Liberation Hogshit

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by amy bandiola



We didn’t notice it right away. The change was so slow, so imperceptible we hardly felt it. People just suddenly stopped clasping hands. I walked into the office one morning and realized that all the women were in the family way. At lunch break I sensed that conversations were going heavy on infant formulas and child prodigies in danger of being raised by ignorant househelps who could not cook a proper meal but knew how to break china and ruin silk blouses. The hamletting happened in the heart. And up there in Digos, there is no forgetting the massacre that took place inside a chapel.

Still, we insisted that it wasn’t over yet. We even believed we were entering a new phase. In the littleness of our lives we harbored hopes, looked for new anchors. We talked about owning up to new realities, new imperatives, adopting new efficiencies, professionalizing. Salaries were standardized and we rethought our rubber shoes. We filled out DTRs and SSS forms, dressed up. There was this officemate who did not want another baby and had a miscarriage, and she had to fight for her health benefits alone. How we gaped as she cried and cursed the clerks at SSS. Well, SSS is an anomaly. You had a daughter outside of marriage or a sister uninterested with motherhood but was not allowed to have an abortion and so you thought you were the ones who needed social security most, and you ended up being shooed out of SSS because you didn’t have a marriage contract and could not produce a husband, how much more adoption papers.

You pushed your table in a rage, wanting to hit everyone with cans of Promil someone mislaid on your litter of papers, but before you could do something interesting, you felt something hot rushing between your legs. Balding Office Secretary, who didn’t even know how business envelopes were folded, stared at the bloodied seat and the back of your pants. You wished he thought you had an abortion, but all he said was, Damak.

We began partying. Tasted the good life. Though most of the time we kept on with our work, going to banana plantations, interviewing farmers and workers, pushing for land reform, talking nationalist industrialization, considering hydro-power, going gender. Papers piled high that at times it felt like we transformed into termites boring through the dusty stacks. An event happened if one of the staff came to work early and some swine wasn’t finished yet masturbating in the hallway. Or if someone did overtime and slept at the office and one of the guys came in at seven before washed underwear could be taken down from behind the refrigerator. The debate would be carried all the way to Sage’s Pizza, after several bottles of beer, one side insisting it was thoroughly disgusting, completely unacceptable, a matter that involved personal integrity— My God, Sheilfa, don’t you have a modicum of decency? At large pa?!?— the other side screaming for the band to hear that it had nothing to do with sex just physics —What would you have me do, wrap it bloody unwashed inside my bag? And my God, Rommel, why can’t you sleep over one panty being hung to dry?—, the rest tipping their heads this way and that, worried about evergrowing backlogs and one husband waiting at home —Paghilum mong duha gahulat na si Dondon unsay modicum?—

Oh it was all very gay. Melot B. our wonderful ED was relentless, never letting pass an opportunity that would make us happier than we already were. She invited Raffy B. one afternoon to speak on the state of the nation, and how we crammed ourselves in the tiny conference room to listen. Maybe I was comparing him to the state of the revolution that my heart went up to him, but he did look like he just got bludgeoned in the head several times over. On his way to the Executive Director’s Office I harangued Raffy. Hey. Have you seen AJ lately? His face lit up somewhat. Tell him I really appreciate that story of his about leaving bourgeois marriage behind and going over to the proletarian revolution, but you know? I like best that part about waiting up all night and down to the wee hours of the morning not taking one’s supper until he came home from his organizing work in Tondo. And where is he now, Raffy? Where was he when the purge happened? Melot B. waltzed in, anxious, as though you were the only one in danger of getting waylaid. I turned on my heel, made myself a mug of coffee, and went back to the tome of paper on my desk and thought, Damn. Peasant uprisings came and went, but I still don’t know how to compute rate of exploitation. How am I to determine Mindanao’s mode of production and social formation so necessary in discussing strategy of struggle? And how am I to hold my head up in conversation with you fucking politburo guys at least even for as long as my mug of coffee lasts? Better a vigiling bourgeois wife on the couch than a flower vase sutra. Jack used to tell me my neurons are as tangled as my hair and suggested I comb more regularly, who knows, the knots might loosen, mats smooth out, and political economy wouldn’t be such a hard nut to crack I make it out to be. But heck. I can’t even change into bikinis the way Rommel and his sleazy ilk prefer, am I to start now on a one hundred brush strokes every night before going to bed? I’m not saying count me out I don’t matter, but most times I can’t kick any cad in the shin, Raffy. I have thus far survived by faking it out: smiling and nodding at the indigestible while hoarding things up in my head. And so when my PO discovered many years later that I was still unconsolidated, he was so appalled. He also felt betrayed. To doubt was to be disloyal, and the times considering (advancing towards strategic stalemate), it also showed lack of intelligence, if not lack of contact with reality. And so he said to me, heavily offended: If you cannot abide by what has been decided on according to the principle of democratic centralism, you are free to leave.

I never passed, Raffy.

Oh John. Is that you? Do you remember? Do you remember that time you came around with a duffel of books telling me about some Food Security study you were doing and asking me where I left my daughter? You went to Agdao. You visited the masa there and walked out of the slum feeling molested, depressed. How you tried to drink with the men, feel things their way. They joked over gin, their foul mouths blubbering with ignorance, trying to mate you with one of their daughters. You were pissed off. You came back to the Philippines to talk Food and Sovereignty, rally against the notion that the Cold War has thawed, and all the beloved Agdao masa could think of was sex: their daughter’s ready meat and the dollar market. I sympathized with you then. I knew you understood; I knew you cared; felt; probably more than what our brightest smartest male revolutionaries here could be capable of feeling thinking conceiving; probably; but I was as angry as you were, John. What I was really thinking was, So gutter-bred Filipino sexism can after all also hurt the American intelligentsia?

I owe you a good part of my feminist education, John. A man could never be a feminist and you aren’t one who would call yourself a feminist just because nowadays it’s sexy and remunerative to be gender-sensitive, but you ought to know that I credit it to the books you sent me that I got to know a little more. That day you scoffed at the drunkards of Agdao for teasing insulting you about taking home with you a Filipino wife? I knew that those poor beasts were the same people who leer and laugh at me every wrathful day of my life damn be class allegiance, but I had sworn then, John, to never serve a White man either.

I have kept my promise till now, John. And the best of my friends like to think that’s how I got myself deep in hogshit.

I’m not sorry, John.