A bittersweet world
Komisar, Lucy
gious life). He therefore believes that "purity" must be an be loved; they do not give themselves so much as seek to be integral virtue not restricted to sexual morality. ...
...Catholic church and pri- The family sits and sleeps on the floor...
...piece work, their pay had yielded only seventy-three cents a Horacia Starke, president of the New Alliance of Sugar day, not enough with which to buy their food...
...That, and the atrocities committed by the military...
...Lacson agreed that sugar workers weren't paid enough, but The workers replied that Claparols had hired contract labor- explained, "We can't afford to pay them more...
...When they were and sold it...
...excludes them from profits and in bad times does not equitably The union has signed up 70,000 out of 300,000 sugar share the burden...
...and doomed, for even when he is in a state of grace, they emerge "du plus needless to say, never to be requited, since, all too often in the trouble de moi-meme...
...While Mauriac has powerfully portrayed the kind of Mauraic seemed to feel that as a novelist he was just as possessive (usually maternal) love that would devour its obcompelled to portray sin as his sinners were to commit it...
...said, and I noted the bamboo floor of Villanueva's shack, The sugar island of Negros used to be the country's richest shattered and dangerous to walk on...
...taken...
...The average laborer works only 120 said...
...we have organizing to win better conditions...
...He gets is owned by his wife and other relatives...
...but without faith, which can only his most heartless characters themselves seek to be loved, or come through the intervention of grace, the quest is illusory...
...Thirteen other organizers have been imprisoned and charged with rebellion...
...Eduardo Claparols charged that the NFSW is a Communist BLOOMING PAST front: "They told the people, `In two years time that farm will 'DESERT' & 'VALENTINE'S DAY' be yours.' " He added that Catholic priests involved with the workers were sowing hatred, disunity, and disorder...
...He says the workers eighty cents to a dollar a day...
...Now they sell only seven...
...The mayor was later off growing rice and corn and raising chickens and pigs on killed by NPA guerrillas...
...The grandfathers of some of my workers worked why people join the NPA...
...In Mauriac's and unredeemed sinful nature...
...In the community toilet, bathhouse, and laundry is the river...
...However, the the land...
...The small children here find anything to eat to fill their LUCY KOMISAR is a foreign correspondent who has covered stomachs...
...He said the thongs...
...Starke feels that the peoples' misery has turned them because since our grandfathers, the hacienda has been a pater- into guerrillas...
...Ask land to grow food and "spent thousands buying seedlings...
...Vista says he and the village men were "terminated for retrenchment...
...On the other hand, his most loving transcendence of self is it possible to break out of the circle of characters may also confuse the act of loving with the desire to self-deception, frustration, and despair...
...We're an industry in no longer get work at Hacienda Camili because the owner distress," he says...
...But, he said, "These men eased themselves out of their saying that the workers had permission to sell it, a sale which work because of their behavior, their anti-social attitude to netted them $200...
...On those that condered by violence against union representatives perpetrated by tinue to exist, the union should have the right to demand a fair the military and by thugs hired by the planters...
...Sugar workers are poor because salary of the farm workers has got to be improved...
...sugar workers' union...
...The loophole now are vacant, and a further decrease in planting is expected...
...this can be they are locked into a plantation system that in good times done only through the organization of labor unions...
...NFS W representative Nita The need for U.S...
...In a world of declining market share, there workers in Negros, but efforts at organizing have been hin- may be room for fewer sugar plantations...
...Vista's husband walks three miles before daybreak to Eduardo Claparols, seventy, manages the plantation which another plantation where he cuts and loads sugar cane...
...The average earnings are sugars...
...Here in Negros, 80 percent or more of the Catholic church are Communists, including the bishop," he said...
...on the floor of his wood and thatch hut in a village not far from New Peoples Army (NPA) leaders say they will not lay down Bacolod City, the provincial capital...
...Light came from a vate feeding programs have been started for children in stages small oil lamp: there is no electricity...
...To Mauriac the quest English translation...
...It is the abdication of responsibility on the part of the Farm workers are wary about admitting to strangers any "lords" in this feudal system that has shocked the "serfs" into direct contacts with the NPA guerrillas...
...and pulmonary tuberculosis as well...
...One escaped into business...
...He said he had given them obligation to help families buy food the rest of the time...
...He had built public toilets, bathhouses, and wells which days a year...
...The owner reportedly It is true that the world sugar market has plummeted, from a told them, "You and the union are subversives...
...Three children died in this house," impoverished in the country - malnutrition borders on starva- he said, "two of diarrhea, the other of measles...
...The peasants are not accustomed to dealing with such a A minority of planters accept the union and have initiated crisis...
...The men were Producers (NASP), said, "Our workers are not paid enough forced to collect sea shells and scrap iron to sell, while the because we don't have enough money from sugar...
...Calculated on Some 80 percent of the plantations face financial problems...
...others hope to stave off the NPA insur"Jose of" a certain planter...
...gotten less than the legal minimum...
...he is among some rice, mangoes, and canned fish...
...The NPA fighting recognition that they will no longer be guaranteed what they for farm workers...
...Even when they were working, they said, they had 200,000 tons to the U.S...
...Since late November, the workers, members of the children...
...town of Kabankalan, 50 percent of the funerals are for chil- Vista, a slight woman, is secretary of the local chapter of the dren...
...opposes their membership in the union...
...they do not give themselves so much as seek to be integral virtue not restricted to sexual morality...
...SUGAR ISLAND' OF THE PHILIPPINES A bittersweet world LUCY KOMISAR tion here - and their efforts to improve their conditions have met with severe repression...
...That is why some have turned to union "We are not so familiar with the struggle of the NPA...
...their work...
...NFS W representatplantation...
...need for subsistence...
...She said women marketed vegetables or bread...
...That's nal system...
...For generations, they have lived in virtual feudal situa- reforms, allowing their workers to plant food crops for home tions, dependent from birth till death on the planters...
...He said, "We understand that the poor them- problems, if we see the NPA could help, maybe we might selves must be able to extricate their miserable situation from support the NPA...
...He had told them he could not give them a rice loan built thirty years ago, those little houses were just right," he during the off-season...
...Furthermore, Marcial province...
...Some, like Horacia Starke, feel the system times they hadn't even used family names, but were known as needs basic changes...
...military prepared a warrant charging him with crimes...
...Seven workers share of profits without fear of repression...
...B ACOLOD CITY, Negros, the Philippines...
...They questioned no profit, or it's very small...
...He sat guerrilla mobilization on the sugar island of Negros...
...Rather than depend on bility for the torture and killing of the victims, but was haras- the vagaries of the world sugar market, they would be better sed by the military and had to leave town...
...seek something that will pass for love, by whatever devious Since the loss of innocence is irrevocable, only through the devices they must employ...
...The workers expect us to do gents who are led by members of the Philippine Communist miracles," Lacson said...
...Because the land is a gift newcomer Eugene Coor, the film is unusual from its initial set of God, it is not admissible to use this gift in such a manner of images: shots of its heroine, a thirteen-year-old girl (Anthat the benefits it produces serve only a limited number of nabeth Gish), trying on her first eyeglasses...
...erotic love from its true source and object...
...heard there is an NPA in the mountains...
...debts...
...I met Efren Villanueva, thirty-three...
...The ones who know only farming should farm and was prepared to testify to the killings...
...In the past, we used to do that, Party...
...Roman Catholic diocese...
...a union lawyer decided to keep him safely out of court, and the case was dropped for lack of witnesses...
...The latter quoted "confession" that try as he will to purify his creative passion generally turns out to be the more implacable and stream, his characters stubbornly adhere to the "scum" at the unquenchable, doomed to stray even further in the desert of bottom, "oi plongent les secretes racines de mon oeuvre...
...So he achieved through a singular gift for making sensible the insen- writes in Therdse Desqueyroux, tracing the criminal tendensible and perceptible the imperceptible (rarely done justice in cies of his heroine back to her early life...
...they can't be watched...
...We don't have anything...
...They were tortured, prices, and since the planters are educated people, they can go tied together, and brought to a field to be shot...
...The sugar planters are caught in his claims of generosity...
...Or running water: the of severe malnutrition, but they reach only a fraction...
...The basis is economic injustice...
...A cook testified to the mayor's responsi- plantations into farmland for peasants...
...In other words, they rise out of the most troubled "belong" to the loving one...
...That is the cause of the the recent political events in the Philippines...
...When Pope John Paul II addressed sugar film that synthesizes American subject matter and a planters in Bacolod City in February 1981 he told them: "The quirky European technique...
...bles growing wild on the bank of the river or they only chew They get food, clothing, and medicine from the union and the sugar cane," she explained...
...His love-tormented sinners are actually, if unwittingly, enFor Mauriac the unpardonable sin is to be unloving, yet even gaged in this very quest...
...ils se forment de ce qui subsiste en moi Mauriacian scheme, the loved one bitterly resents having to malgre moi...
...traditionally, loans are considered the owner's had been ruined by the workers...
...The NFSW was founded in 1971 with the help of Bacolod But Diosdado Jambongana, thirty-six, the local union secreCity Bishop Antonio Fortich, seventy-two, and some Catholic tary, told me, "We heard that the NPA is protecting the rights seminarians...
...Six NFSW organizers were murdered in 1984, three were Bishop Fortich agrees: "Land reform should be the first "disappeared" in 1985...
...fulfillment in a self-transcending idealism, the sublime pasYet oftener than not Mauriac meets the demands of moral sion of renunciation...
...He ject, his more typical portrayal is not of the passion for imposdid not attempt to explain this compulsion beyond the oft- sible possession but for impossible submission...
...from a muddy source but from an "amalgame de sensations" Even our childhood is in a sense an end, a completion...
...Straw sleeping mats the rural poor...
...imports may be cut altogether in a few years Cherniguin said fewer than 20 percent of landlords pay the by the use of high fructose corn syrup and other artificial minimum wage of $1.50 a day...
...Many planters the prosperous ethnic Chinese community...
...Much of the film Commonweal: 302...
...In the 1970s, owners sold 1.5 million tons of sugar Rosaria, thirty-three, the union finance officer, said Claparols to the United States at a controlled price, higher than the world had given them only two hectares of land for 200 people, when market price, and sold another million tons at home...
...I can't give them the work...
...On this evening, she shared a meal of Now Villanueva has another problem...
...The government must buy the lands of the planters at fair arrested by the military that same year...
...Milk costs eight pesos [forty cents] a can...
...Negros sugar workers are probably the most were stacked in a corner...
...diarrhea...
...The very quintessence of Mauriac's art for sanctity represents a quest for the lost innocence of love...
...repeated a worker at Hacienda Guinsang...
...It's Hacienda Guinsang sugar plantation...
...oppressive socio-economic and political structures...
...She denied his explanation about the fertilizer, day...
...But there also must were killed and buried on the plantation of the mayor of be a government policy aimed at turning many of the sugar Kabankalan in 1980...
...A sheet of plastic hung their arms until there is a substantial change in the situation of under the flimsy roof to keep out the rain...
...for my grandfather...
...The low The solutions are evident...
...Now there's ers to do their jobs in order to break the union...
...your rice consumption from the union," Vista said Lacson had And he said he paid his workers the minimum wage of $1.50 a told them...
...quota...
...Thirty percent of the lands that were planted with sugar seventy-five cents to a dollar a day," she said...
...one hectare - 2.47 acres - was needed to feed a family of But there is no more U.S...
...Nine youths active in the union were step...
...He said he fired the workers after they stole his fertilizer He said he had done a lot for his workers...
...About forty-five still very seldom we eat fish or meat, and there is no milk for the have jobs...
...viewed Lacson, he wore silver metal-rimmed glasses and a Claparols, a portly man with gray hair and aviator glasses, pink Lacoste shirt, and sat on blue bamboo furniture in an wore blue and white checked bermuda shorts and blue rubber elegant home surrounded by a concrete wall...
...We usually eat only rice and seventy workers laid off from their jobs as laborers on the camote (a sweet potato), casava or banana," she said...
...Marlyn Vista, thirty-two, talked about the situation ive Cherniguin acknowledged the impact of the planters' ecoas she sat cross-legged on the bamboo floor of a crude wood nomic difficulties and the cheating by the Marcos government...
...at the Americans' administered price...
...He offers no justification for novels, the only love that is not selfish, self-deceived, or thus troubling his readers, and only one for his fictional off- ultimately self-destructive is self-sacrificing love, which finds spring: if they did not love or crave love, they would not sin...
...high of sixty cents a pound in the 1970s to a fluctuating four to Planation owner Felipe Lacson, thirty-four, is a member of eight cents today, less than the production cost...
...UNICEF reports there are 145,000 children on the Commonweal: 300 island suffering from malnourishment and often from anemia shanty at Hacienda Camili...
...Belonging and possessing, like depths of what Mauraic conceives to be his own unappeased loving and hating, finally become blurred...
...realism, which are sufficient justification for any depiction of Although for Mauriac all love, however degraded and perpassion that does not merely pander to the lewd imagination...
...their own plots...
...verted, has a pure source in childhood innocence, he never Charles Du Bos perceptively pointed out that the "element ceased to mourn the brief duration of even the purest child's trouble" is indissociable from the most original, poetic, and innocence...
...Written and directed by land is a gift of God to all humanity...
...from the benefits which the land yields...
...There were no chairs - or beds...
...Bishop Fortich explained that his views were of the farmers...
...He sat on a couch in a living room whose glass doors twenty-six families already owed him $2,500 for three years overlooked a backyard swimming pool surrounded by plants...
...former President Ferdinand Marcos, who set up a marketing The story was only slightly different at another Negros monopoly, had stolen the planters' money...
...is that they give work on a piece-work basis...
...When I interare in debt to the banks...
...The victory of a Visits to the sugar plantations offer graphic witness to new popular national government has not ended the people's suffering...
...could be summed up as emotion recollected with urgency...
...If we could not find any solution to our "liberational...
...there are three left...
...23 May 1986: 301 But she noted that even when the planters were prosperous, people, while the others - the vast majority - are excluded they did not share their fortunes with the workers...
...He failed to repair their houses, they the middle...
...Indeed, the church has taken a high-profile position in favor D EsERT BLOOM aims high: it's a richly literate but tense of the farinworkers...
...People are hungry and get sick and die...
...Our destiny, once we begin to isolate it, is like moving qualities of his stories - qualities which spring not those plants we can never dig up with all their roots intact...
...The National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), have been on children get diarrhea because sometimes we eat only vegetastrike, picketing to prevent the entrance of strikebreakers...
...In January, the bodies of Screen three union organizers were discovered in a part of the island with a strong military presence...
...Some- use on vacant land...
Vol. 113 • May 1986 • No. 10
