Reading and SuchVideo

‘We are here, we remember everything, and we write’

Editor Jo-Ann Maglipon speaks during the launch of 'SERVE,' the invaluable book on the experiences of college editors from 1969 to 1972—at the onset of martial law

SERVE authors and editor gather at launch. Seated, from left: Earnest Zabala, Thelma Sioson San Juan, Angie Castillo, Sol Juvida, Jo-Ann Maglipon, Judy Taguiwalo, Mercy Corrales; Standing , from left: Manolet Dayrit, Rey Vea, Butch Dalisay, Senen Glorioso, Diwa Guinigundo, Sonny Coloma, Alex Aquino, Ed Gonzalez, Bob Corrales, Elso Cabangon (Photo by Cooky Chua)

Serve book cover

This is the speech delivered by Jo-Ann Maglipon at the Sept. 9, 2023 launch of SERVE, a compilation of essays by 19 former campus editors about their life-defining years during the Martial Law era. Maglipon, a former campus editor herself and one of today’s foremost magazine editors, edited the book published by the Ateneo University Press. SERVE is now available at Fully Booked stores.

Good evening. Tonight, we gather—most of us long kindred, some of us friends who chose each other along the way, and a few of us walk-ins just curious and asking: Why this book? Why by this motley crew? And why now?

This may be easier to answer by saying what the book is not.

SERVE is not a vanity publication.

Twenty of us did not gather one morning and say, “Let’s get down and chronicle the memories of our storied youth.” Nor did we decide to immortalize our high- flying journey into our 70s. None of us had stumbled upon the burning bush and come to the epiphany that we were special.

We had always just wanted to put out books. We had the skills; we’d all been editors in college, or even in high school. We had the provocation; the country we knew was being written up in ways that made it unrecognizable. And we had the time—or, more honestly, we felt we had only so much time.

We were open to not just books but to all artistic expression, even before the pandemic, all the way to two Presidents back—except that life kept getting in the way. In 2012, our crew put out a little book, Not On Our Watch. Martial law really happened. We were there. We followed that up with a little film for commercial theater release—and, to our credit, we pulled in the data and research, the interviews, the fact-checks, we got the pledges for funding, we brainstormed with the scriptwriter we commissioned, we decided on Piolo Pascual as one of five leads—but we never made it to the sequence treatment.

Jo-Ann Maglipon, editor of SERVE: ‘This book is not in denial’

For both the book that emerged and the movie that did not, our biggest supporter was one of us, Wency Wenceslao. But, like I said, life kept getting in the way. Then, January this year, we snapped out of it and buckled down to do Serve.

SERVE is not a self-congratulatory book. It is purposeful, but we like to think it is not smug

Our pitch is deliberate; our tone, unhurried, almost steady; our language, decorous, not remotely belligerent. With our combined academic degrees, I suppose we imagine ourselves civilized? Seriously, this is who we are. We say “dark times” when we mean murderous times. We say “events that profoundly changed our lives” when we mean torn families, derailed careers, shattered self-worth. We say “robbed of our rights” when we mean we were debased and defiled. We say our coffers were emptied when we mean our tax money has been squirrelled away in confidential funds. And we say “autocrat” when we plainly mean dictator.

But we resent it when we’re bullied to be civilized. Why the need for riddles—unless we deem them appropriate? Why turn to fable and parody, artfulness and cunning—unless such is our game plan? Why hang this over the head of Butch Dalisay, a master of the craft, to remain a presence in the papers?

SERVE author Butch Dalisay, one of the country’s foremost writers

So, yes, there is virtue in mastering smokescreens. After all, how many times can we write plunderer? How many times sociopath? Narcissist? Homicidal? Brain-addled? These creepy types come around to run the republic with an almost cursed inevitability—how long until people shut down? But, it must be our choice.

Civilized language comes with a command of the message and the mode. With truth in our grasp, we choose not to shout. At this age, we’ve taken on sophistications anyway that allow us to disguise our hysterics. If one day we feel wicked, we will shout and claw, but we cannot be perceived to be shouting and clawing. It’s the name of the game, and we pretty much know the rules.

What’s more, we want to reach people outside our circles—they who flinch before the harsh details of our past, they who like the distance offered by concepts and contemplations, they who find refuge in intellectual fogginess, they who require space to process the ugliness on their own.

Mind, we’re not knocking any of this; we each have our own ways of meeting the assault of evil.

At the launch, National Artist BenCab and Annie Sarthou (Photo by Thelma Sioson)

SERVE is not about extracting sympathy for violations to our bodies and our spirits, as real as these are

Quite the opposite. Our crew of writers does not like to show its tears. It has crossed my mind, maybe we’re not comfortable exposing our skin? Maybe it’s the non-stop buzz to “serve the people”? For how call attention to our minor moans when the mantra is to pay attention to the grand lamentations of others?

This is not to say we’re not sentimental. Scratch the surface; we are.

Sol Juvida interviews children as young as seven orphaned of both mother and father by Duterte’s drug war, and allows herself a moment to wipe away tears, her own.

Senen Glorioso pays tribute to the father he disappointed by not becoming a doctor like him, whom he disappointed even more by joining the SDK, and whom he disappointed yet again by coming under house arrest.

Rey Vea, in 2019, accepts his last check payment as claimant in the human rights class suit filed against Ferdinand Marcos, the Father. Rey writes, “I moved to the last stop where I had to give a final signature. The lady by the table looked up and said, ‘Mabuhay po kayo! Bayani po kayo!’ Something just unexpectedly welled up in me and I struggled to say, ‘Hindi po. Hindi po. ‘Yong mga nagbuwis ng buhay, sila po ‘yon.’” Not only was he emotional for the rest of the day, he says, but he realized just then the depth of emotion he still harbored about that chapter in his life. Far as he has journeyed since, Rey writes, “my student activist years were among the best in my life.”

In lieu of tears, Jones Campos offers raw joy. Being an ex-detainee was not the best credential for landing a job during martial law, and he had a wife and child to feed. After working as clerk-typist in a carpet factory over two long years, he chanced on an ad of Eastern Telecom, applied, was accepted. “The job offered P900 monthly,” Jones writes, “higher than the P500 minimum wage, on top of which came a P350 representation allowance and a P250 transportation allowance. At 27 years old…this left me giddy. I was moving up!” When he retired, Jones, bless him, was head of PR and Advertising and also spokesperson of Globe Telecom of the Ayala Group of Companies.

We have empathy, we have gratitude, we have wonder—no way we are not sentimental.

At the launch, editor Jo-Ann Maglipon and publisher Karina Bolasco, under whose watch SERVE was published by Ateneo de Manila University Press

SERVE does not arise from righteousness and even less from vengeance. It is not even an angry book.

No one is frothing in the mouth—not even Elso Cabangon, who was crossing Taft Avenue going toward the Papal Nuncio residence, unarmed, when he was shot four times by Colonel Gallido of the MISG, but who chooses to end his narrative with his rediscovery of comforting faith and personal peace.

No one is dripping with words of hate. Our guest writer Earnest Zabala, who never really saw her mother Evelyn and father Ric, was left brooding for years about being abandoned, asking if this was because she, unto herself, was not worthy of love, yet chooses to say: “If my own wait ends and I can speak to my mother…I will tell her that I have missed her every day of my life. That there is a hole in my heart the shape of her and Tatay…I will tell them both that…I stand in awe of their personal sacrifice, that I am grateful they had me. I will tell them we will continue the fight for freedom, we will win back the soul of the country, and I love them very much.”

Her Tita Derly Magcalen, Evelyn’s colleague at The Torch, carries with her the memory of Evelyn’s visit in ’73. Evelyn, already active in the underground, asked Derly if she was ready to join them. “On that warm afternoon,” Derly writes, “I came very close to joining Evelyn. Then my eyes traveled to her legs. They were dry and scarred. Mosquito bites, she laughed. I thought to myself: I will have to give up my secure teaching job, move place to place again, go hungry again, have scabs all over my body again. Then the image of the young boy, the science scholar Santillano, his brains splattered on the pavement, flashed in my head.” In the end, the two women hugged, said their goodbyes. Derly writes, “Then, filled with shame and guilt, I watched her walk away to the end of the street. That was the last time I saw my friend.” Evelyn Pacheco’s body was never found. So, too, the body of her husband Ric Mangulabnan.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Manny Mogato (middle) among launch guests, shown here with SERVE authors Thelma Sioson San Juan and Elso Cabangon

This is not a book, you see, that picks on everyone’s foibles but our own. We think we tell it as it is.

If at all, the tendency is to pare away the drama. Chito Sta. Romana, bless him, and Jaime Florcruz, who can do with divine intervention given his current employment, both touch on the bare bones of 14 years of an exile that would’ve broken lesser men, and focus on how they educated themselves to survive.

Otherwise, there is not much that is weepy here.

Alexander Aquino, the same thing. Red-baited, linked to the “kidnapping and serious illegal detention of soldiers in Quezon,” in a time of post-Edsa and at a time he was in Bonn, Germany, engaging in activity more respectable than abduction, Alex read the writing on the wall and made the valiant move to London, there to rise or fall with his young family.

This is not a book of irrationality and harangue.

Again, quite the opposite. Everywhere is mindfulness, self-examination, insight, and distillation. It’s all quite cerebral, really.

Eduardo Gonzalez’s title for his chapter shows the way: “Rhythm and Dissonance: My Life in Public Service,” in which, examining his years as DAP president, he mentions “a longing for clarity, a deep quiet, a serenity and profound interiority, a need to just slip into the background, but I could not at the same time imagine a life free of struggle…”

Angie Tocong reminds us that the Greeks asked only one question after a man died: Did he have passion? To which her self-reflection is: “I would like to believe that my life trajectory has been lit with fire, and that the fire burns brightly on my spot… Still, I ask: Can there be nation-building without a real measure of power going to the working class? I would like…to seek change, drip by drip, trickle upon trickle, alongside the multitude seeking change, until there forms a sea wave powerful enough to overcome the intolerable regimes that…have made us less of the nation we can be.”

Believe it or not, SERVE is not a book of certainties.

Our band of writers may have begun campus life with a world view egalitarian, classless, even utopian, all of which make for a perfect world. But our government, lacking the vocabulary, has always locked that view down as “communist,” a word that can get us killed. In our youth, an ideology captured our imagination—one haunting enough to get many of us to join the underground and bring down a dictatorship, one potent enough to send some of us to the hills; in our mature years, we use our own evolved set of beliefs—one haunting enough to make us ignore the red-baiting, one potent enough to make us write obstinate and contrary books.

From different universes, our motley band has come together to do SERVE.

Mercy Corrales spent decades on foreign shores as president, CEO, and COO of winning global brands, for which she crafted a management playbook that tapped into the democratic centralism and the criticism-self-criticism of her activist years.

Diwa Gunigundo has had overlapping incarnations: Central Bank vice-governor, columnist, political analyst, author, pastor—and cuts a commanding presence in all of them.

SERVE author Diwa Guinigundo, academician and former Bangko Sentral official

Sonny Coloma has worked for three Presidents, his name unsullied, his performance record an honor to parents who were life-long civil servants.

SERVE authors Sonny Coloma (left), now executive vice president of Manila Bulletin, and Elso Cabangon

Judy Taguiwalo, through many high-profile titles, has always put politics and principle in command. This has stood her well in life, even if this is precisely what did not get her confirmed by the Commission on Appointments.

Thelma Sioson understood that finding a job in mass media meant finding her niche. The politics of The Theresian Register would not get her hired. And although everything, ’tis said, is ultimately political, she found her niche in Lifestyle where she became a doyen.

Bob Corrales morphed, in his own words, from rebel to businessman to evangelist, where today he gives Catholics a good name, which is what happens when a believer elevates faith with deeds.

SERVE author Bob Corrales with guests Edna Aquino (right), Paulynn Sicam

All found their way to tell their tale. We had set no rules, no limits, no ideological frame. There was discussion and argument, but there was no such thing as the correct line.

And, as tough as it is to work on an anthology of 19 alphas, I found here a humility and openness that reminded me why I have long taken pride in being in the generation of this band of writers. In Maryknoll I had gotten a D in math under Miss Dimaculangan and had been dropped to Section 2, but here I was negotiating with six PhDs, two Ms.Cs, five valedictorians, three magna cums, multiple cum laudes, and with past and present deans, four; university president, one; ambassadors, two; publishers, two; bureau chiefs, two; group editorial director, one; and MD, one. If my math is flawed, you have context, but let me tell you, there is the least arrogance in the most accomplished.

We have been separate and independent, the 20 of us. Yet from the beginning we had a common, defining ground—our gut understanding of right and wrong, our construct of good and bad. In this, we have not strayed far from each other.

This book is not in denial. We were a minority when we were callow activists; we are a minority when in our 70s.

Fifty-three years have passed since martial law first came down. Millions who vote today have no instinct about martial law, and do not pick up on the parallelisms between Marcos Sr.’s Presidential Decrees then and the Anti- Terrorism Act now handed wholesale to Marcos Jr. The Son need never declare martial law, and he will still wield the same overarching power that The Father did. No wonder Bucth Dalisay says he writes this book’s introduction with a “sadness edging on sorrow.”

So, why this book?

To fight fantasy, forgetting, flagellation. To stop the gaslighting of activists of yesteryears for the resurrection of a dictator’s family. To rebuke exhortations of harmony and unity, false and deceitful. To demand apology, atonement, redress. And, yes, to remind the powers—we are here, we remember everything, and we write.

I leave Manolet Dayrit to say it for us: “Godspeed to all to whom the torch is passed. Alone, on a moonless night in Bukidnon in 1978 I looked up at the stars, and said to myself: I am where I ought to be. I look at where I am today, and I say the same.”

SERVE author, former health secretary Manuel Dayrit (right) with former Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio at book launch

About author

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She is one of the country's leading journalists, the editor behind best-selling publications such as YES magazine and Spot.ph.

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