So again, How Do You Write?

I think for scratching dirt that your art may live, you are bound
to be found in another time by someone also scratching dirt.


Call me what you want, but I don’t really think of my works, of what I write, as craft. I don’t think of myself as an artiste, I am less than that, and also, sometimes, I am more. Life is always bigger, monstrously so, than all that we can do and live for to insist on a fame we can die with.

But of course, I gash if a colleague in the writers guilds or some artiste group dismisses me as less than a writer, or if they drop me for a crappy radfem beside their nationalist artist status. Or when Aida Rivera-Ford, for instance, dreadlocked and well made-up, introduces me to a baffle of high school students as “the next case” as in “the next case is a feminist”, or when the aged Don Pagusara waves me away as “kabalo pud mosulat”. Artisthood, along with craftmanship, is something I really don’t consciously aspire for. I cannot recall counting the meters of any of my verses. If by chance some tallied, either they wrought themselves or, I must have played by ear. I’m bad at quoting the masters and I often mix things up, mistaking one for the other, but for every line they say that serves me, I thank them, and it’s enough moment of glory. Today I quote Walt Whitman: I stand in my own day, and to that I add, And fuck immortality.

I know what I am great at: ransacking the English language, for one. I used to envy those who could name themselves, Audre Lorde, for instance, who called herself a warrior-poet. I did wish I could call myself a warrior-poet. But war is high art and effective power is something I never felt I had. Whether as a feminist, or a lesbian activist, I always felt the mowed one, at each turn.


Someone I can't recall now once said that every time he speaks, his sense of endangerment increases. Speaking before an audience still scares me. I always have this image of cocked guns aimed at my head, whether the listeners were male or female. Speaking before a largely feminist audience in Lausanne, so surprised was I to see heads nodding at statements I made which I myself did not feel very intelligent. More surprised was I when they laughed at something I thoughtlessly said. If someone comes up to me to tell me she likes what I said on the mike, I still trip on my toe. At a poetry reading in Davao attended by Philippines’ so-called best, I panted as I read. I felt I was running. I felt I bombed the place and I should be picked up and manacled rather than shaking hands with people who patted me for my brave take on myself. Always, when I think of myself as speaking and when I think of my words as important, I cannot get through this image of people’s faces stonewalling me. Maybe what happened with me was that I had unconsciously made poems like some people make petrol bombs. Maybe I really want to bomb walls that stop me.

But to call myself a suicide bomber poet is a lot of bullshit. Bombing is high action. I have not demolished anything, not even made a hole on the wall. And anyway, my radfem sisters in Europe warned me not to be taken in with stories about female suicide bombers: It could be that those Muslim women who joined the suicide squads were not really there out of patriotic reasons. It could be that they’re patriotic, but likely, that’s on top of their patriotic brothers and fathers’ fielding them there in the suicide squads for having committed honor crimes, like they got themselves pregnant or they were adulterous and would be honorably rid of anyway. I’m no bomber, certainly, despite the strong terrorist streak in me.

I think I’m just a robber-poet. I can read Whitman or Plath and no sooner had I gotten to the second stanza than I had made up a hack of a poem that can only be called my own. I refuse to be shamed for what I did with the masters’ works. If anyone so much as take courage to castigate me for sacrilege, or theft, likely I will just tell him, How did you know it wasn't mine? I caught Whitman quoting me! My mother used to slap me: Just when she was most angry and was about to absolve me, I always had something better to say. She was proud of that. I heard her brag so to my Aunt and our neighbors. In my adult years I would be slapping strangers who would invariably slap, hit and spit back at me. It’s a hard take, but I just return to my mother’s pride and I stay sane.

I got to read Walt Whitman just very recently. I did not find him new; maybe because I got him already early on through Ginsberg or through Dylan or some other late begotters of him that I’d run into first. Of course I realized that in his time his writings were radical. I did feel unliterate not knowing for a long time what made him such a big event in literature, but I really didn’t know many people in world literature and in Philippine folklore and letters, for that matter. I have this stubbornness in my soul to keep away from the gods. You worship Who? Pues, I will not read him. Maybe I owe it to Rolaiza. She would always refuse to watch movies that the intelligentsia liked to queue at; always refused to read the bestsellers that came with them. She reads Hardy when none reads him anymore; and she reads bestsellers when they’re not bestsellers anymore. She always had a thing or two to say of the Hollywood movies, and also of the intelligentsia that watched them, and I stayed by her word and by her side not only because I did find her innately more intelligent than most of the intelligentsia I knew, but also because she always paid for our tickets.

Or maybe it goes back far into my childhood. To my elders’ annoyance, I always drew the pictures of the anti-heroes in the komiks I read: the adulteress, the robber, the prostitute, the tomboy, and I always drew them beautiful. Reading Jane Eyre, my sympathy and interest went long to the burning woman in the attic, not to Jane and her master for whom I did not feel the least admiration. When later Jean Rhys wrote a novel reinventing the girlhood and marriage of the woman in the attic, I gloated at my perspicacity.


I tend to look to those unrewarded ones. Or to those who get rewarded despite. I even would rather look to those who have altogether stopped writing or have not taken to writing at all but read deep and wide. Like who? I could not think of one immediately. I never got to know what makes other writers stop writing, momentarily or permanently, but I do think that productivity is for the pineapple and the banana industries, not for writers. That’s what sucks with the writing business: if writers start thinking they should meet quotas of works or awards or else they will perish. I admire people who do not fear their own absence. The social scene is the death of the writer. What is she doing there anyway.

I could not think of who belong to the rewarded despite. I hardly follow the awarding ceremonies to know who are there. César Ruiz-Aquino maybe. But Stories, if I remember right, won third, not first prize in the Palanca. And his collection of stories got a belated award, thanks to his friends who must have missed him in the Manila scene for some time. Don Pagusara has been rewarded for the wrong things. His better creations, if I followed his career right, were his poetry and freedom songs made in the 1980s, maybe in the 1970s, and later the Cebuano poetry which DEMS, the cultural education outfit he was once part of, made into songs. The stories and plays that won him awards and grants are so-so. I think it unfair for artists and writers to win for the wrong things. A writing fund awarded in your retiring years to see you through your battle with cancer or to help you look after your comatose artist-husband can be painfully humiliating when you know that you deserved recognition way back,in your braver years. It is unfair. Just like how unfair for Renee Zellwegger to win Supporting Actress for her negligible performance in Cold Mountain when she performed better in Chicago. All because the judges would rather have depressive writers with heroic husbands than heartless wives to clueless dudes, as Salon.com said.

I cannot think of others that are unrewarded despite, and I cannot count those who do not join literary contests because they don’t believe in them. And anyway, you wouldn’t know who are good and didn’t get awards because most of them do not have the resources to publish themselves. Doris Lessing, who might never win a Pulitzer for what she writes and for her productivity, said something about women writers who are good only as far as they can go: They had to pay the penalty of being shown as good women even if they weren’t, according to the hypocrisies of their time. Of George Elliot, Lessing had this to say: there is a great deal that Elliot does not know, does not understand, because she is moral. I hauled Lessing in because that’s the thing with awards. You have to produce literature that is moral according to the morals of those who govern.


Unrewarded people are good judges because they owe no one. You may not agree on a single thing when it comes to art or what one should write about and how, but because they’re not bound by the institutions of learning that exhort people to write or think in a certain way, then they tend to be truthful. They are guileless and guiltless in their criticisms of you, and if they like you, it is not as though they conceded anything to you if they let you know that they admire you.

I cannot say a thing about texts I haven’t read, so I will just make a few notes about those I’m quite familiar with. Lualhati Bautista got rewarded several times over because she is good (even if she’s a hopeless heterosexual – at least as of her last novel) and also at the time her three novels went out, protest literature was the marching order. Same thing could be said of Jun Cruz Reyes, although he tends to sentimentalize those who are so much poorer and hungrier and did more for his much romanticized struggle than him. I do not like the screenplay Lualhati wrote for Bata, Bata Pa’no Ka Ginawa and don't give a damn about if it won an award in Belgium. The concessions she had to make to commerce. Lea Bustamante had to be shown a good woman because she happens to like sex. I think in a healthy society, everybody must like sex, and get it too. In Bata, Bata… Lea had to be shown a bleeding-heart mama above all her other virtues just so to counterbalance the “whore” in her. Motherhood feminism, I'd say. Movies like that are like religion: comforting to those of us who had so little for so long, but cultural mishmash nevertheless: They tend to confuse rather than.

When Sean Penn won Best Actor a few years back – and Bill Murray and other rebels in Hollywood – you would think a little poetic justice was in order. Ever the dogmatist that I was, I could not think of it as a good thing, because anyway the movies they must be doing now must have nothing to do with anything that critiques Establishment, so winning the award has no significance since there are no significant rebellions now in many Christian and moral countries. Of course, Mystique River is a great movie, nothing effete there; it might not be about the IRA (why did I think Hollywood should be making movies about conflict resolution in Ireland?), but it is still the kind of movie that anti-Establishment Sean Penn will choose to appear in. So the fuck with you and your issues, says faggot critic Douglas, Sure, Establishment can now afford to be kinder to its rebel sons since their rebellions are passé, who listens to them now, anyway, and Hollywood is triumphant capitalism, anyway, but for once look at it this way: Hollywood has been mollified, made sober by the times and the money it rakes, that now it can afford to recognize talent where talent is found: Despite being bad boys, Sean Penn and co. are really great actors, first and foremost, before and beside their being great rebels, where is your aesthetics? Did the fag Douglas say those? I think I said those.


There is a movie that Douglas once showed me: Frances. But maybe it was Jessica Lange’s portrayal that got us. Frances, the 1982 Hollywood edition, had a male angel who always appeared each time the evil mother deposited Frances to the mental asylum that lobotomized her. The male angel prop notwithstanding, the movie was depressing. But you hate the lie Hollywood produced for someone who struggled so much to live and have her one life count, and was killed, inch by inch, by Hollywood and the men who run it. The Chicana lesbians are right for their condemnation of what they call Hollywood feminism. I used to be sorry for my deprivation, but when I think of what Hollywood and the glossy magazines could have done to my mind had I been raised around them, I cannot be more grateful. Without them, I had been differently educated.


I want writings that leave a stake in the heart. Hardy on Father Old Time, Thomas on the house a little wrong on the head, Thurber on the murder of that fuck of an aviation genius Pal Smurch by the President of the US of A, Willa Cather about that wedding entourage that got fed to the foxes, and maybe Cesar Ruiz-Aquino's siring of a madwoman whose newborn got eaten by a dog, never mind if for an autobiographical take these were mostly in the third person and more than a day removed from the narrators.

Of the musician-poets, I still love Bob Dylan best because he knows what hurts and will not spare you. I got to know Bob Dylan by mistake. I was in this movement that manufactured poetry with barbed wires, candles and raised fists on T-shirts and posters. One that I liked was the Dylan Thomas poem which the detainees appropriated and rewrote into Do not go gently into the night, rage, rage against the dying of the light. As I said early on, I tend to mix things up. I did not have a phonograph at home, so at first I could not get it right which Dylan sang the times they are achangin’, the one with a bob, or the one with a thomas, and which Dylan wrote rage, rage against the dying of the light. Anyway, I just sort of flipped through the stacks in the library and it so happened that I got to Bob Dylan first before I got to Dylan Thomas. Around that time also, I got to meet Viktor the poet bum, and Diutay the musician bum. Also quite by mistake, the three of us got into some kind of a living arrangement in Diutay’s place, an interesting menage-a-troi on Andre’s back. Andre is Diutay’s wife who didn’t love Bob Dylan as much the three of us did, or at least she didn’t pretend to.


It used to be that when Bob Dylan sang Shakespeare he’s in the alley, with his pointed shoes and his bells talking to this French girl who says she knows me well (this could be a paraphrase), I’d fantasize that I was the French girl whose attention Bob Dylan was rather proud of procuring over Shakespeare. Now I fantasize I am Bob Dylan, and the French girl is a girlfriend Shakespeare didn’t know to be a dyke moonlighting in the Red Light District of Amsterdam where we met. Things are fine: If you believe Bob Dylan, you would think Shakespeare’s more interested in him than in me or in my French girl.

But to go back to barbed wire poetry:

Viktor used to say what a hopeless peripatetic I am that I could not leave behind my national democratic politics. I could not tell Viktor frankly then that beside that politics I thought nothing of him except for a dopehead. But I think he knew it, and though how he liked to quote Bob Dylan’s My Back Pages as a way of gently telling me that life is like a river it moves, he really let me alone with my bouts of nostalgia. That must be 1996 and the times were very different. I left Davao for Silliman because I was beginning to hate everyone in Davao. The natdem politics I put over on Viktor was really at its knees then or in deep recession, so when I spoke of natdem politics to Viktor, I really was still stuck in the eighties. And Viktor actually knew that, too, and that must be the reason he pitied me, at least politically. So as I said, first thing I did there was look for Bob Dylan in the library, thinking he got plenty of barbed wire poetry since they say he authored The times they are a changin’. But instead, I got Lay, lady, lay and his Back pages. Then I found Dylan Thomas and discovered how the natdem guys stole his poem. Thomas he didn’t say a thing about the dark days of military rule and anything of that sort, like the activists made out; he said, and again, this might be a paraphrase: Do not go gentle into the good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light. Imagine my happiness having the god of him rail against retirement plans in a period of triumphant reformism!


I always had a beef against the cliquey literati. They publish each other, they read each other, they reward each other. It’s no wonder they think so well of themselves which is a shame considering that they’re still living and shopping and history has not really begun yet to beat them into a knead. Thanks to Affirmative Action, the NCCA in Manila also now redistributes the funds and the awards to the provinces and so here in Davao, DWG and other grantees can have their own writers’ workshops, literary supplements, book projects, ethno-historical plays. The writing guild people can now also get to read their poems to captive college students and get paid in dimes for the effort. But what of that? And who joins the writers’ workshops, for instance? Take it from a Grind Inc. panelist: “It’s been a long long time since I last read a good story.” And Jose Sionel, quoting someone else: "Writers’ workshops are responsible for the publishing of third-rate poetry in America."

What I think is that writers’ workshops are responsible for the notion that writers are a lovely class of people. Writers’ workshops are some kind of a yuppie health spa, a self-affirmation cum mutual support program for writers in the same way that sessions like Towards A New Women’s Spirituality work for women activists, in the absence of fury. What they mostly teach in writers’ workshops is technique, structure, language, the rules. The rules, especially. And that to never trust the first draft. If you listen too much to them, especially when you haven’t begun to kick on your own yet, you will not be able to make your own stride, or if you had already, you might stagger to a stop. You won’t find your own voice, your own heartpace. You will sound just like everyone else. Better to write alone, when nobody’s watching. Publish later when you’re ready. Or to save yourself the trouble, publish posthumously. Have at least one friend, don’t trust husbands of lesser talent. If you cannot fight back alive, how much more when you're dead. Don't even trust lovers or friends of lesser grace. Hang them dry. Remember what Ted Hughes did to Sylvia Plath’s diaries? Lobotomy is not done only to the living. The dead’s surviving scripts get it, too.


I say hail to the first draft. You know it’s yours. No one else could claim to have mothered it, just you. No poachers, no coaches, no godfathers, no godmothers. You might start bloody, and it might take years to come, but what the heck, your first drafts will come to their own in time. The good thing is, it’s your strokes, it’s your grammar, it’s your language, your line, your text. They can’t touch it with their praises. They tend to overpraise, anyway, especially if you’re young, provincial, and good looking, or at least photogenic and slightly modest. “She’s ours, one of our best!” Imagine winning world reknown, and someone in the province telling his students over beer or in class that Oh, so much for Rosca. It wasn’t her work exactly, the New York critics circle kneaded it. Whoa!


Back here in Davao, I actually appreciate the pains tenacious nationalists and regional writers make, insisting on writing in Filipino or Cebuano, the writers’ workshops and creative writing classes being mostly alien shops, as Don Pagusara says, that will exterminate the race. I really am not an evangelist for the race, in so far as the race has progressed, and I’m no evangelist for the Cebuano language, at least in so far as the Cebuano text has been written. But I do care for those who work for a mass-based culture, even if they go to ridiculous lengths translating and spending so much time making themselves understood by the Manila literati and other audiences. Like Don Pagusara, for instance. I don’t understand why he had to give them the English translations of his works each time. Why?!? So that they will not say that he is not good in the language they are good at? Fear that his Cebuano writings will go extinct if he did not translate them himself into English today? I think for scratching dirt that your art may live, you are bound to be found in another time by someone also scratching dirt.


I have a case against translating. Fidelity to the maker, which is often equated with fidelity to the text, is a great thing. But to bring trains, cable cars, snows, bears and oak trees to the esteros of Dabaw? Unsa may atong bation ana. One can’t get fixated with poetic technique and language skills so much. Why bother to translate if you cannot take the heart of the poem to those who might hear it because the foreignness of the thing stays? That’s the trouble with the hegemony of English: you’ve got to prove that you’re not hurting it by translating it into a local language. As though you could harm Walt Whitman’s poetry if your Cebuano did not come near enough to his American English. As though Walt Whitman would bother to turn in his grave with your quoting and ribbing him. As though Walt Whitman was talking about American English when he spoke of poetry. As though Walt Whitman himself spoke the poetic language of his time. So much for faithfulness to the gods when the gods themselves favor rebels and infidels.

Poetic technique, just like structure, can get in the way of poetry. You wonder why reading some texts, you follow the words, you can see the skeleton (it shows through the skin), but where is the heart?


Taking up The Snows of Kilimanjaro, I liked to annoy my well-off students in ADDU for what it says about writing and gangrene. They could not see how hard it is for a writer to write about her friends who dine and wine her. They could not agree that comfort corrupts and that it could spell the death of a writer. I told them that saying No to money requires moral courage. But of course, most of them will never get to know what hunger can do and will do to you.

Douglas says hunger and depravity, direct contact with hell, makes one a better writer. I say to him how true. But first, it will make Douglas bitter.

And to take it from me: Biting the hand that feeds you requires as much moral courage, if not more.


(slightly revised from a piece written in 2006)