Love for women

WHEN I read the first social media posts about his death, I wanted to doubt the news.

When I read the breaking reports from media I trust, my next thought was of his sisters. When he moved in the Bahay Pangarap in the Malacañang Park complex, his four sisters shared the official duties that, if he had married, would have been carried out by the country’s First Lady.

Finally, when the undeniable sunk in—that the 15th president of the country was dead at 61—my thoughts turned to us, the people he deferred to, first in his inaugural address and frequently throughout his term as the most powerful person in the land: “Kayo ang boss ko”.

As I write this, I feel the familiar hollow of what we have lost, his death debriding me of the carapaces grown even before June 30, 2016, when he stepped down and another moved into Malacañang.

So this is where five years have gone: growing one layer over another as self-fortification against the acid rain of jokes, innuendoes, smearing, shaming, and inanities assaulting women. 

Five years of raining women.  Cut up in body parts: “suso (tits),” “bisong (vagina)”.   As curses replacing presidential punctuations: “putang ina (mother-whore),” “bitches,” “crazy women”. Or reductionist judgement: the presidency is not for women, women are not emotionally wired like men.

Officially anointed, gutter talk is gutter think, spawning a culture that turns violence into a metonym for governance: make the problem “disappear” in the War on Drugs; brand critics as terrorists; cut off media franchise; and threaten resistant women with assault, rape, gang-rape, and shoot-the-bisong.

His death on the 24th of June sent me five years back, long before a strongman’s loud and lewd language converted “love of women” into an infested mattress of thorns. 

The country’s first bachelor president was not above making jokes, often comparing his love life to Coke Zero. Not once did he paw women in public or spit back when they called him out.

This “soltero (bachelor)” reserved his most impassioned side for his parents, sisters, and motherland: “Ang layunin ko sa buhay ay simple lang: maging tapat sa aking mga magulang at sa bayan bilang isang marangal na anak, mabait na kuya, at mabuting mamamayan.”

This was no lip service. On Dec. 21, 2012, Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III signed into law the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, which, after languishing for 13 years in Congress, grants Filipinos, specially girls and women, better access to information and means to prioritize their health and future.

Daghang salamat, President Noynoy. Love for women is again my ballot’s yardstick in 2022. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com, 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 27, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Knitting

IN my memories of sitting in her kitchen, food was the spice and stories, the staple. 

She was daughter, sister, wife, and mother in an age that had the expectations of and prescriptions for women traced and ready for applying to every woman, no matter what was in her mind and heart, like the cut-out clothes I used to punch out for paper dolls.

She was the last of the siblings that included my maternal grandfather. While watching her debone for chicken à la King or turning inside out a pork hock only to stuff it again and sew it close like a sock for contui, I itched silently with impatience, wondering why we could not just eat without the tedious deconstruction.

Painstaking meals prepared daily was Tita’s overture to telling stories.  While cooking, she pulled out and consulted notebooks where she wrote down recipes, jotting on the flour-sprinkled, soy-spotted margins improvisations and tweaked measurements. 

The stories, though, were all in her head. Knitting stories invokes the power to animate. She breathed life and soul—“anima”—to relatives I barely remembered except as family ghosts.

The great grandmother whose amputated leg I heard echoing in every creak of the ancestral house was, in Tita’s retelling, a young girl who witnessed her mother give away the land upon the prodding of her sons, who then treated her as a maid to serve their every caprice. The memory drove my great grandmother to be sparing in showering material gifts on her own children.

A family’s personal stories are stitches seeded on the broad canvas of history. Women as actors and narrators of their fate are often embellishments, decorative while being invisible. 

Tita’s stories first made me draw nearer to the canvas to examine the elision of lives glimpsed as a small hand placed tentatively from the back on a starched masculine shoulder in a studio portrait. 

What are stories if not illuminations and magnifications? In Feb. 1986, I was about to start lunch with Tita and Tito when I absentmindedly refused an offer of Coke. I participated in the nationwide boycott of businesses owned by cronies of Ferdinand Marcos, following the disputed snap presidential election. 

Tito, who worked with the company bottling Coke, was silent but Tita was furious. From what seemed to be a far shore, I heard her speak for employees and families suffering from the boycott. Issues split us, her voice buffeted but holding, a tenuous line above the tumult.

Recently, in the online requiem mass, I looked past the white coffin and saw Juanita Solon Villarosa in her kitchen, meat thawed, condiments ready, memory casting for a story. I’m listening, Tita Niting. 

Source of image: dreamstime.com

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 6, 2021 issue of the Sunday main op-ed column, “Matamata”

WIP

THE NARROW notebook I carry around for jotting has beautiful paper and Japanese characters I cannot read. Since I love this cream paper the color of churned butter that is a joy to write on and smell, I can live with symbols I can only guess at.

Recently, I discovered at the back of the notebook a page with a list of initialisms in Anglicized and Japanese forms. 

WIP stands out. In English, it means “work in progress”. The phrase can mean a draft for rewriting by the writer or polishing by an editor.

The Japanese characters for WIP are still three, which, I am guessing, illustrate the essence of each word in the acronym. 

These three symbols intrigue this non-Japanese reader. The first character looks like crochet needles with bits of yarn hanging as if a knitter hastily put down the needles to check if the pot of rice she put on boil hours ago has not run dry.

There is never an ideal time to write. In between chores, duties, distractions, and excuses, I have even tried the proverbial trick of waiting to write until the children are asleep. By that time, I am also asleep.

The second symbol seems to be a mad woman caught in the crosshairs of a web of yarn, reminding me of every sentence I ended up writing after a whole day of reading and thinking. At the extreme end of the spectrum languishes my long-suffering editor, CTL (not an initialism but her actual newsroom acronym), who often returned my copy because I wrote more than the news hole could fit. 

Hovering somewhere between a yawnsome trickle and a destructive torrent of words, the fluctuations undergone by a WIP are more maddening than my battle with pounds and kilos. 

And the last Japanese character in the translated WIP resembles a small plate mounted on a stick, like the labels a gardener sticks before a row of seeds to jog memory when the future brings the impressive fruits of her labor. 

Writing an essay takes a person to places not foreseen. This is a form that thrives on digressions.

Even more disorderly and disruptive is the use of the “I”. In an essay, the “I” is more than a point of view looking outward. It is an interior digging towards light at the end of the tunnel. Or into the septic tank.  

The reason WIP occupies my mind these days is a project I am undertaking with other women writing about organizing, supporting, and sustaining community pantries in the south. 

If you have a WIP to contribute, please email your essay to mayette.tabada@gmail.com.

A friend speculates that the community pantries may be long gone before the stories see print. But as the wonderful Japanese ideographs suggest, a story-in-the-making is a measure against forgetting. Long live, storytellers!

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 9, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”    

Muse

THE MOTH I mistook at first for a dead leaf or a brown stain on the wall. The kitten who trails me like a shadow pounced and flipped it. The brown wings fluttered on the kitchen floor before I scooped and placed the moth on the water dispenser.

Peering to check if its wings had not been ripped, I was diverted by the moth’s antennae.  In Cebu, the white wall in the garden is a magnet for moths of varied sizes and shapes. Yet, I had never seen until that day antennae as lush and feathery as the ones on the moth that narrowly escaped being toyed to bits.

Sweeping the air with majesty, these projectiles could be coveted by a drag queen or a teen fixated on eyelash extensions. I thought these antennae suited the more elaborate Lepidoptera cousins, the butterflies, but online sources pointed out that a moth flying at night needs these antennae more to make minute but crucial adjustments mid-air to evade obstructions or predators.

The flamboyance of the antennae creates more surfaces for sensors that make the moth more sensitive to smell than a butterfly.  Relying on the wind-borne information processed by the mechanosensors, a moth can smell and locate food or mate even more than seven miles away.

I wondered about our journeys, the confluence that brought a moth, a kitten, and a human in a kitchen being hosed down and cleaned of dog litter. The kitten has all the impetuosity of the five-months-young, pulled invisibly by curiosity and appetite. Already forgetting the moth, she was stalking more accessible prey, the dripping hose head.

The moth had not moved from the water container. It was probably recovering its breath as I was, caught in the eddies of house cleaning, clearing, cooking, washing up, sorting ad nauseam. 

Chores have the undemanding predictability of the quotidian. If I break routine, I brace against and resist the erosion of a formless, immovable monolith I attempt without any trace of irony to shove aside daily to do the work that matters. 

Autocratic but familiar, domesticity beguiles and smothers, delaying the chaos that begins when I sit in front of a screen or open a notebook.  A spanking spotless kitchen, matching pairs of socks: the harbor recedes the farther I strike away to put together a sentence or, by some miracle, paragraphs.

At the turn of the century, the few women who wrote did so for family and friends. Women authors were not published until newspapers, seeing a new market, opened a news hole for short essays. 

Immobile, the moth only puts forth its antennae to argue against historical elision: if you fly blind, trust in yourself, disorder and all.  Tell your stories; let the stories tell you. And fly. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 28, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Milagro”

 

THE ODDEST bedroom talk between newlyweds transpires between Noel Manalansan (acted by Jay Ilagan) and Mila Carandang (Charo Santos) in Mike de Leon’s 1981 film, “Kisapmata”.

Noel is in bed while Mila writes in her journal. 

Though a warm-blooded male, Noel is interested in another form of intimacy. When will you let me read your diary? he addresses the ceiling.

Mila demurs that her thoughts are difficult to grasp. Noel retorts that it is precisely why he is interested to read what she writes.

You will have your chance after I am dead, replies Mila. 

Inequalities of power are explored by De Leon in his dramatization of Quijano de Manila’s reportage of the January 1961 crimes that took place in the Zapote, Makati home of a police officer.

In both versions, the patriarch wields power of life and death. Retired cop Diosdado “Tatang Dadong” Carandang (Vic Silayan) recreates Pablo Cabading of the Manila Police Department, who shoots dead his daughter and son-in-law, attempts to murder his wife, and commits suicide.

“The Manila Chronicle” and the “Philippines Free Press” (with Nick Joaquin writing as Quijano de Manila) focused on physical violence, alluding only to a father’s “obsession” with a daughter who marries without parental consent and attempts to leave the parental home.

De Leon’s film locks our heads in a vise, forcing us to confront domestic and political taboos. When Tatang rapes and impregnates his daughter, he does not only force his wife to connive, he gets a lesser man like Noel to pay the bride price: dowry and wedding to possess Tatang’s prized stock, next to the worms and pigs he breeds. 

Noel is the classic “pendejo”. Among Pinoy machos, the cuckold is the biggest idiot for denying that his woman is fooling him.

Admitting he is one redeems a pendejo. Yet, Noel is denied salvation by the “milagro (miracle)” of his eponymous wife, who confides to her diary rather than reveals to Noel the truth to free him from the dangerous illusion that he is only up against an overstrict father.

Noel and Mila are victims, their Christian names hinting of the dangers of retreating into religiosity to deny and justify exploitation. While Noel is naïve and her mother Dely (Charito Solis) is cowed, Mila, underneath the piety, claws back to survive, seeking to escape from her father-rapist-jailer by using her pendejo of a husband. Postulant predator, she is a true daughter of her father.

In political parlance, “nagmilagro (making a miracle)” cynically expresses the opposite of the Christian miracle: abuse and corruption by those sworn to serve the public, incest and fascism breeding human anomalies: worms, pigs, predators.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in the January 3, 2021 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Source of “Kisapmata” still of Noel and Mila: news-abs.cbn.com

"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”

If

IF I were a hundred years old today, I would put my faith on a “suwiter (sweater)”.

In the American colonial-era periodical, “Bag-ong Kusog,” I came across in its editorial page a two-sentence article advising the reader to choose the right sweater and avoid catching the influenza going around Cebu on Jan. 28, 1927.

The final line clinched it, weaving fashion and public health: “Pangitaa ang ‘Sport Coat Sweater’, kon dili ang ‘Ideal Sweater’.”

The “leading periodical of its time,” according to the 1975 research of National Artist Resil B. Mojares, the “Bag-ong Kusog,” has been digitized by the University of San Carlos Cebuano Studies Center and may be viewed on The Nueva Fuerza Online Archive.

In the age of coronavirus disease (Covid-19), this century-old publication has become my favored “layas (escape)” hatch.

Though I miss the hushed-library sensation of turning slowly an almost sacrosanct sheet of newsprint, the PDF files of the periodical are clear enough for daydreaming.

If I were seven years old in 1927, I would bite all fingers in indecision, unsure what to order and buy from the Mercer Book Company: “Ang Lunario” for P0.20 or “Pocket Dictionary” for P1.50.

More expensive than the dictionaries of Castellana and Binisaya “hinubad (stripped? unchained?)” into English, the new colonizer’s tongue, was the P2 price of “How to write love letters” at the Gacura Mailing Store on Dalan Borromeo.

Two pesos for a book was eyebrow-raising in 1927, when “50 sintabos ang bulan” or P6 for a year was the subscription price of “Bag-ong Kusog”.

If I were seven and had two pesos, I would not choose love but the Philippine Candy Factory (Telephone 388). No seven-year-old can be deaf to their siren call: “Always remember… ‘PhiCyFy’, don’t forget it, they satisfy”.

Nostalgia, exacerbated by quarantine, cloaks the past in romance. A shipment of “Crown” bicycles “for men and boys” was announced in a half-page ad on Jan. 28, 1927. With P150, the most expensive “Model 75, Motobike de luxe” could be brought home by the workman, office messenger, school boy, boy scout or any male taking “pleasure… in the great outdoors”.

Five pages after, another half-page ad shows a 10-year-old girl embroidering on a “maquinita,” which C. Q. Demerry Store offered at P2.50, discounted for all “kababayen-ang sapian kon kabus (women, rich or poor)” to master the craft.

What if I do not fancy sitting for hours before a maquinita? What if I want to escape on a bike? What if I do not believe biking devirginizes disobedient girls who mangle their sewing?

When such questions raise their unruly heads, I know I am back in the present. “If’s” never satisfy for long.



“Old progressive”. (Source of illustration: Dreamstime.com)



* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 5, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917322631)

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”

Slogans of love

LOVE is a tagline.

Like the pails of roses and bouquets inundating the public pulse last Feb. 14, some took to the public sphere of mass media to spread advocacies for lovers, those about to fall in love, those resisting love, and those immune to love.

Here are my favorites, a mix of social good and pithy capsules for that most maddening of emotions (sa Binisaya pa: “makaboang”):

“Wear your feelings.” As paraphrased by SunStar Cebu’s Fe Marie Dumaboc in her Feb. 13 report, this was the essence of Talisay City Mayor Gerald Anthony Gullas’s Feb. 12 memorandum directing City Hall employees to abandon their uniforms in favor of an attire to “express (one’s) feelings” on Valentine’s Day.

His inclusive color code accommodates almost all statuses: red for couples, green for the “single and ready to mingle,” yellow for those neck-deep in “complicated” relationships, orange for the “prisoner to someone’s love,” pink for the solitary ones, gray for those relieved they “got away,” and black for the “dense”.

Talisay City Chief Maj. Gerard Ace Pelare reminds the public to avoid trouble by staying within the law: “make sure your date is of legal age”.

In a telenovela dilemma, a male teacher rejects his undergraduate student, protesting that he is too old for her. What should be emphasized are the reasons why student-teacher romances are inappropriate and must be avoided, regardless of the student’s consent: abuse of authority, conflict of interests, exploitation of the student’s vulnerability, and threats to the student’s emotional stability and academic performance.

“Dili magpataka og partner (choose your date).” Department of Health (DOH) 7 Director Jaime Bernadas advises checking first the recent travel history of the intended before going on a date that may just lead to a possibly fatal exchange of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), reported Wenilyn Sabalo in SunStar Cebu last Feb. 13.

And not the least is “H.E.A.R.T to H.E.A.R.T,” cautions the Commission on Population and Development (PopCom) 7, whose advocacy launched on Feb. 14 emphasizes these touchpoints for millennials: H stands for HIV, AIDS and STI; E for early sexual encounters; A for adolescent sexuality; R for reproductive health; and T for teenage pregnancy.

Love is a minefield, not just on Feb. 14, one infers from this headline from “Bag-ong Kusog,” the leading newspaper in Cebu during the American period: “Mirisi nga babayhana” (published on May 6, 1917).

Tamely translated, the idiom means “serves her right” but it is not just in matters of the heart that the saltiness of the Cebuano is beyond the ken of English.


Too close for comfort. The 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) [Source of photo: Medscape.com)


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in the February 16, 2020 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Different

HOW many types of “friendly” are out there?

Crisscrossing Manila and Cebu, I picked up a new word: “checkpoint friendly”. I had to Google to understand why airport inspection personnel have shifted their interest from my clothing to my gadgets.

A laptop can hide a bomb, confirms the search. The Transportation Security Administration advises that carrying laptops in a “checkpoint friendly bag” with a “butterfly style, tri fold style, or sleeve style” speeds up the airport checking process.

Just when I choose shoes that are easy to slip on and refrain from using a belt, airport security personnel no longer demand that I remove my jacket, shoes, and belt before undergoing the electronic and manual checks.

Recently, I had to take out a laptop and notebook from a tote and put these in separate trays. On another occasion, the person manning the scanner and a colleague discussed lengthily the image of the same tote before the latter requested me to open the bag and remove for closer inspection two pouches containing the gadgets’ accessories.

Peering at my purple MacBook Air power cord, the officer asked me what it was. Irony is the last thing I expect from the bureaucracy. I answered: my friend crocheted this for me, referring to the yarn in shifting shades of purple that Y. devoted her weekend to in covering the white-coated loops.

Both men looked back at me. Crochet hooks or knitting needles? I wondered suddenly, seeing Y. work with her hands: driving motorcycles, cleaning them, painting, cleaning her brushes, crocheting…

Then I remembered that Y. loops and ties the yarn by hand. She joked then I was so obsessed with keeping my year-old cord white and clean, she would make it easier when I reentered the university as a graduate student.

Indeed, in the library where other students’ cords of white and black are snaking on the floor, mine is the only purple serpent. An undergraduate once asked me where I purchased my cord. Because this was a library and not an airport and I was facing a fellow admirer of art and not security authorities, I smiled and remembered Y.’s hands and their movements as she sent me off with waves of purple.

“they taught me different is wrong,” Ani DiFranco sings in her poem, “My IQ”. In the airport, I took another look again inside my bag and saw the notebooks and pens I bought as gifts to encourage two friends to write.

“'cause silence/ is violence/ in women and poor people,” writes DiFranco in the same poem. “'cause every tool is a weapon -/ if you hold it right.”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 7, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Discomfort women

WE never see her. For many students at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, the restaurants at the Ang Bahay ng Alumni are too pricey for gobbled down meals. This hub, though, becomes a favorite when folks are celebrating a reunion, the turning in of the final paper or just one’s grip on day-to-day sanity.

Rushing past her, many of us hardly glance. Distractions are not just of the intimate, academic or ruminative kinds; the Bahay ng Alumni is just one node in the campus network of art and history.

The whole school is a people’s museum, where any citizen can freely enter and gaze at the works of National Artists and creatives sans titles. In this treasury, it is understandable to overlook the “Alma Mater,” the 1996 sculpture of a woman offering a wreath to visitors entering the lobby of The Home of the Alumni.

Created by National Artist for Sculpture Napoleon Abueva in homage to UP, the “Alma Mater” is frequently left out in online posts extolling the bounteous legacy in Diliman. It was only during the fifth year of my studies that I spared her a moment of curiosity—who is she?— when my friend M. and I asked a security guard to take our photo at the lobby.

Both of us are inept at taking a selfie but we looked around for a hallmark for our reunion, perennially postponed by the disruptions afflicting working women who are also wives and mothers.

That shot of our beaming beneath the bronze woman was shared by M. on social media, but my scrutiny of the “Alma Mater” only came six months after the taking of the photo I have mentally captioned as “Tulo ka Babaye (three women)”.

I was in the cemetery in Cebu, visiting my father, when a family friend stopped to chat. He beamed when he said their youngest child recently graduated.

Son, he told this child in Cebuano, as your mother and I don’t have a daughter and you have no job yet, I will use you as a daughter. Please wash the dishes.

T. and his wife put all their sons through college from what they earned in “maintaining” the graves of several families in the cemetery. T. is no stranger to manual labor nor to the cooperation needed for partners to raise a family. Yet, why would he put a gender to housework with no pay or recompense?

Abueva’s works invite a meditation to break expectations, from the iconic “Risen/Dead Christ” at the Parish of Holy Sacrifice in UPD to the quietly subversive “Alma Mater”. The term in Latin literally means “generous mother” or someone who nourishes.

Those invisibles behind countless hot meals, ironed clothes, and enlightened minds are gendered by social edict. Can we finally see her only when she breaks out of these comfort zones?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 30, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

A girl thing

(Don’t read; GoT spoilers ahead.)

“To live without hypocrisy”.

This line written by Dolores Stephens Feria writing about early Filipina writers came to mind when I was viewing for the nth time one of the YouTube videos featuring the knighting of Ser Brienne of Tarth in the “Game of Thrones” series. I lost count of the times the videos blurred before I finally kicked myself in the head: who in that room was the equal or better of Brienne?

In the honor department: no one, at least in my books or the five published ones written so far by George R. R. Martin in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. In the television series, which has outpaced the books, Brienne “finally” receives what she deserves, according to a plot written and directed by men, kneeling before a man invoking a medieval code of honor he has broken beyond count and she has never, and applauded by men who have schemed, deceived, and compromised beyond count.

So why did I binge on the “fireside scene” of episode 2 of season 8? Ah, thanks to being an avid subscriber of the patriarchy, I expect that if the episode writer had set Brienne in a room full of women, I would have felt disoriented: are they knitting the secret weapon to defeat the armies of the undead?

The power of archetypes lies beyond the spinner of tales or the audience. Feria implies in her essay studying women writers who wrote against the tradition of patriarchy controlling not just literature or journalism but human history that the freedom to write and express had to be done within the confines of how women of a certain period were permitted to live out their lives.

It galls to watch Brienne bend her knee in front of a man with two swords and one swordhand—for in a patriarchy, one cannot have too many phallic symbols for conferring and symbolizing power, specially over a woman, positioned in an appropriately submissive position—when in the narrative arc of five books or eight television seasons, this character has never slipped in choosing the path of honor, at great cost to her life or her happiness.

Shouldn’t Brienne be the one patting the shoulders of these men with her Valyrian sword Oathkeeper and exhorting them to keep to the path of honor? Ah, but until that night, she cannot knight because she is not a knight. She is not a knight because she is not a man. She cannot become a man. How can she be a knight?

She can benefit from the generosity of men. Directed to rise, by men.

The archetypes are fixed. That is not just storytelling but tradition.

The acts a woman must do for validation.

Or for love. Amounts to the same thing, yes?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 28, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Choices

FOR as long as I have known her, my friend Brigada’s homecomings have always been marked by the discovery of one or more foibles of her nieces.

At one fiesta, a brother’s daughter failed to introduce the young man she was entertaining with friends at the hut adjoining the house. Imagining that Brigada’s ancestral home was full to the rafters with guests—in their barrio, homes opened doors so anyone could just walk in and pick up a plate—I wondered that she had time to notice the snub.

Brigada said the last time this impertinent chit remembered her manners was the day she turned five and Brigada brought a small cake sweating icing from the city.

In recent years, Brigada’s blood pressure has gone up and down over the diminishing pieces of cloth the nieces wear to the barrio dancing that caps the festivities on the eve of the fiesta.

When Brigada and her sisters were still maidens with willowy waists, I listened till late at night to them plan, engrossed to the last detail, over the cut and color of the dress they were saving for the “sastre” to sew and dieting to fit in for that evening’s “kalingawan”.

Now all Brigada can talk about is the tininess of the shorts each niece trots out to wear for what Brigada hesitates to call as dancing. After Brigada commented that she could already see one girl’s soul through a particularly wee piece, this niece responded by swinging her hips like a pendulum gone haywire.

Those shorts will precede the fall, Brigada darkly predicted.

But contrary to expectations, it was a grandniece—14, in first-year public high school, a government scholar, newly flowered—that became the youngest in their clan to be in the family way, unwed.

The child’s father is the girl’s classmate. How can children make a baby? my friend wailed.

Brigada and I believe in rising expectations: every generation is an improvement on the previous one. Our children are taller, healthier, smarter than us. Our grandchildren will even be better.

Only Brigada’s youngest sister finished high school. By toiling and saving, Brigada and her siblings have put more than one of theirs through college.

A college diploma opens a vista of options Brigada and her siblings never entered.

An unwed pregnancy closes these choices.

Until reproductive health is opened up in families and schools, we will have to live with choices, the hardest being the ones we should have educated others from taking.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

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

Sing the blues

PUKING because one mistook punch for plain fruit juice in a fellowship nearly missed because of a wretched inability to follow directions seems to be just a catalogue of misfortunes snowballing in one’s youth.

So I thought.

One summer decades ago, in a southern city for a workshop, I got lost, first wandering the streets and then finding the house of the writer hosting that evening’s fellowship.

I had no time to eat dinner so when I finally joined our workshop “family,” I thirstily downed several cups of a peach-coloured drink that was the only thing served, aside from copious writers’ talk.

Instantly, I felt warm breathless dizzy. Intending to splash water on my face in the toilet, I knelt before the toilet bowl, which became the repository of everything I could regurgitate, including unruly bits of poetry.

I didn’t end up a mess that night because P, a quiet fellow who worked in a bank and was an intense acolyte of James Baldwin off-work, read my face when I rejoined them.

Hailing a rattletrap tricycle, P whisked me back to the hostel. In his rush to go back, he left his paperback, which had well-thumbed pages of “Sonny’s Blues.” Understandably, this became my favorite of Baldwin’s works.

Yet, ignorance, not liquor, was my real nemesis. Fortunately, no one took advantage of my vulnerability then. I realized this after writing last Sunday’s column, focusing on a friend, raped after she had her first drink in the company of other writers.

The same column connected me with other friends who had their own brushes with sexual violence. This pattern emerges:

The person victimized is a woman. The predator is a male, always a senior in age, experience, and body of works who uses a gathering, such as a workshop, to take advantage of his status and influence to pursue a younger person.

As he is besotted, he assumes that the hapless focus of his self-delusions must also be besotted with him, even if she actively repulses his advances because he is married, repugnant, or both.

The women are overwhelmed, inarticulate, or, in one case, preyed upon by a man and a woman who meld their debauchery to take down their victim.

Language is faithful mimesis to reality: the abuser initiates the abuse. The victim is the object of the abuse; he or she does not “provoke” the violence.

One other feature connects these incidents of violence against women: the survivors tell their stories. To fight predators. To prevent victimization.

Abused for being poor, black, and gay, Baldwin wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 4, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Many mothers

LANGUAGE preoccupies us even when we are swimming blind in its crosscurrents.

Our classmate M. made a discovery she declared to our group as we were leaving an evening class.

R., from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, has learned enough of Filipino to converse after more than a year of studies in Manila.

Often commuting with R., I confirm this: hearing R. address the driver or fellow passengers, I think she sounds much better than I do, born more than 52 years ago in Cebu and ratcheting more than four years in Manila.

Disciplined in her media studies, R. is modest about the acquisition of her language fluidity. She said she had to learn during her regular visits to the wet market for the vegetables and other ingredients she uses for the Indonesian dishes she cooks for her husband and daughter, as well as shares with us in class.

R. messages our Facebook group to clarify instructions of her daughter’s Filipino homework. She also asks us—L. is a native of Laguna, M. is from Iligan, and I am from Cebu—about Filipino customs as when church members here invited them to their wedding.

While my classmates and I use English in our Facebook conversations, English is far from being the “universal language” it is held up to be in the global village.

What connect us more are our shared existences as women, as mothers, as wives, as sisters, as schoolmates coping with commuting, domestic surprises, paper deadlines, “Walang Pasok” watches, and the unpredictable meter of life.

To capture our moments, these times, our hopes, we swap around a mix of Bahasa, Cebuano, Tagalog, and the variants of Englishes transformed beyond textbook notions of the “universal” and the “standard”.

In fact, to tap in shorthand our emotions on Facebook, we don’t even resort to words, just emojis and GIFs :-)

This porosity of language, as well as ironically its density, came to fore in two recent classes. In translation issues, seeking the appropriate word or phrase returned us not just to our mother tongues but the contexts which “mother” or nurture us.

Rendered in Ilocano, Ilonggo, formal or informal Bahasa, or Odiya, the language of Orissa, hometown of S., our Indian classmate, a simple strand of English can unravel into extended, complex skeins of syllables, sounds, and associations. Things are lost in translation, but also gained.

Discussing feminism and discourse, we learned language can become knots of power to silence and subjugate. Yet, just as a phrase can be turned or a word, substituted, power can also liberate the powerless to express.

Language. Not just one but many mothers “complexify” the human.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 3, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, ““Matamata”

Stories à la King

THE storyteller in my mother’s family is my grandaunt Juanita, whom I often visited during summer.

A teenager with an appetite, I wanted lunch to be over. Granduncle Crispin, after coming home for the lunch my grandaunt prepared, then fell asleep in front of the TV set, newspapers opened helter-skelter on his lap or feet, splayed on his chair with the extended leg rests.

When he reported back to work, I could now read the newspapers. During the interlude my granduncle listened to the TV and scanned the dailies, he went through one or two crossword puzzles just before dozing.

My granduncle never left a square in those puzzles blank, a challenge unanswered.

In contrast to my granduncle’s completely filled-in word puzzles, my grandaunts’ magazines had pages with holes. These women’s magazines had features about food, which she clipped and filed away religiously.

Fortunately, I was not keen on recipes; only in their end results. Though all their children had moved away, my grandaunt prepared elaborate dishes.

While she took an hour or more to make con tui—a pig’s foot she emptied of its meat and bones, which she turned into a mash and then stuffed back, sewing carefully the foot-turned-sock—I was her reluctant apprentice.

Privately, I felt she could just have fried the trotter and I would have obligingly gnawed it to the bone. But this would have deprived me of listening to my grandaunt dipping into her bottomless store of anecdotes.

So while I tried to perfectly dice carrots and chayote (my personal opinion was to just delete veggies) for Chicken à la King, Tita Niting told me about her girlhood in pre- and postwar Cebu.

Beyond mediocre as a kitchen apprentice, I remember the stories. After the war, Juanita decided she was going back to school.

Great grandmother Carmen thought too much education ruined a woman, who would just end up as a wife. So these two headstrong women butted heads, Carmen certain that the absence of transportation in those gasoline-rationing days would discourage Juanita.

Age trumped youth. My grandaunt married and learned more practical things, like unstuffing and stuffing a pig’s foot. At one point, Juanita’s shoes so pained her, she removed them and walked home after class.

Ignoring those feet—which, I believe, she would just have stuffed for sausages—my grandaunt attended class the next day. That is how she finished college.

For feminists or any person striving not to be silenced, “voice” resonates. To quote Luce Irigaray, finding your “voix (voice)” is discovering the “voie (way)”.

Beyond pigs and chickens, Juanita’s stories still light the way for me.



(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 19, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Missing

THE FLOWER turned out to be a fruit.

Visiting temples in Hanoi, the older son and I saw several times clumps of these yellow flowers occupying the central place for offerings.

Dedicated to Buddhism or Confucius, the temples drew steady streams of tourists and devotees. So as not to be the archetypal boorish foreigner, I restrained my curiosity until I had a chance to ask Wang, the young man guiding us around Hoa Lu.

The ancient capital of Hanoi has several 10th- and 11th-century temples in a citadel surrounded by limestone mountains and rice fields. In the Temple of Lê Đại Hành, Wang corrected my misconceptions about the citrus-colored “flowers”.

The Buddha’s Hand is a fruit but is not eaten, he explained. Favored as a temple offering, the fruit’s yellow extensions resemble cupped fingers and suggest the hands of the Buddha folded in prayer.

The Buddha’s Hand stands out in the sea of offerings laid out before venerated icons because it is the least ostentatious. Everything else glints and competes for attention.

Art saturates the Vietnamese landscape, from its temples to sidewalks. During stopovers, tourists stepping off buses for refreshments or “happy rooms (toilets)” watch as disabled women turn out paintings that are painstakingly made from stitches rather than brush strokes.

Just as unforgettable as those rooms full of women sewers creating handmade art is their silence. One question lingers: where are the women in Vietnamese history?

In the Temple of Lê Đại Hành at Hoa Lu, I finally came face-to-face with the gilded figure of Dương Vân Nga. After two days of looking up at Confucius, Ho Chi Minh and a host of heroes and sages—all males—it was a relief at first to behold the serene visage of a woman, all but missing in the interstices of Vietnamese history.

Vietnam’s only empress of two dynasties survived the vicissitudes of power through the oldest way women negotiated with men: sex.

Vân Nga married the first emperor of the Đinh Dynasty, and then married the general who plotted his downfall; deposed her son, the child-king; and replaced his rule with his own, the Early Lê Dynasty.

Bestowed a new title by her second emperor, the “Bright Empress of Great Victory” was reviled by Confucian scholars and historians for acts of frailty that violated the strict code of Confucian ethics. She endures today as a popular character in plays and novels.

The temple Vân Nga shares with her second emperor (a stone’s throw from the temple of her first) had few visitors on the day of our visit. It was an opportunity for me to bombard our guide with questions.

As well as to note that the Two-Time Empress was missing a bowl of Buddha’s Hand.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 30, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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”

Leni

IS there a women’s vote?

Proclamation No. 227, series 1998, recognizes “Women’s Role in History” in March. This year, the theme for Women’s Month is “Kapakanan ni Juana, Isama sa Agenda”.

The challenge to include the welfare of women in the agenda for governance has set my choices for the May 9 poll. The welfare of women and children is not among the 10 issues listed by the Philippine Daily Inquirer as national priorities that should guide voters in selecting the next Philippine president.

However, a re-examination of the Inquirer’s agenda for the 2016 election reveals that women’s welfare is embedded in all issues. Poverty, which tops the list, is rooted in inequality, according to studies cited by the paper.

While others argue that women are also part of national concerns and dismiss singling out this sector, I contend that this perception also contributes to the problem of marginalizing women.

If victims have a gender, it would be female. In poor families, they are beasts of burden, sexual slaves without rights to their bodies, and victims of domestic abuse.

Saddled with children and less education and opportunities, many women are sidelined by men in the competition for jobs, livelihood, and security.

Society expects women not only to survive but also to provide for their children’s upbringing, education, nutrition, health, and safety. Society makes excuses for men, and dumps all the blame on women.

When peace and order break down, traffic congests, and predators prowl the Net, who are the most vulnerable? Women and children.

So why should the welfare of women be assumed and taken for granted in national development when social ills put women and their children at the top of the list of victims?

As early as October 5, 2015, when she accepted to run with the Liberal Party standard-bearer Mar Roxas, I already voted in my mind for Leni Robredo.

Of all the contenders for the top posts—of the vice-presidency, as well as the presidency—she alone has the integrity. For more than a decade, she worked with the Public Attorneys’ Office, the Naga chapter of Sentro ng Alternatibong Lingap Pang Legal (Saligan), the Lakas ng Kababaihan ng Naga, the Naga City Council for Women, and the Federacion International de Abogado.
Through alternative lawyering, she served the powerless: farmers, women and children.

After graduating from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, she returned home to Naga. She was shortlisted as a presiding judge for any of the three regional trial courts in the Bicol region when she was thrust into the limelight by the accidental death in 2012 of her husband, former Naga City mayor and interior secretary Jesse Robredo.

Her public and personal life meshes in her campaign agenda of zero hunger, shared prosperity and gender equality. If Leni served then in anonymity, with few resources, and no political backers, imagine her potentials and opportunities as vice-president. Leni’s “tsinelas” advocacy deserves to be spread throughout the country.

Two of the five presidential contenders are women. Neither Grace Poe nor Miriam Defensor-Santiago will get my vote.

More than anything, I question these women’s choice of vice-presidential running mate. For choosing Bongbong Marcos—who compounds the sins of his parents with his historical lies and lack of atonement for the past—shame, shame, shame, Miriam.


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



*First published in the March 6, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column of Sun.Star Cebu, “Matamata”