“The past is never past,” Nelson Navarro wrote in the prologue of his last book, “it lingers in the labyrinth of memory, ephemeral but always intrusive, stalking the ever demanding present which rules the senses like a jealous lover.”
When I got the call early Sunday morning that Nelson had passed away, I had this sense of time closing down the curtains on a generation of Filipinos that bore the brunt of martial law.
Nelson and I were part of the so-called the First Quarter Storm (FQS) generation. It was a turning point in our history when youthful idealism and love of country clashed with a greedy and corrupt regime.
The brutality of martial law left generational scars as young people were tortured and murdered and others forced into exile.
Nelson was lucky to have been abroad when the hell of martial law was unleashed… or all his many wonderful stories later in his life would have remained untold. There was a warrant for his arrest.
Nelson had no illusions what it was all about… what animated our generation.
“Having studied and lived in Diliman during the gloriously liberal Carlos Romulo-SP Lopez regimes, I had a grand time and I left with golden memories to last three lifetimes.
“I entered freshman year crusading against the compulsory teaching of the Spanish language, fought against American intervention in Vietnam, and capped it all by storming the gates of Malacañang and joining the Diliman Commune (The first liberated zone of the Philippines) at the height of the First Quarter Storm in the early 1970s.
“It was the best of times in the late Sixties. That old UP conceit, nationalism, was on everybody’s lips. The siren song of revolution ala Mao Zedong and Che Guevarra was in the air. Student Power was on the march from Berkeley to Paris, and UP’s brand of illustrado activism was political chic.
“We were curious and we kept asking embarrassing questions. We couldn’t fathom why this elite could spawn or tolerate so much poverty and corruption in our country.
“But how were we to know? We were young, we were having fun, we were playing revolution, and we wanted to have it all.”
Nelson talked about this crucial crossroad in his and his country’s life.
“FQS turned me into an exile. It forced me to the kind of life I wanted—to remain true to my values and to be a man of the 20th and 21st centuries. I was a concerned individual who would fight for a good cause but who also loved life.
“(In America), I fell in love with music and literature. For the first time, I was free. I felt good about Marcos and reviled him at the same time. Accidentally, he gave me my freedom from my own country and its parochialism.
“Living in New York, earning a living, spending money, making choices and mistakes, I moved on. How could have I gotten this education? I met wonderful people and went to wonderful places. Those have forever changed me.”
But after 15 years of living in America, Nelson returned home in 1986. He knew nothing has changed; social transformation promised by EDSA wasn’t happening.
Yet, he was full of hope. He told me back then he was giving up his US immigrant green card. He was home at last and he intends to pick up from where he left off.
“What mattered most was that my heart still resided in the old country. It was not enough to visit from time to time or keep fires burning from the distance of a safe and comfortable country. Either I was a Filipino in the Philippines of real risks and turbulence or a pseudo-American clinging to Filipino identity out of guilt and convenience.”
Nelson spent a good amount of time writing biographies of prominent Filipinos. He enjoyed getting into their inner selves, learning about unwritten snatches of history in the process.
Nelson had a close relationship with Max Soliven and he was eventually asked to write his biography that was published after Max died.
“Max was like my father. He taught me about the world. He wasn’t afraid of controversy.”
His most controversial work was Juan Ponce Enrile’s memoirs. Nelson was careful to say that he only edited it, made it easier to read but it was totally Enrile’s.
I know he completed the biography of Jojo Binay but Jojo chose not to release the book. “Maverick: the Story of Jejomar Binay” chronicles the man’s rise from UP law student to human rights lawyer, on to longtime Makati mayor and then defeating Mar Roxas to become vice president of the Philippines. Of course, Binay and Nelson were contemporaries in UP campus politics.
An engaging storyteller, Nelson’s memoirs is fascinating. He wrote his memoirs six years ago because as he puts it, “age has finally caught up with me and it was time to look back to what I now call my half-remembered past… why I have become the person I am today.”
Nelson explains the title of his memoirs: “It is titled ‘The Half-Remembered Past’ because you think of the happy things, but you also edit the events that made you cry.
“I chose to deal head on with the past because I am getting on in years and most of my life is embedded there… the best years may be behind me and the end can come swiftly and at any time, like a thief in the night.”
And it did.
But it isn’t quite the end. Nelson is impossible to forget. We will fondly talk of Nelson. We will remember him as a friend and how we enjoyed many Sunday afternoon conversations with our generation’s master storyteller.
Nelson told the story of our generation. And it is all fading fast… until there is nothing more but our half-remembered past to amuse us up to our very last day on this earth.
Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco