The Wily Filipino

The Trauma of EDSA.

The conference I attended over the weekend -- in particular, UC Santa Cruz scholar Sherwin Mendoza's comments on Linda Ty-Casper's Dream Eden (which I haven't read) -- made me think about EDSA and trauma. Mendoza argued that narrative arcs in novels from what he called "the EDSA genre" followed similar structures, from euphoria to disillusion, which he described as a "fall from utopia."

I like to think of it as an "atopia," if there is such a word. What happened in February 1986 is constantly characterized as creating a singular, atypical moment of social solidarity, perhaps in the way that Durkheim imagined it: the free sharing of food and water, the seeming obliteration of social differences, the pervading sentiments of oneness with the crowd -- in short, a sense of this historical rupture as being outside of time and place. Think of it as the ecstasy of revolution.

Or, in this case, "revolution:" things sour quickly, and in each novel -- indeed, every single year -- the Filipino public is painfully reminded of this traumatic loss, the government's attempts to rein in or at least renarrativize such uncontrollable memories notwithstanding.

This is a different structure of the traumatic event as Freud conceived it: here, the loss happens afterwards, in a protracted non-eventful decline quite unlike the swift act we normally associate with trauma. In this respect it is closer to something like melancholy, resulting in a diminution of the melancholic's ego (or the Filipino ego). As Freud writes:

In melancholia the relation to the object is... complicated by the conflict due to ambivalence. The ambivalence is either constitutional, i.e. is an element of every love-relation formed by this particular ego, or else it proceeds precisely from those experiences that involved the threat of losing the object.

You say you want a revolution, but -- well, you know...

But there is a sense in which EDSA can be seen as precisely reproducing the paradigmatic structure of trauma. By the time "EDSA II" (and the intervening coup attempts both before and after) rolled along, the happy communitas of the original had dissipated, owing, as Courtney Johnson put it, to the difference between the spontaneity of the first and the forced busing of the second (and the "third"). People Power had settled, at this point, into a predictable, reproducible modularity.

One could then understand the EDSA Revolution -- and not just the squandering of political opportunities which happened afterwards -- as a traumatic event in and of itself. Now the great anxiety of the Filipino public is perhaps the frightening possibility that "EDSA" -- now pre-approved, sanitized for one's protection, and packaged with its own narrative template -- could return as an uncontrollably repeating event, forever haunting the nation, infinitely reproducing as EDSA III, IV, V and its sequels thereafter.

Posted by the wily filipino at April 12, 2004 09:13 AM