A Harvest of Sorrows

by Gutierrez Mangansakan II

"It was a girl."

The women are huddled in front of a bamboo pole, their bare feet caked in mud
from last night's downpour, whispering among themselves, when I arrive in the
evacuation center. It is nine o'clock. The sun is already high in the sky.
"Aday. It was a girl."
They mutter, their heads shaking, stares fixed on the ground. They become silent
as soon as the truck stops in front of them." They are here," I hear a familiar voice,
Ayesha’s voice, the social worker whose task is to supervise relief operations in this
remote village. "Come inside," she waves at me. She is standing under an enormous
blue tent, which for the past three weeks has been her home and office.
"We brought several sacks of rice," I point to the truck as I walk towards her.
"I'll ask somebody to bring them in," she tells me." What happened?" I
ask her.
Ayesha tells me the story. There was a woman who gave birth at the crack of dawn.
One of the refugees. The child was premature. Stillborn. Fleeing their village three days
on foot was too much for her. That could have induced the early contraction. Aday. Baba
pan panem.
Ayesha worries that the refugee woman's husband does not know yet. He did not
return to the evacuation center last night. It must be the rain. It poured heavily throughout
the evening. He went back to the village to check their house yesterday morning together
with the other husbands. Harvest is only ten days away. It is here almost the husband
told his wife that he wanted to have money in time for the birth of their child. The rice
field was beginning to turn golden when they heard the droning of the military choppers
two weeks ago. But the husband said the conflict was far from their village. "It will pass
like before," he tried to placate his wife and mother-in-law. And now his family is in an
evacuation center in this unfamiliar village, together with hundred other families, bringing
with them only the barest essentials in their rush to make an escape when bombs started
falling from the sky. His daughter is dead. He still does not know the news.
"You may be hungry by now," Ayesha says as she sets the table. There is grilled
mudfish. I look outside the tent. There are hundreds of people in the back yard. They are
refugees who have fled their homes-like the woman grieving her dead child- taking
shelter in this village since fighting started two weeks ago.
 Nobody knows for certain which side started the recent spate of violence. When
the peace negotiation between the government and the Muslim rebels bogged down in
June, it was almost certain that this was going to happen. The agreement would have
paved the way for the creation of a large autonomous region that allows the Muslims
greater freedom to practice their faith, and with it systems that will shape the future that
they long for. But some politicians, mostly scions of settler families from the North, cried
fowl. They claim that they were not consulted about the provisions of the agreement.
After all, they have settled in this part of the country for decades. Their parents came
here in packs, starting in the 1920s when they were offered homesteads to populate the
region by the national government. They, too, have rights. Whatever the Muslims claim,
this is home for them as well.
The agreement violated the Constitution. That is what they argued. They went to
the Supreme Court and asked that the signing of the agreement be stopped. They got
what they wanted. The fighting began. "I'm not really hungry," I tell Ayesha. She offers
me coffee instead. Who can eat when everybody else is hungry? When refugees started
arriving two weeks earlier, she had called me." We need help. There are a hundred
families here. Relief has not arrived."
We met five years ago. She was then a social work intern when fighting broke out.
She was assisting relief operations in my hometown. I was a documentarist eager for a
subject. We became instant friends, and when I got her call, I knew she desperately
needed help.
Today she is assigned to this village fifteen kilometers away from the town
center. You have to travel across rough, dusty limestone road to get here. When it rains,
it becomes the gloppy mud you pray you never get stuck in. It is like swimming in a bowl
of thick oatmeal.
I started calling friends to ask for donations. Money, food, blankets, medicines,
anything. Relying on aid from the social welfare department is frustrating. They refuse
to give food aid to refugees in evacuation centers far-flung villages. “They say the relief
goods will only go to the rebels, ' a friend of mine, a veteran journalist who has been
covering the armed conflict since the 1970s. Charity organizations, the type that big
businesses establish to circumvent tax laws, are the most atrocious kind. They assure
you that help is coming in the next hour or so. You relay the good news to refugees who
depend on your strong connection for their supper, only to find out later that help will not
arrive that day because a TV network is too busy to cover the PR stint. The refugee will
get disappointed. You ask yourself: Will they trust me tomorrow?
And now that a child is dead, maybe people from the network will come. A truck
relief goods, too. TV has a penchant for hyperbole, and a dead child, a victim of war,
even, indirectly, might make it to the six-thirty newscast. The United Nations Secretary-
General Ban Ki-moon said that this war had become a serious humanitarian disaster.
According to a CNN report, the World Food Programme had warned of shortages in food
supply in their efforts in Darfur and other places due to the looming world financial crisis.
It will only take a matter of time before relief supply dries up in their efforts here in
Mindanao, where the Muslim insurgency has been going on for the past forty years.
When I drove to the village an hour earlier I remembered the first time I
encountered the war. It was in the summer of 2000, a very long time ago. I returned to
my hometown to shoot photographs. A few weeks after I arrived, the president declared
war against the Muslim secessionists. The war displaced almost a million people. I took
hundreds of photographs of the refugees, and now I chose not to bring a camera, but
just capture these indelible images in my memory: the forlorn faces of mothers trying to
hush their crying infants, livestock tied to a tree with a leash so short they might die of
strangulation, a heap of belongings here and there, smokes billowing from makeshift
stoves which leave me dumbstruck—what could they be cooking?—when help is yet to
arrive.
I arrived only thirty minutes ago. The sacks of rice that I brought are still stacked
at the house's front porch. These images will stick in my mind for a long time. From time
to time, it will wake me up from a comfortable sleep. These images I will never forget.
Aday. It was a girl. I overhear a woman tell her teenage daughter as they pass the
tent. Soon the entire village will hear the news.
The child is dead. Her father does not know yet. He guards the rice field now heavy
with fruit from birds and looters. Under a mango tree, he thinks of his wife and, in his
mind, a child yet to be born. He remembers the worry on his wife's face when he left her
only yesterday. Yesterday was a long time ago. He consoles himself with a thought. My
child will grow strong and study hard and become a professional and live in the city far
from all this. "From a distance, a chopper cuts the silence. Reality sets in again. "They
have sent for the father," Ayesha announces. "They will bury the child after the noon
prayer." I nod and drink my coffee until I choke on the granules that have settled it the
bottom of the cup.
THE MAN BEHIND
Hailing from the traditional family of Maguindanao, Gutierrez Mangansakan is a
prolific writer, educator, art scholar, and award-winning filmmaker. Spending more than
20 years in the film industry, Mangansakan, or popularly known as Tng Man (
pronounced as teng man) is considered as one of the prominent personalities of the
Regional Cinema Movement in the Philippines. He produced many films that received
international accolades. In 2010, Libunan was a finalist in the Cinemalaya Philippine
Independent Film Festival. It was nominated in the Gawad Urian (Critics Prize) for best
film and was selected as the closing film of the Critics Week section of the prestigious
Venice International Film Festival. This movie centers on a Muslim woman who is forced
to marry a man whom she does not know to obey the long-time tradition of a Muslim
family. Other films that take part in Gutierrez’ body of works include the following:
❖ Cartas de la Soledad (Letters of Solitude) (2011), a story about Rashid Ali,
who studied and worked in Europe for 25 years. He returns to Maguindanao to change
the lives of the Maguindanaoans.
❖ Forbidden Memory (2016)- a film that recounts the killing of 1,500 men from
Malisbong and neighboring villages in Palimbang, Sultan Kudarat in September 1974.
There were 3,000 women and children were rescued when the massacre took place.
❖ The Obscured Histories and Silent Longings of Daguluan's Children
(2012)- the film presents the daily struggle of the people with poverty, while they continue
to preserve their traditions despite the coming of the war.
❖ Daughters of the Three Tailed Banner (2016)- the film shows the dilemma of
the Muslim women in the male-dominated society. As a writer, Gutierrez’ works
contributed to more than two dozen of books in the Philippines and abroad. In 2008, he
was a writer-in-residence in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa.
He served as a fellow of the 54th University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop
in 2015. In 2018, he was a mentor of the Asia Pacific Screen Lab - Griffith Film School
of the University of Queensland, Australia.
In September 2019, the Office of the President-Film Development Council of the
Philippines honored Gutierrez for his artistry, vision, and contribution to the development
of the Philippine national cinema