Something there is not

There is something I did not tell you.

Did I mention to you I once have a shaman friend? She read my palms and said there are so many broken life lines, and that I had died before once, everything in my life gone. I said true. Must be the time I was marooned at Green Meadows and friends would come to take more of my remains. I could not recall the so many other deaths, the little deaths that come with every loss I make, with every slap in the face that I take. 

And men they all will leave you, she said. 

Now that really hurt. I would like to think that I have very good male friends, only I did not want them in my life, never needed them, and so I made them leave, they did not leave out of their own volition.

Yes, you made them leave, they could not take you, she said. 

How we had a good laugh at that, and I had a moment of what it was like to be in a witch coven, big ladle held in my witch’s hand, a black vat a-boil, men drowning in their fates, as I stir, stir, the way I feel when I am with you sharing a laugh about stories you concocted of men grumbling in the kitchen, hauling in the grocery bag, while you work at your table, in your women’s room. 

Stories that hurt the ones that we otherwise would not let go, if only they loved us well enough.


My mother was no shaman, but she it was who first said that to me. She looked at my palms, maybe I was ten, soon after my father died, or eighteen, a few years before we would find out she had cervical cancer, three months to go. She said my palm looks like hers, the lines are separate, it is better that I became a nun and did not marry, I will just suffer, like she did with my father. I did not promise anything. Then, as now, I perhaps had wanted to be loved, did not want her life, the lines that she found. I must have wanted to be better than the very best that she wished for me. Aren’t all daughters like that? They all want to do better than Mother.

This shaman I knew, she also said to me, Your friends, they will bar you. I fell stumped. By then that had become a recurrent theme in my life: a shipwreck of plans, dreams gone to naught, precisely why I was there, before her, palms laid open, at her seer eyes’ fine mercy.

She did not tell me whether over the long haul my friends will succeed to obliterate me or I will overthrow.

On the perks of left adventurism

Rohan is a friend who runs a video bar at the Capitol Site in Jolo that has become a hangout for lesbians and their dates from the campuses across the road. She has a niece who was a gf to a TL officer and the niece used to snitch, steal from her to give to the lesbian cad. She knows the gang I work with are survivalists of the highest order: if they could steal from their own kin, for sure they could do worse things to me. One time that I was in haste, I left in the vicinity a cell phone I borrowed from the house I was staying in. When I went back to retrieve it, it was no longer where I thought I mislaid it. How Rohan got angry, raising her voice and almost overturning the table. That I should lose a thing in her shop! Out came the cell phone, from the pocket of the thief.

 “Here, you left it here in between the songbook.”

 “Oh. I left it there?!? Thank you for finding it!”

We hugged like the best friends that we are, the thief and I, and I was really grateful, exceedingly happy, having been forgiven for not letting her get away with it. At departure she followed me to the waiting cab, “Kah Sheh, gimme fifteen or else.” I gave her twenty and promised a chocolate bar, she really is improving by the hour, talentwise, though it could be that she was just a little high on something. That smell on her breath!

Rohan and I, we have this plan of putting up a snack house, a way to employ the thieves at Tumba Lata, we said, so that they will stop thinking they joined Tumba Lata so that they can collect money for just being members. For this is what the women in the NGOs here, the gatekeepers and `moral guardians of all things good and true, taught them, by example, and had been blackmailing me into doing: what the USAID and UNDP did to them. People sign their names up for this or that project, their idea of being organized, then they go to a hotel for a seminar on peace, conflict mediation, human rights, all expenses paid, and for attending they are to be given P400 to P500 per day. It did a lot to reenforce the slash-and-burn economy, the patronage system, the mercenary in the tribe. If you are a nakurah, a team leader, head of an organization, or foreman, you ought to be able to deliver this goodie. Or you’re no good.

When in another island a local organizer presented Manila guys a budget informed by this kind of monetary demand, the Manila guys fled, abrogating unilaterally the treaty of friendship with the local organizer and his tribe. The tribe did not hang him; he was one of them, his loss was their loss. He was nevertheless embarrassed, both ways. The tribe was not embarrassed, they forgave him; the Manila guys were not, they are thick like elephants; it was a hold-up. If they cannot get back soon, the tribe will welcome them later; they have money, the tribe does not.

In Jolo, every program, every project set up is bound to be captured by this kind of gunpoint diplomacy. The surest way to make people defect is to not abide. As though you could actually refuse, if there was money, and as though they could actually shoot you in the head if they liked. But it can be very tacky in a long way: They think you can obtain easy money and lots of money from funders abroad on demand because you are a writer, that is what writers do, sit on their butts and scribble and money will keep on dribbling in. If you tell them that one reason it is very difficult to get funding for Sulu is because of this toll tax system, tell them can’t they see NGO work is not like Cotabato to Malabang highway where checkpoint robbery is SOP, they will be snoring on your homily. They also couldn’t care even if you told them that some NGOs in Manila have even learned to exploit this problem to cover for their own financial anomalies; couldn’t care if these NGOs want to do away with your head, too, for knowing what you know, and for being rude, rather than wise, in the knowledge.

It is a throwback to plain banditry, civilization is elsewhere. Bounty is all, and share in the booty is what matters. It is taken for granted that ODA, civil society money, feminist fund or whatever you have there, is tribute money, tithe, resource that have to be extracted, in service of slave society and the unoverthrown sultanate. No wonder that in the debate over the Royal claim in Sabah, all people want to know is whether they will have a share in case the Kirams would be able to collect the 749 million dollars proprietary claims from the government of Malaysia. So what if there is a war in Sabah, for as long as they are not going to do the fighting and the evacuating themselves.

And if they could not care about the war in Sabah, why should they care about rape, about lesbianism, about story writing, which is courting trouble and will only bring harm to the children. Aykamu magkahagad-hagad ha Bisaya yan, makarara, maytah, hikasin niyu yan? Don’t go with that interloper, that Bisaya runaway, she will just take you to harm’s way, why, will you get any money from going with her?

For the bottomline is, this is just a racket, because Mindanao and Manila NGOs do that all the time, sell the poverty, the war, the peace, the women, the halaws, the HRVs, the gang rape, all the Bangsamoro issues there is to sell to the funding agencies and churches abroad, to make money, to buy themselves all those gadgets, to get themselves those offices, those tabs and top-of the-line gadgets, those Land Rovers they ride in their peace caravans.

Since I began doing work among the cads in Jolo, all sorts of accusations  have been thrown my way. That I am not a lesbian before (true); that I got a crush on Vaness (not true: I love Vaness); that I favour Mherz (true: I trust Mherz’s street-smart ass and sense of self-preservation). And very recently, that I have been gangraped. We were discussing the possible areas of cooperation between Tumba Lata and  the Sulu Province Women Council, and suddenly, the woman elder across the table asked me: Is it true that you have been gangraped? I heard from somewhere.

If that would hold me up and make me more entitled to doing anti-rape and gender justice work, and not make more Tausug men want to marry me (I am the way I am, the men say, because I have never tasted the love of a man, LoL), I would own up to being gang-raped.

where the poets have no reading

don't sell my story please

Dear Germy, as for turning the world upsidedown with what ILYB magazine, we was just clowning around, weren't we? ILYBmag was your and Nico's idea. I'm just a sucker. For what is an idea if not pursued. Just thought that would be fun. Thought that it could be possible (what would you want out, anyway, a publication called The Daily Grind, who would buy that when there's PDI.) I really don't care about upturning the world, it can go on with its ways regardless of me, regardless of you and me, but fun with me or fun and me seems not your idea. Bitterness is. But bitterness is best savoured alone. So there is nothing to share. There is no sharing it, sorry, it is mine alone. Lord, have I developed a philosophical mind from reading Sontag or it is just the old wit in me? She called Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" cantankerous feminist. Embittering the text. All feminists, writing or not writing, from the aesthetic or from the aesthete's which we are not point of view is cantankerous. Reminds me of Lia Lopez-Chua's poem Their anger aged/ hardening into a creed/ can't quote the next lines with exactness, I will be dressed down publicly again. All dressing downs are public. Thank you, Poetry, that you are not dress alone; that being dressed, you have nowhere to go. 

I start talking poetry and I forget that I am supposed to be quarrelling with you, for Nico's entertainment and edification, that they may admire and enjoy the bitterness of women and help themself to it if they likes. But I love Sontag. Like I love Lia Lopez-Chua. The men I don't love will never understand. What was I saying? that ILoveYouBabymagazine is apparently not your idea of fun; it was just an idea. Hauling books and putting one's life that isn't yours on public auction seems the more amusing. At least for you and Nico, when you are with Nico. But I can bet you, too, like the cads and the women in Jolo, have no fixed loyalties. Have not one loyalty. Not even to feminism. Not even to books. (Thought you would say, not even to Sean, or to Karl, just because Jan is sometimes unfair. Drop the qualifier sometimes.) Ya, Fair Germy. And I felt sunk because Nico doesn't even have 1k to spare for the books and the entertainment. So it was like friendship between women, friendship between women and gays, even women and gays who don't have men coming in between them making their day, is very hard, I should stop needing people I should stop talking to people, I will just leak in the mouth (to quote Sontag, when she wanted to keep herself to herself). Okay, Germy. Make your day. We only have one day in the sun we had better make it. Yes, Germy, I now admit: I alone write bitterness with a precision that stings the eye. It is a talent honed, though, I didn’t get it from my mother.

But Germy, Respect for the dead, please: If I die tomorrow and you are still up and about, you are not to know. You are to water your dandelions and mint flowers and are skipping media coverage and the writers who murdered Satur at his funeral are to be with you, gardening. Don't make a minor event of a non-event by organizing a search party. There was to be no death no disappearance no footnote about anyone's final annihilation. And you are not even supposed to know.  LoL, I can imagine Nico cheering, Nagsugod na gyud! The spectacle of two ugly unhappy women at each other's hair. Are you going to publish this, too?  Ang bayot. I think I will cry. If nobody profited from me alive, nobody has license to profit from me dead.

Don't sell my story, please. Don't give me away. You know I'm a monster in a cave, why out me, why protect me from obscurity. Remember Tolkien, on walking along dead marshes? Keep away from the lights!

Canon fodder

Jolo is terrible each time. But the last trip I made was amazing. Like there was some fairy holding me by the hand, and I kept on bumping, at very precise moments, into people I only wished in my heart to see but believed I long lost to the dark.

But really, I do feel like a thief. Having gotten this far. My head still on my shoulders. Ces was gangraped, beeh, the human rights women say, with glee. But of course. Why would they accept, take it as given, that their own men would rape their own women but not that kaffir with a camera out to make a story of their savage lives? If they can kidnap and rape their own women, why not Ces Drilon indeed? Are you not afraid? Anthony Tan asks. No. I said. That’s good, he said. Good. To be not afraid is to not bear the reason for being afraid, right?

I sometimes think if the corner princesses will order my beheading, the rapists and the drug addicts will speak in my defense. But that is just a feminist fantasy. Such is my disillusionment with female agency, with female solidarity. Jolo, you see, is very sectarian. Separatist. That's what all those wars have done to a tribe. But not so. Not every Tausug man can be conned into believing that to get to Heaven, one must carry on the tip of his sword a kaffir's head. That's what committing a parrangsabil used to amount to: dih kunu makasud pa Sulga bang way kaw mapatay Kristiyano.

If I am guilty of any crime, it is feudal poaching. I should behave like a captive Bisaya slave, and not like a runaway Bisaya slave. I should be forever grateful for the spared neck, the spared head, forever paying the corner sultans and the sultanas little honors, rostrum mujahideens little praises, little dues. I should not be strolling around the downtown area like the stretches of the roadside canals and garbage-laden pathways are my garden, my skating rink, the hotel rooms and the convention halls theirs. I shouldn't be cussing in the vicinity of the princesses’ houses.

Piso para sa MNLF. Since women cannot fight, the least we can do is help in the fund-raising, pity the fighters. They collect fighters like they collect chickenheads for slaughter, and now they have a pang of conscience, so they collect half a glass of rice from every house and one peso from every tricycle driver that the MNLF may be fed and have a stick of cig? You can bet that most of the fighters are of the tribe that cannot refuse being conscripted. No wonder, Susan is so afraid of getting an inch nearer to any MNLF rally. "Susan, we will only listen to what Bapa Misuari had to say about the giyera in Sabah and then we go home!"

"Dih. Ipamungluh hadja kita ha Sabah, Kah Sheh," no, they'll make of us fodder in their war at Sabah, her fear so real that she gripped my hand as we approached the gym.

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.