"Sa bangkito"

LIKE the “kabo (dipper),” the “bangkito (stool)” is a ubiquitous prop for the Pinoy’s art of making do.

It is cobbled from “retazo” wood, leftover pieces from a bigger construction project. In a country more intimate with dearth than surfeit, we learn to not just not throw away but also to put everything to use.  

Pail and dipper are necessities where faucets drip water by appointment and spew air the rest of the time. In the countryside, where meals are communal affairs, the “bangko (bench),” with its long plank of wood balanced on legs at each end, enables folks to squeeze in for meals by batches. 

The “bangkito (foot stool)” is an adaptation, a diminution of the bangko in size but not in resourcefulness. Before coronavirus disease (Covid-19) demanded physical distancing, public utility jeepneys squeezed in commuters on the bangkitos conductors pulled out from under the seats and positioned on the aisles.

Bangkitos also seat the vendors and patrons of “pungko-pungko (sidewalk-squatting meals sold by the plastic bags)” and other street hawkers of candies, cigarettes, lighters, newspapers, magazines, SIM cards, and face shields.

Papang taught my sister and I how to shine our school shoes like the boys in Colon, straddling a bangkito he painted in bubblegum pink (left over from another job). Is it because our center of gravity is close to the ground that the bangkito is a seat of repose? 

On a visit to Paete, I did not notice the bangkito in the corner of a large showroom of monumental, lushly detailed wood carvings. When the husband asked my opinion, I had to look twice at the reclining figure, so absolute in its stillness.

Barely two feet, the sleeping boy emerges from a stump of wood.  His shirt bares the uncircumcised penis, plump cheeks, and round legs ending in dingy soles.

Pillowed on his right arm, his head radiates ripples of wood. The unknown carver indulged the deep sleeper with a sea for a pillow. Only the splayed legs supporting each end of the stump reminds the viewer of a humble crib, a bangkito.

Every January, when the “novenario” begins for the Sto. Niño, the sleeping boy is not at the center or anywhere near the family altar.  This time, a spray bottle of surface cleanser keeps it company, a reminder of the universal, perpetual fight against the virus.

On the bangkito, the young-old face, slightly bruised around the eyelids, sleeps on.   When construction workers take a nap, they cover their faces with a shirt to keep out the sun or the gazes that catch them with their guards down. 

The boy bares his face, as an animal lies in its lair with exposed belly, the world with its appetites held in abeyance sa bangkito.

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 17, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata” 

Picking guavas

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 27, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Dreaming Edsa

TAKE time and smell the billboards.

For four consecutive days, I recently commuted from Silang, Cavite to Diliman, Quezon City to take exams. Daily, that was approximately six hours of travel by car, bus, jeepney, and MRT trains to sit for an exam taking four hours.

I survive Manila by commuting via the Manila Metro Rail Transit (MRT) System, which feeds the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (Edsa) with about 650,000 passengers every day, according to 2012-2013 data.

More than half a million people “captured” like livestock transported from the farm to the abattoir makes the Abenida irresistible for every street hawker, from the merchants of everlasting youth to the political chameleons of utopia.

I am not one of the cattle plugged in to their smart phones during these Edsa “flights”. I am more bovine, napping even while standing. My favorite MRT activity, though, is to urban-gaze. Even whizzing past, the giant billboards of Edsa exude a potency more mind-bending than a hallucinogen.

This week, the billboards have nearly succeeded at convincing me to buy an overpriced set of triangles (“It’s SUMMER. LiberYAYte yourself!”), as well as use my vote to put the public at the mercy of a mass murderer and bald-faced liar (“TRUST me. LiberYAYte the nation!”).

Trusting a bikini and a politician marks a deficit of sanity, I shout to myself with a bullhorn. But every time I pass their billboards, Nadine winks at me and Bato smiles as if we both share the private joke behind the War on Drugs.

This week, if my brain wasn’t standing-room-only (yeah, Gramsci, Foucault, and Fraser, get your butts off poor Habermas; step out, Heidegger, and bring National Socialism with you), I might have succumbed to a buy-in of these bikini dreams.

Edsa knocks sense in me. Not the Abenida but the great Filipino after which it is named. Don Panyong was a multifaceted genius who defied the conventions of his time to serve Filipinos, including future generations. The First Filipino Academician was a giant of the Golden Age of Fil-Hispanic literature but as the journalist using the penname of “G. Solon,” he co-founded and edited newspapers opposing the Spanish colonizers.

Gregorio Zaide wrote that Don Panyong’s Filipiniana collection was unrivalled, the fruit of the scholar’s indefatigable search across many nations. After he died, his heirs sold the collection to the government for P19,250, an act of patriotism benefitting scholarship re-imagining the narratives constituting the Filipino.

More than an urban nightmare, today’s Edsa reminds us that the struggle to liberate the Filipino continues to saturate our worlds, the everyday as well as the imaginary.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in the March 31, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial page column of the SunStar Cebu’s “Matamata”

The long sleep

THE AIR-CONDITIONING inside Cine Adarna contrasted with the campus grounds, which already had more than a dry-as-summer whiff. Inside the cavernous Film Center of the University of the Philippines (U.P.) Diliman, I was in the audience, watching a silent film, “A Filipino in America”.

I had stayed up late writing, feeling an ant nest roiling behind each eye. The film was narrated in an unfamiliar language: silent scenes of two Filipino friends trying to make it in America, flashing a caption or two that expressed in English what the characters thought or said.

I dozed, woke up, nodded off again while the film rolled.

And yet, despite missing scenes during the movie’s approximately 30 minutes of playing time and patching sound quirks, scratched images, and disjointed storytelling, I found that Doroteo Ines’s 1938 pioneering silent film spoke volumes not just of the Filipino shuttling in the 1930s from being colonized to going independent but also of our people’s eternal suspension in the colonial, post-colonial, and neocolonial purgatory.

How does the colonial subject negotiate identity?

That was the tantalizing question raised by UP Film Institute professor Rolando B. Tolentino in the second part of the Pelikula Lectura 2019 at the Cine Adarna last Feb. 28. Entitled “A Filipino in America: 1930s Filipino Films, American Colonialism, and the Negotiation of Coloniality,” a revised title was presented by Tolentino that morning: “Lagi na kayong buntot sa kanilang pagsulong (you are always tailing their progress)”.

What do the centuries of being ruled by the missionaries and then Hollywood produce? Is it the colonized clinging to the hem of the colonizer’s robes? Or is it the independent and modern trajectory of a former colony that’s still shadowed by its master, who keeps the satellite within its sphere of influence no longer through military occupation but cultural domination and manipulation?

Tolentino discussed how film scholarship is challenged by limited extant materials. Poring over the same data because no other records survived or have surfaced, scholars must also contend with dwindling budgets and space that result in precious materials culled or junked.

“We can’t learn from history if we don’t save it,” Jacqui Banaszynski posted in Nieman Storyboard.

As great a threat is the pop culture we stay awake for and avidly consume without criticism and self-reflection. According to legend, Tantalus is a king condemned in Hades to stand neck-deep in a pool of water under boughs heavy with fruit. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, the fruits and water receded, leaving him eternally empty. As fraught as our search for identity.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in the March 3, 2019 issue of the SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Pinoy fiction

“PANIC buying.” This was how a national daily captioned the snaking queues of people pushing carts loaded with books during a recent book fair in Pasay City.

The event duplicated the mammoth crowds that turned up and hauled away brand-new copies of books that had as much as 90 percent of their selling price slashed off in similar fairs conducted last year in Manila, Cebu, and Davao.
According to the organizers, the popular choice last year was fiction. 

Stories created from imagination appeal to readers looking for “light” reading to relax with. Yet, short stories and novels frequently bring us to unexpected places, confronting what we may have avoided without even being conscious of avoiding such.

Fiction is my first and abiding love. Yet, it was only a few years back, in a graduate class on poetics, that I realized how I was blindly reading fiction.

In that class, I was the only one majoring in journalism. All my classmates and the professor were writing poems, short stories, and novels. My classmates who were at least a decade younger than me, and my professor, decades older than me, did not just bracket the generations of Filipinos.

So I made it a habit after class to walk to the university bookstore and look for the works of Filipino authors that cropped up in the discussions. Whenever I was in mall bookstores, I looked for Filipinos writing in English because while fiction is my natural environment, the Filipino language plunges me into deep-seated anxieties and sinkholes of meaning.

Following this collect-and-read pattern, I note that the past seven years have seen greater visibility of Filipino fictionists in bookstores. Yet, there is still a proliferation of established authors whose “classic” works are being reprinted. 

Remembering my classmates’ manuscripts-in-progress, as well as speculating on the works being critiqued in writing workshops and awarded in literary contests held across the nation, I wonder about the paucity of publicly accessible titles written by Filipino fictionists: the young, the emerging, the regional, and the transnational.

Where do the works go? If we yearn to be a nation of readers, shouldn’t we also be reading the works created by Filipinos to balance a diet nourished by other imaginations?

Some years ago, a novel by a Filipina was marketed as the “first Filipino detective story”. My friend R. countered that Nick Joaquin’s “Cave and Shadows” deserves that first distinction.

What about the second, third, fourth…? There’s a hunger to be sated.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu in its February 24, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”