PILIPINO FOREVER!

Dapat noong isang buwan ko pa ito ipinost, dahil Agosto ang Buwan ng Wika. Sa ano't anuman, huli man daw at magaling (magaling nga kaya?), naihahabol din.

This is a slightly revised version of a piece I wrote for an English-language magazine nearly 40 years ago. I decided not to revise the "fearless forecast" that I made back then. Obviously, I am not a good manghuhula. Otherwise, I think the piece is not entirely outdated.


PILIPINO FOREVER!
Or, The Decline And Foreseeable Fall Of English In the Philippines.

by Jose F. Lacaba
Staff Member
Philippines Free Press, August 29, 1970, pp. 6-7

SEVEN YEARS ago, just before I dropped out of college, I liked to annoy some of my friends—intense young writers who dreamt of crashing the New Yorker or the Free Press with labored Nabokov or Nolledo imitations, and who were all under the delusion that they were destined to write what we called the GFN, or the Great Filipino Novel—by telling them they were wasting their time mastering the niceties of English prose, for there was no future in their efforts, posterity would be able to appreciate them only in translation. English in the Philippines was on the way out, I said, and would surely go the way of Spanish. Its days were numbered. I gave it fifty years or less.

Today I am inclined to say “less.” I’m giving English in the Philippines a decade at the most. That’s a fearless forecast based on a concrete analysis of concrete conditions.

Seven years ago, being myself afflicted with the GFN Complex, I wrestled with The Language Problem. In what tongue was I to express my Filipino soul? In what language was I to write the GFN that I thought was struggling to get out of my skin? Part of the reason I became a college dropout—aside from the usual “sensitive adolescent” compound of existential angst, the alienation bit, the crisis-of-faith thing, the complete De Profundis Syndrome—was the conviction I had arrived at, that the language of my GFN could never be English. The characters I wanted to write about were people who spoke no English at all, or spoke it only when drunk. How could I make a jeepney driver curse the cop at the corner in English? I wrote about a housemaid once, and though the story was accepted for publication in this magazine, I thought it was funny to have a maid speak like a Maryknoll coed. None of the attempts made by established writers to render the native speech in English could satisfy me. The narrative portions of stories by the best Filipino writers in English were almost letter-perfect, but dialogue was something else. My ear always told me something was wrong.

What language was I to use then? Spanish was definitely out. Not only was it deader than a dodo; the 21 units of it that I had passed couldn’t even enable me to read Mabini’s memoirs without consulting a Spanish-English dictionary after every other line. Though I was born in Cagayan de Oro, a Visayan-speaking city in Mindanao, and though my father was a Boholano who wrote poetry in his native tongue, my GFN could not be in Visayan either, because I had left my birthplace at an early age and could no longer speak the language; besides, I knew absolutely nothing of its literary tradition.

The only logical choice then, for me if for nobody else, was the only other language I knew besides English, the language my mother had been teaching in school since I was a year old: the national language. At that time, I didn’t want to call it Pilipino; I preferred Tagalog.

I was an English major in a school renowned for its English, or at least for the way its students spoke English—the Ateneo. I should have been happy enough with English Lit., but the Language Problem kept, as we used to say in our philosophy classes in those days, “impinging itself on my consciousness.”

I had a professor in philosophy, a disciple of the Christian existentialists, who liked to tell the class of Tagalog’s strength and beauty as an “existential language.” At its current stage of development, he said, Tagalog was weak in abstract concepts, but in dealing with “existents,” it was more sophisticated than English. I remember one of his examples. Tagalog would say: Umuulan—“Raining”—and have a complete sentence. English, to complete the sentence, would have to say: “It is raining.” What, my professor asked, did it refer to? Nothing that could be measured by hand or eye; nothing that could be found in existence. He told us about the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who, confronted by what in his time was also an existential language, decided to “teach German to speak philosophy.” (This was in a time when the language of philosophy was either Greek or Latin.) I wasn’t too keen on philosophy, but since I was wrestling with The Language Problem, I wanted to prove that the language I was inclined to favor was adequate for 20th-century needs. I decided to teach Tagalog to speak philosophy. I started by trying to translate Kierkegaard, and gave up after a few attempts. It was not that Tagalog could not cope with philosophy, I reasoned out; I could not cope with philosophy.

As an existential language, however, Tagalog was perfect for poetry. I had two English professors who, strangely enough, were passionately interested in Tagalog literature. They wrote Tagalog poetry, as I did. This was, I think, my most fertile period (I was writing at the rate of a tula a night), and after class I would discuss Tagalog poetry with my English professors. Twentieth-century Tagalog poetry, we agreed, not only lacked roots in native tradition, but, worse, was alienated from contemporary world literature. We arrived at the conclusion that the trouble with Tagalog poetry was its addiction to sound and conventional music; it badly needed the ballast of imagery. We thought it was vital to established the importance of the concrete thing, the real object, the image. So we launched, without benefit of manifestoes or any other formalities, the Bagay Movement.

Today, seven years later, other Tagalog poets whom we didn’t know at the time, but who were themselves on a parallel course with us, speak to me of Bagay. I am surprised that they have even heard of it; we published only in the Ateneo’s literary journal and in an avant-garde magazine that folded up after the first issue. There are those who still do not quite understand what we were trying to do at the time, equating Bagay poetry with the “mestizo poems” of one of our members, who was writing a la The Sun before The Sun was ever thought of, and with more ease and naturalness. On the whole, however, as I keep discovering to this day, the Bagay Movement created something of a ripple in Tagalog literature. I like to think that it has, anyway.

So there I was, an English major writing in Tagalog, and all the while still debating in my mind what language to champion unreservedly. In my last year of college, I began to find it more and more difficult to write term papers on “The Archetype in Canterbury Tales” or “The Early Cantos of Ezra Pound,” things like that. Down went my grades and out went my scholarship, and I decided it was time to write, not the GFN, but something, anything, in Tagalog. I dropped out.

This was towards the end of 1964. Early in 1965, an election year, I found work as an interviewer, at the six-peso minimum wage, for Robot Statistics, a survey firm and a subsidiary of the international Gallup Polls. I liked the job: there was something offbeat, adventurous, glamorous about it; it brought me closer to the people I wanted to write about but felt alienated from; and it enabled me to stop wrssh-wrsshing like a goddam Arrnean. The job brought me to the wilds of San Nicolas and Tondo, to the hinterlands of Sapang Palay, to godforsaken barrios in the Tagalog region. I made mental notes of the linguistic quirks, in accent and vocabulary, that could be discovered in Batangas, Bulacan, Rizal, Marinduque. I spoke virtually no word of English during those trips; in the barrios I met nobody who was “English-spokening.”

I left Robot after about five months because I began getting what to me were bum assignments. Robot must have found out I could wrssh-wrssh like the best of its executives, and it put me to work in the plush districts of Manila, where most of the time I had to wait outside a high gate while the maid who had peered at me through a small round hole went into the house to inform the lord and master of my presence. Never was the gap between have and have-not more clear to me than it was in those humiliating hours of waiting—and I could see that language was an important instrument to maintain the gap. Once inside the Class A home, sunk in the soft sofa, surrounded by stereo and television and refrigerator and modern painting and maids in uniform, I found myself once again exercising my Arrneow acent, what little of it I had imbibed by osmosis. After two weeks of Ermita-Malate assignments, I said goodbye to Robot. It was no way to write a GFN.

Ironically enough, I ended up here in the Free Press. Jobs that required a knowledge of Tagalog were hard to come by.

It was here in the Free Press that I became finally and irrevocably convinced that English in the Philippines was in horribly bad shape, so grievously ill I doubted if it had any chances of recovery. I worked at the desk for more than three years, as copyreader and rewrite man, and the most irritating thing I had to do was edit the copy of earnest schoolteachers who angrily insisted that Filipinos had mastered English as a medium of communication and that English was here to stay. What reached my desk was copy that the executive editor already deemed worthy of publication—that is to say, it wasn’t as excruciatingly bad as the usual stuff he received. The stuff that the executive editor rejected outright and didn’t bother to pass on to me for copyreading was simply unbelievable.

Here’s a typical example of the sort of thing that pours daily into the Free Press office (it was passed on to me because it praises one of my articles to high heavens):

“Sunog! (Ang Lagay E…?) FP—June 14/69, by Jose F. Lacaba. Its enough to fervor your feeling against this redden society of ours with all sort of evils. It’s no longer a joked this Nation is really edging to ‘Satan’s’ path. The cunning characters of all government personnel are the inherited facts from the Americans. Their excessived display of their unmannerism and auspicious wheeling of their personal needs, which is not supposed to be conducived within our Nation, plunged those with weaks humors in such dubious weal.”

I wasn’t much of a newspaper reader before I joined the Free Press. Because in the beginning part of my job was to do a weekly news roundup, I found myself reading the papers daily, almost line by line, from front page to back. Reading the papers regularly, I soon found out, was an infuriating experience, a stomach-turning exercise, not only because the news was invariably bad but also because the grammar was worse. Never mind the reporters, but the columnists who were supposed to be tops in the trade! One could count on the fingers of one’s left hand those who could write a straight English sentence without garbling the syntax, putting subject and predicate at odds, misusing words, mixing metaphors, and wallowing in clichés. The mass media were often cited as proof that English was widely understood in the country; as far as I was concerned, they were the best evidence that the language was being debased and would come to ruin.

At the same time that I despaired of the future of English in the Philippines, I became hopeful about Tagalog. It was at this time that I learned to call it Pilipino.

As staff writer for the Free Press, I have done quite a lot of traveling around the country. What strikes me the most whenever I come into a new town is the abundance of theaters showing Tagalog movies, and stands selling or renting out Tagalog comic books. Nora Aunor is everywhere, from Jolo to Sorsogon, and I suppose all the way to Ilocos Sur, where I have not been to yet. I remember a film exchange representative telling me that in the provinces Tagalog movies beat English-language pictures any time, even if the Tagalog moviehouses are mostly rundown and flea-bitten. And everywhere, too, Pogi and Pilipino Komiks and all those little comic books available at every corner in Manila are doing brisk business.

What this proves is that Tagalog-based Pilipino is more widespread than its enemies think. The squealing teenager in Naga who adores Nora Aunor will not endure the fleas and the bedbugs if she cannot understand what Nora Aunor is saying between songs, and the housewife in Samar who buys Romansa Komiks will not throw away 50 centavos of hard-earned money if Romansa Komiks will not make her momentarily forget the routine and the drudgery of housework. Thanks to the movies and the comic books, I have very seldom encountered difficulty in communicating with people born and bred in a different Philippine language. They may not be able to express themselves very clearly in Pilipino, they may not be able to pronounce it properly, but they understand me and we understand each other.

I am talking, of course, of the so-called lower classes, those who have not had much of an education and can only afford the inexpensive pleasures of Tagalog movies and comic books. Higher up on the social scale, one needs English to communicate—and these are usually the people who are opposed to Pilipino as the national language, knowing as they do that it endangers their position as the current elite.

Dr. Bienvenido Lumbera, professor of English at the Ateneo, writing in Pilipino for Pilipino, sister magazine of the Free Press, has this to say on the situation:

“In the bourgeois mind of the power elite, the interests of their small group represent the interests of the entire nation. What is good for their class is good for the entire masses….

“Perhaps the Philippine situation can never be fully understood by someone belonging to the power elite. The Westernization of those who have graduated from the university is practically complete. The students who have learned English easily are the same ones who have quickly embraced the culture embodied by the English language. They are the citizens alienated from their fellow Filipinos because they live in an artificial society, a society built on the principles and objectives imported through the use of English. It is not surprising that many intellectuals believe that nationalism and the language problem are separate, that it is possible to show concern for the country without supporting Pilipino….

“As it is now, English is the language of government leaders, of the rich, of the professionals. While a leader unavoidably stands out from those he leads, the two should never be kept far apart. Neglect of the people’s needs or blindness to the nation’s true situation is the effect of the English language which, instead of being a bridge, serves as a fence separating the leader from the led.”

The students demonstrating in our streets are perceptive in that they realize their need to bring themselves closer to the masses. We keep worrying that Pilipino will cut us off from the world, but we are not bothered by the thought that English has kept us apart from our own people. The students who have turned their backs on the easy life of the privileged few, to which their education naturally qualifies them, and who have instead opted to, as they put it, “integrate with the masses” and “serve the people,” know that they can achieve their objective only by speaking a language known to the masses of the people.

Those who say that Pilipino is inadequate to meet the needs of the modern world are simply unaware that Pilipino has been making great strides in the past 10 years. Those who say that Pilipino has produced no significant literature are only confessing that they have read nothing of the literature written in Pilipino in the past 10 years. Those who say that Pilipino cannot cope with 20th-century science and technology have not heard Filipino engineers, for instance, talking business in Pilipino: their sentences are in Pilipino but they use English terminology when no terms in the language exist, in the same way that English unashamedly incorporated foreign words, spelling, and pronunciation, unchanged, into its own vocabulary. Those who fear that Pilipino will throw us back to the stone age do not know that Pilipino is already advancing into the space age, the age of revolution.

This is a very exciting period for Pilipino. The language is being bent, battered, hammered into shape, molded, to meet the needs of a rising generation. Read through the convoluted manifestoes of student radicals and you will see what I mean. The Pilipino they use may sound strange and artificial now, but that is because they are trying to make Pilipino bear a burden it has never borne before: they are teaching Pilipino to speak political science. Even now, the bright young men and women of the new generation are giving the language a cram course in philosophy, history, the social sciences, the natural sciences, even space technology. Give Pilipino a few more years and it will be the equal of any modern language in the world.


Note, 2009:
The Sun (I don't recall now if this was a tabloid or a broadsheet) was the first Philippine newspaper written in what we now call Taglish. If I remember correctly, it was still called Enggalog back then.

AQUINO: THE SHELVED STORYLINE

Wearing a two-decade-old T-shirt
for The Aquino Movie that never was
(Photo by Kris Lanot Lacaba)

Sometime after the momentous events that would come to be known as the EDSA Uprising, or the People Power Revolution of 1986, or EDSA 1, film director Lino Brocka got me to write a storyline for a film on Ninoy Aquino that he was planning to make, with Phillip Salvador in the title role. I don’t remember now if Lino was already a member of Cory Aquino’s Constitutional Commission at the time, but in the end the project got shelved, Lino walked out of the Constitutional Commission, and the two of us ended up doing Orapronobis (given the title Les insoumis in France, Fight for Us in the U.S.), a film that was highly critical of the role armed vigilantes and paramilitary groups played in the Cory administration.

A few years later--towards the end of the Cory administration, if I am not mistaken--film director Tikoy Aguiluz tried to revive the project. He even distributed T-shirts to announce the making of The Aquino Movie. This project, too, never got off the ground.

Today being the 26th anniversary of Ninoy’s martyrdom (and coincidentally the 38th anniversary of the bombing of Plaza Miranda, besides being the 96th birth anniversary of my late father-in-law, the poet Serafin Lanot), I’m posting this shelved storyline for all it’s worth.


AQUINO

Storyline by Jose F. Lacaba


AUGUST 21, 1983. Former Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., 50, well-known in his country by his nickname Ninoy, comes home to the Philippines after three years of exile in the United States. He’s traveling on a fake passport under the name Marcial Bonifacio, and underneath his white shirt he’s wearing a bulletproof vest, aware of the danger that awaits him under the ruling Marcos dictatorship--the regime that kept him in prison for seven years, then sentenced him to die by musketry, and finally, when he suffered a heart attack in his prison cell, grudgingly sent him into exile.

When the plane lands at the Manila International Airport, soldiers in uniform and plainclothesmen come up and order Aquino to disembark. American and Japanese journalists traveling with the former senator attempt to follow, but a burly plainclothesman blocks their way. Aquino walks down the ramp alone, followed by a uniformed escort. Suddenly shots ring out. Aquino falls to the tarmac, face down, arms outstretched like one crucified, blood oozing from his head.

In an instant, members of a SWAT team guarding the airport grounds are pumping bullets into another man in civvies named Rolando Galman. The authorities will later claim that Galman was a Communist hitman who somehow broke past tight airport security to assassinate Aquino. It is a story that most people find too incredible to believe, especially since the dictatorship’s propaganda machines have for decades been trying to depict Aquino as both a Communist stooge and a CIA agent.

During the week-long wake for the assassinated senator, a long and endless line of mourners come to the Aquino house day in and day out to view the remains. At a time when a gathering of more than a dozen people is decreed by the dictatorship to be punishable by death, this expression of sympathy for the deceased is also supremely an act of protest.

At a Mass just before the funeral, we hear Corazon “Cory” Aquino, the assassinated senator’s widow, newly returned from exile in the United States, speak quietly about her husband, and now we go back in time to follow the political career that will end in the spilling of blood on an airport tarmac.

In the early Fifties Ninoy Aquino is the Boy Wonder of Philippine journalism. At the age of 18 he is a war correspondent in Korea. At 20 he is covering the last dying moments of French colonialism at Dien Bien Phu, the British counter-insurgency efforts in Malaya. On his return home he helps negotiate the surrender of the supreme commander of the Huks, the Communist-led People’s Liberation Army.

One year after his marriage at the age of 21 to the heiress of the largest landed estate in the country, he becomes the Boy Wonder of Philippine politics. In quick succession he becomes the youngest mayor of a Philippine town, the youngest governor of a Philippine province, and the youngest senator in the land. He’s a young man in a real hurry.

By 1971, the fourth year of his six-year term as senator, Aquino is already being touted as the opposition party’s best bet for the presidency--the only man, when he comes of age, believed capable of trouncing the wily President Ferdinand Marcos or the beautiful First Lady Imelda Marcos in a presidential election.

But in 1972, one year before the presidential election, Marcos declares martial law. On the pretext of saving the republic from the Communist menace, Marcos shuts down newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations, then hauls opposition politicians, student activists, trade unionists, peasant leaders, journalists, teachers, poets, along with a few token smugglers and drug dealers, into military prison camps.

The very first person to be picked up is Senator Ninoy Aquino.

The night before the official announcement that martial law has been declared, military officers interrupt a party caucus at the Manila Hilton and arrest Aquino. He is taken to Camp Crame, where he undergoes the experience of being fingerprinted like a common criminal. He is thrown in with other political prisoners in the Camp Crame gym. A few hours later, he is led out, along with ten other men, and driven to Fort Bonifacio, another military camp in Metro Manila, where a detention center for maximum-security prisoners has been established. It is here in the Fort Bonifacio prison that Aquino will be spending most of the next seven years.


MARTIAL LAW WILL BE A TURNING POINT IN THE SENATOR’S LIFE. Up until then, he has been the most wildly successful Filipino politician not only because he is blessed with a boyish charm, a rapid-fire speaking style, and a razor-sharp mind, but also because he has been a skilled practitioner in the politics of guns, goons, and gold. Though he can give tit for tat in a political debate, he has not hesitated to counter terror with terror when the occasion called for it. Seven years of imprisonment, however, will turn him into a Gandhian disciple, an advocate of nonviolent resistance.

One summer night in the sixth month of martial rule, Aquino and Jose W. Diokno, another imprisoned opposition senator, are handcuffed and blindfolded and bundled out of Fort Bonifacio. The two have become symbols and rallying points of resistance: the fact that their names both end in NO is made much of by people voting “no” in the martial law regime’s rigged plebiscites and referenda.

A helicopter brings the two prisoners to Fort Magsaysay, a heavily guarded military camp in Central Luzon, sandbagged and ringed with barbed wire. They are then led to separate, solitary, brightly lighted cells, where they are stripped of wedding rings, watches, shoes, all personal belongings.

In solitary confinement, practically blind without his eyeglasses, Aquino paces his cell barefoot for hours on end. To keep himself from going mad, he sets his mind to recalling every little detail of his life. He starts a one-way conversation with the God who has never occupied a central place in his life, raising questions about the injustice he has been suffering.

Meanwhile, Cory Aquino has been given a package containing her husband’s personal effects. Cory and Diokno’s wife Nena trudge from one military office another, asking about their husbands’ whereabouts, trying to find out if their husbands are dead or alive. In one office, the military man in charge earnestly searches his files, then confesses to the two women that he does not know where Senators Aquino and Diokno are. Several weeks of anguish and near-despair pass by before Cory Aquino, Nena Diokno, and their children are finally allowed to visit Aquino and Diokno in Fort Magsaysay.

One month after their inexplicable transfer to Fort Magsaysay, Aquino and Diokno are brought back to Fort Bonifacio. Not long afterwards, the trial of Ninoy Aquino--by a military tribunal whose members have been personally handpicked by Marcos--begins. He is charged with participation in a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the government, subversion, illegal possession of firearms, and murder. Aquino tells the tribunal: “Some people suggest that I beg for mercy. But this I cannot in conscience do. I would rather die on my feet in honor than live on bended knees in shame.”

One year after the declaration of martial law, Aquino is taken to Malacañang Palace for a one-on-one dialogue with Marcos. “Why don’t you just give up and join me?” Marcos asks. But Aquino is unyielding.

The trial resumes, and drags on for years. At one point, after his lawyers point out the unconstitutionality of a military trial for a civilian, Aquino announces he will no longer participate in the proceedings. In the summer of 1975, he begins a hunger strike. It is a protest fast that does not even get reported in the mainstream media, which are still tightly controlled by the dictatorship. It lasts for 40 days, during which time the once roly-poly Ninoy, refusing all food and drinking only water, loses nearly 45 pounds.

Towards the end of his fast, his wife Cory has to help him along as he staggers to get to the bathroom, where she gives him a bath like a baby. Three folding chairs are lined up from his steel cot to the bathroom so that he can stop and rest along the way. Jaime Cardinal Sin is allowed to visit him to administer the last rites.

On the 40th day of the hunger strike, Aquino collapses and loses consciousness. He is rushed to a military hospital and force-fed.

Dragged back into court in 1976, Aquino tells the military tribunal: “To acquit me, you have to declare Marcos guilty. This you cannot do.” Indeed, it does not. In November of 1977, the military tribunal hands down its decision: death by musketry. Sentenced along with Aquino are Bernabe Buscayno, better known as Commander Dante, chief of the Communist-led New People’s Army (NPA), and Victor Corpus, a renegade military officer who in 1970 defected to the NPA with a cache of firearms from the Philippine Military Academy.

The international outcry against the death sentence stuns Marcos, and he is forced to promise a re-opening of the Aquino trial. The death sentence is never implemented.

In 1978 Marcos calls for an election for his newly established parliament. Aquino is allowed to file a certificate of candidacy--but he is not permitted to leave his prison cell to campaign. His seven-year-old daughter Kris does the campaigning for him. Ranged against the opposition ticket led by Aquino is the administration party led by Imelda Marcos. The campaign heats up, and on the eve of the election, Metro Manila erupts in an unprecedented noise barrage that is in large part a show of support for the opposition coalition, which is named Laban (meaning: "Fight"). Cars go around the city dragging tin cans. Churches ring their bells. Tens of thousands of residents come out into the streets banging pots and pans and shouting the opposition party’s name and slogan: Laban! Laban!

But the ballot boxes have been stuffed even before the noise barrage begins. The election results show Imelda Marcos topping the polls and her party making a clean sweep. Led by former Senator Lorenzo Tañada, the grand old man of Philippine politics, a group of about 600 stage a funeral march for the “death of democracy.” All 600 are arrested and brought to Fort Bonifacio on charges of sedition and subversion.

In March of 1980, after seven years and seven months in solitary confinement, Aquino suffers a heart attack while doing push-ups in his prison cell. A triple heart bypass is deemed necessary, but Aquino refuses an operation in the the Philippines, afraid that heart surgeons can finish him off on orders of the dictator. Knowing that the world will condemn him if Aquino dies in prison, Marcos reluctantly agrees to let Aquino go to Dallas, Texas, for an operation at the Baylor Hospital, internationally renowned for heart surgery.

Aquino is made to promise that, while in the United States, he will not do or say anything that will embarrass the Marcos regime.


THE TRIPLE HEART BYPASS IS A SUCCESS. Afterwards, Harvard offers Aquino a fellowship in international studies, and he decides to accept it. His family is allowed to follow him to Boston.

It is a quiet, idyllic time for the Aquino family. Ninoy Aquino immerses himself in books, and his children, enjoying the company of their father for the first time in their lives, get the impression that he is renouncing politics and starting a new life in America, a life of scholarly contemplation. But before long, Aquino is on the speech circuit, addressing Filipino exile groups, lambasting the conjugal dictatorship of the Marcoses with his old impassioned eloquence and mordant wit. Reminded of his promise to the Marcoses, Aquino replies: “A pact with the devil is no pact at all.”

Three years after coming to America, Aquino learns from reliable sources that Marcos is suffering from a crippling disease, lupus erythematosus, and is on the verge of death. It is time, Aquino decides, to return to the Philippines.

On one of her shopping sprees in the States, Imelda Marcos summons Aquino to her hotel and tries to dissuade him from going back home. There are reports, she says, that Aquino will be killed if he returns: the Communists are out to get him. The members of Aquino’s own family try to persuade him to remain in Boston, where they have spent some of the happiest moments in their family life. But Aquino has made up his mind, and the danger to his life only adds to the lure of his country’s siren call. He quotes Gandhi to justify his decision: “The willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God and man.” He solemnly declares that “the Filipino is worth dying for,” but he also manages to joke: “I would rather die for a cause than be run over by a Boston taxicab.”

The Marcos regime has warned all international airlines that their rights to land or transit in Manila will be cancelled if they take Benigno Aquino Jr. But secret sympathizers in a Philippine consulate come up with a passport carrying Aquino’s photo but in the name of one Marcial Bonifacio.

In August of 1983, Marcial Bonifacio boards a plane in the company of a gaggle of foreign journalists. On a stopover in Taipei, he tells the journalists: “You have to be ready with your cameras because this action can become very fast. In a matter of three minutes, it could be over. I am taking some precautions. I have my bulletproof vest. But if they hit me in the head, there’s nothing I can do.”

It is practically a prediction of what is to come when the China Airlines plane lands at the Manila International Airport.

When Aquino’s body is taken to the cemetery to be buried, the nation witnesses the biggest outpouring of grief and rage ever. Tens of thousands join the funeral march, and hundreds of thousands line Metro Manila’s major streets to catch a glimpse of the casket and to offer food and drinks to the marchers. It takes nearly twelve hours for the funeral cortege to reach its destination. Halfway through, a sudden rainstorm drenches the crowd and floods the streets, but hardly anyone runs for cover. It is the longest funeral march in the country’s history, but it will hardly merit mention in the dictatorship’s controlled media.

Within days of the funeral, the anti-dictatorship protest movement--heretofore limited to left-wing militants and disempowered opposition politicians in the cities, and armed Communist guerrillas and Muslim secessionists in the countryside--spontaneously balloons into a broad, massive popular front that cuts through classes and ideologies and involves hundreds of thousands, even millions, in almost daily demonstrations. Many of these protest actions are festive affairs, marked by the spirit and satiric humor of the theater of the absurd, which explains why this period of upheaval will later be known as the Confetti Revolution. But some rallies are raucous events that end in violent dispersal by riot police armed with truncheons, tear gas, and water cannons.

In November of 1985, more than two years after the Aquino assassination, an ailing Marcos is forced by public pressure and international opinion to call a snap election. Cory Aquino, housewife and mother and a martyr’s widow, is prevailed upon to run for President: she is the only one who can unify the fractured opposition against the still formidable Marcos political machine.

Like her husband before her, Cory Aquino is cheated of victory in the counting of the ballots. She calls for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience. In February of 1986, a rebel military faction attempts a coup. Marcos gets wind of the plot and starts to move to crush the rebellion. But for four days in February millions of people come out into the streets and surround the military camps where the rebels are holed up. People power, armed only with rosaries and flowers, defies tanks and planes. On the fourth day, the dictatorship falls. The Marcoses are forced to flee to Hawaii.

Cory Aquino assumes power as President of the Philippines. In her inaugural speech, she acknowledges the country’s immense debt to her husband for the restoration of democracy. But for the vagaries of history, it is Benigno Aquino Jr. who should have been President.


THE END

IN MEMORIAM

Sinulat ko ang tulang ito sa pagitan ng 1983 at 1986--pagkatapos patayin si Ninoy Aquino, bago naganap ang pag-aalsa sa EDSA.

Ang ibang mga binabanggit sa tulang ito ay sina Emmanuel Lacaba, Leo Alto, Florendo "Dodong" Castillo, Eugene Grey, Tony Tagamolila, Lorena Barros, Lerry Nofuente, Charlie del Rosario, Caloy Tayag, Henry Romero, Jun Flores, at Edgar "Edjop" Jopson--mga kakilala, kaibigan, kasama na namatay o naglaho noong panahon ng batas militar.


IN MEMORIAM

Ni Jose F. Lacaba

I

Dumadapa ang talahib
sa hampas ng hangin at ulan,
nanginginig ang dahon ng kamyas.
Masuwerte ako’t may bubong sa aking ulunan
at masasarhan ko ang bintana
kung ako’y maanggihan.
Masuwerte, di tulad ng puno ng bayabas
na susuray-suray, parang babagsak;
di tulad ng mga hinahaplit ng lamig
sa bangketa, sa ilalim ng tulay,
sa loob ng mga dingding na yero’t karton,
o sawali’t kugon,
sa tubuhan at talahiban, sa gubat, bundok at parang.

Masuwerte ako’t nararamdaman ko pa ang lamig.
Marami na ang nilagom ng lamig,
at ang aking dibdib
ay parang niyog na pinupukpok ng mapurol na itak
ngayon, habang ginugunita
silang wala na sa ating piling:
Emmanuel, kapatid;
Leo, bayaw;
Dodong, inaanak;
Eugene, Tony, Lorena, Lerry,
Charlie, Caloy, Henry, Jun,
pati si Edjop na aking tinuya,
oo, pati na rin si Ninoy na pinagdamutan ko ng tiwala,
silang hindi lamang mga pangalan sa lapida
kundi kakilala, kaibigan, kasama
sa litanya ng aking lumbay.

Hindi ko iniluluha ang kanilang pagkamatay.
Ang kamatayan para sa layuning wagas
ay bulaklak ng tagumpay,
tanglaw sa mabatong landas.

II

Nagiging sentimental ba ako?
Pasensiya, ginoo, ganito siguro ang minumulto.
Ganito ang nangyayari kapag
bumabagyo sa labas at walang magawa sa loob ng bahay,
at sa kalooban ay dalawang bato ang nag-uumpugan:
tungkulin at hangarin,
hangarin at tungkulin.
O sabihin nating
tungkulin sa iba at tungkulin
sa sarili. O
sabihin nating hangaring
maging langgam, nangangalap ng makakain
para sa kapwa langgam,
at hangaring maging tipaklong, salaginto,
kumakanta, nagniningning.

Marami na akong narating
sa mga oras na gising,
kung minsan ay nakikihalo
sa mga mano-mano at labulabo, kahit nangangalog
ang tuhod, at kung minsan,
namumulot ng lumot sa mga nalimutang ilog.
Kung saan-saan na ako nahiga’t natulog:
damuhan, batuhan, matigas na lupa,
makitid na bangko, malapad na mesa,
sahig na tabla, may banig, walang banig,
sahig na semento, natatakpan lamang ng diyaryo,
silat-silat na sahig na kawayan,
tinatagos ng alimuom,
kinakalawang na tarima
sa seldang wala pang isang dipa ang bintana.
Ngayon ay nakalatag ako sa kutson,
nababalot ng kumot, nangangarap nang gising.

Hinahalinhan ng hininga
ang haginit ng hangin
habang ginugunita
silang wala na sa ating piling:
Emmanuel, kapatid;
Leo, bayaw;
Dodong, inaanak;
Eugene, Tony, Lorena, Lerry,
Charlie, Caloy, Henry, Jun,
pati na si Edjop na aking tinuya,
oo, pati na rin si Ninoy na pinagdamutan ko ng tiwala.
Sila’y nangarap din nang gising
subalit ang mga pangarap nila’y matalim na bituin.
Ang mga berdugo’t panginoon
ay natakot sa kanilang mga pangarap.
Natakot na baka ang kanilang mga pangarap
ay magkatotoo.
At dahil dito sila’y wala na sa ating piling.

III

Alang-alang sa masaganang dugo
na bumulwak sa batok na pinasok ng punglo,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nagsasawalang-kibo.

Alang-alang sa sampal,
suntok, dagok, kulata, pangunguryente ng bayag,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nagkikibit-balikat.

Alang-alang sa masakit na hampas
ng batuta sa likod at tubo sa balakang,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nagtutulug-tulugan.

Alang-alang sa alambreng tinik
na iginapos nang mahigpit sa tuhod at hita,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nagwawalang-bahala.

Alang-alang sa pagkaladkad sa lansangan
ng bangkay na inihulog nang walang kabaong sa hukay,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t walang pakialam.

Alang-alang sa nagitlang mukha
ng buntis na tinadtad ng bala ang tiyan,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nagmamaang-maangan.

Alang-alang sa damit na natigmak ng dugo
at pinaknit sa katawan ng ginahasang puri,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nagtataingang-kawali.

Alang-alang sa nilalangaw na katawan
at pugot na ulong itinulos sa libis ng nayon,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nag-uurong-sulong.

Alang-alang sa mga kamay na pinutol
para hindi na kailanman makapagpaawit ng gitara,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nagtatakip ng mata.

Alang-alang sa tagilirang binuksan
at pinagpasakan ng utak mula sa biniyak na bungo,
kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t nakahalukipkip, nakayuko.

Kaawaan, patawarin, Panginoon,
ang mga berdugo’t lahat kaming
naglalambitin sa balag ng alanganin,
sapagkat ang bayang naghahangad ng katarungan,
pagdating ng panahon ng paniningil ng utang,
pagdating ng panahong uulan ng luha at dugo,
ay baka hindi na marunong
maawa’t magpatawad,
baka hindi na marunong maawa’t magpatawad.


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).

BAHAGHARI

Ilang araw matapos ilibing ang yumaong Pangulong Corazon Aquino, nahilingan akong magbasa ng tula sa isang programang inisponsor ng organisasyong Bantayog ng mga Bayani. Ginanap ang programa noong Agosto 9 sa Yuchengco Auditorium sa Bantayog ng mga Bayani compound sa Quezon Avenue, corner EDSA, Quezon City. Panghuling araw iyon ng isang-linggong tribute kay Cory na isinagawa ng Bantayog; co-sponsor sa panghuling araw ang Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP).

Binasa ko (at pagkatapos ay inawit nang a cappella) ang “Bahaghari,” isang kantang nilapatan ng musika ni Ding Achacoso. Isa ito sa mga awiting sinulat ko para sa isang 16-mm musical film na gagawin sana namin ni Mike de Leon noong simula ng Dekada ’80, bago pinatay si Ninoy Aquino. Kung hindi ako nagkakamali, sa simula’y may pamagat na Sangandaan ang binabalak naming musical, pero sa kalaunan ay ginawa ko itong Batubato sa Langit. Natapos ko ang storyline, ang sequence guide, at lahat ng titik ng mga awitin para sa musical (na tinawag naming “Brechtian zarzuela”), pero hindi na ako umabot sa script stage.

Sa pagkamatay ni Ninoy, ang napagbuhusan namin ng panahon nina Mike at Ding ay isang documentary na pinamagatang Signos at ang pelikulang Sister Stella L. Isang kanta mula sa binabalak na Brechtian zarzuela ang ginamit na isa sa mga theme songs ng Sister Stella L: ang “Aling Pag-ibig Pa,” na binigyang-tinig ni Pat Castillo sa pelikula at sa plaka. Nang ipalabas ang Sister Stella L. sa 1984 Venice International Film Festival, ang pamagat nito ay Sangandaan (Incroci sa Italyano, Crossroad sa Ingles). Pinagtiyap na sa unang storyline ay Sister Corazon de Jesus ang pangalan ni Sister Stella L. Ang nasa isip ko noon ay hindi si Corazon Aquino, kundi ang Sagrado Corazon de Jesus.

Narito ang titik ng piyesang binigkas ko at pinangahasang kantahin noong parangal kay Cory:

BAHAGHARI

Titik ni Jose F. Lacaba
Himig ni Ding Achacoso


Huwag kang masindak
sa kulog at kidlat
o sa alulong ng hangin sa dagat.
May bahaghari, may bahaghari
pagkatapos ng unos.

Huwag kang lumuha
kung mataas ang baha,
wala pang bahang hindi humuhupa.
May bahaghari, may bahaghari
pagkatapos ng unos.

Sa likod ng ulap
may araw na sumisikat,
sa dulo ng dilim
may liwanag na kay ningning!

Huwag mong itaghoy
ang lagas na dahon,
may bagong dahon na muling sisibol.
May bahaghari, may bahaghari
pagkatapos ng unos.