{"id":5701,"date":"2025-08-04T11:00:18","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T03:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/?p=5701"},"modified":"2025-08-04T13:03:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T05:03:01","slug":"from-the-memories-of-manili","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/from-the-memories-of-manili\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Memories of Manili"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laurehl Onyx B. Cabiles<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Riding four borrowed habal-habal, high school boys skipped class
\none sunny afternoon, traversing the outskirts of their town, passing
\nold trees, rough roads, and lonely houses before reaching Manili:
\npeople were circling around the drivers even the women
\nwearing hijabs were present. They stopped
\non a hundred-meter-long concrete road, hearing
\nthe roar of the engines from the modified motorcycles.
\nThe street was filled with exclamations of the crowd, joined
\nby the teenagers, when the motors dashed
\nto the finish line. They went home right after, driving
\nas fast as the racers, bringing this story home<\/p>\n

Inside a cramped-up room with three double-deck beds, during
\nthe beginning of the presidency of Marcos Jr., a boy
\n<\/span>from that Manili trip will be a bed-spacer in that rented
\nspace in his college years at USM, accompanied
\nby his Maguindanaon friends. Some nights, when the schedule chooses
\nto be kind, at a dinner table, little gatherings will arise:
\nfrom asking about the Quran to bartering half-truths
\nand inherited beliefs, stepping into each other\u2019s world, bridging
\nthe gap, then the topic will sway to the horrors they heard
\nand saw, moving from local to foreign, spanning
\nthrough the present and the past, from Kabacan to Gaza
\nto Congo, zooming back in Palimbang
\nIn Manili, on June 19, 1971, when our country was still
\nin the grip of Marcos Sr., a meeting should have happened,
\nbut the Ilaga threw grenades inside a mosque, slaughtering
\nmore than seventy innocent people, turning
\nthe place for showering of blessings into a bloodbath.
\nAnd even when they buried the dead on the next day
\nfor the ones who will carry the memory, after
\nthose gruesome hours, scenes of body parts sticking
\nto the ceiling and fellow survivors wading along
\nthrough knee-deep of warm blood to find pieces
\nof their loved ones among the submerged will be engraved
\nin their minds. The place and their memories wait for the boy<\/p>\n

But right now, the boy is with his friends in front
\nof the store where they always hang out, obliged
\nto listen to his buddy\u2019s stories, who is painting
\nhis grandfather as a mythical figure, whose skin
\ncannot be penetrated by bullets, or guns would not even fire
\nat him because of his anting-anting, and using only a sundang
\nto eliminate his targets. As the clouds eat the moon, the friend\u2019s
\ntales continue\u00a0 like the telenovela Ang Probinsyano while
\nthe boy is still glued to his spot<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laurehl Onyx B. Cabiles Riding four borrowed habal-habal, high school boys skipped class one sunny afternoon, traversing the outskirts of their town, passing old trees, rough roads, and lonely houses before reaching Manili: people were circling around the drivers even … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5701"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5741,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5701\/revisions\/5741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}