Creation

             

            FIRST, draw a straight line. Pretend it is a snake lying on the ground.

 

            Mama looked at the “S” my stick left on the seabed. That is not a straight line.

 

            Yes, Mama, I said. The ground is crooked; the snake lying on it is crooked.

 

            It is perfect, my Moonling.

 

            That is a story the oldest of the Mothers does not grow tired retelling. It requires imagination—some of my fellow mothers say, a suspension of imagination is closer—to see her as being once a mother, spewing bubbles.

 

            We call her the One. A name no one remembers anyone giving. Then again, no one remembers the ones before her. The Mothers are Nameless. Birthing makes us thinner each time. In time, Mothers disappear.

 

            Or perhaps we just cannot see them and the Nameless are still among us. We see through the One, a colorless frond undulating in the current, more Sea than presence. Only the One’s voice is undiminished, naming, telling, humming.

 

            Or perhaps it is our own voices we hear in our heads.  The figure for “one” can stand for “I”. “I” can be the line drawn on the seabed that shimmies as I look at it. I.

 

            Few things in our world lie flat and straight, Moonling.

 

            Our Father, the sea, bends us.

 

            Our edges are soft. Our Father, the sea, bends us.

 

            Can you cut a circle, Mama?

 

            In her stories, the One cuts up the Planet Primus into two parts: us and the Others. The Others are dry mass and air and primitive life. To keep the Others from invading and colonizing us, the sea pays a tribute with his spawns, foam and waves creatures of the deep for food nearshore forests for their houses water corridors and bridges for their ships and, of course, the Moons, our sons, for light and time and sport.

 

            Time for the Others is reckoned by cycles of six moons, each rising from the Sea, each devoured by its successor. Supplying the arena entertained by the gross deaths of his sons has not made the sea saltier than it is. What are tears to the ocean?

 

            Beneath the sea, the bestiality pits Mother against Mother until the One penetrates their laments and cries for vengeance. Where do killers and victims come from? When the killer also becomes a victim, who mourns? Why kill?

 

            We looked at each other and saw ourselves bringing forth life, steering most of the bubbles away from the currents that whip them into sea foam, tickling telling teaching the Moonlings that later rise from the sea as Moons and never come back.

 

            Perhaps it is not birthing that makes us fade. Perhaps it is waiting for sons that never return that brings us closer to joining the Nameless.

 

            A line is perfect, seen from all sides.

 

            What is perfect, Mama?

 

            You are.

           

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

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

The placid ones

THE BIBLICAL injunction to let sleeping dogs lie does not count on Udo, the family aspin (“asong Pinoy”).

When he first arrived about a decade ago, we lined a small box with the younger son’s unwashed shirt in an attempt to quiet him. He was given away from a litter of pups born from an unsupervised coupling between a Labrador and one of the local bitches.

During the drive from the dog farm in the south of Cebu to our home in the city, the black ball of fur ate and sniffled from my son’s lap. Except for the whites in his eyes, he was black all over. Black muzzle, black paws, black pools of misery reproaching those who tore him away from his mother’s side.

That was probably what made the superstitious stay away from him. All that presentiment of darkness.

Or perhaps it was just the noise that he made that first night. A low prolonged thread of keening that dogged and found us wherever we tried to escape in our small home. Thunder, rain, the dark, and sleeping alone made Udo notch his wailing even higher, seemingly beyond human endurance.

When he finally quietened down, we discovered he had overlong ears that flapped, twisted, and upended when he became engrossed: wolfing down pan de sal, chewing shoes, and sitting down with us for meals even though limbs and tail untidily spilled from chairs too quickly outgrown.

The puppy that once kept the whole household awake has become sedate in his senior years. Each time I come home, I find his long dark shadow almost always stretched on the floor, beside my chair.

He still rouses a shadow of the old friskiness when he hears the breakfast rustling of the bag containing hot pan de sal. But even before night has fallen, Udo is a dark comma curled beside our bed, sometimes snoring but no longer yipping puppy dreams.

One thing remains unchanged: a keen hearing in those silken socklike ears. Deep in sleep, he will suddenly leap up and bark in a frenzy when he hears what he alone can hear: someone familiar approaching our home and pushing, predictably minutes after he sounds off the alert, the rusty gate we have never been able to oil properly.

A dog they say ages seven times faster than humans. I doubt that. The disorder that makes one sleep longer than usual afflicts not just aging pets.

Every day, I take in the news. I follow the killings that take place daily, the bodies that go unremarked.

Occasionally, an odd detail catches the eye, a body swinging from the bridge greeting early risers. Or a child catching a bullet like a common cold.

The proverb to let sleeping dogs lie means to let things be. Rise only for the ones you love. That is what the family aspin does while I prefer the long sleep.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


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

Chicks killers

ON Tuesday, ampalaya with egg was my breakfast and dinner. On Wednesday, ground meat in egg. On Thursday, rice fried with egg became breakfast. Friday, smoked fish and salted egg.

Except for changes in main noun and preposition, egg was the mainstay in this week’s meals. Perhaps the Pampangueño cooks just love eggs or cafeteria regulars do.

Many of my breakfast classmates and I take our eggs with a national daily, which are piled near the food trays.

Despite our conspicuous consumption of news, which prominently featured this week the culling of birds to stop the spread of bird flu in Pampanga, when the cafeteria closes by 4 p.m., the hordes have wiped away every trace of egg, presumably to return the next day.

I know because one of the Pampangueña ladies kindly whipped up an egg sandwich I could eat before my evening class.

On the sound theory of not biting the hand that feeds one, I’ve never asked the cafeteria crew if our eggs are sourced from Pampanga, where they are going after every chicken, quail, and duck suspected of or testing positive for the H5 strain.

I’ve tried to eavesdrop on conversations among cafeteria diners, who are mostly from the natural sciences. However, stepping up human resistance to viruses or implementing strict biosecurity measures does not seem to be on the minds of this learned crowd when they are tackling eggs and whatnots.

Being of the humanities discipline, I rationalize my eggs-cesses by creating backstories: for instance, the salted egg lying on its bed of sun-ripened tomatoes must surely be “old stock,” salted away long before some alien winged in from elsewhere in Asia to infect our sitting ducks.

Besides, even if a foreign extremist invasion of H5 carriers did corrupt the Pampanga stocks, I put full confidence on the martial solution to rebellion and chaos in the poultries.

After poultry workers in Pampanga refused to cull the infected birds even if promised the previously unheard-of daily allowance of P700, Malacañang called on the military to step in and terminate the threat.

Given the Philippine track record in extrajudicial killings, gassing and burying birds in pits will not even ruffle feathers.

On the same day the military was ordered to clear contaminated poultries, police officials shrugged off the deaths of 21 drug suspects killed in nine hours in Bulacan.

The deaths are “normal,” given these resulted from 22-25 operations, not just one, a police spokesperson explained the simultaneous operations called “One Time, Big Time”.

Since any form of math, even malicious math, is beyond me, I put my faith on law enforcement to also take care of my eggs, same place, same time.


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

*First published in SunStarCebu’s August 20, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Cardboard justice

THE CORPSE had clean feet.

The body was deposited beside a highway that would soon be crawling with motorists getting away for the weekend to Tagaytay and Batangas, favorite watering holes for Manila’s middle class and affluent.

On a weekend, the site would have been risky for an execution or a disposal. There are nearby malls, arcades, and the restaurants and excursion sites of Tagaytay and the beaches of Batangas.

But late Thursday evening or Friday dawn? A few meters from a university and situated beside an open clearing, the spot is located along a stretch of road that is unlighted and uninhabited.

The body wore denim pants and a white shirt. Any onlooker could see the packaging tape winding around the head, the hands tied behind the back, and the ankles.

All during the ride to Metro Manila, I wondered if the theft of the shoes was an afterthought of the crime. A man’s life was negligible; his shoes were not.

“Bloody PH drug war catches eye of int’l media” was the title of a Philippine Daily Inquirer page-one story on Aug. 6.

After I searched “death toll in PH,” Google turned up 1.7 million references in 0.61 seconds. The first page of the Google search contained only two references to the Typhoon Haiyan casualties; all the rest were about the body count of President Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs.

The extrajudicial killings have been condemned by the Church, media, and human rights organizations, here and overseas.

“Will the human rights people still be noisy when their rights or their loved ones’ lives are violated?” That’s the reaction of Boni, a taxi driver in Lapu-Lapu City who voted for Duterte primarily because of his tough stance on drugs. He said only Duterte is capable of taking on the rich and powerful who are preying on the common people.

Yet, there is a pronounced class slant in the profile of victims falling in the War on Drugs. In photo after photo, the victims shot down in the streets or abandoned in gutters, dumps and grassy lots seemingly come from the lower socio-economic brackets.

The news photos show not just the cocooned faces and the blood bath but also the dead men’s feet in slippers. If bare, the soles are dirty, as these would be if the men had earned their living, shod only in slippers, out on the streets or had just run for their lives.

While drug financiers and narco-politicians are paraded in news conferences or given a presidential face-to-face castigation, the men sharing their crime but not their status end up as statistics. According to another Inquirer report, Oplan Tokhang was not carried out in a gated village after the homeowners’ president certified in writing that no resident was engaged in drugs.

Jennelyn Olayres, widow of a slain drug user, protested against this form of cardboard justice. In an Aug. 1 Inquirer report, she asked President Duterte to look into the deaths of those “judged by a cardboard”.

Beside the body of her partner and many other victims of extrajudicial killings were pieces of cardboard, labelling the body as a “drug pusher” or repeating a moral: “Don’t do drugs”.

To the homeless, discarded grocery boxes have infinite use, whether as a sleeping mat, temporary roof or kindling. Thanks to the War on Drugs, we have another use for cardboard.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 1, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Now showing

I CAME home after three days of being closeted in research proposal writing. The decompression of one’s world jolts when, after three days of trying to read the code embedded in a piece of loom-woven fabric, the same pair of eyes scans the front pages of newspapers.

July 8, Philippine Daily Inquirer, page 1: “Probe of killings pushed,” “PH may become a killing field,” “Drug killings,” “Vigilantes kill Bulacan policeman,” “Rody names 3 Triad drug lords, pins Garbo,” “Inquirer ‘Kill List’,” “Drug-related killings hit 72 since June 30,” “Drug deaths add more life to funeral trade,” and my favorite: “Buhay na buhay ang negosyo ng patay!”

Death used to be a mystery; now it’s commonplace. Occasionally, the mind-numbing march pauses to allow a distraction: the coffin of slain drug personality Jeffrey “Jaguar” Diaz seems to float in a sea of mourners in Amper Campaña’s unforgettable photo splashed on page 1 of the June 28 issue of Sun.Star Superbalita (Cebu).

According to Arnold Y. Bustamante’s report, more than 2,500 people walked the 1.7-kilometer distance from Duljo Fatima, where Jaguar lived, to accompany the body to the cemetery in Calamba. The vivid imagery of Bustamante’s journalese rivals the Campaña banner photo and shames pallid translation into English: “Halos nahabwa and tibuok barangay nga nitahod kang Jaguar busa nagsugwak ang mga tawo sa simbahan…”

What more is needed for a blockbuster? A cast of thousands, a central figure who became even larger than life with his death and burial, the church, the police providing comic relief (the Mambaling police chief had to send officers for Jaguar’s spectacular exit “kase nagka problema na tayo sa ‘traffic’ doon, eh”) and, last but not the least, the drum and bugle corps leading the funeral procession.

In this wired word, an event is an event only when it draws a reaction. Watching the televised coverage of Jaguar’s funeral cortege, I overheard my companion mutter, “Why don’t they arrest all those drug users and pushers accompanying Jaguar? Look, they’re even in uniform(ed shirts). Are the police blind?”

The culture of death is creeping inexorably from the peripheries and the undersides to the center. Just like in a nightmare, our thinking and actions defy what we suppress when we are awake and aware. Those of us who think that the “others” should be “neutralized” to keep the world “safe” for “us” are as abnormal as those of us who gave a man labeled by the police as the no. 1 drug lord in Central Visayas a hero’s burial.

So, are we in a nightmare we need to wake up from? Or do we pretend death is just another movie and we can take a leak during commercials?

Last June 30, I was at the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu Digital Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab), watching an XO? performance.

Raymund Fernandez played a riff with the sax. Linya Ocampo Fernandez rolled inside a black swath of cloth, one hand swaying like a leaf. Aldrich Maligsa pantomimed with pursed lips, emitting the sound of a leaf being played like a flute. The XO? performance was dedicated to the passing of drummer Winston Rallosa Velez.

The performance ends with the destruction of artwork by the artists who created this. Long after the last banging reduces creation to waste, my heart still hammers. I never heard Velez play in life but I can hear what death silenced. And could not.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 10, 2016 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column

Which orifice is talking?

THE ARTIST wore a checkered polo, jeans and running shoes. He uncapped a tube of toothpaste and brushed his teeth.

He bent to put down the tube of toothpaste and toothbrush on the floor. He picked up a megaphone and whispered into it.

I don’t know about my fellow onlookers but I wasn’t sure at first if I heard him right. He said “Patya… patya” as if he were whispering a secret or entreating a lover.

Then the megaphone was replaced on the floor. The artist picked up the tube and brush and repeated the act of brushing.

Then the switch again, the megaphone covering the lips that repeated the words, clearer now because after the second and third and other times, the man was screaming: “Patya… patya… patya sila (kill them).”

A scent of peppermint permeated the silence inside the room occupied at the center by the artist in the checkered polo and his manic monologue.

With each brushing, the man’s lips, chin then the lower half of his face glistened with red. He was a harlot gone amok with lipstick. A clown prowling to get out of a nightmare. A demagogue drunk with power.

To some of us, the performer dripping red reminded us of the man who, just that noon, took his oath as the country’s 16th president.

Later, the artist Roy Lumagbas, known better as Roylu, informed us that the title of his performance was “Sipilyo/ Si Pilyo”. The homonyms are not interchangeable: the first use refers to a toothbrush; the second means “The Mischievous One”.

Some of us wanted to know if Roylu has an advocacy against President Rodrigo Duterte, whose campaign promise to end criminality by any means, even extrajudicial killing, was embraced by more than 14.8 million voters, representing 39 percent of the electorate.

Roylu, who now lives in Bolivia, is a member of XO?, pronounced as “So?,” the quintessential question that triggers doubt, inquiry and criticism. XO is a group of Fine Arts alumni, students and faculty of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu.

Artists in their own right, the XO members occasionally gather to use performance art to draw the public’s attention to issues. The audience gathered last June 30 at the UP Cebu Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab) was composed of artists, students and teachers.

We had earlier listened to visiting multimedia artist, professor Leticia R. Bajuyo of the University of Notre Dame and Hanover College, talk about her work with “momentary monuments.”

Retrieving the detritus of commercial culture, Prof. Bajuyo constructed monumental artwork from metal slugs, Styrofoam peanuts, compact discs and other throwaway materials. Unlike monuments that are traditionally built to last, Bajuyo’s art is about using transience to “make the matter matter.”

People are fickle, she observed. We suffer from “social amnesia”. Yet, art connects people so we can reflect on “what we remember and what we forget.”

UP professor Raymund Fernandez, a co-founder of XO?, said that unlike actors who play a role, an artist is “not acting” in performance art. During martial law, Roylu, Mons and I had classmates, students, and friends who “disappeared” for being political lepers: activists, human rights workers, Reds.

Now we hear again the unspeakable made popular and official: “Kill the others”.

When artists speak—or say, brush their teeth—it pays to listen.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 3, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”