Humor in martial law

It’s been more than a month since the UP Writers Workshop in Baguio, but I haven’t stopped thinking about how — possibly without meaning to — quite a number of the workshop pieces submitted by our younger writers had to do with martial law, when many of them hadn’t even been born yet.

You know — martial law? — that seemingly ancient time when pesky people kept getting dragged off the streets into military camps while more agreeable fellows strode down clean-swept boulevards in double-knit bellbottoms, humming Betcha By Golly Wow.

I’m not sure why, but martial law seems to be back in literary fashion — and it’s about time, too, because I’ve always argued that we haven’t written enough and thought enough about it, enabling and abetting the kind of romantically revisionist malarkey that often begins with something like "Mabuti pa noong martial law…."

It’s a sad measure, of course, of how crazy and confused our politics has become, of how poorly served we’ve been by the people we’ve trusted with our freedom and our future. But before this degenerates into the kind of editorial I used to crank out every other day for another newspaper, now dearly defunct, let me just say this: trust me, folks — me, the martial law "detainee" (to use one of the period’s most enduring euphemisms) who literally lived to tell the story — martial law was no fun and no paradise, unless you were part of that coterie that rode around town with the Madame.

What intrigued me during the workshop was the specific question of whether something so horrifying — as the mutilated corpses of our captured comrades kept reminding us, against the popular conceit that our martial law was a benignly "smiling" one — could be treated with any kind of humor in writing. Would one be guilty of disrespect or do gross disservice to the memory of martial law’s many victims if one were to find something funny about that period and to write about it in a comic vein?

My quick answer then was a resounding "Yes!" Rightly chosen and deployed, the comic attitude can ennoble and elevate, rather than belittle and trivialize; it is a deliberately combative and subversive response, one thought out rather than merely felt. The late, great Kurt Vonnegut steeped his Slaughterhouse-Five — otherwise a memorial to the firebombing of Dresden, from the smoky pits of which Vonnegut had had to drag out bodies—in saucily dark humor; Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful set a tale of insistent and delightful innocence against the backdrop of a concentration camp.

In other words — and to be very Filipino about it — the best way to face and to fight adversity and absurdity is sometimes to make light of it, as a form of resistance. We smile and laugh not to deny reality nor to wish it away, but to strengthen ourselves for that hour when, as Leonidas rallies his Spartans with in 300, "We dine in hell!"

So was there anything funny at all about martial law? (Let’s just make it clear that "comic" and "funny" are not necessarily and not always the same thing, but don’t worry about it. Funny is always a good place to be, in my book.)

Well, yes — to me, at least in hindsight. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, because it means you’re looking back at something from a presumably safe and comfortable distance. (The trouble with martial law in this country is, you’re never sure if it’s securely in the past, never to return.)

Let me share a few martial-law stories that I can now afford to tell with a chuckle. They’d make for great Kafkaesque fiction, but they just happen to — well, have happened.

I’ve already recounted the time when, as a political prisoner itching to get more than a glimpse of the world outside after having been cooped up in Fort Bonifacio for months (to this day, "The Fort" doesn’t compute to "Le Soufflé" for me, but something decidedly less palatable). So I managed to wangle a day pass from the camp commandant in exchange for drawing some posters. My mother came by for me and — with an M-16 toting guard in tow — we all went out to see The Godfather. The Escolta moviehouse was SRO; but when we walked in with the armed escort, three seats miraculously appeared, and a good movie time was had by all. Next time you walk into a packed theater, you know what to bring.

Much earlier than that, a few months before martial law, I’d been sleeping alone in the plyboard palace we were squatting in on Tandang Sora just outside of UP when a stranger — obviously military, from his looks and demeanor — came looking for me. "I’m Captain Q. We’ve been looking at you," he said, "and you seem to be a smart boy. Why don’t you join us?"

"Us," the smart boy quickly gathered, was military intelligence, for which he had nothing but loathing and, okay, more than a little fear, especially since he was all by his lonesome and this officer looked like he used placards for toothpicks. But then again being smart, the prospective recruit said, "Uhm, let me think about it. Why don’t we meet Friday at XXX cafeteria and talk about it there?" Thinking he had made first base, Captain Q left.

That Friday, he returned to the place I’d mentioned — to find himself surrounded by about a dozen of my fraternity brothers, whom I’d hastily rounded up to serve as my escort. The man seemed suddenly very small, and certainly very red-faced. I think I even launched into a speech: "You know what? Instead of me joining you, why don’t you join Victor Corpus instead?" (I was referring to the PMA officer who had defected to the rebel cause.) Everybody laughed except the captain, who left in a huff.

Flash-forward to January 1973. I’ve just been arrested (another story in itself: I’d sort of gone underground, but only half-heartedly, and like a good Catholic boy went home for Christmas, only to find myself sharing a beer with a military asset, who turned me in), and the first thing I see in the room in Camp Aguinaldo where they’re holding us is the sofa from our safehouse, from which I and another friend had fled a week before. Durnit, I thought, I’m busted for sure.

The next morning, we’re all lined up for interrogation outside another room for which someone has thought up the reassuring name of "Exclusion Area." Just when I think things couldn’t get any worse, a strangely familiar figure starts walking up the corridor in our direction — who else but Captain Q, who turns out to be one of the lords and masters of the dungeon. I slink behind a wall and try to make myself as flat and inconspicuous as a house lizard — and, Deo gratias, he leaves, and the moment passes, and I live on to my present age of 53.

After a little over seven months, I’m released — but naturally with a touch of drama. I’m in the camp shower, imagining that I’m being lathered by one of the pretty Army psychologists they send us to mess with our brains and hormones, when I hear my name on the PA system: "Dalisay, to the guardhouse!" The last time that happened, I’d been in for a rude shock, deputized as a punching bag by some free-spirited prison guards. "Oh, boy," I groan, "it’s only 10 in the morning and they’ve run out of fun things to do." So I towel myself dry — where are those psychologists when you need them? — and drag my feet over to the guardhouse.

A captain in uniform is seated behind a stack of papers. He fishes one out with my name on it. "Dalisay," he says. "You’re still here?" Uh-uh, I want to say with some barbed witticism, but I remember Captain Q and decide to keep it simple. "Well, we have nothing on you, so pack your bags and go home." And that’s how I get out of martial-law prison, free to watch all the movies I want, so long as I don’t jaywalk or stay out past curfew or otherwise disturb the New Society that’s been a-borning in my absence. I’m 19 years old, and feeling lucky to be alive.

At some point I realize that, like any good law-abiding citizen, I need to get a job (somehow, for some reason, I think that going back to school under martial law is a dumb idea). But to get a job you need to get NBI clearance, and early one morning I join a long column of well-groomed and well-mannered jobseekers at the NBI headquarters to get the NBI’s seal of good citizenship.

Unfortunately, there’s a glitch somewhere in the bureau’s pre-digital files, and one of my worst nightmares happens. I’m shunted down a special corridor that bears the inimitably creative sign "Quality Control."

"Dalisay, you’re not supposed to be here, you’re supposed to be in prison. There’s a warrant of arrest for you. See here!"

"That can’t be!" I splutter. "I’ve already served my time! Look, here’s a copy of my release order. Besides, the person you’re looking for is Jose C. Dalisay, I’m Jose Y, for Yap, my mother was part-Chinese." "Patriotic Chinese," I want to add, but apparently you just need some reading ability to get into Quality Control, and the officer reads the two forms with a beady-eyed skepticism before letting me go.

And so I get my precious clearance and join the ranks of the responsibly employed, in a government ministry no less — at least until my boss gets a visit from the intelligence people (maybe Captain, now Major Q?) who tell him that the guy who’s writing his speeches is a risk to national security…. But that’s another story, for another time.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.