Domestics

A FILM still of “Kisapmata,” the 1981 masterpiece of Mike de Leon, is both a recreation and a reversal of the tableau in Bethlehem.

There is still a man accompanying his wife, heavy with child. They wait to be let inside a house, its lighted upstairs window seeming to be a beacon in the swirling dark. 

A neighbor’s Christmas “parol” completes the Nativity scene. However, this man-made star streams a weaker light, a visual cue that de Leon’s diorama negates all that the créche in Bethlehem stood for: love, redemption, life.  

An off-duty policeman shot in point-blank range a mother and her son during a personal dispute in Paniqui, Tarlac.

A witness recorded from an overhead vantage point the four times Police Senior Master Sergeant Jonel Nuezca clicked the “gatilyo (trigger)” of his service sidearm and ended the lives of Sonya Gregorio, 52, and Frank Gregorio, 25. 

In film language, the camera angled downwards is a panopticon of surveillance and judgment. 

In “Kisapmata,” the upstairs window monitored by retired policeman Tatang Dadong (acted by Vic Silayan) exposes the limits of our view: we see what we only want to see.  

Enraged citizens called for the punishment of Nuezca and even his young daughter, who joined the confrontation and walked away from the bodies. 

Fewer voices questioned why Nuezca is still in the force despite being flagged for five administrative cases within six years, including two homicide complaints dismissed for lack of evidence.

The Tarlac double murders of unarmed civilians by an off-duty cop using his official firearm is an “isolated” incident that has not convinced President Duterte to rescind his order, made in 2017, to allow off-duty police to carry sidearms as protection from “armed communists”.

Human rights watch groups estimate that more than 8,000 to 20,000 persons were killed by the police since Duterte took office in 2016. 

During the three-year War on Drugs, poll after poll showed that the wealthy and the educated rated Duterte’s performance from “very good” to “excellent,” his popularity only slightly dipping among those with less income.  

In “Kisapmata,” Dadong’s wife Dely (Charito Solis) is cleaning the couple’s room while watching television. She accidentally touches the gun placed underneath her husband’s pillow. Without once taking her eyes off the TV screen, she returns the pistol in its drawer on his bedside table. 

When I was newly married, I learned, before buying glassware, to run my fingers over the surface. The eyes can be distracted; the fingers detect any surface flaw. From Marcos to Duterte, the culture of impunity domesticates us. We sleep with the enemy; we keep them in office.

Source of “Kisapmata” still: news.abs-cbn.com (photograph by Cesar Hernando; courtesy of Mike de Leon)

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 27, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

 

Fictions

CLEARING cabinets, I found old pictures. One photo was taken at the Silver Studio, squeezed in among the automobile spare parts sold in Leon Kilat St.

The woman wears denim pants and T-shirt, the latter bright red in memory but, in the black-and-white photograph, is almost bleached of color, blending with shadows cast on the wall. 

Dwarfing her head are marble roses thrusting out of pots flanking the seated figure. The monster blossoms compete with the large crystal patterns of the rug, on which her dusty loafers rest.

Scrutinizing this younger self, I remember tilting my head a bit to the left, pulling back slightly the right foot, as directed by the woman who took my order and payment in the front office and then that photograph in the studio. 

Decades ago, my Yaya gave me a picture taken at the same studio. Within the fringed borders of her photo, Yaya stood like a caryatid, one foot slightly in front of the other, reminding me of sculpted women holding up temples. 

Or perhaps photographers just like how the eyes follow the slope and fall from shoulder to bust and hip.

I entered the Silver Studio, wilting from the downtown heat. I drooped on the stool, making no attempt to imitate Grecian statues. 

If the woman thought I was incongruous with the overblown flowers and woven snow crystals, she did not let on. Her last instruction before clicking the camera was to remove my eyeglasses.

Scrutinizing now the cupped hands in the photo, I see these are empty. Where did I keep those eyeglasses? Is this why my hands cup air, a last-minute subterfuge to hide the spectacles beneath in a pictorial that did not happen as I imagined it would?

Photography is more simulacra than mimicry. As Baudrillard writes, the simulacrum is not an imitation but the truth hiding the reality that is not true. 

According to the studio receipt, I paid on Dec. 9, 1996 sixty pesos for “JR” photos, which I claimed on Dec. 12. The receipt bears my married name. I recalled I was a coed when I attempted to mimic Yaya’s Silver Studio memento. The yellowed slip proves I was a college instructor when the photo was taken. 

Aside from worsening astigmatism (slowed down but uncorrected by the spectacles), the woman in the photo read and wrote at dawn after inventing stories for a three-year-old son took over bedtime rituals. 

Or did the stranger hoard herself for dawn, before the domestic and the academic imposed their demands?

Studio props are fakery that is true: larger-than-life roses and snow crystals in the tropics setting up the viewer for the more elusive illusion, the creature who tilts and smiles but will not say where those eyeglasses are.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 20, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

"Tukar"

 

THIS MIDMORNING staple: notes floating, more waves of light than of sound. The tinkle of ivories has greeted us since coming home.

On the first day of home quarantine, in a sea of changes, the piano music stands out after our absence of nearly a year. I have learned that our neighbor, a lawyer, recently holds piano lessons at her home-cum-office. 

More than a few teachers live in our street. I am on study leave from the state university. A neighbor used to tutor gradeschoolers in the family garage until she opened a school outside the village. 

Two houses away is property turned into a kindergarten until the increase of enrollees forced the owners to relocate the school. A door away is the extension of the daycare center our younger son attended.

Some years back, the days sparkled with the twitter of children and cries of “Teacher, Teacher” that took to the air like birds. Long before the pandemic locked down our community, the schools relocated, taking away the children.

When I hear the piano’s tinkle now, I think the children have returned.  A few nights ago, high-pitched cries ripped the outside quiet. 

It was a woman’s voice, the words unintelligible. The jagged tirade, rising and falling, spiraled fury, not fear or pain, into the quiet street, the darkened houses with stilled breath and quenched lights.

Morning-after checks revealed that the nocturnal “tukar” comes from the same source of the midmorning piano music. “She is scolding again her foreigner-boyfriend, poor man” is the gist of responses to my inquiry whether the incident of possible abuse should be reported to authorities.

The Binisaya expression of “tukar-tukar,” meaning “off and on,” was used to explain not just the disjointed string of cries, shrieks, and yells but also to imply disorder at other levels: the difference between rhapsody and disturbance, the feud between respectability and scandal, the conflicts that break out and split apart the unfortunate creature born female, “still” unmarried, and living alone. 

It fascinates that there is a word to capture all these complexities: “babaye (woman)”. I could be living in the second millennium BC, when hysteria was first documented in detail as an exclusively female disease.

Binisaya has the peculiarity of changing meaning with the repetition of a word in a phrase. “Tukar” refers to music; “tukar-tukar” can swing from intermittence to unpredictability and insanity, all forms of negation implying increments of differentiation and alienation.

“Babaye,” though, may be the anomaly. The personas warring inside this conflicted sphere do not require linguistic repetition. Then and now, “tukar, babaye, tukar.” 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 13, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column

Mothers and others

        STOP calling them mothers.

In the 1980s, I worked with a multicultural team assisting self-help organizations in the countryside. Among the groups that were first assisted but continued to struggle with myriad setbacks was an organization of upland women making clay pots. 

It did not bode well that, aside from the pots being ignored at the weekly “tabo (market),” community workers had to settle many of the group’s vexations, from personal hiccups between mothers to glitches in the mothers’ bookkeeping.

During a meeting for troubleshooting, the senior German adviser suggested that we stop referring to our partners as a mothers’ class and relate to them as an association of potters.

To name is to call the named into existence. Yet a name can also become a frame contrived for convenience, delineating a reality that may not be the only one that exists.

Culture affixes women into a matrix of roles, identities, and even destinies. It took an outsider to spot how mothers drag around like a carapace the weight of traditional expectations defining not just mothers but women attempting to explore areas ventured into by few others.

More than a frisson jolted me while reading the Nov. 17 Facebook post of Nancy Cudis, award-winning blogger behind The Memowriter Writing Service. 

An interest in postwar women writers egged Nancy to buy Virginia Benitez Licuanan’s “Paz Marquez Benitez: One Woman’s Life, Letters, and Writings” through Shopee. 

She ended up penciling so many notes in her copy, a habit she shares with Benitez, who wrote by hand in pencil and in ink two hardbound volumes of journals documenting her journey as a writer of short stories, particularly of “Dead Stars,” widely acclaimed as the first modern short story written by a Filipino in English.

After graduating as a member of the first freshman class of the University of the Philippines (UP), Benitez became an excellent and much-loved mentor in her alma mater. According to her profile posted by the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings, National Artist Francisco Arcellana, her student, once gushed: “She was the mother of us all!”

Benitez’s letters and journals reach across time and defy death to stir ever younger writers. As Nancy writes, “(The book) shows how the life of a Filipino woman writer is not a linear journey, but a daily adventure interspersed with choices and projects that demand an optimistic perspective and joyful hard work.”

I see women as still being emplotted.  Instead of remaining fixed, many negotiate roles, recreating narratives and journeys that embrace mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and the other selves women become or not become. I see constellations.

Photo: Paza Marque Benitez (source: The Kahimyang Project kahimyang.com)

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 6, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Her words

 

WRITING with a fountain pen should be a meditation. It is torture: I am back in the first grade, gnawing my upper lip and watching the nib, then my fingers, the right hand holding on to its dignity in the grip of the pen, and finally, the person ludicrously failing to flow with the pen. 

Jotting with ballpoint pens, pounding typewriters, and tapping gadgets have hardened muscle memory that rejects this medium for rumination. 

Why do I think of cows “ruminating” in pasture, chewing cud? The nib measures the spread of ink saturating the paper, the acquiescent blankness that is handmaiden to an unbovine rumination.

Or a list of items sent out for laundry. The tallying of books read and lines for savoring. Even in its ephemera, writing hints of an interior life. The nib leaves a bead that unspools into the person hovering behind the veils.

In the past, the hands of a maid were appropriated for everything except writing. Bienvenido Lumbera and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera contrast the precolonial “mujer indigena” who, alongside men, composed the songs, poems, and oral lore passed on by the tribe against the silenced women of colonial times, when the printing press introduced by the Spaniards published no work attributed to a woman.

Not only were they denied education, the culture seeded doubt in women, who questioned whether they were worthy of picking up a pen. 

When a Sister Catherine was told to write down the apparitions of the Virgin Mary that she experienced in 1830, she viewed the task “with repugnance” and only did so out of obedience to M. Aladel, the Director of her community, the Daughters of Charity. 

“(S)he judged herself incapable of doing so, and, moreover, in her opinion, (writing) would have been contrary to humility,” goes the Archconfraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary’s account of St. Catherine Laboure who wrote not once but thrice to document the explicit supernatural visions recreated in the Miraculous Medal of Our Lady of Graces.

After the French nun’s death, Aladel decided not to publish the first account; the other two were made public.

Why was the first narration not published? What happened to this? Why, after waiting for 45 years before confiding to her Director, did she write three accounts?

“She was standing, clothed in a robe the color of auroral light,” Sister Catherine wrote in her extant notes of those Marian visions. So unexpected a harvest from a reluctant writer, its incandescence nevertheless casts in deeper gloom the rest of her words, lost to history. 

Photo of Mangyan woman etching the syllabary on bamboo, the traditional writing surface of precolonial times, was taken by Jacob Walse-Dominguez and sourced from his pinterest.ph account 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 29, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Spines and oracles

       

       

        COVER art is the reason I collect printed books.

When I had eyes only for Nancy Drew mysteries, I would cross the field in campus whenever I spotted a matte-yellow spine popping out in a sea of blue-and-white uniforms. 

Myopic, I passed back and forth to check the title of the book held by a stranger. This was long before Grosset & Dunlap published the neon-yellow “flashlight” editions.

Appearing in the 1980s’ editions, the flashlight did not thrill me as much as the magnifying glass Nancy peered through in the vintage copies I inherited from my mother and the brand-new ones she treated me to during trips to Paul’s Bookstore at Sanciangko St., where odor of ordure dropping from the horses drawing the occasional tartanilla mingled with the smell of books as soon as we opened the door. 

Driven by the anemic fiction collection in my college library, I became a regular at the Music House, a downtown Mecca for secondhand finds. Book spines cued me as I shuffled piles of pocketbooks for that serendipitous find. 

When I wanted to be closeted with a book in mint condition, I went to the USIS Library in Jones Ave. Everything here was hushed, from readers lost like acolytes deep in their prayers to the squeak-free caps placed under the chair feet. Only the cellophane covers of the hardbound books, with their snap and crackle, faintly subverted this order.

The USIS books rarely kept on their dust jackets with the illustrations.   Missing the paperbacks with their crass and loud covers marketed for the masses, I returned to the Music House, which had these in galore, along with a noisome creek, plumes of vehicle exhaust, and a corner bakery that served hot Spanish bread with craters of sweet filling to sustain hours of book excavating.

Because the Music House accepted trade-ins of old books for new ones, I experimented with genres and tasted authors on a student’s budget. I detoured to science fiction fantasy (SFF) novels for their covers of pure kitsch; I stayed for SFF’s unmatched tales of invention and presentiment. 

I brought home, with the Music House’s trademark price handwritten in pencil (“8L”), the 1975 edition by Berkley Books of Frank Herbert’s “Dune”. The story of a fictional desert planet warring over a rare spice was rejected 23 times before published in 1965 by Chilton Books, known for printing car manuals.

For the 1975 cover, Vincent Di Fate drew a pillar of rock that could be a monstrous sandworm guarding the coveted resource from humans. Jim Tierney’s treacherously undulant cover art in the 2010 Ace edition is aptly ambiguous for our time.

Fiction is not stranger than life. Oracular, book covers are the writings on the wall. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 22, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Tse

       

        IMAGINE God as a viewfinder documenting the night of a typhoon.

The viewfinder takes an establishing shot of a village. Cars parked on the street. Darkened houses.

The viewfinder zooms in and under a parked car on the street. A dark shape under the still warm belly of the car engine.

Close-up: meet Tse, aspin (asong Pinoy) with a mongrel’s universal features: sheath of fur of undetermined color under the dirt; wiry build; and intelligence behind streetwise eyes.

Tse does not first mind when the rain falls and water seeps into the dry spot under the car. 

It takes her mind off a growling gut. For dinner, she licked a few cans before the woman came out swatting with a broom. 

Tse! Tse! In a wink, Tse jumped out of the trash bin, followed by rolling cans and cursing. She checked out the houses that placed scraps on the sidewalk, but in the steadily falling rain, no reused ice-cream containers were left out.

She avoided streets where dogs were leashed or caged near house entrances. For such well-fed lives, these mutts had the ugliest tempers, barking and straining to get at the interloper. Sometimes, Tse traded insults with the enraged dogs but tonight, she focused on looking for a dry place.

Tse could smell the chill in the air. It was going to be a long night of waiting for morning and the old woman who came to collect kitchen scraps from house to house. After emptying the leftovers in her canister, the old woman threw away the plastic bags for Tse and the other strays to fight over.

To beat the competition, Tse bolted down the bags without chewing. At first, she was terrified by the bag swinging from her anus but then learned to drag her bottom on the ground to remove it. 

The first time she met a dog whose owner stopped for it to do its business on the street and then scooped the stools in a bag, Tse looked hard at the dog as if it had sprouted wings from its bum.

These ruminations abruptly ended when the water level on the street rose. Tse scampers from under the car. Rain and wind are companions on the street. 

Floods are death.

A lifetime of stepping around traps directs Tse to run for higher ground in the streets plunged into chaos by the cutting of power. People shouting. Dogs still chained and caged, baying. And the waters rising. 

Tse runs past her enemy, the huge black dog chained to the gate where she made the mistake once of peeing against. The dog’s helpless howling follows Tse when the flashflood tags and lifts the aspin, not gently at all. 

Tse’s thought as the dark swirls: where are those wings when you need them?

(In memoriam: if we cannot evacuate with our animals, release and give them a fighting chance to survive.)

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 15, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column

Curating

        IT is a year for watching leaves.

Flipping through a journal tracking the year, I noticed leaves dominating nearly each of the 50 or so pages. 

While sweeping the street or clearing the garden, I pick up leaves to press between the pages of the journal. At some later time, flipping through the notebook for a blank page to write or draw on, I meet the leaf again. 

The dried specimens are attached with clear tape on the page. The sticky tape serves like the thin sheet of glass we used in Biology class to mount a specimen for studying under a microscope. 

Under the clear tape, decomposition reveals an odd beauty in the dried striae, lace-like patterns, and spectral hues.

During summer, we helped Papang sweep and burn the leaves fallen under the caimito trees. He believed the smoke drugged the mosquitos. My sister and I loved smelling the fire in our hair, rising from our sooty, sweaty arms.

A faint memory of burning leaves, prohibited now by anxieties over global warming, lingers over these 365 days, curated by leaves. 

An arboreal diary rendering the Taal phreatic eruption in early January, trailed by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) breaking out in late January, the community quarantine clamping down on the pandemic in March and undergoing permutations by acronym—ECQ, MECQ, GCQ, and currently, MGCQ—until the present. Recently, typhoons Quinta, Rolly, Siony. And then?

Branches of leaves weighed down by a fine down of grey ash greeted the morning after Taal Volcano spewed steam, water, ash, and rock. Even the finest mist from rain turned the ash into slurry paste blanketing the trees, stressing this mahogany stand into a premature shedding of leaves months before its usual summer balding.

The enforced lockdowns that kept residents inside their homes led into a surfeit of energy, partially released by relentless street sweeping and garden planting. I saved a leaf or two from those days when the authoritarian compulsion to impose a façade of order warred with the disorder roiling inside.

We harness science and technology to predict storms and avoid their worst. Leaves, though, tell us something after an upheaval. When there is more rain than wind, leaves clot in the gutters. After more wind than rain, leaves are strewn and left in tatters. Nothing is more eloquent than the unstirring foliage of trees just before a storm. 

The clatter of ghostly phalanges echoed when, after days of good weather, I swept the curling, desiccated carcasses of leaves littering the street, darkening browns dominating but with splashes of green here and there. 

Leaves cling not one second more, a surrendering that fills this primitive human with quiet.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 8, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata” 

Pomegranate seed

        WHEN I first bought flowers from Lucia, about four white chrysanthemums arranged with leaves in a small native basket cost P50. 

Buying cut flowers was anathema until Papang died. When my sister and I came with him to visit my grandparents and brother in the cemetery, we brought a pail holding whatever blossoms grew in our garden: yellow bells, purple tops, even red cats’ tails (which lent our reused milk cans-turned-vases a dramatic air like actresses trailing feather boas).

In summer, when only the bougainvillea was resplendent, Papang clipped santan from bushes growing near the graves. Until I read in a library book how Persephone stayed in the netherworld for a third of the year due to the pomegranate seed Hades tricked her into eating, I took out the filament at the center of each tiny blossom and sipped the sweet beads of nectar. 

I did not want to be trapped with the dead, drinking bone-juice nectar. The underworld I imagined had the moldy scent of flower stems rotting in the slush left in the cans we threw away.

Lucia lent matchboxes to those who bought candles. Walking to the cemetery, I realized I forgot to bring the pack that held the candles, brush, and rags for cleaning the graves. Too early for the stores but Lucia had already laid out her flowers and candles at the side of the cemetery entrance.

After I chose candles, Lucia offered a box of matches, saying I could return it on my way out. On my next visit, I resolved to buy her flowers.  

The blossoms were wilted. Lucia asked if I wanted brighter colors. Choosing a batch with fewer blossoms rimmed by brown, I said my father preferred white for grave flowers. 

When a floral basket fetched P150 last year, Lucia still had white mums for me because I told her he liked it that way.

Lucia’s daughter owned the stall across the street.  Her daughter, the guards, and other vendors called Lucia “ang tiguwang (that old person)”. 

Lucia also referred to her daughter in the third person: “si tambok (the fat person)”.  

Sometimes a grandson helped Lucia. A young person is fleeter at grabbing the baskets and jostling with other vendors when cars slowed down before entering the cemetery.  

When the young man was not around, Lucia watched as the other vendors snagged sales. It’s not only the heat that reduces Lucia’s blooms into brown-lined dolorosas.

Once, Lucia had only yellow mums. She offered to ask “si tambok” for white mums. I surprised Papang with yellow ones that day. 

I never visit the dead on the busy feasts of the saints and the souls. I like the long exhale of silence lying over the graves, thinking when I will outdo Persephone and take one more pomegranate seed.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 1, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Idiom

CLOSE your book. No free reading.

In these lines, borrowed from a store display, I distilled my philosophy on virginity after 12 years in a Catholic school exclusive for girls. 

My parents chose my school by family osmosis. Nearly all the women in Mama’s clan displayed the varying lengths and bodily coverage that the blue-and-white uniforms underwent over the decades. 

Or perhaps Papang expected the nuns to restrain me if I gave in to the urge to burn my training bra and run out of the closet?

In my teens, closets hid nothing dirtier than dustpans entangled with brooms.

Families and schools are the seats where a child learns for life that being Catholic is a perpetual guilt-trip. In kindergarten, I felt different from my classmates. My parents permanently separated.

“Broken families” are red flags for outbreaks of rebellion. I cannot recall a homeroom teacher who was not flummoxed when Mama gave her standard opening to explain why Papang was a no-show in getting my report card: her father and I do not see eye-to-eye.

Though I witnessed my parents locking eyes and horns, I thought Ma’s version was clearer than the one spun by the mother of a friend who said her father drowned in the soup.

Escaping into novels as soon as I discovered “Dick and Jane” (heteronormal twins influencing my conversion of hymen into a “book” kept closed to avoid breaking the “spine”), I saw my classmates and their families in the binaries of wealth (rich/poor), color (mestiza/brown), and marriages (intact/broken). 

In high school, “tomboy” was first whispered in comfort room (CR) colloquies, along with smoking, petting (first base, heavy), Cebuano, and “kodigo (cheat sheets)”. Under segregation (the faculty had their own), the student CR, spic and span, was the black market for the prohibited, disorderly, or just different.

I liked to gabble in Cebuano to the tune of flushing before returning to class where I nitpicked the English in my head, but I had little else to exchange in the CRs. 

I suspected I was heterosexual but was pathetically out of experience to prove or disprove.  Thus, college was the great revelation not just because the “books” were “falling off” the shelves but also flying “open,” helter-skelter.  “Browsing” welcome.

My coed uneducation, first in a Catholic university and then in a state college, began in the CRs, reading the cubicle walls where the graffiti of chatty penises and pushy vaginas illustrated the order of “gender disorder,” to quote Judith Butler.  

In an age when the watchdogs of orthodoxy hold that homosexuality is “objectively disordered,” our society’s spaces for excreta and articulation are, in my uneducation, vexedly misplaced.

Source of image: 123rf.com

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131) 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 25, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Crack

 

THE POLICE should have killed Reina Mae “Ina” Nasino when they arrested her and fellow workers in a raid at dawn on Nov. 5, 2019. It would have saved the State at least the additional expenses it always claims it can ill afford.

Instead, Ina, obscured in personal protective equipment (PPE), dominated online feeds during the furlough of six hours that the court granted so the 23-year-old urban poor organizer of the nongovernment organization, Kadamay, formerly working in Smokey Mountain, Tondo, can leave the Manila City Jail to visit her daughter.

The other body rivaling Ina’s viral image belongs to the truly dead, baby River. Like her PPE-hidden mother, River cannot be seen, only imagined in the small white coffin her mother, handcuffed, touched with difficulty. 

Mother and daughter are in white. Color of surrender, contagion, innocence, death. 

Along with Ina, 61 other activists were arrested in Bicol and Manila on the strength of warrants signed by only one Quezon City judge, reported Lian Buan of Rappler. Had Ina been shot while “resisting arrest,” a dominant narrative explaining this country’s history of inconvenient bodies conveniently silenced, who would remember her now?

Ina and River “benefit” from the punitive justice that reduces bodies into “bodiless reality,” instruments to demonstrate that far better for extracting obedience to the State is not torture or death but “punishment… (that) strike(s) the soul rather than the body,” as  Foucault, quoting Mably, states in “Discipline & Punish.” 

In the ensuing war of opinions spouting over two bodies we barely see, the news photos of Ina and River illustrate the difficulty of seeing,  past the long arms and uniformed escorts bristling around Ina’s white-coated figure during the wake and the burial, what the State and its instruments have effaced: underneath the PPE shroud are the breasts a mother was prevented by law and order from giving to her baby, born underweight after she carried her while jailed in a cell designed for 40 prisoners but holding 80.

No one dropped River into the cracks. Not the jails that don’t have facilities for breastfeeding inmates. Not the courts which ruled against her nursing while on hospital arrest and separated the infant from her mother a month after birth. Not the police, which used national security and the pandemic to keep mother and child apart even unto death.

Specially not us, so quick to condemn activists, dissidents, and political prisoners jailed for their beliefs.

This “bodiless reality”—who next after the Nasinos?—is superior to extrajudicial killing.

Thanks to the State in the time of Rodrigo Roa Duterte, we have a baby album like no other.

Source of photo: AP/sunstar.com.ph

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 18, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Tools

       ON the day it is announced that the poet Louise Glück is chosen for the Nobel Prize for Literature, I look for a pencil left by the man who repaired our roof.

William lives nearby. We like his work, his honesty. He repaired our toilet and dropped out of our life. The husband learned he found regular work nearby.

Then the pandemic. Unable to leave home or to look at each other the whole day, we looked around for what we could repair. The husband is quite the handyman. He built a shelter, the gate. I repaired sentences.

Some things were beyond us. Gutters rotten through.  Drip-drip of a ceiling. The faded pink of a sticker marks the page of “The Egg” in the copy of “Louise Glück: Poems 1962-2012” that I brought home when May was ending in 2018:

“Across the beach the fish/ Are coming in. Without skins,/ Without fins, the bare/ Households of their skulls/ Still fixed, piling/ With the other waste.”

When community quarantine loosened, other men came. They had papers to show they tested negative for the virus. They brought tools; we lent them ours. They repaired what needed to be repaired. William turned up. 

He lost the day job. He put on weight from days of staying home. His young son was not with him when he went up our roof and fixed what awaited William and his tools. Cleaning up, I found a stub of a pencil he left behind.

“EX C.” is left from the wood shaved to expose the dull lead point.  A Mongol No. 2 with a teeth-dented ferrule holding pink bits of eraser. A gap yawns from the lead to the midpart of the wooden body. William decided the pencil was no longer useful for him or his son. So I pocketed the tool.

“… Where/ the rift is, the break is.” At first, I had a hard time finding Glück on the Net because my professor’s pronunciation of her name rhymed with “click”.  When I held her book finally in my hands, turning the pages slowly, the words fell like rain, felt like no rain, fell as pellet after pellet.

I looked for William’s pencil in all the bottles holding an assortment of wooden pencils, regal, honed to a fine point, never been used. I use mechanical pencils in the journals. Pencils go into William’s pockets. I cannot carry mine; these might impale me.

The Mongol No. 2 stub I found finally in the thicket of pens I keep on hand for daily reading and writing. A minimum of words is needed to explain to William what we need.  

In place of poems, William’s pencil left marks and lines. A chewed bit of Mongol No. 2, the prosody of a working life. Glück, closing “Arboretum”:

“Or they became like stones in the arboretum: as though/ our continued existence, our asking so little for so many years, meant/ we asked everything.”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu's October 11, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, "Matamata"

Storytime

Picking guavas

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 27, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Free

 

9/11

             

             A QUIET place.

 

            SunStar Cebu photographer Amper Campaña took what my untrained eye considers as one of the best photographs taken in a long, distinguished career in photojournalism. Last Sept. 11, the newspaper published the moment he captured two women who lit candles and prayed before a crypt at the Carreta Cemetery in Cebu City.

 

            One credits the eyes behind a great image when actually a symphony takes over to capture what could just have been an ephemeral moment: the heart drawn to the meaning of a random act; the mind rapidly orchestrating all elements to replace disorder with symmetry; the finger pressing the shutter or button at the critical moment.

 

            Campaña’s photograph published on Sept. 11 captures the mystery of death and its power over the living. Viewing the photo on www.sunstar.com.ph, I feel the hush when one slips into the presence of enigmas.

 

            What separates sentience from eternal silence? No line is visible between the warm golden tones of the women’s flesh and the bright flare of the candles that melted and flickered out beyond the moment preserved in the photograph.

 

            The dark fall of hair down the women’s backs is twin to the opaque darkness of the unsealed crypts encircling the women. The grittiness of the unfinished walk and the unpainted crypts vie with the density of the shadows closing in on the dwarfed human beings.

 

            To be mortal is to die. But for as long as there is love and remembrance, the dead are not obliterated.

 

            Campaña’s photograph drew me to this meditation on the significance of September 11. Codified by journalese into 9/11, the day is infamously associated with nearly 3,000 persons killed inside the World Trade Center (WTC) and on the grounds of New York City during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

 

            Among the indelible 9/11 images is “The Falling Man,” which shows a man dropping from the WTC North Tower photographed by Richard Drew of the Associated Press and published around the world.

 

            The news media’s use of “The Falling Man” raised discussions and criticisms. The most searing question perhaps was asked by a participant in the 2006 documentary, “9/11: The Falling Man”: “… who… (are) we through watching that?”.

 

            Campaña’s photograph would be timeless but for a detail that dates it: the face masks worn by the two crypt visitors. To prevent a resurgence of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), the authorities will close cemeteries and columbariums in Cebu and Mandaue from Oct. 30 to Nov. 3.

 

            Isolation was the sting of the pandemic. Thanks to the gifts of Campaña, his image transforms 9/11: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55)

 

           

Photo by Amper Campaña first published in SunStar Cebu’s September 11, 2020 issue

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

 

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 13, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Buwan, buwan”

             

            WHERE do I find voice?

 

            The “I” that speaks is strongest in fiction, where the writer, the creator, amplifies the voice through techniques.

 

            She can isolate the voice by creating only the character and no Other. Or she can cram a story with characters but use point of view to focus the reader only on the “I” speaking.

 

            She can also put the “I” in claustrophobic relations with a “you,” who can be the reader privileged with unprecedented access to the “I”.

 

            If the writer bleeds enough into the story, the “you” can feel deep enough empathy for the “I” to close the distance until, merging with the “I,” there is only the “I” once more, no Other.

 

            The stories I like best keep the distance. The “I” and the “you” can dance closely, even have a dalliance, but preserve their solitude. How else can one hear the voice?

 

            I recently wrote a series of stories—allegory to my literary friends, a very short story for my generation—about moons and dictators. And the sea.

 

            There are two great mysteries I retain an unequivocal awe for: the moon and the sea. The first story was written in August, “Buwan ng Wika (Month of the National Language)”. August is also History Month.

 

            There is no voice without language. No one exists outside of history.

 

            The first story about the last dictator came as I stood by an upstairs window, watching the moon. “Buwan, buwan (moon).”

 

            While August gifts us with language and history—expression and context—September 21, 1972 stilled the voices of Filipinos, including at least 92,607 victims of torture, summary execution, disappearance, and public order violation arrests from September 1972 until February 1986—the 14-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

 

            This is according to the “Statistical Summary of Human Rights Abuses,” part of the Ferdinand Marcos Human Rights Litigation collection of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa’s School of Law Library, which acquired the papers of the late Jon Van Dyke, who helped martial law survivors seek compensatory damages from the Marcos Estate.

 

            According to the University of Hawai’i, the Marcos papers remain important because “the issue of Martial Law has not been rectified in the Philippines”.

 

            Indeed. Congress passed this week a bill declaring Marcos’s birthdate of September 11 as a non-working holiday in Ilocos Norte. If the Senate approves its own version, President Rodrigo Duterte will sign this into law as surely as the moon is framed by the upstairs window, as buwan ng Agosto is followed by buwan ng Septyembre, as voice is stilled by repression.

 

            The great postcolonial undead in our collective narrative, Ferdinand Marcos is the “you” surfacing the “I” that should never forget, never be silent.

 

 

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

 

*First published in the September 6, 2020 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Harvest moon

 

Harvest moon

 

            THE FIRST dictator had an attachment to windows that would be reverential if he had been a spiritual man. When he looked out of any window in the Palace, he saw only empty sky.

 

            Infinity. That was the extent of his powers, the interminable, the indefinite, stretching to a point where ambition vied with vision and vision lost every time.

 

            Every window in the Palace confirmed the powers of the first dictator. Or the windows were constructed to affirm the idée fixe of the madman.

 

            But one evening, the first dictator looked out of a window and saw, bathed in the light of the harvest moon, small black figures moving on the ground.

 

            A quaking courtier explained that these antlike figures were farmers harvesting the great man’s grains from the great man’s fields for the great man’s granaries that would be sold back to the great man’s subjects, with taxes and profits going to the great man’s coffers.

 

            The first dictator, after dismissing the excessive possessives, focused on a single grain of truth that did not reside in the sycophantic answer: the moon that lightened the burdens of his subjects.

 

            The Planet Primus, existing in the gnarly nowheres of this narrator’s imagination, was a very cold one. It was not only the harshness of a madman’s rule but biological survival itself was difficult, the moon being the sole source of light sustaining life.

 

            Yet, for as long as the moon was up in the sky, the people left their windowless hovels, worked and created, traveled to their neighbors, bartered, and exchanged information. Full moons brought harvests.

 

            Rising from the sea, a harvest moon was at the brightest phase, its light dwindling as the dark and the cold seeped back and overcame the lunar nimbus until another of the sea’s spawns rose from the waves and took its place in the sky.

 

            For the people, a harvest moon signaled life restarting, survival seeming less harsh in the midst of community. But the first dictator did not like at all the hope the harvest moon ignited in subjects he liked best isolated and abject.

           

            Kept in the dark, people are easier to control.

 

            So the first dictator dictated to the sea,  an ally terrified about having its territories encroached and powers diminished, these new terms: with the sky as an arena, each moon rises from the sea as a marauder, hunting down and devouring its older, weaker predecessor, to reign until the sea sends the next adversary for the nightly entertainment.

 

            And that is how the first dictator, just from standing by the windows, drove out the old stories of community and replaced these with the cataclysms of disaster and competition.

 

            Who would have thought windows made such good arsenals?

 

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917322631)

 

 

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 30, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Inventories

             

            LEARN from housewives. Before dispatching an armada of destroyers to the Planet Primus on the far reaches of its system, the Technical Committee (TC) checked the archives for what is known about an extraterrestrial chunk of real estate that is three-fourths submerged in water.

 

            The archives custodian brought out only one small box containing a few brittle sheets. These were lists, much like the ones a cost-cutting, space-maximizing housewife keeps of the stocks left in the refrigerator and “aparador (cabinet)” so she knows exactly what to pick up at the market, no more, no less.

 

            The first list inventoried resources:

 

            One planet. For exploration. Dry core peopled. Ruled by dictators.

 

            Sea colonized. Moons harvested six times in a cycle. Lunar source of power and spectacle. No signs of depletion.

 

            The second list sketched the assets:

 

            Abject subjects. Terrorized by law and extra-legal justice. Animation suspended. Trade-in value of window-display democracy. If wrapped in oxo-degradable plastic, may be disposed of as “malata (earth-friendly)”.

 

            Greedy, corrupt dictators. (Note: Adjectives are cheap; hence, the overuse; placed here to flag lazy archive researchers that these are the key vulnerabilities, generic to the type but always dependable for exploiting.)

 

            The third list was more wordy as if the list-makers, in describing what the planet had in store as its sole liability, desired to advise and arm in advance the TC of a future but inevitable invasion to destroy the Enemy of the State long before an actual violation on the pure supposition that malice harbored in malcontents erupted at the least provocation, sometimes even with none:

 

            Mothers. Incubators of the Moons. In street slang, “bolsa (pocket)” for limitless capacity to breed and grin. The ideal pocket is capacious but invisible, an extension of the organism that is meant to remain flat to the point of invisibility, expand or contract upon demand, hide well any found ephemera or secrets.

 

            This last inventory had a more recent note attached to the original sheet, “Peligro (danger)”:

 

            “Manggugubot (anarchists)”. Mothers recently infected with perverse psychotic attachment to their children, particularly the males that are regularly sacrificed for the surface spectacles, War of the Moons. “Why kill?” movement bonds mothers. Last dictator unable to put down uprising from total absence of subjects, wiped out in the final purge.

 

            Conclusion: “The Mothers of the Moons have disintegrated into ‘maot nga bolsa (ugly pockets)’ of dissent and rebellion.

 

             “Discard and dispose; no need to restock.” It was, as the archivist noted, a quite small box of mean content.

 

           

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

 

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 23, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”