IS it possible to have a rape-less society?
It was one of the nights in the recently concluded Cinema Rehiyon in Naga City, and re-runs were happening in Savage Mind, a bookstore and cultural hub in the city. Returning to Naga was an award-winning documentary called Walang Rape sa Bontok by Clara Pulido Ocampo and Lester Valle.
It is a thick description of not only rape but gender relations informed by ethnography, immersive filmmaking and political psychology.
Ocampo is the narrator, writer and the researcher. She is in search of a society that has no incidence of rape cases. Her quest has brought her to Bontoc because of Dr. June Prill-Brett, an anthropologist whose study has shown that, for many years, the said place was a land where there was no rape.
What made the study exciting and problematic is the statement that in Bontoc, there is no name, no concept of rape. If there is no existing name for a thing, then that thing does not exist. The theory behind this claim comes under many names—Cognitive Anthropology, Ethnosemantics, Ethnoscience, Folk Taxonomy…
Implicit in the theoretical assumptions is the idea that culture and societal change can create a shift in behavior and social mores. Slowly, a term for the act of rape can enter the Bontoc society and, from then on, alter whatever has been there.
The documentary brings us around the many groups in the Bontoc society. Old men and old women, tribal leaders, cohort groups are made into focused group discussions. Their responses appear to validate the study of the anthropologist. Every now and then, expression of doubts—and sadness—sweep across the respondents as they realize they are talking about an era long gone. Many other non-Bontok groups have entered their society and have brought with them different concepts.
Perhaps, there is already rape in Bontoc?
There is an overwhelming nostalgia in the recollection of these key informants of a time when society had rules governing relations between sexes. It was a society where codes of conducts were enforced given how small, isolated and circumscribed the people and the land were.
Both Bontok men and women are amused, puzzled and admiring of the old society, which has reared them up.
That night though, in Savage Mind, many were not amused but were rather shocked at the reason why the documentary was made. Ocampo who was there for the conversation with the mostly young audience disclosed the reason for her search for a land where no rape existed: she herself was a rape victim at a very young age. Her research assistant who accompanied her in the course of the investigation and filmmaking was also a rape victim.
There was, however, another critical issue facing the documentary. This arose when Ocampo declared that she is not a Bontok, and that she has only lived there for five years. A young film critic approached me a day after the screening and asked how reliable the account of the documentarian was. Isn’t she an outsider?
This position of who has the right to imagine one’s land or region has always branded regional filmmakers. The Mindanaoan filmmaker, for example, can claim that mainstream, Manila-based directors can fetishize—obsessively objectify—the issues or problems felt and faced by those who are of and from the region. That in the final reckoning, the mainstream artist wins by prestigious default and with the region—or the area—reduced to the wild imaginings of an outsider.
The debate is valid. For many years, Manila has been plundering the peripheral regions for their tales and myths mainly because the Center has power and fund. During these latter years, however, homegrown filmmakers and artists have privileged the position of their own languages and perspectives to create new worlds that are sincerely of the regions. The horizons caught by cameras are aimed at displacing and replacing the postcard-pretty and malignant memories inflicted on the past that may not even have existed in non-Tagalog/Filipino fields and battlefields.
Never has the struggle between the outsider and the insider been violently real than in the rise of regional cinema vis-à-vis the mainstream movies.
The documentary with its sense of the actual and real is at the crux of what regional filmmaking can do to our search for identities or the identity of our searches for the truth. A documentary, to quote Raymundo Gleyzer, the Argentine documentarian and desaparecido, “must be a summons for action. It must appeal to our people’s capacity for tears and anger, enthusiasm and faith…”
We can argue on perspectives but we cannot sit idly by and consume a documentary questioning the existence of a place where no woman—or man—is safe from any physical assault or rape.
The question next time should not be about a place where there is no rape but about why there is rape at all. The question should be about the act to end man-made systems enabling rape and all kinds of violence against persons.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano