Pinoy fiction

“PANIC buying.” This was how a national daily captioned the snaking queues of people pushing carts loaded with books during a recent book fair in Pasay City.

The event duplicated the mammoth crowds that turned up and hauled away brand-new copies of books that had as much as 90 percent of their selling price slashed off in similar fairs conducted last year in Manila, Cebu, and Davao.
According to the organizers, the popular choice last year was fiction. 

Stories created from imagination appeal to readers looking for “light” reading to relax with. Yet, short stories and novels frequently bring us to unexpected places, confronting what we may have avoided without even being conscious of avoiding such.

Fiction is my first and abiding love. Yet, it was only a few years back, in a graduate class on poetics, that I realized how I was blindly reading fiction.

In that class, I was the only one majoring in journalism. All my classmates and the professor were writing poems, short stories, and novels. My classmates who were at least a decade younger than me, and my professor, decades older than me, did not just bracket the generations of Filipinos.

So I made it a habit after class to walk to the university bookstore and look for the works of Filipino authors that cropped up in the discussions. Whenever I was in mall bookstores, I looked for Filipinos writing in English because while fiction is my natural environment, the Filipino language plunges me into deep-seated anxieties and sinkholes of meaning.

Following this collect-and-read pattern, I note that the past seven years have seen greater visibility of Filipino fictionists in bookstores. Yet, there is still a proliferation of established authors whose “classic” works are being reprinted. 

Remembering my classmates’ manuscripts-in-progress, as well as speculating on the works being critiqued in writing workshops and awarded in literary contests held across the nation, I wonder about the paucity of publicly accessible titles written by Filipino fictionists: the young, the emerging, the regional, and the transnational.

Where do the works go? If we yearn to be a nation of readers, shouldn’t we also be reading the works created by Filipinos to balance a diet nourished by other imaginations?

Some years ago, a novel by a Filipina was marketed as the “first Filipino detective story”. My friend R. countered that Nick Joaquin’s “Cave and Shadows” deserves that first distinction.

What about the second, third, fourth…? There’s a hunger to be sated.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu in its February 24, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Hold the line

THERE is only one Maria Ressa.

That she posted bail last Valentine’s Day after her arrest the day before on charges of cyber libel speaks loud and clear for those of us who are NOT Maria Ressa.

The chief executive officer of the news website Rappler received the 2017 Democracy Award given by the National Democratic Institute and the 2018 Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers.

She was one of “The Guardians,” journalists fighting the global “War on Truth,” named by the international newsmagazine “Time” as its “Person of the Year 2018”.

Malacañang has denied it is applying political harassment against Ressa and Rappler, vocal critics of the Duterte administration. It has accused Ressa of “weaponizing” the issue of press freedom to attack government and escape accountability.

“Weaponizing” is a neologism referring to how something previously unconnected to warfare—like information, the Law or freedom of expression—is converted into a tool for attacking or defending oneself against an enemy.

In the age of disinformation, bodies and bloodbaths are replaced by doubts sown, credibilities destroyed, and political will diluted.

Political liquidation was first raised into a cottage industry during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. With our country being the most dangerous in Southeast Asia to practice journalism—as tallied in 2017 by the International Press Institute—this administration may yet elevate impunity against the press by turning a top-drawer journalist like Ressa into something more useful than a statistic: the weaponizing of permissibility.

One doesn’t require permission to express views. One thinks one doesn’t require permission. One does.

Martial law in 1972 created this leap in the progression of the freedom of expression. No one spoke what was on their mind. Too many people disappearing; too many bodies reduced to litter.

By the 1980s, the quality of air had improved but the lesson was learnt. The first gatekeeper of information are not the censors nor the liquidators: it is the person with a thought.

Noting how public executions faded by the nineteenth century, Michel Foucault wrote that state power brought about the “age of sobriety in punishment”.

Torture took a bloody long time. Horses tied to tear a man limb by limb were prone to panic. How can the punishment of rule-breakers be made more edifying for the public?

“Since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul,” wrote Foucault. “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”

Ressa, weaponized by an onion-skinned administration, appealed to those who love this country: “hold the line”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 17, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Matamata”: Storytellers

IN the flesh. Enfleshed.

An artist’s rendering shared on social media brought me back to those mornings in Sanciangko, the street behind my son’s downtown campus.

Whenever we brought him to his morning classes, I often saw this woman washing clothes like any dutiful homemaker.

Yet hers was no humdrum chore. She wore not a stitch, all fleshy contours carnally glisteningly wet as she squatted on the sidewalk, rinsing clothes in an overflowing canal.

My first reaction was to look away. Where was this woman’s family? What if she came to be harmed by more than the fetid wastewater or a jeepney driver racing to meet the day’s rent?

I spared her the few seconds it took to form these thoughts and then forgot her. Life took over.

It became part of the morning ritual to see and not see her, this woman who blended with the city waking up around her, the still-shuttered stores, bars, honky-tonks. She was a face on the other side of our car windows.

Yet, she was me. We had chores; on some days, I could not say I looked forward to mine the way she pinned her attention on those bits she rinsed along with the city’s waste.

Then my friend H. shared a sketch of the woman posted on the Facebook page, “JuanMiguel does Art”.

Juan Miguel Cañeda, a comics creator who started and manages the page, transformed the woman I saw years ago washing in the gutters of Sanciangko into a graphic novel “bida (hero),” surrounded by a halo of half tones and dingy blotches on bulging acreages of exposed skin.

Only rabid comics readers recognize the sigil representing the power of this misbegotten creature: the half-note or minim, universal notation for music.

In his caption for “Our Nudist Neighbor,” Cañeda wrote: “I don’t know her personally but she reminds me to just do what you love to do…”.

Like the spinners of tales of old Cebu, Cañeda’s sketch sparks other riffs. Some of the 900 people following his page commented that they have seen the same woman turn up in other streets, other gutters in Cebu City, still washing clothes. One Netizen recognized her, saying the woman’s family looked for her and brought her back home each time she ran away. In the end, they let her be.

Through their FB page, Cañeda and his partner, Rio Maghinay, make and sell shirts and hoodies. Their real passion are the stories of the people sketched by Cañeda.

Or enfleshed. Just as the woman washing in Sanciangko brings me back to the days my mother brought me across the same street to the now defunct Paul’s Bookstore, which started my girlhood’s collection of novels.

And, yes, I learned her name: Helen. In my favorite stories, no one, not even a character named Nameless, remains nameless.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 10, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Lost and found

I WOULD feel lost in a world without libraries. I cannot imagine a world without libraries. I can get out of this world just by stepping inside a library.

Yet, there was a moment in my studies when I detested libraries. Every course seemed to require reading books that were out of print, not in the public domain, or shelved in a library elsewhere in the campus.

So I trudged in a physical chase for paper-and-ink books that did not want to be found on shelves. Perfect anachronism in the Age of Google.

One library I reached after navigating a labyrinth of cat poop. In that first visit, I checked under each shoe to make sure I was not bringing in anything I shouldn’t before wiping my feet on the welcome mat. There was none; the librarians apparently shared my anxiety.

Another’s catacomb-like façade was guarded by watchers as grim as Charon, ferrying the dead. The human quizzed me while her feline partner sniffed suspiciously at my shoes (did a whiff of piss and worse from the other lib felines trigger that one’s territoriality?).

In a state university, libraries are not made equal. A few are modern learning hubs; the rest are ageing and dreaming of better funding.

Finding a book sometimes rests on the gods of penmanship: watching the librarian’s fingers spider-crawl through a stack of yellowed, fraying cards held by a band that snaps, finally liberated after aeons of disuse and a succession of librarians spiderly writing the secrets of its shelves.

What is the value found on these shelves? Just the self.

Whether kitty-musty or high-tech, libraries nurture the same thing: silence. Except perhaps for an occasional crescendo of snoring, the library is the only space, outside of a cathedral, where not talking is natural and encouraged.

We have unkindly sketched librarians as humorless enforcers of quietude but the reader herself puts up a canopy of interior silence to hear better the other voice or voices speaking through the written word. While one watches as an author conjures a world from the scaffolding of her imagination or engages with the ideas argued by another, all else recedes into ambient noise—a throat clearing, pages flipped, the fading of the present like dry leaves skittering down the street on a windy day.

For while through reading we escape, we also discover other thoughts, lives strange and compelling, words to express the inchoate lurking until these are named and raised to the light. In the interior unlocked by a book fetched down from a shelf in a library, we come upon ourselves: what we love, what we honor, what we oppose.

In a library, what is found is sometimes not what is lost.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 3, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”