I started going to Davao City soon after I joined Jack in the volunteer brigades. I would be walking with the girls I knew back in college, and we would cross paths with Alsa Masa (Arise, Masses!) marchers, their placards in red ink screaming anti-communist slogans. CPP-NPA Salot sa katawhan! Down with godless ideology! I felt no fear either. If anything, I felt spite. Anger. Our beloved ignorant masses. Davao’s dregs. Toothpick’s cult members cloned in scores in the urban enclaves. The rot in the foundation being erected.
We tramped along, I and my friends, past garbage-filled lots, past tumbledown houses and half-bare latrines, running children at our heels. We would head straight to Agdao, to buy ourselves homemade ice cream, ladled out straight from the aluminum bucket of a thin man with skin dark from the sun. He could have been our neighbor’s son in the province, the one our grandparents would bribe with a pint of coconut wine to shovel dirt out the roadside canal. I did not ask if he was on our side, a disemployed factory worker who went on strike and not a taho vendor tasked to identify UG houses. I kept my thoughts to myself, and my friends kept theirs, as though not naming the worse would make them go away, then we could have our treat: delicious, cheap, home-made ice cream made in Agdao. Maybe we were just testing the waters. We do that all the time. If we could go in and out of the place unmolested, we must be winning more ground. By then the Lakbayan marchers had outflanked the Alsa Masa and the Tadtads, and Cory Aquino had raised a fist and sung the International.
I frequented DEMS, the long house along Matina Highway where most everyone I knew in the movement trained. Photography, news and feature writing, script writing, chalk-talk, slide production, low-intensity conflict, most everything there was to learn. Jack showed me Our Roots are Still Alive, an audio-visual presentation on minority peoples’ struggle for self-determination. Rene and Amy made them, Jack bragged. Rene is an anthropology major from Diliman, a writer; Amy his partner-comrade. They were with the Center for Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Manila, then later, they transferred base to Cagayan de Oro, closer to home, closer to ground. CMCD was renamed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, staying behind in a tiny office in Quezon City, which was how Jaja our duwendeng kapre comrade got taken out of PETA to take charge of it, along with one or two other handful of volunteers. A lucky thing for me: Had she stayed with PETA, I would have not known her.
I would have not heard her sing The International, the first stanza in French. I would have not gone with her to the KAMPILAN congress in Cotabato where early morning of the first day, the sun glowing, we sat on stumps of wood by the walkway, the three of us—she, Bing Gamolo, and I—singing Belle Ciao Belle Ciao again and again, while delegates walked up and down over our shoulders, bearing glasses and toothbrushes, the boys smoking their first sticks of cigarettes, carrying the brown envelopes loosely tied with sword-shaped nametags yet unhung around their necks. Nazra and the KAMPILAN champions waited inside the hall, gearing for battle.
I’m going to fetch our keynote speaker at ten, come with me, Jaja had nudged me between songs. Midmorning, we went to Awang Airport to meet Alan Jazmines, whose name I vaguely recalled as one of those less articulate, or perhaps just quieter, political detainees—beside Joma—interviewed on television upon release from prison by Cory. Then the day after, while everyone was still staggering from a pouncing—our Islamic brothers rejecting the name KAMPILAN as left-leaning rather than Bangsa Moro leaning, and throwing the meal stubs we gave them saying it’s like that under communism food are rationed and everyone had to wait in line—I went with Jaja again to take our guest back to the airport. He had asked her to accompany him to the bazaar—the barter trade at Super—before heading to the airport. He wanted to buy her mother a malong to remember Cotabato by. At the airport he handed us his nametag and unused meal stubs—a sad, sweet parting gift, over what hurt us hard back there in the congress hall—.
Rene’s name I would always associate with Tribal Forum, that neatly-made quarterly magazine which our sister organization, PACT—People’s Action for Cultural Ties—put out. PACT was a pioneer social development institution that helped UCCP—United Church of Christ of the Philippines—map out the region’s multiethnic landscape, naming the various groups and languages and their specific locations and places of origins. I remember Rene coming by our office but once, looking for Jamela or Nazra, even Jack. Didn’t stay a minute as they were all out. Rene would die in a plane crash a decade later, the plane going down into the slopes of Mount Sumagaya in Claveria, Misamis Oriental, before landing at Lumbia Airport in Cagayan de Oro. Around the time cell phones must have come into vogue, or Nazra would not be relating to me what was relayed to her.
Tumawag pa raw si Rene kay Amy bago sila nag-crash.
Rene had accordingly made a call to Amy seconds before the plane went down, he saying, the plane was diving down steeply and so fast, it looked like they were going to crash.
Magka-crash yata kami—.
We were to do a slide show on the Moro people, Jack said. Similar to the one Rene and Amy made. Could I please write the script?
I did make one after going through a series of trainings at DEMS—photography, scriptwriting, drama—and I had a great time while on training. We went around the crowded pavements and the shoreline communities of Davao trying on our rules of thirds, our long shots, close-ups, the various angles from which a human figure may be shot at. Boy Hernani, yanong lungsuranon— humble city dweller—and DEMS’ inhouse photographer, behind us all throughout, playing tour guide, lookout, trouble shooter. Our group produced a five-minute slide show on the gas price hike, the narration and the dialogues in Cebuano, and I played urban poor wife serving supper and complaining to a driver-husband, Tata of Data Link-Mindanao —DALIM—a groupmate who would be detained a little later, directing the playacting for the much-needed images.
How everyone laughed, including DEMS’ comrade-bosses Mac Tiu and Don Pagusara, Melba, their young artist-trainor, turning her head up to me to say how I look it. Angayan kaayo ka!
Then I returned to Iligan and set to work, some of the recording done at DALIM in Cagayan de Oro. How I harassed several voice talents into auditioning for the narrator’s voice—including Jamela OMG, making her take a quick trip to Cagayan on top of weekdays’ and night-hour work shuffles between Iligan and Marawi to record a three to five-minute part—then conducted more try-outs among friends and DEMS’ artist staff in Davao. Even made a trip to Ozamis because I was told there was an Australian artist-photographer there, someone in the ISW—International Solidarity Work—network, who made very good slide shows.
Neil Frazer, the artist-photographer, and his Filipina wife were very warm to me. We sat and traded notes and stories. Neil told me our friend Mario had asked him to produce a slide show on the MNCs—multinational corporations—in Mindanao. More than glad enough to be useful, Neil crafted one. Mario had it shown to Dole plantation workers, the ones in the workers’ unions, without pretesting it. We democrats liked doing that, herding in workers and anyone in sight as jurors and audience of our shows and pretest shows.
Five minutes into the show and Mario had to stop the carousel. He was so embarrassed. The narrator was all praises for the US company—how the welfare of the country and the worker’s family was at the heart of the much misunderstood land grab—. It turned out there were two points of view though the whole caboodle used the same images inversely ordered after the first part, the first slide as the last slide and the last slide as the first in the other half of the show. The second part was told from the point of view of the ragtag poor, the exploited and impoverished plantation worker, and belied with vengeance all the claims earlier made by the company.
Neil did not say what Mario and company did with it afterwards. Neither did I hear anyone mention that small incident. I reckon they had a lively discussion—Mario and Neil—and later, Mario and the comrades. I would have loved to listen in, Jamela, Daniel, and Ompong in the review panel; Nazra, Rene, Amy and the Mindanao Commission as main discussants, one or the other talking artistic merit, propaganda value—where’s political bias here, how much political bias there, do we have time for this, vis-à-vis our most urgent tasks in these insurrectionary times—.
Our own slide show got done. The final takes—voice recording and sound-mixing—were completed at DEMS, with Choi in charge of the technical side and Mac Tiu the office head even helping with the script, writing with red ink on the margins: Recast. AWK. Syntax. They had this topnotch basement facility for audio recording and sound mixing, and anyone in the vicinity may be dragged in to help. Geejay, one of Mac Tiu’s younger staff, was first narrator, and I don’t remember all the other details, the second or third narrator, only that everything was done for fun and for the love of it. The script lacked solid data and in terrible want of clear propositions, unbacked as it was by research, the training for which, I realized later, had to be completed after years of hard life. What I got for keeping away from those poleco books—at the time I did not know what beast poleco was—lining the shelves like a phalanx of red soldiers guarding the Kremlin.
Got shown a few times to our YS visitors but I really forgot what happened to that. Wasn’t very useful, I guess: it was in English and too literary in a way that our rural poor did not understand. The peasants in countryside villages and the fishermen in the islands and shoreline communities hardly spoke either English or Tagalog, their poetry and metaphors in their own languages always way better. Then it only told the stories of the three major Muslim groups, the 14 or 15 others left out in limbo. Sentimental rubbish for the most part, enough to make Tess cry.
Tess was our community organizer in Marawi. We must have edited the slides in their office in Marawi, or pretested it before the girls there to solicit feedback. When Tess got to the part where the Maranao character narrating said that they Maranaos are the source of water that powered the engines of industry in Iligan but they don’t even have drinking water, how she cried.
I don’t remember showing it to Mario or to Jamela. Jack praised almost everything a comrade wrote but said no more. He did not say, for instance, that he expected an ethnographic profile, and I loved him for that.
Mario was some kind of a laughing Jesus to me. Everyone’s friend; always up and about. A Task Force Mindanao Task Force Philippines of one, all-support. Must be why he found no time to view the slides in his room or in Neil Frazer’s studio. Would leave all the braying to others and would rather do something that would move things, quickly going around, quietly lodging a case here, an appeal there, in behalf of, for the sake of, laughing at your naïve presumptions and vehement objections until life tripped you over. Mario’s office along EDSA (complete address, 879 Epifanio delos Santos Avenue, Quezon City) was always full of people. I hardly knew anyone in the eighties, they be artists, musicians, theatre hands, pastors, laymen, ex-detainees, white or black, who did not know Mario.
Our Roots are Still Alive, the slide show, came from a poem written by Adel, also of the same title. Adel was one of the early volunteers that staffed those pioneer Church institutions engaged in Muslim-Christian dialogue. She was some kind of a firebrand, on account of that poem, and also, because of her unconcealed distrust of Party politics. She also distrusted Moro elite politics as much as she disliked Moro rebel politics—rebellion as road to high office— and if the comrades refrained from badmouthing her, I suppose it was because at heart she was no princess and had no lost vassals herself.
She worked some for our office. Took homework assigned her, coming around to browse through the stacks and borrow references, then going home to Marawi before late. She had been asked to write her heart out as very few authoritative texts on Moro RSD—short key for right to self-determination—existed, none of which written by local Muslims. The ones we used were the papers written by Aijas Ahmad and Eliseo Mercado, Jr. The former is a Pakistani, the latter a Manila-born OMI cadre-priest based in Cotabato, known to comrades and friends as Father Jun. Ahmad elaborated on US participation in the war against the Muslims in Mindanao, lending credence to the US imperialism cry our Quiapo rallyists were regularly issuing, while Fr. Jun talked of the Moro people as an amorphous mass and distinguished a bit between elite rule and mass following, both promoted under the banner of Islam.
Adel did hand in her bit after a little while although I cannot recollect much of what she wrote besides the old role-of-Islam paean. I remember more Jamela’s side note: it held the past in a romantic light—the romantic past that again—. Ugh. In another light touch, she would tell of an FQS lady intellectual—the one whose bed and palatial house with the front gate padlocked got walked out of, the stowaway spending a night over coffee and beer at our kitchen table—who took to romancing the native, bselling herself off late in the day as adopted daughter of the Cordillera—
Adel’s fame preceded her. Even before I heard her name mentioned in our small office at DBP Drive, I already glimpsed a little of the character. One morning that I was fiddling with the books in the shelf, I opened this story set by Carlos Bulosan, and on the bottom of the title page, a scribbled note: Dear Mario, please extend my regards to the woman named Adel. Let me share with you Bulosan’s anger. Ariel.
I smelled sulfur. I smelled love. The kind one soldier would have for another soldier; the kind a proud father may have for a banner-bearer son. This Ariel liked Adel, I thought. In spite of, or perhaps, because of, her unlovability. My, anger all-consuming always impressed me. Thor burning down everything that got in his way; Achilles dragging around Hector’s fallen body; Medea poisoning the young princess her husband’s new bride, the gown she made her wear burning the skin, eating into the youthful flesh.
Anger kills, cleanses the world with fire; love only forgives, changes nothing.
When I first held the Bulosan book, I did not know Mario yet. I did not know Adel and Ariel yet, or that they were just around the bend. Mario must have donated the book to our office through Jamela at the time that the resource center, library, and clearing house for Moro concerns was being created. Jamela might have dropped by Mario’s office in Midsayap or perhaps they met in Cotabato for the purpose when our office was not yet an office.
I was with the teachers’ organization in Marawi when yanked out, Jamela would tell me decades later. The lady cadre in charge of the place she had to oversee was being recalled for another task in Manila or thereabouts. As soon as the center was established, out this cadre went and Jamela had to come in. That was where she and Telay bonded some though not very long after, Telay, too would be pulled out of there, and that was when Jack thought of taking me in.
When much later I finally caught up with our pioneer guy, he would tell me that in 1984 he was being recalled because a problem arose in the Cordillera region. Amidst the windfall brought on by the post-Aquino assassination, there emerged in the mountain province a growing opposition. Cadres that had his experience were thus needed. Right on he returned to Manila, to attend to the problem, among endless other needs just then arising. That was in November. Early that year was the Mindanao plenum where he and another comrade spoke up against a proposed shift in strategy. But to the Cordillera Region he proceeded, only to see that the problem situation described to him did not exist, or did not specifically called for his kind of expertise.
The Cordillera was unlike Mindanao, he explained. The Cordillera people were long integrated with the Christian majority. Christian missions took root there much earlier compared to Mindanao and western-oriented political institutions had a more solid foundation there, so unlike Mindanao where Moro polities developed distinctly and separately. He began to perceive that the Mindanao Commission just wanted him eased out of Mindanao: he and this other comrade-buddy of his were getting in their way.
When in 1985, the DPA problem exploded, he felt grateful enough that he got thrown back in Manila, a safer ground. The comrade-wife had to stay behind, though, to see to the setting up of the office where I would find myself a year later. Until she was certain that the office was in good hands, she did not follow him. In 1986 when most offices were still reeling from the DPA trauma, the office she left behind, both founders and heirs were rather proud and glad to say, was about one legal institution that has managed to quarantine itself against enemy infiltration.
The Moro Committee which our pioeer guy headed and under which our office operated, was about one Party organ that escaped detection by enemy agents. The couple who was placed inside their cell, Kahos would find out, were DPAs. But he and his wife had detected them early on and had rid of them when they transferred base from Davao to Marawi, in 1983, thanks to a reorganization necessitated by the post-Ninoy Aquino assassination revolutionary wave. The man was executed, but the woman was spared: she was pregnant when Kahos tried them. Found in the man’s possession was a bank account with PhP88,000.00, with a deposit every month.
We were operating on only PhP5,00 to PhP20,000 budget a month and this couple who shared our living quarters had 88 thousands in their bank account!
Eric, the other comrade who staunchly stood against the shift toward militarism, was in an even funnier situation. He was in the Investigating Committee’s list and an order for his arrest had been issued. Someone tipped him—someone playing double agent, UF mode, I suspect—and Eric fled.
Actually, Eric was the more politically astute, our pioneer guy added, comparative mode.
It must be in the later part of 1986, maybe early 1987, soon after we had moved to our new office, the one vacated and owned by our pioneer guy’s underground network friends in Marawi, when our liaison guy came by, bearing the news that Eric, who had shown up once or twice and very briefly at the living room, had fled to Cebu. A day or two later, Nazra herself, thoughtful and concerned, would demand,
What’s this they say? That Eric is being suspected as a DPA?!?