colors of my mind

a blind alley cat

Did I tell you I’m done with cats? Yes, I was. Until about two nights ago when, tired from a week-long work and travel between Lanao and Davao, I could not sleep in my bed because some God-damned kitten was meowing from outside my window. It wasn’t raining, so the wayside culvert should be dry, I said. If the little devil would just keep walking, she should soon find ahead of her the uncemented part that offers for her a way up the road or up to our neighbor’s fence. But she seemed such a darn stupid cat to find her way that I gave up and decided to pick her and throw her to the highway in the hope that some fucktruck ferrying illegal sand and gravel would for once put an end to her whining and wailing.

She was a foot down the culvert. Did not hiss or budge a little as I reached down to pick her. I was a little unsure about putting her inside my room as I know that people in the neighborhood, including my landlady, are getting a little sick of cats that keep on multiplying themselves. Way down the alley some houses even took to poisoning them, feeding them with food laced with Baygon. I could smell that in the air now and then as I pick my way through along our streets, and by and by, I would just notice that the population of cats standing by my doorway had drastically gone down, say from five to two. Maybe food is going scarcer hungry humans are at each other’s throats over it all the time; maybe thieving cats are an aggravation.

This one I salvaged is about three months old. Kind of cute, but for her face. I couldn’t place her family line, if she was cat or dog or hare or mouse. Looks like her face underwent several radical surgeries. I understand, of course, that it’s just the skin disease that she got for eating straight from garbage and rusty food cans. At first I thought she was Chinese I even wanted to name her Xu Xien; but closer to truth is she looks mongoloid. Perhaps I had better call her Loida, or maybe just plain Ugly Cattie.

But first thing is her survival, or she won’t have a chance at her famed nine lives. There was no food in my room, so I had her put down in the yard so that I could go out to buy from the store, but no sooner had I gotten out of the gate than she got to running and meowing after me. She would stop every a couple of yards, turning her head this way and that, like she was trying to trace which way my scent went. I hurried some more. A bit of me was hoping that by the time I came back some jealous owner had already picked her up. But it was almost eleven and the barbecue stands and roadside stores had all closed down. I returned without food and the damn kitten was still there, running to me as soon as she picked my smell.

I put her inside my room. Her eyes wouldn’t glow into my flashlight, and it looked like she was dying from malnutrition. She could hardly open her eyes, like they sunk beneath layers of dried pus, and she kept on jerking and choking on water like the feel of liquid in her mouth hurt. She had nothing but water that night, but as soon as she found a rag, she slept and never woke me until early the next morning.

I still have to find a vet to properly appraise me, if she was born blind or kids in the neighborhood had fun gouging her eyes out. They do that all the time: clip their tails; sew their limbs with wire; throw them into the canal, wrap their heads with cellophanes, prick their eyes with banana cue sticks. They’re so creative, so naturally ingenious in the fun art of torture I am all admiration for them. And I haven’t asked around as yet who could have played with this one so that I can properly thank them.

But it feels nice, annoyingly so, to have some cute thing playing around one’s feet again, at the time when you thought you are through with cute things; at the time when you thought you’re past caring about pets.

Corners in my room

on my side of the street

I live on a street which has no name. My landlady calls it the shortcut street to Ma-a highway, which I didn’t know existed until a few days after I had settled in a room she let me for a song. I thought it was one of those blind streets you see a lot in the city’s more crowded pavements downtown where you are stopped in your tracks by some sorry boarding house or a junkyard strewn with garbage and corrugated iron. Barely finished when they started letting the rooms, the floor was unpolished, the locker unpainted the day that I looked in. I had the honor of doing the painting and the polishing myself, so of course I chose tile red for the floor and mahogany for the closet, and they do well by the white water-stained walls. I have five windows, or two pairs on the side that looks into the shortcut street, and an unpaired one on the room’s front side.

There are two sides to where I live. On the “back side” is the shortcut street, littered on both sides with makeshift shanties attached to or hanging by the back fence of a private elementary school or a big house. A morning trip to buy a packet of shampoo at the corner store is a sightful of life’s sundry details: you walk right into a family breakfasting around a small table right by a fireside with a black kettle still boiling water, half-naked men scrubbing their thighs by the wayside tap while their wives scrubbed laundry over wooden washboards, little children being dragged towards washbasins, old men squatting with cups of coffee between their knees.

The “front side” is the middle-class neighborhood of First Street whose faces you seldom see as they hardly go out of their gates on foot. Most of the houses are built tall, shaded with big trees, climate change sensitized, sotospeak, but for the controversy over the hillside development way up, not to mention the diggings for gold and lime here and there, which threatens to bury the housing subdivision in a landslide one fine day, oldtimers in the NGO circuits say. I worry, of course, mostly for the nice houses who may not outlive the trees. But I reckon that by then I’d be in Ireland making my own diggings at William Butler Yeats library, or in nearby Ho Chi Minh City, consorting with holdover commies.

By then, if my landlady’s own modest projections hold true, they would have made a two-story or three-story building in place of our humble hovel. There will be three or four rooms to a row, all bachelor’s pads, said she, which she will let at 3k apiece, twice dearer than what I pay her presently. Strange that well-married people always prefer bachelor boarders for co-occupants in the vicinity, couldn’t stand to see more of themselves, but I didn’t tell her that. What I wanted to say to her was, I reckon I can afford to rent three rooms by then, if I could still enjoy visiting rights to the country.

Projecting on you again? Please to excuse me, just my own little take at macho swagger. Did you know that in pre-Christian Beowulf hubris is amply rewarded, not severely punished? But in Catholic Ireland Yeats wrote a prayer for her daughter saying may she grow up without an opinion. I don’t know why he prayed that, maybe he wanted his daughter to be good and stupid, that she may marry properly and not be one of them disgraced divorcees. I wish Catholic men shut their big mouths up and stop bothering God and women, how thoroughly ignorant they could be. And by the way, the opposite of hubris is not humility, but grief, which according to Sappho has no place in a house with a resident poet (namely Herself). Humility is post-Christian acquisition, like wedding ring is post-marital clamp on one dirty finger. But I’ve gone a little way off your turnip heads must be going in a spin following me. I am making soup as I write this and outside it rains and children from the shortcut street are running and shouting. I stay inside, held in by the waiting for the roof to start dripping.

Yes sirs, there’s a leak in the ceiling that once every so often drips water onto my red tile floor. One fine day I will fix it, it’s just Vulcaseal or the gutter clogged with mango leaves, and will grill the windows as well. Right now I don’t want to outstyle my landlady as yet. Already she is distressed with the pots I planted with green veggies right outside my door. Not her idea of ornamental gardening, I reckon, and on days that I am gone and it doesn’t rain, I come home finding the plants drying at the roots.

Objet d’Art

Your eyes pierce through me
Into the core
Through the core
Until there is only you

And where have I gone?

I am the breath that stokes your mind’s fire
Everywhere you are I am with you
The way an artist devours her subject
And is in turn consumed by it


Lia Lopez-Chua

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.