EDITOR’S NOTE: These remarks were delivered as a message from the family at the close of the 5th Edel Garcellano Conference with the theme “Resistance, Contradiction and Critique: Committed Writing Now,” held at the Ateneo de Manila University last Nov. 29.
It’s extraordinary that the conference honoring Edel Garcellano and his work is now on its fifth year. His children, Liana and Lyra Garcellano, and I are grateful to his colleagues and comrades for this continuing endeavor and to the participants for their efforts in making today’s presentation of ideas possible in this crowded, cacophonous time.
Today we are in a critical intersection that demands full attention and clarity of thinking. The corruption scandal that is coming to light piecemeal is breathtaking in its range even as its actual extent has yet to be plumbed. Who knows exactly how much was plundered from taxpayer money spent on flood control and other infra projects in this and other ravenous administrations all the way back to the Marcos Sr. dictatorship?
As in the past but in great measure today, power in its many forms is being employed to confuse, distract, and deceive, and we are called upon to make sense of the information that is thrust on us, or that we manage to extricate from the welter of detail and worthless words.
Today we are called upon to identify the opportunistic voices and, at the same time, to recognize and challenge a specific silence, the silence that Edel Garcellano described as “full of speech.” Most important, we are called upon to help others do so.
In explaining and interpreting, in providing the correct framework with which others may comprehend how the majority of Filipinos continue to be kept impoverished, and therefore ignorant and powerless, we may begin to justify our reading, our writing, and ultimately our being here, talking each to each, within these privileged walls.
Lately I’ve been trying to pick myself up from a certain sadness resulting from reading “Trail of Blame,” William J. Pomeroy’s collection of “stories of the Philippines.” Many of these stories, he said, “evolved out of observations of life in its underdeveloped, semi-feudal conditions of poverty, superstition and inequality.” The American Pomeroy lived in the Philippines for 17 years, during which he became committed to the Huk liberation movement against the US colonial government, and for which he and his Filipino wife and comrade, Celia Mariano, were captured and held as political prisoners. The stories were published between 1949 and 1968 in Philippine and foreign magazines and journals. How long ago that was, and here we still are.
Yet there’s another story that has been chewing at me all week. Just last Monday after an errand, I had a late lunch with Liana at a popular chicken joint where the tables spill over onto some sort of open-air terrace five steps down from where you order your food. We settled at a table beside a 4-seater, the chairs empty now but, I noted idly, the table yet uncleared of the remains of what looked to have been a hearty meal. Still waiting for our food, I looked past it and was watching the Timog Avenue traffic when a man entered my peripheral vision and stopped at that table. He wasn’t wearing the staff’s black uniform but he appeared to be getting the table ready for the next clients.
Well, not exactly. A quick sidelong glance showed me that he was collecting leftover scraps of pork and chicken, as well as chicken bones, onto one of the used plates. He took the plate to another yet-uncleared table directly in my line of vision, settled in, and began to eat, helping himself to that other table’s leftovers.
Unfortunately, as I grow older, I seem to tend to avert my eyes from fraught moments; in close-quarter instances such as that Monday encounter, I tend to unfocus my gaze. Had I been sufficiently bold—the way I was when I was a young reporter who thought she had the world on a string—I would have directed a steady stare at this man on hunting-and-gathering mode, I would then have a detailed story to tell of him, probably in his late forties, gray streaking his hair, gaunt and looking burdened by a lean backpack, and now eating with dignity from used plates, partaking of other persons’ leavings, sipping from a glass still half-filled with someone else’s order of soda—a man no longer of use to this capitalist system, what the scholar Neferti Tadiar may cite as a remaindered life.
At some point I wanted to bring him the small bowl of broth that came with our side order of bangus sisig. But I desisted, wary of embarrassing him and also myself. Would he have accepted it? Or would he have been annoyed by this rumpled woman who couldn’t mind her own business? I’ll never know.
I looked at the others on the terrace: They seemed unperturbed, as though it were no big deal. Even the staff seemed to steer clear of his table. I realized I was making a running whispered report for Liana’s benefit, so she wouldn’t turn around and look.
When the man got up, he seemed to sway a little, as though exhausted. He walked to a ledge and sat, quietly surveying his surroundings. He wore faded clothes, a T-shirt with a collar, frayed pants, rubber slippers. His face was calm. I left my unfinished chicken inasal and the bowl of broth, stupidly hoping he could get to the pittance before the staff cleared it away.
Last night, I thought of the man again as I listened to news that the resigned public works district engineer Henry Alcantara had surrendered to the Independent Commission for Infrastructure ₱110 million in cash that he had stolen from flood control funds, apparently part of the money he had not yet squandered in the gambling casinos, and as part of who knows what deal for him to qualify as state witness to a terrible crime.
“What must it take to convince Filipinos that they’re poor?” Edel Garcellano wrote. “Only a few are up in arms, as if life would take care of itself.”
Today I will come away with lessons I picked up from this conference, primarily of the continuing importance of committed writing, both in the academe and in journalism, in depicting our material realities and the necessity of resistance. I’d like to think what I have been practicing in my field, where I continue to toil in the trenches, is “involved” writing—that is to say, caught in the constant tension of being both observer and participant of events—in a field where neutrality is perpetually invoked but, never to forget, neutrality that never precludes truth-telling.
My family and I thank the Ateneo de Manila University and Polytechnic University of the Philippines for organizing the fifth conference on the work of this man we love and always remember: Ateneo’s Literary and Cultural Studies Program, Kritika Kultura, Ateneo Archive of Philippine Literature in English, and Kwan Laurel Fund for the Humanities. And PUP’s Research Institute for Culture and Language, Center for Creative Writing, and Center for Philippines Studies.
May everyone stand strong and safe.
