About this site

Tumbang Preso (meaning, knock down the jail) is a game of arrests and escapes where each player's life
chances depends on the toppling of a tin can watched by a tag who plays guard.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Pity the poor Zamboangueno




You know that things are back to normal in Zamboanga if the daily onslaughts of unannounced power outages are back. The curfew is down at ten from eight during the “crisis.” But at seven in the evening no more jeepneys. So every other night after supper I walk the stretch from my room at Canelar to Orchid Garden where I have free wifi connection without the embarrassment of ordering coffee or tea. At a little before or after ten I would be walking home to find the gate to where I live double-locked and my neighbour a chief of the police and nephew to my landlady would be sniffing my backpack for explosives. I strain myself from too much smiling through it all but it’s daytime I dread more when I have to go to the shops, with guards in full gear at the door, Muslim terrorist sensors a-bristle, alert against every oncoming buyer of their wares. 

“Why did you choose to settle in Zamboanga? It’s Moro country.” Toni once asked Karen, seven, maybe eleven years ago, when she got married and got herself some low-cost housing in the outskirts of the city. The asker, a poet and a fictionist, was himself a native of Siasi, who had chosen to make a living elsewhere, away from Chinese-Tausug ancestry. 

It is being repackaged as Asia’s Latin City, Karen would later speak of the city admin’s denial phase policy.  I did try searching for resemblances, and for the life of me,  I couldn’t see anything Latina.  The jeepney drivers are dismally so Pinoy; they alternately speak to me in Bisaya, Tausug and Chavacano, and if I tell them, No comprendo, speak to me in English or Filipino, pleeez, they get lost like chicken in someone else’s chicken yard. 

Neither is there anything Latina with the dancing dragons on Chinese New Year; nor in the mall and food court habitués in their hijabs. The edifice of the renovated Immaculate Concepcion Cathedral at Purisima Street does look like a Spanish fortress against Moroccan invaders, but I couldn’t get it; if anything, it is very contemporary and very Zamboangueno in its phobic height, so bereft of post HR/IHL sensibility. Maybe Latin are the cross-dressers, the cholos behind black shades and baggies, or the gyrating at Paseo del Mar to the tune of some Spanish ditty. But gyrating fountains are not Latinas, and they consume a lot of electricity, like the walls of the City Hall covered with Christmas lights from inch to inch every December, which is better saved for the month of Ramadhan, or yes, for its true-to-itself 24-hour anti-terrorist surveillance. 

But what is in Latin America, anyway, that you wouldn’t find anywhere in the Philippines? The Catholic processions? The chapels and the cathedrals, the not-quite-extinct-yet priests and the nuns, the banana plantations, the soap operas, the whores plying their trade, the macho dudes?
The Chavacanos, as Tausugs like to say, were Subanens whose grandmothers fucked with the infidels the Spaniards. (Now doesn’t that sound very Catholic and very Latina?) But voluptuously fair-skinned curly long hair and round big beautiful eyes Karen would inform me that in the family sitting room, if they feel uppity, it is their Chinese aristocratic bloodline they claim. Or, if they feel ironic about their buena familia status, it is their Sama side they call on. Spanish miscegenation is out of the picture, out! you slut! 

But Samas are supposed to be the slut. So mothers with Tausug ancestry in their blood would castigate their daughters who had sex before they were eighteen, or who were getting on with their third marriage (across tribes and interfaith dialogue), “You whore, baisan kaw tuud. You really took after that aunt of yours, in Samal yattu.” 

But you see, nowadays, with what they did to Rio Hondo, ancestral omboh territory, you do not bash a Sama for being anything. Their oppression is your oppression, too. Their displacement your displacement. Put that into good patriotic use, sisters.

Patriotic calls aside, the Sama Dilaut have actually long left their bancas, their ag-omboh (ancestor worship), their five hundred to five thousand pesos housing units in Siasi, in Jolo, in Rio Hondo. They have taken to the cities, the streets, and have not really left their occupation: anarget, with Lahat Bisaya as fishing ground.

In Sitangkai, Tawi-Tawi and other agar-agar plantation areas, Tausugs who were displaced from their farms in Sulu are now the migrant labour. They farm the sea, alongside Bisaya workers who man the warehouses. Some of the boys have Bisaya housemaid girlfriends wives sluts. Some upwardly mobile Sama households even have Bisaya and Chavacano daughters-in-law and labanderas

In Zamboanga and “Christian cities”, intermarriages between elite tribes is common. More so among slum dwellers. In Jolo, however, street-bound dykes who do errands for politicos’ sons would say that rapists would be choosy enough not to go so low so as to pick a Sama girl. For one, their virginity is always suspect. They prefer Tausug lasses, because they are fair-skinned, clean, malanuh. They also would not rape Bisaya girls, them of the slave progeny; them who wipe their asses with toilet paper.

A year in Zamboanga is enough encounters in cross-dressing and border crossing. You meet workaday Tausug girls who got through college, thanks to some Catholic scholarship intended for Sama indigents back in Jolo, now going to Catholic service and disowning Tausug polity and society, if not ancestry. They would say their kamaasan converted to Christianity during Spanish colonial rule, or around the time the Spaniards set up Notre Dame of Siasi. At the tiangge, old women would tell you, No, they are Lannang, Chinese, not Tausug, but had been residents of Jolo since after the war and so they speak Tausug which makes them Tausug-Chinese, and so they are Muslims now and go to Friday worship.
Then you don’t speak against Tausugs who the Tausugs themselves would call Bisayah Bagu (nouveau-Bisaya), having taken on the garb of the oppressors, ashamed of the sins of their tribe, the ones who have become paid servants and loyal defenders of majority chauvinism and Christian establishment.  
And how about Bisayas who were brought over by piracy and slavery, who later blended into the tribe and the territory, some earning their freedom and citizenhood early on, others bought to pad up the shrinking population of local lords’ subjects and armies, where are they now?



Mao Tzu Hu


(Para sa mga armchairs)

E, ano kung mali.
E, ano kung marami ang nawasak na buhay, ari-arian.
Mas marami ba sila kaysa mga nasalanta
Nung nagdaang bagyo, dilubyo,
Nung huling pulitiko,
Huling kawan ng mga santo rebolusyunaryo?
Walang tama o mali sa kamay ng kasaysayan;
May nakakaligtas lang at may nababak-hu;
Mas madali ang umamot ng buwayang luha,
Mga matatalinong aral na salita.

Mas madali ang pumula sa kasaysayang hindi ikaw ang me gawa.

Kung totoong mas alam mo,
Sana’y hindi ipinaubaya sa mga dukha sa adhika.
Sana’y ikaw ang gumawa.


Wednesday, October 2, 2013

habang naggigyera sila nagbakasyon ako


(para kay Gigi)

feeling ko pina-R&R lang ako
magliwaliw ka muna doon, kas
toka namin ito

parang regalo
para sa iyo lahat nang ito

para sa mga butong hindi nabakat
sa mga apoy sa dibdib na hindi kumilanap

mag-aaklas kami
magbubuwis ng buhay
masusunog ang mga bahay
ng mga walang bahay

pero sa iyo lahat ito
digma mo ito
ikaw
na walang kaibigan
walang kasama
ikaw
na walang matatagpuang iba pang daan
lampas sa lahat ng nalakbay na
ikaw na walang mauuwiang
tupok na bahay

tupok na buhay

Monday, September 30, 2013

Bangsamoro Basic Law and the Mursid




September 28-29, 2013, I holed up in some posh hotel in Davao with a motley set of gays and transgirls to talk Basic Law and LGBT rights. We were there, supposedly, to work on a provision that would make a good insertion in the Framework of Agreement on the Bangsamoro (FAB) and submit it to the Transition Commission so that when and if the Moro Islamic Liberation Front made it to the seat of autonomous governance in Mindanao, we wouldn't be banished or decapitated en masse.

For the MILF's ideological tenets, HRD informed me, are informed by the Ikhwan; the Ikhwan al-Safa is a brotherhood of idealists on the fringe of Orthodox Islam. So the MILF has this Mursid as basis of their framework of governance. They have the National Mursid, they have this Mursid Division Commander, Mursid Battalion Commander, Mursid Platoon Leader, Mursid Squad Leader. If it is put into effect, you will have a hard life, dear, said HRD.

That is why, he went on, human rights groups, women rights groups, LGBT rights groups ought to really do a lot of lobbying in the framing of the Bangsamoro Basic Law.

The comers to the conference were a pretty mixed-up group, most from outside the designated autonomous region, but you understand that, as there are not many LGBT organizations in the ARMM. Then from Zamboanga and Jolo, none made it to Davao, thanks to force majeure which blocked civilian routes between Jolo and Zamboanga and between Zamboanga and the rest of the land.

Half of the participants didn't even know what brought them there, or that there's such a thing as Bangsamoro Autonomous Political Entity, or FAB, and what's this TransCom. There was a whole bunch of pageant gays from Ladlad Butuan; a smattering from other parts of Mindanao outside the MILF's claimed domain (South Cotabato, Davao and some other virgin territory where LGBT rights consist of being welcomed into Catholic embrace to decorate the vicinity and gay pride lay in having a straight man for a boyfriend, and one from labour union way back, and one representing the religious Muslim sector). But I appreciate the sincerity and the truth of it when a couple of guys said, it's not about us; it does not concern us because we are not part of the autonomous region, it is really up to you there in the ARMM.

Right. Who gives a bleep about territorial wars that burn houses down to ashes and displace a hundred thousand people for as long as it does not happen in one's own backyard or bed.

HR Guy from U.K., whose office hosted the conference, butted in. It's not his problem either, said he, but human rights is for all -- something around that point --. Right. All those wars for your signature online across borders, Uganda, Iran, Cameeron Islands, Russia.

At the days' end, we indeed agreed on a nice one-paragrapher, slightly revised and directly lifted from Article III Section 5 of the Republic Act 6734 or the Organic Act Creating the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. To wit:

            The Bangsamoro Government shall adopt measures to ensure equality and protection of distinct beliefs and customs among its people in the spirit of unity in diversity and peaceful coexistence: Provided that no person in the Autonomous Region shall, on the basis of creed, religion, ethnic origin, parentage, gender, economic, social or any other status be subjected to discrimination.

Beautiful law. No mention of lesbians, gays, bis, trans please, lest, IHL Expert cautioned, it will only open the floodgates and you get nothing instead of little.

Negotiating for one's rights is like that, you have to make concessions. Maybe in twenty years, you will be able to get the kind of recognition that you want, and the kind of law that you want, but at the moment...

At the moment wait twenty years.

It was very educating, I said to a feminist lesbian friend who did human rights watch across the globe.

A hard lesson in docility.

Yes, she said.