Refuse the silence

Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done — Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses”

I woke up to pain in my right fingers. Took some time to straighten my elbows without wincing. My veins shot up my skin like little rivers whose liquid life is weighed down by boulders and stones. My wrist swelled with the memory of a bad fall.

For some reason a dream in black and white had left me teary-eyed. My heart pounded. All I can remember is that I bid someone goodbye.

Still, the daily ritual called on me: a cheap, hot brew in my right hand, a hotdog sandwich on the left. The country has been under quarantine for six months. It was unusually hot for September. I dragged my feet out into the veranda where my laptop awaited the daily import of words.

I opened my Facebook account. As always, death was everywhere.

Two from cancer. One from the coronavirus. Read a story about how this American writer lost her 33-year-old husband to Covid-19 during the early stages of the pandemic. A 62-year-old grandmother and her grandchild (or was it her daughter?) were shot by still unidentified gunmen in the ongoing ‘drug war’. A human rights group accused the Philippine military of ‘beating’ indigenous people. A former classmate and friend back in college is under sedation for Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Another friend from long ago had passed on.

On the bright side, a cousin announced that he and his family tested negative. My son, whose hair had grown too long than his patience could care for, got a much-needed trim. On his own volition. These were the only good news for the day.

I rushed to my library to read Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses to get my day’s bearing, but stumbled on this line, “for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset…”

I asked myself how? How in this godawful region of Hades can one push against the pile of dead bodies too high to even get a glimpse of the sunset, let alone Achilles’ Happy Isles?

It was E.L. Doctorow who caught my mood in his hands: “I have been steadfast, and it has led me to this desert, this flat horizon. I turned around and around, and I’m alone. Is there a specific doom which comes with commitment? You cross some invisible limit, in logic and in faith, and a nameless universe blows through your eyes.”

Thirty or so years of writing go by and still murder and death haunt us all.

‘What can you expect from a country who barely reads, and granted that it does, reads without comprehending?’ I ask myself.

Sleeping has been a chore the last four weeks, writing an unbearable exercise in futility. The arrogance and tragedy of this era leave me craving for new and fresh ways to speak of old things. Life hasn’t really changed much. If at all, we are left further deformed by either disease or lies.

I’m aware that as a journalist and a writer, I shouldn’t let my emotions get in the way of the job. But there is nothing more debilitating than to be human at this time. The death toll rises. Idiocy even higher.

Humanity is on the brink of annihilation and all this regime can do is cover the historic Manila Bay with white sand, regulate Netflix, monitor social media, and craft a bill imposing a new way of greeting.

So, will it be Filipinx? Pinxy? Honestly, “Filipino” doesn’t even sit all that well with me. Our country, Philippines, was named after that bumbling colonial idiot, Philip II of Spain. But then again, who am I to argue against the so-called victors?

I look at my benighted country and wonder: why choose indifference? I think we all know why and I don’t blame them. For the longest time hope has left many of us disappointed. Disenchanted. Tired. Choked with promises that never saw the light of day.

We’ve been shot, raped and gutted when all the while we thought we were under their protection. We were dragged by our noses with fish hooks. Our aspirations burned at the stake. We dared dream of freedom but never thought of seeing the same fizzle before our eyes. In the hands of fellow Filipinos nonetheless.

Why even bother, right? Why lift a fucking finger? A better question would be: why choose to face the juggernaut? The authoritarian offensive, let alone a raging pandemic? When we can all just sit back and enjoy the vision of our future in the safety of our silences.

But that’s the thing. Silence never saved anyone. Not from predators. Not from the wolves at the gate. Not these pathogens just waiting to rip our lungs apart. It is in their blood to hunt for prey. Silence only helps them prowl beneath the bushes, seconds before the ambush.

I’m acquainted with this sort of silence in all of nine years of martial law. At the dinner table where every sort of talk about Marcos was shushed. In the classroom or with friends. Same thing. The last thing anyone needed back then was to have their friends or family sniff out the curious and the headstrong from the rubble of dissent.

Imagine that: friends and family. Not strangers.

To be caught breaking curfew was no different from being raped. Imagine speaking truth to power when power was the only truth many were forced to recognize.

Those who broke their silence were found either floating along the Pasig or buried somewhere in a shallow grave. They were the lucky ones. Many simply disappeared.

A little over 30 years into the future — that’s today — we are once more compelled to choose. Either speak out or forever hold our peace.

Peace: such a disingenuous word. Only two things remind me of peace: the peace found in a photograph and the peace found in a shallow grave. I have no plans of being either one or both.

But if such a choice had to be made while in the face of overwhelming grief and violence, then let me end with novelist Arundhati Roy:

“Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation Are we ready to get off our starting blocks? Are we ready, many millions of us, to rally, not just on the streets but at work and in schools and in our homes, in every decision we take, and every choice we make?

“Or not just yet?

“If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has shunned us (as it should), we too will learn, like the ordinary citizens of Hitler’s Germany, to recognize revulsion in the gaze of our fellow human beings.

“We too will find ourselves unable to look our own children in the eye, for the shame of what we did and didn’t do. For the shame of what we allowed to happen.”

Refuse the silence.