This being September 21 and the 50th anniversary of martial law, I suppose I should say something about that turbulent period, which I’ve written about many times in many ways. There’s little more that I can really add to what many of us already know and what other people will be bearing witness to today, with even more authority.

I was 18 when martial law was announced–not on September 21, but on the 23rd, actually. I had dropped out of UP as a freshman and had finagled my way into a full-time job as a reporter for the Philippines Herald and then as a correspondent for Taliba, the Tagalog counterpart of the Manila Times. I was in UP attending a rally at the Sampaguita/Kamia area when I noticed a fraternity brother of mine, the son of a senior government official, being whisked away by a security detail. That was followed by what sounded like gunfire (which it was) from the direction of the Iglesia ni Cristo. Being 18, I was excited; I found a phone and called the office, eager to let them know I had a scoop: UP (or something around it) was under attack! (As it turned out, the INC and its radio station had been seized by the Metrocom, and some of its guards resisted, explaining the gunfire).

Instead of a pat on the back, the night editor at Taliba had a laconic message for me: “There’s no more newspaper. We’re being shut down. Martial law’s been declared.” That’s when I flew into a panic, although the declaration had not been totally unexpected; I and some other comrades sought out a friend’s boarding house nearby and hid there until the morning, when we all snuck out into a world that had suddenly gone strangely quiet with fear and tension.

Three months later, still 18, I would find myself in prison, after having been ratted out by a neighbor, a comrade whom I didn’t know had become an informer. I don’t know if he scored any points with my arrest because I was strictly small fry–an occasional writer of manifestoes, a mimeographer, a street marcher, a discussion-group facilitator (see pic below), and a kwitis-bearer at the Diliman Commune, but otherwise undistinguished as supposedly Marxist heroes went. I guess I just got caught in a very large and very fine net.

I spent more than seven months–most of my 19th year–in Bicutan, three of them at the maximum-security Youth Rehabilitation Center (now the Makati City Jail) where we had absolutely no privacy. The walls and partitions within were made of chicken wire, so that even the toilets were see-through, and a guard patrolled a catwalk above our heads. (I suppose this is where a troll will interject that if I was in maximum security, then I must have done something awfully wrong, but the absurdity of this situation still baffles me.) Yet nothing could be more absurd than my release–a captain said they had nothing on me after all, and told me to pack my bags, just like that.

I got off easy; some of my fellow prisoners went through horrible torture; some snapped, others didn’t. I learned that people have breaking points, and I learned not to expect or demand of others what I could stand for myself. I should be full of rage for my imprisonment, but looking back I have to speculate that if I hadn’t been arrested, I could have been dead at 19 or 20, like many of my friends, because increased involvement in the martial-law resistance then raised the likelihood of being deployed to the countryside, where city-bred partisans stood out like tender egrets in the rice paddies.

As it happened, after my release, I found a job (with government, of all places, most media outlets having been closed down), met and married Beng, fathered Demi, and created another life as a writer, student, and teacher. I saw myself as an “articulate survivor”–happy and grateful to be alive, especially for Beng and Demi, but also touched by that guilt that forever scars the lucky few who walk away from a deadly plane crash. (In my first novel, “Killing Time in a Warm Place,” I would write: “You think you’ve put it all together–a stitch here and a patch there, and great black sheets spread entirely over trenches brimming with hateful things. You strike a pose of amused collection, head hung to a favored side, hands limp in deep pockets or feeling fabrics in the air, and on your lips the apology, as tentative and as practiced as the preenings of a showy diver, of the articulate survivor. And then in one withering moment you lose it all.”)

What else can I say? One refrain I’ve come to repeat often recently has been my realization that those of us who actively opposed the martial-law dictatorship were in the minority, and we remain so today. Martial law wouldn’t have lasted that long–like Hitler’s Germany–without some significant degree of popular complicity, whether from denial, disinformation, or ignorance.Our martial law was not theirs. Only a few of us were tortured or imprisoned; most were not and saw only the clean-swept streets and the shortened hair. Few realized that we were all being robbed blind and continue to pay for that plunder. Torture takes many forms.

Now let me return to fiction, which can be far more sensible and comforting than real life.

Photos: Jose Dalisay Fb