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MY memories of Martial Law are semi-happy ones.
I was in second grade, walking to Cebu Normal School with my mother. We reached the corner of P. Del Rosario and Jones Avenue. We were crossing P. del Rosario, near the Sto. Rosario Church, when my mother stopped. She stopped because she had seen the writing on the wall -- literally, across the street. Scrawled in large, rough and bloody-red letters on the wall of what was then the Boy Scouts compound was this unfinished sentence: "Marcos fascist imperialist pupp..." Whatever anti-Marcos, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist sentiments the person who painted those words could have stirred in my eight-year old mind were never stirred that day because they were immediately overcome by something more important to my Grade 2 curiosity: what had the vandal meant to write -- "puppy" or "puppet"?
"Puppy," I concluded. "Puppet" was possible but "puppy" made more sense. It made more sense to me and my Grade 2 knowledge of political science. My very first ideas about political science came from my mother. For instance, my mother informed me -- while Marcos was still dictator and when informing your elementary school son anything about Marcos that Marcos didn't want your son to know, was done in whispers, even at home -- that Sergio "Serging" Osmeña was labeled Serging-iring or cat by pro-Marcos politicians because Serging himself had accused Marcos of being an itoy or puppy.
How amazing, I thought at the time. It was amazing that adults did exactly what we were doing in elementary school: provoking our schoolboy enemies by taunting them with some pejorative-sounding label that rhymed with their names. The rhyme was really hilarious -- Serging iring, Serging iring, I repeated to myself over and over. (Last week, my mother had to remind me to stop it already.)
And now, at the corner of P. del Rosario and Jones Avenue, at the crossroads between going to school and going home to watch cartoons because Martial Law had been declared, here was another example of the kind of name-calling I could do all day, calling Marcos a fascist and imperialist puppy. Painted in English as anti-government graffiti, "Marcos fascist imperialist puppy" would obviously not have sounded anti-Marcos at all.
It would have in fact sounded cuddly and thus, Marcos-huggingly strange. It would have made the New People's Army seem like they were looking for a lost puppy, a cross-breed of Marcos and fascist features, with more tricks than any old dog may have ever had before. Had anybody ever thought of writing that on an anti-Marcos placard, he would have been expelled from the Kabataang Makabayan. So they opted for "Marcos Hitler diktador tuta," which sounds really taunting and doesn't suggest any other image but that of a small dog with a mustache.
Of course, I cannot now claim that all those ideas were running through my head in the less-than-a-minute that my mother and I had spent while stopped at the corner of P. del Rosario corner Jones Avenue. I was just a kid. Martial Law had apparently been declared around that time. Newspapers were closed. People were nervous. I was laughing at Serging iring.
I must confess that my memories of Martial Law are memories I thought I might have, confused as I am about exactly what I was doing when Marcos appeared on TV, read his own Proclamation 1081 and made such words as "therefore," "wherefore" and "hereby" sound not only pompous but downright menacing. But I do remember that life went on -- for me, my mother and my Grade 2 class.
Of course, we were all now required to exercise every morning and sing the Bagong Lipunan song. We were also told to take an oath of allegiance to the New Society -- which confused me even more since it was the name of a bakery near our neighborhood. What? Why should I swear loyalty to a place that ran out of pan de sal by 8 a.m.?
Several years later, I was in college, Marcos was still President and I, the Grade 2 boy of years gone by, was beaten up by the Philippine Constabulary, taken to Camp Lapu-Lapu and charged with subverting Marcos. My mother tried to visit me in detention and she could not because the fascist imperialist puppy had become a vicious dog and would kill a thousand boys and their fathers and mothers, too, before he was finally driven away.
