Walking to light

It is called a “Journey Towards Light” (“Biyahe Patungong Liwanag”), but most of the journey is carried out in darkness, in corridors sheathed by black tarpaulin, rooms divided by dark curtains. In one such hall, where lies a central core of black-and-white photos attesting to the abject poverty of the times, exhibit-goers can peek through holes to glimpse a party going on inside, peopled by figures in glittering formal wear, indulging in wine and victuals, sharing laughter and gaiety. The feeling of exclusion, of suffocating anxiety, follows one until the last hall of memory.

This is the “experiential exhibit” put together by the Edsa People Power Commission to remind Filipinos, but especially those yet unborn or were too young to remember today what transpired 30 years ago and in the years before then, of the darkness that the country went through before emerging into the light of freedom.

The creative minds behind the exhibit must be credited for conceiving this unusual, disturbing, shocking, moving and heartrending experience. Not for them the usual route of photographs and memorabilia, set against the backdrop of protest songs and news footage, to “tell” the story of Edsa. Instead, what those who take the time and make the effort to visit the exhibit will go through is a veritable walk through history. It is indeed a way to experience the years of martial law, the creeping anxiety, the pain and fright and anger, as well as the euphoria of the protest movement, the better to understand this watershed event in Philippine history.

It is not a comfortable experience. One emerges into the early afternoon heat and light with the weight of sorrow and regret bearing down. But also with the realization that all the sacrifices made by people we knew and loved were finally repaid by our freedom.

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For me, the most wrenching part of the walk-through was entering the “Hall of Orphans,” where children, clad as waifs in ragged clothing and confined by a fence of barbed wire, held up photos of their missing “parents,” young and not-so-young activists and peasant and labor leaders who make up the desaparecidos or the disappeared, demanding of the viewer if he or she knew where the missing loved one was.

About the first child my eyes settled on carried a poster on which the name “Leticia Ladlad” was printed, with a picture of a first cousin who had gone underground and then disappeared at the height of martial law. I was, to say the least, taken aback. It was as if my cousin Tish was reaching out to me, sending a message whose meaning I could not fathom. I remember a sister of Tish telling us that they had been told she was shot dead and buried in an anonymous grave. But seeing her photo in the exhibit was like seeing her come to life, triggering memories, scenes of her younger self replaying themselves like a silent movie reel.

Actors take on various roles: as a circus barker presiding over a demonstration of torture techniques; as martyrs of the antigovernment struggle who tell their stories in monologues; and even as supine bodies introducing the public to what is about to follow, with the Philippines and Filipinos still caught in a “restless sleep.”

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It is indeed “experiential,” walking the viewer through the years of the dictatorship and paving the way for a transformation from observer to participant. “Edsa veterans,” who were adults or students during the “parliament of the streets” that followed the Ninoy Aquino assassination and the Edsa gathering, would feel a surge of not just nostalgia or warm remembrance, but also a revival of the anger that rose up during those years, as well as of a tinge of regret that some of our soaring ideals remain inchoate.

But I wonder what the “Edsa babies”—all those literally still babies during Edsa or too young to remember those events clearly—and the generation that followed them, most notably the oft-cited “millennials,” will feel once they walk through the exhibit and emerge into the daylight.

They may not enjoy the same powerful tug of memory and lost youth as our generation may. But there will be, I’m sure, the shock of the new, the sense of having scales falling from their eyes, of being awakened to truths that had been denied them, or else buried into forgetting and insignificance.

After all, it is they who are the true bearers of the messages that the Edsa exhibit wishes to convey, the true inheritors of the legacy that those four days of protest, bravery, idealism and unity created.

Will young Filipinos respond to the challenges raised by this exhibit? Will they be moved by the walk-through experience that dramatizes and brings back to life the people who sacrificed their youth and their lives that we may enjoy the freedoms and the blessings of democracy? Will they respond as we wish they would?

It is a question to which we have no clear answers now. And I do wonder how much of an impact this “journey to light” will have on the young people of today. Some have urged that the exhibit be brought to other parts of the country, to reach out particularly to student groups and youth gatherings. But we, their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, can also start speaking out the truth, no matter how painful, how wrenching. It can be our own contribution to shedding light on those events of the painful past.

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This is for the girl, now a woman, who was sheltering in my womb during those four days of Edsa and was born 30 years ago today, on the “morning after” the departure of the Marcoses. That event effectively brought an end to the spontaneous uprising and public show of defiance, but as we know, the struggle continues. You will always be a part of our Edsa memories.