“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”

Stories à la King

THE storyteller in my mother’s family is my grandaunt Juanita, whom I often visited during summer.

A teenager with an appetite, I wanted lunch to be over. Granduncle Crispin, after coming home for the lunch my grandaunt prepared, then fell asleep in front of the TV set, newspapers opened helter-skelter on his lap or feet, splayed on his chair with the extended leg rests.

When he reported back to work, I could now read the newspapers. During the interlude my granduncle listened to the TV and scanned the dailies, he went through one or two crossword puzzles just before dozing.

My granduncle never left a square in those puzzles blank, a challenge unanswered.

In contrast to my granduncle’s completely filled-in word puzzles, my grandaunts’ magazines had pages with holes. These women’s magazines had features about food, which she clipped and filed away religiously.

Fortunately, I was not keen on recipes; only in their end results. Though all their children had moved away, my grandaunt prepared elaborate dishes.

While she took an hour or more to make con tui—a pig’s foot she emptied of its meat and bones, which she turned into a mash and then stuffed back, sewing carefully the foot-turned-sock—I was her reluctant apprentice.

Privately, I felt she could just have fried the trotter and I would have obligingly gnawed it to the bone. But this would have deprived me of listening to my grandaunt dipping into her bottomless store of anecdotes.

So while I tried to perfectly dice carrots and chayote (my personal opinion was to just delete veggies) for Chicken à la King, Tita Niting told me about her girlhood in pre- and postwar Cebu.

Beyond mediocre as a kitchen apprentice, I remember the stories. After the war, Juanita decided she was going back to school.

Great grandmother Carmen thought too much education ruined a woman, who would just end up as a wife. So these two headstrong women butted heads, Carmen certain that the absence of transportation in those gasoline-rationing days would discourage Juanita.

Age trumped youth. My grandaunt married and learned more practical things, like unstuffing and stuffing a pig’s foot. At one point, Juanita’s shoes so pained her, she removed them and walked home after class.

Ignoring those feet—which, I believe, she would just have stuffed for sausages—my grandaunt attended class the next day. That is how she finished college.

For feminists or any person striving not to be silenced, “voice” resonates. To quote Luce Irigaray, finding your “voix (voice)” is discovering the “voie (way)”.

Beyond pigs and chickens, Juanita’s stories still light the way for me.



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


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 19, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”