Pity the poor Zamboangueno

You know that things are back to normal in Zamboanga if the daily onslaughts of unannounced power outages are back. The curfew is down at ten from eight during the “crisis.” But at seven in the evening no more jeepneys. So every other night after supper I walk the stretch from my room at Canelar to Orchid Garden where I have free wifi connection without the embarrassment of ordering coffee or tea. At a little before or after ten I would be walking home to find the gate to where I live double-locked and my neighbour a chief of the police and nephew to my landlady would be sniffing my backpack for explosives. I strain myself from too much smiling through it all but it’s daytime I dread more when I have to go to the shops, with guards in full gear at the door, Muslim terrorist sensors a-bristle, alert against every oncoming buyer of their wares. 

“Why did you choose to settle in Zamboanga? It’s Moro country.” Toni once asked Karen, seven, maybe eleven years ago, when she got married and got herself some low-cost housing in the outskirts of the city. The asker, a poet and a fictionist, was himself a native of Siasi, who had chosen to make a living elsewhere, away from Chinese-Tausug ancestry. 

It is being repackaged as Asia’s Latin City, Karen would later speak of the city admin’s denial phase policy.  I did try searching for resemblances, and for the life of me,  I couldn’t see anything Latina.  The jeepney drivers are dismally so Pinoy; they alternately speak to me in Bisaya, Tausug and Chavacano, and if I tell them, No comprendo, speak to me in English or Filipino, pleeez, they get lost like chicken in someone else’s chicken yard. 

Neither is there anything Latina with the dancing dragons on Chinese New Year; nor in the mall and food court habitués in their hijabs. The edifice of the renovated Immaculate Concepcion Cathedral at Purisima Street does look like a Spanish fortress against Moroccan invaders, but I couldn’t get it; if anything, it is very contemporary and very Zamboangueno in its phobic height, so bereft of post HR/IHL sensibility. Maybe Latin are the cross-dressers, the cholos behind black shades and baggies, or the gyrating at Paseo del Mar to the tune of some Spanish ditty. But gyrating fountains are not Latinas, and they consume a lot of electricity, like the walls of the City Hall covered with Christmas lights from inch to inch every December, which is better saved for the month of Ramadhan, or yes, for its true-to-itself 24-hour anti-terrorist surveillance. 

But what is in Latin America, anyway, that you wouldn’t find anywhere in the Philippines? The Catholic processions? The chapels and the cathedrals, the not-quite-extinct-yet priests and the nuns, the banana plantations, the soap operas, the whores plying their trade, the macho dudes?

The Chavacanos, as Tausugs like to say, were Subanens whose grandmothers fucked with the infidels the Spaniards. (Now doesn’t that sound very Catholic and very Latina?) But voluptuously fair-skinned curly long hair and round big beautiful eyes Karen would inform me that in the family sitting room, if they feel uppity, it is their Chinese aristocratic bloodline they claim. Or, if they feel ironic about their buena familia status, it is their Sama side they call on. Spanish miscegenation is out of the picture, out! you slut! 

But Samas are supposed to be the slut. So mothers with Tausug ancestry in their blood would castigate their daughters who had sex before they were eighteen, or who were getting on with their third marriage (across tribes and interfaith dialogue), “You whore, baisan kaw tuud. You really took after that aunt of yours, in Samal yattu.” 

But you see, nowadays, with what they did to Rio Hondo, ancestral omboh territory, you do not bash a Sama for being anything. Their oppression is your oppression, too. Their displacement your displacement. Put that into good patriotic use, sisters.

Patriotic calls aside, the Sama Dilaut have actually long left their bancas, their ag-omboh (ancestor worship), their five hundred to five thousand pesos housing units in Siasi, in Jolo, in Rio Hondo. They have taken to the cities, the streets, and have not really left their occupation: anarget, with Lahat Bisaya as fishing ground.

In Sitangkai, Tawi-Tawi and other agar-agar plantation areas, Tausugs who were displaced from their farms in Sulu are now the migrant labour. They farm the sea, alongside Bisaya workers who man the warehouses. Some of the boys have Bisaya housemaid girlfriends wives sluts. Some upwardly mobile Sama households even have Bisaya and Chavacano daughters-in-law and labanderas. 

In Zamboanga and “Christian cities”, intermarriages between elite tribes is common. More so among slum dwellers. In Jolo, however, street-bound dykes who do errands for politicos’ sons would say that rapists would be choosy enough not to go so low so as to pick a Sama girl. For one, their virginity is always suspect. They prefer Tausug lasses, because they are fair-skinned, clean, malanuh. They also would not rape Bisaya girls, them of the slave progeny; them who wipe their asses with toilet paper.

A year in Zamboanga is enough encounters in cross-dressing and border crossing. You meet workaday Tausug girls who got through college, thanks to some Catholic scholarship intended for Sama indigents back in Jolo, now going to Catholic service and disowning Tausug polity and society, if not ancestry. They would say their kamaasan converted to Christianity during Spanish colonial rule, or around the time the Spaniards set up Notre Dame of Siasi. At the tiangge, old women would tell you, No, they are Lannang, Chinese, not Tausug, but had been residents of Jolo since after the war and so they speak Tausug which makes them Tausug-Chinese, and so they are Muslims now and go to Friday worship.

Then you don’t speak against Tausugs who the Tausugs themselves would call Bisayah Bagu (nouveau-Bisaya), having taken on the garb of the oppressors, ashamed of the sins of their tribe, the ones who have become paid servants and loyal defenders of majority chauvinism and Christian establishment.  

And how about Bisayas who were brought over by piracy and slavery, who later blended into the tribe and the territory, some earning their freedom and citizenhood early on, others bought to pad up the shrinking population of local lords’ subjects and armies, where are they now?

Mao Tzu Hu

(Para sa mga armchairs)

E, ano kung mali.

E, ano kung marami ang nawasak na buhay, ari-arian.

Mas marami ba sila kaysa mga nasalanta

Nung nagdaang bagyo, dilubyo,

Nung huling pulitiko,

Huling kawan ng mga santo rebolusyunaryo?

Walang tama o mali sa kamay ng kasaysayan;

May nakakaligtas lang at may nababak-hu;

Mas madali ang umamot ng buwayang luha,

Mga matatalinong aral na salita.

Mas madali ang pumula sa kasaysayang hindi ikaw ang me gawa.

Kung totoong mas alam mo,

Sana’y hindi ipinaubaya sa mga dukha sa adhika.

Sana’y ikaw ang gumawa.

habang naggigyera sila nagbakasyon ako

(para kay Gigi)

feeling ko pina-R&R lang ako
magliwaliw ka muna doon, kas
toka namin ito

parang regalo
para sa iyo lahat nang ito

para sa mga butong hindi nabakat
sa mga apoy sa dibdib na hindi kumilanap

mag-aaklas kami
magbubuwis ng buhay
masusunog ang mga bahay
ng mga walang bahay

pero sa iyo lahat ito
digma mo ito
ikaw
na walang kaibigan
walang kasama
ikaw
na walang matatagpuang iba pang daan
lampas sa lahat ng nalakbay na
ikaw na walang mauuwiang
tupok na bahay

tupok na buhay

Bangsamoro Basic Law and the Mursid

September 28-29, 2013, I holed up in some posh hotel in Davao with a motley set of gays and transgirls to talk Basic Law and LGBT rights. We were there, supposedly, to work on a provision that would make a good insertion in the Framework of Agreement on the Bangsamoro (FAB) and submit it to the Transition Commission so that when and if the Moro Islamic Liberation Front made it to the seat of autonomous governance in Mindanao, we wouldn't be banished or decapitated en masse.

For the MILF's ideological tenets, HRD informed me, are informed by the Ikhwan; the Ikhwan al-Safa is a brotherhood of idealists on the fringe of Orthodox Islam. So the MILF has this Mursid as basis of their framework of governance. They have the National Mursid, they have this Mursid Division Commander, Mursid Battalion Commander, Mursid Platoon Leader, Mursid Squad Leader. If it is put into effect, you will have a hard life, dear, said HRD.

That is why, he went on, human rights groups, women rights groups, LGBT rights groups ought to really do a lot of lobbying in the framing of the Bangsamoro Basic Law.

The comers to the conference were a pretty mixed-up group, most from outside the designated autonomous region, but you understand that, as there are not many LGBT organizations in the ARMM. Then from Zamboanga and Jolo, none made it to Davao, thanks to force majeure which blocked civilian routes between Jolo and Zamboanga and between Zamboanga and the rest of the land.

Half of the participants didn't even know what brought them there, or that there's such a thing as Bangsamoro Autonomous Political Entity, or FAB, and what's this TransCom. There was a whole bunch of pageant gays from Ladlad Butuan; a smattering from other parts of Mindanao outside the MILF's claimed domain (South Cotabato, Davao and some other virgin territory where LGBT rights consist of being welcomed into Catholic embrace to decorate the vicinity and gay pride lay in having a straight man for a boyfriend, and one from labour union way back, and one representing the religious Muslim sector). But I appreciate the sincerity and the truth of it when a couple of guys said, it's not about us; it does not concern us because we are not part of the autonomous region, it is really up to you there in the ARMM.

Right. Who gives a bleep about territorial wars that burn houses down to ashes and displace a hundred thousand people for as long as it does not happen in one's own backyard or bed.

HR Guy from U.K., whose office hosted the conference, butted in. It's not his problem either, said he, but human rights is for all -- something around that point --. Right. All those wars for your signature online across borders, Uganda, Iran, Cameeron Islands, Russia.

At the days' end, we indeed agreed on a nice one-paragrapher, slightly revised and directly lifted from Article III Section 5 of the Republic Act 6734 or the Organic Act Creating the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. To wit:

            The Bangsamoro Government shall adopt measures to ensure equality and protection of distinct beliefs and customs among its people in the spirit of unity in diversity and peaceful coexistence: Provided that no person in the Autonomous Region shall, on the basis of creed, religion, ethnic origin, parentage, gender, economic, social or any other status be subjected to discrimination.

Beautiful law. No mention of lesbians, gays, bis, trans please, lest, IHL Expert cautioned, it will only open the floodgates and you get nothing instead of little.

Negotiating for one's rights is like that, you have to make concessions. Maybe in twenty years, you will be able to get the kind of recognition that you want, and the kind of law that you want, but at the moment...

At the moment wait twenty years.

It was very educating, I said to a feminist lesbian friend who did human rights watch across the globe.

A hard lesson in docility.

Yes, she said.

  

Happiness is a warm gun

 

To think the last couple of weeks you had been wanting to bomb Zamboanga.

The seven- to eight-hour brownouts a day and no one complaining. And even fags who proudly declare they support Ladlad because of discrimination speak in defense of business, a case of Stockholm syndrome, the brownouts are constant, they explain, because that’s how business had to make profits, and when you go around the shops to buy a printer or maybe just some frigging Globe Tattoo you keep on losing and you go to the shops without combing your hair, your backpack’s zipper unsewn in one place, the idiot guard will stop you at the door, No you cannot enter, we do not sell those. You get the shock of your life. You understand it is your has-been look, you know, straws of white hair, uncut nails and scrawny fingers, but when the shop says it is a computer-and-accessories shop and at the door the guard decides you look like the terrorist-thief that you are even with your glasses on and therefore you cannot take a look inside, you kind of understand how much “Jews and dogs not allowed” hurts and did hurt real Jews and real dogs and bitches. So you march in and demand to see the Human Resource department, this is fucking harassment, is there not a thing like consumer rights around here. All the clerks make out like you have not spoken, and close ranks with the guard to say, No, our manager Mr Albert Lim is out, not here, in a meeting and so on. After a long wrench, a senior staff finally apologizes, but the store manager never apologizes, never  sees you even if all of you inch to inch from second to second is on ctv, a dozen of them at you, and it happens regularly, in so many variations, and degrees of degradations if you ever so much as feel degradation and so you understand that if they can do this to you, how much more to the real goddamned terrorist by pedigree fucking Muslims?

And so how you liked to bomb establishment.

Where we are things are fine

"Give me your poor your huddled masses,
let's club them to death, dump them in the boulevard."

                                                       

The evening before the dawn of the “siege” I flew to Davao. I was at the MASS-SPECC dorm at Maa when Dhex texted: Eow, Kah Sheh, bunnal aun kunu bunuh ha Sambo? I checked on Mherz, who was supposed to be doing a lot of video footage and photo documentation with his new Android phone, but the guy is so busy photographing himself and other things; he was momentarily out of commission. Gema, who was scheduled to come to Zamboanga along with two other guys, asked the same. Kah Sheh makalaus da kami duun? Laung awn bunuh duun? 

News-blind and ignorant of what I can allow myself to be ignorant about, I had to get a quick look at the headlines. The social network was crying. Pray for Zamboanga. No to war. It was disorienting. War is on Jolo; not elsewhere. Least of all Zamboanga, where you know who is in power. 

I made another call to Jolo.  Generally, people there are constantly mobile between relatives in Zamboanga and a house in Jolo and they are gadget-savvy: they know more about the world and the city a boat ride away than me. So I was told, it was all the fault of Zamboanga. Why didn’t it grant the MNLF permit to rally, when it was all they asked for. Davao granted it permission; Cotabato granted it permission; how come they can’t have a day in Zamboanga? Now look, they had to take out their arms. I made a call to the houseowner in Zamboanga, who understands I am into some volunteer work for the rest of my life for what they call the-Muslims-are-you-not-afraid?” They tell me things are fine; classes have been suspended; offices and businesses are closed; flights to the city cut; but things are fine; it is only in the coastal communities of Rio Hondo, Sta Barbara, Mampang, Talun-Talun, Sta Catalina, where we live things are fine just to follow instruction, and the instruction is for everyone to stay at home. A friend who works in the peacekeeping force informed me, shutdown and cutoff are the operative words.  And they burned a Muslim community in Zamboanga, Sta. Barbara. And there are texts messages circulating, threats that they will burn the city down.

That couldn’t be the work of the MNLF, why would the MNLF burn a Muslim community, I protested.

“Kaya gani.”

By late evening of the 10^th I finally got to Mherz. He is holed up in the gimba, some rural side I please don’t announce the name of lest they bomb it;  he is with his father and siblings, hiding with other families. They had been there since five in the afternoon because they had been forewarned and told to evacuate. The military brigade camp was attacked at around 8pm, he said, and in Maimbung soldiers and MNLF are in a gunfight. “Limatag na in bunuh ha Sug.” The war has spread in Sulu. "

 I made another call to another Tausug friend, “Of course it is the work of the military, you idiot.”

Napoles is about to sing, she said, and if she sings, the top brass in the military establishment will fall, South Com will be red-faced.”

You saying they are burning the Muslim villages just as a diversionary tactic??? The goddamned Muslim villages as collateral damage???

And didn’t they do that before? Remember Estrada? If this little drama sparks a real rebellion, hah. You go watch TV. You saw those old men? I am not impressed if I see young Muslim boys raise fists and arms, they are just playing games, but if I see old men carrying rifles standing by what Maas Misuari stands for, all things considered, all his faults included…. Hah.

No Germelina, I don’t miss Davao. Not even the durian and the Chinese pomelos. Or the mushrooms and lettuces and the taxis and the teeming intellectuals there. They're all boors. Gathering agar-agar is better. They have more minerals. There is nothing there. I perhaps will miss tabaghaks and bayots but no, it's still a no thank you.

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.