THE VEIN OF THIRTY-FOUR YEARS

(Sept 12 is also Marcos' birthday, if I remember right)

To: red_constantino@
Sent: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 11:34 PM
Subject: from Red - THE VEIN OF THIRTY-FOUR YEARS

Hi all. September is about momentous occasions, including monumental
forgetting. Here's something for those who wish to remember and those who
want to forget. I hope it's interesting enough to pass on; if it's not, just
hit delete and be done with it. A cleaner version with complete notes and
pics is in www.redconstantino. blogspot. com. This is for Janus and Rene.
Warm regards.

red


THE VEIN OF THIRTY-FOUR YEARS
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
ParasIndonesia
September 11, 2006

Turbulence framed his horizon and the young writer wrote it all down. Visage
and facade, noise and speech. He drew anger and desire and with words pushed
history to quicken its footstep.

"Thunder of feet, tumult of images and sounds," scribbled the writer of the
clash of January 26, when discontent collided with the conceit of power, and
everywhere the disparate sounds of footfall: clatter of blustering protest,
cadenced menace of pursuing boots, and the louder, unmistakable canter of
nervous indifference.
The year was 1970 and the sounds of the epoch largely sketched the mood of
the nation. Perhaps the sounds resonate still.

"White smooth round crash helmets advancing like a fleet of flying saucers
in the growing darkness," wrote Jose F. Lacaba, then a young journalist, in
prose that allowed generations to "see the faces ... hear the voices" -- to
smell the mood. "The tread of marching feet, the rat-tat-tat of fearful feet
on the run, the shuffle of hesitant feet unable to decide whether to stand
fast or flee.... And everywhere a confusion of shouts

Two years after, the eminent Senator Pepe Diokno would speak about the
imminence of martial rule at a gathering of intellectuals and explain why,
if the judiciary fell to pieces, he would be left with no other option but
"to take up the gun and go to the hills with the activists."

The late professor Dolores Stephens Feria recalled running into Nur Misuari
at the faculty center of the University of the Philippines. It was the
middle of July 1972 and Misuari had just come from Cotabato. "They are
murdering hundreds of our Muslim people daily through death squads and
arresting even more without warrants," said Misuari, who shared to Feria the
shape that his life had taken and how he had decided to speak openly in the
marketplace and urge his Muslim countrymen to arm themselves. "I only came
back to the university to formally resign and turn in some old grades for my
students," said Misuari, who would eventually become a beacon of resistance,
Months later, on September 21, 1972 Ferdinand Marcos declares martial law
and the American Chamber of Commerce cheers the open display of the iron
fist. Scores go underground or flock to the hills while others such as
Diokno take the equally epic route of confronting the dictatorship openly.
Each course was a recourse of solidarity. To defend the rights of others. To
give refuge to the hunted. To mourn the fallen and to embrace the faltering.
To stand with others. To write with unambiguous honesty, as Pete Daroy once
explained, at a time when telling the truth, especially through writing,
"had become a historical and moral -- even genetic -- responsibility. "
The best and the brightest are mown down by the dictatorship. Lorena Barros.
Edgar Jopson. Eman Lacaba. Leticia Ladlad. A fistful of names among martyred
nameless multitudes. "We are tribeless and all tribes are ours," wrote Eman
Lacaba in a poem he penned in 1976, months before he was murdered. "We are
homeless and all homes are ours. / We are nameless and all names are ours."

Thirty-four years ago the country bled for fourteen years. And then some.

But we are such a forgetful people.

Lured once more by blustering promises of affluence and the so-called
material comforts of the iron order, too many today feign disinterest
despite the festering disquiet, convinced again, perhaps, that they can
inhabit the ennui of the spectator with little disruption to their lives.

The big lie lives.

Here is the comfort today: Filipino care -- mothers, sisters, nurses,
doctors and teachers -- boxed and flown to other countries while the
caregivers' children are left behind to be nourished by neglect or, if the
young ones are lucky, to be nurtured by decrepit hospitals, dilapidated
schools and disintegrating families.

Here is the care: butchers propping up an illegitimate administration have
set up shop in the presidential palace and in whole provinces; they refuse
to leave. Today, dissenters are slaughtered again like chickens. Mission
orders are sent out by the military to slay members of the clergy, members
of political parties, young activists, students, lawyers, labor leaders,
farmers. Elected officials. Journalists.

No door of restraint is left unhinged and no family is left unscrewed, save
for a handful among the old landed clans and the total handful of the
rapacious new oligarchy. And as it was before, so it is today -- the price
of unconcern remains the same -- things have not gotten better; things have
become worse.

"A typhoon approaches quietly, massive and grey," wrote the Filipino
fictionist Eric Gamalinda in his 1992 novel The Empire of Memory, which
tells the story of a Marcosian-like era long gone. And yet, the novel seems
to be telling us about today. For a long time in the land of dreams,
Gamalinda tells us, "Thunder rumbles but always seems too distant to cause
alarm. And as always, everything is caught by surprise: the sky darkens
immediately, like ink in water, and the rains begin to pour in unrelenting
torrents, as if someone had ripped the sky open and drained enormous oceans
out of it."

Maybe it is really as Gamalinda wrote, that ours is indeed "a land both fact
and fiction, where generations leave no trace of themselves and everything
is constantly wiped out by clockwork destruction: typhoon, tsunami,
earthquake, drought." Even martial rule. "We have no memory of ourselves,"
Gamalinda notes. "[W]e remember only the last deluge, the last seismic
upheaval." Then new pain inundates the land and the last calamity is again
forgotten.

If the bane of the past is forgetting, what is the vein of the present?

Thirty-four years ago we bled for fourteen years. We bleed still. #


* Renato Redentor Constantino is a writer and painter based in Quezon City.
He is the author of the recently released book The Poverty of Memory: Essays
on History and Empire (CFNS: 2006). Constantino maintains a blog site at
www.redconstantino. blogspot. com and can be reached via redcosmo@gmail.
com.

-- Renato Redentor Constantino
The Kamuning Republic
www.redconstantino. blogspot. com

"There's nothing more difficult than a line." Pablo Picasso


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