One for Linda Bansil

Ardi, my country is a village

A village with no country

Thus wrote Linda Bansil in her poem for a friend who appears to be dying from a fire in the ocean which the poet blames to an imperialist responsible for oil spills and such toxic conflagrations in our seas. 

Or so how I understood the poem.

I first knew Linda from Karen Kay. A decade ago maybe. Karen Kay Rivero said she had a poet friend who writes about harems and muezzins calling one and all to prayer. Then she gave me one of Linda’s poems in Tagalog, for we were then publishing a leukemic second issue of our two-issues magazine. About a poet’s lowly agency, about how poetry is so without purchasing power -- without power -- in a world where everything else is for sale and is on sale. 

Paano kaya kung ang tula ay may katumbas na pera makakabayad ng ilaw at kuryente – or so I can recall, imprecisely, of the lines, for the magazine did not outlive the poem.

--You remember Linda Bansil? Friend I told you about?-- Karen rang me a couple of weeks back.

---She was kidnapped, she and her sister, by the Abu Sayaf, while filming a thing about the Sultanate of Sulu! --

What I felt was, what the fuck. That Linda should give a fuck about the Sultanate of Sulu, and waste Cinemalaya’s low-budget production on it, too. 

Or what the fuck. That Cinemalaya should buy the Sultanate story, too.

That they should go there at a time when the sultanate just lost a battle with the Malaysian state, and at post-election time, too, when the coffers of the islands’ royal houses are about empty and need replenishing.

No-no. Royal houses abhor the Abbu Sayaf and have no stakes in these mercenary and quasi-jihadist movements. Tribesmen now kidnap their own men their own kind their own kin regardless of Islam. Like they now rape their own women. My friends in the Mindanao Solidarity Network and the peace movement are right: bleeding hearts like Linda had better forget about Jolo, there is nothing to get there by way of social development work. Abandon Jolo. Close the shops. Get a vacation. Forget about coffee growers and Starbucks.

Did Linda and her sister wear scarves when they went to Jolo? I wanted to ask Karen, as though that was relevant. But she must have said once that they don’t. So I only asked, Do they speak Tausug? Karen said yes. And Arabic, too.

I told Karen the two of them will be fine. I hope to God.

Hope to God, Karen had retorted, furiously.

I was hoping Linda’s poetry will save them, for doesn't poetry have that agency? I was hoping a Koranic verse will save them. Perhaps like in that film I watched on the Iranian revolutionists, about an American journalist spared the stone by a woman jihadist, thanks to a verse he borrowed from a hospitable believer, which he managed to quote just as the rock-wielding woman was about to strike him, while he knelt chained to a mountain wall dying of thirst and hunger and old wounds in his kaffir body politic. 

But the reports as reports go are often insensate to all these fucking politico-religious nuances. In one report, it would appear that Linda and sister lied to the Sultan and was stealing their way around the islands, not informing the Sultan that they were filming him and his royal claim, when the two of them called at his house. His House could have provided security, the sultan was quoted to have said, as if blaming and regretting that the two interlopers did not ask enough of the house. Give-away reporting, I would call such. Reporters don’t owe sultans anything. Linda and sister owe them less. Why inform on them. 

The ARMM Governor, who must have known the two girls from his side of the human rights fence, made his own suit. Why didn’t the two ask for security, why didn’t they coordinate with the AFP? he asked. Promised to send rescue forces, and days later, two Abu Sayaf would be reported dead after a bombardment, and that the two were said to be the two responsible for the kidnapping. Oh wow. Since when have the military become that logistically precise? 

I wish reporters stop calling us half-Algerians, we are Filipinos, the brother, fearing that portraying them as of foreign progeny would give the impression that they have money to ransom the two, complained. But somehow reporters like to keep on calling them half-Algerians. For that’s what they are, aren’t they, the mother of Moroccan descent? Journalists report, they don’t take side nor interfere to influence commercial interests. Besides, why should the two sisters be not made to pay for their own lineage. Besides, they only make films, we stick our necks out down here. What are they doing there anyway, shooting sunrises and expecting to get away with it when others get shot for shooting sunsets. They should stick to shooting Bajaus in southern Manila and leave Sulu islands alone to the savages.  

As though there was anyone, least of all Linda and sister, who did not know what they were getting into. As though the two of them did not know that Jolo, and Sulu Islands for that matter, is jungle journalism. Which means everyone is give-away; no one’s head is safe from anyone, not even from fellow journalists or fellow human rights defenders.