Scholar's Journal
I spent the first two weeks of my research in the Kroch library at Cornell University, reading through the microfilm copies of the Philippine Radical Papers Archive. These are twenty three reels of documents dating anywhere from the mid forties to the late eighties - polemics, circulars, articles, mimeographed pamphlets, handwritten notes, legal briefs, etc. They made for fascinating reading. The microfilm reader that I spent two weeks seated in front of had a comfortable chair and the wonderful capability of scanning images to an adjacent computer in Adobe PDF. I copied nearly all of the archives to files and burned these files to a CD, thus allowing myself future access to this information. I hope to copy the information and make it universally available on the internet.
I tend to find a touch of humor in almost everything, so a trip through archival material is no different. A document prepared by a left-leaning fraternity concludes in this manner: "The yellow snake of fascism shall cower against our wrath!" I know that animal metaphors are popular with all groups, but this one never seemed to catch on. This rather silly image of cowering yellow snakes (how exactly does a snake cower?) gave me the idea of expanding our usual animal metaphors. Moving beyond fat cats (capitalists) and running dogs (of imperialism), why not sniveling armadillos or rapacious aardvarks? The possibilities are endless.
As always, it was wonderful to be back in Manila – a dense, sprawling immensity for me simultaneously beloved and loathed, a vast yet personal, inescapable city. As I traveled from interview to interview, riding in the ubiquitous jeepneys, I surveyed this city that is the locus of much of the resistance that I am studying. Innumerable placards and posters lined telephone poles and walls along the busy, dirty streets. The posters are the residue of past elections; the squalor of reality and the digitally retouched campaign photos jostle with each other for public viewing.
The interviews I conducted were at once revealing and bewildering. Nothing confuses neat paper historiographies quite so much as the intricate complications of the personal. The splits in the Philippine left, as recalled by its participants, were a genuinely messy affair. Somewhere between the frailty of human memory, the dissimulation of long-standing resentments, the blunt implausibility of monocausal explanations, and the painfully weary shrug of the veteran activist, lies the fascinating story of recent Philippine politics. I sought to tease out its nuances in my interviews.
Certain trite but rather amusing conclusions can be immediately drawn: Filipino communists smoke incessantly. It is very awkward to ask an armed man if he killed a prominent labor union leader. Dogmatism loves slogans. Acronyms are inescapable. (E.g., A lack of CSC led to the RJ/RA of the CPP-NPA-NDF, but the BMP and the KMU because they were both MRRC tend to, etc.) At the end of every interview, I left the heady realm of power, ideology and charisma, and returned to the tangible dirty concrete of Manila. Safehouses and restaurants, familiarly whispered gossip (“Do you know he never actually read Capital?”), the perpetual nervous glances over the shoulder, and the acrid smoke of Champion cigarettes, all faded before this reality, the urban immensity of sprawling shantytowns and estero rivers. A worn, yellow notepad of scribblings, diagrams, and frantically scrawled Tagalog shorthand in my backpack, I walked through eskinitas and along thoroughfares, trying to make sense of it all.
Click to read some of Joseph's blogs of his time in the Philippines during the summer of 2005: June 4, June 6, and June 9.
