DID YOU KNOW that the first act of the Taliban was to hang a rapist?
The word talib means student; the original Taliban were born in the chaos of Afghanistan’s civil war. In 1994, a group of righteous seminary students, many of them schooled in Pakistan, rose from the countryside around Kandahar to challenge the predatory warlords then ripping Afghanistan apart. The Taliban’s first act was to hang an accused rapist from the barrel of a tank.
I think of this as I leave Jolo on the second day of the Ramadhan. It was my third visit, the last was three months back when I first met up with the lesbian community there. Now, I bear away full of bad news.
Alyssa, the 17-year old dyke who lived everyday of her life aboard a motorcycle was married off to another 17-year old boy with whom she had been spending lots of time for weeks months on end. The boy, lean and handsome with thick black brows and set jaws, is well-mannered and quiet in a deep way. He once had her maulers salvaged, Alyssa said, and an ex-girlfriend's brother tortured, his nails pulled out, for having slapped him in the face. The ex-girlfriend ditched him after self-administering an abortion, with Coke on mornings without end. Yes, says Alyssa, he is more than good enough for her for a young man,something she cannot say of the silly girls she is dating.
Mherz is also nineteen, reigning king of the road for sometime now until a week back when she got mauled by a gang of boys. Nobody utters a dirty word against Mherz and he friends, they will get a good beating. But nowadays, Mherz is a little depressive, left eye swollen and walks out on friends a lot.
Sadder still is what happened with Vaness. She was the wild thing, you could not ask her to vend candies and cigs for loose change. Last December she beat two boys one after the other in two boxing matches at Kasalamatan. No, trust me, said she, when I expressed misgivings about going with her to a videoke on my first visit, the both of us looking like grandmother and granddaughter dykes. They will come after us, I had said. Not at all, they're afraid of lesbians here, she'd insisted. Sent out of the house by a mommy who adopted her, she now had to go rural where the family that adopted her, the parents of her pretty girlfriend, had to teach her to pray, five times a day.
The last time I saw Kah Weng, the tomboyish barangay captain we had on board, she was all spunk. She escorted the young dykes to a camp-out cum hiking to Bud Datu, jamming it up with the Army officers who had set up defense facilities there. Now she sits at the porch, struck down by breast cancer.
I don't know what else happened on board while I was away thinking, just thinking. Of the impossibilities, the hopelessness of it all, the mulcting, the ribbing, the thieving, the petty but seriously mean fights among the NGO women managers over the loose change and discard goodies that get there, but each time I think of Mherz and the anger in her eyes, in her set jaws, a little hope lives, lives in me.
