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.
Susan Quimpo is a friendly, soft-spoken woman who laughs easily and often. She’s an art therapist and counselor. Besides her private practice, she works with civil society groups to help alleviate trauma in communities affected by typhoons and war. She provides therapy to political prisoners and victims of human rights violations. She also writes for Philippine news publications and international journals. She is the co-author of Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years (Manila: Anvil Press, 2012), recently re-released by the University of Ohio Press/Swallow Press.
I met Susan after a rally against the proposed burial of Ferdinand Marcos in the Cemetery of Heroes. The body had been flown over from the United States in 1993 and placed on display at the Presidential Center in his home province. The Marcos family was waiting until an administration took power which didn’t oppose his internment as a hero. With the election of Pres. Rodrigo Duterte and the subsequent approval of the Supreme Court, the time seemed right. On November 18, when Duterte was conveniently out of the country, the body was brought in by helicopter. There was a 21-gun salute, but only an hour before the ceremony did outsiders learn that this was not a rehearsal.
On Nov. 24, over lunch in Manila. I asked Susan to tell her family’s story of political activism during the period of martial law and to include an explanation of the anti-Americanism in the revolutionary movement, the burial controversy and the talks she delivers to Filipinos too young to remember martial law.
Susan’s story
I was born in 1961, the youngest of ten children. My parents were married during World War II. They were very pro-American. They grew up in Philippines when it was still a colony of the US. The Philippines was under the US from 1898 through 1946, except during the years of the Japanese occupation during World War II. [The Americans brought in English language education and established public education. As colonizers they were far more popular than the Spaniards.]
But to go back a bit, in 1898 with the end of the Spanish-American War and the Treaty of Paris, the Philippines was sold to the US for $20 million. The Filipinos, who’d been fighting for their independence from Spain since 1896, now discovered they had a newer, stronger enemy. In the Philippine-American War, they put up a good fight. They had gotten some concessions from the Spanish government, including money to buy arms, but these were peasants used to machetes who’d never held guns before. A historian told me that triangular thing on a rifle—the sight—which allows you to aim at your opponent, they considered it a nuisance, so they tore it off and threw it away. The Americans were amazed that the enemy kept firing above their heads. The war supposedly ended in 1903, when the revolutionary republic told people to lay down their arms, but some were still fighting until 1907.
The war was called an insurrection but was actually a national revolution against the new colonizer. The Americans won in part because the Filipino leaders were not united. The different factions were even killing one another. General Luna was assassinated by people within the revolution. In-fighting was a recurring story throughout WW II and throughout the Marcos era, spoiling the revolution against the oppressor—the Americans, Japanese or Marcos.
Anyway, my parents grew up under a time when American education was in the schools. They grew up saying “A is for apple” and “S is for snow,” even though they had never seen snow. They were both staunchly pro-American.
Your dad worked for Coca-Cola as an engineer.
Yes, his entire life. Mom came from the landed elite, although over the years they lost whatever prominence they’d had. In WW II, when my parents were in college, Dad wanted to volunteer as a guerrilla fighting against the Japanese. He went to say goodbye to his sweetheart, my mom, and when he got back to where the volunteers were being bused out of Manila, he missed the bus, which saved his life. All the students were leaving for the provinces because Manila was obviously going to be a battleground for the Japanese and the Americans. My father couldn’t get back to Iloilo, his hometown on Panay Island, so he followed my mom to Pangasinan, where they were married.
When the Japanese came, they lined up all the young men, and when they realized that my dad couldn’t speak the local Pangasinan language they suspected he was a guerrilla. He was about to be shot when my grandfather intervened. Again my dad was saved. He stayed in Pangasinan and was very valuable to the Americans, when they came, because he’d repair the jeeps and military trucks. When the Americans left, a mechanic gave him all his tools. He kept them until the day he died.
Moving into the 1960s, there was the Vietnam War and an overall sentiment against America. My brothers and sisters were in high school and university, where some of the students were mouthing anti-US imperialism slogans. In 1969, I was eight years old. There were heated debates at the dinner table, where my siblings would be spouting Marxist theories and my father would be really angry at them for shouting slogans in the streets against US imperialism.
As the youngest I had no voice. Looking back, I see I kept wondering, “What is my role in all this? All I do is I watch.” Only very recently did I think of the phrase “bearing witness.” I know it’s a biblical term, and I’m not religious, but I suddenly realized I’d watched the transformation of my siblings from good academic students to student leaders to activists to guerrillas and leaders of the revolution against Marcos. Now I am not an eight-year-old anymore, and I see it as my role to speak out for the martyrs of martial law. But I’m getting ahead of my story.
The first activist in the family was Ronald Jan, who went to Philippine Science High School, the premier science high school in the country. When he got there the school building hadn’t been built, and classes were held in an old building that had held government offices. The roof leaked and the chairs were broken. He told us that the chemistry class heated up chemicals in coke bottles because they had no test tubes. Students had to wait in line to use a Bunsen burner. When they complained to the principal, he said, “Look, I’m a government employee, and this is a public high school, I really can’t do much. Go to Malacañang [the presidential palace] and air your grievances there.”
So these kids between the ages of 13 to 17 went to the Presidential Palace. At the gates students from all the other schools were there also. It was the First Quarter Storm—the first quarter or the first three months of 1970, when Manila was hit by a storm of protest rallies. Three, four, five times a week, students were at Malacañang or at the US embassy or at the Congress Building shouting slogans.
Why demonstrations at the American embassy?
It was Marcos’s second term and the height of the Vietnam War. Anti-American sentiment was worldwide. Besides, Marcos was saying things like Filipino troops should be sent to fight in Vietnam under the American flag [as South Korea did]. Filipino students looked at the controversy over the draft in US universities and young Americans’ returning from Vietnam in coffins. They didn’t want that.
Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base [not far from Manila] were the largest American bases outside the US. There was a lot of abuse—prostitution, drunk American soldiers. Outside the bases, a lot of poor people, scavengers, were picking up garbage, and there were stories of American sentinels using them for target practice. The New York Times ran a story on this. If I remember right, over three years there were at least 32 deaths. The shooters would say, “Oh, we thought it was a wild boar.” It enraged people. [The US military also left a massive amount of chemical waste which has still not been cleaned up.]
People were angry with Marcos for pandering to the Americans. As a child I saw pictures of Marcos with Lyndon Johnson and their wives, all decked out. Imelda invited American dignitaries to lavish parties while the economy was failing. College students had no jobs when they graduated.
I remember Jane Fonda showed up at an antiwar rally. This was just after the release of Barbarella, where she was a sexy science fiction character, and there she was in a baggy white shirt waving her fist in the air. It got the students all fired up to be with an American movie star who was also an anti-imperialist.
In 1970 one of the worst typhoons, Typhoon Yoling, hit the Philippines. For the first time, Nueva Ecija, the rice region, was under water. For weeks only the tops of the coconut trees were above water. As a result, there was a lack of rice and the economy dipped. There was an oil shortage, and the price of gasoline went up. But still Marcos and Imelda were holding parties on their yacht; Imelda wore a diamond tiara like royalty at State functions. The typhoon had led to economic ruin, and during the typhoon the government did not help. It was the priests, the nuns, the civic organizations that brought relief to the victims.
So there was a lot of uncertainty inside and outside the country because of the situation in Vietnam. I remember as a kid seeing pictures of Woodstock in Life Magazine and thinking, “Wow, this is wild. Why are people wrapped in mud and dancing? Why’s a half-naked woman dancing in the mud?”
You were not doing drugs at the time, obviously.
[laughs] But I think there was worldwide anxiety anger against anything from the previous decade. I didn’t understand. I was just taking it in. We lived close to the presidential palace, and there were rallies three, five times a week. At least five thousand people marched past each time. Nowadays I tell friends, “As a kid I didn’t watch church parades, I didn’t watch the saints go by, I watched the police beating up demonstrators.”
At that point Mom was still alive, and our home was at the end of a row of modest apartments, which today would resemble townhouses. The row of eight apartments had a metal gate facing the street. We’d see a group of students march to Malacañang, and the mothers in our apartment row would watch for the students running back with the police after them. They’d open the gate for the students and close it so the police couldn’t get in. They’d give the students water or bread or let them use the telephone to call their parents. Despite the fact that my mother was very pro-American, she behaved like a mother. She was worried about the kids.
Ronald Jan, the brother in Philippine Science High School, was demonstrating in the streets. The activists went into all the schools. My siblings were part of it, consciously or not. It was the thing to do. Inside school campuses, at teach-ins students sat in circles on the grass while student leaders lectured on Marxism and imperialism and service to the people.
At the time my father was earning a thousand pesos a month. [During the First Quarter Storm, the value of the peso slipped from P4 to P6 to the dollar, so 1,000 pesos would have been roughly $200]. That was for food, rent, utilities, clothing and tuition for a family of twelve. That was really nothing, even then. We had rice, and we had eggs because an aunt who had a poultry farm brought us the damaged eggs, the ones with two yolks or something. But much of the budget was ear-marked for tuition because my father always believed education would be our deliverance. He was hurt when his children became activists because their grades suffered. It came to the point when he told Jan, “If you attend that rally tomorrow, you’re out of the house.” And he was. Then martial law came.
A week before the declaration of martial law in September 1972, Marcos threw all the legal opposition in jail—Ninoy Aquino, the senators, the Congressmen, the trade unionists, the vocal faculty members of the University of the Philippines. The only ones left to challenge the dictatorship were high school and college students. At least three of my siblings were very much involved in Kabataang Makabayan, a militant youth organization that went underground. I don’t think they’d have become as radical in the underground movement or even in the Communist Party if Marcos hadn’t been so vindictive in going after student leaders.
At the gate of each high school and university was a huge billboard with pictures of all the student leaders, the president of a theater group or the botany club or a writer for the school paper or the head of the student council. If you were the president of anything, you were on that billboard, and the minute you stepped on campus the military picked you up. You were lucky if you were only questioned. A lot of people were tortured. Basically, the idea was that the intelligent students would lead the would-be opposition. That’s why Marcos was so bent on getting them.
Nobody was prepared for martial law to rule the entire country for fourteen years. Everybody had thought that we’d only have a suspension of habeas corpus or that martial law would be declared only in Mindanao. A few months after the declaration, the populations in high schools and universities had dipped because the students were hiding—or going abroad if they had money. Students were scrambling to get to the provinces. The extreme left had painted romantic images of a people’s army. These young people being hunted by the police thought their only option was to join this army. But it wasn’t even an army. According to Time Magazine, there were only 600 guerrillas with arms from WW II which were so covered with rust they wouldn’t fire. A lot of the students who made it to the mountains to form the New People’s Army were killed. They were all young, some of them teenagers, nobody over thirty. They didn’t know how to use guns, which—if they had them—would jam. They’d be ready to fire on the police and the military then retreat because they were out of ammunition. Some of those who died were friends and classmates of my siblings.
Between 1973 through 1978, our family went through arrest after arrest, raid after raid, torture after torture. Once they got you, they’d torture you so you’d point to other students, and then they get them too. The police and the military were seen as pretty much the same thing — Marcos’ soldiers of terror. The military eventually took four brothers and a sister and threw them in the Marcos prisons; four of them were heavily tortured.
A week after martial law was declared, our house was raided. The police were just looking for guns and subversive materials in the homes around Malacañang, not making arrests. But when they came to our apartment, we knew it wasn’t safe for my siblings to come home. They started staying wherever they could spend the night. My brother Ryan, the one who has polio, was 15. He said that he and student leaders from other schools would spend the entire day in Luneta Park eating fried bananas or crackers, and at nightfall, because of the curfew, they’d go into funeral homes and pretend to be relatives of the deceased. They’d eat the food provided at the wake until someone asked them about their relationship to the deceased. My siblings weren’t home much. Now and then they’d call, but we were worried that the phone was tapped. We spoke in codes. So I grew up always conscious of being watched, aware that my siblings could be arrested, I wasn’t supposed to know where they were. It was a very paranoid childhood.
I was just thinking that here was a therapist in the making.
Exactly. Early training. Then they were captured. I’d read in the newspaper and hear on television, Marcos telling the press there were no political prisoners, and he’d laugh it off. And yet every weekend for four years I visited siblings in one or two or three camps. I was really confused. “What am I doing? Are they criminals? I know they did nothing except go against Marcos. So why are they in jail?”
They took people without warrants of arrests; they just barge into your homes, taking people and confiscating property. The military would throw you in jail and there you stayed indefinitely, without charges being filed against you. No court trials, no sentencing procedures. Then I’d hear my dad speak to my sisters who were not arrested, and they’d whisper about the others’ being tortured. “Why were they being tortured? What did they do wrong? What’s wrong with shouting slogans at a rally?”
The pain didn’t stop when they were released. Ronald Jan would have nightmares. He’d be shouting, kicking, screaming and falling out of bed. At the time I didn’t know about post- traumatic stress, but now I do. When my sister was released we were very worried about her. All my siblings played the guitar and sang very sad songs. Once she was singing a song with words like “and this is the end.” My other sister Caren and I exchanged glances as if to say, “Oh, my God, what’s she going to do?”
Well, they were able to pick up their lives somehow. Ronald Jan returned to university and completed his studies. One day, in late 1977, he left to go to school and remarked that we should leave him some dinner that evening. He never returned. To this day, he is a desaparasido [disappeared]. We believe he was picked up by the military and executed extrajudicially. A week before his disappearance our home was raided again, so we knew that we were under military surveillance.
Another brother, Jun, was a college freshmen when he joined a Catholic volunteer organization that assisted an urban poor community set up a livelihood program. When the government moved in bulldozers to demolish shanties, Jun joined the residents in a protest rally. I think 200 people were picked up by the police at the rally and 199 people were released that same evening. The only one detained Jun because they found his school ID with his name on it. The police said, “Oh, another Quimpo. Your family is like a factory for activists.” So he was beaten up for ten days just because his surname was Quimpo. When he got out he was so angry he joined the guerillas. A few years later he was found in an open rice field in the province of Nueva Ecija, with seven bullet wounds in his body.
The sister who was detained and tortured, when released, moved to Australia, got married, had a family and stayed there. Two brothers whom the police were instructed to “neutralize” (kill on sight) sought political asylum in Europe. One of them eventually became a professor in Japan; the other raised a family in France, and after his kids grew up he moved back.
People went on with their lives, but I think the hurt was never processed. Our family doesn’t talk much about it. In fact, Ronald Jan went missing in October 1977. I came back from the States in 1995. Over dinner at my sister’s house, I said, “You know, there’s a wall of remembrance called Bantayog ng mga Bayani or Monument to the Heroes. We should get (Ronald) Jan’s name on it.” She answered, “Oh, this fish is really good. Have more rice.” If you mentioned his name, my siblings would change the topic. So I knew my family wasn’t dealing with it at all.
But because I “bore witness,” all these stories were in my head. In fact, when I was ten I told myself ,” I’d have to write this down. “Much later, when I was in graduate school in the US, I was taking a class called Southeast Asian History from a fantastic professor of social history. He said, “You know, it’s a lot more interesting to look at a country from the perspective of ordinary people, not the leaders.” At that point I started writing.
Of all the lies Ferdinand Marcos propagated, the most interesting one has got to be his Tasaday hoax. I say “interesting” because it is unlike most martial law stories of unconscionable torture and murder; we can be interested in it without feeling ignorant, remorseful, or angry. Marcos’ fabrication of a Stone Age tribe is seemingly harmless beside his plunder and slaughter, so we end up glossing over it and forgetting that it ever happened. But like other stories from that dark period of our history, the Tasaday episode is worth examining if we wish to understand how truly despicable Marcos’ rule was. I stumbled upon the first extensive article in National Geographic magazine on the Tasaday, published August, 1972, a month before martial law was declared. In those 20 months leading to martial law, there was grave political and economic unrest: gas prices soared worldwide; the peso crashed from P3.90 to the US dollar in 1969 to P5.5 to $1 in January 1970 due to the net deficit (i.e., mismanaged debt) of the Marcos government in 1969, standing three times larger than in the previous year and roughly equal to the cumulative deficits between 1961 and 1969; the average income of the richest families ballooned to 15 times more than that of the poorest; and nearly half of the family population (16 million) was unable to satisfy minimum food needs. Marcos needed to take the heat off him, so he decided to rally Filipinos against the Malaysians instead. His administration set out to win back Sabah. But in order to do that, they felt that they needed to prove that prehistoric Filipinos existed. And, as though on cue, the Tasaday sprouted out of nowhere, “discovered” by one of his cronies, Manuel “Manda” Elizalde, Jr.
Worldwide curiosity: A Tasaday child, named Lobo, hanging onto trees; one of the few times the Philippines landed on the cover of the National Geographic magazine.
‘Hero for Indigenous Peoples’
Mando Elizalde was the appointed Secretary of the Presidential Arm for National Minorities (PANAMIN). He had been hailed the hero of indigenous peoples ever since his appearance in an article for National Geographic magazine, entitled “Help for Philippine Tribes in Trouble” in August 1971. He was depicted as the savior for the Lumad, rugged, “young, wealthy, and Harvard-educated,” who, with Marcos’ blessing, helicopters down into their villages (with a Vietnam War veteran as his pilot, no less) as he stops loggers from ever entering their land. Beat that, Captain Planet.
In the 27-page article about the Tasaday, entitled “Stone Age Cavemen of Mindanao,” Manda Elizalde was known to the Tasaday as Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday, or Great Bringer of Good Fortune. In it Balayem, a representative from the Tasaday, was quoted as saying, “Our ancestors told us never to leave this place of ours. They told us the god of our people would come if we remained here. Their words have been proven true by the coming of Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday.”Mahayag, also a Tasaday, continued by saying, “If we had not met Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday, we would probably have died in darkness without seeing the prophecy of our ancestors come true. We can see how he loves us. He has eyes and ears with us now.” Of course, President Marcos was duly credited as the one with the power to give them their lands.
Last Remnants of the Stone Age
Kenneth MacLeish, senior assistant editor for National Geographic magazine at the time, wrote with fascination about the Tasaday. He was stunned the moment he entered their cave, let his guard down, and immediately viewed the Tasaday as mankind’s last remnants from the Stone Age. He swallowed their story without thinking twice and wrote a sensational account of men who called their helicopter “a big bird,” a tribe who had “no words for numbers,” refused meat and hunting bows because they had “no need for it,” scattered their dead around the mountains, had no agricultural implements, and no leader all at the same time. MacLeish dubbed them as “perhaps the simplest of living humans… closest to nature… gentle and affectionate.” He even narrated an instance when a Tasaday attempted to build fire by placing tinder over his flashlight’s lens. The National Geographic Society also filmed them; the documentary was shown repeatedly worldwide. Perhaps unknowingly, MacLeish and his organization became an accomplice to the Tasaday hoax. But it was Manda Elizalde, as well as the Marcos administration, who benefited most from the Tasaday story. They captivated the world’s imagination and a slew of visitors from here and abroad paid handsomely to visit and study the so-called “Stone Age tribe.” Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday exclusively facilitated the excursions.
But it didn’t take long for archeologists to smell a rat. When the Marcos administration was deposed by the People Power Revolution in February 1986, Elizalde no longer held control of visitations to the Tasaday. The authoritarian government’s filter on what researchers could and could not do on-site was removed. Swiss journalist Oswald Iten, accompanied by Joey Lozano, slipped into the area on March 1986 and spotted the Tasaday living in houses and wearing regular clothes. The following week, German magazine Stern sent their reporters who saw the Tasaday wearing leaves once more… but with cloth garments underneath.
Worldwide Curiosity
It caused worldwide curiosity and, with the tyrannous Marcos and the PANAMIN gone, the Tasaday’s ways were called into question. If they indeed foraged for food, how come they never migrated from their cave? Introduced to metal, how come they never sought it themselves? And most pressingly, what was up with the habitat/clothing shift (and shift back)? Soon, experts declared that the Tasaday was simply a fake, a ploy by the Marcos regime to revise history and gain sympathy when they needed it. The Tasadays were called con artists by the press, and their existence was wiped out of many history books. In Iten’s article, a Tasaday confessed, “We didn’t live in caves, only near them, until we met Elizalde. (He) forced us to live in the caves so that we’d be better cavemen. Before he came, we lived in huts on the other side of the mountain and we farmed. We took off our clothes because Elizalde told us to do so and promised if we looked poor that we would get assistance. He gave us money to pose as Tasaday and promised us security from counter-insurgency and tribal fighting.”When the initial shock receded early in the ‘90s, it was declared that the Tasaday were probably related to the Manobo of South Cotabato. And while it was true that they had a culture of their own (and were not simply acting), they — most definitely — had not been a tribe from the Paleolithic period. It remains widely accepted that their claim to fame was an outright lie. My cousin, practicing archeologist Anna Pineda, calls the Tasaday hoax “a cautionary tale for nationalism driven by the wrong reasons.” Kara David of GMA News visited the Tasaday in June 2009. In her short documentary, she showed how the Tasadays continued to live real lives, and that they cursed the day outsiders came. They now farm, live in nipa houses, remain poor and sparingly schooled, and they wholeheartedly believe that they are Tasaday. It became clear to me that the real culprit was not the Tasaday, but the ones who declared them relics of the Stone Age. The Tasadays were used, sent back in time, to support the belief that all power, all truth, and all that’s fair emanated from the great Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos.
