BLOGSHOT: Down with POs

One cannot assume that gender practice or that the feminist agenda can be best advanced or conveyed by political organizations or development practitioners. There are overt “structured expressions” as there are the generally unseen or unrecognized undercurrents of opposition –revealed not so much in terms of what is publicly admitted and socially and politically accepted as in terms of the concretely and objectively lived by everyday women. A feminist critique should not confine itself to the readily observable, the formal political expression and meaning; it should also clarify and crystallize the often disjointed, because ignored and rejected, social practice as conveyed by women outside the helm and influence of the often elitist and unconsciously conservative political and formal organizations.

Believing in a good cause but acting out of ignorance, these organizations often don’t see that they have been allying themselves with the Church, the State, the repressive forces of conservatism, the hell with them.

Liberation Hogshit

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by amy bandiola



We didn’t notice it right away. The change was so slow, so imperceptible we hardly felt it. People just suddenly stopped clasping hands. I walked into the office one morning and realized that all the women were in the family way. At lunch break I sensed that conversations were going heavy on infant formulas and child prodigies in danger of being raised by ignorant househelps who could not cook a proper meal but knew how to break china and ruin silk blouses. The hamletting happened in the heart. And up there in Digos, there is no forgetting the massacre that took place inside a chapel.

Still, we insisted that it wasn’t over yet. We even believed we were entering a new phase. In the littleness of our lives we harbored hopes, looked for new anchors. We talked about owning up to new realities, new imperatives, adopting new efficiencies, professionalizing. Salaries were standardized and we rethought our rubber shoes. We filled out DTRs and SSS forms, dressed up. There was this officemate who did not want another baby and had a miscarriage, and she had to fight for her health benefits alone. How we gaped as she cried and cursed the clerks at SSS. Well, SSS is an anomaly. You had a daughter outside of marriage or a sister uninterested with motherhood but was not allowed to have an abortion and so you thought you were the ones who needed social security most, and you ended up being shooed out of SSS because you didn’t have a marriage contract and could not produce a husband, how much more adoption papers.

You pushed your table in a rage, wanting to hit everyone with cans of Promil someone mislaid on your litter of papers, but before you could do something interesting, you felt something hot rushing between your legs. Balding Office Secretary, who didn’t even know how business envelopes were folded, stared at the bloodied seat and the back of your pants. You wished he thought you had an abortion, but all he said was, Damak.

We began partying. Tasted the good life. Though most of the time we kept on with our work, going to banana plantations, interviewing farmers and workers, pushing for land reform, talking nationalist industrialization, considering hydro-power, going gender. Papers piled high that at times it felt like we transformed into termites boring through the dusty stacks. An event happened if one of the staff came to work early and some swine wasn’t finished yet masturbating in the hallway. Or if someone did overtime and slept at the office and one of the guys came in at seven before washed underwear could be taken down from behind the refrigerator. The debate would be carried all the way to Sage’s Pizza, after several bottles of beer, one side insisting it was thoroughly disgusting, completely unacceptable, a matter that involved personal integrity— My God, Sheilfa, don’t you have a modicum of decency? At large pa?!?— the other side screaming for the band to hear that it had nothing to do with sex just physics —What would you have me do, wrap it bloody unwashed inside my bag? And my God, Rommel, why can’t you sleep over one panty being hung to dry?—, the rest tipping their heads this way and that, worried about evergrowing backlogs and one husband waiting at home —Paghilum mong duha gahulat na si Dondon unsay modicum?—

Oh it was all very gay. Melot B. our wonderful ED was relentless, never letting pass an opportunity that would make us happier than we already were. She invited Raffy B. one afternoon to speak on the state of the nation, and how we crammed ourselves in the tiny conference room to listen. Maybe I was comparing him to the state of the revolution that my heart went up to him, but he did look like he just got bludgeoned in the head several times over. On his way to the Executive Director’s Office I harangued Raffy. Hey. Have you seen AJ lately? His face lit up somewhat. Tell him I really appreciate that story of his about leaving bourgeois marriage behind and going over to the proletarian revolution, but you know? I like best that part about waiting up all night and down to the wee hours of the morning not taking one’s supper until he came home from his organizing work in Tondo. And where is he now, Raffy? Where was he when the purge happened? Melot B. waltzed in, anxious, as though you were the only one in danger of getting waylaid. I turned on my heel, made myself a mug of coffee, and went back to the tome of paper on my desk and thought, Damn. Peasant uprisings came and went, but I still don’t know how to compute rate of exploitation. How am I to determine Mindanao’s mode of production and social formation so necessary in discussing strategy of struggle? And how am I to hold my head up in conversation with you fucking politburo guys at least even for as long as my mug of coffee lasts? Better a vigiling bourgeois wife on the couch than a flower vase sutra. Jack used to tell me my neurons are as tangled as my hair and suggested I comb more regularly, who knows, the knots might loosen, mats smooth out, and political economy wouldn’t be such a hard nut to crack I make it out to be. But heck. I can’t even change into bikinis the way Rommel and his sleazy ilk prefer, am I to start now on a one hundred brush strokes every night before going to bed? I’m not saying count me out I don’t matter, but most times I can’t kick any cad in the shin, Raffy. I have thus far survived by faking it out: smiling and nodding at the indigestible while hoarding things up in my head. And so when my PO discovered many years later that I was still unconsolidated, he was so appalled. He also felt betrayed. To doubt was to be disloyal, and the times considering (advancing towards strategic stalemate), it also showed lack of intelligence, if not lack of contact with reality. And so he said to me, heavily offended: If you cannot abide by what has been decided on according to the principle of democratic centralism, you are free to leave.

I never passed, Raffy.

Oh John. Is that you? Do you remember? Do you remember that time you came around with a duffel of books telling me about some Food Security study you were doing and asking me where I left my daughter? You went to Agdao. You visited the masa there and walked out of the slum feeling molested, depressed. How you tried to drink with the men, feel things their way. They joked over gin, their foul mouths blubbering with ignorance, trying to mate you with one of their daughters. You were pissed off. You came back to the Philippines to talk Food and Sovereignty, rally against the notion that the Cold War has thawed, and all the beloved Agdao masa could think of was sex: their daughter’s ready meat and the dollar market. I sympathized with you then. I knew you understood; I knew you cared; felt; probably more than what our brightest smartest male revolutionaries here could be capable of feeling thinking conceiving; probably; but I was as angry as you were, John. What I was really thinking was, So gutter-bred Filipino sexism can after all also hurt the American intelligentsia?

I owe you a good part of my feminist education, John. A man could never be a feminist and you aren’t one who would call yourself a feminist just because nowadays it’s sexy and remunerative to be gender-sensitive, but you ought to know that I credit it to the books you sent me that I got to know a little more. That day you scoffed at the drunkards of Agdao for teasing insulting you about taking home with you a Filipino wife? I knew that those poor beasts were the same people who leer and laugh at me every wrathful day of my life damn be class allegiance, but I had sworn then, John, to never serve a White man either.

I have kept my promise till now, John. And the best of my friends like to think that’s how I got myself deep in hogshit.

I’m not sorry, John.

One day in March

One day in March I was in this IWD rally. I was feeling sick because the marshals (all-male, of course) came at me over the placard the witchie hanging by my side was brandishing. As the megaphone blared I sat in a corner under a shade not quite decided what to do: to leave or to stay. Then out came Nelson smiling a mile high.

Nelson is from those days when to be poor and hard-knocked was a way to live and to steal or damage property, say of a bus company monopolizing the Davao-Cotabato route or a banana plantation not following labor laws, was glorious. It was one of those post-recovery period rallies where a few thousands of people had been collected and hauled aboard Sarao jeeps and garbage trucks to make a show of force, so it was like happy-days-are-here-again! So Nelson he approached and extended one hand to me, and I myself wasn’t scowling exactly, just my old wary and hyperacidic self. I didn’t really mean to join that rally, only to look for Godot or some other being who might bring news big or small that will perhaps turn the tide, so when Nelson asked how I was doing and what exactly am I doing there at the back side when I should be with the crowd or at least up there on the stage with Macariu Tiu and Don Pagusara reading poems for women, I just said that them Gabriela boys probably didn’t think of my poems good enough for women and that Mac and Don were probably the new women poets now, not I. Besides, I said, I was only here in the hope that I would run into somebody who could lend me a few hundreds as I had been on indefinite fast. This embarrassed him he blushed. Then genuine distress took better hold and his hand went looking for some bills in his side pocket. I started talking feminist organizing among street lesbians that his embarrassment soon turned to suspicion, maybe fear: That his otherwise very intelligent and once pretty friend would end up a street loonie. He was also glancing down at the witchie slung around my shoulder with a nylon string.

At my witchie’s broom’s end is a tiny placard saying Legalize abortion! which an hour ago had earned me the kinship of a 37-year old woman from a Muslim village nearby, the indignation rally of a well-heeled host of Mom’s Radio, smiles and looks of recognition from streetside onlookers, and the eight-mile long lecture of the marshal who did not leave my side through the march along the city’s main thoroughfares. Nelson seemed to have seen the resemblance between me and my witchie and he lent me a five.

I promptly left the rally.

Went to an internet café and did printouts of Marge Piercy’s Right to Life, a bullet-size poem telling priests and legislators to fuck off, we’re no corn field, no factory, no uranium mine no cattle for fattening, and a nice poster telling guys to vasectomize if they didn’t like an abortion. I hopped from CR to CR of restos, coffee shops and malls gluing the papers up in front of the urinals. I felt I was doing some high crime, like wiring a bomb onto the bathroom door as I pasted and wiped sticky glue off my hands. Just around the time the rallyists were dispersing the herd at the plaza for home, I was done.

I bumped into Jimmy as I was walking along the dark corridors of San Pedro Street. Jimmy is a guy from a high school I went to some 25 years back, and my, was he darker and handsomer. The first thing he noticed was the placard-carrying crone strung around my shoulder. His nose screwed up at me. Oh I went to a rally for abortion rights, I explained, and No, I have not gotten married yet, I’m a dyke, you see, how are you?

He looked like he didn’t hear a word of what I said, just kept on screwing his nose and looking me in the eye, head shaking like he couldn’t believe the fuck that he was seeing.

“You never changed, didn’t you?” he finally asked, voice low and strangely bereft of vehemence.

I looked away, heart lurching, then looked back up at him.

“I just said I crossed over. You may tell our high school friends in our little town that. I did, I have, for the worse.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

I stopped in my track.

“I mean, when I heard you went with the activists? I thought it was just rebellious youth. I thought you would mellow, get a job, lie low. Just like the rest, you know?” He chuckled, still shaking his head.

“But you haven’t! Tsk. You’re something, Man!…”