Red flag, yellow star

This Thursday, March 13, from 3 to 5 p.m. at the main lobby of Palma Hall, the University of the Philippines in Diliman, a new book is going to be launched by Anvil Publishing with the somewhat improbable title of Militant But Groovy: Stories of Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan. I wondered where the editors — chiefly human rights lawyer Soliman Santos — had gotten that title until I re-read my brief contribution that volume, which I’d submitted more than two years ago, and I realized, much mortified, that it came from me.

The book is a collection of personal memoirs from veterans of what’s come to be known as the First Quarter Storm — that long period of intense, rousing, and sometimes frightening political protest that presaged (and, some say, provoked) martial law in the early 1970s and set the stage for EDSA. For those of us born in the late 1940s and early ’50s, it coincided with our physical, emotional, and intellectual coming of age; and those of us who managed to survive the FQS and stagger on to midlife will always look back on it as our defining moment; indeed, it defined us as much as we defined it.

The Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan, or SDK, was one of several “mass organizations” that brought young activists together under the banner of what we proudly avowed to be the “national democratic revolution.” I was 16 when I joined it and embraced its yellow-starred red flag; barely two years later I would land in martial-law prison. I’ve always considered myself lucky to have come out of martial law alive, because many of our comrades didn’t. When I wrote my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place (Anvil, 1992), it was a form of thanksgiving, of memorializing the dead, and also, I should admit, of apologizing to them for straying from the path that led them to their graves.

It’s easy to see the events of 35 to 40 years ago with a moist, romantic eye and to cast ourselves as noble heroes; the definitive, scholarly history of the martial law years has yet to be written, and when it is, I’m sure that all our petty foibles — the bare humanity of those whom we swore could walk on water — will come through. That will not tarnish nor diminish the very real contributions of those young Filipinos to the causes and crosses that we sadly continue to bear today: the struggle against tyranny, injustice, exploitation, and corruption.

A few weeks ago, on the 22nd anniversary of EDSA 1 — I was interviewed on TV as an FQS activist and as a writer for my impressions of the current political scene. As often happens with these things, I forgot what I really wanted to say until I was driving out of the studio. And it was this: that when we look at or look for the champions and the heroes who will lead us out of the darkness, we shouldn’t expect to find a perfect man or woman of entirely unblemished character.

I can’t prove it with statistics, but I have a dramatist’s suspicion that every great hero is, in one way or another, deeply flawed — by hubris, ambition, venery, naiveté, or some wayward passion — but they became and they remain heroes because, at the tipping point, they rose above their flaws and did something for the greater good that may have surprised even themselves. When I see all the muck that’s dredged up and thrown at anyone who dares to blow the whistle on bigtime corruption and oppression in our society, I can’t help thinking what a demolition job they could’ve done on the likes of Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, and Ninoy Aquino — and if we had believed them, or let ourselves be distracted by Bonifacio’s pride, Rizal’s romances, and Ninoy’s ambition, then we would have gained nothing in the end, perpetually hostage to our mistrust and fear.

An interviewer asked me: how should young people — your students — look at a character like Jun Lozada? I gave a rather broad answer, but I should’ve just said, “He’s no Rizal and no Ninoy, certainly not, but if you’re a teenager, just think of him as your father, warts and all. Now what would you do and how would you think if your dad were caught in that situation — if armed men took your dad away to keep him from telling the truth?” (And for that matter, what can you say to a child who demands the truth from his teacher, only to be told, “I can’t tell you — it’s executive privilege”?)

But to get back to the book: these are the stories of a generation of street-marchers, and how ironic and yet how apt it is that it’s being launched not in the soft and cozy lap of safe nostalgia, but in the grip of another crisis, whose noises — whispers, alarms, clamors, slogans, and soundbites — seem all too familiar.

Here’s what I sent in for that book, and for many more of these reminiscences from such names as Butch Hilario, Gani Serrano, Rol Peña, Jeepy Perez, Jorge Sibal, Lynn Castilla, Ome Candazo, Jonat dela Cruz, Efren Abueg, Ven Jose, Jerry Araos, and the late Alex Ontong and Popoy Valencia, join us this Thursday afternoon for the launch. I don’t know how militant or how groovy we remain, nearly four decades after the facts being recollected here, so we’ll just have to go there and see.

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I joined the SDK almost as soon as I entered UP in 1970, through what I later realized was the normal recruitment route — first, membership in the more innocuous Nationalist Corps, then integration into SDK itself. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly, as it turned out), SDK appealed to me as being somehow just as militant but groovier, to use a word from that time, than the fire-breathing, roughshod Kabataang Makabayan (KM).

A lot of the people I knew and idolized were with SDK — Gary Olivar, Tony Tagamolila, Mario Taguiwalo, Rey Vea — writers and editors all of whom I, a couple of years their junior, wanted to follow. Some members were also fraternity brothers in Alpha Sigma — Benny Tiamzon and Joey Calderon, most notably. I felt I was in the best company; these guys (and some very nice gals) couldn’t possible go wrong. I was small fry then (and remained small fry), too young to be in on the big discussions, but it impressed me to overhear people like Vic David and Titus de Borja chat about the “18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte.” I was good only for Mao and the Five Golden Rays.

I remember a blur of Hqs — Scout Castor, Arayat, an apartment near Sulo Hotel — but our favorite hangout was the “Trialogue,” a small room at the far left end of Vinzons Hall. At this time my family lived very close by — we were squatters on Old Balara — but I liked spending time at the Trialogue, watching Willie Tañedo draw figures for flyers and streamers (I recall being entranced — with horror and fascination — by Willie’s depiction of Francis Sontillano’s splattered brain).

I fancied myself a propagandist and had had some training in theater with PETA, so I signed up for what was then Dulaang Sadeka as soon as it was formed, and even joined a chorus that performed a piece from Brecht — can’t remember now which one it was, exactly — in whiteface at the ALEC. This was even before Gintong Silahis emerged as SDK’s cultural arm, and even before Brecht had be set aside for being too bourgeois in favor of more overt Peking-Opera-style tableaus.

It was exhilarating to be in as many rallies and demos as possible, to be right there in the thick of the Diliman Commune, to march with a thousand others from Los Baños to Manila, to actually carry a small Beretta in a hollowed-out Bible, Godfather-style, for Tony Tagamolila at the CEGP conference (not that I would have known what to do with it; I’d never fired a shot in my life, and still never have).

There were, of course, deaths and betrayals to contend with, especially as martial law approached and took over the landscape. The bloated face and mutilated body of my tocayo Butch Landrito has stayed with me all these years, and the last time I counted all the people I personally knew who died in the FQS, I came up with 21, and certainly there were more, too many more. There was this one time, early during martial law, when I found myself in a UG house with people who’ve all passed on — Tony Hilario (with his trademark way of holding a cigarette between the tips of his circled fingers), journalist Henry Romero (technically still a desaparecido), and Jack Peña (ever the Ilonggo, railing against imperiali-sum and the o-well price hike). Ironically, I may have been saved by being arrested in January 1973 and spending the next seven months in Fort Bonifacio.

And so I live on, we live on, as the articulate survivors, a little yellow star imprinted in some imperishable corner of our graying minds.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.