Land of death

I come from the province of Northern Samar, a land of sprawling green fields. The land is usually caught between raging storms and silent skies: The blue overhead is a vast blanket that comforts the weeping people of the weeping land, and its dark rage is a billowing conscience that brings us down to our knees and forces us to remember our collective insignificance.

In the west the Prince Moon torridly kisses the Mountain that cradles a protracted revolution and spits out Juan Ponce Enrile’s logging concessions. In the east is the vast Sea that changes color from blue to green and back, and whose pristine shores stretch over the edges of the island like a rebel’s halo. Then there is a rugged road that starts in Allen’s port, where sadness boards the Melancholy Ship and meets up with “Yolanda,” forcing it to sleep with the thousands dead. The road sighs at the passage of the tedious hours, just in time for when the Sky weeps its first tears of the day.

The land is home to happy people. Its history is replete with bravery and fierce resistance to power. More than 300 years ago, a man named Agustin Sumuroy led one of the first armed rebellions against the Colonizers. More than 300 years thereafter, the rage is still seething, and continues to throb in the veins of its people.

Sumuroy led the revolution in the town of Palapag. This is the same town where a man named Emil Go was shot dead one sleepy Friday morning practically outside his house in Doña Manuela Village, Barangay Tinampo. He was on his bicycle, heading home from the market after buying bread and fish. Unidentified men, says the report, tailed him and shot him multiple times in the back.

“Examined a male cadaver in a state of post-mortem lividity wearing gray shirt and white short pants,” read the first paragraph of the postmortem examination report of the Rural Health Unit of Palapag. Emil was 44 years old when they found his corpse 20 meters away from his house where his wife and three young children were waiting for breakfast. Five shots had been heard, breaking the silence of a sunny morning when the dew was just drying under the summer sky.

It is public knowledge that Emil is, was, an activist. I do not know how a local public perceives an activist, as opposed to the national imagination of a sea of clenched fists on Mendiola. Emil, according to his closest friends, was a man filled with love for his family and his community. A testament for this was his involvement in various advocacies—from students’ welfare to human rights, from labor strikes to environment and cultural preservation. Reports say that his killing was election-related, Emil having supported a candidate in the local race. Wherever the investigation leads, one sure thing is that it drew strength from his long history of involvement in local and national issues—from his being a student leader and campus journalist to the various posts he held in the past decades.

On the day of Emil’s interment, his young daughter was seen gripping a white flag screaming for justice. The mourners all wore white shirts bearing a black image of a man. One woman was seen raising a clenched fist. Riders were seen in a parade of motorcycles. In the silent dusk, the municipal park was covered with lighted candles; a white banner was tied to an old tree—a plain canvas of a mourning people.

This is what happens when a man loved by his community is murdered. The sun dries the land that fed from his blood. The humid air sweeps away the tears from parched cheeks.

I come from Northern Samar, the fourth of the poorest provinces in the country. Death in our province is delivered, not by the Grim Reaper, but by the muzzle of a gun. This is where students are chased in the open streets, and journalists and civilians become casualties of the crossfire between political dynasties and warlords. This is where Enrile’s logging concessions pillage the hinterlands. The man is out on bail on a plunder charge, but the official definition of plunder does not include the massacre of trees.

The province takes pride in having the first state university in the Visayas, which was once tagged by the administration of Gloria-Macapagal Arroyo as training ground for communist insurgents. This is a land where news about killings settles gently over one’s breakfast, leaving its sting outside the door.

I want to tell you what I imagined that morning when I woke up to the news of death. I imagined I was in the middle of the sprawling green fields of Northern Samar. Bodies were falling from the vast blanket of blue, and blood was seeping out from the parched land. I was counting the corpses.

I saw Prof. Jose Maria Cui who, in 2007, was shot dead inside a classroom in front of his students at the University of Eastern Philippines while administering a midterm exam. I saw the priest gunned down on the national highway on account of his defense of people who believed that there was no second coming of God. I saw myself under an old tree, holding a candle around which was tied a black ribbon. I saw a similar black ribbon around an arm of a local journalist and around a woman’s forehead. Everyone was singing “Kulay dugo ang kulay ng bawat pahayagan”—blood is the color of every newspaper—in solidarity with Leo Mila, the seventh journalist murdered in that year of terror in Arroyo’s term.

I thought that after all the endless daily reports on torture and massacres, it would be easy to confront news of death. It is hard to write about death, especially if it is the death of a man who had written in the same school paper where you once wrote. It becomes difficult when you remember that you once had a happy lunch together in his house, which now happens to be 20 meters away from the murder site. Words stop, become superfluous, and your imagination scurries with you into the bedroom, crawls under the bed, and stirs its way into your cup of coffee at three o’clock in the morning.

I will end with telling you what I saw on that sleepy day when we had a happy lunch with Emil at his house. There was a small poster made of cardboard above where he was sitting. The message written on it was: “Rage against the dying of the light.”

Rage, rage against the dying light.

Angelo Karl Doceo, 23, is a certified public accountant and former vice president for the Visayas of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines.