Jolo, Dumaguete a reprise

16 May 1997. Every night when I lie to sleep the fetid air assails me. I left the bowl of dust for the sea of garbage. Cellophane is going to gobble this whole town down.

Maimona says: I love like fire. My husband raped me when my parents were away. It’s because he loved me so much. Olive smiles: Im a ref. Cool. I throw away the bad things I keep the good.

Sheena: I am a rock. Hard. Hard. I have no friends except Farisha. She’s a tomboy. Together we scrounge the streets and fight men.

Mimi: I am a sunflower. Bright, bright, bright. I say Hi! to the sun. Say Goodnight to the night. And Bow. Bow.

Eleven years. My memory of Jolo was one of romance. I am devastated. In all those eleven years, the town has sunk down; only the garbage has piled up. I should write Jack. And tell Fatima: Here, the town you were so jealous of you don’t want us around. Can you embrace it? Embrace it.

18 may 1997. At the boat, aircon department. The lady tells me the bed belongs to her. She hunches and sprawls her legs her whole body saying this is mine mine mine keep off keep off. It isn’t greed. Just unhappiness. By and by an old man gently pushes me out of his cot. Sibug kaw, Indah. I expostulate, in choppy Tausug, telling him that I don’t like upper decks because I don’t like to sleep right in front of the TV the screen glaring at me it hurts my eyes. I feel stupid, irrational: like, in this shithole am I arguing for such a little thing? But how readily he agrees. The rest of the trip he sits there with his son glued to the TV, forgetting about me.

Humped over on my cot my hands in my belly a man asks: Maita kaw, Indah? My God, he knows I am Bisaya, but he only sees me as he sees: something in pain. They’re not at all like people I used to know in another country.

Morning at baliwasan grande: A clean well-lighted place. Is this relief I feel? I can’t wash Takut-Takut off me.

24 may 1997. Back in Takut-Takut and back to this pit. I happen to love the baby and didn’t feel for once like bashing its head against the wall. But I have this urge to push the door shut each time Mike threatens to show his face at the door to check on me saying Hi, trying, ever trying, to be nice. Mohay. That little woman with so much strength.

I feel sapped. All my energy drained out of me by all the noise all the clamoring needs the filth the despair around me. The stench of human habitation. I can’t stand it. The house Mohay is going to live in… incredible. Okay. Okay. So I am old. All my youth’s strength gone out of me gone into this sewers known as Takut-Takut.

25 may 1997. It’s no wonder the Tausug girls in Silliman are that deadly indifferent to talk of country. No language for struggle. Don’t care about Misuari and his bullshit. I can’t write. I can’t think. It’s not amoy basura, it stinks of godshit. Tinaehan ng gobyerno? Ng Diyos? And Saliya just said today she can’t bear the smell of fake leather it makes her sick she's going to faint. I can’t tell her I can’t bear the stench of everything else I could eat leather.

I need a cup of strong coffee. But there’s no coffee. No. There is, but no water to wash the spoon with. Okay there is water but there is no hot water. There is hot water, but it’s for the baby. Goodness. What am I to do? What am I doing here? Did I jump from the frying fan to the fire? Again?

Dear Zeny, You and Malik deserve a medal each for valor. You know what was my first thought after snugly settling in Takut-Takut? Arson. My second thought? Fatima. And that she should be here. My third thought? To flee! To hell with it all. Bahala kang Zenaydaha ka. Bahala kang Rolaysa ka. Bahala kang Mohaya ka. Mogradweyt ko, mogradweyt ko, uy. Lupad balik paDumaguete. Suffer Tim. Suffer Mr and Mrs Kelso. Suffer everything.

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?

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.