‘May go home’
One hundred and twenty six years ago today, the Pact of Biak-na-Bato was signed. If you have forgotten or were absent when this was discussed in Araling Panlipunan, this was the truce between the Spanish colonial government, represented by Pedro Alejandro Paterno, and the Filipino revolutionaries, headed by Emilio Aguinaldo. The pact is made up of three documents that lay down the terms for the truce and for the revolutionaries to go into exile abroad. Aguinaldo left for Hong Kong with a down payment of 400,000 Mexican dollars. Balance was not paid, leading to the resumption of the second phase of the Revolution.
As usual, textbook history leaves out the details found in two primary sources. Most accessible, in English, are Aguinaldo’s “Memoirs of the Revolution” (1967) translated from the original Tagalog “Mga Gunita ng Himagsikan” (1964) and Paterno’s “The Pact of Biyak-na-Bato” translated from the original Spanish “El Pacto de Biyak-na-Bato” (1910) and published by the National Historical Institute in 2004. Both texts are memoirs, written years after the actual events, so one need to be wary of memory creating its own fictions.
I made two trips to Biak-na-Bato in the 1980s: first, with my graduate class on the Philippine Revolution, second with the late Benedict Anderson. On my first visit, I did not realize the Aguinaldo cave could only be reached by wading neck-deep in water. I just went in and air-dried on the ride back to Manila. On my second visit, Anderson asked one of his incredible questions—“did Paterno have almoranas (hemorrhoids)?” I didn’t have a documented answer to this question but how could one explain Paterno traveling from Manila to Aguinaldo’s lair not in a carriage, not on horseback, but in a hammock carried by twenty men in relay. He was also accompanied by his loyal valet Andres Cabrera who carried his personal effects. If there was one thing one could say about Paterno, he did travel in style.
On a map, Biak-na-Bato looked too close to Manila to be a place of refuge for the revolutionaries, but visiting the caves (one called Bahay Paniki) with all its hiding places and escape routes gave me perspective. I remembered the secret passages in Aguinaldo’s Kawit mansion. He survived all assassination attempts (both real and imagined), not because of a “kapre” guardian, he was always prepared. Rounded off the trip by looking at photos of Aguinaldo’s camp and those of the major players in the negotiations, those who accompanied Aguinaldo into exile in Hong Kong. It always pays to have a face to connect with the names we read in our history books.
Compared to Aguinaldo’s matter-of-fact narration of events, Paterno’s re-telling is more creative because he was both a poet and novelist. Lest one forget, Paterno’s “Sampaguitas y Poesias Varias” (1880) is the first published collection of Filipino-Spanish poetry, and “Nínay” (1885) is the first Filipino novel, antedating Jose Rizal’s more famous “Noli me tangere” by two years. As a self-referential document, Paterno does not even feign humility stating that to effect peace in the Philippines after the outbreak of the 1896 Philippine Revolution:
“I was disposed to sacrifice my well-being, the comforts of my home, and even my own life for my adored country that I have idolized and venerated since childhood. Before, though I was away from my native land, I could feel the warmth of her sin and the perfume of her flowers in far exotic Europe.” He spent over 20 of his 54 years in Spain.
On his way to Biak-na-Bato, he met Rizal’s brother Paciano, then a general in the revolution, who did not look kindly on a truce. For Paciano and many revolucionarios willing to lay down their lives for their country, peace was out of the question without Philippine independence from Spain. They would not accept anything less. Paciano received Paterno formally, coldly, not even to offer a handshake. Paterno presumed that “the general … heard my name mentioned a thousand times by his brother, Jose, [who] spoke to me lovingly and with respect.” When you read Rizal’s diaries and letters, you will know that this was not the case. Rizal accepted Paterno’s hospitality abroad, ate at his table, but made fun of him in private.
“What do you want,” Paciano asked Paterno, “do you want for us to make peace with Spain and be precisely the bearer of that peace when they shot my brother Jose, banished my parents and brothers, and even accused us falsely, down to the last member of my family, confiscating our lands and hurling a thousand horrors on our faces?
“Ah, Don Pedro! Dig a very deep well. Fill it, top to bottom, with all the bolos and lances that you want. Then, later on, command me to throw myself into it and Paciano Rizal will do just that. But do not ask me the other one, that of peace [with Spain], because that one, Don Pedro, is impossible and absurd.”
I’m glad college students now have a course on Philippine history from primary sources, I just hope teachers supply what is relevant and engaging.
—————-Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu
It is a common saying that “people come and go,” that we are meant to touch each other’s lives even more temporarily than their durations. But personally, I feel like the saying stops short; people come and go and change you with each step they take along the way. If we were to liken human hearts to objects, I’d liken mine to a house—a refugee center, a community shelter. There are foot tracks too many and layered to differentiate, holes punched in walls, and stains no amount of cleaning can erase. Now, it does sound sad, but isn’t a lived-in house warmer than an abandoned one? Isn’t it true that even ruins once loved wildly before they burned? There is a strange logic to it I can never put my finger on.
What’s stranger still is the way I remember the history of it to the most minute details—the way some guests have come in without knocking or locked themselves in a room to never come out.
The way I’ve sometimes seen people linger on the front step and turn away before they could come inside.
Or all the ways I found out my house is apparently different from others. People will tell me there are too many other guests, that they want the whole place to themselves, and leave when I say my house is not for sale. People will complain of the cold when my house was not built with a furnace. People will trip over the flooring as uneven and unsteady as the blood in my veins. All these things I thought were normal until I found out some guests grew up in cookie-cutter neighborhoods, without the constant buzzing noise of renovation nor the remnants of repurposed materials, of hand-me-down love.
And it is only natural they return to the comfortable over accepting the unconditional. And it is only natural I have no blame to throw out the door after them when it is I who is so strange.
And yet I have guests who have not left since their arrival, who looked around and made a home for themselves, and loving them is as easy to me as breathing. They help me change the dead lightbulbs, they see the marks on the wall and ask me how they got there instead of looking away in disgust.
And what’s more, they put their belongings down, take their welcome and bask in it, hang pictures of memories in their rooms. They speak of things again and again until my heart remembers, until the words echo off the walls: “I’m here,” “I understand,” “Don’t be afraid.” But even then, I anticipate the goodbye, the fading of their footsteps met with new, unfamiliar ones. But the goodbye doesn’t mean I pack up their things and throw them into storage, it just means the new guests will have more things to ask me.
After all, I don’t like my walls painted unevenly, where you can see patches of a lighter shade and can tell a picture once hung there. After all, I have an entire room in my house that was once defiled beyond recognition, completely razed down in a fire—my very own little Library of Alexandria. And while I can’t deny I still feel the fear of the heated memory whenever I approach its door, all I can think about when I look through it is how wonderfully I built it back up again. All I can think about is the day I might be able to trust someone with its key.
The strangest thing of all is how matter of fact this has become for me, no longer something I hide in shame. It’s true that my house can never escape its weak foundations no matter how much I renovate or how much I expand. It’s true that the ground it was built upon was not watered with love, and any kind of love I give to my guests in turn may as well have been something I invented myself with how unfamiliar I am with the word. But it’s also true that my house can become anything I shape it to be: a church, a museum, a mausoleum. And it’s true that I still choose to make an excuse of a home out of it, to invite people in, all my dysfunction laid bare on the welcome mat. For at the end of the day, it is mine.
Because while it is others who leave their marks, it is me who chooses if and how to remember, how and what to rebuild or destroy.
Because I have always loved like a broken faucet. Because I have never assumed that to give someone something would equate to taking it away from myself.
And though the appearance inside may change with time and the comings and goings of its guests, my house will always welcome me with the same words on its front door: You will hurt everyone you ever love just as they will hurt you. Everyone you have ever loved, you will love for the rest of your life.
—————-Zoë Salinas, 23, is a psychology graduate who wrote this because of a certain song she could not get out of her head.
Islamabad—The figure of the loan shark has always been a grim and fear-inducing one. For centuries, the creditor showing up at your door to demand money has been the central plot of many a tragedy. In many novels of Charles Dickens, it is creditors who precede the carting off of many a character to the debtor’s prison.
Even now, a mother, wife, or sister putting her jewelry up as collateral against a loan and then losing it all when the money taken cannot be repaid is a frequent character on television and in films and books.
In some Western reality shows, the “repo-man” is seen tracking and then outwitting payment, dodging borrowers or simply carting away cars or other items that have been bought on unpaid loan. There is money to be made in loan collecting just as it is in lending to needy customers at high interest.
However, it must also be said that there are legitimate fintechs that are entering consumer markets to provide instant loans (albeit often at very high interest rates). Their existence has created a gray zone that can be exploited by scammers to fool potential borrowers.
According to news reports, loan scams are predominantly seen in Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Colombia, Kenya, Singapore, and the Philippines. While the details may vary, the general ploy is the same: A customer is coaxed into taking an instant loan which can be approved and deposited into the borrower’s account at great speed. Note that these fast loan approvals themselves are not scams in the sense that the money is usually delivered to the borrower. This makes it tricky to distinguish from, for instance, instant loan approvals being offered by consumer giants like Flipkart or legitimate fintechs, which also provide money at high interest rates.
Detecting misuse, Google recently took down 17 loan apps from its Play Store. In dubious apps, the borrower is asked to download a particular application from Google Play, which shows why Google is taking the issue of scams very seriously.
Until now, it could count on the borrower feeling secure in downloading the app because of their confidence in Google-related products. In any case, scam applications are essentially spyware. Once the borrower downloads the application, he or she is bombarded by a series of confusing and often contradictory loan guidelines. In the meantime, the app collects information stored in the individual’s phone that is then used to blackmail the customer and extort money.
In a recent television documentary, spyware scammers used an Indian call center to harass and blackmail Australians. The call center employees that work for these scam spyware applications are nothing like the ones of yore, beyond the fact that they still use Western names instead of their own.
Instead of being polite, etc., they utter profanities, resorting to lewd descriptions, and threaten to disseminate illicit photos or pornographic deep fakes to get people to send them sums of money at huge interest rates.
The easy temptation inherent in these applications and the difficulty in distinguishing their “services” from the high-interest loans offered by legitimate fintechs has created an environment where already harassed and vulnerable victims all over the world can easily fall prey to their dubious dealings.
A legitimate fintech will also offer an instant loan and charge an exorbitant interest rate. However, it will not use spyware installed on one’s phone or attempt to blackmail and extort money using abusive tactics.
This leads to a difficult question regarding mass consumer finance availability and credit markets. In the West, where credit ratings of individual consumers are well-established, the threat of having these adversely impacted and having to declare bankruptcy, etc., provide a mechanism that creates incentives to pay back loans with a high interest rate.
This is more difficult in emerging credit markets like South Asia and certain countries in the far East. With familial and community networks dissipating and inflation at record rates, consumers cannot be blamed for needing instant money for sudden and unexpected expenses.
These abusive scammers then perform the role of the loan shark of old—crossing the line between what is a legitimate tactic to get a customer to pay and extortion using means such as spyware.
In the meantime, consumers need to be extremely careful regarding who they trust, and should think twice before downloading apps that provide a deal that sounds excellent but is actually too “good” to be true.
While Google’s ban on 17 of these is a good first step, it is hardly anything when one considers the fact that Lookout media has identified 251 android apps and thousands of Apple Store apps that are still available. Even worse, they have already been downloaded a collective 15 million times. Dawn/Asia News Network
—————-Rafia Zakaria is a lawyer teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
—————-The Philippine Daily Inquirer is a member of the Asia News Network, an alliance of 22 media titles in the region.
