Naming of Farts

Malou Jacob’s “Anatomiya ng Korupsyon” offers many ways to interpret the social realities in our lives, here rendered as rather bureaucratic and monotonous existence.

Brimming with outstanding acting and internalization, “Anatomiya” is both cynical and realistic. While it looks at the negative aspects of human attitudes and tendencies, it also draws the challenge to the human soul when the corrupt system presents false options for him to act either for the common good or his good alone.

Aptly titled “anatomy”—the play is a naming of farts—as it delineates the stubborn and shady structure—Family Court, a public attorney’s office filled with characters portraying the so many faces of dishonesty, duplicity, and dilemma.

First there is Cely, an idealistic young lawyer who joins Family Court full of hopes and aspirations so she could promulgate the law in the strictest sense, but who later finds herself in a dilemma that will later question her integrity. When we see her hopes are dimmed by the outright corruption involving her officemates, we realize that she is the odd man out, the outsider who stands her ground, who sticks to her principles, even as she juggles work—personal achievement—and her personal life—her ailing mother.

There is also Atty. Ricarte, the head attorney who represents the unscrupulous leadership in the office, a personality which he must have imbibed while working in the corrupt system. When we see him taking part in the pusoy session, we realize that the status quo is indeed dilapidated, a hopeless structure that needs facelift, perhaps much like Virgie’s noselift in her desperate act of vanity.

Interestingly, there’s the clerk Bok who is in charge of publication and every possible obfuscation the word entails. He exemplifies the ideal fixer; as if a matchmaker of other people’s destiny, Bok arranges people’s transactions so that it caters to his kickbacks that can aid his whims and vices. His character is so apparent in real life; and some people really thrive on such setup—he is not much different from T.S. Eliot’s “hollow man,” whose subsistence is all too uncertain since it is hinged on fly-by-night arrangements. His crass loudmouth badmouthing on anything only validates his promiscuity and lack of good breeding.

Aside from the office newcomer Atty. Cely Martinez, we can also consider Charing—the employee who jots down the employees’ DTR—as another catalyst. The rather romanticized malunggay scene between her and Cely provides the anticlimactic effect, especially when she approaches Cely in the forlorn Christmas party, after everyone else has left to prepare for the celebration.

In the end, we can see Charing not at all too calloused just like the others, as she can sympathize with the isolated attorney herself. She illustrates the contrast to the enormous apathetic void that even encroaches on the main character.

The late female employee, for one, also highlights the typical bureaucrat whose existence is hinged on personal interest—it thus proves public service is plain rhetoric. Some greater things like ideals and other abstractions are simply a joke. Everything is reduced to a laughing matter.

In its full regalia of vices and stark lack of virtues, the Family Court office takes pride in its dishonesty; its duplicity in the grandest forms. The so many people who visit the office—with their individual and dismal issues awaiting delayed resolutions—ironically tell us that the office cannot, if at all, resolve them, to no avail, to no avail.

Anatomiya adds to our sense of cynicism when it portrays the Filipino family in the most correct or realistic way. The “Family Court” spells the bigger irony when the clients—mostly couples are not resolved to get back together. The court office, in all its efforts to settle the individual cases, only witnesses how families disintegrate, as in the case of the separation of conjugal property between the vendor couple, or as it was not able to settle the conflict between the Japanese national and the Pinay prostitute.

The whole set of sensibilities presented in Anatomiya throws into the audience the kind of reality that we rather choose to ignore because it’s undesirable and uncomfortable.

Most important, the controversial file involving the adoption case, which was used by Bok to perpetuate his dishonesty at the expense of Cely and the office itself, blows the top of Cely, especially further when she realizes the judge’s identical double-life in the end.

To Cely, the judge symbolizing the blindfolded lady holding the scales—the icon of justice—is merely a drawing, a caricature drawn in or out of the human’s pathetic tendencies for self-protection.

In other words, jurisprudence becomes a big joke. The ideals about the law by the main character may cease to be—unless she does something about them.

Fanned by Ricarte’s fiery words to eject her from the office, Cely is then pushed to the limits, to the extent that she is also forced to choose between two lesser evils.

Despite the indeterminate ending, we are still convinced that Cely must have gone out of the corrupt system if she were to sustain her character as the catalyst, the stereotype tragic hero who will effect change in a corrupt status quo.

Anatomiya is indeed the naming of farts, the bad parts, the rotten parts of a disintegrating structure that only thrives because the world so desires the unscrupulous, dishonest, and the fraudulent.

If all these so exist in the Philippine government, as one cast member assumed in the forum, then we are all bound to think and identify ourselves clearly with Cely, the self-proclaimed catalyst, the antisocial in that rotting lot.

It proclaims that we are the ones who prophesy our own salvation and redemption. We are the ones that will save our own souls. And the play seems to continually ask us: Who else? Who else?

In all, Anatomiya challenges us continually to keep pace with the signs of the times, be vigilant about them so that when our own dilemma comes, even their most unexpected dismal forms, we are at least prepared to leave our comfort zones if it were for the sake of truth.

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