a journal entry

I thought it was an advertisement for a mosquito repeller or a new brand of pesticide. Not until I saw 10th ID did I realize what it was all about. Killer! Salot! It says. And the other one looks like a new energy drink or a pain killer a boxer champ might endorse. Berdugo! It says. Lining up cement walls and fences or tacked one on top of the other on building posts.

Whoever had those bills tacked there, must have gone inarticulate with anger.

10 March 2008

Chips on my shoulder

I never for once ignored the rape of Rebelyn. I just felt that people who claim her as their own are the ones in the best position to take it up, issue a statement, call women to arms.

I have chips on my shoulder and I have my own ideas about women and war, about men at war. Which are what I think of right now as I write or reinstate what I once thought about Rebelyn. What I feared was, that what I might have to say then, and now, would not sit well with what Rebelyn's father stands for.

I know, of course, that Rebelyn's father must have known enough to know where to place his griefs. Coming from where he comes from, he must also have read enough and known first-hand about war. He must have been reading Lenin's treatises on war and peace, and must have read that one which says that if women do not take up arms to defend themselves, they deserve what's coming for them.

That's not supposed to be same as saying women get raped because they ask for it.

Had Rebelyn's mother and other siblings gone underground and taken up arms too, I wouldn't be so surprised. I might even be happy. The NPA might not be a women's army, but women bearing arms have better chances of defending themselves than those who are carrying laptops wearing stiletto heels.

If I didn't happen by Rebelyn's funeral and had not shaken hands with her orphaned mother, I would probably have just dismissed her case as another number added to the rape statistic. Or maybe as another number added to the list of left-affiliated people killed by the military.

I did wish I had a claim on Rebelyn's death. I did wish she wasn't just another number gone by.

Because women get attacked everyday, get threatened, beaten, resisting or not, working-class or petiburgis. And it's not everyday that we raise a voice in protest or cry for justice from a streamer. Often, people don't always care if one woman survived, went crazy, or got killed. Sometimes it had to happen to the daughter of someone we know to be brave and good and famous before we hurt on their behalf.

For anyone in the street rally circuit, it's hard not to note how well-timed the assault was. Four days before IWD, which nationalists in the city commemorated a day later, on a Monday, because it would encroach on our weekend break? Forgive my impudence, and my rage, but if we cannot rise up on a Saturday or a Sunday to raise our fists for women, what else would we not rise up for? I can not remember anyone ever rescheduling celebration of Labor Day a day earlier or later.

If I were in the women's bureau of a people's army, I would have taken it as a gift especially given for me and the women in my army, and perhaps I would be so honored by the gift that I would return the favor by gathering a women's squad and set it to chopping military dickheads.

But I have no army and I am in a quandary, as some of the women in the NPA might also be. Because I don't even know Rebelyn, never got to know her, and all I ever heard from those close to her or at least knew a little about her, was that she was innocent too innocent for anything that was done to her and what I know is, being innocent has little to do with women's defense against rape.

I wouldn't know, would never know, if Rebelyn would ever be with me or anywhere near me, politically. I would never know if Rebelyn would ever be around women's defense just because she was her father's daughter. Being petiburgis of course made her an easy target. Being a good girl all the more didn't help. And while petiburgis is looked down on by any proletarian army, being a good girl commands its respect, even draws on its protective impulses.

But to call a warrior's daughter a ptb is to misunderstand the dialectics of a revolution and to misconstruct the world. That she served as stand-in target in lieu of her father's head is proof where she stands in the logistics of defense.

If I were one of those women feminist activists who are now sitting in Congress or the City Council, I would have taken Rebelyn's death as a personal affront. To happen at a time when women are making waves passing landmark legislations for women's rights? What are they trying to tell me, that I should forget about rape and repro rights and start passing laws providing separate CRs for gays and stiletto-friendly stairs for women instead?

But I am neither and nor, so I dismiss my ifs and my hopes. And because I am neither and nor, I must be getting it all wrong. Because it could have not been rape, as nobody calls it rape, and it could have not been a crime against women, because nobody calls it that. It was only a crime against the proletarian revolution and family happens to be just there, a soft target in its phalanx of defense.

Nudes and Poetry

Ikamo,
May tingga sa aking katawan at kalawang
Na gumagapang, pumapasok sa puso, umaakyat
Abot-utak, at tumatagos hanggang kaluluwa.
Kung kaya’t hindi mo ako maaaring mahalin.

Ngayon at magpakailan pa man.

Enough about love

There must have been a time in your youth or childhood when, starry-eyed, you sighed and plucked words from the air as you got to the next item in your girl-friend’s slumbook: Define love. Then spent the rest of the day waiting for Mr Right?

One of the things that I hated about my mother is, she never said a nice thing about anything at all, unless she was envious. Way back in Grade School and on to Private High, my English teacher would ask me to read to the class stuff I wrote like What I Want To Be When I Am Two and Twenty or If I were a Rich Man, and I would show her my A marks, would even volunteer to read them to her, but before I could get to the fourth or fifth flourishing paragraph, she would turn her back and walk out on me saying, What do you know? I also liked carting home Barbara Cartlands I borrowed from our school lib, but again, she never praised me for being such a book reader, even when she could not even afford to buy them herself. She’s like that old ma in a CCR song who always told her star-struck boy, No no, not talk about someday because someday never comes. Always broke my heart each time.

But about this time, you can bet that I am as old and cronewise as my mother, and like her, I too have tossed most of those silly-girl ideas into the sea, or flung them back to the sky where they properly belong, that little girls may climb them. Not saying you’ll never catch me now singing the sweetest thing I found I found in you, only that, please, enough about crap, let’s talk about something else.

It’s like Ara Mina, bosoms full, gushing in an interview, I never thought I’d be like this! For I believe we all somehow started out pure-hearted, even if not always clear-headed. Then two or three decades and another car later, we find ourselves standing by our bedroom window and reaching for our second pack of cigarettes and looking into the dark and asking, Is this all?

No. It’s not about no longer loving the man of the house and the licensed driver of the new car. Neither is it about meeting someone presumably better than the one who has been sleeping with us in the last ten or fifteen years and is snoring right there arms dangling to the floor. What I’m talking about is this: That life – or love for that matter – can’t possibly be the sum total of two lives or two sorry selves together? Friend Eva R. and her American husband put it this way before they finally split ways and found other loves: He: I cannot be more than what I am! She: I cannot be less than what I am!!!

One afternoon on a walk from a hotel lobby to a resto, otherwise handsome Carlo P. said to me: The thing I don’t like about being married is it fixes you for life. People see you as that and that’s it, it's a straight cut ahead. You’re career is pre-ordained, doomed. I really don’t like married men talking, even if they’re only indirectly implicating their unsuspecting wives, but at any rate, he is partly right: To be stuck married can be a very sorry thing; why indeed be content with being a hero of one’s backyard when one can trip the world fantastic and beat windmills down, too? Besides, if truth be out, it’s not true that it’s a cruel world out there, there are just so many people to love and there’s simply not enough room for everyone, and that’s true for boys more so for girls.

What I am saying is, it’s nice to have one true love a la Juliet even if all we could get is a paltry fuck-up who thought himself your Romeo, and we will never be in want of romances to keep us glued to the old windowsill, but if life shows us another way and we soon find out that it’s a swivel door, someone enters as someone leaves, and pain is as pain goes in, don’t lose heart, be grateful.

Now we have some peace and we can clean up our room. Now we can sort the garbage and dispose of the litter of dogs. Now we can have a new pet or be done forever with pets. Now we have sole final claim to the territory that is our singularly beautiful incomparably terrible life.

Ma sorcière

Doing fifty

Never thought I’d get inside a gym. Watching girls —and boys—on their way to the fitness center, with their high-gear suits and designer knapsacks it’s like watching cutouts from Slick magazine, if there’s such a porn mag as that, or maybe, Sex in the City minus Carrie Bradshaw. They may be black belters, can lift tons, are scouring the reefs scaling cliffs and mountain borders or the moon on weekends, but they’re not my heroes. Training in self-defense under the studio lights of some state-of-the-art fitness spa is one thing; growing spine and muscles out of the daily perils of living in the rough tracks and subways is another thing. Listen to those boxing champs, ask them where they first grew their instincts for the kill: if not on the streets it’s right in their backyards, which could be the entire stretch of Boulevard or Bankerohan Underpass. Doesn’t mean got no respect for women who do away with their hairdressers and pick weights instead; where househelps can lift everything up for you, from your comb to your pee pan, and where it’s so much easier to be a cog in the machine than to rage against it, that requires some grit and will power.

Months back, a 58-year old dyke asked me, aghast, that what, dear, you didn’t know any self-defense??? My already brittle sense of self was dashed into pieces. Around that time, I had been mostly in a vegetative state: poor memory, poor body coordinates, poor chemical balance. It was ages since I last went to swim, clambered up a tree, or hiked mountains; in fact, all I counted on was the growing flab in my middle. I suppose I got depressed with the idea that my menstruation stopped rather too early and if I said to a friend I think I'm menopausal, they’d tell me to see an obgyne, might be tumor, remember you’re over 40; and if I told them I think I needed a cancer check, they’d say, it’s just menopause, remember you’re over 40. It was demoralizing, the idea that one’s being 40s is being taken against you every which way, and by Gods, please, I’m not like anyone else okay? I don’t think of aging as an inevitable confrontation with God or reality, I grew up believing that one gets better and better as one gets older, my pitched battles are yet to be fought, shame is to be the young arrival, and now you see me falling face down and getting a black eye just for heaving two bundles of groceries across some rusty stupid gate?

Then Evir G. told me about this gym he frequents for thirty pesos per session down Jacinto Street, ground floor of Dover Lanes.

“Thirty pesos an hour?”
“Thirty pesos per session, my dear, you can live there if you like.”

Well, it isn’t your classy gym steamy with hot legs and men’s mag cover types. In fact it’s so lower-income group, so working class, or maybe just working-hard class, across the board and across borders, that diverse crop whose common denominator is they feel shy or sneer at the idea of going with the yuppies in the fitness clubs uptown at Marco Polo or Torres Street, maybe akin to that section in the sex spas a gay friend in California calls the urinal where the fat unattractive faggots like him are dumped to help themselves to each other or unto themselves, except that in this case, you know that the people who are with you are way over the urinals and are down there mostly for themselves, for the one body they are left with and have to love for the rest of their lives. The equipments are a little run-down with not a timer still working, the locker room not so tidy, the comfort room not so aseptic clean, but about everything you need for your legs, arms, abs, is there.

And it was a gym crowd I could perfectly belong with I almost expected to bump into Amy B there. There’s this fat woman about my age who perfectly fitted into every contraption, could lift tons and knew how to strike the right poses; there’s this 65-year old doing stretches who must have been a yogist or a karate kid in her time, didn’t even deign return my smile, maybe because thanks to the northern light I looked young and stupid by her or I was not doing the arms and the abs right. There’s this other forty something with great long legs and well-muscled arms who spends amounts of time on the bikes and her biceps; then there are young awkward girls, older versions of me, I’d like to think, doing aerobics, trying to learn how to dance or maybe just working some more on their waistline.

My favorite? The little tykes six- and eight-year-old, at the rear of the taekwon-do class, and this young girl in early 20s, a newer version of me, I’d like to think, the lone female in a ring of five not-so-good-looking boys trying to learn kickboxing.

Ma Chatte