Gaslight

TO gaslight is to manipulate a person into questioning his or her sanity. This form of emotional abuse was first depicted in the 1944 movie “Gaslight,” featuring Charles Boyer as a husband plotting to drive his wife, played by Ingrid Bergman, to insanity.

Based on the play by Patrick Hamilton, Boyer’s character switches on the attic lights, making the gaslights flicker. The husband convinces the wife that she has imagined the spectacle.

False narratives shift the ground of reality to make a victim cling as to a lifesaver the false reality created by his or her abuser. In Mike de Leon’s 1981 film, “Kisapmata,” mother and daughter swill the dark to bare their hearts in a house where both women are imprisoned by the retired police officer Diosdado “Dadong” Carandang.

Dely, played by Charito Solis, knows their daughter Mila (Charo Santos) is pregnant with Dadong’s child. Incest and rape are impossible to prevent, the viewer gleans from Dely’s testimony that before Mila was born, she fled Dadong, only to return because no one helped her. Resistance is futile for Dely, who conspires with Dadong to keep Mila from leaving home with husband Noel Manalansan (Jay Ilagan).

In this odious tête-à-tête where light is broken to pale shards by the overriding darkness, Mila blurts out that she did not invite Dadong’s attention, immediately establishing that these two are not mother and daughter but rivals and antagonists. 

Mila escapes to religion, going down on her knees the morning after she is raped by her father to pray to a vengeful God to rescue and free her, a divine champion whose wrath will open the eyes of the blind, unplug the ears of the deaf.

What is ultimately unbearable in “Kisapmata” is not Dadong, the fiend with a fetish for guns and his own flesh. What chills is the gaslighting. 

As pupils well-schooled in their trauma, the women do not blink in sacrificing all to secure their own survival. Dely will feed Mila again and again to the monster who begat her. Mila will not show her diary and at least gird with the truth her poor naïve husband, who thinks he is only up against an overprotective “Tatang”.

Gaslighting bends and twists logic. Why does a woman escape and then return to give birth in the lair of a beast? 

Why do Filipinos dehumanized by a family that has plundered, raped, and murdered for years bring the Marcoses back to power? Why do we breed in fake histories and varnished pasts the monsters that will devour our children again and again?

In the darkness of the Carandang prison, Mila cries out: “Ba’t ganito tayo? Nagsamasama dahil sa takot?” If we cast our future in lies and nightmares, we are truly insane.

Source of image: “Elephant in the room” by Tarantadong Kalbo  

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 26, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Knitting

IN my memories of sitting in her kitchen, food was the spice and stories, the staple. 

She was daughter, sister, wife, and mother in an age that had the expectations of and prescriptions for women traced and ready for applying to every woman, no matter what was in her mind and heart, like the cut-out clothes I used to punch out for paper dolls.

She was the last of the siblings that included my maternal grandfather. While watching her debone for chicken à la King or turning inside out a pork hock only to stuff it again and sew it close like a sock for contui, I itched silently with impatience, wondering why we could not just eat without the tedious deconstruction.

Painstaking meals prepared daily was Tita’s overture to telling stories.  While cooking, she pulled out and consulted notebooks where she wrote down recipes, jotting on the flour-sprinkled, soy-spotted margins improvisations and tweaked measurements. 

The stories, though, were all in her head. Knitting stories invokes the power to animate. She breathed life and soul—“anima”—to relatives I barely remembered except as family ghosts.

The great grandmother whose amputated leg I heard echoing in every creak of the ancestral house was, in Tita’s retelling, a young girl who witnessed her mother give away the land upon the prodding of her sons, who then treated her as a maid to serve their every caprice. The memory drove my great grandmother to be sparing in showering material gifts on her own children.

A family’s personal stories are stitches seeded on the broad canvas of history. Women as actors and narrators of their fate are often embellishments, decorative while being invisible. 

Tita’s stories first made me draw nearer to the canvas to examine the elision of lives glimpsed as a small hand placed tentatively from the back on a starched masculine shoulder in a studio portrait. 

What are stories if not illuminations and magnifications? In Feb. 1986, I was about to start lunch with Tita and Tito when I absentmindedly refused an offer of Coke. I participated in the nationwide boycott of businesses owned by cronies of Ferdinand Marcos, following the disputed snap presidential election. 

Tito, who worked with the company bottling Coke, was silent but Tita was furious. From what seemed to be a far shore, I heard her speak for employees and families suffering from the boycott. Issues split us, her voice buffeted but holding, a tenuous line above the tumult.

Recently, in the online requiem mass, I looked past the white coffin and saw Juanita Solon Villarosa in her kitchen, meat thawed, condiments ready, memory casting for a story. I’m listening, Tita Niting. 

Source of image: dreamstime.com

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 6, 2021 issue of the Sunday main op-ed column, “Matamata”

On the ground

MISTAKING one jeepney for another, I once took a route that took the passengers past the old stud farm at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman. 

Same trees, same abandoned air. The sight of what used to be the National Stud Farm created during the Marcos administration made me remember 2017, when a professor gave our class a choice to either write a paper on martial law or visit the “lumad” visitors hosted by the UP Diliman community at the old stud farm.

I chose convenience; I wrote the paper. I wondered what I could “teach” in the informal classes being held for the lumad youths, who joined their parents and other elders in the annual Lakbayan ng Pambansang Minorya.

“Lumad” is Bisayan for “of the earth,” a term chosen by 15 of more than 18 indigenous cultural communities (ICC) in Mindanao during the Cotobato Congress in June 1986. 

From grade school references in Social Studies, I thought of them as a generic collective, “cultural minorities”. Alienating and politically incorrect, the term is still apt; the “minorities” remain at the margins of power, deposed from lands, waters, and other tribal spaces inherited from ancestors effaced by a succession of colonizers. 

I know arguably more about the Dole and Del Monte products than the lumad displaced by their plantations: the B’laan of Tupi and Polomolok in South Cotobato, the Higaonon and the Talaandig in Bukidnon. The wars of colonization were replaced by other wars: corporate plunder by multinational companies, “modernization” and “development” financed by foreign loans, culture of impunity targeting dissidence, and community lockdowns to quell coronavirus disease.

Since 2012, the lumad, joined by other “minority” peoples, undertake the Lakbayan to focus on their plight and search for social justice. If the center will not go the peripheries, the marginalized will go to us. Are we listening?

Journalism is essential for our democracy. Writing for deadline, sound bites, and live streaming metrics can take us only to a point. The lumad is more complex than the “bakwit” (Bisayan for “evacuee”) and the IDPs (internally displaced persons) constructed by narratives of conflict and war.

These are not the only stories. We are not the only storytellers on the ground. As a people deprived of visibility and intelligibility, the lumad best tell their stories.

When I stayed away from the Lakbayan sojourners sheltering in a center Ferdinand Marcos created in 1965 to improve horse breeding and discourage the local elite from illegally importing horses for racing, I was blind to the conceit of my “teaching” the lumad.

In or out of classrooms, the only activity worth doing is learning.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 21, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Domestics

A FILM still of “Kisapmata,” the 1981 masterpiece of Mike de Leon, is both a recreation and a reversal of the tableau in Bethlehem.

There is still a man accompanying his wife, heavy with child. They wait to be let inside a house, its lighted upstairs window seeming to be a beacon in the swirling dark. 

A neighbor’s Christmas “parol” completes the Nativity scene. However, this man-made star streams a weaker light, a visual cue that de Leon’s diorama negates all that the créche in Bethlehem stood for: love, redemption, life.  

An off-duty policeman shot in point-blank range a mother and her son during a personal dispute in Paniqui, Tarlac.

A witness recorded from an overhead vantage point the four times Police Senior Master Sergeant Jonel Nuezca clicked the “gatilyo (trigger)” of his service sidearm and ended the lives of Sonya Gregorio, 52, and Frank Gregorio, 25. 

In film language, the camera angled downwards is a panopticon of surveillance and judgment. 

In “Kisapmata,” the upstairs window monitored by retired policeman Tatang Dadong (acted by Vic Silayan) exposes the limits of our view: we see what we only want to see.  

Enraged citizens called for the punishment of Nuezca and even his young daughter, who joined the confrontation and walked away from the bodies. 

Fewer voices questioned why Nuezca is still in the force despite being flagged for five administrative cases within six years, including two homicide complaints dismissed for lack of evidence.

The Tarlac double murders of unarmed civilians by an off-duty cop using his official firearm is an “isolated” incident that has not convinced President Duterte to rescind his order, made in 2017, to allow off-duty police to carry sidearms as protection from “armed communists”.

Human rights watch groups estimate that more than 8,000 to 20,000 persons were killed by the police since Duterte took office in 2016. 

During the three-year War on Drugs, poll after poll showed that the wealthy and the educated rated Duterte’s performance from “very good” to “excellent,” his popularity only slightly dipping among those with less income.  

In “Kisapmata,” Dadong’s wife Dely (Charito Solis) is cleaning the couple’s room while watching television. She accidentally touches the gun placed underneath her husband’s pillow. Without once taking her eyes off the TV screen, she returns the pistol in its drawer on his bedside table. 

When I was newly married, I learned, before buying glassware, to run my fingers over the surface. The eyes can be distracted; the fingers detect any surface flaw. From Marcos to Duterte, the culture of impunity domesticates us. We sleep with the enemy; we keep them in office.

Source of “Kisapmata” still: news.abs-cbn.com (photograph by Cesar Hernando; courtesy of Mike de Leon)

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

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

 

“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”

Not just on paper

LOVE is physical, most of all love for a book. You know the signs of obsession: the desire, always keen, never stale, to open a new book and dip your nose into the fusion of odors rising from the crack of its pages, to run the balls of one’s fingers on the unevenly serrated pages, and more.

By now, you know I am talking of a book made of paper. In the age of ebooks, this love endures. Nothing replaces the sheer physicality of bodily contact with something that segues into imagining, reflecting, thinking.

Like all loves, this one, too, has its perils. This week my search for a book took me to one of the libraries, where I and then a succession of librarians realized that the anthology edited by Seyla Benhabib and others, “Feminist Contentions,” did not exist except in the virtual sense.

While a digital system keeps track of entire collections in all the libraries of the university, this particular collection was recently transferred from one building to another. According to a librarian, the book may have been “misplaced” during the relocation.

Another book I sought was also lost to history. My professor’s copy of “Gender Studies: Terms and Debates,” edited by Anne Cranny-Francis and others, went up in flames along with other irreplaceable collections in the destruction of the Bulwagang Rizal some years ago.

Pursuits drive obsessions. There are other libraries, friends with collections, friends who know other book lovers, secondhand bookstores, and, if all else fails, online sellers.

Paper may be a fragile vessel except in the estimation of those for whom its existence matters. Fire took away all that my professor collected over a lifetime of studies except for those she had turned over to the college photocopier for reproducing the reading packs in the courses she was teaching.

In the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman Main Library is a collection that represents a collective resistance to amnesia. The Philippine Radical Papers were criticisms printed from the late sixties to the early seventies against the Marcos dictatorship.

Activists donated collections. Students, teachers, and library staff gave the manifestoes and leaflets collected during teach-ins and rallies. Underground organizations sent copies of newsletters.

Library tables became depositories for unknown others, who left behind materials, possession of which turned one into an enemy of the state and subject for arrest or worse during martial law. In 1998, the UP Press published a subject guide to the collection.

When the object of love cannot be physically possessed, what comes closest is anamnesis (remembrance).


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)



*First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 23, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata"

Oblations

I STARTED and finished the book while waiting for class.

Yet, in the space of that hour or so, “Macli-ing Dulag” (UP Press, 2015) brought me to so many places: our family’s reading of Sunday newspapers in bed, martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos, and my high school discovery of journalism in the pages of a Sunday newspaper supplement.

Deceptively slim, “Macli-ing Dulag” combines two books: Ma. Ceres P. Doyo’s expanded article, and “A Peek into Cordilleran History, Culture and Society” by Nestor P. Castro.

I was in high school when Doyo’s article on Macli-ing Dulag was featured in “Panorama,” a magazine that came with “Bulletin Today”. My father did not think highly of the newspaper. Of the three national dailies, though, he thought the Bulletin had the thickest main section devoted to news.

While my sister and I flipped through the supplements, my father read the news section from front page to back. He often pronounced the news was the “usual propaganda.” As we had several mutts that resisted housebreaking, propaganda served a purpose.

On June 29, 1980, my father asked me if I read this “Panorama” article. Edited then by the legendary Leticia Jimenez Magsanoc, the magazine offered little to interest a teenager.

In Doyo’s account, I read Macli-ing Dulag’s response to a government official belittling his people’s lack of land titles that could have “legitimized” their opposition to the Chico River Dam Project: “How can you own that which will outlive you? Only the race owns the land because the race lives forever.”


Only in college would the sacrifice that saved the Kalinga way of life sink in. Only during the recent reading of Doyo’s book did I realize that we have no lack of heroes: the tribal leader who gave up his life to defend his people’s culture, which Marcos would have traded for 1,010 megawatts of electricity; the untried journalists (Doyo and Rene O. Villanueva) who went through arduous travel and a military interrogation to write the reports that led to the first face-of between the media and the state since martial law was imposed eight years before.

The Filipinos’ heroism does not belong to the past; it manifests in the struggles to assert self-determination being waged by the indigenous peoples, non-government workers, students, and other citizens.

Asked during the military hearing why she only carried “one side” of the story, Doyo explained that the government had unlimited access to the media. “My article is a challenge to the government to print the truth.”

My father pointed me to my earliest memory of journalism’s oblation. As custodians of our shared memory, have we discharged our duty?



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


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 12, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Footnotes for post-truth

LIBRARIES open their doors. What would be the value of collections if the doors were closed?

During an afternoon’s aimless browsing, I was nonplussed to discover a library that, to become the “unofficial archives of the political underworld,” also went “underground” for 30 years or so.

So wrote professor Francisco Nemenzo in the foreword to the “Philippine Radical Papers in the University of the Philippines Diliman Main Library: A Subject Guide,” (UP Press, 1998).

The book was compiled by the Filipiniana Special Collections Project staff of UP Diliman, which collaborated with the Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin in 1996-97 to catalogue and microfilm the Radical Papers.

According to project leader Verna Lee, the UPD Main Library became the repository of a collection, ranging from underground periodicals to protest poetry, that became contraband after martial law was imposed by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.

After executing the “autogolpe (coup),” Marcos consolidated his dictatorship by rounding up his critics and seizing all means of transportation and communication. Nemenzo observed that Marcos should have then gone for the “secondary targets”: “libraries and bookshops”.

He did not. This wasn't due to dictator’s remorse or oversight. “(Marcos) probably reckoned that the Filipinos are not book readers,” wrote Nemenzo.

Marcos passed an edict against even the mere possession of “subversive documents”. The ultimate cost of criticism against the despot was “disappearance”.
Nemenzo commented that so great was the “nervousness” of UP librarians they removed from the shelves all books about communism AND anti-communism. Only fear of the state auditor stayed their hands from burning the incriminating collections.

Yet, “radical papers” kept turning up in the library, were left on the tables or discreetly deposited on the service desk of the Filipiniana Reading Room, he wrote. Through the cooperation of the three universities, the Radical Papers is now organized and accessible for all.

For keeping these records during an epoch that burned truth and murdered to enshrine lies, the UP Diliman Main librarians deserve the respect of the nation, not just its scholars.

The accounts written by the Left do not constitute truth. Yet, their preservation makes it possible for anyone to scrutinize and test these versions against information contained in other documents.

Through cross-checking, which involves validation or rejection, a semblance of truth emerges. In the post-truth era, that is essential to remember: knowledge comes from sifting through, not stifling the flow.


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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 15, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Labyrinths

IT has been pouring in this city for days. Not just rain but middle-of-the-term, over-panic’s-edge succession of class requirements.

When it rained, we stayed indoors and read. That childhood rule makes sense except library research means tracking down a book in networks connecting a system of libraries or existing informally among colleagues connected to other systems.

No one I know orders online. Given the labyrinthine process of shipping, an online habit only adds another layer of torture beyond human endurance and government book stipends.

Photocopying—a settlement with intellectual property preferred by Third World academics—often saves the day, or at least deliverance from a deadline.

Yet, our age is so cosseted by the availability of information. Our fingers simply “walk” around a digital system, and we enter the 18th-century circumlocutions of a dead German to confuse our 21st-century sensibilities.

Bibliography is an academic discipline, with multiple specializations in library science, languages, and a particular branch of learning to create the perfect bloodhounds to track and trace all and recent information published in any niche of knowledge.

Did libraries ever shun, instead of usher in, searchers?

In the “Tower of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges tells a story of generations of librarians driven mad by the search of a room containing just four book shelves hidden in the labyrinth of a library containing twaddle. In another essay, Borges theorized that half a dozen monkeys provided with typewriters can produce all the books that the British Museum can contain.

How does one recognise true from fake knowledge? Borge’s tongue-in-cheek reply is monkey mumbo jumbo: it must have the “25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and the space)”.

In the fictional 14th-century library of the Aedificium (“structure” in Latin) at the centre of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” murderous intent is coupled with information glut to keep searchers from ever returning and finding a book.

Eco’s monks are driven actually mad by the belief that the mission handed down to their order by God is all about “preserving, repeating, and defending the treasure of wisdom”.

When martial law was declared on Sept. 21, 1972, the sound of incriminating documents torn and flushed down toilets echoed around the nation (the memory was narrated by Randy David; the exaggeration is mine).

Only to one library did dissidents entrust their papers before many of them disappeared or were made to. Which library hid and later revealed its radical heart?

Reader, the labyrinth opens next week.


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

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 8, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Love, lies, Heidegger

I CAN'T. Never again.

When my editor-in-chief texted to ask how I was doing in graduate school, I said I was sneak-reading fiction to clear my hangover over Martin Heidegger.

Since the age of Enlightenment, Germany yielded many intellectuals. The ideas that swept Europe since the 18th Century are as relevant now, specially in communications.

At first glance, the world three centuries ago barely shows any kinship with the digital age. How did people communicate then?

From the Net: “(T)hey wrote letters, sent telegrams, gave a message to a messenger, attached a letter to a bird and (obviously) talked to each other.”

Waking up to read that Malacañang has again backpedaled on an earlier pronouncement about the “remote possibility" that martial law may be declared nationwide a few days from now—the 45th anniversary of the first declaration of martial law in the country—I realize that “talking to one another” remains as reflexively human, and thus as complicated, as ever.

So, despite my forthright reply to my editor-in-chief, I am back in the labyrinth with Heidegger, who countered many ideas of the Enlightenment in the 20th Century.

“To read Heidegger is to set out on an adventure,” wrote William Lovitt in introducing the philosopher’s essays, translated in 1977.

To get lost and remain lost is part of the Heideggerian tour. Try parsing this line in his seminal essay, “The Question Concerning Technology”: “That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees.”

An astounding ability to use one noun multiple times, with each use signifying a different meaning, is, fortunately not the only (doubtful) virtue of Heidegger.

His love for words should mean something in a world beset by fake news, “illegal content,” and the even more nefarious legislations created to attack the weeds in our midst.

Using etymology, which traces how words developed meanings over time, Heidegger wrote in the same essay that the Greek word “aletheia” means truth, which involves a “bringing-forth”.

Paradoxically, Heidegger illustrated best the complications of truth not with philosophy but his own life. Illuminating the post-Enlightenment world of ideas, he embraced Nazism and seduced his student, then 19, the intellectual and humanist Hannah Arendt.

“Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves,” wrote the man who loved a Jew and hated the race, bringing forth how, in talking to each other, we walk a tightrope, then and now.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 17, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column “Matamata”

The big picture

MARTIAL law makes many people feel safe. Often left out in the assertion is a question: safe from whom?

In the late 1980s, on my first job, I travelled by land to Sta. Catalina in Negros Oriental. I was hired by a consultancy firm hired by a government agency that had World Bank funding to solve poverty.

An invisible speck in the entire bureaucracy, I was tasked to ask farmers about a comic book on land tenure.

Being young, I missed out on the joke and saw only the final report as the Holy Grail of a quest that took me from Alegria in the south of Cebu to San Miguel in Bohol.

In the bus from Dumaguete to Sta. Catalina, it rained hard. My bag floated in the greasy pool that collected the rain dripping from the bus roof. I hugged the comic books in their plastic bag, and worried what I would do without clean clothes for the coming week.

The thought that I would have to revert to the field worker’s strategy of using underwear “side A-side B” distracted me from the camouflage helicopters that hovered over Sta. Catalina, one or two at a time but all the time.

During the motorcycle ride to the upland site office, I asked the driver about the torn bark and hole gouged out by bullets in a tree.

An encounter, he said. Ambush? I asked. Farmers, he said. So what did they fire with: produce? I asked, still peeved about the rain and my sodden bag.

The site office was located beside a military detachment, but it was indistinguishable where one ended and the other began. The same barbed wires connected the margins. When lights went off at curfew, I listened to the distant popping sounds.

Christmas in May, I thought before falling asleep.

Field workers were instructed not to get involved with our neighbors on either side of the spectrum. Yet, we slept near and drove around with one side. Did we feel safer? I thought I did.

Interviews went like a breeze in Sta. Catalina. Above the farms, helicopters crisscrossed like green-bellied flies.

The farmers and I watched the circling choppers more than we discussed the comics. Like strange antennae, the long prows of M16 barrels and muzzles protruded from the sides of the Sta. Catalina “flies”.

The gunner stationed at the open sides of choppers is an “innovation” learned from the Vietnam War, according to a U.S. Army documentary, “The Big Picture”.

Inviting young Americans to train as “shotgun riders,” the 1967 documentary shows instructors sitting beside the open doors as if they were “on (their) front porch,” coaching young men to fire M16s at 450 rounds a minute, with one reminder: “Don’t get carried away while firing; it’s important to conserve ammunition.”

In Sta. Catalina, I finally caught on.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 30, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Ear to the ground

WHAT is “the situation on the ground”?

Today is the 60th day martial law was imposed by President Duterte in Mindanao.

Last May 23, the President reacted swiftly to the Maute Group’s occupation of Marawi City.

As commander-in-chief, the President can suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or impose martial law “in case of invasion or rebellion,” based on Section 18, Article VII of the 1987 Philippine Constitution.

However, the 1987 Constitution is more specific than the 1935 version, which President Ferdinand Marcos used as the basis for passing Proclamation 1081 and putting the country for the first time under martial law.

As amended by the 1986 Constitutional Commission created by President Corazon Aquino, the 1987 Constitution imposes a limit on martial law: no more than 60 days.

Today is the deadline. Will martial law be lifted or extended?

Two weeks ago, House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez proposed a five-year extension of martial law.

The 1987 Constitution permits the Congress to extend martial law if “the invasion or rebellion persists and public safety requires it”.

Yesterday, the two houses of Congress were expected to hold a special session to decide on the President’s request for extension of martial law in Mindanao. (Update: During the joint session on July 22, the Senate and the House voted to extend martial law until December 31: 261 for, 18 against.)

Sixty days ago, the Maute Group and Abu Sayyaf terrorists torched Marawi; robbed, raped, and killed civilians; and tried to create a “province of the Middle East-based Islamic State (IS) jihadist group in Southeast Asia.”

The deadline to suppress the rebellion has lapsed many times. Yesterday, the military again said it expected to retake Marawi “in a few more days.”

But lawlessness and the IS threat are apparently still serious enough for the military. National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. said martial law will prevent some 700 jihadists from entering the country.

Despite its jingoistic rhetoric, the military says something that must be repeated: what is the “situation on the ground”?

Yesterday, in Iligan City, Tindeg Maranao (Stand Up Maranao) gathered some 100 evacuees to oppose the extension of martial law.

It is an opening salvo for the July 24 protests being organized by civil society groups around the country. On this day, a day after the 60-day deadline of martial law in Mindanao lapses, President Duterte will deliver his State of the Nation Address.

The evacuees call for an end to martial law and the end of military airstrikes in Marawi City.

On July 24, some 260,000 evacuees vow to return to Marawi City. “We will go home!”

What is the “situation on the ground”?



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

* First published in the July 23, 2017 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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”

Guardians of the gates

You can turn martial law and the dead into entertainment. If you’re a nine-year-old with a smartphone and a tablet, you definitely can.

That’s my most memorable take-away message from the recently concluded Cebu Press Freedom Week (CPFW).

I got into the Internet on a tourist visa. I’m not close to a digital immigrant and, most certainly, am not a digital native.

In his 2001 article, Marc Prensky created these distinctions. Millennials, born in the 1980s just as the Internet was booting up, take to technology as anyone in a bib given a digital mouse as a pacifier will.

However, this tourist-nearly-half-a-century-old also digs the Internet, a virtual public playground. Last Sept. 21, Sun.Star Cebu’s “Top of the week” editor singled out the online trend of posting selfie photos with the dead. After a prize was awarded to the best selfie of the week—the “photo of a girl, 13, who died in a car accident, with her relatives grinning beside the corpse”—a popular blog drew the attention of the police.

Last Sept. 21, I was also at the Marcelo Fernan Press Center theater, joining an audience dominated by millennials. A meme showed Rodrigo Duterte comforting a teen stood up by a date. When the Davao mayor mutters about cutting off the head of the fickle lover, a section of the audience titters.

The burning at the back of my neck forces me to count slowly. After reaching 10, I’m glad I’m not about to have a stroke. But the heartburn doesn’t go away until I’ve spoken out in the open forum.

Duterte, that most charismatic of politicians, jokes about summary killings on the day Filipinos remember martial law, the darkest in the nation’s long history of betrayal, repression and rebellion. Some of the millennials, born decades before Proclamation No. 1081, laugh at Duterte’s joke.

In my view, the black humor is watching the young be entertained by a viral meme about Duterte, dark knight of a “separate peace,” whose association with the Davao Death Squads brings back more than a stench of the nameless and faceless dead unearthed from unmarked graves dotting the landscape when the Marcos dictatorship imposed the New Society over the country.

Technology gap? Natives versus immigrants? Open access versus gatekeeping? All of the five CPFW events my students and I recently attended tackled the impact of technology and its potentials for good and evil.

Now on its 23rd year, the CPFW is the only event in the country that the news media industry organizes to commit to collective memory the stories that should never be forgotten. In the many fora held during this week, local students and teachers are not just warm bodies filling a venue. We are at the frontline of preventing mass amnesia.

Despite information overload, epic struggles with school administrators, and extra commuting costs for schools without buses, Cebu academia must make time for the CPFW.

Prensky challenges teachers to reach out and converse with students despite the gaps created by our generational differences in the use of technology. We should not be the last to wake up to the fact that the micro-media mocking history emanate from the young, absentmindedly doodling while we ramble and scribble on the board.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 27, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Tango with millennials

AFTER a three-year hiatus to study, I returned to teach undergraduates and found the ground has shifted.

“How do you find this batch?” asked Ian, a former student who became a colleague. Disconcerting, we agreed.

Class discussions this September reinforced the impression. At the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu, junior Mass Communication undergraduates dutifully researched on martial law’s (ML) impact on press freedom.

Our attempts to link pre-ML press licentiousness, ML press censorship and early attempts at media self-regulation were fraught. Half of the class had glazed eyes, an invariable effect of history lessons.

Things dramatically improved when discussion bridged the past to the present. Another group of junior undergraduates named Rodrigo Duterte as the presidentiable to watch in 2016.

Duterte’s political tango (Will he run? Won’t?) tantalizes the young. The controversy over his record of human rights abuses does not.

The man who “cleans” the streets of Davao through his speculated links with Death Squads is deemed by half a class of bright, idealistic youths as the country’s next hope.

My younger son, a freshman in a private university, also recalled hearing Duterte’s name among schoolmates attending the prayer vigils for a slain student, a recent victim of crime.

Unlike Millennials, I have a knee-jerk reaction to vigilantism, which I associate not with the cleansing of crime-free streets but with the purging of dissent and opposition by the power-obsessed.

Even the memory-challenged must associate the month of September with the 1972 imposition of martial law.

The Cebu Press Freedom Week and the Cebu Broadcasters’ Month remind Cebuanos how civil liberties were lost and won again at great cost during the dark years of struggling in the iron fist of the Marcos conjugal dictatorship.

Born in 1976, Ian considers himself a “Martial Law baby”. Fond of the Carpenters, the Abba and Sesame Street, this Gen X member was an activist for human rights, then as a UP Cebu undergraduate and now as a lawyer.

Spanning the mid-1960s till the mid-1980s, Generation X witnessed the rise of mass media and the collapse of the Cold War. What prevented Filipino Gen Xers from getting completely lost in the hedonism of the MTV culture—the penetration of music videos shaped the youth culture at the turn of the millennium—was an anachronism called repression.

Born in 1965, I’m in between trains. I qualify for a front seat in Generation X. Yet I think I managed to squeeze in the last trip for the counterculture Hippie Generation of the 1960s, which opposed the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Martial Law.

When our family left for work and school early in the morning, we passed a secluded spot where bodies were often dumped. An industrial zone, our barangay’s warehouses and high walls lack eyes and ears, the perfect witnesses for clean-up teams in summary killings.

Once seen, never forgotten. Hogtied and bloated, a corpse rarely resembles the person it was before torture and decomposition.

Millennials, straddling the 1980s till the 1990s, are also called the Generation Y.

“Why?” is a good lens for scrutinizing Duterte, who will never get pass the throwback of my 41-year-old memories of martial law: “Never again”.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 21, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

People of the curtains

IN our tropical country, curtains should be anachronistic. A stroll around neighborhoods, though, will have well-dressed windows showcasing what must be a Filipino homeowner’s favorite accessory.

One takes out the special china, silver and glass for fiestas and holidays. Yet many a homemaker’s pride cannot countenance anything but spanking new curtains peeking from windows to announce to all that, if a family had not yet surpassed the neighbors, it was getting there.

For a particular generation, the expense and bother of changing curtains was, like wearing Sunday’s best, a sign of not just pride in oneself but respect for company.

Yet, the value placed by one generation on social acceptance is perceived as froth and air by another generation. Why put one’s best foot forward if, in reality, you possess two left feet? In this light, the stiffly new, bright-because-as-yet-unwashed curtains seem to try too hard to aspire through ostentation and facile rivalry.

A similar rent in the Pinoy’s religious and cultural fabric can be seen as the country prepares for Pope Francis’s visit next week. Papal visits to the country, predominantly and rabidly Roman Catholic, are illuminating. When Pope Paul VI visited in November 1970, I was only five years old, too young to remember that he spoke for peace in a world torn apart by the Vietnam War.

During the February 1981 first visit of Pope Saint John Paul II, I was 16 and blinded after standing for hours in high noon along the Mandaue highway. When the popemobile rolled into view, it was not the whiteness of the papal vestments that blinded me but the unearthly beauty of the “Maganda” of the conjugal dictatorship slowly strangling the country then in their iron fist, First Lady Imelda Marcos.

White was the motif of the 1981 papal visit: the white terno of Madam Marcos, the white paint of the shanty roofs under the Mactan bridge, the white of the walls the Marcoses put up to hide the poor of Metro Manila from the papal gaze.

To complete the country’s whitewashing, martial law was lifted, exactly a month before Pope Saint John Paul II arrived to the Marcos version of a Filipino Eden: no scavengers, no detainees, no human rights victims.

With old specters hovering over us, I hear the curtain rending again. A church official has asked the faithful to bring candles and images of the Sto. Niño to the Jan. 18 grand mass Pope Francis will concelebrate with 2,500 priests and 200 bishops at Luneta Park, which coincides with the feast of the Sto. Niño.

Can faith be choreographed? The sea of humanity surging around the Sto. Nino de Cebu is not buffeted by rehearsed passion. Only stone can be unmoved by the fervor of hundreds of open palms waving at the Holy Infant image. Many fathers carry small children on their shoulders as the grand procession snakes for hours.

To replicate this Cebuano expression of belief in order to stage a papal spectacle in Luneta is to orchestrate just that: a rehearsal with props of resin, stone and wood.

We, the people, the majority composing the church, should take our cue from Pope Francis, whose papal insignia and motto is “Miserando atque eligendo (lowly but chosen)”.

Mercy and compassion is the theme of the Pope’s pastoral visit. It’s not about changing curtains.


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


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 11, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”