Our untold story

OUR HISTORY, a son told me once, is a history of conquest written by colonizers. That is why, he went on rather resentfully, we celebrate our defeats, very seldom our victories.

Maybe not much has been written about our victories, I said, trying to sound authoritative by quoting an eminent history professor who told me during a seminar-workshop on local history, “if it is not written, it is not history,” which sparked a violent exchange between my son and me which I would rather not reproduce here due to lack of space.

This is not to say that our historians have not been writing. But I remember browsing through the exhaustive bibliography compiled by the late Dr. Alfredo Tiamson (I still have the autographed copy of the first edition that he gave me; I bought myself a copy of the second, updated edition) and sad to say, most of the listing consists of dissertations, theses and monographs, while many of the larger works are reinterpretations and updated analyses of primary and even secondary sources. In other words, nothing risky.

But then there is always this cautiousness that is sometimes mistaken for trepidation among academics that one assumes is dictated by the rigid rules they have to work with, because any wayward statement that cannot be grounded on an unassailable footnote could threaten to scramble up the academic initials after their names into an anagram. So that unless you are an avid student of history, they usually come across as plain boring.

Which is why I find the writings of archaeologists and anthropologists more exciting. There is always a sense of adventure in the way they base their speculations on material evidence, and with mechanical and other scientific tools available like DNA analysis and carbon-dating, together with artists’ concepts of the subject, we are irresistibly drawn into a reconstruction of the past, according to how we perceive the evidence, guided by what is presented to us, and our stock knowledge and sentiments. It therefore becomes an interactive movie in our mind.

So it was engrossing, as always, to read the latest column of my favorite historian and fellow columnist Ambeth Ocampo (“Been there, done that,” Inquirer, 4/27/11) who, I was happy to note, shares my concerns on our historiography, especially concerning local history, and as important, the content of history textbooks.

Meeting Asian historians during a conference on Southeast Asian Historiography in Penang, Malaysia a decade ago, Ocampo writes, made him realize that we and our Southeast Asian neighbors “face the same problems: the content of school history, the accuracy and interpretation of history in textbooks, teacher training and the delivery of history in the classroom, how to deal with the colonial past, etc. (underscoring mine).”

The last clause is especially relevant to Mindanao, particularly in our never-ending peace negotiations which, as of this writing, is ongoing. This has to do with the interpretation of history by groups with their own particular interests, objectives or agenda.

It will be noted that history as interpreted and written for their propaganda literature by separatist groups such as the Moro National Liberation Front is a history not only of defeat but also of bitterness and resentment, with the objective only of uniting the Moro peoples against the perceived enemies: colonization, and the institutions that abetted the injustices of colonization—government and Christianity.

This was very important in validating their “struggle,” and certainly necessary in soliciting the support of Islamic countries like Libya, which was the first Middle East country to provide financial assistance and which, it is widely known, sponsored the nomination of the MNLF for observer status in the powerful Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC).

Then there is the problem of how local history is written, if written at all. During the conference he attended, Ocampo says, a historian asked him: “Isn’t the history of the Philippines nothing but a local history of Manila?” a remark, he writes, that has haunted him since.

Well, hindi ka nag-iisa, Ambeth. This is a main grievance of the Moros. Like my son said, our history was written by the conquerors, and since they were fighting the Moros to the end, they only wrote about their victories against the infidels, pagans and savages, which was how they saw the people they called “Moros,” with the same revulsion with which they regarded the real, original Moros who subjugated them for close to 900 years. And like I told my son at the end of our discussion, ours is really a history of omission and commission, on the whole an untold story.

But like the biblical Pharaoh Ramses said, “So shall it be written, so shall it be done.”

If it is not written, it is not history.

Which was the idea that lay, I suppose, behind the title of Ambeth’s piece. Up to now, over a century after the colonizers left, we don’t even know each other. More tragically, we don’t even know ourselves.

The consequences? Hilarious, to say the least. We perceive our problems at the shortest visible distance, so that our solutions are as astigmatic: the problem is the traffic, the solution, ban wang-wang and penalize counterflow. Problem solved, while Rico Puno lists down the names of police jueteng (illegal numbers game) protectors in the privacy of Camp Crame. There are simply people who like keeping lists.

“I took every opportunity to visit the Visayas and Mindanao to learn more about their heroes, their food, their culture, and their history that isn’t represented in our textbooks,” Ambeth Ocampo writes.

You’d be surprised just how much there is untold of our story as a people, as a nation. What a pity. Because it is a very beautiful, fascinating, marvelous story.

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