Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
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could be irrevocably drawn to this dark side or, worse, be active agents carrying out its orders, was cause for alarm. The Philippine Collegian had in fact published Sison’s influential essay entitled “Student Power?” just days before the rally. The essay was a call to arms, exhorting student activists to enfold peasants and laborers into their movement.20 The political inclusiveness of the demonstration and the ideological substance of many of the speeches and the slogans chanted that day would seem to indicate that Sison, who had been in hiding since 1969, was present at least in spirit at the demonstration. Rumors quickly spread that for his part, Commander Dante, who had a price of 90,000 pesos on his head, had managed to infiltrate enemy lines to personally attend the rally.21 Suffice it to say that in light of these developments, the January 26 demonstration represented a critical juncture for the radical Left. As clashes between the NPA and the Philippine Constabulary began to multiply in the hills and flatlands of Luzon, radical students had, it seemed, begun to take a new tack: provoking violent confrontation in the streets.22
The students at the January 26 rally used mass action, or the threat of it, as their political weapon against the government. Theirs was a performative mode of politics that pivoted on the affective presentation of a collective identity—one based on their values and lifestyle as youths. Such a form of “identity politics” was colored by the politically calculated performance of nonnormative or abject identities. Consider the students’ slogans and shibboleths: “Their slogan was “Fight! Fear Not!” and they made a powerful incantation of it: Maki-BAKA! Huwag ma-TAKOT! They marched with arms linked together, baiting [the police], taunting them. “Pulis, pulis, titi mong matulis!” (Pigs, pigs, uncircumcised dicks!) . . . Baka magreyp pa kayo, lima-lima na ang asawa ninyo!” (You might be thinking of raping someone, you already have so many wives!), “Mano-mano lang, o!” (Let’s have it out, one on one!).”23
The students, it must be pointed out, chose to stage the rally in Tagalog. It was a way of distancing their public sphere from the official business of Congress (carried out, as per political custom, in English). Their acts of defiance, though reminiscent of child play, aimed to transform the terms of political contestation in the nation. Vicente Rafael’s focus on the linguistic dimensions of the affective style of youth politics is instructive: “Rather than acknowledge authority as the giver of gifts, the language of the demonstrators negated the conventions of [official politics]. Taunts replaced respect, opening a gap between the language of the state and that of the students.”24 As we shall see in a moment, however, the students’ tendentious language and performance of nonnormative conduct came at a price.
The January 30 Revolt
Student agitation resumed with a vengeance on January 30. Of the even more spectacular violence that erupted that day, a police officer would comment, “This is no longer a riot. This is an insurrection.” President Marcos, final arbiter on these matters, would call it a revolt—“a revolt by local Maoist Communists.”25
The January 30 “revolt” began with simultaneous demonstrations held in front of the Congress Building and Malacañang, the presidential palace. By early evening, the two demonstrations merged. Exactly what triggered the battle that spread to other parts of the city and lasted till dawn the next day may never be known. Lacaba gives the following account:
The students who came in from Congress claim that, as they were approaching J. P. Laurel Street, they heard something that sounded like firecrackers going off. When they got to Malacañang, the crowd was getting to be unruly. It was growing dark, and the lamps on the Malacañang gates had not been turned on. There was a shout of Sindihin ang ilaw! Sindihin ang ilaw! (Turn on the lights! Turn on the lights!) Malacañang obliged, the lights went on, and then crash! a rock blasted out one of the lamps. One by one, the lights were put out by stones or sticks.26
Lacaba’s report provides us with a highly symbolic incipit—or narrative opening—for the volatile events that would follow. The insistent demand for light, which, upon provision is immediately put out by persons unknown, paradoxically sets the stage for the most spectacular public drama to emerge out of the First Quarter Storm. It is indeed ironic that the January 30 “revolt” begins under the cover of darkness. It creates a gaping hole—an enigma—around exactly who or what precipitated the ensuing battle between the military and the dissidents. Despite this enigma—or maybe even because of it—the events of January 30 were highly sensationalized by the media, which followed the drama until its denouement the next day.
According to Lacaba’s report, chaos almost instantaneously erupted after the lights went out. Holding aloft CPP banners and crying “Dante for president,” hundreds of demonstrators surged into the palace grounds, lobbing homemade bombs at buildings and vehicles in the vicinity. The Presidential Guards Battalion came out to meet them in full force, firing bullets into the air. When the demonstrators refused to desist, they fired tear gas bombs at the charging crowd.
Reinforcements from the constabulary soon arrived. By 9:00 p.m., the students and the military had secured their own strongholds, each side “capturing” major city streets extending deep into the heart of Manila’s so-called university belt. The battle would reach its climax when constabulary troopers guarding the Mendiola Bridge faced two advancing “armies” of students. They opened fire on the students.
Immortalized by the media soon after as the battle of Mendiola Bridge, the incident performs a mythological function in the public record of the First Quarter Storm. Now designated by military terms (combatants, armies) the students have ceased to be activists, and have crossed the bridge—so to speak—into the war zone of the NPA insurgents. Profusely captured in print, radio, and television accounts, the legendary confrontation at the bridge created a spectacle in which two previously discrete phenomena—the recent wave of student agitation and the underground insurgency—appeared to overlap. The mythological quality of the resulting spectacle hinged on the instantaneous collapsibility of the two phenomena, a substitution that suddenly appeared natural and irrefutable. Buried in that spectacle was the seemingly irrelevant detail that authorities were shooting at unarmed civilians, most of whom were just teenagers.
Many spectators found they could no longer passively watch the volatile turn of events. As Lacaba points out, students “found doors being opened to them, or people at second-floor windows warning them with gestures about the presence of soldiers in alleys.”27 The lines separating spectacle and spectator had effectively collapsed. The phenomenon was a microcosm of the revolutionary feeling gripping the nation at large. In Lacaba’s words:
In many a middle-class home, parents could only shake their heads in sorrow and bewilderment, no my child was not a part of it, my child was an innocent bystander, my child was never an activist. But that night of January 30 no one who did not belong to the camp of the enemy could remain a bystander; anyone who was not a minion of the state became instantly an activist, even if only for a moment. Every soul who had ever experienced poverty and oppression found himself linked to his neighbor in those hours of turmoil, welded tightly by a shared fate. . . . A spirit was abroad that night, and the streets spoke of it in whispers: the revolution has arrived. . . . And indeed, the revolution was on everybody’s mind, before everybody’s eyes. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends sat by the radio throughout that sleepless night, all on edge, thinking of the revolution.28
Media coverage of the revolt allowed spectators to see themselves as actors in a public drama. Their lack of political indoctrination notwithstanding, subaltern groups, who rose to the occasion by aiding dissidents, became temporary “activists.” Meanwhile, Manila’s most powerful families, certain that their homes would be “set afire by an avenging people,” made ghost towns of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. The next day, the nation took stock of the night’s events. Four students were reported killed. Untold numbers sustained injuries. Almost 300 were arrested and detained at Camp Crame. As it turned out, the revolution had not yet arrived. The public drama of the January 30 revolt was nonetheless a foretaste of that crucial threshold where spectacle ends, and where the revolution might begin. It was an object lesson for Marcos, who would appropriate that spectacle in order to begin foisting a revolution of his own.