A letter home

photo by jon roberts




Dear Anna.

I'm sorry if I didn’t get you right the first time. What I get for not looking back.

Pigcawayan is a long way back and since family I was closest to -- my mother, my grandparents (two sets) and an aunt-- are all departed, there’s nothing there left that I love except the graveyard, which I heard will be bulldozed in a little time soon. High school wasn’t so happy a time for me, you know that, and I have little to connect with as far as my high school classmates and friends are concerned. I have a few good memories of people, can't remember if you were one of them. But one day, I will go back to Pigcawayan. So much of me is buried there.

When you said you’ve read all of me, it was like oh, so someone from down there reviewed my career and had taken a peep at the shape of my soul, too? that should be nice. Our country should know a bit of us before we depart, don’t you think so? But understand that I’m rather long estranged from home and I’d like to believe that I had gone continents. I am honored by your good appreciation of me but if you knew what I know, you wouldn’t like me very much. Happens all the time, even with those who swore fealty, sad planet this.

You want to know something? I don’t miss them.

I want to excuse myself from whatever it is you want of me. Besides, I love someone. She’s okay by me. The rest would be excess baggage. But more than anything else, I love my art, my writing. Beside all that she’s nothing too.

I will probably die alone, my shadow high above these walls. How glorious.

baliwasan grande, a reprise

photo by talisa





Remember the cat they dumped at our gate? Who would have thought it would survive? Then a couple of nights after, we heard it wailing among the crash of tinplanks. And then no more. That was your cat, Shi, you said into the dark as we quietly coaxed ourselves to sleep. Between the two of us, I was the one who was a streak messianic, always out to bring dead cats back to life. You were the one who always knew better, knew who will live and who would die.

Of course we never saw that cat again.

Later Gigi gave you a gun. How we laughed at it. Paltik. We said we could not fire a shot through all this rust! But how he made so much a show cleaning it. For the children to see. They liked to clamber up our fences and hang by the branches of the guava tree to watch us. You went to Zeni’s house across the street carrying the gun in your hand. That hushed them. The doctor has a gun! And even Zeni laughed, politic that she was.

Then I collared a man. How An-An shouted at them in the name of Allah. Don’t you know a little respect? She yelled. Are you doing this because she is a Christian? Later, Zeni would tell us that they went out and fired shots into the air. But I was so furious to listen and be frightened. What I felt then was, her young niece did so much better than she ever could by me. For I couldn’t remember a time when Zeni or anyone of the cadres I knew ever spoke up for me and I hated her cavalier defense of the offended distinct Moro culture. Iba kasi ang kultura ng Moro, she kept on yammering. I could have struck her if I were a rod. It was An-An I wanted to embrace and cry to, tell her that that was the first time someone ever stood by me against a tribe. But I didn’t. I was afraid she would smell my loneliness, my bereftness, and doubt me.

Soon, I would leave Zamboanga, without making leave. You said that was a good decision. I could have killed someone there, or I could've gotten myself killed. I said I couldn’t stand the quality of the anti-communist anti-Christian talk I was made to listen to. Said I couldn’t stand Moro nationhood, if that was all there is to it. Shirien would later relay to me the censure. You could have talked things out with them, he said, they would have understood, accepted any explanation you could have offered them. I did not tell him that leaving doesn’t need any reason or explanation, could not tell him that understanding and acceptance is the last that I wanted from anyone.

In Marawi twenty years later I would visit your mother and I couldn’t find the old hearth of the home I once knew. Tita Aida was forever wiping your car’s windows, forever testing your car’s battery, and I could not, for the life of me, understand why anyone in that freezing cold climate would aircondition their bedroom. I promised myself to not ever go back there and to not ever talk to you again.

Now Gigi is dead, leaving behind with me a nylon rope to make revolution with. I am honored by the gift. But I cannot even organize a forum without Gabriela’s minions barricading at the gate. How they buggered me. Had me bought and resold. Made me walk their dogs.

I feel irrelevant. I feel important.
I feel blasted, I feel blessed.

But I must have known, even then, that I will live.

Unmedicated gargoyle

Sometimes you feel that what you feel, know, hold in your heart, head, hand is too big for you. And yet you know that there's no abdicating it: they hold you as you hold them.

*****

I am not and I cannot be an ivory tower intellectual. I cannot find myself outside the shit that is social history and attack from there. I am part of it all, even if I fuck up all the time, even if it fucks me up all the time.

*****

Lifestyle environmentalists, lifestyle lesbians, lifestyle gay men, what else? How about erstwhile communists who had broken into smaller units of procreation and consumption how are they called? How about cadres with children taken care by the partido with a taste for gadgets and gourmet meals and an addiction to sleazy soap operas, how do i call them, lifestyle masa?

I am neutered and spayed, kurdt, and I'm on a plain I can't complain.

*****

I was getting my brains beaten up
Because I had to be a lesbian
Because I had to be working-class
Because I had to be an intellectual
Because I had to be a feminist
Because I had to be.... Me.

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.