EDSA’s ‘Histories’

Thursday, 03 March 2011 23:43

Written by Neric Acosta

History, they say, is written not by the vanquished but by the victors. Historiography, the writing of history itself, is inherently tendentious and vested with inherent biases. Depending on the prism through which events and experiences are seen, the recollecting and analysis of circumstances surrounding and leading to a particular set of milestone episodes of struggle and triumphs of a country and people are largely shaped by subjective interpretation, selective reliving of experience, or ideological bent.

Twenty-five years after the 1986 People Power Revolution, notwithstanding the commemoration of a glorious watershed point in history, the interpreting, or rewriting, of EDSA by some quarters has begun – possibly opening a field of historiographical contestation or revisionism in the coming years. From the standpoint of the military personae in the events leading up to the downfall of Ferdinand Marcos, it was the mutiny staged by then General Fidel Ramos and Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, that triggered People Power. In the face of the tsunami of change now occurring in the Arab world, former President Fidel Ramos – arguably to reinforce this theory -- was quoted as saying that people power movements turn bloody and protracted unless a splinter group within the police or military forces break away and join the protesters.

From the perspective of the vast range of activists and ordinary people who over time stood up to the dictatorship in ways big and small, the Ramos-Enrile mutiny was simply an offshoot of an escalation of dissent and sustained public demonstrations of protest against the authoritarian regime. That while the military factor is instrumental in the overall equation of regime change, it is the sheer force of an emboldened people that catalyzes and drives the energies of political and social change.

And for the Marcos family, three members of which are now back in national and local positions of power, the reading of events that drove them out of power and ushered in democracy again is yet again reconfigured. If not for the People Power Revolution in 1986, they say, the Philippines would “already have been a Singapore.” The revisionist subtext is that EDSA aborted a trajectory of infrastructural development and economic progress, as if to say that the democratic uprising is to be blamed for retarding the country’s growth track.

The call yet again for Marcos to be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani is made as part of this symbolic, revisionist reading of history: the dictator ousted 25 years ago is recast as a hero of the nation deserving to be buried amongst a pantheon of self-sacrificing and brave patriots. This is, to the millions who trooped to the thoroughfare of EDSA, nothing short of a nasty, dispiriting affront to the very spirit of those four days of February 1986, when the rallying cry was that of a morality play to manifest itself: the male tyrant and his phalanx of brute force trounced by the sheer strength of the female emancipator and her army of determined, valiant citizens. To insist on the symbols of heroism for the dictator erodes the bedrock of heroism that belongs rightfully to the people.

History, after all, as scholar-historian Eric Hobswan says, is about the aggregate of “histories – of ordinary men and women.” EDSA was a bright shining moment for the nation, where people from all walks of life laid a claim to greatness because they were integrally part of a larger cause of freeing themselves from bondage. Ultimately, that is how history will have to be narrated or read, from the accounts of ordinary men and women and their collective converging and understanding of the struggle they helped wage, the inspiration they embraced, and the spirit they were moved by.

History, as such, will have to be written from the spaces of human freedom, where ordinary people claim an ownership to its own recalling, writing and reliving. And no attempts at revisionism from certain quarters can stand up to that forceful reality.

The field and processes of democratization that came with EDSA 25 years ago are, of course, hardly dichotomized into binary realities of light and dark, good and evil. If there is anything that we have been witness or complicit in over the last quarter-century, it is that the democracy we won back was not a finished product but an open-ended proposition. Just because the glorious promise of EDSA has remained in many respects unfulfilled ought not diminish the magnitude of its meaning in the shaping of a national mythology of freedom and democracy. Just because grinding poverty, deep conflicts and widespread corruption continue to bedevil us and restrain us from being propelled towards heights of national progress does not mean our “histories” of EDSA are any less meaningful or ennobling.
As we gather in commemoration along the historic stretch of a national highway to mark the greatness we found in ourselves in 1986, we return to writing our proud, common and individual “histories” (no less made pertinent with the Internet Age of the Facebook-Twitter and the blogosphere) that will serve to define the journey of a nation for the next 25 years.

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