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”