THERE are two direct translations of the Kapampangan word “talipanpan”: alias and “nom de guerre.” The peak of its usage was during the Japanese occupation and that was because most of the fighters of the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or Huks — from the ordinary fighters to the celebrated commanders — used aliases. Casto Alejandrino, the rare combination of Marxist theoretician and military strategist who came from an upper-class Pampanga family and was related to Jose Rizal’s Madrid friend Jose Alejandrino, had the nom de guerre “Guan Yek.”
A fierce Huk fighter from my Lubao barrio, Silvestre Liwanag Sr., was called “Linda Bie.” Another legendary Huk from my barrio who, according to local guerrilla lore died early in the Philippine-Japanese war when he single-handedly took on an entire Japanese unit, was named “Conchito.” My mother, a teenage fighter who returned to civilian life after the Japanese surrender, was called “Mameng.” The conferring of nom de guerres was not without its moments of levity even amid the brutality of the war. The least gutsy of the Huk fighters in Linda Bie’s squadron was named “Suicide.”
My Lubao barrio was the epicenter of the anti-Japanese resistance in the area and it was the Huk unit led by Linda Bie, not the US-backed resistance USAFFE, that retook the main Japanese headquarters based at the Pampanga Sugar Mill in Floridablanca town after a bloody fight.
After the war and the return to normalcy, most of the Huk fighters from my barrio, including my mother and father, figuratively turned their “swords into plowshares” and returned to their ordinary lives. Linda Bie, meanwhile, joined Guan Yek and Luis Taruc in the Huk hierarchy, this time as communist guerrillas out to topple the established government.
With the return to normalcy, the word “talipanpan” lost its currency and agency in the Kapampangan lexicon. I last heard the word in the early 1960s when a farmer about my parent’s age told me that he had fought with my mother and father during the war and that my mother’s “talipanpan” was “Mameng.”
That word was about to permanently join the list of unused and about-to-be forgotten Kapampangan words until a recent inanity during the impeachment trial jogged the memories of men and women of my age whose parents fought as Huks. Collectively, we were reminded of the word “talipanpan” — or rather its storied English translation — after a senator claimed that some of the gutter-level names used as supposed beneficiaries of the confidential funds of Vice President Sara Duterte fall under the category of aliases.
If martyrs and heroes used aliases, why can’t the supposed confidential fund beneficiaries use “Pagong” and “Pusa” and “Belat” to hide their true identities, said Sen. Robin Padilla, whose foray into tortured linguistics recently cited instances of man-made and premediated events as prime examples of “force majeure.”
After Padilla’s take that it was par for the course for the Duterte confidential fund beneficiaries to use aliases — to cover up what the House prosecution panel has called a money scam — those with parents who fought as Huks and adopted aliases during their fighting years shared the consensus that Padilla’s version demeaned the heroic intimations of “talipanpans.” Collectively, we pooled these questions that we want Padilla to clarify.
Can aliases laced with vulgarity be official entries into the liquidation literature and grace the ledgers of the Commission on Audit (COA)? Aliases that the members of the House of Representatives used as part of their evidence to impeach Sara Duterte on the grounds of allegedly betraying public trust, the laws and the constitution. Aliases that the House prosecution panel are now using to convince the senator-judges to declare Duterte guilty, then remove her from office.
It is our view that using aliases to cover up alleged official grifting — and official grifting allegedly on a mind-boggling scale — is not the equivalent of using aliases in fighting for a cause, or the elevated version of scaling martyrdom.
Of course, we do not expect even a marginally coherent answer from Padilla, a pardoned felon who once claimed that if he were to be burned alive, his charred remains “would still smell of the Dutertes.” A senator-judge so transparent on where his loyalty lies that he can’t even differentiate between using aliases for alleged official grifting and using other names in the fight for deeply held beliefs. And in many cases, aliases becoming part of a martyr’s lore.
Still, the children of the Huks whose fathers and mothers fought under the cover of “talipanpans” are thanking Padilla for dredging that almost-forgotten word from its state of unuse. In a sense, the limbic malfunction of Padilla made us recall that glorious time our parents fought in a war without ranks, without pay and tragically, without any recognition from the mainstream military.
Just the determination to end the Japanese Conquista with “talipanpans” as inscrutable as Casto Alejandrino’s Guan Yek and as romantic as Silvestre Liwanag’s “Linda Bie.” The last one literally meant “life of Linda” in Kapampangan and Linda happened to be his second child, after the eldest, named Leticia. Of course, such concept as fighting for a cause with the mindset that — whether right or wrong — the fight was for a daughter’s future is something totally alien to Robin Padilla.