Remembering Beng: An Atenean Who Became a People’s Poet

On a hot summer day like today, exactly a year ago, a girl went up to the mountains, lived with the masses and learned their struggles. She was just 22, all rosy, with a bright future ahead of her, as people would always want to put it.  

By Dayami Flores 
Bulatlat.com

Campus writers rally for justice for slain colleague Beng Hernandez

She was an Atenean, a literature student, a young journalist, a poet -- needless to say, compassionate. She had pains, lots of it. Growing up in a family ripped by class contradictions and the painful contradictions of life surrounding it -- having a father coming from an upper class family who married someone of the lower class, her mother, life must be tough for her and she had to grow up with the grandparents. She grew up quite ordinarily.

Yet, Benjaline “Beng” Hernandez was no ordinary person. What kept her apart from the preoccupations of her generation soaked in “electromedia escapism” is the part of her that made her follow her passions.

At that time she was still a college student in Ateneo, the militant youth movement was already burgeoning. As some would put it, as has always been, Ateneo is a fertile ground for activists. Why is it so is a question that deserves asking for it could help us find out about the consciousness that shaped her and made her an out-and-out activist later.

In the very first poem she wrote in Arakan Valley with the introduction “written in a cold August night,” she spoke of her former school as that, undoubtedly, of the elite. She wrote:

And Beng once treaded the corridors of that school, tarried around with both the rich and the “struggling,” those who were, like her, also had a hard time putting through school.

“Kolehiya na may kaya”

While everyone was forced to live the lifestyle of a “kolehiyala na may kaya,” she was confronted with the reality that she could hardly live with the sum sent by an overseas contract worker aunt -- another contradiction that she had to deal with.

Little wonder then that Beng, as her activist colleagues would put it, was not difficult to convince to join marches and demonstrations that slammed the school for the skyrocketing tuition fees and underpaid teachers.

She felt poverty right in her very gut and she felt it more when surrounded by her filthy rich classmates. Aching to understand society further, Beng finally went out of the university and decided to learn more about the world she was in.

Apart from that, she saw poverty present everywhere. There were the workers demanding just wages from owners who are capitalizing on their labor; there were the urban poor trying to frustrate attempts of demolition of their shanties; their were peasants struggling for lands and yet the political decisions rendered by the state continue to pronounce policies in defense of the oppressive economic order. With a country of almost five million jobless, a person like Beng could not have missed the necessity for people to bond together and do something to arrest the economic order that perpetuates the oppression. She wanted to learn, and she learned well. And so Beng did choose to march with the oppressed majority on the streets, dissenting against anti-people policies.

Contradictions

Beng ached to know for herself further why these contradictions exist. And she moved on to know for herself why. She was one of the best and bravest students there ever were.  While still a student, she volunteered for the human rights alliance Karapatan.  There, her eyes were opened to more realities. Beng learned about rampant killings by military and paramilitary elements. And she wondered why those killed were always the poor, the peasants, the landless and the perpetrators were always the private armies of landlords and the military with connections to the ruling class.

Beng saw these and she searched for more. Not only did she choose to deal with the families of those killed by the military for senseless reasons. She was with them in times when they demanded justice for their loved ones. Beng walked with them, even if it meant a great deal of sacrifice for her.

When there were needs for Karapatan volunteers to go out to the areas for fact-finding missions, she was always there with a ready “Yes, I will go!” It was at that time when she heard of peasants massacred in Tababa, Arakan Valley.

Reaching Arakan Valley, one would think, Beng must have really fallen in love with the place.  It is beautiful and yet dangerous.  Arakan, at first glance is a very contested place. Somewhere in its lowlands lie vast ricefields owned by the few rich. Buildings at its foot range, the city of Kidapawan, is host to foreign-funded development projects with buildings sprouting everywhere.

In its logged-over hinterlands where houses of farmers who till the lands which are either set to be confiscated or turned into large palm oil plantations by capitalist intruders. And yet these farmers she once lived with, continue to live there under threats of being dislocated.

She went there to know about how peasants in Arakan valley and the kind of lives they live under conditions of abject poverty and oppression.

Simple lives

Poor as they were, these peasants live to be able to eat and eat to be able to live. They live very simple lives. At daytime, she would teach their children songs, and tell stories, for she had this certain fondness for children. On starry nights, she would just be there hanging around with the folks and talking with them about anything - their dreams, their aspirations under constellations whose names she took time to teach them, as one farmer would later recount.

And such was the life that drove Beng to learn more, search more until that fateful day, on a day like today, April 5, when Cafgu paramilitary men and elements from the 12th Special Forces surrounded the house where she was about to eat with peasants, that fate met her.

The dry, cogon-covered rolling hills which spelled hunger for the people was witness to how she was felled by bullets from Cafgu and military elements. These men took away a life of a very young human-rights advocate who just sought to walk along the people in their struggles for land and justice. And yet, months after, she had to come back in a cold coffin.

What could have Beng done that deserved the ire and recklessness of these men who fired M16 bullets into her lithe body at close range? This is the question that human-rights advocates have been asking.

Indeed, in a country where an economic order yields massive oppression, siding with the poor has come to mean death. And yet, our lives continue to be touched by people like Beng who was brave enough to take the side of the poor.  It was a life that will continue to lead others to follow her path. She lived a life that is an inspiration to many who, until now, are still crying out for justice.

How else she had lived her life, getting out of the secure corners of the university and out alongside the terrain of mass struggles, only the poet in her could best put it. Beng, in this poem, wrote how different was her newfound “university” from the one she used to have:

Beng Hernandez: November 21, 1979 - April 5, 2002
 

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