Reverberations of Revolution

I. The Revolution

“The old is not yet dead, the new is not yet born… That’s this moment. There are intimations of the new, there is consolidation among the old. In between, there is a transition. Here, a lot will be formed. But many of those formed will be morbid.”

—  from "The Great Left Divide"

“One man will think for 48 million Filipinos”

—  from HARING BAYAN: Democracy and People Power in the Philippines

Specters of communism haunt many immigrants.

I first met the ghost through my mother who introduced me (through stories, not literally) to the New People’s Army, a group waging guerilla warfare throughout the Filipino countryside, championing their constant violence against proletariats and bourgeoisie alike as their tool of ‘liberation.’ It is the longest running ‘communist’ insurgency in the world (though they don’t follow much of its ideals) all led by Jose Maria Sison, their leader of admittedly bourgeois upbringings who died last year. So, vis a vis my mother, I came to know my first variant of McCarthyism; how American of her!

Alongside these stories of militant rebels, I learned of what happened to those who were ‘too political’: Folks who disappeared under the Ferdinand Marcos regime, friends shot, lovers dead. Daily news of the deceased. Keeping your head down made sure it stayed on your body, and people’s heads were so down, some of them went underground and a counter-movement against the dictator began.

There was the First Quarter Storm of 1970, a period of protests consisting of events like the Battle of Mendiola, where protesters clashed with police (one side was clearly being shot); A ‘People’s March’ in Manila with students, workers and the urban poor crowding the streets; the Diliman Commune protest of 1971, when students occupied their university campus in the romanticized 60s-70s fashion, which left several students injured and one dead (a 17-year-old boy named Pastor Mesina), and the Plaza Miranda bombings, which killed nine and injured 95, reportedly done by the government or the CPP though both deny it.

Regardless of its cause, the Miranda bombings was Marcos’ excuse to declare martial law, leading to the persecution and death of many.

One of the most significant protests occurred in 1983, when Ninoy Aquino, opposition leader to Marcos, was assassinated. The streets were decorated with yellow ribbons to welcome Ninoy’s return to the Philippines. His mother advised him against it, especially with the upheavals and antagonisms present in the country, but he went anyway and upon arrival at the airport, shouts of “Pusila! Pusila! Pusila!” emerged and he was shot on the airplane tarmac. Ten days after Ninoy’s death, more than a million Filipinos would carry him to his grave, along 19 miles for 10 hours and a half. One mourner was reportedly struck by lightning and died.

So, Ninoy came, and died, as many others did. The Filipino people had seen and felt much. Liberation from centuries of occupation and imperialism, through Spain, America and Japan, engendered a discussion of how to build a country anew. Is it built through sacrifice? Through industry? Through democracy? A market? Capitalism or communism? What -ism, what body, what people, makes a country? Freedom was a gargantuan possibility. After Filipinos dismounted the ‘colonial horse,’ where would they walk? Would they really be governed by another administration, another group of people who had no stake, nor care, in their living?

As if in answer, 1986 came, and the People’s Power Movement came to its crux. Between February 22 to 25, Malacañang, the ‘White House’ of sorts in the Philippines, was surrounded by protesters. Flashes of yellow re-emerged in the streets, particularly at EDSA, Epifanio de Los Santos Avenue. People were tired and starving, and many felt that death was nothing worse than what they could feel now.

My mother was praying in the countryside with her family at the time. She was Catholic, like many Filipinos, and simply wanted everything to go well. A tense fervor swallowed the country. You couldn’t help but think: would I live? Go to school? Meet my friends? Have another meal? What happens now? Soldiers readied themselves. Tanks rolled in. Archbishops, militants and cardinals were interspersed throughout the fiasco. As death seemed imminent, neither the religious nor secular provided answers.

However, the guns would be lowered. Military defections in the Filipino army took place. Radio and TV stations were reclaimed by protesters. Cory Aquino would be sworn in as President as Marcos tried to retain his power. Panic ensued, and one of Marcos’ generals, Fabian Ver, implores Marcos to authorize an airstrike to disperse the protesters. On air, before the TV screen, Marcos replies: “My order is not to attack.” Some Filipino ‘loyalists’ praised Marcos for his ‘forbearance’ and ‘self-control’. What 3,200+ extrajudicial killings and 75,000+ reported instances of torture under his rule attests to, I leave you to ponder.

Protests continued, and on February 25, protests would end. Cory Aquino, wife of Ninoy, would be sworn in as President, hand on the Bible owned by her dead husband’s mother. At Malacañang, Marcos was preparing to flee. Around midnight, with millions of dollars in gold, jewelry and cash, the Marcos family fled. Protesters celebrated, and Malacañang’s gates broke as people flooded in. They entered, walked around, saw its halls and saw the opulence that had come at the cost of the Filipino people. They entered the dining room. On the table were plates of hot food, untouched and left in a haste according to my father, who stood in the room that day; what he felt, I don’t know, but complex histories produce conflicting individuals, and Marcos was gone: he was saved by the U.S.A., never again to return to the Philippines.

II. The Leaving

“Kung hindi tayo kikibo, sinong kikibo? Kung di tayo kikilos, sinong kikilos? Kung hindi ngayon, kailan pa?”

“If we don’t move, who will move? If we don’t act, who will act? If not now, when?”

—  a slogan created by Abraham “Ditto” Pascual Sarmiento in UP Collegian

17 years later, my mother herself would come to America. Big ambitions filled her head and 1986 was long past. She came out of the countryside with our family. We had lived on! Cory Aquino had the presidency and with her ascension came hope. My mom went to college, and through the years presidents changed. However, conditions didn’t: Poverty remained and new problems emerged. Rapid urbanization during and after Marcos’ rule created new sociocultural issues and divisions. People remained dissatisfied and to this day, the NPA still recruits, guerillas still exist and political corruption still remains. Much of the country is still ruled by the same old political dynasties and families. In fact, by 1991, the Marcos family was back in the Philippines (though Marcos Sr. the dictator was dead).

The Aquinos accuse the Marcos’ of corruption, the Marcos’ accuse the Aquinos, who then accuse the Dutertes and so on and so on. Of the 80 provinces of the Philippines, about 73 have similar familial dynasties. Then, in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte came. Drug wars were waged and thousands were killed, and under his presidency, Ferdinand Marcos would be buried in the national Heroes’ cemetery. In 2022, the son of Marcos became the new president, rewriting his family’s past and rejuvenating his family name anew.

The genealogy of the country concerned my mother no longer for she had a life of her own to wrangle. In 2003, I was born. My mother was now in New York, the ‘Big Apple.’ Things were new, and America’s politics seemed particularly new, especially with its bold proclamations of Democracy. But a month after she arrived in America, the Twin Towers fell. The Iraq war started. Impingements and intertwinings occurred, and lives were lost, claimed, and taken once more.

Revolution entails more than destruction: it means making something of fragments. It means not only transformation and preservation, but cycles, in the way that one never flees one’s oppressions but faces it.

When does one first meet war? At birth? Or when it’s too late? From a distance? Or on our street? Supposedly post-racial and post-everything compared to the ‘third world,’ America promised to be the Dream. Instead, many immigrants were presented with a dissociative vision: America the dream, America the nightmare and America the slumbering and unfulfilled project, that just needed one more voice, one more eventual American, one more nation under the Nation, and perhaps, in amnesia or jubilee, it would overcome its own silences and cacophonies to create a sacrosanct nation for all.

I saw the incongruency of this country, perhaps in the way that my mother would have seen the Philippines. The colonialists were ousted, and freedom was there, so why did Ferdinand Marcos come? But again, he was more a symptom of a condition rather than a cause, revealing that Filipinos were still invariably shackled. By what? Did the key break on the path to ‘liberation’?

Revolution entails more than destruction: it means making something of fragments. It means not only transformation and preservation, but cycles, in the way that one never flees one’s oppressions but faces it. And this honesty towards one’s condition, of recognizing that one is still affected in whatever way, leaves one yearning for more.

A mouth opens in America, and at times the words become silent.

III. The Reverberations

“O kay sarap mabuhay lalo na’t may lambingan.”

“Oh how good to live, especially when there is tenderness.”

—  from “Maalaala Mo Kaya”

12 years later, 2015, my mother and I are watching a melodrama called M.M.K, Maalala Mo Kaya (Could You Remember?), an anthology series detailing the hardships and lives of true-to-life Filipinos who overcame situations, detailing ‘bootstrap’ stories and the like. A special episode featured Manny Pacquiao, a boxing world champion and Filipino icon. It is said that whenever he has a fight, crime decreases in the Philippines!

Anyways, my mother stares at the screen of whatever episode we were watching that night. She stares, blinks, then says her story could be there on the TV, flashing before us. I laughed in disbelief at the time; I couldn’t quite fathom my family or my people’s condition then. I was quite numb to myself, and as an extension, to her. To admit something has happened to your people is hard, especially in America, where admitting particular disappointments and inequities are often pinned on the supposed incompetence of an individual and their people.

She continued, as I paraphrase and translate from Tagalog: “You know English well. You should write our story down.” I couldn’t fathom that either. Our story being valued? Who would it be valued by and why? Would we not be an Oriental oddity, an exoticized good, peddled around on a global scale outside of the local marketplace? It’s a fearful thing to be a story or a narrative, to be exchanged and bartered, to be reduced to an expression of something else other than Life.

I wanted to feel human in whatever context I was in, and now, I may understand what she may have wanted. She only wanted something to corroborate her life and her sense of reality, to prove that things had happened, to and around her, that she had lived and still lives, like many others in America yearning for a confirmation that one has existed with or without a country.

And in this country, in this house we call America, questions of liberation, freedom, and ‘unity’ have defined us since our inception. Who are we? Who is ‘we’? And at times I don’t feel my particularities until I am with others, and I remember an old friend saying once, sometimes I forget you are Asian, until I remember that you are, and yes, I am that and something else that I’m forgetting, because we’ve all been touched in some way by this American malaise, of this ‘figuring out’ and yearning.

IV. The Questions That Remain

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul”

—  Leviticus 17:11

How do we process a break long after it happens? I suppose the first step is to return to something, so I remember this: On early mornings my mother would see her father rise. Outside, there were chickens crowing as rubber trees flitted in the wind. Village folks, farmers, and workers were about. Women at the marketplace carried goods, coca-cola and Americana. It was the 70s, and she was young. The economic situation was damnable, but my mother told me there was something about that life that gave her joy, though she was aware of her condition.

There was the sun. The country air. Plants and ‘nature.’ And most of all, family. In spite of what revolution or change does to a country and its people, they held onto each other.

All I know is that people have always lived in spite of deprivations, for the dispossessed have always lived despite death.

She recollects one morning where there was only a singular egg to be shared for breakfast. She was hungry, and between her brother and sister, they divided it into three. I don’t know how good that egg was; as for what my grandparents ate, I also don’t know. All I know is that people have always lived in spite of deprivations, for the dispossessed have always lived despite death.

There are no bidas, no heroes in this story, or any story for that matter. No protagonists, only recurrences. Those we focus on, we focus on because they are in our blood, our heads and once there, they live, no matter how far removed or far they are from us. Homesickness and yearning only ever means finding yourself strangely transposed in a piece you don’t quite note. So you move, and you play and a note is out of time and you’re trying to remember why you’re syncopated.

I’ve come to regard my familial phantasms in such a way. Like a ghost looking for a body, I see my history, and I lose myself to it sometimes. Possession: that’s the issue. Filipinos are a translated being, as all humanity is. Who possesses a translation? The language? The author? Or the translator? All that remains is a body, whether real or an ‘idea,’ a corpus of work, a word, a book, newspaper clipping or something. Looking at garbage in the street, or the metal or concrete, I sometimes wonder where it came from.

I would come to be American in the fact that my mother is not. I feel at times that the act of immigration is one of literal translation. To transfigure one’s culture to relay itself to another: it’s not hegemony, it’s not adaptability nor assimilation but simply survival. Because you can’t speak survival in another country with the same tongues. America has new mouths and structures. Saying bayan ko and kailan pa is of another time and space, a mirror world.

The People’s Power Movement is long past, and I am now in the States, but what remains? I guess names. The fact that so many stories converge within me, producing confusion. Or is it the fact that I am connected, but painfully severed, from my past, so I can’t help but feel that in each story I learn, I hear something of my own people?

“When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams: On the brow of the sleeping people, the poem is a constellation of blood,” said Octavio Paz. I look up at the sky, not many stars in the cities of America. No Big Dipper, Orion or Hunter, though those are Greek conceptions not exactly pertaining to my people. My people’s myths are somewhere, but I am struggling to see where as I sift through newspapers I’ve never held, within archives that attest that my family’s history has passed.

So, like an American, I’ve come to see myself in others because I can’t see myself. In immigration, things are not lost, but turned into impressions, or a hardscrabble reality, rugged, realistic, rough. In the way that colors flow into one another, it’s the only way I can envision an American, one, who despite all parochiality and myopia, finds themself incontrovertibly tied to another. Someone is in their blood regardless of blood, and their living depends on how they’ve come to face this fact.

In “Time is A Mother’', poet, archivist, writer, and dreamer, Ocean Vuong, wonders, “No, not beauty –– but you and I outliving it…” To outlive, and be outlived… History is a way of figuring out what has happened to one’s people, a way of continuing in spite of death, to not exactly give birth, but to reincarnate what’s been ‘lost,’ in the process finding possibilities of redemption, not simply for you and I, but perhaps for what remains in the land our forebearers left.

When we look back, what do we see? Things past, or our face, woefully present, looking back?