My wife and I woke up one Wednesday morning and I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock. It was raining and the air was cool. In the additional five minutes of sleep, otherwise known as negotiating with myself if I should get up or not, there was a quandary in my head: With everything that’s been going on, are we Filipinos still allowed to enjoy the rain?
The rain has always been a great hammer to our consciousness, but there were certain points in recent history, whether personal or occurring in the much larger social sphere, when the rain’s intensity and our uneven reactions to it gave way to epiphanies that altogether changed the ways we live our lives.
When I was in Grade 4, our Language and Reading teacher, Mr. Rabonza, scolded us for celebrating “like monkeys” when classes were called off because of the rain. He demanded that we think about the way we jumped around the classroom and made animal noises just because of the no-classes announcement coursed through the school’s PA system.
“Not everyone will be going home to cozy houses like yours!” he told us before storming out of the classroom. This was in 1999, when class suspensions weren’t a thing yet.
Looking back now, I realize it must’ve taken a lot of guts for him to tell that to 40 little Atenean boys who were likely to “make sumbong” to their parents about their teacher throwing a fit.
Tropical Storm “Ondoy” in 2009 was an apocalypse, a point of no return, for those who lived in the National Capital Region and most especially in the cities of Pasig and Marikina. It was followed by Severe Tropical Storm “Sendong” in 2011 and by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” in 2013. Sendong was peculiar, especially for Mindanawons like my family, because typhoons didn’t usually bisect Mindanao Island, east to west, in December.
Yolanda was an anomaly for all of us Filipinos because of the wide extent of death and destruction it caused all over the Visayas and parts of Luzon. In Leyte, particularly in Tacloban City, grew an acute understanding of (indeed, a trauma over) storm surges.
But after this triumvirate of massive storms, we seem to have developed a tolerance and a vocabulary for the rain, whether caused by habagat (monsoon), tropical depressions, low-pressure areas, or wind patterns in places as far as Russia and the Pacific Ocean. We called them “natural disasters,” not man-made ones, and we shrugged, helpless every time they wreaked havoc and caused chaos. “Natural lang,” we said.
Naturally, too, over time, there seem to be fewer people enjoying the rain. Fewer kids horsing around and bathing in the rain. Fewer people savoring the cold it brings, and fewer people proclaiming that they do.
The rain is always followed by news of floods, of people stranded in traffic, and of livelihoods lost, whether it be a dreadful five-day downpour or an abrupt two-hour thunderstorm. The idea of dancing in the rain is as good as Greek mythology now. It got me thinking why we often describe rainy days as “masama ang panahon”—bad weather—when the sky has no concern whatsoever for, or cannot concern itself with, ethics or morals or things good or bad for humankind.
South Korean Bong Joon Ho’s 2020 Oscar-winner Parasite immortalizes on film the power of the rain to evoke social inequality. The scene has been turned into a reliable meme. “Today, the sky is so blue and no pollution! Thanks to all the rain yesterday!” says the rich mother Choi Yeon-gyo on the phone, and Kim Ki-taek, the quietly scorned driver, hears everything while at the wheel. On our shores, Irene Villamor’s “Ulan” (2019) has Nadine Lustre, as Maya, navigating life and love with the rain as gift-giver and, ultimately, as the ruler of her fate. There is no shortage of works that tackle our relationship with the rain.
The way pop culture has made sense of the rain has varied over the years. There’s “Ulan” (1994) by Rivermaya, and there’s “Ulan” (2005) by Cueshé—two songs on opposite ends of the spectrum. Most recently, there’s “Raining in Manila” by Lola Amour that’s celebratory on one end and mournful on the other. The Beatles have “Rain,” while Prince has “Purple Rain.”
In Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, there are five crucial scenes under the rain: when Don Rafael Ibarra’s corpse is being transferred, when Pilosopo Tasio’s character is introduced, when Crispin is being whipped in church, when Elias tricks Lucas, and in the final few pages of the Epilogue, set one September, when a ghostly apparition is rumored to be Maria Clara.
I’ve titled this piece “I’m Only Happy When It Rains,” which is the title of a song by the American industrial rock band Garbage, because it was the first thing that played in my head when I began that Wednesday wondering if we still had the right to enjoy the rain. Over heavy, wrenching guitars and the banging of drums, Garbage singer Shirley Manson demands, over and over, that you “pour your miseries/ pour your miseries/ down on me.”
I imagine the few people who remain unadulteratedly happy these days whenever it rains: contractors of flood control projects and the politicians, engineers, and influencers (their children) they dine with. I feel that so much of our hesitation to storm their houses, ransack their bedrooms, and burn everything down stems from the ways that we make sense of the rain and the floods that come right after. That what’s keeping us at a deadlock between righteous rioting, as they have in Indonesia and in Nepal, and maintaining the status quo is that we seem to find the idea of holding them accountable absurd when their corruption involves saving us from a force of nature.
Put simply, we seem to merely accept that we’re up against big forces (the rain, the floods, the changing climate) and that placing our biggest enemies (the Dutertes, the Marcoses, the Discayas, their friends, and all these political dynasties, etc., etc.) in guillotines and burning their luxury cars and Forbes Park mansions just won’t help anyone. Oh, dear. Such prudish times.
But this isn’t so surprising when we think of how we’ve long been raised and educated to love “peaceful” ways. Mayor Vico Sotto, instigator of all these investigations, was quick to disavow the protests aimed at the Discayas. In the Mass I attended three Sundays ago, the priest started strong. He talked about the floods in Quezon City the day before, connected the massive destruction everywhere to the massive corruption by a few, and explained how sin is so insidious that it infiltrates and destroys too many lives. But then he turned the tables around and said that maybe, before we judge the Discayas and the corrupt, we should look inward and see if we’ve never done wrong ourselves. It was disappointing. To allow such framing and comparison between the rich and the poor, when the poor will never earn in a lifetime what the corrupt earn in a week, is just ridiculous.
Perhaps it’s time to talk about how anger is sometimes a gift, a valid human emotion in response to things, great or small, gone wrong. There is, of course, the incident of Jesus cleansing the temple. But more apt for our situation, I would cite the event in the Gospel when the water and the wind were raging, and Jesus asked Peter to come and walk on water with him. I would think that, with the scene occurring over a body of water, the raging wind would count as rain. Peter did walk on water, but upon feeling the wind, was filled with doubt and began to sink. Jesus reprimanded him: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
I’d like to think that this is a much more liberating way to make sense of all this rain, all this water, and all the scandal that surrounds us. It is an invitation for us to defy the odds and do the unthinkable, the “impossible.” Do we doubt so much our capacities to discern and act on what’s right that we falter in taking the next step? That we fail to walk on water, too?
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