Memory needs an occasion

Were it not for the fact that Sept. 21 is a date in the calendar, and that there are Filipinos still alive who recall what it came to signify in 1972, I am fairly certain this day would not merit a pause in our daily lives.

I am of that generation. I still remember the early morning when soldiers came to the house where my wife, our infant son, and I were staying, to arrest my father-in-law, the historian Renato Constantino. My recollection places it on Sept. 23-the day Ferdinand Marcos went on television to announce that he had placed the country under Martial Law, cloaking himself with emergency powers under a proclamation he said he had signed two days earlier.

Proclamation No. 1081 is indeed dated Sept. 21. But the arrests and the televised broadcast came on the 22nd and the 23rd, and it was only afterward that the earlier date was fixed as the official one. In time, Sept. 21 displaced what those of us who lived through it actually remember. The discrepancy was noted, briefly argued over, and then eventually set aside. It no longer mattered.

What mattered was the form of what had just happened. That, one morning in September 1972, the President of the Republic assumed the power to rule by decree. He abolished Congress, shut down every media outlet except those he permitted to operate, and sent the military to arrest without judicial warrant the journalists, artists, politicians, students, teachers, labor leaders, and businessmen who had criticized him. The arrests continued throughout the regime, most intensively in its first four years.

That is what the nation would not forget. And it was that retained shape, not the calendar, that determined the work of the commissioners who wrote the 1987 Constitution.

This, systems theorists would say, is what memory is for. Its function is not to store everything that has happened but to filter—that is, to retain the small portion a society needs in order to continue operating, and to let go of the rest. Forgetting is therefore not a failure of memory, so much as it is the condition of memory’s usefulness. It is the clearing of capacity to make room for what comes next.

If that is so, perhaps we need not despair that younger Filipinos remember so little of the dictatorship’s particular acts. What would matter is that they remember the form: how power behaves when it is not accountable, and what it costs those who resist it. I should admit that this is my hope rather than a conclusion. Systems theory describes how a society’s memory works; it makes no promise about what it will keep. Like many of us, I find that I demand something from memory that it does not offer.

And memory is tricky in another way. In the modern era it has no single repository. The legal system keeps its own memory on file-in the form of evidence, testimony, authenticated documents, rulings. Cases once vigilantly watched by an emotionally invested public go quiet for years, and when they are finally taken up again the documents are missing, the witnesses are dead, and the case has outlived the judges who first heard it. What remains on record is all that can decide it. As I argued in my column last week, that is how the remaining forfeiture cases against the Marcoses ended—dismissed.

Books, films, and memorial exhibits face a subtler version of the same problem. They are not empty. But they wait. They require something in the present to summon them, and when they are loaded with too many particulars, they may lie dormant, unable to find the contemporary event that would activate them.

Which is why I found myself thinking about all this the other evening, at the launch of Carmel Abao’s biography of Etta Rosales. Etta is 87 now and not in the best of health, but she was there to sign copies of a book aptly titled “Difficult: The Life and Times of Etta Rosales.” Twice detained during martial law and tortured by her captors, she had every reason to hate the military. Yet as chair of the Commission on Human Rights she built a human rights education program for soldiers.

What struck me most, though, were the chapters on her childhood and her life as a wife and mother. She grew up in a traditional middle-class family; her father was a commodore in the Philippine Navy. She taught in college and was married to a successful lawyer, and they had two children. Nothing in that secure upbringing prepared her for what became a life of full-time organizing.

The details of that life belong to her and her family. What the rest of us might keep is its form—that the pursuit of justice can be consuming enough, and valuable enough, that a woman will set aside what her world told her she owed her household. Uncommon as it is, that form of life is worth holding on to. Books like Melay Abao’s are how it waits for us. What they need is an occasion to connect them to present concerns.

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