Fathers who cook

PAPANG did not cook. My father-in-law did. The husband does.

Papa Peking made “inun-unan (dish simmered in vinegar)” I can still taste: the fragrance of sauteed garlic and onion, the tartness of vinegar, the sly spice of ginger, softness of flesh after the scales peel away from the fish, and, overlaying all these, the sinfulness of pork lard, which he added as the finale, never measuring, just knowing by sight and smell how much to pour.

I grew up in a home that woke early to the breakfast smells of fried eggs, “buwad (dried fish),” and inun-unan, mingling with the aroma of Papang’s first cup of coffee, black as the night that still clung to the sky, leavened by a spoon of powdered milk, absentmindedly stirred while the sun suffused the dark and cold. 

The staccato of Papang’s two-fingered typing on the heavy Army-issue Underwood typewriter punctuated many mornings when I resisted stirring from my mat. Inun-unan, conspiring with omelet curling at the fringe and “sinangag (stale rice toasted with garlic),” always won.

My father bought the typewriter for a song from a relative. I was in senior high school then, feeling superior that I was learning how to touch-type in class. 

When I catch myself pounding away on the laptop keyboard, I hear that Underwood antique, silent now under its plastic cover, never to echo from my father typing exams for his medical students.

Papang and Papa Peking liked to share beer and stories. When Mama Margie talks about my late father-in-law, she often slips into the present tense and refers to him as “Mr. Tabada”. At first, I thought it quaint to refer to someone you were married to for more than four decades in such a schoolmarmish way.

The husband’s parents were public school teachers until they retired. Mama Margie still tears up remembering how she stroked a piece of cloth with longing in one of their outings in Colon. Papa coaxed her away by saying they had to stop for bread to bring home to the children.

“Breadwinner” is a many-layered word that hints of what fathers do for their families. The stories often describe what these men do, leaving unsaid the unlived and unfulfilled worlds they turn their gaze away from to stop by on the way home for bread.

When a friend commented how I refer to “the husband” in my writing, I joked that, thinking of my parents-in-law, I wanted to avoid mixing up the multiple “Mr. Tabada” in my life. 

In truth, I smell Papang and Papa Peking when our home is redolent with the scents, flavors, and memories stirred up when the husband cooks inun-unan with “iba (bilimbi or tree sorrel)” and the secret ingredient of a father’s abiding love for family.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 20, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

WIP

THE NARROW notebook I carry around for jotting has beautiful paper and Japanese characters I cannot read. Since I love this cream paper the color of churned butter that is a joy to write on and smell, I can live with symbols I can only guess at.

Recently, I discovered at the back of the notebook a page with a list of initialisms in Anglicized and Japanese forms. 

WIP stands out. In English, it means “work in progress”. The phrase can mean a draft for rewriting by the writer or polishing by an editor.

The Japanese characters for WIP are still three, which, I am guessing, illustrate the essence of each word in the acronym. 

These three symbols intrigue this non-Japanese reader. The first character looks like crochet needles with bits of yarn hanging as if a knitter hastily put down the needles to check if the pot of rice she put on boil hours ago has not run dry.

There is never an ideal time to write. In between chores, duties, distractions, and excuses, I have even tried the proverbial trick of waiting to write until the children are asleep. By that time, I am also asleep.

The second symbol seems to be a mad woman caught in the crosshairs of a web of yarn, reminding me of every sentence I ended up writing after a whole day of reading and thinking. At the extreme end of the spectrum languishes my long-suffering editor, CTL (not an initialism but her actual newsroom acronym), who often returned my copy because I wrote more than the news hole could fit. 

Hovering somewhere between a yawnsome trickle and a destructive torrent of words, the fluctuations undergone by a WIP are more maddening than my battle with pounds and kilos. 

And the last Japanese character in the translated WIP resembles a small plate mounted on a stick, like the labels a gardener sticks before a row of seeds to jog memory when the future brings the impressive fruits of her labor. 

Writing an essay takes a person to places not foreseen. This is a form that thrives on digressions.

Even more disorderly and disruptive is the use of the “I”. In an essay, the “I” is more than a point of view looking outward. It is an interior digging towards light at the end of the tunnel. Or into the septic tank.  

The reason WIP occupies my mind these days is a project I am undertaking with other women writing about organizing, supporting, and sustaining community pantries in the south. 

If you have a WIP to contribute, please email your essay to mayette.tabada@gmail.com.

A friend speculates that the community pantries may be long gone before the stories see print. But as the wonderful Japanese ideographs suggest, a story-in-the-making is a measure against forgetting. Long live, storytellers!

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 9, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”    

Boomerang

 

I READ the stories I like. When I cannot find these stories, I write them. 

Forged one summer when my younger self ran out of books to read and my exasperated father made me read twice the novels before he returned these to friends (“in case you skipped to the ending”), this self-help principle seems to be rendered obsolete by the endless stories streaming online.  

Obscure, literary magazines priced beyond my budget now mirror their content in obscure, literary websites that give free unlimited access or a certain number of free articles per month for subscribers. 

Online public libraries have deep virtual shelves that include every bookworm’s fantasy, from the out-of-print to the highly popular titles that are never on the shelf in a brick-and-mortar library. 

Digital reservations perfectly work because the marvelous robotic librarians never sleep and carry out without glitch their program to abet the electronic traffic in books.

As a reader, I look for the divergences that connect and the connections that diversify, which reading brings as true rewards. We are chosen by our stories as much as we select the stories we read. 

Once, I posted a picture of two boomerangs found in a Japan surplus store after I was tagged by a friend to post 10 photos for 10 days, with no explanations except for the theme of the “love of travel”. The idea of “travel” bemused me as our community had just entered another enhanced community quarantine (ECQ).

Seeing my boomerang post, another friend inquired on Messenger if my boomerangs were functional or decorative.  I picked up the boomerangs because of their handpainted images of ancestral creatures from Dreamtime, which, according to the Australian aboriginal myth, is where creation began.

L. explained to me that a functional boomerang that returns back to the thrower has a slanted inner arm. She knew this because her father used to make boomerangs. 

And then she told me one of the Dreamtime myths behind the first boomerang. At the start of life, all creatures walked on fours because the sky was too low for upright walking. When a man came upon an unusual piece of wood, so straight and beautiful, he used this to prop up the sky.

The sky stays where it is now. The piece of wood, though, had become bent and ugly. Thinking it was useless, the man threw it away.

“It came back,” narrated my friend. May the stories we release to the world find their way back to renew us.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 2, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Muse

THE MOTH I mistook at first for a dead leaf or a brown stain on the wall. The kitten who trails me like a shadow pounced and flipped it. The brown wings fluttered on the kitchen floor before I scooped and placed the moth on the water dispenser.

Peering to check if its wings had not been ripped, I was diverted by the moth’s antennae.  In Cebu, the white wall in the garden is a magnet for moths of varied sizes and shapes. Yet, I had never seen until that day antennae as lush and feathery as the ones on the moth that narrowly escaped being toyed to bits.

Sweeping the air with majesty, these projectiles could be coveted by a drag queen or a teen fixated on eyelash extensions. I thought these antennae suited the more elaborate Lepidoptera cousins, the butterflies, but online sources pointed out that a moth flying at night needs these antennae more to make minute but crucial adjustments mid-air to evade obstructions or predators.

The flamboyance of the antennae creates more surfaces for sensors that make the moth more sensitive to smell than a butterfly.  Relying on the wind-borne information processed by the mechanosensors, a moth can smell and locate food or mate even more than seven miles away.

I wondered about our journeys, the confluence that brought a moth, a kitten, and a human in a kitchen being hosed down and cleaned of dog litter. The kitten has all the impetuosity of the five-months-young, pulled invisibly by curiosity and appetite. Already forgetting the moth, she was stalking more accessible prey, the dripping hose head.

The moth had not moved from the water container. It was probably recovering its breath as I was, caught in the eddies of house cleaning, clearing, cooking, washing up, sorting ad nauseam. 

Chores have the undemanding predictability of the quotidian. If I break routine, I brace against and resist the erosion of a formless, immovable monolith I attempt without any trace of irony to shove aside daily to do the work that matters. 

Autocratic but familiar, domesticity beguiles and smothers, delaying the chaos that begins when I sit in front of a screen or open a notebook.  A spanking spotless kitchen, matching pairs of socks: the harbor recedes the farther I strike away to put together a sentence or, by some miracle, paragraphs.

At the turn of the century, the few women who wrote did so for family and friends. Women authors were not published until newspapers, seeing a new market, opened a news hole for short essays. 

Immobile, the moth only puts forth its antennae to argue against historical elision: if you fly blind, trust in yourself, disorder and all.  Tell your stories; let the stories tell you. And fly. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 28, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Dispensable

 

SUMMERS when A. came to live with us were good ones for my sister and I. Younger than I but older than my sister, A. was a perfect fit. 

But as kooky as she was about playing and chattering with us, A. loved Math, too. Studying in an upland public school in the southwest of Cebu, A. welcomed the workbooks we passed on to her at the end of the school year.

While we thought Math matched summer the way “bagoong (fermented fish)” complemented ice cream, A. answered the computation exercises with a gusto that awed. 

Saying the books would be used by her younger siblings and even teachers, A. avoided marking the books’ pages. A. sewed together the unused leaves of our discarded notebooks and made another notebook, where she worked on the computations. 

Paper is a material we take for granted as always being there, disposable because replaceable. Yet, while I was browsing in a bookstore, two women walked in and inquired about planners, only to be informed that none was carried by the store this year. 

In previous years, the display of paper journals began as early as December. Like wall and desk calendars, perhaps diaries are phased out, their commercial value fading with the rise of technology, the replacement of eminently more desirable gadgets, and shifting trends in consumption.

The year 2020 left a host of casualties, with planners one of the hardest hit. With work, studies, worship, malling, and other social activities suspended, what was there to plan, tick off, or reschedule after months and months of a pandemic of drudging sameness?

A few days ago, I watched the digital story of a friend who celebrated her unboxing of a planner. She even crowed about the free pencils received from the online seller. Another friend posted the printed designs adorning a desk calendar. These are former students, now colleagues, whose love for print I am familiar with.

The journals I kept in 2020 are sliced through with a wide track of unsullied paper, not just marking the days and months bled dry by state-mandated community quarantine but also stretches of instances left blank by self-imposed isolation. 

At the rims of these blank troughs are my scribblings. Before knowing mechanical print, paper knew the slopes of a writing tool held by a person following thoughts half-glimpsed in a trail of lines and slopes. 

By practicing penmanship, I found my way through last year. One’s cursive, like paper, seems always to be there until it’s not.

A. showed a long time ago what it took to renew and repurpose. Here’s hoping that, with this year’s journals, my writing hand will remember.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 31, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, 

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”

Free

 

“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”

Analog

THE PLANNER I chose for next year disconcerts. It marches the months in a row before inserting the weekly pages. The journal plots 2020 but begins in December 2019.

Then I remember why I liked this journal, its simple lay-out, almost bare except for fine lines and grey print. I am seduced by all that expanse of unmarked paper inviting contact with a pen’s nib or the gossamer brush of daydreams.

Yet, choosing a planner these days has become a chore. Do you need one for goals, exploration or inspiration? Will it be a-page-a-day, a weekly spread, monthly, five years, or a lifetime?

The word “planner” itself is a giveaway. Do I “plan” each day, let alone 365 days? While I live with some intentionality, productivity is a grid that I chafe at rather than welcome.

Perhaps this mindset has something to do with my start in keeping a journal. In grade school, my father passed on to me the diary given away by pharmaceutical companies. I could doodle in it and buy with my savings a book instead of a sketch pad, he suggested.

Later, my maternal grandmother gave me the journal a bank gave at yearend to clients.

How would I fill all those pages? Nothing much happens to a seven-year-old.

I did not know then the effect paper has on imagination. I tore out and cut up the medical ads inserted in the journals. Purple intestines, blue hearts, and rainbow organs became paper mosaics. I drew cartoons in the readymade panels of the corporate diary.

And I experimented with my handwriting, trying and discarding attempts to copy my classmates’ admirable cursives before settling down with the scrawl that is no one else’s but mine.

Even though I compose now with a keyboard, I think there is no better way than holding a pen and letting it flow on paper to hear myself better.

Keeping a journal is like taking a walk. Why one does, where one goes are minutiae; what matters is keeping the conversation running.

The bead of ink from the ballpoint becomes a trickle, a gush, then a slipstream widening into a channel where the unknown tempts and daunts.

Ever the good listener, paper receives everything unspooled by the pen, absorbs confidences, makes omissions palpable, nudging the voice to move on to the next recall, coax the lurking insight, claim the orphaned memory at the fringes of self-conceit.

In these digital times, when each is hell-bent on talking to all, writing to oneself, an attentive, thoughtful audience of one is not just another analog anachronism, not a trend in communicating in bullet form, not a selfie in long form. If we cannot hear ourselves, who can?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 24, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Before Eve

WHEN we were girls, my sister and I pretended we owned an island and did absolutely nothing we did not want to do and everything we wanted to. At those ages, our indulgences ran to: not doing house work, sleeping when we wanted to.

Remembering that childhood game, I wondered if it had been at the backs of our minds then to not marry, not bear children, not lead domestic, thoroughly domesticated, lives in that Isle of Not’s.

Couching that fantasy requires a series of negations. No, sustaining that imaginary demands exploding social myths, for instance: if a woman is not a wife and a mother, what is she?

Cebu in the 1970s was a bastion of traditions bookended by family, school, church, and state. Even just conscious of the first three, my sister and I created the Isle of Not’s as a backdoor, almost as if we already foresaw our futures.

It was then with a shock of recognition that I came across Dolores Stephens Feria’s essay, “The Patriarchy and the Filipina as Writer,” which is part of her book, “The Long Stag Party” (1991).

Dolores knows the women of the diaspora. Before global migration, colonization imploded the Filipina. An American who married a Filipino academic despite the anti-miscegenation tide in the U.S., Dolores joined her husband in returning to the country after the Second World War. She taught English and literature at the Silliman University and the University of the Philippines Diliman. Shortly after martial law was imposed, she was arrested and detained without charges for three years.

In the journal she kept clandestinely during her incarceration, Dolores wrote how state oppression made Filipinos stateless in their own country. For women, the oppressions were more restrictive.

Likening to one “long stag party” the Spanish and American colonizations that subjected women to the double bind of imperialist and masculinist domination, Dolores argued in her essay that the colonialist and androcentric writing of Philippine history buried women who, in pre-colonial times, were the “babaylan,” “dumandang,” and “mandadawak”.

These pre-colonial healers, psychic interpreters of a tribe’s inner life, and priestesses were supplanted by men by way of the pulpit, the bedroom, the classroom, and the political sphere. When assimilation did not work—most women had their uses as wives and daughters—society turned these ill-fitting ones into Others.

At the turn of the century, women who wrote were regarded as treacherous as uncharted islands on which men could dash and lose all plans and ambitions for progeny. Outside of my sister’s and my imagination, these female Isles of Not’s existed. Who was Dolores referring to?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 14, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata"

Contact

SNUG in its father’s chest, with only its small head poking out of the sling, the infant slept on as its parent checked out merchandise. In a mall during a weekend, I spotted father and baby among the people milling about the infant section of a department store.

At first, I was drawn to the ring sling, a frontal variation of the papoose that’s made with a loop of cloth threaded through two rings. When my sons were babies some 30 years ago, the ring sling wasn’t trendy yet. Nor was babywearing a man thing, too.

Then I noticed what hogged the young father’s attention while his baby napped. It was a tube he kept upending then peering into with an eye at one end. A kaleidoscope.

A favorite back when I was a child, the “magic” tube occupied me endlessly. I held it to the light, shook the tube, and watched the colored bits inside dissolve into crazy patterns, no two ever alike. When I first held my parents’ gift, I thought it was cooler than a book.

I mentally added the kaleidoscope in my rapidly filling bucket list for future grandchildren, and then moved to a secondhand bookstore. Bookstore browsing is my weekend contact sports, with reading titles sideways or on my knees having the highest level of difficulty so far, while other bookworms around me trawl, read, diss/defend authors, flirt, and, once, write what must have been a book in the making.

Stepping out to take a breath, I realized, not for the first time, how all of us must resemble ants tunneling around merchandise, which can be summed up in three adjectives: American, popular, and cheap.

There is a smattering of authors with non-North American names but rarely anyone representing the Global South, which, in transnational or colonial speak, stands for developing or less developed countries. Only in Cebu did I buy books written in English by Cebuano authors in a branch of this popular secondhand bookstore.

As a reader whose obsession for books outranges her budget, choosing to read works about the Filipino written by the Filipino is an act of will that often gets eroded by what’s left in my wallet even after I forego brewed coffee and “turon”.

Yet, to quote anthropologist Arturo Escobar, “we are… placelings”. “To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in,” Escobar quotes philosopher Edward Casey.

Since I was a kid, the imaginary, imagined, and imaginative lures and beguiles, like magic glimpsed at the end of the kaleidoscope. Yet, life, enfleshed and quivering, can only be in the here and now, what’s in place and in contact, enrooting, transforming, transposing.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 17, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Pinoy fiction

“PANIC buying.” This was how a national daily captioned the snaking queues of people pushing carts loaded with books during a recent book fair in Pasay City.

The event duplicated the mammoth crowds that turned up and hauled away brand-new copies of books that had as much as 90 percent of their selling price slashed off in similar fairs conducted last year in Manila, Cebu, and Davao.
According to the organizers, the popular choice last year was fiction. 

Stories created from imagination appeal to readers looking for “light” reading to relax with. Yet, short stories and novels frequently bring us to unexpected places, confronting what we may have avoided without even being conscious of avoiding such.

Fiction is my first and abiding love. Yet, it was only a few years back, in a graduate class on poetics, that I realized how I was blindly reading fiction.

In that class, I was the only one majoring in journalism. All my classmates and the professor were writing poems, short stories, and novels. My classmates who were at least a decade younger than me, and my professor, decades older than me, did not just bracket the generations of Filipinos.

So I made it a habit after class to walk to the university bookstore and look for the works of Filipino authors that cropped up in the discussions. Whenever I was in mall bookstores, I looked for Filipinos writing in English because while fiction is my natural environment, the Filipino language plunges me into deep-seated anxieties and sinkholes of meaning.

Following this collect-and-read pattern, I note that the past seven years have seen greater visibility of Filipino fictionists in bookstores. Yet, there is still a proliferation of established authors whose “classic” works are being reprinted. 

Remembering my classmates’ manuscripts-in-progress, as well as speculating on the works being critiqued in writing workshops and awarded in literary contests held across the nation, I wonder about the paucity of publicly accessible titles written by Filipino fictionists: the young, the emerging, the regional, and the transnational.

Where do the works go? If we yearn to be a nation of readers, shouldn’t we also be reading the works created by Filipinos to balance a diet nourished by other imaginations?

Some years ago, a novel by a Filipina was marketed as the “first Filipino detective story”. My friend R. countered that Nick Joaquin’s “Cave and Shadows” deserves that first distinction.

What about the second, third, fourth…? There’s a hunger to be sated.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu in its February 24, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Writing again

THANKS to social media, former students keep in touch. One of the subjects frequently raised is writing.

Although their careers have taken off, the writing they once carried out regularly—oppressively, too, as I once handled 7:30 a.m. classes and am inflexible with deadlines and rewriting—catches hold of them again.

Some wonder if they can go back to writing again.

The “again” punctuates their thoughts like a lead sinker. The qualifier embraces many possibilities but this one seems to apply to my former students: can I write again even after not writing for many years?

As my semester as a student draws to a close, I realize a deeper anxiety can yawn under someone who writes for a living: can I write what I have always wanted to write?

Yes is the answer to both questions.

Commenting on “Letters Home,” which published nearly 400 of Sylvia Plath’s letters, written from her years as a college freshman up to the final days leading to her death by suicide, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “What comes across in these letters is a survivor who knew that to be a writer means discipline, indefatigable commitment, and passion for hard work.”

Of writers writing about writing, Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings” lingers.

The slim volume collects three lectures the fictionist delivered at Harvard University in 1983. The book is organized into “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice”.

Immediately, on the first paragraph of the first section, Welty answers obliquely the self-doubts that plague writers by opening with, “In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks.”

The power of reminiscence to guide the writer is clinched at the close of this perfect paragraph: “It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.”

“Writing by not writing” is a technique used by writers to hoard material, sharpen skills, or refresh inner resources.

As my professor, the poet J. Neil Garcia, said at the start of poetry workshops: you cannot write if you have not read. Rich, Plath, and Welty grew up in “bookish homes”.

Reading is a pleasure to be enjoyed for its own sake. Yet, caught up in it, one comes into the presence of the unspeakable.

The desire longing ache to shake loose from what also bound the limbs of Lazarus before Jesus summoned him to come forth from the grave can only end when one writes.



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


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 5, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Paper cuts

WHEN you write, you make an incision. You make a cut and think you know what follows.

Sometimes, the writing surprises. The sliver opens and a stranger looks out. You cannot look away. You can. You want to. You don’t want to.

Writing is pain. It should come with the standard warning for danger zones: DO NOT ENTER.

I should have said this when I was invited by the “Tug-ani,” the official student publication of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu.

Michelle Grace Cabrales, a Business Management student who’s the current Tug-ani EIC, and her team invited writers to discuss the craft and make a critique of articles submitted by the participants.

I chose covering human trafficking to jumpstart the talk on features, which two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jon Franklin likens to “news of the emotions”.

Students of UP and the University of San Carlos showed up for the Friday talk, which included fellow teacher and writer Joanalyn Gabales and our resident cat, Walter Stefano.

Our small group discussed after my talk our reactions to four articles written by “Tug-ani" writers. Claire Michaela Obejas, a Psychology major who wrote one of the articles, asked how one knew which voice to follow when a writer found herself shifting from one point of view to another in the course of writing an article.

During the workshop, my response addressed the question as a technical one involving planning and publication: on an assignment, a writer discussed with the editor the desired format, angle, length, and deadline.

If contributing an article, a writer has better chances of publishing if he or she scopes out the targeted section, the ratio of text to graphics, and the targeted audience.

Yet, Claire’s question went beyond the challenges of deadline and market. Striking out beyond the safe harbor of information and “verifiable” truth, a writer can wander without noticing into the quagmire of memory, introspection, and self-conflict.

When one finally notices the water rising, what act of self-preservation does one choose: retreating back to the shallows or going into the deep?

In a movie directed by Wong Kar-Wai, a journalist and a secretary discover that their spouses are having an affair.

“In the Mood for Love” is set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, which Wong depicts as a claustrophobic prison of cramped apartments, nosy neighbors, and double standards.

Albeit betrayed, the protagonists do not want to betray their spouses. Or think they don’t.

Not even his profession in dealing with truth saves the man from self-deception.

Beyond the tidy rules of grammar, writers learn that paper cuts are the deepest, “the most unkindest cut of all”.



*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 16, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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

Summer mysteries

CATCHING sight of the modest starbursts of yellow in our water apple tree, I realized that summer is here.

The tiny flowers with many stamens promise that the bell-shaped fruits will soon be out. I grew up thinking that the fruits saturated in pink verging on the red were the juiciest and sweetest.

The tree in our small garden, though, yields only the greenish white bells of the parent tree from which it was marcotted. Their pale jade wakes a memory of sourness, only to be dispelled when the first bite brings a watering, overflowing tart sweetness.

Like children and water apples, summers change. Of all the occupations I held, I stayed longest with teaching perhaps because it left me summers to enjoy.

Two months of freedom from school and routine challenged my sister and I to think of ways to rush sunrise into sunset. Long after we tired of eating, playing, quarrelling, and watching TV, the day was still far from over.

So I read. When I was finished with the books at home, I reread those I liked.

Then I got tired even with the ones I liked. So I wrote.

I discovered empty sheets in old notebooks, and converted these spaces into an impatient, furious confessional. Some stories I rewrote and reread to myself.

School interrupted. But there was always summer to look forward to.

Now, whenever I see summer’s flowers—white stars dotting the water apple tree, the dirty yellow carpet shed by trees growing on the wayside, orange flames engulfing fire trees—I think of the mysteries of reading and writing.

As a consequence of the shift to the August to May international academic calendar, the midyear term has affected summer.

Yet, it may take time for the rationale of improved competitiveness brought about by synchronization with the global community to seep in and transform summer, which, in this country, embraces not just climate but also culture and consciousness.

Recently, I saw on my table a story handwritten and illustrated on a ruled yellow sheet of paper. Its author is Athea, 9.

She loves to plant herbs with her two younger brothers. When she discovered how much herbs fetch in markets, she made up her mind to grow and sell them.

Athea and her brothers have mixed cement, sand, and water to help the carpenters building their home. She has also made up her mind to become an architect.

In a haste to grow up, Athea makes time to read Geronimo Stilton. She can only focus on her tablet for half an hour. Then she gets restless and looks for a sheet of paper and pencil.

Her tale of two friends and their floating pumpkin came from one such interval in Athea’s crammed, full life. And for her, summer—a lifetime of summers—has yet to begin.



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

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 5, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Love letters

“MARKING papers” is an inevitability if one embraces teaching as a calling. The expression may confuse some but is actually more accurate than the Filipinism we favor: “checking papers”.

In reply to an expat colleague, who commented on the uncommon number of teachers bent over their desks in the faculty room, I explained that we were “checking papers”.

When she came back to the room to refill her mug of tea, she said that the expression was quite new to her. Indeed, reviewing papers means more often pointing out slips and gaps in the work than making neat little check marks.

Generations of students have this one abiding memory of being in my class: a trail of “bloody” papers inevitably demanding to be rewritten and resubmitted for more “marking”.

The journalist who taught me how to write news in college narrated how her teacher favored a green pen for checking copy.

The tradition was to use a blue pencil since typewriter ribbons came then in only two colors: black and red. “Blue penciling” meant scribbled “love notes” an editor left on copy that should not be ignored by a “green” reporter who wanted to spend a lifetime with ink-stained fingers.

Personally, I like red pens. Nothing like the impact of red against white paper to stand as visual semaphores: Replace that verb! Are you stringing along adjectives? What’s wrong with a period? Check, spell, get it right.

The advent of computers was supposed to lessen the writer’s post-editing traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Tidy, neatly-aligned-to-the-right balloons contained the editor’s comments, insertions and deletions instead of the slashes and unreadable, unprintable comments of the blue-pencil era.

I don’t mark copy in this virtual, bloodless manner. I tell my students it’s a compliment to have this kind of close, obsessive, ferocious reading of their works. Pay attention to your reader. Listen to what she thinks. If the copy is returned to you without marks, it may be already perfect. Or it was never read at all.

This midyear, seven students chose to apprentice with print newsrooms. That’s about 10 percent of a batch whose predominant choices leaned towards corporate or development communications.

This “Magnificent 7” intrigued me. Millennials have a different way of reading and, presumably, of writing. Of all the kinds of writing, news writing for the print medium is the least expressive, the most self-effacing, the most enveloped by conventions and standards.

At least two student moaned that they would never get a story published.

That was at the start of the course. The stories told by their writer’s journal tells another thing. At the completion of 200 hours, an intern submits a compilation of their published works. I require they pass the entire printed or online page so I can see how the editor treated their article and grade them accordingly.

More telling than the editorial treatment is the student’s filing of their body of works. Some articles were filed in the folios as if the writer was in a bloody hurry, impatient with an assignment once passed, already focused on the next one and the next deadline.

Other interns file their articles, even those of a few column inches, in a scrapbook to be scanned some day with a grandchild on one’s lap, hanging on intently to the retelling of the backstory behind each article. Once upon a red pen…


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 17, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The lost art of paper

I BRING paper to my classes. After three years of studies, I am glad to put to use all these discarded but still useful sheets.

I bring these sheets for reuse also because I’ve noticed that Millennials don’t have much use for paper. Rather than copy the lectures or assignments I scribble on the board, my students take a shot with their phone. They record thesis consultations. They present with PowerPoint.

When I announce an “exercise,” the one or two students with paper often end up sharing the pad with classmates. Perhaps like one awaiting word from someone on a journey, I push this pile of paper on my students because I would like to catch sight of their penmanship or read thoughts that haven’t first been Googled.

A Sept. 4 report from the International New York Times (INYT) confirmed what I always knew. Makers of backpacks—a $2.7 billion industry led by JanSport producer VF Corporation—are redesigning this student staple because Millennials bring fewer textbooks and more electronics.

A team from VF Corporation interviewed two groups of “extreme” backpack users: mountaineers and the homeless in San Francisco. The first group packs gear that must instantly be reachable. Because their life, too, hinges on this packing principle, the second stores disposables in shopping carts but also keeps money and food in backpacks.

All this industrial brainstorming is creating a new crop of backpacks that responds to the digital lifestyle, from designs that can fit solar panels for survival to so-called “Digital Burritos” that ensure cords and chargers will not emerge tangled from a bag.

And paper? The INYT article only mentioned water-resistant materials, which may be regular features that are in place to primarily protect electronic gear. More than three decades ago, I closely examined the straps of a backpack before buying to make sure the bag could hold all my notebooks, novels AND the books I would still be borrowing from the library.

In a coffee shop, where I take an occasional cup of hot choco to chase away midweek blues, I noticed that I seemed to be the first to shake open the shop’s newspapers, whether I came early in the day or just before closing. Even when they don’t come alone, the other patrons are often “in a relationship” with their gadgets.

So when I once saw a fellow writing in a notebook, I stared long and hard just to verify the pencil wasn’t a stylus pen and the platform, a touchscreen gadget in retro disguise, made to look like a notebook in the “classic” style.

As all letter writers, paper book readers, and other pre-digital dinosaurs know, a sheet of paper means communion. Blank or covered in script or text, paper invites indwelling, an emptying and a refilling that I’ve never been able to do in front of a screen.

St. Augustine traced the word’s origin to “com” and “unus,” meaning “with oneness”. His definition embraces every possibility paper can conjure, from a reader’s escape into a world spun by language and imagination to the daily acts of resuscitation that bring together a psyche sundered by timetables and minutiae.

While industries move on and embrace the digital as the future, I think I’ll stay with paper. I agree with mountaineers and the homeless: Keep your lifesavers close to you.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s November 22, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Script for life

NOTEBOOKS punctuate our learning more than we expect.

When a school year begins, we weigh down our shopping basket with this classroom staple: 90 or 100 leaves, sewn or spiral, iconic white-as-a-blank-tablet or politically correct recycled sepia.

At the end of the year, I see the notebooks again to weed out the used from the unused pages. When the boys were in the lower years, I recycled the remaining clean sheets to jot down grocery lists or mathematical exercises.

But as they grew older, the boys seemed to use fewer pages until it seemed, at the end of the school year, the notebooks looked as mint as they were when the year was about to start.

It’s not a surprise. Homework, readings, news, chitchat, photos, research, music, videos—from the Web unwinds the spool of their wired lives.

Computers, PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones: the young will sooner be parted from the womb than from the electronic extensions of their identity.

Will the digital age banish the notebooks of old to the trash-crammed pockets of last year’s knapsack?

I hope not. Notebooks, with their leaves of paper, are the spaces where we learn how to write. Recent research has psychiatrists and neuroscientists asserting that writing by hand lets children read more quickly and communicate more expressively.

In a June 2, 2014 article, “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,” Maria Konnikova of The New York Times reported that a University of Washington study of children in grades two through five showed that those who composed text by hand produced more words and ideas than those typing on a keyboard.

In brain imaging, those with better handwriting showed greater activation of neural activity in areas associated with reading, writing and memory.

Other studies showed that, over tracing and printing letters, cursive writing has an edge, such as training self-control. This is food for thought for parents whose five- or six-year-olds are quicker than their elders to swipe and activate their personal tablets as soon as they are seated.

At the very least, it’s an argument favoring eateries with paper placemats that challenge adults to unscramble letters and their children to doodle while waiting for pizza.

The scientific link between penmanship and communication is even more significant for public school students. Reportage about the first day of classes this week has generally been dismal and frustrating: cramped classrooms, “alternative” classes where learning is dubious, even chairless classrooms.

In one TV report, primary students were sprawled on their sides or tummies, writing in notebooks. Chairs had yet to be delivered.

While the situation sorely tests the students’ endurance, not to mention legibility, the exercise with paper and pencil prepares them for a principle proven in laboratories and classrooms: writing by hand helps a person process a lecture and reframe it in his or her words.

According to The New York Times article, perfecting the art of penmanship in childhood benefits the adult’s skills in comprehension, encoding, reflection and memory. A Yale psychologist who is unconvinced by the link between handwriting and learning did admit that “(handwriting) maybe… helps you think better”.

I remember comparing research skills then and now with a college librarian. She said the Internet may have helped students come up with more pages in their theses. Yet, she observed that teachers have to work harder to review manuscripts for plagiarism.

I said the copy-and-paste garden variety of plagiarism must save a lot of library books from losing their pages. She retorted: still doesn’t mean there’s a lot of reading going on. Aye, that’s the rub.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 8, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”