Why are our revolutions unfinished?

Was Andres Bonifacio an invented hero? Did Aguinaldo really try to recall the order to execute him? Why are our revolutions unfinished? What was the Revolution really like from the point of view of ordinary men and women who formed the ranks of the Katipunan? These are some of the questions intriguingly raised in the new zarzuela, Bayan, Isang Paa Na Lamang, set to music by the well-loved National Artist Lucio San Pedro just before he died.

A prize-winner in the 1998 National Centennial Literary Awards, the zarzuela is an imaginative reconstruction of the events of 1896. But beyond history, it is a literary piece told from the perspective of an invented character named Pilo, an ordinary Katipunero. As such, notes National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose, it becomes less about the historical question of who were the heroes and villains as about the more universal problem of coming face to face with the "recurrent agonies of human frailty."

The following is the text of F. Sionil Jose’s literary notes on the zarzuela which was read during its launching last Thursday, June 6, at the UP Abelardo Hall.

It is not unusual that a historical event gets to resurrect before us as a fictional work. Work of this nature either becomes too imaginative that it loses historicity, or too much of a documentary that it ceases to be literary, it is not often that one comes upon a work that is truly history in fact and fiction in its power.

Bayan, Isang Paa Na Lamang is one such work. It tells us a story from the events of 1896, that wellspring of memory which continues to engage and enrage our historians.

The conflict between Bonifacio and Aguinaldo, for instance, is seen not from the usual vantage of a garden variety historian. It is seen from what the Latin American call the "underside of history," and presented before us not as mere politics but as a human drama writ large on the canvas of our national story. The conflict is seen through the eyes of Pilo, an ordinary Katipunero who represents those unsung and anonymous men and women who bore the brunt of the people’s struggle, first against the Spanish regime, and later the American occupying forces.

Pilo is both a participant and a witness to the forces at work inside the revolutionary ranks. An idealist by temper, he is drawn to the Katipunan’s homegrown dramas of peoplehood and liberation as articulated by the Supremo. As well, he is a member of that class of people who live by the rough and rugged intelligence of their bare hands. As such he sees the futility of the folk belief so entrenched among his people that amulets and prayers can make them invincible against bullets. At the same time, he is witness to the declensions in character and the failure of social vision among the principal figures of the revolution. In the end he gets disillusioned, both by the naive mysticism that sends his people to battle with nothing but faith and raw courage, and the social ambivalence and failings intrinsic to the nature of the ilustrado class.

Pilo as a character is pulled by the high ideals of the revolution, only to come face to face with its shadows and the grim and bitter price of realism. The high rhetoric of the Katipunan is shaded by Bonifacio’s flammable temper and known ineptitude militarily. The flash and gleam of the armies commanded by the ilustrados is stained by the bloodguilt of having sacrificed a man’s life to the altar of expediency. Native spirituality, this feeling for transcendence which for centuries has defined our sense of identity and served as solace in the face of indignity and oppression, is shown to be hopelessly naive about the power of faith and ritual.

Yet ultimately, the power of this work lies not in the roundness of its characters nor in the depth and breadth of its social themes. It lies instead in having surfaced, through the issues raised by this part of our history, the recurrent agonies of human frailty. One of the most powerful scenes in this play is that of Pilo railing in anguish, asking "Sino – o ano – ang ating kaaway?" Having seen the Supremo die by the hand of our own people, Pilo rages in bewilderment at how our own dreams are thwarted by something intractable, even monstrous, in our own nature.

Past the euphoria of the two EDSAs, we suffer a similar sense of failure. We dredge up all that is bad about us and drown in our own muck. Yet, that our revolutions are unfinished is not peculiar to us. The difficulties of Russia and Eastern Europe and the disillusionment of democracies that have emerged out of the experience of authoritarianism are testaments to the hardness of evil in our social life. No sooner have we dislodged one form of evil than another takes its place.

What then is the answer? Perhaps it is best captured by the title itself, Bayan, Isang Paa Na Lamang. The metaphor is taken from the legend of Bernardo Carpio, originally a Spanish tale. Histories tell us that current among the folk movements that formed the backbone of the Katipunan was the expectation that Bernardo Carpio will rise again. Entombed in a cave, he is about to set himself free: only one foot remains pinned down, wedged in the stone bed on which he lay. In the mind of the people, the figure of Bernardo Carpio had been fused with that of Bonifacio, a historical footnote that found expression in that critical scene when Bonifacio enters Cavite and is hailed as hari ng bayan. From this height he very quickly descends to the humiliation of Tejeros, victim of his own tragic flaws and the cultural and social divide that made the Caviteños close ranks and shut the doors on him.

In our memory’s fictions, we tend, like the movies, to divide people into heroes and villains. But in real life, there are no heroes nor villains, only human beings. For the most part, the real battles in our history happen not in the arena of politics, but in the human heart. In our time as well as in other times, the critical struggle is not between parties and ideologies, but in the battle between good and evil in our own hearts.

We live in a time when the Filipino people are increasingly unable to believe in their capacity to shape a future. Bayan, Isang Paa Na Lamang tells us that there is this dormant power that lies within us, if only we can be released from the inner bondage that makes us feel like basket cases. To have a great nation you need a great people. But like Bernardo Carpio, we need to grow inside, to overcome the constraints of being pressed and hemmed in, not just by forces outside, but by the imperfections of our own nature.

In a way, the best of us are like Pilo. We hang suspended between the need to contribute to the growing good of the world and our own revulsion over the moral horrors of our time. In his own inner conflict, we see embodied the tension of having to act effectively in the real world without surrender of idealism. It is within this larger, more universal struggle for integrity and honor in a fallen world of complex choices that the work gains literary significance coupled with the hauntingly lyrical quality of Lucio San Pedro’s music, this zarzuela is a fresh and original work that is likely to stand the test of time and circumstance.