Something there is not

There is something I did not tell you.

Did I mention to you I once have a shaman friend? She read my palms and said there are so many broken life lines, and that I had died before once, everything in my life gone. I said true. Must be the time I was marooned at Green Meadows and friends would come to take more of my remains. I could not recall the so many other deaths, the little deaths that come with every loss I make, with every slap in the face that I take. 

And men they all will leave you, she said. 

Now that really hurt. I would like to think that I have very good male friends, only I did not want them in my life, never needed them, and so I made them leave, they did not leave out of their own volition.

Yes, you made them leave, they could not take you, she said. 

How we had a good laugh at that, and I had a moment of what it was like to be in a witch coven, big ladle held in my witch’s hand, a black vat a-boil, men drowning in their fates, as I stir, stir, the way I feel when I am with you sharing a laugh about stories you concocted of men grumbling in the kitchen, hauling in the grocery bag, while you work at your table, in your women’s room. 

Stories that hurt the ones that we otherwise would not let go, if only they loved us well enough.


My mother was no shaman, but she it was who first said that to me. She looked at my palms, maybe I was ten, soon after my father died, or eighteen, a few years before we would find out she had cervical cancer, three months to go. She said my palm looks like hers, the lines are separate, it is better that I became a nun and did not marry, I will just suffer, like she did with my father. I did not promise anything. Then, as now, I perhaps had wanted to be loved, did not want her life, the lines that she found. I must have wanted to be better than the very best that she wished for me. Aren’t all daughters like that? They all want to do better than Mother.

This shaman I knew, she also said to me, Your friends, they will bar you. I fell stumped. By then that had become a recurrent theme in my life: a shipwreck of plans, dreams gone to naught, precisely why I was there, before her, palms laid open, at her seer eyes’ fine mercy.

She did not tell me whether over the long haul my friends will succeed to obliterate me or I will overthrow.

On the perks of left adventurism

Rohan is a friend who runs a video bar at the Capitol Site in Jolo that has become a hangout for lesbians and their dates from the campuses across the road. She has a niece who was a gf to a TL officer and the niece used to snitch, steal from her to give to the lesbian cad. She knows the gang I work with are survivalists of the highest order: if they could steal from their own kin, for sure they could do worse things to me. One time that I was in haste, I left in the vicinity a cell phone I borrowed from the house I was staying in. When I went back to retrieve it, it was no longer where I thought I mislaid it. How Rohan got angry, raising her voice and almost overturning the table. That I should lose a thing in her shop! Out came the cell phone, from the pocket of the thief.

 “Here, you left it here in between the songbook.”

 “Oh. I left it there?!? Thank you for finding it!”

We hugged like the best friends that we are, the thief and I, and I was really grateful, exceedingly happy, having been forgiven for not letting her get away with it. At departure she followed me to the waiting cab, “Kah Sheh, gimme fifteen or else.” I gave her twenty and promised a chocolate bar, she really is improving by the hour, talentwise, though it could be that she was just a little high on something. That smell on her breath!

Rohan and I, we have this plan of putting up a snack house, a way to employ the thieves at Tumba Lata, we said, so that they will stop thinking they joined Tumba Lata so that they can collect money for just being members. For this is what the women in the NGOs here, the gatekeepers and `moral guardians of all things good and true, taught them, by example, and had been blackmailing me into doing: what the USAID and UNDP did to them. People sign their names up for this or that project, their idea of being organized, then they go to a hotel for a seminar on peace, conflict mediation, human rights, all expenses paid, and for attending they are to be given P400 to P500 per day. It did a lot to reenforce the slash-and-burn economy, the patronage system, the mercenary in the tribe. If you are a nakurah, a team leader, head of an organization, or foreman, you ought to be able to deliver this goodie. Or you’re no good.

When in another island a local organizer presented Manila guys a budget informed by this kind of monetary demand, the Manila guys fled, abrogating unilaterally the treaty of friendship with the local organizer and his tribe. The tribe did not hang him; he was one of them, his loss was their loss. He was nevertheless embarrassed, both ways. The tribe was not embarrassed, they forgave him; the Manila guys were not, they are thick like elephants; it was a hold-up. If they cannot get back soon, the tribe will welcome them later; they have money, the tribe does not.

In Jolo, every program, every project set up is bound to be captured by this kind of gunpoint diplomacy. The surest way to make people defect is to not abide. As though you could actually refuse, if there was money, and as though they could actually shoot you in the head if they liked. But it can be very tacky in a long way: They think you can obtain easy money and lots of money from funders abroad on demand because you are a writer, that is what writers do, sit on their butts and scribble and money will keep on dribbling in. If you tell them that one reason it is very difficult to get funding for Sulu is because of this toll tax system, tell them can’t they see NGO work is not like Cotabato to Malabang highway where checkpoint robbery is SOP, they will be snoring on your homily. They also couldn’t care even if you told them that some NGOs in Manila have even learned to exploit this problem to cover for their own financial anomalies; couldn’t care if these NGOs want to do away with your head, too, for knowing what you know, and for being rude, rather than wise, in the knowledge.

It is a throwback to plain banditry, civilization is elsewhere. Bounty is all, and share in the booty is what matters. It is taken for granted that ODA, civil society money, feminist fund or whatever you have there, is tribute money, tithe, resource that have to be extracted, in service of slave society and the unoverthrown sultanate. No wonder that in the debate over the Royal claim in Sabah, all people want to know is whether they will have a share in case the Kirams would be able to collect the 749 million dollars proprietary claims from the government of Malaysia. So what if there is a war in Sabah, for as long as they are not going to do the fighting and the evacuating themselves.

And if they could not care about the war in Sabah, why should they care about rape, about lesbianism, about story writing, which is courting trouble and will only bring harm to the children. Aykamu magkahagad-hagad ha Bisaya yan, makarara, maytah, hikasin niyu yan? Don’t go with that interloper, that Bisaya runaway, she will just take you to harm’s way, why, will you get any money from going with her?

For the bottomline is, this is just a racket, because Mindanao and Manila NGOs do that all the time, sell the poverty, the war, the peace, the women, the halaws, the HRVs, the gang rape, all the Bangsamoro issues there is to sell to the funding agencies and churches abroad, to make money, to buy themselves all those gadgets, to get themselves those offices, those tabs and top-of the-line gadgets, those Land Rovers they ride in their peace caravans.

Since I began doing work among the cads in Jolo, all sorts of accusations  have been thrown my way. That I am not a lesbian before (true); that I got a crush on Vaness (not true: I love Vaness); that I favour Mherz (true: I trust Mherz’s street-smart ass and sense of self-preservation). And very recently, that I have been gangraped. We were discussing the possible areas of cooperation between Tumba Lata and  the Sulu Province Women Council, and suddenly, the woman elder across the table asked me: Is it true that you have been gangraped? I heard from somewhere.

If that would hold me up and make me more entitled to doing anti-rape and gender justice work, and not make more Tausug men want to marry me (I am the way I am, the men say, because I have never tasted the love of a man, LoL), I would own up to being gang-raped.