the poetry of cigarette a reprise

You won't learn anything by me

A young writer came up to me today. You write so well, she said. What is your technique?

I felt diluted. Like I really wasn’t the talent I or she thought me to be; just someone picking her way and learned a trick or two along the block.

I said I actually don’t write so well, and I am not a writer. Are you?

But my God, was she tough. She just cast her eyes down and smiled, then knitting her brow as though she was in some harmless guessing game, she again turned her face to me. Wasn’t I glad she isn’t pretty: her cop-out, her get-away. You saying I just wait for the Muse, if she finds me worthy she will find me?

Oh no darling I’m not saying anything!

This is an effort to save that young writer. I am a just a teacher, not a writer, and this is what I have to tell her: Don’t follow me, I have lost my way. As for writing, It cannot be taught. It can only be bought.


When my best friend got married, how my walls went tumbling down. Mimi was my confederate. In life, and in Literature. She drew and wrote poetry and run-on essays, and my, was she good and was getting better and better by the day. So when one day she took the notion of carrying the neighbor’s baby like she wanted to know how it'd feel to play cradle and coo, I just knew she was going to leave me.

Now she’s a doctor in the KSA. I sometimes imagine her going crazy, making doodles inside a stonehouse harangued by an oversized baby. If she ran into a surgeon who told her, You know you’re different, she keeled over. Even of the husband she was rather proud to have procured for herself, she’s run out of things to say. I’m only happy here on payday, she last told me.


Danny was a classmate in college. Quiet but articulate, I once thought he would make a brilliant poet-revolutionary one day. Imagine my dismay when he ended up an officer of a giant pharmaceutical company and stole my pitch in service of corporate money. Charged, he told his girlfriends at FB that he was still going to pay me even if like I said there's no such thing as free lunch in Cuba, but to please please, he loves his wife and family.

And so when it was Karen Kay’s turn to marry and have a baby, I just said Damn. Now there goes another. Into the gully. You cannot marry and be good by me.

I once caught Uma Thurman on telly telling Oprah how women’s lives are interrupted by motherhood. The host cut her. Don’t you ever say that, went Oprah, emotive and sincere-like, hurting in behalf of martyred humanity. You would think Motherhood was Art itself and that great beauties like Uma would do fine serving time in the scullery. Uma, then divorced wife and single mother, blinked and smiled, all artifice. Thankfully it wasn’t her show. She had erroneously used the word “ruined”, too strong too sharp, a taboo for such a dull magazine show.

Are you learning anything? If you are not, then I’m a good teacher, you Go.

I saw you last night

I was at the coffee shops looking for this book I just took back from a friend who refused to read it because I asked her to, and I couldn't find it. Instead, I saw you. You were in a corner table with this nice workaday girl in heels and make-up and it was like a whiff of breeze blew in my face. I saw the You I never knew. You looked all your years, and you looked easy, almost happy: a hair and two loosed about your face and weren't you laughing! I said how good must you be going around these days, surely you didn't miss me, maybe didn't even think of me. Then I started telling myself that that woman you were with isn't half as good as me and can't hurt you as much.

I stood there a good while just staring at you until another customer elbowed me. I picked my way out of the coffee bar.

Back in my room I thought of the last thing you told me. What did you ask? What it is that I wanted? Did I tell you what? I wanted to call. I told myself that when you are so happy like that, surely you wouldn't mind being called, being clawed at, even if I were a crow back from seven hells. I said I will call because you asked me not to bother you anymore and our relationship had always been set that way: you ask me one thing, I give you another thing.

But I was rather tired. I don't even know how to write now without being crazy and unclear. So I didn't do anything. Just set about to packing my things because I was supposed to go to the province, visit my Grandmother's grave. Then when I lay down in bed, I got so irritated with the water stains on the ceiling that I got up and started scraping them off, first with my fingers, then with a knife, until I started thinking about the cost of paint and Vulcasel and nails and everything that will glue things together. Then I thought about the cost of going home and seeing nephews and nieces and relatives who don't really care about grandmothers and one crazy relation.

At the day's end I settled for the cost of paint, because I said right now it's all that I have, this room and roof above my head, for there is nothing to have really, there is no You, there is no Grandmother even, no family, no friends to turn to. I had better keep it, the bed and the roof above my head or I won't feel right about so many things else. So there: I canceled most everything I wanted, kept to the economics of bare living, and now I feel done.

I am ever so done.

So here I am still in my room with the bareness of bare, preserving nothing and telling myself not to waste love, to not exhaust love, since love is done.

Wife and woman a moribund state

Southbound am I. There's no other way. Incidentally.

***

Chopping heads, making a new tract. My God, how refreshing. My cold blood warms up for the kill.

***

Hey, I’m trying to put it nicely but I don’t know Nice. Will you stop calling me Maam? It makes me feel less than the person I am. The impersonal I-don’t-know-you. The heartless label taped on a cardboard box.

***

Guilt, yes, but mostly anger: that friends and family should hurt by how one lives and defends her one little life over and often against and above their many.

***

To say the right political thing: my God, what am I, a leftist manifesto?

***

In the conventicle of the beleaguered, one sits alone and doesn’t speak up, her comrades of yesterday now her enemies.

***

I know what you think. Devious of me to throw you back to Pre-literate England just when you are conquering Europe with your post-Enlightenment liberalism and all the wares you have purchased by it. Dear T, please don’t get mad, or do get mad, but I’m just trying to understand the world that I want changed that I may fit into it like a T.

***

When Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, she could not be just talking about the biological sexes male and female. Or when we say the fags are the third sex and lesbians the fourth, there’s nothing biological in the configuration. And, when I say sex as politically re-inventible, that should include gay men recasting themselves as lesbians (as happened in the late 60s in the separatist groups)and friend fD (former Dennis) defying God and the universe remaking herself as authentic glam woman via breast implants. Should this also include those women who are forever casting and recasting themselves: lesbian today, bi tomorrow, dyke next day, wife and mother next?

***

But wife and woman is a moribund state to fall into: not many are lucky enough to survive and make another climb or jump from there. That’s why I much like better the cross-dresser who doesn’t have the hardware to authenticate itself. The struggle, more than the arrival, gives us political and sexual edge.

***

Or what else do we have to make all the difference that we make in the universe?

A head among turnip heads

“This daily news reporting... sometimes I feel like I’d jump on it,” she complains. Perhaps, seeing too that, I, fictionist and sometime essayist, am not overly subjected to the same grind, the same pain. To deal with cold facts day in and day out: the rally at the park, a statement from the Mayor, the Congressman’s privileged speech, the latest resolution from the City Council on the motion for a separate CR for the third sex, the rape victim, the surviving relatives of the Maguindanao Massacre. To hold each in a page and to make it matter: can you do that? I am a fictionist, no deadlines to beat, no gun to my head, no shaking with politicians' greasy hands and no duty to read through dead-in-the marrow manifestos from left and right activists.

I can’t even keep at my once-a-week column. I get blocked. By one thing or another. Or I’m just too lazy for it. I have no stakes in current events: I don’t even watch TV or read the news. And I don’t care, or wish I didn’t. Cabbage journalism I’d like to call it: the poverty of information, the lack of imagination. But isn’t all human affairs like that? Garbage in garbage out, the repetitiousness of it, the so-much talk, the pretense to involvement, the useless comings and goings, the treadmill. Or maybe it’s just the painful consciousness of the audience out there, who, if you run into them while throwing in sardines and noodle packs into your blue grocery basket will ask, What are you doing now? Still that work of yours churning instant propaganda for that tabloid, for that NGO when are you going to write your first novel?

You stare at the words you chomped out of your system, words, always words that often mean nothing to most people, words which you thought stood for your hold of things, your approximation of truths as you grasp them; then the remorse upon seeing them in print, the wrong predicates, the slightest of typos, the imperfect phrasing, the play with words that don’t need playing with. Then you stare at yourself in the mirror: at your own indifference to errors made, to the sloppiness, and your anger and shame for not making every word matter, for not making yourself matter.

Not to think of the pay and the children and young relations who want this and that. The broken radio, the ceiling that needs repainting, the coveted signature dyke shoes, the coveted books. Some days you go to the bank, hand your two-hundred pesos sometimes eight-hundred pehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsos UCPB check in your name to the lady clerk, a former student at ADDU. She smiles up ever so nicely at you as the computer monitor blinks your name reporting you as bad credit agent, an electronic pillory you cannot contest or haul to court or at least banter about at the canteen over coffee and stale white bread.

I am all-sympathy. Yes, Virginia, you should be writing V.S. Naipaul stories, putting out books. Except that she's not Virginia, and Virginia is dead, so is Sylvia. She's just Germelina, she says, and a mother besides.

To live. To write. My God, she’s otherwise awful good, what’s she doing there, a head among turnip heads!

Unmedicated Gargoyle

Writing or not writing, I am all that I am. And yet there’s this, too: that I’m the best thing that ever happened to me, though not to you, sorry.

All contact is harmful. Dennis says so, quoting me. I don’t remember ever saying that. I think I said all contact hurts. But that’s the trouble with quotes. You are bound to be misquoted even by yourself.

***

Brain injury. When I think that I am thousands of brain cells less after that idiot of a guy knocked me down I panic. Then I hurry to pen and paper to put things down at once lest I will lose it, lest tomorrow I will be thousands of brain cells less more if I bang against another damn stupid wall, less sharp and less lethal than when I was last seen.

Oh to be able to inflict harm. Will I come out of it alive?

If we can inflict enough damage, if we can leave enough clue that those who will come after us may pick after us, that should be contribution enough. Oh the future that yearns to be itself. What I wouldn’t give to birth you.

***

You.
And why must I love you. I don’t care about you. I long accepted, first painfully, then bitterly, and finally blissfully, that the two of us can never love the other without making either less than what we each are.

***

Repeat after me: I’m beautiful I’m beautiful damnit
Not quite orginal damnit, Bette Middler said those, not I.
What I want to confess without shame is that
I am so amazed with myself.
I never cease to amaze me.
Even now.
Don’t you think such praise really sounds sincere for once?


***

My darling says I am only my own light. I may be brilliant I may be black, but she wasn’t there when I was trawling my dark, I just made it all up in my head. And neither was I ever there in her jungle of a heart. Love? she asks, askance, putting out her own headlights. What kind of talk is that. I just want a good fuck. How right she is, the friggin dyke.

***

Sometimes it feels like I will not die without seeing the sun. Sometimes it feels like the mid-day sun!

***

If I didn’t wait for my sisters on my way to liberation, they would have tied me. Oh yeah? If they caught up with me I would have not lived.

***

These endless peace conferences. The staunchest of advocates turning their heads away before you could finish like my god oh my god this fuck of a dyke so tiresome will she never finish with her feminism feminism feminism the world has turned several times over and she’s still there in her feminism feminism feminism. ya. the world has turned on its head over and over and now it has its dirty butt up.

***

Dennis is dead. Why is that? Oh to be serviceable. You grow silicon tits. So that you can bake a cake and be praised for it. It doesn’t connect. You cannot be another being for dressing the part: you are just a dress. Putting on new boobs you cannot be less than a pair of boobs, but neither can you go far more than your pair of boobs. I on the other hand want my breasts removed. That’s not mutilation. That’s doing away with unnecessary parts. How nice to be thin like a sliver of light. Tumescence: loss of will to fly and defy. Gravity.

Removing one’s breasts: that will not make me less. Boobs makes me less; a penis lesser so and an ugly freak too. With boobs removed I will be beautiful boy with clits. How perfect. Is that how transsexuals feel after going under the knife? Loren Cameron felt perfect after she removed her breasts, happy as she always was with elongated clits. How about transsexual women who had breast implants, how do they fare? Padded with dead plastic and rubber chips on all the sad watery places. How do lovers make love with silicon breasts? I wish they would tell. But never mind. They probably know I cannot sympathize. I only care about my life.

***

Dear Menses, thank you for visiting me, I had been trying to forget you these last couple of months and just when I thought I had discharged you for good, you suddenly pay me a visit. Please don’t be mysterious: I have no time to play games like that. We are not getting any younger.

They say there are only two sexes: male and female. Then the more you know, the less you know about sexes. Some say it is bio-chemical; some say it’s just genital: you either have gonads or clits. Then others say it’s chromosomal, you are either XY or XXY. And then there’s hormonal: it’s about the amount of estrogens or progesterones in your system that you either have the temper of a man or a woman. I once thought it’s political, and so I liked to tell people my sex is lesbian, dyke, and that’s not female okay? And then these days when my menses just left me or at least took a leave of absence without a by-your-leave by me, I started growing to grow a mustache.

You guys out there, tell me: Is it a triumph of science or of politics?

***

On being fired: What did you hire me for, if you only wanted me to write old platitudes and safe lies?

***

I am not being ironic: I do love the Philippines, country that fucked me crazy. Can you say that of your US of A? the love, I mean; not the fuck.

Footnote to Notre Dame: My foot. They can only pray for themselves and their lives and their future, my life is beyond recall, beyond rewinding and re-recording. It is made without my making it; It just happened by itself!


Oh to be quoted rather than just to quote and quote. And thank you Moira for the quote about the quote.

Outrageous sellouts and atrocious notes

Letters of Leonard Woolf being sold at P375 at NCCC Mall Booksale. In another booksale (at Victoria Plaza) I found Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at P45. Publisher’s or book seller’s revenge?

NCCC Booksale also very recently disposed of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch at P65; Susan Faludi’s Backlash (my third copy) at P15.75 and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! at P35. Early on, I found Kate Millet’s The Sexual Politics at P95, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will Men, Women and Rape (my third or fourth) at P65 and This Bridge Called My Back Writing by Radical Women of Color at P85.

The sad fact about life (mine) is that I would have not gotten these life-changing books if they didn’t first go out of print decades ago that they may be retailed today at sidewalk vendors’ prices. So don’t blame me, dear reader, if the feminist revolution took very long in coming or never happened in the Philippines. Blame ABS-CBN, the chatbox, and cybersex.

Anne Proulx’s The Shipping News I bought at Gaisano South (then JS Gaisano at Ilustre) at P65; then very recently, it was being auctioned at Victoria Plaza Ground Floor for P35. I also found there Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster’s Place, Fannie Flag’s Fried Green Tomatoes, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, along with her The Hundred Secret Senses and The Kitchen God's Wife, all sold at P35 apiece. I don’t have my copy of these treasure books anymore, but I didn’t buy them, just prayed over them that may others who deserve them as I once deserved them would find them. I bought other unread ones instead, such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at P15 and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God at P35 and other books of plays (Alan Bennet, August Wilson, Willis Hall) and one on Sanford Meisner, plus a novel by David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars, priced at P10 to P65.

Back at NCCC, I found Marge Piercy’s He She It, a book I would recommend as a bible to anyone who thinks about how may revolutions happen in the future. My own copy is with a gay friend-enemy who first refused to read it, then later, refused to return it (after I refused to return her – right, her, not his – treasured Camille Paglia bomber The Sexual Personae Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson unvandalized and unmolested.

I am almost happy with what I’ve got, though I still think a lot of those I lost and rather miss: Nadine Gordimer’s Sport of Nature, Arundhati Roy’s The Gods of Small Things and its Filipino translation deftly done by that UP FQS rad Monico Atienza, now dead.

I also rather miss Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I especially miss her Mrs Dalloway; too bad I lost it before I could even read it (at the time I thought of VW as a little way inaccessible for my rather rough-straits education) and too sad that the literary wanna-be who took off with it did not do better by it or by me.

The Atienza translation was a case of double tragedy and double injury: I lent it to a street dyke who was pretending to go through my books when in fact she was only looking for paper bills I have the habit of using as page markers (it was one of the three four or five paperbacks I had then in the collection that was written in Filipino, the others being Lualhati Bautista Palanca-winning novels Bata, Bata Pa'no Ka Ginawa, Gapo, Dekada 70, and Eleyna S. Mabanglo’s also Palanca-winning poetry book Kung Ibig Mo). This my semi-illiterate dyke friend would tell me later that it was taken by the storm that flattened the shoreline community where she lived. At the time the typhoon struck (it must be that deadly destroyer Ruping), the author-translator was dying of cancer on top of his house getting burned for which he didn’t get sympathy (read as donations) because he didn’t pretend to the humilities that he didn’t feel in the least towards the UP literary and academic community. Bakit nung si Jun Cruz-Reyes ang nasunugan ng bahay, nag-donate sila lahat? he said, as he was autographing the The Communist Manifesto poster that I untacked from his office wall while he wasn't looking. (When I informed him about my theft all he said was that it belonged to a fellow faculty member occupying the other table and that he will autograph it anyway.) I did not inform him that I had also untacked another thing from the board as he was doing the autograph, a news item and a picture of Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright and novelist. My guess was, the Jelinek piece was done by the lone female occupant of that faculty room, who would surely miss it, and take to task the two other guys, Who ripped down the news cutout off this wall!!!???!!! Did you?!? Did you!?! Earlier, a little orgasmic over his ouvre, Atienza had bragged: Sa kanila na iyong one million centennial novel award nila, they can have all the Palancas they like, basta ako nasalin ko sa Filipino ang nobela ni Arundhati Roy. I imagine Karen's ex Duke Sumthin', an Atienza follower, nodding: Olrayt. Saludos, maestro.

Books I still treasure for one reason or another? Sydney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels and Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tide. Then all of Kate Millet, of course: (TSP, Flying, The Loony Bin Trip), Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness, James Francis Warren’s The Sulu Zone, Cesar Ruiz-Aquino’s Word Without End and his prose collection Chronicles of Suspicion, Lia Lopez-Chua’s The Fate of All Progeny, Merlie Alunan's Hearthstone, Sacred Tree, Dolores Feria’s Project Sea Hawk The Barbed Wire Journal and her other book The Long Stag Party. I still hurt for losing the latter, and would be happy if I’d get Adrienne Rich’s What Is Found There Notebook on Poetry and Politics back.

Books I haven’t got around to seeing as yet? Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Mary Wollestonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Somehow I never got to read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in its entirety while it was within the vicinity and also Vladimir Lenin’s The National Question. I also don’t have any of Gertrude Stein, want to get hold of Agnes Smedley's China's Red Army Marches and couldn’t wait to read Zadie Smith, Jelinek Elfriede and all of Jean Genet (who I only happened to know through Kate Millet and Marge Piercy, though God knows every little theft I make, I do in tribute to his life and art). I think Rushdie a goner now, and that Satanic Verse not as good a book as The Gods of Small Things, Haroun and the Sea of Stories knots behind Lewis Carroll's Alice, but I still want to read Midnight Children which, at the time it was making the rounds of activist circles, was a sure miss. Other misses I’ve made: Nabokov’s Lolita, Doris Lessing’s Ben in the World, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Dee Brown’s no never mind that.

Finally I propose that a better tract be written to improve on or replace Philippine Society and Revolution, thank you.

Women Who Drink to Forget

photo: Marc Calumpang





story by Paul Brinkley-Rogers


I asked the young woman from Venezuela if I could buy her a drink.
She told me it was her 21st Birthday.

I am a woman, not a girl, she said with a flutter of her eyelashes…..Can you imagine what that means?

I only drink Amaretto with a mix of Grenadine and lime over ice, she told me. And it has to have two cherries on the top.

Oh, I said. That is your own special drink?

No, she said. It is the drink of my family in Caracas.

The women in my family started drinking when Hugo Chavez became President, and they haven’t stopped.

Dios mio, I said. He has been President for 8 years. The women in your family have been doing a lot of drinking.

Yes, she said, as she studied the Amaretto being poured into a glass by the bartender. It had a copper tone to it, exactly like her skin.

And now it is my turn to drink, she said. I am a woman, I can do that.

You mean you had to wait until you were 21, I asked.

Oh yes, she said. Those are the rules. You have to be old enough to know why you are drinking this particular drink. We call it the “Alo Presidente” (Hello Mr. President). It is a very strong drink. You drink to forget. My mother told me that.

You mean you and your family do not like Hugo Chavez, I asked.

Ambar gulped and upended the glass. She slammed it down on the bar and waved her hands over her head. She looked as if she was about to deliver a speech, maybe a long one, like Mr. President.

No. I do not like him, she said indignantly. He is a dictator. My family has horses. We play polo. Hugo Chavez is trying to take our land. I can’t wait to get back to Caracas so I can be with the women in my family. They gather in the sala (living room): my mother, my two grandmothers, my seven aunts, my great aunts, my cousins and my three sisters. And then they drink.

I had a vision of Ambar (that is Spanish for Amber – I was named for the stone, she explained) and all the other women in the Monroy family upending their Alo Presidentes in unison, as if the act of drinking was an act of exorcism.

A gathering of witches, I thought….No. No. If they looked like Ambar they were much too good looking to be witches. Although, on the other hand, some women I have known have been bewitching.

She ordered another Alo Presidente. The bartender, who had just checked her ID to be sure about her age, looked concerned. Are you going to be ok, he asked her.

Look, she said, forcefully. This is the drink of the women in my family. It is traditional. We know what we are doing. We drink to forget.

I wondered what the men in her family were doing while their women were drinking. I asked Ambar about that.

They know better than to hang around, she said. We don’t even have to tell them to get lost.

What's wrong with Venezuela, she demanded. What's wrong with our men? Why don't they do something....about Hugo Chavez?

I thought about asking if the women drink because they are disappointed in their men. Or if they drink to rob Hugo Chavez of the opportunity to bombard them with his rhetoric. Or both.

But I did not.

I was relieved when Ambar’s friends materialized to join her birthday celebration. They were all from Venezuela. They were talking very very fast. They were very very loud. They did not caution her about drinking.

You were privileged, her friend Adriana whispered to me. You were there when she became a woman. Don't forget that.

On the Church-led peace movement and Islamic sectarianism

Question: Did the dialogue movement offset Islamic fundamentalism's sectarian politics?

Answer: Maybe.

But did the dialogue movement improve the way priests and bishops ustadzes, and muftis’ view women?

No. They only have another moment of male bonding are now more convinced than ever that they are holier than their wives thought them to be. The Church at the helm. What does that mean? What does that mean in a social movement where feminist demands had been practically thrown overboard? Priests and bishops and ustadzes at the helm of course it had to assume a moral if not strongly religious tone. Behooves women to obedience and peaceableness. Real debate avoided and the patriarchal order unquestioned or at least unconfronted.

Not consciously or directly in collusion with state powers maybe, but nevertheless serves the conservative agenda. It obscures, confuses, misleads: now no one asks for a coherent critique of the politico-military establishment.

Human rights in Sulu: the case of Temogen Tulawie

How it all began

What does it mean to be a human rights defender in Moro country? Temogen Tulawie is no rebel. Though had he wished, it would have been easy.

Belonging to one of the prominent clans in the Sulu islands, Cocoy was privileged enough to be sent to a university in Manila for a college education. He enrolled in an Engineering course at Adamson University, and a year later, went over to the University of the Philippines in Dilliman to take up Islamic Studies. It was however a time of intellectual ferment: Cory Aquino had just been installed into power via people power and there was all over the country a desire for a much needed change. In the city, the Muslim youth were bestirred, engaged in one social transformation project or another. Islamic scholars were doing the lecture circuit and the Golden Mosque in Quiapo was becoming a hub of activities critiquing society and Moro polity. In the University, he sat in his Arts & Science courses with would-be leftists. They were wary of his Moro trapo background; he was cautious and didn’t find secular organizations faultless. Leftists invited him to their forums and discussion groups; he went if he could, but most days he was too preoccupied with trying to organize fellow Tausugs in the city to have the time. More radicalizing was his two-year exposure and involvement in the struggles of farmers in Batangas and Tagaytay and of the fishing villages in Navotas, where he did community immersion as part of the required units in the Community Development electives he chose. The experience would later be very useful when he would go back to Jolo to do human rights work.

His apartment in Sta Mesa became a meeting place for Moro youth to gather, sleep and eat together. They spent nights talking Islam, history and Bangsamoro struggle, filling each other out on news from back home. At the time (late 1980s) their families back home were in a bitter feud, the Tulawie versus the Estino, and then the Tan versus the Tulawie. While relatives home were killing each other, the sons in the city reached out to each other. There was a consensus that all right, let’s face it, Moro society is just as rotten at the core, if not more, the Bangsamoro masses are oppressed, we have to do something. They formed a loose group calling themselves Tawhid (Unity), regularly meeting to engage in political discussions and meet with other Muslim intellectuals in Manila. People often came to the house to speak with him, introduce themselves as coming from one group or another, asking help or offering one. Perhaps, he thinks now, more important than whatever political discussions they were having, his place served as some kind of a hideout, a home away from home, where fellow Tausugs could freely speak in their own tongue and talk about home and bangsa. It was a camaraderie that lasted for years, from 1986 to 1992. For himself, he was growing restless and yearned to be home to do things. His family, he knew, was part of the problem, forever enmeshed in bitter family feuds. He wanted to be part of the solution.

In Manila, some of the youth who came to his place had fallen into vice: Unable to adapt to Manila’s maddeningly fast life, they sought relief in drugs. One such youth got to such a mess that he ended up selling the last furniture he was sitting on, to his family’s embarrassment. His parents disowned him. He had him join them, taking him to meetings and prayers. When later the poor guy was reformed, the parents’ gratefulness was boundless. During school breaks when he would be home, he tried to do what he could, talking to tricycle drivers, fish vendors, neighbours and poor relations who would come to their house for one need or another. Then without finishing his course, he finally decided to get home, for good, he had hoped.

The way back home

In 1993 Cocoy married Mussa Sherian, a nurse, also from Jolo. He went into business, plying the southern route between Malaysia and the Sulu ports -- used clothes, garlic, sotanghon, canned goods and later, seaweed. He was making well, especially after a couple of Chinese-Singaporean businessmen from Singapore, looking for an honest man to deal with, found him. The Chinese nationals were into sea cucumber and he did middleman work for them, going around the islands and sailing with them to as far as Cagayan de Tawi-Tawi, collecting and then shipping the product to Cebu for export in Singapore and Taiwan. Then in 1997, the Asian economic crisis hit home. His business partners cut down on orders. As business slowed own, he found himself more and more engaged in community work.

When Cocoy went back to the islands in 1993, the Abu Sayyaf was already training recruits in Patikul, Sulu. He knew that as early as 1991, the idea of an Islamic revolutionary group was already in incubation among the Moro youth and young intellectuals. Abdurajak Janjalani was then teaching in a madrasah in Zamboanga City. Cocoy himself does not believe the CIA had ever anything to do with the formation of the Abu Sayyaf; he knew some of the core leaders of the Abu Sayyaf, some of them were his best friends from home. He knew that the idea was birthed locally, out of the realities of Bangsamoro society, and cradled in the Muslim youth’s radicalism, in their rejection of what they perceived to be an evil system.

One day, while tending the store fronting their house, Majid Ibrahim, a close friend of his and one of the Abu Sayyaf Group’s core members, visited him and invited him to visit them in the camp. When he finally made his visit, his wife Mussa and friends went with him. Seven of them trekked to the hills, four women and three men including himself. The young were earnestly looking for something to anchor their hopes on. The MNLF had by then practically ceased to exist as a revolutionary organization, only resuscitating itself later when the Ramos government entered into another peace talks with Misuari. Amidst unchecked military abuses in the islands and unbridled corruption in government, people were growing helpless. Nur Misuari was in self-exile in one Muslim country or another, so were almost all of his field commanders in Sulu. The few that were left behind surrendered. The civilians, who had to bear the brunt of military reprisals in line with government campaign of wiping out the secessionist rebellion, felt abandoned, having to face the wrath of the military on their own. They moreover felt betrayed: they stood behind the MNLF-led jihad because they wanted a Bangsamoro Republic, that is what Nur Misuari promised them, how come the MNLF negotiated with the traitor government and settled for autonomy and on top of that, they now leave them to fend for themselves? So they took to the Abu Sayyaf. “I’m not an impressionable person. I admire a few people. But he really was very charismatic,” he says of the now martyred Abu Sayyaf founder Abdurajak Janjalani. They made several visits more, discussing the situation in Lupag Sug¸ the need for change.

There was of course the temptation to join the group. But there were things he could not fully accept, such as the idea that all Christians are considered enemy and oppressor of the Bangsamoro and that kidnapping for ransom is allowable, if the jihad had to come to it. After all, it is their tax money that is being used in the war against the Moro people. He hesitated. His years of community development work among the fishers and farmer activists in Luzon had taught him enough to accept such sectarianism. He also felt that even if he went with them now, the day will come when they will disagree. Besides, he could not decide alone. He had a family. His father was still alive then and he had duties he could not just turn his back on. He was also with the youth and students who dissuaded him from going: they still needed him for the many things they wanted to do in their hometown without having to resort to the use of arms.

That did not change the respect and trust they had for him. When the Abu Sayyaf would later have their first hostage-taking, their demands were basically political: the removal of the foreign vessels in the archipelago. Ransom was not in the agenda. Erap was the vice president at the time; he came to Sulu to negotiate with the release of the American linguist Walton. The ASG asked him to be the local negotiator, because they said to him, there was no money involved in this case and they would like him to be the negotiator as he could best articulate the political demands they were putting forth. He did not want to be on the spotlight; he asked an uncle, then Congressman Ben Saudi Tulawie, to do the negotiating. Erap agreed to the conditions set by Walton’s captors and the ASG released the captive. But none of the political demands asked was fulfilled. “Erap made a promise when he went down to Sulu,” he says, “that’s why when he became president, the Moro people really took him to task, demanding that he fulfil his promise.” Of course in the end, it was all-out war that Erap delivered.

He set out to do full-time human rights work. He gave up his sea cucumber business, understanding as well that once he got to moving things in the grassroots, he would be at loggerheads with those at the board room of the sea trade. The marines, under instruction from the Southwestern Command in Zamboanga City, guard the backdoor ports; they also provide security for the giant trawlers combing the Sulu seas. Smuggling in the southern borders has been made lucrative for local businessmen with the help of military officials who got big stakes in the sea-based businesses. In Jolo and neighboring municipalities, the Scout Rangers were in a rampage, burning houses, killing civilians, destroying crops. Politicos were not doing anything, preoccupied as they were with keeping themselves in power. Ridos between rival families raged on, driving people out of their homes and livelihood, further impoverishing the poor. In the hills, armed bands took to extortion activities. There was a growing awareness as well and discontent over the state of things in the islands. In 2000, he set up the first island-wide alliance of human rights advocates, the Bawgbug.

A new clearing

About the time that Bawgbug was set in motion, peace advocacy and good governance projects were well on their way in conflict areas. There was a keen interest from the outside world and the rest of Mindanao on the viability of democratic reforms in the islands and there was a welter of support from everywhere. A believer in self-reliance and people’s sovereignty as both means and end, Cocoy refused external funding to run local organizations. He had seen enough corruption around him to know that outside funding only managed to divide people, sowing intrigues and dissensions within organizations. If an outsider NGO worked with him and Bawgbug, he made sure it was on those terms: the locals make the decisions and own the process and they tap local resources.

In 2001 following the arrest and detention of Nur Misuari, Bawgbug led the protest as Sulu once more rallied behind the beleaguered leader. Together with religious leaders and young students, he went around the town, gathering people up – youth and students, farmers and fishers, vendors and tricycle drivers – to demand for the immediate release of the detained leader. Thousands poured out into the streets to show the world where lies their allegiance. For all his failings and all the blame heaped upon him, most of Lupah Sug has remained steadfast in their support for their fallen hero. After all none has risen so far to equal what he did and achieved in his time.

Perhaps, the most important accomplishment Bawgbug made, he says, is the new awareness that people had after direct engagement with human rights work. Before Bawgbug, all that people ever knew was to pick up a gun to fight. They didn’t know of other avenues of struggle. Such only serves the central government’s militarist agenda in dealing with the Bangsamoro people. Soon after he set Bawgbug into motion, people were suddenly speaking up, going to him to file their complaints that they would be handling one hundred HRV cases at a time. It is not true, he says, that it is not in their culture to file a case, get documented. The experience of Bawgbug has disproved all that. It’s a matter of making people aware and making them feel that they are not that powerless.

In 2003, the Cotabato-based Consortium of Bangsamoro Civil Society made its way to Jolo. A Mindanao-wide network of Moro civil society organizations, CBCS wanted Jolo to be part of the broader solidarity network. Cocoy played mediator, neutralizing resistance. In the wake of mounting criticisms against fund-driven NGO projects, people were wary of help, even if it came from fellow Moro Muslims. There were accusations that people would not normally bother with projects unless they have something to gain for themselves. Sometimes he wanted to scream, he says, tell people that he is not doing anything for money, he’s using his own money and he is not about to be used by anyone, but he chose to shut up, laugh it off and kept on with his work. Soon people took to him. When he coordinated the CBCS program, he insisted on certain terms before he accepted the responsibility, ensuring that voluntarism was going to be the main mode of doing work. He felt that this is the only way to answer to people’s criticism about their misery being capitalized on by opportunist NGOs. Such policies however did not always endear him to other local actors: while others were asking for more money, he was setting himself above the rest, asking for less.

In Jolo as in other conflict areas saturated with peace projects, new NGOs proliferated. He however feels that before warlord politics, most NGOs do not have mettle enough to influence local government. Instead of influencing government and introducing democratic reforms, he says, they sometimes end up being used by politicos who profited from the so-called GO-NGO partnership, refurbishing their image and giving them credibility they otherwise long lost. He cautions INGOs about creating wrong expectations: “Upon entry INGOs would explain their presence, saying they’re in the islands to help, to provide accompaniment and civilian protection and improve the human rights situation, and to connect the islands with the rest of the world, work which they often could not deliver.” He especially doesn’t take well to INGOs’ offer of funding: It gives people all the wrong notions.

Intrigues and vilification is something he had long learned to weather. “If you threaten those in position of power, you are bound to be attacked.” And sometimes it was not just politicos and the military that disparage his efforts, but fellow Moro activists as well. Detractors in the Southern Command and politicos say he is making himself very useful to Christian activists and leftists. Critics in the civil society movement question his connections: isn’t he scion son to one of the warlord clans in Sulu? It just so happened that the Tans now have the upperhand; if his family was still in power, would he be a rebel talking human rights like he does?
In fact, he did. In his family, which includes his notorious Uncle Tambrin in Talipao, he has become the troublemaker, a rebel son. Even when he ran and served as municipal councillor from 2004 to 2007, he did not turn trapo but remained a staunch human rights defender and government critic. Whether he is sincere or not is up to those in the grassroots to judge, he says. He admits to his trapo origins. Totoo naman. Corrupt naman talaga ang pamilya ko, he says, with a laugh. But he has good memories of his own father, Kimar Tulawie.

In 1989, he recalls being summoned home. His father, then Vice Governor of Sulu, was in a rage over military abuses in the islands, particularly of one Colonel Caharian who headed the Cobra Team which specialized in abduction and killing of suspected rebels. Bodies were being dumped in shallow graves. The Governor told his gathered children that he could not anymore take what was happening in Lupah Sug, he was withdrawing his support to then incumbent Governor Tupay Loong. It was a shame, his father said, that opposition to the military had to come from a lowly functionary in the local PC-INP, while the highest officials in the islands looked on: A certain Sargeant Hapas in the Jolo police force had just challenged the fascist Colonel Caharian. Wielding a megaphone in front of the Islamic Center in downtown Jolo, Hapas dared Caharian to come out, if he be so brave, and face him in a man-to-man combat. Caharian responded by sending a load of soldiers that had the policeman picked up and pushed out of the truck, then shot at. The incident would be reported later by the military as an encounter with Moro rebels. That was only the latest of the Colonel’s capers. There were countless other hapless victims before Sergeant Hapas, most of them unvindicated and unindemnified. At least Hapas fought back and miraculously survived and would later join the Tableegh, a fundamentalist sect; most did not even make it to the Provincial Hospital. People’s anger was a-swell and the Governor was not doing anything. His father took on the task of seeking vengeance. He took leave of his family saying he is going to square it off with Caharian, even if that meant rebelling against government, or dying in the attack. He led the raid of the Colonel’s camp in Asturias, Jolo. The Colonel escaped but several soldiers died. The incident made news enough to call the attention of Malacaňang and compelled Cory Aquino to send his Chief of Staff to the islands. The dreaded team was in no time booted out of the islands. His father had of course thenceforth removed himself from office.

In a way he took after his father, he says. “And he didn’t build a house or got himself a car using government money.” Before his father died of cirrhosis a few years back, the old man had told his wife Mussa how lucky and proud he is to have a son and a daughter-in-law like them. The two of them, he and his wife Mussa, are deeply involved in human rights work, and they make sure that this legacy is passed on to their children.

Warlordism and contemporary Moro politics

For being a consistent critic of whoever is in power, Cocoy is of course “enemy” of the status quo, regularly disparaged and pilloried even by friends and kin in government. “When Governor Jikiri was the incumbent and Tan was running against him, I was being accused of being in the payroll of Tan. Then when Tan won and Munir Arbisson ran against him, Tan accused me of being in payroll of Arbisson.”
In fact, he and Arbisson were far from allies, he says. Bawgbug blames Congressman Arbisson as responsible for the presence of the US military troops in the Sulu Islands. He opened District II as entry point of the US Army when the rest of the archipelago was against it. When Bawgbug held a rally barring US forces from the shores of Sulu, Congressman Arbisson mobilized his own contingent for another rally welcoming the troops into the islands. In the trumped-up multiple-murder charges filed against him by Governor Abdusakur Tan, the Governor took the notion of lumping him with the Congressman as co-accused. The Congressman challenged Tan in the last gubernatorial race but was defeated by the latter. Even Arbisson, he gathers, was also surprised that the two of them should be co-defendants in a case. It’s bad mathematics, associating him with Arbisson, but it’s Sakur Tan’s game at the moment and he wants Cocoy eliminated, along with his rival Arbisson.

Since he took up the human rights crusade, threats have hounded him. His own trapo uncle Tambrin Tulawie took the trouble of showing him an intelligence report purportedly of an assassination plot against him and crying, offered him money how much ever he needed to get away to Malaysia or Singapore or wherever he wished just he leave the place. His own wife would be followed by motorcycle riding men on her way to work in the provincial hospital.

In the contemporary politics of the ARMM, power still comes out of the barrel of a gun and wealth may still be secured through the control of vast lands, but there is a shorter way now: the IRA. Good governance and democratization aside, the IRA is as good as loot. In the town of Talipao, for instance, where his aunt Hadja Sitti Raya Tulawie and her husband Tambrin Tulawie sit unopposed as Mayor and Vice Mayor, he knows that of the 7 million monthly IRA, only 2 million is used for implementation; the 5 million is take-home money, from month to month. “All you have to do is have the local banks’ managers in your confidence. That’s what I mean when I said welcome to Sulu’s mansions and palaces of corruption.” And to please count out the line agency monies, he adds, in the Department of Agriculture, for example, and to count out as well the business side of political office, the share in the backdoor trading, the contraband goods, including guns and narcotics. That’s why officials in the Southern Command had to be paid off as well: They oversee the sea routes, and oversee the election results. If the armies of private security cannot ensure electoral victory by bribe and harassment, the marines take over to take care of the votes. That’s why the same military officials in the Southern Command are in the sea business as well. That’s why the local lords had to buy guns from them as well. You keep each other in the wealth. It’s all part of the family business, and the Southern Command, if you look close enough, is family to the Tans, to whoever is in power in the islands. And if you look further, of course, Malacanang is family, too. It is an interlocking directorate of reciprocal political economic and para-military interests.

The crusade for human rights in Sulu

On July 22, 2009 a charge of multiple frustrated murder and attempted murder has been filed against Temogen Tulawie at the Regional Trial Court branch 3 of Jolo, Sulu. He was supposed to have plotted the bombing incident in Patikul, Sulu on May 13,2009 which wounded twelve persons including the Governor and his uncle Tambrin. He had been granted Temporary Protection by the Court of Appeals in Cagayan de Oro City when he filed a Writ of Amparo on June 13,2009 and was provided escorts from Philippine Marines, but when a warrant of arrest had been issued against him on October 5,2009, he had to go into hiding.

For frontlining in human rights defense in Sulu, Cocoy has earned the wrath of the powers-that-be in the islands. In the last decade, his organization, Bawgbug, has been working with local, national and international rights advocates to bring in change in the warlord-dominated politics of the islands. In his various capacities as community organizer, provincial chair of the Consortium of Bangsamoro Civil Society, and one-time Councillor of the municipality of Jolo, he had rallied attention to the human rights situation and had organized campaigns and mass actions in the local level. These included fact-finding missions, legal actions, forums and symposiums, and mass mobilizations.

In January 2008, an ID Card System was proposed by Col. Natalio Ecarma of the 3rd Marine Brigade station in Sulu in line with the military campaign to flush out the Abu Sayyaf in the islands, a move which the Governor supported. The plan was suspended following mass actions spearheaded by Bawgbug and other local civil society organizations. Reports of killings, abductions, and massacre of families, including cannibalism, were also investigated and acted upon. For more than two decades, civilian abuse by Marine soldiers have been the order of the day, with no action from local officials for fear that come next election the military will not support them. Under his leadership, HRV cases have been dug up and brought to court and the office of the CHR-Region 9 in Zamboanga City.

In June of 2008, right after the release from kidnapping by the Abu Sayyaf of ABS-CBN news reporter Ces Drilon, military bombardment of Tanduh Pugut, Barangay Siunugan in Indanan was conducted by the military. The offensive came after the Governor’s appearance on national television saying Tanduh Pugut is a playground of the Abu Sayyaf. Cocoy facilitated a preliminary investigation by local human rights activists then arranged for an international fact-finding mission. Both missions revealed that the community bombarded was civilian territory and damage to life and property has been extensive. The Governor was forced to backtrack and promised compensation for injuries inflicted. The promise was of course never fulfilled and the Governor went on to say that human rights reporting is detrimental to the image of the province.

Then on March 31, 2009, following the kidnapping of International Red Cross volunteers, the Governor issued Proclamation 1 putting the entire province of Sulu under State of Emergency and converting the ruling clans’ private armies into the Civilian Emergency Forces. On the same day, warrantless arrests were carried out. Cocoy challenged the declaration and set out to organize a huge mass protest, to be staged in front of the Governor’s Office. He questioned the basis of the latter’s proclamation and demanded for the guidelines in the implementation of the Emergency Rule and reminded him as well about the killings and massacres very recently committed by the military which remain unaccounted for. Piqued, the Governor called his uncle, Vice Mayor Tambrin, and castigated the latter over the behavior of his nephew. His uncle invited his mother and two brothers in his office. In the meeting the Vice Mayor told his mother and siblings that whatever will happen to Cocoy, he is not to be held responsible. His brothers retorted that’s okay, neither are they expecting any help from him. Cocoy filed a petition before the Supreme Court, on April 4, 2009, challenging the legality of the Proclamation. Then he proceeded with the plan to hold a big protest action that will demand for the immediate release of arrested civilians. Before the rally could be launched, the Regional State Prosecutor of Region 9 issued an order releasing those arrested. The Governor complied, but the Emergency proclamation remained in place. It was not to be lifted, especially after the Governor finally succeeded in exiling him from the province: using all his powers, the patriarch procured a court order for Cocoy’s arrest.

Temporary victories

It was no mean feat, organising people, telling them to take to the streets and demand for their rights when they have a fatalistic attitude towards life and believe that their lives are not in their hands but in the hands of God. “If someone dies, from a bullet or from hunger, they attribute it to destiny: pre-ordained by the Maker.” And now there you are telling them that they have human rights, that the rich oppressing the poor is not necessarily the natural order of things? It was a daunting task. But once you get them out of their holes and got them engaged in struggle, you know that you are on your way. He makes sure he does not give people false hopes, does not make wrong expectations. You just make them see the world as it is, the truth as they themselves have known it: that’s consciousness-raising. “I tell them not to expect that justice will be served in their time, because it is going to be a long journey, and a hard one.” But sometimes just getting them involved in human rights struggle is victory enough, against fear, against helplessness.

That is why he believes that no matter how small the step that has been taken, it is worth celebrating. Every little victory should be celebrated, he says. Just seeing people leave the drudgery of work and enslavement to march in the streets, challenging the political and military establishment, pouring out their anger, their collective outrage, is exhilarating. Even the “Samals” (Sama Dilaut), who never in their whole life participated in political actions called on by Tausug leaders, he says proudly, went out into the streets with them, exhorting others, shouting Para kato ini! Para kato ini! (This is for us ALL!). It is this engagement in struggle, in collective action, that gives people a sense of awakening, that makes them feel their lives can change and political change is possible. When Jolo Mayor Amin, for instance, raised the tax they levy against tricycle drivers, Bawgbug mobilized a huge rally protesting it. Tricycle drivers sacrificed a day of work just so they could join the protest. Rightly so: the Mayor rescinded the newly issued tax.
Knowing how this new awareness, how this awakening threatens their hold to power, politicians have sought not only to rein in the emergent human rights movement, but took ways as well to ensure that it lost religious backing. When the Jama’a Lupah Sug, an alliance of civil society organizations in Sulu of which Bawgbug is one of the convenors, launched a protest action in November 2009 against the holding of the35th Bishop-Ulama Conference in Jolo, the mass mobilization was so huge that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had to cancel coming to the conference as guest of honor. Graced by high military officials and heavily guarded by the abusive Marines, the people saw the high-level Catholic-dominated conference as an insult to their religious sensibility: the conference program included a visit to the Central Mosque by the most corrupt local and national government and military officials, to be escorted by the most venerable of bishops and ulamas. People massed in front of the mosque to barricade the offending guests, to the displeasure of the Governor and local hosts. The Grand Imam of the mosque, Cocoy would learn later, had been heavily rebuked by the Governor that thereafter he was not to allow the use of the mosque as rallying point for the faithful. On that very same day, in what looked like so quick a turnaround, he announced to the gathered throngs of people that from that day on, the mosque is not to be used as rally area. Cocoy had asked that he be allowed to speak after the Grand Imam made his one-hour khutba (Friday sermon), that he may thank all those who participated in the mass rally cum barricade for without the strength of their huge presence, hypocrisy would have won the day. The latter refused to lend him the mike. Except for Nur Misuari who is Chairman of the Board of the Grand Mosque, no one else has the right to use the microphone but him. Angered, Cocoy would later grab the mike as people were being dispersed and told to get home, and asked one and all: How come that if it is for Misuari and in praise of Misuari, we don’t mind extending khutba time for political speeches, but if it is only for the Godforsaken tricycle drivers, we are not allowed to speak? That of course had the tricycle drivers and the hordes of the unfortunate raising their fists shouting Takbeer Allahu Akbar.

Women and the religion of honor

The Central Mosque in Tulay, Jolo, has always been the hub of religious-political gatherings. The khutba always served as a crier of issues that affect the community of the faithful. It was therefore a big disappointment for Cocoy to know that the ustadzes, the appointed moral guardians of the Muslim community, would close their eyes at the time when they were most needed as witness by the community people. “You would not expect much from your politico-businessman friends. But you would hope that your ustadz friends would do better.”

A focal issue that divided the religious was rape. The Civilian Emergency Forces of the Governor had been involved in the gang rape of two women, with some of the perpetrators identified by the victims. However, no investigation and no punitive action has been undertaken by the police or civilian authorities, least of all by the Governor. The identified rapists, it turned out, belong to prominent families. Cocoy sought help from the ulama. He had hoped that the ustadzes would act with more conscience. The mufti (the Muslim equivalent of a bishop) did take part in the indignation rally; but that was all. He didn’t even enjoin his followers to make a stand. And as though the crime did not deserve his outrage, neither did he make a public statement denouncing it. At one time or another, he expressed doubt the rape happened. In fact, most of the ustadzes would like to believe that the gang rape is hearsay: no Muslim would rape another Muslim. While the ustadzes step back before condemning rape, they usually don’t think twice when object of the protest is US imperialism, the Manila colonial government arresting the great leader Nur Misuari, or the Catholic bishops guiding Gloria Macapagal Arroyo into the Grand Mosque of Jolo.

In traditional Muslim society, rape is meted out with the death penalty. Not only is it a crime against chastity; it is also a crime against family honor. Men (husband, brother or father of the rape victim) may commit parang sabil, killing or dying, in redeeming family honor. In demanding for justice for the rape victims, women human rights workers were invariably questioned, harassed and interrogated: asked to shut up and file the case away. The ideology and religion of honor likewise edicts that the “dishonored woman” is irredeemably damaged and is best “banished”. But over decades of military and para-military abuses in the islands, rape of women has become all part of enemy’s terror tactics, along with killings, beheadings and mutilations, and in one documented case, cannibalism. Cocoy avers that rape has been the most difficult to handle. It incurred him the most enemies and caused him to fall out from friends in the religious community. At one moment, he thought he was going to die on it.

A day after Cocoy brought the complaint of the two rape victims to the attention of the town mayor Hussein Amin, he got a call from the latter. The Mayor asked him to bring the complaining victims to his office, for an interview and for affidavits. Accompanied by two Marines (provided him by the Court after he filed a writ of amparo following threats and harassments from the Governor), his wife Mussa, one of the victims and her mother, he went to the Mayor’s office. When they arrived, the place practically was in a state of war. Around a hundred CEFs surrounded the Mayor’s office, waiting for them, their guns cocked. Hadji Kadil Estino, a warlord and adviser to the Governor, was there; so was Hadja Amina Buclao, wife of Provincial Board Member Hector Buclao, whose two sons were implicated in the crime. Buclao’s wife was especially agitated and followed the rape victim when the latter went to the comfort room. Cocoy, seeing the hadja going after the victim, went after them and heard the Board Member’s wife tell the other woman: “Hilapun ku in tutuy muh” (I will cut your clitoris off.”) Outraged, Cocoy raised a hand to slap the woman, at which instant he also saw her draw a pistol from her bag. He had a vision he was going to die that day and that hour and was only saved by the push of bodies that came between them, putting down his raised arm and embracing him. Upstairs of the municipal building where he used to hold office as town councillor, he would be told later, some of the employees were already crying: they thought the Mayor invited Cocoy that he may be handed to the CEFs to be shot. The victim would refuse to sign the affidavit that day because nowhere in the document was it clearly stated that the affiant had been gang-raped; neither were the rapists named. The three of them went home cold, the women crying. They had been had. The rape victim threatened by the hadja, incidentally, was a relative to the latter, a poor relation.

In the face of intensified harassments against victims and human rights defenders, the Central Mosque in Jolo took a beating, too. It was learned the around 50 ustadjes had stopped getting their monthly stipends after their participation in human rights and anti- US troops rallies. When after negotiation with the Governor they were able to get their allowances back, along with the monthly allocation for light and water for the mosque and the madrasahs, the khutba changed gear: New rules have been imposed. From then on only the Grand Imam can use the microphone and he alone may decide what are topics fit for discussion and who can be lecturer. These days, the khutba keeps off from political issues. Human rights and good governance are taboo topics; lectures now focus on virtues related to obedience and respect for leaders. The ustadzes are to stay put henceforth; no more participation in rallies unless called on by the ruling politicians. The ustadzas (the female Islamic teachers) had also been issued an ultimatum: they either stop going with Cocoy and Bawgbug or they stop going with the ustadzes and lose their jobs at the madrasahs. The women chose the latter.

Hope for human rights

The last time that Cocoy heard from Jolo, the Governor and his men were happy over his “banishment” from the town. With him gone, the voice of dissent has been silenced. Even NGOs and INGOs who have managed to stay in the islands have grown more and more cautious. There are no more human rights rallies, like the Governor wished. The youth and student activists who now and then break out from the corral, to speak up, to disagree with how things are, are all too quickly hushed, reprimanded: would you like to be another Cocoy? Now a fugitive, his adversaries like to reduce him to a lesson in prudence.

He sometimes suspects that his enemies back home only want him out of the islands; now that he is not there to give them trouble, they probably would rather that he enjoy a long get-away vacation, like what his uncle Tambrin once begged him to do. He however understands that no matter how insular Sulu Islands may be, what happens there is not divorced from the bigger realities outside it, not separate from the bigger rot that is Philippine polity. In the first place, the monstrous corruption and abuse of power that have taken hold of the islands would have not been possible without the help of Malacanang and all those in the higher echelons of power. It is a big chain to break and that way, he is not neither safe where he is.

Hopeless as the situation may be, he believes that there will always be those who will keep the fight. “Out of ten there is always one soul who will dare; who will refuse to be gagged. They are the ones who will keep the sliver of light all throughout our struggle. The history of Lupah Sug has shown so, time and again.”

“Do you really believe they will be in power forever? I don’t think so. Naniniwala ako na tayo pa rin ang mananalo. The thing to do is to reach out to other democratic forces.”

this is how i found the poet

photo by Germelina Lacorte



by Quennie Wang Yuni

This is how I found the poet.

One day when I was talking to Karen about writing again, she said that her poetry was a one-time thing—like she had a one night stand with the muse who left before she woke up the next morning. Of course, Kian was there to console her—almost as if she had always wanted to be a full-time mother.

Then I asked her to find me a poet—not one who is long dead nor someone we would have to invent. And no, not like the fictionist I met when I was too young either. Yes, we were fascinated by his stories that won several Palanca and other awards but growing up made me forget why. I no longer love how he writes—dry but earnest. Besides, I do not want to break another heart like that.

The ones after him were far more poetically challenged. I was on my tippytoes like a Love Girl Scout who lives in infinite hope until I decided to take a break (yes, the self-imposed dating hiatus). We could not really blame amateurs for leaving my heart in shards, could we? They spoke the language of dreams in another tongue—like photography, music, film, technology, law, money, science, etc.—and I was too lazy to take their language lessons seriously. When they tried to tread on my dreams by attempting to write, I drifted—and once, even fled. I must warn you though that if you ask them, they most likely will tell you another tale.

As I started to plan for the search, Karen wandered into my poet wonderland with a huge sign that says:
“He is not the poet. I AM the poet.”
~Sheilfa (when asked about her lover eight years ago)

I smiled after reading which prompted her to add, “The search for the poet is futile. You should date an accountant. Really, look at Carrie. Her Mr. Big is a financier because she is THE WRITER. Never mind that she is fictional.”

And like most of our conversations, this ended in laughter—the kind that makes the muse forget that we had broken up.

in the rot and welter of unmade loves

I asked her to call and she never did. So I said the hell with it, I don't wait for nobody.

Then on my way to buy a call card something happened. I was from down the school basement of this university looking for this friend the school wanted to hang and not finding her among the trees, I went across the road over at Marco Polo to get a book from another friend doing a conference there. First thing that greeted me before I could walk into the hotel was this tall lean white woman standing askance in the driveway, in her ruggedly rolled up blue shirt zipped up to the neck and her rumpled cropped head, an arm across her chest, her other hand holding a cig. Her head turned toward me and she looked me up as I approached.

Then she smiled, rather sourly, sucking her cig in between her teeth as she fixed her gaze at me with a look so hard that...Godalmighty, was I sexually aroused? I cocked my head and mocked a yell, my voice a crack hysterical. Hey! you're looking at me! She chuckled, pink tongue wetting her cracked lips, her eyes dancing wolves in the cold frost. I reached the door weak in the knee and when I looked back at her as I gave myself to the lady guard who groped my sides and my front for anything incendiary in my person, she was still watching me, smoke swirling about her face.

my house in a shambles

You poison kings and generals messing around your bed,
but not an orphan rat hiding among your treasure vault.
You can't go that low.


No idea what set it off, maybe a case of terrible maladaptation to a loss after loss: my tiptop acer laptop self combusted after I fell back into a river while doing a research I wasn't so happy to take on. Around the time it had started to rain, too, and the roof over my head, repaired several times over before, was dripping again, making pools on the floor and wetting the books and the notebooks I heaped in a paper box under my bed. Then as though those weren't disasters enough, a stinky mouse got to visiting my closet.

In the beginning, one had to manage. You knew someone finished off by a rat: Or maybe not by a rat but something else: the boy husband ditching him and the comrades laughing off his back. A hard blow it was that one atrophied: he could not lift his butt to get to a doctor perhaps thinking that leptospirosis seemed as good a cause as any other to die of, so there, wasn't he a spectacle, Bayan NCR sending a statement read at his funeral draped with a red flag to the effect that he elevated faggotry to respectability by getting front page coverage of their partido-officiated wedding. Wouldn't one get sick when they're dead with that.

Forswearing death and publicity, I emptied my locker out, brush brush, soak with soap and water, then padded the holes through which the little pest must have gotten in. But alas, it was only paperboard I used, so no sooner had the paste dried on my fingers than mousie got to nibbling through again. I found black dried droppings, not just under the stove and around the tipped plates on the kitchen table, but also in my box of underwears. Gutted the locker clean another time, more furious washing, then on to the mall for a mouse trap, gritting my teeth at having to succumb to another atrocious lie: some icky glue for some panicky runner to step into. Damnation: the awful invention only managed to stick in your clothes and fingers, Rattie just skittered through the whole layout and has moreover moved to the gay literature department, its litter now all over your boxes of poems, paperbacks and like perishable excretions. Poison is out of the question; unpolished brown rice mixed with chicken gravvy and Baygon? That's simply horrid, outrageous. Graceless, too, and unaccounhtably stupid, immoral. You poison kings and generals messing around your bed, not an orphan rat hiding among your treasure vault. Can't go that low, Baby.

You filed a complaint at your landlady's office, a cornerstore fronting their house, only slightly implicating her cat-hating ways. Weren't she the one who made you dispose of your teener cat at your sister-in-law's charge? “I would need wood to caulk the seams and the rot in the timber. And by the way, the ceiling, too, there's a new leak right by the peg hanging my clothes everything under the bed's wet that all I do all week is mop.” She made out like she heard, and you waited for action, but all you heard from day to day was the husband's ever rising voice, gimme this gimme that, where's my other sock, where's the food in the pot get off that rack you brat. A few days later, you'd catch her sneaking out of the gate on foot, knapsack on her back, her three-year old daughter in one hand, in the other a plastic bag. It's not cars and houses alone that make a marriage tick, you knew that, ages back.

You stayed out most nights, a way to walk out of one's own vexed life. Dust accumulated on the surfaces of things, on the caps and lids of food uneaten, on the little jars and cabinets of one's will. You got to frequenting your friend's house where chaos reigns even more supreme. A huge plush sofa occupied center stage around which everyone had to slink and bad days would be when the ex-husband and call-in father telephoned and asked who's in? In the offices, you noted that the population of laptops outranks the number of the employed, and none of them as hardworking as you once were. You excused yourself out of their sorry lives and checked into net cafés, sitting around your old haunts, sipping hot chocolate and staring at the quaintly empty street at three in the morning while the waiter and the guard slept with their heads on the nearby table. Soon you were ruining files, retyping pages here, losing a bluetooth device there, later your memory stick, then your earphones.

You walked home.

You set out to bribing the neighborhood cats. Your friendship with the lot, it so happened, stopped at your doorstep. You stooped down to pick one and they hissed and scampered around. How skittish they had become. Their wives and babies kept on disappearing: not so many folks could live with the racket they make, the rough and tumble on the ceiling, their noisy lovemaking, the crash of pots and dishpans, the devastation of the trash can. Elsewise, they're so easy to tame. Leave the door open, feed them as you eat, let them saunter around, let them sleep at your feet. Soon, they'd be in your bed, on the shelf between rows of classics, on your desk on a loose sheet, the presumptuous bastards.

You never knew what happened to the little rat. Once on your way to the bathroom, you smelled death. But of course. Five cats in a room? What rat wouldn't jump over to their end? Somehow you feel bad the sorry thing didn't die the way you would have preferred for it: in between the fangs of a merciless cat, gnawed to the bone, shred after shred.

Old Man Peter

It's just him with some of the usual failings, I know. Nothing against me. Nothing against Shirley. Nothing against anyone. My annoyance has nothing to do with what he did or did not do for his crazy wife and crazy children, but more to do with what he did not do or say for me and my crazy life. Because, of course, like him, like anyone else, I am just interested in myself and nothing else matters as much as my momentous fuckover life. And that's his fault by me. But of course, how could he, by God, with his troubles and life's emergencies, capped by a hospitalization a few months back from which he might have not emerged alive, and Shirley forever fucking the world with his money, the children he was otherwise too old to look after and do laundry and ironing for, his work in Wollongong and the human rights journals he sometimes had trouble writing for, his unwritten books and the interview transcripts which he wants to finish by himself, his friends in the movement asking for more and more of him when all he could scarcely afford really is less and less.

And so when he thought of you at all, of course, it is more as one of the many things he comes by as he tries to search hell for a way to deal with his life's toughest trial: Shirley. In what way can you help him, in what terms could you come useful, say – say to see to his affairs while he is away; to make sure that Shirley could not hurt him some more in the only way she can: financially, that is, even if he has no finances to speak of, or precisely because he has no more for Shirley to want and profit from some more. That you yourself would need anything from him, professional, political – that one never occurred to him. Once he appeared in your trial where you stood him, thanks to a nice advice from your lawyer-employer friend who didn't even know that the law to which she should be appealing your case did not apply and therefore could not help you fuck be her.

How sad that about everyone is so encumbered with the most important problem to deal with: the self; one's small life. The small self as the big burden, says Kate Millett, who was betrayed, turned in by the very friends and comrades who God knows probably were just jealous of her years her money her property and just wanted to stomp their feet, a way of reasserting parity, she had no right to think of herself an artist and shoot up by them and so they turned her in to the psychatric ward where they themselves were more than fit to be in, to be sedated and straitjacketed for life, if they knew what they deserved. That is the very function of friends, Peter said one night in the kitchen that he was making coffee as I made out to wash the dishes, Gwen smoking her life away in the veranda. To betray you. You should expect that of friends. How consoling it all sounded then. And now that is probably how he feels towards me, that I betrayed him. For allying with Shirley's fucked-upness, or at least for refusing to take his side, for refusing not to defend Shirley's Goddamnalmighty life. For refusing to make a hero of him or at least paint the good man that he undoubtedly is.

So I have this resentment against him, too, for being not thoroughly enlightened, not thoroughly socialist or feminist enough? For being a man who for all the good that was in him, did not know how to listen, is not ever capable of listening, to what is said by those who did not make history, who did not make books, who did not make or were said to be did not make revolutions?

But who is ever thoroughly anything?

Whoever is ever.

Bob Dylan, Agnes Smedley and me

>

A letter home

photo by jon roberts




Dear Anna.

I'm sorry if I didn’t get you right the first time. What I get for not looking back.

Pigcawayan is a long way back and since family I was closest to -- my mother, my grandparents (two sets) and an aunt-- are all departed, there’s nothing there left that I love except the graveyard, which I heard will be bulldozed in a little time soon. High school wasn’t so happy a time for me, you know that, and I have little to connect with as far as my high school classmates and friends are concerned. I have a few good memories of people, can't remember if you were one of them. But one day, I will go back to Pigcawayan. So much of me is buried there.

When you said you’ve read all of me, it was like oh, so someone from down there reviewed my career and had taken a peep at the shape of my soul, too? that should be nice. Our country should know a bit of us before we depart, don’t you think so? But understand that I’m rather long estranged from home and I’d like to believe that I had gone continents. I am honored by your good appreciation of me but if you knew what I know, you wouldn’t like me very much. Happens all the time, even with those who swore fealty, sad planet this.

You want to know something? I don’t miss them.

I want to excuse myself from whatever it is you want of me. Besides, I love someone. She’s okay by me. The rest would be excess baggage. But more than anything else, I love my art, my writing. Beside all that she’s nothing too.

I will probably die alone, my shadow high above these walls. How glorious.