In praise of Silliman U’s dying minotaurs

(Or: ODE TO GERARD AND VIKTOR SCREAMING VAGINA)



Bim and I were flipping pictures today. Shots
from this year’s writers’ workshop in Silliman University we happened by on Sawi’s Facebook wall. We got to talking about poets we admire and don’t admire, writers we know and don’t care to know, until we got to Viktor, who we both happened to know and admire, and somehow still root for, just for the raw talent and, particularly for me, for the crow madness of him and for going the other way, no matter how badly he might be doing right now healthwise. So what if he didn’t win any Palanca, Bim said. He is one who’s got depth of character.

Oh wow and alright. And who cares if Eskinol and Clear do not make any revenues by him, he is not running for President, is he not.

The first time I laid eyes on Viktor was at the Silliman Weekly. Sawi, the school’s Poet Emeritus, dragged him there one late night in December that we were doing the proofs for Sands & Coral. Another guy was with them, Gerard Pareja, introduced to us by Sawi as a poet from Cebu. They looked blasted before anything could hit them, didn’t even mumble a hello, just looked at their sides and down and grinned liked hyenas, if I ever saw hyenas grinning.

Whether they were just acting themselves up, or that was the way the were, I have no idea. But the two of them distinguished themselves from all the others who sauntered by because… well, they had no social skills. A bit like me, in other words, and they were worse: They looked liked a couple of catatonics straight from the urinal. All the time that Sawi was going high holding center stage telling his regrets to one and all what a sorry thing he did not use the body as a sex machine it was meant to be when he had it young and strong, the two of them just sat there in a grin and looking every inch like deactivated chimpanzees.

I would not recognize Gerard now if I run into him in the street, but I got to read his first rather thin volume of prose and poetry which Viktor said saved his ass: it opened for him the ounce of an opportunity that he needed to teach in a university. Viktor gave me a copy of Gerard’s book and asked, “Sheil, why did Marge call it sexist?” He seemed to think that because the persona there was a limp dick before the female sex, it could not be possibly sexist.

There was this poem about a girl standing before a mirror with nothing on but a bath towel she unwraps around her body while her water carrier of a writer friend (Viktor, for whom the poem was written) looks in from outside the window, and beneath them both, in the store downstairs, the boyfriend waits for the girl to come down. Then there’s this short poem about a girl who the speaker in the poem claims to have taught to swim in a pool but who left him for the sea, a line I later sneaked into one of my stories which an online literary magazine published sans the credit to Gerard P (for which I thank him, the literary ed, not GP, for encouraging me early on in my career as poet-thief). The last pages were about this guy who’d never been with a woman and had the misfortune of going with pals who liked to make him slobber dry, even not washing the hands they dipped into their girlfriends thighs just for him to smell. He got so obsessed with the vagina that as though to exorcise it, he screamed up vaginavaginavaginavaginavagina ad infinitum ad nauseum through the story’s end.

Are these sexist? Viktor ribbed. I must have sidled down to his side then because Marge was not looking, but ten years later, one otherwise uneventful day in Davao, Viktor’s question hit me between the eyes. I was with a crowd of pedestrians at the intersection of Quirino and Magallanes, mostly women over forty, all of us waiting for the traffic light to turn green, and each poised to cross the street, all sticky with exhaust fumes, and all grimacing under the mid-day sun. This cigarette vendor who was snaking in between running jeepneys made his way through us and drummed his finger on his cigarette box just at the precise moment that the traffic light said Go and blared behind us eight-decibels high, Mga bilat naglaray!!! Some of us tripped on our feet, as we rushed to the other side of the street. As for me, I was so caught by the arresting image that my reflexes froze for a moment and was not able to scream my thanks.

But I did remember Gerard and his case about screaming vagina right then and there in the thick of that mid-day traffic and all I could think of was, Lord, how vivid!

BLOGSHOT: I love patti smith period.

To the playroom

art work by liloy




Karla brushed away the tear that had escaped from her eye. She looked up and saw Papa looking at her. “Don’t cry, Baby,” he said. He held out his hand to her but she shook her head so firmly that he drew back and leaned on the sofa. He motioned for her to sit by his side. She adjusted the cumbersome contraption under her arm and complied.

Papa spoke low and called her Baby. Come here, Baby. Don’t cry, Baby. He picked up Panda who had fallen onto the floor with her ass up and sat her on the opposite corner of the sofa. Karla sat between Panda and Papa. Now, don’t you three look like a family? Mama used to say. Panda came with Papa the day he gave Mama the keys to his car. “It’s not a bear, Stupid,” Mama had said to Papa. Karla inched away from the toy. She felt strangled with Papa on one side, his big stubby fingers running from her hair to her nape now and again, and Panda dull and shapeless with its gray rough skin on one side. An idiot’s toy, Mama called it, but Papa would not hear. Mama never liked Panda. First thing she’d do before sitting down with Karla is to lift Panda by the ear and dump it behind the couch. Mama did not like so many things in the house. She kicked them if they got in her way.

Papa brought Panda home the day he bought himself a new car. “A new car for Papa and a new teddy bear for Baby. And so that Mama can drive herself to Hell if she likes!” Papa laughed when he said that. Mama did not, but caught the keys Papa threw at her.

Then went out as often as she could until she stopped coming home altogether. Papa had since taken to the sofa to watch dirty words flying, night after night.

“What is shit, Papa?”

“It’s a dirty word, don’t you say it.”

“Yaya says shit.”

“Don’t take after the househelp!”

“What is fuck you, Papa?”

“Hey, Baby! Don’t you use that dirty word.”

“I know damn.”

“Don’t use it!”

“Mama used it.”

“Don’t you take after that bitch! Go to your bed now.”


Without Papa knowing, Karla liked to repeat Mama’s words under her breath. I’m so damn tired. Move over, Karl. Damn that cough. Mama called her Karl. She had a strong deep voice that rang across the room.

“Karl? Where are you?!?”

“Damn. What did you do all day, shut yourself in with your stupid dolls?” Mama liked to call everything stupid.

“Papa bought me a new one.”

“That’s all he knows.”

“Don’t shout at the child, Honey.”

“Don’t Honey me!”

“Don’t shout in front of the child.”

“I’m not shouting! You cooped her up all day? She will never grow a spine!”

She will never grow a spine Bam! Karla loved the sound of Mama banging the door. It sounded like Damn. She will never see the sun Dam. If she should leave and disappear, Karla told herself, she would bang the door loud like that. Papa wouldn’t tell where Mama went. Each time she asked him he always said, Go to your play room, Baby, okay?

“I’ll bring Panda with me.”

“You will not. Everything you take down there never goes whole out again.”


Karla pulled herself up, refused Papa’s proffered hand, and made her way to the playroom. Damn, she told herself as she moved toward the closed door. She reached for the knob, twisted it, pushed, hopped in, and slammed the door. Bam. She blinked at the unexpected force and smiled. From the inside she opened it again, then closed it again. Blam. She laughed at the powerful sound she made. She felt merry. “Stop playing with the door!” she heard Papa call after her. Karla kept on at it until she heard Papa’s footfalls coming. “Stop that you little bitch!”

She pushed the door shut once more and pressed the lock in the knob. She turned around and leaned her back against the frame. She could hear Papa’s heavy breathing from behind the door. “Stop making all that noise, Honey, okay?” Don’t Honey me! How Karla liked to shout at Papa. Mama always damned Papa. Damn this house damn this car damn this neighborhood. Mama did not come home. Mama is gone. Now there’s nobody to damn Papa. Karla let her crutch drop on the floor. She spread her arms at her sides, pressed the back of her head against the door, and closed her eyes. Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn.

She went on and on until she made enough. Then Karla opened her eyes, glanced around the room. Dropping to her knees, she dragged herself toward the heap of mangled dolls.

Liberation Hogshit

photo
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.

Not nearer any point of pain

He liked cars with tainted windows. Cool inside and laced with the sickening odor of Glade air fresheners. To protect oneself from the gas exhausts, he said, and the noisy traffic-jammed highway. He had his way with me: he was paying for the rides. While my head turned against me, my stomach churning and turning. A stupid ailment, he called it, but would not deign tell the driver to turn off the aircon and open the car windows to let the sun and breeze in, like I wished, for fear I would make a trail of vomit in the air. At his hotel he would drag me up the stair, gagging my mouth with my own hand lest I puke on the feathery carpet, and in the bathroom his face would be distorted with panic as he rubbed my back up and down, up and down, all on the wrong places and not any nearer any point of pain.

He limped. Left leg shorter than the right. Hid his defect with a skip to his gait. Good leather shoes, fine clothes, finer manners. Nice car. He didn’t have to walk long to expose himself.

Gay men scare him. His one encounter stained him for life, he said to me one night that I was reading on one side of his bed. He was sitting alone inside this movie house staring at the screen when this man to his left stood up as if to go out. Before reaching the aisle the man stopped. Stopped between his knees. I sat bolt upright. What did you do??? I ran, he said. He was pushing his cuticles with his nails, a slight pout on his lips. I screamed. I said to him I’d tell my dad. Swore I’d get a gun and kill him.

He always slept with his back to me, pants on. Why do you do that? I asked. He said you never know when a fire burns the hotel down. Why not put your socks and shoes on as well? That’d make you readier to run! I'd say. He would leap out of bed, arms thrashing in the air. It’s all sex you could think of! he would scream. Not really! I'd say to him, putting the book down. Besides, we hardly had sex in all those years that you made it out to your colleagues and fans you have hot sex with me! My hands shot out of me, palms open. Then have sex with yourself!

He would cart his pillows and blanket and drag them about the room, pitch a tent on the floor.

I would read until I dropped off to sleep. But at dawn when he would be snoring by my side I would quietly make love with myself. I'd feel better afterward that I could kick him out. Move out, Big Dumb Boy, I'd hiss in his ear, I’m going to sleep now I rather want the bed to myself. He liked that. He would gather his pillows and blanket and set himself on the sofa. In the morning, he would be feeling so sexy for having been asked last night that he would nuzzle my shoulders and nape, kiss and hug me from behind, and go out of the room humming.

The last time I saw Cuba

photo from Generacion Y





The last time I saw Cuba was on the face of what I thought to be Rated B artist. Which is not how I think of Cuba.

The artist was on the last leg of her travel grant, courtesy of NCCA, which allowed her to go to Havana to interact and talk art with the Cuban children. I had the impression she was not so happy about her trip. She kept on complaining about the exorbitant rate the Cuban government is charging tourists as though she wanted to be Tourism Minister herself.

The audience were mostly laissez-faire artists who had little interest in Cuban history and politics, about which the artist herself seemed badly informed. What I thought was, the gringos in the bureaucracy there took her for a schoolmarm from political wasteland Pinas and had her properly relegated to the singing children department rather than make time for her discussing Cuban art and revolution. And so, of course, the most she could tell about the Caribbean island was that it is a poor country, no shopping malls, no colorful arrays of goods to choose from, and how men harassed you, propositioning you so that you will marry them and take them out of the country. When someone in the audience mentioned the US embargo and that it was one country where anyone may address the President by their first name, her IQ dropped. But she was considerate enough to make one upbeat observation, i.e., that there are no prostitutes, no street children, no roaming lunatics in Cuba, something one cannot say of Bayang Pilipinas.

It was unsettling for me. At the time only thing I knew about the downside of the food rationing was that ice cream was not available for everyone and gay artists wanting to get out. I hadn’t as yet read literature about the scarcity of milk and meat. Yoani Sanchez and wordpress.com did not exist then, though of course, I had already noted by then the silences of my French radfem sisters who made visits there, who said they rather enjoyed talking to the fags they met in Havana and that No, they could not cut canes for the Cuban revolution if revolution should come down to cutting canes, that’s so fucking peasant economy which only Germaine Greer could appreciate. I also thought of Margaret Randall, lesbian, feminist and socialist activist, who spent decades of her life working and writing for the Cuban revolution, only to opt out of the country and get back home to capitalist haven America. Made me wonder if women like her, like me, can only grow old and irrelevant there and die broken?

I hadn’t as yet read the fiction of Ronaldo Menéndez. About how zoo directors slew ostriches, crocodiles, monkeys, red-feathered birds, camelids just because there was nothing to eat at home, so that now only hyenas and wolves were left to eat each other. I hadn’t as yet heard of pigs being raised in the bathtubs of the metropolis squealing every morning very far from the river and very close to one’s bed. I hadn’t as yet heard of Yoani’s stories about homemade shotguns in the countryside and farmers’ families staying up until sunrise to protect crops and animals from those who try to steal.

And I do not thoroughly agree that that there are no prostitutes in Cuba. Besides, anywhere where contraception and abortion may be accessed without Catholic churches raising hell over it, and in any place where women as equal partners in a revolutionary project may say to a comrade Quiero hacer amor con tigo any day she likes, who needs to pay for prostitutes for specialized services? Who needs to pay for dowries and weddings.

I remember very well one woman in Margaret Randall’s book. One good thing that the Cuban revolution had done to her, she said, was that now she could marry the man she chose and not that which her parents chose for her. Another woman said that her daughter was her daughter not because she was the one who gave birth to her, but because she chose the girl to be her daughter and the girl chose her to be her mother. The girl just turned up in her door and set camp in her house and they got along fine and that's it. Such arrangement, the mother said, could only be possible in revolutionary Cuba with its revolutionary conception of the family. And then, of course, what do you make of “womanizing” when even in “post-revolution” Cuba, we will not want of women who will defend their men’s womanizing, granting that such womanizing is male prerogative, patriarchal privilege and feudal entitlement?

I don’t know what to make of Cuba now. Once I thought I had been there and shook hands with Fidel and walked with the women in the defense and the production brigades. Once I thought I will not substitute roasted chicken and ice cream for taro and red beans.

Guess it’s just the growing hate I feel for the flabs in my middle. Guess I just miss the Cuba that I once knew.

One day in March

One day in March I was in this IWD rally. I was feeling sick because the marshals (all-male, of course) came at me over the placard the witchie hanging by my side was brandishing. As the megaphone blared I sat in a corner under a shade not quite decided what to do: to leave or to stay. Then out came Nelson smiling a mile high.

Nelson is from those days when to be poor and hard-knocked was a way to live and to steal or damage property, say of a bus company monopolizing the Davao-Cotabato route or a banana plantation not following labor laws, was glorious. It was one of those post-recovery period rallies where a few thousands of people had been collected and hauled aboard Sarao jeeps and garbage trucks to make a show of force, so it was like happy-days-are-here-again! So Nelson he approached and extended one hand to me, and I myself wasn’t scowling exactly, just my old wary and hyperacidic self. I didn’t really mean to join that rally, only to look for Godot or some other being who might bring news big or small that will perhaps turn the tide, so when Nelson asked how I was doing and what exactly am I doing there at the back side when I should be with the crowd or at least up there on the stage with Macariu Tiu and Don Pagusara reading poems for women, I just said that them Gabriela boys probably didn’t think of my poems good enough for women and that Mac and Don were probably the new women poets now, not I. Besides, I said, I was only here in the hope that I would run into somebody who could lend me a few hundreds as I had been on indefinite fast. This embarrassed him he blushed. Then genuine distress took better hold and his hand went looking for some bills in his side pocket. I started talking feminist organizing among street lesbians that his embarrassment soon turned to suspicion, maybe fear: That his otherwise very intelligent and once pretty friend would end up a street loonie. He was also glancing down at the witchie slung around my shoulder with a nylon string.

At my witchie’s broom’s end is a tiny placard saying Legalize abortion! which an hour ago had earned me the kinship of a 37-year old woman from a Muslim village nearby, the indignation rally of a well-heeled host of Mom’s Radio, smiles and looks of recognition from streetside onlookers, and the eight-mile long lecture of the marshal who did not leave my side through the march along the city’s main thoroughfares. Nelson seemed to have seen the resemblance between me and my witchie and he lent me a five.

I promptly left the rally.

Went to an internet café and did printouts of Marge Piercy’s Right to Life, a bullet-size poem telling priests and legislators to fuck off, we’re no corn field, no factory, no uranium mine no cattle for fattening, and a nice poster telling guys to vasectomize if they didn’t like an abortion. I hopped from CR to CR of restos, coffee shops and malls gluing the papers up in front of the urinals. I felt I was doing some high crime, like wiring a bomb onto the bathroom door as I pasted and wiped sticky glue off my hands. Just around the time the rallyists were dispersing the herd at the plaza for home, I was done.

I bumped into Jimmy as I was walking along the dark corridors of San Pedro Street. Jimmy is a guy from a high school I went to some 25 years back, and my, was he darker and handsomer. The first thing he noticed was the placard-carrying crone strung around my shoulder. His nose screwed up at me. Oh I went to a rally for abortion rights, I explained, and No, I have not gotten married yet, I’m a dyke, you see, how are you?

He looked like he didn’t hear a word of what I said, just kept on screwing his nose and looking me in the eye, head shaking like he couldn’t believe the fuck that he was seeing.

“You never changed, didn’t you?” he finally asked, voice low and strangely bereft of vehemence.

I looked away, heart lurching, then looked back up at him.

“I just said I crossed over. You may tell our high school friends in our little town that. I did, I have, for the worse.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

I stopped in my track.

“I mean, when I heard you went with the activists? I thought it was just rebellious youth. I thought you would mellow, get a job, lie low. Just like the rest, you know?” He chuckled, still shaking his head.

“But you haven’t! Tsk. You’re something, Man!…”