Loving February
February holds the honor of holding on to the last chill for the cold season. In tropical places like ours, the month breathes wind, which when sustained can assume the threat of an impending storm. but the old observers in us know it is just this month, February, the harbinger of crisp air in the morning, a comfort from nature assuring us not everything about the climate has changed. and that there is a month that may not be festive, but a last assurance before the arrival of a mean March and the cruel april, with the heat we attribute to the said two periods.
And yet February has a past and a calendrical burden.
It was in February, the 4th in 1899, that the Philippine-american War was dated to have begun. The said war, vague and contentious, would be proclaimed as having ended in 1901. That terminus would be the start of the American colonization of the country, the beginning of an errant brotherhood between the two countries as conflicted as it is regularly comforting in times of storms, both meteorological and political.
The mosaic narrative that profoundly impacts the Philippines and the US is such that events disentangling the links between the two appear to have circulated only on days of various years in the month of February. While many historians posit the end of the Philippineamerican war (said to be staged) on the day Aguinaldo was captured, the old general would die on February 6, 1964.
On February 10, 1899, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands” was first published. The poem goes: Take up the White man’s burden–/send forth the best ye breed–/ Go bind your sons to exile/to serve your captives’ need;/to wait in heavy harness/on fluttered folk and wild–/your new-caught sullen peoples,/half devil and half child.
The poem, seen as a celebration of imperial conquest and poetically (in form) pushed for the benefits of colonization to the colonized, appeared in the debates in the American Congress on days leading to the ratification of the Treaty of Paris. The treaty, which became known as the “Treaty of Peace Between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain.” would establish the formal hold of the US over the Philippines. And the rest would be a sweet and bitter history.
Unbeknownst to many, there was a small crisis that we experienced some years ago together with those who had studied in Japan. In our Japanese Studies Program in the Ateneo de Manila University, February used to be a busy month as it was then the Philippine-japan Friendship Month. We organized international conferences on Philippine-japan relations, lectures on Japanese cultures and films. These events were well covered by the media. But as the years went by, a parallel announcement would also take place in newspapers: the memorialization of the Rape of Manila.
In James C. Scott’s overwhelming Rampage, the author opens Chapter 12 with this paragraph: “Japanese marines fanned out the morning of February 9 through Malate, rounding up men, women, and children and marching them to St. Paul’s College, where troops assured residents they would protect them at the Catholic school.” All of them would be herded inside a huge dining hall where “booby-trapped fixtures fell and detonated almost simultaneously. Witnesses would later recall the bright—almost blinding—flash of light that preceded the thunder of explosions.”
Scott writes: “Outside in the corridor the Japanese tossed grenades through the transoms, which exploded and caused more chaos. [Japanese] Marines then stormed the dining hall and opened fire. Others attacked survivors with bayonets.”
A witness “staggered through her feet in time to witness a Japanese marine yank a baby boy from his mother’s grasp and toss him into the air just as one might throw a ball.” Another witness would tell of a Japanese who stuck a baby with a bayonet right in the middle of his stomach. He would later write how he saw “the baby dangling with the bayonet still in his stomach,” and “how the impaled baby did not immediately die.”
In Bayview Hotel (a new structure now still stands in the same place), women were all gathered to be raped. A young girl who was earlier spared from sexual abuse because she told the Japanese soldiers she was menstruating was dragged back to one of the hotel’s upper floors: “She again protested that she was menstruating. He did not believe her, so he took a piece of cotton on the end of his finger, inserted it inside her, and pulled it out.” She was spared but not her sister who was raped so many times she could not remember how many men assaulted her.
On February 12, 1945, some 20 Japanese soldiers led by one officer entered the De La Salle College. Scott writes: “The assault on the brothers and refugees at De La Salle had lasted barely 20 minutes yet in that time Japanese marines had killed or mortally wounded 41 men, women and children, turning this once holy place (some killings happened in the chapel) into a hellhole.”
We stopped celebrating the friendship month in February. The event now happens in the month of July.
For all this, February is turned into the Arts month. It is also the Love month because, come hell or high water, the 14th day is Valentine’s Day. Flowers are priced higher as if inspired by present inf lation. Blooms rare are offered to the beloved; gifts also are given by the besotted. The day, no matter, leaves a space for the bittersweet, but no sadness is summoned for memories of deaths that took place some old, cold Februaries ago.