Our failed barricades

Most everyone cries watching Les Miz. Onstage or on screen, the drama touches off the sadness, the sense of tragedy inherent in life and human existence. Someone said online that the movie made her think of the loss of lives in Sandy Hook. At some level perhaps, all human grief is the same.

I saw the Broadway production sometime in the early nineties. It had opened on London’s West End in 1985 and on Broadway in 1987, a span of three years within which our own People Power Revolt of February in 1986 threw out a repressive regime and enthralled the world with its non-violence.

I was in the theater with my sister, Ging Deles. We both wept shamelessly, overtaken by sadness, unable to rise from our seats after curtain call, waiting as the people around us made their way toward the exits, staying in place as we both tried to recover some emotional calm.

I can no longer recall what we said to each other as we walked away from the theater. Surely, our tears expressed our feelings of historic loss, the shared fear that our own struggle for freedom may have seemed to have lost its way and gone a wayward distance from the point.

We had become familiar with the music before seeing the play. The brilliance of stage production enlivened the message with more meaning, immortalizing and making universal the idealism that fires up and calls out leaders of change to take a stand. The music and the lyrics, inspired by the novel written in 1862 by Victor Hugo, popularized for our times a tale of love and loss, along with the confrontation of conflicting principles, cast against the background of the revolutionary cycles in eighteenth century France. The political and personal drama in the musical pivot on the barricades on the streets of Paris in 1832, led by young idealistic students who called out to the workers and the poor people of Paris to join them, as the change they envisioned was for their benefit. But the throngs who cheered them had shut their doors and windows to the battle in the streets. Abandoned by the people in whose name they had launched their crusade, outnumbered by the soldiers and overwhelmed by military firepower, they died as martyrs and heroes. But they gained little for the struggle.

By the time of our viewing, some years had passed since the Philippine events of 1983 to 1986 unfolded, from the funeral march of opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. to the triumphal stand of the people on EDSA, an uprising without guns, ordinary men and women with only their courage and their dreams. But they forced the fall of the regime and democracy was restored.

Despite some dramatic gains, the national mood at the time was overtaken by a sense of drift. I viewed the play, and responded mainly to the words and music about another futile attempt in history to join forces for change. There was cold comfort in realizing that we were not alone in our floundering, perhaps, in our failure. Like the heroes of the barricades, our struggle for change was hobbled by human frailty, what Victor Hugo described as “the enormous fortress of prejudice, of privilege, of superstition, of lies, of executions, of abuses, of violence, of iniquity, of darkness…towers of hatred that must be brought down.”

The movie did not disappoint. It did what only film can do, project character as larger than life on screen, take the viewer up close to every expression of pain and triumph, opening the eye to the nuanced light and shadow, to take in the grandeur of the panoramic view as well as to capture every precious detail of every scene—thus deepening, I think, in a way that the stage musical did not do for me, the understanding of every twist and turn of plot and the various personal journeys in the drama.

Even without the vocal quality required by theater, the music soared and lifted the heart even as it weighed it down with sadness.

As political theater, the showing of the movie Le Miz is timely. Once again, February approaches and along with spiritual season of Lent, we shall move through the distractions of Valentine, Chinese New Year and the start of an electoral campaign. It has become more difficult with each passing year to join in the spirit of the celebration of the milestone, having been assigned to government to mount as an official ceremony, drawing those in public service for whom the 27th anniversary of People Power is just another moment in history.

But the distance from the event may now deliver a new message. Revolutionary change does not automatically happen with regime change, although the latter is required for the former. The French republic spawned its own post-revolutionary terror. The students at the barricades of 1832 and those who held their ground against the tanks on EDSA saw much of status quo unchanged. Note even the quick fade out of the celebrated promise of the Arab Spring. Regime change is only the beginning. We must learn the lessons taught by freedom as we move away from the first steps we take as citizens of a democracy.

The “empty chairs and empty tables” in a song sung by the survivor Marius are a metaphor for lost lives, and like him, we must hold on to the memory of those who passed on as the sentiment may nurture the ideals they lived for. Listening to this song, the words referred more to those who have turned the revolution on its head, perverted the ideals of People Power and made it about themselves and their ambition.

Crusading allies who marched together the countless miles in protest, human rights defenders who stood up for the rights of the detained and arrested, activists who joined arms with nameless citizens—a collective pause might help us recall the point of it all.