bayan – Page 79 – Katrina Stuart Santiago

On August 7, 2011, the History Channel premiered its 48-minute documentary on the bus hostage drama that happened in Manila a year ago on August 23, 2010.

For a full week after the premier, this same documentary would be replayed every day, sometimes three times a day, on cable TV. There was no noise about it, barely any media mileage other than what looked like press releases from the History Channel itself, where the documentary is sold along with the rest of the channel’s offerings for August.

For a nation that prides itself in having a powerful online and mainstream media, for a nation that can pick on a private citizen like Christopher Lao, and an artist like Mideo Cruz, we sure as hell know when to keep something under the radar. We sweep it under the proverbial rug, so to speak, just in case we might also be allowed to forget it. Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, means we cannot be seen as evil? (more…)

it was daunting more than anything else, though at some point all that operated was an amount of yabang: i’ve seen friends do this before, i’ve seen wonderful beautiful local books happen without a big publisher behind it, without press releases coming out in papers. and this book, i knew, deserved the major major effort of blood/sweat/tears because it is about family and history. because it is unconventional in form, an almost refusal to fall within the genres that are familiar, a straddling among creative non-fiction/historical essay/memoir. because it demanded a freedom from the standard limitations of publishing, given its refusal as well to deal with the ways in which things are usually written, how they usually look, what can usually be said.

and so Revolutionary Routes can be infinitely controversial, familiar as many of the personalities within its pages are, from former presidents Manuel Quezon to Ramon Magsaysay, Vicente Sotto to Artemio Ricarte to Tomas Mapua, yet here, more than anything they are revealed to be people. there should be no fear in that. there should be freedom in it.

because that is also what it means to family: a great amount of freedom. to be able to let go of these stories, and more than sharing it with the world, show the world how our Lola Concha, unnamed and anonymous, knew somehow to sit down and write, in long hand, about the life she lived. with no pretenses at publication, no grand narrative tying everything together, no effort at making saints out of sinners. in the process she left not just a narrative about family, but a history both local and national in the voice of someone who actually lived within it. Reynaldo Ileto’s Foreword to the book begins:

Revolutionary Routes is more than a family history across four generations. Author Angela Stuart-Santiago has deftly woven together the memoirs, clippings, correspondence and other traces of her family’s past into a microhistory that spans the late 19th century up to the 1950s. While this book is rooted in the specific experiences of a family that lived in Tiaong and its adjoining towns in southwestern Tayabas (now Quezon) province, it also tells us much, from the ground up, about everyday life in the countryside under the shadow of successive imperial and national regimes. This book can also be read as a modern history of the Philippines.

it seemed there was no other way to do this book, but to take it by the horns and make it walk a path we were making up as we went along. a kind of tribute to the way Lola Concha lived believing in hard work and with more heart — heart — than i can muster. a tribute to Lola Nena who could see most clearly even as she was blind, who inadvertently led me to reading beyond my years, whose sadnesses are a thread i find strength in. and really, ultimately, a glass raised to Angela, whose writing’s a gift in the most basic and complex of ways.

today these arrived in the house and home that Lola Concha and Lola Nena continue to provide us in Mandaluyong:

and i realized there was no other way, no other way at all, but to have taken the path we did, difficult/stressful/frustrating as it was. and today, i felt as close to this joy as i could, as in the end, this route could only be liberating, in all ways imaginable.

***

we’re launching Revolutionary Routes, on August 20 2011, 5 to 8PM at the Filipinas Heritage Library. come buy a book and have Angela sign it! we’re celebrating family and Tayabas, and Elias from Rizal’s Noli who we now know to be a crucial part of our story.

if at all, you’ll get to meet us beyond our blogs, with partying the only thing on our minds, no fangs included. do come!

Revolutionary Routes by Angela Stuart-Santiago

Revolutionary Routes, Five Stories of Incarceration, Exile, Murder and Betrayal in Tayabas Province 1891-1980 by Angela Stuart-Santiago

based on the memoirs in Spanish of Concepcion Herrera vda de Umali
as translated into English by Concepcion Umali Stuart

foreword by Reynaldo C. Ileto
book design and overall layout by Adam David
cover design and Elias illustration by Mervin Malonzo
official website by Joel Santiago

on August 11 the presscon of the group Palayain Ang Sining became interesting to me for many reasons, least of all what was being said. and no, this wasn’t a measure of who was speaking, or what was being said, but the kind of room it became, filled with media as it was.

and no, pinky webb wasn’t even there. neither was karen davila. but there were men with huge versions of their penises, este, long hard lenses. and they weren’t pointing it at who was talking.

i’m this close to that man’s elbow because he was practically standing over the girl beside me. we were facing the front of the room where National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, Karen Flores-Ocampo, Myra Beltran, etal., were making their statements about freedom of expression, which should’ve matter to all of us in the audience. except that these men weren’t interested in who was talking, nor did they want to gain a better sense of what’s actually going on here, complicit as they’ve been in the manner in which freedom of expression has been compromised given media’s treatment of the exhibit Kulo.

instead they had their sights set on the one person they had sacrificed and made into their headline, and who was refusing to speak that day, who has (thankfully) refused to speak since.

what astounded me about these members of the media, in this small conference room of the college of mass comm in UP, was not so much that they were zeroing in on mideo, but that they were ultimately bastos about it. they not only had their backs turned to the ones speaking in front, they also kept disrupting the proceedings as they reprimanded each other and talked in loud whispers among themselves. they didn’t even stop taking pictures as we sang the national anthem. they didn’t stop for the national anthem when there was a Philippine flag in that room.

that morning, and without a doubt, the media showed what it is they’re made of, and why they are so capable of irresponsibility and sensationalism. we should all just admit that in the end, when push comes to shove, all we want is to find an enemy and serve him on a silver platter to the religious and conservatives and powerful in this country, thinking that we’re gaining tickets to heaven by doing so.

in truth, we’ve built a version of hell here, and it’s pretty clear who the devils are.

Going to art exhibits and events since 2009, I find that what I enjoy most about it is the solitude and silence. I’m not known in art circles (or any circle for that matter) and can go around unobtrusively; on “gallery days” it’s rare that there are other spectators, least of all someone I know, in these art spaces. It’s a gift, a break I take even as it requires trips to places from UN Avenue in Manila to West Avenue in Quezon City. The time becomes mine, the art I own with my gaze.

It was with this same gaze, within the same task of going to see as many exhibits as I can, that I went to Kulô at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) on July 2 2011. I was doing Virgin Labfest 7 marathons, and made sure to come early to spend a good hour at the gallery. A day or so after, I virtually happened upon participating artist Pocholo Goitia and told him how much I loved the exhibit, the best of the Rizal efforts I’d seen so far; a couple of weeks after he tells me in passing that it’s gotten into some controversy or other and I brush it off: who has cared about art in the past three years that I’ve been engaging with it in my own way(s)? Given Kulô’s premises I also thought the only ones who’d wrongly take offense would be the University of Santo Tomas (UST), alumni as the exhibiting artists are of the said university, the Goitia essay particularly placing the exhibit within, beyond and against the said institution.

When the noise about Kulô became real to me, I couldn’t even believe it was about Mideo Cruz’s “Poleteismo.” My experience of the installation as part of the exhibit was limited to two points of interest: one, the manner in which the various works of Cruz were curated and put together into this one installation that allowed it to be powerful from outside without the crucifix and without zeroing in on what else was attached to those walls; and two, the fact that it still seemed to work for me, old as the work was. Context could only be the reason for the latter, and in the case of this exhibit which consisted of many old works, context was key: there’s the fact of UST no matter the individual relationships of the artists with the institution, and there’s the 150 years of Jose Rizal, a UST alumnus.

the rest is here.

there is no excuse — no excuse — for a President who not only presumes that 85% of this country are the same kind of Catholic; he also then thinks that this is a valid enough reason to gauge public anger. no excuse for a President who is as bad as Vic de Leon Lima. let me not begin with the fact that his own father died for democracy and freedom, the same things that this President has sacrificed here. and you are wrong, Ser Noy, this is not a question of whether or not freedom is absolute; it’s a question of you folding to the CBCP and Pinoy conservatives, who in this country have proven themselves as bad as the kukluxklan. this is about you — and everybody else who sacrificed critical thinking in this case — revealing whose got the balls. and it is apparently all them priests and conservatives who could only zero in on those penises, because that’s all that was in that exhibit as far as they were concerned.

except that there were these works: