'Calling Out the Destruction': How De Mesa writes ‘extrajudicial’ journalism
Fewer than a handful of books published in this country leave a smattering of blood on the reader’s hands, shirt, and tongue.
Karl de Mesa’s Calling Out the Destruction is one such book. It takes the extrajudicial-ness of writing history on the fly to the next level – on that vivid yet narrow chasm between journalism and literature – and there conducts experiments on how language can be of service to facts using the gizmos of fiction.
He wasn’t the first to tread the literary tightrope as Filipino greats Gregorio Brillantes and Nick Joaquin a.k.a. Quijano de Manila had ventured into it decades ago.
The difference with de Mesa is that he grabs hold of the savage by the neck and exhibits the creature for all to see without taming its ferocity. He is no snake charmer or lion tamer by any stretch of the imagination. The author’s journalism preserves the wilds in which these creatures roam without fear of the whip or the cage.
And it’s a great deal more necessary to mention here that de Mesa puts to good use not only his long experience in writing, but his network of connections into worlds not even angels dare to tread. Calling Out the Destruction is de Mesa participating and getting actively involved in the lives and times of the subjects he interviews, leaving nothing to either chance or speculation.
One story I found really fascinating was “A Beauty Queen in Exile: How Iranian Women’s Rights Activist Bahareh Z. Bahari Became a Refugee in Manila.”
He begins his tale with an enchanting first line, one too propitious to ignore: “Bahareh Zareh Bahari can remember the scent of apples,” offering a reference to Filipino writer Bienvenido A. Santos’ The Scent of Apples.
De Mesa’s use of odors, quite rare in Philippine letters, brings to mind a literary tool never used sparingly by the famous author of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan.
“She could remember running among those trees, their scent of wood and soil powerful in her memory, underlying it was the sickly, saccharine odor of apples that had fallen from the branches, their pulp open and rotting on the ground,” de Mesa writes.
The story of Bahari echoes the plight of women, especially women’s rights activists, all over the totalitarian world. Those who run afoul of Iran’s Sharia Law found themselves surveyed and punished, even harassed, as Bahari would later recall, via phone texts.
When she was served a Red Notice by Interpol in 2019, with more than enough veiled charges to deport her back to Iran, she started to rally her supporters. Amnesty International also came to the rescue with a statement requesting the Philippine government not to deport Bahari back to her home country.
'Calling Out the Destruction' is de Mesa participating and getting actively involved in the lives and times of the subjects he interviews, leaving nothing to either chance or speculation.
By so doing, Bahari later became a political exile.
“Recently, environmentalist Niloufar Bayani claimed she was subjected to more than a thousand hours of interrogation and torture by the same intelligence branch. All the while she was threatened with death and rape, forced to imitate the sounds of wild animals.
Notwithstanding the aggression and the violence she had to endure, Bahari, like all lovers of freedom, Filipino exiles included, echoes the cry: “What gives me strength is thinking that freedom is close, that maybe tomorrow Iran is going to be free. Then I can go home.”
De Mesa’s stories cut deep. Where he paints an awful picture of Barangay 105 in Tondo, Manila, he spares no stain: “It’s a stone’s throw away from Smokey Mountain, the primary source of income to the community’s approximately 7,000 families who scavenge the hills of rubbish of Manila’s biggest landfill dump for junk and spare parts to resell. At the end of the day, they go home to the slums where the norm is no electricity, no running water, and the usual meal is called pagpag in street cant – a reheated gumbo of leftovers found from the rubbish heaps, like fast food discards or whatever the restaurants had thrown out.”
In this hellhole made more debilitating by this ongoing threat to health and one’s confidence, the dream of a library was born. One may think it irrelevant to build a library in a community where food and medicine and jobs should be primary considerations. Not to Remy Cabello, one of few daycare workers interviewed by de Mesa.
“The value of a good library, coupled with a literary program, extends to more than just kid scavengers being able to read a pop-up children’s book in Cabello’s opinion. ‘I have also observed that criminality in our community has been reduced.’”
Calling Out the Destruction will hardly be complete without de Mesa’s blow-by-blow accounts of one of his favorite sports: MMA or mixed martial arts. In one of his stories – “Free Fight in the Far East: A Brief History of the Violent Art of Brazilian Luta Livre in Manila” – de Mesa delves deep into full contact fighting as only an MMA practitioner can.
Just to give you a whiff of what some practitioners of the art call “dirty fighting,” de Mesa writes: “Brazil’s violent art has an equally violent history, most of it stemming from the feud with jiu jitsu and its primary proponents in Brazil, the Gracie family.” The art eventually found its way in Manila where affiliate gyms in Quezon City, Cavite, and Cainta can be found.
What could very well be ironic is the fact that the author who calls out the destruction is a practitioner of some of the most violent fighting arts ever to be had. But as any martial arts enthusiast would tell you, there is more to the mastery of facing battle than mere bloody lips, broken bones, and bruised knuckles. We all talk of life as a continuing struggle, more so in times when freedom is seized and human dignity ignored.
To de Mesa, a story once told itself faces struggle – to be believed or ignored – with only the heart of the author dictating its fate.
Sans the risk of being melodramatic, life lessons can be learned here. As de Mesa stressed: “The tombs of many men approaching middle age must be littered with the epitaphs of ‘he tried to take on too much, went too hard, too fast, too soon.’ You can only question yourself so many times after gassing out and feeling like your heart’s about to burst. After tapping out countless times, so the lessons sink in, and you can execute techniques under the stress of battle.”
And this is where de Mesa’s storytelling becomes extrajudicial – shorn of the laws of man and nature. This is where he brings home the idea of struggle in the courtrooms of literature. To de Mesa, a story once told itself faces struggle – to be believed or ignored – with only the heart of the author dictating its fate.
“And everyone travels at his own space,” he concludes, “to the dictates of his own spirit.”
In a nutshell, what de Mesa is saying is that during battles, one must show up, regardless of the pains and countless losses, to be counted.
