A Life less Ordinary (pasintabi kay Danny Boyle)
My friends in high school, or even those in College, were surprised when they found out that I’d become an activist. I suppose it’s because I never looked like anyone who’d be interested in engaging in the social debate, much less marching in rallies and demonstrations where the military came out in full-battle gear to ‘keep chaos at bay.’
Generally, I was a bleeding heart, a pacifist. Someone who wanted peace all around – harmony between all peoples of all races and religions and all that. Then, I thought that wars were the results of serious, complicated misunderstandings between the leaders of nations. Then, I believed that through sincere negotiations, conflicts could be settled; and with the help of continuous prayer, people would be guided into understanding each other better, and essentially overcome tendencies of cruelty and selfishness. The concept of class struggle was alien to me: some people were rich, some people were poor, but it wasn’t as if there was a direct relationship between the state of one group and the other. It was cosmic bad luck which we all had to help one another to lick.
I went to the university known for being liberal and even progressive (in truth? It’s quite reactionary only it carries pretenses of being liberal). I had a clear cut idea of what I wanted to do: get good grades, join the student publication, graduate and then embark on a career as a professional journalist/fiction writer.
I joined the student paper, and there I was bombarded with various ideas and world views. It was the height of the debate between the so-called rejectionists and the re-affirmists, and I was among those caught in the middle. What was to reject? And what was it that I was supposed to re-affirm? I didn’t understand what was going on, and no one really bothered to explain.
But outside the ivory tower that was the office of the student publication, militant student organizations were busy organizing support teams for deployment to the picketlines put up by striking workers of Henry Sy’s department stores. By then I had sat in on some of their discussions on the national situation, as well as on the meaning of national democracy and socialism. I found it exhilarating that there were people no older than myself who spoke so knowledgeably about social realities, and who presented alternatives to the social ills as if they had seen the future and it was bright for the Filipino poor.
That’s how it started, I suppose. I made close friends with some members of the militant groups –- they were not robots, they were young people who chose to abandon self-serving pursuits in favor of ideals greater than themselves.
I borrowed their books, and they explained to me what I had difficulty understanding. In rallies they made sure I didn’t get lost. They shared with me their experiences in various picketlines, in the palay fields of Central Luzon or the copra plantations of Southern Tagalog. Sometimes, though, I would also hear stories of how heavy an M-16 was, or what bayawak meat tastes like, and how comfortable it is to sleep under the stars in a hammock outside a peasant’s hut in Mindanao.
From them I learned what the words “pagkamulat” meant, and “kamalayan.” Also, I learned from them the meaning of the word “Kasama.” The content of the poetry, fiction and other writing assignments I turned in to my professors radically altered. Where before I wrote about Isaac Asimov and his contribution to the science fiction genre, I wrote critiques of Jose Maria Sison’s essays compiled in his book “Struggle for National Democracy.” When before I reviewed plays with focus on the internal turmoil suffered by the protagonists, I found myself delving more into the social context that birthed the conflict between the characters. I understood Bertholt Brecht like I had never before.
What does the Kilusan mean to me? My facility with language is not enough to enable me to explain. Chances are I’ll come off sounding like some looney convert to some crackpot religious sect, but I’ll risk it.
Before I became activist, my dreams were mostly for myself with the occasional intent of being socially relevant. I’d thought of joining Amnesty International, or the International Red Cross, Green Peace. This as I wrote for the country’s top newspaper, or even as a correspondent for international wires.
But when I became activist, I saw how shallow and self-serving my ambitions were. I also felt a bit embarrassed for myself because till then I had believed that I was an individual who cared about what really went on in the world. Turned out I didn’t. There was so much I didn’t know, and the realization struck me like a shot in the gut. The Philippines wasn’t heaven, and the government wasn’t there to guide the people towards better lives.
Whenever I hear or read anything negative about the Kilusan, I can’t help but get riled up. A slur against the Kilusan, against other comrades I take to be an attack against myself. I am certain that most comrades feel this way, too. We live and breathe our respective lives within the same context of struggle; united by the same principles and inspired by the same ideals and dreams. It shouldn’t be surprising that we should also feel the same fury (at varying levels, the factors determining this being age and emotional and political maturity) at anything and anyone who maligns the movement and its members.
I ‘m turning 30 years old soon, and 13 years I have spent as a national democrat. It surprises even myself that I find it already difficult to remember what sort of person I was before I joined the movement. I remember bits and pieces of what I was like, the dreams I used to dream; but mostly, these memories pale in comparison with the memories I have accumulated as a member of the movement. These memories – of rallies and meetings and educational discussions; and - as a journalist and writer - of being warmly welcomed into the homes of workers and peasants; of meeting members of the New People’s Army (NPA) for the first time – these memories and my perception of them form the tapestry of my character, influence my personality, and make me affirm daily that the Kilusan is where I want to be.
Of course, this does not mean that I have thrown off all that I was before I joined the movement. Unlike what the ideologues of the former Siglaya and the guardians of the cultural status quo say, the Kilusan never demanded that its members become stereotypes and to lose their individuality.
I still read what I want to read (comic books, children’s books, European contemporary fiction and punk-anarchist novels, etc), listen to the music I feel like singing along or even dancing to (The Smiths, U2, Sting, Coldplay, Nirvana, the Beatles and 60s music), and watch plays or movies whose trailers or reviews whet my curiousity (anything starring Colin Firth, Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett and Kristin Scott-Thomas).
But the music, literature and culture produced by the artists of the Kilusan have, however,become more important to me. Words that describe the humanity of comrades, melodies that approximate the beat and rhythm of their lives, and images of their daily sacrifices and contribution to the cause, these affect my emotions and thoughts in a way that is both tender and fierce. In a way that I can never be affected by the books and music created outside the movement.
All that I have learned of art, literature, culture and beauty has been enriched by my involvement in the Kilusan. There is the recognized duty to use all that is serviceable and admirable in the dominant culture and transform them into something that will help the people free and empower themselves. Even as I read Rainer Maria Rilke or Nietszche and Oscar Wilde, I am well aware of how wrong they are in saying that art is for arts’ sake, and that the souls of poets and writers should only heed the voice of the muses and not be influenced by the weariness of the world.
Psychic Income
The detractors of the Kilusan say that revolution is obsolete, that the theories that guide it have been exposed as hollow and wrong; and that those who insist in being communist at these day and age are fools.
I am no ideologue. Sometimes when I read discussion guides, or hand-outs I have to read them out loud to understand what they mean (lalo na pag malalim ang Filipino, harhar). Neither do I claim to be adept at theoretical discourse.
But what little I have read of what Marx, Lenin, Mao and Jose Ma. Sison have written, I understand. And I believe in. Everyday I see how correct revolution is – in the sunken eyes of streetchildren begging for alms; in the exhaustion of workers who brave the evening traffic; in the newsreports of how many farmers have been evicted from their land or have been killed in their efforts to defend their right to till it.
It can never be wrong to fight against those who exploit for profit. In a country, in a world where less than 5% of the population control the world’s resources while the rest live in dire poverty, hunger and disease, the struggle for justice can never be passe. There is no expiry date on Revolution. It is as necessary as air.
For me, and for thousands of other young activists, joining the Movement is one of the most important decisions of my life. That’s the main reason why I have always been open to my parents about who I am, what I have become, and what I do. I want them to know the Kilusan through me, and perhaps even love and respect it because of how it has helped me, shaped me, their own daughter.
These days I cannot see beyond the Kilusan. The people who mean the most to me outside my blood family are all in the movement. My role models are the likes of Rafael Baylosis, Edgar Jopson and Lorena Barros; but daily I derive inspiration from reports of victorious local mass struggles in the factories, and by tactical wins in broad campaigns such as that denouncing the corruption of the incumbent illegitimate presidency .
Reports of successful campaigns and protests in the provinces launched by the progressive and militant people’s organizations are also cause for jubilation. All the greatest challenges, the most profound realizations and the most intense of experiences I have had I found in the movement. Sure, there isn’t any money here (har-har), but the psychic income is beyond what transnational companies can ever accumulate in all their voracious years.
History will not be beautiful.
Unsparing, relentless and brutal
It will describe
The bloodied mornings
The silenced evenings
The rivers of tears
And the ravaged plain
What horror has been unleashed
That sunrise, that sunset
By monsters proclaiming righteousness.
But history will be just.
It will not neglect to bear witness
To the joyous mornings
The serene evenings
The ocean of victory
Nourishing a liberated land
What force has been unleashed
That sunrise, that sunset
By a people who wrote history with their own hands.#
