Discomfort women

WE never see her. For many students at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, the restaurants at the Ang Bahay ng Alumni are too pricey for gobbled down meals. This hub, though, becomes a favorite when folks are celebrating a reunion, the turning in of the final paper or just one’s grip on day-to-day sanity.

Rushing past her, many of us hardly glance. Distractions are not just of the intimate, academic or ruminative kinds; the Bahay ng Alumni is just one node in the campus network of art and history.

The whole school is a people’s museum, where any citizen can freely enter and gaze at the works of National Artists and creatives sans titles. In this treasury, it is understandable to overlook the “Alma Mater,” the 1996 sculpture of a woman offering a wreath to visitors entering the lobby of The Home of the Alumni.

Created by National Artist for Sculpture Napoleon Abueva in homage to UP, the “Alma Mater” is frequently left out in online posts extolling the bounteous legacy in Diliman. It was only during the fifth year of my studies that I spared her a moment of curiosity—who is she?— when my friend M. and I asked a security guard to take our photo at the lobby.

Both of us are inept at taking a selfie but we looked around for a hallmark for our reunion, perennially postponed by the disruptions afflicting working women who are also wives and mothers.

That shot of our beaming beneath the bronze woman was shared by M. on social media, but my scrutiny of the “Alma Mater” only came six months after the taking of the photo I have mentally captioned as “Tulo ka Babaye (three women)”.

I was in the cemetery in Cebu, visiting my father, when a family friend stopped to chat. He beamed when he said their youngest child recently graduated.

Son, he told this child in Cebuano, as your mother and I don’t have a daughter and you have no job yet, I will use you as a daughter. Please wash the dishes.

T. and his wife put all their sons through college from what they earned in “maintaining” the graves of several families in the cemetery. T. is no stranger to manual labor nor to the cooperation needed for partners to raise a family. Yet, why would he put a gender to housework with no pay or recompense?

Abueva’s works invite a meditation to break expectations, from the iconic “Risen/Dead Christ” at the Parish of Holy Sacrifice in UPD to the quietly subversive “Alma Mater”. The term in Latin literally means “generous mother” or someone who nourishes.

Those invisibles behind countless hot meals, ironed clothes, and enlightened minds are gendered by social edict. Can we finally see her only when she breaks out of these comfort zones?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 30, 2019 issue of the 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"

Fire sale

CAN a room have a spirit?

Waiting to consult my professor in his office, I looked around: the framed ancient magazine covers, towers of books that leaned from all corners of the room, the smudged pane of the window he would later open so his cigarette smoke could drift out while the ancient air-conditioning unit wheezed along.

I learned more about poetics in that single visit than from the readings I made the night before. One semester in graduate class, I brought a thesis proposal on media self-regulation to a class handled by a recognized master of Filipino literature in English.

The professor emeritus was too kind to turn me away from the class I took as an elective. I could feel, though, that the jargon and concerns of journalism stood out—grimy and plain as newsprint—in a class where young writers discussed creative works in progress: poetry, novels, a suite of plays.

The differences disappeared when I waited in the professor’s office. Little more than a cubicle with a door, the room bore more than an imprint of the person that occupied it for decades. I do not know if he had worked on drafts of his poems in that room or edited his landmark anthologies at that desk.

If the room bore more than traces of a reading and writing life, it must have been because of the stories overheard by this room. My professor had a habit of reaching out for a nearby volume, reading from it to illustrate his point, and then—the Muses smiled—passing on to me the journals of poetry.

On the morning of Apr. 1, I heard about the dawn fire that gutted the Bulwagang Rizal (Rizal Hall) at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman campus. The inferno destroyed the offices and faculty rooms of two colleges.

A day later, fire also razed two college buildings and the chapel in the Manila campus of the University of the East (UE).

No casualties were reported in the two incidents. Classrooms can be constructed; equipment, replaced.

In contrast, the psychic loss was felt to be “incalculable” by UP Diliman teachers, unable to save manuscripts, notes, books and other collections.

Four publishing houses recently launched the “Sagip-Guro (Save a teacher) Campaign” to benefit the 267 members of the UP Diliman faculty affected by the Bulwagang Rizal fire.

This consortium of Philippine presses encourages individuals and companies to purchase and donate books to the teachers of their choice.

According to the UP Diliman Information Office, the UP Press and the De La Salle University Press will give a 75-percent discount to all titles from Apr. 6 to Nov. 29.

For titles published in 2009 and the previous years, the Anvil Publishing Inc. will give an 80-percent discount; titles from 2010 to the present are discounted by 20 percent.

UP Diliman and UE faculty affected by the campus fires are entitled to a free book published by the Ateneo de Manila Press. All of their titles are also discounted by 50 percent from Apr. 18 to Apr. 29.

In this land of termites, mildew and fire of unknown origins, impermanence shadows knowledge.

Yet, in the life of the mind, only one thing ensures that nothing is lost and something is created: passing on knowledge to the next generation of students who may mentor another generation.


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


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