The poor and suffering

This writer, the writer of kinutil, grew up in childhood as a close neighbor to poverty.

He grew up, first, in Dumanjug where they were landowners with tenants who depended on them and to whom they were dependent on. His mother taught him repeatedly to love their tenants and to take care of them especially because they were poor. On a few occasions, she told the story of how her family survived the time of war, sa panahon sa gubat.

Sa panahon sa gubat, she was left by her siblings in their hometown to take care of their aging widowed mother. The male members of the family escaped early to the islands in the farther reaches, away from the invading Japanese army; islands like Bantayan, where the Japanese had less of a presence. And there were times of tension, as his mother remembers, when they themselves had to scamper to safer ground in the high hills.

Her widowed mother, his grandmother, was by the time of the war quite fat and quite incapable of walking up the steep, winding, footpaths of the boondocks. Which was why she had to be carried in a hammock stretched over a bamboo pole and carried on the shoulders of their tenants.

One can only imagine how they must have loved their landlords to have gone through this trouble. And it wasn’t just about carrying his mother’s mother around. There was also the problem of food and water. The Japanese did not allow the planting of food-crops like corn or rice. They, the natives – for that was what they quickly and finally realized they were – subsisted in the hills on root crops and the occasional landang, to go with it. Meat was a rarity, unless one hunted it. And so, for the period of the war, the local aristocracy, such as my mother and her mother were, lived as, with and because, of “their poor.”

This would be an attitude his mother would take with her even after the war. And long after the war, she always took pains to make sure her own children would not be afraid to live “as, with and because” of their tenants: And always, in a situation of a conflict of interest between them and “their” tenants, “their” poor, to side in their favor.

His mother’s lesson is important as he considers it now. And, invaluable not just for him but also for others.

The landowner-tenant relationship is a universal field of conflicting interest for these islands. The more so, the more valuable land becomes here. And people ordinarily reduce it to questions of simple legal ownership: Who owns the legal title to the land? No one remembers at all, that the ancestors of all who live here lived in these lands as farmers long before the concept of legal land titles was ever introduced into the culture.

And certain nuances of this issue are often missed. Such as those related to the question of whether squatter communities burned down by fire should be allowed to rebuild their burned homes without legal impediments. Few consider that if the precedent is set that would prevent squatter fire-victims from doing so, this precedent will only encourage the use of arson as the easy solution landowners employ to recover lands they “legally” own from squatters. Few remember how this was the usual case in ‘70s back when city governments did not yet see the relationship between fires and the land and housing situation of the city.

It is a thorny truth: But the issue of landownership and housing is the core issue of poverty here. For in point of fact, concerns  related to the moral aspects of this issue are seldom ever talked about, issues of the moral culpability of the local aristocracy, the local gentry, the landowning class are seldom ever talked about and sincerely considered. Instead, the arguments often raised have to do with pretentious legal considerations that obviously follow after an historical amnesia.

No one, it seems, remembers the time before the coming of the Spanish when the concept of landownership was a different universe entirely. Few consider how morally despicable it must be to be fated to become a tenant instead of a landowner, rich or poor, educated or unschooled, simply from an accident of history. His mother taught him this: No, you are not well-to-do just because of hard work. You were born into it in precisely the same mindless historical logic that your poor friends become who and what they are. You are not superior.

And who remembers the time of war when all these pretentious demarcations between rich and poor fell apart and all had to rest on each other and the inherent strength of poverty even to survive? Who realizes how those times could, out of nowhere, come again?