To Kiev with Love

These days I am a little stimulated. Yesterday or day before yesterday Germelina wanted to know where was I, still in Zamboanga or still in Jolo? I wanted to ask if they want for me to cover the escape from captivity of the Bansil sisters, hot copy that would be, but I don’t like melodramas, people who were not there suddenly turning up to congratulate the two kids whose dad they knew for escaping from hell?

I cover my own non-story of non-captivity and I would rather nobody reads me even after I survived.

Weeks before I went to Jolo, friends warned me against coming to Jolo. They kidnap anyone here, big time or small time, no discrimination. Don’t come around these days, they advised.

Okay, I said.

Do I fear the Abu Sayaf? I don’t know. I feel something akin to fear when I cross the street full of soldiers. What if someone took the notion of shooting at the exact moment that I put my body on his line of fire? 

I’d like to think they’re just like me. They’re just like anyone. A bunch of armed fucks trying to make out. It's not their fault if nobody taught them correct political lines. None of them perhaps cares about political lines or about God and whatever it is up there that looks down on them. Then, I do not really think hard before I get on to something. Like going to Jolo. Or doing work in Jolo. Or setting a program or an office in Jolo. Who wants me there? What could I want from there other than more of the same thing I already have in excess.

And I don’t really differentiate between big moves and small moves; high-risk or small-risk; they amount to the same non-sacrifice to me. They make so much of not going abroad earning dollars or euros in consultancy fees rather than doing social work among the poverty-reduction cuckoos, as though when they leave the godforsaken country they can make something out of their godforsaken social welfare careers. So much for migration. It’s a nice name for dissolution. Got that from Zadie Smith, not from Mariam Gagosh.

Weeks ago Kim poked me.I will put the Jolo girls online, she said. We are a bunch of illiterates when it comes to friggin' hosting and all this web thing and she said yesso, most of these lgbt ezines are so-so, people getting away with certain lifestyles in the name of advocacy. The Jolo guys had more to offer.

Whoaa!  I almost flew in my seat. I haven't told her as yet that I said something like that to her ex, that Mary whom the ex called alpha omega female was the sleuth not her and that did it. She never spoke to me again.  I also cannot tell Kim that the more I know, the less I feel for our kind. At times when I feel awfully down I fear that I will abandon all my beliefs, in lesbianhood and feminism included.

Fortunately for Facebook, it has its uses. I gloat at sightings of feminists into self-defense, demands for safe abortion, decriminalization of prostitution. Just a couple of years back, maybe three, Sara, a natdem gun from UP Diliman spoke in a women conference in Davao. It was March 8 if I remember it right. And she damned shopping-rights feminism, like feminism is all about that. Like what daphnie and carol appreciated with gender hogging the headlines. The flights of stairs of Ateneo de Davao are not gender-sensitive, they say. Girls in stiletto heels are bound to trip and fall. Oh let them fall. I wish they fall all the pretty girls in stiletto heels. A big comedic break that would be.

  

But the wind did change. I don’t know where it came from, Egypt or Uganda; Venezuela or America. There was Saira writing to me about the takeover of the neoliberal regime co-opting the feminist organizations in the US. We were not talking about the feminist movement, really. Because there was no feminist movement by then. We were talking about the peace movement in the US, the ones that put up schools of peace upon schools of peace in Mindanao and other parts of the world where conflict once mattered. And she said, I am out of here, I am going over to the other side of despair, and you know what, we have this org called Incite!

That was ages ago. And now here comes Mariam Gagosh refusing to say she is in solidarity with the protesters at Kiev. How could she say, she said, that she is there with them when her butt is in a couch in San Francisco? Damnit. Then I had to do some more tracking. I like tracking people, I tell you, their allegiances. Ruby with the striking workers in Camboadia, Germelina at Pete Seger’s funeral singing paeans to dead communists at a time when communists are no longer looked up as saints. Then Neldy coming at me with the news that Linda and Nadjoua escaped from capitivity after eight months of sitting it up with the Abu Sayaf. Then Cocoy from prison saying he is amazed beyond belief that his friends in Jolo could just let him rot in jail. When he gets out, he said, when he gets out the struggle will be more beautiful.

Lordgodalmighty he gone bonkers! When did people last remember struggle as good and beautiful? That there is joy in revolution? My consultant friends, erstwhile heroes of my lost youth, all they repeat to the last of their breath, a way to cleanse themselves of the guilt perhaps that sticks, is that let us be kind to ourselves.

Over what?!