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Arlene Babst Vokey is a name from the recent past to many who
remember her as one of the courageous women columnists at the Manila
Bulletin in the Martial Law period. Unlike many of their male
colleagues, this group of women columnists, many of them still at it
in the field of journalism, went close to the edge of and beyond the
era’s restricted and repressed media behavior. As a result they
were fired from their jobs, had their columns shut down and were
left to try other ingenious ways of communicating the state of the
nation’s psyche to the public. But not before being grilled and
lectured by the military guard dogs of the time, a procedure that
did not seem to intimidate them in the long run.
With this background in political history and
professional journalism, it is interesting to come across Arlene
Babst Vokey alive and well and feisty as ever in her recent
publication, Echoes (Benjamin Press, available in National Book
Store). Echoes is a slim book of insightful essays and provocative
short stories that deal with the Filipino universe here or abroad.
(Arlene has been living for decades in Canada).
From the perspective of distance and with a few
visits to the Philippines, Arlene Babst Vokey has looked at her
native land in the eye and come up with past and present scenarios
that reveal the multiple Filipino identities. As she herself puts
it, “Here are Manila’s corporate bosses with their armies of
chauffeurs and nannies; struggling artists, drunken writers,
communist rebels, newspaper publishers, resilient overseas workers,
betrayed wives, panicked lovers, provincial mayors who are targets
of assassination, and Catholic clergymen as dictatorial in their way
as Ferdinand Marcos.” Very much in the picture and playing out
roles that are familiar to us are the Filipinos and part Filipinos,
the people of the Philippine Diaspora, who have left their homeland
to find a living abroad, but who in a sense have never left at all,
being so fixated and oriented to what they have ostensibly left
behind.
In Echoes we have the essays and the short
stories depicting the state of the Filipino psyche with its
overtones and undertones of history, politics, sociology, religion
and a value system that oscillates between Christian mores and
survival imperatives.
There is Patricia de los Reyes, betrayed wife,
who unthinkingly marries a weakling posing as a Filipino macho,
mostly because he is from the class she is familiar and comfortable
with. Not for long, the horse-loving gambler soon stops even the
pretense of working at his family’s business enterprise, takes up
with young girls, and in general proves to be such a pain that
Patricia and he leave separate lives in separate homes. Meanwhile
she is left to become a business success, a lonely icon of a
prominent family and an alienated mother.
Then there is Athena Hesse, a mixed-blood
Filiipina, with a total devotion to her Philippine roots and
Philippine history. A journalist, obviously Arlene Babst Vokey’s
alter ego, she has the luck to be so in the Martial Law era of
censored news and inhibited journalism. She gets back with daring
opinions and critical pieces, stirring debates with her
publisher-friend, General Hermann Grass, who has his own opinions
and way of dealing with the dictatorship—how to view it, manage
it, survive it. General Grass, is obviously Hans Menzi, the
erstwhile publisher of the Manila Bulletin.
In between Arlene Babst Vokey brings on all the
value systems that the Philippine experience has come up with –
from why Athena Hesse is unmarriageable as a journalist, Zen
practitioner, rebel with or without causes, daring experimenter of
love and religion. And how Patricia de los Reyes, convent-bred and
ensconced in her comfortable family’s cocoon, comes to meet real
life face to face, and is seared by her recognition of Reality.
Meanwhile there is the politics, the chicanery,
and the economics of living in the Philippines circa the turn of the
last century and the beginnings of this one.
Arlene Babst Vokey may be talking about serious
themes and intractable problems which in turn make us do our own
take of what ails us. Serious as this is, the essays and short
stories are entertaining and clever. The writer has a sense of
humor, a contagious sense of fun that conveys clever and delightful
insights. Her prose is light, readable and clear which makes the
reader happy to go along with her and be educated regarding history,
current social events as well as one’s self in the world of
today’s Filipino.
miongpin@yahoo.com
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