Memorabilis

THE DAY Kitkat’s last litter of kittens found their climbing legs meant a catastrophe of sorts for my books. She moved her four kittens to a corner near a bookshelf, where they broke their 24-hour napping and nursing to explore the vastness of our half-a-duplex unit.

One of the books dislodged by feline curiosity was a slim volume that slotted perfectly between the shelf and a sack of rice where it opened like an accordion of newsprint pages, which Mo, Mongha, Heart, and Q decided was a good repository for piss and poo.

So when I had to check again Julian Go’s “American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism,” I found the fallen volume reeking unmistakably of kittens but fortunately spared their claws.

Cleaning off the worst of the kittens’ memorabilia, I wondered if Q and company had used their toilet break to browse through Go and left their tokens as proof of their opinions on: a) the U.S. colonizers, b) Filipino politicians at the cusp of their tutelage in the oldest profession of selling their nation for lucre and power, or c) the historian’s take on a contested past.

History is anything but objective and dead. I only have to scroll Facebook for five minutes to be bombarded by the War of Colors blooming among advocates for politicians making their bids for 2022.  

Underneath what is dangerously veering to become a pissing contest of hues and tints are attempts at conversations on how the past relates to the present and the nebulous future everyone, no matter their color preference, has in their sights.

I went back to Walter Benjamin (fortunately, filed digitally), a thinker whose reflections before World War II have bearing on what seems to be trending, from Facebook to Twitter: “what really happened in the past”.

For Benjamin, the view of the ideal to be achieved in the future reduces the present to an “anteroom” where “one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity”. Yet, one can also view “historical time” as “constituted… via the existential modes of memory, expectation and action”. 

Agreeing with him that the present is an “interruption of history” or an “arrest of happening,” I see it as a grievous mistake to focus on current disagreements and throw away communication and relationships. 

After the winners and losers are tallied in 2022, are we restarting life with people sharing our beliefs and biases? Unless culling takes place, the current motley company, human and feline, continues. The present is more than kindling for the future, beneath the piss and poo.

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

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

Lift

 

LOVE came disguised as fear. Professor Madrileña dela Cerna had a formidable reputation even among the terror teachers undergraduates love to parody when they are unable to separate love from the farrago of fear and awe.

Later, when I taught in the same campus, I respected from a remove a senior member of the faculty, research director, and advocate of causes from women empowerment to history and heritage.

In 2007, I crossed the threshold when Ms. Madz became my editor in the Cebu Provincial History Project.  

The husband and I conducted field interviews and archival research for the histories of Badian and Alegria. We worked on the field with our two sons in tow and, once or twice, with Ms. Madz, not quite yet a tita but no longer the paragon of academia whose presence always snapped me out of my slouch, real and imagined.

After work took the husband off the research, I continued with the writing of both histories and lapsed, time and again, in meeting deadlines. I dreaded the confessionals with Ms. Madz.  Bending slightly over the short maternal figure and leaning to hear her soft-voiced inquiries, I felt the weight of my transgressions. 

Being Ms. Madz, she jacked me out of that sinkhole. If ever there was a person destined to be a mentor, she was. She shepherded our team to cross the finish line years after the deadline with ferociousness and empathy. 

Ferocious because she recognized no obstacle in seeking the truant among us. She persisted and succeeded in getting a contemplative order to grant her a phone call so she could ask a fellow writer, who was in strict seclusion in monastic silence, about a manuscript in progress.

Empathetic because she made us listen to another writer digress into the manifold ways the families in one town cooked “humba (braised pork belly)”. Ms. Madz praised the writer after this soliloquy, which made me savor history for the first time as pork lard simmered slowly melts on the tongue and suffuses the soul.

“Humana gyud (finish it),” she said in her soft as steel Madrileña tone after she listened to my personal Calvary. And we did, those town histories. As I did years later, my master’s thesis. 

When I talked to her about the dissertation I am pursuing on Cebu journalism, Ms. Madz was already my mother’s “classmate” in a renal unit, undergoing regular hemodialysis. 

The familiar figure was much diminished by the machines softly whirring, flushing and cleaning blood. Somehow she always turned our talks to focus on what I had to finish. Last July 27, my shepherd, and for countless other students and mentees, went home. 

“Nahuman na (it is finished)”. Puhon, Ms. Madz, in our next confessional.

Source of the image of Prof. Madrileña de la Cerna: cebudailynews.inquirer.net

* First published in the August 1, 2021 issue of SunStar Cebu's Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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

“Buwan, buwan”

             

            WHERE do I find voice?

 

            The “I” that speaks is strongest in fiction, where the writer, the creator, amplifies the voice through techniques.

 

            She can isolate the voice by creating only the character and no Other. Or she can cram a story with characters but use point of view to focus the reader only on the “I” speaking.

 

            She can also put the “I” in claustrophobic relations with a “you,” who can be the reader privileged with unprecedented access to the “I”.

 

            If the writer bleeds enough into the story, the “you” can feel deep enough empathy for the “I” to close the distance until, merging with the “I,” there is only the “I” once more, no Other.

 

            The stories I like best keep the distance. The “I” and the “you” can dance closely, even have a dalliance, but preserve their solitude. How else can one hear the voice?

 

            I recently wrote a series of stories—allegory to my literary friends, a very short story for my generation—about moons and dictators. And the sea.

 

            There are two great mysteries I retain an unequivocal awe for: the moon and the sea. The first story was written in August, “Buwan ng Wika (Month of the National Language)”. August is also History Month.

 

            There is no voice without language. No one exists outside of history.

 

            The first story about the last dictator came as I stood by an upstairs window, watching the moon. “Buwan, buwan (moon).”

 

            While August gifts us with language and history—expression and context—September 21, 1972 stilled the voices of Filipinos, including at least 92,607 victims of torture, summary execution, disappearance, and public order violation arrests from September 1972 until February 1986—the 14-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

 

            This is according to the “Statistical Summary of Human Rights Abuses,” part of the Ferdinand Marcos Human Rights Litigation collection of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa’s School of Law Library, which acquired the papers of the late Jon Van Dyke, who helped martial law survivors seek compensatory damages from the Marcos Estate.

 

            According to the University of Hawai’i, the Marcos papers remain important because “the issue of Martial Law has not been rectified in the Philippines”.

 

            Indeed. Congress passed this week a bill declaring Marcos’s birthdate of September 11 as a non-working holiday in Ilocos Norte. If the Senate approves its own version, President Rodrigo Duterte will sign this into law as surely as the moon is framed by the upstairs window, as buwan ng Agosto is followed by buwan ng Septyembre, as voice is stilled by repression.

 

            The great postcolonial undead in our collective narrative, Ferdinand Marcos is the “you” surfacing the “I” that should never forget, never be silent.

 

 

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

 

*First published in the September 6, 2020 issue of SunStar Cebu’s 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”

Spawns of Mabini’s legs

IT’S become a case of the accidental overshadowing the premeditated.

During the Sept. 29 ceremony for the Apolinario Mabini Awards at the Bulwagan ng mga Bayani at Malacañang Palace, the President voiced out his concern that today’s students may be inadequate in their grasp of our history.

He told the audience, which included awardees distinguished for their work with the disabled, that he shared the sentiments of many Netizens reacting to a question posed by three college students to actor Epy Quizon, who played Mabini, on why he never stood up during “Heneral Luna”.

Despite extreme poverty and the paralysis of his lower limbs, Mabini’s brilliance and patriotism stood him in good stead as the country’s first prime minister. My generation was one of those that memorized the “Sublime Paralytic” tribute made to Mabini, also recorded in textbooks as “the brains and conscience of the Revolution”.

In his Apolinario Mabini Awards speech, Aquino called on Education Secretary Armin Luistro to address possible deficiencies in the teaching of history. Luistro later assured the President in a text message that he will discuss this concern with curriculum supervisors.

The spiral of consequences triggered by the furor over Mabini’s legs reveals some of the power unleashed by “Heneral Luna”. Time and history will determine if the movie will join the ranks of classics, immortalized not only for exceeding the standards in filmic storytelling but also for moving us to examine ourselves and aspire for more beyond our usual preoccupations with showbiz and politics.

“Heneral Luna” made me realize how parched we are as a people and as a nation of filmgoers. After stepping out of the theater, I shepherded my sons to the mall’s bookstores to search for a reference.

The dramatization of the past in “Heneral Luna” raised more questions than answers. I wanted to winnow facts from artistic interpretation. I also doubted my memories of the Philippine revolution, memorized under duress of miserable mastery exams and the horrors of class recitations.

It took only a few minutes to confirm that our history is an endangered genre. I could not find the titles that stood out in more than two decades of study under the pre-K to 12 system. Zero copies of Teodoro A. Agoncillo’s “History of the Filipino People,” Renato Constantino’s “The Philippines: A Past Revisited,” and Renato and Letizia Constantino’s “The Philippines: The Continuing Past”.

Later, I found an entire shelf of Agoncillo’s book in a branch that seems to serve as a warehouse. Should the scarcity of scholarly and critical references on Philippine history mean bookstores can hardly replenish their stocks fast enough to catch up with demand?

Or in the face of apathy from readers and schools still adjusting to K to 12 upheavals, are books on Philippine history stockpiled in the warehouse to make more room in mall branches for adult coloring books and perfumed pens?

The most important question spawned by the furor over Mabini’s legs is: If artists, educators and other influencers will not bring the discourse on Philippine history to social media, micro media, and the rest of new media, which is the portal of choice of Millennials and other digital natives, are we doomed to forgetting and repeating history?


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 4, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Lapu-Lapu, Hu U?

I’M not looking forward to returning to Manila, beloved of rains, flood and traffic.

But aside from having to attend to unfinished business, I read about a fellow Bisdak who’s also stranded in the Bad City.

This is the 40-foot brass statue of Lapu-Lapu found in the Agripina Circle of Rizal Park along Roxas Boulevard.

Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Paz Radaza wants the statue transferred outside the Hoops Dome in Barangay Gun-ob, reported Flornisa M. Gitgano in Sun.Star Cebu last July 14. In 2021, the city will celebrate 500 years of independence from Spain.

However, Cebu Gov. Hilario Davide III prefers that the statue remains in Manila.

I don’t know about my fellow Oponganons but I’m sure I don’t want the government shouldering a hefty fee to ship a 40-foot brass statue.

Even if the statue could be levitated to Mactan without wasting taxes, I’m not in the proper frame of mind to contemplate this gigantic icon as I stew for at least an hour in the Vhire, crawling past the Hoops Dome, the alternate route serving the public while excruciatingly slow road repairs close most of the main thoroughfare in Barangay Basak.

Am I saying that Oponganons can’t appreciate the first Filipino to reject colonizers? I doubt transplanting a brass statue or erecting a two-hectare monument at Barangay Punta Engaño will make us understand better Lapu-Lapu, shrouded by myth more than facts.

His brass statue, donated by the Korea Freedom League to the Philippine Government in 2004 and erected at Rizal Park on the mandate of then tourism secretary Dick Gordon, says volumes about the hold of the first Filipino hero on Pinoy minds.

Called the “Motto Stella (Guiding Star),” the Rizal Monument is a mausoleum in granite, topped by a 42-foot bronze sculpture of the hero and set off by an obelisk in the background. There is continuous ritual guarding of the monument’s perimeter by the Philippine Marine Corps.

Rizal’s hold on public imagination is as formidable as his dominance of public space. Over the years and climaxing during his centennial in December 1996, we have not lacked for scholarly and popular articles, books, movies and other media about Rizal. Writer and academic Ambeth Ocampo contributed in making Rizal and Philippine history “familiar and approachable”.

In contrast, who is Lapu-Lapu?

We think the first nationalist is a long-haired he-man in “bahag (loincloth)” with no great fondness for foreigners.

We don’t even “know” Lapu-Lapu; we imagine him to be this way, based on visits to the Punta Engaño shrine, annual reenactments of the Battle of Mactan, and a controversial TV ad selling disposable diapers.

That’s a pitifully paltry pool for fanning hero worship. According to an “I-Witness” 2012 documentary of Lapu-Lapu, the hero may even have a different name. Kalipulako, Pula Pula or Cilapulapu? Historians don’t agree.

Can we worship a hero of indefinite name and visage? A 1933 statue of Lapu-Lapu showed him wielding bow and arrow. The same “I-Witness” documentary quoted residents recalling a rumor that this statue, with weapons pointed towards the old town hall, caused the death of three mayors. The mayor who replaced the bow and arrow with a bolo went on to live much longer.

In 2008, the Cebu Province commissioned 55 local histories for each town and city in what is known as the Cebu Provincial History Project. I would love to read the Lapu-Lapu City history researched and written by Ahmed Cuizon, now Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board-7 regional director.

But the publication of the local histories is, alas, also shrouded in mystery. Past thickets of myth and myth-making, the quest for the real Lapu-Lapu continues.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 20, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Black Friday

BLACK Friday in the United States (US) is anything but dreary, an aunt told me as a prelude to her story about the single lens reflex professional camera she got for less than half the regular price.

In the US, the Friday after Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 28 this year), is called “Black Friday”.

Ushering in the season for Christmas shopping, Black Friday is promoted through sales spectacles, which, according to Wikipedia, attract aggressive crowds, assaults, shootings and trampling of shoppers by throngs of people rushing to get the best deal before supplies run out.

I was agog over the aunt’s tale of how she camped on the sidewalk with a hundred other New Yorkers on Thanksgiving night so when the stores opened the day after, she got her hands on the toy of her dreams at a marked-down price any self-respecting Cebuano (read: “tihik” or thrifty/stingy) could brag about.

The aunt and I have the family posterior. Because I got carried away by her recounting of how she used her head, elbow and nails to move the crowds out of the way when the store opened, I forgot to ask her how useful (if ever) is our inherited prominence in clearing away opposition.

I might have used the tip in dealing with last Friday’s multiple obstacle course.

Nov. 29 required traveling to and fro Intramuros, the walled city, seat of power during the Spanish colonial times.

A day bookended by history is not just a diversion from academia but, as my teachers like to say, evidence that there is life after clearing away distractions.

I was aware that Nov. 29 is a Friday. A newsroom advice for public relations officers is to refrain from organizing an event on a Friday. The start of the weekend seems to be everyone’s favorite for scheduling events. Yet, it means one competes with more rivals to get the attention of editors, reporters and photographers, specially in the lifestyle beat.

To turn the screw a bit more, Nov. 29 is a Friday that’s a mere 26 days away from Christmas. Shopping is said to be the Filipino’s favorite preoccupation.

In Manila, shopping is serious, next only to breathing and commuting, in no particular order. By mid-November, when bonuses and yearend windfalls are released, if there is no sane reason to leave home, stay put in Manila. This is how to avoid the hordes or prevent yourself from turning into another barbarian.

Such aversion to shopping (“It’s more fun in the Philippines…”) is questionable in a Filipino. As a hypochondriac gains security from a self-mounted pharmacopoeia, we do our American colonial past justice by surrounding ourselves with malls and arcades.

But no mall—even with its obsessively self-flushing toilets (and eternally renewing toilet paper)— has the attractions of Divisoria. This is the grand dame that spawns her prodigious progeny: bazaars, street vendors, “biyaheras” (Filipinos who shop abroad and resell here), ebay.ph sellers (not to be confused with the international variety) and mall/bazaar crossbreeds (unlike regular mall locators, these mutants are found in areas with lighter traffic, lower rent and a liberal policy of encouraging haggling and wholesale discounts).

Months before Christmas, every commuter and motorist learns to respect the moods of Divisoria. When she yawns, she inhales the flow of traffic, even as far as provinces outside of Metro Manila. Only God can foretell what will happen if she coughs.

On hindsight, it was downright silly of me to expect I could slip out of Intramuros before Friday’s afternoon rush hour. At 3 p.m., my editor and I prowled for a taxi to take us back to Makati and the airport. Two hours later, we found a taxi whose driver was insane enough to take us. (Or perhaps he was sane, just terrorized by possibly two insane women who leaped into his taxi, stubbornly dropped their posteriors and locked the doors of his taxi, without giving him a chance to reject their destinations and drive away.)

Another two hours and we got out of the rational-defeating hysteria of downtown to the refined chaos of uptown. Is the season of Black Fridays due to the old historical snub that Divisoria suffered from Intramuros, where non-Christianized Chinese were forbidden to trade and live so they had to set up in Binondo, which includes present-day Divisoria?

Just before my tired old self hit the bed on Saturday dawn, I remembered the third curse haunting Nov. 29: payday. Never, as my teachers say, turn your back on history.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Dec. 1, 2013 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column

ML for kids

RECORD-KEEPING is curious. All the national dailies marked the 40th anniversary of Marcos’ signing of Presidential Decree 1081, which placed the country under martial law (ML) on Sept. 21, 1972.

Even the Manila Bulletin, venerable for its indifference to the rules of lay-outing and newsworthiness, devoted 1.5 pages to feature “Martial Law@40: Never Again” in its F Section for youths.

Unlike in other broadsheets, PD 1081 and its aftermath don’t appear on the front page of MB or its main opinion-editorial section. There are two columnists writing separately on two celebrations falling also on Sept. 21: the national day of Malta and the independence day of Armenia.

Is ML a subject for kids? I agree with the editors: “never again” should be chanted by those born years after the Marcos regime but never too young not to know this period of our history.

Curious to re-view ML through the lens of youths who cannot hum in a heartbeat the Bagong Lipunan hymn, I took the cue to reminisce online from Ambeth R. Ocampo’s Sept. 21, 2012 column, “Looking Back,” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

According to Ocampo, the diary of Marcos, “fascinating” for its insights into ML, is available for free, along with other diaries of Filipinos and foreigners writing about the country, in philippinediaryproject.wordpress.com.

While Ocampo is drawn to reviewing the past through the eyes of a man whose role was central to its unfolding, I am struck by the Tweet-like journalizing of the 10th president of the country while he plots and executes Oplan Sagittarius, the imposition of “Batas Militar”.

On Jan. 3, 1971, a Sunday, Marcos wrote: “… I had a light lunch of docon and paltat.” After leaving Gabu for Nichols Airbase, he is met by “Imelda and the children,” who have brought him “pospas” that he eats in the car.

The chicken-flavored porridge, a folk remedy, is probably taken to soothe a bum stomach. “It is most probably due to the tension arising out of the plan for the proclamation of martial law…”

The mention of ML jolts the domestic narration. The fellow comforted by porridge brought by his wife and children has the power to start a chain of events that will darken the land and bring suffering for two decades and counting.

Unlike Tweets and blogs, diaries of the past were written for the writer’s eyes only. That is why reading old diaries is beguiling: one presumes the outpouring is uncensored, written without the pressure of playing to an audience or justifying oneself for posterity.

On another Sunday, Sept. 17, 1972, Marcos writes at 10 p.m.: “We escaped the loneliness of the palace for this old Antillan house now known as Ang Maharlika, the State Guest House several blocks from the palace… The departure of our children has made the palace a ghostly unbearable place.”

Waking up from a long siesta in the room of son Bongbong (now senator)—“which has the worst bed and lumpiest mattress”—Marcos has sardines and “pancit (noodles)” for early dinner. He browses in the library: “… to my delight I discovered the books I have been wanting to read for some time including Fitzimmons, The Kennedy Doctrine, Sorensen’s The Kennedy Legacy, The Dirty Wars edited by Donald Johnson… Days of Fire by Samuel Katz (The Secret History of the Irguny Zrai Sanmi and The Making of Israel, Chou-en-lai by Kai-Yu, Room 39 by Donald Macfaddan (The room of the British Intelligence in WWII), the History of the World in the 20th Century by Watt, Spencer and Brown.”

On a Saturday, Sept. 23, 1972, Marcos wrote: “Things moved according to plan although out of the total 200 target personalities in the plan only 52 have been arrested, including the three senators, Aquino, Diokno and Mitra and Chino Roces and Teddy Locsin.

“At 7:15 pm I finally appeared on a nationwide TV and Radio broadcast to announce the proclamation of martial law, the general orders and instruction.”

The diary of Marcos is more than a keepsake. It is a hall of mirrors: does the human make the man less monstrous or more?


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



* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 23, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

The original Ms. Congeniality

I SYMPATHIZE but have to agree with Sen. Joker Arroyo, who told a national daily that he wasn’t attending last Monday’s State of the Nation Address (Sona) because: first, no one called the roll; second, he would not be missed; and third, he would stay home and do what everyone else did, watch the beauties parade in what is now The Filipiniana Sona.

Let it not be said that Filipinos don’t appreciate beauty. They even marry them. The rest of us live vicariously through beauty pageants, vote by SMS and Facebook for favorites, and even name our children after slant-eyed embodiments of beauty’s universal, even inter-stellar, appeal.

Actually, I have no proof that Martians watch as avidly gown and swimsuit competitions. Our Pinoy obsession with “Ms.” titles has colonial roots.

In January 1908, when the First Assembly was just inaugurated, Governor-General James Smith needed a celebration to further melt local resistance. According to Alfred McCoy and Alfredo Roces in “Philippine Cartoons,” the first organizer, Captain Langhorne, asked for P50,000 to build a cockpit, exhibit half-naked Igorots, and hold amusements.

Horrified by the prospect of a freak show that would congeal hostility, Smith turned to his Secretary of Commerce, Cameron Forbes. The Boston financier asked only for P15,000 and raised another P15,000 through subscriptions to pursue a “ritual celebration of Philippine-American progress”.

Forbes proposed a carnival. Its highlight would be a beauty contest to select a Queen of the Occident and a Queen of the Orient.

The American community chose the sister of Customs Collector, G. R. Colton.
The Filipinos, though, initially recoiled. Elite Manileños felt it degrading to parade their women. When Smith asked Mariano Limjap to allow his daughter Leonarda to join, the business leader and founder of the Federalist Party said he “did not want to be talked about”.

Lipag Kalabaw and the Philippines Free Press denounced the Americans’ debasement of Filipinas. Lipag Kalabaw, which skirted stringent libel laws by having no masthead and using only pen names for artists and writers, ran a satirical cartoon, entitled “Paghanap ng Reina (Buscando Reina),” showing Americans bringing lanterns and conducting a search in the city’s brothels.

Yet beauty melts all hearts. Manileños voted with cash for their candidates. On February 1908, a maritime parade in Manila Bay climaxed in the meeting of the Queen of the Orient and the Queen of the Occident, complete with garlands of cadena de amor, flowers that creep among and cover tombs but was ironically used by the American colonials to show how fate “unites eternally the countries of East and West”.

The Queen of the Orient, Pura Villanueva of Molo, Iloilo, was smashing in a “stunning gown of flowing folds draped with strings of pearls”. While bands played and crowds cheered, the Queens “opened seven days of bread and circus”.

The Carnival became the two-week highlight of Manila’s social calendar. Daughters of the wealthiest families competed fiercely, in their demure, well-bred ways, for the title of Carnival Queen. Aside from sating vanity, the title guaranteed good marriages. The 1920 Carnival Queen, Trinidad de Leon, married Manuel A. Roxas, future president. After her 1922 reign, Queen Virginia Llanas married her escort, Carlos Romulo, future foreign minister.

Even the press lapped up the Carnival. Except for a brief salvo of anti-Americanism, the prickly Free Press and other papers got too busy printing ballot papers for the beauty competition. In 1926, the Carnival Committee replaced the Carnival Queen with a nationwide search for the first “Ms. Philippines”. Only World War II halted Manila’s annual Carnival.

Our love for beauty contests endures. Then and now, it is difficult to weed out the seeds planted in colonized hearts.


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 29, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Origin of evil

IF I were to curate our times, I would begin at the comfort rooms.

CRs, as we call them in this shortcut-loving country, reflect the values and temper of an age.

When I was still in uniform, we could eat in the CRs of our school, run by nuns. The air was so pure, these places seemed only remotely associated to Bodily Function No. 1, and hardly to No. 2.

Cleaned once a day by the staff, the CRs were maintained this way the rest of the day by us students.

It was a feat. Anyone with an idea of the amount of powdering, combing and fixing up girls subject themselves to in privacy before appearing in public, will be in awe of how we never left even a telltale strand of hair on the sink long after the last class.

Decades later, I ran into a friend when we both used a CR in our alma mater. About to wash my hands, I stopped when I saw the congealing swishes of pink foundation and hair strands of assorted length marking the white bowl. When I looked up, my batch mate shook her head and said sorrowfully, “Things have changed.”

My college years introduced me to other kinds of CRs. In this university, students protested about tuition fee increases that were forever lining the priests’ pockets and not improving the students or teachers’ lots. Yet, by rigging CRs with whistlebombs that only sometimes whistled but almost always blew doors off hinges or cracked bowls, these students were reducing the functional CRs on every floor and increasing the bladder-challenged among a population better known for lifting more bottles than books.

Why was I not surprised that these petty anarchists were also bigots? In the girls’ CR, the bombs planted were not the whistling variety because, they claimed, the girls could be counted on to supply the acoustics.

When I transferred to a state college, it was impossible to ignore the reek of state-subsidized education because the library was beside the girls’ CR.

“What kind of library is this?” often warred with “What kind of girls use this CR?” for my quote of the day.

Though I gave up on research attempts with references that may have been abandoned in the mass retreat before the Japanese Imperial Army (the campus was a holding center in World War II), I could not snob the Origin of Evil, as our CR was called by the boys (whose CR, across the hall, proved there was indeed a Residence Beyond Evil).

Before it was taken over by the Crying Girl (a spirit, urban legend or noisy manifestation that interrupts many a visitor’s No. 1 or No. 2), the OOE was notorious for its three cubicles—Bad, Worse, Worst—that did not only refer to the frequent occasions when there was no water, or too much.

When I was an undergraduate, the cubicles were the final bastions of campus freedom. Every comment that could not get past the faculty advisors of the student publication or the rally marshals checking ideology and grammar on placards and streamers ended on the CR walls and cubicle doors with the genteel wooden louvers.

Adding more atmosphere to the material and astral haunting of the place were the graffiti that, in Cebuano, English and CebGlish (never Tagalog), roasted students, teachers, God, landladies and Charlie Chaplin.

How could anyone write such a long scurrilous insult without the ballpen ink drying up? Share the brand please. What kind of spelling ignoramus are the taxpayers educating? Want to know the secrets of passing Math 11? Hoy, it’s not “in” but “on” the bowl. (Hoy)2X! The preposition depends on the object, object ka?

Times have indeed changed. Student groups now raise funds for CR sanitizers and must field student agents to check if you are handwashing properly. It’s not only choosing to do No. 1 or No. 2 but knowing eye and wrist coordination to shoot inside one of at least three CR waste receptacles to prove your IQ and EQ on segregation.

And today’s bare and unstained CRs prove only that the young have moved away to post on their Facebook wall and through their Tweets what used to be the unmentionable, unintelligible and memorable in the CRs of my time.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Oct. 16, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

History, rewinded

ONE day while scanning symbols—coded for the unexplored terrain of economics and finance—I realized how the discourse that flows around us exists side by side with small, still pools that separate their secrets from the pedestrian.

While we bob around, content to be carried here and there, by the streams of language we pay only half a mind to, it may happen that our attention is snagged by a tree-overshadowed shallow that, in its stillness, hides creatures that have yet to creep into our fervid dreams.

This summer, I am coaxing the hieroglyphics of numbers and symbols to unlock secrets. More than three summers ago, there was history to circumnavigate.

I like to listen. I like how stories intersect and mesh into a fabric from which surprises emerge, a conclusion that sprouts doubt or a fact disrobed as a lie. I believe in literary journalism, a genre that mines the layers underneath beat coverage and deadlines.

Such quirks and habits from writing features and special reports I brought with me when I joined 54 writers assigned to research and document the histories of the Cebu Province, its 44 towns and nine component cities, and the Provincial Capitol.

The Cebu Provincial History Project was envisioned by the Provincial Government to be the first in the country to preserve and publish local history. Within a year, writers had to pass the manuscripts of 55 volumes that were to be published and read by public school children.

During that heady maiden assembly in December 2007, it was not just the approaching Christmas or the cash advance that plastered huge smiles on our faces. All of us anticipated our appointments with history.

And as for the challenge of luring school kids to line up for their local histories, our smug smiles foresaw the Province going through several reprinting to accommodate the hue and cry to install a 55-volume set in every Cebuano town hall, reading room, library, hut and local watering hole. Foundations might just partner with local governments to convert the histories into graphic novels and resurrect reading among children AND teenagers.

Twelve months later, we reconvened. It was lunch before business as usual. Unusually, though, we were fewer. The present ones had either the skittish look of those haunted by a specter of the past or the fixed stares of those who already saw the hereafter after a quick exit from the painful present.

While lightning, thunder, wind and rain played the chorus to our editors’ dark mood, our project manager reported that, in general, our manuscripts were not just delayed but disappointing. Of infinite patience and incurable optimism, he said he looked forward to seeing us complete our commitments by January of the following year. My final manuscript was received for copy editing a few days before the end of December 2010, or two years after the original deadline.

The Cebu Provincial History Project yields so many lessons for local governments and other entities attempting to preserve local history. There are insights to be gleaned from not only the diversity of the writing expertise but also the unpredictability of the creative sensibility—a monster of so legendary an appetite it will swallow its own self before it ponders on the technical difficulties of a mouth swallowing itself.

After the 55 volumes are completed and submitted to the Cebu Province, a reunion of writers and editors would be nice. We should choose a date when hearts are light again, no deadlines hang over our necks, minus lightning, thunder, wind and rain.

I remember the serious amusement of my journalist-friend when I mumbled I was still lost in the mists of pre-Spanish history. This, while ostensibly turning a colonial letter of eggshell brittleness in an air-conditioned library of a modern university or listening to an upland healer recount the rites of “dulodiwata” passed down generations venerating both the Christ and the spirits animating water, air and land. She kidded, “What can one possibly write about a small and sleepy town?”

The smaller and the sleepier a subject seems, the more difficult the trail. Only by staying as still as the pool can one see that it is far from shallow.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s April 10, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Finding Leon

FOLLOW the stories. Find the way.

Last Saturday, we left home too close to noon and had to walk from Plaza Independencia to reach Leon Kilat St. Some streets in the downtown area were already closed to vehicular traffic to clear the route for the 1 p.m. Grand Procession of the Señor Sto. Niño.

Our older son was assigned with his college batch to man the cordon along Leon Kilat St. As we were all preoccupied with our computers till mid-morning, we realized quite late that my son was clueless about downtown Cebu.

He checked Google maps. Thinking a landmark would be more helpful, I mentioned that along Leon Kilat St. was a branch of my favorite bakery. The mention of Chinese “masi,” birdseed “ampao” and special mongo “hopia” only deepened the furrows on my son’s forehead.

Then his friends posted on Facebook a photo of a downtown branch of this international chain of burgers, fries and shakes. New age, new signs.

When roads were closed at the pier area, my husband and I decided to walk with our son until we found his group. Born nearly half a century ago, my husband and I know our downtown. Years of walking these streets made us slip through the crowd. While my husband knows street names and grids, I love the stories.

I wanted to tell my 17-year-old that Leon Kilat St. is named after the great Bisaya, Pantaleon Villegas. Born in neighboring Negros, this authentic revolutionary stumbled on his fealty to Philippine independence by way of Cebu’s lumpenproletariat.

The lumpen: lowest of the low, common and vulgar. Yet this social substrata produced a Visayan patriot and legend. In Cebu, Villegas worked in a pharmacy, bakery and circus before he was recruited into the Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (KKK).

Immortalized in Krip Yuson’s “Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café,” the bravery of Leon Kilat the Legend was as magical as his “anting-anting,” a handkerchief that supposedly enabled him to appear and disappear like lightning (“kilat”) in battles against the Spaniards, as well as shed bullets as if his being was coated with “lana (blessed coconut oil)”.

Yet more unforgettable than the amulet-protected, bullet-shedding warrior-myth is the common and vulgar figure of Villegas, uncompromising and thus undimmed. In college, I first heard the story from a friend who took the pseudonym “Leon” for his work in organizing lumpen and who signed his poetry by the same nom de guerre.

This stirring quote, though, came from the research of Sun.Star Cebu editor Max Limpag, who is also the award-winning blogger known as Leon Kilat. In an Aug. 16, 2005 post on his blog, max.limpag.com, Max wrote that Villegas was not cowed even when the Katipuneros in Cebu were exposed and arrested.

“Kadtong saad ayaw na’g hulata, dili ta kini palabyong adlawa,” Villegas reportedly said. In Limpag’s translation: “Let’s not wait for the promised help, we will not let this day pass.”

A few days before Good Friday of 1898, Villegas was betrayed by members of the elite in Kabkab, now known as Carcar. Its skull crushed, the body of Villegas was still stabbed by the killers in a bloody parody of a hanky shredded by “patriots” who believed that by trapping and murdering one of their own, they were buying time and favor from the enemy.

A few minutes before the Grand Procession was due to start, we found Leon Kilat St. My son merged with the crowd. Google maps and the Facebook photo were indeed more accurate than my childhood food trips: my son’s schoolmates were congregating closer to the burgers and fries than to masi, ampao and hopia.

“Okay na, Ma.” The SMS came while my husband and I waited for the procession from the sidelines. One hundred and twelve years ago, Villegas died and set free two myths: that faith resides in any object, stone, hanky or scissors; and that those who have more in life will put first the welfare of the least.

Standing on the street named after a lost liberator, I slurped my sundae.

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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 23, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Nameless

UNTIL he started shooting the hostages, the man was a seven o’clock news joke.

He was a cop but a disgraced one, condemned for extortion and stripped of all his retirement benefits.

He wanted to be reinstated and to get the authorities’ attention, held hostage foreigners who wanted to see the best that this country could offer.

He was a certified creation of our times—a newsmaker who shot to primetime notoriety and as quickly fizzled to give way to the regular soaps that were displaced by breaking coverage—someone who stepped out from the crowd of nameless others, someone many of us had never heard of, someone we might have met and passed on the street, meriting no comment.

Yet, because he had a gun, because he hated, and because he shot and killed at least eight innocent and unarmed strangers, and terrorized the other survivors—we know his name.

Some of us might even recall that by mid-morning on the day of the incident, the initial reports already identified the armed assailant.

His name didn’t stick then. We could blame how that Monday seemed to cram more than the usual Mondays.

But when the first reports cut in on the predictable flow of our morning, we stationed ourselves before the nearest TV set in our living room, the office conference room, an electronics arcade in the mall, the corner store selling phone load.

We got busy doing what humans do better than other species: be curious about other humans.

We didn’t just want to know how the story would end. We felt more keenly our vantage point by witnessing someone else’s misfortune.

After the incident, we pitched in with all the talk about self-restraint: how the dead man lacked it, how the news media lacked it, how the Hong Kong citizens lacked it.

But during those hours when we kept our TV watch, did we step back and ask ourselves, in between the commercials, bathroom break and channel-switching: should I see this? Should the man with the gun also see this on the bus monitor?

We pointed fingers at journalists after the carnage. Who was at the other end of that accusing finger, being fed more images and information that was needed or understood?

When we first saw the police attempt to get into custody the hostage-taker’s brother, we were pulled in. Everyone was shouting. We were shouting, guessing what was going on, letting our emotions follow the source of the loudest whining. What a story! We were in the story! We were the news!

But when the first deadly eruption broke the silence in the darkened bus, we drew back to the safety of our couches. Silenced, we mumbled about letting the authorities handle the situation. We watched. And wondered when they would resume regular broadcasting.

What did this extreme sport of TV-watching accomplish? Saturate us with information. We became experts and concluded.

This was the extent of our certainty: the man was guilty.

Of murdering the innocent. Of exposing the ill-preparedness of our authorities and the media to deal with a crisis. Of subjecting our nation to the world’s condemnation and ridicule. Of jeopardizing the gains of tourism, our recently defended democracy, the stability of our society.

Did we reexamine who else was reduced to a limp form hanging from the broken glass of a bus door?

Why is it so easy to get hold of a gun in this country?

When does our access to information endanger life?

Why, in the age of instantaneous transmission, are we communicating less?

Why are we blind to the nameless victims of injustice before it’s too late?

If we missed these questions, let’s not be too hard on ourselves. The police asked the TV crews to turn off their lights during the negotiations. Visibility was poor.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 29, 2010 issue of the “Matamata” column

Binay and my lola

WHEN we visited my lola the other night, she was repairing her wooden fan.

Lola was applying a bottle of glue to stick back the cloth that came loose from some of the wooden staves.

My cousin, glancing up from his laptop, offered to buy our grandmother a new fan.

Lola held up the repaired fan, now fully unfurled, and experimentally stirred the air with it.

If I forget this fan in church, it will still be good for the one who finds it, my grandmother mused aloud.

I looked down at the newspapers I was sifting. On the front page of the July 2, 2010 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) is a boxed story of Vice President Jejomar Binay on his first day at his rented office.

“His chair is too big; his office is a tad too small, too warm and too bare,” PDI’s Tarra Quismundo summarized Binay’s carping about the place he found too stark (“hubad na hubad”) and lacking of the “dignity commensurate to the occupant of the office.”

Complaining that he has no official residence or a permanent office, Binay is eyeing the Coconut Palace. In 1978, when then First Lady Imelda Marcos commissioned the mansion for Pope John Paul II, she said “Tahanang Pilipino (Filipino home)” will display different types of Philippine hardwood, coconut shell and a “specially engineered coco lumber” known as “Imelda Madera”.

When the pope came in 1981, he did not stay in the Coconut Palace, finding this strange in a country suffering from widespread poverty.

Today, the Coconut Palace is still grand enough to house dignitaries, serve as backdrop for society weddings, and apparently appease the injured feelings of the country’s 15th vice president.

During World War II, my grandmother, pregnant with my aunt, moved between two houses, one in Sibonga Poblacion and a mountain retreat to avoid Japanese soldiers. Even when the rain turned the mountain trails into red mush, my mother’s family was forced to evacuate frequently.

Unlike her younger brother, who loved to run up and down the trails, my mother, horrified to have red clay squelching between her toes, and an aunt, often driven to tears by hardship, rode the “balsa,” a wooden cart pulled by the carabao. My grandparents chose to walk during the entire journey. Lola was expecting to give birth any day.

Protocol affixes “The Honorable” to the vice president’s name for occupying the second highest executive position in our government. The 1987 Constitution puts the vice president as “first in the presidential line of succession. Upon the death, resignation, or removal by impeachment and subsequent conviction of the president, the vice president becomes the new president.”

In Binay’s words, he’s the “No. 2 man.”

During the war, my lolo was the only doctor for miles around. When he treated guerillas, the Japanese and their local puppets took umbrage. When he treated the “enemy,” the guerillas took issue. My lolo shrugged and said no one could tell him how to do his job: lessen pain, save lives.

Thus, it fell on Lola to smoothen the churning wake left by my lolo. Japanese officers frequented her table as they were drawn to the chorizo, tapa and other dried meats she hung from the rafters, visible from the windows. To keep the soldiers from eating everything they had, my grandmother showed them my mother and her younger brother, and mimed to them to leave something for her children.

Heavy with child, my grandmother was not scared the Japanese would harm her. She hid her sisters-in-law under dried banana trunks from soldiers. When she learned the Japanese interrogated Lolo, she sought them, armed only with her anger, her fear, and the unbearably swelling burden of my aunt, who still refused to leave that safe cocoon for a war-torn world.

In time, the “enemy” did not just eat in her kitchen and sleep in her veranda without guards or bayonets within reach. One officer cried in her presence, hugging my uncle in place of the child the war made him leave behind.

Many strangers, when they learn Lola is 91 years old, are overcome with awe. I am silenced by my grandmother remembering the tears of an enemy or repairing a fan anyone else would have thrown away.

Binay, too, reduces me to silence. Before June 30, the worst thing about Binay was that he is not Mar Roxas. Now, I think the worst is that Binay is Binay.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 11, 2010 issue of “Matamata”

Tibak, 37 years after martial law

THERE was a well, one day.

And later, plants encircling the ancient trunks.

A swathe of pebbles blanketed the ground another day. Workmen watered the shiny, carnivorous-looking leaves. Petrified blocks of wood became a table, a bench when, under the timeless trees, a student sketched on a pad.

Leaving my class one morning, I saw that the mouth of the well was a mosaic of glinting pieces of broken glass and tiles. It was so good enough to eat, I looked around for Hansel and Gretel to appear from behind the trees.

I have taken this path too many times to count. When I was a student, this route had straggling grass pushing past broken stone slabs leading to a decrepit office where tibaks (activists) made out, painted placards and streamers, read Ibon tracts and Issues Without Tears, tattered from being passed around.

This space we shared with the campus security, some administrator’s feeble attempt at check-and-balance.

We who were antsy about campus militarization sometimes went around to the other office to ask the guards to jimmy open the locked door when someone got too drunk again to remember to bring the key to the student council office.

We who were brusque and crude about the military, the state and the church would always knock first on the guards’ door in case we would catch them at an awkward time, changing into their uniforms, with their pants down or their ear glued to the thin walls, listening to someone read aloud Engels or poor Marx in mangled German.

Then as a teacher, I saw the struggling grass finally flattened and the ground, tamped on by students trooping to the new undergraduate building, rising amongst the trees.

When classes failed to normalize, the edifice remained “new” for quite a time. The security guards (another batch) accused students of stealing the starters to disable the fluorescent lights in the classrooms. The students took potshots: yes to consultation, no to overpricing, yes to state subsidy for education, no to corruption!

When the sun set and the trees cast longer shadows inside the classrooms with the missing starters, professors either graded recitation or resorted to storytelling. I transferred all my classes to 7:30 a.m. and have not changed my mind since.

A room that’s too dark to see the writing on the blackboard is still not as bad as the old Bagong Lipunan (New Society) classrooms located across the street. If it rained, the roofs dripped and the pathways flooded.

BL10, where aspiring journalists and broadcasters studied, was reportedly haunted: first, by agents that left electronic ears to monitor our teachers, prone to outspokenness and mini skirts; and then by A, a classmate who cleared her clogged sinuses by systematically blowing her nose on every inch of the room’s curtains (we never told the younger batches).

For all its waterlogged state, the BL10 years left more than an impression on me. I had teachers of all stripes: daughter of a Marcos crony, daughter-in-law of an opposition stalwart, mother of society columnists, daughter of the First Quarter Storm, estranged partner of an underground fighter and then wife of a consultant for international aid.

Teaching the young horrified by an early morning start, I try to pass on what I learned: embrace passion and a dictionary. I wince when I read, sprayed on the boulevard: “Outs Gloria!” I beam when I read my students blogging about the abandoned, the abused, the silenced, the hunk in very short shorts.

The garden emerging from the trees stopped me. A Fine Arts student’s final thesis, this spot of quiet and retreat is discordant with all that I remembered of the past 37 years.

Yet, isn’t that what we live for: capture space, leave a mark, be not left unmarked?

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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 27, 2009 issue of “Matamata”

Mermaid’s tears

TRAVEL puts you in the mood for the unexpected.

I chant this to myself when, at the end of the road, is not a bath and a book but a “No Vacancy” sign.

This mantra usually works unless there’s a triple whammy of the unanticipated: a frustrating chase for a fact that might be camouflaged as fiction, a favorite room found to be taken, mosquitoes that end up as surprise roommates.

To be fair, the mosquitoes—long-legged beauties with hungry whines—were as taken aback as I was when I opened the tiny bathroom attached to our room. It was too late to fuss then about the in-house bloodsuckers: notebooks used in the fieldwork had to be sorted out; Juan demanded to swim.

At the pool, we found the staff applying chlorine. Best to wait for one more hour, they advised.

As my son’s grumbling was beginning to sound as maddening as the creatures we left in the room, I told him we could walk along the shore and look for mermaid’s tears.

A National Geographic article read some time ago ran a photo essay about sea glass. These are the small, frosted remnants of bottles and other glass items that end up in the sea. Sand and sea water break them down, smoothen and mold them, even etch patterns on the surfaces.

While looking for sea glass is as popular as and even more politically correct than taking seashells and corals, collectors covet the colors of red and black, which are more unusual since present-day beer bottles are usually green, brown or colorless.

But even the most common shard of sea glass, when it is slick with the sea or glinting with reflected fire, is not difficult to imagine as pearls of a weeping sea maiden or, found once on a beach in Dalaguete, a glass slipper just waiting for a royal foot.

A beachcomber’s dream, this coastline is a trifle treacherous for swimming because of the white-capped waves that slap and curl around the slabs of stone. Juan and I took a close look at the undisturbed hoard strewn along the coast. It is nearly beyond human capacity to fully appreciate even just a square inch of the shore. Just when one thinks the shade of this stone is unlike any hue seen before, the sifting of sand will reveal a tiny periwinkle with a shell design more intricate than any pattern woven by human hands.

Yet, sea glass remains my favorite as a showcase of nature. Where is the maestro to rival sand and sea in creating art from the meanness of garbage and negligence?

If only life’s surprises were all as delightful: a few hours before retreating to this place, my husband and I listened to a resident recount stories of a war I only read about, even grudgingly, from course-required references.

To reach the beach after the interview, we drove past a patch of trees. It looked the same as always: canopy shadows dappling the ground, a sleepy breeze ruffling the overgrown grass. Passing by this place countless times, I’ve never really seen it.

I could not now look at it, remembering the source’s stories of children tossed in the air while soldiers made a bet to see whose bayonet could impale the most number of bodies. Whole families were executed once fingered by the hooded informer, star and sole witness in the town’s juez de cuchillo (justice of the knife).

It is said that something nameless still flits across the faces of oldtimers when the name of the war collaborator is mentioned.

When a name was finally given in answer to our question, I was slow to react. Perhaps the hours of listening played tricks on my mind. Maybe I had been asleep in actuality, dreaming only that I was interviewing. It is hard to wake up when you are working so hard to convince yourself that you are awake.

Like a pretty glass washed ashore, memory can become anything. Increments can compress to bear down, reduce bottle into shards into a fairytale slipper or pearls rolling from a sea maiden.

When a name was uttered that afternoon, I remembered the stern face of a senior who said, write as if you are chasing the truth, while another recalled bodies transfixed on the lance of an unforgetting, unforgiving memory.

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

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 31, 2008 issue

Vice and virtue

PARTLY to escape the streets, which now shimmer from the heat, I stepped inside the Cebuano Studies Center at the University of San Carlos. For this assignment on prehistoric Visayans, I wondered if I could last an hour, as catatonia from siesta habits or bemusement with 17th century documentation seemed preordained.

I was wrong. From the shimmering streets, I found myself lost for hours in the simmering pages of a chronicle written in 1668 by a Jesuit priest.

Ignacio Francisco Alcina, SJ, took down voluminous notes from his observations of and interactions with the local people that he met in his travels around Samar, Leyte, Cebu, Panay, Bohol and Negros.

The product of 36 years of life among the Bisayans, “Historia de las Islas e Indios de Bisayas (History of the Bisayan People in the Philippine Islands)” runs to four volumes and covers every subject, including those that seem unlikely to engage the religious.

In chapter 4 of volume 1, which tackles the local custom of tattooing, Alcina writes of “a certain practice which the Bisayans cultivated.”

This was the piercing of the male organ and suspension of a “sakra,” “sagra” or “sagka” (a wooden peg whose ends protruded on both sides and from which hang rings of lead or gold, if the person belonged to the principales).

“Sakraan” referred to a man who had this device. This term may have been superfluous as the practice was common. Alcina writes, “In ancient times, they mocked those without it.”

But it was not the barbarity of self-mutilation nor its high cost (“most excruciating pain” and “virulent cancer”) that made the Spaniards punish with a beating any Bisayan caught wearing a sakra, an ironic twist since, for the clergy, it was a “word so holy among us but extremely obscene among them.”

Alcina writes that the practice was resorted to “for a greater incitement to carnal pleasure, not only on the part of the men but especially the women.” According to the annotation accompanying his text, “there were some 20-30 different versions of the device.”

What reduced me to greater stupefaction: the realization that there is a personal dimension to history or that these “cracks in the parchment curtain” were made possible through the efforts of a 17th-century religious?

From the rote learning of facts in elementary and high school to the politicized deconstruction of colonial history in college, I had the impression that history was all about war, religious, political or armed.

Who would have thought that a prehispanic sexuality thrived until the Spaniards came and conquered with their version of the yoke?

In popular history, women are figureheads, if mentioned at all. Who was Hara Amihan before she was renamed Queen Juana after receiving the Sto. Niño from Ferdinand Magellan?

Alcina parts the curtains to show that women—not the Spanish stereotypes of virgin and whore but real women of flesh and spirit—existed before the natives embraced straitlaced Christianity: “(The men) say that their women wish it so, and that if they did otherwise, they would not have communication with them.”

In prehispanic relations, what was the sexual politics? Alcina’s notes imply that domestic abuse existed long before the age of gender and development: “Many women paid for (sexual gratification) dearly when the paramour, or a husband resenting the woman’s lack of fidelity, or for some other disappointment which they wished to avenge, placed the said peg not of wood but of iron with its ends sharpened. Thus, they either wounded or killed many a woman…”

Would these accounts be extant if early documentors had followed the sway of their biases? Antonio Pigafetta, chronicler of the voyages of Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcano, wrote, “These people make use of that device because they are of a weak nature.”

Another explorer, Miguel Lopez de Loarca, also documented the practice but judged it as an “abominable custom… modesty forbids us to speak of them.”

In his age and in his vocation, Alcina was uncommon: “No matter how vile and diabolic this may be, history must not hide anything, especially since it was a common practice in this nation.”

In the 21st century, as it was in the 17th, an unsparing eye and pen is a virtue without parallel.

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


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s April 13, 2008 issue