PDInquirer interview, Part 2

… continued from yesterday

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Writing about the intense days during martial law is something she had wanted to stop doing after “Dekada ‘70” and two or three other teleplays about the period, says Bautista. “But there are still so many stories waiting to be told about that era.” While set against the backdrop of those turbulent years, the two novels are also vastly different: “”Dekada” is more about a family outside the movement, a mother on the outside looking in. This is really more about a mother who changes her perception of herself and of society (because of her son’s activism). ‘Desaparesidos” is about people inside the movement, young people who lived the horror of militarization during the martial law period.”
“Desaparesidos” might as well be the story of her friends, she says. “Before and after martial law, there were many disappearances. Charlie del Rosario disappeared; I knew him in college. Henry Romero disappeared; he was my friend and godfather to my firstborn.”
Not that things have changed much, she acknowledges. “What is the difference between martial law and the years after if people are still being killed all the time, if they keep disappearing because they are presumed to be enemies of government?” she asks. “I may not know her personally but I feel the pain of Edith Burgos over her missing son, Jonas, just as I felt the pain of Gina de Venecia when she lost her child in a fire. I feel bonded with all the mothers who lost their children in the past and present regimes. Whenever I read about Edith’s search for her son in the papers, I want to hug her even if I tell her nothing because even a writer can be at a loss for words.”
But as harsh as that reality is, Bautista also defines “Desaparesidos” in a different, albeit just as traumatic, context in this novel. Not only does the term refer to friends and kin who were deemed disappeared or missing because of state or military forces, the word also speaks of the disappearance or absence of activist parents in the lives of their children as they elude arrest to pursue their revolutionary goals.
Again, personal history has a lot to do with this insight. “When my children were very young, I could not leave them with just anybody,” recounts Bautista. “But I have known mothers in the movement who did that. Mas mabuti ba akong nanay kaysa sa kanila, o mas mabuti lang silang anak ng bayan kaysa sa akin? (Am I a better mother than them, or are they better patriots than I am?) Hindi ko ba mahal nang sapat ang bayan ko para iwan ang mga anak ko, o hindi nila mahal nang sapat ang kanilang mga anak? (Don’t I love my country enough to leave my kids, or don’t they love their children enough?) I have no answers to that.”
In fact, she adds, the questions she raised in the novel about commitment, priorities and choosing between family and country should not even be asked of those who had to make that difficult decision. While she writes of truths that she has come to know and of people in such circumstances, it is not for her to judge them nor direct their lives, she says. “When I write, I do not think of my characters as my creation; I think of them as real people. I don’t direct them, I just follow their story.”
Her next novel, to be serialized in a vernacular magazine, similarly follows the story of women in their sixties who are fighting to live their own lives, refusing to become wards of their children and nannies to their grandchildren.
But how typical! After a novel on the “disappeared,” trust this unconventional writer to focus next on women who have finally found themselves.

“Desaparesidos” is available at all National Book Store branches.

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