By CHARLIE SAMUYA VERIC
When the news of her death broke, the memories of our days at UP Diliman came rushing back. We were both students then, young and invincible in the sprawling campus where we beheld some of our earliest freedoms.
My first impulse upon learning of her passing in Negros was to look for our last photos together. Not yet grieving and still in shock, I scrolled down my feed in search of her. I was looking for the ones that I posted on Facebook before she left. How hard to write the preceding words—how hard to know which before I actually mean as I confront the fact of her irrefutable loss. Do I mean before she hied off to the boondocks? Or before she died at the hands of her enemies?
According to the reports, she suffered from blood loss owing to a gunshot wound that ruptured her shoulder. A bullet tore through her hand. Her killers let her bleed to death, her eyes wide open as her last breaths were slipping away.
*
And I found them, photos of us having dinner in October of 2016 before she left to disappear in the countryside. Her hair was cut short, unlike the long tresses that she wore back in college, in preparation perhaps for the journey she was about to make.
On the table, there was a feast from Ken Afford, an old haunt in Katipunan: seafood kare-kare, sisig, beef steak, and squid ala pobre. I also brought a bottle of red wine to celebrate her as well as her husband who joined us.
The photos were taken after the meal. Our faces were rosy from drinking. In one shot, she had her arm resting on the chair, her head tilted to one side, looking at her husband who must have been holding forth at that point. Behind her were young students.
We were no longer young then. I was a teacher. They were revolutionaries waiting to fight again.
*
I realize now how fugitive our meetings had become after graduating from college. We would bump into each other unexpectedly on some street in the metropolis, or meet at random events like the cultural night for Lumads who were taking refuge at UP, or at a May Day rally in Liwasang Bonifacio or Mendiola. We would talk, exchange notes, ask about a common friend who was not around. Then off we vanished once more in the labyrinth of our individual lives.
Yet I knew too well that in her vocabulary the notion of the individual did not exist. She did not lead an individual life the way I did who was, and continue to be, fiercely solitary.
What she lived for, what was true for her, were the people, always the people.
*
Done with our meal, we stepped out of the restaurant to say goodbye. Following some reminders to take care, we parted. It was quick.
I watched them walk away, the night getting deeper as they receded from my sight. There was no drama when they departed, no existential angst, no romantic interlude, only the stark reality of an impending sacrifice.
*
I first met her more than twenty years ago at Vinzons Hall where the Philippine Collegian held its office on the fourth floor. We were both probationary staffers for the Kultura section, spending our weekends drafting articles. Our bonds started with our regular treks to Chocolate Kiss at the Bahay ng Alumni when our food allowance was newly released, and to the old Shopping Center at Rodic’s when the budget was running low. We walked around the academic oval in the middle of the night as we waited for our editors to hand back our drafts.
Soon, we discovered each other’s deep love of poetry. I remember scoring the last copy of Benilda Santos’s Kuwadro Numero Uno at the bookstore in the basement of Vinzons Hall, and when I learned that she was also an admirer, I gave my first and only copy of the book to her.
She had read some of my earliest attempts at poetry. In those days, I wrote poems in Filipino more frequently, perhaps because she was there as my intimate reader.
I do not know what it was that drew her to me. But she was quite a character. The look of her eyes was intense, probing. It was enough to expose an imposter.
A person of few words, she was nonetheless capable of bursting into mischievous, yet always restrained, laughter. On most days, the best you could get from her was a simper.
But I knew I had earned her trust when she started talking to me about her notebooks where she recorded everything in handsomely rendered Baybayin, the better to keep them from the inquiring eyes of others.
She also had a penchant for renaming people. Bien Lumbera was Bien Tambling. Alice Guillermo was Alice in Wonderland. She called me Charchar, a cross between Charlie and the swardspeak, charing, meaning, just kidding.
She nicknamed her son Cricket, possibly after the lighter that one could get readily from the many sari-sari stalls on campus. It was also the username for her private email.
*
When I returned from my doctoral studies in the US, one of my first meals back at Chocolate Kiss was with her. She too had just returned from the countryside. She was usually scarce, keeping herself under the radar, but she made herself available for me.
The powerful fiction of American life still held me in its thrall. I saw things through the lens of economic and philosophical notions that I had learned in New Haven. I was back in Manila, but part of my mind was still somewhere in JFK.
I twirled my seafood pasta as she dug into her dish.
Then she spoke of the fate of the revolution.
Looking around before resuming her speech, she declared the looming victory of the armed struggle. A party document, according to her, stated that the crisis of Philippine society would soon come to a head. It is only a matter of months, she said.
She spoke, it seemed to me then, like a believer who was waiting for the second coming of Christ.
A newly minted PhD, I was skeptical. Benigno Aquino III had just been swept into power, riding on the outpouring of sympathy that followed his mother’s death. Meanwhile, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo started wearing neck braces to avoid imprisonment. The wheels of liberal justice appeared to be turning. Everywhere, people were proclaiming the triumph of globalization. How could the revolution happen soon?
Yet that conversation taught me deeply about the social meaning of revolutions, how their historical time came to be imagined, why the most sophisticated American theory of everything could not compare with her radical hope. I got my rude awakening.
As her life and death reveal categorically, revolutions follow a timeline that defy the plausible. For revolutions represent the politics of the impractical. When you declare a war on an unjust system, you bet on loss.
But that precisely is how the powerless win: With nothing to lose, they have everything to gain.
*
I was a witness to her determination to advance the revolution, even if it meant going against a behemoth. In February of 2011, the military in San Jorge, Samar, one of the poorest towns in the country, arrested her husband just as I was submitting my dissertation at Yale. When I returned to the Philippines in May, we met soon after. She asked me to translate a poetic sequence that her husband had written to alert the international community to his condition as a political detainee. She was leading the campaign for his release, and she understood that any kind of attention from international publics could help her husband’s cause.
Poetry provided the way. But for his work to be accessible to foreign readers, it had to be translated. Without hesitation, I took on the task.
From his cell in Samar, he emailed her the poems in Filipino for translation into English. A lyric sequence, the poems described the life of a revolutionary being pursued by enemy forces, each piece like a searing detail in a mural. I proceeded with my work and sent her the first draft as soon as it was ready. Through her, my translation would land in his cell via email. His comments would reach me soon after.
Together, we mulled over the language, careful not to misrepresent the people’s struggle that the poems tried to depict. We went through the task as if our lives depended on it.
When I sent her the final draft, she emailed back to say how happy she was with it.
“huy,” she wrote in lower caps using the queer speak that we had perfected in college, “ang ganda talaga lola, nakakacrayola, iba ang dating pag iningglishing din anez? laluna you feel mas marami ang makakagets for more international solidarite hihi.”
*
Before writing this essay, I struggled mightily with language. I had to decide which one to use: Filipino or English. I originally intended to use the former to honor the language in which we wrote as young poets.
But then I came across our email exchanges over the years, which I dug up after learning of her death, particularly the ones that we wrote to each other when she campaigned for her husband’s release.
There, I found my answer.
I think I know what she would want for me, that is, to choose English, “for more international solidarite hihi.”
How I miss her giggles.
*
In August of 2012, I received an email from her in the thick of the campaign to free her husband. Attached to it was the pdf of her book of collected poems and drawings, titled Alamat. I remember asking her at some point about the book that she was hoping to publish when we were still in college. I knew that Bien Lumbera and Ricky Lee had already written their blurbs for it.
Then the book disappeared. Her life as a revolutionary took over.
In her email, she said that she had been able to recover the old hard drive that contained the file, which was buried in the shoe rack in the house of her mother-in-law.
She was not sure yet about the book, and felt that it needed updating, that some section needed to be added to make it whole. Take a look, she said.
“so eto isense mo muna ang reli nito…”
*
The entire arc of her short yet storied life is built precisely on a revolutionary’s longing for relevance. That is what she was for me, and what she will be for the generations to come: a poet who wanted to be relevant for the powerless, the dispossessed, and the vulnerable.
In her death, she delivers a challenge to the living.
The world must be changed.
Be worthy.
Make your lives relevant! ●
Charlie Samuya Veric holds a PhD from Yale. A former fellow of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and the author of Histories, Boyhood, and The Love of a Certain Age, he teaches at the Ateneo. His most recent book, Children of the Postcolony, explores Filipino intellectual history after 1946. His fourth book of poetry, No Country, is forthcoming from the University of the Philippines Press. He wrote for the Philippine Collegian as a Kultura staffer from 1997 to 1998.
