Her words

 

WRITING with a fountain pen should be a meditation. It is torture: I am back in the first grade, gnawing my upper lip and watching the nib, then my fingers, the right hand holding on to its dignity in the grip of the pen, and finally, the person ludicrously failing to flow with the pen. 

Jotting with ballpoint pens, pounding typewriters, and tapping gadgets have hardened muscle memory that rejects this medium for rumination. 

Why do I think of cows “ruminating” in pasture, chewing cud? The nib measures the spread of ink saturating the paper, the acquiescent blankness that is handmaiden to an unbovine rumination.

Or a list of items sent out for laundry. The tallying of books read and lines for savoring. Even in its ephemera, writing hints of an interior life. The nib leaves a bead that unspools into the person hovering behind the veils.

In the past, the hands of a maid were appropriated for everything except writing. Bienvenido Lumbera and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera contrast the precolonial “mujer indigena” who, alongside men, composed the songs, poems, and oral lore passed on by the tribe against the silenced women of colonial times, when the printing press introduced by the Spaniards published no work attributed to a woman.

Not only were they denied education, the culture seeded doubt in women, who questioned whether they were worthy of picking up a pen. 

When a Sister Catherine was told to write down the apparitions of the Virgin Mary that she experienced in 1830, she viewed the task “with repugnance” and only did so out of obedience to M. Aladel, the Director of her community, the Daughters of Charity. 

“(S)he judged herself incapable of doing so, and, moreover, in her opinion, (writing) would have been contrary to humility,” goes the Archconfraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary’s account of St. Catherine Laboure who wrote not once but thrice to document the explicit supernatural visions recreated in the Miraculous Medal of Our Lady of Graces.

After the French nun’s death, Aladel decided not to publish the first account; the other two were made public.

Why was the first narration not published? What happened to this? Why, after waiting for 45 years before confiding to her Director, did she write three accounts?

“She was standing, clothed in a robe the color of auroral light,” Sister Catherine wrote in her extant notes of those Marian visions. So unexpected a harvest from a reluctant writer, its incandescence nevertheless casts in deeper gloom the rest of her words, lost to history. 

Photo of Mangyan woman etching the syllabary on bamboo, the traditional writing surface of precolonial times, was taken by Jacob Walse-Dominguez and sourced from his pinterest.ph account 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 29, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Afraid

THE MEMORIES came unbidden, released by a line I read for class.

The first took place when I was a teenager. For an X-ray requirement, I was removing my shirt and bra inside a government facility when the male technician suddenly returned to the room.

It was my first time. I was not given a lab gown. My father explained that during the procedure, no one would be allowed in the room except for the technician and I. X-rays were painless.

My father was right. It was over very quickly: the technician stood in front of me, snatched the shirt I was covering myself with, and took the X-ray.

I don’t remember if the technician was old or young, fat or thin. Some details remain sharp, though. I could not steady my fingers to refasten my bra even though the man stepped out as soon as the X-ray was taken. The room was chilly yet I burned, burned inside when the man looked down my chest.

We went home after the hospital. My father talked about something. We did not talk about what happened. After all, what can happen while one’s X-rays are taken?

Decades later, my son and I were going home after his grade school classes. When the van for hire stopped in front of our home, it was just my son, an elderly couple who lived in our village, and I who were left.

My son and I had to pass the husband, who was seated nearest the door. The avuncular fellow tilted his legs and helped my son down the van’s steps.

The man kept chatting with his wife, seated in front of us, when I followed with my bags and my son’s schoolbag. I felt his hands hold the seat of my pants and squeeze.

I dropped one of the bags in my hurry to get out of the van. Our neighbor did not look at me when he pulled the door shut and the van drove away.

Did it happen? I asked myself many times after the second incident. Today, more than a decade later, I can answer definitely. There are impressions that create a memory with the solidity beyond denial. The spread-out fingers covering and squeezing my buttocks are as real as the eyes that scoured my adolescent breasts, never even seen by my parents.

Why did I not call out the abuse? I never asked this question until a few days ago, when I read, stopped, and picked up reading again Sara Ahmed’s “Living a Feminist Life”. Ahmed summoned the memories with the line used by women in self-flagellation: “if something happens, you have failed to prevent it”.

In a roundabout way, I found my answers: I was afraid my father would blame me. I was afraid I imagined the abuse. I was afraid of being vulnerable. I was afraid.

I am no longer afraid. This is my answer to the girl left in the X-ray room and the woman holding the bags. I am not afraid.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 21, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Switch

IF a prostitute were mistaken for a politician, would he or she cry, “Foul”?

Or shrug off the slip as just hair-splitting?

The recent incident over a public official charged for misconduct stemmed when the official, a woman, verbally and physically assaulted hotel employees who mistook her for her male companion’s “escort”.

In the official’s own statements, the euphemism “escort” was replaced with the Cebuano slang for a sex worker, “pokpok”.

In street talk, the Cebuano word is often accompanied by or substituted with an index finger tapping a surface twice to mimic the sexual act of penetration.

While “escort” attempts to neutralize the negativity clinging to the world’s “oldest” profession, “pokpok” abandons the pretence. It is gutter talk, which, by treating the sex worker as an object to be penetrated, diminishes and degrades the person underneath the label.

In keeping with pejorative language, “pokpok” spares the customer, who completes the transaction. In the cultural superstructure, a line is drawn between the women deserving of respect and the rest.

I sensed this in the 1980s, when I was a young non-government worker traveling for the first time to Thailand with a co-worker. We were “escorting” a public school teacher, who wrote a prize-winning essay, to visit women’s groups in Bangkok and Chiang Mai.

My co-worker was delayed from boarding by immigration officials. Since they were grilling her in Filipino, I rushed to assist and got roped in the laser-focus of their speculations, which, while no word ever surfaced, centered on their suspicions that we were workers joining the international flesh trade.

In the business class of the plane, the European flight crew gave us the same skewed regard. My co-worker and I hardly resembled “painted ladies”. Traveling from our rural assignments, we were simply dressed, carrying only backpacks. Perhaps we looked naive, ideal for a market always in need of fresh meat.

In Bangkok and Chiang Mai, I realized that sex work was a far cry from the “Pretty Woman” fantasy spun by the escort played by Julia Roberts in the movie.

For one, her character had smooth arms, not marked by needle punctures. Needle-sharing was common among the intravenous drug shooters. The prerequisites for sex work: body orifices.

Some of the workers we met were still young enough to enjoy the keychains given away by AIDS advocates pushing the use of condoms. “Break glass in case of emergency” said the sticker encasing a tiny condom, which caused a lot of amusement among us girls.

Another glass ceiling still exists, segregating the women deserving of respect from the Others.


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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 15, 2018 issues of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata"