Art therapy

Ino, an 8-year-old boy, looks at a cell phone photo of his mom and sketches it on the rubber plate. The plate is then carved, inked and printed using a spoon pressed on paper. Sitting beside him, Muhammad, who is a year older,  relies on imagination to draw his own portrait of his mom. Both their mothers were killed along with 56 other individuals  in the Maguindanao massacre that shook the nation a year and a half ago.

Both kids were among the 40 or so participants in the four-day art workshop we recently held  in Tacurong, Sultan Kudarat, for the families of non-media victims in the gruesome massacre. The group was made up of children and adults.  They were predominantly Muslims from Buluan, Maguindanao.

It may come as a surprise to most of us outside of Mindanao that many of the victims were actually Muslims and not members of the media. The media, of course, have a tendency to put themselves in the news. In the coverage of this issue, journalists tend to focus  on their fallen comrades and those they left behind.

The hype created an impression in the global community that the incident was the worst case of “violence against journalists.”  Public sympathy, which came in the form of financial aid, scholarships, and other vital support for those left behind, poured in. Unfortunately, these blessings rarely trickled down to the families of non-media victims.

The privileging of media victims came with the stigma that the  others who were killed could not have been too innocent as they could be the usual players in the board game that is Maguindanao politics.

We seem to have forgotten that somebody had to stand up against tyranny, and who else had the power to do so than the politicians themselves. Then of course, there were those who had to help them—the lawyers, ordinary civil servants, and volunteers, mostly women who were brave enough  to join the convoy despite the constant threats. And there were the  people in a car who were unfortunate to have been caught in the convoy as they were rushing  a relative suffering from a stroke to the hospital.

We had a chance to work with the children and relatives of these non-media victims during the art workshop as we tried to let art ease their trauma. I have no knowledge of how art therapy should be conducted but I told our host that my own experience with art has always been therapeutic. So, art itself is therapy. No need to do psychoanalytic mumbo jumbo.

We just let them enjoy the process of rubbercut printing, terracotta sculpture (which is very apt, considering the attempt by culprits to hide the killings by burying the victims in mud), mural painting (facilitated by a local T’Boli artist) and some paper crafts for the kids.

Of course, the works had to reflect the given theme which was  simply “justice.” And for the children who can barely understand this political abstraction, we just let them draw their lost loved one as they remembered them.

The works reflect a range of feelings, from sober landscapes with mosques and cathedrals existing side by side to representations of the culprits as demons. The murals, which were done as group work, were  full of violent imagery and statements of vengeance.

But such is the power of art—as in the ancient Greek tragedy, it has provided these people with catharsis, a way to purge hatred and violence even as they brave the “long way to justice,” as the label in one artwork put it.

Calm yet more touching are the portraits made by children of their dead loved ones.  They may be crude images of a man or woman with no specific likeness, but in the eyes of the child they bring to mind vivid memories of their loved one, whose name is etched with a carving knife on rubber like a wound that never heals.