Shuttered

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the ugliest of them all?

I’ve lost count of the number of times our class on media and culture lamented over the state of our affairs.

“Our” here does not refer only to the Filipino; we have Indonesian and Indian classmates.

Yet, the mediatization of culture—a theory asserting that media frames and influences social interactions and more importantly, its discourses—illuminates issues that cannot be contained by borders of space, time, and specially constructs like culture.

In the 1800s, the English, Dutch, and Spanish colonial powers destroyed the Balangingi and Iranun people and called this act of genocide and ethnic cleansing the redemption of civilization from Muslim piracy and slave trade.

In the present, centuries later, the Christian phobia of the Moro simplifies my reaction to media reports of Islamism or Islamic militancy or fundamentalism. A complex issue is reduced to the same end of colonial campaigns: distrust the other.

Until I read James Francis Warren’s “Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity,” my grasp of pirates was the sum of watching reruns of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, produced by Hollywood and inspired by the popular theme park ride in Disneyland, perhaps the most insidious culture industry of all time.

I perceive therefore I know.

I criticize President Donald Trump for banning travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries; waffling on the role of neo-Nazi groups in the Charlottesville rally that turned violent; and more recently, caving in to pressure from the Right to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which may end with the deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Brought illegally to America by their parents, the so-called “Dreamers” escaped poverty, repression and threats to life but are now perceived to be rivals for jobs by blue-collar America, who compose the mass base of pro-Trump voters.

Yet, stranded for hours last Aug. 31 when the “Lakbayan” or People’s Caravan entered the University of the Philippines Diliman campus to assert the rights of indigenous peoples and the Moro people against state neglect, militarization, and other forms of oppression, I lamented my poor luck to be caught in the miserable crosshairs of history.

“To see is to know”. Snow White’s evil stepmother did not realize this; nor the Westerners gawking at the Igorots and pygmies displayed at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which adopted this motto in showcasing anthropology in 1893.

Nor will we. The mirror of our perceptions is trained on others; our eyes are shuttered from its one true reflection: ourself.


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

* First published in the September 10, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column of SunStar Cebu, “Matamata”

Penmanship

WHAT lurks behind the banal? Recently, the librarian made an observation after I handed to her the borrower’s cards to take out books.

Did I have a tough time learning to write such a long name? she asked.

Learning to write in script must have slowed me down in grade school since I was always bringing home classmates’ notebooks to copy the notes that the teachers erased before I could finish.

In high school, when classmates borrowed my notes more often than I did theirs, I remembered their grumbling that they could hardly read my penmanship.

Legibility is the hallmark of perfect penmanship, so we were inducted. Yet, intrinsic to character, penmanship is anything but uniform and remote. We write first to ourselves, if we write to anyone.

Generations of students have commented about my penmanship. The braver souls complain; the sentimental ones don’t throw away their drafts, which they say “drip” with the comments I pen in red ink.

Whether as teacher, editor or reader, scribbling on the margins of text is hardly vandalism or graffiti art: we are not declaring to a public but writing for ourself.

In Ha Jin’s short story, “Broken,” Shen Manjin, driven to rise in the Communist Youth League Section, stays after office hours to practice his penmanship.

“(T)he Political Department always needed cadres who could write well,” Ha Jin prefaces the vigor with which Manjin applies to his overtime exercises, anticipating a future when he will lead over a hundred branches of the Youth League and its more than five thousand railroad workers.

For two friends at the turn of the nineteenth century, penmanship was a test of devotion. Best friends forever (BFFs) Karl and Friedrich were as thick as thieves, once spending 10 days together, just talking.

When Karl died, only 11 people turned up. Yet Friedrich made it possible for his BFF’s life’s work, the outputs of day after day of researching in the Reading Room of the British Museum, to be published after Karl’s death.

The second and third volumes of “Capital” by Karl Marx was “stitched together” by Friedrich Engels from “hundreds of pages of scrawled-over drafts,” writes Louis Menand in an Oct. 10, 2016 article in “The New Yorker”.

“(Marx had spectacularly bad handwriting; Engels was one of the few people outside the family who could decipher it.)”

Whether as handmaiden to the seismic but invisible changes in a life or eyewitness to a body of ideas changing a world, handwriting is the ultimate subversion, proof that the personal is potent and enduring.


* First published in the September 3, 2017 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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

Dream university

SO indefatigable was the woman’s storytelling, she roped me in with her companion and perhaps the rest of the Toki jeepney passengers.

“Ikot” is the more popular version of the iconic jeepney that goes counterclockwise around the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines (UP).

The jeepney that goes around the campus clockwise is called “Toki,” which is “Ikot” spelled backwards. Had my curiosity won, I might have asked the Toki storyteller if she knew the legends behind the creation of these names.

However, when I disembarked, she was still in full stream, enumerating the members of her clan that graduated from, or taught or worked at, or was going to take the coming Upcat to enter the college associated with the different academic buildings in the Ikot/Toki route.

Passing the University of the Philippines College Admission Test (Upcat) is a ritual my sister and I went through, with varying degrees of uncertainty. UP was not my first choice for college, but I ended up finishing my undergraduate studies in Communication Arts at its Cebu campus.

My sister was unsure about her course so I suggested. She also finished Business Management at UP Cebu, quite happily as it turned out. Like many alumni, we can say our student identification numbers in our sleep.

My Toki companion’s discourse underlines again that the decision to choose UP is not just a personal or family decision but also a communal one.

Vivid oral historians are the Ikot and Toki drivers who have these past weeks been orienting senior high school students, parents and even grandparents seeking the Office of Admissions or Rodik’s for the iconic tapsilog break—part of the formal and informal rites initiating one to Diliman, the flagship campus.

What is most moving, though, are the students who must pass through the eye of the Upcat to enroll next year in their “dream university,” as one lass emphatically declared inside the Ikot, filled to bursting by her seemingly equally overwhelmed classmates.

For many takers, UP will remain just that, a dream.

Of the 87,000 who took Upcat in 2014, only 1,588 passed and were qualified to enroll in UP’s eight constituent universities across the nation. That’s a passing rate of 1.8 percent.

This year’s Upcat is historic, involving the first batch of senior high school students. How many takers will pass, enroll and graduate from UP? How many will enjoy greater subsidy or even the sustainability of free college education?

How many graduates will serve the people?

I would not mind sharing a Toki or Ikot with passengers brimming with stories of their UP-educated clans.


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


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 27, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”