I am Leila

THE YOUNG woman was distraught. She had been looking forward to celebrating with her friends. Then her father fired several bristling questions: Why? When? Where? With whom?

To seal that disastrous day, she ran into a particular young man just when her eyes were puffy from crying.

She had not seen him in campus for days. Then they walked into each other just as the covered walk was deserted. There was not even a scrap of poster she could pretend to read as he passed her, oblivious.

Why do men bookend our disasters?

My student’s rollercoaster Friday channeled my thoughts to misogyny. A parent’s concern and young love’s throes hardly manifest the deep-seated, even unconscious, contempt against women.

Yet, men socialize women: fathers, brothers, playmates, classmates, lovers, spouse.

Not to mention the usual suspects: the construction worker, the president, the troll and their rape jokes.

The catcalling variety of misogyny may have lost much of its novelty. It has swaggered from the streets and dunghills to straddle Malacañang and the once hallowed hall of Senate.

The first 100 days of this administration has ushered the most maddening honeymoon between President Duterte and Filipinas, 28 million of whom comprised 52 percent of the 54.4 million voters who turned out in May 2016.

We bristled and seethed as the president and his men made a new twist of the old carrot-and-stick approach with Vice President (VP) Leni Robredo.

First, he shut her out of his Cabinet, saying he was “non-committal” about Robredo, elected by 14,418,817 voters, because he did not want to hurt the feelings of his good friend, defeated rival Sen. Bongbong Marcos.

Then, after he “courted” her into heading the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), we had to read his nauseating “compliments” to the “beauteous” vice-president.

“You won't listen to a female president, you will just stare at her because she's beautiful,” said the president, who has told journalists he often gazes at Robredo during Cabinet meetings.

President Duterte has defended that he was not patronizing Robredo, a vocal critic of extrajudicial killings and the president’s move to give the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos a hero’s burial.

Misconceived as hatred of women, misogyny can be disguised as the idolatry of “women as divine creatures.”

“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person,” wrote Dorothy L. Sayers in her essay, “Are Women Human?”

For other women, though, who don’t fit into the president’s mold of "lady-like and kind" paragons of femininity, the prince will readily turn himself into a frog.

In his brutal, relentless public destruction of Sen. Leila de Lima, the president has pulled out all the stops. He has even used standard English, for once eschewing his colonial curses.

An “immoral woman”. The greatest English monarch, Elizabeth I had been called “diseased,” “deformed,” a “man in disguise,” wrote Sayers.

From Elizabeth I to Leni and Leila, slut-shaming is not so much about women going out of control as the desire to control women by men, who are, if they would admit it, afraid of them.

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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 9, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Dirty

A PUBLIC relations veteran and I shared a sense of impending disaster when we separately heard the reporter in Davao ask President Rodrigo Duterte how he would respond if U.S. President Barack Obama questioned him about the extrajudicial killings in the War on Drugs.

The answer sent a shudder around the world.

Much of the commentary over the incident and its repercussions has focused on President Duterte’s failure again to calibrate his language.

“Words matter” was the U.S. advice for Duterte on the future of Philippine-U.S. ties.

Duterte has earned the notoriety of a dirty mouth. He called Pope Francis a “son of a whore” for congesting the streets in his 2015 papal visit. After he was criticized for trivializing rape and degrading women, Duterte catcalled U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg a “gay son of a bitch”.

Yet, on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by the al-Qaeda group in the U.S., the rhetoric of political correctness (“words matter”) must be seen in context.

Review the footage of the Davao City presscon on Sept. 5. Duterte vented after the reporter asked the question, with its implication that he would be like an errant pupil chastised by a teacher with a lecture on human rights.

“I am no American puppet,” said Duterte. “I am president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony. I do not have any master except the Filipino people.” These statements are frequently left out in reports about Duterte’s name-calling of Obama as a “son of a whore”.

Last year, I watched “Heneral Luna,” a movie about another hot-headed leader, Antonio Luna. As portrayed by John Arcilla in the movie, Luna was unrelievedly foul in temper, speech and action.

Yet, Jerrold Tarog’s oeuvre attests that the man who asked, “Bayan o sarili (country or self)?,” was not just toying with rhetoric.

According to Ria Limjap’s “Heneral Luna,” which is based on an interview with Dr. Vivencio R. Jose, author of “The Rise and Fall of Antonio Luna,” Jose’s research led him to conclude that Luna “was the best general in the Philippine-American War.”
However, he fell victim to the intrigues spun between his enemies and the country’s first president, General Emilio Aguinaldo, who had already plotted and carried out the murder of Andres Bonifacio, another rival in Aguinaldo’s “boundless appetite for power”.

Here is Jose’s take on why the Filipinos lost in the revolution against the Americans: “The Revolution failed because it was badly led, because its leader won his post by reprehensible rather than meritorious acts, because instead of supporting the men most useful to the people, he made them useless out of jealousy, identifying the aggrandizement of the people with his own, he judged the worth of men not by their ability, character and patriotism but rather by their degree of friendship and kinship with him; and, anxious to secure the readiness of his favourites to sacrifice themselves for him, he was tolerant even of their transgressions.

“Because he thus neglected the people, the people forsook him and forsaken by the people, he was bound to fail like a waxen idol in the heat of adversity. God grant that we do not forget such a terrible lesson, learnt at the cost of untold suffering.”

In a dirty world—post-First Philippine Republic, post-9/11—a dirty mouth is the lesser evil.


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 11, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Kinatam-isan”

LAST week’s column (“Parsing Cebuano”) stirred up a hornet’s nest in the family.

After I posted on Facebook the article, first published in Sun.Star Cebu last Aug. 28, my sister and aunts reacted to Cebuano words for garden fauna.

One lives in Sydney; another in New Jersey. However, our mother tongue remains a puissant link across time, place, and even communication platforms.

The contentious stemmed from the disrobing of the familiar. When I wrote last week that “alindanaw” translates to dragonfly, an aunt expressed her confusion over the Visayan folk song, “Ako’y Pobreng Alindahaw”.

Many Cebuanos, or at least those of my generation, grew up hearing the lilting lyrics and melody of an “alindahaw” flitting among plants and flowers: “Ako'y pobreng alindahaw/ Sa huyuhoy gianod-anod/ Nangita ug kapanibaan, Ahay!/  Sa tanaman ug sa mga kabulakan”.

Based on the context of the song, I always assumed the song was about butterflies. Writer and fellow teacher Lilia Tio pointed out that “alindahaw” means a drizzle. Google validated with several articles and even a book that referred to an error that still flits across generations.

I wonder how Tomas Villaflor, credited in the Philippine Music Registry website as the song’s composer, immortalized the wrong word.

Yet, listening to a version sung by the Mabuhay Singers and uploaded on YouTube, I feel that the slip, though linguistically unfortunate, doesn’t mar the nostalgia that warms the heart of those who remember and often yearn for the Cebu of old—“ang kinatam-isang Cebu”—before traffic, Oplan Tokhang, and the unofficial but more feral Toksil.

Recalling how our family scrambled over the Cebuano words for spider, butterfly and moth, I remembered Lily’s observation that Cebuano is an earthy language.

Not only are many words in the vernacular rooted in agriculture and nature, our mother tongue is as uninhibited and robust in its literal and symbolic associations with desire, procreation and regeneration.

Listen to blogger, poet, and fellow teacher Jona Branzuela Bering’s dirge to the late Temistokles M. Adlawan, part-time “habal-habal” driver, “balak” poet and recipient of the First Taboan Literary Awards, along with Erlinda K. Alburo, Merlie M. Alunan, Resil B. Mojares, and Rodolfo E. Villanueva (also known as Renato E. Madrid).

In the second stanza of “Sa Imong Pagbiya (Alang Kang Nyor Tem),” Jona writes: “dinhi/ ang katri nakadungog / sa imong gipang-agu/ samtang gadamgog ugdo/ hamis, dughan, sampot”. And she concludes in the final stanza: “dinhi/ ang abog nahimong/ kabahin sa tanan/ ang tanan nahimong/ kabahin sa abog.”

In five short stanzas, the speaker invites the listener to revisit the latter’s home before departing. Only Cebuano can turn a short circuit of the earthly abode into a meditation on desire and decay, the fleeting and the enduring: “ayaw kalimtig tan-aw/ ang sulod sa imong payag/ hinumdomi, kini ang nag-inusarang/ saksi sa imong kaugalingon.”

“Sa Imong Pagbiya” is taken from “Alang sa Nasaag,” “balak” written by Jona from 2008 to 2015, published by Bathalad Inc. and launched last Aug. 27.

Thanks to her many lovers—Lilia, Jona, Nyor Tem, Bathalad, and binisaya.com—Cebuano endures and transports a yokel like me to appreciate the sublime nuances of sound and sense: “tam-ison (sweetish),” “tam-is (sweet),” “tam-is-tam-is (sweeter),” and “kinatam-isan (sweetest).”


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 4, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Parsing Cebuano

“TOKHANG o toksil?”

Freshly minted from the jargon of politics and media, these two words show how extrajudicial killing (EJK) has come a long way.

The “Philippine Law Journal” carries an article discussing the dispute over the definition of EJK. Should the term refer only to state-sponsored acts? What about the killing and enforced disappearances carried out by others besides the police and the military?

But it is these two words in Cebuano that measure how EJK has traversed from a technicality to reality, from Marcos to Duterte, from the vigilantism in Davao to the culture of impunity threatening to take over the country.

“Tokhang” is a contraction and fusion of two words. In Cebuano, “toktok” means to knock; “hangyo” is to plead.

National media translate these words into “katok” and “pakiusap”. However, there is no catchy equivalent for “Tokhang” in Filipino, primarily because it is the official name of the Duterte administration’s anti-illegal drugs campaign, also known as the “War on Drugs”.

According to a MindaNews article, Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Ronald de la Rosa first “hatched” Oplan Tokhang when he was the police director of Davao from 2011 to 2013.

Countless Oplans have been hatched and passed without catching the public’s attention. Even Oplan Sagittarius is obscured in the infamy surrounding Martial Law.

Why would “tokhang” pass so fluidly and seamlessly from officialspeak to plain speech? Is it because the bodies of users, pushers, couriers, and other drug suspects have spilled from news photographs and footages into our streets and backyards?

Is it because the sweep of Duterte’s War on Drugs deprives the poor of their life and the right to clear their names, the very same class that ironically turns up in many presidential speeches and promises for change?

Or because “tokhang,” like social cancer, comes with an even more vile twin: “toksil”? According to the same June 3 MindaNews article, De la Rosa already foresaw the pincer strategy behind Tokhang before he implemented the nationwide campaign on June 30.

“We (knock and) appeal to you to stop. If you do not stop, we will stop you.”

It was not unexpected then to overhear during a Vhire ride two women, who were chatting in Filipino, fluidly switch to the Cebuano words when discussing the fate of a missing neighbor.

They speculated that if their neighbor did not listen to the knock-and-appeal “tokhang,” his fate had surely been decided by “toksil” (meaning knock-and-shoot; “pusil” in Cebuano means to fire a gun).

Porous and malleable, language is vulnerable, specially when barbarians are waiting outside the gates. Catching sight of my dragonfly pendant, Professor Lilia Tio, my colleague at the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu, taught me its Cebuano name: “alindanaw”. An award-winning writer, Lily teaches Cebuano writing and Sugbuanon literature.

More than grammatical usage, Lily instills an appreciation of the beauty and expressiveness of Cebuano. She pointed out the “alindanaw” is often mistaken for “alindahaw,” meaning a drizzle.

From Justiniana Catubig Tagayong, my yaya, I learned the uncommon Cebuano names for common garden creatures: “anunugba” (moth), “kaba-kaba” (butterfly), and “higop-higop” (small yellow butterfly).

My wish is for other Filipinos to discover there is more to Cebuano than tokhang and toksil.


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


* First published in the August 28, 2016 issue of Sun.Star Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The rescue

SURROUNDED by a phalanx of reporters and recorders, Presidential Assistant Michael Dino presented an unenviable sight before and after the Cebu Citizens-Press Council (CCPC) quarterly meeting.

But during the Aug. 18 meeting of the CCPC, where he was a guest, the Visayas alter ego of President Rodrigo Duterte mentioned a detail that made me curious.

He said that even before he has moved into his office at the Malacañang sa Sugbu, “half a sack” of letters is already awaiting.

I turned this fact over and over in my mind, wondering if I ever would receive such a bounty in my lifetime. When my boys—a husband and two sons—were younger, they wrote me letters, often with a drawing or two.

And then text and email came, followed by Hangouts and Facetime.

Also kept as keepsakes are the yellowed notes that a class presented me during one birthday. Now yellow and curling in a paper box covered with news articles, my students’ letters linger longer than the chocolate cake we shared.

Letters, of course, have different flavors. Mr. Dino implied that some of the letters may be divulging more names that may end up in a narcolist.

As a child, I woke up every morning to my late father’s favorite radio commentators reading aloud letters demanding official action. These were sent by “concerned citizens”.

The current War on Drugs and the lengthening “Kill List” stain the civic letter-writing of old with a repute that puts it more in league with medieval plots, wily whispers, and Judas kisses.

More than political vagaries, technology accounts for the dramatic decline of letters. Reading the missives drafted by students for news sources, I am appalled at times to discover how the curtness, informality and self-entitlement of instant messaging and Tweets have turned the letter into a Frankenstein creation of mismatched intentions and expression.

So Education Secretary Leonor Briones’s decision to continue the “Salamat Po (Thank You) Letter Writing Project” on its fourth year should be celebrated by all those who believe there is more to communication than composing and reading “Wer U :-)”.

The Department of Education (DepEd) and the Philippine Postal Corp. (Philpost) will award P50,000 to a student who mails at any post office a handwritten letter to any person he or she is grateful to.

Written in Filipino or English and using the proper format, every letter sent locally entitles the student to a raffle coupon. If sent abroad, the letter writer receives two raffle tickets.

Prizes of P10,000 will be given to students, as well as to their teachers and schools, in the semi-grand draw on Mar. 15, 2017. The grand winner will be announced on April 2017, also the Philpost anniversary.

I would have preferred that the contest involves reading and selecting the winning letters. Other stakeholders have to take up the slack to get more than the luck of the draw to restore the lost art of writing letters.

For instance, will newsrooms recognize the most unforgettable letters written by the public? Do editors still print a letter that’s handwritten? Who has the patience to untangle penmanship?

Letter-writing, penmanship—what else is for the rescue?



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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 21, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”