beautiful: the bitter life
after i slept the entire day (i'm in hibernation mode this weekend; will officially start official thesis work this week), i dragged myself to my pc to check mail and reply to some. and in my routine of checking out news websites, i came across this beautiful retrospective of hacienda luisita at gma news. check out www.gmanews.tv and click on bitter life: hacienda luisita revisited by jes aznar.maybe beautiful is not the most apt word to describe how jes aznar repainted hacienda luisita, but rather poignant. in a 52-slide flash presentation, he stirs you with photographs (beautiful at that) of how the workers managed to live every day while in the hands of the tyrant cojuangcos, and makes you remember how, despite having won the battle over the hacienda, the war is still far from over.
i really don't really know how to describe how i feel when i see the photos. maybe it's the music, or how the military trucks were arranged on one of the photos that makes suffering in itself, in a perverted way, a beautiful form of resistance. i say beautiful more times in this post that in anything because the photos make it look so beautiful that you want to be there, but you very well know that it's far from it.
i guess the best form of beauty is the kind that agitates you, and rouses you from the slumber of complacency to act, fight, and create something new. in the case of jes aznar's photographs, i suddenly remember how i felt when i heard the news of some 9 farmers (including a couple of children) were killed while military troops were trying to disperse the rallyists. and it makes me guilty that i'm not in their position. that my material circumstances don't allow me to feel their pain up close. that everytime i feel something that vaguely resembles how they felt for so long it sometimes feels so fake, because then when i feel it, and it gets a rise out of me, i'll get a text message that tells me to take an air-conditioned cab from covering a morayta rally so i could meet my mom at the podium because i would have to go home with her. because really, just my covering rallies entails a great deal of negotiating her and my dad, which makes me feel bitter about not being able to "transcend my inner contradictions" as much as i want to, or can.
maybe that's why i fought to keep this thesis. so many times my parents convinced me to change topics because they're scared of what might happen to me when i finish this, have it bound and have everyone in the college read it. so many times i was offered a different topic, something that's way easier and could get me in a couple of cocktail parties, or let me do a couple of days off doing shopping in my spare time. so many times i felt this topic was getting me nowhere. so many times my parents would make me feel like this topic will get me nowhere.
but i made a promise to the victims, to their families, to my thesis advisers (one who suggested me the topic, the other my official thesis adviser) who both were victims of the system that bore personalities like him. i made a promise to the stakeholders of this issue. i made a promise to myself, that once and for all, i won't fail them.
so many times i failed different people in my life, simply because i felt powerless. maybe that's why i hold such high regard to this thesis, to this time that i'm doing it. because this is the best time that i can prove to myself that i'm not powerless before my own failures. that i am equally as capable of not failing myself as i would.
that i won't fail myself this time. no, not this time.
thank you, jes aznar, for making me feel this rise again in my spirit.
i know agitation should be something that's within, something that's easy to invoke in one snap. i think i've invoked mine.
i'm charging on.
xananananananananana
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