Taming People’s Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their Contradictions by Lisandro E. Claudio (review)

How do memories weave into the fabric of contemporary reality, and how does an interpretation of an event, as opposed to the event itself, become a site of political contestation? In Taming People’s Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their Contradictions, Lisandro Claudio examines memories of the EDSA Revolution not to contribute to historical knowledge of what occurred on those fateful last days of February 1986, but to make sense of memories and memorials as competing national narratives and fraught mythologies that somehow cast their dark shadow on the acrimonious Philippine politics. He rethinks the connections between the Philippine leftist movement and national politics by situating this interaction in the plane of mythology, narrative, and discourse. Accordingly, the book is divided into two main parts. The first part examines the People Power Monument and the Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Monument of Heroes) and argues that these monuments occlude the history of the leftist movement, specifically, their importance in the anti-Marcos struggle. The second part studies the more disturbing side of the traditional People Power narrative, in particular, its connection to patronage politics and nationalist discourse. The book concludes with the tragedy of People Power and how it has spawned the government of Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino III, which is not entirely different from “Marcosian politics,” and the communist movement, which fails to provide an alternative narrative and politics (23–25).

For Claudio, who has taught political science at the Ateneo de Manila University, this project of situating the leftist movement in nationalist politics is both personal and political: personal, as his family was hunted down by the Marcos dictatorial regime and continually persecuted by the rightwing elements of the Corazon “Cory” Aquino administration and then later by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). He wants to understand how the EDSA People Power narrative displaced the stories of his parents and their comrades, or how popular Philippine histories downplayed the role of leftist movements in the anti-Marcos struggle. This project is also political: transcending the narrowness of his attempt at rediscovering his roots, he immersed himself in Katarungan, an NGO affiliated with Akbayan, a leftwing movement and party-list group established by former CPP members and other non-CPP activists. He interviewed Akbayan-affiliated community leaders in Hacienda Luisita, owned by the Cojuangco families that include no less than former president Corazon “Cory” Aquino, and made sense of his family’s and Akbayan’s cynicism with the Cory government, the CPP, and the New People’s Army (NPA). For Claudio, Hacienda Luisita farmers were, like his family, not only suffering from landlord exploitation, particularly from the Aquino family, but also from the CPP’s centralization of power and instrumentalization of people’s tragedies and real stories.

There is no problem with this book’s main assertions and arguments if only this project were an autobiography. After all, integral to the discursive methodology of memory studies is an account of the author’s situatedness and partiality, and Claudio’s project is unabashedly personal and reflexive. Autobiography would have lent itself properly to this project and its methodology since the book deliberately avoids a positivist or objectivist’s historical critique and has no intention or illusion of being a grand narrative. As Claudio would say, there is a need to account for our postmodern condition, or the inherent brokenness of reality, and the multiplicity of interpretations of events (18–22). To read Taming People’s Power as an autobiography is to read it as a supplement, a dangerous supplement in the Derridian sense that jars our conventional reading of history. For deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida, a supplement is an inessential extra that adds to something complete in itself, and since ironically what is complete in itself does not need additions, then the supplement seemingly recreates what has been created and makes things contingent, fluid, and open-ended. Autobiography as a supplement and as...