‘War Requiem’ and other thoughts

We’ve been in war zones these recent times, in wars unprecedented for the countless victims claimed in short spans of time and the manner they lost their lives. We are barely out of the war as far as the COVID-19 pandemic is concerned. In this week-long remembrance of our dead, as only Filipinos know how to do, we must remember the tens of thousands of Filipinos who perished during the three-year COVID-19 pandemic, health-care frontliners among them. We hold in our hearts their loved ones left behind, still in the pits of grief and waiting for the pall of sorrow to lift so that they can let in some joy in their lives. Grief cannot be articulated in numbers but numbers portray the enormity of what the world had to bear collectively and what many individuals we know suffered in the suffocating silence. The World Health Organization’s death count as of Oct. 18, 2023 (the numbers are updated regularly): Global (6,972,152), Regional: Europe (2,969,521), Western Pacific (2,251,388), Americas (2,969,521), Southeast Asia (806,796), Eastern Mediterranean (351,564), Africa (175,440), Philippines (66,702), recorded from Jan. 3, 2020 to Oct. 18, 2023.

We remember, too, the thousands of victims who were felled so arbitrarily (ni ha, ni ho, in Filipino) in the dirty drug war of former president Rodrigo Duterte, a reported conservative count of 6,000. The International Criminal Court would have received by now the incontrovertible proofs of “tokhang” deaths for which Duterte could be held to account. Fiat justitia, ruat caelum.

During the long All Souls’/All Saints’ holiday week (with the Oct. 30 barangay elections interrupting) I finally got to sit through “War Requiem,” an experimental movie directed by Jerek Jarman. According to movie notes, it “synthesizes the poetry of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), wordless reenactments of events from Owen’s life, stock footage of 20th century wars, and music by Benjamin Britten.” Owen (played by Nathaniel Parker) was a British soldier during World War I; he saw what it was like in the trenches, even clung to hope and love for an army nurse (played by Tilda Swanson). Owen was killed in the war but his war poem outlived him and gave rise to Britten’s symphony (for orchestra and voice) “The War Requiem, Opus 66” composed for the 1962 consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral.

“What passing bells for those who die as cattle?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns,/Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle/Can patter out their hasty prisons …”Britten’s symphony is one difficult opus. The Requiems composed by famous classical composers (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johannes Brahms, Giuseppe Verdi, to name some) played and sung in cathedrals and concert halls are easier on the ears, uplifting in parts, profound as they are meant to be. Make mine Mozart’s with his thundering “Lacrimosa” that has a way of catapulting me to outer space while I exclaim, “Mein Gott!” Britten’s has a dissonant, cacophonic quality to it, well, because it is a war symphony, a war requiem. Jarman’s movie is no less difficult to bear but, as I said, I sat through it, also because the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes gave it a rare 100 percent. No horror movies for me this Halloween week, only “War Requiem” while Israel’s bombs are falling on innocent civilian Palestinians in Gaza in its effort to flush out the Hamas from their lair. It was these armed Palestinian militants that fired the first salvo on Oct. 7, killing more than a thousand Israelis. And now Gaza has more than 6,000 dead, children and babies among them. This kind of conflict is as old as the Bible, to put it simply.

“War Requiem” the movie, its sound track, and the poetry that inspired it, is a meditation on the horrors of war. Who else, if not the venerable British actor Sir Laurence Olivier, would be in the opening scene as an old soldier in the sunset of his existence. Vintage war footage in black and white are interspersed with created tableau-like scenes so gut-wrenching you would not know where to look. But one quiet scene that moved me was that of a bugle lying in a puddle. I could not miss the meaning of it. “The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;/ And bugles calling for them from sad shires …” In those days bugles were sounded along with marching orders, even as shooting began and critically wounded soldiers cried out for their mothers.

There are field hospital scenes as well as liturgical scenes that suggest worship, an altar in the ruins, while a bloody hand is raised in benediction. Was that the Eucharist being held high? A resurrected Jesus in the ruins? An altar turned into a tomb?

I dread the moment Israel would make good its plan (if it has not already) for a ground attack on Gaza and the blood that would be spilled on ancient lands where prophets walked.I offer some verses of my own (excerpted from “I Read Your Name: A War Requiem”) in this month’s issue of a literary magazine: “I read your name/Written on a child’s brow/Torn and ripped away/On the ground/Strewn with bullets yesterday/On stains on rough terrain/ As mothers dig up daughters missing/On faces of men waiting/For sons dying and dead …”

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