THERE are moments when two works from the distant past insist on being seen and heard. Like pieces of memory tumbling out of a forgotten baul, they announce their existence through a haunting which forces the present to recall and relive a twin narrative of great hope and despair. Such was the dramatic effect of the rediscovery of an early Nena Saguil aquarelle that commemorates the anniversary of Philippine Independence in 1947, stashed together with an equally rare, type-written manuscript by Eulogio B. Rodriguez, titled “The Liberation of Manila,” dated November 15, 1945.
Image and text could not have been better paired. On the one hand, Saguil’s homage to the birth of the Republic of the Philippines depicts a woman, embodied Filipinas, boldly rising from the devastation wrought upon what was once the Eternal and Primate City of Manila. On the other hand, Rodriguez’s reportage on “liberation” dwelt on the unexpected and perhaps pyrrhic nature of the so touted “victorious” event. His rather poetic description of the historical event betrays ominous tones, which in his words were “…like the beam of sunshine in the midst of a surging storm.” In his narrative, libertad did not come in la forma feminina. Instead, it took the male form of the American soldier, thousands of soldiers battling furiously, on land, in sea and on air, for the liberty of a city and its people, while simultaneously laying it down to waste.
Partly echoing Eugene Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” Saguil’s Filipinas holds the Philippine flag in her right hand and a palm leaf, a symbol of peace, in her left. The palm leaf symbol transports the Filipino mind to images of Lent; Jesus of Nazareth’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem followed by his betrayal, arrest, suffering and cruel death on the cross. Like Filipinas, Filipinos were not given a choice to hold arms. America refused President Manuel L. Quezon’s urging for the formation of an armed force. As such, the Japanese advance into Manila didn’t meet such great resistance in terms of tactical and strategic preparation, as well as in terms of war equipment. The battle of Manila was, likewise, fought mainly by Japanese and American soldiers, with the Filipinos playing the unfortunate supernumerary roles of victims, collateral or otherwise, or the passive roles of deliriously happy, half-starved milling ‘liberees,’ mixed with “equally happy GIs who gave all their rations away, guns, foxholes, shells, and death.” Clearly, at the point of “liberation,” Filipinos were not poised to hoist flags of independence; they were too preoccupied with survival or “hoisting selves.” If they were at all predisposed at the time to raise any flags, it would be the make-shift white flags declaring “surrender” or imploring “don’t shoot.”
Having been earlier denied the right to bear arms, Filipinos like Sanguil’s Filipinas, and unlike Lady Liberty, understandably have no desire for arms. Alas, this denial of equipping Filipinas with arms to defend herself resulted in the disaster that was the “liberation of Manila.” At the price of such destruction, one wonders about the value of being saved. Most unfortunately, even this choice was not for the Filipino to make. Manila burned for its liberation. Saguil captured the great conflagration in her depiction of opalescent skies, their cheerful brightness and rainbow hues contrasting with the ever-present haze that hung low from heaven’s ceiling. The irony of terrible beauty resulting from such a horrible disaster is, likewise, rendered in vivid description in Rodriguez’s text: “Great fires gave purple hues to the horizon of Manila and tremendous explosions shook the Earth and the firmament…. The people watched in helpless horror as the fires spread east and west and finally merged into a single inferno. The Tondo Church caught fire and burned, the whole superstructure fantastically ablaze….”
Indeed, Saguil’s Filipinas has already suffered the insufferable. She now adamantly demands to claim the promised sovereign fruit, a prize well-deserved for her steadfast devotion to America’s manifest destiny and self-proclaimed exceptionalism in its gracious bestowal of democratic tutelage. She turns her back away from the vestiges of conflict, represented by the ruins of Manila that appropriately recedes into the faraway background. With the past put in its proper place, she hoists the flag and brandishes it toward the peace of a yet unwritten future. “Enough already,” she appears to say in exasperation. “Proclaim my republic, and let us move on with!” As she rallies her unseen followers, her swirling garments and the unfurling motion of the flag she holds high proclaim the excitement of “glorious liberty.” For Rodriguez, liberty did not come gloriously at all. It also appears not to have left him with much optimism for the future. “It took three agonizing bitter weeks before the city was completely liberated…. Such was the garish setting for the Battle of Manila, in the course of which the heart of the city would be burned out and 1,000,500 citizens would have been massacred in a bloodbath—few parallels in history as many people conglomerated in the city believing that Manila would be declared an open city.”
Historical continuities and discontinuities aside, Saguil’s hopeful portrayal of Filipinas still inspires. Hope sometimes emerges from, to borrow Carol Hau’s phrasing, “necessary fictions.” The fiction of Filipinas rising from the ashes of war sans America implies a recasting of the historical self into an aspirational self who is not beholden to and dependent on a foreign power. The fiction of Filipinas rising from the ashes of war with seemingly great ease, hardly affected by the great cost of liberation, exuding great confidence or, even to a certain degree, some nonchalance, allows for the development of psychological resilience. Painted in 1947 and labeled in the manner of a plate for class submission, this work may very well be a requirement for one of her Fine Arts subjects, perhaps even under the maestro, Fernando Amorsolo, who notably did not cease portraying golden sunlit afternoons even during the Japanese Occupation. Saguil’s hope is the hope of the young unfettered by the mistakes of an extended past.
But what of Rodriguez’s despair? Well, it too has its uses. Despair is damning only if dwelt upon. Indeed, the national librarian had a lot to despair about after witnessing so many great events in Philippine history. As a member of the first generation graduates of the University of the Philippines, and as a pensionado who finished his master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin, he was a member of an exclusive intellectual elite that included, among others, Teodoro M. Kalaw and Jorge Bocobo, a group of people who had the luxury of defining the character of the Filipino nation through their work in the government and scholarship. Rodriguez witnessed the drafting of the 1935 Constitution. He presided over the National Library and Archives. He attended the inauguration of the Republic of the Philippines. He knew historical greats, such as Emilio Aguinaldo, Manuel L. Quezon, Manuel Roxas, Sergio Osmena, Jose P. Laurel, Elpidio Quirino and many others. As in the lives of many pioneers, not all goes well all the time. Like Vargas and Laurel, he stayed in Manila during the Japanese Occupation and sought to preserve intellectual life and public order during that dark period of Philippine history. His despair is understandable in the face of happier and more productive times.
The wanton destruction of Manila, along with it all the sites and properties of cultural and historical importance, was too difficult to accept for someone who appreciated the history and culture of the Filipinos. As with many intellectuals of his generation, he was able to speak and write in Spanish. The loss of Intramuros must have caused him great pain and may have displaced him from the certainty of what he knows as his most cherished past. But did he dwell on this great despair? Judging from the great volume of written works that he produced after the war, and judging from the many yet unpublished poems that he had written, in English as well as in Spanish, poems and essay that extoll the beauty of the Philippines and the Filipinos, one can confidently say that his heart did go on.
As Nena Saguil went on to become the most accomplished Filipino female abstract artist whose works revel in the subtly iridescent and translucent hues of moonstones, opals and fine jade, as well as the ovoid shapes of the singing celestial spheres, Eulogio B. Rodriguez has moved on and is remembered as one of the most well-respected national librarians, blessed with the great ability to deploy the written word in prose and poetry. Sadly, he did not live long, succumbing to a heart attack in 1948, a few years after the inauguration of the Philippine Republic. Had he lived longer, his achievements would undoubtedly not be as underrated. The recent recovery of his collection of rare books, documents and manuscripts, his personal archive for the Filipino nation, augurs well for scholars of history and culture. It seems that his deployment of the word, as a Filipino intellectual, is not yet over.