Davao Diaries

Missing Gizzards

2012-02-08T17:12:00.000-08:00

In times like these, I dream of Sheilfa, angrier than usual, complaining how some particular guy had attempted to steal her eyes and ears, had she not been too careful and alert. “Don’t trust anyone with your eye,” I warned her, vehemently, in the language of women trying to deal with typhoons and earthquakes every other day or of people on alert for those tropical storms that usually caused the swelling of the river Pangi once in a while.
When I woke up, I discovered I was already robbed of my gizzards. I looked for them under the pillows, under the bed, inside the shoeboxes, cabinet drawers, even in the freezer of the refrigerator where I stored my lipstick, but they were nowhere to be found.
I had a funny feeling from the start who the culprit was; and it grew even more stronger the more I confirmed my missing gizzards—the one who stole them was the father of my son!
But it was still in the early morning, when like all the others, I was still breaking my nose over the breaking news, there was no time for me to stop, take the gizzards and fight back. I thought I would find time late in the evening when the air was cooler and everything was written and done with, though, I thought, I would already be too tired and exhausted at those hours.
In the afternoon, I discovered my liver gone; and so were my small and big intestines, the entire 12-meter length of them, gone without a trace; and so were some parts of my brain. I declared it the greatest monstrosity to ever happen in my life! Somewhere deep in me, in some parts I could not locate yet, rumbles a slow burning rage strong enough to break the nose of the of the guy who robbed me of my gizzards, liver, intestines and brain; a rage so slow and protracted it could fuel a long running feminist revolution that would surpass all other world revolutions in time and scale.
So, in the midst of my cluttered room in Nova Tierra, and with the help of a rusty old laptop bought from a Korean junk shop in 2008, I began to track down the gizzard thief. A stolen look at his Facebook profile showed a plump man with a potbelly, with partly greying hair and a receding hairline. Hah! So, do you consider that a vindication of years?! Going over some of the comments posted on his wall, I noted how almost everybody called him ‘engineer,’ in such a stupidly patronizing manner; and that included himself but nothing about the man gives off an air of intelligence at all. All you can sense, when you take a closer look at his picture, was the sheer stupidity of the eyes and the awkward way in which he held the bottle of beer in his hands to show to the world he was a man. In fact, someone with a discerning nose would notice outright that the stupid guy was holding the bottle as a prop to cover from the eyes of the world the rotten dullness of his life.

On the Road to Buluan

2012-02-06T21:35:00.000-08:00

Buluan is one of those places I consider so near I could almost touch it; and yet, so far and out of reach.
It sat very close to my hometown, only two or three towns away; and yet, I never heard of Buluan until after three decades I was born. This won’t explain the whole story.
I first discovered Buluan in 2003, when I was part of the team tasked to document the proceedings of the Mindanao Peace Institute (MPI) workshops, where participants from conflict areas around the world spent a week or two learning about peace in Mindanao.
Those workshops culminated on a trip to the conflict areas of Mindanao. On the road, we passed by the Maguindanao town of Buluan.
The ceasefire with Moro fighters were on the papers when organizers boarded the participants in vans that travelled in a convoy to see, among others, the zone of peace in the conflict areas of Pikit, Cotabato and to interview people in Muslim and Christian communities affected by the raging war between government forces and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and even before it, the Moro National Liberation Front.
I sat next to a bunch of South Koreans, a Canadian and an American who kept talking about how they could never understand why Filipinos could elect Imelda Marcos and her children back to power; [[Are we short on memory or IQ? I was tempted to challenge them but refrained]]; and a young German woman who kept so quiet for most of the trip.
When the van left the Davao-Cotabato highway in Makilala to follow the road leading to the towns of M’lang, Tulunan and Buluan, I was aghast to realize that like the foreigners next to me, I was also traveling that part of Mindanao for the first time.
As soon as we reached Buluan, the first things that caught my eyes were women and men in the midst of a harvest, their clothes flapping like tiny bright specks in the distance; the nipa-thatched huts huddled close to the ground and a beautiful mosque in the midst of the green fields.
Later, in a town of Sultan sa Barongis, I saw egrets feasting in the swamp; and realized that like them, I, too, was a stranger there.
I would hear of Buluan again on November 23, 2009, when a group of journalists left and met their death on the way to Shariff Aguak. But this was another story.

Letter to Kathmandu

2012-01-28T22:34:00.000-08:00

Dear Pratish. I tried to find the Nepali writer again; our Nepali writer, remember?
But going over my copy of “New Nepal, New Voices: An Anthology of Short Stories,” I felt lost, somewhat overwhelmed by all the strange sounds of the Nepali names; I could no longer recognize our writer among them.
But how could I forget? We have a much stronger claim over her than her father, or husband, or maybe even her lover! We were her sisters in life and struggle; her victories were our victories (or so, we’d like to think!) even if she never knew us, she never knew me, she never will. We were her readers; and that’s the most important thing of all, isn’t it?
The first time you showed her to me, and I read the first lines of her rapturous writing, I had gasped with delight. I tucked her name to memory; in a special place nobody could enter. I promised to read her again until she will become part of my body. We both promised to return to her over and over again, when reality is hard to bear; or when we were half dead struggling against the yoke of our daily coverages: the fightings, the wars, the politics. She would be our refuge, a sanctuary, a place so deep, so safe, no one could probably touch or harm us there; a place where our exhaustions vanish; a place where we start to forgive ourselves and we can be friends with the world again. But two summers afterwards, I have forgotten her name. Wasn’t she the daughter of a royalty who had once outraged her father by joining the street protests against the monarchy? Was she a recluse, who once retreated to the forest to write her first novel? Or were we just making up stories, turning up fictions to escape the tyranny of facts in our lives? I know that our link to our writer is made of a more lasting stuff. Even if I can’t remember her name, I still can still find her in her writings.

Sleepless at Esteban Abada!

2012-01-28T22:31:00.000-08:00

EXCERPT FROM A JOURNAL
May 13, 2009—

We just entered our room at half past midnight after Pratish and I listened to Kevin, a young Tsinoy from Davao’s Juna Subdivision, discussing Heidegger. He’s taking up Philosophy at ADMU and staying up all night to do some paper.
“Are you, in any way, planning to be a priest?” I asked, just curious, when we first learned about his course.
“That’s the problem with Philosophy,” Kevin began, obviously flustered by my question. “People think that if you’re taking Philosophy…”
“She used to love Philosophy,” Pratish quickly said, turning to me, coming to my rescue.
“Yes, I used to love Philosophy,” I said, thinking only of Literary Criticism and Deconstruction during my Silliman University days.
Kevin nodded, surprised.
“She wanted to be a Priestess,” Pratish added.
Kevin’s eyes widened.
“Yes, I wanted to be a High Priestess, that’s why I asked.”
I did not say I wanted to be a Witch. And a witch doesn’t need Philosophy to be a High Priestess, anyway. All she needs is a pure heart, and that will serve as her compass; her ephemeris, and a blanket of goodness that will protect her against evil and will enable her to read everything—the present, the past and the future—! Pratish knew how often I struggle to keep a pure heart every day because my mind is always up to some particular mischief. I could never be a witch.
Kevin said, “Ahhhh!” nodding even more vigorously.
Finally, he welcomed our friendship and began discussing Heidegger. It was our turn to nod. Pratish and I couldn’t seem to fall asleep that night. We took iced tea with milk for dinner.

A Walk in the Park

2012-01-25T06:48:00.000-08:00

While we were talking in a bamboo shed, a drizzle began and just as suddenly, the sky over the Philippine Eagle camp in Malagos grew dim. "Don't worry," Rolly assures me, "It's still early and it's still pure sun down there," he says, his lips, pouting towards the town of Calinan below. "It's just this way up here, the precipitation is high."
Just as he speaks, we feel the coldness of the jungle beginning to penetrate our bones. The chill reminds me of what I once felt in the forests of Makilala, Cotabato, a long, long time ago. The memory curiously mingled with the smell of damp clothes and bath soaps of a certain fragrance. I remember the feel of soft mahlong beneath my feet, I remember the sight of wet earth and the shivering frames of our companions as they rushed to join us, leaving their slippers at the door. I remember a particular look on a boy's face.

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

2012-01-25T06:08:00.001-08:00

For years, I've been living beyond the fetters of Time. Maybe, this explains why I could never keep dates. I can only remember the "before" and the "after" of an event, never the actual event, itself. But this year, at least, I'll make a real effort to remember. I'll take note of beginnings and endings; of the ebb and flow of the tide, of the rising and the setting of the sun, of the appearance and disappearance of the moon, of the time for planting and the time for harvesting.
I'll try to follow the seasons.

Cubicle

2012-01-24T02:58:00.000-08:00

I’m inside my favourite internet café in my favourite cubicle: an empty wooden desk near the glass wall looking out to one side of the JS Gaisano mall.
I used to love it here because the sight of the empty desk the color of maples reminds me of the cubicles of some libraries I used to love: the cubicles on the third-floor window of Silliman U Lib looking down into the acacia-lined green oval of the soccer field in Dumaguete city; or, the reading cubicles of the Rizal Library looking out into the dark limbs of acacia inside the ADMU campus in Quezon city. I used to think the mere sight of this empty desk at the internet café could inspire the deepest of my thoughts to come out of the dark dungeons where they lay imprisoned; could perhaps help break my fettered spirit free!
Until the guys next to me started their transactions on the phone; all with their booming voices and their tripping egos, announcing to the world they are certain-so-and-so's, berating someone in a merchandising department of some Tagum city mall, complaining why their dicer cannot get through.
I wonder what a dicer is. I’m sure she’s not someone who throws the dice, the way I used to see people playing dominoes. But the guy is very mad. His voice fills the entire internet cafe as he scolds the woman—I imagine someone on the other end of the line as a woman because of the way the guy talks; I couldn’t imagine him talking that way to a man!
I came here in my favorite cubicle, thinking I could be alone with my thoughts. Now somebody else is stealing my focus!

In Fairness to God

2011-12-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

I had struck a friendship with God sometime in our Reporting on Religion Class at the Asian Center for Journalism when Dr. Eric Loo in Sydney, Australia and Mr. Anwar Mustafa in Malaysia had asked us to do a profile of a noted religious leader for Christmas. I was in Davao, trying to find an Islamic leader for the story, but since the deadline was very close and I realized I still had so many things to learn about Islam, I decided as Christmastime approached, to track down God in a parish in Cotabato, where he had been saying mass at dawn in a remote village that was always in the headlines of newspapers because of the frequency of armed encounters between government soldiers and New People’s Army guerillas.
God’s story towards the end of the Martial Law years was both tragic and shocking but just a few months before I set our meeting, the convicted man out to kill him towards the tail-end of the Marcos regime was freed and the man went to him to say he was sorry. They both went to light candles on the grave of someone the convicted man had killed in God's place.
It took some time before I could find someone who could give me God’s contact numbers but with the help of friends I did; and when I called him, he was open to meeting a stranger and asked me to come meet him near the white statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe on a Sunday morning that week.
I hurriedly prepared for the trip because as usual there were simply so many things to fix at home during my absence. God had not yet arrived when I got there so I had plenty of time to compose my questions and to orient myself. When his old blue Isuzu pick up pulled up, I saw a tall, thin, fragile-looking man got off and walked towards me.
He led me to his office, where a yellow Royal typewriter sat on the shelf full of other documents. He asked me about my religion; and for a while, I was tongue-tied.
I had declared in class I was an “agnostic” and a “free thinker,” next to Jana from East Germany who declared she was an aetheist. The rest of our classmates said they were Roman Catholics; like Lilik from Jakarta or Bryant from Bulacan or even Debbie; or Muslim, like Yuri and Kurniawan, from Jakarta; or Buddhist married to a Hindu but who grew up under the tutelage of Irish nuns who taught her to pray the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Holy Rosary, like my dearest roomate Pratish from Kathmandu. Mukund Pandabhan, our professor for Media Law, had once asked me to define what a free thinker was and he did not give me any trouble with my definition.
But when God asked me where I got that notion of being a free thinker, he quickly put me back to the 18th or was it 17th century when the enlightenment and rationalism swept over Europe. “Jesus Christ is even more of a free thinker than you are!” God quipped, irritated, knocking his holy fingers onto my forehead.
God had taught History in a US seminary years before he was sent to the Philippines, where he ended up at the heart of Tondo on the eve of Martial Law. He remembered that the first mass he ever said here in this country was done inside a prison cell.
I first caught sight of God towards the end of my adolescent years which also coincided with my activism years when a friend pointed to me the first European I saw who could speak Ilonggo. He was fascinating to look at: a towering figure surrounded by lumad children who took their turn kissing his hands. In his book which recounted his trip from the Marco Polo airport to Manila, he noted what the Filipino tradition of kissing hands meant because the practice was quite new to him at that time, a source of endless fascination. But now, surrounded by lumad children, I could swear he already looked like one of them if not for his skin.
He also noted with surprise how Filipinos loved to worship all those European-looking saints who peopled the Church’s altars.
Some of the images still stuck with me after that trip: God leading me inside a sooty kitchen, where he shared the offerings of the morning mass with the children, his old cellphone and its faded numbers, the old jacket he wore. How lovingly he brushed aside the dry leaves that littered the grave of a friend killed when God was hunted down by the killers and was nowhere to be found.
Back in his office, as he complained about the volume of paper works he had to deal with that week, as he crouched upon the stack of papers in his desk to find that document that could answer my question, I was struck by how fragile and delicate God has become.
Maybe some people would say the suffering of God was nothing compared to the suffering of people he had served—all those mass of humanity toiling under exploitatively low wages, tilling the land of the haciendas all their lives in exchange of measly pay, the subhuman condition working in the mines, in banana plantations and in factories, those persecuted for their political, ideological and religious beliefs.
But knowing how God, too, survived death threats all his life for doing what he got to do; and how he is fast giving in to age in a land far away from where he was born, I felt humbled.

Caraga 2009

2011-10-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

Traveling to Caraga feels like you’re on a graveyard shift. You know the feeling. You struggle to keep awake at 12:30 in the morning and watch your seven year old son march off to bed, drowsy after the last show on television, you dial up the taxi that will fetch you from home in Nova Tierra, near the mosque, you say; and then, when everybody is snuggling comfortably to bed you brave the cold slap of the early November breeze on your face as you board the taxi to the terminal. You found a convivial listener on the taxi driver, suddenly a companion in this dead hours of the night, when all the living are asleep and you are headed for the terminal to catch the first trip to the town you only knew by name from some old travel brochures that featured the oldest church in Mindanao, built here in the 1660s, as an outpost of the Spanish forces who failed to conquer the interior parts.
Inside the Ecoland terminal, people sleep on their folding beds (for rent, at P15 to P20), with their bags on their heads. It takes quite a few pages of Milan Kundera’s “Slowness” before the bus for Cateel (which will pass by Caraga) arrives at one o’clock. You go to the Bachelor bus driver bound for Mati, just to check and counter check. I’ve never been to Caraga before. I never knew where Cateel was. It’s a strange place for me. I wonder, what will greet you when you get there? I stared at the Cesar Montano’s face on the bright huge TM posters above the signs overboard. Mati, Cateel, etc. I glanced sideways at the vendor selling cold eggs, cigarettes by my side. I wiped and blew my stuffy nose and wondered how long can I bear this—not the stuffy nose—but this, being treated like this, a worker without right, without voice. I kept wondering what this—this being yanked out of your sleep at the most unholy hour of the night—had anything to do with writing??! Or, book editing for that matter? When the Cateel bus arrived, I asked the driver again, I asked everyone I could talk to. I was excited (and tired) to go to that old place, that old Spanish bastion, the only one they were able to hold in Mindanao. Then, somebody turned off the bus lights. Everyone claimed the seat as bed. The woman across my seat stretched her legs on the bus aisle even as she asked her companion (a male) where he had parked the car. Park where?! Aren’t they riding this bus? Then, I claimed another seat too, and lay down listening to The Campaign Trail on The NewYorker, for this was the time when Barrack Obama was still running for President. Then, a woman-a hefty one—came aboard grumbling because everyone has been making every bus seat his bed. I got up, asked the woman if she wanted my seat because I wanted the old seat across, but seeing that somebody had already occupied the seat I wanted, I returned to where I was sleeping.
A brief talk with the conductor, telling him I had a companion waiting at the terminal in Tagum, the first stop. Then, in Tagum, seeing Allan coming up the bus aisle in the dawning hours before the bus moved on again; and a few hours later, a drowsy glimpse of Mati, where they fix something of the bus engine. Snaking around the sneaky mountains of Caraga, I was reminded yet again that the place where nothing happens is also a place where everything happens. Away from the newspaper headlines, everything happens in Caraga. You knew all about it during breakfast of nilagang baka and fried talong in a rundown torotoro along the highway, people lining up the weather-beaten dirty counter, waiting for the steaming rice, grabbing a greasy table across a woman in her late fifties, her hair unkempt, her old printed duster had seen better days. She, too, would have been beautiful when she was young. I wonder what she’d seen in these places. Everyone was talking about some encounter between soldiers and the NPAs somewhere beyond the mountains. We will pass by Tarragona, the one included in the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE), Allan kept saying. Later, what I saw of Tarragona was an abandoned wooden shed and an empty public market, I wonder where the people are, what they’re doing at that time of the day. Maybe, sleeping??
When we reached Caraga terminal, I was already dead tired. All I wanted to do was plop down somewhere, bed or no bed at all, but everybody kept talking. Then, I realized sleep was still out of question. We still had a far way to go. We boarded a crazy motorcycle to a village called Pantuyan and waited and waited for the people who never arrived. They were trying to settle some dispute somewhere, trying to avert a “pangayao,” what do they call it, a tribal conflict? I slept on a bench. Somebody handed me a pillow. I slept until my stuffy nose was gone. When it was five o’clock, they said, it was time to go. We boarded a motorcycle that climbed up a newly scraped road. The soil was rocky and limey, like what I used to know in Argao, Cebu, my mother’s hometown. But when I glanced over my shoulder, I discovered we were already on top of the world, the ravines were the deepest I’ve ever seen, I’ve never been in a mountain as high as that and I did not even know its name. We were still climbing higher and higher to I don’t know where: Pluto, perhaps, Mercury or Mars? The motorcycle ahead of us went overboard, its passengers laughing. How could they laugh?! All around us were forest; a weather-beaten shack would appear once in a while, with people staring back at us. Except for that and the jungle, I saw nothing else. Later, much, much later, we followed another rugged, abandoned road. I thought, we were already close to the place where we were supposed to go. But later, I learned, we were still very far. The skylab climbed down and up the mountainous incline as high as 85 degrees. I was bowling over. It was a journey that never ends.
But later, I was struck as soon as I saw the place: a thriving Mandaya community surrounded by forests. Looking down the bluish haze of mountains and outlines of rivers far below, I said, this is heaven, this is the place where I belong, I’m not going out anymore.
But as it happens, I still did.

Being Mary

2011-08-02T04:33:00.000-07:00

I resented it when Ja prevented me from getting a house help in the last seven years and now he flew into a rage because he said he was beginning to feel like a house help. I remember A.S. Byatt’s “Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary,” and then, I remember that story itself the way it was told in the Bible, and curiously felt like I was Mary for the first time in my life, talking to Jesus while Martha flew into a rage over the dishes. This is something new to me because all my life I have often felt like Martha, doing all the dishes while someone else like Ja do all the talking to Jesus. [Now, don't ask me, who is Jesus, here, it's Karl].
Being Mary for the first time makes me feel a bit giggly and happy for a change. Ja would kill me once he read this and realized he was being compared to Martha. [[Shhhh, it's Ja's birthday today so I better stop!]]

Ora pro nobis

2011-08-02T04:21:00.001-07:00

The landscape at home is getting very horrifying, like the prospect of Hades. I thought a home is a place where you can take a rest and get a good night’s sleep but no. At seven thirty to eleven o’clock at night every night, sometimes extending down to two in the morning, I keep my vigil, waiting for someone to come home. Had I been a bit of the prayerful kind, I would have started saying the novenas, or the holy rosary or the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which surprisingly for my agnostic soul, I found rather comforting once or twice when I tried it. Even if I can’t actually make sense of half of what I was chanting, it took away some of the pain off my chest or even eased the terrible headache I’ve been carrying along for days. Isn’t that why the patriarchs invented it?
But I hate patriarchs. I am sure I am either an agnostic, or a pagan so Sheilfa lent me Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” or Ana Castillo’s “Peel My Love Like An Onion.” She even followed that up with a whole bunch she left at the Bagobo Hotel the following week, which included Flannery O’Connor’s letters, “The Habits of Being;” “Three,” a collection of Flannery’s novels and short fiction; Edith Wharton’s “Old New York,” Katherine Anne Porter’s “Ship of Fools” and Willa Cather’s “O, Pioneers!” You would think I have been reading these while keeping my nightly vigil, waiting for the precious one to come home. But no, I would oftentimes be too tense to read. I would keep repeating whole paragraphs five times in a row, and still, could not make heads or tails of what I am reading. It doesn’t help that my eyesight sight blurs. When the kid finally toned down this week and started coming home on time without a trace of liquor in his breath, I started to feel relieved and happy. But then, Ja started banging things in the kitchen, saying words that are difficult to take. I was worried the kid might flee off again and renew the habit.
The kid confided to me about something when Ja started his temper tantrum. Ja had no idea how it was to learn of things like what the kid was saying. He flew into a rage over the unwashed plates. But what do I care about plates when my son was listening to suicide music?
I watched Sean doing his assignment. Sean’s face looked soft under the light and he was really working hard on his assignment. I did not want to shatter that look on his face. I wished I could get hold of old women’s novenas and moan, “Sa langub nga among gipuy-an imo kaming panabangan,” just the way my old grand aunts from Capiz used to chant when they were still alive. I also wanted to get hold of the Latin version they used to read, chanting, ora pro nobis, every end of the line. But the strange sounds they made and even the strange clothing they wore, those dark skirts reaching down the floor, used to turn me off as a girl, I ended up avoiding them and not learning anything. Now, I began to be intrigued by that cave they kept talking about. This choking, sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach, all remind me of the inexplicable horrors of caves.

Complications

2011-07-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

If you’d ask, why have I been switching jobs that fast in the past months, perhaps, Flannery O’Connor could explain it better to you than I do. Just look for Enoch Emery, when his blood was conspiring something, and he got to do what he got to do. I was thinking about this, walking past Kapitan Tomas Monteverde elementary school, thinking, I only desire a simple life, why do things easily get so entangled? When a ball jumped out of the fence and for a while, looked like it will bounce on the roof of some running jeepney. Luckily, it didn’t. Instead, it bounced back the side of the road and got caught by the passersby before me. The guy played with the ball for a while and almost reverently put the ball down on the pavement and left. Just as I moved to pick it up so that I can throw it back to the fenced campus where it came from, another onlooker got it ahead of me and did just what I had in mind.
I was thinking about Flannery O’Connor all the while. I was thinking why would Flannery O’Connor choose a character like Hazel Motes to cross the path of another character like Enoch, to cross the path of the blind man, the fake, and later turn to be the real blind man himself?
Why would Hazel Motes stand there as if struck as he watched the peeler when what interested him were the scars on the face of the blind man and the blind man himself? Why would Sheilfa suddenly leave the entire bunch of books—containing Flannery O’Connor and Flannery O’Connor—in the lobby of the Bagobo hotel and call me days later to ask if I already got it? Is Sheilfa some kind of a Hazel Motes?

Fathers

2011-07-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, it must be sad to lose a father; yet, I can’t help wondering, how much sadder to lose a son? Or, how is it to have a father and not to have one at the same time? Or, to have one who is still alive but who is not quite a father at all, the way a classmate’s father or a friend’s father is, even if only taken for granted? It wouldn’t really matter, would it? As long as he is there: mad or angry, friend or a foe, someone to rebel against or someone to follow; as long as he is not someone living a separate life totally different from your own.
How is it to have a father that way? You don’t know how it feels, Ma, because you have had a father all your life. Do you know how it feels to be me?
Before the news came about the passing of your father’s father, you woke up one morning, saying you dreamt that your father was dead. Were you sad? I asked. Why were you sad? I asked again when you nodded.
Because then, he would no longer have the chance to know me, you said, speaking as if you were still a work-in-progress, soon to be completed in some future time, like some deadline for your architectural plates, before being offered to some distant, unworthy god. You did not ask who fathered me when I grew up. I would have told you it was my mother.

Gift from the Hermit

2011-07-25T23:39:00.000-07:00

My Birthday Card is a hermit, shown here as an old man in a long robe, looking straight into the lamp, giving the light his full attention. In the horizon, where the hermit stands, is a mountain, denoting isolation and distance.
On a special day, I tracked down the hermit where he lives to beg from him a bit of that isolation and distance which has endowed him the eternal wisdom.
Instead, the hermit showed me a box full of mementoes of forgotten things, now soiled and full of cobwebs.
I opened the box and two decades of dust flew off the lid, clouding my eyes. Afterwards, I saw books half-eaten by termites and ants; among them, “The Principles of Structures,” “Advanced Mathematical Formulas,” before a dusty executive organizer, its pages stained and browned with age, caught my attention. Its once white cover page, now badly stained, showed what could only be inconsequential scratches made by a baby with a fuschia pentel pen. The following page showed the name of a woman who lived at 202-F Tres-Labangon St. with a business address at Sunstar Daily, Osmena Boulevard, Cebu City; and the old telephone numbers, 54543 and 52658, still in use before that newspaper changed its address to its own building along P. del Rosario St., boasting of its first of a kind newspaper architecture in that part of the country.
The following page of the organizer showed a three-year reference calendar, denoting the years 1992, 1993 and 1994 and somewhere towards the end of 1994; a ballpen scribbling of a woman’s hand showed a series of dates from January 1 to 14, when she wanted to take a leave of absence from work. Immediately beside this note, as emphatic as if she was ordering herself, she wrote another note which says, “On November 15 or November 30, book a plane ticket to Cotabato for a December 31 flight.”
Everything that followed was history. How she made that crucial decision and boarded the Airbus 320 flight—or was it a smaller aircraft then?—that took her away from that place of nightmares, perhaps, forever. How someone had come only a few days after that looking for what he could no longer see, now safely intact and unreachable across the sea. How she had come to watch those inconsequential scratches of fuschia eventually transformed themselves into plates of architectural drawings.
The Hermit’s lamp particularly illumined the lone entry of the journal on January 2, 1993, which says, “3:07 a.m.,” the major source of energy for the woman. It was the only entry she wrote on her journal that year because of the volume of mind-numbing work she had to do. Her superhuman energy turned her into the female version of the mythical Bernardo Carpio. In the following pages, where her January 16, 1993 entry was supposed to be, the woman had crushed out the “3” and replaced it with “4;” which means that the next entries were made in 1994, exactly a year after she wrote her lone entry.
I took a look at all the entries of the journal, over and over, wondering how the woman was, what happened to her over the years? Clipped in the journal was the December 20, 1993 x-ray results, which says, “no radiological evidence of active PTB,” for the woman, 24 at that time, was frequently worried about her lungs and her frequent coughing.

Pasensya! These are dangerous times!

2011-06-01T01:46:00.000-07:00

[From a conversation with a noted radio broadcaster]

When I told him about it, he did not laugh. Unlike most people who learned about what happened along the boundary of barangay San Isidro in Carmen, Davao del Norte at 9:24 to 9:34 am on Black Saturday, he did not even pass judgment over what we did or did not do, as if there were really some right things and wrong things to do under those circumstances; as if the incident itself was our fault.
Things like that always happen, he said. It was designed to scare you, he said. It also happened to me before, he said. Two times.
The first time it happened to me was back in the 80s somewhere in Ecoland. I never knew I ventured into the territory of intelligence agents.
We were just looking for corpses in a sack because someone called the radio station about the corpses hidden in a toilet of Kabacan elementary school. The one who called said the corpses were hogtied and placed inside the sack. This was in the 80s, when Davao City was the killing fields. I used to work for DXRH and four of us--three regular reporters and a volunteer--took quick notes of it and went to find the corpses.
We did not know where Kabacan elementary school was, so we kept asking.
We went all around the place looking for the goddam school. We reached where the Hall of Justice building is standing now, asking where Kabacan was. There was no SM City yet. There used to be the headquarters of the CHPG (Constabulary Highway Patrol Group) nearby in a building they shared with the police. We were so determined to find the corpses that when we came upon the headquarters, we asked the policemen on duty whether they knew where the Kabacan school was.
"Why?" The policeman asked.
"Someone told us there were corpses inside the toilet there. We want to verify if it was true because we want to report it on air."
The policemen told us to wait. One of them went inside to tell the chief. Afterwards, the policeman who went inside came back. He said the chief wanted us all to go down.
We were using the Pinoy 2 vehicle, the mobile patrol of DXRH, at that time, and the vehicle did not have a lock. We brought along with us the mobile radio base at that time and I was afraid it might get lost if I leave it alone in the car.
So, I told the police, maybe, I should stay in our vehicle to watch over our equipment. But the policeman said, no, the chief asked all of you to go down. All of you, he said. So, I was forced to go down.
But before that, they took our tape recorders, our IDs, even our wallets. When they took our wallets, I was alarmed. Why would they take our wallet? I asked myself. I began to feel helpless. They all forced us all to go down.
“Get inside!” said one policeman who shoved me into the door using his armalite butt because I did not want to follow inside.
Then, we were led into a room in a basement which only had a stair going down. We were practically under the earth, then. When we reached the bottom, we saw the chief. He had a desk. So, I realized, it was his office.
I never knew until then that the building had an underground; and that they used that underground office as base of their operations.
He made us stand in the middle of the hall. All of us, made to stand in the middle. Do you know how it felt? They could just have shot all of us there and nobody would know. We were under the ground. They’ve taken all our IDs.
The next thing that the chief ordered was, take off your clothes, meaning, the upper clothes. So, we took off our shirts. Then, he ordered us to take off our pants and we took off our pants.
Then, the chief asked, “So, what brought you here?”
“We’re just looking for the corpses, sir,” we said. “Somebody told us there are corpses hidden in the toilet of Kabacan Elementary School. We’re only here to cover the news.”
“Ahh,” the chief said. “Maybe, those were dogs.”
That’s all what the chief said.
Then, he said, “You may dress up now.”
Then, he said to his men, “Give them back their belongings.”

On our way home, we were all so shaken no one said a word.

Actually, they always do things like this to scare you. Especially when you venture inside their territory.
It happened to me two times, he said. The second time was when I was walking along Jones Avenue, this black jacket.
Jones Avenue, somewhere in Acacia, used to be the site of big protests in the 80s. This used to be where the protesting groups meet. This was also where the three (or four?) Davao lawyers, among them Lawyer Larry Ilagan, the husband of Luz Ilagan, were arrested.
I was walking through this area wearing this black jacket one day, the recorder clipped in my arm, when a car stopped just beside me, all its windows opened at the same time, with a full-cocked long firearm protruding from each window, all pointed at me. Somebody inside the car ordered me to raise my hands.
I could not immediately raise my hands because my recorder was clipped in my armpit. If I raise my left hand, my recorder will fall.
But they compelled me to raise both arms, so, I was forced to do just that. My recorder fell crushing to the ground. Yes, the recorder fell! I was lucky no one pulled the trigger.
When everything was cleared, they said, “Sorry, Bay, pasensya! These are difficult times, you know.”
They must have mistaken me for an NPA (New People’s Army).
I picked up my recorder. It was totally shattered.
They just sped away.

HE SAID these are the things they do to you when you venture into their territory, their operation base. That is where the body was found. That was also the place where they throw away the corpses. Who said there is such thing as the right thing or the wrong thing to do under those circumstances? You could never guess what’s on their minds!
When they come upon you and isolate you from the rest of humanity, the first thing for you to do is to find connection because you never know what will happen next. When they take away your phone, your last chance is gone.
It’s better to err on the side of caution.
You would never know whether or not your press ID can save you.

Dear Old Self

2011-05-22T00:57:00.000-07:00

So, do you still remember going into the midnight sale at the Metro? No, no, not even the Metro but that rustic department store somewhere near Gaisano South of Colon? Yes,Fairmart. Where we used to walk through the thickening crowds swarming the store and pushing their way to the rummage bins, where the sales staff used to throw away those items as thick as they’re dusty and smelling of old corners for having stayed on the display shelves for years.
What were you thinking then, as you waded through the swelling, palpitating crowd, finding your way around the thick forest of clothes, inch by inch, nudging those who shoved and elbowed you, shoving and elbowing in return?
What decadence, you used to grumble, your eyes popping at the price tags of a coveted piece of blouse or underwear which could transform you into another you, affording you a chance to dream, “What decadence!” you exclaimed, mimicking that Russian KGB in a popular American situation comedy you used to watch in Honey’s room inside the Tsa Elim Dormitory.
So, what were you thinking then? Did you think you can change yourself from being a poor girl from a land across the sea now in a big city to get a college education? Did you think you can change the world by changing the way you looked?
You tried a dress and saw how it suited your young and scrawny body, how it flattered your skin, your mind a whirl of emotion as you looked at that face in the mirror. Was it you? Who’s that girl? You asked, turning, staring, wanting to take all, spending a day’s worth of food allowance to buy a dream and feed your burning delusions.
I didn’t know what happened after that. I have counted the years and surveyed this particular time, and found out how brief it was compared to the great avalanche that eventually followed and pulled you out of there and brought you to me.
I wish you had been more circumspect. I wish I had warned you but I was equally careless! I wish you had tarried in one of those magazine shops somewhere near the Ultra Vistarama and the Oriente where you can read Time and Newsweek for only P5 or so, or a newspaper for P2 or so; or ogle at Itzhak Bentov’s “Stalking the Wild Pendulum,” or Carl Sagan’s “Broca’s Brain” in another bookstore, instead of shoving your way into that stupid midnight sale, flirting with your own ego!

Stuck!

2011-05-22T00:43:00.000-07:00

The shape of my writers block is a jagged rock that feels like a migraine. Why can’t you finish what you’re writing and move on with your life? Ja kept asking me, so, I go back to this tiny laptop to see what I can do with the story, but still the story refuses to budge. What is wrong with my head? The migraine seems to open ugly cracks on my mind where the blood cascades in powerful torrents.

The boy who (does not) refuse to grow up

2011-05-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

Yes, I’m here inside Peter Pan, the curious dropping place of women shopping in the nearby mall. They came here in thongs and printed dresses, mother and daughter in the next table, a woman, a friend and a cousin, wiggling their bodies, shaking their hair as they go from table to counter, waiting for their orders. I just arrived here with Sean, who after a bite of the sugar-coated raisin bread, loosened up a bit and told me how, when he was in Grade One, he tried to buy an icecream cone worth 20 pesos with his 25-centavo coin. He was a bit puzzled why the woman selling it was mad at him. It was such an embarrassing blunder, he said, but now that he is entering Grade Four, he already has a fair understanding of things and would no longer commit such a mistake. I told him it was okay. I sensed it was better here than at Dunkin’ Donuts, where he would be preoccupied with the sweetness of his ChocoWacko. Or maybe at the Bread Station where he would be too busy eyeing the array of starchy delights to put in our basket. Earlier, I was here to exorcise the headache I’ve been having on Holy Thursday and Good Friday and erupted full blast on Easter Sunday. Now that everything is over, I am perfectly okay.

Everything Is Accounted For

2011-04-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

What they pay with money, I pay with my own body. I pay with skin boils, inflamed sinuses, sour throats that develop into hard coughs, stomach acidity, stomach ulcers, arthritic knees, blurring eyesight, blurring memories, crumbling spirit, long hours of hard mental labor.

My Kerala

2011-04-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

Maybe, she's still out there, doing volunteer works in Kerala. Though, I found out a few days ago the Kerala she was talking about is not the place where Arundhati Roy grew up but quite a totally different kind of Kerala.
“Why?!” she had asked, raising her brows when she saw the look of consternation on my face. “Does it make any difference? What is so special about your Kerala and this Kerala? The work I'm doing here is just the same. Why do I have to go to India?”
I said because in India, the colors of the flies are different.
I'm thinking of this because I'm beginning to be afraid. I just walked out of the store because I found out, rummaging through my bag just when I was about to pay, that I was short of cash and that I could have placed my money somewhere else. The storeowner, an accommodating lot, allowed me to bring the food to the table, while I run to the nearest ATM but when I rummaged through my bag again, I discovered that even my ATM was missing. I placed an emergency call to Ja but Ja, as usual, is unwilling to help. He is perched on his stool on Mt. Olympus, watching the rise and fall of whatever stocks on Bloomberg, so what do you expect?
Now, I'm beginning to be afraid. Someone is telling me to see to it that schedules should be followed to the letter so that nothing will go to waste. The hair on my neck stood on ends. I thought the world already knew I never follow anything to the letter. How can they missed my reputation as image breaker, iconoclast, rule breaker?
Years ago, I told my Uncle during the funeral of an older Uncle that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who follow rules and those who break them. "I belong to the latter," I said, pursing my lips, "I make my own rules." Uncle was shocked.
Now, I'm afraid of people who tell me to follow rules. I spend my whole lifetime breaking them and I'm not about to give that up.

The Language of Birds

2011-03-21T21:55:00.000-07:00

On February 16, 2010, I paused after I finished Batman’s part in, “On a Deadly Trail: Three Journalists Killed in the Philippines” when I noticed a piercing sound that began at the neighbor’s ground and increased in intensity as it approached my window. It sounded like a fierce warning—so I thought it was somebody downstairs, a possible assassin, perhaps, whistling a secret code.
Ja said I was becoming neurotic because of what I was writing—but there was something about this particular sound, which was so shrill and so piercing as if it tried to attract attention. When the whistle grew very painful to my ears, I turned around to find out what was going on.
And when I did? Lo! A yellow bird, a tamsi, perched itself on my window grill, chirping with delight; its companion, perched on the clothesline, returning a piercing chirp. The sight was a treat after days of wrestling with my thoughts, staring at an empty computer screen for long hours. The birds made me think of Batman, a Davao broadcaster killed on Christmas Eve in 2007 and Geneboyd, a young photojournalist killed in Jolo, Sulu on November 12, 2004.
I remember how Batman last waved at us at Yellow Haus while I and Mandaya and Jepoi and Di were brainstorming for the maiden issue of I Love You, Baby magazine, the magazine that circulates in our mind. It was late at night and Batman and Tec, talking at a table away from us, stood up to go. He was gone a few weeks after.
I did not get to finish our last conversation with Geneboyd. We were at the Waterfront Hotel waiting for the press con to start and he was talking about that cartoon show a lot better than Spongebob Squarepants we used to be so crazy about in 2004. We had to stop because the guests had arrived and we had to listen and he had to take pictures. We all got down to work and rushed to write the stories afterwards. But the next thing I knew, he was in Jolo and something happened.
The whole thing was so unacceptable and senseless, I got the sudden urge to ask him, who was that cartoon character, again, Boyd? Please tell me. Please tell us what happened in downtown Jolo. But he could no longer reply.
I thought about the two journalists as I watched the bird on my window grill pointing its beak to the sky. I never knew a bird’s beak could be so beautiful. It was so extraordinarily sharp and I gasped at its thinness. I wanted to grab my camera and capture the moment. But the birds must have noticed. They started to fly, still chirping at each other and shrilly calling back to me. I strongly felt they were trying to tell me something I couldn’t make heads or tails of, a message that must be very important.
Suddenly, I wish I could understand the language of birds.

Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T23:58:00.000-08:00

Did you notice how hollow it sounded, even as a soundless text message from me to those happy enough to remember today?

The doctor is sick

2010-10-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

I tried to make out the expression of her face as she sat silhouetted against the glass door. But the glare from the street outside hurt my eyes. All I could see was the shape of her hair falling on her shoulders and half her body leaning against a chair. Her voice was sad and clinical, as if she was explaining a surgical procedure. “The lumads—once they get pregnant, they already half-expect to die,” she continued in a monotone. “Yet, when everybody talks about the Reproductive Health Bill, nobody thinks about the lumads.”
For a moment, I swore she was only talking to herself. But she was facing me, gesturing with her hands. She tilted her head slightly up, so that the light caught briefly the outline of her nose and eyes. She was a doctor. Her profession trained her only to deal with the coldness of empirical facts.
I squinted. The sun outside was harsh. It was hot, something they blame on global warming. Perhaps, if I had only moved closer to where she was, I could have seen some anguish—or anger—on her face. Perhaps, I could have established a human connection. Perhaps, I could have understood better what she was talking about. But I was a little farther away and I could only see her shadow.

Please remember everything!

2010-10-24T02:57:00.000-07:00

Where were you on January 2, four years ago?
I tried asking you but you can’t remember.
Is it only the mind that forgets? Or, is it the heart?
Is it because we did nothing significant that day that the date simply slipped off our memory for good?
We must still have been living in that rented house with a red gate, numbered 72, along McArthur Highway, the house that Sean thought was our own to the chagrin of the real owner. It was the house that Ja, your stepdad, described as a garage because the owner used to park their rusty old sedan and a new van just outside our front door window. It was a house that I remember with horror and helplessness because the bedroom where we used to sleep had no window and the other room, where you used to draw and be alone, used to have windows that looked out to a stove in the open kitchen of the other house. That window was eventually overshadowed by ugly granite when the owner built another extension to their house.
It was a perfect trap, that house. It was built only as an afterthought.
First of all, I’m not very good at dates. I couldn’t remember the exact day I met your father or when exactly America first attacked Iraq, but I can still picture his eyes and the way that his shirt revealed the curves of his shoulders. Just as I had clear pictures on my mind of Operation Desert Storm on the pages of Newsweek magazine on the magazine rack of the Recoletos library; and then, of Typhoon Ruping, afterwards, when the entire city went dead and we had to hunt for bread and canned goods out on Colon street because there was nothing to eat in the entire Tsa Elim dormitory. I still can remember the exact day when you arrived, the dress I was wearing, the look of panic in your father’s eyes, the exhilaration and the long hours of struggle before that. It was a day that changed my life, so, I can’t believe I can’t remember anything on January 2, 2006, when you turned 13. I remember meeting towards the end of that year another 13 year old boy whose mother and father were killed on the street of Kidapawan in broad daylight; and I immediately took to him because I was thinking of you.
If I could not remember where I was on January 2 four years ago, it was not because I had forgotten you. I’m sure I was shuttling to and from Davao city and hometown again, desperate, as usual; trying to cope with the crazy demands of the holidays and jobs. Maybe, it was the Christmas I lost Sean’s biplanes along with his medicines and other toys in a small backpack in the bus, because deep inside, I was crumbling. The holidays always required me to spend the money that I didn’t have and I was always thinking that I wasn’t good enough for you.

Missing Kwin Dukduk

2010-10-06T17:35:00.000-07:00

In times like these, one could not help missing Kwin Dukduk. She’s an intense young woman who fiercely believes in what she says and would often arrive with lots of egg pie from Goldilocks to give when she’s terribly upset about something.
At least, Kwin Dukduk is sharp.
I missed her today when the sun was at its zenith, and somebody started talking about the discarded bag of a boxer’s wife selling at P120,000 or more. Actually, I did not have anything against the boxer’s wife or her discarded bag (which Ylevol said was Chanel and did not interest me at all). But somebody insisted that if the boxer’s wife only lived abroad, she could have been selling her discarded bags or panties for a million dollars and everybody would be crazy enough to buy them.
I was not surprised at all by that stupid display of absurdity and decadence. Just like everybody else I’ve been used to it, but I couldn’t help opening my mouth because I know of somebody who sold his old camera seven times its purchase price by bestowing upon it some historical value no brand new camera could ever have. (It was Jamil!)
Didn’t we learn enough that the market has always been susceptible to some idiosyncratic twists and turns just because such thing as 'market value' has oftentimes been dictated by perception? And that, perceptions going awry, with all the overvaluations and undervaluation in between, had precipitated numerous historical crashes in the stock market and the world economy, looking back to the early part of this century alone, including the most recent global financial meltdown? I know that if Kwin Dukduk were here before me, she would vehemently nod her head and say, "The market is such a cold-blooded idiot. It has no heart at all," and then, because this thought itself would upset her, she’d turn the computer's volume up and break into a song by Susan Vega!
One could not help missing Kwin Dukduk. Every time I was with her, I always felt I could turn the world upside down and still emerge as winner.

Letter to Sean

2010-10-03T03:21:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of you when I got a glimpse of the waves of Lianga from the car on the road. I never knew that waves could gallop like that. But there they were, right before my eyes, galloping like horses at the back of thatched structures that served as the public market. It was raining and the people I was with in Lianga were taking lunch at an eatery that displayed gigantic fresh crabs, fresh catfish and octopuses that reminded me of the tentacles of the kraken in the Pirates of the Caribbean. I never stopped thinking of you even for a while. When I saw the kraken’s tentacles on the plate, I wanted to shout “The Flying Dutchman!” the way we do it at home, taking in a scared look before breaking into our long hard laugh that continue to amaze the neighbors.
I told the people of Lianga I felt like a cannibal eating the kraken. They were telling me some people sometimes come down from the mountains to flee the fighting and stay in the gym for days.
Braving the rain, I went out of the eatery to take pictures of the galloping waves, intending to frame them against the dark shadows of the thatched huts.
But I discovered when I got closer, that my camera could not capture the terrifying texture of the waves before my eyes. Within the thatched huts were women persuading me to buy the fish they were selling. I aimed my shot at the gleaming bodies of their fish, instead.
It was a terrifyingly ugly shot because it was made as a compromise. I’m sure that people who would happen to take a look at it someday would wonder about the senselessness of the whole shot and would harshly judge me for taking it.
As you grow older, you would know how to be true to what is in your heart. Once you set out to take pictures of the waves, by all means, do it whatever it takes, and don’t stop to take pictures of krakens.

The Lettuce Tree

2010-09-30T14:19:00.000-07:00

I wish you'd find time to water the lettuce I planted in the pot outside my window. I only remember it on my way to Esperanza when I looked out the window of the running car and saw the murky brown water of the Naboc River snaking down the ridges below, trying to but never finding the level ground that could put a stop to all its running.
I want you to remember as you water the plant that there was only one leaf left of it the other week but now it has grown three leaves, each one promising to be greener than the other.
Let's not allow the plant to wilt. Let us work together and pray for more shoots to grow and spread into leaves so that when I come back, its succulence and crispiness will make us forget the blight.

Bottled Feelings

2010-09-24T03:16:00.001-07:00

I know you’d say this is such a boring picture. That you’ve seen this before and that I could have done this better; maybe, find another angle to give larger space for the ripples in the water, so that maybe, it could bring about the catharsis that we need.
You know, you might be right. I took this picture towards the sunset in early 2006 when things were equally foreboding as they are now. I remember staring at the dark clouds looming over the estuary of Davao Gulf and thinking I should not take such kind of pictures in the beginning of the year--!
But who could resist? I clicked away the shutters, discarding the symbol and, as my pagan soul seems to warn me, a thousand and one repercussions. In the face of such irresistible beauty who would still care for meanings? Isn’t that how cruel our impulses are?
This morning, I was crying at the dining table because Jamil told me I was not cut out for running stories, I often get left behind. But I was not cut out for slow moving stories either because I had not written anything of the sort for a long time.
I did not have anything against Jamil. He is the kind of man who would push you down when you’re down and push you up when you’re up.
In fairness to Jamil, he cried the first time he saw my first fiction in a magazine. That year, we still lived in a garage. He used to treat me like that woman in VS Naipaul’s “The House of Mr. Biswas” but the day he read that story, he came up to the room in a daze and taking a long, hard look at me, said, “Ma, you made it, Ma.” If you’d known Jamil for a long time, you wouldn’t believe he would do it—come to the room in a daze and say, “Ma, you made it, Ma.” I wanted to ask him, made what? But I merely stared at him and kept quiet because I knew how lousy that story was. I kept a copy of it in my drawer to take a look at it once in a while but over the years, my belief only strengthened that it was really such a lousy piece. So, I hid it again in the drawers hoping that someday, I will have the courage to burn it. I was not crying because Jamil told me I was not cut out for running stories because I believe he was right. I was crying because I remembered something that Rainier Maria Rilke wrote in his “Letters to the Young Poet.”
Things are getting so dark for me these days that I began rummaging my files to search for meanings.

Lusting at Zeitgeist

2010-09-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

It’s a German word, I know. Which means, the spirit and outlook of the age. But we never saw it when over a year ago on our way to the campus, roommate Prathibha and I first passed by the row of shops just outside our dormitory’s gate.
We were only aware of the most pleasurable things staring at us from the glass walls: Jeanette Winterson’s, “Arts and Lies,” Neil Gaiman’s collections, and again, further down, Winterson’s “Oranges are not the only Fruit.”
We were almost late for the morning classes but we couldn’t help ourselves. We entered the shop, almost gasping for breath, to find more treasures inside (perhaps, the world classics crammed in such a small space): Gabriel Garcia’s “No One Writes to the Colonel,” in at least three editions; “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” some old classics by Chesterton and other titles I thought I’d never ever find on earth.
It was only much, much later, when Pratish and I would meet our German roommate Jana would we find time to look at the shop from a distance and read the German name above it.
If there was one pleasure that Pratish and I were hanging on to during our summer stay in Manila, it was this very small bookstore that offered the best of the world’s classics in such a small space. The prices, however, were not really as dirt-cheap as it could go: the owner, of course, knew what she was selling and had kept the prices only as low as P100. I discovered that in Manila, you can book-hunt to places where you can actually find books by your favorite authors at P50 (try the uppermost floors of the National Bookstore in Cubao) or even at P20. Try the Instituto de Cervantes during its anniversary and you’d get them with long-stemmed American roses!

Lady of the Flies

2010-07-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, you should stay here for a while. It feels better to work with editors who treat you like a real person.
Quite unlike those people you knew who rushed you into writing something they thought was easy simply because they didn’t know anything about it and you were just as stupid to oblige.
The last time you left this job for such a thing as a book project, they let you climb the highest mountain in Davao Oriental on a habalhabal.
The driver got so pissed off when you insisted getting off the motorcycle instead of sticking it out with him down the slope that you swear was an 80 per cent incline. You went there supposedly to edit a book, didn’t you, and not to commit suicide!
But when you reached the highway and you were back on this habalhabal, the driver revved up the engine and sped along the road like crazy. All the people by the roadside of Caraga were turning their heads to see what was going on and because the driver was already flying so maddeningly fast, you only managed to catch a glimpse of the look of concern on their faces.
The driver only wanted to scare you, you knew even without looking. He thought you did not have the right to complain because you were a visitor. It’s part of the customs and traditions of the place, is it not? You must do everything they wanted to—including getting killed in a stupid habalhabal ride, maybe?
As soon as you reached their house, somebody asked, ‘Were you scared? That was so fast!’ and you managed to say, ‘Was that the fastest you could get?’
You were seething with fury. When, days later, you told a man about it, the man said, ‘You should have complained, you should have gotten off that motorcycle, you should have told them how you felt!’
But you were just a woman they were trying to scare. You knew you would detest the look of triumph on their faces. So, all you did was to tell them their fastest was not even fast enough for you.
It was a totally different kind of job. They made you travel over 24 hours on the road non stop from Davao to Bukidnon to Cagayan de Oro, to Iligan where you crossed the Mukas wharf near Kulambogan on your way to Ozamis, going all the way to Oroquieta and the small towns leading to Dapitan and when you reached Dipolog, you could not even sleep a wink because they had to start the meeting where you were supposed to interview, or at least ask questions from, the leaders they gathered. You could no longer remember what questions you managed to ask because you were so numb and dumb from sleeplessness and exhaustion after more than 24 hours on the road.
They didn’t notice, though. They were so goddamned dedicated to their work, they thought it was natural for you to travel all the way from the other side of Mindanao and still be up and about to ask all the brilliant questions!
When they were about to start the meeting a latecomer arrived and everyone decided to let her have a nap because she traveled three hours on the road. Three hours against your 24 hours!
When you got too tired to stay awake, they just let you sleep on a hammock while flies buzzed around the benches and tables scattered over the uneven dirt floor. The people you met there were patient, too. Their leader did not make it because he got no money for the fare, said the woman you talked to. The sound of your last conversation mingled with the buzzing of flies in your dream.

Women are strong

2010-07-07T00:43:00.000-07:00

[[From the Journal of a Demented Woman. Retrieved from the Trash Bin of Decaying Things]]
“Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don’t know how strong we are until we’re pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.” –Louise Erdrich

I’m training for sainthood and this has gone on for years. Martyrdom is not my cup of tea but here I am, sacrificed before an altar, staying awake at 10:41 at night, waiting for him to come home.
It’s another kind of experience, something which fiction could only approximate but never copy. Bleeding and angry at the same time, I sit here on a chair, facing this computer on my table, trying to make sense of the ticking of the clock, thinking of that body—a baby I once pushed out of my body now a being separate from me. It is now a body with a life of its own and a mind that has totally discarded me.
Early in the afternoon, I climbed up the stairs leading to the high school faculty room on the second floor and was surprised to find the teachers waiting for me. The stories they told me were simply astounding. Of the school disciplinarian chancing upon the four of them--smoking? maybe drinking?--in a store in an eskinita across the school ground. Of the sketchpad full of drawings—his drawings?—of demons and monsters and obscenities—what do they mean?
Six hours after I left the school campus, I sit here, waiting interminably, thinking of a million things that could go wrong. I am thinking of the dark, deserted road stretching from our house to the highway. I am also thinking of the people surrounding him, I am thinking of gang wars in the news, of dangers lurking in the streets. I am thinking, too, how come that he cared more for other people than he ever cared for me?
Where in the world is he?
It’s like inside a torture chamber, sitting here, held incommunicado for eternity. It’s like the crucifixion of Christ, only that, this time, I am the one being nailed. I can feel the stab wounds all over my body. I am bleeding.

Thoughts in Midair

2010-05-06T00:08:00.001-07:00

I did not know how it happened. I only knew I was on top of the stairs, hurrying down to catch up with Sean and Ja who had already gone out the door a few minutes before. When all of a sudden, I lost my balance and my feet and body succumbed to the laws of uncontrollable motion. I could see all the people down below in the midst of their Chowking dinner, looking up at me and gasping, all of us contemplating the natural course of my fall. Right there in midair, I was struck by the hopelessness of the situation: I had fallen from some other places long ago but never from such a stairway as this. There was no way I could ever stop the fall. I only wished I could get a glimpse of Sean and Ja’s retreating back and ask them to come back.
But it happened in a flash. I did not even have enough time to say goodbye as I looked down and contemplated my end at the bottom of the stairway. These were my last thoughts as my head hit the floor and I saw the sparks of a million stars.

For Each Pot, a Bowlful

2010-04-16T02:55:00.000-07:00

“Don’t forget to water the plants. Pour one bowlful of water onto each pot in the morning because that’s what ganda loves. Don’t use the dipper from the bathroom. Use the big bowl we use for rice. The rice bowl is the symbol of life. Using it will give us sustenance, blessings. As long as the plant lives, we will survive.”
This was the text message I sent Ja exactly a year ago from a room I shared with Pratish on Esteban Abada, just a 15-minute walk to the Ateneo campus on Katipunan Avenue, where we were having on campus classes at the Asian Center for Journalism. The Ganda, which I raised in a pot at home in Nova Tierra, was a gift from Babu Avelina, a brave and intelligent Mansaka woman we interviewed some time in September 2008 for a book project on the Lumads in Mindanao.
I carried the plant uprooted from Babu’s garden in Maragusan to the rickety bus that took us out of the rustic town near the foot of Mt. Candaraga to Tagum city. From Tagum, I took a more comfortable bus to Davao city, where Sean and Karl were waiting for me after such a long absence.
I couldn’t describe in one sitting what happened to me during the trip.
It was not Babu—but something else about the whole set up that actually left me feeling drained and downright oppressed. The plants must have sensed how my feelings towards the whole thing warmed and soured and then, warmed again. Only the memory of Babu Avelina sitting in her porch that faces the beautiful Mt. Candaraga reminds me that the trip was worth taking after all.
Mansakas use Gandas to spice up their tinolas (I could no longer remember how they call the dish) just the way we use onions. Our hosts proudly let us taste the dish for lunch—and that was the first time I tasted the native spice.
When Ja saw the plant, he said, “Oh, my God, I never knew you’d like to plant a weed!”
I merely smiled. Months later, when out of desperation, I put the weeds into his cup of noodles, he suddenly changed his mind.
“I never knew a simple plant like that could make my noodles taste better!” he said.
Now, I’m going ahead of the story. At the time when I sent Ja the text message, he still was unconvinced about my plants. I had to use it as a metaphor to scare him into watering it and taking care of the boys while I was away for the summer. I was worried about my boys. I was worried that the plants might not survive my long absence.
By the end of May, I went home to see the plants, scraggly from lack of water, but still surviving. Sadly, though, this is also how I feel about my boys but thanks God (or Goddess), we survived!

Before Ampatuan

2010-01-20T00:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, we still look back and realize that we have crossed the line between the before and the after; and we are sad because we could no longer go back to that lazy--no, hectic--Sunday afternoon when everybody was packing, rushing to go. We agreed, we had biases, afterall. We are human beings. Our biases will always be towards humanity. Looking back now, we realize that we are thinking of another place, another time; and the thin line that separated our present from the past is the same thin line that bordered sanity and madness. That Sunday, we never had a hint about what will happen on a Tuesday, in between nine o'clock and eleven o'clock in the morning, when our world changed forever.

Lost and Found: Memories

2010-01-05T23:36:00.000-08:00

Maybe, because I’ve taken so many detours in the past and gotten lost so many times in some jungles; maybe, because I’ve been stranded too often in someone else’s kitchen or got trapped in some odd jobs, my memories of dates have gotten so mixed up. Since the day I left the university I’ve been having trouble filling up forms that needed dates: I no longer remember things the way I used to remember them before.
But I still remember very clearly how the news of Ninoy Aquino’s death found us inside the upper classrooms of Holy Cross of Bansalan College in August 1983; which meant, we were in our higher years, then; because higher years at the Holy Cross of my hometown were in the classrooms on the third and fourth floors—the freshmen were on the ground floor.
When news about the Yellow Friday movement reached the airwaves, we were aware of the surging excitement in the world beyond, although we were still being kept inside the protective campus walls. One day, the whole class watched Ninoy’s wake on TV—I couldn’t remember where this was, but we were agog over Kris Aquino because we thought she looked like Jane! And here, the memories came back, Marichu or was it Tessa or Angie calling up Jane to catch a glimpse of her look-alike on screen—but this was still when K was still sweet, slim and seventeen; her mother, not yet President; and we watched Fr. Patrick Payton’s show in the park at night, featuring Jesus, Mary and the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, where at the end Fr. Payton would say, “The family who prays together, stays together;” followed by another show of the Exodus with Moses and his long cane in the desert.
Since I could no longer remember dates, I had to figure out many things on my own, which was rather hard to do. I figured that I couldn’t have graduated from high school in 1982, before Ninoy Aquino was gunned down on August 21, 1983 in the airport tarmac. To find the exact date, I’d begin again in 1972, when (former President) Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law. I was still four years old. I can’t forget the sight and smell of lush Bermuda grass getting mixed up with the sound of Ma in the background, as she turned on the radio to listen to static (was this my memory or the memory of someone telling this to me?!). I remember hearing my agitated Ma the following day, talking to her fellow teacher in a slightly suppressed voice, “huh! Marcos has declared Martial Law!” and the rest of their blah-blah-blah!
The following year, I started school. I’d begin counting six elementary years and add them up with the four years in high school to finally get the exact date I graduated.
Just to make sure I got it right, I’d validate it with another memory: this time, no longer in the four-story building of my high school and its perennial sound of trumpets playing. This time, it’s the memory of huge glass windows awash with sunlight; of whitewashed walls and our tightlipped Ilocano professor holding us in his geodetic engineering class when all we wanted was stick our ears on the radio to listen to the reports of people crowding the streets of Edsa. That was February 21 to 25, 1986.
I did not make it to the reunion of the high school Batch 1984. But the huge streamer they put up had put an end to my figuring out.

Karl

2010-01-01T22:55:00.000-08:00

Late in the afternoon of the last day of the year, the sun made bright outlines of your shirts on the clothesline and painted strips of gold on the walls of my room. Near the corner where you always strummed your guitar, sat an empty chair. I listened to the neighborhood kids singing your songs downstairs. All I had were the debris you left behind, as usual: an abandoned cap of the black pentel pen that dried up long ago left lying on the floor, a drawing pad full of sketches of skin-and-bone kids with angular faces, long spiky hair and half-finished bodies, a tattered notebook full of your dogged attempts at rap, the earphones I told you not to mix with my clutter; your soiled socks strewn in the corner.
Where are you? I strain my ears for the sound of your footsteps. It has been 17 years today since you left my body. I wait for the sound of knocking at the door.
My room is full of shadows.
You are everywhere.

Happy Birthday

2010-01-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

What do I have for you today? Our years have been spelled out by p-o-v-e-r-t-y. I should stop trying to send you gifts I can barely afford; stop pretending I could even cook up your favorite spaghetti, or give you that branded hood you wanted so badly.
I have to be more upright; more down-to-earth. All I have are words. Let’s sit down and count the years we’ve been together. I still remember the precise hour when you arrived; I can reduce that entire year to one eventful second—only one second—that changed my life.
I can start at the dawning of the early signs. It was quarter to one in the afternoon on New Year’s Day of 1993 there at an old Tres de Abril apartment. I could not forget the bright red cushions on the rattan chair. Facing the wooden bookstand, I was glancing at the clock, timing the pain every five minutes, seeing your father’s anxious face outside the screen door. He had rushed in from his rented house to take part in this moment of great drama: The rush to the hospital on a taxi, the panic on his face, moments of exhilaration as I was led the way to a mysterious chamber filled with women’s screams.
My first encounter with snotty hospital attendants and edema, a form of women’s torture, angry voices scolding women giving birth to men; bloody sheets and writhing bodies on the beds next to mine, women moaning in great pain.
Sorry to give you these ugly images on your 17th birthday. But ugliness surrounded that moment of great beauty. If I fail to remember this, you wouldn’t understand half your life: You were raised in great pain.
Your father only came in when all the blood had been washed away. He actually missed the whole story.

This little corner at the mall

2009-12-17T14:51:00.000-08:00

12 graves

2009-12-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

The place was deserted when the group arrived. But we can still see the telltale signs of the day before: The footprints on the fresh, sandy earth; the flowers, once fresh, beginning to wilt; the streamers soiled by the wind.
The sun burning furiously on my temple, I took the camera to frame the 12 newest graves. Twelve, I heard Richel say in a car on our way here, was the highest number of dead ever buried in the history of this cemetery. Behind the lens, a photojournalist once told me, one should detach oneself from the scene one was about to record; one should stop being herself and put ones self at the service of an image. So, as I crouched to frame the 12 graves, I was a bit puzzled by sounds. A sniffling or two coming at intervals and in increasing regularity, as each journalist crouched before each grave to offer a single flower, or light a candle. Until I put down the camera to take a candle to light, I never understood that sound.Until I, too, crouched on to the nearest grave, and caught sight of a name—just a name—and realized she was a woman. She must have been looking forward to do a story that day, aboard the convoy that left Buluan town in Maguindanao on its way to the capital town of Shariff Aguak; after an imam said a prayer at the house of the politician set to run for governor; after they took breakfast and went aboard the convoy, smiling--maybe, laughing--as they heard women in the clan saying, ‘women should be given more space in the leadership’ of that province because they can do many wonderful things simply because they were women. It suddenly crossed my mind that this woman journalist, whose name I happened to read, whose grave I happened to see, had left behind a son or two, a daughter or an eight month old baby, and may not have known what awaited them along the road to Shariff Aguak. She may not have known or believed there was this reigning culture of impunity in our midst, and that press freedom in this country was merely skin-deep. Did she secretly love covering that story? Was she thinking it was a big scoop?But there was no longer a story to cover that day. Over a hundred men armed with the most powerful weaponry under the command of a warlord clan who had powerful links with Malacanang, had killed the story right on the road to Shariff Aguak, in an isolated lot in Ampatuan town. They tried to kill the story by killing the representatives, lawyers and supporters of the political clan who wanted to challenge the ruling governor. They killed the journalists so that no one could write about it. They buried everything under the crunch of a backhoe, thinking that in burying the bodies, everything can easily be forgotten and everything will be business as usual in the province ruled by terror.
But the sheer monstrosity of what they did was a story that could not be contained; not by the perimeters of their power, not by the bounds of their territory. It was beyond words to describe; and because it was indescribable, it escaped language, itself. It escaped their hold and spread to the remotest corners of the world.
No one could probably know the extent of the horrors that those killed in the carnage suffered—not one among those journalists was able to file a story. But they continue to speak to us in many other ways; and the task of writing that story fell upon us, who remained.

I won't weep for the women

2009-11-29T23:53:00.000-08:00

I won't weep for the women who died in the carnage in Ampatuan town in Maguindanao; I won't weep. I won't weep to satisfy their murderers, whose brutality and ruthlessness shock people around the world. I won't weep for the journalists who died, whose names have joined the growing lists of journalists killed in the Philippines. I won't weep for the culture of impunity and the reign of terror in my country.I won't weep for the government's reluctance to punish the perpetrators. I won't weep for the unholy alliance of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the political clan that puts her in power.
Sorry, I won't weep. I won't weep because the victims deserve more than what anyone's stupid tears can bring. They deserve justice and we, who remained--we who are here--, should see to it that it must be served. We shall never settle for less.

Few minutes before Madness

2009-11-25T00:34:00.000-08:00

Just need to link this here before everything turns to chaos and my life will turn upside down.
Following the carnage in Maguindanao that killed at least 57 unarmed people (as of the press time the number continues to climb), members the international media group IFEX condemned the killing, describing it as a "crime of such scale and horror that is incomparable to anything we have seen."

Women's fiction in Asia

2009-11-18T00:23:00.001-08:00

It’s sinful, I know. And besides, I already have a copy of Tony Nieva’s “Pasilyo 8” somewhere in my files at home, safely tucked in a folder with Leoncio Deriada’s “Road to Mawab” and the third name, I could not yet remember. Yes, they were the top three winners of the 1981 Asiaweek short story writing competition in that decade when Asiaweek still allot some of its pages to fiction. The magazine folded up two decades later, though; shortly after it reformatted itself as Asia’s business magazine.
I can’t remember now, if it was Ja who first told me about the Asiaweek fiction competition at the time when I was so crazy about fiction. (Until now, I still am, can’t you see?) But in 2000, while drifting inside the Silliman University library, I found the Asiaweek copy that featured these top three winners, and made sure to keep a copy.
Sorry. Actually, I could not remember exactly how I got that Asiaweek copy. Maybe, it was not a library copy after all. Maybe, it was only one of Ja’s old copies, remnants of his Asiaweek days for he could be that “sentimental.” He used to keep at home all those old Asiaweek issues where his stories appeared—but this was before he decided to live like Henry David Thoreau and cast away all his belongings (at our expense) and donated all his books and magazines to the Davao city library. But just to accompany me in my lonely journey to writing fiction, I decided to keep those three old Asiaweek winners among my files at home; and although I might find it hard to locate them now, without turning the whole place upside down, I have not forgotten yet that I still have them among my files.
So when I found a few copies of “Prizewinning Asian Fiction” (edited by Leon Comber) prominently displayed on the shelf of the National Bookstore—I almost went berserk. (Am I exaggerating?) The book features all the winning writers from 1981 to 1988. I felt I needed very badly to read the women!For among those fiercely vying for the top Asiaweek prize, were women (some identify themselves as housewives or someone from the academe, whose mastery over language and form had surprised Asiaweek editors. Of the 26 winners (some of them won twice in different years, of course), only nine were women, a small but nevertheless encouraging number considering how women have always been silenced from writing fiction close to a hundred years after Virginia Woolf wrote “A Room of Ones’ Own.” So, just to console myself because I don’t get to write fiction anymore (this semester will be gobbled up by my master’s project), I will treat myself to reading Niaz Zaman, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Evelyn D. Tan, Minfong Ho. Claralice Hanna, Fanny Haydee Bautista Llego, Ovidia Yu, Nina Sibal and Nalla Tan.

The Visit

2009-11-18T00:10:00.000-08:00

Deep in the night, I dreamt of a woman sticking her brown elbow inside the front window of our apartment. She was trying to open the latch. When I turned to look, she called a strange name, a certain Mrs. B—(I could no longer remember)—so, I immediately called Ma, who in that dream was sleeping in my room as if she lived there. But looking back now, I thought the name that the woman was calling was a strange name, it couldn’t have been Ma’s. It could have been somebody who used to live in an apartment where we stayed, somebody who was a friend of the woman. But in the dream, when the woman called and saw me seeing her trying to open the latch, she said I needed not open the door, she only wanted us to know she was in distress; and she began telling me, half crying, that the landlady had kicked them out. She said something about the landlady suing her. She needed help, her four small children, around her, listening.I saw all of them outside the window she was trying to open. It was then that I suddenly realized it was Ja, not Ma, who was sleeping in the room. I decided not to wake Ja (who’d surely get mad for being interrupted in his sleep). I decided to talk to the woman, so, I began to open the door, drowsily reaching up to the latch, swaying in my half-sleep.
But then, as the door broke free, I was suddenly exposed to the bright white light outside and the woman was gone. It was then, that I realized the woman was an apparition; and suddenly everything turned into a nightmare. As usual, an unusual force whisked my body and sent it to the floor; I was unable to move. I tried to scream and when I managed to let my voice out, I awoke, feeling the crushing, tingling sensation that only a stupefying nightmare can bring.
I told Sean, once when I chanced upon him waking up that night, that I didn’t want to go back to sleep anymore for fear that the nightmare might come back. In the morning, he asked me what the dream was all about. Why it got me so scared. I told him about the woman. “It doesn’t sound so scary at all,” he said, in his own child wisdom. But I was totally shaken by the dream. The following night, I told Karl about it. He laughed when he saw me making the sign of the cross because he said I was supposed to be a pagan, [yes, i wanted to be a witch!] and there I was, making the sign of the cross. Why was I so easily scared by a simple dream? He asked. I said it’s because I could not understand its meaning. Until now, when I get to think of it, it still gives me the creeps. Who was that woman in distress? Why did she visit me in my sleep?

Light and Shadows

2009-11-17T23:58:00.000-08:00

Now that the multimedia class is over; a class I had survived despite my most rudimentary piece of equipment, my slow and memory-challenged laptop, most of all; I needed to thank everyone who had made my work a success (despite its being a disaster.) At last, I decided to remove my disastrous video here, (it was not only because of poor planning that the images failed to match the story that unfolded, it was also shortage of time, lack of gumption, the vacillation of will. For, imagine making a long form documentary in a minute’s notice! While trying to master all those audio and video editing software I handled for the first time!) So, for the benefit of all of us, I decided to remove that piece of disaster to put in its place the only shot I liked in the entire video. It was a shadow cast by a worshipper on a wooden bench inside the small chapel in Mayo, a sitio about 30 minutes ride from Poblacion, Columbio.
For there was nothing I loved better than shooting shadows! This shadow was shot during what Ja always referred to as the “magic hour,” when the sun is already 45 to 30 degrees to the horizon, its yellowish tint saturate the colors on earth, sending even the most ordinary thing aglow, making everything looks so special.
Earlier, we had left the perfectly-decent, concrete church in Columbio. When we arrived, the small wooden chapel on the hill was awash with sunlight. The view of the surrounding hills and mountains was magical from the inside, framed by the chapel door; but something had prevented me from aiming the camera and pressing the shutter. Fr. Peter Geremia, PIME, was saying mass and I was worried that if I aimed my camera at the door, I would meet the rebuke of the faithful—! So, there! That was how I missed that magical door shot as I, instead, aimed my camera on the floor to record the shadows.

At home in Columbio

2009-10-19T00:38:00.000-07:00

Over twenty four years after the killing of Italian priest Fr. Tulio Favali in a remote town of Tulunan in Cotabato, Southern Philippines, the Italian-born priest who was the target of his killers find a home in the Moro-influenced town of Columbio, Sultan Kudarat. Fr. Peter Geremia, the survivor, talks about the place he loves.

A Look Back

The anti-Moro and anti-Communist fanatic group Ilaga (rat) were on a killing rampage that day of April 11, 1985, looking for Fr. Peter Geremia when they found the Italian priest Fr. Tulio Favali responding to a distress call from a Tulunan church leader.
They burnt his motorcycle and when he came out of the church leader's house to ask why, one of the Manero Brothers, the leader of the fanatic group, asked, "Do you want your head blown off?" and shot him.
Afterwards, the elder brother, Norberto Manero alias Kumander Bucay, told the triggerman, "Is that all you do when you kill a priest?"
So, the killer poured all the bullets on to Fr. Favali's body and then, stepped on the body afterwards.
Following the People Power revolution in 1986 that ousted the dictatorship of former President Marcos, Favali's killers served their terms in jail.
But in 2007, Norberto Manero was released on Presidential pardon. He immediately went to the Kidapawan diocese to seek forgiveness from the man he wanted to kill 20 years back and lit candles on the grave of his victim. This site also tells a story about the killer's repentance, although much of his story here does not jibe with the survivors' and witnesses' accounts of what really happened on that ignominious day.

Durian time in Davao

2009-09-27T05:21:00.000-07:00

Cheap durian has been flooding Davao streets for days. At every turn of the corner, people feast on the sweet, rich-textured fruit as prices plunged down to a dirt-cheap level of P20 to P30 a kilo. Prices used to hover at P80 to P100 a kilo before fresh harvests started coming from the farms about three weeks ago.
“We’re hardly getting any sleep,” says Susan Malayaw, a durian seller in a family rented block of stalls which opens 24 hours on a Rizal street corner. “Customers flock to our stores happy since prices are down, but we’re not earning anything much.”
“We’re earning better when the fruit was scarce,” said Judith VillaAbrille, at the next stall. “Few customers used to come but at least, the price was much higher.”
Even the City Agriculture Office admits to an oversupply. “We wish some people will invest in a big processing plant to absorb the glut in the market,” says Rocelio Tabay, city agriculturist. “It will stabilize prices.”
But whether prices are high or low, customers keep coming. “More people drop by at night, than during daytime,” Malayaw says. “Most people who buy in big boxes are travelers on their way out of Davao or people who spent the whole night in bars and restaurants.”
She expects the deluge of supply to last till November. “When we get tired, we just look for a place to lie down around here to get some sleep.”
In different parts of the city, men are emptying truckload of durians, hurling them onto waiting baskets.
Just a piece of advice to those who can’t stand the smell, though: You might have trouble getting anywhere. The entire city practically reeks of durian.
DURIAN BOY (left) quits school hoping he can save enough money working at a durian factory. A man (above) shows off his display.
SLEEPLESS. Durian seller Susan Malayaw (left) hardly gets enough sleep selling durian for 24 hours in a streetcorner in Davao. She says more people come at night than at daytime.

Durian time in Davao

2009-09-27T05:07:00.000-07:00

THE HEAVIER, THE MERRIER. A man (below) weighing durian in a scale while a boy (left) sells durian at Magsaysay Park.Listen to podcast

Durian Time in Davao

2009-09-27T04:50:00.000-07:00

Dirt cheap durian floods Davao city streets because of over supply.

Students' lightning protest in Davao

2009-09-12T01:05:00.001-07:00

Student says no country could develop under US control

2009-09-11T23:42:00.000-07:00

Karlos Manlupig, spokesperson of the League of Filipino Students in Davao.

Student activists burn US flag in Davao

2009-09-11T20:48:00.000-07:00

Chanting, "US imperialist, the number one terrorist," student activists burn the US flag in front of the Ateneo de Davao University campus to protest the continued presence of US troops in Mindanao. Students demand for the scrapping of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) which allowed US troops in the Philippines to conduct combat war exercises with Filipino soldiers. Led by the militant League of Filipino Students, they expressed outrage over President Arroyo's "frontline" stance in the US war on terror, in exchange for military aid from the United States.

Life at "Onse"

2009-09-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

My favorite place assignment for Dave Clark's multimedia class.

Yellow’s passing

2009-08-10T03:26:00.000-07:00

When I caught a glimpse of Cory Aquino from my bus window during the snap election campaign somewhere in Kidapawan many years ago, I was still 16 on my way home from school after dropping by at the Kidapawan diocese where they showed some pictures. Now, as I heard about her leaving, I became aware that my little boy is 16, and I looked back to those tumultuous years, wondering how I first became aware of something about to burst, of something about to explode violently like a dam.

It was my heart. Silenced and deprived of “fact” all through the Martial Law years, I felt a creeping sense of disgust at the pictures I saw at the Kidapawan diocese that day. They showed dead bodies on the road; and one of those I did not recognize was the Italian priest Fr. Tulio Favali. Those pictures had the color of blood. But it was only much, much later, when I’d begin to associate the way that I felt with the right colors. Right at that moment, I thought the color was yellow.

So, when I heard the crowd chanting “Cory” that day, waving the Laban sign as the convoy of yellow and green passed by, I could feel my heart lurch. Laban was (and still is) the Tagalog word for ‘fight.’ I could hear the pulse of other passengers as we watched the passing convoy in silence.

Now they tied yellow ribbons in front of hotel facades to mark her passing. As the jeepney I took rolled by, I became aware of the yellow bells and the yellow marigolds outside the SSS building along JP Laurel street; of some rickety yellow car overtaking us; of the bright yellow scarf that the teenage girl seated across from me wore. Even the gibbous moon up in the sky was yellow. But in yellow, I feel an acute sense of absence; an acute sense of something missing.

Now, it’s all up to me to find out what it is!

Media's ideological bias

2009-06-21T21:50:00.000-07:00

Our Media Law professor Mukund said this was not what he saw when he observed the press in the Philippines. Submitted as a paper in the Media Law class we took with the rest of the ACFJ fellows batch 2008 in the first semester of SY 2008-2009:

If media culture in the Philippines is plagued with ideological bias, it is not yet the “liberal left” bias that Marlin Maddoux talked about in the book chapter,” Free Press or Propaganda? How the Media Distort the Truth,” but more on what Noam Chomsky said about the corporate media’s hunger for profit that media oftentimes become an unwitting tool of those in power to “manufacture” the consent of the public.
In fact, one only has to watch five minutes of prime time TV in the Philippines and see how one gets bombarded by the conventional, subtly masochistic and sadly (some remnants of) colonial worldview.
The media oftentimes take the standpoint of powerful institutions (corporate, government and otherwise) and wittingly or unwittingly package this as unquestioned Truths.
That’s why, I consider it a good thing when liberal-left ideas, such as the concept of press freedom and media independence, creep into the consciousness of the mainstream press.
I say “creep in” because these liberal-left ideas have never been so “esconced” in the mainstream press despite the Philippines’ long tradition of press freedom.
The country’s tradition of press freedom that dated back to its struggle against its former colonizers over a century ago, only asserts and reasserts itself, depending on the political situation in the country.
For a long time, it has been considered a “given,” that the Philippine media is considered the “freest in Asia.” And yet, it has not been able to use this press freedom (coupled by advances in technology) to keep its citizens well-informed.
Most often, the media in the Philippines have become spokespersons and mouthpiece of those in power.
In between the country’s past, when it was not under the grip of a political turmoil that marked the time of the dictatorship of former President Marcos and now during the time of President Arroyo, the media as an institution was in a lull, driven by the ideology of market forces.
For instance, the left liberal idea of press freedom was very strong during the struggle against the dictatorship of Marcos in the 1970s and the 1980s, but rather weak during the market-oriented policies espoused by former President Ramos.
During the time of Ramos, the media (except for the few alternative presses) had carried the government’s standpoint hook, line and sinker on such policies as deregulation, privatization and the country’s supposed role and participation in the global free trade era.
There have never been in-depth reports coming from the mainstream media during the time of Ramos that challenged this government line. Except for those coming from few alternative presses, of course, most of the reports never questioned policies on deregulation, the privatization and even the country’s prospects in the liberalized trade era under the World Trade Organization (WTO).
It was a pity that the media at this time only mouthed what the government was saying. Yet, the impact of what was never discussed before is now staring us in the face.
For instance, the government’s classical WTO line during the time of Ramos was, the Philippines should only produce goods that the country has a ‘comparative advantage,” compared to other countries.
Both the country’s top industry players and government trade officials were saying that the country should only produce goods which local producers can produce fast and cheap and in better quality than those in other countries so that they can compete in the world market.
In other words, they were saying that the country should not bother producing goods which take much longer time--and more costly--to produce.
The Philippines would rather import those goods from other countries, which can produce them cheaper.
The country’s rice problem had sprung from this policy, which the media failed to check at the earliest stage of its inception.
Because of this policy of importing “cheap” rice, the government neglected its own agriculture. The country has become so dependent on other countries for the supply of this critical staple food, increasing the country’s vulnerability to price fluctuation in the world market and in the end, threatening the country’s food security.
This is an example how media’s bias for the powerful policy makers, trade and industry players has undermined its prime and important obligation of informing the public.
The Bill of Rights, Section 7 of the Philippine Constitution provides for the public’s right to know, by recognizing the “right of the people to information on matters of public concern.”
However, this provision in the Constitution is oftentimes set aside and forgotten in the day to day operations of the media. It’s only very rarely that citizens invoke this Constitutional provision to assert their right.
Government has also come up with policies and statutes that seek to block transparency of public records; like the Executive Order 464 that bar Cabinet and other government officials from testifying in Congress without the President’s consent.
Invoking national security issues, the government also came up with the Human Security Act, which also restricts media’s role in informing the public. Under this law, the media interviewing terrorist suspects can also be held liable and guilty of “acts of terrorism.”
At present, the Freedom for Information Act, which will require government offices to make available public documents in a matter of days, is still pending in Congress.
But the rise of institutions in the country fighting for press freedom, media independence and ethical practice, has ensured that the media become conscious of its role not only as watchdog, but also as an institution that can give voice to the voiceless in society.
Slowly, it has dawned upon most of the media practitioners to uphold their independence and police their ranks for abuses, rather than relegate this duty to some interest groups and powers-that-be who might subject the media to their own agenda.
In the Philippines, however, what has been denied from the people by the elitist Philippine media always finds expressions in political cartoons, which is the easiest and most accessible reading fare among the masses.
For instance, more people savor the biting humor of “Pugad Baboy” which expresses wry commentary about the political situation in the country in the most humorous way.
I don’t think that these political cartoons are “less biting” than those in other countries. They reflect Filipino humor and the country’s political situation that the masses can easily identify.
Despite of and amidst of the killing of journalists in the country, I can say that the political cartoons—dating from the time of Marcos to the Hello Garci tapes under Arroyo and onwards--are biting critiques of today’s Philippine society.
But it’s a different story altogether for television sitcoms.
In the Philippines, it’s very rare for television sitcoms to push the liberal left agenda. In fact, television sitcoms are still tainted with conventional, machosist bias and conservative standpoint.
The dominant network culture, as Noam Chomsky said, is market driven and is influenced by both corporate advertisers and top policy makers in government.
Despite its relative political freedom, though, the media in the Philippines do not, as a general rule, make outright fun of religious conservatives. As a rule, majority of media practitioners grew up and are still part of the predominant Catholic culture, hence, the subconscious reluctance to displease someone with so-called religious authority.
In fact, the marrying of corporate interest with that of the predominant conservative culture have their expression during Christmas season, when everything from soap operas to variety shows and public affairs programs tend to encourage buying spree for supposedly “gift giving” among the public, even amidst the increasing poverty and declining purchasing power of the Filipinos.
In this example, I understand what Maddoux was saying about the media using “repetition,” “selective reporting” and the “conscious dispensing with perspective” to promote the ideology of the market.

At a loss for words

2009-06-21T07:47:00.000-07:00

To someone who inspired me enough to write this poem sequence--a set of poems that explore a single complication, like what's usually done in a novel, but this time, applied to poetry--as our untiring teacher-poet Allan Popa made us see; he who opened my eyes to paradox and ambiguity as we sat in the faculty conference room of the Filipino department on the third floor of ADMU's Horacio dela Costa building while outside the window, the leaves and gnarled branches of acacia filter the heat of summer. To my roommate Pratish, a natural poet who can recognize poetry by the sound of it even if it is in a foreign tongue she doesn't understand, to the people close and not so close to me who allow me to "see," to friends who have been tolerant of my long absences, disappearances and resurfacing, to the young writers of Matanglawin who sat in that class through thick and thin, while I - always at a loss for words in that "other" language they call Filipino but which is actually Tagalog - grappled with images and never let go.

SIMBAHANG BATO
(a poem sequence)

Gising

Inang nakaratay sa loob ng silid,
ama at tanong ng mga kapatid,
iniligpit sa isip
habang ika’y sumahimpapawid

Dito sa kabilang daigdig

Hinahanap mo si Kristo sa kasukalan ng Tondo
nang abutan ka ng Martial Law
at pilit iniligpit sa loob ng silid. Sa dilim ng curfew
naaaninaw mo ang mga anino
ng maraming inang gising na gising
sa iyong pagdating.

“Blood of Martyrs”

Matagal nang patay ang mga santo
ngunit ganoon pa rin kung patiwarik na ibitin
ang isang taong ayaw umamin

Isang timba ng tubig, naghihintay sa ibaba
naghihintay sa nahihintakutang mukha
doon ilulublob pansamantala
upang ilang saglit na mag-agaw-hininga.

Ngunit bago tuluyang lagutan ng hangin
hahayaang huminga sa pagkakabitin
hahayaang humingal ng iilang saglit
bago muling ilublob nang paulit-ulit
pabalikbalik ang halik sa tubig

hanggang wala nang maikumpisal—kundi tubig.

May Likha

Nakatagpo mo Siya sa pagitan
ng mga tula ng pagdurusa.

Nakatagpo mo Siya sa
pagitan
ng mga tula ng
pagdurusa.

Nakatagpo mo Siya
sa pagitan ng mga tula
ng pagdurusa.

Simbahang Bato

Sa loob ng simbahang bato
nakahilera ang mga santo
Naninigas sa pagkakaupo
ang nagmamanman sa may pinto
habang inuusal mo
ang banal na panalangin

Ayaw na yatang magising
ng pulubing nahihimbing

Damang dama mo ang mga mata
sa mga dinding na semento
Papaluhod na lumalakad
sa altar na ginto
ang kay raming may bagabag sa puso.

Pinagmasdan mo ang dugo
sa mga paang nakapako

unti-unting natutuyo.

Tinatawag

Kay rami nang patay sa liblib
na sitio ng New Panay
Patuloy silang tumatawag ng tulong,
kumakatok sa simbahan, nagtatanong.

Nasaan ang Diyos? Takot din ba siya
sa Cafgu? At di mo alam ang isasagot

Sa pinid na pinto at mga bintana
binubuklat mo ang aklat
pilit inunawa ang bawat salita
pilit inunawa kung bakit
ang Diyos ay biglang nawawala.

OB List

Mula nang mapabalita na kasama
ang iyong pangalan sa humahabang listahan

mga pangalang isa-isang buburahin
sa listahan hindi ka na mapalagay

Paano maninimbang sa pagitan
ng kanan at kaliwa ang aklat
ng magandang Balita?

Alagad

Balitang-balita ko pa
kung paano mo pinatakbo
ang luma mong Isuzu
sa gitna ng daang pa-Cotabato
nang mapansin ang mga motorsiklong
sumusunod sa iyo.

Ba’t mo pa kasi sinundan si Kristo
sa bako-bakong landas ng Columbio
upang dalawin ang mga musmos
sa mga dampang naghihikahos
sa mga bundok na pinupuyos ng takot at poot?

Kung naghintay ka lang
sa loob ng kumbento
upang pagpira-pirasuhin ang tinapay tuwing Linggo—

Di na sana sumabog ang matigas mong ulo.

Making Sense

2009-05-16T23:16:00.000-07:00

Every morning, I yank myself out of bed trying to make sense of my crazy life in a room inside the dormitory near the juncture where Esteban Abada meets Katipunan in barangay Loyola Heights in Quezon city. Oftentimes, Pratish, my roommate from Nepal, would still be asleep as I grope my way to the bathroom to glance at my groggy face in the mirror. There, I could make out above the din of the tricycles the voice of the man calling out “atini yeow” “atini yeow!”
He was the dark man in a white shirt, calling out to students lining for a ride at the tricycle terminal outside the MiniStop. He was the man with the belly, Pratish pointed out. Pratish said he was so cute she wanted to bring him to Nepal as a souvenir.
It used to be so hot when we arrived here mid-April; so hot that we could actually feel the entire Metro Manila simmer, but then, the rain (and the floods) started to come leaving some remnants of mud in the otherwise clean brick pavement of the Ateneo.
Some time in between, typhoon Emong came and went out of Luzon while we were deep into a trance (in Fr. Bulatao’s hypnosis class) or we were having an agitated discussion of the phenomenon of the digital age with Cheryl, our professor in the new media culture. Or, was I inside the Filipino department faculty office on the third floor of Costa Hall building, where the poet Allan Popa (who reminds me of Nico) patiently opened our soul to the art of poetry?
Just the other night, Bryant asked me why I kept staying too long in the library. I didn’t tell him that the library, named after the Ateneo famous alumnus Jose Rizal, is one big Borgesian labyrinth. I didn’t tell Bry I discovered Apocrypha in one of the shelves and I got lost among the lives of saints--full of torture, gore and violence. Or, that I chanced upon this crumbly English translation of St. Augustine’s "Confessions," which I would have loved except for the outrageous things that St. Augustine said about women. I only told Wawan that when I made my way to the third floor of the general circulation section, I saw the new copy of J. Thomas Moore’s “Spinoza’s Ethics” so that I had to spend the next 30-minutes or so reading about the philosopher that had obsessed the leading Jewish character of Bernard Malamud’s “The Fixer.”
Wawan knew that Spinoza was a Portuguese whose Jewish parents escaped Spanish Inquisition in their country to live in exile to The Netherlands, where the Jews who escaped persecution ostracized Spinoza because of his wild ideas about God and religion. So, when Bryant asked why I’d been spending most of my time in the library, I told him I’d been researching for a difficult assignment on the “knowledge economy.” I didn’t tell him I found Fr. Albert Alejo’s “Sanayan lang ang Pagpatay” next to such titles as “Ang sarap Mabuhay” while looking for Lamberto Antonio’s “Hagkis ng Talahib.”
Inside the room I share with Pratish, I always look up at the big jalousie windows just above our bathroom mirror to see a row of windows in the upstairs room of the next house. It’s here where I see the first rays of sunlight but in the mornings of the M-W-Fs, there usually is no time left to think as we rush to the SS building (pronounce that as Soc Sci so that the tricycle driver would know where to drop you); we’d be huffing and puffing as we take the twisted stairway up to the third floor of the Department of Communication building for our “new media culture” class at the studio! Then, after the in-depth discussions on the digital age, we’d be so hungry for lunch at the cafeteria--just turn left past the Faura hall (the Rizal library to your right), where Yuri would eat bowlful of pancit Malabon (no pork please!) and fried chicken. Pratish would be looking for vegetables, as usual, and I’d be craving for eggs while Bryant would be talking about the competing freedoms—of the citizens and the state on the issue of freedom of expression and the so-called "national security." (I told him he talked like Luis Teodoro now and he nodded.) But then, as everybody finished her meal and was about to start another round of discussion, I’d leave for the building across the Rizal Library, where the white streamer marked “mula piedras platas hanggang payatas” in red hung near the wall entrance.
Later in the afternoon, Fr. Bulatao with his trademark stick he nicknamed as “tongkat ali” would walk inside the Psychology Lab on the ground floor of the SS Building; and will put the whole class in a trance. Bryant and me will struggle to get our spirits out of our body while Pratish would wonder what the hell is going on…

A Glimpse of my Thought...

2009-02-27T03:40:00.000-08:00

Creative Writing

2009-02-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

I don't know whether to feel offended or flattered (huh?!) when another Filipino journalist abroad told me last month, "Bay," he said, addressing me. "I think you're more suited to this job I'm doing here. This is creative writing, not journalism. There's no such thing as freedom of the press here."
I blushed and for a moment, felt a sudden surge of pity, shame, humiliation, pain. But then, I quickly recovered, thinking of the suffering of those who have left us and those who are left behind.

Life with Ja

2009-01-28T00:37:00.000-08:00

“Tell me, Ja, do you know how to pray?” I asked Ja this afternoon while I was taking a break from writing.
“Why?!” he asked.
I shrugged. Then, I said, “Last night, I was in panic. I had to edit five chapters in one sitting and I had to finish a three-part story about rice and the global financial crisis. You were all asleep but even if you were awake, I was thinking no one could ever help me now. I was really in big trouble and I needed some help! I was on the verge of madness. I was afraid I might snap. I wanted to pray but I don’t know how to. Now, I realize, it pays to learn how to pray.” I paused. “So, I’m asking you now, Ja,” I said, looking up at him, “Do you know how to pray?”
For a moment, Ja looked at me, stunned. He just came home from a trip downtown and he still had that handkerchief wrapped around his shaven head and there was something in the way he peered down at me through his thick glasses.
“Yes, I know what you’ll do!” Ja said, suddenly excited. “I know you! I can imagine you praying to Buda!” He pronounced it as Buda, as in Bukidnon-Davao. “Yes, Buda! And all sorts of Gods! Of all shapes and sizes! Including Mickey Mouse!”
“Ja!” I said.

Letter from Jegenstorf

2009-01-14T21:18:00.000-08:00

I just received a letter from Monika, together with some pictures. She said she took those pictures on the first day of the year! Her letter is for all her friends in Mindanao working for change. "It was a wonderful morning," Monika wrote, "With sunshine glimmering on a brand new snow cover! All the dirt, the evil, was covered under the bright new snow and peace was over the land! I made a walk through the woods and I was the first human being, stepping on this New Year morning through the snow. How much I would have taken you with me to admire this nature phenomenon.The first four pictures were made out from my kitchen. The next three pictures I took in the woods and the last two pictures were taken in the Wallis, up on the mountains on 1600 meters.
Lets hope that this absolutely clean nature on the first day of the year, will be a symbol of more justice and peace in this world!"
Yes, Monika.

Getting over God

2009-01-14T01:51:00.000-08:00

I still meet Pratish on cyberspace. She told me something and asked me if I was shocked. “No,” I said. “I also fall in love—with God. Are you shocked?!”
It was my turn to ask.
“No,” she said. “But how does it feel?!”
“I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t think, I can’t work, I can’t write, I can’t do anything but stare in space.”
I don’t know why she called me Emily Dickinson. She wouldn’t explain why. I just feel this lump in my throat every time I think of God. It was a curse that I saw him one morning in December, so thin and fragile as he climbed down his Isuzu Elf, I wanted to protect him. I was even surprised by my feelings.
If I hadn’t seen God in that state, maybe, I wouldn’t care if I’ve seen a big mouse on my way home the other day, being doused by a hose of water in Karwasan ni Jullan (open 24 hours on corner Nova Tierra and Lanang highway) by teenagers who have never seen a mouse that big before.
The mouse was as big as a cat, something that a mouse should not be, because it could challenge a cat and win. People do not like that. That’s why the mouse easily attracted the kids’ attention. I was so mad at those teenagers because the mouse looked so innocent and so fragile, shivering and wet at 10 pm in the evening.
The tricycle driver noticed I was already growling in my seat but I did not have the courage to stand up to confront those youngsters about the mouse.
Maybe, they’d laugh at me. Maybe, they’d open the tank of a motorcycle and burn it and when I’d ask them why, they’d train their gun at me and fire at me and blow my head off and then, after I’ve fallen on the pavement, the leader would ask, “Is that all you do when you kill a Woman?” and so, they’ll step over my body, empty all their bullets onto me and scatter my brain on the pavement.
So, I tried to turn my back to those youths so that I could not see what they were doing to the mouse. A boy lifted a very big stone to crush it.
But then, I realized how could I just close my eyes if I see somebody doing that to an innocent mouse?
I don’t know why, but the mouse reminded me of God. I just read an account how a suspected gunman had once aimed his pistol at God while God was driving his Elf in the outskirts of Sultan Kudarat. It was just lucky that the gunman missed.
God has been receiving plenty of death threats, I was wondering what God could be doing at that hour in the evening, at that exact moment that I’ve seen the mouse; whether he was still up, reading his copy of Newsweek magazine or if he has lain down to bed, exhausted after a long day.
Does anyone ever talk to God before he sleeps? I wonder what kind of bed God sleeps on. Does he prefer a soft bed that would bounce back when he drops his weight—or something hard and unyielding, like wood, perhaps?!
But then, in my accursed state, I don’t have any way of knowing anything about God. I live in another world. Without God.

Christmas in Qatar

2008-12-30T03:17:00.000-08:00

I just read what Chris V. Panganiban, one of the many Philippine Daily Inquirer Mindanao correspondents, wrote on my Facebook wall at 9:55pm of I don't know the day some months back.

"Bay, biya na ko dire sa atong yutang batoon karong Oct 15. Manimpalad ko sa Doha, Qatar isip reporter. Salagma man god nga nakuha ko sa among Briton nga managing editor nga si Rachel Morris aron himoon ko niya senior reporter sa The Peninsula.
Cge ayo, ayo mo dha tanan sa Inquirer. Padayon pakigbisog alang sa kawsa sa mga matarung nga journalists dire Pinas!"

I don't know how I came upon Chris' Facebook message in the midst of some editing works at davaotoday. But I was thinking about Chris because we ate durian, and sugbang panga, and rambutan, and lanzones, and alimango during Inquirer Mindanao's blow out party in May, when Grace kept asking me if I had plans to go out with her abroad, too, and I told Grace, no, sorry, I will stay here with my kids; and Grace said, "Even if you'll get paid P---,000 a month?" and then, my eyes popped up and my ears burst, and I said, "Okay, when?!" I was still in the midst of an assignment for media law, some sort of an essay about libel and freedom of expression versus freedom of religion but I stopped thinking for a while.
Then, later, I heard about Chris already in Qatar without ever seeing his message on my Facebook until now, when I'm in the midst of editing this story about Christmas in some OFWs home, thinking about my Christmas, which is no Christmas at all; and the fear and panic and butterflies in my stomach, and some inner voice telling me to seek some job--no, not a job really but something that could keep body and soul intact--and I thought again of Grace and our wild plans and then, I realized that I can't even buy a birthday gift for my son. I only wanted to ask Chris how is his Christmas in Qatar.

On the Road to Caraga

2008-11-17T23:03:00.000-08:00

It may have happened 400 years ago but the stories how the Caraga church was built are still in the minds of the Mandaya people.
"They fell down trees from the forest," said Agusto Diano, a tribal leader in Pantuyan, "When five men could not carry the log, the Spaniards would flog them and then, reduced their number until only three men, out of fear and panic, or by miracle perhaps, could already carry the log previously too heavy for five men.
They would drop those logs in the waters of Caraga river to bring them to town. The Dutch missionary Peter Schreurs, in his book, "Angry Days in Mindanao," wrote that the Spaniards failed to conquer Mindanao, except for this part of the island, where they put up the church that used to serve as their outpost, overlooking the deep blue Pacific ocean.

Juvenal

2008-10-31T04:33:00.000-07:00

Hey. Are you a Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the aristocrat in love with the Poetic Festival when all around him, people are dying in the bloody Civil War?!

Fil Am Books

2008-10-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

Poet Luisa Igloria shows us the link to Bino Realuyo's fil-am book project.

Halohalo and a Broken Heart

2008-10-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

“What shall we do?!” Prathibha asked when I chanced upon her online and read that Pooja was making a last minute request to allow us into the course.
“Have I let you try ‘halohalo’ when you were here?” I asked back.
“No,” she said.
“Halohalo,” I said, suppressing my guilt for neglecting her, “is a Tagalog word for ‘mixture.’ This Filipino delicacy is a mixture of a variety of sweetened fruits, beans, langka, jellies, lecheflan with crushed ice, topped by a scoop of ice cream, sprinkled with crunchy chips. It’s so sweet and creamy and crunchy all at the same time, you’d forget everything once you tasted it.”
“I wish I had that now,” she said. “The news has been so devastating to me.”
So, with a broken heart and a gnawing stomach, and a futile wish that Prateeh (in Kathmandu) were here, I set out to my favourite halohalo parlor, known in Davao as Mercorner, because it sits in a junction where Mt. Apo Road slants irregularly towards where it meets Quirino only to get lost and emerge at the other side as Duterte street. Merco’s homegrown icecream shops have been known for years in Davao, so that the moment I ordered it, the waiter broke into a smile, I almost thought he knew what was on my mind.
The halohalo that day - in Merco, they always come in tall glasses - was just as I expected it: the creamy smoothness of the ube ice cream contrasting with the rough crunchiness of the chips in my tongue. I almost gobbled up the whole scoop on top even before I can stir it with the mixtures at the bottom.
For this is what halohalo is all about: it had to be stirred and mixed together, so that, in the end, it will lack the steady and consistent smoothness of an ice cream. The roughness of crushed ice both shocks and delights the tongue, carrying with it a hint of flavour, a prelude to the variety of tastes and textures soon to follow.
With halohalo, every scoop is both a surprise and a new experience; at one moment, you ladle a fibrous piece of langka to taste its melting sweetness; and then, the next moment, a scoop of smooth jellies linger and titillate your tongue; and then, all of a sudden, you find beans, thick and starchy, crushing under your teeth; and so on.
Scoop after scoop, I savored those brief, delicious moments, drawing enough lessons from the beans and the jellies and enough sweetness to last a lifetime.
For halohalo has always been more than pleasure of the palate for me. I have sought it, time and again, when life starts to turn sour or bitter.
And that Friday afternoon, for both Prateeh and me, life indeed was soooooo bitter, I was only too glad for just a glass of sweetness!

I miss it again!

2008-10-20T02:16:00.000-07:00

I got an email from the Asian Center for Journalism the previous week that Creative Writing, the course that I put on my list to take the following semester, was on a first come, first served basis; and that the professor would only take 10 students for it; and that I, and Prateeh of Nepal; and Yuri of Jakarta, and Pooja in Manila did not make it.
“I can’t believe it!” I said, because I felt I was among the first to express interest in it.
In fact, I was already interested in the course even before it was offered; because the course has been an unfinished business for me ever since I failed to come up with the collected works demanded for the creative writing thesis for that MA in English in Creative Writing I took at the Silliman University (SU) many years ago.
The pressure of the daily deadline, earning a living, raising a kid with asthma and finally looking for means to pay the boys’ tuition (including my inability to write a good enough short story?!) have prevented me from coming up with so-called body of works.
(How could I come up with a body of works, when I don’t even own my body in the first place?” I used to retort to friends who asked about it, referring to the role women are always forced to assume as mother, the nurturer and breadwinner at the same time).
That’s why, when the news first came out that they’re going to offer three units of creative writing as an elective for the MA Journalism Fellowship we’re currently taking at the ADMU, I was secretly dancing with joy.
"What am I going to do with a subject like THAT?" Seng Thong had asked from Ventiane. "It can't earn extra money in Laos!"
"But money can't buy everything you want in in life, Seng," I said, "Including love!"
"Why are you so crazy about THAT course?" he asked.
"Because it's my first love," I said. I did not say, journalism is just an alibi, an excuse.
But I was on the road when the emails came. It was obvious that everybody has beaten me to it. When they sent their list of courses, I was still on a Rural Transit bus bound for Dipolog, looking out to what I could make out of Kulambogan town of Lanao del Norte, wondering whether the Jamiatul cooperative of the Maranao women I knew years ago was still there; hearing some stories from the passenger who sat next to me, about what happened there at the height of the government and MILF fighting in August.
Or, perhaps, I was on the wharf sitting next to a police officer inspecting passenger baggage when darkness descended upon Mukas, Lanao del Norte; and I was in panic because I thought I was left behind by my bus, still stranded in Ozamis, on my way to Cagayan de Oro.
I never had the chance to log on to an internet café during that long and exhausting trip. Except perhaps, if I had succumbed to that temptation at the sight of that cozy internet café in Dapitan, just across the shop where they sell souvenir t shirts featuring the Rizal shrine and Dakak; but then, I fought off that impulse, and asked the tricycle, instead, to bring me to the Polo crossing, where buses bound for Cagayan de Oro pass by. I spent a straight 15 hours on the road from Dapitan to Davao, only to find out about the devastating news after I arrived!
Now that I can hear the halls of learning slamming its door shut on me again, I don’t know how to console myself because like the first time, I feel disoriented and confused; and suddenly, I realized, life has lost its meaning!

Three Men in my Life

2008-10-20T02:13:00.000-07:00

It just strikes me more frequently these days that for how many years now, I’ve been living with three men in the house; three very different men at different stages of their lives; Ja, the more mature one if you happen to look at him, but who--and I only discovered this after years of violent disagreements and long periods of moping—is still very much the boy that lived on Malvar street many years ago, when Davao city was still a rustic town and he was a six year old on a carabao’s back in love with a 10 year old girl up on a camachiles tree; the girl whose black underwear he happened to see when he looked up in a mad rush of newly discovered feelings. Karl, the toddler who made life beautiful for me inside that two-story apartment on Tres de Abril in Cebu when I was still picking up the shattered pieces more than a decade ago, has grown up now to discover the world of men, the world with its own code of silence, a world where he does not allow me to enter supposedly because I, his mother, am a woman; a world where I secretly sneak into, every time he opens up to me to unravel the latest adventures of his teenage life; and Sean, the only one who loves me, no matter how bad I look, no matter how I misbehaved; in love with me like no other person in the world, past and present, but who is now discovering the curiosities of numbers: what twenty pesos can do that five pesos cannot; and what happens when he and his Dad join forces against me! These days, I’ve been reminding them more frequently that I’m supposed to be the only woman in the house; I should be treated like one: delicately, like how they’d treat a princess; or honoured, like how they’d treat a queen!
Instead, I feel quite the opposite. I’m the one who had to stop a difficult writing assignment midway to do an emergency washing for that uniform that Karl had to wear the following day but forgotten; I’m always the one pinned down to count Sean’s breathing every time he had attacks of asthma while Ja keep convincing me at my back that the child was getting better every minute; and then, after finally deciding (on my own) to rush him to the hospital, I had to take all the blame from the doctor, who scolded me for going there almost too late!
I grew up in a house without a man except for my father, who used to be distant, aloof and morose that God had given him three daughters (“Daughters!” as Topol exclaims, his eyes rolling up to the heavens in the movie version of that musicale “Fiddler in the Roof”) and no son! I have survived a girlhood longing for a company of men, never had a playmate except a dog named Janggo, but now that I have male company in abundance, I don’t feel any better at all!

DISCLAIMER (just in case the three men that I love might read this): the writer of this blog disclaims any ownership of this entry, which she claims to have been written by a madwoman while she was asleep or dreaming. The writer, in no uncertain term, claims that the culprit was an impostor who often visited her both in her sleep and wakefulness to mine her life of materials that can be turned into a piece of writing for the sole purpose of entertainment; with the stupid ambition of stealing the world’s attention away from the current meltdown in the US economy.

Communication

2008-10-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

Something struck me about what Joey D. of Mindanao Times said after the press con as I was writing this.
“No, I don’t rely in the words of old folks,” he said.
“But aren't they wisdom nuggets?” I said. “Coming down through the ages?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I rely more on the wisdom of strangers, told to me in time of distress.”
“Huh?!”
“Did it ever happen to you? You were in the midst of something and then, out of the blue, you sit down in a jeepney and something that a man tells you seems to hit a cord somewhere deep within you, something that resonates with what is happening to you right at that moment.”
“How did you come to know of such things?” I asked, because it happened to me so many times.
“They always happen to me—and these are people who don’t know me. Isn’t that ironic? The people that you know always give you the wrong advice.”
I stared at him, nodding, knotting my brows.
“Because those are words from the Spirit,” he said, nodding, too.

Reading in Secret

2008-10-13T20:25:00.000-07:00

Flipping through the pages of Salman Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence,” I was on my desk in our working room on the second floor of the apartment on Mapa street when the chimes played again, and I looked up at the yellow balloon that held them; which Ja attached to a cord from the ceiling.
“They’re trying to tell me something,” I thought. A subtle, almost imperceptible breeze from the huge picture window that framed the neighborhood of Mapa outside, tossed the balloon, causing it to turn and make the mysterious sound.
Moved by the playfulness of the wind, I think of Prathibha (simply Prateeh to me), and of those other chimes in Nepal; and my thoughts went back again to that two weeks in July, when we stayed together somewhere in Loyola Heights, a walking distance away from the university, in a room whose windows faced a high wall so that neither air nor light could come in. We only hear the sound of water when we awoke to a heavy rain early in the morning; and in Manila, it rained heavily in the middle of July; once, we had to come to class soaked in dirty brown water that flooded Katipunan Avenue (and I thought, it beat the hell out of the floodwaters in the hinterlands of Mindanao where the Matigsalogs live!), but scared of missing anything in Chay H.’s class, we merely left our clothes to dry as we tackled the ethical dilemmas of blogging, sponsorship, advertisements. We were on the second floor of the Ateneo de Manila’s old Bellarmine Hall. Unlike the other structures in the campus which were new, the building had a special meaning to Chay, our teacher--Chay, herself, pointed out--because it was still the one they used during her college days.
I had arrived at the airport late in the afternoon of a Friday, slightly out of my wits for leaving my boys in Davao, not knowing which part of Esteban Abada I was going, I had to stop the trolley and rip open my bag in the midst of the onrushing crowd at the passenger terminal, to rummage for that notebook where I wrote the number of the house where I was supposed to stay.
Seven. It was a house with a green gate, highly-fenced. A framed certificate on the wall said it was one of the accredited dormitories off campus. The taxi driver tracked it down very near where Esteban Abada met Katipunan in Loyola, where a flyover slowly made its ascent, across the 24 hour convenience store they call the Mini Stop, where Prateeh and I would sometimes drop by for a cup of instant noodles or a styro cup of coffee; and where, on the eve of my departure for home, I had spotted Jaybee smoking near the huddle of tricycles that parked outside the store.
From where we stayed, Prateeh and I would sometimes walk up to the campus gate, connected by a walk bridge somewhere near McDonald’s and Pizza Hut two or three blocs away. It was the walkbridge of my suffering, I told Prateeh, who laughed, because we were thinking of the 2,500 word assignment for Media Law that we had to send online only two hours away. But that was much, much later.
When I arrived at number seven, the woman who met me at the door said I had a Taiwanese woman for a roommate. I was still trying to figure this out because I was expecting to dorm with somebody from Nepal, when Prateeh came in, saying, she was no Taiwanese at all, although she admitted, shyly, she was a little bit fair for Nepalese standard, and we settled for such basic things as where to find food and water, where to find the nearest internet café and for Pratee, where to find the right currency. She kept talking about what it was like to be a journalist in Nepal, working for the Kantipur television, which was actively involved in a broad democratic movement that had forced the king of Nepal to resign.
I said, I was lucky to have Prathibha (she said I would never be able to pronounce her name correctly) for a roommate, first, because her simple joys consisted of a walk in the rain and poetry; she was easily scandalized by the sight of somebody (me) eating corned beef, because she never eat meat at all, a big problem when you’re in Manila, where it was very rare to find a store selling vegetarian food! But she said she loved the Philippines because it never cast her off like a stranger, something that she felt when she was in Europe. Here, everybody mistook her for a Filipina until she opens her mouth, because she speaks the English spoken by the Caucasian sisters, who trained her in Kathmandu and taught her the Hail Mary’s even if she’s a Buddhist.
I love her most for tolerating my infatuation for Salman Rushdie, whose book we found inside the bookstore, sinfully expensive, but which we bought and hid among my pile of dirty clothes to prevent Ja from discovering it when I’m home.
So, when I heard the chimes again in the other room of our Mapa apartment, I asked Ja if someone was playing with the yellow balloon. “It’s only the wind, Ma,” Ja called from the other room. So, I lay there, listening to the windbells, thinking of Prateeh, reading the book in secret, trying to figure out what the wind was trying to say.

Love Notes to Flo

2008-10-11T02:27:00.000-07:00

In an airy, open space that served as our function area on Naong beach, just a tricycle ride from Dipolog bus terminal, while listening with horror to Thelma, the Subanen woman from Zamboanga del Norte, recount a motorcycle ride that sliced part of the sole of her right foot because she clipped both her feet on to the burning motorcycle engine when they were about to fall on a cliff, I saw you concealing yourself behind the post.
Someone pointed you out to me. He hides himself with the grace of an antler, I thought. Who could he be?!
Every time I moved, the antler moved gracefully, covering its track, tilting its face from behind a trunk of a dead tree.
From where I was, all I can see was a brown shirt and a backpack. I chased you down the corner to see a glimpse of your face. Finally, you gave in. You came to me asking for the girl we both lost more than 20 years ago.
What do I remember about that girl? A vague memory of her shy, awkward strides, her fears of offending somebody, or of what her friends might say! I can’t even remember her face.
I can remember the university gate where we camped in, the shards of broken glass near the door of the administration building after it was hit by water cannon, the cries of teachers, the squad of soldiers in camouflage and long firearms facing the picketline, the police and their truncheons, the bruises on our arms, the awareness that even an ounce of water, when shot in a trajectory, could also hurt and kill. I can still remember some godforsaken thing she used to wear, the stupid things she used to think, some moments inside the picket line with huge streamers marked “Imlan resign,” few stolen moments at someone else's backdoor grabbing a bite of skyflakes in the midst of a hunger strike, an old black typewriter where we used to type—what? I can’t even remember.
Everything has become a blur, except for the memory of your sweatshirt.
Why do you ask me about what happened to that girl? She might have died so many years ago. She might have been trapped inside the university wall, unable to get out. All I can say is I'm happy to be here--for I am the one who survived!

Is that Kurniawan?!

2008-09-08T20:15:00.001-07:00

Yes, I can still remember correctly as we were going down the steps of that old ilustrado house on Calle Real and spotted this old well that reminded me of Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman," who killed herself by jumping into the family's drinking well. I briefly told Yuri about it before we posed for pictures and argued.
"That's my picture because that's my camera," Yuri said, grinning. "But Yuri," I said, grinning too. "That's also my picture because that's my idea!" "Okay, okay," Yuri said. "Just take my own photo alone, idea or not."
And so, we stood there--me, Prateeh, Yuri, a tiny drop of sun glinting on his nose. I thought we all looked like tadpoles.
But who's that other one? I can still remember Lilik, tinkering with Yuri's camera. But I could almost make out the face of Wawan!

On Campus

2008-08-29T02:39:00.000-07:00

So, there. To spare myself nights of agony every time I misplace my flash disk, where this image of San Agustin Church is stored. To spare my partner Yuri of Jakarta's Antara News Agency whose camera I used, the trouble of rummaging through his files again just to retrieve one picture, this picture of an old Church somewhere on Calle Real, somewhere in the walled city of Intramuros, where the whole bunch of MA Journalism fellows went one Sunday in July, as a temporary reprieve from all the assignments and workloads we had on campus at the Asian Center for Journalism of the Ateneo de Manila University.

I’m sorry

2008-05-07T04:09:00.000-07:00

These days, I’ve been trying very hard to break free, to force myself to write what I needed to write but an overwhelming sadness always cut me off in mid-sentence. This morning, when it was at its worst, I retreated to the sleeping room and dreamt of a little girl of about ten years old, wearing a pink dress that was already so faded it was already white. She was out on the streets, walking. Her hair was cut short almost like that of a boy. I was looking at her from a broken glass window.
Awake now, I wonder who that little girl was. I did not even see her face but I knew that this sadness that has been threatening to drown me for weeks may have something to do with her.

The Case of an Unhappy Hen

2008-04-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

Was it Calvin Trillin who wrote that the best tasting chicken are those raised and allowed to roam freely in the range? One can only taste the sadness of those broilers, who spend their lifetime caged in a chicken coop, deprived of the sun and the taste of freedom, as can be gleaned from the blandness of their soup. I have turned into a very sad, unhappy hen. I'm thinking of ways how to get out of my cage.

Slice of Night

2008-04-26T06:38:00.000-07:00

I found myself alone among abandoned files, crumpled towels in a chair, half-opened chicherias, half-opened books, unread newspapers, my favorite coffee mug filled with water. They did not forget to turn off the air con, this time, like they did the other night. I tapped on the keyboard and listened to the whizzing of the electric fan. I could hear the rumblings of distant jeepneys, the scream of a street girl, a whistle of a balut seller. But the hoot of construction workers, the thrashing and grating of metals, the roar of heavy equipment around the skeletal building being built across the street seemed to have stopped. In their place is an engulfing silence. I scooped my pants pocket for coins and kicked off my shoes. I could play DonMcLean in his 30s singing the American Pie over and over until the lizards tilt their heads an inch off the wall, nodding to its rhythm. Or, I could play Gorillaz, over and over, until my eyes get so drowsy, I could hardly open them. I could open my new tarot deck I have kept locked in the drawers and discover ancient wisdom. I could read F. Sionil Jose's "Poon," translated into Tagalog by Lilia F. Antonio when she was in Osaka. But instead, I think of my Ma and how, I have never given her a single gift ever since I was born.

The Magistrate

2008-04-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole. “Close it up,” I say. The guard bunches the opening together. It falls open. “They say that he hit his head on the wall. What do you think?” He looks at me warily.
---from JM Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” of the magistrate looking at the corpse that bore the marks of torture

The Magistrate's Monologue

2008-04-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

“You feel that it is unjust, I know, that you should be punished for having the feelings of a good son. You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know.”
I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill-wheel, knew what was just: all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
“But we live in a world of laws,” I said to my poor prisoner, “a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.”
After lecturing him I sentenced him. He accepted the sentence without murmur and his escort marched him away. I remember the uneasy shame I felt on days like that. I would leave the courtroom and return to my apartment and sit in the rocking chair in the dark all evening, without appetite, until it was time to go to bed.
“When some men suffer unjustly,” I said to myself, “it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.”
But the specious consolation of this thought could not comfort me. I toyed more than once with the idea of resigning my post, retiring from public life, buying a small market garden. But then, I thought, someone else will be appointed to bear the shame of office, and nothing will have changed." ---from J.M. Coetzee, “Waiting for the Barbarians

A Glimpse of Tobias Mindernickel

2008-04-10T17:13:00.000-07:00

I see Tobias Mindernickel roaming around the streets of Davao. His appearance is just as Thomas Mann had written, "eyecatching, quite odd, indeed ridiculous."
Out on a walk, he hauls his gaunt frame with the help of a cane, no longer up the hill, this time, but in an overpass reeking of urine and rotting garbage. He is no longer dressed in black from head to toe, in fact, he had changed into tattered rags that hang limply on his skeletal frame.
It must have been such a long and arduos journey for him from that small quayside town in Europe.
His mud-hardened hair covers half his face. He stares back at me with that gaunt look in his eyes as he hovers around the rows of stalls selling durian and pirated DVDs.
The sight of his sunken cheeks depresses me. I remember how Prof. Philip Van Peele back in Silliman U had pointed to us that Tobias Mindernickel is a perfect picture of Death.
He is lucky, no children come to tease him now. It's quite too far away from the street of Grauer Weg where he came from. Filipino children hardly know him at all.
Then, I begin to suspect that he is stalking me---or am I stalking him?
"Where is the dog?" I ask as soon as he is off the stairs of the smelly overpass, standing face to face with me on the ground. I am referring to that yellow dog, with one black ear and a black ring around one eye, that he bought from a man in Germany. A picture of sadness and remorse shows in his face. He had named that dog Esau.
"Where is the dog?" I ask again.
He began to sob. He did not reply.
"C'mon, tell me," I said, "What happened to Esau?"
His furious sobbing turn to a loud wail.
"What did you do to your dog?!" I said, loudly, this time, that passersby begin to notice.
Suddenly, he stops and squints a pair of bloodshot eyes at me. I could see sadness, but not guilt, in those eyes, before he scampers away and vanishes from my life forever.

In Search of the Lost Goddess

2008-04-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

Some time in the previous months, I got the rare treat of finding my lost goddess in Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent." The whole novel exceeded my wildest expectation, a rewriting of the familiar account of the Bible in the point of view of a woman named Dinah, who--if you get down to it--was a mere footnote on the pages of Genesis. Diamant's book deserved to be talked about, if only because the God of Jakob, Isaac and Abraham, the only God I was borne to believe in and the only God I was made to believe existed, appeared strange and unfamiliar all throughout the book, while the household gods of Rachel, the rituals of the moon goddess and her daughter, the great mother Inanna, became increasingly familiar as I found myself getting drawn towards the lives of Jacob's daughter Dinah and her four mothers Leah, Rachel, Zilpah and Bilhah.
I would read the book again, if only to know the goddesses better; or get intrigued by the goddess ritual of Opening of the womb, as opposed to the display of virgin blood by the groom during the night of the wedding. Or, to rage against the clan of Jacob, against the brothers of Dinah, against patriarchy who regarded (and continue to regard) women as piece of properties to be exchanged or sold in marriage! The book is the Jewish equivalent of Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman," a story of how a woman's name was erased, the woman forced to live as an outcast, for crossing over to the borders of taboo. I first heard about the book on the Ms magazine's bookshelf, when the book hit the bestsellers' list in 2001 four years after it was published in 1997. The writer Patricia Holt recounted how the book was not really on a big sellers' list in big chain bookstores when it first appeared. It only started to hit the chart when independent booksellers started recommending it to customers. In Davao, you could hardly find a copy of it at the National Bookstore. I found mine somewhere else. Such a pity I only read it now.

On the Road to Monkayo

2008-04-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

I feel so tired, body and soul.
Wednesday last week, I journeyed through the night with my boys from Butuan and thought I was perhaps the happiest mother in the whole world, making plans how to spend time with them, but even before I could get them settled in Davao the following morning, I had to leave them with JA to continue their trip to Bansalan while I embarked on a nightmare trip to the town of Monkayo. There, we rode the famous skylab (a motorcycle built with a contraption to allow the two-wheeled vehicle to carry more passengers), and made the daredevil journey to the sitio (subvillage) of Calinogan in barangay Casoon, where the Dibabawuns live.
The contraption was such a crazy structure that sometimes during the trip, passengers seated on it look down to realize they're already sitting on top of a cliff while the motorcycle negotiates a narrow road up the mountain.
It was not just the whole trip that made me so depressed but the nagging feeling that I was trapped. Back in Davao city, we received two PJR Report's copies, where the article on Life as Correspondent appeared and somebody, it was Gra, who said the story was--uhhggh-"inspiring." I felt even more depressed. It was not even half the picture of the life I had seen!

Poem from Paring Bert

2008-03-26T04:07:00.001-07:00

A poem from poet-anthropologist-philosopher-Jesuit priest Fr. Albert Alejo. It's interesting to read a more elaborate discussion of his poem here.

Lakbay-Kamay

Ano't tila singlawak
ng lupaing pangarap
itong munti mong kamay
dito, mahal, sa aking palad?

Ang mga ulap sa iyong mga kuko
ang mga bangin sa mga daliri mo
ang manipis na batis ng iyong balahibo
at ang pagpapalit-palit ng panahon
ng init at lamig sa bigla mong pagpisil,
pagbitiw, at pagkapit ng ubod-higpit
sa bawat panaka-naka nating pagtatagpo
na kung bakit laging kailangang patago--
lahat ay tila kawalang hanggang
paano ba lalakbaying pilit
nitong nalulula, at nangingimi kong
mabilisang paghalik.

Little Swiss Shop

2008-03-25T06:18:00.000-07:00

On a drizzling afternoon of January, I found myself in a crowd of NGO workers, dancing to the beat of a sacred music under the huge dome of the sky. Three Swiss women led the sacred dance (and I had a sudden wish it were a full moon) but of course, it was not, and it was not really that kind of dance!
The three Swiss women belonged to the women's group Theresa Ladeli (ladeli is the Swiss term for "little shop"), who auctioned unused items in Switzerland to send the proceeds to help poor communities in the Philippines. Later, Daday would tell me how boxes of pencils made in Switzerland and Germany would find their way to Aeta communities in Tapak or how boxes of Swiss knives would sometimes get into the hands of Customs officials who wanted to take some of them as "souvenirs."
Monica Baumann founded the group after the shock of her first visit in the country 16years ago. She has been coming to the Philippines once in every two years to see how far the group's assistance has been going; and this time, she was with two women companions, Lilly Wirz and Anna Rosa Gersbach.
Lilly was upset because she saw a baby died of pesticide poisoning in the midst of a banana plantation in Compostela Valley on the week of their visit. They also went to a house in between the huge tracks of land owned by the Zubiris and another landed family in Bukidnon, where a few months earlier, a nine year old child happened to eat a stolen banana (newly sprayed with insecticides) and died. (Later, I would also read what happened over a year ago to two women workers of a group that Theresa Ladeli was assisting.)
Lilly could not talk to the crowd without bursting into tears. I thought that Ana Rossa did not want to talk, too, because she did not want to show her emotions. But at the end of the program, she delivered this message:
"Maayong Hapon, my dear sisters and brothers," Ana Rossa began. "I say sisters and brothers because you did let me feel at home, you did let me feel being a member of a big family - salamat kaayo!
You gave me the chance to look behind the smile in the faces of the Philippino people and what I saw is more than sad and bad - it's unjust and unhuman.
After all I have experienced these six weeks, the last five and the first three weeks here in Mindanao, I do not go back home the same woman as I was before. I will go home half Swiss and half Filipino (not only because my skin did turn darker) and this half part always wants to come back to you again, because you became part of my life.
It's a privilege to have the choice--as all the people you serve--and this is unjust and unhuman. But you help them, you bring hope, you give all you have --your love--and you risk your life. I admire all of you and thank you for this very precious work. You work as NGO's, you do not go overseas. You have the choice to either work for a big company here and earn bigger money or go abroad but you made your choice to stay in your home country, to stand up for your people, to serve the poor.
On our way back to Davao city, our companion pointed to them a Swiss Deli we passed by on our way to Bajada.
"No, no," Lilly said, vigorously shaking her head. "We don't go looking for Swiss food when we're in Asia, we eat 'real' food," she said. "We eat Swiss food only when we get home and then, we know, that it's for real."
I nodded because I saw her eat with relish boiled eggplant and okra with bagoong that afternoon.

Life of a Gay-sha!

2008-03-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

I was asked to do a story on the "Life of Correspondents," by the Philippine Journalism Review (PJR), but to my dismay, no one really wanted to talk to me about it. Bong told me to interview his bureau chief, instead; Esco did not want me to reveal which paper he was writing, Q was upset with his date and became very scarce, and except for Julie in far off Zamboanga city, everybody--from Nash to Jeoffrey to Grace---was silent.
I was lucky to find the gay-sha.
She set our interview inside the newly-opened Peace Café on Juna Subdivision where she was doing an interview with the café owner! Is it possible to interview somebody who is doing an interview? I asked.
But then, I realized this was how impossible the gay-sha was! After waiting for quite a time, while the gay-sha sipped her iced coffee, finished her ice cream, demolished her banana cake without even the courtesy of handing me a fork I could use to help him, peppered the café owner with questions before dismissing her, the gay-sha confronted me.
"So, what are you going to ask?" she asked.
"I don't know," I shrugged. "I don't want to ask anything."
The gay-sha sighed. "Maybe, you give me answers first, before I ask my questions," I continued. She sighed again. "This is an interview where the first question is, what is the question?!"
She understood that she was supposed to tell the story of our lives.
The gay-sha did not complain. In the news, Rep. Prospero Nograles was already voted as the new Speaker of the House and the Inquirer Mindanao Bureau was texting the gay-sha and me to gather the people's reaction about it. Nogie is from Davao, the political archenemy of Davao's tough-talking Dirty Harry. But the gay-sha stayed in her place, a picture of perfect calm. She knew how to act out her role, whether as interviewer or interviewee.
As she started to open her life, which was also our life, I had to wade through a forest of jargons to decode the language of the gay-sha. "You know what I mean," she'd say, "I don't believe in such fracka-fracka, do you understand?"
Of course, I did not understand. But I nodded. "I don't believe in such chuvanesque," she added. The gay-sha wanted to demolish the belief that there was no story worth dying for. "If no story was worth dying for, no story will get written in the first place. We might as well stop writing," the gay-sha raved. Like mad.

Caged Birds

2008-03-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

I am no longer a stranger to jails, so, when I went to do a story on Davao city’s newest women prison facility (which, except for the high fence, did not look like a jail at all), I already knew how to strike a conversation with the women inmates.
“Will you talk about your case?!” I asked the woman who took the courage to approach me, the closest link she thought she can get to the outside world.
“Drugs,” she said, smirking. She got caught in a police buy-bust operation, she explained in a Tagalog I did not understand, because she was using the language of the trade.
“And you?!” I asked another woman beside her, “Drugs,” the woman smiled and nodded.
“About 40 per cent of the cases of women inmates here involved drugs,” said the first woman. “Except them,” she pointed to a handsome woman in her forties, whose voice---when she described the new facility as more “hygienic,” “well-ventilated” and less crammed compared to the old one---was that of someone accustomed to giving orders.
Her case was illegal recruitment, the first woman said. There were only eight or 11 of them here in every 40 of us, said the first woman.
The first woman introduced me to the 64-year old woman, with graying hair framing her sad, wrinkled face. The old woman said she was accused of theft, for stealing coconuts from her own land. The land was mortgaged for a pig, a goat and a can of rice for her wedding feast back in the 1950s.
Her husband tried to redeem the mortgage but their neighbor refused. Three years ago, she was harvesting coconuts from an adjacent farm when the coconuts rolled over to her neighbor’s property. She came to retrieve the coconuts but her neighbor accused her of theft.
“I won the case in the barangay and in the lupon,” the woman said, in a voice made stronger and louder by her belief that she was right.
She failed to show up in Court two times after she was summoned for a hearing. She said she was so busy selling vegetables in Bankerohan, she had no time for Court hearings. Her family depended on her, she said. After two Court summons that she largely ignored, the sheriffs came to detain her.
Over a year ago, I saw the insides of a jail for the first time when we paid a visit to Lex Adonis, the Davao broadcaster jailed for libel. The broadcaster was jailed largely because he failed to defend himself in the proceedings. He was tried in absentia. He was the only libel case in the sea of other criminal cases. I remember the first conversations we had with the inmates.
“So, what’s your case?” one of our companions asked the man that Lex Adonis introduced to us. “Murder,” the man replied.
We nodded our heads vigorously to hide our surprise.
“How long have you been here?” one of us, who recovered, asked.
“Seven years,” the man said, “Still waiting for conviction.”
“Seven years!” we chorused, no longer able to hide our surprise.
“What will happen if you get convicted for four years?” one of us asked.
“I don’t know,” the man said. “I’ll just do what they want me to do.”
Everybody reflected on the murder and the man.
“I did not regret it,” said the man, as if he could read our thoughts, “I killed the bastard who raped my daughter.”
We nodded again, slowly this time. The circle around us grew as more prisoners came to join the conversation. Most of their cases were murder, rape, drugs. We listened to another man who told us how he was mistaken for the murderer, after he found himself standing near scene of the crime just when the police were arriving.
I remember what I learned from all the prison movies I watched: Even in jail, no one is guilty. Everyone is innocent.

In Search of Ghosts

2008-02-12T06:10:00.001-08:00

“People go in search of ghosts whenever they return, after a long absence, to a place where they once lived,” Philip Roth says, in an interview with New Yorker magazine’s Life and Letters. On the day that I arrived in Cebu after over 15 years of absence, I found myself not only looking for ghosts but also turning into one. (to be continued)

Santo Niño Cathedral

2008-02-12T05:04:00.000-08:00

Coffee Break

2008-02-09T01:31:00.000-08:00

This morning, as we sipped coffee and exchanged the latest trade gossips, we were surprised to know that two plainclothesmen went to Mindanao Times two days ago, demanding to see the reporter who wrote about the New People's Army statement on the killing of Davao businessman Vicente Ferrazini. They wanted the Davao paper to disclose the source of the information. Amy told them that instead of interfering with the affairs of the newsroom, they should go ask the city mayor, because he knew everything about the case!
Ferrazini, whose family owns the Merco food chain and icecream stores in Davao, was shot by unidentified men on A. Pichon St. (old Magallanes St.) on Saturday, February 2. He died two days later. The New Peoples Army owned up the killing, through a statement emailed to the media. Maybe, those plainclothesmen were not aware yet, how fast information can travel in the age of the internet, so, they went to the Mindanao Times office to ask the reporter how she got the information.
Isn't that a bit threatening? As if, there was an absence of law protecting the media against unnecessary disclosure of information? Republic Act 1477, as lawyers patiently explain to members of the press, provides that editors and newspapers are not compelled to disclose sources of news revealed to them in confidence, except in cases affecting national security.
Or, maybe, the government and military establishments thought the newsrooms as mere extension of their offices...? (photo courtesy of davaotoday)

Portrait of a Journalist

2008-02-02T06:24:00.000-08:00

Our Editor's Note

2008-01-31T04:33:00.000-08:00

On November 6, 2005, we came out with the maiden issue of Davao Today, which never diminished in value even over time. Maybe, it was because we invested sheer hard work in it; maybe, love's labors were never (and could never be) lost. A click of the mouse sort of brought me back in time, makes me long for the moment when everything was just beginning, when everything was still on the verge of being.

Full Moon over the Bat Caves

2008-01-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

On our way to a bat cave on Samal island, I knew that I was destined to see the bats taking their circadian flight with a full moon rising as the backdrop. I simply knew it. It was like the feeling you get when you're playing that game called "mastermind," and you've already figured out the colors and the exact arrangement of the hidden chips. I was very sure of it. The fact that I was switched in between Ja and a passenger next to Barry inside a crowded bus on a ferryboat bound for the island seemed a perfect reason why I should see the bats taking flight on a full moon.
"No, they don't cover the sky like clouds," the American scientist Jim Kennedy patiently explained how the skies look like when the bats start flying, leaving their roost to look for food at night. "They're more like a stream, undulating against the red sky when the sun sets." I did not say anything because I knew the moon will show up for me that night. It was something I can only feel in my gut. Simply because I have faith in the moon when it is at its fullest and that I was there to visit nocturnal creatures like bats, I was sure I'd get to see the two fascinating events happening simultaneously before my eyes.
Even Ja's prediction of rain did not bother me. "You see those rain clouds from the east? No moon would show up tonight," Ja kept saying.
We did not stay long to wait for the moon over the island.
I texted Mrs. Monfort as soon as we got back to Davao, to find out how the sky over Samal looked like when we left. Was it covered with clouds? Was the moon even visible? She replied that at that moment, it was already covered. But earlier, she said, the moon was very big and beautiful.
The Goddess was always known to favour women. I simply knew how the sky will clear to allow me a glimpse of the full moon, when the bats are in flight, if I had only been stubborn enough to stay and wait.
I knew Ja was wrong simply because he's a man.

Falling in Love with Butuan

2008-01-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

I never thought I'd ever fall in love with a place like Butuan.
In my good old student days, it looked to me like a person with a shabby character that I had to avoid at all cost as I used to disembark from a boat from Cebu, jostling my way to the crazy Nasipit pier.
But what I used to see of the place then, was just the fleeting view of the pier and the bus terminal on my way home to Davao during the chaos of numerous coming home seasons.
In the previous years, I noticed young girls chatting away their time with bald, potbellied foreign men on their computer screens, in the cubicle next to mine in an internet cafe while I was doing one of those story assignments for Newsbreak.
But these days, Butuan is turning a friendly face to me. It has suddenly, become familiar, like the face of a younger sister.
One Monday, when I walked inside Urios University's highschool department, I felt my heart skipped a bit at the sight of 14 and 15 year olds, cramming for their third grading exams. I crossed the street to the St. Joseph Cathedral to discover the pleasant patterns of light above the altar. I stared at the letters of Fr. Saturnino Urios and Ferdinand Magellan posted on the wall. I sauntered into the dusty basement of Gaisano Butuan, and found old copies of the NewYorker magazines and Antique Journals, haphazardly strewn inside an abandoned box. Before I knew it, I was already coughing my way into the pages on Ramses II's life as Pharaoh of Egypt 3,000 years ago. I completely lost track of time.
Suddenly, Butuan ceased to be a stranger to me. It has become a family member, whose character is a delight to discover.
But I have yet to dig up its most exciting story as an ancient trading port in this part of Asia over a thousand years ago.
I could not make out anything yet of the writings on the wall.
That's why, JA was bewildered when I got back to Davao. "Are you crazy?" he asked. "Everybody hates Spanish so much they were so happy to get rid of it!
But now, you tell me, you want to learn Spanish? What do you want to learn it for?!" He was hysterical. "What has gone into your head? Everyone who speaks Spanish is already dead!"
"I saw letters of dead men on the wall of a cathedral in Butuan," I told him. "They were all written in Spanish. I want to read them."
Thus, I started another form of madness.

Sunny Notes for the Year!

2008-01-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

I still want to start the year right, so, I came up with a list of things that make me smile [and keep my soul warm and my heart beating for the rest of the year.]
1. DavaoDiaries [on the bottom five---hahaha!] of the top 100 Mindanao blogs and seeing my friends up ahead.
2. Taking a walk with Sean on the road down the creek.
3. Looking at Karl's drowsy eyes every time he confronts his notebooks.
4. Catching a glimpse of a couple of white egrets, making a courtship dance in the swamps. (This was in October when the egrets were still on the way to Australia. In February, they'll be passing by again on their way to China, or Siberia, or whereever they may have come from.)
5. The rare sight of the Rising Crescent at the strike of the New Year!
6. An old, fat cat snoring on the dining table on drowsy afternoons when Ma is not looking.
7. Topol singing "If I were a Rich Man," as Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof."
8. Everything about Franz Bardon
9. Antares
10.Pirates of the Caribbean
11. The Three Wizards who followed the star to Bethlehem.
12. Magick
13. A Recipe for Poor Poets
14. All my favorite blogs [and there are millions!]
15. House lizards cocking their heads on the wall to listen to Don McLean's and then, Madonna's "American Pie" on YouTube.
16. The sound of a baby gecko in the farm.
17. The soft, creamy taste of Mandaya Moore-Orlis' cinnamon rolls. (Melts in your hands, not in your mouth, I swear!)
18. Sunrise! (not sunset, take note.)
19. The feel of sands on my feet.
20. Tchaikovsky's Piano Concierto No.1
21. Smell of coffee
22. Waltzib's "Papa's Paklay," and whatever came of it.
23. News from Bosom Friends, near and far!
24. Ceramic Bowls
25. Scent of freshly-cut herbs
26. Laughter (especially Sean's)
27. And Many More
You see, the list is endless. I will never run out of reasons to celebrate!

Happy New Year!

2008-01-04T06:55:00.000-08:00

Dasia and I finally got to meet each other yesterday. “You’ve not updated your blog,” she said, glaring at me. “I still read Mariannet--and it’s already New Year!”
“Can you feel it?” I asked her.
She gave me her puzzled look.
“The ground is shaking,” I said. She stopped on her way out the door. She must have been thinking of earthquakes.
“The ground is not solid anymore,” I said, but noticed that the words didn’t sound right to my ears.
“I mean, we’re no longer standing on solid ground,” I corrected myself but that didn’t sound right, either. I was sweating. “Can’t you feel it?! The ground where we’re standing is not solid anymore. It’s so shaky!” I blurted, with a hint of panic, because of my inability to express myself.
As usual, Dasia was still her cool, reliable self. “That’s only because you’re thinking too much about it,” she said.
Actually, I wasn't thinking of anything. I did not tell her I got colds, and that, I've even been having trouble breathing since Christmas.
She paused and noticed my eyes. “Too many dark rings,” she said. “You’re excused tonight.”
She said, she’ll just tell Banana and Mandy that I couldn't make it.
We were supposed to go to The Café, where some time in early December, we saw Tec talking to Batman in another table. We never thought that was the last time we would see Batman alive. He was the fifth journalist to be killed in the Philippines before the turn of the year, the 91st since democracy was restored in 1986, according to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) list.
In November 2004, he still joined the march for dear friend Geneboyd, the 59th on the list. Urggh, the terror of numbers! Who would have an inkling who'd get to be the 91st?! During that march, Batman was bringing along with him a copy of an article about him on the Mindanao page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Batman told JA he decided to frame the article because he considered it an "apex" of his career as a "hardhitting" radioman to get printed on the page.
When I think about this, I often pause and wonder how he would have taken it, to know that he even made it to the front page banner headline nowadays? But, of course, that is such a bad joke. He could not have known!
"Kung mag-inday-inday ka, wa kay madawdaw," he used to say, showing off the old scars he got from an attack he survived over a decade ago. Everybody knew he was identified with a politician. But what was it that he said that got the bullet into his head? Was that bullet intended to silence him?
At The Cafe, we just waved, because all of us at our table were so busy talking about a dizzying range of topics from Mariannet Amper, the Digong-Nogie war and Lex Adonis.
If you happen to live in Davao, you would see the connection.
We were talking about covering disasters and whether or not journalists were at fault at the Manila Pen coverage (because earlier, at the PCIJ training at the Chateau del Mar, Malou Mangahas of PCIJ said, probably, they were!) We never kept track of the time (how could we, with Mandy and Banana around?!) so, the next time we looked up, we saw Tec and Batman waving, turning to go.
Then, in the morning of Christmas Eve, we just became dimly aware of the music from our cellphones, bringing along the message that another journalist was killed.
Brrrh. Is this the way to celebrate New Year?!

The Rape of Mariannet Amper

2007-11-16T18:14:00.000-08:00

Mariannet Amper is raped!
She was raped when she was alive, she is raped when she is dead.
Based on the findings of the medico-legal officer of the Regional Crime Laboratory, who did a less-than-two-hours autopsy on the exhumed body of the 12-year-old suicide, there were lacerations on the girl’s private parts that could have suggested rape.
The tough talking mayor Rodrigo Duterte called a criminal investigation on the girl’s death. The police invited the girl’s father and elder brothers for questioning and will subject them to a drug test.
But everybody knows who raped Mariannet Amper.
She was the girl whose suicide rocked the nation because it had put a face to the poverty experienced by the whole country amidst the series of bribery scandals faced by the Arroyo administration. Because her death has become a metaphor, it had not only captured the imagination of people but had turned her into a debate and her body into a battlefield.
The media raped Mariannet Amper. Armed with their camera, they reduced her once quiet life into a commodity for people to consume. Like vultures, they feasted on Mariannet Amper’s death. They came to her house to see how much it has decayed, how its sawali walls crumble at the slightest touch, turning the family’s life, inside out.
By portraying the scandalous image of her poverty on television and forgetting to relate it to the extravagance of the government that should have protected a child like Mariannet, the family of Mariannet Amper was robbed of dignity and humiliated in public.
In life, Mariannet Amper’s illegitimate government raped her.
Mariannet live in a period, when government's penchant to protect foreign interest and the interest of the few had robbed her of her right to a decent life and a secure childhood. Her parents had to eke out a living for the family to survive, leaving Mariannet to confront her own demons alone.
Her government, preoccupied with political survival because of questions of legitimacy, had no time to take into account the conditions of its people, much more of children like Mariannet Amper.
Yes, Mariannet Amper was raped—and the mayor does not have to look very far for the suspects!
He does not have to invite Mariannet’s family, who is still in a state of shock and mourning at the shape that the turn of events has taken. He does not have to exhume the girl’s body from the grave, five days after she was buried; nor invite Mariannet’s father to explain, why it took him five days to tell the police what happened. The medico legal does not have to perform the autopsy in a hurry and become defensive in the eyes of the media, just to get to the bottom of the rape.
For everybody knows who raped Mariannet Amper.
Everyone is guilty of that rape.

Reflections

2007-10-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, I get a glimpse of some dark abyss impossible to fathom. The awesome sight gets darker and deeper as the years go by but beholding it only serves to deepen my respect for people who have the courage to make the final plunge and those who choose to remain. It doesn't matter, really, which choice one happens to make because one choice is always as good as the other. In this world of binary opposites, life is almost interchangeable with death, beauty with ugliness, light with darkness, and so on; depending on where you happen to be standing at the moment.

Blogging Mindanao!

2007-10-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

I often think of a blog as a kind of a mirror. We see in it our very own reflections, the images we allow the world to see, so that we tend to be fidgety and choosy about it, revealing only parts, instead prying open entire lives, to tell our stories. So, it's not surprising, then, that an online diary often comes out embellished, sanitized, when posted on the worldwide web, so different from those diaries we lock up in our closets at home, those keepers of our most deadly, unhappy secrets; because whether we like it or not, there is still that part of us we hold back; that part of us that remained locked up, that part of us we do not want the world to see.
In the end, I could not help wondering whether that virtual reality we have created in our blogs and in the blogs that we read, is nothing but a mirage.
So, I decided to join the first Mindanao bloggers' summit to find out if the Mindanao bloggers I only meet on cyberspace are also people of flesh and blood, and not made entirely of words. I'd be glad to hear them laugh, talk, chatter, argue, fight each other while we eat, drink, meet new friends, fall in and out of love as fast as we can, get hurt, go home bruised, bloodied and happy, because these are stuffs that real life is made of, the life where the virtual world springs from. I'd like to hear the speakers talk about both the technology and the joys of blogging, the economics of this joy, the identity and identities of this imagined community of bloggers, who seem to closely identify themselves with this hotly-contested geography and political arena called Mindanao.
Thanks to the usual suspects who organize the event and the sponsors:
Join the DigitalFilipino.com Club!, Dimsum Diner,Councilor Peter Laviña, NoKiAHOST.COM P5/day webhosting , BisayaBloggers.com, Davao Food Huntress, Globe Broadband, Act for Peace, Web Design Philippines, Lane Systems, Snap Graphics and Sign, Orange Country, Web Developer Philippines, Eric Clark Su, Swiss Deli Fwendz Diner, Artcom Printing Services and Cubepixels Design Studio. So, see you all at the summit!

Lovers of Light

2007-10-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

What's Wrong with the Devil?!

2007-10-09T06:33:00.000-07:00

I chanced upon the Devil one day, talking about "the environment" inside an air-conditioned room full of people and I thought he made some sense.
He said something like if the law only worsened the human condition, then we have to ask why that law had been there, in the first place.
He kicked off his slippers under his chair and because I was at his back, I marveled at his unwashed soles as he kept crossing and uncrossing his feet while making his point. Right there and then, I began to like the Devil.
When the talk was over, it was lunch. I happened to fall in line next to the Devil, who turned around half way when he got his plate and saw the identification card on my chest. “Are you from the Philippine Daily Inquirer?” he asked, surprised.
I nodded.
“So, are you going to write about this?” he motioned to the hall where we just came from. “Maybe, yes,” I said, and was about to ask him why but he already turned away, mumbling something I could not make out.
The Devil was very tall, and surprisingly, a Caucasian, but the way his face flushed, I suspected, he must be saying something like, “Be sure you understand what you’re writing about,” or, “I hope you won’t add something to what I said,” or, “Don’t you misquote me, you should not be allowed to write anything here,” or, “No media is supposed to be here!”
Things I used to hear from other similar gatherings before.
It was such a pity that he was already moving away and I could not make out exactly what he said.
I was already seated at the table when a servant sent by the Devil told me to get out because the event was not supposed to be for the media.
So, I got up feeling so stupid, lost my way trying to find the elevator, then, heartily took the stairs down seven floors as I pondered upon the power that betrayed the basic fear and weakness of the Devil! He had the maze of structures to surround him, he had the power to employ (and exploit) people and control their minds—and yet, how pathetically insecure the Devil was! [Anyway, why would someone wall himself up behind horrendous physical and psychological structures if he were not afraid and needed to feel protected, in the first place?]
I came up with several hilarious conclusions about the Devil as I finally reached the last flight of stairs:
The Devil was paranoid.
The Devil was afraid of the media!
Because he was afraid fo the media, the Devil must be very obsessed with his image.
I conjure an image of the Devil looking at himself in the mirror, worrying about his looks! Something must be terribly wrong with the Devil!

Bad Karma

2007-10-06T04:07:00.000-07:00

This morning, I set aside my unfinished stories on Ramadan, the Human Security Act, (and many more that I could not mention for fear that doing so might stop me from writing them); I’ve foregone the pleasure of re-reading Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Zahir,” and “The Aleph” (which in the past few days have intoxicated me) or Edwin Mullins’ “The Pilgrimage to Santiago,” which I had started and abandoned a few months ago, or, Starhawk’s “The Spiral Dance,” which I found switched in between the rotten copy of Hendrik Willem Van Loon's "The Life and Times of Rembrandt Van Rijn" and Italo Calvino's "Difficult Loves" on the shelf of an obscure bookshop!
Worst of all, I turned down Dasia’s invitation for coffee--which is very rare, it happens only once in a hundred years!---because I had earlier promised Mandy I will attend that forum for her.
Only to be told---after half a day of listening to the speakers masticate about mining inside an air-conditioned room---that I did not have any business to be in that forum. They invited Mandaya, not me.
I was kicked out, so to speak, by people who did not even bother to explain why my name (instead of Mandy's) appeared on the attendance sheet (and it was not Dava Maguinda, I swear!) and why I had to waste precious hours before they could tell me I was not wanted in the first place!
But okay, it was over and I'm not going to wallow into it!
I was only there “to fulfill an obligation” and did not want to engage in any sort of “intellectual masturbation” about mining and the “indigenous peoples,” anyway, when the “indigenous peoples”(except one) were not even around.
Besides, I don’t really believe that there is some kind of a middle ground on such issues as mining. If you talk about mining and you tell me, we can just pose questions without making any strong statement for or against it--I’d surely feel very uneasy just sitting there, keeping my seat extra-warm without even bothering to ask: Are you deluding yourself? Are you pulling my leg? Or are you fooling the people?
So, I was just too glad to get out of there as fast as I can. They also told me I could not write anything about that forum, something that I never dream of doing so in the first place. For, except perhaps, for lawyer Marvic Leonen, who made perfect sense to me, are they really worth writing about?