Living Through Terror by Suvendrini Perera Antonio Traverso

Author:Suvendrini Perera, Antonio Traverso [Suvendrini Perera, Antonio Traverso]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415614474
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 10161507
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Perhaps the writer’s ‘watching eye’ is always an insider, insinuating itself in personal and vicarious histories. I grew up studying ‘our bloody and heroic Philippine history’ in the small, sleepy city of Legazpi in the Bicol region, which would later become a hotbed of insurgency and militarism. I was about thirteen years old when the dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and all schools were shut down for months. Weeks earlier a student rally had been broken up by the military at our doorstep. Terrified, I ran to the Last Supper picture in the dining room, fell to my knees and prayed hard to save us all from this impending and yet unknown danger. My prayers were not answered. Student activists from our high school went underground. Two years later a friend’s brother, a human rights lawyer, was ‘picked up’ by the military and disappeared. A few more years and a high school classmate went to the hills to join the New People’s Army. Later as a young university lecturer in Manila during the Marcos years, I grew accustomed to the violent rallies in the streets, which I avoided with an apolitical wish for self-preservation. It is with shame that I recall how I kept teaching literature, while some metres away the military was breaking up a student rally with water cannons and tear gas. Always, at each outbreak of a coup attempt or a rally, I was afraid I would not be able to get home because of blockades or the stoppage of public transport. During the February 1986 revolution, which ousted Marcos, my sister and I joined the People Power in the streets. Like everyone we scampered in panic when a sniper began firing at the crowd of protesters. We had it easy; my university colleagues had to contend with army tanks. I remember going home to my ‘sleepy city’ and seeing a tank rolling down the street like a permanent fixture in the traffic.

This lived history is not only in my eye. It is a psychic imprint with which I listen to stories and write. Storying is contextual and historical. No one can tell about now without before or the consequent after. History is changed as we tell stories, because the storying act psychically determines how we see and relate to the world now and before – which in turn determines how this world is continuously shaped and named, and narrativised for – and in the future.

I make the above point in my novel The Solemn Lantern Maker, which is about another total war currently being waged by the Philippine government in the Muslim south of the country. In one scene, a Filipino journalist and an American colonel argue about the use of the word ‘terrorism’ in contemporary warfare:

‘I’m sorry, Miss Fuentebella, but the United States is not lecturing you on terrorism. As you may appreciate, politically motivated violence has new dimensions, so the contemporary use of the word “terrorism” is entirely different from the old definition –’

She’s even more incensed.

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