Fathers and sons

There is so much chaos in me for [the Almighty] to create another world,” Isabelo de los Reyes once lamented. Aside from our shared Ilocano roots an orchidaceous penchant for all manner of knowledge, it was a similar “inner chaos” that has animated my political interventions throughout the years: a million social media posts, thousands of articles, even more vlogs, and a dozen books/chapters in the past decade-and-a-half alone. I was often confounded by my own inexplicable drive. There was always this sense of immediacy, of urgency, and this all-consuming will to express myself and speak to the world.

I had an inkling that it was also my way of honoring my father, who had an understandably ambiguous relationship with my career choice even as he loved me unconditionally like no one else. “Son, politics is dangerous!” he counseled me throughout my teenage years as I prepared myself to enter the medical field—the centerpiece of his and my sister’s education. His dream was, I reckon, to see me opening my own clinic, building my own family, and spending my years near him.

I was keenly aware of the origins of his misgivings. To my father’s generation, “politics” meant division and despair. He watched how “politics” produced revolution and wars in his fatherland; drove a wedge among his friends, who, in the halcyon days of youth, adopted radically divergent utopian goals with troubling consequences; and systematically instilled fear and anxiety in the soul of millions of families the world over. The ruthless struggle over power and ideology in recent history clearly traumatized my father and his countless peers.

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Yet, my father was also the reason why I decided to pursue political science and journalism. To ensure my command of language, he regularly made me listen to international news early on. Listening to news over BBC radio was our shared first hobby—the beginning of a lifelong filial love story between a son and his father. In later years, watching global news together became our main way of bonding. For hours, I would just lie on a sofa or work on a table next to him watching news. Among my fondest memories are watching him pleasantly startled, and subtly beaming with pride, whenever he would suddenly realize the “expert” being interviewed live on television is none other than his own son, who happened to be perched in front of a laptop not far away from him.

With his hearing, speech, and mobility impaired by age, and further compounded by the debilitating impact of his brain surgery from decades earlier, my father mostly relied on speed-reading to keep abreast of the latest developments in the world. And thus, hand gestures and physical expressions of affection—hugs, kisses, and long embraces— became our main means of communication in recent years. Fortunately, we had a long catalogue of shared memories and reference points to draw on, so a simple gaze or smile communicated a million words between our hearts. So one could imagine the “inner chaos” that came to surface once it dawned on me that I could lose my father, who valiantly fought for life through countless hospitalizations. That near-breakdown happened a week earlier in between his two latest operations, which he survived just to succumb to many complications afterwards. In “Fathers and Sons” (1862), Ivan Turgenev portrayed a world of profound mutual alienation between two generations, with the main father figure dismissing political activism as “romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, [and] art” and saying that “even nightingales can’t live on songs alone.”

I shared my father’s skepticism toward fantastical political promises and grand ideologies. I also believe that politics can become a force for good, if it’s deployed as a vehicle for progressive change. After all, the very roots of the word “politics” come from polis, the Aristotelian Greek city-states, which, notwithstanding their many faults, were collective experiments at nurturing human flourishing (Eudemonia) and instilling a deep sense of social responsibility among citizens in an age of violence and chaos. Politics is the process by which we can create rules and institutions for a better world. My father’s (Nasser) greatest legacy, however, was his immense determination to fight for life—and be there for me and his family despite all the pain and the suffering. And it’s precisely that unremitting courage that made me believe, as in Turgenev’s poem, that even when we “sit in the mud” we can still “reach for the stars.”

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richard.heydarian@inquirer.net