Maalaala Mo Kaya? The Forgetfulness of the Filipinos

Blogger's Note: This article reminds us of the short memory we Filipinos have. Astrocities committed by foreign powers to us is but a distant past now. Read on...

Memory and truth
First posted 02:13am (Mla time) Aug 17, 2005 By Michael L. Tan, Inquirer News Service
http://news.inq7.net/opinion/index.php?index=2&story_id=47122

THEY seem to belong to a very distant past, these aerial photographs of Manila flattened after the American bombings in February 1945.

Until you see photographs of people moving around the smoldering ruins. There's a nun carrying a child, making her way across the rubble. There's an emaciated child clinging to her ration box.There are medics pushing a "kariton" [wooden pushcart] with a patient inside. There are the thousands of people fleeing across the Pasig River on a makeshift bridge.

I'm describing photographs from the Remedios Jubilee Mission Exhibition, which was launched in February this year to mark the 60th anniversary of what older Filipinos call Liberation, when American troops returned to the Philippines. The photo exhibit is on loan this week to the University of the Philippines (UP) campus in Diliman, Quezon City, shown at the main library's basement, part of History Week celebrations. The UP exhibit is all too short, considering Friday the 19th is a holiday, but I think the photographs will go back to the Remedios church in Malate district, where I hope the exhibit will continue and more people can drop in.

Pearl of the Orient
The photographs show how costly the Liberation was. Consider the death toll of 100,000 during the World War II battle for Manila -- that's greater than the total number of civilians who died in Hiroshima where the Americans dropped their atomic bomb. Historians estimate that for every six Filipinos killed by the Japanese, there were four killed by American Liberation bombs and bullets.

Manila, the Pearl of the Orient and one of the most beautiful cities in Asia before the war, never quite recovered. Sixty years after the end of the war, Manila remains one of the most squalid cities in the world. It was almost as if the war snuffed out our collective will to create, to live.

Last week, I got a phone call from Carlos Conde, who was doing an article on the end of World War II for the International Herald Tribune. He asked why -- compared with our neighbors -- we seem to be so much more forgiving of the Japanese. He had visited Mapaniqui, a small village in Pampanga province, where several women were raped during the war. Yet that village now sends out its residents to work in Japan, including granddaughters of the raped women who now work as entertainers.

My explanation here is that as a nation, we have not worked hard enough at memory-keeping. Our textbooks mention, only in very general terms, the atrocities we suffered during successive colonial occupations, with the Japanese Occupation receiving the least attention.

Carlos had another interesting angle, which he wrote up in an incisive piece in the International Herald Tribune last Saturday: perhaps, we forget World War II because we are so beholden to Japan, because of its "aid" and, ironically, because it is the market for our women.

Not only have we lost our memories, we've also allowed myths and lies to take over. When Japan early this year cut down its quota for Filipina entertainers from 80,000 annually to 8,000, we saw full-page ads vehemently protesting the move. Today, the government's pre-departure orientation seminars for the women emphasize they are not "japayuki" but Overseas Filipina Entertainers (OFEs), while their recruiters coach them on what to answer Japanese immigration officials. (Sample: Do you sit with your customers? No. What do you do between your performances? I wait in the dressing room.)

We are told to be grateful for the Japanese aid that poured in after the war -- to build hospitals and highways -- without realizing these were loans, many of which mainly benefited the likes of Marcos and other politicians. No wonder we agreed to the Japanese putting up a memorial to their kamikaze pilots in World War II.

One of Mapaniqui's grandmothers told Carlos: "You can't eat the past." Indeed we can't. But even beggars need some pride.

Reconnecting
Last week, clinical psychologist Dr. Maria Lourdes Carandang spoke at the University of the Philippines on "Truth-telling and National Healing," drawing parallels between the recovery process for individual victims of trauma and a battered nation.

Dr. Carandang worries that lying may have become a way of life in the country, and this may have happened because we have become so fearful of the truth. Our fears heighten because of the current controversies, where truth-telling is parodied through political circuses. I worry about people who are genuinely concerned, but who have grown weary, and wary. We see people disengaging. Some cop out, refusing to read the newspapers or listen to the news. Others take more drastic steps, making that final decision to join the diaspora because they fear they can no longer raise their children morally in this country.

Dr. Carandang says there's still hope if people can just get together and do what they can around truth-telling; in effect, she's prescribing group therapy, getting people to reconnect and reminding us of what the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: "Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have."

Memory's light
Memory-keeping and truth-telling about World War II means going beyond the facile "good guys" (Americans) and "bad guys" (Japanese) formulation of Hollywood. We all grew up hearing of MacArthur's triumphant landing at Leyte in fulfillment of his promise, "I shall return." We know little about how that return involved the destruction of Manila, or how Filipino guerrillas held the fort through the war; and how many of those war veterans died and are dying without any benefits from Mother America.

We have to recognize, too, how the Japanese suffered because of their leaders' imperial adventures. We need to look, too, at how their right-wing politicians are trying to suppress the past, revising textbooks to downplay descriptions of the Imperial Army's atrocities. Their conservatives recognize the power of memories.

Memory-keeping isn't just remembering the painful aspects of the past. During the symposium at UP, Dr. Elena R. Mirano also talked about how we forget particular moments in history where we dared to stand up. She recounted the debates around the US bases treaty. We were fearful then, that if we voted not to renew the bases, the country would die. But we dared to say "Enough. No more bases." And more than a decade later, we see we've survived. The decision on the bases was a defining moment in our long recovery process, but memories of that historic decision have faded as well.

Closing the UP symposium in behalf of the dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Prof. Joy Barrios quoted from Emilio Jacinto:

"Ang ningning ay maraya. Ating hanapin ang liwanag..."

"Ningning" is the artificial glow, the dangerous glitter and glamour of myths and lies. Emilio Jacinto says all that is illusory, that what we need to search for is "liwanag," light. A wise advice, indeed, as we embark on memory-keeping and truth-telling.

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