Love? What Love?
For you and I, there is only Survival. About time
you woke up from your dream.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Takut-Takut
That you should get back at me. Or I at you. Was it 1995 when I went there with Mimi? The stench of sepsis permeating the air. I could not think right. My migraine wouldn’t leave me for days on end that Mimi had to invent a medical excuse just so I could go back to Zamboanga and get some clean air.
What I felt then was fury. And I wrote Jim, the comrade I once knew and who was with me when I went to Jolo in 1986. Your friend Fatima’s dearly beloved Bangsamoro revolution has come to this, Jim, I had said, a shitload of garbage and human excrement that stinks to dear Heavens. The rest was relief: that I was forever out of it, Bangsamoro revolution, shitloads and all.
But like what poet-bum Viktor said, I’m a peripatetic. I keep on coming back for more of things long lost to me. Like Jolo. Which should be my first sight of revolution. The camp that warmly welcomed us was an armory of weapons, something I cannot say of the other revolution I got to know later where I was made to carry a .20 shotgun among a squad of ill-equipped dog-howled sniggering combatants. I felt like turning on my heel, to shoot birds, and leave the hukbos alone to do their guerilla warfare without me. Which they of course did, much much later, except that I didn’t take to shooting birds.
Nineteen-eighty-six was when I first set foot on the island. We went to Maimbung, Indanan and Patikul. The walls of the ruined mosques, edifices of the 1972 bombings, accused: Moros, not Filipinos! I was one and twenty then. No. One and twenty-two. I walked fast, thought slow. Rolling hills is all I recall of the terrain. Then we climbed a steep incline. Reaching the top and resting on a huge rock, our host, Fatima, would tell me that we were standing on what used to be seat of the Sultanate of Sulu, and that the rocks were hauled up all the way from the riverbed below by the sultan’s slaves to make a fortress. As I said, I was young and credulity was my strongest point. You couldn’t hear me arguing against anything you knew about the universe, much less about riverbeds drying and earth rising. And I wasn’t overly conscious then. My world so narrow I romanced everything I knew next to nothing about. I was also so earnest you couldn’t hear me laughing about floods and people drowning twin towers toppling.
Fast forward to 2011 and I’m back to where I first made the first cut. The people I used to know are no longer there. They have gone over to the other side, occupying the seats they once wanted to overthrow. It’s still the old town I used to know, only, none of the backdrop countryside romance. Dashed hopes, armies in disarray, corrupted one way or the other. Hungry people savage in their demands, shameless in their despair.
My luck that I had been properly warned, aptly armed.
Catholic doctrine, Flannery O’Connor: The Kingdom of Heaven is a violent one, and only the violent will bear it away.
What I felt then was fury. And I wrote Jim, the comrade I once knew and who was with me when I went to Jolo in 1986. Your friend Fatima’s dearly beloved Bangsamoro revolution has come to this, Jim, I had said, a shitload of garbage and human excrement that stinks to dear Heavens. The rest was relief: that I was forever out of it, Bangsamoro revolution, shitloads and all.
But like what poet-bum Viktor said, I’m a peripatetic. I keep on coming back for more of things long lost to me. Like Jolo. Which should be my first sight of revolution. The camp that warmly welcomed us was an armory of weapons, something I cannot say of the other revolution I got to know later where I was made to carry a .20 shotgun among a squad of ill-equipped dog-howled sniggering combatants. I felt like turning on my heel, to shoot birds, and leave the hukbos alone to do their guerilla warfare without me. Which they of course did, much much later, except that I didn’t take to shooting birds.
Nineteen-eighty-six was when I first set foot on the island. We went to Maimbung, Indanan and Patikul. The walls of the ruined mosques, edifices of the 1972 bombings, accused: Moros, not Filipinos! I was one and twenty then. No. One and twenty-two. I walked fast, thought slow. Rolling hills is all I recall of the terrain. Then we climbed a steep incline. Reaching the top and resting on a huge rock, our host, Fatima, would tell me that we were standing on what used to be seat of the Sultanate of Sulu, and that the rocks were hauled up all the way from the riverbed below by the sultan’s slaves to make a fortress. As I said, I was young and credulity was my strongest point. You couldn’t hear me arguing against anything you knew about the universe, much less about riverbeds drying and earth rising. And I wasn’t overly conscious then. My world so narrow I romanced everything I knew next to nothing about. I was also so earnest you couldn’t hear me laughing about floods and people drowning twin towers toppling.
Fast forward to 2011 and I’m back to where I first made the first cut. The people I used to know are no longer there. They have gone over to the other side, occupying the seats they once wanted to overthrow. It’s still the old town I used to know, only, none of the backdrop countryside romance. Dashed hopes, armies in disarray, corrupted one way or the other. Hungry people savage in their demands, shameless in their despair.
My luck that I had been properly warned, aptly armed.
Catholic doctrine, Flannery O’Connor: The Kingdom of Heaven is a violent one, and only the violent will bear it away.