Myths

THE MYTH is that in universities, God is dead. While it is true that Karl Marx’s recent 200th birthday was celebrated by some zealots as if it were the Second Coming, the pews in our usually empty church found a number of bench warmers.

Though a seat of learning, the university’s end-of-term final exams and requirements always put a spike on “permutations” of the spirit.

I see more of us at church, remorseful for denying deadlines or seeking at least a postponement.

Certainly, God is not dead. He is just rubbing elbows with lesser gods.

Towering above my university quarters is an ancient mango tree. On certain nights, while a classmate and I go over our theory papers, a mango fruit falls nearby, exploding the quiet of our street.

T. and I immediately stop talking. She continues her walk home and I pass through the gate. Mangoes fall all the time. Yet, I am not willing to disregard a fruit aimed and hurled by a spirit like the “mangmangkik,” perhaps driven to irritation by so much foreign-influenced theorizing.

The tree-worshipping ancient Ilocanos sought permission from the “mangmangkik,” the “anito (secondary god)” residing in trees, by chanting “Bari-bari, don’t be disturbed, my friend”.

The “katatao-an” or “sangkabagi” is the “anito” of space. Living in trees, the invisible “katatao-an” travel at night on huge boats called barangays that “fly through air like aerostatic globes,” according to Isabelo Florentino de los Reyes, writer of the Propaganda Movement.

In 1890, the acknowledged Father of Philippine Folklore Studies included a chapter on Ilocano myths in his writing of the prehistory of Ilocos.

According to the English translation by Maria Elinora Peralta-Imson of “History of Ilocos” (UP Press, 2014), de los Reyes, by recording local mythology, rescued its effacement at the hands of Spanish missionaries who dismissed native religion as the “superstition” of the unlettered Indio.

The Ilocano’s “bari-bari” has no equivalent in Spanish or English. But it resonates in the Cebuano expression of “tabi, tabi” I mutter when walking in the dark and anxious not to trespass on the space of unseen others. I heed the explosive sound of a fruit suddenly falling nearby and go inside the dwelling, not waiting to hear something hiss in the dark, “sst-sst” or “kwek-kwek”.

I shutter the windows when reading late or studying at dawn. I don’t want to attract a wandering “sangkabagi,” who “appear at midnight at the windows or the holes of the houses of their chosen few from where they awaken them with a barely perceptible voice,” wrote de Los Reyes.

Writing 128 years ago, de los Reyes helps me understand my Filipino soul, once deciphered only through the foreign and the alien.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 13, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Still enough”

ON Mar. 3, World Press Freedom Day, I realised how the world is still split between the information haves and have-nots.

At the 2018 Philippine Journalism Research Conference conducted by the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman Journalism Department, I listened to journalists discuss how practitioners, by returning again and again to “good journalism,” sustain “the fight” for “democracy” and against “disinformation”.

In the afternoon, I joined other judges as students from private and public universities presented their academic news analyses, academic journalism studies, special projects, and investigative reports.

Like the media professionals, these young communication researchers tackled issues created by the excess of information and the resulting cultural tumult.

Yet, one encounter reminded me that the other side of today’s information traffic is silence.

I had trawled online, as well as searched the database of the university’s library system. No copy of this book was available. So when I ran into my graduate professor, who has an extensive library of e-books, I asked if she had a copy of “Silences”.

Who wrote it? my teacher asked. I forgot; I had to look in my phone’s memo to remember: Tillie Olsen.

More are familiar with Virginia Woolf, who speculated that if Shakespeare had a sister, she might have passed away without writing a single word because she was a woman of her time.

In 1929, Woolf wrote that the women passing away in silence “live” on “in you and me and in many women who are not here tonight because they are washing the dishes or putting the children to sleep.”

In the 1930s, Olsen needed more than “a room of one’s own,” the metaphor used by Woolf to describe the “full freedom and courage (needed) to write what is in our minds”.

She was a mother of four. She organized workers and was jailed. She lived in the margins, waiting after her children slept or using bus rides to read, make notes, or copy passages from books she could not afford to buy.

“Almost no mothers—almost no part-time, part-self persons—have created enduring literatures,” Olsen wrote in “Silences” (1978), the “unnatural” silences that are about the “unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being”.

Yet, despite a thin body of works, Olsen lives on in other writers drawing on her words. I would like to think it is Olsen speaking through the mother ironing the clothes of her teenage daughter in her short story, “I Stand Here Ironing”: “So all that is in her will not bloom… There is still enough to live by… Only help her to know… that she is more than this dress, helpless before the iron.”


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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 6, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Colony

THE GIRL with her head on the woman’s lap may have been protesting. It was hard to tell since all I could see was the black hair cascading on the lap, and the woman nimbly threading her fingers in that black stream.

During an early morning ride on the MRT, two women and a girl boarded my train. The younger of the women had shaved both sides of her head, leaving only a centurion’s bronze brush in the center.

While the older woman picked lice from her head, the kid fought off drowsiness, her feeble protests sounding like a stream’s timid burble, punctuated now and then by the liquid pop of a tiny parasite disintegrating between the nails of those remorseless fingers.

The lice-seeking madonna and her child sped with us through Edsa and its monumental billboards peddling all kinds of religions, including body modification.

Hair remains a colony ruled by other people, other tyrants.

When my mother found out I had head lice one summer vacation, she stopped short of setting my hair on fire. A tomboy, I didn’t bother with combs, which would have been my mother’s first suspect if she had found one I actually used.

After I finally guessed I might have picked the lice from sleeping with the dogs and cats we adopted, my mother hauled me off to get the shortest possible haircut, her hairdresser stopping only while I still vaguely resembled a girl, not a hairless golf ball when it’s just sprung out from its package and has not rolled on any surface, gathering a stray tendril or two.

That one summertime invasion of head lice has changed my life forever. I decided hair is more trouble than it’s worth.

My yaya, who gave up her siesta so she could conduct search-and-destroy missions of the lice that had marched over with their nits (eggs) from my “aspin (asong Pinoy)” pillow friends, shushed my protests when I had to put my head on her lap by spinning the Horror Story.

She said disobedient girls who could not stay still paid for their lives when the lice took over and airlifted these girls to a fate too hair-raising to be mentioned. I dared her to name at least one unfortunate. She named three, who stole the boys who could have proposed and won her hand.

The thought of losing Yaya made the stubble on my head stand on end.

These days, I keep boring habits, including the use of a comb (one thing I don’t share with stray cats).

Yet, I have outgrown my usual boy’s cut. Strangers now approach me, offering comment or advice on how to deal with my hair, tangled, headstrong, ash-colored.

Like the girl on the train, I know by now hair is a mass noun: even if you tend the tresses on your private scalp, the people still own the whole crop.


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


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 29, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”