BAYI-LINES | What the body remembers
In the face of perceived threats, especially from entities that loom many times larger and more powerful than myself, I don’t fight or take flight.
Instead, I fawn.
It was a strategy I learned as a child in dealing with hostile dogs in the neighborhood, later applied to vigilante heads or mad dictators. Don’t threaten, make yourself small, invisible. Walking, keep your normal pace, I remember my father’s advice. Don’t let them smell your fear or they will grow more hostile.
But that morning in October 2011, I could not bring myself to fawn. The guy in front of me had an M-16 and his breath smelled of liquor. He was wearing a soldier’s uniform and I looked at his name tag. Are you going to board the van, he asked, smiling, trying to open a conversation. I could not remember now how I replied. But I remember weighing the chances of boarding the van as a stranger among strangers; thinking of the long stretch of isolated highway that separated this remote town from the next town. I started calculating–the chances of things happening in between those isolated cliffs and mountains and decided it was a bad idea that I decided to go home alone.
I had just left the Mother of Perpetual Help Parish, whose parish priest, the Italian priest Fr. Fausto “Pops” Tentorio, was murdered the day before. He just finished his run around the compound, his morning exercise, and was about to board his car when he was shot by a gunman inside the Church’s compound.
This happened while a flag ceremony was going on in a school just across the compound.
Fr. Pops laid sprawled under his vehicle that the convent’s cook first thought he was just fixing his car’s engine when she first saw him.
Since he was identified with the Left, the whole place was teeming with policemen, National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) agents, soldiers inside and around the compound. I spent the night interviewing people, slept inside the room where they kept the shattered glass of the priest’s car window, sucked in the whole story as I slept.
In the morning, I stubbornly insisted on my independence as a journalist by deciding to travel back to the city alone.
But as soon as I walked out of the Church compound, I saw the guy with the long firearm following. As I neared the place where the van bound for the city was parked, the guy asked where I was going, where I had been. I might have shown him my press ID, although at that time, I was already keenly aware that the press ID was only good in certain places, that there were certain places in the country where showing it would instead turn yourself into a target.
While I was deliberating with myself, I was suddenly conscious that I was hungry and spotted the sari-sari store nearby. I asked the owner if she had a hot cup of coffee and maybe something less acidic, a Milo or an Ovaltine, perhaps. As soon as I took the first sip of the hot liquid, rivulets of sweat came running down my face and neck. I did not know whether that was from hunger or fear. “You look healthy,” said the guy who continued to hover around. When I knitted my brows, he said, with a smirk on his face, that the fact that I was sweating came to show that I was healthy.
In my mind, I searched for creative ways to get rid of the guy without inviting his suspicion. I asked the storeowner if they were also selling breakfast or even cup noodles in the store. She apologized because she was not selling any. So I grabbed the chance to say, convincingly, ah, ok, I think I have to look for breakfast first. Maybe they have breakfast here somewhere, and the soldier, unaware that I was just looking for an exit, finally left me alone.
I hurriedly went back to the convent. I was a relative stranger to most of the people there but I politely asked if somebody was going back to the city that day. I decided that it was better to go with a group instead of going home alone. Someone said that a group of RVM sisters were on their way back to the city after breakfast and that I could possibly go with them.
When the sisters and I boarded the van, I scanned the faces inside. I can’t tell how it happened but I seemed to have developed the ability to read faces in a room and alert myself to danger. As the van started to fill with passengers, I was relieved that everyone inside was safe. But just when the van started to go, a person wearing a brown vest climbed aboard. I immediately sensed he was different from all the rest. There was something dark and heavy about him, descriptions not really that acceptable for us journalists, but it was unmistakable.
I told the friend about this but he said it was just my imagination. “You’re a nobody. They won’t waste precious bullets on your head,” he said. But this happened during the years when I’ve been covering a lot of extrajudicial killings of political activists and each story had seeped into my mind like water in a sponge.
Because it was I who wrote the narrative, I had to check on the tiny details so each story came to me as vividly as if I were living them. Through the years, I can still remember the 13-year old son who was in his school uniform, brushing his teeth, when alleged state forces came to massacre the entire family in their home somewhere in Sultan Kudarat. His father was a Blaan fighting for their ancestral domain and was reported to have joined the communist New People’s Army.
An eight-year old boy in a remote village of Arakan, Cotabato who witnessed how his father had struck a military officer with his bolo, and in turn, was felled by bullets from a group of soldiers. Another father and son, peasant activists in a remote area in Davao City, were doing carpentry work in their house when killed by armed men, among others. Their stories stay in my body and I carry them with me.
As clinical psychologist Rhodora Gail Ilagan said, trauma bypasses the narrative memory but is stored in the body. As one returns to the newsroom, the story becomes the priority and the journalist disappears. One goes into a fight or flight mode as one races against the deadline, checking on facts, writing the narrative of the story. In the midst of the adrenaline rush, there is no time to remember what happened in the course of getting the story. The face of the guy who followed us inside the van, the moment when I got off the van with the sisters was momentarily forgotten but was stored inside the body.
But on March 2 and 3, Bayi-lines, the latest of the Safety Training Series of Media Impact Philippines (MIP), dealt with these stories that lay buried deep in the minds and bodies of 15 women journalists in Mindanao.
With psychologist Ilagan, Mindanawon journalist Vina Araneta, artist and creative arts therapy practitioner Amanda Fe “Mandy” Echevarria and Kandiletita, women journalists dug those stories long buried in their minds, surfaced them and got in touch with the part of themselves that lay buried underneath their bylines.
By taking the much needed pause, we begin the process of cleansing, recharging and energizing ourselves to meet the challenges that journalism faces both in the present moment and in the future.
Aubergine is the pen name of a Mindanao journalist who joined Bayi-lines)
[BAYI-LINES is part of the Safety Training Series of the Media Impact Philippines project implemented by the Mindanao Institute of Journalism (MinJourn), publisher of MindaNews, in partnership with the International Media Support (IMS) with funding from the European Union and the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark.]
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