Mod and majestic

Exactly a month ago, the book Madame Excelsis: Historying Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, authored by no less than Nick Joaquin, published by Philippines, Inc. and Strategic Advantage, Inc., saw a ceremonial turnover to its subject, the President of the Republic of the Philippines, at Manila Hotel, on the occasion of the 28th Final Plenary Session of the Philippine Business Conference.

The book project’s co-chair, Donald Dee, looked back at how "National Artist (for Literature) Nick Joaquin interviewed then Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Sept. 21, 1999 for an article in The Philippine Graphic. ..," after which the journalist par excellence and literary master had commented that he found GMA "a fascinating subject for a book."

"In earlier years," Mr. Dee recalled, Nick "interviewed and wrote about both Diosdado Macapagal and his daughter GMA when she was a teenager in Malacañang, and again when she was Senator."

Indeed, coming full circle seemed destiny for subject and biographer, even as the book project, initiated in November 1999 and with the background interviews started in March 2000, saw "substantial difficulty in scheduling common times between the temperamental National Artist and the busy Vice President."

Continued Mr. Dee: "Then came the turbulent events that eventually led to Edsa Dos. Nick Joaquin and the project principals agreed that the book would be incomplete without including those events. Nick gathered additional materials from published and personal sources, including interviews with Edsa Dos personalities for behind-the-scenes accounts of those crucial dates. Nick had one final interview with now-President GMA at Malacañang on March 29, 2001.

"Nick Joaquin completed his manuscript on the President’s biography in November 2001… The work comprises 16 chapters and a prologue, tracing the President’s family roots and culminating with her oath-taking for the presidency…

"Today, we finally turn over the result of a three-year effort. We are delivering most of the copies of this book to the Philippine Information Agency for safekeeping and proper dissemination, as well as to see to its formal launching. (Reviewer’s note: Today, we believe.) My project co-chairs Jun Ortiz-Luis and Sito Lorenzo will turn over a copy of the book – with a special personal dedication from the author, National Artist Nick Joaquin – to its subject, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo."

And how does the handwritten dedication go? It reads as follows, in NJ’s own write:

"Dear Madame President,

"Hope you like a portrait that really goes back to when your father was President and you were the little Malacañang girl granting me your first (I think) photo op.

"The portrait was done under the dazzle of your father the President, one of the great admirations of my life. May you continue his dazzle, as worthy daughter.

"Hope you like Madame Excelsis but, more importantly, may your father like it.

"Happy Reading!

– Nick"

Virgilio "Billy" F. Lacaba, a member of the project management team and who also served as editorial director, notes that the word "dazzle" was used twice, perhaps pointedly, by the careful, caring writer.

Comments Billy further: "I think he did so advisedly, as he went through two drafts (now that is very unusual) before finalizing his personal dedication. I know because he wrote it in my presence in his San Juan home."

And true enough, GMA dazzled us all with her Rizal Day announcement that she won’t run for the presidency in 2004. In fact we’re all still bedazzled.

Far be it for this reviewer, however, to speculate that a book, even on one’s life, and one written with such dazzle by a simultaneously mod and majestic biographer, would have accounted for that spark of inspiration that has re-installed our President as a paragon of statesmanship.

We say "re-installed," for as Nick’s portrait of the lady clearly depicts, fleshes up with context and contours, limns with socko grace and suave clarity, his subject was to the manner born and bred. And it is a stately paradigm indeed that destiny was hers even as she culled together background and birthright, and emerged as quintessential Filipina, quintessential leader.

"My father," subject tells biographer in the prologue on "Grounds and Roots," "Diosdado Macapagal, and I are the only Presidents of the Philippine Republic with humble origins."

The author confirms this: "…(T)he Macapagals were for real: Poorest of the poor, the lowest of the low, in a province, Pampanga, which seemed to have only three kinds of people: hacendero, peon, and subversive."

And yet there was another side to the presidential provenance. "But if the Macapagals of tuberculous Lubao were lowly, the Macapagals of pre-history were lordly, belonging as they did to the royal house of Lakandula, the king of Tondo during the Spanish advent."

Joaquin waxes lyrical, rhetorical, yet insightful, over the premise. "…(T)hey are the root and ground from which developed the history. They are the past apart from which Gloria Macapagal cannot be understood or appreciated. We can hail her as in excelcis only if we know that her past is de profundis. And the past is that wretched wasteland in Lubao, that sordid skid row in Tondo, her bohemian grandfather, her labandera grandmothers, her father’s starved childhood, and effortful youth, and forlorn reaching for the top. She had never sought to disown all that. And anyway how could she when all that was so much a part of her? Ground and root, they: Was she not the growth? And is not this history flower and fruit?"

Yet another side to the lifetime equation was early childhood, when her father had already turned into a successful national leader.

"Arcadia was Iligan in the 1950s, when Iligan was still a small frontier town in the forest primeval that was Mindanao. On that green outpost where her maternal grandmother ran a farm, the little Gloria Macapagal enjoyed childhood from age four, romping between sea and wilderness for some seven years, for her Lola’s hacienda had a beach for front yard and boondocks for back yard..

"…Iligan was ‘home’ to her then; the house in the Manila suburb of San Juan del Monte was merely where she sometimes went to visit Papa and Mommy: Congressman Diosdado and Eva Macapagal."

City-born turned provinciana then was the young Gloria, who mingled, and worked, with Muslims, Tsinoys and peons in her Lola’s farm.

"Then back to Manila as a colegiala: a half-boarder at Assumption, so genteel and conservative… Then back again to Iligan, where at lunchtime, if I was working on the farm, I’d run to the riverbank to buy kinilaw from the fishermen, and eat it right in the fields, along with tenants and their children."

The author has solid ground to stand on, therefore, when he es-says a prime contention.

"The superficial view of the ’98 polls is that, in the clash between the Masa and the Elite (the latter supposedly composed of academe, agora, altar, and affluence), the Masa triumphed utterly by elevating to the presidency a movie star the Elite adjudged utterly unfit for the position. But if Erap’s 10-million-vote win represented the Masa embattled, then who was represented by Gloria’s thirteen-million-vote win? Obviously not the Elite alone, since the Elite is said to comprise only about 10 percent of the population.

"And we are confronted with what we failed to take into account: That Gloria too was elected by the Masa – but a Masa very different from, and apparently more numerous, than Erap’s 10 million, which we always refer to as the Masa and characterize as the bakya crowd. But now we see that there’s another Masa which though just as indigent, is not bakya, not promdi, not payola: Its decent politics makes it go for candidates who are cultured and good."

This is what we enjoy with Joaquin as historian: His brave forays into a sociological accounting that takes the risks of upbraiding by the academically inclined, if however burdened by blinders. NJ’s peripheral view allows him to render biography and history as enjoyable as narratives of both discourse and disquisition, as well as heady imagination and inquisition.

GMA’s own academic steadfastness, marriage to Mike Arroyo, motherhood, return to academe, entry into technocracy and government, and maturation as both a politician and a server of the people do not fail to elicit fom the biographer his canny takes on the marvels of history, destiny, fate.

"From this Masa rose poet Andy Cristobal Cruz, who began life in darkest Tondo. From this Masa sprang artist Bencab, who was a Bambang slum kid. From this Masa emerged politician Jovito Salonga, out of the murk and misery of a Pasig barrio. And from that Masa ascended N.V.M. Gonzalez and Frankie Sionil Jose, peasant boys from the boondocks who are today our supreme men of letters."

He may as well have included himself among those who rose to excellence, just as his subject has risen and re-risen, time and again, from one misperceived stereotype to another, still however far from truth as only once-and-future history would have it.

In this book they are a match, and we can only be engrossed in our pluperfect perusal.