Love without reserve

“NATIVE chocolate drink” was the Tagbilaran waiter’s rejoinder to my order of “sikwate” for breakfast.

I could not fault him as the menu indicated the exact words he used.

It was more of a personal preference that I chose “sik-wa-te,” prolonging each syllable, as if I were already holding a cup in hand, blowing at the steam rising from the opaque blackish brown surface, sipping the viscous lava, seeking the sweet in the bitter, and, after adding a little hot water to swirl the sludge silting the bottom of the cup, trying to sip the drink to the very last greedy drop.

With genuine “sikwate,” you cannot. Cheat, get enough of, sate.

The dregs that settle down like a clotted conscience prove not only that several “tableya” coins, unsweetened and unrepentantly bitter, were used to make the “sikwate," but also that the “tableya” is pure and made entirely of cacao seeds picked by hand, dried, roasted, pounded, kneaded, and shaped into the dark coins that turn breakfast into memories and family lore.

The waiter’s choice of an English phrase disappointed. His hotel’s choice of “tableya” supplier did not.

The cup he set down still bubbled, as if the “sikwate” had just been whipped to a foam inside a metal “batirol (pot)” with a wooden “boloneo (whisk)”. The only difference between this cup and one I would be sipping at home is that I had to add milk and brown sugar to taste.

Those cups of “sikwate” in Tagbilaran reminded me of other cups of native chocolate encountered, with varying degrees of disillusion, in places faraway from home. In Tagaytay and Baguio, powdered chocolate drink, sipped as the house specialty, only made me more homesick and alienated.

If the locals accept this as “native chocolate,” was I to also settle for this “tsokolate-ah”?

According to lore, thick and rich “tsokolate-eh” (“espresso”) is served to guests. However, for uninvited visitors, decorum still requires a serving of diluted “tsokolate-ah” (“aguado”), meaning less “tableya” and more water.

My friend, Lilia, a diabetic and a sweet tooth, prefers “tsokolate-ah” as healthier. “Tsokolate-eh” is more sinful and thus, like love, must be taken with moderation.

In our family’s traditional yearend sojourn to the south of Cebu, we wended our way to a roadside store in the interiors of barangay Canbanua in the town of Argao.

We smelled the “tableya" even before we saw a young man carry out white-rimmed-with-blue metal “sarten” bowls with telltale smudges of brown.

At the source, where Miguela “Guilang” Lanutan, 92, and her family still makes them, the “tableya” coins are wrapped in old newspaper. Stark and pure, love in no other form demands abandon and no reservations.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 31, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Almost home

IN this room in Tagbilaran City in Bohol, I muse about the adverb, “where”.

It is three days before Christmas. Signal no. 1 in the route of typhoon Vinta in the country has led to the cancellation of trips leaving and going to Bohol.

While waiting, I get to know this city again. I was fresh out of college, working for a poverty alleviation project. Tagbilaran City was the jump-off for project sites in Bohol.

In development circles then, Bohol was the scrappy rival of Cebu.

In the fast craft leaving Cebu and at the Tagbilaran City pier, there were several foreigners. Of tourist or backpack, I don’t catch a sight of while walking along C. P. Garcia North Ave.

Perhaps the tourists are all in the nearby islands or towns, with more allures to offer than the hordes of tricycles and motorcycles descending up and down the main thoroughfare.

It is just as well. I like that Tagbilaran belongs to the locals.

In my pedestrian explorations of this part of the city, where a shop selling fishing implements is next-door to a mall with generic fast-food offering, I am reminded of downtown Cebu except that Boholanos are more polite and mild-mannered.

They make easygoing parents. Toddlers and even infants outnumber adults at the fast food joints. Unlike in Metro Manila and Cebu, where both kids and adults are glued to tablets and smart phones, the children here run and horse around, driving adults crazy.

I witness one domestic havoc after another, which proves that some things remain the same from the time I was a child, hell-bent on squeezing in as much play in the waking hours.

“No you can’t go home yet/ but you aren’t lost,” wrote Adrienne Rich in her poem, “The School Among the Ruins”.

My hand clasps the sharp corner of the table just as a girl slides perilously close to it. Her smile trembles on her lips, but it is chased away by her playmate, a boy whose roar is outsized for his age. It is a marvel the pasta they serve here ends up on plates, not on the floor.

Being part of and being outside these fast food family vignettes, I wonder if, given a choice, I would stay put, become a grandmother, and watch children and cats the whole day.

Or if I would, in an alternative world, look for a notebook and write down thoughts about going away.

Of all the adverbs, “where” seems the most diffident until you are off-kilter. Then it can be as piercing as “why”:

“Why does the outstretched finger of home/ probe the dark hotel room like a flashlight beam// on the traveller, half-packed, sitting on the bed/ face in hands, wishing her bag emptied again at home” (Adrienne Rich, “Tendril”)


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 24, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Kitchen rules

SLOW conversations go with slow food.

We had Igorot friends visit for the weekend. For our last dinner, they prepared pinakbet and adobo, the Ilocano way.

It took a time to look for boneless bagoong from Pangasinan. And then more time was needed to slice the vegetables. The size of the pork cuts warranted another discussion. And the order of sautéing the garnishing.

Always, there seemed to be a Cebuano way and an Ilocano way. In a matter of speaking, there were significant differences in going about things.

And a spontaneous concurrence of what is good food.

Trying to combine Ilocano and Cebuano ways, we ate dinner at past 1 a.m. Somehow, all of us woke at 7 a.m. to whip up an omelet and then resume eating the pinakbet and adobo of undefined ethnicity.

Looking at the frothy mounds made by the whipped eggs, M. remembered that the omelet his mother made for him and his seven siblings was as thin and smooth as the film that floats to coat the surface when oil is poured onto water.

His mother warned all the children watching, round-eyed, as that omelet was sliced and distributed around the table that there was no need to ask for more.

Mealtimes where “more” did not exist taught M. and his siblings that rice was not a staple but a strategy. He said he buried his viand in a mound of rice. After everyone else had eaten, he dug out and ate his hoard.

He felt full, whether from consuming his share or being consumed by his sibling’s envy, he could not say.

R. said having too many mouths was also a challenge for researchers in remote areas. He and his fellows once bought a chicken from a farmer.

The native fowl was lean and compact, virtues for a boxer but not for the meal prospects of ten hungry youths. D. volunteered to cook the chicken.

Sliced and spiced, the chicken adobo ended up as the dish for no one except D. When R. complained that the dish too spicy, D. explained that pepper is the secret in cooking. Why, he now had an entire chicken to finish!

Sharing a meal reminds us that we have more than appetites in common. M.’s drunk father insulted his neighbors. Walking home, M.’s father was set upon and nearly beaten dead by the neighbor and his sons.

Months later, these neighbors visited M.’s family to apologize. M. recalled that when it was their turn to visit, these neighbors would cook and eat breakfast even when M and the family were still in bed. Isn’t this tolerated because it’s all in the family?

M. asked his neighbors: When one’s father becomes an ugly drunk, do you look the other way or knock out all of his ugly teeth?

To this day, M. and his neighbors still visit each other’s home on the other side of the mountain.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 17, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Illumine

BY next week, these corridors will be empty.

Above the flushing sounds of the toilet at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, I overheard this line exchanged between two women.

The speaker may have been just observing a trend of immemorial predictability. Like other campuses, UP quickly empties after final exams in December.

Yet, the comment resonated again when I stood before the tableau set up for this year’s Lantern Parade, the tradition closing the year in all UP campuses.

The Oblation is set in the midst of a gigantic eye overlooking a field of installations representing children. From pennants hanging around the Oval, I learn that the theme of this year’s Lantern Parade is “Paaralan Palaruan”.

School, playground. Are these terms synonyms or kindred metaphors? Or, from the way the words are positioned on the pennants, binaries and therefore bipolar opposites?

By day, the Quezon Hall tableau remains the favorite for selfies. The gigantic eye, some of the freestanding children figures, and even the “parol (lantern)” ingeniously designed to resemble a child are wrapped in pastel yarn and dangling with strips of kaleidoscopic color.

By morning, the Quezon Hall tableau is a happy place. It is different at night.

Joggers and bikers still gather on the steps or nearby. Unlike the rest of the year, Quezon Hall and the Oblation are ablaze with light and color.

Perhaps there is something wrong with my 52-year-old eyes but the spectacle turns into a stark presence the dark that saturates what’s beyond that golden circle. Many of the “children,” specially those that are bare outlines or unadorned tracery, become more absence than presence.

In the gloaming, these resemble the chalked silhouettes that mark where bodies lie at the scene of a crime. Rushing from my evening class, I glanced at the Quezon Hall tableau, and felt the cold that was not the nip of evening air.

Schools are emptied not only by holidays. Personal crises jeopardize studies.

Midway this semester, the unjust suspension of scholarships by the Commission on Higher Education forced many teacher-scholars, specially those in private and overseas universities where cost of living is steeper, to drop out from graduate school.

The war in Marawi also displaced students and teachers.

And the other war—the bloodiest and most contested in this nation’s history—is blotting out Filipinos, including those who should have been anticipating now the break from classes.

How can we forget Kian delos Santos pleading before the cops shot him: “May test pa ako bukas (I still have an exam tomorrow)”?

Light brings to sharper focus the dark in us.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


*First published in the December 10, 2017 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Golden grain

STREETS of gold.

On a recent journey to the north of Luzon, I saw the local practice of drying rice on the highway.

Even outside the urban centers, Luzon is blessed with superhighways. In Dagupan and Cabanatuan, half of the highways and even narrow feeder roads are covered by rice being dried.

These grain gardens are swept and raked into rows occupying half of the road. Set off by endless rice fields in brilliant quilts of green, the streaming grains, poured by workers into sacks, are redolent of abundance.

For drivers, though, the practice of drying rice on highways is a nuisance. Vehicles are forced to share the remaining lanes in a highway ironically expanded to decongest traffic.

The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has advised farmers and rice traders not to dry their produce on national roads, particularly the McArthur Highway or the Manila North Road, widened and improved to improve access to the Ilocos Region; the Cagayan Valley Road going to Nueva Ecija, Nueva Vizcaya and Isabela; and the Manila South Road or Daang Maharlika leading to Bicol.

Obstructions placed to prevent vehicles from driving over the drying “palay” pose a threat to road safety, pointed out the DPWH.

Yet, the practice endures. Local culture, particularly the influence of local elites, dictates what constitutes as unbreakable custom.

In more ways than one, Luzon’s thoroughfares of grains are truly “Daang Maharlika (high by birth, rank or title)”.

It’s not only the DPWH that’s against the practice of rice-drying on roads. In a 2011 online post, the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) of the Department of Agriculture published its “Panatang Maka-palay (“Save Rice, Save Lives" pledge)”.

First vow on the list: “I will discourage and avoid drying ‘palay' on busy roads and highways as this will reduce the quality of the grains.”

The rest of the RICEponsibility campaign is relevant, specially in the approaching holidays, when many Filipinos bond through feasting.

Order rice in half-portions or bring home what cannot be consumed. I remember a catered lunch when two cups of rice were served per participant. A colleague took home the extra rice for her pet cats.

Another PhilRice advice is to recycle cooked rice. Garlic or fried rice for breakfast tastes better when leftover rice is used rather than newly cooked rice.

The PhilRice also promotes more nutritious rice substitutes, such as corn, sweet potatoes, “gabi,” cassava, and banana. Root crops have lower glycemic index (GI), representing less risk for heart disease or type 2 diabetes.

When I put rice on my plate, do I see and value each grain?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 3, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata"

Calling names

WHAT is the power in naming?

We call into being what we name. Those we have no name for do not exist for us.

In class, I first read about the Kalanguya and the Ikalahan of Northern Luzon from Babette P. Resurreccion’s “Imagining identities: Ethnicity, gender and discourse in contesting resources”.

In her 1998 study, the Ikalahan reside in Imugan and nearby villages in the town of Sta. Fe in Nueva Vizcaya. The group lives inside the reserve of the Kalahan Educational Foundation (KEF).

Outside the KEF reserve is the group that calls itself the Kalanguya. Fighting a land-grabbing attempt in 1970 to develop parts of Imugan into a mountain resort, the Kalanguya asserted the right of ancestral domain.

In 1974, the government granted instead the KEF a 25-year lease agreement that placed some 15,000 hectares of public forest land in Imugan under its stewardship.

In this competition for resources and other entitlements from the government, a “crisis of ethnic identity” arose among some of the Kalanguya and the Ikalahan: can a tribe have two names?

According to American colonial records, neither the Ikalahan nor the Kalanguya existed. Resurreccion traced that in their 1908 survey that became the basis for subdividing the Mountain Province and Nueva Vizcaya, the American authorities named only eight major groupings of uplanders.

By their non-inclusion in this colonial survey, the Ikalahan and the Kalanguya were not allocated territories.

The contemporary struggle of the Ikalahan and Kalanguya over ethnic identity goes back to this colonial act of omission, which turned them into a “people without history,” observed Resurreccion.

What is worse than being historically invisible? Being named by those who consider your existence a curse.

Ethnic names “were imposed” by the colonial authorities and later lowlanders, wrote historian William Henry Scott.

“Igorot,” the name given to ethnic groups, such as the Kalanguya, living in the uplands of Northern Luzon, has its roots in the Tagalog word “gulod,” meaning “mountain range,” according to Nestor T. Castro.

Yet, the “Y gorrote (people of the mountains)” was lumped with the other “tribus salvajes (savage tribes),” as the Spanish colonizers labelled the Igorot “pagans” who resisted Christianity.

Stereotyping the uplanders was also played up by the American colonizers, who practiced “divide and rule” among the uplanders and lowlanders of the Cordilleras, observed Scott and Castro.

The “Igorot” only acquired honor in World War II, when they drove the Japanese imperial forces to surrender in Northern Luzon, wrote Scott.

What is a name? A seed of narratives.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 26, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Seeking the Igorot

THE “TOURORISTS” are back.

A social media rant by a resident popped out in an online report about the gridlock that recently locked down Baguio City.

The portmanteau combines “tourists” and “terrorists” to aptly capture the exasperation of Baguio residents after a three-day holiday declared to decongest the streets in Metro Manila during the ASEAN Summit resulted in an exodus to the so-called summer capital.

I was guilty of adding to that congestion. The Baguio hallmarks were still in evidence: pine tree silhouettes, bracing upland air, and the fog, which, according to Carl Sandburg’s immortal line, “comes on little cat feet”.

But of traffic, too, there was more than anyone—resident or “tourorist”—desired. One queued to go inside the city’s only mall, to park a car, to use the toilet, to get a taxi, even to enter the “wagwagan (used clothes)” night market.

I waited for nearly an hour to take out siopao from this popular eatery, which has four floors and is open 24 hours. In the gridlock of that long weekend, snaking lines of people waiting to get in during dining “rush hour” meant rising at dawn to get the siopao that left my husband sleepless.

Is tourism a boon? According to city planners, Baguio’s woes are caused by the influx of visitors (and their vehicles) that bloats the population of more than 350,000 residents in a city designed to hold only 25,000.

I prefer to walk around to know a city better. During this visit to Baguio, though, walking seemed more of a duty, an attempt not to add to the toxicity hovering above irate motorists, jeepney commuters suffering behind long lines, and the frustrated waiting fruitlessly for an empty cab.

Yet, walking has its limitations. History is often found on the outskirts, rarely at the center. Baguio is the capital of the Cordillera region, the largest community of indigenous peoples in the country.

According to Nestor T. Castro’s brief but excellent “A Peek into Cordilleran History, Culture, and Society” (UP Press, 2015), the region derives its name from the Gran Cordillera Central, the mountain ranges serving as the “backbone” of the central part of northern Luzon.

This backbone is not just geographical. The Cordilleras is the bastion of ethnicity, “historically differentiated” from the rest of the country for successfully resisting the “inroads of colonization,” according to Republic Act No. 8371, also known as the Indigenous Peoples Rights Acts of 1997.

During this visit, the closest I got to Igorot culture was admiring the weaving patterns of a red-and-black loincloth called “binolda-an” in Sagada. To know why the “Igorot” is a contested being will have to be for another visit.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 19, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Oblations

I STARTED and finished the book while waiting for class.

Yet, in the space of that hour or so, “Macli-ing Dulag” (UP Press, 2015) brought me to so many places: our family’s reading of Sunday newspapers in bed, martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos, and my high school discovery of journalism in the pages of a Sunday newspaper supplement.

Deceptively slim, “Macli-ing Dulag” combines two books: Ma. Ceres P. Doyo’s expanded article, and “A Peek into Cordilleran History, Culture and Society” by Nestor P. Castro.

I was in high school when Doyo’s article on Macli-ing Dulag was featured in “Panorama,” a magazine that came with “Bulletin Today”. My father did not think highly of the newspaper. Of the three national dailies, though, he thought the Bulletin had the thickest main section devoted to news.

While my sister and I flipped through the supplements, my father read the news section from front page to back. He often pronounced the news was the “usual propaganda.” As we had several mutts that resisted housebreaking, propaganda served a purpose.

On June 29, 1980, my father asked me if I read this “Panorama” article. Edited then by the legendary Leticia Jimenez Magsanoc, the magazine offered little to interest a teenager.

In Doyo’s account, I read Macli-ing Dulag’s response to a government official belittling his people’s lack of land titles that could have “legitimized” their opposition to the Chico River Dam Project: “How can you own that which will outlive you? Only the race owns the land because the race lives forever.”


Only in college would the sacrifice that saved the Kalinga way of life sink in. Only during the recent reading of Doyo’s book did I realize that we have no lack of heroes: the tribal leader who gave up his life to defend his people’s culture, which Marcos would have traded for 1,010 megawatts of electricity; the untried journalists (Doyo and Rene O. Villanueva) who went through arduous travel and a military interrogation to write the reports that led to the first face-of between the media and the state since martial law was imposed eight years before.

The Filipinos’ heroism does not belong to the past; it manifests in the struggles to assert self-determination being waged by the indigenous peoples, non-government workers, students, and other citizens.

Asked during the military hearing why she only carried “one side” of the story, Doyo explained that the government had unlimited access to the media. “My article is a challenge to the government to print the truth.”

My father pointed me to my earliest memory of journalism’s oblation. As custodians of our shared memory, have we discharged our duty?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 12, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Writing again

THANKS to social media, former students keep in touch. One of the subjects frequently raised is writing.

Although their careers have taken off, the writing they once carried out regularly—oppressively, too, as I once handled 7:30 a.m. classes and am inflexible with deadlines and rewriting—catches hold of them again.

Some wonder if they can go back to writing again.

The “again” punctuates their thoughts like a lead sinker. The qualifier embraces many possibilities but this one seems to apply to my former students: can I write again even after not writing for many years?

As my semester as a student draws to a close, I realize a deeper anxiety can yawn under someone who writes for a living: can I write what I have always wanted to write?

Yes is the answer to both questions.

Commenting on “Letters Home,” which published nearly 400 of Sylvia Plath’s letters, written from her years as a college freshman up to the final days leading to her death by suicide, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “What comes across in these letters is a survivor who knew that to be a writer means discipline, indefatigable commitment, and passion for hard work.”

Of writers writing about writing, Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings” lingers.

The slim volume collects three lectures the fictionist delivered at Harvard University in 1983. The book is organized into “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice”.

Immediately, on the first paragraph of the first section, Welty answers obliquely the self-doubts that plague writers by opening with, “In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks.”

The power of reminiscence to guide the writer is clinched at the close of this perfect paragraph: “It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.”

“Writing by not writing” is a technique used by writers to hoard material, sharpen skills, or refresh inner resources.

As my professor, the poet J. Neil Garcia, said at the start of poetry workshops: you cannot write if you have not read. Rich, Plath, and Welty grew up in “bookish homes”.

Reading is a pleasure to be enjoyed for its own sake. Yet, caught up in it, one comes into the presence of the unspeakable.

The desire longing ache to shake loose from what also bound the limbs of Lazarus before Jesus summoned him to come forth from the grave can only end when one writes.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 5, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Of huts and books

IF the “bahay kubo” had bigger floor space, would we now be a nation of readers?

I contend that books tend to proliferate like molds. My husband says that’s the kind of thinking that keeps us perennially running out of house space.

A couple I know rent the apartment beside theirs to store their library; his and hers, I stress. He said he could go solo and I could cohabit with my books.

Had our ancestors been more into reading, our contemporary huts should include, along with the family altar and wall of children’s diplomas, a shelf or two of reading material.

From Patricia May B. Jurilla’s “Bibliography of Filipino Novels 1901-2000” (University of the Philippines Press, 2010), I learn that the early Tagalog novels did not even impose that much on spatial constraints.

“Quite a number,” she writes, were “booklets, chapbooks, or pamphlets… resembling novenas.” Citing the standards set by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), Jurilla said a “proper” book must have at least 49 pages.

Since her book about lists concentrates on books, Jurilla also did not include fictional works that were published as serials in newspapers, magazines, and popular publications, such as “komiks (comic books)”.

The popular success of serialized fiction—with writers, readers, and publishers—as the cheaper and more entertaining medium also whittled down the growth of Tagalog (Filipino) novels.

Books written in Tagalog faced stiffer competition with films and telenovelas. Jurilla does not venture into the impact of the digital sphere, but I can speculate how e-books and online user-generated content, such as those found in Wattpad, affect local publishing.

What lessons can be applied from Jurilla’s study for nurturing the writing of and reading in the 12 other major indigenous languages: Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray-Waray, Bikol, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Maranao, Tausug, Maguindanao, and Kinaray-a?

Commitment from the same triumvirate: writers, readers, and publishers.

We need also translators to enable Filipinos to appreciate the literature of other regions.

We need the academe and other advocates from the community to promote the voices of the Filipino Others so that, as Jurilla quotes Resil L. Mojares, the “Golden Age” of Filipino novels will represent a watershed both in terms of “artistic and social illuminations,” as well as “quantity of the novels produced”.

More than the freeing of literal space is required. No less than the unmooring of our narrative space will free the Filipino imagination.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 29, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Tale of tales

BOOK-READING friends protested when I cited last week that Ferdinand Marcos never bothered to close down libraries and book stores, as he did the mass media when he declared martial law in 1972 because, in his view, “Filipinos are not book readers”.

Added professor Francisco Nemenzo in his foreword to the “Philippine Radical Papers” (University of the Philippines [UP] Press, 1998), “In the Philippines books do not pose a threat to power, as in other countries.”

If that judgment grates, what do you think of this observation?

“The ‘komiks’… would be described at one point as the ‘national book’ of the Philippines, a label not altogether inaccurate given the massive readership and the influence on national culture that the form achieved.”

Cheap and disposable, the “komiks” were illustrated novels sold as serials. Cinema and “komiks” lorded over the entertainment market in the Golden Age of the 1950s and the 1960s.

Culling information that refracts into many insights of Filipinos as a nation of readers, Patricia May B. Jurilla traces in the “Bibliography of Filipino Novels 1901-2000” (UP Press, 2010) that market survival conspired with war and martial law to stunt “Tagalog (Filipino) novels” and Filipino “novels in English”.

In the 1990s, Filipino-penned novels suffered again setbacks from TV romances and “telenovelas” with their “fanatical” following.

Jurilla observes that knowing the apathy of masses to English as a medium and the predilection of educated Filipinos to read imported books, the Filipinos persisting to write novels in English are driven by interests other than profit: “fulfilling artistic, cultural, nationalistic, or personal objectives”.

That line opened another window to introspection, a pleasure handily passed on by this reference, described by its author as “a book made up of lists of books.”

Does our fraught relationship with Tagalog or Filipino hobble our reading as a nation?

In an endnote in her introduction, Jurilla recites the facts that captures the arc of our polarization: In 1959, the national language known as Tagalog was officially renamed to “Pilipino”. In 1973, it was changed into “Filipino” and affirmed in 1986. “Filipino” is still in use.

When I recently recoiled from writing a paper abstract in Filipino, my hesitation stemmed from the same reflex pushing a Cebuano, placed in a situation where Bisaya cannot be used, to choose English over Filipino.

Tagalog is the alien and alienating tongue.

It is worth one’s time to get lost among books. Not all encounters lead to a confrontation with the stranger inside our heads.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 22, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Footnotes for post-truth

LIBRARIES open their doors. What would be the value of collections if the doors were closed?

During an afternoon’s aimless browsing, I was nonplussed to discover a library that, to become the “unofficial archives of the political underworld,” also went “underground” for 30 years or so.

So wrote professor Francisco Nemenzo in the foreword to the “Philippine Radical Papers in the University of the Philippines Diliman Main Library: A Subject Guide,” (UP Press, 1998).

The book was compiled by the Filipiniana Special Collections Project staff of UP Diliman, which collaborated with the Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin in 1996-97 to catalogue and microfilm the Radical Papers.

According to project leader Verna Lee, the UPD Main Library became the repository of a collection, ranging from underground periodicals to protest poetry, that became contraband after martial law was imposed by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.

After executing the “autogolpe (coup),” Marcos consolidated his dictatorship by rounding up his critics and seizing all means of transportation and communication. Nemenzo observed that Marcos should have then gone for the “secondary targets”: “libraries and bookshops”.

He did not. This wasn't due to dictator’s remorse or oversight. “(Marcos) probably reckoned that the Filipinos are not book readers,” wrote Nemenzo.

Marcos passed an edict against even the mere possession of “subversive documents”. The ultimate cost of criticism against the despot was “disappearance”.
Nemenzo commented that so great was the “nervousness” of UP librarians they removed from the shelves all books about communism AND anti-communism. Only fear of the state auditor stayed their hands from burning the incriminating collections.

Yet, “radical papers” kept turning up in the library, were left on the tables or discreetly deposited on the service desk of the Filipiniana Reading Room, he wrote. Through the cooperation of the three universities, the Radical Papers is now organized and accessible for all.

For keeping these records during an epoch that burned truth and murdered to enshrine lies, the UP Diliman Main librarians deserve the respect of the nation, not just its scholars.

The accounts written by the Left do not constitute truth. Yet, their preservation makes it possible for anyone to scrutinize and test these versions against information contained in other documents.

Through cross-checking, which involves validation or rejection, a semblance of truth emerges. In the post-truth era, that is essential to remember: knowledge comes from sifting through, not stifling the flow.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 15, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Labyrinths

IT has been pouring in this city for days. Not just rain but middle-of-the-term, over-panic’s-edge succession of class requirements.

When it rained, we stayed indoors and read. That childhood rule makes sense except library research means tracking down a book in networks connecting a system of libraries or existing informally among colleagues connected to other systems.

No one I know orders online. Given the labyrinthine process of shipping, an online habit only adds another layer of torture beyond human endurance and government book stipends.

Photocopying—a settlement with intellectual property preferred by Third World academics—often saves the day, or at least deliverance from a deadline.

Yet, our age is so cosseted by the availability of information. Our fingers simply “walk” around a digital system, and we enter the 18th-century circumlocutions of a dead German to confuse our 21st-century sensibilities.

Bibliography is an academic discipline, with multiple specializations in library science, languages, and a particular branch of learning to create the perfect bloodhounds to track and trace all and recent information published in any niche of knowledge.

Did libraries ever shun, instead of usher in, searchers?

In the “Tower of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges tells a story of generations of librarians driven mad by the search of a room containing just four book shelves hidden in the labyrinth of a library containing twaddle. In another essay, Borges theorized that half a dozen monkeys provided with typewriters can produce all the books that the British Museum can contain.

How does one recognise true from fake knowledge? Borge’s tongue-in-cheek reply is monkey mumbo jumbo: it must have the “25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and the space)”.

In the fictional 14th-century library of the Aedificium (“structure” in Latin) at the centre of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” murderous intent is coupled with information glut to keep searchers from ever returning and finding a book.

Eco’s monks are driven actually mad by the belief that the mission handed down to their order by God is all about “preserving, repeating, and defending the treasure of wisdom”.

When martial law was declared on Sept. 21, 1972, the sound of incriminating documents torn and flushed down toilets echoed around the nation (the memory was narrated by Randy David; the exaggeration is mine).

Only to one library did dissidents entrust their papers before many of them disappeared or were made to. Which library hid and later revealed its radical heart?

Reader, the labyrinth opens next week.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 8, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Peter panned

TODAY is a double celebration.

As set forth in Republic Act 10868 or the Centenarians Law of 2016, the first Sunday of October is observed as National Respect for Centenarians Day.

Oct. 1 this year also ushers in Elderly Filipino Week.

Why do we honor the elderly? We are not just awed by their feat of longevity. Primarily, we are grateful for the guardianship of our elders.

Contradicting the view that the elderly are past their prime and dependent on the younger and more abled are present realities.

In the gaps created by the global diaspora of workers, grandparents keep the bonds of family. In many Filipino homes, grandparents do not just stand in as surrogate parents; they are often the only parents known by the children of their children.

People die, migrate for work, separate from spouses or generally flop as self-regulating, mature adults. Who frequently takes up the slack?

Even in households where parents are not biological and sociological catastrophes, the elderly are held up as exemplars of a life well-lived and, thus, worth emulating.

Paradoxically, Oct. 1 this year focused my thoughts on a 91-year-old who turned upside down all social expectations, as well as stereotypes, of the elderly.

When Hugh M. Hefner died of natural causes on Sept. 27, 2017, the press reported that he left behind a multimedia empire and a sexual revolution that shows no sign of winding down.

It does not seem much of a legacy.

The empire was built around a magazine whose journalistic highs and lows were bracketed by breakthrough interviews and the centerfold of a nude “playmate of the month.”

The magazine later clothed the “playmates” after conceding its defeat in 2015 by a more aggressive rival, the Internet.

Mr. Hefner said he “decontaminated” sex and chose the “frisky and playful” bunny as the enterprise logo to represent how fun and liberating the Playboy ethos was on the “romantic boy-girl society”.

His worldview was farm-like: “bunnies” were the accessible women in his magazine and in his life, and the “other chicks” were militant feminists, the “natural enemy” getting in the way of all that bunny play.

Even after bedding thousands of willing bunnies, he admitted, in his 80s, that he was still searching for his “soul mate”.

The world will never have enough of this Peter Pan.

“Pan” was one of the names he considered for the magazine. In J. M. Barrie’s stories for children, Peter Pan leads a group of Lost Boys in Neverland. His friendship with the human, Wendy Darling, is frozen because, although she loves him, as the boy who never grows up, he cannot love back.

There is life beyond bunnies and chicks, Mr. Hefner reminds us.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 1, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Madame Panopticon

HER signature of rummaging in two big bags made me realize I was again seated beside the stranger I named Madame Panapticon.

Bearing two full bags and dressed in clothes that came down like curtains for a final performance, this elderly lady gets on the train at Boni, two stations after mine, and always gets off at Santolan, another three stations before my train stop.

Except for the infants, everyone in our train watches as, during the entire ride, she fishes around in one bag after the other and transforms before our eyes.

In the frenetic pace of the city, many working women and girls going to a meeting put on their “faces” in the train, not minding the strangers staring at or ignoring them.

Madame Panapticon mimicked the exhibition but, in place of a mirror guiding the hand putting up the scaffolding for the public self, the people across her became the tool to reflect her face as she slathered, one after the other, various unguents that she took, one item at a time, from her bags.

In a queer way, the layers she applied on her face and neck did not end in a mask. I fell asleep, watching the people across us watching her. I woke to find a garish, rouged face turned towards me. For a moment, I saw the “skull beneath” Madame Panopticon’s visage.

In the second occasion, she transferred without ceasing items from one bag to another. One elderly man even peered inside a bag, as if to verify the source of the seemingly endless stream.

When she shook out and folded underwear as decrepit as the bags and their owner, I closed my eyes. I was no longer comfortable with the eyes watching Madame Panapticon. Mine.

The first time I started commuting in Manila, I imagined I was part of a supercolony, as populous and eusocial as the Ant World.

Among animals, eusociality is the most advanced form of socialism, where nature selects the best to breed and everyone else specializes in other tasks essential for the colony’s productivity.

I imagined that if I fell out of my place in the commuter chain—squashed perhaps by a passing bus—the blot my corporeal self would leave behind may eventually dry up and disappear from the single-minded tramping of other commuters.

To keep a supercolony—or any system working—a miniature of that system embedded in the collective consciousness and the subterranean levels is all that is needed.

Eyes are superfluous. These are private, looking inwards, into something as unverifiable as the soul. Eyes are not eusocial.

Madame Panapticon ignores this conceit. The All-seeing Eye—what the Panapticon stands for, in Greek—seeks out and judges the abnormal to be assured I am part of the herd and safe. How our eyes betray us.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the September 24, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column of SunStar Cebu, “Matamata”

Love, lies, Heidegger

I CAN'T. Never again.

When my editor-in-chief texted to ask how I was doing in graduate school, I said I was sneak-reading fiction to clear my hangover over Martin Heidegger.

Since the age of Enlightenment, Germany yielded many intellectuals. The ideas that swept Europe since the 18th Century are as relevant now, specially in communications.

At first glance, the world three centuries ago barely shows any kinship with the digital age. How did people communicate then?

From the Net: “(T)hey wrote letters, sent telegrams, gave a message to a messenger, attached a letter to a bird and (obviously) talked to each other.”

Waking up to read that Malacañang has again backpedaled on an earlier pronouncement about the “remote possibility" that martial law may be declared nationwide a few days from now—the 45th anniversary of the first declaration of martial law in the country—I realize that “talking to one another” remains as reflexively human, and thus as complicated, as ever.

So, despite my forthright reply to my editor-in-chief, I am back in the labyrinth with Heidegger, who countered many ideas of the Enlightenment in the 20th Century.

“To read Heidegger is to set out on an adventure,” wrote William Lovitt in introducing the philosopher’s essays, translated in 1977.

To get lost and remain lost is part of the Heideggerian tour. Try parsing this line in his seminal essay, “The Question Concerning Technology”: “That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees.”

An astounding ability to use one noun multiple times, with each use signifying a different meaning, is, fortunately not the only (doubtful) virtue of Heidegger.

His love for words should mean something in a world beset by fake news, “illegal content,” and the even more nefarious legislations created to attack the weeds in our midst.

Using etymology, which traces how words developed meanings over time, Heidegger wrote in the same essay that the Greek word “aletheia” means truth, which involves a “bringing-forth”.

Paradoxically, Heidegger illustrated best the complications of truth not with philosophy but his own life. Illuminating the post-Enlightenment world of ideas, he embraced Nazism and seduced his student, then 19, the intellectual and humanist Hannah Arendt.

“Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves,” wrote the man who loved a Jew and hated the race, bringing forth how, in talking to each other, we walk a tightrope, then and now.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 17, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column “Matamata”

Shuttered

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the ugliest of them all?

I’ve lost count of the number of times our class on media and culture lamented over the state of our affairs.

“Our” here does not refer only to the Filipino; we have Indonesian and Indian classmates.

Yet, the mediatization of culture—a theory asserting that media frames and influences social interactions and more importantly, its discourses—illuminates issues that cannot be contained by borders of space, time, and specially constructs like culture.

In the 1800s, the English, Dutch, and Spanish colonial powers destroyed the Balangingi and Iranun people and called this act of genocide and ethnic cleansing the redemption of civilization from Muslim piracy and slave trade.

In the present, centuries later, the Christian phobia of the Moro simplifies my reaction to media reports of Islamism or Islamic militancy or fundamentalism. A complex issue is reduced to the same end of colonial campaigns: distrust the other.

Until I read James Francis Warren’s “Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity,” my grasp of pirates was the sum of watching reruns of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, produced by Hollywood and inspired by the popular theme park ride in Disneyland, perhaps the most insidious culture industry of all time.

I perceive therefore I know.

I criticize President Donald Trump for banning travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries; waffling on the role of neo-Nazi groups in the Charlottesville rally that turned violent; and more recently, caving in to pressure from the Right to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which may end with the deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Brought illegally to America by their parents, the so-called “Dreamers” escaped poverty, repression and threats to life but are now perceived to be rivals for jobs by blue-collar America, who compose the mass base of pro-Trump voters.

Yet, stranded for hours last Aug. 31 when the “Lakbayan” or People’s Caravan entered the University of the Philippines Diliman campus to assert the rights of indigenous peoples and the Moro people against state neglect, militarization, and other forms of oppression, I lamented my poor luck to be caught in the miserable crosshairs of history.

“To see is to know”. Snow White’s evil stepmother did not realize this; nor the Westerners gawking at the Igorots and pygmies displayed at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which adopted this motto in showcasing anthropology in 1893.

Nor will we. The mirror of our perceptions is trained on others; our eyes are shuttered from its one true reflection: ourself.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the September 10, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column of SunStar Cebu, “Matamata”

Penmanship

WHAT lurks behind the banal? Recently, the librarian made an observation after I handed to her the borrower’s cards to take out books.

Did I have a tough time learning to write such a long name? she asked.

Learning to write in script must have slowed me down in grade school since I was always bringing home classmates’ notebooks to copy the notes that the teachers erased before I could finish.

In high school, when classmates borrowed my notes more often than I did theirs, I remembered their grumbling that they could hardly read my penmanship.

Legibility is the hallmark of perfect penmanship, so we were inducted. Yet, intrinsic to character, penmanship is anything but uniform and remote. We write first to ourselves, if we write to anyone.

Generations of students have commented about my penmanship. The braver souls complain; the sentimental ones don’t throw away their drafts, which they say “drip” with the comments I pen in red ink.

Whether as teacher, editor or reader, scribbling on the margins of text is hardly vandalism or graffiti art: we are not declaring to a public but writing for ourself.

In Ha Jin’s short story, “Broken,” Shen Manjin, driven to rise in the Communist Youth League Section, stays after office hours to practice his penmanship.

“(T)he Political Department always needed cadres who could write well,” Ha Jin prefaces the vigor with which Manjin applies to his overtime exercises, anticipating a future when he will lead over a hundred branches of the Youth League and its more than five thousand railroad workers.

For two friends at the turn of the nineteenth century, penmanship was a test of devotion. Best friends forever (BFFs) Karl and Friedrich were as thick as thieves, once spending 10 days together, just talking.

When Karl died, only 11 people turned up. Yet Friedrich made it possible for his BFF’s life’s work, the outputs of day after day of researching in the Reading Room of the British Museum, to be published after Karl’s death.

The second and third volumes of “Capital” by Karl Marx was “stitched together” by Friedrich Engels from “hundreds of pages of scrawled-over drafts,” writes Louis Menand in an Oct. 10, 2016 article in “The New Yorker”.

“(Marx had spectacularly bad handwriting; Engels was one of the few people outside the family who could decipher it.)”

Whether as handmaiden to the seismic but invisible changes in a life or eyewitness to a body of ideas changing a world, handwriting is the ultimate subversion, proof that the personal is potent and enduring.


* First published in the September 3, 2017 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

Dream university

SO indefatigable was the woman’s storytelling, she roped me in with her companion and perhaps the rest of the Toki jeepney passengers.

“Ikot” is the more popular version of the iconic jeepney that goes counterclockwise around the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines (UP).

The jeepney that goes around the campus clockwise is called “Toki,” which is “Ikot” spelled backwards. Had my curiosity won, I might have asked the Toki storyteller if she knew the legends behind the creation of these names.

However, when I disembarked, she was still in full stream, enumerating the members of her clan that graduated from, or taught or worked at, or was going to take the coming Upcat to enter the college associated with the different academic buildings in the Ikot/Toki route.

Passing the University of the Philippines College Admission Test (Upcat) is a ritual my sister and I went through, with varying degrees of uncertainty. UP was not my first choice for college, but I ended up finishing my undergraduate studies in Communication Arts at its Cebu campus.

My sister was unsure about her course so I suggested. She also finished Business Management at UP Cebu, quite happily as it turned out. Like many alumni, we can say our student identification numbers in our sleep.

My Toki companion’s discourse underlines again that the decision to choose UP is not just a personal or family decision but also a communal one.

Vivid oral historians are the Ikot and Toki drivers who have these past weeks been orienting senior high school students, parents and even grandparents seeking the Office of Admissions or Rodik’s for the iconic tapsilog break—part of the formal and informal rites initiating one to Diliman, the flagship campus.

What is most moving, though, are the students who must pass through the eye of the Upcat to enroll next year in their “dream university,” as one lass emphatically declared inside the Ikot, filled to bursting by her seemingly equally overwhelmed classmates.

For many takers, UP will remain just that, a dream.

Of the 87,000 who took Upcat in 2014, only 1,588 passed and were qualified to enroll in UP’s eight constituent universities across the nation. That’s a passing rate of 1.8 percent.

This year’s Upcat is historic, involving the first batch of senior high school students. How many takers will pass, enroll and graduate from UP? How many will enjoy greater subsidy or even the sustainability of free college education?

How many graduates will serve the people?

I would not mind sharing a Toki or Ikot with passengers brimming with stories of their UP-educated clans.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 27, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Chicks killers

ON Tuesday, ampalaya with egg was my breakfast and dinner. On Wednesday, ground meat in egg. On Thursday, rice fried with egg became breakfast. Friday, smoked fish and salted egg.

Except for changes in main noun and preposition, egg was the mainstay in this week’s meals. Perhaps the Pampangueño cooks just love eggs or cafeteria regulars do.

Many of my breakfast classmates and I take our eggs with a national daily, which are piled near the food trays.

Despite our conspicuous consumption of news, which prominently featured this week the culling of birds to stop the spread of bird flu in Pampanga, when the cafeteria closes by 4 p.m., the hordes have wiped away every trace of egg, presumably to return the next day.

I know because one of the Pampangueña ladies kindly whipped up an egg sandwich I could eat before my evening class.

On the sound theory of not biting the hand that feeds one, I’ve never asked the cafeteria crew if our eggs are sourced from Pampanga, where they are going after every chicken, quail, and duck suspected of or testing positive for the H5 strain.

I’ve tried to eavesdrop on conversations among cafeteria diners, who are mostly from the natural sciences. However, stepping up human resistance to viruses or implementing strict biosecurity measures does not seem to be on the minds of this learned crowd when they are tackling eggs and whatnots.

Being of the humanities discipline, I rationalize my eggs-cesses by creating backstories: for instance, the salted egg lying on its bed of sun-ripened tomatoes must surely be “old stock,” salted away long before some alien winged in from elsewhere in Asia to infect our sitting ducks.

Besides, even if a foreign extremist invasion of H5 carriers did corrupt the Pampanga stocks, I put full confidence on the martial solution to rebellion and chaos in the poultries.

After poultry workers in Pampanga refused to cull the infected birds even if promised the previously unheard-of daily allowance of P700, Malacañang called on the military to step in and terminate the threat.

Given the Philippine track record in extrajudicial killings, gassing and burying birds in pits will not even ruffle feathers.

On the same day the military was ordered to clear contaminated poultries, police officials shrugged off the deaths of 21 drug suspects killed in nine hours in Bulacan.

The deaths are “normal,” given these resulted from 22-25 operations, not just one, a police spokesperson explained the simultaneous operations called “One Time, Big Time”.

Since any form of math, even malicious math, is beyond me, I put my faith on law enforcement to also take care of my eggs, same place, same time.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStarCebu’s August 20, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

My way

GOING back to school in one’s 50s is like returning to kindergarten: at the end of the day, the senior student monopolizes the dinner conversation with “I did this” and “I did that”.

That’s a thought expressed by N., who's my classmate in two courses this semester. We sat across each other in our first class. By our next class, we were seated beside each other, swapping notes about our reading assignments.

Our classmates, who could be our sons and daughters, prefer e-books they can store in their phones and read while commuting. N. and I are old-school; we prefer to photocopy, highlight pages, and make longhand notes in notebooks that don’t require batteries.

N.'s children point out that one can also digitally mark pages, minus a sore back from lugging around all that paper. My boys—a husband and sons who speed around the information highway—rebuke me for holding back from technology.

N.’s rejoinder says it best: Let me do it my way.

I would be glossing over if I left the impression that the freedom to pursue my way is what alone distinguishes the two cycles of kindergarten.

A word of German origin, “kindergarten” literally means “children’s garden”.

The promised Eden of exploration and discovery was, I discovered when I was five, a terrifying place. I had to find a voice to get the teacher to give me permission for the toilet or plead with a classmate to return my pencil.

That voice never seemed to be around when terrors rattled the gates of my five-year-old mind.

At 51, being able to say what I want no longer seems as important as knowing what I want even if others doubt that I do.

I remember a terrifying first meeting with two poets. Both are decades my junior. My classmate has published a book of poetry; my teacher is awaiting his seventh.

In contrast, I wrote my last poem for the Silliman Writers Workshop perhaps three decades ago. The last poem I read, liked, and reread was three years ago.

Had I done the math, I would have fled that classroom as if all the wraiths of bards, from classical to free verse, were yapping at my heels.

Yet, I stayed in my seat for easily the most uncomfortable and illuminating discussion in nearly half a century of learning in classrooms: why writing poetry is the most useless activity, and why in this uselessness lies its greatest use for society.

There’s nothing quite like youth and its prodigious gifts of energy and self-regard.

But before the sap dries, one should put all one’s heart, soul, and strength into replenishing the well of one’s ignorance. The more we learn, the more we unlearn.

Or, as N. said: Let me do it my way.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 13, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Closed encounters

IN Cebu, the bus exists largely as a figment of contention. In the labyrinth that is Manila, the bus rumbles out of the discourse and into the realm of the banal and inescapable days of our lives.

Traveling by bus used to be about romancing the countryside. As a young community worker, I learned a few tricks from traveling by land around Cebu and Central Visayas.

Bus tip #1: backpack it.

The terminal is where life begins. Come early and your ticket will still come with a seat.

Bus tip #3: watch life go past. In Dalaguete, the scenes outside the window replayed when the bus, like a car pool, came back for a regular passenger, who had been taking a bath.

In the city of queues, I arrived at the bus half an hour before it left. In the seat of dreams, one can nap or watch the movie on board to dilute reality with a bit of make-believe.

While my seat mates juggled dinner and smartphone monologues, I watched the night’s feature on “Cinebakbakan”.

Like me, Raymond Bagatsing travels from the province to the big city. His cousin introduces Serafin to Sarge (Tonton Gutierrez), who gives him a job and more guns than seems necessary to man the gate of a shack in the middle of nowhere.

Though naive, Serafin is not too slow to catch on that Sarge actually leads a kidnapping ring. When Sarge goes amok, Serafin tries to out-Adam Adam: return to the Eden where he was expelled.

The movie is full of stereotypes (chain-smoking journalists) and peculiarities (Serafin gets in the pool of mud with his carabao and gives it a back massage). Yet, when the bus vents gushed water instead of freezing air, I was the last to leave my seat for the safety of the aisle.

In the melee of corporate drones cussing like fish vendors, a barking driver, and the ticket collector passing around one sodden rag to stanch the shower on board, I followed Serafin’s changing fortunes: he emerges from the margin to assume a dead man’s fearsome reputation, marries a woman later possessed by an evil spirit, dupes a kidnapped child into regarding him as the father, and finally unburdens to a journalist who smokes more than takes notes.

Movies on buses are kitschy or pornographic. “Serafin Geronimo: Ang Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion” is neither. I waited for the closing credits to reveal the director.

And got instead the opening scene of “True Lies,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course, art is dead in the city. A bus is not a cinematheque.

But would it have hurt if deadened commuters went home that night, realizing that the movie we all got drenched for was the first one directed by Lavrente Indico “Lav” Diaz? Probably not. Bus tip #4.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 6, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The big picture

MARTIAL law makes many people feel safe. Often left out in the assertion is a question: safe from whom?

In the late 1980s, on my first job, I travelled by land to Sta. Catalina in Negros Oriental. I was hired by a consultancy firm hired by a government agency that had World Bank funding to solve poverty.

An invisible speck in the entire bureaucracy, I was tasked to ask farmers about a comic book on land tenure.

Being young, I missed out on the joke and saw only the final report as the Holy Grail of a quest that took me from Alegria in the south of Cebu to San Miguel in Bohol.

In the bus from Dumaguete to Sta. Catalina, it rained hard. My bag floated in the greasy pool that collected the rain dripping from the bus roof. I hugged the comic books in their plastic bag, and worried what I would do without clean clothes for the coming week.

The thought that I would have to revert to the field worker’s strategy of using underwear “side A-side B” distracted me from the camouflage helicopters that hovered over Sta. Catalina, one or two at a time but all the time.

During the motorcycle ride to the upland site office, I asked the driver about the torn bark and hole gouged out by bullets in a tree.

An encounter, he said. Ambush? I asked. Farmers, he said. So what did they fire with: produce? I asked, still peeved about the rain and my sodden bag.

The site office was located beside a military detachment, but it was indistinguishable where one ended and the other began. The same barbed wires connected the margins. When lights went off at curfew, I listened to the distant popping sounds.

Christmas in May, I thought before falling asleep.

Field workers were instructed not to get involved with our neighbors on either side of the spectrum. Yet, we slept near and drove around with one side. Did we feel safer? I thought I did.

Interviews went like a breeze in Sta. Catalina. Above the farms, helicopters crisscrossed like green-bellied flies.

The farmers and I watched the circling choppers more than we discussed the comics. Like strange antennae, the long prows of M16 barrels and muzzles protruded from the sides of the Sta. Catalina “flies”.

The gunner stationed at the open sides of choppers is an “innovation” learned from the Vietnam War, according to a U.S. Army documentary, “The Big Picture”.

Inviting young Americans to train as “shotgun riders,” the 1967 documentary shows instructors sitting beside the open doors as if they were “on (their) front porch,” coaching young men to fire M16s at 450 rounds a minute, with one reminder: “Don’t get carried away while firing; it’s important to conserve ammunition.”

In Sta. Catalina, I finally caught on.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 30, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Ear to the ground

WHAT is “the situation on the ground”?

Today is the 60th day martial law was imposed by President Duterte in Mindanao.

Last May 23, the President reacted swiftly to the Maute Group’s occupation of Marawi City.

As commander-in-chief, the President can suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or impose martial law “in case of invasion or rebellion,” based on Section 18, Article VII of the 1987 Philippine Constitution.

However, the 1987 Constitution is more specific than the 1935 version, which President Ferdinand Marcos used as the basis for passing Proclamation 1081 and putting the country for the first time under martial law.

As amended by the 1986 Constitutional Commission created by President Corazon Aquino, the 1987 Constitution imposes a limit on martial law: no more than 60 days.

Today is the deadline. Will martial law be lifted or extended?

Two weeks ago, House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez proposed a five-year extension of martial law.

The 1987 Constitution permits the Congress to extend martial law if “the invasion or rebellion persists and public safety requires it”.

Yesterday, the two houses of Congress were expected to hold a special session to decide on the President’s request for extension of martial law in Mindanao. (Update: During the joint session on July 22, the Senate and the House voted to extend martial law until December 31: 261 for, 18 against.)

Sixty days ago, the Maute Group and Abu Sayyaf terrorists torched Marawi; robbed, raped, and killed civilians; and tried to create a “province of the Middle East-based Islamic State (IS) jihadist group in Southeast Asia.”

The deadline to suppress the rebellion has lapsed many times. Yesterday, the military again said it expected to retake Marawi “in a few more days.”

But lawlessness and the IS threat are apparently still serious enough for the military. National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. said martial law will prevent some 700 jihadists from entering the country.

Despite its jingoistic rhetoric, the military says something that must be repeated: what is the “situation on the ground”?

Yesterday, in Iligan City, Tindeg Maranao (Stand Up Maranao) gathered some 100 evacuees to oppose the extension of martial law.

It is an opening salvo for the July 24 protests being organized by civil society groups around the country. On this day, a day after the 60-day deadline of martial law in Mindanao lapses, President Duterte will deliver his State of the Nation Address.

The evacuees call for an end to martial law and the end of military airstrikes in Marawi City.

On July 24, some 260,000 evacuees vow to return to Marawi City. “We will go home!”

What is the “situation on the ground”?



(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the July 23, 2017 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Paper cuts

WHEN you write, you make an incision. You make a cut and think you know what follows.

Sometimes, the writing surprises. The sliver opens and a stranger looks out. You cannot look away. You can. You want to. You don’t want to.

Writing is pain. It should come with the standard warning for danger zones: DO NOT ENTER.

I should have said this when I was invited by the “Tug-ani,” the official student publication of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu.

Michelle Grace Cabrales, a Business Management student who’s the current Tug-ani EIC, and her team invited writers to discuss the craft and make a critique of articles submitted by the participants.

I chose covering human trafficking to jumpstart the talk on features, which two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jon Franklin likens to “news of the emotions”.

Students of UP and the University of San Carlos showed up for the Friday talk, which included fellow teacher and writer Joanalyn Gabales and our resident cat, Walter Stefano.

Our small group discussed after my talk our reactions to four articles written by “Tug-ani" writers. Claire Michaela Obejas, a Psychology major who wrote one of the articles, asked how one knew which voice to follow when a writer found herself shifting from one point of view to another in the course of writing an article.

During the workshop, my response addressed the question as a technical one involving planning and publication: on an assignment, a writer discussed with the editor the desired format, angle, length, and deadline.

If contributing an article, a writer has better chances of publishing if he or she scopes out the targeted section, the ratio of text to graphics, and the targeted audience.

Yet, Claire’s question went beyond the challenges of deadline and market. Striking out beyond the safe harbor of information and “verifiable” truth, a writer can wander without noticing into the quagmire of memory, introspection, and self-conflict.

When one finally notices the water rising, what act of self-preservation does one choose: retreating back to the shallows or going into the deep?

In a movie directed by Wong Kar-Wai, a journalist and a secretary discover that their spouses are having an affair.

“In the Mood for Love” is set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, which Wong depicts as a claustrophobic prison of cramped apartments, nosy neighbors, and double standards.

Albeit betrayed, the protagonists do not want to betray their spouses. Or think they don’t.

Not even his profession in dealing with truth saves the man from self-deception.

Beyond the tidy rules of grammar, writers learn that paper cuts are the deepest, “the most unkindest cut of all”.



*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 16, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

In the dark

In the dark

NIGHTMARES happen. Last Friday, I was working late at the office when the power went out.

The tinkling of the piano that had been soothing on Spotify a moment ago now turned sinister. The glare emitted from the laptop screen cast long shadows on the walls.

I was alone in the office, the entire second floor. Or so, I hoped.

I cleared away papers while straining my ears for any sound. When I did hear something, I was brushing my teeth.

Investigating the open door to our office, the evening shift guard heard the unmistakable sounds of choking.

The squeaking of the door he pushed open made me almost swallow the toothpaste, as well as the toothbrush.

Catastrophe averted, I moved to the lobby, lit by the stretch of Gorordo Ave. that was crawling with cars.

Students from the nearby night high school walked in counterflow to the stalled vehicles.

In the resurrected debate over the bus rapid transit (BRT) versus the light rail transit (LRT), the right of pedestrians has been sideswept again.

Many people walk home when getting a ride entails a long wait. Walking is free.

I walk because I need the exercise. Many a dog performs a public service by dragging its overweight owner for a walk.

The sidewalks fronting the campus must be among the most pedestrian-friendly in the country because of the ancient acacias.

What can be more magnificent than the crown of a century-old tree? What is more vulnerable?

The most harebrained scheme I read about was a proposal to implement an LRT-MRT system to “complement” the BRT for Cebu.

A transportation official said that the LRT-MRT railways will be set up on an elevated platform and not interfere with the BRT traffic below.

I wonder again if our planners ever commute like we citizens do. Nothing but carbon emissions and urban blight thrive under the LRT-MRT in Metro Manila.

Wary of the predators prowling under the belly of the public transport system that has so far not delivered the masses from Edsa hell, commuters like me choose mall transit points.

“From the frying pan to the fire” comes to mind when malls go on weekend sales, and the metropolis descends into a different kind of madness.

Last Friday, as traffic crawled, the sidewalks of Gorordo Ave. became lanes dedicated to those who have nothing but the power to walk.

When I shifted my glance slightly, I saw how the sidewalks disappeared under the press of street commerce. Across these nightly transformations is the barangay hall.

Why do I not wonder if some form of power failure keeps our officials, and by extension public service, perpetually in the dark?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 9, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Aloft

THE CALL time to assemble prior to marching was ignored by Batch 2017. That could be predicted.

What could not be foretold were the thoughts that wandered as I dutifully stood at the imaginary head of the imaginary queue, followed by the first student to lead (still imaginary), in alphabetical order, the graduating class of “iskolar ng bayan”.

What awaits these young people beyond the march that was about to start (imaginary again), after the moment the university would pronounce them as graduates and alumni?

The question darted and ducked as I gave up all appearances of duty to pose for photos with these gilded young people, familiar enough as my students these past years, but strange and daunting, too, with a way of gazing back and talking about the future that their former selves could never pull off in the nail-biting days before the official list of graduates was released.

Then I spotted on the ground, beside someone’s fallen hankie, yellow-green blossoms that resemble, had these still been aloft our heads, clusters of sea stars drifting in an unseen current.

Unlike the iconic sunflowers that have been biologically engineered to bloom in time for graduation at the Diliman campus, the ilang-ilang tree in the Lahug campus goes generally ignored.

Some of us remember that the tree was already there when we were undergraduates. We ignored it, too, preferring the nearby “tambis” tree, prolific and easy enough to climb for its juicy fruits in summer.

Then a former janitor made a morning rite of picking the fallen ilang-ilang and placing a blossom on each desk in the faculty room. A male colleague joked that it was so “awkward” to receive flowers from another man.

I remember giving him the look. “Then can I have yours,” I said and scooped the brown gnarled litter from his desk to mine. It was unnecessary as the perfume of one ilang-ilang blossom can permeate a whole room, let alone a tiny brain.

Even now, when it is increasingly a challenge to stoop for the blossoms the wind has shaken free from the branches, I gather ilang-ilang to take back to my desk, press between pages, or bring to meetings.

Unlike flamboyant orchids, the ilang-ilang blossom is found more often on the ground, never as corsages. Its journey from air to ground is short and fraught.

When still green, the blossoms blend with the carabao grass carpeting the ground. Trodden, ran over, crushed, perhaps merely being severed from the tree starts the quick descent from yellow to brown, the inevitable decay.

Seneca wrote, “There is no easy way from the earth to the stars”. As the ilang-ilang tree drizzled earthbound stars over yet another batch of graduates, I thought the reverse is also true.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 2, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Coming home

WHEN one comes home, the time one has been away is measured by changes.

Many things vie to catch my eye: the cleaned and buffed Crucified Christ, the crown of thorns catching the glint of dying sun and dripping bronze blood; the light grey coating of molds dusting the carved Ifugao couple bearing harvest offerings; and the rubber slippers bearing the shape and weight of my soles I hunt for and find among his shoes.

Grey fuzz coats even the female figure’s soles, created with a few flicks of the knife.

I pick up and return the couple on the shelf, which displays couple figurines collected from various places. From Indonesia to the Philippines and Vietnam, these pairs invoke harmony in the union, as evidenced by the male and the female figures mirroring the same actions.

Only the Ifugao couple is different. Though having the same bald heads and dangling wooden earrings, the man stands astride while the woman kneels. In the store, the sight of her bare soles stopped me until I noticed that even while kneeling, her head is nearly at the same level as his.

The most telling changes are not found in objects but the living. It rains nearly every day now, but the rains came too late for the pepper. The leaves are shrunk and wrinkled, like crepe cut-outs of green framing the red and orange pods that respond to the rain like impertinent little boys’ penises.

I search for the oregano that once grew as high as my waist. The kamuning is lush but subdued; no fireflies and no full moon mean that, during this short visit, I will not experience the white kamuning blossoms perfuming the nights.

The bamboo remains a presence but has become a stranger. From being a few clumps of straggly stems, there is a marching row of bamboo that the husband’s onslaught of pruning has disciplined into a vertical mat of green.

My mornings used to begin before the bamboo that unpredictably broke ground or shot for the sky overnight. After the fog crept away and before the sun broke over Laguna de Bay, clusters of dew turned the stems into arcs of diamonds refracting light.

Birds once nested in this recalcitrant, unkempt growth. A wisp of bamboo spurred avian lovemaking, its pliability ending often with the bird on top slipping off and falling before instincts kicked in and the inept lover flew back and tried again.

Standing before this tidy, tame wall of bamboo, I hear no bird-song, no liquid rustling. Coming home, I notice how, while I was away, change came and made itself at home.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 25, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Father and daughters

FOUR o’clock in the afternoon still brings my father home to me.

When he was working, he organized his work meticulously—from running a surgery department to teaching medicine—so that at 4:30 p.m., his blue Beetle was always parked outside our high school, just a few minutes after dismissal.

My father’s predictability enabled me to estimate that, except on days when I had to clean the classroom, I had just enough time to run to the library, borrow a book (that I searched for and reserved during lunch), and find my sister before we went to our father.

It was a fast rule that we should all be home before the Angelus.

Though simple enough for my father, this rule made it a challenge to survive high school without going to the meetings, practices, PTA assemblies, charity concerts, and myriad activities held after classes ended.

The germ of writing must have been activated from the number of excuse letters I drafted for my father’s signing to explain his Angelus rule to school administrators. Fortunately, they were nuns.

Even when I became a coed in a state university, I preferred the routine of going home with my father and sister. He still waited for her outside my alma mater at the usual place and time.

Then I discovered that a bakeshop at the corner where I alighted from the jeepney to walk to my father’s Beetle served hot bread at around 4:30 p.m.

Despite the loss of some molars, Papang enjoyed the steaming, crunchy crust, and I welcomed, for the first time, having a parent whose predictability of habits made loving a simple and daily pleasure.

The first crack in my adolescence came when a classmate tried to start a habit of walking home with me.

Since we both had to count centavos, we didn’t mind chatting while walking from the state university to the bakeshop at the corner, a little over a kilometer. However, I was adamant about parting ways at the bakery.

What would my father think if I brought back this boy along with a bag of hot Elorde?

At first, my friend took the four o’clock routine as a joke. Then he got hurt, upset, annoyed.

I also became sorry that this boy wouldn’t go away if I gave him an excuse letter. Perhaps I did grow more than a little fond of listening to such a well-read creature.

But there was no space for him in that four o’clock zone, which I shared only with my father, hot bread, my sister, and the family Beetle.

With his trademark sarcasm, my former classmate might ask me today if my father has turned every merienda with hot bread into a fraught encounter with cold memories.

However, I have sons and he has daughters. He can best answer the question: why do fathers spoil their daughters for other men?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 18, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Love and oblivion

AT Santiago Bay, Camotes, the dogs live the life.

Low tide leaves a wide expanse of fine sand, enjoyed by early morning strollers, selfie worshippers, and dogs.

Recently in Camotes, I got to know the mutts very well. They are Asong Pinoy (Aspin), lean and even bony, with rough coats from living outdoor and eating scraps.

But the dogs have a contagious zest for island life. In an excess of brio, one puppy leaped up and pawed every stranger as if reunited with a long-absent mistress.

The ones napping on the shore were gradually isolated into isles by the incoming tide. When the water finally lapped too close, a dog snapped awake and plopped down on a drier spot.

While going through the motions of winding up the semester, I took minute breaks from theses defense by holding out my right leg, which bore the silvery shadow of a nail scratch from an Aspin encounter.

To crisscross the borderless sliver separating wideawakeness from oblivion: I envy the dogs.

During the last thesis defense of the semester, I glimpsed why, despite our kinship with the canine, we are fated to search for but never find this refuge.

Judelyn Felicilda is one of the strongest-willed young women that I have worked with. Before this month is over, she will don the Sablay, the official garment worn to culminate one’s journey in our university.

For Judhai, the years of searching for knowledge ended on the streets, where she engaged commercial sex workers (CSWs) who are men who have sex with other men (MSM) and transgender women (TG).

Last June 8, Judhai presented a video that seeks to convince CSWs to use a condom in every transaction as a protection from the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (Aids).

Judhai’s video rests on testimonies why, even among hardened professionals, love becomes the knife we turn against ourselves.

According to her, CSWs fall into two types. The professionals offer sex for pay. For the non-professionals, “harvat (gay lingo for “harvest,” meaning the need to earn) determines whether money exchanges hands.

Yet, some CSWs admit that “harvat” can be set aside for an attractive partner who looks clean (healthy and non-infectious).

However, when the CSW is in love with the partner, “modnoc (condom)” is never used.

Over the years, the rise of cases has been accompanied by the rise and fall of monikers for persons living with HIV/Aids: “Gset,” “shitsu,” “posit,” and “josh”.

These euphemisms may be attempts to blunt the cut of living with Ida (Aids).

As Judhai suggests, teaching CSWs the skills for condom negotiation can zero in on ways on how to cope with love.

Who among us is immune to it anyway?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 11, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Spirit diving

I EXPECTED least but got a baptism when I recently swam in the underground waters of two caves in Camotes Island.

A dedicated armchair tourist, I still somehow ended up in caves, from the wartime bunkers in Alegria, south of Cebu to the trans-water caves, with a few running for 2-km stretches, in Trang An, Vietnam.

Caves exert a powerful hold. From World War II survivors in Alegria, I learned how upland caves aided their escape from the Japanese Imperial Army and town collaborators.

Almost a quarter of a century after, survivors recalled vividly how the caves held water they took care not to spoil with human waste. Inside these caves, entire clans lived and wove mats of river reeds for extra warmth and barter while under siege.

Yet in caves, too, repose our primal fears. When the husband had me sit closest to the prow of the boat, he kidded that he only wanted to make sure I wouldn’t fall off while we were part of a group exploring the Underground River of Palawan.

Inducted in 2012 as one of the New Seven Wonders of Nature, the now-renamed Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park has one other thing, aside from stalactites and stalagmites inducing awe, that it has in common with other sites of natural heritage: tourists.

As tour operators and communities co-exist in uneasy compromise to manage traffic and the inevitable degradation, tourists of all persuasions—including newly-weds having their pictorial while balanced on a bamboo boat outside the trans-water grottoes of Trang An—dispel superstitions enshrouding caves.

Only some.

Perhaps because entering a cave involves descending and leaving a realm where light and air are taken for granted, caves bring to mind entering a crypt and never being able to leave it, like Persephone hostaged by Hades in the bowels of the underworld.

Bukilat Cave on Poro, Camotes is ideal for families. It has seven “windows” or natural ceiling apertures to let in light dappling the cool brackish pool, and serving as natural spotlight for selfie poses and Facebook memories.

High tide raises the level of the underground waters of the Amazing Island Cave in San Francisco, Camotes. A life vest and buddies helped me hurdle for the first time being dunked in the water to go past a low ceiling, competing for thin air in a cavern overcrowded with tourists, and kicking around like a day-old tadpole in waters about 9-ft deep.

Later, while drinking my fill of the sky above the sea in Mangodlong, I realized why swimming in caves draws and repels: as life throws a curve, caverns deprive us of our comforts and conceits, forcing us to claw inside and reach for that which we never knew existed just to break through.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 4, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Camotes

ON my first visit to Camotes, I count it as a blessing that I ate at the house of a resident.

Having breakfast at the ancestral home of the Borlasa clan in Poro, I was fortunate to not only break fast with colleagues who have become friends, I escaped the tourist handicap of seeing a new place as being created for the express purpose of amusing me.

Jiji, who once sat in my classes as an undergraduate and now teaches at the same state university, recalls spending summer with cousins who homed in from many parts of Visayas and Mindanao.

The home of her grandparents may have been transferred to above the street after a truck veered off and rammed into it, but it still retains many reminders of those endless summers of reunion.

If by some quirk of fate, the Borlasa home in Poro will lose all its material connections to the past, there’s still Jiji’s aunt.

Josefa “Pipay,” 82, does not only give obvious cues about how Jiji will look when she breaches her 80’s. Aunt and niece share, beyond a puckish humor and a direct but inoffensive way of speaking, a sense of place.

When the expression, “take root,” is used, it often refers to how something germinates, flourishes, takes hold.

Over the course of four days, I’ve seen how Camotes takes root in people, no matter how dissimilar they are.

Perhaps due to an economy that has remained agrarian and maritime, the two generations of Borlasas reflect how the people of Camotes are segregated between the native-born who never leave like Josefa, and those like Jiji who live and work elsewhere but never fail to go home.

Yet even among her sons and daughters who cannot escape the diaspora, the hold of Camotes on their sensibilities implies a complexity lying below its pastoral and placid charms.

Wrapped around the island is a thick belt of mature, verdant mangroves that serves as a natural buffer for disaster.

This resource so vital for marine ecology and disaster preparedness co-exists with the beach resorts, caves, and other hangouts in Santiago and Mangodlong.

Yet, more than political will prioritizes sustainability over present gains.

The community decides and participates, down to the “barangay,” ”sitio,” and “purok”.

A dialect named Porohanon is still spoken fluently despite the influx of Cebuano and English. Traced to migrants from Bohol and Leyte, Porohanon fascinates: “Nikuligi na l’at an puza (the child is crying again).”

A nylon sack, that’s reused after storing rice to holding trash, hangs outside every home in Camotes. It speaks volumes to visitors, perhaps not in Porohanon but of the ethos of interdependence: my home is your home. Treat it as you do your own.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com / mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 28, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”)

Imagined

A LUNCHBREAK encounter brought my attention to a book my fellow teachers were holding close to their chest.

One more copy will wend its way to a friend in Australia, which, for once, was viewed as backward: its bookstores had yet to display copies of the Penguin Classic edition of Nick Joaquin’s “The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic”.

My friends’ expressions telegraphed the quiet exultation of having finally nabbed Nick, whose birth centennial was last May 4.

The new media has irretrievably changed why we read and how we read, but working daily with teachers and students, I confirm that technology leaves untouched an older, enduring obsession for books.

For knowledge workers, books are necessities. Yet, the books that occupy permanent, though cramped, space in our hearts and minds are the ones that open doors and windows to an imagined life.

I have no functional use for a black-bound book with tarnished gold-edged pages, picked up in a store of secondhand books.

Published in Amsterdam in 1905, “Het Boek der Psalmen” has all its pages covered in musical notes and Dutch lyrics, which I cannot read.

On the flyleaf of this hymnal is written the name of Minnie De Zeeuw. Handwritten under her name is March 27, 1908, Minnie’s 12th birthday.

I cannot imagine a 12-year-old plotting to get her hands on a hymnal, even in 1908. Yet, when I turn slowly the brittle pages, I can conjure up Minnie and her book of psalms.

That is perhaps why I keep between the pages of this 112-year-old book a handwritten letter my grandfather wrote to my father from his hometown in Magting, Mambajao on July 2, 1971.

Unfolding this letter, sandwiched between the indecipherable, I resurrect the man who was a dry cheek pressed against my sweating, flushed ones when his visits interrupted my playing.

In a June 17, 2016 interview by CNN Philippines, Penguin Classics publisher Elda Rotor explained the decision to include Joaquin in its roster of the world’s classics.

“The main joy is bringing an audience to a work that would otherwise lead a quiet life,” she said.

Between the pages of a book, up close and personal, has never been about absolute solitude.

Forty-six years separate now and the time my grandfather penned that letter. In that interim, four of the persons mentioned in the letter are dead, including my grandfather and father.

I will never be able to ask the questions raised from reading the domestic minutiae unraveled by the upright penmanship in blue-black ink: Did Lolo Tatay live to see the house he was constructing in two months? Were three of his teeth pulled out the following week, as planned?

I will never know but I can imagine.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 21, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”