BLOGSHOT: One more, for a year-ender, on the Maguindanao massacre

Let’s admit it, the MILF is a goner, thanks to the ravages of peace. It has no mettle in the face of the return to power of warlord politics.



I should think it was both spontaneous and also method (as in method to madness and madness to method). You never know who is client to whom. But for sure it is a parasitically reciprocal relationship between Maguindanao and Malacanang. I’m sure Malacanang knew all along about the ever increasing bodycount going on there on both sides of the clan war and we knew all along why the evacuees could not go back to their homes: it has little to do with the anti-terrorist military operations or the AFP-MILF battles. The warlords and business have so much to gain if people cleared out of there. And I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the evacuees in Maguindanao had “sold” their lands altogether to the ruling families there. I myself did find it incredulous at first, preposterous, the idea that many of the evacuees are more keen on sending their daughters abroad to work as domestic servants in the Middle East and live off that rather than go back to the warlords’ domain. The hope is, if their daughters’ indentured labor pay off enough, they will find a new place in another town or province to eke a living in. The reason why I don’t like all this drama over the plight of the evacuees in Maguindanao is that most of it is yes, Lila, bathos, sentimentalism. I sometimes suspect it is very diversionary, you know, like the soap operas at ABS-CBN, it keeps attention away from the maneuverings going on in high places, and also in low places (if we think of the little fiefdoms in Maguindanao as low places). This is also the reason why I’m not so fond of this lobbying thing aka advocacy work, all this paternalistic welfarist politics. Why take to task a government that is up there in power only for itself. It is such a waste of political energy. I mean, NGOs and Church organizations, especially those with good track record in grassroots organizing, should leave charity and mercy work to DSWD and to Jaycees and do some really solid self-organizing work. That which will make people see their condition and do something rather than stretch their hands out longer and longer for more and more dole-outs. I’m sure everyone is entitled to and would choose a little dignity than all that they have been getting all these years. It will be harder, so much harder than we wish, of course, but I’m sure there are sincere people out there and even in the international aid and humanitarian organizations, who would be willing to invest in more coherent community organizing projects, even in organized resistance work, if only to get this damned country out of the mire of backwaters politics it is wallowing in. Let’s admit it, the MILF is a goner, thanks to the ravages of peace. It has no mettle in the face of the return to power of warlord politics. I’m sure so many of them are in the employ, as part-time security maybe, of the ruling families and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those who fired the guns at the journalists were former or part-time rebels. The Ampatuans can even summon history to their side to justify such dastardly act if they like. Who knows what exhortations better than drugs they used before they sent their men to execute the order to kill? Remember Bud Daho, Remember Bud Bagsak, all those massacres committed by the kaffir Christians the infidels and their friends the Melikans against the Bangsamoro? Remember Palimbang Massacre? remember remember all those genocides committed against the Bangsamoro nation. This is the moment, this is our jihad, our moment of vengeance, of justice takbeer! I could go on and on. I could also imagine what the Ampatuans said about the Mangungudatus. Then as before the Melikans and those in power have local collaborators. If history is guiding us right, the Ampatuans should be rightful heir to that race of collaborators. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But what right have these upstart Mangudadatus to suddenly feel good and martyred for putting themselves in the service of the Melikan’s multi-million (Is it billions? I’m sorry, I don’t keep track.) good governance projects? Mow the rascals down.

“I wouldn’t be so stupid so as to escort a bejeweled bai on her way to file a COC for her datu husband!”, a Muslim friend who used to be with Moro human rights work, said to me. “And why are there so many of them escorting the Mangudadatu party, anyway?!? Is it the pay envelope? Or just the scoop?” Right. Bakit andami nga naman nila. Of course, it is provocative. Kung ako siguro Ampatuan, mapipikon rin ako. Di ba, Orak? You are somehow sorry kasi karamihan sa kanila mga pobreng bisaya, local reporters na tiyak kapipiranggot ang suweldo. I propose there was no pay envelop involved: It was a convoy of good-hearted good governance citizens for free and honest elections.

I myself never liked riding air-conditioned vans, a point of irritation for the NGO driver and fellow commuters I had to go with each time: the Glade freshener brings on my migraine, makes of me a vegetable upon arrival at destination point, but if that’s the way everybody gets a ride nowadays to get in and out of Moro country, would I have a choice of not riding to save my ass if I were there scavenging for news or some signs of hope?

Life is cheap. You are either predator or prey. From moment to moment of history’s unfolding. And spoils is all.

Does She Like You?

I had been decorating her clotheslines with my briefs and Good Morning towels and she always took them off for folding and ironing, but you can’t just assume that one aunt understood that as a sex change.

My Aunt Lydia suddenly got into dolling me up. I don’t know why. Maybe she just wanted to clear her lockers of unworn clothes hanging like unsold brides or she just found me a little too poorly dressed that she kept on handing me things to fit into. Yesterday morning she took a red sequined blouse shining like a street car which I promptly waved away saying, “Not that, that’s for a girl,” and she yelped and stared down at me her eyes big as her gaped mouth, “And why, what are you a boy?!?” I scratched my head and went back to my book mumbling something about crossing universes a long time ago and where are you which I hoped she didn’t hear and she didn’t and she turned her head around to whoever was there and broke into a loud laugh that called everyone within earshot to her side. “Listen! Listen to this fool! She thinks herself a boy!!!” She kept on repeating the tale to every neighbor and member of the family that came to the house later that day that My Goddess, at 45 I felt like a tyke running fussed over by adoring adults.

My Aunt Lydia is sixty-seven and very provincial. In another time you would not find her making a big laugh about a thing like who you like to sleep with, which is, as I explained to her long ago, what being a lesbian is all about. But we aren’t that theoretical, Aunt Lydia and I. You can’t get around long with old folks explaining your sexual preferences elaborately. You just tell them Oh I don’t like the smell of them sticking in my bed sheets, the smell of their urine in my latrine, like it’s all about hygiene and you have them agreeing and imagining that lesbian sex is indeed far cleaner than heterosexual sex. From there, if you like, you may proceed to talking about limp dicks and big egos beside the many ways that two women can understand the world they both live in on top of sexually pleasing each other, and I promise you, the worst you could get is some cussing and swearing, the best hugs and wild sniggers.

It’s not that my cross-dressing never registered. But if you are the family’s most trusted laundry machine, after some time nothing surprises you anymore, be it a nose ring, a dollar bill, a packet of female condoms in one of the pockets turned inside out, or strings and funny strings with tiny flaps of wings. Reality often doesn’t flop down your lap that way, no. Like I had been decorating her clotheslines with my briefs and Good Morning towels and she always took them off for folding and ironing, but you can’t just assume that one aunt understood that as a sex change.

But really, I have had no trouble with telling as far as my old provincials are concerned. And sometimes I get carried away with the telling that I make up more than what is actually there to tell. Like today my Aunt Lydia had me telling her about girlfriends that I skidded away improvising along the way about why two women who perfectly understand each other often do break up.

“Oh Auntie, I don’t really like girls, they’re all traitors, double-crossers.”

“What?!?”

“You should see them. How they think of themselves priceless gifts to lesbians.”

“What you talking about you nut?”

“It’s true! They’re rotten at the core! They’d trade you for some idiot of a guy with a car and come back crying like you’re some ortho clinic for the convalescent. Oh Auntie, most days I just want to break their teeth and knee their pits. A thankless sorry world if you get so unlucky as to get stuck with one…”

                                  

I was growing uncomfortable, also sad, because it looked like I disappointed her about a truth neither of us could help. One arm akimbo, she put her weight on one side and looked me in the eye.

“Now what are you talking about, you, rascal!?!” her voice was so low, so soft, it broke my heart.

I turned away, lifted a comb from on top of the refrigerator and pretended to be brushing my hair.

“I don’t really take to girls, Auntie.” I put it back and turned around to face her. She really looked so distressed that I could not stop myself from smiling.

“I swear! They’re a lot of baggage!”

“So you take to boys???” She was picking up and was beginning to smile herself.

“Why, sure, Auntie. I’m a homo, didn’t I tell you? So I take to boys. And I go boy-to-boy only. And you know, Auntie, this girlfriend I have? Geeh! She’s the real one! You could spot her without your glasses on. She looks a mighty testicle crusher from five miles up.”

Guffaws. “You crazy fool!”

“Yes, Auntie. And she’s a bit like you, too. A little jagged and a little aged.”

Silence. Long silence.

And then, “That’s nice, dear.  And does she like you?”

 

A report from Basilan: No Room for Damsels in Distress

There was no one to commandeer you to put down the hammer,
get down from that roof, leave the repair of the ceiling to me,
leche! that’s not a job for a girl! It was the best setup in the world!

Karen Kaye Rivero

Being born and raised in infamous Basilan Island has its advantages. You get to play inside army tanks, you get to learn Tausug and you get to drive at eleven years old.

But being born and raised without a father is even more amazing. One grandmother, one mother, and two sisters are all you have, and it’s the best setup in the world!

There was no father, no uncle, no brother, or houseboy to tell you what is safe and not safe, what you should or should not do. No one was there to commandeer you to put down the hammer, get down from that roof, leave the repair of the ceiling, of the kitchen door to me, leche, that’s not a job for a girl.

You thought that it was natural, and that this is the best setup in the world. You took it for granted that your mother had to work doubly hard. You even thought it was cool to be on a scholarship, even if the nuns insisted to take you off the roll because your Chinese middle name betrayed you. You looked up to your glamorous and feisty grandmother, but feared her at the same time. You would later learn that this is how it feels to fear a father.

The male form, manner and temperament were so foreign to you, so alien, that you simply never thought that they should have a space in your young life. Why, there was even a time that even the dogs you had at home were all bitches. No single male, human or animal, imposed its presence on you.

So as a result you and your sisters grew up braver than most. You did not cower when warning shots were fired in the middle of the night. You long remembered that one shot meant ‘warning!’, two shots meant, ‘siege!’ three shots meant ‘fire!’. You did not wait for strong male arms to scoop you up from your bed and carry you off into the moonlight; you and your sisters were dreadfully organized. You were the first ones to run down the stairs at the first shot. You knew exactly what to do:

Eldest Sister would be stationed at the gate, and would drive the jeep if Mommy wasn’t around. Middle Sister’s task was to wake Grandmama up, and help her onto the vehicle. Youngest Sister’s order was to check the premises, peer from the balcony, and yell out information to Ate at the gate.

Like a military unit you moved without fear, with only the intent to survive and protect each other buffeting you.

You grew up like this, doing things on your own; no chivalrous knights needed nor wanted in your all-female household.

That is why, when you finally left that small town in that small island for a college education on another scholarship, you could not understand why in the world people around you should consider you different!

They would be surprised that you didn’t need a companion for your bathroom breaks; they would be amazed you didn’t need the school guard to usher you across the street. They were so intrigued how you could be so comfortable being alone walking or sitting in a corner! So what, you thought.

Just the same, your classmates used you as an example in your Speech class: “Do you agree that children in father-absent families have a harder time in life?,” went one discussion one day. And when they started whispering, nodding their heads, and said, “Well look at Karen, she grew up without a father, and she seems okay;” you failed, for the life of you, you failed to stop from laughing like a hyena right across their struck faces.

You had them start thinking there must be something wrong, something wrong in the world that went on.

A GIFT LIST FOR MY FRIENDS AT FB

photo by Eleanor Trinchera


A snowpick for Douglas to find the road’s artery
Some warmth for Talisa in a room all her own
St. Bernard puppy for Moira, and the courage to cut through
A good shovel for Xiaomin and one good foot on the snow
A ripple of laughter for Mags and a room for some mistakes
More grit for Jean, and the courage to cut through
A life full of wishes for Paul and some surprises
A good knife for Pancho and a school of fish to clean
Less hurts for Hazel, and more reasons to holler

A bar of gold for Cyc and more roots in the mind’s circuitry
Rubber shoes and baggy pants for Ram and a wide road ahead
Less book reading for Angely and more of Romes burning
An ax to grind for Kim and a forest to clear
A good hold of things falling apart for Lila and a hiding place
Incendiary evenings for Joi and the courage to cut away
A clearing for Daphne through the fallen slash of the heart
The right lights for Jessie, no more stumblings in the dark
A sheaf of things burning for Marge and rocks to throw

A round of shelling for Jermy to cut through the grief
More road life for Enoi and the safety of home in the evening
A pocket knife for Mimi and an apple to peel
A bar of chocolate for Ed and some nuts in the gallery
An opinion page for Kaye and stakes in the money market
Men good enough for Karen to keep alit the fires in the loins
A new car for Cherry to bang around and cut through the Freeway
A block of schools for Anthony and a matchstick to beat it with
A running gear for Hazel and some rock music in the inner ear

A new place for Amy and a love to home in
Discernment for Dainty and the courage to cut through
More plays to direct for Eve and a cast of good actors
A love next to nothing for Kharen and no more divorces
More lights for Sayid and no more hungers in the belly
A black alley cat for Quennie and a bar of soap to bleach it with
A warm hearth for Shep and the abiding love of friends and family

Scatologically yours

“The Republic of Letters is in reality an aristocracy.” (C. Seligman)

















Most funding agencies thought our interest had nothing to do with feminist politics. At worst they think we are people from the urinals and bug-infested moviehouses; at best they thought our project was bourgeois and that we were bohemians having a good lay all the time – didn’t we wish!


Reading my Bisaya pieces and the few lesbian poems I had written to college students in Davao, friends in the Writers Guild, who seemed to equally enjoy them as much as the students, call them “scatological”. It makes me uncomfortable. At the same time, I get the sense that though I find nothing obscene in what I write, homosexuality is still perceived as perverted sexuality. And that sex is still viewed as obscene. Therefore, if I wrote something about sex or lesbian sexuality, and read it, too, I said a dirty joke. That’s why the students and the men in tow were laughing. Good thing is, the girls seemed to enjoy the jokes more than the boys, if jokes they were.

Early in my writing days, I remember my dismay upon discovering that a piece I sent as fiction to a weekly magazine was not printed in the short story pages – because it did not comply with the prescribed number of pages – but was printed as essay, as a literary piece, which it was, but I recall my fear of people thinking what I wrote was confessional and not fictional. That brought me to my first brush with What makes for legit writing?

What I wrote in that piece was cute as cute could go, believe me, but real life did bite in the form of a censure by relay from a PO (political officer, I was then a volunteer human rights worker churning out anti-Cory and anti-status quo propaganda) saying how could I publicize something as scandalous as that (about making love with just a few chairs or a bench, and no moon hanging under the ceiling). At the time the feminists hadn’t deployed the concept of the personal being political yet – or not as stridently as we did later – and people hardly talked and wrote about how we get beaten by our spouses and partners inside or outside the struggle, how much more of how we make love, so it kind of shamed me – the censure and the kind of writing that I did then –.

Comfort came in the form of a mentor-friend who happened to be highly literate not just in Marxism but other texts as well. She told me not to overreact because she didn’t even see sex in that piece, and I guess there wasn’t, just the mention of it, though ever the paranoid that I am, I did wonder if she said that not so much to allay my fears as to drive home the point that I did not matter and that that piece did not deserve the attention I was trying to summon to it.

Then about a decade after, I tried sending a “similar” piece to a progressive publication asking for literary contributions. I sent it not so much in the hope of getting it published as finding how people trained in an era of the personal-is-political and adequate funding for training men in feminism would respond. I used another name, because one or two of them must know me by my byline for having contributed another story which they wanted to publish. Well, I did get the expected reply of Sorry, we cannot publish the kind of article you sent in, but for the hello-have-nice-day-tone to it. You would think I was not taking their organization and noble causes seriously that I should send in to them something like that. Anyway, the point is, these were people who thought of themselves as progressives, as activists educated in basic feminist theory, and these were also highly literate people: the same people, I reckoned, who know themselves as the intelligentsia and must have enjoyed The Vagina Monologues and, maybe, perdoname for the unfair comparison, Eve Ensler, Henry Miller’s Tropics of Cancer. The reply came from a male editor. Had it come from one of the female editors, I would have not been any less surprised. I remember how, when the Kris Aquino and Joey Marquez STD non-event got publicized, this progressive paper’s feminist ed complained of how sensational media give undue coverage to people who like to launder their dirty linen in public when there are more pressing issues facing the day. This, even as Gabriela was ardently hailing and claiming the ex-President’s daughter’s brave front for telling on her boyfriend. The one comment on the Kris-Joey event that made me happy, ironically, came from gay critic-friend Douglas who pointed out how Kris betrayed her class by publicizing what also happens in the bedrooms of the upper crust.

Earlier, too, Douglas and I had this brief stint at what we thought was envelope pushing in the field of sexual politics. We pledged to write about what we know about the seamy side of life. We set up hags and fags magazine as counterpoint to for him magazine. Our claim was, that “we know sex, good and bad, and we are not afraid to tell.” Our hfm was supposed to be an antidote to the sexism and exploitative pornography that gays and girls seem unable to escape.

The response was hilarious. Some parents thought we were selling vibrators to their virgin daughters. One gay reader, thinking I was a fag, texted asking for advice where to buy gay sex mags like the one we produced. Some of our White and Peruvian friends said we were reenforcing the notion that homosexuals are decadent and immoral. Their Belgian and Filipina wives said if our motive was to shock, we succeeded, but if we wanted to educate or make people more acceptable, we failed. Douglas was indignant. "That your foreigner friends and their well-traveled wives used the word "acceptable" at all shows their ignorance! Wala gani nashock ang semi-illiterate nga mga bayot ug mga househelps sa Digos!" Of course, the more comprehending ones said it is good that we describe life as it is, about time someone told that oral sex is done outside the pages of Playboy, even as they advised their daughters against appearing in our magazine as it might affect their employment status at middle-brow Ateneo. Sad that our paper had to fold up: We had no funding as most funding agencies thought our interest had nothing to do with feminist politics. At worst they think we are people from the urinals and bug-infested moviehouses; at best they thought our project was bourgeois and that we were bohemians having a good lay all the time – didn’t we wish! – while they were deep into poverty alleviation, peace, indigenous peoples’ rights, training men in gender sensitivity and that sort of thing. But sadder was the notion that being always on the dark side of the road, we were not bringing any lights into the world at all. Some even believed we were part of the exploitative pornography that sex magazines are all about. “Why don’t you just contribute to hfm (the glam glossie for him magazine)?,” artists raised in liberation politics, missing our mag, advised. “Then you need not burden yourselves with administrative and printing costs.”

Apan dunay usa pa ka mahinungdanong pangutana: Magbinisaya diay? Unya linumpen pa gyud nga Bisaya, unsang klase man na, tula ba na?

Bisan sauna ra nga di pa ko kamao mobisaya, I always asked myself: Wherefore this writing thing? And always I would ask fellow writers, Do you think of the market when you write? Si Don Pagusara, gaimagine tingali og gilangawng mga isda sa Bangkerohan: Unsang market? Si Lydia Ingle nikatawa: Oh, she means the audience. You mean the audience? I nodded yes, the audience. But I really meant the market, ang talipapa, ang tindahan sa kanto, the fish and meat stalls, the mass market, ang tapukanan sa mga kabarangay, ang bularan sa mga way-eskuyla. Dangerous for art, isn’t it? Leave populism to politicians and NGO activists; the writer, the artist is something else.

I happen to believe that art is not a luxury. And that there is not one legit language, not English, not even Tagalog (or Filipino, as Jun Cruz Reyes would insist), and in Davao, it’s not even Cebuano. In the first place, I’m not Bisdak, I’m not tubong Dabaw, excusez-moi. Dili ko Cebuano, hinulman ra sad nako ning pulonga: borrowed, purloined, kay Ilonggo takon ya. Language, pour moi, is like citizenship, open to appropriation: malleable, up for anyone’s claim, migration policies and troubles with travel visas notwithstanding. If fine language (and by that we mean say cherry, not virgin cunt; say kinatawhan, dili otin) is all there is to poetry, then that’s like saying the tilapia vendor, the warehouse laborer, the housewife and the run-of-the-mill computer science or nursing graduate have no access to poetry and no access to whatever power poetry claims to wield.

Now that’s the kind of luxury I don’t want any part in.

Just as Lorde speaks of the bridge between the intolerable now and the tomorrow that is dream and vision, I want to speak of the bridge, too, and the breach that is my tongue.