Nudes and Poetry

I hide my skull in my closet.
I bolt the door and bid it Quiet!
Each night I take it out.
Smooth the cracks of its surface:
Traces of the fissures of my brain
Warring with the elements from within.
The eyes have gone out: seeking forms
For the gritted words from the dark
Inside. I cannot sleep.
At midday I wake sun-struck,
Spineless. Nodding at the world
That nods back at me.

Notes from a roomer

In 2009 I got this job documenting peace conferences that allowed to me to get this room which collected quite a rent in my pocket and a little after that I also got myself a discard laptop which made me stay inside the house instead of out on the street where I mostly was for years on end. It was a new situation, not bad altogether, only rather too dull too easy for comfort. It guarded me in some way, the staying-home: I felt I was in some kind of a built-in control program that kept people quiet and acquiescent. It also made me watchful of myself: did it silence the mind as well and all the intelligence that it rallies and deploys to espy upon the world?

I leaked there. But how comforting: to know that one is still their old demented self.

It is not that I stopped being insane altogether just for getting a room of my own. The truth is, the relative comfort only made me more schizophrenic. I could not get inside a big mall playing the six o’ clock angelus without thinking of smashing a glassful of cosmetics or knocking people’s bowed-down heads as they held on to their baskets and cartfuls of goods while saying their holy marys mother of God, and when I went to the counter, how I begrudged every paper money going out of my wallet: I was supposed to have those goods for free and not being made to pay. Still I paid my way and went to work day after day to write what was asked of me, and though I always intended to give them the crap that they wanted and more than deserved, I always ended up delivering more than what I got paid for.

What’s happening to me offline is something else. Most days I kept away from people. When I rode the jeep I would not even look at people around me. My head was always turned away; long before I stretched my hand to hand the driver small change, I had taken leave of everyone already. It did help that as soon as my foot touched ground, I was in my room already. If I went with a friend, I mostly sat and listened and would not talk, nodding at things I otherwise thoroughly disagreed with. It was an unfair exchange, I knew, and though it was good I had a little money to pay for my dinner and when the friend felt generous enough, for hers, too, I felt sad with the thought that if my friend found out where lied my beliefs, she would feel betrayed and take me for the cur traitor bitch that I am. I had had more than enough of bitter friendships to last me a lifetime to be making some more.

So anyway, with the job, I was aground most days and had this notion that I’d escaped or was momentarily making my way out of the precarious fuck of a life which I’d liked to believe, I’d always chosen and lived spectacularly. I remembered so well that before that room were two other rented rooms behind me, one a makeshift quarter nailed against the tall fence of plush Las Terrazas in Ma-a where I got mauled by two boys next-door, upon the request of the women at the compound; and another a ragtag upstairs affair right under the shade of a star apple tree with neither electrical sockets nor a decent ceiling. The owner was what you call fallen royalty, a local magnate in the food business once, Magnolia chicken and ice cream specifically, and did not provide light for the helps because anyway they just went home at ten or eleven to sleep, so gas lamp should be enough. I left that compound as soon as the rooms next-door got occupied by boys who liked to gather over cheap gin at the veranda right across my room’s window to talk about girls and prostitutes. That’s how I got mauled in the last compound at Las Terrazas, after all: when I started behaving like I grew prostitutes and made them so respectable too that no man may badmouth them for as long as I was in the vicinity.

So I got that nice room right across McArthur Highway in that nice compound at Oak Street in Matina and I rather liked it: white walls all over the place, a closet for clothes and a bed with a book case for a headboard, a big tiled bathroom and a kitchen with a door that looks across the green hills that is GSIS Heights. I was a long spiral case above the rest, mostly couples and families in temporary living arrangements, pending the arrival of a baby or the purchase of a house in one of the city’s ever expanding housing subdivisions. There were four of us in the loft. I occupied the room in the middle part of the house, between the kitchen and bathroom on one side and sleeping quarters on the other side. The other roomers were all young, in their twenties and early thirties, employed in one painless occupation or another, a tutorial agency, a call center selling computer parts and repair services, or a company distributing and installing house appliances. I am a writer by profession, which is, strictly speaking, no profession at all. “So where do you write? For the radio?” they asked. I write for research institutions and non-government organizations, I said. Do they pay? How much? they asked. I get by, I said.

A week into the rooming life I got into a nice conversation with Mr Congeniality. I was cleaning the window jalousies thick with dust you could sow tomato seeds into them. And why are you smiling ever so sweetly to me? I asked. I’m so happy because you are cleaning our windows, he said. Well, I’m not happy, I said, and I’m not doing it to make you or anyone happy 'derstand?

He didn’t understand and his own happiness was so fragile that we didn't get by not long after that.

My Cousin Cel

photo by pinoy estacio




I could still remember when she was pretty. She would beam me the brightest smile every time I went to her bringing a paperback I sneaked out of the high school lib we used to huddle in. Boys turned away at the gate unable to cross the blockade of advice my uncle fielded. Strange that I didn’t feel sad watching their stooped backs and my uncle’s grave face discussing us. Strange that “cannot study” and “cannot marry” came with the word “epilepsy”. I was in the room with her overlooking the road when the high school boys retreated.

Then before graduation something in her heart stopped.

“I will not have them anyway,” she said, eyes to the window, my Science notebook bent in her hand. I just asked her will she ever marry? She had been sitting at the table barricading the door and ignoring my motioning for her to sit in bed with me.

Then she looked at me, face stern.

“And I will have no more of you.” She threw at me the crumpled notebook, dragged the chair and the table. The door opened ajar. She pointed her finger towards the stair.

“You’re the only friend I’ve got!” I jumped out of the bed throwing the pillows, tears streaming out of my unbelieving eyes.

“You will marry one of them stupid boys.”

“No!”

I gripped her wrist.

“You will leave anyway!!!” She wailed crumpled under the table.


She always fell head down, my Auntie would write to me as I read my life away in a college far away. We moved her to the room by the kitchen because she kept on falling down the stair. It’s a miracle she did not break her neck. Home, I would venture to touch her, reach for the scars that striped her brow and her cheeks. She would fling my hand and claw at my face. She spat curses. Cried at turns. Refused to read. Refused to talk for days on end. Made fire out of pages torn from my books and notebooks. Stepped on my glasses and pretended not to see. I stopped going home altogether. Went the furthest my books and my feet could get me.

I never saw her again.

But the facts did get to me: Dead face down on my forty-second birthday. Neck twisted, head turned up, eyes to the sky. A big cat with terrible deformity visited me, stared up at me for an endless time as I stood transfixed at the door.

At 52 how thoroughly schooled I am. None of them stupid boys married me. But girls’ stooped backs leaving my door still make me sad.

The Fluidity of Gender

I don’t know who in the world started the idea, but the first time I heard it, it felt like turpentine. Like all ideas that didn’t suit me, I just let it on, knowing that there’s no arguing with the world that insists on its terms, not yours, even if the critics who were talking about the fluidity of gender were describing my play, which by all intent and purposes, I meant to be a lesbian play, which is to say a joke on heterosexual society.

The trouble is, but for a handful of women readers in the audience, who enjoyed the cussings and the semi-nudity, everybody seemed to have missed the point, including the producers who staged it. I don’t know what is that guy doing there, but they couldn’t seem to conceive of a lesbian play without a daddy inserted and so the gay director put in some flashback device where a family (Mommy, Daddy, and two tykes) was to be seen at the play's opening, looking every inch normal as a sunny day. So one gay critic demanded that it was good alright, but where’s the resolution of the conflict, and by resolution of the conflict he meant, will the family situation improve from abnormal to normal? It can get depressing, people's obtuseness, I mean, like couldn't they see there was no freak of a family to laugh at up there?

But what could you do when you had been overly congratulated that your non-winning entry to the Palanca, Little Sister, got lucky enough to be selected among the 17 plays to be mounted in a playfest crowded with talent? Wouldn’t you feel happy and grateful enough that you’re entitled to free tickets to all these 17 winner plays if you paid for your own airfare from the province to Manila and way back, and never mind if the contract that they sent you weeks after the playfest stipulates that your play will fetch you an honorarium of P3,200.00 withholding tax deducted, and what is that scary provision saying there about the honorarium being a matter of confidentiality and is not to be revealed to anyone?

And about a week back, that was what someone was saying. Isn’t she 57, that old, she said, how come these younger lesbians on the scene here are so conservative, playing butches and femmes and oh so full of sins to confess, isn’t she supposed to be the old-fashioned one, the lola here?

I got lucky to have gone out to listen to her lecture on gender and sexual orientation and thank Heavens, she did not talk about the fluidity of gender, only that you could have as many sexual orientations to choose from or fall into, from the first categories of lesbian, gay, bi, transgendered, transsexuals and intersexuals on to the combination of two or three or four and so on of these categories to make up a new one. Or say you may start off thinking you are oriented to be sexually attracted to the opposite sex, which makes you a hetero, then discover later on that you have been all along actually sexually attracted to women, which makes you a lesbian, then later on you go bi, then graduate a transsexual man and turn into a fag, then a lesbian fag, who may then marry a dyke. I’m not joking. Neither was she. There’s no playing with these things and the LGBTI categories anyway are so limiting; life is much more painfully complicated than what the book says.

Fine.

Gender fluidity sounds to me like political pluralism, it sucks, people made that up because they don’t want to problematize anymore the world they inherited. So I protest. For instance, I have always thought of myself a sep (a lesbian separatist) since the day I realized that you could not just count on the most revolutionary of men to give up the perks of manhood and the Glory and the Power of the Pope for the sake of liberating humanity, and especially the rebelling other half of humanity. But at the same time, I felt at a deadend, knowing that I have to work with other social agents (who aren’t feminist lesbian like me) if I want to get anywhere at all. So in a way, it was a way out for me, a promise of liberation, you could say, the idea that I could and may one day go to bed with just anyone I meet on my street and hopefully share a trench with him or inherit his rifle, too. (I think of Gwendolyn Brooks saying she doesn't like deadends, where there is no one to meet or to berate.)

So compulsory heterosexuality did not exist now? All that is old feminism? I still cannot think of the dykes in Bankerohan, the vendors and the cartpushers, saying that of themselves, that their gender is fluid. Or my parlorista gay and bugaw friends now in their retiring years. Easier for the privileged sex and the privileged classes to say that.

And if I ever so much as broach it to my cousins in the province that they could be gay, they will just bash me in the head for the plain crazy old woman that I am.

We write for ourselves, because
if we don't we feel less of who we are.


Lia Lopez-Chua

Some people, maybe in the Philippines, will call me a Chinese poet. But to the rest of the world, I will be a Filipino because of my country of origin.

Is my poetry Chinese? Filipino? Regional? Cultural? Existential? Maybe a region of existence.

Different readers will respond differently to my work. My book's title and cover may grab some and not others. My poetry will resonate with some and not with others.

If the kids cannot afford to pay for my book, they will find a way to copy. I have done that too, and years later when I can afford them, I went searching for those books to have them in my hand. I don’t think I need to bring anything down. The book can be loved or lambasted, or whatever. Just like any work of art, it is what it is. And so be it. Not to mention the book can be thrown into the discount bin, then hallelujah.

What I can say regarding this book is: I think I have given the important details enough thought. I think as with anything important we get ourselves into, we will have second thoughts as to the validity, appropriateness, and verisimilitude of details. And of the endeavor itself. Is this book worth publishing? Is it worth the weight of the paper, the money, the time of people involved, the beautiful cover design? Does the title and the art on the cover do anything for it? Will it be accessible? Some of us will say yes and some of us will say no.

But to go back to writing itself:

No. It has nothing to do with print. I have never focused on print myself. All the publications I’ve had after the age of 22 were not of my own initiative. The only reason I published when I was in college was because my poet buddies in college were published, and it was a challenge to me to get published.

I don’t join literary competitions. I think I have enough ups and downs in my life, just being myself, just doing my darn best to function like a normal person and take care of myself. I only share my work with friends. With Tita, and she had been an advocate for me, sending my work here and there, and of course, there’s her Road Map. The truth is, no matter how corny it sounds, we have to write our truth only for ourselves. I believe that if anything I’ve written deserves its own existence, it will find itself a place in this world. Life has a way of taking care of its own, for whatever reason it has. I was driven to “conclude” The Fate of All Progeny and take care of and put up with all the tedious details because I love the cover so much, because I value what all my friends did to help me get the book together. Otherwise, I really don’t need a book. Especially now, at 52, who I am has nothing to do with either I get published or not. I am a poet whether I write poems or don’t write them anymore; I am a poet even if I don’t publish.

I will always be a poet, because of my way of being in this world, because of my sensibilities. We write for ourselves, because if we don’t, we feel less of who we are. There will be stretches of time when we don’t write or can’t write, and these are the times when we must not forget who we are.

The most memorable thing my ex-partner said to me when I was at the lowest point: Lia, do not forget who you are

BLOGSHOT: Yoani

photo from Generación Y



Generación Y is a blogsite run by Yoani Sanchez that won Best Weblog in 2008. Yoani is a Cuban dissenter and she wants out and not dumped, in her own words, “in the corridors of those condemned to stay”. Yoani’s blog is read all over the world, by all those who care about Cuba, I included.

Generacion Y also perhaps stands for the Young Generation of Cubans, those born in the “post-revolution” 1970s and 1980s, with names starting in Y, or with Y wedged in between, such as Yanisleidi, Yoandri, Yusimí, Yuniesky and so on, and whose education is “marked by schools in the countryside, Russian cartoons, illegal emigration and frustration”.

Yoani is admired by many, but also censured, berated, not least of all in her own country. I have the impression that for speaking against her own country, or at least, the country as run by those in power, Yoani has been rewarded by the “free world”.

Amazing, is it not?

But come. Cuba probably doesn’t belong to Yoani or young people like Yoani. They may not want any of it, as things are, the way every one, young and old, with a green card or a Schengen visa would not want to have anything more to do with the Philippines. Maybe Yoani herself doesn’t think of Cuba as her country, perhaps the way I sometimes feel that the Philippines is a lost country to me, my compatriots in government and in the liberation movement an army of locusts, which makes me, I am aware, the lost cause. Right?

Maybe Yoani’s country is the Blogosphere, or West Germany (sorry, I’m stuck), the imperialist havens allied to the US, or all those corners and places who take well to her rebellion. Or maybe her country is just that little corner in the heart, in the vicinity of Carlos Bulosan’s America, and all things taken, Yoani is good as far as she could go, and like you and I, she is just questing for freedom, however that quest shows itself to her and wherever it will take her.

I grew up admiring Cuba, that small nation who had gumption enough to boot the most powerful nation in the world out of its shores, in the belief that it belongs only to itself and can take care of itself, and my, didn’t it withstand decades of economic embargo, cyclones, desertions. The free education and free medicines, which means a lot to me and those of my relatives here in the Philippines, for instance, who had to dig wild yams to survive dry spells and die from poisoning without seeing a doctor or a school flag, it seems to me, count for nothing now for young Cubans like Yoani. Which makes me cuss for the injustice of it, because… because what, because I would give up my fucking gadgets like oh this hand-me-down mobile phone and your Northface backpacks and sneakers and this discard laptop I am typing on and pints of ice cream and layers of chocolate cakes just to cut canes and hammer houses into place for the Cuban revolution?

I would have, years back, if my next to nil political resources allowed me to travel to Cuba. But it didn’t, so now, I join Yoani in the belief that talent and labors like mine have no room to thrive in islands lorded over by sterile cows and revolutionary stayovers. Or who knows what I did, if and when, I made it to Cuba years back and found out as Yoani did how indefensible things have become there, how worse off "communist cadres" are there compared to here, no wonder those who wanted to save their revolutionary asses chose to leave and make a life elsewhere?

I’m not saying I don’t want Yoani hanged. I think of her privileged enough to have been born in “post-revolutionary” Cuba, in the same way maybe that I think fucking privileged and look down on the young in my own country who think armed struggle does not go with ipods and Louis Vuitton bags and stiletto heels and precision-design toenails and regard me as stone-age feminist who cannot see that gender is fluid or that post-conflict transformation is as real an event as the 2010 presidential elections ergo worth involving in.

For sure, one didn’t have to go to Cuba to know about how “communists” and Party-ordained revolutionists don’t take to writers with their own minds. If revolutions out-of- power can have arrogance enough to reject smart alecs who think they know better than those actually doing the dirty job of running a revolution, how much more those in power like the one in Cuba, although if Yoani wants my opinion, I don’t think the Cuban communists are in power. I think they really are fucked up and at their knees, just as Filipino communists are as fucked up and at their knees these days or they would have not handed over some of their best cadres to the circus at the zoo called electoral politics.

This is no best of time, these are the glory days of commerce, or I would have not lived to see my pals up there globe-totting hacking it up with the biggies and signing their names up to the aid agencies leaving me to swallow my own vitriol. This is the march of capital the world over and wouldn’t we know it if what we said or did served the retail sites, offline or online.

Wouldn’t we know it if what we are doing were part of the problem, or part of the solution.

I hurt for Cuba, and can’t help but feel let down, betrayed maybe, by its failure to keep Yoani and the Y Generation to itself.

Would that Yoani trade places with me.

Isang Araw sa Katanghalian

Pinagbabaliktad ko ang mga bato, pinagtutuwad ang mga flower pots, subalit di ko makita ang susi sa pintuan. Siguro nakalimutan ni Jano. Puwede ba iyon? Saan naman kaya si Sarah at ba’t sarado ang mga bintana sa itaas. Di kaya’t nasa loob siya? Nakatulog sa sobrang pagod? Iyong tingala ko at akmang sisipol, bigla may narinig na anasan sa itaas. Boses ni Jano at Sarah. Nagsiseks sila?

Naupo ako sa malaking bato katabi ng saradong pintuan, nagpasyang maghintay. Sa biyak-biyak na sahig na semento sa aking paanan ay nagpuprosesyon ang mga langgam. Nagbabatian, naghahalikan. Niyakap ko ang bakbak na puno ng mga papel at labahan. Sa kabilang apartment kumakanta’t nagigitara ang binatilyong madalas kong nakakasalubong at nakakangitian sa daan. Bye, bye Miss American Pie… Bakit kaya bumalik si Jano. Di ba’t sabi niya’y me importanteng lakad sila ni Omeng ngayong linggo? Umungot ang pintuan sa silid-tulugan. Napaigtad ako. Tapos na sila? Tumayo ako. Aktong kakatok, nang bigla’y pumalandit sa hangin ang maigting na boses ni Sarah, sinundan ng pabulong na sagot ni Jano.

“Ginawa mo na iyan nun! Gagawin mo na naman uli ngayon?”

“Lakasan mo pa!”

Nag-aaway sila?

“Tatakbo ka na naman? Diyan! Diyan kayo mahusay!”

“Marinig ka ng kapitbahay!”

May mga paang nagtatakbo pababa ng hagdan. Kumatok ako. Dire-diretso ang labas ng pintuan ni Jano. Madilim ang mukha nito. Ni hindi ako tinanguan. Pumasok ako, alumpihit ang hakbang, ipinatong ang bakpak sa upuan at dahan-dahang umakyat ng hagdan. Bukas na ang kanina’y nakasarang mga bintana. Nakatanaw sa labas si Sarah, nagyoyosi.

“Bakit iyon?”

Tiim ang bagang niya. Ni hindi ako nilingon. “Dumating ka na pala.”

“Ba’t andito si Jano? Nagpaalam siya bago ako umalis, ilang araw raw siyang mawawala. Me lalakarin sila ni Omeng.”

Nanginginig ang mga daliring me hawak na sigarilyo. Naglalarong parang ulap ang usok sa kanyang mukha.

“Buntis si Emma. Iyon ang lakad nila.”

Girlfriend ni Omeng si Emma. Walang nakaiskedyul na kasalan, pagkakaalam ko. At tensiyonado lagi si Emma sa mga araw na ito. Pero lahat naman kami tensyonado lagi. Sunod-sunod na reyd at hulihan, pagbobomba sa kanayunan.

“Anong pasiya ninyo?”

“Ayaw nilang ipaalam.”

Nila.

“Gusto ipaabort.” Mapait ang ngiti at nanglilimahid sa luha ang mukha na lumingon sa akin.

Saglit akong nagulat. Umiiyak siya? Si Sarah umiiyak?

“Wala bang magagawa ang mga medik sa mga ganitong bagay?”

May punyal na kumislap sa kanyang mga mata. Pagkuway parang pagod na ibinaling muli ang tingin sa bintana. Humugot ng hininga bago nagsalita uli.

“Pinaakyu na nga pero ayaw matanggal ang bata.” Kampante at praktikal uli ang tono ng kanyang salita.

“Buti ipinaalam nila sa iyo?”

“E, hindi nga nila alam pa’no mangtanggal na bata, e.”

Napakunot-noo ako. Dinudurog niya sa pasilyo ng bintana ang hawak na sigarilyo.

“Nagkonsulta sa akin, kung pa’no ko pinatanggal iyong beybi namin, nung iwanan niya ako sa QC, nang tumalilis siya papunta rito sa Mindanao.”

Natulos ako sa aking kinatatayuan.

“Ngayon niya lang binanggit sa akin iyon, alam mo ba? At ngayon niya lang tinawag na beybi namin iyon.”

Nakangiti siyang humarap sa akin, basa ang mukha. “Pagkatapos ng limang taon.”

Patda akong nanatiling nakatitig sa kanya. Sa hataw ng araw na tumatama sa kanyang pisngi, parang maliliit na sapa ang kanyang mga luha.