Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson [James Hamilton-Paterson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571314003
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

What has Manila to do with Tiwarik?

I have tried to suggest how utterly remote is an islet off an island which is itself off an island province. Yet even that islet exists as a political entity, is involved in the politics of everyday living. Some years ago – long after the declaration of Martial Law in 1972 – troops stationed up the coast near the provincial capital turned up one morning in Sabay. It was merely a day’s stopover on a leisurely tour they were making of the province, which must have been a dull place for them since there was no political opposition there, no NPA guerrillas, no angry students or farmers. To fill the time they made an effort to improve their own living conditions and came to Sabay on the scrounge. They requisitioned Arman’s father’s boat for an afternoon’s drunken fishing and, having caught nothing, shot it full of holes and let it settle on the rocks off the beach. For a time it looked as though they might shoot its owner too.

Since then they demand that barangay Captain Sanso give them fresh fish regularly on the plausible grounds that Army food is atrocious and one of their officers is anyway selling canned stores destined for his own troops in the market at Bulangan. The quid pro quo is that the soldiers keep the village supplied with blasting caps and demolition fuses so the fishermen can use dynamite. This ensures their catches are sometimes large enough for another officer to sell off any surplus in the market at Malubog.

If dynamite fishing had already been part of the way of life of Sabay (as throughout much of the archipelago), this episode made it an impossible habit for the villagers to break even if some of the more observant fishermen were beginning to worry about dying corals. The unofficial threat of a handful of official troops became one more of the interlocking imperatives which entangle the lives of a socially complex, isolated community.

And thus a familiar view from Tiwarik. A small boat drifts on the glassy calm, its occupants muffled against the sun, hanging over the sides, gazing down for hours. The sea is molten, nothing moves. Then beneath it a great door slams, loud enough to bring me out of my hut to look in all directions. But there is nothing much to see: a wisp of steam and spray dissipating above a patch of foam on which other boats converge, their occupants already slipping purposefully overboard with sleeve nets.

Far away in Manila there is a law ratified by all sorts of governmental and international bodies which says this sort of thing is completely illegal. But here at Sabay it is at the express command of ‘the Authorities’. It is as if they had known all along I would one day come to live on Tiwarik and were adding that touch of ordnance and war without which my arcadian landscapes are never complete.

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