RESCUING TOMORROW BY REMEMBERING THE PAST
A Book Review of Poverty of Memory: Essays on History and Empire by Renato Redentor Constantino
Robert JA Basilio Jr., June 2006HOWEVER cleverly written, newspaper columns have never been given a break.
Treated as the poor cousin of the essay — considered as the quintessential form of non-fiction since the Renaissance, so says an American critic — opinion columns, together with editorials, feature stories, and what can be generally considered as “think” and “color” pieces have been refused membership into the literary club.
Which perhaps explains why in the early nineties, Adrian Cristobal decided against asking fellow columnist and current Makati City congressman Teodoro M. Locsin Jr. from writing the foreword of his fourth book.
Entitled Pasquinades, Cristobal’s work was a collection of occasional pieces written primarily for the weekend supplement of the defunct The Daily Globe, a newspaper which Locsin published and edited.
“This book is an inconsistency,” Cristobal said in his introduction. “Like Teddyboy Locsin, I believe that a collection of newspaper columns in book form is sheer vanity: what is perishable — and newspaper pieces are perishable — should be allowed to perish without benefit of clergy...[B]eing a ruthlessly honest writer, [TeddyBoy] might go at it too well for my comfort, and I happen to perversely value his friendship more than his honesty.”
Although Locsin was able to defend himself against this barb — through a speech delivered at the book’s launch at a Makati City hotel and later published in the Philippines’ Free Press — the witty exchange between the two writers emphasized the amorphous position occupied by well-written, non-straightforward news pieces published in dailies, weeklies, and some glossies.
And so, the question must now be asked: can these same pieces be considered as essays or are they simply just passing fancies, perishable goods to be consumed today and discarded tomorrow? Is there a clear demarcation between the non-fiction piece written under a tight deadline as opposed to the one that was produced leisurely?
Not even the celebrated National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin thinks so.
Writing tons of non-fiction under the pen name Quijano de Manila, the prolific fictionist, poet, biographer, and journalist has shown that a well-written prose piece of any substantial length can inform, educate, entertain, and, in certain cases, even enrage. (Witness, for instance, Jose “Pete” F. Lacaba’s Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, a collection of narratives about the First Quarter Storm, one of the most tumultuous events in the country’s history.)
This sentiment is shared by American critic and professor Cristina Nehring in an essay published in the May 2003 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
Although castigating essays “that strain to be stories — the ones, in other words, that renounce the main privilege of the essayist over the storyteller: the right to think out loud, the right to draw conclusions from data than merely present it, the right to offer interpretations and propose hypotheses,” Nehring says that there is no such thing as a higher or lower genre in literature.
“[T]here is only good writing and bad writing, strong thinking and weak thinking,” she said, in a piece entitled, Our Essays, Ourselves: In Defense of the Big Idea. “Stylistically, non-fiction has produced gems that glitter as brightly as the clearest stones of fiction.”
Going by the Nehring protocol, the collections and anthologies of a number of Filipino writers are not going to lose their luster anytime soon.
Decades after their publication, the essays of Joaquin, Lacaba, and Cristobal will always remain a pleasure to read.
This same pleasure is replicated whenever Locsin (before he ran for office) delivers a printed tirade against stupidity in government, Conrado de Quiros fulminates against Malacañang’s current resident, and Gregorio C. Brillantes waxes sentimental about his trips to Manabo, Mexico, and Madrid.
Although Philippine literature and journalism lies in wait for an anthology compiling unpublished gems produced by these writers, a younger generation have thankfully emerged to fill the vacuum.
Among them is Renato Redentor Constantino, who in March 2006, released a collection of nearly 70 of his published columns and pieces in a book entitled The Poverty of Memory: Essays on History and Empire.
With four sections discussing an impressive array of topics — an American anti-imperialist group protesting US annexation of the Philippines to a profile of Iran’s pro-poor prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh — Constantino’s collection is more than just a samples of good writing and in-depth research. It is proof that combining talent, tenacity, and noble intentions can do more than just beat deadlines: it can stimulate ideas, widen perspectives, and help propose alternatives to the current local millieu, which has only helped to deepen oppression, encourage mediocrity, and tolerate ignorance.
Unfortunately, despite his skills, Constantino, also known as Red, is burdened with two sets of luggage, the kind that may not be easily jettisoned.
Besides being the grandson of the late, great historian Renato, Constantino the younger is also a committed environmental activist, one who remains connected with Greenpeace.
Fortunately, his personal affiliations have never gone to his head nor has his professional involvement clouded his judgement. In short, Constantino is very much his own man, preferring to lay claim to the world of words on his own terms, despite bearing a name that resounds with Philippine history.
Besides being published in the opinion sections of various Manila-based newspapers, the younger Constantino is also one of the few writers — then and now — who can claim that his pieces have seen print abroad, including in publications such as The Nation, one of the leading alternative magazines in the US (which incidentally has also published University of the Philippines sociology professors Randy David [who also happens to be his uncle] and Walden Bello).
However, to merely consider Constantino’s work as opinion pieces, in the strictest sense, would be unfair and misleading.
After all, these essays are more than interpretations of facts but pieces put together, placed in a historical context and, for better or worse, simplified to fulfill the quotidian demands of a newspaper’s opinion section.
Lourdes Molina-Fernandez, BusinessMirror’s editor-in-chief, has it down pat. In a blurb on the front cover, Fernandez says that the collection is “[h]istory and the breaking story in one seamless tapestry.”
She continues: “This is a book for anyone who cares to remember, whether the chronicles are written as journalism, or as timeless literature; whether the stories happened this century or the last, or even four centuries before; or whether the persons in them, though set apart by creed or greed, by color of skin or of views, or by class or interest, have something to teach.”
Which just perfectly describes Constantino’s hell-raising, mind-blowing, and eye-opening pieces that should give pause to current media practitioners who act more like petty bureaucrats than idealistic muckrakers that they are supposed to be.
But then again, that might be asking too much from the majority of the parochial, half-literate, junket-crazy, social-climbing, self-proclaimed journalists unable to distinguish their pampered asses from a press release.
While he is — arguably — not a media professional, Constantino is, first and foremost, a writer who collects facts and ensures the veracity of his assertions without compromising the demands of the craft and the art of writing.
Even without intending to become the journalists’ journalist, Constantino also plumbs the depths of Philippine history, and, much like his grandfather, involves himself with the minutiae of what life was like back then, when electronic mail and text messaging were the stuff of science fiction.
Thanks to his curiosity — a trait no doubt acquired by the grandson from his grandfather — the younger Constantino comes up with loads of relevant information rarely discussed in a country whose many residents have mistakenly recognized that democracy was introduced by the Americans.
Since many have been misled into believing that former US vice-president Al Gore invented the internet, this is not surprising. After all, Filipinos, as a whole, have yet to come to terms with the big war which defeated Asia’s first democratic republic.
Fortunately, Constantino is not about to let this issue go unnoticed. Or at least not in his book.
As expected, the collection opens with his essays about the Filipino-American War, an event which easily lends itself to discoveries, which may be shocking even to those currently seeking the benefits offered by US citizenship.
Supposedly the US’ first Vietnam, the defining battle which marked America’s rise to global preeminence murdered anywhere from 250,000 to a million Filipinos.
In a piece entitled Memories of Black and Blue, Constantino cites a pro-imperialist New York Times piece which describes the attitudes of American soldiers fighting in the Filipino-American war.
“It kept leaking down from [our officers] that the Filipinos were ‘niggers’ no better than Indians and were to be treated as such,” Constantino cites a soldier as saying during the hostilities.
While these accounts may prove unnerving, even to little brown Americans, it attempts to emphasize what has been ignored all along: that America’s promises to encourage democracy, promote equality, and uphold liberty may just prove to be necessary diversions to advance its imperial interests.
To underscore his point, Constantino, in his introduction, only had to quote Thomas Friedman, the celebrated right-wing, Iraq-war-supporting, free-market-thinking, socialist-bashing New York Times columnist.
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist,” Constantino cites Friedman as saying. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” However, despite continuous attempts to implement Pax Americana, it is good to know that the imperialist country’s atrocities are condemned the world over, even by its own citizens.
More than a hundred years before America invaded Iraq, it successfully attempted to conquer the Philippines through a policy known as benevolent assimilation.
But David Fagen, a black American soldier, and 20 other black troops knew that they were fighting for a country whose strategies were less than benevolent.
So one day, Fagen and his like-minded brothers decide to quit the Army and fight alongside Filipino guerillas.
In a piece entitled The blood that binds, Constantino says that this event is “unprecedented in Black military history.”
The same essay also discussed a different kind of hero in America, one that has been disenfranchised since birth, much like Fagen.
Shortly before World War II, Dr. Charles Richard Drew discovers the process of storing human blood for months without the need for refrigeration.
“As the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank, Drew ensures that shipments of liquid plasma [the fluid left when red blood cells are removed from whole blood] are sent to combat zones where Axis bombs and bullets are spreading death,” Constantino says. “...At first the Red Cross and the military refuse the blood of Blacks in the plasma banks so as to avoid the possibility that races might mix by transfusion. But later they relent—provided Negro blood is separated from Caucasian blood. Charles Drew resigns. Charles Drew is black.”
These and many other heroes, mostly unsung yet inspiring, populate the pages of Constantino’s collection, a stark contrast to the world outside which has way too much of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Iza Calzado.
In Constantino’s collection, there are individuals such as Mordechai Vanunu, the world’s very first independent nuclear arms inspector.
Discussed by Constantino in more than three essays, Vanunu worked for nearly a decade as a technician at Dimona, Israel’s nuclear installation in the Negrev desert.
In 1986, after painstaking documentation and preparation, Vanunu told the world that the country developed 40 kilograms of plutonium annually. Thanks to his steely commitment against nuclear weapons and his opposition to Israel’s nuke program, he was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome, five days before his well-documented exposé appeared in the London Sunday Times.
Held incommunicado for 11 years, Vanunu was imprisoned for another seven years before authorities agreed to release him in April 2004, especially after he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, a distinction he shares with Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchu, and Aung San Suu Kyi.
Despite leaving jail, Vanunu’s freedom remains limited.
Besides being disallowed to leave city limits without permission, the whistleblower mightier than Israel (which is what Constantino calls him) is banned from going near any border terminal, including the Ben-Gurion International Airport. He is also prohibited from communicating with foreigners including expatriates in Israel, whether in meetings, by phone, fax, or email, let alone talking about Dimona’s warheads to anyone.
But like many others similarly situated, whether in Israel, Iraq or the Philippines, incarceration and torture failed to break his spirit.
“I still believe Israel is wrong to develop nuclear weapons, and I still believe the abolition of nuclear weapons is possible in our lifetime,” Constantino quotes Vanunu as saying immediately after his release. “I call on international nuclear inspectors of the UN. Come to Israel. Inspect Dimona. Dimona must be shut down.”
Despite international condemnation for its weapons program, Israel conveniently cites the Holocaust, an atrocity in whose name it has committed many smaller and similar crimes.
“[A]nytime the Israeli government is pressed to account for its duplicity, for its malevolent intentions, for its extraordinary racism, the Holocaust card is flashed to shut up its critics,” Constantino says in a piece entitled “What is required of Israel.”
He continues by asking a question, more practical than theoretical.
“What exactly is a country surrounded by hundreds of millions of people each one of whom have sworn to destroy her supposed to do, some Israelis ask, as if the mere question is supposed to still the demand to dismantle Israel’s nuclear facilities?” he says, adding that the question, theoretically put forth, ignores interesting facts.
Among the ignored facts, Constantino says, is “that for over 20 years, Arab governments have recognized Israel’s right to exist; that polls taken among Arab nations confirm what most people already know—outrage over the brutal treatment of Palestinians under Israel’s occupation is increasing, not diminishing; that the same polls acknowledge the continued legitimacy among most Arabs of a solution to the Middle East peace problem that includes Israel; that those who bring up the matter of Israel’s supposed ‘impending annihilation’ by its ‘sworn enemies’ do not always realize that the reasoning used to justify Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons is in reality a way of thinking framed by a familiar narrative: the small civilized community in a wasteland versus the millions of murderous savages intent on annihilating their way of life.”
What is required of Israel is a series of cogent arguments asserting that Israel’s current right-wing government has become no less racist—and perhaps no less violent—than the Nazis.
Although longer than the other pieces, the essay not only is recommended reading, it is instructional as well, providing clarity to those who are unable to make heads or tails of the current Lebanon conflict.
This, incidentally, brings up yet another kind of hero, many of whom were found to have been working at Lebanon before the war began.
These are the same kinds of people who have sacrificed hearth, and to some degree, health (both mental and physical), just to provide a better life for their families: overseas Filipino workers.
Whether maids, drivers, nurses, or tragically, even sex workers, Filipinos working abroad regularly send money to prop up the economy which has been ailing for so long, very few remember how it was like when the Philippines was progressive.
To show his gratitude for their sacrifices, Constantino allots a section entitled Memories of Exile dedicated especially for profiles of Filipina domestics.
In “The vitamins of Erma Geolamin,” Constantino relates the life and times of a domestic helper who has spent 14 years in Hong Kong only to find out later that the family savings were squandered by a husband who has been living with another woman.
“Another familiar story...It’s like the relationship between overseas Filipino workers and the Philippine government,” Constantino says, referring to the larger, menacing yet often-overlooked form of squandering: that of the Philippine government’s automatic provision of using precious dollars earned by the likes of Geolamin to pay for fraudulent, graft-tainted debt, best represented by the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP). These automatic debt payments, Constantino adds, is “a monumental barbarity that re-exports the dollars remitted by overseas Filipino workers.”
But as everyone who has a father, mother, brother or sister working abroad knows, the Philippine government’s methodical mismanagement of funds from its toiling expatriates is just one among the many urgent issues brought about by the policy of exporting the country’s labor force.
“For behind almost every statistic of Filipino workers ‘deployed’ by government to work abroad is a home fighting to keep the fabric of family intact,” Constantino says in a profile of Loretta Bruinio.
Although most tales of Filipina domestics are of woe and desperation, Constantino is not reduced to cynicism, unlike the many professionals who leave Philippine shores even if they can afford to stay. Instead, he waxes poetic, emphasizing isolation and loneliness as a means to focus and act towards a hopefully brighter future — the very ideals exuded by a Brunio, who impresses Constantino with her heroism and humanity.
Admitting that she sometimes is overwhelmed by loneliness on some nights, Brunio says that her “antibiotic” is Ivy, her third and youngest child. “Some nights, when sadness is overwhelming,” Constantino quotes her as saying, “I call up Ivy and ask her to sing for me and then I’m okay.”
It appears that nothing ever lets Brunio down at all.
Although she failed to find fulfillment even after attending a born-again Christian group, it was not enough to discourage the Hong Kong domestic helper from establishing the Coalition for Migrant Rights, an organization whose membership included Sri Lankans, Indonesians, Thais, Nepalese, and Indians.
It comes as no surprise that Constantino chose to call this piece Loretta Brunio: Filipino. This, no doubt, was made in honor of a woman who, without intending to, has come to represent the Filipino everyman. Though successful in securing a job abroad, each overseas worker—most especially those with only manual labor to offer—has grown to realize that there is very little difference between foreign employment and forced exile.
And that, surprisingly, these OFWs not only manage to overcome all forms of adversity, their government’s indifference included, but that they also have learned to improve themselves, doing the country proud.
“In a world imprisoned by self-inflicted ignorance, among people sedated by affluence, inside communities immobilized by fear, the conduct of [Brunio] remind[s] us...of the essence from which springs acts that we have come to know as that glorious but seemingly unattainable thing called heroism,” Constantino says in a piece entitled Well of Valor. “We honor our heroes not merely by erecting monuments in their likeness. We celebrate them, too, by recognizing that they were not uncommon women and men but ordinary people like us who carried attributes that we, too, in truth possess: extraordinary hope, will, and heart.”
Although Constantino has celebrated the achievements of these unsung Filipinos, he nevertheless offers a few rules for those intending to secure a brighter future for everyone.
“Rescuing tomorrow from those who wish to appropriate it carries some requisites,” he says in the introduction. “History must penetrate memory. Memory must permeate history. Act deliberately but with dispatch. Understand. Listen. Reach out. Act with others. Rescue tomorrow together. Hope abounds. The future’s already here, said the writer William Gibson. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”
It’s nice to know that in less than three hundred pages, Poverty of Memory, filled with bite-size pieces, is successful in what it sought out to accomplish.
Robert JA Basilio Jr. is a writer and senior editor of the leading Philippine business paper. He is the husband of award-winning poet Conchitina R. Cruz. They both live in Quezon City with a fat, lazy cat named Minggoy. A shorter version of Basilio's review can be read here.
