Reality check

I found 17 still very much around: Dex (1) washing clothes in the river with her partner, the same girl she eloped with after getting back home in the island some time in the middle of last year. How thin she has become, her skin burnt dry. Susan (2) has grown her hair long, and unkempt, too harassed with work to get a trim. Still within beck and call, and still the cad that she is, hasn’t finished high school and is now working in a big house at Chinese Pier, cleaning and washing mountains of dishes, maybe piles of laundry, swarmed by legions of flies singing round her head. She earns one thousand and five hundred a month, said she, and wants to save up for her entrance fee this coming June, three thousand pesos, which Aisa says is putting, a fib. Her sister Alex is now lost to them or the family has lost track of her, they have no idea if she is in jail or out of it, the last they heard is she was still into pickpocketing, she and her Bajau crew in Manila, and they have a preference for Melikans and Koreans in their trade. Vaness (3) is sweet on me again. Last time her father shooed us away, shooed me out of his way, apparently informed by Inah Cely that I am out to bring harm to his daughter, exposing them to the elements, them and their young minds and precious lives which I supposedly don’t care about. Ivy (4) is still out of college, but wants to reenrol in June, is interested to join the writing workshop at Notre Dame of Jolo College, where she used to go to. She’s still with the girlfriend a bit older than her, the same one who walked with her when we crossed paths. Nuralyn (5) looks the same as last seen, surprisingly, and still the shy one I remember her to be. So that’s where they go to hang out? Where they get stoned, someone said, if they made so much noise or did unpleasant things, like making out with their girlfriends. No wonder that old man there dreads most the population explosion of tomboys. Nashra (6) is much bigger and taller and the same timid girl we first met at Subah Datuh. Mherz (7) colored her hair brown, LoL, and he looks a Bajau prostitute with it, something I couldn’t say to his face. All she needed, I said, was a lipstick and she may dance. What I wanted to say was stripdance or stand at the doorway of a beauty parlor like an authentic hustler that she is. Kept on repeating Ingat lang, Te, obviously aware that so many people want me dead. Earlier she refused to do the legworking, cannot bring a friend to the meeting with the MNLF, she said. I have not a single friend here, you know that, said she. What freedom. I wish I could say that and not be damned. Aisa (8) seems doing well, healthwise, only that she is making of her girlfriend her househelp and has two other girls on the side. She also dropped out of second year high and has another important gang, Klan Adventures, of which she is a founder. Mherz said she and Coms are still into drugs, but it looks like she and Coms are not even very good friends now. Cannot even call Coms’ girlfriend by her name. Amun iban niya babae maitum, they kept on saying. Gema (9) is still the big baby that she is, though mentally she is way out,  most of the time. Like Vaness, she is very hard to involve, intellectually, in the work and study level. Riyang (10) looks well, but who was it who reported she has a boyfriend beside the older girl she has been living with? She denies it, of course. “Who told you that?!?” Arnalyn (11) is doing good and appears like she actually has time to go out if she likes or if she finds group activities worthwhile. I wish she were a little rebellious, but she makes good compensation enough beside all the ungrateful and heartless cads that surround me. I still don’t know what to do with Amrina (12) and her gang. She doesn’t look like she is capable of any independent thinking or any thinking at all outside bread and shoes and brokenheartedness. Told that Tumba Lata is a goner, she believed so. Told to burn down the group resolution, she complied so. Suppose they ask her to shoot me down, would she shoot me down, too? Should be on her way out if only she knows of other ways out. Her gangmates, Ness (13) especially, seem way too unreliable to be counted on. Chanda (14) though has a set of parents wise and good enough to see her through, if only she would put more mind to what we are trying to do. Arriana (15) I still have to know; same with Ziana (16). Next trip to Jolo I should sit down with them two. It is Robina (17) I much trust better, always ahead of herself performance-wise, she indeed will make a good Pinay sweetheart for some gullible Melikan.

I do not know Adrienne Rich

 I don’t know what is the last book that Adrienne Rich wrote and I wonder if she died because she stopped writing books? To this time I still haven’t checked if she died in her own hands or what. Low-grade depression, she calls it. In the forest without trees, in the forest of cables and steels, quoting john haines. To outlive one’s political uses. She could have not possibly begun doing community organizing. Like Wilhelmina Orosco. Distributing pamphlets at 50. Like me. Selling a twenty-five pesos tabloid to people who only tolerate you because you have human rights and not because you are literary they are not.  If only they start buying because they read, that should be halfway to victory.

 Books books books. Maybe I will never have the time to reread them Maybe I do not need to read them. I just feel sorry Mherz might never get to read Tolkien. He will read it, said he, the blasphemer. If he will read a bit of Bob Dylan and some of Bono, maybe Cobain, I would be happy enough. 

Blast of loser taking nothing.

I Do Not Write Loneliness: a repost

 

 














I do not write loneliness. I do not write poems. Not with the directness of the sun in a desert. Not with their scorching absolutes, their blinding truths. I shut my mind in. There in the dark where I will not be found out. No laser beams to shine on my ugly sides. The gnarled roots of my existence: dried remains of a carcass that was once my body. The same one that was once possessed of a heart and a brain pecked on by vultures wearing the clothes of friends.

Of lovers I have no memory. Only strangers come to lounge at my table and bed. Strangers who, content, then discontented, went back to spouses children dogs estates.

There would be mornings when the mirror reflected a pretty thing. Tall, a surprised lookupon her face. A shimmer on her hair, curly behind the ear and cropped just so and ever undone. The skin glittering soft. Too thin too young to look all those lived years. The long bitter days. It was just the right amount of light coming in through all the windows.

I no longer hold my life any more precious than I would the fishwife’s next door. Her eyes! Popping out of their sockets as she stands sideways to watch me scratch dirt bent on the low stool I made. Knees apart. Splayed toes crawling out of hiding, dibble in hand. Wedging in thin stalks of sweet potato into cement-laden earth.

There would be salvaged lines yet. A long time hence when the bones shall have crumbled into dust. For now I hold soil reclaimed from among packed sand and gravel layered over clay. Boon and bane of the reconstruction years when cavalries of revolutionists subdivided into couples and families and moved into apportioned lots and corners the size of a cow’s dunghill. Fenced in. Gates grating as people slip  in and out of each other’s lives.

I converse with cats and wives. Sneaks from Hell! This one, come lately, is starchy with gossip. She likes to stand askance as I crouch hacking at the coconut with a bolo she walked the roundabout way from her kitchen to my side of the fence to lend. On other days I would have wielded a cleaver at her face like she were finished cadaver. That she is. But today I let her have her way. Look the terror that she felt as I whacked and cracked open the shell in the palm of my hand to reveal before her staring eyes and open mouth not the hoped-for milk but rotting flesh. It spilled through my fingers like pus on a leper’s stump alive with worms. The same godforsaken nut the househelp back of my fence threw into my debris-laden garden. She must have been told that hereabouts what they cannot eat up as young meat is salvaged to be squeezed dry for milk.

The couple she serves are second-lifer Catholics. In their youth they tracked mountain trails tubao-strapped, knapsacks on their backs. Told the peasants the story of The Foolish Old Man, taught the students about the life of Norman Bethune. Their kitchen window my unwalled fence curtained and screened from where noises rise on early mornings without sleep. The clatter of cups and dishes wake me on days without coffee or bread, their own hunger days of corn grits and cassava tops dipped in vinegar and salt now riverbeds away, a gauntlet to keep poverty off their children’s way. Their days at the barricades and the purge they escaped a closed book unfit for the young to read, like men’s magazines hidden in the attic of kept under the bed. The clip-clopping of my typewriter’s keys and the heavy falls of books on the floor horsehooves and gunshots warping their time zone.

Their goodly neighbor has a son whose father they hid from her. She was a comtemporary, a Gabriela cadre once now making a living balancing checkbooks and padding cash receipts for multi-donor NGOs peddling peace. Her brother she would like me to marry. Ask him to sleep over on days that you’re away,” she liked to tell me. “Better to keep the house safe and you have free-service security!” The brother himself thought so well of himself having been asked to fix my door and bedroom window for a cup of coffee and a little fee. He mistook my wood-hacking ways as female industry soliciting male company. She herself must have thought he was more than good enough for me. Could strum the guitar and belt out a Don McLean on top of his peasant origins, just like me, to say nothing of his time with the peoples army. It was an honor otherwise well-bestowed, I being by then a has-been writer-activist whose last caller was a tazi-conveyed married-looking fag with a grocery bag.

Why don’t you sleep with your pathetic brother?” I found courage to say to her one day. Her chicken eyes blinked at me, only then suspecting butchery. Now she wouldn’t part with a hundred and would rather ask her househelp to trust me to repay a pinch from her laundry money. Some mornings of digging dirt her brother would perch atop their evergrowing fence to heckle me with spittle. Pthwak! went his sticky charge. He would spit every after looking my way.

I hack and stab at buried rocks.

an excerpt from a text (or why I don't think much of my being a lesbian)

Thanks to cable TV, the internet, overseas work and the growing affordability of travel, gayness in the Philippines is being reconstructed. Where once there was only the “bakla” and the “tomboy” and the rest invisible, nowadays the short key LGBT (for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals or transgendered people) is slowly being appreciated. In Manila and provincial cities where gender consciousness has touched shore, more and more trans people come out to distinguish themselves and identify with either the male or the female sex. The transits, or more accurately, the evolution from one sexual identity to another has not been easy, however. Some politically conscious gay men, for instance, do not take well to the emergence of the “transsexual Pinay”, viewing it as impertinent, maybe a repudiation of a caste. Among unpoliticized butch lesbians, there is also a strong prejudice against those who do not dress the part and there exists a stubborn demand to play roles, i.e., imitate heterosexual patterns of behaviour, with one partner playing masculine and the other playing feminine. Androgynous types who do not fit the binary roles are an object of jest and dubious interest and may be harassed for double-crossing or for being phony wannabes. There is too the tendency among middle-class and urbane lesbians to dissociate themselves from what they contemptuously call the “generic” butch —an ascription that has more to do with class and lifestyle rather than one’s sex.

Generally, lesbian presence are taken for granted in dirty and low-paying occupations as bus conductors, security guards, janitors, cannery workers, porters, cart pushers and tricycle drivers. But in white-collar jobs like teaching, banking, lawyering and the like, lesbians are ostensibly less visible. Recognition and respect, it appears, is up to the heterosexual world to confer or deny, not for the minority sex to obtain on demand. Even organizations like the party-list Ladlad has to face widespread condemnation for daring to question the dominant norm of the traditional family and heterosexuality. Within gay associations and butch camps that privilege machismo, sexism and misogyny are yet to be confronted.  

The gay scene in the Philippines is maybe among the liveliest in Asia, although as in most other continents, the country’s “sexual minorities” were hardly ever part of its political life. Gay and lesbian activists first came out in the 1990s, buffeted by the strong wave of feminist consciousness that came with the pouring in of aid money for women and gender-related projects. A strong albeit small segment of the women’s movement in the Philippines would later give birth to a feminist lesbian perspective which supports pro-women legislation, including reproductive health, sexual rights and violence against women. This segment distinguishes itself apart from, and is critical of, the gay-dominated LGBT activism of the 2000s which is perceived as having little or no roots in feminism and as such, does not adequately represent the interests of women-identified lesbians. The party-list organization Ladlad, which at the moment is the lone contender in the country’s electoral politics in so far as looking after the specific interests of the minority sexes is concerned, has yet to galvanize gay and trans vote for it to earn a seat in Congress. With inter- and intra-organization conflicts very much alive as each player seeks to compete for turf, funding, and political resource, it may still be a long way before it can command the following of a broader contingent. 

Gay issues reinvigorated in the Philippines in 2007, after Ladlad’s application for accreditation to join the elections was rejected by the Commission on Elections. Ladlad seeks to represent the interests of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders. When the Commission on Elections initially denied the party’s application on grounds of “immorality,” the resulting indignation prompted the discrete and otherwise disunited LGBT communities in Manila and nearby cities to rally for a common cause. With congressional representation via the country’s party-list system unrealized and several anti-discrimination bills still pending in Congress, the LGBT community has every reason to unite around this organization. Ladlad’s work among non-gays is however spotty. For lesbian organizations with provincial issues, support for this LGBT organizations is lukewarm, non-committal. 

Little girl blue

I have not even read my second book for this year. Susan Sontag waits. And Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark. And The Second Plowing. And a dozen others now in the care of Nico. The books that I lost. The texts that I miss. That I remember them distinctly is perhaps an indication that they are not really lost to me. They have served me, and have remained with me, textually. Nadz lost to the typhoon Monico Atienza’s translation into Filipino of Arundhati Roy. It went with their house. How angry I was for a little while. But what is a book to a house? I did miss it, but it’s Monico Atienza I miss more. It’s Rosa Luxemburg I miss more, more than her little book Reform or Revolution, which can be accessed in the net, anyway. It is Switzerland I miss  more than the stories about Swiss watches and the Swiss army’s compulsory draft. Lol, they trained all their citizens that they may shoot at those who want them on their side? Is that what defending neutrality means? Marge Piercy’s  He She It I have thoroughly absorbed I live some of it while Piercy only wrote it. That was my last word to her: Oh, I thought you live what you write. 

What will Douglas think if they found out I quarreled with Marge Piercy over permit to publish? Hahaha. That I dragged Marge Piercy down to their level or that I upped them? They are just like Marge Piercy. Petty like kitchen wives always complaining about the costs of things and the hardscrabble life of the hardworking writer. They work long and hard without recognition, said she. When it was her poem we were negotiating about, not some other obscure poet’s! Lecture galore. To tell me that. 

When you write to writers they always assume that they are the writer, not you. We are all like that, except Sawi.

But I am not a writer. I am just me little girl blue.

There would be days when

There would be days when I feel heathen, friendless, like Cain driven out of Eden to the edge of the earth, eschewed from the company of men, and I feel an utter shame. Shame, that social thing again. I am a bad strategist. Too many bridges cut before I could cross them. But maybe that is really what I wanted all along. To be an island unto myself. To be cut out from it all. All social relations artifice -- to survive in an artificial world. 

I will make no noise! I will do no harm! Said Plath. I will be quiet, I will be courteous and resolute, said Susan. Too late for that now. Such graciousness is not useful to me. Long have I been dragging my entrails behind me. I should be glad I did not have distended uterus.

Technically speaking I should be dead. Politically speaking I should be long dead. When friends see me,  they ask how come I am still alive. I cannot tell them that even to me it is a miracle without sounding like God was with me all along. But a miracle it is that I still manage to thieve along the precipices of the sewers like that stinky rat of Patrick Chamoiseau in that Granta edition Germie ceveted so much. The rat. The child. Who grew up obsessed with catching that rat and ended up crying for the rat when he was an adult, having grown old and shrunken, the rat not the child, stealing a life that never became his.