What is wrong with June 12? Better still, what is wrong with our Independence?
It is good to ask stupid and dumb questions when the days do not make sense, when people who are supposed to be with you in the celebration are nowhere to be found, and you are an inch away from despair.
We hanged a flag on that day. That will be the memory I expect the younger members of my family to remember. The fact that we keep a Philippine flag speaks about our own valuations of Independence Day. I know that there are emotions involved in that act of seeing the tricolors and the stars and sun flapping during that dry morning. By mid-afternoon of that day, the wind had come courtesy of a low-pressure that was less than 100 kilometers from our home. The flag became a cliché, a stubborn if not an old-fashioned symbol of what it is to be part of a nation.
I kept looking at it and I knew if we lose this nation, that flag will be the most significant artefact of my citizenship. Shamelessly even without that day at hand, I knew I would weep when this flag had all but disappeared.
Out in Manila, in selected sites of historical importance, flag ceremonies were taking place. A regular ritual—the raising of flag—once more was turned into a ceremonial that was seen as enabling histories to come alive. In that very brief action of important personalities walking to the flagpoles are supposedly the stories of heroes. History, monolithic and monumental, urges the current of narrative. One Nation; One Spirit, a Dictator in years of violence dictated his own version of the story of our nation. Anything that did not conform to his edition and delusion was declared a sub-version. The sub-versions were meant to be hidden, and anyone who told that story was jailed or killed, or became part of the “disappeared.”
Out in Manila, in the University of the Philippines ground, a huge demonstration was taking place. Socially distanced or, more appropriately, physically distanced from each other, the individuals appeared from afar as if they had taken hold of the wide areas surrounding that seat of learning. It is a good idea, I told myself, if we, indeed be six feet apart not under, or two arms detached from one another, form lines along the longest streets in the big city, extend the lines to the next province, stretch it across regions, until we covered the entire Luzon. This would be the antithesis to a lockdown—for the fear that had closed the islands would now be the terror that would open something more terrible than the plague, which is the death of freedom while one was still breathing.
There were questions about that gathering and the smaller crowd protesting in the other places of the country. Isn’t the Independence Day being celebrated about a specific point in history—that day when our nation became a sovereign state? Why were the protestors dressed in bright costumes, with many bearing roses and other flowers?
Can one observe a handing over of freedom from a foreign country, call it independence and assume that no other oppression will ever take place? Or, that oppression is any force imposed from outside by a foreign country while any sign of persecution from within, or from one’s government, is politics?
The fact is our own day of Independence does not matter anymore. The story of heroes are merely that, tales that will inspire us to be brave in our own ways. Their lives are distant and detached from us. Where poverty remains and inequality is part of the social structure, we have the right to wonder what the Revolutions of the 1800, the deaths of our own soldiers during World War II, and our participation in two wars—the Korean and Vietnam War contributed to the country. We must question why the nation and its leaders allowed martial rule to last for many years. We should be bothered by the concept “People Power” and be amused by the sincerity of that tribute. We should be interested to find out why after what seemed like an upheaval in those three or four days in February, nothing had changed, and that the elite that disappeared during the long martial law years came back, with the elite linked to the conjugal dictator going through self-imposed perfumed exiles in their own homes only to come back again and join their fellow-elites.
The fact is there is no Independence Day to celebrate unless you are thinking in terms of epic plots and pageantry. The main narratives of heroes dying for us are molded into hagiographies. The millenarian movements are disparate and divisive. What happened to democracy that was achieved at the end of these battles and conflicts?
Gayatri Spivak, in her lecture entitled “The Trajectory of the Subaltern” speaks of the “habits of democratic behavior, which makes it possible to create the condition of possibility for “metonymizing oneself.” Metonymy, in any dictionary, means allowing an attribute or trait to stand for that thing being referred to. In this process of being a metonymy, we make our self a part of a whole. In Spivak’s words, the self “can claim the idea of the State belonging to one.” This further means that the State is the service of the citizen or that the State will serve the people. The literary critic (she says she is not a historian and not an anthropologist) calls this status “hopelessly idealistic” especially in “repressive states” and “in this current era of globalization where the state is more and more reconfigured as not an agent of redistribution but the agent of repression.”
Quoting another intellectual, Spivak explains that in those two current conditions “the will of the citizen has been separated from the State.” She says, “There is subalternity [here] because the part is no longer part of the whole.” With the “withdrawal of civil liberties, the citizen was no longer part of the whole.”
Following this, our health system is not inefficient; it merely does not work for people. The press is free, its freedom not trampled upon, but that freedom is not given to everyone but only to select few, the part that remains linked to the whole.
Thus independence is displayed as an artefact for a nationalism spoken in one breath with fascism. The Nation banishes the plurality that is the seat of liberty, the flag a signifier for freedom is folded over the coffins of those who dared to fight, or raised high above to subjugate citizens and convince them to die for a country that has long been gone. We are, after all, not part of the State anymore.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano