Three Cheers for Maarva, Ferrix, and the Periwinkle
How a character from Andor pushed me to write my Palanca Award-winning essay about cancer and the Madagascar periwinkle.
This Substack post was originally intended to be a very short announcement of my Palanca Award winning essay, “The Year of the Periwinkle,” which explores the links between ecology, the Madagascar periwinkle, and my experience with cancer. The Palanca is one of the Philippines’ most well-known literary awards. If you’re interested in reading how a character from the show Andor pushed me to write my essay, read on. Otherwise, you can find the link to my award-winning piece here.
[Spoilers ahead for the Disney+ series Star Wars: Andor]
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, as I was recovering from a perilous stem cell transplant meant to cure my relapsed cancer, I listened with the people of Ferrix, a rocky mining settlement on the fringes of space occupied by the Galactic Empire, to an impassioned speech by the aging rebel Maarva Carassi Andor. The speech was delivered by way of recorded hologram; Maarva was speaking at her own funeral. A stubborn, kindly old lady, she had been felled by a creeping illness some time before.
Not that dying seemed to have had any effect on Maarva’s spirit. On the contrary, she towered in death: her soaring likeness loomed above everyone else, an ethereal presence projected in flickering blue light from a packed plaza at the center of town. To the Imperials policing the gathering, she must have appeared a terrifying ghost. But to the overflowing crowd of neighbors, friends, and adopted kin in solemn attendance that afternoon, her radiance must have felt like an unbearable beacon. Despite the occupation, despite the ban on public meetings, and against the threat of guns and stun batons and riot gear, it seemed like almost everyone in Ferrix had turned out to hear her speak. Miners, barkeeps, junkyard keepers; the people all looked up in hushed expectation.
The deceased, a touch nervous, takes a breath then begins.
“My name is Maarva Carrassi Andor. I'm honored to stand before you. I'm honored to be a Daughter of Ferrix, and honored to be worthy of the stone.”
When I was first diagnosed with cancer last 2021, I told myself that I would win a Palanca Award. The Palanca is one of the Philippines’ most well-known literary prizes. Jose F. Lacaba, the first poet I ever truly read, won the contest for his beautiful collection of translations named Sa Panahon ng Ligalig [In a Time of Unrest] in 1983.
I did not know how I would win the contest. I just promised myself that I would. I would suffer, I would write, then I would win. That was roughly the plan, at least. It simply felt unacceptable for me to die so early, before having had any opportunity to make a lasting mark on the world. I thought that a Palanca might, etched on my urn in case of some premature demise, help prove my worth to anyone who still cared enough to look.
That initial burst of determination did not last long, as vows fed mainly by ego generally do. It was a useful handhold to have, true, an arbitrary goal I could latch my mind onto during the worst parts of chemotherapy. But it could not sustain itself after my first remission, following the first disappearance of cancer from my body, when the desperate joy of seeming good health demanded I forget everything related to my days of sickness. I had no stomach for it; I just wanted to go back to normal. And, when my cancer eventually came back, months later, neither could the desire to write withstand the leaden wave of silence that would swamp me with chilling force and power.
Gray meals, gray dreams, gray quiet; during those slack-faced days enduring further treatment I felt lost in fog. I was surrounded by doom. Reading, for once, held little pleasure. What distraction to be had arrived in the form of video games and shows. And it was in this extended state of dazed confusion that I stumbled upon the magnificent series Star Wars: Andor. By some good fortune, I discovered Ferrix and the people who lived there.
Andor isn’t just an excellent Star Wars story. It’s just an excellent story, period. There are no lightsabers here, no mystical Force users or outsize Skywalker heroics. This is a tale of the galaxy at its lowest point, absolutely, or almost absolutely, under the heels of the totalitarian Empire. The fascists have won; their gargantuan ships dominate the hyperlanes; career bureaucrats order mass arrests while white-armored troopers haul armies of innocents to prison planets. It’s an age of surveillance, of discipline, of order. The Imperials have everything under control. Or at least they think they do.
So far, this doesn’t sound like a particularly uplifting show. And indeed it rarely is. The galaxy is in an ominous place. Shadows peek from every corner. Some of the most edge-of-your-seat moments consist entirely of cutting dialogue, the tension supplied by intricate webs of political intrigue and subterfuge. The heroes, if they can be called that, thrive in the dark. They’re spies, arms dealers, two-faced liars, backstabbers, and cheats. The eponymous protagonist, Cassian Andor, starts off as a hard-eyed, ruthless petty thief. He’s on the run; he does not pay his debts. And when fight do occur, they are deadly. The team seldom emerges complete after an encounter with the enemy.
Sacrifice forms one of the main themes of this story, that and a particularly painful brand of selflessness. There is a cost for everything, if not in physical terms, then a moral, ethical price, the damning compromise made for the sake of rebellion. As one of the show’s most memorable characters goes, “What is... what is my sacrifice? I am condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them... I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.”
Dawn has not yet arrived, is a long way from arriving. Which is why it’s perhaps so surprising to find that at the source of this bottomless murk, beneath all the scheming and deception, lies an aching human need, during the most trying of times, to light a lamp for somebody else’s future. Andor rarely uplifts. But when it does, it soars. And nowhere, I think, does the show fly higher than in the person of Cassian’s mother, Maarva Carassi Andor.
She continues at the funeral:
“Strange, I... feel as if I can see it. I was six, I think, first time I touched a funerary stone. Heard our music, felt our history, holding my sisters hand as we walked all the way from Fountain Square. Where you stand now, I have been more times than I can remember.”
Maarva has lived in Ferrix all her life. She grew up on the hard-beaten clay of Rix Road, heard every morning the beating of the anvils calling the miners from their yellow brick homes. The dusty air, the ochre streets – these form the backdrop of her life. Long ago she used to go scavenging in space with her husband, but in her failing health, and after the Empire exacted from her family a terrible loss, not anymore. Since then, as a white-haired, weathered old lady, she has stuck close to the earth, to home.
During the opening episodes she pleads with her son to keep his head down, to lay low. Stay quiet, don’t attract any attention, follow orders, be safe. Even when Imperial forces land on Ferrix, even when their thugs break into her home, all she wants for Cassian is to survive, to keep quiet, to lay low. At times her eyes almost seem to beg: just live, please? For me?
But then something changes. She hears it on the news. Uproar in the Empire; somebody somewhere has committed something outrageous. And something long dormant in her catches fire. It lights. And it won’t go out any more.
When it’s time for mother and son to switch places, when it’s Cassian now begging her to keep cool, to run away, to please just live, for me? Maarva refuses. She will not leave. She will not run away. Cassian says: we’ll find a place the Empire hasn’t touched. Maarva replies: "I'm already there. That place is in my head. They can build as many barracks as they like, they'll never find me."
She commits tiny acts of disobedience. She refuses to leave her house, even when ordered to, even if it would let her access medical care. She will not go out. And when Maarva finally senses that her years have caught up to her, that her body is well and truly about to fail, she calls her droid, composes herself, and drawing upon the deepest reserves of her soul, makes a recording.
Maarva is not a soldier. She’s not a cutthroat spymaster or a manifesto-writing idealist. She writes no pamphlets, wields no guns, is part of no secret cadre. She is simply a mother. She is a Daughter of Ferrix. And she understands what the rest also do but are unsure how to confront, that the occupation they are living under isn’t really living, it’s more a slow death. They are being choked, so gently they can afford not to notice, out of every human feeling, out of compassion, out of affection, out of kindness. They’re being suffocated. And she will stand for it no longer.
Does she do it for the greater good? For the cause? Probably, on some level. She’s certainly astute enough to expect that her choices will have consequences that ripple beyond her immediate circle. However, at the end of the day, one suspects that she is doing all this, sacrificing all this, merely for love. Love for her home. Love for her son. A love that compels her to do something, anything, to make sure that the people and places she cares about most will one day be free of the desperation that now crushes her, never mind if she’s still around to see it happen. And it is from this love that everything else explodes.
“I always wanted to be lifted. I was always eager, always waiting to be inspired. I remember every time it happened, every time the dead lifted me... with their truth. And now I'm dead. And I yearn to lift you. Not because I want to shine or even be remembered. It's because I want you to go on. I want Ferrix to continue. In my waning hours, that’s what comforts me most.”
Maarva does not end there. She goes on to rouse her people to fight, to resist, in a brilliantly rising crescendo. She refuses to let them sleep. But all that excitement aside, it’s this part of her speech, where she says it’s her turn, her responsibility to make sure her home continues even as she passes on, that is to me most revealing. More than anything else that she said, it’s this part that almost blinded me with tears.
I’m not a revolutionary. And I’m even more definitely not a wise, white-haired old lady. But I do have my own Ferrix, as does, I suppose, everyone else. My Rix Road is Kamuning Road, where my family and I have lived close by my entire life. You can find my Ferrix along Panay Avenue, where I celebrate New Year’s; you can find it in the columbarium at the Santa Maria della Strada Parish, where the ashes of my maternal grandparents lie sleeping. I carry my Ferrix with me, when I can, to bars, parks, camping grounds. I have a home. Like Maarva, I want it to go on.
It goes without saying that reality is even more unsettlingly complex, even more bleakly obscure than Andor. That said, fiction has its own truth, and the mortally ill (or those who think themselves mortally ill), whether they reside in a galaxy far, far away or right here, always want to leave a record of their consciousness behind, some trace of their existence that others can touch, for their loved ones to sustain themselves with. It’s nice to know that people will grieve for me. It’s nice to know that they’ll be sad. But I don’t want them to be sad forever. I did not want to pass away and leave people with nothing but empty air to count the days by. There had to be something I could do, not necessarily to lift anyone, even less to inspire anyone, but something to help them understand, to keep them going, to help the healing. I wanted the world to remember that I was here. But I also wanted to afford people some measure of grace, even long after I’m gone.
After the season finale of Andor I went straight to my desk. I looked around for a droid. I found none. This world, unfortunately, does not have holograms. Instead it has writing. So, I wrote.
This year the essay I wrote, largely inspired by the help of others both fictional and not, including Maarva, won first prize in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. It’s named “The Year of the Periwinkle,” and it’s about the links between ecology, a certain flower, and my experience with cancer. The piece is currently published online at the Business Mirror website. You can find the link here.
There’s no use pretending. I’m proud of my award. I’m proud of what I wrote. Still, more than the award itself, I am relieved beyond measure that I finally have something my parents, grandparents, friends can read at their discretion should the worst come to happen. Not that I’m sick right now, as far as my doctors and I can tell. The latest tests say that I’m in a good spot. But knowing there’s something there for people to go back to, if they want to – in my waning hours, that is what comforts me most.