WOMEN, on the Verge of Another Breakdown
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First row (L-R): Marites Danguilan-Vitug, Sylvia Mayuga, Sheila Coronel
Second row: JoAnn Maglipon, Lilia Quindoza Santiago, Paulynn Paredes Sicam, Gemma Nemenzo, Marra P.L. Lanot, Rochit Tañedo and Karina Bolasco
Standing: Neni Sta. Romana Cruz, Ceres P. Doyo
Not in picture: Sol J. Mendoza, Fanny Garcia, Mila Astorga-Garcia and Arlene Babst-Vokey
These women wrote these stories under the threat of censorship and imprisonment.
In Manila, there is a wall of remembrance built soon after Marcos fell in 1986, to honor and remember victims of his repression. This Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Wall) is somewhat secluded near a busy highway, and one has to search for it to be able to recall a dark past that most Filipinos seem to have forgotten over the recent decades.
It has been ages since I read these stories in magazines that were either passed around clandestinely or published under limited circulation. We called these publications the “mosquito press,” the alternative to the sanitized daily broadsheets, and the source of unblemished journalism on issues hidden from Philippine society and the world at large. Anything we could get our hands on, about rivalries in the cabinet, corruption among the Marcos family cronies, or the growing threat of a communist “people’s army” in the countryside.
I was a journalism student in the early 1980s. In the university, we spoke out loud, marched in demonstrations, and listened to the voices of leftist activists. The journalism club of which I was an officer invited gutsy women journalists to speak to us. We were awed by their audacity. In spite of the repressive atmosphere, they had wit and style, and definitely gave meaning to the oft-repeated phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword.” We read every piece they wrote – poetry, reportage, opinion columns, and anything else that was denied to the public.
Subversion was their genre.
A few of these memories have returned recently, the result of trying to make sense of these bleakest of times. I remember magazine editor Jo-Ann Maglipon and other writers who, in 1974, were detained at Fort Bonifacio, then the sprawling Army headquarters, but now a high-end district of condominiums, shops, and restaurants. She was telling us of her visitors, a poet and his wife who brought a lovely picnic basket for lunch.
“Under a little thatch roof held up by four sticks, in the middle of a jogging path in that prison, right on top of the dusty earth, they spread their red-and-white tablecloth, on which they laid out pewters and silverware and fine glasses and nice breads. It felt almost English.”
She had been in the underground when she was in her twenties in the early 1970s, supporting the Communist Party’s efforts to overthrow Marcos. Another rebel among the WOMEN was Gemma Nemenzo, sister of an eminent scholar and activist, and once married to an NPA fighter. From 1972 to 1981, the official years of martial law, her life turned upside down, bringing her up close and personal to prisons, killings, and betrayals. [See https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/gemma/creative-subversion]
She called it a time for “creative subversion” by artists and writers, the most unforgettable specimen of which was an “anonymous poem borrowing references to the Greek mythology but was actually a protest slogan when deciphered from the first letter of each line.”
“Before I knew it, 30 years had passed, but the ghost of martial law began to loom over us again in the shape of a new president, a tyrant wannabe who thundered out of the blue from a Mindanao city that had been wracked with violence.”
It read, MARCOS HITLER DIKTADOR TUTA (Marcos, Hitler, Dictator, Lapdog), and it spread like wildfire in the underground. Marcos was the country’s Hitler, the dictator, and a puppet of the American government that supported his regime from the start until he was deposed and spent the rest of his life a virtual prisoner on Oahu island in the middle of the Pacific. He died in 1989. Unwittingly the poem, titled “Prometheus Unbound,” came out in a Marcos-controlled publication whose editors had clearly not realized what it was intended for.
These were but a few of the stories I remember about the WOMEN. They survived to tell their stories, witnessing the end of a tyranny and the country breaking into light out of nearly two decades of darkness. These days, their slogan is “Never Again!”
My generation reaped what it sowed.
A failed coup plot by a faction in the army triggered Marcos’s ouster in 1986. Before they planned their coup, these colonels were calling for reforms in the military, which they claimed had become riddled with corruption. To keep people informed they reached out to journalists, especially the WOMEN; and while their plot failed their actions were still part of the larger political process that forced Marcos out of power. Sometimes I would close my eyes and see myself there at the moment of history unfolding, those four days in February 1986, and I could say that it was the best time to be a journalist in my country.
But instead of celebrating the return of democratic institutions, these officers mutinied against the new (and popular) government of President Corazon Aquino. Theirs was some kind of a knee-jerk reaction to the suddenly diluted power of the military. Their coup attempts split the establishment: the constitutionalists among them held tight for the principles of democracy and civilian supremacy, while the politically ambitious kept plotting. All these made investigating the military exhilarating for the journalists of my time, to keep the flame of democracy alive while the country hung in the balance.
For about seven years after Marcos, there was no rest, every day we woke up to rumors of yet another plot. We followed at all times reports and rumors of the outbreak of mutinies from the presidential palace to the military camps.
Developing ties with the officers before 1986 paid dividends. The gates of the army camps were always open to journalists. The officers aired their views as though they, too, had broken free from a dictator’s rigid mouthpieces. This was unthinkable under martial law. It was unheard of to be traipsing from office to office, from one headquarters to another trying to get a scoop. The men in uniform had been the monsters unleashed by Marcos; they had been recast as heroes helping to save democracy, which became a fresh breath of air that gave the press all its might to grab any story of the day. No one was going to stop us.
My journalistic and creative writings grew out of the saga of the military after martial law. There was not much else to cover save the string of mutinies until they petered out, after which the focus shifted back to the counter-insurgency campaign in Mindanao. The mutinies erupted throughout the decades, from under one president to the next. There were battles, attacks, and sieges. There was a long-delayed attempt at brokering peace. I wasn’t always there, but I always wanted to be there because these were stories I felt attached to; I had them on the palm of my hand. I worked for foreign news agencies and then turned freelancer, giving way to writing books about Mindanao or the military, in between other stories.
Before I knew it, 30 years had passed, but the ghost of martial law began to loom over us again in the shape of a new president, a tyrant wannabe who thundered out of the blue from a Mindanao city that had been wracked with violence. Rodrigo Duterte did not mince words about his love for the late Marcos, whose remains he allowed to be buried in the Heroes’ Cemetery near Fort Bonifacio; and by doing this revived the horrors of the past.
The country became divided, and the opposition was torn apart. One by one, the president targeted women who opposed him: jailing a senator he accused of involvement with drug dealers; removing the vice president from his cabinet; unseating the Supreme Court chief justice who questioned his drug war. His open misogyny is unrivaled by any other Philippine leader. Some of the younger women journalists, who have followed the trail of extrajudicial killings in the slums of Manila under the force of his anti-drug war, have seen scenes as brutal as Marcos’s anti-subversion campaigns.
His popularity has been unscathed: How do we write about this? How do we explain it? He entertains, he ridicules, he flips his words at the snap of a finger. We are jolted by his pronouncements every so often, unable to make sense of his mind, which one academic from Mindanao, Duterte’s bailiwick, has likened to that of a drunk at the neighborhood store, riling himself up when awakened from a stupor.
He has catcalled young women journalists at press conferences, he threatens press freedom by intimidation through legal action. It hasn’t yet reached a point where journalists are literally shackled, yet the fear is there.
For journalists and writers, we are living through a twilight zone: everything is the unknown, as with the rest of the world, and democracy is losing out to illiberal populism.
We may possibly recover later on, if one may be optimistic about it. I can still roam my country, I can still visit military camps in Mindanao, where martial law was declared at the outbreak of a battle against Islamist rebels in 2017. But conversations with officers show how guarded they are. Disgust, anger, and fear are a lethal combination that paralyzes journalists and many among the outspoken. We have reached another junction in history.
Meanwhile, the WOMEN went back to the streets and published their writings of yore. Jo-Ann Maglipon recently edited an anthology of writings, “Not On Our Watch: Martial Law Really Happened. We Were There.” We are a country, it said, that has the hardest time remembering anything, and this book should call us to a “Great Remembering.” Ceres Doyo, a longstanding columnist of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, revived a compilation of more than 30 newspaper and magazine articles by emboldened journalists, mostly women from those years of media shutdowns, arrests, detentions, forced resignations, interrogations, libel cases, and deaths.
Two anthologies of martial law stories edited by WOMEN members. Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon (right) and Ma. Ceres P. Doyo.
My country will never run out of stories to tell, I can bet on that. I often wonder though how much of these stories will stay in our collective memory, what we recycle or thresh out, and what we must keep writing to save us from falling again.
Reprinted with permission from the online magazine 'A Carnival of Mirrors: The state of freedom of expression in Philippines,' published for the 85th PEN International Congress that was held in Manila in September 2019.
Criselda Yabes
Criselda Yabes is the author of "Below the Crying Mountain" set in the rebellion of the 1970s in the south. It won the UP Centennial Literary Prize in 2008 and was nominated for the Man Asian Prize in 2010. She is currently based in Manila.
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