The Free Press

It's amazing how we can easily tell the kind of freedom of the press we have right in this country just by listening to journalists argue about t-shirts. I have the queasy feeling that something must be terribly wrong in a democracy when journalists start talking about (and sometimes become afraid of) what to wear. "Is it safe to wear t-shirts like this one when we're on coverage?" Riza asked, pointing to the green shirt that Walter wore, bearing the text of Section four Article 3 of the Bill of Rights of the Philippine Constitution, which assures that, "No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression and of the press." Weng was in the midst of the discussion on "safety while on coverage" in the upcoming May elections, projected to be one of the bloodiest ever, what with all the journalist killings that have been going on for how long! "Of course, I wear this because we're here together," quipped Nelson, who was wearing the black version of Walter's shirt. "At least, I am with you and we understand each other. I also wear this when we're on the streets on press freedom day, or when we protest and demand for all the killings to stop, or on a funeral march when one of us has just gotten himself killed by who-knows-who (?) but I don't wear this on coverage."
"It's not advisable," agreed Q, vigorously shaking his head. "Afterall, it's election time. You could easily get killed."
"It's a no-no," said Walter. "Especially when you're in an area which is very dangerous."
"When you're in a conflict zone, maybe," said Weng. "But what's wrong about wearing that when you go to the Comelec office to follow up election results?"
"Isn't it election time?" asked Awi, "When people from all walks of life put forward all kinds of agenda in all forms of advertisements?" "I may not wear that in places where goons with guns freely roam," I can't help saying, "But perhaps, on ordinary days when we cover the news, why not take the chance?" (But I did not actually mean one hundred per cent of what I said because--when wearing something interferes with my getting the story I would rather change my clothes or go naked!) "But aren't we in a democracy here?" Che of davaotoday.com shot back from the booth at the back where all the t-shirts---printed with stop killing journalists---were displayed. "Why do we have this kind of argument about such a trivial thing as a T-shirt to wear when we're supposed to be free?!"
Everyone fell silent. I felt weird because after all, the Philippines has always been touted to have the freest press in Asia and yet, journalists seem to be thinking twice about wearing certain types of T-shirts while on coverage.

Covering the Elections

Who is Afraid of the Naked Truth?

On the day that Gemma Bagayaua of Newsbreak was arrested for libel, we were made to strip inside the Davao city jail in Maa just to visit a broadcaster behind bars.
“What is our fault that we are made to strip like this?” asked Silya Lektrika, my woman companion, who was disgusted by the ordeal. “Are you only out to humiliate us?”
“Who is that prisoner you want to visit, anyway?” asked the inspecting woman cop who surprisingly didn’t even bother to look if a gun or shabu was hidden in my sanitary napkin. “What is his case?”
“He is a broadcaster. He is jailed for libel.”
On the television breaking news later that day, we watched a police handcuffed (or was I just imagining it?) Gemma Bagayaua inside Newsbreak office on Tektite Tower in Makati for the story she wrote for Newsbreak about a man from Vigan who wielded power in the country. In my mind, I saw the metallic chain circled her delicate wrists almost like a bracelet, except that unlike a bracelet, those handcuffs drove home a shattering message to intimidate, to humiliate and to crush her spirit.
Gemma Bagayaua was not able to post bail that day. Her arrest warrant was served at the last hour. When Newsbreak tried to post bail, the Court officer in charge was already on his way home, so that, Gemma Bagayaua, who wasn’t able to avail of the night bail, went through the humiliation of prison life, if only for a night. For libel has been used to threaten and intimidate journalists in the country, to silence voices critical of those in power.
Lex Adonis, a Davao radio broadcaster who carried a story of an important government official allegedly caught in a hotel with a police major’s wife, did not bother to present his side in Court when it was his turn to refute the accusations hurled against him. He jumped bail and was tried in absentia. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He was already there two weeks when it crossed the minds of his colleagues to visit him in jail, not to question the Court’s decision, not to question the merit of the case but perhaps, to ask him why he didn’t bother answer the accusations against him. Why didn’t he ever bother presenting his side? Was it true he had approached quite a number of lawyers who turned him down because they did not want to fight his accuser, a powerful man very close to Malacanang? I thought I could take some shots of a broadcaster holding the cold prison bars that day only to find out as we approached the whitewashed, barbed wired prison walls that no, we can’t bring in our camera, we can’t bring in our cell phone, we can’t bring in our tape recorders, we can’t bring in our notebooks, we can’t bring in our ballpen. Most of all, we were not allowed to wear belts, we had to leave them to the guards at the gate. Our men companions were complaining that walking without belts made them feel naked. They were complaining that their pants might fall. The guards stamped Davao city jail marks upon our arms. After they were searched, the men disappeared inside the gate. It was our turn to enter but the guard stopped us. “We’re not allowed to inspect women here,” said the male guard, “It’s illegal.” We thought he was joking. He pointed to the woman cop standing in the corner. We approached the woman, who said as soon as we came face to face with her: “You have to strip.”
Silya Lektrika’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets. “Strip?! Why?!”
The woman cop shrugged her shoulders. “It’s the rule here,” she said, with an air of bored indifference. “You have to strip.”
Shocked, Silya Lektrika faced the guard, then, turned her back and faced the woman cop again. “What will you get if you see our bodies naked?” she asked. Afterwards, she turned to the woman cop again and asked, “But can we, at least, close this door while we strip?”
“No,” the woman guard said. “You don’t need to close the door. No one will watch you anyway.”

So, I started arguing with myself. I started arguing with Silya Lektrika, my woman companion. Our bodies---Silya Lektrika’s and mine---suddenly became the site of struggle, the site of war. What is it about our bodies that the world wants to see, anyway? Are women’s bodies keys to women’s soul? Do the jail guards harbor the illusion that they can conquer us by just looking at our bodies? But what is it about naked bodies, anyway?
“Well, it’s up to you if you don’t want to strip,” said the woman cop, turning her back to us. “But you won’t get inside the jail.”
So, I told myself to keep quiet. I have the ability to slip in and out of my body. I took my pants down to my knees and looked at the woman’s cop’s face for reaction but the woman cop was not even looking at me.
“Have we committed any crime that you subject us to this humiliation?” Silya Lektrika resumed asking the woman again. “We’re only here to visit a broadcaster jailed for libel. We haven’t even committed libel, yet, (for she was thinking, libel is a real threat for her) and what is libel, anyway, compared to murder, drug trafficking, embezzlement of public funds, corruption, cheating in an election, illegitimate rule, dictatorship, assassination, ethnocide, extra judicial killings, etc.?” But the woman cop wasn’t listening. It was only much, much later, when I finally reached home and watched the breaking news on TV to see another journalist arrested for libel that I realized what all these stripping naked, handcuffing of hands, and humiliations all about. It suddenly dawned on me that as long as libel remains to be a criminal offense in this country, journalists will continue to face the threat of going to prison like real criminals once they happen to antagonize powers-that-be in their stories. I can hear Silya Lektrika grumbling in my mind. "Who's afraid of the naked truth, anyway?" she asked.

What shall I tell this little boy?

(Today, February 23, 2007, is International Day of Action against Impunity. As we count the dead among us, we urge fellow journalists to wear black over the failure of government to solve the extra-judicial killings of journalists in the country, which has become more blatant by the day---a text message I got from the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines-Davao chapter, which sent me rummaging into an old clothes bin, in search of a black T-shirt. )
I found myself talking to this little boy very recently. He was 13 years old and our topic was another boy who was about his age last year and whom he never met: my son. In a manner that was quite surprising, he was sharing with me some of his 13-year-old wisdom, giving out secrets how every mother should treat a son and how to keep little boys like him from telling a lie. “You should always keep your cool,” he said. “No matter how angry you are. If he senses that you’re mad, that will probably scare him and then, he’ll begin to tell a lie.”
“But what really prompts young people to tell a lie?” I asked.
“Fear,” he said. “Nobody in his right mind would ever want to tell a lie. Except when he’s afraid.”
My conversation with him would have been just another normal conversation with another 13-year-old child, except that we were in a room full of people, talking about how his mother and father were killed by unidentified assailants on their way home from work in Kidapawan city last year. A copy of the forensic report had been passed around to me to the little boy and I felt like snatching that document away from him. If the diagram of the bodies, showing bullet holes, had been too disturbing for a grown up like me, who has never known his parents when they were alive, how much more for this little boy? But the boy calmly held up the paper before his eyes, carefully touching the little dots with his fingers, counting them over and over, playfully maybe, but with calm solemnity he alone can muster. Those dots represented bullet holes on his mother's body. Then, a copy of a newspaper article was passed around showing a picture of his mother and father during happier times when they were still alive. “Do you miss them?” I asked, reluctantly because I didn’t want to touch the little boy, where he must still be hurting.
“Wala man (Not at all),” he said quickly, shrugging his shoulders. His reply reassured me for a while. Amazing! I said to myself as I looked at him again, seeing no trace of sadness, no resentment on his face as we listened to someone talked about how the couple were slain in broad daylight, in one of the city’s most populous areas, even in front of the house of a government official and everybody was saying nobody saw anything. Where were the people then?
Then, I heard the little boy speak to me again in the same jovial tone I’ve been very familiar with another 13 year old at home, only that for the first time, I heard in his voice that tinge of disappointment that up to that time, he had been trying so hard to conceal. “Why?” he asked. “How come nobody comes out? Was there really no one there? Not one? Siaro? Nganong wa juy mosulti? (How come nobody speaks up)?
Today, I feel the urgency of the little boy’s questions. The world has a lot of explaining to do to him because his parents’ death has ceased to be just his parents’ death. It has assumed another meaning to us who are living; and to every little boy growing up in these turbulent times, where you can easily get killed just for being “different.” What shall I tell this little boy? Shall I tell him that his pain is not my pain? Shall I tell him that he’s alone? Shall I tell him that I’m not his mother, so, I can’t feel what he’s going through? Shall I tell him to keep quiet? Shall I tell him to just follow what everyone else is doing because being himself might be a big risk? Shall I tell him not to speak his mind? Shall I tell him it’s all right for someone to keep quiet just to stay alive? What shall I tell my little boy at home? What shall I tell every little boy and girl that I meet in the street? What shall I tell every little girl and boy in school? What am I telling them in my silence? Shall I-who call myself a journalist, a mother--disappoint them by refusing to speak up when my freedom is under attack, by setting aside and refusing to answer their very pressing, very important questions???

Under Siege!

When I unexpectedly bumped into another long lost friend over the weekend, I noticed that she was bringing along a copy of Andrew Marshall's Time magazine essay, "A Philippine Shame."
"Why on earth are you bringing that?" I asked Ruby Padilla for having missed her all these years, I was in a very jovial mood and was prepared to tease her about anything. But Ruby's answer shocked me.
"Because he was writing about me." I was puzzled because I had read the article earlier but did not see her name on it, so, I looked again and realized that the reason I did not recognize her was because she was using her husband's family name.
"Ruby Sison is waiting for someone to kill her," Marshall wrote in opening his essay. He met Ruby at a Kidapawan cemetery while paying their respects to slain journalist couple George and Maricel Vigo. George and Maricel were killed on their way home in June last year by unidentified assassins, one of the increasing number of journalist killings in the country that until now remain unsolved. For someone who had known Ruby back in our much happier, younger days in Kabacan, the simplicity of the statement struck me like a lightning bolt. The journalism profession is indeed, under attack and any self-respecting journalist could not afford to just sit around while state forces continue their assault on press freedom and freedom of expression, which is supposed to be the hallmark of a working democracy, the basic element in every journalist's quest for truth.

Bankerohan!

RIVER LIFE

Dead Woman Walking

Seven years ago, Ian Fermin Casocot wrote in very plain, simple words what took me years to figure out and too much beating around the bush to put on paper: “Only a dead woman is a happy woman,” he began his essay on women in Contemporary Drama, which made up our final exams in Prof. Philip Van Peele’s graduate class at Silliman University. “Everything in this world works to make woman very unhappy."
Then, he proceeded to name the women characters---all tragic and sad---in Contemporary Drama by numerous playwrights from Ibsen down to Brecht and others to illustrate his point. It’s only now, seven years later, that looking through myself as the closest flesh and blood woman I happen to know, I felt the full impact of Ian’s words. “Why hadn’t I written that?” I had said the first time I heard it read in class seven years ago. “Why hadn’t I seriously thought of that?” I am thinking now, as I---standing in a doorway after slicing tomatoes, grimly realized the truth I am forced to swallow. I wish I could take a glance at that piece of paper again where he had written that essay but I have taken a close look at my life and finally gotten its message: Only a dead woman is a happy woman. A woman who seeks her own happiness will not likely attain it in this life so that a woman who truly and seriously wants to find her happiness has to take solace in Death as her only means to attain it. How true!

Sweet Valentine

Bloody Workshop

Shortly after the New Year, I bumped into a long lost fellow John Bengan at the SM lobby when the mall was about to close and I was already rushing on my way to the door. I heard someone called out my name and when I saw (with delight!) it was John, my first question was, "Did you go to Ava's wedding?"
He shook his head and threw me one of those morose looks that only John can do. "I was alone, I was looking for you," he said. "But I told her I can't come."
I told John that I did not make it. That it was impossible for me to make it. "I wasn't able to tell her," I said, my shoulders slumped. "I was looking for you, too," I blurted out guiltily because I knew that if I really wanted to look for John, I could just have taken a ride to Mintal and ask for him inside the UP Mindanao campus where he is teaching; and knowing too, that if John really wanted to look for me, he could just have gone out of his campus to look for me downtown, where I'd surely be roaming the dirty streets of Davao, scavenging for news.
Back in the summer of 2003, John and I were fellows to the Iligan national writers' workshop, where we met Ava and three others from Luzon and six others from the Visayas and Mindanao. One has to go through a writers' workshop before one can understand how the bond among the fellows develops, but until now, I continued to be amazed by how easily we took to each other after the bloody whipping each of us got from all the writer panelists in that workshop. Of course, we had a hell of an adventure in some waterfall in the outskirts of Iligan but we also enjoyed exploring each other's mind inside our room, we didn't feel it necessary to go out and have a drink.
I could not forget how Ava and I had taken that elevator up to the third? fourth?? floor of Iligan city's Elenita Inn on our last night there. Our works were the last one to be read by the panel (which included the lovable but highly critical Chari Lucero and the equally critical Leoncio Deriada), who were about to make their judgment on our stories.
Inside the elevator I told Ava the sickening feeling we both feel at that moment was the same one you get when you're about to give birth to your second child. You already know how intense the labor and suffering that awaits you for the night, you wish you could run away and get out of there, but how can you get that child out of your body? Then, I heard Ava's thoughts echoing my own. "Why am I made to suffer for attempting to write fiction?" But we went through the ordeals of that passage rite and in my case, did not regret it a little bit.

Holy Smoke!

FORBIDDEN IN THE CITY: Don't Click!

Lost and Found

She said she had lost her poems. They were written a long, long, long, long time ago. But recently, she found them on the internet, this one posted by bisayanarsing:

Ginamos ug ang Kinabuhing Daplig-Dagat

ni Che Fiel

Bulanon.
Wa tay mahimo.
Si Nanay nanangpit
Igawas ang garapon
Kay panahon na nga makuhaan
Ang mga bolinaw
Nga usa ka bulan ng giasinan.
Way kuha,
Matud pa ni Tatay
Kay ang mga isda ga iyahay
Sa lapa lapa sa lawud gataguanay.
Nangaon mi tanan
Sa ilalom sa bulan
Pagkahuman nanggawas ang mga silingan -
Ang mga inahan,
Gatapok-tapok sa may pantawan.
Ang mga amahan,
Gatinagayay ug tuba sa may lapyahan
Samtang ang mga bata,
Gapatintero sa basa.

Ug si Nung Tusoy gasugod nag balak
Dinuyugan sa gitara ni Undo nga iyang anak
Samtang ang bulan
Galili sa mga manag-uyab
Nga naggitik-gitik ug gaginukuray
Sa ilalom sa baga nga mga dahon sa Talisay.
Kay ugma kinahanglan na sad maghubang
Para ang pukot unya maandam
Kay sa Kadlawon nga musunod
Ihatud na sad sa mga inahan
Ang tingkarol
Samtang palawig ang mga amahan
Sa mga lawud nga wa pa naadtuan.
Ingon ini akong mahinumduman
Sa dapit nga among giput-an
Lami,
Bisan ginamos among sud-an.


(Si Che usa ka babayeng balaknon. Sa una pirteng latagaw apan karun nahiuli na gyud. Ang iyang binisaya gidalit niya sa iyang kagikan nga anaa nanimuyo karun sa usa ka baryo sa likod sa kinatas-ang bungtod sa Zamboanga Peninsula, ginganlan ug Lumad. Gidalit pud niya ang iyang mga balak sa mga nagkadaiyang pwersa nga karun, sa iyang dughan ug alimpatakan, gasanggka ug gadula.)

Drowning in the Shallows

Stop.Look.Listen.

Caloi's story is also posted in davaotoday.

Mother, Ever Help Me.

I've been doing quite a number of repetitive, endless chores at home these days that I, numbed and dumbed with fatigue, could no longer write a simple sentence. Perhaps--and even if I don't really believe in it---I should borrow that verse in the Galatians that I once saw hanging on the toilet walls of the old Mindanews's office, something that I would never forget: "We should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired,we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, we should never get tired, for we shall reap the harvest."
I don't really believe in what it says about reaping the harvest. Some other people will surely get the chance to reap whatever harvest there might be, right before our very eyes, even before we could lift a finger, as what's happening every day. But at the time, when I'm numb and dumb with exhaustion, it pays to repeat any phrase even if it doesn't mean anything. It's only now that I begin to understand why the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church invented the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary; with its repetitive "Pray for us;" and the Novena of the Mother of Perpetual Help, with its perpetual, "Mother, ever help us."
For the damned women of the past centuries (and now) drowning under the load of heavy, repetitive tasks at home, repeating the phrase, "Mother, ever help us," may spell the difference between madness and sanity.

Her Father's Daughter

I am trying to write about her father's daughter except that she's in Manila right now (I imagine--and I'm just imagining this--that she must have left in a huff???), I wouldn't know. I love reading this, though.

An Excuse for not Blogging

The last 20 days, I have been nursing my five year old asthmatic Sean back to health. I keep missing press conferences, coverages and all types of writing assignments just to make sure that he has his share of protein, fresh fruits, vegetables to finally put an end to his reliance on antibiotics and all those medicine. The last 20 days I thought I was successful. In 2006, he got sick every month. He got sick on February 24, 2006, the 10th year anniversary of the People Power Revolution that ousted a dictator and the day that an unpopular President declared the country under a state of emergency and began her crack down on critical press. When everybody was covering stories about the ironic twist of events, I was massaging Sean's back---a thing any mother would normally do.
I wasn't complaining, of course. After all, with God's help, I was already starving to death. But in the last 20 days, I thought all my instincts were right. I finally conquered the monster that keep hovering over us in the last three years (his attacks started at the age of two.) I had finally saved him from bad eating habits, fatigue, dust, extreme weather condition, weapons of mass destruction.
The last 20 days, I thought. Until last night when the spasm of coughing was back again and I realized we're back to SQUARE ONE. I thought, when will this finally end???

Davao's San Pedro Cathedral

Among the first structures that the early missionaries put up in this place when the (Christian) settlers first arrived in the late 1840s and pushed the heroic Datu Bago deep in the hinterlands of Waan and beyond. The shape of this Cathedral used to puzzle me until recently, when I finally decided it is shaped like a boat. When you happen to stand right at the gate of Camp Domingo Leonor police barracks just across the street, you could almost say, only the masts are missing!
By posting it here I don't mean to glorify the spirit of conquest that this Cathedral may stand for (if only to be blunt and honest about it) but only to reflect on that time of the past that hasn't gone away.As if to straighten out the rough edges of history, some groups who want to make their message clear love to bomb this Cathedral during Davao's most turbulent times, so, until now, as I drop by to light a candle sometimes, I can't help looking around just to see if it's not one of those days again. In the good ol' days of the early 90s, Sunstar reporter Charles Maxey used to love to recount to me how Digong , as what the media like to call Davao city mayor Rodrigo Duterte, had made a 60 year-old man accused of raping his 10 year old granddaughter to walk down San Pedro street to the Cathedral on his knees. I did not see it. I was still with Sunstar Cebu at that time but for Charles, it was a great spectacle that seemed to speak something about him and his people.

Dark Clouds over Davao Gulf

Can you blame me if this is how the New Year looks to me? After all, the Siberian winds are here, blanketing our days with the cold and damp. Gray clouds and rain-soaked streets dominate the landscape. But did it ever cross our mind that this kind of weather is rather late in coming? This is supposed to come in December but in our most recent December, the heat was terrible. Environmentalists have been pinning the blame on global warming but for some of us, it was more than that. It was a killer weather and it was hardly the Christmas we imagined, at least, for some of us. Those who were afflicted by that overwhelming sadness that tend to visit the poor and the oppressed during the happiest part of the year have succumbed to disease and die. I did not manage to die, though. I merely drifted in and out of consciousness while happy Christmas came and went away. In the afternoon of December 25, I was lucky enough to awaken to see eight messages on my phone, one of them from the most beloved Mandaya Moore, but then, it was too late for a Merry Christmas!
Amidst the dark clouds, however, the New Year promises new hope. First, it was the day when five year old Sean finally got well. For refusing to take food for days, he looked gaunt and tired as we reluctantly strained our ears to listen to the proverbial ringing of another year. Karl finally turned 14, despite our absence. Now, as we try to catch up on reading assignments, re-discover a crazy mixture of Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean and Sesame street characters, we begin to nurse a fledgling new hope for the year. Maybe, the grasses will continue to grow afterall.

Thank You, Firedog!

For opening us to a hundred ways of seeing this part
of the Davao Bankerohan river.

The Horse Talks Back!

Suddenly, the road behind me and the road before me has become life itself and I have turned into a horse. I am a beast living at the mercy of your whip, which dictates upon me which way I should go up and down the cliff, left or right, without much choice because I am a beast. You thought you’re free to put all your lousy burdens upon my back, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for you to do. You don’t even stop to think of how much you’ve been depriving me of my nature, when you profit from all my work.
You want to tame the beast in me when my bestiality has always been the best thing in me. All I want is to run wild in the fields, feel the breeze upon my mane, and give back to nature what nature has given me but your whip and your reins are now preventing me. Don’t talk to me about being grateful to High Heavens for creating my beautiful mane when I don’t even own my own body. My whole body is for sale and you’ve been selling me so many times ever since I became a horse. You’ve been selling my labor up and down the cliff to people who can’t even scale a simple cliff with their own feet. For they got money, of course.
My market value, you measure, by how fast I can go over that cliff and back again, by how much load I can carry, by how many other young horses I can bring to the world, by how soon my hooves can bring a lazy man to his home, by how much my little body can take all the burdens and toil and abuses imaginable. All for a piece of paper that I can’t even chew and swallow! Sometimes, just to make more money, you even come up with such an outrageous concept as improving my pedigree!
Sometimes, of course, you loosen your hold of the reins just enough to let me go up this difficult cliff unhampered. But most of the time, I can’t even take a rest in this beautiful landscape to grab something to eat. There are times when I look at my hooves and think how powerful they are compared to your delicate frame. Why did I ever allow you to push and order me around? You, who can’t even give one decent kick to kill a beast, what quirk of fate had put you where you are now to lord me over? And how stupid can I get to allow you to?

Lessons from the Bagobo Horseman

PART THREE

How did a horse get a full grasp of the mathematical formula of gravitation? Or, was it born with an innate understanding of the principles of levity? Yet, as it moves its rider to higher grounds, the horse musters all its strength and speed as if the universal mind has stamped upon its body the intelligence to understand and defy gravity. There’s only the rider and the horse on the way up the cliff. No other world exists; not even the landscape, which at that height, can be so fatally captivating! But a moment’s inattention can prove too dangerous. The rider has to time all her movements with the horse, has to become one with the horse in mind and body. She has to let go of all controls and trust everything to the horse, which at that moment becomes an embodiment of wisdom; allowing her a glimpse of the eternal mystery of life and death in a flash of a second.