She was the fearless warrior who never stopped fighting. Susan Quimpo, friend, comrade, sister, simply would not quit.
She joined the fight against Ferdinand Marcos as a young woman — then led the effort to make sure young Filipinos know, remember and understand what the dictator did to the country.
Susan Quimpo passed away last week. She was one of the most courageous activists of our generation.
That courage was underscored by the way she left this world: She had been struggling with an illness over the past two years, but she took one more fight, one more battle against another dictator.
The activist who faced off with Marcos did not think twice about taking on another thug, Rodrigo Duterte. It was a fight that quickly became eerily similar to, and in some ways worse than the one our generation faced.
And the urgency of that new battle was evident in Facebook messages she sent me, especially as the brutality of his regime became clearer.
“If people react fast through a ground swell the martial law or revolutionary government declaration and all its ill effects can be avoided,” she told me amid reports that Duterte was planning a crackdown by declaring a revolutionary government. “Don’t wait for leaders. Be one.”
Sadly, it was a journey, a fight, whose end Susan would not be able to witness and celebrate.
She died as the new dictatorship was tightening its grip on power. Her journey ended shortly after Duterte signed a cruel ‘anti-terrorism” law to crackdown on anyone who fights back against his regime.
It was the end of a warrior’s journey, bold and awe-inspiring.
We had known each other at UP in the early 1980s, at the height of what eventually became a triumphant battle against the Marcos regime. We became close years later as we shared insights into what became a shared passion: telling the stories about the fight against dictatorship.
I wrote a biography of Edgar Jopson in 1989 which was republished as UG, An Underground Tale in 2006. She became interested in the process I went through in putting together the book as she pursued her own project. It was an ambitious narrative about the Martial Law era focused on her own family.
It quickly became clear to me that it was an important undertaking, and one that I actually related to. That’s because Susan and I shared a similar background. We came from middle class families with hard-working parents who wanted their children to get a good education so they could lead stable, prosperous — and safe — lives.
We were children when Martial Law began in 1972 and we both had and were influenced by older siblings who, with the rise of dictatorship, opted to pursue lives that were neither stable, prosperous, nor safe — who, amid the abuse, thuggery and torture under Marcos, declared: ‘We can’t just stay silent — we have to fight back.’
Susan’s family paid a hefty price for that defiance.
Of the 10 children of her parents, Ishmael and Esperanza Quimpo, seven joined the underground resistance to the fascist dictator Marcos; five were imprisoned; four tortured. One was murdered by the military; another abducted and is presumed dead; another forced to live in exile in Europe.
Subversive Lives is undoubtedly one of the most compelling and important narratives of the Marcos years.
But it was also just a small part of what Susan wanted to accomplish: to help young Filipinos know, remember and learn from our past.
“My sole purpose is to remember a generation of activists who really gave their all,” she told me in 2013. “Dapat lang naman. It has to be.”
When Subversive Lives came out in 2012, it had become clear that many young Filipinos didn’t know much about Marcos and weren’t aware of what we had gone through under his dictatorship.
That was when Susan Quimpo was transformed into the leading activist of the Martial Law generation who led the struggle to correct what had been the gravest mistake of our generation: failing to help later generations know, remember and understand how dictatorship wrecked Philippine society.
Writing Subversive Lives was one way to address the problem. But she knew that wasn’t going to be enough. She had to reach out to young Filipinos to inform, educate and engage with them on what had happened to our country under dictatorship.
It wasn’t going to be easy.
How to connect with young people in exploring the Marcos years was a concern she was constantly thinking about. “Tell me how UG has fared with Filipino youth,” she asked me once, referring to my book on Edgar Jopson. “I am constantly thinking of how best to maximize Subversive Lives as a vehicle for informing the youth”
Slogans, like ‘Never Again!’ which became an activist battle cry, can only go so far. “We keep saying, ‘Never Again to Martial Law,’” she told me. “But really… besides ourselves, who actually gets the message?”
To find more effective ways to spread that message, she hit the road, spending time with young people on campuses and other venues.
“I spent much of last year doing a school tour (high school/university) to give talks about martial law during the 40th anniversary of its declaration,” she told me. It was difficult to connect – but one thing was clear – the kids were interested in Martial Law, but they really needed a language they could understand.”
We had talked about putting together a new book together with writer Kris Lacaba on the Marcos years geared to millennials and other young Filipinos, But eventually, Susan saw the need for a more direct and dynamic approach.
In early 2016, she helped launch The Martial Law Chronicles, a campaign that featured a more direct, grassroots approach, including a wildly successful exhibit and in-person presentations on high school and college campuses.
She continued reaching out to even more young people in classrooms across the country. She clearly connected with many of them like Matthew Flores, a 10th grader at Xavier School in Manila who talked about what he learned from Quimpo and who shared his insights in a school publication.
“I feel that we are all compelled to become a more socially aware community, to see the parallelism between then and today,” Flores wrote. “After the talk, I was compelled to ask myself, “What am I called to do? What do I do now?’ I believe the best way we can properly honor the Martial Law victims is by making sure it doesn’t happen again.”
It is happening again.
Duterte’s election in June 2016 ushered in a new era of brutality, marked by mass killings and a new abusive, authoritarian order. Susan was personally outraged by Duterte’s decision to honor Ferdinand Marcos as a hero worthy of burial at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani.
She led a daring, creative campaign, dubbed #BawatBato, in which activists and citizens wrote names of the victims of the dictatorship on stones which they then placed on what was to be Marcos’ gravesite at the Libingan.
“Buti pa nga si Marcos may bangkay, marami ho tulad namin, wala kaming bangkay and we cannot even mourn their death,” she was quoted in a new report, after Marcos was buried at the Libingan, referring to his brother Jan who was made to disappear by the Marcos security forces.
In 2017, Ohio University, where she had earned graduate degrees, published an international edition of Subversive Lives which led to plans for a US tour.
Susan had always understood the importance of the huge Filipino community in the US. She had launched and led Tagalong On-site, a popular and successful program which allowed young Filipino Americans to learn Tagalog while being exposed to Philippine social realities in the urban poor areas or rural communities.
But the 2017 tour unexpectedly turned into a distressing, even painful experience.
Strange things started to happen during the San Francisco leg of her trip. One event got canceled mysteriously and others had to be scaled back amid lies spread about Susan. She was accused of being a red-baiter, whose main goal in the book and the tour is to wage a witch-hunt that would endanger the lives of activists.
These were brazen lies.
In a way the attacks underscored the powerful honesty and sincerity at the core of Subversive Lives, which recounted not just the idealism, courage and sacrifices of the Quimpo siblings, but also their criticisms of the underground left, including its hardline dogmatism and even an alarming capacity for torture and violence.
That antagonized people from the UG left, some of whom hit back at Susan. I denounced what was happening in a column that supported Susan.
But that triggered an even more outrageous attack.
A Bay Area organization, the League of Filipino Students at San Francisco State University, put out a statement titled “A ‘Subversive’ Only in Name, Not in Action” denouncing Susan and me.
“To members in the League of Filipino Students at San Francisco State University, to be a ‘subversive’ during a time of neoliberal and violent regimes is quite the opposite of Quimpo and Pimentel’s defensive behavior,” the group said.
In a bizarre argument, the League of Filipino Students sought to draw a connection between Susan’s work to Trump and Duterte: “During this particular political climate when Donald Trump’s neo-fascism is transforming US imperialism globally and in the US, and when Rodrigo Duterte’s state violence reigns with impunity, members of League of Filipino Students at San Francisco State University, insist that subversion cannot take the form of self-aggrandizing via book tours.”
I wrote a follow up column, in which I also invited the LFS to a dialogue. I did not receive a response, but the offer stands today.
It was a strange, troubling skirmish with an organization whose roots can be traced to our time as activists. The League of Filipino Students was one of the leading student activist organizations during the Marcos years, with whom Susan, other activists and I had marched against the dictatorship. The LFS in the US chapter was launched and led by a good friend of mine, Francis Calpotura, who is now a respected social and racial justice activist and community organizer in the US.
But it was also clear to us that the activists who attacked us had been misled. Still, Susan was clearly hurt by the verbal assaults. When she returned home in Manila, she sent a note to friends recalling the tour which she called “a unique opportunity to speak to groups, especially the Filipino American community.
“Sadly, it wasn’t pro Marcos/Duterte supporters who blocked some of my talks in the San Francisco area, but members of the extreme Left,” she said.
Susan returned to the US in 2018 for another book tour which was more successful and was not disrupted like the previous trip. After UG An Underground Tale, my book about Edgar Jopson, was republished last year, we talked about holding a joint book event this year in time for the 50th anniversary of the First Quarter Storm, the 1970 student uprising against Marcos.
The pandemic put an end to that plan. For Susan, who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2018, time was running out.Susan died on July 14.
There had been times when she seemed frustrated and even discouraged. Another dictatorship was rising, and there was no strong, vibrant activist movement like the one we were part of in the fight against Marcos in the 1980s. The old forms of activism didn’t seem to be working, she lamented.
“Naku, I’m glad you’re not here,” she told me. “Nakakadismaya lang — none of our old methods seem to work anymore.”
But she always managed to remain upbeat. Despite the bizarre, hurtful attacks in San Francisco, she grew excited as she recalled her other interactions with other young Filipino Americans during her 2017 tour.
“Mataas ang interest among Fil-Ams,” she told me. “Doon ako nagulat. Many Fil-Ams are very interested and that really surprised me.”
She remained consistent and never got tired of one thing: recalling, exploring and warning us about our past, reminding us of the previous order we lived through as young Filipinos, when our people endured abuse, corruption, torture, brutal thuggery and death.
That horrible past has returned. And Susan knew what had to be done. This was underscored by what she also told in her 2017 message to friends: “Again we are called to defend democracy.”
Paalam at salamat, Susan. Pahinga ka na, Kapatid. Itutuloy namin ang sinimulan mo…Farewell and thanks, Susan. Rest now, sister. We will continue with what you began.
Please join us for an online memorial for Susan Quimp on July 26, Manila Time. You can find more information on the We Remember Susan Quimpo page on Facebook.
AUTHOR, AUTHOR! Susan Quimpo signing her book, “Subversive Lives” during an author’s talk session at Mt. Cloud Bookshop in Baguio.
She was many things to many people—activist, author-editor, healer, street performer, teacher. But for those who’ve heard her speak, Susan Quimpo was first and foremost a storyteller. Posted one friend on Facebook: “She has mastered the art of storytelling—so gentle even in the harshest and bloodiest details.”
And the harrowing details in Quimpo’s life had been many, most of them recalled stoically in “Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years,” that was published in 2012 and won for the author a National Book Award.
There was “a brother’s death in the hands of a kasama [comrade] … [and] the near hallucinatory tales of [another brother who had gone missing and now presumed dead after his] imprisonment and torture at the hands of the military,” wrote history professor Vince Rafael in the book’s preface.
Darkest era
Quimpo died on Tuesday of systemic scleroderma, a rare and painful autoimmune condition that reached her heart and lungs. She was 59.
The youngest of 10 siblings, Quimpo used her family’s experiences to recount the horrors of martial law to a generation largely unaware of what many describe as the darkest era in modern Philippine history.
Sibyl Jade Peña, a medical doctor doing international humanitarian work, remembered Quimpo as being “part of the fight against the Marcos rule” who, until her death, had been active in “ensuring that the youth doesn’t forget that period.”
Recounted Peña: “In one of our reunions (just before the 2016 elections), in the midst of the singing, reminiscing and eating, she stood up and spoke softly—on the need to connect with young people and to learn how to talk with them so that they may understand what the Marcos rule meant and why Filipinos should never let it happen again … I would like to think that those were the seeds sown, which sparked the massive protests among the youth against the hero’s burial given [to] Marcos.”
Gift of empathy
Despite or perhaps because of the violence visited on her family, Quimpo remained a gentle soul, said her husband George Chiu.
“I think her empathy was a gift. She always had it. She was an extrovert to boot so people were easily attracted to her,” he said.
“The specific object of her passion varied over time … but it always revolved around love of country,” Chiu added.
Quimpo, who spent some years in New York as a graduate student, once quit a “meaningless” but well-paying job at the Columbia Law School to organize Filipino-american youth, Chiu said. When the couple returned to the Philippines, Quimpo established Tagalog on Site, a program that brought Fil-am youth to the Philippines, often to her own home, to learn more about their roots.
“She changed the lives of so many Filipino Americans who were given the chance to come home, learn Tagalog and attend lectures on Philippine studies by some of the great professors in our universities,” Chiu said.
Martial law history
In her video tribute to her distant cousin, children’s book author Candy Quimpo Gourlay recalled how Quimpo brought some of the students to the Cordillera and later, had them meet and interact with Amerasians, the Filipino children abandoned in Olongapo by their American servicemen fathers.
Quimpo was among the first to detect historical revisionism in social media, leading her to launch the Martial Law Chronicles Project (MLCP), an all-volunteer collective dedicated to training high school teachers on how to teach martial law history accurately and in compelling ways.
“When Susan rose to speak, she cut a very unassuming manner. But the second she narrated her family’s stories you could see the audience stunned into silence. We were enthralled not just by the scale of one family’s sacrifice but by her steely determination to make sure we never forget,” said Aimee Santos-lyons, a National Program Officer of the UN Population Fund, who became part of the MLCP training team that conducted three-day workshops for educators.
For martial law survivors, Quimpo offered art therapy, coaxing out repressed memories into visual representation.
‘Embodiment’
“She was a healer. During my dark days in chemotherapy, she took me in and she helped me. I became very close to her,” recalled Etta Rosales, former Commission on Human Rights chair and torture survivor. They would laugh a lot during those sessions, she said, mainly because she was no artist.
Quimpo daughters Sarita, a medical student, and Adriana, a political science student and aspiring human rights lawyer, said their mom “cared so deeply” that despite difficulty of breathing in her dying days, she managed to remind them to drink calamansi juice three times a day.
In her story for Verafiles, writer Babeth Lolarga recalled that shortly before her death, Quimpo still attended rallies against impunity and would make the rounds of schools, asking if she could teach martial law history. At one forum, she was asked, “Why blame Marcos for what the country has become in the last three decades?”
Quimpo replied: “I cannot mourn my brother Jan. We do not have a body to bury while Marcos has a body and was buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.”
Quimpo’s story gives her hope, Lyons said. “She was proof and embodiment that a person, a family and a country can survive the darkest of days and emerge as freedom fighters.”
The threat to deploy police house-to-house to forcibly take COVID-19 positive people from their homes and bring them to government isolation centers was the latest in disturbing news we don’t need during a pandemic. Shouldn’t we send health workers instead of police in fatigues carrying long arms? Why the dragnet after our stressed-out health secretary just announced that the Philippines “has flattened the curve”? He retracted that claim within the day and said he meant “bent,” not “flattened.” Duh.
While most people think the Philippine National Police’s announced search for COVID-19 positives is another form of “tokhang,” perhaps we should look back to history beyond Marcos and martial law, to Hitler and the extermination of the Jews. Adding to the bad news was the notice that the activist Susan F. Quimpo had passed away. Her last and most moving soundbite came in the wake of the opposition against the Marcos burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, when she declared: “Buti pa si Marcos may bangkay…,” referring to her brother who disappeared during the dark days of martial law, believed to have been killed by the military. How, indeed, can one have closure and mourning without a corpse?
There is no better time than now to get hold of “Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years,” which Susan coauthored with her brother Nathan Gilbert Quimpo. Do not be put off by its 468 pages, because it is actually hard to put down. I finished it in one sitting. “Subversive Lives” is a compilation of essays, neatly arranged into thematic and chronological chapters that can, however, be read in any order, each essay complete in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end. Lucidly written, the narratives from different points of view reminded me of the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant from the various body parts each one had at hand: tusk, trunk, ear, body, leg, tail, and penis. One can even say the book is like different strands of raw silk, irrelevant and monochromatic by themselves, but woven together transform into a vibrant tapestry brought together by one big family’s experience of a period in history variously referred to as the Marcos years, the martial law years, the Marcos (conjugal) dictatorship, or the Marcos regime, depending on who is telling the story.
The Quimpos have left us with personal views of martial law, written years after, when memory casts a soft light on even the most horrendous experiences of abuse of power, corruption, torture, summary execution, and murder—on a scale of impunity we are starting to see again in our day. It should be read by the youth, who have been raised to think physical books are obsolete. They have no patience and discipline for a long read, having come of age with abbreviated txt on their smartphones, or the 114 characters that make up a tweet. The Quimpos, through their memories and reflections, provide us with one more primary source to counter the growing misinformation and slick full-production fake news that have been flooding social media. After three decades of post-
Edsa historiography, the Marcoses are making a comeback, asking people to move on and forget. If not checked, the Marcos propaganda and revisionism may one day hog the top of internet search results, drowning out the truth that commands us not to forget and #neveragain.
Some years ago, I found out that the Marcos Foundation published books carrying reassessments of the Marcos years. You don’t see them in bookstores, not even in bargain bins, because copies were donated to libraries where they will sit like land mines to trip the unwary reader in the future. Despite the Bantayog ng mga Bayani and an online Martial Law Museum, we need more truth-telling like those shared by the Quimpos, which makes real and gives a human face to a clear and present evil that has been summarized, bowdlerized, and emasculated for use in K-to-12 textbooks.
As history is written and rewritten by different historians, all rely on primary source material like memories preserved in tangible form, in print, audio, video, and art. In “Subversive Lives,” the Quimpos are narrators coming to terms with the past and taking us along with them in their long and painful journey. Today, more than ever, we need more accounts of the martial law years, for without these we won’t have history. Echoes of Marcos and martial law are being felt in our time, a nightmare we can only hope to wake up from—soon!
A dedicated activist and writer, Susan Quimpo dies on July 14, 2020. She was 59.
Susan Quimpo (1961-2020) passed away after a prolonged and painful illness on Tuesday, July 14, at 8:45 pm. She was 59.
It is difficult to sum up the many facets of Susan’s life. A friend and mentor to many, she was a dedicated activist till the end of her life. As a student at the University of the Philippines, she became radicalized and joined the theater group, Peryante.
After Martial Law, she pursued her own path and became a teacher and mentor to many young students. She went to the United States to study for her Masters in Southeast Asian Studies, living for a few years in Washington, DC and New York City. While in the States, she realized how there was a growing need among Filipino Americans to learn about their ancestral country. With her husband George Chiu, she organized Tagalog On Site, an NGO that took Filipino American students for brief summer trips to the Philippines to learn about the language, culture and history of the country. Susan also became a dedicated teacher, touring universities and high schools both in the Philippines and the US to lecture on the terrible legacies of Martial Law. Part of her activist life also entailed providing art therapy to survivors of political trauma and natural disasters. In short, she was always engaged with struggles for social justice, giving her time to the relief and rescue of others in desperate need.
Susan is perhaps best known for editing, along with her brother Nathan, Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years. More than a family history, it is also a series of related tales about surviving the horrors of the Marcos regime.
Rhythm of the revolution
The genesis of this book owes something to a series of conversations we had around 2007. While driving around Central Luzon to visit various historical sites, she would talk about the experiences of her family during and right after Martial Law. I marveled at these tales and felt that they should be shared more widely for posterity. It also occurred to us that the memory of Martial Law was fast receding among the younger generation and the stories of her family would be a way of keeping alive the legacy of Marcos for the reckoning of future generations.
A LIFETIME OF ACTIVISM. Susan Quimpo shows the book that she had written about her family’s long involvement in the anti-dictatorship struggle. Photo from Vicente Rafael’s Facebook
After numerous reminders and elaborate negotiations with the surviving members of the Quimpo family, Susan and Nathan finally published the book in 2012 with Anvil. It has been enthusiastically received as a unique and valuable chronicle of the Marcos years. It won a National Book Award and is now on its 6th printing from Anvil Publishing. It has also been published in the United States by Ohio University Press. Susan often jokingly blamed me for making her life difficult by pushing her to write the book. By way of recompense, she asked me to write the Foreword, part of which reads:
“Written as a family history, Subversive Lives gives us powerful testimonies of the vicissitudes of the revolutionary movement. Each living Quimpo sibling bears witness to the events they and others did so much to shape. From aborted attempts to smuggle weapons for the NPA to heady times organizing “spontaneous uprisings” and general strikes in Mindanao, from the cruel discovery of the cause of one brother’s death in the hands of a kasama to the near hallucinatory tales of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the military, these stories remind us of the personal costs and the daily heroism of those who joined the movement. But they also bring forth its messy and unresolved legacies: of sons alienated from their father; daughters abused and victimized by the military and deluded by religious cults; brothers lost to the war; friends betrayed, comrades purged and revolutionary affection soured then destroyed by intractable ideological differences. Such stories are much less about the unfinished revolution as they are about an inconclusive one.
To read these accounts, each so clear and distinctive in their tone, is to hear the rhythm of the revolution. There is the blast of pillboxes so omnipresent in the early days of student activism bursting on streets and hollowing out heads; the sound of fists hitting faces and body parts shocked with electrical wires to the hiss of the interrogators’ demands for more and more and more information that one simply did not have or want to give up; the chants of demonstrations as masses of bodies fill up streets, waving banners, defying cops, escaping tear gas; the sigh of a guerrilla husband writing from a red zone in Bikol lamenting the absence of his wife forced to live underground in the city.”
Subversive Lives marked an important moment in Susan’s life and made a considerable impact on those who read it. In the midst of her painful illness, she was still thinking about the book and its possible afterlives in the last few notes she sent me just a few weeks before her death:
“I’m just glad Subversive Lives is out there. It has affected so many young people (with the school tours as well) so I’m hopeful it will continue having alife of its own. Life has been good and I’m grateful… ok na rin!
“I am writing select friends now to thank them for sharing this adventure called life. I know this must be ‘uncomfortable’ to read and respond to so please don’t feel obliged. You have certainly helped bring my dream of completing Subversive Lives. Actually, it was you who really pushed me into completing the project despite our family squabbles. You contributed a lot to Tagalog on Site as well. Discussing its curriculum points with you was such a creative exercise.
“If I survive this, another book project is brewing in my head as well as workshops to prepare for the elections 2022! Ha!Ha! I told you I was in high spirits!
But I have made peace with my version of God and I think I am ready to go either way. Thank you Vince… hopefully the next time you see me will be under better circumstances. Do take care of Lila…autoimmune disease can be a bitch!
“Had 4 hospital confinements since I wrote you last. I now have a stunt sticking out from lung to drain fluids for the next 6 weeks! But yes, it’s provided relief. I am writing because Ohio University press is emptying their Chicago warehouse and now selling authors their books for $5 ( kawawa!) so I’m thinking to buy extra copies for you to please give away to where you give talks with substantial Filipino populations whenever/wherever that is possible. Would that interest you? I was thinking of sending you 10-15 books. Sorry for the business tone of this email but texting is still hard for me. I hope you and Lila are well.”
And to her brother Ryan Quimpo who she was closest to, she wrote that the book helped shape the views of a lot of millennials. “I believe its task isn’t over.”
We all grieve Susan’s passing. She will be greatly missed.
In Part 1 of this interview, Susan Quimpo talks about her family’s activism during martial law and the initial impetus for the memoir. In Part 2 she continues with a description of writing the book and her own life afterwards.
Susan’s story
At first I wrote two chapters. Then I went for two master’s degrees, one in Asian Studies and the other in journalism. For my journalism class I wrote about the family and martial law. I thought if I could make my narrative comprehensible to Americans, who knew little about the Philippines under martial law except the name Marcos, if I could write so everybody understood, then maybe my children and my brothers’ children and their children would understand despite the passage of time. With each story I brought to class, my classmates were really interested, and they’d say, “When is the next chapter coming? What happened to this character?” A journalism professor said, “You know that there’s an option to do a writing project instead of a research thesis. You could do this.”
I did a book outline of sorts and submitted it to her, and we worked on ten chapters. That became my thesis. My teacher suggested submitting it to her literary agent so the agent could find a publisher. Nothing came of that. By that time I was already married, organizing among the Filipino-American (FilAm) groups in New York. I put the manuscript on the shelf. Without a publisher what was the use of writing it up? We went home to the Philippines, I got into other things. I had kids.
Years later, I think in 1997, I was talking about FilAm programs with Vicente Rafael, a professor from the University of Washington. He said, “Oh, I heard about this activist family of Quimpos. Do you know them?”
I told him I was the youngest of that family of Quimpos. He said, “Well someone should write that story!”
I said I’d tried, but no publisher was interested, He asked to see the ten chapters I had written for my graduate school requirement. I handed him my manuscript and forgot about it.
A year later, he came back, we had lunch, and he said, “You know that manuscript you gave me a year ago, the one about your family? Anvil Press wants to talk to you next week. You have a meeting with a publisher.”
“But I haven’t touched it in ages.”
“Just go.”
Anvil Press edition, available at National Book Store
So I met with the publisher, and they were interested. Karina Bolasco of Anvil Press was very supportive. Later, when I talked to Vince, I said, “I don’t know where to take the book.” I’d gotten to the part about the armed resistance against Marcos, but I hadn’t been part of the Communist Party of the Philippines. I didn’t want to assume things. That wouldn’t be history. Vince suggested asking my siblings to contribute. My brother Nathan liked the idea, and we started talking to the others. There were varying reactions. One sister said, “Why do you want to wash our dirty laundry in public?”
I answered, “What dirty laundry? This isn’t dirty laundry. This is history.”
She didn’t speak to me for two years. I persisted. I said if she didn’t want to write her story I’d write it for her. I wanted to respect her, so I wrote around her. I consulted with people who were part of that scenario or human rights reports about her arrest. So when she saw I wasn’t going to stop she said, “Okay, I’ll do my bit,” and she did.
The family had serious fights over the book. I wanted it to be a tribute to young martyrs. A brother who’d been deep into the revolutionary movement wanted to critique it. I said, “No, this isn’t about the dialectics of the movement. This is a memoir.”
It took a long time for the book to come out. In fact, Karina Bolasco said in her twenty-five years of publishing it was the most difficult book to get published because of the fighting among the Quimpos. Finally we got to the point where we knew if we kept retracting, rewriting, re-angling we’d never finish it.
After the book was published a whole new life started for me. I started receiving invitations to speak at schools, and these haven’t stopped. I was horrified at how little people knew about martial law history. At first I just went and told my story. Then I realized young people didn’t understand me. At that time there were only a few small rallies, maybe one every six months. They couldn’t imagine the First Quarter Storm with daily rallies of 5,000 people in front of Malacañang. In 2013, a rally would draw maybe a hundred. Even now. At the one in Luneta Park [a demonstration against the burial of Marcos in the heroes’ cemetery] there were three or four thousand, but that was so hard to piece together. A few hours before the rally started we were still considering calling it off, thinking no one would come.
It was hard for students to imagine the military being brutal or people getting picked up. They had no concept of a curfew. So I turned to my own children, who at that point were in high school, and I’d discuss it with them. Before the book came out I wrote an article for Rappler to announce the book. (Link)
At that point my youngest was about eleven years old. She said, “Good article, Mom, but you know what? You don’t say ‘underground’ to us. We think that’s the subway or we think Harry Potter’s subway.”
I decided that I’d have to provide images. I started digging out pictures. Then I realized I could only speak from my own perspective. “My brother Ronald Jan was 15, your age, when he started going to rallies, at Malacañang. This boy next to him, who was 15, got his head blown off.”
My children were wonderful. One of my first presentations was at their high school, and my little girl was among the students. When she frowned, it was a sign that I had to explain more. Eventually I was able to reach the audience with actual stories. I kept getting invitations.
When Bongbong Marcos,Ferdinand Marcos’ son and namesake, ran for the vice presidency, strangers on Facebook wrote me to ask what could be done. I took chapters of the book and posted them on Facebook. Some went viral. I was getting more “friend” invitations and more questions. I said, “I don’t know what can be done. Don’t ask me, I’m not an organizer.”
After a while I agreed to meet with people who wanted to do something about the Bongbong Marcos’ candidacy. When we got 15 people, we decided to launch a campaign against revisionism. Our little group created four short online videos targeting millennials. These went viral. That wasn’t enough. So I went back to our funders and asked if we could get a team of people to talk to schools. For three and a half months, we reached people from Baguio to Zamboanga with one speaker per place. Bur once there, we’d contact other schools. That way we were able to maximize. We also gave interviews. Our audiences ranged from 20 to 800. Soon we got invitations from churches, barangays [local districts] and factories. I went to a sweets factory in Bulacan because the owner was horrified that her staff was thinking of voting for Marcos.
After the elections I said, “Okay, enough already.” Then the burial issue came up, and I found myself helping to organize the rallies against that. At the same time I was still trying to pay my bills. My husband is amazingly supportive. Whenever I get an invitation and I’m free, I say yes, but add, “Can you pay for my transportation?”
It’s been hard but also strangely encouraging. For example, on September 8, when the Supreme Court decision was announced [allowing Marcos’s burial in the Cemetery of Heroes], I was in Cagayan de Oro facilitating a group therapy workshop. Someone who’d heard me speak messaged me on Facebook, saying how dismayed she was about the court’s decision. I looked at her profile and saw she was from Cagayan de Oro and asked whether there was a rally I could attend. They were doing a nine-day rally for the nine justices who voted for the burial. At the rally, total strangers were coming to me, hugging me and crying, sobbing. They said, “We’re here because you spoke to us.” They arranged for me to speak the following week at a church, and a thousand students turned up.
So things like that are very encouraging. I’ve found that young people were not apathetic at all, but very affected. They understood the lie in having a dictator buried in a hallowed place. They knew this affected history. That’s why we saw millennials marching from the University of the Philippines, to Ateneo, to the People Power Monument last Friday.
When I picked my 15-year-old up from school, I told her about Marcos’ being brought in by helicopter and buried. After a silence, she said, “Today?” Then she put her bag in the car, got in, and after a few minutes she was sobbing. Weeping, sobbing and shaking. I asked, “What happened? Did you get in a fight? Did you have a problem with an exam?” She couldn’t speak for a full hour. When she could get the words out, she said, “The Marcos burial. How dare they?” Now she’s got her friends and their mothers going to rallies with us.
These high school kids are so wonderful. Despite the fact that we’ve supposedly losing the burial issue, I think we’re actually winning the hearts and minds of young people.
Personally, I’m committed to the cause for the next six years. I was devastated by the Supreme Court vote. Nine to five? One Justice abstained. Something is really wrong with this court. I’m hoping for a snowball reaction. We talked about the nation, all the way from the Katipuneros, the fight against Spain and America, then the Japanese and Marcos. We have to learn to take these things seriously, or history will just keep repeating and repeating and repeating.
I said to a Buddhist friend of mine, “Spiritually, I don’t understand. Is God’s justice not available to us?” She said, “It’s all karma because we haven’t learned.” I agreed, that was the whole point. If I can be part of the instrument of learning, so the next generation won’t repeat our mistakes, then I think I’ll have done justice to the martyrs of martial law.
I’ve been trying to mediate between anti-Marcos burial protest groups these past weeks. And some people asked me suspiciously about my ideological affiliations. In my head I answered: I belong to the group which believes in the martial law martyrs’ sacrifice. I used to be red, I’m no longer red; I was never yellow [pro-Aquino]. Now I’m more pink. But come on. We have to learn our lesson sometime; we need a united force to overcome a dictator.
I have one more question for you. I was amazed at the amount of detail in your book that went into names, and dates of this meeting, and this and that group. During martial law you had to be careful about not keeping records around because they could be found. So my question is where did all the detail come from?
My brother Nathan was writing his own memoir at the time Vince Rafael suggested that we do a family project. I think he’d been writing it for years, so he’d already researched the times and dates and places and things like that, while I’d gone into the files of the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, a human rights group, for information on my siblings’ arrests and detention.
Then, as I said, at the age nine or ten I knew I was going to write this memoir, so I consciously remembered. I could draw Ronald Jan’s detention cell right now. I know where the guard sat, and where that corridor was and where the bathroom was because I committed it to memory. When Jun was killed, we really didn’t know who killed him or what the circumstances were. In 1991 when I came back from New York, I looked for members of his old guerrilla squad. Two members were still alive, and they brought me to a place very close to where he died. They gave me the story and the descriptions and other details.
I think for my other siblings writing the book was cathartic. My brother Ryan had a lot of friends who disappeared, were tortured or killed, and he kept the memories close to his heart. His first drafts for our memoir were excruciating to read because they were all snippets of painful incidents. Perhaps not literary enough, but nonetheless wonderful. They were so raw and honest that his stories and images stayed in your head for months. I think the book was an opportunity to get it all out.
So there was healing in the family?
I can’t answer for the others, but for me, yes. That’s why I can go to schools and give talks without breaking down—which I did at first when I told my story. Initially, it was so embarrassing when I spoke to audiences and my voice cracked and I held back tears. Then I realized that my role was to speak out. The more I spoke, the more I realized I was getting through to young people. Now I see this is probably part of why I’m here and why I survived martial law. To be able to bear witness. This was how I healed.
A lot of people say, “Why don’t you move on? You’re so full of hatred. You need to forgive.” My response is it’s not about hatred or forgiveness. It’s about truth. You do a disservice to continue to believe a lie about our biography as a nation.
When some people say “forgiveness,” they mean putting the problem in a box and putting the lid on it, you seem to mean more like “acknowledgment” and “acceptance.”
Forgiveness demands justice. The Marcoses have not even acknowledged the grim history of martial law, much less apologized for their father’s brutal dictatorship. In a sense I pity the Marcoses because they’re continuing to propagate the lie their father started, passing it onto the next generation so that they have to live it and defend it. Why keep lying to yourself and rationalizing? What about the Marcoses’ children? Do they wish to continue living this legacy of lies?
I have close friends who are loyalists because of their family and because of the region they came from.
That’s another thing we have to learn. The truth is beyond family ties, friendships, regional loyalty and things like that. You can be friends with the Marcoses but still acknowledge that he was a dictator, a thief and a human rights violator. That’s just stating a fact. People are marching in the streets because they see the truth. For me, I think that’s enough of a reward.
A reader writes:
Carol, really enjoyed the two columns on the Marcos resisters. Good stuff.
