Alternative biographies

One of these days an adventurous, experimental writer will come up with an "unauthorized biography" of the suspected international terrorist who is now a "household word," Osama bin Laden, marking yet another chapter in the continuing documentation of the exploits of the infamous and which, in the long run, might trigger a fatwa against the unfortunate author.

The Britain-based Indian writer Salman Rushdie knew how it was to play with fire when, in his The Satanic Verses, he placed the prophet Mohammed in a fictional situation that departed from the Quran and so, the Muslim faithful felt, constituted a blasphemy.

For many years, and even to this day, Rushdie has lived a life on the run, surrounded by security agents and body guards, and surviving on royalties while seeing his marriage crumble. His first book after the issuance of the fatwa was a children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Islam however does not have a monopoly on moves to curtail artistic license; it can be remembered that the Catholic church was up in arms over the film Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese, which for the most part depicted an altogether human side of the Christ, something which the Church considered blasphemous, especially Jesus’ sexual fantasies about Mary Magdalene. Needless to say, the movie never got past the censors of this predominantly Catholic country.

Here’s food for thought: If the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had his way, he would have included Bin Laden in an updated version of his A Universal History of Infamy (Dutton, New York), a fictional-biographical account of the lives of scoundrels and other lowlife the world over. Too bad, he (Borges, not Bin Laden) is dead, passed on to the great beyond some years ago without winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But that slim book has had a lasting influence on the writing of a different type of fiction – a biography based as much on hard documents as on hearsay and a runaway imagination.

Translated by the inimitable Norman Thomas di Giovanni, A Universal History of Infamy features the unlikely episodes of one-upmanship of, among others, the dread redeemer Lazarus Morel, an implausible impostor named Tom Castro, the pirate widow Ching in a Gabriela Silang mode, and Bill Harrigan alias Billy the Kid.

Where Borges chose to expound and where he stuck close to whatever facts available of the lives of the infamous decades, maybe even centuries earlier, is not entirely clear. What’s clear is the fluidity of exposition, indeed the reading is first-rate entertainment, the kind of which the Taliban might be well advised to pore over as bombs fall around them, if by the grace of Allah they manage to secure a copy at this late, late hour.

The infamous can rest easy with Borges, but what of the obscure and no less heroic?

Madison, Wisconsin-based writer and editor Alfred McCoy, whose preceding book dealt with the PMA fraternity (Closer than Brothers), saw the proper antidote to this with his Lives at the Margin (Ateneo de Manila Press), an anthology of biographies of obscure, ordinary and heroic Filipinos.

McCoy himself wrote just one of these alternative biographies, that of the Iloilo waterfront labor organizer Jose Ma. Nava, whose misadventures in the politics in his island led him adrift leftwards and became bedfellows with communists, not that this was necessarily a bad thing in the ’30s and ’40s. The ideology might well have been in vogue then and the risks even greater, with no far off Netherlands to run to.

Among the other well-researched biographies included in the anthology are those of the charismatic Filipino-American Hilario Moncado (by Michael Cullinane), who always had himself photographed in banquets and conferences in the US, with an ear cocked for any feedback on "the Filipino question"; and Celia Mariano Pomeroy (by Vina Lanzona), the first woman in the local communist party’s politburo, who brought up the issue of sexual harassment and "double standard" of cadres in the movement.

Brian Fegan pieces together the life of peasant leader and professional oppositionist Dionisio Macapagal, while John Sidel expounds on the parallelisms of the lives of Cebu underworld characters and the movies based on them.

The marginal have often been left to rust in obscurity –the communists, the Moros who do not even want to be called Moros but Muslims, maverick religious leaders, and the misunderstood underdog forced into a life of crime.

They have stories to tell as well, and the writers McCoy gathered to tell them, acquit themselves admirably, thanks mainly to a lot of sweat and scholarly research both in the field and in musty libraries with poor lighting.

Fegan writes: "After finishing this account, I was not able to check with Mang Dionisio to confirm that what I have made of his life corresponds to what he makes of it."

Such risks are the hazards of the writing of an alternative biography; one never knows how large the margin of error is, and if it can be made up in the clarity of the writing itself, or devolve into plain fiction, which paradoxically may be more truthful than the real thing.