Isang Pitak ng Isip

Ang pagiging kawal, o pagiging kadre, ay pagiging isang bitak ng bato. Pagiging isang bloke ng semento sa itinatayong pundasyon ng pagbabago. Isang pares ng braso’t kamao sa walang mukhang digma. Isang buhay. Isang kulumpon ng buto. Baril man o salita ang hawak mo, mag-isa kang tatalunton sa masukal na gubat ng pag-alam. Mag-isa mong tatawirin ang ibabaw ng bangin, ang madulas na tulay na kawayan, at mag-isa kang mahuhulog, mag-isang lalangoy, aahon, aakyat sa kabilang pampang. Mag-isa kang haharap, makikipagtunggali sa panganib. Ano man ang iyong kahihinatnan, matitipak ka ba, o manatiling nakatayo, walang kamay na sasalo sa iyo; walang ulo, balikat, katawan na tatakip o mananagot para sa iyo. Sa katapusan ay mag-isa mong ipaglalaban ang buhay mo. Sa katapusan, ang lahat, ano man ang kanilang adhika, ay mag-isang makikipagdigma at mag-isang mamamatay.

Three Takes plus 1

a slut in a ballot box

I have this sense this is the dirtiest election this country has ever had. Or Ka Satur and Lisa Masa wouldn’t be fucking with Bongbong Marcos aboard Villar’s campaign wagon. Or the feminist icons of my youth wouldn't be campaigning for Noynoy like he is all they could scavenge from all this political garbage the country has produced. Or I wouldn’t be there whoring around doing errands for fags writing solicitation letters to Councilors that they may pay for our snacks. Or I wouldn’t be writing press releases a peso and fifty cents per word and explain it away by saying I did it for a friend who wanted company in some shit job or that I needed the money to pay for someone’s fare to Leyte that he may be able to vote and campaign for Ladlad.

Yes, Dear Reader, I am depressed. Suicidal.

Now I cannot say I am out of this fuck. Now I cannot say that I am not voting for anyone there screwing for my vote the ballot is the coffin of class consciousness period. I have lost that right.

And now I lost appetite writing and can’t even read a book with a clear conscience, cannot meet my deadlines doing reports for children rights offices so that I can keep tab of the rent and buy the Carol Lewis classic and the Tolkien volumes I promised my nieces.

Dear Reader, help. I feel like a slot in a ballot box.

BLOGSHOT: Why I am (not) voting

About a week back, you should have seen me crapping I am not voting for Ladlad. That Ladlad is for the fags and belongs with the fags, and to please give it to them, I am not there.

Homophobic?

No, just suffering from some kind of a new strain of elections-related allergy.

In the first place, I didn’t know my account with Comelec is still active. I have stopped bothering about people’s right to vote, mine most of all, after having been robbed of my vote in the last presidential elections that put GMA in power. Other than that, for a long time I couldn’t take what had been going on, I am out of the pale. Then a housemate had this notion of checking it out with comelec.gov.ph and voila, it’s my name alright, I may cast a vote if I like!

Then I got a call from a gay friend saying Ladlad nominees are around, let us please take them around and help them to gay people we know?

I couldn’t tell him right on that, But I am not legal and I don’t even know what my citizenship is, even if he himself likes to think he lives in Gay Republic! I couldn’t tell him that I may be currently employed and can manage from time to time to iron my clothes and sit anywhere near a Wifi zone, but my legal papers are spotty and that my employment record highly suspect. Moreover, I’m lesbian, not gay and that the last party I voted was Partido ng Bayan. I had had by then enough dosage of sermons about the need for compromise and more compromises, about the fluidity of gender and the importance of an LGBT representation in Congress, about how hard the struggle for legitimacy and political representation had been, and how having someone up there speaking for us and in behalf of us means for people like us. So when I realized that the Ladlad guys were here to collect from me what they call the pink vote and to tell me further that they are doing this—running—for me and for the entire Pinoy LGBTs, I swang on my feet. Like: What’s happening around me? Could it be that I am the only lesbian voter not voting for Ladlad? And then felt contrite. Like: Am I to let them alone in this difficult part of their careers as gay advocates and if and when they win a seat and succeed in passing the anti-discrimination law, will I avail of it the next time that another macho dude search for my dick like I myself fought hard for it?

When I think of it, the harder part of the trauma was not so much being made a sack bag by those who wanted to give you a lesson in good manners and right conduct as walking alone on the street at two in the morning to find police officers to whom you may show your hurts to. Nothing as tough as going around the welfare ward of the Davao Medical Center carrying a slip of paper saying Non-VAWC case. Nothing as sad and crazy as going home alone, praying Dear God, Dear Fucking Goddess If You Are There At All, Let it not happen to another woman again please! when you felt that there was no law protecting you, when you understood that the women manning the barangay justice system who could have been your mothers were out to protect your attacker from your accusations, and not only protect him, but back his countercharges against you as well that you may shut up and stop feeling good about yourself.

Am I saying I am voting for Ladlad now so that other welfare cases lesbians like me may find succor in the anti-discrimination bill when and if the same or worse things happen to them?

I don’t know.

I still don’t like what’s going on. When I filed a case and lost, my faithlessness in the law and the kind of democratic processes that put such laws up there only grew harder. It’s defeatist, you might say, but to me it’s not.

I still cast myself as Opposition, which means that anything Establishment has to come down by all means. Which means I hate the paternalism, the relying so much on the few dubiously good old men to do the job for us, the banking so much on the law-making powers of those who cannot think far beyond getting pork barrels that they may give livelihood to aging basket cases.

I think I will go with L.G. who posted at FB that No way, she is not participating in this ugly dirty circus; she declares herself apathethically apolitical, and that she is taking her vote to her grave.

Lord, it is so refreshing. Like: hey, isn’t that the most political thing to do these days???

Pagmumunimuni ng Isang Kabebe

Diyata’y schizophrenic rin ang kilusan. Split. May dalawang mukha. Magkabilaan. May kaliwa at kanan. Leftism at rightism. May panglabas. May pang-loob. May bukas. May sarado. May kasinungalingang mga patotoo. May dalawang lengguwahe, dalawang boses, dalawang tono ng salita na ginagamit. Ang isa’y pangsentro, at ang isa’y panglabas sa sentro. O labag sa sentro. Itong pangsentro, eto iyong di tumatawa, at di nagmumura. Eto ang ginagamit na lengguwahe tuwing nagmimiting naglalagom tumatalakay ng mga usapin, nagreresolba ng mga suliranin. Eto iyong boses ng Diyos, naghuhusga: Tamang linya, lihis sa linya. Ang kabila nito’y yaong madalas ginagamit sa breyktaym pagkatapos ng mahahaba at masinsinang usapan. Eto iyong mga salitang hitik sa lecheng yawa at mga putangina: mayaman sa mura. Mga salitang parang pag-uutot at pagkakantot na hindi kailangang giyahan gabayan upuan na parang kursong rebolusyunaryo. Eto rin iyong boses na laging nagbibiro, nanunudyo, tumatawa. Boses at salitain na sumasalungat, dumidekonstrak, at rumirebisa sa kani-kanina lang ay napagkaisahang pagtibayin at tupdin. Kung susuriin iisa lang ang tinutukoy dinadala na usapin ng dalawang ito. Sa magkasalungat lang na panig ng iisang dibdib nanggagaling. Habambuhay silang maggigirian, magtutuligsaan, isnaypan, trayduran. “Isentro iyan.” At dadalhin sa gitna ang salaring salita para doon itabi. Upisyal na hihilumin at patatahimikin. Ngunit hindi ito mahihilom, hindi tatahimik: parang sugat sa isip na kikislot-kislot, kikibot-kibot. Lulusot nang lulusot. Gagapangin ang mga namamahinga nang mga usapin. Kamuka’t-mukat ay may mauuga, at magtataka ang mga guwardiya ng gitna, dahil may humihila mula sa ibaba, dinidesentro, nilalabas, dinadagit pabalik sa kadawagan ang paulit-ulit nang ihinimlay at ikinahon. Ganun di natatapos ang dayalektiko ng pagtatalo.

Nudes and Poetry

I hide my skull in my closet.
I bolt the door and bid it Quiet!
Each night I take it out.
Smooth the cracks of its surface:
Traces of the fissures of my brain
Warring with the elements from within.
The eyes have gone out: seeking forms
For the gritted words from the dark
Inside. I cannot sleep.
At midday I wake sun-struck,
Spineless. Nodding at the world
That nods back at me.

Notes from a roomer

In 2009 I got this job documenting peace conferences that allowed to me to get this room which collected quite a rent in my pocket and a little after that I also got myself a discard laptop which made me stay inside the house instead of out on the street where I mostly was for years on end. It was a new situation, not bad altogether, only rather too dull too easy for comfort. It guarded me in some way, the staying-home: I felt I was in some kind of a built-in control program that kept people quiet and acquiescent. It also made me watchful of myself: did it silence the mind as well and all the intelligence that it rallies and deploys to espy upon the world?

I leaked there. But how comforting: to know that one is still their old demented self.

It is not that I stopped being insane altogether just for getting a room of my own. The truth is, the relative comfort only made me more schizophrenic. I could not get inside a big mall playing the six o’ clock angelus without thinking of smashing a glassful of cosmetics or knocking people’s bowed-down heads as they held on to their baskets and cartfuls of goods while saying their holy marys mother of God, and when I went to the counter, how I begrudged every paper money going out of my wallet: I was supposed to have those goods for free and not being made to pay. Still I paid my way and went to work day after day to write what was asked of me, and though I always intended to give them the crap that they wanted and more than deserved, I always ended up delivering more than what I got paid for.

What’s happening to me offline is something else. Most days I kept away from people. When I rode the jeep I would not even look at people around me. My head was always turned away; long before I stretched my hand to hand the driver small change, I had taken leave of everyone already. It did help that as soon as my foot touched ground, I was in my room already. If I went with a friend, I mostly sat and listened and would not talk, nodding at things I otherwise thoroughly disagreed with. It was an unfair exchange, I knew, and though it was good I had a little money to pay for my dinner and when the friend felt generous enough, for hers, too, I felt sad with the thought that if my friend found out where lied my beliefs, she would feel betrayed and take me for the cur traitor bitch that I am. I had had more than enough of bitter friendships to last me a lifetime to be making some more.

So anyway, with the job, I was aground most days and had this notion that I’d escaped or was momentarily making my way out of the precarious fuck of a life which I’d liked to believe, I’d always chosen and lived spectacularly. I remembered so well that before that room were two other rented rooms behind me, one a makeshift quarter nailed against the tall fence of plush Las Terrazas in Ma-a where I got mauled by two boys next-door, upon the request of the women at the compound; and another a ragtag upstairs affair right under the shade of a star apple tree with neither electrical sockets nor a decent ceiling. The owner was what you call fallen royalty, a local magnate in the food business once, Magnolia chicken and ice cream specifically, and did not provide light for the helps because anyway they just went home at ten or eleven to sleep, so gas lamp should be enough. I left that compound as soon as the rooms next-door got occupied by boys who liked to gather over cheap gin at the veranda right across my room’s window to talk about girls and prostitutes. That’s how I got mauled in the last compound at Las Terrazas, after all: when I started behaving like I grew prostitutes and made them so respectable too that no man may badmouth them for as long as I was in the vicinity.

So I got that nice room right across McArthur Highway in that nice compound at Oak Street in Matina and I rather liked it: white walls all over the place, a closet for clothes and a bed with a book case for a headboard, a big tiled bathroom and a kitchen with a door that looks across the green hills that is GSIS Heights. I was a long spiral case above the rest, mostly couples and families in temporary living arrangements, pending the arrival of a baby or the purchase of a house in one of the city’s ever expanding housing subdivisions. There were four of us in the loft. I occupied the room in the middle part of the house, between the kitchen and bathroom on one side and sleeping quarters on the other side. The other roomers were all young, in their twenties and early thirties, employed in one painless occupation or another, a tutorial agency, a call center selling computer parts and repair services, or a company distributing and installing house appliances. I am a writer by profession, which is, strictly speaking, no profession at all. “So where do you write? For the radio?” they asked. I write for research institutions and non-government organizations, I said. Do they pay? How much? they asked. I get by, I said.

A week into the rooming life I got into a nice conversation with Mr Congeniality. I was cleaning the window jalousies thick with dust you could sow tomato seeds into them. And why are you smiling ever so sweetly to me? I asked. I’m so happy because you are cleaning our windows, he said. Well, I’m not happy, I said, and I’m not doing it to make you or anyone happy 'derstand?

He didn’t understand and his own happiness was so fragile that we didn't get by not long after that.