On the ground

MISTAKING one jeepney for another, I once took a route that took the passengers past the old stud farm at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman. 

Same trees, same abandoned air. The sight of what used to be the National Stud Farm created during the Marcos administration made me remember 2017, when a professor gave our class a choice to either write a paper on martial law or visit the “lumad” visitors hosted by the UP Diliman community at the old stud farm.

I chose convenience; I wrote the paper. I wondered what I could “teach” in the informal classes being held for the lumad youths, who joined their parents and other elders in the annual Lakbayan ng Pambansang Minorya.

“Lumad” is Bisayan for “of the earth,” a term chosen by 15 of more than 18 indigenous cultural communities (ICC) in Mindanao during the Cotobato Congress in June 1986. 

From grade school references in Social Studies, I thought of them as a generic collective, “cultural minorities”. Alienating and politically incorrect, the term is still apt; the “minorities” remain at the margins of power, deposed from lands, waters, and other tribal spaces inherited from ancestors effaced by a succession of colonizers. 

I know arguably more about the Dole and Del Monte products than the lumad displaced by their plantations: the B’laan of Tupi and Polomolok in South Cotobato, the Higaonon and the Talaandig in Bukidnon. The wars of colonization were replaced by other wars: corporate plunder by multinational companies, “modernization” and “development” financed by foreign loans, culture of impunity targeting dissidence, and community lockdowns to quell coronavirus disease.

Since 2012, the lumad, joined by other “minority” peoples, undertake the Lakbayan to focus on their plight and search for social justice. If the center will not go the peripheries, the marginalized will go to us. Are we listening?

Journalism is essential for our democracy. Writing for deadline, sound bites, and live streaming metrics can take us only to a point. The lumad is more complex than the “bakwit” (Bisayan for “evacuee”) and the IDPs (internally displaced persons) constructed by narratives of conflict and war.

These are not the only stories. We are not the only storytellers on the ground. As a people deprived of visibility and intelligibility, the lumad best tell their stories.

When I stayed away from the Lakbayan sojourners sheltering in a center Ferdinand Marcos created in 1965 to improve horse breeding and discourage the local elite from illegally importing horses for racing, I was blind to the conceit of my “teaching” the lumad.

In or out of classrooms, the only activity worth doing is learning.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 21, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Ear to the ground

WHAT is “the situation on the ground”?

Today is the 60th day martial law was imposed by President Duterte in Mindanao.

Last May 23, the President reacted swiftly to the Maute Group’s occupation of Marawi City.

As commander-in-chief, the President can suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or impose martial law “in case of invasion or rebellion,” based on Section 18, Article VII of the 1987 Philippine Constitution.

However, the 1987 Constitution is more specific than the 1935 version, which President Ferdinand Marcos used as the basis for passing Proclamation 1081 and putting the country for the first time under martial law.

As amended by the 1986 Constitutional Commission created by President Corazon Aquino, the 1987 Constitution imposes a limit on martial law: no more than 60 days.

Today is the deadline. Will martial law be lifted or extended?

Two weeks ago, House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez proposed a five-year extension of martial law.

The 1987 Constitution permits the Congress to extend martial law if “the invasion or rebellion persists and public safety requires it”.

Yesterday, the two houses of Congress were expected to hold a special session to decide on the President’s request for extension of martial law in Mindanao. (Update: During the joint session on July 22, the Senate and the House voted to extend martial law until December 31: 261 for, 18 against.)

Sixty days ago, the Maute Group and Abu Sayyaf terrorists torched Marawi; robbed, raped, and killed civilians; and tried to create a “province of the Middle East-based Islamic State (IS) jihadist group in Southeast Asia.”

The deadline to suppress the rebellion has lapsed many times. Yesterday, the military again said it expected to retake Marawi “in a few more days.”

But lawlessness and the IS threat are apparently still serious enough for the military. National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. said martial law will prevent some 700 jihadists from entering the country.

Despite its jingoistic rhetoric, the military says something that must be repeated: what is the “situation on the ground”?

Yesterday, in Iligan City, Tindeg Maranao (Stand Up Maranao) gathered some 100 evacuees to oppose the extension of martial law.

It is an opening salvo for the July 24 protests being organized by civil society groups around the country. On this day, a day after the 60-day deadline of martial law in Mindanao lapses, President Duterte will deliver his State of the Nation Address.

The evacuees call for an end to martial law and the end of military airstrikes in Marawi City.

On July 24, some 260,000 evacuees vow to return to Marawi City. “We will go home!”

What is the “situation on the ground”?



(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the July 23, 2017 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Veneer of language

MY sons’ school required students to come in Filipiniana for a day to usher the month celebrating the national language.

This year he broke his personal record and chose to go as a farmer: plain white shirt, denims and my old slippers (that are not made of rubber harvested from some South American rain forest).

I considered but later abandoned voicing out my suggestion that a field-battered native hat and a Made in China cotton towel slung around his neck would make him look more like the Filipinos, male and female, who turn the soil and raise the greens we eat.

Due to some star-crossed accident, my son, a fastidious dresser, happens to have a laidback, sartorially clueless mother. Since nursery, when August rolled into view, I always sent him off to school dressed as a farmer while his classmates came in barong.

During those years when I could dictate to him, I mounted an elaborate song-and-dance to convince him to choose comfort over appearance. I could think of no more horrible torture than to be stuck the whole day in an itchy top that took itself so seriously.

Who has a better job than the farmer? I expostulated to my son then. To have all those sun-drenched fields to yourself and a placid colleague, who, if he gets too warm, will simply cool off in a mud pool? In a barong, all one can do is to look honorable, which is of not much use if you want to shuck off your slippers, look for guavas or catch fat frogs.

For a couple of years, my son complacently marched to school as a farmer. I don’t know when he stopped making concessions to me and ushered in Buwan ng Wika in a barong. It must have been at about the time I grew up myself, and stopped deciding what he should read, how he should structure his free time, etc.

So I was not just mildly surprised when he chose his farming “threads.” I speculated on the reasons: was his crush going as a barrio lass? Days earlier, his younger brother left for school in a barong, looking like a pure, unblemished acolyte of new politics. When Juan came home, his barong suggested that he must have spent the rest of the day cooling off in a mud pool with carabao chums.

When Carlos, my farmer, came home, he looked as fresh as ever but a tad sheepish. He had debated calling home to ask me to send his barong, formal pants and shoes after he learned that his particular garb was forbidden by the school. He and a few others of the same bucolic fashion were excused only after it was learned that a teacher had failed to communicate this policy.

I was furious the way a carabao, creature of legendary placidity, becomes a frothing element of red wrath when he finds that his pool is being converted into a mud spa for tourists.

When did the country become an archipelago of barong wearers? Sure, piña and jusi confer dignity but you only have to watch three minutes of the House and Senate in session to realize how thin a veneer of intelligence and honor the costliest barong can guarantee. If all of us stayed inside a barong, would we have any rice to shovel down our throats? Would you be drinking dalandan juice right now? I asked my befuddled son.

I was still mumbling that ukay-ukay (used clothes) and cheap Chinese imports were drastically changing the way many Filipinos dress when the TV news showed footages of civilians caught between the conflict between the military and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Kauswagan, Linamon and Kolambugan,

Widows no longer seemed to cry. After losing partners and breadwinners, these war widows draped themselves over coffins and bodies in the timeless, wordless posture of uncertainty. On their children’s faces was the blankness of shock. What future can we expect if our hatreds rob the young of their hope?

A few days ago, I was crossing the college quadrangle when the public address system aired the noontime angelus. I paused in the shade of a mango tree and looked at a blinding blue sky.

Language is not just about words. It can also be the wordlessness that constricts the throat. In the presence of a particular shade of blue and tolling bells that summon grace. Or under the mercy of an open, ambiguous sky.

When we honor the Filipino this month, may we never forget one word, garbed in whatever language: kalinaw (peace).

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 24, 2008 issue