On a Writing Residency sponsored by the WrICE Program

Flew in from work travels in France - with a quick day-off in Belgium - last Saturday morning (about which I have a few notes to share in a separate post), and flew to Vigan, via Laoag (a historic city in the northern part of the Philippines), the following night. The layover at home was too short, but just enough for me to be treated to a pampering by the husband, to unpack and repack, and recover a bit from the long-haul flights. 

Here now in Hotel Salcedo de Vigan, where fellows are billeted for the next eight days, as part of the first leg of the 2017 WrICE residency program. I moved stuff around a bit in the room to maximize view from the picture window. Now I can write, and my leave from work officially starts. :) #WrICE2017

Vigan City, Philippines

The Movie Oro, Extra Judicial Killings, and Animal Rights Advocacy

Note: I have decided to revive my blog, and use it for lengthier musings about art, literature, writing. This is my first post for the year. 


The movie Oro tells a very important story, and many important points about social justice -- points which are executed with utmost care and intelligence, and with a keen awareness of the social and political backdrop against which the story is being told. 

One of the points made by the film is how systemic injustice and structural violence brutalizes and bestializes people; how it perverts their view of society and of themselves, and how it turns them against each other. Another point is about how power is used to legitimize divorcing concerns for the environment from the concerns of the community, how it is used to turn man and woman against nature. The part of the movie where the armed men harass one of the villagers by taking his dog, and later butchering it for pulutan, is important to show this brutality, and the power relations at work. They did it because they could. The villagers, hungry and fighting for daily survival with the loss of their livelihoods, could do the same -- kill their pets for food, and that would have been perfectly justified -- but they don't. Because they are more humane, more principled than the armed men. This point is emphasised more clearly when it is revealed that some of the villagers were former armed rebels who had put down their guns, availed of amnesty programs, to join the community in managing and making a living of mining their natural resources. In contrast, some of the armed men and fellow rebels of the villagers turned out to have been "recruited" or pirated from their previous roles as defenders of the community, to become paramilitary for the governor and his business partners. These same men would of course later also butcher, massacre, four of the villagers, former comrades, as foreshadowed by the animal killing.

***

Beyond the film, it's hard to gauge whether or not the outrage over the animal killing in (and for),the movie is more intense than the outrage over the ongoing, nightly extrajudicial killings of poor people. It sometimes seems that way on social media, but I suspect it is less so in the real world. I do think that the analogy is not invalid, not false, given the very obvious context in which our lives and our movies are currently being played out. 

There are so many interconnected issues here, and many ways by which they're being viewed. I thought that it is a good sign that people are still capable of outrage, that we have not been numbed by the daily and nightly barrage of images of violent, extrajudicial killings of fellow Filipinos; of the violence in the president's speech and pronouncements, and in his view of women; of the violence that workers and indigenous peoples are subjected to on a daily basis. Is it too much to hope that the outrage over the death of an animal in the filming of a movie will get people to realize that taking the life of, exploiting and marginalizing people, is very, very wrong indeed? Can this outburst of compassion for animals perhaps be harnessed and used to proactively call for an end to the state-sanctioned killings? 

Just wondering.