body and soul. Surely, his involvement in and connection with progressive causes were not merely the offshoot of his daughter Bobbie’s (and her husband Satur Ocampo’s) long stay in the underground and active participation in the movement against the dictatorship, although these could have served as the eye-opener, the trigger, as it were, of what became a profound understanding of the issues saddling life as he was living it. In his old age, Malay proved the Hegelian idea of “becom- ingness”—that ideas and people are never static. From the strictures of the classroom, he entered the wide arena of society at large, where dialectical situations constantly clash or come together, and fought for the old truths he held dear (ethics, freedom of the press), as well as the new ones to which he had become committed (human rights, genuine national indepen- dence, possibly even decolonization). By then he was “speaking the truth to power”—that is to say, as Said so simply put it, “carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change.”
v v v
People remember Malay as “Prof” or as “Dean,” the latter particularly, by virtue of his last post at UP as dean of student affairs. His years in academe did not make of him a discourse theorist who would not deign to descend to the dust from his ivory tower; he was an organic intellectual who grappled with the fundamental, troubling, questions: “How does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?” Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and activist who was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmen- tal and human-rights activists on what many contended were
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker