Tumbang Preso

2014-11-19T08:22:00.000-08:00

2014-09-27T08:34:00.001-07:00

2014-09-27T08:19:00.001-07:00

2014-09-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Russia.

2014-09-27T07:18:00.001-07:00

2014-08-17T06:53:00.001-07:00

There’s a blackened patch of earth in the landscape of my mind as far as home is concerned. When I think of it, I don’t even want to see anyone from high school. I guess I have lived for so long in Kerala I could not tell people anymore what I think of high school reunions. But that the smartest should be sitting in the town council is a piece of glad news, and I would have been gladder if they made it to the mayoralty and vice mayoralty. Conversation always wind up to high school reunion, and our jolly batch of 1980 graduates, my cousin who lives in town, reported to me, topped the bill in the fund-raising. Your batch is the richest, with the guys in America contributing thirty thousand pesos each and an engineer now in Cebu donating another thirty. And as the class treasurer reported to me, the hundred thousands in donation went to benches in the school gymnasium and scholarships. Lord oh Lord, the donors’ names etched on benches and fences. See. I am really Arch Meanie and don’t deserve a peso in donation for my causes, and still Boyet, nicest guy in high school now in the town council, showed me around. They took me to lunch and to my surprise and delight, they did not ask me any questions, and the one who did ask, asked one question that matters. “Happy ka didto sa Jolo, Sheilf?”

2014-08-05T13:55:00.000-07:00

This is a major maladjustment. The loss of privacy. The invasion of the other world. Now my day revolves around alimentation and the spirit world. This can’t be.

On the other hand I should feel privileged. The world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Isabel Allende and Toni Morisson, maybe less, now at my feet. But where is literature. I am with conmen.

The spectre of couples they disgust me so. Zero credit for la causa everybody looking forward to their first decent pay. Ness leaving everything to the girlfriend to do all the performing. The world and all its problems, tuition, boarding house brawls, everything petty bourgeois, now toppling my book case and account notebooks. Water is scarce, and they finish what I haul inside, not even considering if I need a bath, too. Someone is stepping on the toilet seat and not flushing the bowl. I’m sick. Sick to death.

Yesterday Maher came, a swagger of self-importance. Suwerte nyo, he said, kapag ipinagluto ko kayo, when asked to do the cooking. Took two pieces from the egg tray to mix with the sauteed cabbage, which is no vegetables to me. He did clean the fish though, a little grudgingly, telling me this should serve the three of us until tomorrow. Of course he counts every cent I spend on the girls. Then Chinchin volunteered to do the cooking while he watched Boys Don’t Cry which he could not appreciate. Haram, he said, when Brandon started making love with the girlfriend with a rubber penis bought from a store. Then stood up and left.

Unu kaw?

2014-04-29T08:47:00.001-07:00

“Unu kaw, usug kaw? Babai kaw? Di ko maunu…” That is to say, What are you, are you a man? A woman? I could not tell, thus said a 50-year old woman occupying the cot next to mine. I am always surprised. I have this imaging of myself as female walking, a pair of lumps on my chest, girl’s doe eyes, girl’s thick mouth, but happens all the time, people in the street and marketplace addressing me as Utuh. So I said, “tomboy ako, Inah.” She nodded in total comprehension, “Ah tomboy huun,” like she gotit right the first time.

Not without my...

2014-04-29T08:17:00.003-07:00

CRISIS IS OVER. At least that’s what my landlady said to me as soon as I stepped on to the yard of her house of which I am good tenant after a week of absence. After your rally, she announced, no more kidnapping incidents. The Chief of Police had been fired, a new one has been appointed. And all the while, she added, our mayor was abroad, in Europe, vacationing.

So that was why he wasn’t there at the plaza, the Lady feeling betrayed and giving him a special citation for not showing up. The rally organizers projected four thousand marchers. Actual show-ups, I’d say, would be a thousand at most if hangers-on and those standing outside corner stores across the streets counted. Most of these hundreds, largely male, stood outside the fenced yard of the plaza, limbs straddling the painted steel bars like dingbats caught in mid-flight by the mid-day sun.

What put a stop to the kidnappings, Landlady explained, was the coming of former Vice Governor Jikiri, who came to Jolo and went straight to the Office of the Governor bearing a list, the names of suspected kidnappers. That’s how the kidnappers fell, she said, one by one. One of those in the list was the son of a prominent politician; the father had a heart attack when he learned that his son is in the list. He had to be carted aboard a C-130 plane, and later, had to be brought to Manila because the hospital in Zamboanga could not handle the case. A vendor whose daughter had been raped gave me these details. But the tricycle driver who first gave me this news did not name the father. My landlady did. I remember him as the husband of the lady with a pistol who screamed not without my son!!! She would not go home unless she took home with her the darling son who was lined up there among other suspects, and was positively identified by the raped girl, but whom the mayor, in whose office the case had been brought, defended as an improbable rapist because he knows the boy, and knows him to be gay.

No more dramas in my life!!! is what I have been wanting to scream to the world all this time. Kviranda Akulova, to my surprise, wrote back, promising an English translation of her take on the Pussy Riot for the heroes martyrs western press made of this oh-oh band because I could not understand any Russian, I just understood that that’s what she titled the piece -- No more dramas in my life!!! –. The first time I encountered that line, it was not a Russian but a Colombian speaking. I was talking to Juliana and I asked her if she knew Mujeres Creando and she said of course she does, she did, and that but Mujeres Creando is a couple, so when they broke up, the feminist lesbian collective collapsed, and that she has no problems with radical feminists in the US or Latin America, only that she hates dramas, what she wants is work. LoL, see, that’s what I meant that nobody could comprehend all these years, that in Life as in Work, in the trenches as on paper, sentiments are a bog gitawtoffitt.

To go back to the son and the father, the identified rapist son is the same one who figured in the kidnappings and rape of women in Jolo between 2007 and 2009. The same one the then mayor and now vacationing mayor defended as “bading” to be guilty of rape of women. Hija mia, said this mayor to the girl who filed the case, I know this boy, he could have not been one of the guys, bantut in bata’ yan, the boy is gay. LOL, and the boy’s mother, the one with a pistol in her bag, which she took out and pointed at Cocoy Tulawie for raising a hand threatening to slap her when she rained insults on the molested girl his HR client, hu u? she shrieked at her, in crisp Tausug, rereypin ng anak ku? excuse me, bading yang anak ku para hipuan ka! The girl recanted later, after having been gifted by the mayor and God knows who else with fare money to get out of Jolo.

I don’t think anyone was surprised when the names came out. Rapists roam free, in Jolo and elsewhere. People know them by name meet them on the street befriend and chat with them on Facebook, but to cry rape?

The rally at Plaza Marina on the 14^th of March, for instance, if anyone noticed, was strikingly quiet on rape, as though rape was not an issue. The only speaker who tangentially took it up was the young girl who represented the youth sector, who said that most of those kidnapped were women. She didn’t elaborate, but you knew what she could not and did not mention in her speech. Doctor Ismael was bold enough to make known a plaint long there in the hearts of many, but no mention of rape either. He rued that there was a time when there was the MNLF to defend us and stand by us, but now no more, there’s only us to help us. Nakauna aun pa MNLF mamaugbug katu’, bihaun wayna, kita na hadja in mamaugbug katu’. At the same moment that he was speaking, some of those who still believe in the MNLF were at a conference hall at Mindanao State University, where an MILF peace agenda was in progress, and they complained, this Framework of Agreement on the Bangsamoro disregards everything the MNLF stood for and is out to replace the MNLF why must we rally behind this. A friend in the NGO with an Abandon Jolo policy (maybe at post-FAB it’s not Abandon Jolo, anymore; but hey you get into the bandwagon) was there in the FAB-CAB rostrum, and he could not go out of the hotel to buy a fifty pesos shirt at the jual mura because there’s an order from his office to not stray into the street considering the situation.

The group that organized the rally named itself BASSAKAO, Bangsa Sug Against Kidnapping and Other Crimes. Rape, you assume is among the other crimes, but even now when the rapist-kidnappers are supposed to have been arrested, some people, when speaking about the crisis, past or present, would still refuse to say rape. They will say problems in our community like kidnapping, extortion, hold-up…

Nahuli na daw, naipadala na daw sa Zamboanga, Landlady informed me. The kidnapper-rapist son had been apprehended and had been sent to Zamboanga. A friend in Zamboanga instructed me: He will not tarry here in Zamboanga; he will be sent to Manila, for sure. That’s their idea of an arrest. You send the erring son to another city or another country, for a vacation, until the trouble blew over or until people forgot about it. You get them out of the island so that they will not bring more disgrace to the family, to the Muslim community, to the bangsa. Kidnap capital is not as bad as rape capital, is it? But just this morning (26^th of March) DXMM has this report that Lanao is the country’s kidnap capital, not Sulu. Honour, martabat, is the key word, and you smuggle these boys out not because peanut vendors are out to fry them alive or the raped girls are arming themselves and out to lynch them. You send them out so that their good-hearted father will not have another stroke.

NO MORE FUCKING DRAMAS PLEEEEASE!!!

Citizen arrest

2014-04-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

Morning of March 25, a local radio station in Jolo reported of a foiled kidnapping at Martirez Street just right outside Sulu State College. It was a case of Citizen Arrest, the report said. The kidnapper, purportedly, was a tricycle driver who picked up a female student for a passenger from Alat at downtown area who asked him to take her to MSU, but as the vehicle was on its way up Martirez Street, the engine conked out the driver had to stop. When the girl lit and made out like she was to flag another tricycle, the driver reportedly nabbed her. The Martirez guys came to her rescue, the radio reported, and had the tricycle driver taken to the police station. The driver cum suspected kidnapper, whom the police did not name for the benefit of the radio report, purportedly said he intends to marry her.

Another citizen arrest happened right in front of Plaza Marina, reported to me by my landlady. Vendors nabbed a kidnapper purportedly there to collect a five thousand ransom money. He came at the same spot where he or company collected another ransom earlier when they kidnapped a vendor selling banana cue. This time though, the vendors were ready, suicide mode. They just lifted the big pot hot with boiling oil and splashed the kidnapper with it. The other guy who was with him fled in the direction of the Cathedral so that he ran right into the arms of the Marines guarding the vicinity.

It is all very confusing. And very funny. The lady announcer advising one and all to always take a look at the guy on the driver’s seat and if he looks like a kidnapper, not to get on to the cab, better safe than kidnapped.

A day after, the same radio announcer would report that the arrested kidnapper at Martirez Street was lynched by tambays, hangers-on, and that a grenade was found on his person. Then this time they gave him a name, Juls, but for whatever reason, he didn’t have a family name. It was not mentioned either that the driver-kidnapper has no tacked ID on the cab’s front seat. I haven’t found time to ask around the Cathedral because nowadays if you ask street vendors, complain the police people, they’d answer “Inday ku” (I don’t know) like automated machines. And for whatever reason, friends working at the Cathedral didn’t know about the fried man in the plaza or about the other man running into the Marines at their gate.

Ordinary citizens and ordinary tricycle drivers, they tell you, kanila ra yan, sila da in mangidnap sila da isab in magsaggaw-saggaw. It’s all their racket, they set all this kidnap racket up, then set up these friggin so-called arrests. I can’t help but feel sorry for the tricycle driver they arrested at Martirez Street. For all I know he was just distressed the girl will not pay him the projected twenty pesos income. After all they were close to getting to MSU, just way over the SSC vicinity. Lately, or since this wave of kidnappings and rape of women, tricycle drivers are held suspect, and they have been complaining of poorer revenues. Women refuse to ride and after four o’ clock no more passengers to pick.

I suspect it’s hearsay, B minus movies meant to entertain the duped still in post-trauma confusion while the rapist sons are being led away.

My prayer is, that they amply compensated the lynched tricycle driver.

Cafe Armalite days

2014-03-15T20:07:00.000-07:00

Is Sabrina Ikbala Voon Muslim or Not?

Days after she was kidnapped, this question was posted on Facebook.

You never know, one put in, the times they are a-changin’. The girl is a businesswoman, she sells beauty products.

One male gossip insinuated that it was the son the kidnappers wanted; but the boy violently resisted while the young mother bravely volunteered herself, in lieu of the son, so it was she they took.

A jihadist argued: kidnapping of jahils (whores), munafiqs (hypocrites), and kaffirs (infidels) is just. But fellow Muslims, no.

Not Muslim, some bar-going men judged.

Hands off, dear, a Tausug friend now in the peace-keeping force stopped my rantings. It might not be kidnapping for ransom. What she heard, she said, is it was a custodial fight between two adults, private matter. The boy’s father could not even get near his son, how is that.

By the time I got to Jolo, I had made enough enough enemies on account of Sabrina’s Muslimhood that I threw Sabrina out of my mind. So much for. I was thinking of Linda and their Café Armalite film, now unfilmed, and who Karen said, was a Muslim and did not wear a scarf. I was thinking of her because a friend said that she saw the news of their release and that the two of them were covered head to foot. Only their eyes could be seen from behind the slits of the black cloths around their faces.

Be that they did not set the camp to fire.

Then Linda and Nadjoua, I should know, are no whiny bitches. They get along; won’t do theatrics just because some sword-brandishing Koran-quoting Quasimodo asked them to cover their aurat. Just like that other girl, the one who got widowed after marrying her abductor, I can’t even remember her name now, Jo?, the kaffir engineer in the Ipil caper over a decade ago, whom the Abu Sayaf converted and married. We interviewed that one. At the time we were doing this CATW-HURIDOCS project inventorying human rights violations against women, and big was my dismay because she attested that No, she was not forced; she fell in love, or learned to love his captor now his husband, and that she found redemption or found a truer faith in Islam. She also related that the kidnapper-lover, during the early phase of the courtship when she was still all-resistance, kept on saying what a waste she was, a waste that she had to be a kaffir, a lost woman.

So when my friend in Zamboanga said later that Sabrina, it turned out, was not a kidnap for ransom case but an abduction for marriage, it felt like Alhamdulillah we will never run out of this. Marriage boom in the country’s kidnap capital!

Question: Who collects?

Gone are the days when

2014-03-15T20:00:00.002-07:00

Monday morning, 03 March, a friend in Zamboanga messaged me. Dr. Ikbala has been kidnapped. The incident, it was said, happened Sunday afternoon. A lady who claims the doctor is a relative belied the news. Yes, kidnappers did enter the Ikbala vicinity, she said, but the doctor refused to go with them and just gave them money. A day later another version had it that robbers and not kidnappers entered the house.

The headline news on Jolo’s runaway wire that Monday, however, was the Jajurie children, not Dr Ikbala. Three kids from Dr Farouk Jajurie’s household, ages eight, twelve, and fifteen, were nabbed by armed men, along with their driver, as they were on their way to school. On the banner side of the day’s news would be the two salesclerks at Natasha’s ground floor of Helen’s Lodge just right across Rizal Plaza.

On the street, people were abuzz with more news. On the same day that kidnappers or robbers got into the Ikbala house, a policeman had been shot; he just bought a ticket for Zamboanga and had taken a peep at the gym where a pageant was in progress. His daughter was up there and would be crowned Budjang Tiangge (Miss Jolo) later that evening. She would be informed of her father’s death. She stood through it all, in a state of shock, tears streaming down her face as she was dragged around the show.

Hulah mangih, people whispered to each other. The times are dangerous; evil is aboard. Be careful, be ever careful.

Media is however conspicuously silent. Even the social media people in Zamboanga did not know about it. My sister in San Fernando sat through the newscasts, ABS-CBN, GMA, TV5; there was nothing on Jolo, she said.

She was interested because a daughter was pregnant and wanted to take a vacation in Jolo. The girl is thoroughly ignorant; didn't know a thing about war, about garbage disposal issues, about water supply issues. Whaat??? Oh my God, you have no TV??? Several text messages later she decided she will not get out of the island alive.

I also haven’t told her mother that the death of the policeman here was on account of another man’s daughter getting pregnant. That the boy’s father the shot man’s brother, refused to pay a fine; refused to spend for the wedding, saying it’s the fault of the girl, if girls nowadays were not cheap sluts, so what if she was family to that goddamn island politico (he didn’t say this within anyone’s earshot, I’m sure). So the boy’s father was shot first last year and no wedding took place. This cop who lost a brother therefore decided to bring the case to Camp Crame in Manila, where the generals are; and that was what this trip was all about. So they got two in a row. I have no idea where the boy or the girl is now, but obviously, fines and weddings and blood debts are matters that belong to fathers and elders; erring kids are not supposed to interfere.

It is all very discouraging. I was not even through thinking over the Bansil sisters when all this got to me. Linda and Nadjoua, who, as town talk would have it, were just in Talipao all those eight months, playing house with the kidnappers. “Nagbaybay,” as they say in local lingo. One of the sisters is pregnant, or pregnant months ago, “matagal na,” according to someone who came from there. The guy who brought the news to Jolo could not tell however which one was pregnant; he had not spoken with the kidnapped girls, of course, as none could get near; they were cordoned off from visitors. Besides, with the both of them covered from top to bottom, who could tell one woman apart from the other.

Then women friends also told me about a Sister Fatima, a nun, who was half-white, very pretty. An Abu Sayaf commander married her, a few years back. She was pregnant when she was released. Of course she left the nunnery and went back to her country.

You just don’t jump into conclusions, no you don’t, they warned me. Don’t I say that it was kidnap, kidnap for ransom it wasn’t; it could have been guyud. We were sitting inside a roadside coffee shop, and a councilor from the municipal hall right across the street is being chatted up by another friend; he is paying for our coffee and the friend is soliciting for our publication, which the girls said, is high offensive lesbian. With their help, we are going to make the March women issue more photogenic.

Guyud, the friend sitting across explained, is traditional Tausug custom of getting oneself a bride by abduction.

I sometimes cannot believe my eyes how some legends and fantasies about horse-riding men lifting with one hand runaway women still persist. So I said to friends who order me to evacuate, Shucks who wants my head; halaws don’t interest Captain Jacks in the least.

Don’t say that, they say. We don't know who are they; they're no Captain Jacks; they could be neighborhood addicts and they will pick anybody, and soon they will pick anything for a ten thousand or five.

Hilarious. Wouldn’t that democratize kidnapping a bit when traditionally it was only lucrative scourge of the rich? Why, in some shoreline communities, bride price has gone that low. And diyat, the fine for physically injuring another person, can go as low as five hundred, if it was only a tomboy hurting another important tomboy. (Unimportant tomboys won’t haul you to the barangay justice hall.) At the rate we are going, rape should be decriminalized soon.

Just a week back, a journalist friend to Arlene dela Cruz was relating to me what Arlene related to her. That no, the Abu Sayaf did not rape her, they just stripped her naked and threw her into a pit they dug for her, where they hogtied her, and spat at her. That’s what you do to kaffirs. That’s what you do to journalists.

So I can understand and I thoroughly understand, if Philippine media, taking the cue from Mindanao HR groups and CSOs, had taken on an Abandon Jolo policy. They don’t want journalists? Fine. Let the rotten island rot. They’ll slaughter their own children soon and that will be the day when the place will perhaps be story-worthy.

The first time I heard of it this policy was from an NGO bigwig. Abandon Jolo!, he said. His own organization’s long foray into the field ended somewhat badly, resources captured, the best of his HR people now either settled down or remarried, with one slapped with a criminal case and is now in jail.

This recent wave of kidnappings, I want to tell them, should be interesting because they are taking fellow Muslims, not just kaffir journalists from Manila. For all they know it might be the new class and gender war: two-pronged; one against the elite; and the other against the female sex. See, the Tausug community itself is confounded; wayna, they say, we are a lost tribe if we hurt our own, bang pagkahi ta da in mulahun ta. The girls working at Natasha’s, said a tricycle driver, were Tausugs. He was mumbling to himself as he said so. It's all very well if it's only the Christians they kidnap. Then he checked himself and gave me a second third look.

So I said to my sister, who is neither a journalist nor a sociologist, I don’t really know what’s going on. I’d like to think, like how my Tausug girl-friends think, that the boys just want to marry. There is so much hunger here, so much deprivation. Then Jolo is full of bachelor women, young, pretty, and looking. Then if the men who kidnapped the girls were jihadists, maybe pretty girls selling cosmetics is their idea of kaffir bagu, the new infidels? Isn’t that nice? Muslimhood, ethno-religious identity continuously being redefined and reinvented? The Tausugs maybe extremely ethnocentric and chauvinist; the decades of war on their communities may have made them very sectarian and anti-Christian; but they are not a closed society.

Gone are the days when the only enemy they knew, their idea of a satru, was the Marine soldier and his whore.

2014-02-25T23:08:00.003-08:00

I don't care about you
If you get what you want
If they get you
And hand you over to the men
Who elsewise could not get near you.

You are just a piece of meat
No less untouchable
They will clothe you

Like what they did to the others
You will come home changed gagged

You will embrace your sins
You will recite verses for curses

Soliloquy of the Sollipsist

2014-02-23T19:48:00.003-08:00

by Sylvia Plath

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott any color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All you beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

Sabrina Ikbala Voon: Kidnapped!

2014-02-22T07:50:00.000-08:00

photo: doc raden ikbala

A couple of days before the news of the Bansils' release or escape from captivity, out came the news of another kidnapping, that of Sabrina Ikbala Voon, 28-year old.

After the outpouring of prayers and sympathies, the background check. Is she Muslim? Who is the truer Muslim, Sabrina or her abductors? And then one mouthful: I knew her years back. I met her in a bar. There was nothing Muslim about her, but maybe I am mistaken and didn't really know her.

I hate checking on beautiful girls. But I had to go, and among my finds (this is random and incomplete):

1. she owns a guitar, with her name etched on it, and thinks that life is like playing the guitar; it has its transitions, and the more you listen, the more that you tune in, the sound getting better and better;

2. beauty is her trade and she believes that imperfection is beauty; and that happy girls are the prettiest.

3. she loves marilyn monroe, who said that if you cannot take me at my worst; then you cannot
have me at my best;

4. she signs with her name all her art works, including her self-portraits. There is no taking from her what she wears well -- beauty, elegance, and the brightest pair of eyes.

5. She may color her hair red, or yellow, but she is no dumb blonde. (Apologies to dumb blondies, if dumb blondies do exist.)

My suit is: should beauty and vibrance make of a girl less Muslim?

where do you hang out?

2014-02-22T01:38:00.002-08:00

Where do you hang out? Mindvalley asks. In my mind’s plateau?

I like the question though. It is interested. So I curtsy and answer: Right now I am at Garden Orchid, all gratitude to the graces of capitalism – whatever that means. I am in no mood to wrestle with the igzakness of words. All I mean is I am enjoying the luxury of a spacious hall, free wifi access, free power charge, without the clerks and the stewards sending me out or pushing under my nose the bar menu.

Igzak. I first encountered this word from Amrina, semi literate high school graduate who can’t even pronounce Tumba Lata right. Laa-tah, she likes to say, until I had to give up and say, so be it. Laa-tah then. Her mother, who was Day Care teacher of an alternative children’s school where she was enrolled liked to berate her, calling her, not semi-illiterate, mind you, retardate, she would say. My retardate daughter, in local lingo. Retardate kaw! Retardate kaw tuud! I can’t recall if Child Rights were in vogue by then, that was late 1990s, I believe, and incest rape and such were what was looked on as human rights violation (or women’s rights, at the time).

Ten o’ clock igsak, she wrote. You do not spell-check a word like that. It’s so authentic. And the Tausugs, or the locals, have this way with words, they have a way of picking words from the air and make it homegrown. That’s how we have meyul for mayor, gubnul for governor, abugaw for abugado. Naghapen for what happened. And now, igzak. But the z replacing s is my own interference. I cannot stand sitting by watching when there is so much word game going on.

What is hanging out in Tausug? Naglali. Yari aku ha lawang sin Garden Orchid naglilingkud ha sopa nila ini, nagfi-facebook. Iyan hi Neldy, Tausug researcher, linguist, local historian, in correct word kunu subay pag-usalun when we are referring to the language, Sinug, bukun Tausug. In Tausug tao, in language Sinug. Like Sinama for the language of the Sama people. Okay. No probz.

I bury camouflage my face behind all this. Because I cannot bury my face in the couch. I don’t want to be seen. Stealing info tech access, no cup of coffee to prop me for company; it feels lonesome. Muslim ladies sashay by. The crème de la crème of the Moro intelligentsia. They don’t know me I don’t know them.

I wonder. If there was a third party watching us, would they observe, “they look at each other archly.”

white man in my country

2014-02-21T15:40:00.001-08:00

When I first read this piece what I felt was, Fuck. This one hurts.
Then on second reading, it was, Hell, it was a life well-lived! Selling ice cubes is appropriate; it goes with beer and rum. And he was right about rum over piggy-banking; he was right about fries and hotdogs and about bastard fathers; and he was right about dying on some friggin’ plan to retire in a country he long abandoned for what he became. The rest (Jesus, funeral rights, Facebook, one cold heart) is not for him to suffer.

Passage
Ed Quitoriano
(a repost from Facebook)

His first love was computers, not new ones but stuff that needed his screwdrivers, solders and wits for resuscitation. You could see heaven on his face once the dead computer came to life. Then came Ms. J, the biggest love of his life.

Life with Ms. J was the peak of the happiness that he wished for. All the more the world around him became hazier. He chose only a few people to connect with and only those he believed could understand him. In fact, he was a person not easy to fathom and I am not one of the few who could. For almost twenty years we talked without talking, thought of each other without really trying; I, always hoping he got what he wished for.

Ms. J died somewhere in 2008 but not without giving her all to him, including a will to a family inheritance for him to live by in Bohol. But without Ms. J, he went deep inside himself, harnessing and brandishing his own beliefs and fought for the will as if it were a claim he could make without making friends with Ms. J’s family and friends.   He placed all the money he got for legal battles he could not win until he lost and found himself dejected, always believing that he was a victim of discrimination in a foreign country.

But he never gave up nor dared himself to rethink fully well. He just pivoted, acquired some rice lands on mortgage, ran a small swine farm and soothed his loneliness with beer and rum. In March 2011, he met Ms. L through SMS. She was forty-something then, never married. She is a teacher, a specialist in braille.

They decided to live together, moved to Ms. L’s hometown and decided to live as man and wife – alone in a rented small bungalow near a jetty. She went to teach and he to sell homemade ice cubes. He bought three freezers, she a generator after Yolanda struck the power lines. After work, she would come home to prepare a hundred of ice packs in small plastic bags. The ice business earned them PHP200-300 a day but not without a daily fight over how the earnings should be spent. The man won and got the daily dose of beer and rum and the usual drunkenness, vomiting and not knowing where the bedroom is.

For him, the booze was his world away from sadness into a make-believe world of remembering Ms. J.  He loves Ms. L, he would say but nonchalantly also say that he loves Ms. J more than everything else. He still had Ms. J’s dog with him and her name as password to his email address.   He would play their favourite songs and shed tears in front of his desktop, with Ms. L patiently watching and listening by his side.

Two years of booze and dejection, on the one hand, and the ever-loving presence of Ms. L, on the other, made him decide that 2014 would be different. He whispered a promise: he would marry her, bring her to his homeland, tour her to Paris and money would be no object. He said he had stashed some money, big money, somewhere in Switzerland in the care of someone he would divulge. He also got himself a new passport and was making inquiries with his embassy for the marriage and travel requirements.

On January 10, he passed away, found slumped in front of his desktop with earphones still on. The whispered promise to Ms. L. came too late. Even the passwords to his files and pin numbers of his ATM he brought to his grave.

To local people, he was ‘the American who died because of too much drinking without eating.’ But he was also the American who dug an old man and a child from the rubbles during the October 2013 earthquake and the technician who taught neighbours how to convert their motorbikes into power generators during the blackout that followed Yolanda’s onslaught.

A lot of foreigners got married to locals in Bohol but to most people they are all Americans, including Mr. K. But he was not the typical foreigner or the typical Dutchman. Even during the earthquake, he admonished Ms. L to stop praying to Jesus on the argument that Jesus has nothing to do with earthquakes. In fact, he could easily get into an argument with anyone if it was about religion, faith and super beings. He would rather that Ms L watch science documentaries than talk about God. How much he hated Pacquaio, dancing prisoners and Pinoy soap opera for wasting the time of viewers.
At one time Ms. L’s uncle, a 60-something community organizer, offered to give them company. It did not take very long for him to claim primacy of beliefs, calling him a ‘murderer’ for killing ants that clung to his underwear; or an abuser for shooing his dogs away; or a transgressor for switching on the TV without his permission or for wiping off the stinking vomit from the floor.

He could wage war on anything and everything if it was about what he stood for. He grew pigs and could not stand the sight of a slaughter. He ate crabmeat but could not help calling a cook a torturer for cooking the crab alive and bound. I too had a bout with him many years ago for suggesting that I should not dare to offer fries and hotdog to my son because I was only the biological father and he was the real father in my frequent absence.

A lot of friends really wanted and tried to understand him, but he chose to be alone. Ms. L tried her all to bring him to the present in her hometown. She introduced and brought him to parties and reunions with fellow teachers and never for a moment faltered on the husband-wife image and despite the frequent remembrance of Ms. J as the love of his life.   The only moments that she stood up against him were when she demanded he stop drinking, forcibly pulling him to the bathroom. She would beg for him to change his clothes when he took her to school. But he was a fortress of self-choice. He would demand ownership of Ms. L’s time after school, often threatening to complain why she had to work overtime when it was voluntary on her part.

Ms L was in panic when she found him dead. She had never seen a dead man in her house, much less a partner whose family she did not know and whose friends she would only know from the stories he told or via Facebook. She was alone with him and there was the basket of fears - of being asked by the police about the cause of death, payment for the morgue, when to bury him and the expenses for the wake and the funeral.

But to her surprise, people she does not know were forthcoming. Even the neighbours who kept their distance came forward to console her and offer their prayers – despite knowing that if he were alive, they would not be allowed to pray in his house. Somebody even made sure that a customized casket would be crafted because his size would not fit the standard Pinoy caskets.

Now he has no choice; he cannot prevent people from praying over him or the priest who said mass yesterday.   He and Ms L never officially got married but on his casket Ms L. inscribed “from the loving memory of his wife… sons, daughters, relatives and friends.” Underneath the casket are his dogs, including Ms. J’s dog. For them, he is just asleep and they wait.

I owe him, a debt I can never repay. The last twenty years without communication is something that brings pain, and somehow, the good years before that do not strangely warm my heart.

Goodbye, Kees.

To Kiev with Love

2014-02-21T04:41:00.005-08:00

These days I am a little stimulated. Yesterday or day before yesterday Germelina wanted to know where was I, still in Zamboanga or still in Jolo? I wanted to ask if they want for me to cover the escape from captivity of the Bansil sisters, hot copy that would be, but I don’t like melodramas, people who were not there suddenly turning up to congratulate the two kids whose dad they knew for escaping from hell?

I cover my own non-story of non-captivity and I would rather nobody reads me even after I survived.

Weeks before I went to Jolo, friends warned me against coming to Jolo. They kidnap anyone here, big time or small time, no discrimination. Don’t come around these days, they advised.

Okay, I said.

Do I fear the Abu Sayaf? I don’t know. I feel something akin to fear when I cross the street full of soldiers. What if someone took the notion of shooting at the exact moment that I put my body on his line of fire?

I’d like to think they’re just like me. They’re just like anyone. A bunch of armed fucks trying to make out. It's not their fault if nobody taught them correct political lines. None of them perhaps cares about political lines or about God and whatever it is up there that looks down on them. Then, I do not really think hard before I get on to something. Like going to Jolo. Or doing work in Jolo. Or setting a program or an office in Jolo. Who wants me there? What could I want from there other than more of the same thing I already have in excess.

And I don’t really differentiate between big moves and small moves; high-risk or small-risk; they amount to the same non-sacrifice to me. They make so much of not going abroad earning dollars or euros in consultancy fees rather than doing social work among the poverty-reduction cuckoos, as though when they leave the godforsaken country they can make something out of their godforsaken social welfare careers. So much for migration. It’s a nice name for dissolution. Got that from Zadie Smith, not from Mariam Gagosh.

Weeks ago Kim poked me.I will put the Jolo girls online, she said. We are a bunch of illiterates when it comes to friggin' hosting and all this web thing and she said yesso, most of these lgbt ezines are so-so, people getting away with certain lifestyles in the name of advocacy. The Jolo guys had more to offer.

Whoaa! I almost flew in my seat. I haven't told her as yet that I said something like that to her ex, that Mary whom the ex called alpha omega female was the sleuth not her and that did it. She never spoke to me again. I also cannot tell Kim that the more I know, the less I feel for our kind. At times when I feel awfully down I fear that I will abandon all my beliefs, in lesbianhood and feminism included.

Fortunately for Facebook, it has its uses. I gloat at sightings of feminists into self-defense, demands for safe abortion, decriminalization of prostitution. Just a couple of years back, maybe three, Sara, a natdem gun from UP Diliman spoke in a women conference in Davao. It was March 8 if I remember it right. And she damned shopping-rights feminism, like feminism is all about that. Like what daphnie and carol appreciated with gender hogging the headlines. The flights of stairs of Ateneo de Davao are not gender-sensitive, they say. Girls in stiletto heels are bound to trip and fall. Oh let them fall. I wish they fall all the pretty girls in stiletto heels. A big comedic break that would be.

But the wind did change. I don’t know where it came from, Egypt or Uganda; Venezuela or America. There was Saira writing to me about the takeover of the neoliberal regime co-opting the feminist organizations in the US. We were not talking about the feminist movement, really. Because there was no feminist movement by then. We were talking about the peace movement in the US, the ones that put up schools of peace upon schools of peace in Mindanao and other parts of the world where conflict once mattered. And she said, I am out of here, I am going over to the other side of despair, and you know what, we have this org called Incite!

That was ages ago. And now here comes Mariam Gagosh refusing to say she is in solidarity with the protesters at Kiev. How could she say, she said, that she is there with them when her butt is in a couch in San Francisco? Damnit. Then I had to do some more tracking. I like tracking people, I tell you, their allegiances. Ruby with the striking workers in Camboadia, Germelina at Pete Seger’s funeral singing paeans to dead communists at a time when communists are no longer looked up as saints. Then Neldy coming at me with the news that Linda and Nadjoua escaped from capitivity after eight months of sitting it up with the Abu Sayaf. Then Cocoy from prison saying he is amazed beyond belief that his friends in Jolo could just let him rot in jail. When he gets out, he said, when he gets out the struggle will be more beautiful.

Lordgodalmighty he gone bonkers! When did people last remember struggle as good and beautiful? That there is joy in revolution? My consultant friends, erstwhile heroes of my lost youth, all they repeat to the last of their breath, a way to cleanse themselves of the guilt perhaps that sticks, is that let us be kind to ourselves.

Over what?!

2014-02-01T09:54:00.002-08:00

Courtney, when I say I love you I am not ashamed, nor will anyone ever ever come close to intimidating persuading, etc me into thinking otherwise. I wear you on my sleeve. I spread you out wide open with the wing span of a peacock. Yet all too often with the attention span of a bullet to the head. I think its pathetic that the entire world looks upon a calm demeanor as the desired model citizen. Yet heres something to be said about the ability to explain oneself with a toned down, tune deal tone. And I will say it: I am the boy who is slow. how I metamorphosised from hyperactive to cement is for lack of a better knife to the throat uh, annoying, aggravating, confusing as dense as cement. Cement holds no other minerals. You cant even find fools gold in it. Its strictly manmade and you’ve taught me it’s ok to be a man and in the classic mans world I parade you around proudly like the ring on my finger which also holds no mineral. Love kurdt

Courtney Love

2014-02-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

2014-01-30T19:48:00.000-08:00

“[I]t makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.”

― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Mariam Gagosh (take two)

2014-01-29T08:42:00.005-08:00

Transgressive feminism:

... endeavors to take up histories, geographies, affective dimensions, and political stakes of various feminist insubordinations in the spaces they occupy: intellectual and institutional, local and global, public and intimate, by choice and under duress. Mobilizing the multivalent concept of transgression helps reframe interrogations and impositions into those locations where we labor, love, defy, resist, protest, play, create, and or celebrate.

Thus advertized NWSA in its call for proposal for a forthcoming conference in Puerto Rico.

But that's not what I what I want to announce here. I just want to mount these images I found on the wall of Mariam Gagosh. (Damn if she found out that I did this without her permission.)

Fall in love, darlings. It's a looong queue.

Mariam Gagosh

2014-01-29T07:11:00.001-08:00

this mask belongs to mariam gagosh

The first day of an international human rights conference near Oakland California, a conferencee, Mariam Gagosh, made the following rediscoveries (and this is a repost from her wall at FB):

1. I hate the country of my origin.
2. I hate the country I currently reside in.

Migration is beautiful and this wondering makes life worth my while; it also makes this feeling of non-belongingness bearable; it tells me that I am a nomad, a bird, or a butterfly; most of all, it reminds me that I’m just a Visitor. So are we all.

It struck me because 1) it has been a long while since I last heard a feminist (I assumed she is a feminist because I met her online through Frida) use the word hate (it's out of fashion); and 2) in my world the only people who announce right on their outcast status are poets and artists and Captain Jack. It's refreshing!

But then the conference Marian Gagosh went to is a funders group, so I said she must be on the donor side, and therefore she can say what she likes without fear of loss of funding? Plus Gagosh is not American or Afro-American or whatever it is that I associate with positivist feminism (wherever I got that ugly word).

(I am a psychotic, according to the women human rights groups in Davao and Manila who discharged me properly and duly. Coming from them, I say Thank you, glad to be rid of you.)

I have nerve to say that here right on because she has this mask and she wore it and called it angrywomanpower mask. In Jolo, I am all support for Mary because if she is angry she is angry and doesn't think twice about breaking bottles picking a knife a gun and kicking doors. I said you are like Thor, you derive your powers from anger. Cultivate it. Friends ordered me chained. Told the other dykes to keep away.

Back to Mariam Gagosh. Another surprise is the line about migration and country. Just today (as I said, I am light years away from everything that advances in the universe and on Facebook) I encountered for the first time critical race theory, and so I said, thank you, feminism (because it's in a feminist website that the encounter happened), thank you science, thank you empirical research, for how come people just assume that because you support right-to-self-determination of peoples you therefore is on their side.

Not saying I am not on the side of the secessionists of Sulu; only that I am in Sulu with or without help from the secessionists of Sulu and their girlfriends in the NGO community. But what struck me more is the realization that I actually went to Jolo on some set of NGO-HR informed assumptions. Like even if I am working among young street nomads like the lesbians and transguys, I have this idea, this demand in me for them to stay and save their country, rather than find another way using their own agencies.

These street nomads have no stakes in the Islamic state being brandished by the nationalist Tausugs, they do not give a shit about human rights and all their lives it's slash and burn hit and run. They are indeed butterflies in their pursuit of pleasures, birds in their longings for other shores. And there I am waxing feminist activism and island economy when I could do better conniving with the Dutches talking shipping industry.

2014-01-29T07:08:00.001-08:00

hard to think in the belly of the beast.
is that why i have not been writing had not been reading?

today dex called. are you still here in jolo? she asked.
to ask that when she herself is in jolo.

i wanted to just scream fuckoff stop following me but she's one kid who has poor stamina that if i said another word to injure her, she would be comatose by the time i got back to jolo. then i will have no one to speak to.

2014-01-29T05:59:00.001-08:00