The burning of Jolo: Why it should be remembered
LAST weekend I decided to take the day off and read a book while staying indoors and recharging, instead of the usual out of town escape.
I rummaged in my room for reading materials, something to keep me company while I was cocooned.
Underneath a pile of papers and books, I saw an old but unopened copy of Criselda Yabes’ “Below the Crying Mountain.”
It was probably given to me as a gift years back by I could not even remember who. Or perhaps I bought it when I had time for book-hunting when I was in Manila.
I decided to spend the whole day reading it since, as the summary at the back cover said, “‘Below the Crying Mountain’ is about a place and event close to the Tausug in me—Jolo and the bloody two days in February 1974 when the entire country was still under martial law.”
“Below the Crying Mountain” was published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2010 after it won a national literary award sponsored by the university.
I felt both excited and cynical about how a journalist, like Yabes, would write a novel about the burning of Jolo.
Tausug stories
The first time I heard about it was when I was in elementary school.
I remember relatives retelling stories of deaths, evacuations and burning of houses that included those that had stood in Jolo for centuries and establishments owned by Tausug and Chinese traders.
I remember them telling stories about how Jolo, repository of the Sulu sultanate’s glorious and powerful past, was flattened in two days by soldiers of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
While listening to these stories, the scenes of horror ran like a movie reel in my imagination—dead and burned bodies on the streets, Moongate (a famous restaurant and rendezvous place in Jolo) razed to the ground, togas and freshly pressed graduation clothes gone in flames that devoured the houses of those that owned the attires and children barely dodging stray bullets and bombs while crouched in foxholes.
Stories told by Tausugs about the burning of Jolo revealed how resilient my people were, how we fought to keep ourselves and families alive and how we would not let the memories die, passing them on from one generation to another so that people would never forget how lives were sacrificed so others could live.
Imperfect
“Below the Crying Mountain” lifted my expectations. I was happy that Yabes did not fail to deliver.
It tells the story of the burning of Jolo through the eyes of a fictionalized character, Rosy France. Yabes navigated the in- tricacies of the historical event through an outsider looking in.
Rosy France was a beauty from Zamboanga City, a belle from a wealthy family with roots from the colorful colonial past of the city’s ilustrados and cacique oligarchy.
She was a colegiala from an old Catholic school for girls when Omar, a young instructor in the school and a Moro with a degree from a prominent university in Manila, plucked her and brought her to Jolo as his wife.
Everything wasn’t perfect in the relationship—a Moro and a Christian union from an elopement, an economically struggling man and a woman from a landed class, a naïve princess and a commander of an armed rebel group that sought to liberate the Bangsamoro people.
Omar would always remind us of Nur Misuari in the book but Omar was not quite the character that portrayed the Maas (leader).
As an outsider, Rosy France was a witness to the brutality that sent Jolo to its knees on Feb. 7 and 8 of 1974. She was there when the Philippine military and renegade Moro freedom fighters turned the city into a battlefield where 20,000 ended up dead and the city reduced to ashes.
The conflict between the conquering Manila government and Moro freedom fighters was captured in the personal struggles of the main characters in the book, their failed relationships and the dreams and daily routine of ordinary people.
Yabes was attempting to humanize the burning of Jolo so we could enter the narrative with a fresh mind and feel the pain of the people.
Burning with Jolo
This is perhaps the power and privilege of literature over journalism and “Below the Crying Mountain,” as a fictional narrative of the burning of Jolo, exploits one of the privileges of fiction over historical narratives—to offer hope from war without providing us a temporary escape common among run-of-the-mill war stories about Mindanao.
After the two-day fighting and destruction, the lives of the characters continued as their personal struggles and problems did not burn with the city. Rosy France was sent back to Zamboanga and reconciled with her mother.
Other characters who survived the burning either went on with their lives or ended their struggles in death, in a lifetime of regret or simply slipping into oblivion.
Rosy France returned to Jolo in the hope that she could rebuild what was destroyed, that, like the other inhabitants of the city who returned after the burning, she thought she could rewrite history or build from what was left behind.
With the exception of historical texts available online and newspaper articles, few literary works were produced on that historical event. How is it possible that writers and artists overlooked this?
Survivors, families of the victims and Tausugs from the Sulu archipelago and Zamboanga peninsula remember the burning of Jolo with either remorse or sorrow. To some, it serves as an inspiration to continue the struggle for justice and the right to self-determination of the Bangsamoro.
What is sad is even Moro artists, writers and those in the creative arts and are active in cultural productions in the region seldom revisit the event. Writers are the keepers of memories, however small and insignificant, bitter and beautiful these may be. Criselda Yabes’ novel has proven to us that the simple remembrance of the past, the hope for a better future is within reach.
Storytellers like Yabes, who’s not a Moro or a Tausug from Sulu, can pledge allegiance to a struggle, armed or otherwise, in reconstructing people’s narratives.
(Editor’s note: Amir Mawallil is a member of Young Moro Professionals Network, the country’s biggest organization of Muslim professionals.)