dumped into the Pasig. The strip of water that remains in Pateros is choked with waterlilies the whole year round. It’s such a thin and shallow strip you can almost wade across to the other side. Political candidates always promise to have the thing dredged, but the last time I looked, the land borders of Pateros and Fort Bonifacio seemed about to meet.

I can still remember when the river was big enough to swim in. It was already dirty and smelly back then, but the dirt and the smell came from the ducks and the laundry and the human waste, which prevented finicky souls like myself from learning to swim but which, at least, were not river-killers. It was a river big enough for the the annual fluvial procession to St. Martha.

The official patron saint of Pateros is San Roque, but for some reason it is Santa Marta whose feast day we celebrate. The feast day of Santa Marta, the biblical virgin who attended to the household chores when everybody else was listening to Jesus, is in July, but again for some reason (probably because July is rainy season) we insist on celebrating on the second Sunday of February.

The story is told that when one of my mother’s forebears, Lorenzo Quiogue, was swimming or perhaps performing his morning ablutions in the river, a huge crocodile appeared and threatened to make duckmeat out of him. He prayed posthaste to St. Martha (I don’t know why he didn’t pray to St. Roch; perhaps virgins make better intercessors), and she obligingly zapped the crocodile. This is, of course, the story told by Lorenzo Quiogue’s descendants, who in eternal gratitude converge on Pateros from all over the world for an annual celebration in August.

Another version of the story is that the crocodile was decimating the ducks when the duckers prayed to St. Martha. As in the first version, she answered the prayers by zapping the crocodile. Ever since then Pateros has honored the virgin saint with a river procession.

When I was a boy the centerpiece of the fluvial procession was a floral arch mounted on a platform carried by three or four bancas lashed together. On this makeshift but elaborately decorated vessel, known among tagailogs as a pagoda, women in balintawak and men in kundiman pants (those red pajamas that Katipuneros wore) would be dancing, and for many of them it was a fertility dance, as in Obando. I can still recall fragments from an early poem I wrote:

Martha, Martha, friend of Jesus,

intercede for us and bring

bring the surge the sway of dancing

into flat bellies and dehydrated skins.

Directly in front of or behind the pagoda was a large colorful wooden crocodile atop a towed banca, and above the crocodile danced, in hieratic frenzy, an old man in harlequin’s costume. In one hand he carried a wooden scimitar; in his other hand, a fishing pole. From the pole hang, like bait, a little plastic doll, obviously a fertility symbol.

A procession of bancas sandwiched the pagoda. The bancas were loaded with goodies bought along by people who had had their prayers answered by St. Martha and who had therefore made a panata, a vow, to express their thanks by showering the watchers on the shore with mangoes, turnips, boiled saba bananas, candies, suman, even balut and red-dyed itlog na maalat.

The river procession was always in the late afternoon. By the time it reached the river’s end darkness had set, and the virgin saint’s image would be taken down from the pagoda and taken back to church in another dancing procession: literally dancing in the streets! an orgy of dancing in the streets. I once thought of writing a short story with the Pateros fiesta as backdrop, but was afraid it would sound too much like Nick Joaquin’s story on San Juan’s tatarin.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have abandoned the project. Unless the Pateros River gets dredged, the pagoda could die like the tatarin, and be remembered only as an element in a writer’s story. On the other hand, if the river does get dredged and the pagoda is restored to its former glory, there is danger—now that the original religious and ritualistic impulse of the fiesta is gone and only its mercantile possibilities remain—that it would be transformed into a commercialized tourist undertaking like Aklan’s ati-atihan and Marinduque’s morion.

I don’t know which prospect I dread more.

-- Jose F. Lacaba

From: Writing Home: Nineteen Writers Remember Their Hometowns, edited by Ruel S. de Vera (Anvil Publishing, 2002).

LINO BROCKA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION DAY

2010-05-22T13:32:00.006+08:00

Lino Brocka demonstrating
outside the house of then censors chief Maria Kalaw Katigbak,
after she tigbak'd the film Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim
(circa 1985)

Today, May 22, 2010, is the 19th death anniversary of filmmaker Lino Brocka.

I wrote the following article nine years ago, not long after a group of his friends and admirers unofficially proclaimed the day of his death as Freedom of Expression Day.

Freedom of Expression and Its Discontents

By Jose F. Lacaba

…freedom of expression … is the oxygen of our creativity. Without it, many talents on our continent have struggled for breath; some have choked; and some have been lost to us in that other climate, the thin air of exile.
—NADINE GORDIMER, 1997

ON MAY 22, 2001, on the 10th death anniversary of filmmaker Lino Brocka, his friends and admirers gathered at his grave to honor his memory by launching Freedom of Expression Day.

It seemed only fitting that a day associated with Lino Brocka should be chosen to bring the issue of freedom of expression into sharp focus. For this, of all the causes he championed, was probably the one closest to Brocka’s heart.

In the words of a statement issued during the memorial ceremony:

“As a founding member and the acknowledged leader of the Free the Artist Movement and the Concerned Artists of the Philippines, Lino Brocka was at the forefront of the struggle against all forms of censorship of the arts and the media. As a member of the local and international film communities, he continually stressed the right and the obligation of the filmmaker, in the exercise of freedom of expression, to shed light on social realities and the human condition. As a complainant in the Kapit sa Patalim case, he elicited from the Supreme Court a decision affirming that ‘freedom of expression is the rule and restrictions the exemption.’ As a member of the Constitutional Commission that drafted the present Philippine Constitution, he is credited with introducing the phrase ‘freedom of expression’ into the constitutional provision that now reads: ‘No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances’ (Section 9, Article 3, Bill of Rights).”

A decade after the death of Brocka, the memorial statement continues, “freedom of expression remains beleaguered on all sides by forces that seek to restrict or repress the inquisitive mind and the creative spirit. There is as much need today as in Lino Brocka’s lifetime to uphold and defend freedom of expression as a necessary condition for a strong and vibrant democracy.”

What the memorial ceremony for Brocka made saddeningly clear is that freedom of expression remains on the endangered-species list despite upheavals that have restored or enlarged the country’s democratic space. Even more saddening, the active role that artists and cultural workers played in those upheavals has resulted not in the expansion but in the diminution of their artistic space.

This is especially true of filmmakers. Brocka and fellow concerned artists helped oust Marcos, and as reward they got Morato and Mendez. Like-minded members of the film community helped ease out Erap, and in exchange they got the tightened noose of a new sanctimonious censorship.

That noose was much in evidence in the controversy over Live Show (also known as Toro), a film about the men and women who perform sexual acts in the presence of paying customers.

Live Show is written and directed by Jose Javier Reyes, a leading member of Pagbabago@Pilipinas, a group of professionals (including personalities from the arts) that made its presence felt at Edsa 2. When the controversy over the film erupted, the newly appointed chair of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board was the respected cultural scholar Nicanor Tiongson, who had resigned as MTRCB member at the height of the Juetengate scandal. The opposition of Reyes and Tiongson to the past regime, at a time when that was a risky proposition, proved to be no assurance that the new dispensation would be hospitable to their artistic concerns.

Government action in this case was a consequence of the knee-jerk reaction of religious groups and self-appointed guardians of public morals to “smut films,” meaning, all films that deal with human sexuality, whatever their intentions or level of artistic accomplishment. The noisy protest of these sectors was not unexpected. In 1999 they had rallied against the exhibition of Sutla, Warat, and Talong, among others. But what complicated matters this time was the openly interventionist role that the dominant church played in getting Live Show banned and Tiongson sacked.

If priests and televangelists had written pastoral letters and delivered sermons condemning the proliferation of sex in cinema; if the running priest had gone from mall to mall and from motel to motel to shout out his jeremiads; if the talk-show monsignor had gone from TV station to TV station to deliver his harangues; if the Cardinal had invited movie producers to his palace and appealed to them to stop making sexually oriented films, or even threatened them with a boycott; if the Cardinal had proceeded to call on the Catholic faithful to mass at the Edsa shrine to force the resignation of the MTRCB chief or the pullout of Live Show—the Church might not have won pogi points with the general moviegoing public, but there probably would have been no outcry from concerned sectors of the film and cultural community. After all, the Constitution extends freedom of expression to democrats and demagogues alike, and protects ideas of whatever shade, whether sublime or ridiculous.

But when the Church in the person of its best-known cleric summoned the head of a government agency to Church premises and then, in a high-handed and insulting manner, gave that government official his marching orders—when Cardinal Sin told Tiongson to resign as MTRCB chair—then a line seemed to have been crossed: the line called separation of Church and State.

LIVE SHOW reopened the never-ending debate over censorship and freedom of expression, particularly in relation to cinema.

Censorship, of course, has been with us since time immemorial. Often, it entailed the suppression not only of contrary ideas but of the persons who embodied those ideas. Socrates was sentenced to drink poison because he allegedly poisoned the minds of the youth, and Galileo was placed under house arrest when he wrote that it was the earth that moved around the sun and not the other way around. The burning of books, not to mention the burning of heretics and witches with beliefs anathema to the orthodoxies of their time, was a regular feature of the Inquisition.

One of the most zealous book-burner was the Holy Roman Catholic Church, which maintained an Index of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum) for more than four centuries. Set up in 1559 by the Congregation of the Inquisition, the Index banned non-Catholic translations of the Bible, which meant that reading the King James Version when it came out in 1611 could get a Catholic excommunicated. The Index also blacklisted the complete works of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Voltaire, Zola, and Sartre, and selected books of Milton, Flaubert, Rousseau, Kant, Spinoza, Pascal, Tolstoy, Stendhal, George Sand, Daniel Defoe, and Darwin. The Church formally abolished the Index only in 1966.

Under Spanish rule, the Philippines had a Comite de Censura that banned the novels of Jose Rizal, who would eventually be subjected to an extreme form of censorship: death by firing squad. As late as the 1950s, when Rizal was already the National Hero, the Catholic Church was still trying to block the passage of a law making Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo required reading in Philippine schools. During this same period, ballet was deemed immoral and was banned in schools run by the Catholic Church.

These days, in countries that claim to be democratic, censorship is seen as an idea whose time has passed, allowable only in exceptional circumstances, such as in times of war. Even the Marcos martial-law regime recognized this fact when it changed the name of what used to be called “board of censors” to “board of review” and then “review and classification board.”

While a stigma has come to be attached to the word censorship, its antithesis, the term freedom of expression, has gained currency. Freedom of expression is not expressly mentioned in our last two Philippine Constitutions, although the Malolos Constitution of 1899 speaks of the “right to freely express [one’s] ideas or opinions, orally or in writing, through the use of the press and other means.” Jurisprudence has established that the terms freedom of speech and freedom of the press, mentioned in the 1935 and 1973 constitutions, are broad enough to cover new media such as film and television. Nevertheless, freedom of expression is deemed to be the more inclusive formula, unequivocally encompassing even speechless and non-press forms of expression such as mime and painting—in short, artistic and cultural expression.

Lino Brocka, hounded by censorship in his lifetime but proclaimed a National Artist and hailed as a “legendary director” when he was safely dead, made a significant contribution when he moved for the inclusion of the phrase freedom of expression in the 1987 Constitution. But he did not invent the term. Indeed, even before he became a constitutional commissioner, the Concerned Artists of the Philippines of which he was founding chair had already declared in its credo, first enunciated in 1983: “We stand for freedom of expression and oppose all acts tending to abridge or suppress that freedom. We affirm that Filipino artists, in the exercise of freedom of expression, have the responsibility to do so without prejudice to truth, justice, and the interest of the Filipino people.”

As early as 1941, United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a famous speech outlining the objectives of U.S. policy as “four freedoms,” had said: “The first is freedom of speech and expression.” (The three others: freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear.)

In 1966 the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly expressly stated: “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”

The International Covenant, as the credo of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines would later do, recognized the “special duties and responsibilities” of those who would exercise freedom of expression. The exercise of such freedom, the Covenant noted, “may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary: (a) for respect of the rights or reputations of others; (b) for the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals.”

Note the mention of “protection … of public health or morals,” which may warm the hearts of puritans and fundamentalists. The operative phrase here, however, is “provided by law.”

Which brings us to the question: in this country, what exactly does the law provide, particularly in relation to cinema?

THE LAW that currently regulates film and television in this country is the Marcos-era decree that created the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board. This is Presidential Decree No. 1986, which specifically objects to material “which, in the judgment of the Board, applying contemporary Filipino cultural values as standard, are objectionable for being immoral, indecent, contrary to law and/or good customs, injurious to the prestige of the Republic of the Philippines or its people, or with a dangerous tendency to encourage the commission of violence or of a wrong or crime.”

PD 1986 is a deceptive piece of legislation. It institutionalizes the system of classification according to audience suitability, but allows films to be cut up or banned. It recognizes the eventual need for self-regulation, but does not set a deadline for privatization and government deregulation. And it takes cognizance of the Supreme Court decision in the Kapit sa Patalim case while trying to maintain restrictions that were in line with the Marcos dictatorship’s general policy of media control and censorship.

In the Kapit sa Patalim case (Gonzalez vs. Kalaw Katigbak, in which the complainants were Antonio Gonzalez, Dulce Saguisag, Lino Brocka, and this writer), the Supreme Court had come up with a decision that, although decried in some quarters as wishy-washy, nevertheless paid obeisance to free expression. “Freedom of expression is the rule and restrictions the exemption,” the court said. It added that “censorship, especially so if an entire production is banned, is allowable only under the clearest proof of a clear and present danger of a substantive evil to public safety, public morals, public health or any other legitimate public interest.” Moreover, it stressed that the constitutional guarantees on freedom of expression are not limited to the expression of safe and acceptable ideas, but also extend to “unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion.”

From this it can be safely inferred that freedom of expression is not limited to artistic expression. The constitutional guarantees extend to both art and non-art, good art and bad art, Bayaning Third World and Bobocop.

U.S. jurisprudence, which generally influences Philippine court decisions, goes farther in defining what is or is not protected by the “freedom of expression” clause—specifically, what is or is not legally obscene or pornographic.

Miller vs. California, promulgated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, is the most recent and therefore the current legal thinking on the subject. Under the three-pronged Miller test, a material is adjudged obscene if all of the following standards are met:

1. An average person, applying contemporary local community standards, finds that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest.

2. The work depicts, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law.

3. The work in question lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

How does Live Show stack up in light of these provisions?

WHEN THE MTRCB last year, under Armida Siguion-Reyna, gave Live Show a permit to exhibit—with an R classification, meaning, For Adults Only—one thing was clear: “in the judgment of the Board” as constituted at that time (I was part of the committee that granted approval), the film was not considered objectionable but was deemed permissible for adults aged 18 and above. It was also the judgment of the Board that “the work, taken as a whole,” did not appeal to prurient interest, and that the sex scenes were handled with restraint (no leering close-ups of body parts), were not gratuitous (this was a film about sex performers), and were not unduly prolonged (a combined total of two minutes, according to one computation).

The critical reaction to Live Show has been mixed. The Film Ratings Board, which grants tax rebates to films of artistic and technical merit, did not give it a passing mark; and the university-based Young Critics Circle dismissed it as “exploitative.” Still, other critics who considered the film flawed recognized its serious intent—and Live Show, while not exactly a prophet in its own country, had sufficient artistic credentials to be invited to a number of prestigious international film festivals, starting with a gala premiere in Berlin.

To its defenders, the film is a harrowing, even depressing depiction of the grinding poverty that drives people to unspeakable extremes in order to survive. But to its detractors, it is nothing more than a lascivious display of frontal nudity and simulated sex under the pretense of art—a “well-made soft-core pornographic film,” in the words of the new President of the Republic herself.

By describing Live Show as “well-made,” the country’s new leading film critic attested that the film was not entirely lacking in “redeeming artistic value.” Under the Miller test, the film could therefore not be counted as legally obscene.

What is legal, it may be argued, is not necessarily moral. This may be true. But it is equally true that the MTRCB is primarily a legal body and not an arm of the morality police. As pointed out by Father Joaquin G. Bernas, S.J., in a newspaper column about an earlier censorship controversy (Today, Nov. 14, 1999): “The clamor against the MTRCB is couched in language of moral indignation. In judging the board, however, it is good to remember that it is a law-enforcement agency. Law enforcement does not cover the entire spectrum of morality. A basic principle of jurisprudence is that morals and law are differentiated in character and are not coextensive in their functions. It is not the task of the legislator to forbid everything that the moral law forbids or to command under pain of punishment everything that the moral law commands.”

Bernas is both lawyer and priest, and the distinction he raises needs to be understood by all those well-meaning individuals who insist that the MTRCB should function as a guardian of public morality. Still, even among those who take moral considerations into account, the verdict on Live Show is by no means unanimous. The Cardinal (who hasn’t seen the film) and the President (who has) both think it’s pornographic. But Father Peter Malone, an Australian priest who heads the prestigious International Catholic Organization for Cinema (Organisation Catholique Internationale du Cinema, or OCIC), saw the film at the Berlin International Film Festival and praised it for its “very strong social concerns.” On the other hand, Cinema, an organization set up by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, while critical of the film’s moral content, nevertheless found it suitable for adult viewing and gave it an R-18 rating, not an X.

I wonder what it is about Live Show that has provoked so much outrage among the guardians of public morals? Driving through Cubao on Holy Wednesday, I saw moviehouses showing two different movies with the word Init in it. I’m sorry I can’t remember the exact titles, but from the gaudy billboard display and the names of the leading actors I could guess that not even the kindest critic would find any “redeeming artistic value” in the Init movies. So why was there no comparable outrage over those movies? And they were showing on Holy Week!

I can only surmise that part of the reason could be that Live Show, while dealing with a sexual subject, does so in the realistic context of prevailing social conditions. It does not simply titillate us with the lusty acrobatics of generously endowed sex objects. Rather, it shows us how poverty can desensitize and dehumanize. It shows us, with painful clarity, the hell on earth that those who live in palaces cannot imagine or comprehend.

The May 1, 2001, attack on Malacañang by masses loyal to the deposed Estrada regime shocked us with its picture of the rage that drives the urban poor to suicidal undertakings. Live Show similarly jolts us with its raw and gut-wrenching portrayal of the desperation that can lead a small segment of the urban poor into the lower depths of degradation. A character in Nick Joaquin’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino says: “The purpose of art is not to enchant but to disenchant.” This may not be the only function of art, but it is a necessary one. And in the performance of this duty, Live Show has exercised its freedom of creative expression honestly and responsibly.

I believe Lino Brocka would be pleased. But Lino Brocka would also caution us that freedom of expression, given its attendant discontents, still has a long way to go before it gets to be recognized as a basic human right as crucial to the well-being of the nation as the right to food, clothing, and shelter, and as necessary to our well-being as the air we breathe.

First published in
Human Rights Forum
Vol. X, No. 2
January-June 2001

Edna St. Vincent Millay: TAGSIBOL

2010-04-30T08:25:00.003+08:00

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Tagsibol

Ano ang dahilan, Abril, at muli kang bumabalik?
Hindi sapat ang kagandahan.
Hindi mo na ako mapatatahimik sa kulay
Ng mumunting dahong bumubukadkad nang malagkit.
Alam ko ang alam ko.
Mainit ang araw sa aking leeg habang pinagmamasdan ko
Ang mga tinik ng rosas.
Kawili-wili ang amoy ng lupa.
Malinaw na walang kamatayan.
Pero ano ang ibig sabihin niyan?
Ang utak ng tao’y hindi lamang sa loob ng hukay
Kinakain ng uod.
Ang mismong buhay
Ay walang kabuluhan.
Tasang walang laman, hagdang walang patutunguhan.
Hindi sapat na taon-taon, sa bur¢l na ito,
Bumababa ang Abril,
Parang baliw na nagdadadakdak, naghahasik ng bulaklak.

Salin ni Jose F. Lacaba

Mula sa kalipunan kong SA DAIGDIG NG KONTRADIKSIYON: MGA SALING-WIKA (Anvil Publishing, 1991).

Salin ng tulang “Spring.” Mababasa ang orihinal na tula dito:
http://www.poetry-archive.com/m/spring.html

Sa hindi ko malamang dahilan, ayaw gumana ngayong araw na ito, huling araw ng Abril 2010, ang "Add Image" feature ng blogger.com, kaya hindi ko maisama sa post ko ang larawan ng makatang Amerikano na si Edna St. Vincent Millay. May black-and-white photo niya dito:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/millay/millay.htm

Spoof song adaptation: NANGGIGIGIL KAMI

2010-03-28T14:43:00.004+08:00

HINDI PO ITO SALINAWIT.

Kamakailan ay muli kong nadiskubre ang isang ginawa kong lumang song adaptation na nakalimutan ko na. Para namang pinagtiyap ng panahon na muli ko itong nadiskubre ngayong panahon na naman ng eleksiyon.

Marami na akong nagawang song adaptations o free translation mula sa ibang lengguwahe, at ang mga ito’y nakikilala na sa tawag na salinawit. Itong sumusunod na song adaptation ay hindi salinawit sa pakahulugang nabanggit, kundi isang kantang Tagalog na nilapatan ng spoof lyrics.

HAHA-HALAWIT

Ni Pete Lacaba

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

NANGGIGIGIL

Written by: Mike Hanopol?

Kami ay lalaki, kami ay maginoo.

'Wag kang matakot kung kami ay ganito,

Ganito, ganito.

Masdan mo kung manamit kaming mga lalaki,

Mayro'n kang makikita sa gitna ng aming dibdib,

Dibdib, dibdib...

Bridge:

Ganyan kaming lahat,

Matatapang ang mukha.

Kung kami ay kakausapin,

Di kayo mapapahiya.

Kung kami ay gagalitin,

Di mo na kailangan pang magsalita...

Chorus:

Nanggigigil kami sa 'yong kagandahan.

Nanggigigil kami, di namin maiwasan.

Nanggigigil kami sa 'yo, sa 'yo, sa 'yo...

(Repeat)

Kami ay lalaki, kami ay maginoo.

'Wag kang matakot kung kami ay ganito,

Ganito, ganito.

Masdan mo ang braso at ang aming mga kamay,

Mayro'n ding namumukol sa baba ng aming balikat,

Balikat, balikat...

(Repeat Bridge & Chorus)

Adlib:

(Repeat 1st stanza & Bridge)

(Repeat Chorus 2x to fade)

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

PRESIDENTIABLES' SONG

Sa himig ng "Nanggigigil" ng Hagibis

Halaw: Pete Lacaba

Kami'y kandidato, hangad namin ay boto.

'Wag kang matakot kung kami ay ganito,

Ganito, ganito.

Masdan mo kung umasta kaming nangangampanya,

Mayro'n diyang sumasayaw kahit paa ay parehong kaliwa,

Kaliwa, kaliwa.

BRIDGE

Ganyan kaming lahat,

Makakapal ang mukha.

Kung kami ay nangangako,

Di kami nahihiya.

Kung pangako'y napapako,

Di na po kailangan pang magsalita.

CHORUS

Nanggigigil kami sa inyong mga boto.

Nanggigigil kami sa boto n'yo sa Mayo.

Nanggigigil kami sa 'yo, sa 'yo, sa 'yo.

Kami'y kandidato, hangad namin ay boto.

'Wag kang matakot kung kami ay ganito,

Ganito, ganito.

Masdan mo kung umasta kaming nangangampanya,

Mayro'n diyang kumakanta kahit boses ay parang palaka,

Palaka, palaka.

Repeat BRIDGE and CHORUS

P.S. 2010

Ginawa ko ang "halawit" na ito noong 1998 bilang bahagi ng script ko para sa Gridiron Night ng National Press Club (NPC). Ang Gridiron Night ay tradisyonal na roasting program na dati'y ginagawa ng NPC taon-taon. Hindi ko lang alam kung meron pa nito hanggang ngayon, dahil hindi na ako miyembro ng NPC (sobrang nagmahal kasi ng membership fee ;-). Si Bart Guingona ang direktor ng pagtatanghal na iyon, at concept niya ang pinagbatayan ng aking script.

Sa title page ng script ay ito ang nakasulat:

GRIDIRON '98 / Head Writer: Jose F. Lacaba / Partly based on the concept by Bart Guingona and the Usual Suspects / Additional dialogue by Kris Lanot Lacaba, Bart Guingona, and the Usual Suspects / Additional lyrics by whoever put new words to "Katawan" and "Awitin Mo" / 1998 April 12.

Narito ang unang eksena ng aking Gridiron Night script:

GRIDIRON '98

Scene 1

Heroes Hall, Malacañang. Gabi. May presidential desk sa gitna. Papasok si FVR, nagbabasa ng libro.

FVR: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore… [Titigil sa paglalakad, ilalapag ang libro sa mesa.] Ilang araw na lang ang nalalabi. Ilang araw na lang, hindi na ako Presidente. At pagdating ng Philippines 2000, history na ako. Lumang diyaryo na ako.

[Kakanta.]

O, kay lupit ng kapalaran,

Ako'y lame duck na lamang.

Kay hirap maging pangulo

Kung walang second term…

[Pasalita.]

Diyos na mahabagin! Bakit mo ako pinarurusahan nang ganito? Hindi ko pa pinagsasawaan ang Malakanyang. Napamahal na sa akin itong Heroes Hall. 'Tsaka, ang dami pang lugar sa mundo na hindi ko nararating. Rwanda! Timbuktu! Ang elevator ng National Press Club!

Akala ko pa naman, makakalusot ang Cha-Cha. Ang sabi sa akin ng mag-asawang Pedrosa, ang sabi ni Joe Al, ang sabi ni Kadiri Ruben, este, Kadre Ruben pala--ang sabi nilang lahat--Fidel Forever! Tsuwari-wari-wa… Wow, mali! Wrong mistake. Ito naman kasing sina Cory at Cardinal Sin, killjoy. Nag-People Power ba naman sa Luneta. E, di, siyempre… Quoth the people--Nevermore!

Totoo kaya ang kuwento tungkol sa guardian devil? Na puwede mong ibenta ang kaluluwa mo kapalit ng--?

Tutunog ang malaking orasan: hatinggabi. Uuga ang desk. Usok at patay-sinding liwanag. Isa-isang lalabas mula sa likod ng desk ang mga multo ng mga bayani--Rizal, Bonifacio, Aguinaldo, del Pilar, Antonio Luna, Sakay, Padre Burgos, Tandang Sora, Gabriela Silang, Mabini.

FVR [medyo matataranta]: Nagtatanong lang po! Joke only! [Mapapansin na hindi mga demonyo ang kaharap niya.] Teka muna. Hindi naman kayo ang aking guardian devil, a. Si Joe Al 'yon. I mean, si Joe Al Pacino, do'n sa pelikulang "Devil's Advocate" … Sino ba kayo?

RIZAL: Hindi mo ba kami kilala, Eddie? Nag-iisyu ka ng pera, pero hindi mo kami namumukhaan? Tingnan mo akong mabuti.

FVR: Ninoy?

RIZAL: Limang daan 'yon. Hamak na barya lang ako. [Ipapakita ang profile.] O, natatandaan mo na ang profile na ito?

FVR: Leopoldo Salcedo?

RIZAL [iiling]: Eto pa ang isang clue: Piso para sa Pasig.

FVR: Piso! [Maglalabas ng pisong coin mula sa bulsa at titingnan ito.] Jose Rizal! Sabi ko na nga ba, e. Kamukhang-kamukha mo nga sina Albert Martinez, Cesar Montano, at Aga Muhlach. At itong mga kasama mo?

RIZAL: Kami ang mga dakilang bayani ng lahi.

Kakantahin ng mga bayani ang "Heroes' Song."

Heroes' Song

(Sa himig ng "Katawan" ng Hagibis)

FVR [isa-isang kakamayan ang mga bayani]: Bonifacio… Aguinaldo… Tandang Sora… Gabriela Silang… Padre Burgos… Sino sa inyong dalawa ang del Pilar at sino ang Luna?

PLARIDEL: Ako si Marcelo H. del Pilar, kilala sa bansag na Plaridel. [Espanyol ang bigkas niya sa middle initial na H: A-che.]

LUNA: Ako si Luna. Heneral Antonio Luna.

FVR: Nako-confuse ko kayo dahil sa mga bigote n'yo, e. Sino naman itong mukhang hippieng kulelat?

SAKAY: Macario Sakay po, pag-utusan ninyo.

MABINI: Apolinario Mabini, Sublime Paralytic.

FVR: Bakit wala ka yatang--ano'ng tawag do'n sa binubuhat na ano, kung papunta sa Hinulugang Taktak? Duyan. Ba't wala ka sa duyan?

MABINI: Pag multo na, hindi mo kailangan ng duyan.

FVR: Multo? Ngiii! Mga multo pala kayo. Ano'ng ginagawa n'yo rito?

BONIFACIO: Ito ang Heroes Hall, di ba? O, heroes kami. Tambayan namin ang kuwartong ito.

TANDANG SORA: Lalo na ngayong Centennial, madalas kami rito.

GABRIELA: At pag malapit nang matapos ang term ng isang presidente, talagang nagpapakita kami. Tulad sa mga Marcos. Minulto namin ang mga 'yon no'ng bandang huli dahil hindi na namin masikmura--

FVR: --ang pandaraya nila sa eleksiyon?

AGUINALDO: Hindi. Meron din niyan sa Tejeros Convention.

FVR: Ang kanilang human-rights violations?

AGUINALDO: Hindi. Meron din niyan sa Bundok Buntis.

FVR: E, ano?

GABRIELA: Ang mga disco parties ni Imelda! Hindi ko matuk! Ang ingay-ingay kasi!

PADRE BURGOS: 'Tapos, kakanta pa siya ng "Dahil sa Iyo" at "Feelings." Kung hindi ka ba naman makukunsumi!

FVR: O, e, bakit n'yo 'ko minumulto ngayon? Sinabi ko na naman, paulit-ulit ko nang sinabi--hindi na ako interesado sa second term. Read my lips. Hindi na… ako… interesado… sa… sa… [manginginig ang labi, mapapahagulhol] sa second term.

GABRIELA: Siya, siya, tama na. Bumenta na 'yan. Nauna na sa iyo si Fred Lim pagdating diyan sa crying game.

FVR [presidential uli]: Sa madaling salita, may el, may proc, may cen, may tran.

TANDANG SORA: Ano raw? Ma-L? Sino raw ang ma-L?

BONIFACIO: Pasensiya na, Ka Fidel. Medyo matagal na kaming patay, hindi na namin alam ang mga bagong usong salita. Pakiisplika nga.

FVR: May election, may proclamation, may centennial, may transition. Malinaw? O, ano pa'ng gusto n'yong malaman?

RIZAL: Sino sa tingin mo ang susunod na mumultuhin namin dito sa Malakanyang?

FVR: Kung ako ang tatanungin, siyempre ang gusto ko e 'yong aking anointed one. Si Yoda V. Yes, yes, Joe! Kaya lang, me nagsasabing kailangan daw niya ng makeover. Ano'ng ibig sabihin no'n? Kailangan ba niyang komunsulta kay Ricky Reyes?

GABRIELA: Ba't hindi mo itanong kay Ming?

FVR: E, kayo, matanong ko naman kayo. Meron ba kayong mga manok? Ikaw, Senyor Plaridel?

PLARIDEL: Pareho tayo. Medyo napupusuan ko rin si Joe de Venecia dahil, tulad ko, dumaan siya sa pagkaperyodista.

AGUINALDO: Teka, teka. Hindi ako komporme diyan.

FVR: Heneral Aguinaldo, sino naman ang napupusuan mo?

AGUINALDO: Teka, teka, iniisip ko pa. A! Rene de Villa. Pareho kaming heneral. At tapat na kaibigan 'yan. Hindi siya nagpunta sa Luneta, dahil ayaw niyang saktan ang puso mo. Walang utang na loob!

FVR: Wala ka na ro'n. Don Andres Bonifacio?

BONIFACIO: Fred Lim siyempre. Batang Maynila 'yan, tulad ko. At ang trato daw niya sa lahat ng tao--mahirap at mayaman, matalino at mangmang, bata at matanda, tomboy at bakla--ay pantay-pantay.

FVR: Baka pantay-ang mga paa. Alam mo bang ang tawag sa kanya e Dirty Harry? Kasi, 'yong nangyari sa iyo sa Bundok Buntis, nangyayari din sa iba pang batang Maynila.

BONIFACIO: Hindi ako naniniwala diyan. Kung totoo 'yan, bakit suportado siya ni Cory?

FVR: Malay ko. The heart has its reasons which reason does not know. E, kayo, Padre Burgos?

PADRE BURGOS: Medyo kiling ako kay Manoling Morato. Malaki ang naitulong niya sa simbahan noong siya ay chairman ng sweepstakes at lotto.

SAKAY: Kaya lang, marami siyang ginaroteng matinong pelikula, tulad ng "The Priest." Itong buhok ko, baka niya guntingin.

TANDANG SORA: Pari po kayo, Padre Burgos. Ang dapat ninyong suportahan ay si Santi Dumlao. Kasi, bawat bukambibig niya e bumabanggit siya ng kapitulo at bersikulo mula sa Bibliya.

SAKAY: Kay Lito Osmeña ako. Kasi, ako rin e promdi… Meron pala akong knock-knock joke.

GABRIELA: Corny mo.

SAKAY: Knock-knock.

GABRIELA: Sige na nga. Who's there?

SAKAY: Promdi.

GABRIELA: Promdi who?

SAKAY [kakanta]:

Promdi candy store on di corner,

To di chapel on di hill…

GABRIELA: Nagpapatawa, hindi naman kalbo!

FVR: Senyor Mabini, sino naman ang kandidato mo?

MABINI: Para sa akin, ang karapat-dapat ay si Raul Roco. Panyero ko 'yan. Ewan ko lang kung miyembro siya ng Mabini.

TANDANG SORA: E, bakit may nagsasabi--iyan daw si Raul, e… si Raulo na, Roco-Roco pa?

LUNA: Ako, kay Johnny Enrile. Bukod sa pareho kaming Ilokano, pareho din kaming inambus.

MABINI: 'Yon nga lang, peke ang ambus sa kanya--kaya buháy pa siya, samantalang multo ka na.

GABRIELA: A, basta ako--Miriam Santiago. Gerera ding tulad ko.

TANDANG SORA: Sabi ni Manoling, me tililing.

GABRIELA: Nagsalita! Anyway, kung meron mang tililing, wala namang Kuratong Baleleng.

FVR: Doctor Rizal, wala kang kakibo-kibo. Meron ka bang pinapaboran sa ating mga presidential candidates?

RIZAL: Dyaheng sabihin, e.

FVR: Sige na, sabihin mo na. Tayo-tayo lang naman ang narito, e.

RIZAL: Si Erap.

General shock. Exclamations of "Si Erap?" at "Bakeeet?

FVR: Bakit nga ba?

RIZAL: E, kasi… pareho kaming maraming chicks.

SINING NG PAGTULA

2010-03-21T23:01:00.004+08:00

Ngayon, Marso 21, ay Pandaigdigang Araw ng Panulaan, o World Poetry Day, alinsunod sa isang deklarasyon ng UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). Narito ang aking ambag sa araw na ito.

SINING NG PAGTULA
Ni Jose F. Lacaba

Kung baga
sa palay, ang tula
ay binabayo o kinikiskis,
saka tinatahip, bago
ialok sa madla.

Kung baga
sa bigas, ang tula
ay pinipilian at hinuhugasan
bago isaing.

Panghalo sa kaning-baboy
ang hugas-bigas, patuka
sa manok ang piniling palay,
ibinubudbod sa lupa
ang ipa at bato.
Ang inihahain sa mesa
ay kaning umaaso.

Kung baga sa bigas,
hindi rin naman mainam sa tula
ang sobrang kiskis at kinis.
Malinamnam ang milagrosa,
pero masustansiya
ang bigas na pula.

Mula sa kalipunang SA PANAHON NG LIGALIG (Anvil Publishing, 1991). Muling nalathala sa kalipunang KUNG BAGA SA BIGAS: MGA PILING TULA (University of the Philippines Press, unang limbag 2002, pangalawang limbag 2005).

Auden: BATAS AY TULAD NG PAG-IBIG

2010-02-25T23:02:00.007+08:00

Pahabol sa Valentine's Day.

W.H. AUDEN
Batas ay Tulad ng Pag-ibig

Batas, sabi ng mga hardinero, ang araw,
Batas ang siyang
Sinusunod naming lahat
Ngayon, kahapon, bukas.

Batas ang dunong ng matatanda,
Tili ng mga lolong inutil at mahina;
Inilalabas ng mga apo ang matinis na dila,
Batas ang pandama ng mga bata.

Batas, sabi ng paring banal na banal,
Nagsesermon sa bayang walang kabanalan,
Batas ang mga kataga sa banal kong libro,
Batas ang aking pulpito at simboryo.

Batas, sabi ng hukom na may matang nanlilisik,
Habang nangungusap nang malinaw at mabalasik,
Batas ay tulad ng lagi kong isinasaad,
Batas ay tulad ng palagay ko’y batid ng lahat,
Batas ay hayaan ninyong muli kong ipaliwanag,
Batas ay Ang Batas.

Pero ayon sa mga pantas na masunurin sa batas:
Batas ay hindi mali o tumpak,
Batas ay mga krimen lamang
Na may pook at panahong pinarurusahan,
Batas ang damit na isinusuot ng tao
Kailanman, saanmang dako,
Batas ay Magandang umaga at Maraming salamat.

Sabi ng iba, Batas ang ating Tadhana;
Sabi ng iba, Batas ang ating Bansa;
Sabi ng iba, sabi ng iba,
Batas ay wala na,
Batas ay kung saan-saan nagpunta.
At sa tuwina ang maingay at galit na madla,
Lubhang maingay at galit na lubha:
Batas ay Tayo;
At sa tuwina ang sinto-sinto, pabulong: Ako.

Kung alam natin, mahal, na tulad nila’y
Wala tayong alam tungkol sa batas,
Kung ako, tulad mo, ay walang kamalay-malay
Sa dapat gawin at sa hindi dapat
Bukod sa nagkakaisa ang lahat,
Nalulungkot man o nagagalak,
Na ang batas ay umiiral
At hindi ito kaila kaninuman,
Kung, samakatwid, itinuturing nating kakatwa
Na iugnay ang Batas sa iba pang salita,
Tulad ng marami pang iba’y
Hindi ko masabing ito pa rin ang Batas,
Tulad nila’y hindi natin kayang supilin
Ang kagustuhang manghula
Para makaiwas sa tungkulin,
Hindi natin kayang magkibit-balikat na lamang.
Bagamat maaari ko nang ilimita
Ang pagyayabang nating dalawa
Sa kiming paghahambing
Na kiming bibigkasin,
Atin pa ring igigiit:
Tulad ng pag-ibig.

Tulad ng pag-ibig di natin alam kung saan o bakit
Tulad ng pag-ibig di natin matakasan o mapilit
Tulad ng pag-ibig sa atin ay nagpapaiyak
Tulad ng pag-ibig madalas nating nilalabag.

Salin ni Jose F. Lacaba

Mula sa kalipunan kong SA DAIGDIG NG KONTRADIKSIYON: MGA SALING-WIKA (Anvil Publishing, 1991).

Salin ng tulang “Law Like Love.”
Mababasa ang orihinal na tula dito: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/law-like-love/

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
Ang retratong ito sa pabalat ng kanyang talambuhay
ay kuha noong dekada 1960, noong panahong ginawa ko ang salin ng “Law Like Love.”
Retrato mula sa:
http://johntranter.com/reviewer/auden-rdh.shtml

EDSA 1986

2010-02-18T11:38:00.005+08:00

This was a column I wrote for the Manila Times in 1996, a decade after the people power uprising that is now known as EDSA 1.

PRESENT AT THE CREATION

FEBRUARY 22, 1986, was a Saturday. At that time I was editor of a magazine, the now defunct National Midweek, then a small, almost invisible part of that committed conglomeration that the Marcos regime derided as “the mosquito press.” Saturday was normally a day off, but we had not succeeded in closing the issue the night before, and on this particular Saturday I was helping the staff artists with the pre-computer cut-and-paste layout.

Late that afternoon, our landlord—we were renting a room on the ground floor of his Sta. Mesa house—came down with his radio to bring us the latest news: Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile had announced his break with dictatorship and was holed up in Camp Aguinaldo. We immediately sensed that something really big was happening, or about to happen. We decided to stop work on the issue of Midweek that we were planning to close.

The rest of the night and the next three days are now a blur of memories that I can no longer get in proper sequence. The magazine temporarily moved its base of operations from the office to my house, which was near the corner of EDSA and only two blocks away from the Bohol Avenue studios of what was then Channel 4, the government station.

I remember going with my wife every day to EDSA—or rather, that strip of EDSA between Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame. Sometimes our 15-year-old son joined us, though he and his high-school buddies had their own EDSA itinerary.

We never camped out, however. Part of the reason, on my part, was psychological. Crame was prison and painful memories. But now the festive crowd was compelling me to view Crame as a symbol of freedom and democracy. I remember bumping into playwright Boni Ilagan, my cellmate in the early years of martial rule. Outside the camp gates, we reflected on the irony of being in a crowd that was guarding our jailers and torturers.

So my wife and I never stayed long in the Crame-Aguinaldo area. When we weren’t home offering snacks and drinks to correspondents and photographers of various publications who asked to use our telephone and our toilet, we moved around.

We were outside Channel 4 when reformist troops captured it. Afterward, they threw huge oil paintings of Marcos and Imelda to the crowds gathered outside, who stomped and spat on the canvases and finally set them on fire.

We were on a late-morning jog when we chanced upon a firefight between reformist troops on the ground and loyalist soldiers guarding the Channel 9 transmission tower on Panay Avenue.

When word got around that Radio Veritas in Novaliches was to be attacked by loyalists, we rushed there with a contingent from the Concerned Artists of the Philippines. We joked that, while the rest of the Filipino people were protecting Enrile and General Fidel Ramos on EDSA, we were protecting the Apo Hiking Society.

Much has been written about Nora Aunor going to Aguinaldo and being booed away by the crowd because she had campaigned for the Marcoses, then gutsily going back the following night and being tearfully embraced by Enrile. Me, I remember seeing bold star Sarsi Emmanuel on Quezon Avenue, seated on the hood of a car and gleefully announcing that Marcos had fallen.

It was the night of February 25, the fourth day of the people’s uprising, and my wife and I were with Sarsi’s Boatman director, Tikoy Aguiluz. This was the second time word of the Marcoses’ leaving Malacañang had spread, and we were not sure if this was another false alarm. But we hitched a ride with Tikoy to Sta. Mesa and from there walked to the Malacañang gates. I briefly caught sight of my brother, the one who would later be imprisoned under Cory’s administration, just before he disappeared behind the closing gates.

Shut out of the Palace, we walked back to Tikoy’s car on Sta. Mesa. I picked up a piece of barbed wire that someone had shaped into a crown of thorns, but I dropped it somewhere along the way because the crowd was so thick I was afraid of hurting someone. On Sta. Mesa, I remember seeing Joker Arroyo and Teddyboy Locsin momentarily getting out of a car that couldn’t get past the crowds. I exchanged a few words with Joker, and then he and Teddyboy got back into the car and inched their way toward Malacañang, while I walked on to oblivion.

Senator Gringo Honasan wonders whether Cory Aquino was on EDSA during those four momentous days in February. This is a foolish question. On those four days, EDSA was not just a strip of road between two military camps. EDSA was the entire country.

Jose F. Lacaba
MATTER OF FACT
Manila Times
1996 February 21

Ka Pete: EDJOP AND THE FIRST QUARTER STORM

2010-01-26T15:17:00.000+08:00

http://kapetesapatalim.blogspot.com/2009/08/in-memoriam.html

EDJOP AND THE FIRST QUARTER STORM

2010-01-26T14:53:00.001+08:00

Today, January 26, 2010, is the 40th anniversary of the start of the First Quarter Storm of 1970. In commemoration of that now historic event, I am posting the following piece, a belated apology to the late Edgar Jopson, which appears as an appendix to the updated edition of my book Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage (Anvil Publishing, 2003). The appendix comes with the following note: “Slightly revised version of the foreword to Edjop: The Unusual Journey of Edgar Jopson, by Benjamin Pimentel Jr. (Ken Incorporated, Quezon City, 1989).”

STRANGE ODYSSEY

I never really knew Edjop. I expect that he and my brother Eman knew each other, since they were at the Ateneo de Manila at about the same time; and we had a mutual friend in the poet Alfredo Navarro “Freddie” Salanga. But we never really met face to face, Edjop and I; we were never formally introduced. I saw him from a distance at various demonstrations, and I have a vague recollection of seeing him at closer range inside a University of the Philippines dorm, when the Bantay refugees were briefly housed there.

He had the misfortune of coming into my line of vision just when I was, as a writer, undergoing what was then known as “politicalization.” I had come from the Ateneo myself (AB ’65, Dropout ’64), but I had this ambivalent attitude toward my alma mater: no doubt it contributed to my intellectual growth, but it turned me into a misfit, because at the Ateneo I was a poor boy (on scholarship) in a school for the rich, and after the Ateneo I was Adam after eating of the apple, Persephone after tasting of the pomegranate.

The social discomforts notwithstanding, I was almost completely apolitical in college, though the Tagalog poems I was beginning to write at the time already betrayed an incipient disquiet hiding behind a pose of gentle irony. “Politicalization” was a by-product of journalism, which took me to cocktail parties at chi-chi hotels and to drinking sessions in foul-smelling slums, which in turn intensified both philosophical and physiological nausea, which thereby sharpened the existential angst and the essential rage and gave them political shape.

It was at that point in my “politicalization” that my work brought me into contact with the various shades of student activism, and it was therefore not surprising that I was not disposed to look kindly upon any hoity-toity Atenean claiming to be fighting for the upliftment of the hoi polloi. My sympathies were with the scruffy firebrands coming out of the public schools and even the diploma mills, rather than with the Ms. Cleans and the Little Miss Muffets from the exclusive schools.

This explains the ill-concealed antipathy for Edjop and his kind in the reports I wrote at that time. When I started collecting the articles that would go into my book, Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, Edjop was dead, and I wondered whether I should write an afterword or appendix tracing the amazing routes that the dramatis personae in my reportage had taken since martial law: fire-breathing radicals had become apologists for fascist dictatorship, while Edjop, the epitome of reformism and moderate student politics, had joined the armed struggle. In the end, not without a nagging sense of guilt, I decided to let the collection stand as a historical document without benefit of updates or post mortems. I subsequently expressed my mea culpas to Edjop in a Tagalog poem, “In Memoriam,” written sometime after the Ninoy Aquino assassination, but I knew that wasn’t really enough.

I am glad that Benjamin Pimentel Jr. has decided to redress the balance with a book that takes up where Days of Disquiet leaves off. If there is anything to be learned from Pimentel’s extremely absorbing account of Edjop’s “strange odyssey,” it is the fallibility of first impressions and of built-in prejudices. For here, in various unpredictable circumstances, is where the children of the First Quarter Storm are now, almost twenty years later: some betrayed the passions of their youth and some kept the faith; some backtracked and some persisted; some moved on to other lifestyles and some simply changed their methods of struggle; some went on fighting and some were immobilized by fear or weariness or domesticity or the frenzy of the rat race or all of the above; some took the high road and some took the low road and some, like Edjop, chose to veer away from the well-worn paths to take “the road less traveled by.”

This is not just the biography of one person; it is the history of a generation.

Jose F. Lacaba
April 1989

EKPHRASIS: Malevich

2010-01-17T22:07:00.004+08:00

Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematist Composition: White on White” (1918)
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Mayroon na naman akong muling nadiskubreng isang lumang ekphrasis na sinulat ko noong nagsusulat pa ako ng tula sa Ingles. Ang ekphrasis ay tulang pumapaksa sa visual arts o artistic objects. Matagal na pala akong nagsusulat ng ekphrasis, pero nalaman ko lang ang terminong iyan may dalawang taon na ang nakararaan mula sa kapwa makatang Marne Kilates.

Sinulat ko siguro ang sumusunod na soneto noong early Sixties, noong panahong student assistant curator ako ng Ateneo Art Gallery, presidente ng Ateneo Arts Club, at art editor ng Heights, ang literary journal ng Ateneo de Manila University. Kung hindi nagkakamali ang aking senior-citizen memory, hindi pa ito nalalathala

On Malevich’s “White on White”

Of purity almost nothing can be
said with strength. It is quite easy to spit
on rot and curse the harbinger of it,
but the only things to say of the saint are three:
his past until it was bathed suddenly
by a flash in the mind; his struggle as he pits
strength against the abscess to keep lit
the present; and speculations, really
nothing, on his future, where he will stay.
What can you say of purity patched on
purity? There can be no lighted way
firmly pointing to the prepared inn.
You can only paste faith to a silent heart,
marvel at the absence of a wart.

Jose F. Lacaba

THIS COMING-UP SONG...

2009-12-21T00:30:00.006+08:00

Illustration by Danny Dalena

This 41-year-old article, first published in the December 14, 1968, issue of the Philippines Free Press, was recently reprinted in the December 5, 2009, issue of the same magazine. I am indebted to Ricky S. Torre, currently associate editor of the Free Press, for rediscovering, and giving new life to, this old piece—and for giving me a jpg copy of Danny Dalena’s illustration.

“THIS COMING-UP SONG IS EXCLUSIVELY AND ESPECIALLY AND ALSO DEDICATED TO EVERYBODY, DEDICATION COMING FROM YOURS TRULY”

Being a Carol and a Paean to Downtown after Dark, Where They Celebrate a Beery Merry Christmas All Year Round.

by Jose F. Lacaba
(Philippines Free Press, December 14, 1968)

THE CROONERS at the downtown beer joints are dreaming of a White Christmas these days, just like the ones we used to know, the only White Christmases we used to know being those that saw a corner of the sala graced by a leafless guava tree painted white and covered over with thick fluffy soapsuds simulating the snow most frequenters of beer joints will never see, except in movies. Anyone can dream, right?—and the crooners, whose calling gives then better chances of making it to temperate climes, have snow-white dreams like you and me and all our little brown brothers; above the din of the beer drinkers, in the tearjerking smoky dimness, the crooners dream of a winter wonderland and valiantly assert that all is calm, all is bright, in these dives where every night, while neither silent nor holy, is always full of good cheer. Good cheer! good cheer! even if the year has not always been good and the beer is, ecchh, served warm and on the rocks. They are keeping the faith, baby, yes, they are, these crooners and their attendant combos, in this season of chill and good will they are keeping the faith in their fashion: with their profane caterwauling they are proclaiming the good news that unto us 1968 years ago was born a Savior whose feast we now celebrate with merrymaking and prayer, with misa de gallo and noche buena.

Noche buena! The good night into which none must go gentle! Quaff the glass, lads, that’s what the downtown beer joints are for, night after night, all year round; and the dolce vita, too, if you don’t mind the juxtaposition. Let us not belabor the analogy, but if Christmas is Joy to the World and No Room in the Inn, Away in a Manger and Gloria in Excelsis Deo, if Christmas is gaiety and spirits in the wretchedness of the human condition, then, downtown, Christmas isn’t a sometime thing. The essence of Christmas, which is the mystery of the Incarnation—“the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” Christ humbling divinity in human flesh and exalting human flesh with divinity—that is not what we are talking of here, though that, too, surely applies. What we are talking of here are merely the trappings of Christmas, and some of its grim existential reminders: the gaudy colored lights, the caroling, the feasting, and, past midnight, the sight of the homeless on the sidewalks, asleep in their rags on newspapers, unable like Christ to come in from the cold. It is so easy to be mawkish about Christmas, and downtown after dark provides grounds for perpetual mawkishness.

Now, of course, you could say the same of Dewey after dark, or Mabini after dark, or any other spot in the country where the lights are just as bright and the wretchedness no less glaring; but what the heck, the analogy stands: downtown celebrates Christmas all year round, those sordid little alleys with the peopled doorways notwithstanding, or included.

Lest the metaphor get stretched too thin and we be drawn into a theological argument, let us leave Christmas for the nonce and get back to those crooners crooning Christmas carols.

They are crooning Christmas carols because Christmas carols are the top tunes of the moment, will be for some time, and top tunes are what the beer-joint vocalists vocalize 99 percent of the time. There was a time not too long ago when they were all singing “De Colores,” which had replaced “Together Again” as the most popular number in their limited repertoire. It never failed. The moment the band struck up the tune, you got staggered by the multitudinous clapping and foot-stomping and lusty screaming all around you; and when the crooner launched into the kiri-kiri kara-kara refrain, man!—the boozy chorus that joined in was such as to bring down the walls of Jericho.

In beer joints more than in posh nightclubs does the heathen become aware of the awesome power of the Cursillo, and how far it has gone. You expect the kiri-kiri chorus in the posh places where you can’t get in unless you are in coat-and-tie or barong, because you have been told that the movement works through the pillars of society. But in the beer joints you realize that the humbler temples of the Holy Ghost have also been infused with “that Christian spirit.” You should hear them. And after the song, they go table-hopping, introducing themselves to each other. Brod! What was your Cursillo House, brod? Lipa, brod, only last month! The bunch with Father So-and-so, brod? The very same, brod! We serenaded you when you came out, brod! Is that so, brod! De colores!

Every now and then, in the midst of these effusions, you hear a dissenting “De colorum!” from some unconverted table, and then all the gentiles turn to that table with a sly smile at the heckler, as though he were a partner in crime. In that instant, there is a communion of kindred spirits—dialogue! I and Thou together, against Them!

The cursillistas, let it be said for them, never take offense; at least, I have not seen one take offense. If they do at all, it is at something said or done by one of the brethren. There was that time at the Peacetime in Quiapo. Past midnight, when “customers and waitresses are allowed to sing,” one cursillista lurched over to the bandstand, had a brief consultation with the combo, turned to the mike with hands in pockets, then softly, tunelessly crooned “Mañanita,” which is about the beautiful morning. It was a nice tune, if he only sang it properly. I know it was “Mañanita” because, a few minutes later, in the comfort room, I was the unwitting listener to a tongue-lashing. One cursillista from one table was chiding the singer, a cursillista who had come with another group.

It wasn’t really a tongue-lashing. It began with praise for the singer, but praise almost immediately turned to censure. The gist of it was that the singer shouldn’t have sung that particular song. “You were okay, brod, you sang good. But that was foul, brod, foul.” “Why, brod, what was foul, brod?” “Singing that ‘Mañanita,’ that was foul, brod. You should not have sung that here. This is not the proper place.” “Why, brod?” “Basta, brod, this is not the right place. ‘De Colores,’ puwede pa. But ‘Mañanita’—foul, brod.” “It was special request, brod. I was requested to sing it.” “Even then, brod. What is a request? You could have turned it down, you could have sung another song. That was foul.” They were using foul the way it is used in basketball, I soon realized that; but I didn’t stay to hear the end of the argument, which a third cursillista from yet another table had joined. I excused myself (they were blocking the doorway) and went back to my beer.

Audience participation in the entertainment, while permissible after midnight, is not really common in the beer joints. The drinkers here are not a timid lot (as evidenced by the occasional shootings in these places), but most of them know they are no singers, and leave the entertainment to the professional crooners and the combos. Most of the crooners can’t sing, either, but that is of little consequence. The most popular singers are not necessarily the best ones; the most popular are those who know the most people.

There are usually three singers to a joint; in one hour, each has the microphone for 15 minutes; the last quarter is break time. During break time, unless they are having dinner with their mother, sister, or maiden aunt (the chaperons are almost always seated at a corner table near the kitchen), the crooners are circulating, greeting old flames and old friends, making new ones. Making friends with the crooners is the easiest thing in the world to do; the privilege goes with the price of your beer. Just tell your waitress which one you would like to meet, and she’ll come, escorted by your waitress, as soon as she has fulfilled all her commitments, i.e., greeting and talking with the other customers. Once introduced, you will never be forgotten. A tremendous memory for names and faces seems to be one of the requisites for success at the beer joints.

There’s this slip of a girl at Alex, for instance. Sally Buena. Small, slim, creamy-skinned, and still a teen-ager in looks though she must be in her early twenties by now, Sally has been with Alex for as long as I can remember; and one reason for her staying power must be her prodigious ability to remember names and faces. She is also developing into a sophisticated singer, has extended her repertoire to include more standards, but that is not the point here. I wrote her up once long ago; she has never forgotten that. I had stopped frequenting Alex for more than a year, but when I went back there a few months ago, though I had glasses on and wore my hair longer, she spotted me right away. The waitress who had always served me failed to recognize me, and when she did she could not recall the name I had given her; not Sally.

“This coming-up song is exclusively dedicated to Pepito and company,” she said when it was her turn at the mike, “dedication coming from yours truly.” A marvelous ego-booster! I felt like Joe Quirino entering the Nile and suddenly being surrounded by all the ludicrously dressed waiters, who momentarily abandon what posts they may be manning to ask Joe for movie passes. It was a great feeling. “And company” was impressed—even when, after that exclusive dedication, Sally looked around and started reeling off the names of other guys to whom she was dedicating the coming-up song. Sally knows practically everybody who has been to Alex more than once.

All the other crooners, especially in the more popular joints like Alex, Luisa & Sons, the new Avenida Beer House, and Peacetime, cannot begin a song without first making kilometric dedications. The typical prose intro to the lyric goes like this:

“This coming up song is dedicated to Manny, Danny, Sonny, and Tony, dedication coming from yours truly. Also dedicated to Gene, Doming, Tino, Hermie, Berting, and company. And especially dedicated to Bobby, Totoy, Emet, and company, dedication from yours truly. Also heartily dedicated to Attorney De la Cruz, Engineer Punongbayan, and Director Bustamante, from yours truly. Finally, dedicated to Daniel, David, Samuel, and company. Also dedicated to Ninoy, Ferdie, Dadong, and Serging. And exclusively dedicated to Bondying, Engot, Kenkoy, and Tikyo, dedication coming from yours truly. And to everybody.”

All this time, a sophisticated piano player, like Odon Cabailo, who’s now with Avenida Beer House, will be playing a beautiful standard like, say, “I Concentrate on You” or “Manhattan.” Sometimes, the band will even go into all of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” As soon as the dedication portion is over, however, down go the standards, in more ways than one, and the band strikes up the tune of some real stinkeroo like “It Hurts to Say Goodbye” or “Memories of Our Dreams,” enough to make a grown man cry. But the grown men here just love it; they yell for more, and they don’t mean “More.” The bravest are the tenderest, as they say—tough guys are sentimental slobs at heart, raving over the ickiest song.

Not a few come to the beer joints for the singer, not the song. We all have our dreams about having famous movie stars for sweethearts, to put it mildly. Well, famous movie stars are unobtainable, unless you have the looks or the lucre; so the beer-joint habitué settles for another item in show business: the novato crooner. There is always a wolf at the corner of the bandstand where the crooners wait their turn. Some wolves not only woo but waylay, and management in some beer joints have deemed it wise to erect glass partitions to prevent the damsels from getting distressed by the drunks. The less aggressive would-be lover waits at his table for break time, where the object of his desire may be gracious enough to tell him where she lives, where she can be visited on a Sunday, when she is free to go out bowling or to the Luneta.

The less ambitious ladykillers come for the waitresses. These girls are really waitresses, make no mistake. They serve you beer and peanuts or whatever pulutan you ask for, spoon blocks of ice into your beer, dally at your table for small talk; that’s all; you can’t touch them, or dance with them, or have them sit with you, at least not while they’re on duty. Many of them are real knockouts; they’re part of the attraction, a vital part of the decor, of the beer joints. You can spot the best lookers in a trice. They have all these sampaguita necklaces dangling from their necks, the gifts of admirers. Give them a little polish and, as the class-conscious kanto boy would say, puwedeng pang-display. Scions vie with prole and peon for their hands.

A friend of mine knew a fellow who won a girlfriend at one of these beer joints. The first time he came to the place, all by himself, he cased the joint, saw a pretty waitress to his liking, got her name from one of her co-workers. Let’s call her Gina. The next time he came around, he asked for Gina; she served him; he was silent throughout it all, addressing her only to order more beer. All the time, he pretended to look glum and disconsolate, stared into his beer, seemed oblivious to his surroundings. He returned to the joint again and again, always alone, and did exactly the same thing. Of course, the girls in the place began to notice him, began to talk about him: me problema sa buhay, they said of him, me problema sa puso, etc.

It was then that this fellow decided the situation was ripe for dramatics. One night he came to the place with a box of chocolates he had bought only a few minutes earlier. When Gina arrived with his first beer, he gave her the chocolates. “Take them,” he said. “I was going to give them to my girlfriend. But when I went to her house this afternoon, she had gone out with another man.” As corny as that; but this fellow was a good actor, he really looked downcast and bitter, and there was a catch in his voice when he spoke. It broke Gina’s heart. She began acting like Miss Lonelyhearts all of a sudden, dispensing advice with the the ice. The following week, she agreed to go out to a movie with him.

This is a true story, my friend swears, and he plans to try the novel approach himself. Unless you can keep a straight face, I would advise you to try something else. Not that I’m an expert in these matters, but I would suggest a simple, corny approach (the cornier, the better) that doesn’t strain the credibility too much. Don’t be like this Chabacano I know who introduced himself as Muslim in search of a second wife, preferably Christian; he wanted a taste of Christianity. He was the ninth of 32 children, he said, his father having had three wives; himself, he was the father of five. Incredibly, his tall story worked. The waitress fell for him, thinking he was such a joker. Unfortunately for her, my Chabacano friend wasn’t joking. Though he was no Muslim, he was indeed a father, but not of five, and he was indeed married, but to a Christian girl.

Oddballs as well as cornballs abound in these dives. There’s this old man who’s at Alex almost every night, an old man somewhere in his fifties, scrawny and cadaverous. Almost always, he is alone, often comes in brown americana and garish shirt, sometimes with dark glasses. He takes a table near the bandstand and orders coffee, nothing but coffee, the only drink he will have the whole night; sitting there, enveloped by the noise, swaying to the music, he grasps the ends of his table as one would grasp a pinball machine, and sways, shakes, swings, rocks, rolls to the insistent rhythm of the drums and the electric guitars and the piano and the crooner’s reedy voice while on his table coffee cup, saucer, teaspoon, sugar bowl, and napkins’ wooden container sway with him, who now has a look of orgasmic rapture on his face, obviously feeling like a psychedelic tripper. A real music lover he is, that old man.

You know the night’s about to end when the kitchen boys push out, past drinkers and bandstands and out the door, newspaper-topped cans of garbage, and the waitresses doff their uniforms and start changing into street clothes. A few minutes before two, the combo packs up, the crooners go by with their chaperons, waving to all the boys they have dedicated songs to, and the lights are all turned on, a blinding radiance that can make you squirm and make the best-looking waitresses vain.

It is then time to go, out into the streets where cab and jeepney wait and the night is never over. The neons flash and flicker; the air is clean; the sidewalks are all yours, if you don’t count the huddled bodies near the shut stores and the security guards asleep on rattan chairs. You can jaywalk and no cop’s voice will bawl you out over a loudspeaker.

If you’re still raring for action, you can go to Plaza Miranda.

At two in the morning, Plaza Miranda becomes an impromptu Hyde Park. With nothing but the occasional honk of jeepney horns and the mesmeric swish-swish of streetsweepers’ booms as counterpoint, many Walter Mittys of daytime acquire the nerve to shoot off their mouths. They harangue; their listeners heckle. Under the bronze marker with Magsaysay’s dictum—“Can we defend this in Plaza Miranda?”—people argue, debate, discuss, dispute, wrangle, proselytize, polemicize, propagandize. There are those who say that the current issues of the day don’t really touch the man in the street, are only objects of controversy in the coffee shop patronized by businessmen and highly paid columnists. Bullshit. I’ve heard a streetsweeper arguing with a drunk over the advisability of trading with Communist China. “Bakit, kung bibili ba ako ng sigarilyo sa Intsik e Intsik na rin ako?” cried the streetsweeper, clutching his broom like a spear. "E, ba’t mo sasabihing magiging komunista tayo kung makikipagnegosyo tayo sa komunista?"
Another time, there was this popsicle vendor expostulating on the Sabah issue with apparently more lucidity than all our foreign officials put together—in English yet! It wasn’t Acchhneo or television-commentator English, but it was decidedly a notch above the English you hear in Congress. He must have been talking for some time when I heard him, at past two in the morning, for he was growing hoarse, his voice rasped each time he raised his voice, and his voice was raised practically all the time. “What Marcos did, it is wrong!” he screamed at the men clustered around his popsicle cart, some of them eating popsicles. “We should have not recognized Malaysia! Macapagal is right! We should send our beloved countrymen to Sabah to do business, to live with the people of Sabah, so that they will see the enlightenment of us Filipinos which is enviable. Not like Jabidah! Jabidah is stupidity, I tell you! We only make the Malaysians angry! That is why it is wrong that we recognized Malaysia! Now look! Look what happen! They want to burn our flag! Our flag! I tell you!”

It isn’t current events all the time. Sometimes, it’s religion.

I remember a particularly heated three-sided debate on faith and truth. I couldn’t quite follow the drift of the argument because, first of all, I was, to say the least, loaded, and secondly, the drift led to non sequitur most of the time. But the speakers were extremely good, were very fluent in Tagalog. One was a clean-cut young fellow, in his late twenties, with a boyish haircut, wearing a polo barong and slippers; his adversary was another young man about his age, kanto boyish, wearing tight maong pants and rubber shoes, holding a plastic envelope under his arm; the third was a policeman who acted like a kind of devil’s advocate to both speakers and spoke like an Iglesia Ni Cristo minister.

Belief is based on truth, argued the clean-cut young man: Ang paniniwala ay batay sa katotohanan. Not so, said the kanto boy; it is possible to believe in something that is not true. You mean to say, said Clean-Cut, who kept cutting the air with karate chops and never once raised his eyes from the ground, that you will believe in something that you know to be untrue? Why not? countered Kanto Boy, who kept jumping around and staring from face to face with mercurial eyebrows and a conspiratorial smile. You mean to tell me, went on Clean-Cut, that if this guy here were to tell you that your wife is making a cuckold of you (kinakaliwa ka ng asawa mo) and you believe him, what he tells you could still be untrue? Of course, assented Kanto Boy. Then if it is untrue, why do you believe him? Clean-Cut persisted. But belief and truth are two entirely different things! said Kanto Boy: I may believe this guy here but he could be telling a lie. Then why do you believe him if he is telling a lie? But how do I know he is telling a lie? Well, if you know he is telling a lie would you still believe him? Maybe. What do you mean maybe? You either believe because it is true or you disbelieve because it is untrue!

And so forth. Clean-Cut began to sound more and more anguished, Kanto Boy grew even more lighthearted. Finally, the policeman, who, like the rest of us, had kept silent except for laconic comments, broke in, and delivered a stirring sermon. Picture this cop, not yet 40 from the shape of his stomach, a gun at his hip, delivering a sermon on faith and truth; a sermon, no doubt about it, and just the rhythm of his words, the rise and fall and swell of his formal Tagalog sentences, was enough to rouse the most sluggish spirit. At least, I found it rousing, even if I couldn’t follow his argument. He was disputing, he acted as if he was demolishing beyond repair, the arguments of both Clean-Cut and Kanto Boy. And having had his say, even as the two flabbergasted young men started speaking at the same time, this cool cop excused himself because, he said, in a smug imperious drawl, it was time for him to make a report.

At this point, I decided it was time for me to get into a cab and report to bed, and only now that Christmas is approaching do I recall that, with the spirits of beer spreading within me at the time, I was almost tempted to give my two-cents’ worth to the theological dialogue, with some handy quotes from Kierkegaard about the leap in the dark, about the faith when faith is impossible, the belief in the incredible. For the Incarnation is the most incredible proposition of all: that God should become man is a proposition incapable of rationalization. It simply boggles the imagination, and you end up concluding that faith means Take It Or Leave It; the leap in the dark, the leap of faith.

Downtown after dark, where the beer is lousy but the atmosphere congenial—where else, I ask you, can you get drunk and have Good Clean Fun on less than ten pesos, and not once bump into an R & R gringo?—downtown after dark is the best place for indulging in maudlin sentiment and amateur philosophy. God rest you merry, gentlemen, wherever you may be. Me, I’ll take downtown to a White Christmas any time, I think.

Neruda: IPINALILIWANAG KO ANG ILANG BAGAY

2009-12-10T22:42:00.004+08:00

PABLO NERUDA
Ipinaliliwanag Ko ang Ilang Bagay

Itatanong ninyo: At nasaan ang mga lila?
At ang metapisikang nababalot ng amapola?
At ang ulan na madalas na sumasalpok
sa kanyang mga kataga, tinatadtad iyon
ng butas at ibon?

Ikukuwento ko ang lahat ng nangyari sa akin.

Nakatira ako sa isang baryo
ng Madrid, may mga kampana,
relo, punongkahoy.

Mula roon ay natatanaw
ang tuyong mukha ng Castilla,
tila kuwerong dagat.
Ang tawag sa bahay ko’y
bahay ng mga bulaklak, pagkat sa lahat ng dako
sumasambulat ang hasmin: iyon
ay bahay na maganda,
may mga aso’t bata.
Raul, naaalaala mo?
Naaalaala mo, Rafael?
Federico, naaalaala mo
sa kinalilibingan mong lupa,
naaalaala mo ang bahay kong may mga balkonahe,
ang mga bulaklak na nilunod sa iyong bibig
ng liwanag ng Hunyo?
Kapatid, kapatid!
Ang lahat
ay tinig na matitinis, inilalakong asin,
kumpulan ng titibok-tibok na tinapay,
mga palengke ng baryo kong Arguelles na may istatwang
tila maputlang lalagyan ng tinta, napaliligiran ng isda:
ang mantika’y lumalapit sa mga kutsara,
mga paa’t kamay
ay matinding pintig sa mga kalye,
metro, litro, maanghang
na katas ng buhay,
nakatambak na tulingan,
kulu-kulubot na bubong at malamig na araw
na pumapagod sa banoglawin,
makinis at nakahihibang na garing ng patatas,
hile-hilerang kamatis na umaabot sa dagat.

At isang umaga, lahat ng ito’y nagliliyab.
At isang umaga, ang apoy
ay pumapailanlang mula sa lupa,
lumalamon ng buhay,
at mula noon, sunog,
pulbura mula noon,
at mula noon, dugo.
Ang mga bandidong may mga eroplano’t alipures,
ang mga bandidong may mga singsing at dukesa,
ang mga bandidong may mga prayleng nagbibindisyon
ay bumaba mula sa langit para pumatay ng mga bata,
at sa mga kalye ang dugo ng mga bata
ay umagos na lamang at sukat, tulad ng dugong bata.

Mga hayop na kamumuhian ng hayop,
mga batong kakagatin ng damo at iluluwa,
mga ahas na kasusuklaman ng ahas!

Sa inyong harap, nakita ko ang dugo
ng Espanya, bumubulwak
para lunurin kayo sa daluyong
ng kapalaluan at mga balaraw.

Mga taksil
na heneral:
masdan ang bahay kong patay,
masdan ang Espanyang lupaypay:
pero mula sa bawat bahay lumilitaw ang nagbabagang asero
sa halip na bulaklak,
mula sa bawat sulok ng Espanya
lumilitaw ang Espanya,
mula sa bawat batang patay lumilitaw ang baril na may mata,
mula sa bawat krimen sumisilang ang mga punglo
na isang araw ay matatagpuan sa gitna
ng inyong puso.

Itatanong ninyo kung bakit sa kanyang mga tula
ay hindi inaawit ang mga pangarap, mga dahon,
ang malalaking bulkan ng kanyang lupang tinubuan?

Halikayo’t pagmasdan ang dugo sa mga kalye,
halikayo’t pagmasdan
ang dugo sa mga kalye,
halikayo’t pagmasdan ang dugo
sa mga kalye.

Salin ni Jose F. Lacaba

Mula sa kalipunan kong SA DAIGDIG NG KONTRADIKSIYON: MGA SALING-WIKA (Anvil Publishing, 1991)

SHELVED STORYLINE: JOSE P. LAUREL BIOPIC

2009-11-29T01:16:00.006+08:00

November 6, 2009, was the 50th death anniversary of Jose P. Laurel Sr., president of the Japanese-sponsored Republic of the Philippines from 1943 to 1945. The event almost went unnoticed, although there was the usual wreath-laying at his tomb in Tanauan, Batangas, and the President of the Philippines herself attended the ceremony.

In 1991, I was commissioned by the Laurel family—specifically, then Vice-President Salvador “Doy” Laurel’s wife Celia Diaz Laurel, who got in touch with me through entertainment columnist and talent manager Bibsy Carballo—to write a script about the life of Laurel Sr. for a two-hour TV movie. I recall that they were thinking of getting Eddie Romero, now National Artist for Film, to direct the biopic. I wrote a synopsis after some quick research and interviews, completed a 16-page scene-by-scene outline (or sequence guide), and began work on the script. For reasons I can no longer recall, the project was shelved before I got to finish the full script.

In belated commemoration of my tukayo’s 50th death anniversary, I’m posting my shelved storyline here.

SA DALUYONG NG DIGMAAN
(Working Title)

Synopsis
by
Jose F. Lacaba

Our story is told in a series of flashbacks. The cinematic present is the period from 1945 to 1951, while the flashbacks show us Jose P. Laurel’s childhood and checkered political career, with a time span of more than 50 years.

We open in 1945, in Sugamo Prison, Japan, where Laurel, 53, is in solitary confinement. Laurel, president of the Philippines under the Japanese occupation, is accused of collaboration and treason. As he writes his war memoirs and goes about his daily prison routine, he recalls his childhood and youth.

In July 1946, after a year in Sugamo Prison, and soon after the American grant of independence, Laurel is brought back to the Philippines. He is met at the airport by a sight that brings tears to his eyes: a crowd of welcomers cheering and applauding him, though he stands accused of treason. From the airport Laurel is whisked off to another prison, Muntinlupa, where his wife and family are waiting for him.

In August 1946, Laurel’s case goes to trial in the People’s Court, with Lorenzo Tañada as prosecutor and with a defense panel that includes Claro M. Recto. In a dramatic courtroom scene, one of the judges of the People’s Court, Antonio Quirino, decides to step down and join Laurel’s defense panel.

In the course of the trial, Laurel, now 55, defends himself, explaining why he agreed to serve in the Japanese-sponsored government, first as commissioner of justice and later as President of the Second Republic. Collaboration, he points out, was forced on him by circumstances, specifically, by America’s unpreparedness to defend its colony; but collaboration was also a way to ensure national survival and protect the people against the brutality and depredations of the occupation forces.

As he delivers his fiery courtroom speeches, we intercut another series of flashbacks showing crucial incidents in the dangerous political game by which Laurel, Recto, Manuel Roxas, Benigno Aquino Sr., and other prewar political leaders, while overtly collaborating, seek to outwit and outmaneuver the enemy.

2.

In the flashbacks, we first see Laurel in Tanuan, Batangas, as a rowdy boy who likes to play truant. Once he falls into an open well while showing off that he can walk on its edge. As a teenager he spends a night in a cemetery during Holy Week in order to acquire an anting-anting. The son of a revolutionary who fought in Aguinaldo’s army against both Spanish and American colonizers, the young Laurel seems more interested in affairs of the heart, serenading girls with his guitar and his violin, than in public affairs and patriotic concerns.

The big incident of his teenage days involves a girl from whom he steals a kiss on a dare. The girl’s boyfriend engages Laurel in a balisong duel, but it is the boyfriend who ends up severely wounded. The ensuing court case depletes the resources of Laurel’s widowed mother, forcing the remorseful son to take stock of himself and resolve to go straight. He goes off to Manila as a working student.

At 20 Laurel elopes with the strong-willed Paciencia Hidalgo, also of Batangas. As a young husband and father, he takes the bar and places second, then goes to Yale on a scholarship and earns a doctorate in constitutional law with top honors.

At 33, not long after his return to the Philippines, Laurel becomes the youngest member of the cabinet when the American governor-general, Leonard Wood, appoints him secretary of the interior. It is a short-lived assignment. Barely five months later, Laurel suspends an American police detective accused of corruption. When Wood reinstates his fellow American, Laurel clashes with his boss and subsequently resigns in disgust. His move precipitates a cabinet crisis: all the Filipino cabinet members resign in a gesture of sympathy.

Two years later Laurel runs for the Senate (election at this time is by district) and wins handily, though he is a newcomer pitted against a veteran politico. When a constitutional convention is called in 1934, the 43-year-old Laurel is elected delegate from Batangas, along with another Batangueño, a political rival who is nevertheless a close friend: Claro M. Recto.

A few days before turning 45, Laurel is appointed by Manuel Quezon, president of the Commonwealth, as associate justice of the Supreme Court. Laurel now has the singular distinction of having served in all three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. It is in his capacity as Supreme Court justice that he acquits a young man convicted by a lower court for the murder of his father’s political rival. The young man’s name is Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Laurel is serving as chief justice of the Supreme Court when war breaks out in 1941. Quezon prevails upon him to change places with Jose Abad Santos, secretary of justice, in the wartime cabinet. Laurel has been advised to be ready to join Quezon and Douglas MacArthur in the retreat to Corregidor, but when the time comes, Quezon decides to leave Laurel behind with instructions to remain in his station “for the purpose of meeting an invading enemy force and with a view to protecting the people and interceding in their behalf.” Laurel, who has already donned regulation khakis, is disappointed to be left behind, and briefly entertains the idea of going off to the mountains, but finally decides, however reluctantly. to accept Quezon’s assignment.

This crucial decision leads to Laurel’s appointment as commissioner of justice in the Executive Commission led by Jorge Vargas, and eventually to his selection by the Japanese to be president of the Japanese-sponsored Second Republic.

As commissioner of justice, Laurel tries to prevent arbitrary arrests and to save the lives of captured guerrillas. This brings him in constant confrontation with the Kempeitai, the secret police, commanded by Colonel Nagahama.

One guerrilla unit, however, unaware of Laurel’s role, sends out a hitman to liquidate him. The assassination attempt occurs at the Wack Wack golf course, but is unsuccessful. The Kempeitai pick up a suspect, a onetime boxer named Little Joe, and bring him to the hospital where Laurel is confined. Though he immediately recognizes the hitman, Laurel tells the Kempeitai he cannot make a positive identification. Little Joe is released.

Later, as President, Laurel continues in his effort to save Filipino lives. Though he fails to prevent the execution of Jose Abad Santos in Cebu, he succeeds in the case of Roxas, who has been captured in Bukidnon with incriminating resistance documents, but who is brought to Manila alive and is even subsequently given a position in the Laurel government.

In Malacañang itself, Laurel employs a number of military officers and men who have links with the underground. With their help, a clandestine radio is set up in the Palace, and though it has to be moved from time to time because of spot checks made by the suspicious Kempeitai, it keeps the President informed of allied activities in the war.

At one time Laurel receives a tip that his aide de camp, General Jesus Vargas, is about to be arrested by the Kempeitai, who have obtained proof of Vargas’s links with the guerrillas in the hills. Laurel refuses to turn in his aide, and instructions are given to Palace guards to be ready with their arms to repulse any Kempeitai assault. Contingency plans are made for Laurel’s retreat to the mountains. But the Kempeitai back down.

On another occasion, Colonel Nagahama wants to re-arrest Roxas and bring him to the dreaded Fort Santiago. Laurel pointedly tells Nagahama: “You will have to kill me first.” Once again the Kempeitai are foiled.

Laurel’s most difficult game of wits is played not just with the Kempeitai but with the Japanese High Command, including Premier Tojo and Generals Homma and Yamashita. Pressured from the very start to declare war on the United States and Great Britain, President Laurel initially resorts to delaying tactics. Nearly a year later, as the war nears its end, no longer able to resist the pressure on pain of execution, he declares instead that “a state of war exists” (basically a statement of fact) and categorically announces that no Filipino will be conscripted (leading Yamashita to comment that the declaration of war is useless).

Realizing that they cannot use Laurel to the fullest, but unable to purge him because Japanese propaganda has been claiming that the Philippines has been granted independence, the Japanese military authorities organize the Makapili. This is led by Benigno Ramos, former Sakdal chieftain, and Artemio Ricarte, the legendary El Vibora of the 1896 revolution. The plan is to arm the members of the Makapili and put them directly under the Japanese military. At the Makapili launching ceremony, Laurel boldly contradicts Ramos and Yamashita, and declares that even the Makapili are responsible to the Philippine government.

When the tide of war turns and MacArthur makes good on his promise to return to the Philippines, Yamashita brings along the Laurel family and the members of the Laurel cabinet in the dangerous retreat to Baguio, and from there to Taiwan and Japan. After Japan’s surrender, Laurel signifies his intention to turn himself in to the American command in Tokyo, but an American team comes to arrest him just as he is about to leave for Tokyo.

This ends our series of flashbacks and brings us back to the cinematic present.

3.

While the trial proceeds, Laurel is embittered by the fact that President Manuel Roxas, whose life he saved several times during the Japanese occupation, has made no move to help him or the Laurel family in any way. After Laurel is released on bail, he finally gets an invitation to meet with Roxas in Malacañang. But even this turns out to be a humiliating experience. Because Roxas is afraid of what the Americans will say, Laurel is made to enter through the back door and go through the kitchen.

In the end, Roxas undercuts the Laurel trial by announcing a general amnesty for accused collaborationists. Laurel resents this move because it has deprived him of the chance to prove his innocence in court.

Though he has earlier indicated that he is through with electoral politics, Laurel is prevailed upon in 1949 to be the Nacionalista Party candidate for president. Running against the unpopular Elpidio Quirino, who succeeded to the presidency after Roxas died of a heart attack in Clark Field, Laurel seems like a sure winner--but he loses in an election marred by unprecedented fraud and terrorism. Laurel partisans in Batangas take up arms in protest, and Huk emissaries from Central Luzon propose a united front with Laurel in an uprising against Quirino. Though Laurel never concedes the election, he opts for peace, calming down his followers and rejecting Huk overtures.

Two years later, in 1951, Laurel runs again, this time for senator. One of his bodyguards and most ardent supporters is Little Joe, the hitman who once made an attempt on his life. Laurel chalks up the highest number of votes. The election results are seen as a sign of the people’s continuing confidence in Laurel and his vindication at the bar of public opinion.

THE END

Laurel storyline
1991-06-29

CULTURAL CENTER OF THE PHILIPPINES, DAY ONE

2009-10-01T23:07:00.005+08:00

Because of the uproar raised by the recent tribute that the Cultural Center of the Philippines paid to La Imeldific on its 40th anniversary, I decided to dig up my 40-year-old article about the CCP’s opening.

IF IT’S WEDNESDAY, THIS MUST BE THE CULTURAL CENTER
The Art Of Politics, The Politics Of Art.

by Jose F. Lacaba
Staff Member
Philippines Free Press, September 20, 1969

FIRST there was pre-opening night, really a dress rehearsal with an audience, the audience in this case being the workers who had built the Cultural Center, their families, and a handful of reporters who would later give warning about the bore and the botch that was dularawan. The next three nights were all, according to the calendar of events, “invitational opening nights.”

The first invitational opening night, Monday, was I think supposed to be for provincial governors, small-town mayors, and minor government bureaucrats, but the people at the Center weren’t too strict about invitations. I should know because I was there, though the invitation I got was for the third night, the black-tie-or-formal-barong night. I was with some friends, and we had come from a cocktail party where the drinks really flowed; royally smashed, and seeing the glittering lights of the Cultural Center up the boulevard, we decided to give the old gatecrash a try. As it turned out, there was no need for gatecrash. When we walked into the chandeliered lobby, nonchalant as you please, we heard a loudspeaker blaring out the good news that the show was about to begin and would everybody please go on in and find a seat, there was plenty of room and no invitations were necessary—“hindi na ho kailangan ang tiket!” We got ourselves good seats, right in the orchestra, and during the intermission we disappeared: nobody could introduce us to the lovely usherettes, and Salakot na Ginto had given each of us the craving for a stiff drink.

On gala night, Wednesday, cold sober, all dressed up, and armed with the determination to be fair and give the dularawan a second chance, a fair hearing, I was back at the Cultural Center. This time I sat the dularawan through to the end. The least said about it the better. The craving this time was for five stiff drinks.

The real drama on gala night occurred off the stage, before the show.

My ticket said the show was to begin at 8:30 in the evening. At eight, when I arrived, there was a knot of demonstrators on each side of the doors. To the left of the Center were the dissenters, to the right the defenders, their positions seemingly indicative of ideological leanings. There were some writer friends on the left, and I was trying to stop my taxi before them but a policeman waved it on to the right, where I recognized nobody and nobody noticed me. Everybody was staring at the jewels disgorged by the air-conditioned limousines with tinted windows.

The same lovely usherettes who had graced the first invitational opening night were at the lobby, tearing away ticket stubs and distributing programs, one on the Center itself (reproduced on the cover was the Hernando Ocampo painting reproduced on the outer curtain of the stage), and inside this program a smaller one on the show to be presented. Completing the handouts were two loose-leaf pages, one of acknowledgments, the second defining a dularawan.

“The word dularawan combines three words: dula (drama), awit (song) and larawan (picture). The term signifies a concept of Filipino theater which is at once radically new and deeply traditional.

“A dularawan is basically the presentation of Filipino myth and history in drama, poetry, music, dance and spectacle. In other words, it is total theatre. It is radically new in the sense that it brings together for the first time various elements of indigenous Filipino culture in an integrated composition of grand scale. It is deeply traditional in the sense that it appears to be the logical outgrowth of the development that flowered in the moro-moro and continued to prosper in the Filipino zarzuela.”

Since I couldn’t find the word awit in dularawan (maybe it should have been dularawit?), I looked around. The first thing I saw, shining on the first balcony above the lobby, was David Cortez Medalla’s bright orange shirt. What I didn’t see right away was the Muslin malong that covered his legs. David himself was flanked by two thin young men, Marciano Galang, the painter, and Jose Lansang Jr., the poet. Both were in everyday wear, Mars Galang in a long-sleeved button-down printed polo shirt, Jun Lansang in a white T-shirt and a green jacket.

Uncomfortable in the barong Tagalog I had not worn in ages, I asked enviously: “How did you get in?”

“We’ve got invitations,” said Mars.

Touché. So I said: “But you’re not dressed.”

“What do you mean we’re not dressed!” said David, indignant. “For your information, this elegant malong I’m wearing is the authentic kind used by Muslim royalty, and it’s a gift from the wife of your editor.”

That shushed me up for a while. Then, I said: “Well, what are we standing out here for? Let’s go in and sit down.”

“Stick around,” said David, his voice charged with promise and portent, his manner suggestive of mystery.

“What’s up?”

“Basta stick around,” said Mars.

“Me pakulo yata kayo, ah.”

“Maghintay ka lang, pare,” said Jun.

I was curious (and would be yellow later). So I stuck around and waited. I still didn’t know what was up, but the real drama was already beginning.

AT ABOUT 8:30, there was a flurry of activity beyond the glass doors, the sequins and diamonds in the lobby perked up, and the rumor spread that Imelda and her guests, California Governor Ronald Reagan and his family, the American President’s representatives to the grand night, had arrived. It was a false alarm, but it galvanized the three in the balcony into action, if galvanized is the right word for the very languid, very leisurely way in which they pulled out some folded cartolina sheets from the traveling bag that Jun Lansang always has with him. With a hint of a flourish, they unfurled the cartolina like banners down the sides of the balcony.

“WE WANT A HOME NOT A FASCIST TOMB!” read the red letters on Mars Galang’s placard, for a placard it was, painted in the style of psychedelia.

Jun Lansang made a Joycean pun with “RE: GUN—GO HOME!”

And hanging between these two standards was David Medalla’s cartolina, the most elaborately decorated of all, aswang with rich dark colors, primitive and messy like his paintings; you could barely make out the letters that snaked in and out of the surrounding hues: “A BAS LA MYSTIFICATION! DOWN WITH THE PHILISTINES! (A columnist who wasn’t there would later report that the sign read “Down with the Philippines!”, which gave a rather sinister cast to David’s playful protest.)

Earlier that day, Mars Galang had decided to go to Jet Snack on Mabini for a drink. Jet Snack is a favorite hangout of some young writers and painters who go there for the delicious river snail known as kuhol. When Mars looked in on the restaurant, however, he saw David Medalla and Jolico Cuadra; David, who has been converted to Buddhism, was having a glass of kalamansi juice, and Jolico, who prides himself on his drinking prowess, was having a beer. Galang knew that if he joined the pair he would be drawn into either an argument with the Buddhist or a contest with the drinker. His wife was waiting for him at home, with the new terno she had had made for the gala opening of Imelda’s Cultural Center, and Mars thought it might be wiser to forego that drink. While he was trying to make up his mind, however, David came out. Unable now to get away, Mars walked David to Indios Bravos, where the latter stays, and it was then that Mars learned of David’s plot to infiltrate the citadel of the philistine (for that is how David saw the Center) and strike at its nerve center. The painter was a reluctant accomplice: in the first place, he was thinking of his waiting wife; in the second place, he had joined only one demonstration in all his life and, because he had fled in panic at the first sign of trouble, he had since then kept away from public protest, preferring to experience no reprise of his cowardice. But at the door of Indios Bravos, waiting for a jeepney, was Jun Lansang, who is even more leery of flamboyant display than Mars Galang, and when the poet quietly gave his nod to David’ s plan, Mars felt ashamed of himself and his fears. Anyway, the idea was to stage the protest before the show; he still had time to go home, pick up his wife, and catch a substantial portion of the dularawan. So they had worked feverishly on their posters, which, when dry, they carefully folded and tucked away in Jun’s traveling bag; then they took a cab to the Cultural Center, and now here they were on the balcony with their masterpieces on display.

It was an instant demo!

And in the lobby below, instant commotion! I had gone down to read what was written on the placards, and was shaking with silent laughter and secret admiration when I noticed Kokoy Romualdez authoritatively jerk his white head sideways. A signal; and before you could say Shazam! a policeman in khaki, his face a mask of grimness, the potbelly that is a trademark of his profession shaking above his belt, was half-running towards the escalator.

Cigarette dangling from the side of my mouth, I pretended to be a suave but hardboiled private eye and tailed the cop across the lobby, up the escalator, down the corridor, toward the three musketeers of the arts. When the cop adjusted his holster, I became aware of his gun for the first time, and I slowed down to a dead stop five full steps away from Mars Galang, feeling the skittish flutter of a Judas heart beneath my shirt’s embroidery, a humiliating circumstance I justified to myself with the reminder that I was here as a reporter, therefore not as participant in the event but as impartial, objective, uninvolved spectator.

“Doon sa labas ’yan,” the cop whispered menacingly.

“Bakit?” cried David in a voice as loud as the thunder that said data, dayadhvam, damyata. Those in the lobby who had not noticed the demo now looked up in astonishment and alarm. “Isn’t this supposed to be a home of the arts?” David asked. “Isn’t this supposed to be a home for artists? Do you know who we are? We are artists, and we have come here as artists. This”—raising his placard and pulling it away like a bullfighter’s cape when the cop tried to make a grab for it—“is a work of art, and I have every right to exhibit it here in the home of the arts!”

The cop tried another tack. “Me permit ba kayong mag-demonstrate?”

The three slowly brought out their invitations from Malacañang. “I am a guest of the First Lady,” said David imperiously, “I have been invited to this gathering as an artist, and as an artist I have come to exhibit my work.”

The cop now grabbed David by the arm, the cop was embarrassed now to be the center of so much unwanted attention, and he would allow no wisp of a boy, long-haired and unwashed, to make a fool of him. “Sa labas sabi, e,” he growled between clenched teeth.

About this time, some demonstrators for the Center, men in T-shirts and sombreros, had been allowed into the lobby by a husky man carrying a bullhorn and wearing a denim jacket with the letters F.D.W. stitched on his back. “MABUHAY ANG CULTURAL CENTER!” said their placards. “MABUHAY ANG PHILIPPINE CULTURE!” “MABUHAY SI IMELDA!” The signs were neatly lettered, and down in a corner of each sign were the initials of the labor unions to which the demonstrators belonged: PAFLU, NATU, FDW.

“E, bakit ’yong mga iyon,” cried David, pointing to the counter-protest, “bakit sila pinapasok? Mga artista ba ang mga iyan? Bakit hindi sila pinapaalis? Papaano sila nakapasok? Kami, mga artista, at ito’y bahay daw ng mga artista—bakit kami ang inyong pinapaalis?”

The cop tightened his grip on David’s arm.

“Huwag mong pilipitin ang kamay ko!” David screamed in the most regal manner at his command.

The three spokesmen of the apocalypse were now completely surrounded by security men in dark suits. Juan Ponce Enrile, secretary of justice, signaled the uniformed policeman away. The pro-Center demonstrators, about ten of them, were now directed to go up and stand with their placards on both sides of Mars, David, and Jun.

“Mabuhay ang Philippine culture!” the bullhorn roared.

“Mabuhay ang Philippine culture!” David yelled. “Down with the philistines!”

“Ano ba ito,” whispered one dark-suited man to another, “Kabataang Makabayan?”

“Ang Pilipinas para sa Pilipino,” came the bullhorn, “hindi ke Mao Tse-tung!”

“At hindi rin sa Kano!” bellowed David.

“Iyang si Reagan,” Jun Lansang now interposed, “’yan ang nagsara ng Unibersidad ng California,” but his was a gentle timid voice, Jun Lansang was not used to raising his voice, so David picked up the cry. “Reagan is a fascist!” he screamed. “He closed the University of California, he gassed students, he jailed artists! Why is he here among us? What has he done for Philippine culture? I have gone around the world to spread Philippine culture, and what have you done to me? You twist my arm! You want to drive me away! It is Reagan you treat royally!” And now David lost his cool and ended his polemic with “Putang inang Reagan ’yan!”

Reagan wasn’t around yet, the First Lady had not arrived, and after cooling off a little David turned to the gaggle of glitter in the lobby. He said something in French; then: “You don’t understand that? You’re supposed to be cultured people and you don’t understand that? Let me translate it for you. Yea, I have bathed myself in the finest perfumes from Paris, but what do I know of culture?”—and then: Baka hindi n’yo pa rin naiintindihan ’yan? Tatagalugin ko na!” And he did.

Meanwhile, officialdom was in a fluster, Kokoy Romualdez gritted his teeth, Ernest Maceda’s eyes blazed like a Byzantine ikon’s. Ponce Enrile shook his head. Andres Cristobal Cruz was at David’s side, trying to calm him down, still trying to convince him to hold his protest outside. Reminded that he had been David Medalla’s comrade-in-arms in one of the very first demonstrations staged in this country, Andy Cruz replied, “Oo nga, pero Kano naman ang kalaban namin noon, hindi Cultural Center.” Finally, Andy gave a weary shrug, grabbed a poster from the PAFLU delegate and positioned himself between David and Jun. When he saw that his placard read “MABUHAY ANG CULTURAL CENTER,” Andy grew thoughtful, muttered, “Siguro ’yong MABUHAY ANG PHILIPPINE CULTURE ang dapat kong kunin, ano?”

David had by this time grown tired of yelling and was content with greeting the guests who, he said, “used to come to my barong-barong when my barong-barong was the only Cultural Center of the Philippines.” Some of these friends, like Adrian Cristobal, he taunted openly: “Oy, Adrian, sumama ka rito! Noong araw, kasa-kasama ka namin! Ngayong me atik ka na, hindi mo na kami kilala!”

Finally, the First Family arrived with the Reagans. Flash of bulbs. Applause. Cheers. The spotlight shifted. Nobody heard what Jun, Mars, and David shouted in protest. Imelda saw the posters on the balcony and turned away with an embarrassed half-smile. Ferdinand, ever the skilled practitioner of the art of politics, gave the picketers a wide grin and raised his fingers in a victory sign. Reagan read the posters and never once lost the hearty smile of an embalmer which made his face a sea of wrinkles.

It was now past nine o’clock.

THE UNIQUE DEMO was over, but there is more to our drama, this drama whose theme could very well be the politics of art, or of artists. For politics so pervades our life that even art cannot escape its taint, even culture becomes a political issue, and dissent in whatever form, nonconformity however innocuous, is immediately interpreted as obscene, or subversive, or partisan. David Medalla may flout conventional morality, but can anyone accuse him of being an agent of Mao Tse-Tung or a hack of the Liberals? Yet Mao Tse-tung somehow got into the picture during the gala opening, and the Liberals earlier: if the formal protest outside the Cultural Center was small, part of the reason is that many who planned to join it kept away for fear of being identified with the Opposition. (If the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg had made an attempt to send the Cultural Center levitating with his all-purpose incantation, “OM,” he would surely have been branded a tool of the Liberal Party and an alien meddling in Philippine affairs, for is not his magic syllable made up of the initials of Osmeña and Magsaysay?) Yes, politics so pervades our life that even those artists who shun it like the plague find themselves stricken by it, which is precisely what happened to Jaime Arevalo de Guzman, the painter, who suddenly woke up one morning to find his name in a full-page newspaper ad as part of a Committee on Arts and Sciences making a declaration of support for Marcos and Lopez—this, as he wrote in a strong letter of protest, “without prior notice and consent.” There is nothing intrinsically wrong in any artist’s proclaiming his political allegiance (Michelangelo did magnificent masterpieces for the Borgias, and there is no reason why Filipino artists cannot serve, or simply sympathize with, the present dispensation, whose reputation is surely better than that of the Borgias), what’s wrong is the use of art and the artist by politicians to serve their own ends. This is as bad as the use of political power to force the anti-Establishment artist into submission. The political propagandist who has so little regard for a man’s name that he can use it as freely as toilet paper in a public lavatory is just one side of the coin whose other side is the cop who twists the arm of anyone rude to the established order or contemptuous of it.

The moral of our story having been spelled out, let us get on with the final act of our drama.

On the second floor of the Cultural Center is the art gallery (where hang paintings by Jimmy de Guzman and Mars Galang), and here, at the door, David Medalla listened a few minutes after the demonstration to a gentle reprimand from the Center’s soft-spoken deputy director, Antonio Quintos.

David was incorrigible. “Look,” he said, “they let in all these other people with placards, these paid hacks. Were they even invited? I am a guest here, and I have come to exhibit a work of art!”—here, the placard in his hands shook like a shirt on a clothesline during Typhoon Signal No. 2. “Why should they twist my arm? I am not armed, I am not a criminal; why should men with guns surround me?”

“You call yourself a guest,” said Tony Quintos, repressed anger showing in flare of nostril and flash of eyes. “Is it your custom to insult your host?”

“Did I insult Imelda? Did I even attack the Cultural Center? I said, ‘Down with philistines!’ You are a cultured man, Tony. Do you find anything wrong with that?”

“You should at least have behaved.”

“I did behave, “said David. “I behaved as an artist should.”

The lobby and the balcony were empty of glitter now, only the security men were around, the guests were in the auditorium, the program had begun. Jun Lansang was nowhere in sight (he had gone in), Mars Galang wanted to go home to his waiting wife, and David himself was all set to leave the Center to his philistines; but I had overheard one dark-suited guy whisper to a T-shirted fellow, “Paglabas ng mga ’yan, barugin n’yo,” and fearful for their safety, I persuaded Mars and David to sit out the dularawan; it is better to suffer through a new art form than suffer at the hands of men whose loyalty to Philippine culture is unquestioned, and whose hatred of “all things counter, original, spare, strange” is beyond doubt.

At the door of the lower balcony, the pretty usherette accepted my proffered ticket with a gracious smile, but a security man with a crew cut barred the way when the shaggy-haired pair tried to go in after me. David had his ticket in hand; Mars had lost his sometime during the demo but still had his printed invitation; the security man at the door was as impassive, as immovable, as the Colossus of Rhodes.

Before David could open his mouth, Tony Quintos was at his side. “David, David,” he said, “we’ll let you in, but only if you promise not to make any further disturbance.”

“I never make any disturbance when I am before a work of art,” David replied.

“What if you don’t consider this a work of art?”

“I consider any performance that contains singing and dancing,” David said grandly, “a work of art—no matter how bad.”

“Okay,” Tony Quintos wearily told the security man, waving him away. “I’ll sit with them.”

Inside, Jun Lansang was already quietly and snugly seated. We took our seats in the same row, Tony Quintos between David and Mars: the atmosphere was as tense as a Central Luzon town’s on an election day. On the stage, the director of the Cultural Center, Jaime Zobel de Ayala (who had earlier greeted David from the lobby), was winding up his opening remarks. Very soon, Imelda was walking up the stage; the audience gave her a standing ovation.

And then the dularawan began. In Europe, Maria Callas on a bad night has been booed off the stage; the dularawan was quietly tolerated; the patience of the Filipino is as renowned as Job’s. After a stiff, uneasy silence that lasted for about a quarter of an hour, David could no longer stand it, and began to give a running commentary on the show, in discreet but steadily-getting-indiscreet whispers. If Tony Quintos was annoyed, he said nothing.

“Look, that’s just like a Noh play…. Now this one is a Balinese dance…. It’s a balagtasan…. But that’s a Viking ship, not a barangay!... If our ancestors were as inert as these people, they could never have crossed from one end of the Pasig to the other…. That dance is straight out of Martha Graham…. That’s the kind of acrobatics they have in Chinese opera…. Now we have Cecil B. DeMille…. They have a vaudeville act at the Place Pigalle which is just like that…. Why do those Jewish slaves never get up? What are they doing, taking a shit?... Is that Reli Estanislao? Hey, he’s good. He’s the only good thing so far…. That’s a Senegalese dance, complete with headfeathers…. This is just like the imitation of the Folies-Bergere they put on in Japan, but at least in Japan you see a lot of legs…. Hey, there’s the Teahouse of the August Moon!... Don’t you find the music monotonous?... Walang life, walang joy, walang adventure—all the elements that make theater!”

Actually, on the basis of David Medalla’s remarks, you can describe the dularawan as very Filipino: for do we not say of the Filipino that he is a hodgepodge of cultures and styles?

Down the escalator after the show, David said: “They’ve got a better program at Cine Dragon on Ongpin.” Out of the door a few minutes later, David shouted to the waters of the gigantic fountain and the scattering of the people around it: “It’s a great big bore! The dularawan is a great big bore! There, that fountain is more beautiful, more exciting!” In the taxi on the way to Indios Bravos, David clucked his tongue: “That was 300,000 pesos? Why didn’t they just give Nick Joaquin ten thousand to write another masterpiece?”

Jun Lansang had walked out before the intermission; did he perhaps worry about his newly acquired job at the National Library, where his immediate boss is the assistant director, Andres Cristobal Cruz? Mars Galang stayed behind after the show; had champagne in the art gallery and a discussion with a security man (“I don’t blame you, you were just doing your duty, just as I was doing my duty”); hitched a ride with Bobby Chabet on the way home and had a really heated argument this time, the upshot of which was that he was told to get out of the car (“I lost my best friend”); and thought of his wife at home, his wife who had a new dress made, waiting like Penelope.

And now, an epilogue.

AT INDIOS BRAVOS later in the night, a student who had demonstrated against the Cultural Center had a story to tell.

“The U.P. student council had voted to picket the Center, but then there was this meeting in Malacañang with the President and the First Lady. I wasn’t there, but they told me umiiyak daw si Imelda. She implored them not to embarrass the country before its guests, you know. And the councilors naman, naawa. So the student council had another meeting, and this time they voted that there would be no formal picket. If anyone wanted to demonstrate, he could do so, but he would be there as an individual, not as representative of the U.P. The council chairman, Jerry Barican, did just that.”

And a folk dancer who had demonstrated for the Cultural Center spoke of the experience.

“We walked down the boulevard, all dressed up, and with the torches yet. Then this band of kids came toward us—aaah!—and we dropped our torches and we screamed. Nagtakbuhan na po! Look, I still have mud all over my shoes and pants. But afterwards everything quieted down, and then finally there was nothing more to do, so we decided to go in and see the show. There were I think 35 of us. After the intermission, 34 had disappeared, I was the only one left.”

He must have liked the dularawan, if he stayed behind?

“Ay naku! Before, I was pro-Center. Now, I don’t know any more. Tinulugan ko! Talaga. Mabuti na lang me nakatabi akong lalaki.”