Why it can’t just be about Imelda and her

The goal seemed simple enough: Al Jazeera news anchor Veronica Pedrosa was coming home to the Philippines to find out why no one paid for the Marcos regime’s atrocities. In the process she was seeking answers to her own family’s history of exile, forced into leaving nation as they were after her mother Carmen wrote a book about Imelda at the time of Marcos’ oppressive regime. Entitled Imelda and Me, the documentary seemed like Pedrosa wanted to set it up as a personal narrative, one that could only be immensely interesting, where the distance from the story is deemed null, the notions of objectivity void. And it is exactly that for the first half of the documentary, where Pedrosa establishes the Marcoses’ atrocities on the levels of human rights abuses and murder, political prisoners and torture, interspersed with an Imelda interview where the latter expectedly denies everything, even swearing that God may strike her right then were she lying. Of course we aren’t that lucky. But Pedrosa seems to have lucked upon this particular interview with Imelda, unscheduled as it was, revealing a version of defensive that seemed ultimately to be out of it: Imelda denials were expected, but her and Ferdinand’s grand “mathematically perfect" plan for the nation, diagrammed and framed, hanging on her office’s walls, the hardbound material on her achievements as First Lady that she leafed through in front of Pedrosa, those revealed such an inanity Imelda’s usually able to – is allowed to? – hide from the public. That this interview was happening in the halls of Congress where Imelda holds office was a tragedy and travesty all in one; that Imelda seemed off-kilter was no surprise. What was surprising though was the fact that Pedrosa seemed ill-equipped to deal with Imelda: in the midst of the latter’s denials, Pedrosa moved from questions about what the Marcoses should be remembered for to asking about Martial Law atrocities, from Ninoy Aquino’s assassination to demanding an apology for what happened to her family. The latter becomes Pedrosa’s biggest problem here because while the personal history with Imelda is what allows her to even begin this documentary, it’s one she doesn’t problematize at all or contextualize properly. This might be why, when the camera was on her as she walked away from Imelda’s office and she tried to grapple with what had transpired, the emotional response was more bemusing than it was touching. But the emotional aspect of talking about Imelda and herself might be the least of this documentary’s problems. Without being critical of the perspective she takes here, Pedrosa ended up putting exile and death, escape and staying within the dangers of nation, on the same plate called victim, no matter that one weighs more heavily than the other. Torture and disappearance and murder cannot but weigh heavier after all, than the luxury that was exile for those who could afford it during Martial Law. Pedrosa’s unique stance in Imelda and Me needed to acknowledge this, at the very least. Yet this personal stake in the narrative, this space of representation, Pedrosa herself easily lets go of, if not loses altogether, as she moves from the Marcoses to the Maguindanao Massacre. Yes, it’s the most jarring of shifts, though not altogether illogical: Pedrosa asserts that part of the Marcos regime’s continuing legacy is warlordism and what better way to connect the latter’s impunity with the former’s violence than to talk about the Ampatuans of Maguindanao and the massacre of 58 in November 2009? Except of course for the fact that this connection can only be affected by and is riddled with, oh I don’t know, about two decades of local history and four presidents, including a regime deemed more violent than Marcos’s in Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s. In the process of keeping this flimsy connection between the Marcoses and the Ampatuans valid, Pedrosa dangerously leaves Arroyo’s regime out of it and carelessly silences history that has allowed warlords and political dynasties to continue to exist across the country. Worse, there’s a very short summary of the history of conflict and insurgency in Mindanao done vis-à-vis the question, will the Ampatuans (and the Marcoses) ever pay for their atrocities? To which the answer, apparently, is no, that’s what democracy is about. Pedrosa says, “The Philippines sees itself as a showcase of democracy in the region, but the truth is that the system is rotten to the core, those guilty of the worst crimes known to humanity go unpunished, and so those crimes continue." Now while this assertion might be valid, it has little value not just because it states the obvious, but because this documentary actually didn’t concern itself at all with the system that it says is to blame. Instead it spent 48 minutes or so talking about people: those who abuse power, those who have suffered in its hands, not quite about the system that puts these people in their places. It spent 48 minutes trying and failing to tie together Martial Law and the Maguindanao Massacre, Pedrosa’s family’s exile and countless victims of mass murder and torture, the past and the present of Philippine politics and governance into anything other than a hasty conclusion. The only thing that made it worse was the fact that in the end Pedrosa goes back to the personal, speaking about how she was inspired by her conversations with victims of atrocities who dare to speak, limning over the fact that speaking about Martial Law and talking about the Ampatuans are two very different things at this point. It might be said that this was a documentary that was biting off more than it could chew, wanting to do two very different stories, but that would be letting it off easy. The premise of the personal, which is to say the premise of being Filipino, was Pedrosa’s entry point into this narrative; the fact that her family was forced into exile by the Marcos regime was the uniqueness this documentary was banking on. This was Pedrosa’s stake in the story, and had it been dealt with more critically, it could’ve gone in the direction of telling a new story about the different victims that a time of impunity creates, without sacrificing one for the other, without having to go all the way to Maguindanao to make a point about the system that allows for violence to continue. But it didn’t, and in that sense Imelda and Me really did become as myopic as that title. – YA, GMA News Imelda and Me was aired starting Sept. 22, 2011 on the Al Jazeera cable channel.