Shorthand

ESCAPISM would have been welcome but my soon-to-be-81 mother decided to butt heads directly with an APC (armored personnel carrier) when I recently called her.

“Mga tangke de giyera (war tanks)” patrol the streets of Cebu City, reported my mother.

With relish, she added: So many of us here are “gahi’g ulo (hard-headed)”.

Her remark did not make me blink. My mother was born with steel plating bolting down that part of the brain that flips on the obedience switch.

She has mellowed, though, donning a mask and face shield when she leaves thrice a week for hemodialysis at a hospital as Cebu City weathers the changes of acronyms in the season of quarantine.

The mask forestalls her signature red lipstick but it sure sharpens those eagle eyes. When I pretended to nap after lunch, my mother, without putting down the novel she was reading, would say in the somnolent hour of siesta, “dili mag-gahi’g ulo (do not be hard-headed)”.

Guilt or self-preservation squeezed my eyes tighter, slowed my breath, and, without counting sheep, dropped me off to a nap. “Do not be gahi’g ulo” was fair warning to us youngsters as few things were more calamitous than grown-up meddling.

In our family’s linguistic shorthand, “da, gahi’g ulo” represented just dues for someone with a greater appetite for punishment than reward. When I fell inside a cement trough, sneaking to feed turtles raised for soup by my great grandparents, my yaya fished me out with an incantation of “da, gahi’g ulo” even though I fell in headfirst but, thanks to steel-plated genes inherited from my mother, only had to be washed free of mushed overripe bananas and turtle gunk.

Under special circumstances, the “hardheadedness” representing childhood’s cardinal sin acquired an opacity whenever the elders decided to sidestep messy explanations. Overhearing aunts whispering in shock over a teen pregnancy, I asked what caused the “disgrasya (accident)” and got immediately two answers: “she did not pray the rosary” and “gahi’g ulo”.

Sugbuanon language has nuances hiding meanings like the skirts of old women that inflate like balloons shielding their owners from a stranger’s immodest glimpse of flesh. Since I have sat inside an idling bus watching the same old women with the same voluminous skirts squat by the roadside to pee without the inconvenience of pulling down underwear, I imagine “gahi’g ulo,” as with the rest of the mother tongue, has more meanings than can be encompassed by a politician’s Pontius Pilate act of washing hands.

As my mother, the original maid of steel, pronounced: I hope they have enough tanks in reserve. “Gahia’g ulo ra ba gyud nato.” Take that extra “a” as fair warning.



Maid of steam (source of image: Shutterstock.com)



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


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

Girlfriends

MY marriage may not survive without my girlfriends.

The good Father who counseled us before the boyfriend and I tied the knot 28 years ago never anticipated a pandemic and lockdowns as potential storms threatening the safe harbor offered by marriage.

Yet, like lighthouse keepers obsessively watching the scudding of clouds for a clue to shifts in weather, the spouse and I, during the past three months when our place shifted from enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) to general community quarantine (GCQ), have seen rising levels of intolerance as our eyes clash across meals or over laptops.

It began as a squabble over the charging bay when our gadgets needed to be simultaneously charged. It is not that the house did not have other outlets; the contested bay just happens to be the closest to our common working area and requires no relocation for the victor.

Victor? Domination and conquest? Power play over power?

Time to defuse the inner hellcat. Before quarantine became a way of life, I remember meeting up with friends, who are invariably women. We may not see each other for years or weeks. We may have planned only to meet for coffee and then, still having untouched topics, move on to early dinner.

Marriage demands monogamy. Friendship—thank God—not.

Notwithstanding differences in age, status, temperament, and even politics, it is easier for me to hang out with another woman.

Women are expressive, with a loquacity that sinks deep into genuine expansiveness and kinship. I find myself spontaneously unspooling with my girlfriends about what is on our minds and in our hearts, as well as what we had for breakfast.

What quarantine has made me appreciate most is that while my girlfriends and I still chatter through Messenger about the children who grew up while our backs were turned, the diets we know will not work again, music for our souls and prayers for our bodies, pets and gardens we baby, and the ageing that makes us enter and leave and enter a room without accomplishing anything, I can also talk with my girlfriends about politics in these impolitic times, without fear of a rape joke pouncing from nowhere.

Social media tethers us to the essential relationships that have to remain virtual while the pandemic rages on. Yet, a treacherous undertow of intolerance singles out and pulls down many navigating online.

Much of this small-mindedness is gendered and misogynist. To counter this tendency to shut down and silence expression, I hum this Beatles ditty, with a bit of my rephrasing at the end: “What would you think if I sang out of tune?/ Would you stand up and walk out on me?/ … Oh, I get by with a little help from my (girl)friends…”



Lifeline (Source of image: shutterstock.com)


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 21, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

No impunity

NEW normal for protests.

Last June 12, a “lightning rally” composed of 10 persons and lasting for “only half a minute” was held along Gorordo Ave. to protest the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.

As reported by a SunStar Cebu team on June 12, professor Regletto Aldrich Imbong, president of the All UP Academic Employees’ Union at the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu, said the “lightning rally” responds to the present intolerance of the police for mass assemblies beyond 10 persons.

Convenors of the Movement Against Tyranny (MAT) Cebu and the Youth Act Now Against Tyranny (Yanat) Cebu, which organized the June 12 lightning rally, protested police discrimination in allowing supporters of the same bill to disperse “at least eight minutes” after their assembly in downtown Cebu. No riot police present.

Why should dissenters of the bill be singled out for violent dispersal and arrest?

Based on grammar and praxis, there is no distinction between “riot police” or “anti-riot police” because, as seen from the June 5 dispersal and arrest of dissenters, the formation outside UP Cebu of the Civil Disturbance Management Unit (CDMU) of the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) turned a group of 30 or so persons into a riot requiring “hot pursuit” of unarmed rallyists by heavily armed officers.

During the Marcos years, activists covered their faces with “tubao” (woven indigenous scarves) because agents in civilian attire, mingling with rallyists and spectators, were filming and photographing street protesters for the dossiers compiled by the police and the military.

Smart phone videos of the June 5 incident uploaded by UP students and faculty confirmed that operatives in civilian clothes emerged from the crowd and chased the rallyists when the order to disperse came from police higher-ups. They breached the low walls of the academe, with some snatching at and wrestling with rallyists helping companions being manhandled by these operatives.

Police presence in UP Cebu, as well as allegations of campus guards cooperating with the police in the June 5 dispersal and arrests, must be acted upon by the UP Cebu administration.

Such acts violate UP autonomy from military and police interventions, as sealed by the 1982 accord signed by student leader Sonia Soto and then defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile; the 1989 agreement signed between UP president Jose Nemenzo and then secretary of the national defense Fidel Ramos; and the 1992 agreement covering the Philippine National Police (PNP), signed by UP president Jose Abueva and then Interior Secretary Rafael Alunan III.

Police impunity should not be part of the new normal.




Mouthwash? Tom and Jerry image sourced from bbc.com



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 14, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Posture

THE RECENT arrest of eight persons participating in a rally outside the gates of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu made me suddenly remember Noy Usting.

Uniformed and non-uniformed members of the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) detained seven members of cause-oriented groups and one pedestrian for violating the general community quarantine (GCQ) protocols specified in section 4 of the Omnibus Guidelines released by the Inter-agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

A SunStar Cebu team reported on June 6 that the Police Regional Office (PRO) 7 director, Police Brigadier General Albert Ignatius Ferro, said the rallyists endangered the public by illegally gathering in a pandemic and possibly infecting others.

What if the police had waited for the rallyists to finish airing their protest against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 and then, in an orderly fashion, transported all the participants for testing of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) before pressing charges, if any? They could have netted the whole caboodle, instead of just eight fingerlings.

Would being detained for joining a mass assembly be the best way to jump the queue for Covid-19 testing in this country?

Thus, the hot spectacle outside the UP Cebu gates, with all the officers hardly dressed appropriately to listen and endure until the protests ended. Weighed down by high-powered firearms and what must be the next-gen anti-riot full-body OOTD (probably also anti-Covid-19 since the troops did not practice physical distancing, unlike the rallyists), any being inside that unwieldy carapace would be human in his or her response to the ensuing “hot pursuit” and “assault against persons in authority” that Ferro accused the rallyists of instigating.

Noy Usting would have handled the situation differently. A member of the university’s maintenance team when I was an undergraduate, Noy Usting joined many of our rallies and sit-ins. Sometimes, with a broom in hand, he paused and stood at the periphery. Or he sat down among us, smiling to acknowledge greetings but never disrupting the attention of people listening to the speaker.

Joining us in those rallies did not have any material impact on his life. Noy Usting’s silent presence, though, concretized for my fellow students and I what being in UP means, what being subsidized by the taxpayers obligated us to, why it matters to discuss issues many choose to unsee.

In the reckoning of the world, the late Noy Usting was a man of no power. Of one thing, though, I am convinced: he had civility, a quality that evaporates in the presence of power. Thus, we settle for posture.



Tom and Jerry. Source: maacindia.com



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in the June 7, 2020 edition of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”