One day last month, a faceless avatar and a notice (“I have removed my profile picture in solidarity with Edith Burgos and others worldwide who have lost loved ones to abductions, kidnappings and summary executions…”) appeared in so many Facebook pages. It was a unique way of observing the International Day of the Disappeared. Social networking may have its downside, spawning stalkers, idle-banter addicts, inveterate chroniclers of their lives’ minutiae, intemperate ranters and the like, but it has also become a new forum for intelligent discourse in branching streams, and a new front for pushing social agendas and causes.
Songwriter-musician Luisito Queaño, who lives in Toronto and belongs to a family of musicians and writers, never lost his faith even while abroad, posting on his Facebook wall gritty comments on Philippine politics, the plight of the environment, the sufferings of Pinoy teachers in the Diaspora, links to activist and advocacy blogs on various Philippines issues, and other matters of great import. Recently he has been on a roll, posting his latest compositions that are worthy heirs to the works of “people’s minstrel” Jess Santiago and the late Dr. Aloysius Baes — a veritable Renaissance man described in a tribute as “scientist, composer, and revolutionary,” who composed many of the “top hits of martial law,” including the prison songs we used to sing in detention camps: Mutya (adapted from the Kundiman of Bonifacio Abdon), Diwang Walang Takot, and Huwad na Kalayaan, among many others.
The international commemoration of the world’s “forcibly disappeared persons” inspired Queaño to come up with a plaintive song, Para sa Inay ng mga Desaparecidos, which provided the accompaniment to a poignant slide show reminding the regime, past, present, and future, that so many Filipino patriots remain missing and unaccounted for: Jonas Burgos, James Balao, Rizalina Ilagan, Glory soco, Noriel Rodriguez, Karen Empeño, Sheryl Capadan, Cris Hugo, Prudencio Calubid, Roger Viray, Rogelio Calubad, Gabriel Calubad, and thousands of others whose names may have receded in the public consciousness, but are still uttered in prayers and protests by those who choose not to give up hope.
Queaño also posted a link to a Petition to Free all Political Prisoners (who are also virtual vanished persons because cruelly isolated away from family and society, in often unbearable conditions).
Pablo Baen Santos, a member of the original Social Realists group of visual artists whose worldview and brushstrokes were influenced by the revolutionary ferment of the pre-martial law early Seventies, reproduced on his Facebook page an old mural whose theme suggests that it might as well have been done very recently. The actual work, measuring eight feet by 36 feet and titled “Oplan Tumba” (referring to a military “Operation Plan” given the codename “Tumba” or Liquidation) is simply described by the artist as “a mural on disappearances,” and has echoes of Juan Luna’s “Spoliarium” as well as Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.” The painting depicts both the disappeared and the people deprived of their loved ones. The artist reveals what we eventually come to know of the fate of the disappeared, but only some of them: gagged and bound decomposing corpses, bullet-riddled and violated bodies. Those left behind are naked orphans and grieving wives, husbands or parents carrying the burden of grief or continuing with the struggle for a just and peaceful society.
While the painting pays homage to the memory of Filipinos martyred for a cause, the accompanying poem by Pambie Herrera — “Tugon sa Oplan Tumba” — posted in the same Facebook page is a literary artist’s response to a comrade’s work of art, thus an ekphrastic collaboration in true social-realist mode: Lumuluha ang mga daang tinahak ng mga duguang talampakan / Nagsusumbong ang mga bintanang nakakita ng bawat panggagahasa / May samut-saring sigaw na nagmumula / sa mga basag na labing hindi maririnig kahit sa tahimik na lansangan. (The paths grieve where the bloody soles drag / Windows bear witness to the ravishment / Anguished cries issue from cracked lips, unheard / where silence rules the streets.)
It was, like the “lightning rallies” of pre-EDSA and martial law days, a highly symbolic show of protest in the cyber age. A day after the International Day of the Disappeared, the faceless avatars were replaced by photos, or other representations, of living people. Those who had posted vacant portraits of themselves to send out a message through this medium of social networking medium continued what they normally do on any day, even long before the Internet came into being — writing songs and poems and creating works of art depicting outrage, demanding justice, in this land of vanished lives.