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”