By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

MY windows are always open to allow the air and the scents from the garden to come in. The gardenias, the ginger lilies, the jasmines and all the smells of weeds and grasses waft through the curtains as freely as birds fly through, and perch on the grills, often leaving white little droppings for the sun to bake. Freedom is sweet this way.

Visiting the Pasig City Police Headquarters where some 80 detainees are cramped in a room is a totally different experience for me. Except for the “detained” air, nothing circulates there except the miasma of despair.

This experience is the same for a woman living in a big house, where a husband keeps her in captivity with good food, designer clothes and jewelry. No birds fly through the windows, even when they are widely open, and the scent of flowers, even when they come inside her room, is overwhelmed by the scent of money reacting to the bottled odors of her body.

A friend told me that only the body is detained in a prison cell, the mind is free. Really? How freely can thoughts circulate with other thoughts in the limits of a physical space?

On the other hand, a man can be in prison and free, according to my sister, relating her “secret” conversation with a politically-incorrect but powerful person:

I thought you were in prison.

My name is in prison, my body is not.

Freedom can mean many things to many people. Broadly, it means “the ability to act or change without constraint or to possess the power and resources to fulfill one’s purposes unhindered.” This definition makes freedom elusive and achievable only to a privileged few.

In a political set-up, freedom can mean “free expression, free choice and democracy, on the one hand – and repression, censorship and autocracy on the other. We are to guard the former from the latter.” Under this definition, freedom becomes a thing to be transmitted from the “free” world to the “unfree” countries of the world. When freedom is viewed this way, it atrophies into a tool to preserve the status quo and consolidate the power of the already powerful nations. Then it becomes the opposite of itself.

Frederick Douglass, American social reformer and abolitionist considers freedom as a practice, the core of the practice is struggle. Remain in the fight, challenge and change: “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” 

Freedom

“Today, we are free”, I was told.
“Are you truly free?” I asked the larvae, weaving its cocoon
but it lay quiet, eating its food, gathering enough energy
to fly, soon
and so I asked a full-grown fly with a pair of flight wings
and a pair of hind wings, “Are you truly free?”
but it has no teeth, and free to eat
only the rotten

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