September 23, 1972: incoherent memories

September 23, 1972

It was a Saturday and I took two jeepney rides from Lawaan, Talisay to the U.P. Cebu campus in Lahug. I was excited because I had been chosen as one of two editors for the high school paper Tambuli, old vernacular for horn shell. There really might be no English equivalent, as with many words outside of English. Picked as a co-editor was my classmate Rita Murillo. It was supposed to be our first editorial meeting to discuss the launch of the paper and the articles for the first issue. I cannot now recall who else were chosen to staff the paper except Ella Rose Cabiluna and Rosendo Estoye.

Fe Reyes, the paper’s adviser, met us near the oblation to say we should all just go home because ‘martial law’ had been declared. It was the first time ever I had heard that phrase. A year earlier I had heard of ‘writ of habeas corpus.’ But in September of 1972, I was just seven months into my first year as a teenager.

I did not go straight home but instead went to my aunt and uncle’s bookshop (Paul's bookstore was the first after WWII in Cebu) at the time one of the top three book stores in Cebu. My aunt Fidela did not really know what had happened or what was happening. So she allowed me to hang out and browse while waiting for word from home. I don’t even remember where I had lunch that day but I do remember buying ‘My Name is Asher Lev’ by Chaim Potok for my older sister Josephine, who turned 17 two days earlier and who had planned on inviting her college sophomore classmates to the house for a celebration that Saturday. There was a another bookshop near the jeepney terminal, and I spent some more time there because it was in a block we called ‘Lane’ and I recall having been home that night in time to see the official broadcast with the president who said he had declared a state of emergency to save the country from all sorts of trouble makers.

The remainder of the year and the following were eventful to say the least. The crisis in the Middle East, including the Munich hostage crisis and the Yom Kippur War. As a junior in high school I chose Yom Kippur as the subject of my English class baby thesis and it had to go through an oral defense when I was fourteen.

But before that I had had a lot to read, and many of the books I didn’t really understand (Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, ... I tried but at the time there really wasn’t much to do aside from brood and since I wasn’t ‘normal’ in terms of being a boy chasing girls, I was in the library often. And when I wasn’t in the library I was in the faculty room. I don’t know why my teachers allowed me in there to have coffee with and even smoke with them, even after the edicts on short hair, and the subsequent youth civic action program (YCAP) and citizens army training (CAT) had been imposed.

After graduation from high school, my values had pretty well been shaped. I was an atheist even before I called myself Marxist. I was first associated with the group of the Maoist party in Cebu before I joined the old communist party (PKP) in 1977 or 1978. In 1990 the PKP expelled me after I ahd spoken out at a forum challenging the scientific nature of historical and dialectical materialism.

Now after 35 years, I feel just slightly older than I was in 1972. Old comrades have moved on with their families and careers. They may have perfected the art of forgetting and surviving. I wake up and still ask myself the same questions, perhaps more calmly now, but still the adolescent I was on September 23 35 years ago.