The challenge of history: Mindanao - sana!
I was invited last week by the Ateneo of Zamboanga and I went there, courtesy of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. In the Fifties when I was with the old Manila Times, every year, I was in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. Much of Mindanao was jungle then and I traveled on unpaved roads, and on hand me down Philippine Navy boats all the way to Sitangkai and Simunul in the Tawi-Tawi group. I went as far down as Sandakan in what was then North Borneo. This is what I told the faculty and students of Ateneo de Zamboanga:
I first came to Mindanao and Zamboanga in the very early Fifties when as a journalist, I gathered stories about our Moro brothers and our ethnic groups. I witnessed the opening up of vast forests in Lanao, Cotabato, Surigao and Basilan, saw the birth of new towns like Tacurong and Marbel. Marawi then was Dansalan and I went around Lake Lanao, to Tugaya and saw the famous Singkil performed not by folk dance troupes but by Maranaos. I even went crocodile hunting in the Liguasan marsh. In Maimbung, Sulu, I was a houseguest of Sultan Ismail Jamalul Kiram. I was traveling alone with just a camera and a notebook. Half a century, and here I am once more in this beautiful city of flowers, redolent of romance and the ancient tensions of our troubled history, yet verdant with hope for the future.
Today, the Moros demand the right of self-determination and claim a separate and distinct homeland, a territory which they insist is theirs as sanctioned by the principle of ancestral domain. The principle as applied in the adjudication of land as property is, at best hazy, and inapplicable in the context of realities today.
How far must ancestry go back to be legitimate? Who owns the land — all that jungle that is not cleared, tilled and made productive? How about those who settled in virgin forests a hundred years, 50 years ago? Are they not ancestors, too? How far back in time is ancestry to be recognized? The non-Christians who roamed these wilds, the Tasadays — how is their domain marked and measured?
When we contemplate such issues, they become murky, doubt settles in and the term ancestral domain becomes so diluted, it loses meaning. The basic issues then are justice, human rights and poverty as they impact on the Moros today — not some distant and romanticized past.
The core of the Moro problem is land — not religion although religion has definitely colored it. The influx of settlers from the Visayas and Luzon created tensions, cultural ruptures. Through the years, too, there has been a steady intermarriage of Moros and non-Moros.
The clash of cultures, the entry of Arab imams and Christian missionaries have impacted on traditional Moro society bringing into it both liberal as well as conservative ideas. There was no purdah in Mindanao in the Fifties; it is here now. Archaic Moro communities were soon outpaced by progressive immigrant towns — a common phenomenon because immigrants cut off from traditional support systems, are industrious and innovative.
Mindanao is one vast vacuum. The physics principle is simple — it must be filled. This law cannot be revoked.
And this is the crux — the vacuum in Mindanao is not only physical. It is also of governance, of leadership. But then this vacuum in leadership is nationwide. Some Moro leaders believe that this emptiness in the national leadership contributes to the erosion of trust in government itself.
This vacuum in leadership is just as pronounced among the Moros themselves. For instance, we had such high expectations of Nur Misuari who led the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) but he had failed willfully and so have the others who tried to lead.
It is very sad for an octogenarian like myself to say now, I told you so. I am no clairvoyant but any Filipino with some hindsight and perception of how society moves knew that both the New People’s Army (NPA) and the Moro rebellion did not erupt from nowhere. I saw both coming — the NPA after the Huk uprising was quelled by Magsaysay in 1953 and the Moro rebellion after the surrender of Kamlon in Sulu in the Fifties.
A smug and complaisant leadership ignored the danger signals. The much younger Jesus Dureza, and the equally youthful Michael Mastura, the young Mamintal Tamano and Santanina Rasul who both became Senators — we forged resolutions and recommendations after several seminars.
We said, government must act quickly or Mindanao will blow up.
And sure enough it did.
I see now that that old, dear friend, Michael Mastura is a leading light in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). I have known Mike for decades — perhaps the most brilliant Moro mind today, acknowledged as such outside these islands. I had expected him to rise to the very top, to the Supreme Court, to the Senate, to the highest elective position although Filipinos say we are not yet ready for a Moro in Malacañang. It is not his fault that this has not happened; our political system has never anointed the best of our leaders, Jose Diokno, Raul Manglapus, Emmanuel Pelaez. We have elected the ampao to lead us instead.
Mastura is fully aware that Filipinos will not permit the breakaway of the Moros and their creating an independent and separate Moro state. He knows that the obstruction to development also lies with them, their culture, their outmoded datu system, the corruption. I hope that now, in his pivotal position as legal counsel of the MILF, he will guide that organization into genuine autonomy and felicitous governance in harmony with us. That will take some doing but in essence, the ball is in their court. I trust Michael Mastura with my last peso.
For him, this caveat then: the ideal of self-determination as the bulwark against colonialism — domestic or otherwise — is laudable and necessary, not just in the ancient world but now. The limits become self evident when that self determination leads to the break up of a country or even, in a very narrow sense, the splintering of a clan. The building of a nation is long and painful but when finally erected and formidable, it assures the individual a haven from the alien marauder; provides him with justice and security. Self determination must therefore culminate into a strong state not in its diminution or emasculation.
We must now convince our Moros to understand that a great and prosperous nation does not deny diversity; that this diversity is the bedrock of our identity. But again, loyalty to the nation state must emanate not from economic or political gain but from an abiding trust in the institutions of that nation — a trust which could take decades to shape, from childhood onwards. This must be asked of our Moros, and of us — Ilocanos, Cebuanos, Igorots who were born in this fractured and unhappy country.
Where do the writers of Mindanao, of Zamboanga in particular fit into this troubled equation? What can writer-teachers do?
When Mindanao and its literature come to mind. I immediately recall the Darangen and the sterling achievement of Sister Delia Coronel who translated those many volumes into English and made this Maranao epic available to us and to the world. It all started way back in the Forties when Delia from Zambales and Mamitua Saber from Lanao met at the University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. We were all classmates; Pito as Mamitua was called convinced Delia — then a nun — to go to Marawi to work on this epic. It took years of rigid scholarship but she did it — brought to us the magnificent story of Maranao nobility.
Ibrahim Jubaira, a Tausog from Sulu, wrote about his people starting way back in the Fifties: his charming stories appeared first in the Philippines Free Press then in other journals including my own Solidarity. I used to meet Ibrahim in Manila — he was my informant on events in Jolo and on Tausog culture, among others as was Sammy Tan, the Tausog historian and scholar. I lost contact with him and didn’t even know that he had passed away. Jubaira opened the shutters to the Moro’s humanity and rooted pride in his homeland. We need writers like him to continue forging links with us.
And here in Zamboanga is one of the finest of our contemporary writers, Antonio Enriquez. Tony has already published half a dozen novels and several collections of short fiction which are evocative and insightful commentaries of Mindanao life, not just of Moros and non-Moros but also of our ethnics who inhabited Mindanao long before the Spaniards and the Arab traders came. Tony is also a social commentator and his audience is no longer confined to this archipelago but is global as is the case with writers who transcend their borders because of the universality of their themes and the superior skill with which they unravel those themes.
He was telling me he wanted to write in Chavacano — the dialect — not language of Zamboanga. It would be a very interesting experiment. I recall how an African writer tried to do it in pidgin English, the kind that is used in Papua New Guinea, and in the regions colonized by the Europeans.
Many young writers are coming up after Enriquez and Jubaira. Among them Jonathan Jimena Siason who has already shown his mettle in short fiction. I hope there will be more particularly among the Samals and other ethnic groups. These young voices will then open an even wider window to Mindanao.
When Wallace Stegner, the famous American teacher and writer, came to Manila in the Fifties, he expressed surprise that at the time, he didn’t see any literary record of the Huk rebellion. I should have told him there were several in the works. I am sure there are several now being written, not just Tony’s fiction which has grappled with these heart breaking conditions.
The closer the writer is to the fire, the more and easier he will be singed, the heat forever branded in the mind and heart to be ingested then retrieved as literature. Never forget this—that traumatic events can, by themselves, be the precursor of art. The artist must, however, work such material with care so that it will not be trivialized by mawkish sentiment or uncontrolled passion. Always remember that great literature is also molded with great craftsmanship.
In a region riven by internecine conflict and hobbled by culture change, peace is far more elusive now than two decades ago. This absence of peace and security obstructs the development of the island. This conflict has already cost the government billions of pesos and thousands of lives—and the end is not yet in the horizon.
The Moros and other inhabitants of Mindanao and Sulu must find within themselves the formula for peace because the Moro problem cannot be resolved by arms. If this was the solution, it can be won by the government tomorrow with its superior fire power—but at what cost?
A minority problem is enduring and constant and will always be with us far into the future. But it can be tamed, resolved in a manner that will enable the minority to be secure, its existence not tortured by injustice and discrimination.
Civil wars, revolutions, strife — nations emerge from the dark womb of conflict and violence. Spain’s dynamism today is a result of a bloody civil war wherein brother fought brother. Much earlier, a bitter Civil War also brought the Americans closer to one another but that war did not immediately liberate the Negro from discrimination — that took several more decades of activism and violence all of which fructified today in the election of a Afro American president.
So it must be with us. For all their recalcitrance, the Moros know we share a history of opposition to colonialism, and a geography which also binds us, a country wherein they are free to move about as, indeed, they are doing, for our Moros are now all over the archipelago. What to do with those who settled in the Ilocos? In the Visayas? Hustle them back to that narrow enclave which the MILF claims? And how about the thousands upon thousands of happy intermarriages?
In the end, we will find that we are not just kith and kin, but that we cannot leave this earth which Allah or Bathala decreed to be our place in the sun.
To recognize this, to make this land bloom is a purpose to which we all should commend ourselves.
Given this basic understanding of the plight of Mindanao, what is to be done?
For the writers then, aside from the demands of art and the ego, the literary effort must always be contextual, ever contemplating the very pith of conflict and resolving it with honesty and integrity.
The conflict in Mindanao cannot be resolved with the gun, only with the heart.
In the mid-Fifties, the aging Hadji Kamlon waged war on the government with but a hundred loyal followers. His grievances foreshadowed this much larger MILF rebellion. I stayed for a month in Jolo. The governor Leon Fernandez walked around with a cocked 45 in his waist. The Moro Col. Mamarinta Lao commanded the Constabulary contingent from his headquarters in Luuk. Navy boats sealed off the island, Air Force planes flew over the jungle trying to locate the rebel camp and battalion combat teams searched in vain for Kamlon. They failed. Kamlon had to surrender to a negotiated peace.
During that month, I had this happy opportunity of meeting Princess Tarhata Kiram — heiress to the Sultanate of Sulu which leased “in perpetuity” North Borneo to the British North Borneo Company.
I remember her very well, in her sixties, fair, petite, vivacious, American-educated. She was then married to a retired Army officer. I remember, too, the wonderful scent of her perfume which swirled around us.
Most of all, I remember her dismissal of the great divide between us. She said gaily, “It will be solved in bed.”
