A journal entry

You cram yourself in in people’s already cramped lives. They say they don’t mind it’s okay but you know that they know that you know and that any moment the taut rope of friendship will snap. You take a deep breath so that you need not smile up at people, because the moment you do you will begin to spin lies and there’ll be no stop to it. At the corner of your eye you see a lover coming into the horizon and you wish she came at another time. But know that it had to be at this time. When you have nothing left of you to show. When you are stripped of everything you own and lay claim to. Work. Political beliefs. A rented house. A warm stove.

She leaves as soon as she arrives. And you crawl back up to people you cursed a hundred times before. You don't look back. You know it's just you dragging your intestines behind you you will see. You look at your friends' faces instead. They stand askance, never facing you. You pretend not to see the hate in their eyes. They make a joke to make light of it. You can’t laugh. To laugh is to be bought back.

You harden yourself some more.

27 november 2007

Water war in MOA-AD territory

“Bawat harvest harasan.” Thus said Barangay Councilor Mando of Rangaban, an interior barangay in Midsayap, North Cotabato, describing the ongoing land conflict between Christian settlers and native Muslims in the area. Lives, houses, properties had been lost to this long-running feud which implicates politicos with landed interests in the area.

One such violent conflict happened in 2004, when a landed settler brought in tenant farmers from the provinces of Sultan Kudarat and South Cotabato to harvest his crop. They were confronted by Moro armed men who told them that the land does not belong to them but to the Moro natives. The Ilonggo farm laborers fled and reported to their relatives in the paramilitary groups. The CVOs arrived a couple of days later brandishing their arms. A violent exchange of fire ensued.

True, it is the settlers who were responsible for developing the agricultural lands in Rangaban, said Councilor Mando. It was them who introduced the irrigation system that now regulates the supply of water into the rice paddies. That’s why their crops are flooded all the time and during months of infrequent rain irrigation water cannot reach the Muslims' farms, other farmers butted in. “The Christian farmers capture the water all to themselves.”

The Moro farmers’ fields are in the low-lying areas, he said, so while the settlers get good harvests, the Muslims get damaged crops all the time. “If not from drought, from too much water.”

So every harvest, gantihan, harasan.

Most of the Moro farmers in Rangaban also cannot afford the P2,300.00 irrigation fee they have to pay every cropping season. Besides, they quite cannot get used to the idea that one should be paying, in thousands of pesos at that, just for using water that is just there in the ground? It is like being taxed for walking in one’s yard.

And it helped some more the misunderstanding that the irrigation administration is also overseen by Christians, who in the heat of the ongoing conflict, display a good bias in favor of settler farmers.

So armed hostilities were a daily show. Christian farmers on their way to harvest would be blocked by Moro armed men. And if the CVOs were around, skirmishes would follow. Civilians, both Muslims and Christians, would get out of the vicinity. This conflict had reached such level of violence that it once necessitated the intervention of the Provincial Government, the military, church leaders and non-government organizations. A Joint Military Action Team (JMAT) composed of Bantay Ceasefire volunteers, Malaysian deputees, MILF and MNLF representatives and soldiers from the 7^th IB was set up. This team made up the barangay’s peacebuilding force. It monitored people’s movements, ensuring that civilians, both Muslims and Christians, could go on with their everyday work, sometimes accompanying them to their farms. Still, cases of harassment continued.

One such incident involved an Ilonggo farmer who was strafed by an unidentified assailant while replanting. The farmer was patching bad yellow growths with green ones when bullets started whizzing by his ears. The farmer crawled through the mud and went running in a zigzag even tumbling through the paddies while his assailant had fun shooting at him without really hitting him. He reached the JMAT headquarters in one piece, though, looking like he woke up in a carabao wallow. His newly patched rice paddy was all the worse damaged. It was found out that he was working on borrowed land which was owned by a Muslim neighbor who was his friend. The neighbor, seeing him as dirt poor, let him borrow his small parcel. He did not know the assassin, of course.

“Nagtumbling-tumbling siya,” the Moro farmers recalling the incident said. Laughter lighting the white fires of anger in their eyes.

The Bangsamoro and the labor agenda

With the innumerable issues confronting Mindanao, and with everybody holding a placard or a conference invitation to bolster each of these, sometimes it can be quite confusing and exasperating which way to turn that you just would rather go home and read a book or cook. So when a friend drags you to a peace play, a forum, or some other cultural event of the day, and especially when there’s nothing there that amuses you, you just can’t help but feel like bolting: I should be doing something else!

Months back, I was asked to document a dialogue of sorts gathering a group of peace advocates bleeding with classic what-is-to-be-done earnestness. Peace and support for the Bangsamoro struggle, everybody was saying, though certainly you could sense that some were just as sick as you are with all this peace work and tri-people unity talk. Some even started betting on the dollar earnings they should be making had they chosen to work abroad. Peace work entails a lot of sacrifice, it’s about putting one’s life on the line, everyone agreed. So when one of the advocates from the Alliance of Progressive Labor stood up to talk labor issues, I was kind of surprised. Like: hey, isn’t he outta line.

He was saying that they at the APL believe that indeed we should stop the war. He was asking, but what is the way? What should be our strategy in winning peace in Mindanao? Good for us, he said, who are all here and know all the issues, but how about the others? Suppose not all of us understand deeply enough, the issues, suppose the majority don’t understand and hesitate to support MOA-AD or the Bangsamoro struggle, what do we do? And he was not talking about Piñol or Mar Roxas and the military or the business companies with vested economic interests in Liguasan Marsh and adjoining territories, he was talking about the laboring Christian majority: those workers in the plantations in these lands under contest. Please understand that they too just have their own bias, he said, and especially those of us from the national capital region do not understand the issues here and that our primary concern is for the labor sector.

I wished he said more. I wish he said his bias was for the industry sector, not for landed interests, which does not belong with labor, but to the feudal Moro lords, who are not without stakes in the export industry, or to the Christian politicos, who are not without feudal stakes in the local politics of this Land of Promise.

Remember how labor unionizing has become terribly hard around these days, he said, though his issues are more immediate, something to do with the pragmatics and logistics of labor organizing and the difficulty, or ridiculousness, of having to talk labor rights with armed islamist combatants like the MILF. Some of his confederates in the labor movement, he went on, are thinking na kapag Moro na ang nagdala, what will happen to the labor agenda in these lands? How do we ensure that our labor agenda is protected once it is the MILF now or whichever new ethnic-nationalist entity that is in charge of developing lands here in Mindanao?

There were quite a number of women in the conference and I was hoping one would get up, too, follow the argument and say, How about women’s rights, how about us? Suppose we do not put our stakes in these rido-infested feudal turfs? Suppose we just want work or just want to get away even if we have to work as domestic helps abroad? Or suppose we stay, how do we know that our rights will be protected too?

One Lumad woman did speak up for the tribe and asked, suppose we do not want to be part of the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity? Why does the MILF include the Lumads as part of the Bangsamoro people when we are not? To which one of the Moro participants replied “divisive”, which made me laugh in my seat. The specter of division had at one time or another made of feminism a scarecrow in many an ethnic and nationalist struggle. Here we go again!

But that’s one good thing about dialogues, at least some questions got fielded at all. Enough to make one hope that even as our lives’ daily emergencies now mainly consist of getting the bills paid and running to the store for a can of milk and getting held up with Hail Marys and Glory Bes at Felcris or Gaisano, from the rougher edges of the refineries that is our minds, all is not lost really, not yet, anyway, to the truisms and speeches of the day.

BLOGSHOT: One on the yiffies

In one of her books of essays, Steinem wrote about the conservatism of young women. Women is about one group, says she, that becomes more radical as they age.

Ewew. How so?

Her argument is, it’s thanks to the radicalizing experience of marriage a.k.a. direct contact with hell. Exaggerating? No. Marriage is contact with inescapable reality, ask your Mom or, if you don’t believe me, ask Amy B and her friend Liv, and they’d tell you, My my, those years of servitude!

Easy guys, I’m not about to repeat myself here for the umpteenth time and start yakking about evil men bred like maggots by patriarchy, I leave that task to women who have the heart for it, maybe to these younger feminists here who like discussing feminism in classrooms, seminar houses and coffee tables. I would flee such huddles of muddle and would rather play rugby or maybe have a beer with Liv and Amy.

What I recollect as I reread Steinem is a conversation I recently had with two women one evening of post-morteming movements and liberation projects we believe we helped spawn but could not get enough credit for. Anna Leah was describing the young lesbians she met in Sydney and Manila and she was dismayed because oh my God, said she, they’re into this butch-femme pairings, one playing boy the other playing girl?! She went kind of, What is this!!! when they’re supposed to be the young here!!!

That got us laughing because we were the three of us over 40 and further up, but thanks to feminism we are way over such stupid role-playings. Anna Leah’s explanation was it’s because these young people are raised in a very conservative environment, never gone to a rally denouncing US imperialism and the Vatican, instead they go to Church every Sunday and are with the Charismatic and go home to very Catholic homes. Which we again found rather sad: by comparison, we are unmarried and uncompromised to one man or another and are rather enjoying the slighter pleasures of our slaveries.

Steinem’s contention is around what she perceived then (in 1978, by God, does that date me?!) as young women’s relatively clean years and supple flesh giving them a kind of “home advantage” in a game where youth and obedience or at least congeniality is commercially valued and rewarded. Steinem drew her observations from her own young years which to her, was laughably conservative. Young women, she says, have this hope of excelling at the existing game, playing good girls, observing rules they can break without getting punished.

In other words, we old cows say, young women like to set themselves apart in the belief that they can do better than their aunts, can make better public approval ratings without having to look like ugly frogs in a bog. And public approval, if you ask them, is thanks to themselves and their own resources, not to patriarchal policy, maybe thanks to the breadth of their minds and embracing hearts which others don’t have.

My, does that sound like a declaration of war on the yiffies (young interesting freedom-loving fucks)? Not at all. If these girls feel equal to the boys they grew up with, and feel equal to the boys and girls you grew up with, surely they must be. What else do they need feminism for? Why make them sweat, why problematize the world they inherited from you, why impose an unnecessary gender war on them when they themselves are not touched by it? Leave Gioconda Belli alone. If Gioconda Belli feels the holier one beside all of New York she met on their way to the bank just because Nicaraguans, unlike tuxedoed and pointy-shoed Americans do not pass through life in this world without scratchmarks on their brains, let her. Who needs brains, anyway, if you’ve got a credit card. And if they’ve got dreadlocks and you haven’t, don’t get envious get one.

And that’s exactly the point: Most women way over 40s, if they’re lucky enough not to get mastectomy, hysterectomy or cervical ca on top of getting a marriage annulment after having been declared insane by the judge their husbands hired (what intelligent woman wouldn’t, under conditions of servitude) usually end up with neither a credit card nor a dreadlock, just pounds and pounds of stress-induced slabs and a tow of children to be properly dispose of. That is also the reason why they're the ones who have a good ear and a good eye for liberative texts, whether they’re shouted across the street and brawly market stalls, or written in slutty formal English.

Will gray-haired women one day take over the world like 80ish Gloria Steinem once imagined? I don’t think so. Most likely they will stay underground, rumbling in their kitchens, toppling dishes, making history by breaking a glass.

With an eye, or a foot, to the door.

Fitness foist at ang mga gansang ligaw ni Babeth

about this painting:

title: "fitness foist"
medium: acrylic on paper canvas
size: 16" x 20".
first exhibited at babeth lolarga's solo exhibition "bling blings & lucky me" at taumbayan bar in April-May 2010.
now in the collection of desiree carlos



MGA GANSANG LIGAW

(salin ni Babeth Lolarga
mula sa orihinal na Wild Geese ni Mary Oliver)

Di mo kailangan maging mabait.
Di mo kailangan lumakad nang paluhod
Ng isang daang milya sa disyerto, humihingi ng tawad
Kailangan mo lang na payagan ang malambot na hayop ng iyong katawan na mahalin ang gusto niyang mahalin
Sabihin mo sa akin ang iyong kawalan ng pag-asa, at sasabihin ko sa iyo ang akin
Samantala patuloy ang mundo.
Samantala ang araw at ang mga malinaw na bato ng ulan
ay gumagalaw sa kalawakan
sa mga kapatagan at kalaliman ng mga puno
Sa mga bundok at ilog.
Samantala, ang mga gansang ligaw, sa kaitaasan ng malinis na bughaw na hangin
ay pauwi na muli.
Kung sino ka man, gaano ka man kalungkot,
inaalay ng mundo ang kanyang sarili sa iyong imahinasyon
Tinatawag ka tulad ng mga gansang ligaw, marahas at nakakagulat—
paulit-ulit na inaanunsyo ang iyong lugar
sa pamilya ng mga bagay-bagay.

Nudes? Bad time!

photo: xiaomin zu


Nudes? Bad time. Been voracious the past weeks. Nakakaloka ang mga love handles ko pati bilbil. I might put Venus of Willendorf to shame.

Sex in the hospital? Wahaha! So far people in the hospital know I am not sexually accessible. Mga amoy kapatid sila, so it’s kind of incestuous if I get into one. They wouldn't dare ask about my sex life, except for the surgeons. Even the surgeons know better than ask me to bed. One surgeon who greeted me on my birthday even said he wouldn't dare kiss me for fear of getting accused of sexual harassment. They are rather aware of my preference for good-looking infertile men. Vasectomized at the very least. Or, he should be a very skillful condom user. Those bad acronyms are not worth the risk. HIV/AIDS, HPV, GC, NGCU, Hepa B, Hepa C, Cervical CA, and other STIs. Anyway, if they insist on being fertile they have to wait till my menopausal phase is over. I can't have their babies.

I have dated a foreign anesthesiologist for two summers. Everything was good but I don't think it will work out with a rabid Republican on a long-term basis. Otherwise, I would have to wear an armor to survive.

He told me that during our intellectual fights, he got gastric stimulation most of the time. Meaning, he felt nauseated and wanted to vomit. And that occasionally he got mental stimulation. So I told him, at least on most occasions I still hit his brain, specifically his chemoreceptor trigger zone (that’s the part of the brain that is also called the vomiting center). But it was not my fault if his cerebrum got stimulated only occasionally. I wonder what happened to most of his neurons.

So like Obama and his friends in the White House, we just agreed to disagree. He felt I was making him my love toy. Actually he would prefer to be a love toy. He probably deserves it. O.D.