SEVEN TIMES SEVEN YEARS OF SOLITUDE: RIZAL,
HISTORY, AND THE FUTURE
Dear Ayi, a firstborn:
Yesterday, you emailed me about what is happening back there in the home country.
You know well that even from afar, I keep tab of what is dished out by spin doctors who are in the business of tampering with history—or if you so wish, this business of writing history from their perspective, from their dominant position as power-holders who, for centuries and centuries on end, have not let up with their project and program of rationalized greed, wanton accumulation, and systematic prevarication to perpetuate, in an unceasing way, their stranglehold on us.
You are right, son, you are absolutely right.
These people, though born of the land, have not learned from the lessons of the past.
You were citing Jose Rizal in your letter, your phraseology renewing the same wisdom he shared with us in order for us to learn and see and know and understand.
You said: the book of the past is a book of knowledge since it is the repository of all the things that give us a handle, a direction, a sense of self, an idea of what is to come.
You said too: we need to take to heart this book of the past in much the same way we need air to breathe, air to live.
I do not know what to say even if I am your father and in linear time, in a reckoning that cuts up history into empty moments, time, and events, I am the past and you are the present and the future.
I can only laugh now and from my perch here abroad where the wind is cold and the mornings are foggy and the future of other lands and peoples are also divined and dictated in the war rooms of generals and presidents who have appointed themselves as guardians of democracy and Christianity, I see the distance between us: a distance in time, a distance in mind-set, a distance in the manner of loving our very land, our very heartland.
You say you want to take part in the remaking of history when I warned you of your going to the anti-war rallies, you and the rest of the young in the state university crying out loud that warning to the president and her cohorts and allies and jesters about their not knowing history and not learning from the past.
You were quoting Santayana, son—well, not exactly citing him but you and your battalion of idealists were restate his case: Those who do not learn from history will be condemned to repeat it.
You all were a mile away from the pretenders of intellect of the inangbayan, they who can only know how to corrupt Rizal and Santayana and the wise philosophers of old who talked of justice and love and peace and equality as not separate dreams but concrete realities that are part of a continuum.
Perhaps they did not read Diokno or they never understand how he articulated that intertwining of history and collective dream and the task of nation building.
Land and liberty, he said, are extensions of each other.
So do justice and jobs.
So do food and freedom.
What a way of reading history—of opening up its can of worms in order to name our pains, christen our sorrows, diagnose our seven times seven years of solitude.
Ah, that biblical number comes to me like a ghost lurking at the back of my head even as I try to distance myself from this little talk we have—a father and son talk, if you so wish to call it that way.
But I would like to believe that the reverse is truer: That you set this whole discourse into motion, you who are so young and yet pestering me with our business towards the future.
Is it the case that you have read so much about the need to reread our history by reclaiming our stories and allow the real actors to come forward and narrate of their actions and courage and boldness and daring?
May the good Lord of life and history, you who are so young and yet who are conscious of our destiny be blessed more and more.
The Lord of liberty and freedom and justice is the Lord of history, son.
The incarnation story, minus all the gender and sexuality references, tells us so much about history power and truth in our quest for meaning and substance and redemption.
These people whom today play on our fate and our future are the very people who have come on our shores and took part in our feasting uninvited.
I heard you translating this long duration of oppression of our people into a mystical metaphor that harks back to two covenants of Israel, the old one that was so obsessed with the law of law and the second one that pillared on the law of love.
This oppression has been going on for a long time in human history and history itself has sided, it seems, those who have the cunning and gumption to rule over other unjustly.
You called this phenomenon as “the seven time seven years of solitude of our people” a la Gabriel Marquez in his artistic treatise of the solitude of the Latin American peoples and their centuries of oppression under Spain and Portugal and their allies, the priests and other religious leaders most specially.
Perhaps you were thinking of Rizal’s conclusion that when a country does not have the boldness and daring to open the books of its past, that country will never have stake of the future?
You said you are worried about the future and in your youth, at eighteen and in your prime, I should tell you that you have no cause for worry.
But to be honest: I have so much cause for worry even as you also tell me that perhaps there is a fair, fighting chance with that actor who never died in any of his films but always ended up vanquishing the cruel overlord and then, of course, hailed by the people as their hero and redeemer and savior.
But then again you said that this actor might not stand a chance at all since a broadcaster with the baritone to hide his ambition and to convince every foolish voter that he is indeed sincere and ever willing to be crucified on the cross in the name of the last Juan de la Cruz is offering himself up for immolation in the fire of the nation’s politics.
And then of course, the reigning queen in our politics-as-usual collective life wants us to believe her, she with her rice stalks for a bouquet in that multicolored poster splashed on all the city walls and house doors and concrete posts, she with her big American roses smiling sheepishly as if saying: Give me a chance, give me chance.
We must now reckon, however, in the way we must reckon everything in history: that we gave her the presidency on a silver platter in the hope that she would do better than the Erap of the masses, the Erap whose life was a product of programmatic publicity stunt.
Los Angeles/Dec 2004
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