Book Review: The Story of a Life
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U.G. An Underground Tale: The Life and Struggle of Edgar Jopson
By Benjamin Pimentel
(Anvil Publishing, 2019)
U.G. An Underground Tale: The Life and Struggle of Edgar Jopson by Benjamin Pimentel (Anvil Publishing, 2019)
My generation couldn’t just leave, then, but we had the providential fortune of witnessing the historical people-power revolt in the mid-1980s. The generation before mine had the tumultuous First Quarter Storm, the massive student unrest that rocked the nation on the eve of authoritarian rule in the early 1970s. The youths of those “days of disquiet and nights of rage” fled – to the mountains to join a guerrilla army, or to the underground, U.G. as it was called, for a movement of subversion.
If a millennial were to read about the life of Edgar Jopson, he or she might find it so very odd that a young man, short but fashionable, schooled by the Jesuits but radical in intellectual pursuits, loyal to a childhood love but married to a communist goal, had gone to such an extreme in an era where action and patience were the mode. Social media could have made it a ton easier, but that would probably have made him less of a hero.
To the young ones of today, Edjop – his diminutive name – could be explained in the way that Rey was told about Luke Skywalker in ‘Star Wars,” to simplify the image of an underground figure of that era. There were other students like Edjop who took their own path to the underground and died fighting for their cause.
Edjop’s story will have to be read in a biography written by a friend and colleague, Benjamin (Boying) Pimentel, who is of the same generation as mine. Boying was a young journalist in the 1980s when he wrote his first book on Jopson’s biography (Edjop: The Unusual Journey of Edgar Jopson) and it has since evolved into editions broadening the picture of life in the underground, at a time when various forces came together with a single aim.
Edgar Jopson, at a rally in Plaza Miranda (Source: "UG: An Underground Tale: The Life and Struggle of Edgar Jopson" by Benjamin Pimentel)
U.G. An Underground Tale: The Life and Struggle of Edgar Jopson (Anvil Publishing) is out again this year, giving us a breath of what went wrong in the underground’s last daunting years. Reading it again felt like traveling back in time with the familiar names to faces of the National Democratic Front that sought to overthrow the dictatorship of the late Ferdinand Marcos. There were scenes that Boying had pieced together behind the divisiveness among university students marching in the streets during those violent and eventful days in January 1970 known as the First Quarter Storm – less than three years before Marcos declared martial law.
There was Edjop pulled to radicalism in the aftermath, from being a moderate that others had ridiculed. He was a model student for the Ateneo de Manila school, rising high to being elected the leader of nationwide student organizations. When he was helping labor unions, it was then, according to Boying’s timeline, that Edjop shifted to the far left, discarding his middle-class background of a family that made money in running a grocery store. So there was that iconic scene in which the young Jopson sat before Marcos in a meeting at the presidential palace demanding the president to put in writing that he would not prolong his term. Marcos had angrily rebuffed the kid, “Who are you to tell me what to do? You’re just a grocer’s son.”
From then on there were the dark years of the 1970s: we were just in grade school. When we reached the state university in the 1980s, the campus in Diliman remained the center of the tempest. In our sophomore year, we heard about the death of Jopson in the hands of the constabulary in far Mindanao, where Edjop had then organized a Communist collective for the undertaking to overthrow the government. The following year, Marcos’s political rival Benigno Aquino was assassinated, spelling the beginning of the end that culminated in a military-backed people’s uprising in 1986.
“To the young ones of today, Edjop – his diminutive name – could be explained in the way that Rey was told about Luke Skywalker in ‘Star Wars,” to simplify the image of an underground figure of that era.”
In our last year in school, Boying was the editor-in-chief of the prominent campus newspaper Collegian. We were going to be journalists, witnessing the revolt straight out of school. I would find out just recently that neither of us showed up at our graduation ceremony. We were immediately catapulted into the ringside view of history.
What happened to the Communists and the middle forces that it had swayed to get rid of a dictator? How did the underground break up and split between those who still supported the party chairman and those who rejected him? What was the bloody purge all about, one that had begun in Mindanao? What was the secret that shocked the followers of the movement? All these are woven into the life journey of Edgar Jopson, the answers trickling into spaces and filling in some gaps of our long political narrative that has been revised (by pro-Marcos elements), or has gone stale for the generations that followed.
Jopson was one of many young bright people who brought romance and fierce ideological commitment to the underground movement for a radical change. His death, like the others, too, spelled the dearth (or absence) of courageous leadership of the future we now live in. If something has to give in in the current political climate, one only has to look to the past and pluck the courage from those who came before us. And we can read about it from what certainly was the unusual journey of the young Edgar Jopson. He would have been 71 years old. He was 34 when he was killed.
Criselda Yabes
Criselda Yabes is the author of "Below the Crying Mountain" set in the rebellion of the 1970s in the south. It won the UP Centennial Literary Prize in 2008 and was nominated for the Man Asian Prize in 2010. She is currently based in Manila.
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