Happy New Reading Year!

2013 left while I was absorbed in the world of books: cleaning the shelves that have not been touched for years, discovering the titles, some of them still unopened since the day I bought them (a silent catastrophe!), dusting, covering the new ones, changing the covers of the old ones, fingering their pages, studying the moths, the fungi that had settled, leaving specks of browns on the pages; turning them over to find the traces of time or simply to note the scratching, or marks or writings someone left on the pages. But most of all, reading! Flitting from Annie Proulx’s "Accordion Crimes" to Alice Munro’s "Moons of Jupiter," to David Berlinski’s "A Tour of the Calculus," to James McPherson’s "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution," to Susan Sontag’s “Where the Stress Falls,” I could never get enough of them, I could not get over them; could never forget them, could never leave them alone, could never stop myself from going back to them over and over and again and again, couldn’t stop myself from talking about them, from exclaiming, from laughing, from crying, from quoting passages from them, from ejaculating, from dreaming, from thinking. I know I could never completely free myself of them, they become a regular part of myself; and so, as 2014 comes, I promise never to neglect myself completely as to deprive myself of them. I look forward to another year of secret, sneaky, passionate reading!

Musings under the Pagan Tree

I used to tell myself, if I had the money, I wouldn’t waste it on some huge, extravagant Christmas tree such as this, with all of its stars and pendant balls flashing gold and silver all over, trying to attract all kinds of luck and money and fake friendships and greed. This year, I told my sister, who said she faithfully kept such a Christmas tree in her home, “Why don’t you want to make a political statement? Rebel against the established tradition? Make a Christmas tree that totally overhauls their concept of a Christmas tree, something that will disturb them, something that will shock and awe, or blow them away, something that will completely demolish their idea of a Tree?” She listened to me, as if, to consider. “How?” She asked. But we were in a hurry then and instead of waiting for my reply, she began telling me me how, year after year, she had faithfully stuck to the tradition of the luxurious Christmas tree, so huge, it looms over you larger than life; its golden balls and golden stars so resplendent and decadent they never ceased to amaze the neighbors and all the guests who came to her house, year after year. "They were unerringly attractive," she said, as she mused over her own version of the talk-of-the-town-tree for years. So, I gleaned from her gestures, she could not easily give up that idea of a tree, it was the tree that served her purpose, it was what she considered the right tree for her, looming over her and over everyone who beheld it to stand for what it was supposed to stand. But I wanted another kind of tree and I knew it would take an extraordinary amount of courage, another grit of spirit, and another perspective, to put up a Tree that will overturn this concept of the tree, to crush and challenge commonly-held beliefs and assumptions and turn the world upside down. It would take another kind of bravery to come up even with an idea of such a tree, and then, to turn the idea into flesh!

Spanish Lessons

At the Bookshop, I caught sight of Herman Hesse’s “Gertrude,” (a translation, at a dirtcheap price of P70), grabbed it, put it on top of the bantam-sized, unabridged copy of DH Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” [[the 1981 and 1993 film versions of which I just watched very recently, deep in the night, while Ja and Sean snored only a few feet away from me]]. Tucking both books safely in my arms, I cast my eyes upon the rummage bin and caught sight again of Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” another irresistible sight I pretended not to see, as I kept turning some more books, inspecting their covers, and unwittingly unearthed Marguerite Duras’s “Four Novels,” and “Colette, Una Vida,” a Spanish translation of Herbert Lottman’s “Colette, A Life,” a book I suddenly desperately wanted to buy more because of my obsession with Spanish than because of my obsession with the writings of the French author Gabrielle Sidonie Colette. I remember Sengthong and Prateehba years ago, laughing, when I arrived at the Esteban Abada dorm, showing my loot of cheap Spanish books I bought on sale at the Instituto de Cervantes, complete with stems of red American roses I gave to the girl at the nearby shoe repair shop because I can’t bear to bring them on my long ride back to the dorm, where Seng, astonished to see all the Spanish books bought at dirt cheap prices, asked, “So, you read Spanish?” and me, correcting him, “I want to read Spanish, that’s why, I bought them.” Prateesh laughed as Seng, shocked, retreated to his room to read about the American Founding Fathers. After that, I started reading my basic Spanish, once in a while. Even without my six units in Basic and Advanced Spanish Lessons back in college, I thought Spanish was quite an easy language to learn for Filipinos like me, because, except for a few consonants and some subtle vowel sounds, you could not really be far too wrong about its pronunciation. Yet, I never really had enough time to keep at it, I live in what has always been a tough and tumble kind of world, always on the run, night and day, sometimes, even in my sleep, I feel I'm still running, chasing the news; so, I never had the chance to stop, think, ruminate, and learn Spanish. Years ago, when my Spanish obsession started, Ja asked, and he has been asking ever since, what kind of madness has driven me to suddenly want to learn Spanish, when it used to be the most hated subject back in college, discarded from the regular curriculum in later years because people thought it was useless? I decided my yearning to learn the language had something to do with all those Spanish authors who had some original works in Spanish, whether it be Rizal, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz or Jorge Luis Borges. They were never really “useless” to me. I came up with quite a lot more reasons: The original edicts to the colony were once written in Spanish, remember? Our early oppression had been in Spanish. Perhaps, my yearning also had something to do with my desire to know what happened. Or does it have something to do with a penchant to break the images in the mirror: how can you break them if you have never seen them intact?

Ode to the Fallen YlangYlang

They call the YlangYlang the perfume tree because of the fragrance its flowers exude in the rainforest. They extract the fragrant oil as an ingredient in the making of expensive perfumes, among them, the famous Channel 5, concocted by the designer Coco Channel in the early 20s. The tree’s fragrance is known to blend well with quite a number of floral scents. Environmentalists call the tree’s penchant to attract insects, rather heroic, because it saves precious crops from the damage. YlangYlang is known to thrive naturally in the Philippines and Indonesia, and an environmentalist friend told me, they’re using this tree to rehabilitate riverbanks. These, I only learned later, after my first encounter with the tree. I already had this heavy and oppressed feeling when I think of the rainforest in that place that people call Upper. The last time I went there, I was surprised to see a whole tree, perhaps more than 50 years old, lying along the stretch of the river bank, like a corpse of an unknown person no one cared about. “Who fell that old tree?” I asked the workhand named Jimmy, upon whose hands Pa had entrusted the care of his farm. “Why is it left lying there?” J said it was a “useless” tree, totally of “no consequence, at all,” since its trunk would crack at the touch of the chainsaw. How could you measure the worth of a tree on how hard or how soft it could take the teeth of a chainsaw? I was about to ask. He said he had mistaken the tree for another tree he wanted cut for the wood he needed to build an extension to the pugon, the oven where he cook the coconut meat into copra. He also admitted he knew nothing about trees at all and couldn’t recognize one from the other, except perhaps, the hard timber trees he fell one after another to sell to somebody I did not know. “That’s criminal,” I said, “You took this tree for another tree and now, you leave it rotting on the banks.” I failed to point out to him that his admission was contradictory. How could he say the tree was a “useless” tree when he even hardly knew the tree? The idiot even stopped me from going near what remained of the fallen tree, which we can only view from an embankment overlooking Bal’wanan River. He said it was too steep to go down, I might fall; and the other way was too long and too roundabout, a too tiresome way to go. But I went, anyway. I literally crawled down the embankment, trying to keep my balance. I didn’t look at the tree because I knew I wouldn’t recognize it. Just like the idiot, I was also ignorant about trees; but unlike him, I did not think any tree was a useless tree. I was boiling mad because no one planted that tree, it was a natural flora in that rainforest; it survived the era of the logging and it had stood bravely and fiercely on its own in the forest for years. But then a complete idiot and a madman came down to fall it. He kept saying to me it was just an YlangYlang, a totally “useless” tree and this infuriating statement keeps ringing in my ears ever since, with alarm and urgency!

Book Lust

Just like any other healthy tree, my bookpile is growing very fast everyday, but no one is reading them yet. At least, officially: don't call my sneak-reading any legitimate form of reading because they're not supposed to be counted. I am still so busy getting my life back on track, trying to cover stories to get me back in circulation; cooking meals to test the limits of my herbs to Ja and Sean's discriminating tastes; running to the kanto, pretending to buy something at the corner grocery store and secretly hoping to lose some weight; sorting and re-arranging the clutter on my table, marking all my reporter's notebooks with dates and subjects of coverage, recording and remembering dreams, thinking about the rainforest in B'la, conjuring things. There will always be sometime at night when everyone is asleep and I turn on the lamp on my table, open the pages of Edith Wharton's Buccaneer and I will be transported back to another time, another place. Then, I will cease to be myself. I will be transformed into someone else I hardly know.

Running and Reading

I ran after the last page of Colette’s "Cheri and The Last of Cheri," because Ja pushed me out of doors. This was a Sunday in October 2013, a day after I ran in the morning of Saturday, when it was already too late, the sun was up and very hot, and I did not know whether I was sweating because of the exertion or because of the heat. I would have turned back home but Ja wanted me to run to buy pandesal, so, I ran under the hot seven o’clock sun and fulfilled my mission; I brought home 10 pieces of pandesal for Ja and Sean, who did not like to eat pandesal anyway. That Sunday, I spent the entire day reading Colette; and when I got to the last page of the sad, sad story [[which meant that Colette was a serious writer]] it was already dark and I reminded myself I was supposed to run and when Ja heard me, he pushed me out of doors because running, he said, is a lonely enterprise, I got to face the fact all on my own. So, when I was running I started thinking of myself and the classes that occupied much of my time that semester and how, I was facing the prospect of not getting paid (I got paid, anyway) because I failed to process my papers because I had so many things to do and did not have enough time to do them. I also felt the students, most of them, were taking my classes for granted and suddenly, I was sick and tired of all the papers I had to check, I wanted to give up because I needed to get my writing back on track. I said I should strive to get my writing back on track by lining down all the stories I needed to write.

Getting back on my feet

Just like those houses that lay devastated after the typhoon, I will pick up the pieces again, one by one, taking care to mend those which can still be mended and throwing out all those pieces which had to be discarded. I should sort out and pay attention only to the most important things in my life and avoid wasting time with certain types of people.

Morning in Upper B'la

Memories of Tacloban

Remembering Tacloban is not really pleasant thing to me: I accompanied the Dork, who had to cover his face and body with an old blanket all the way from Cebu, because he had the chicken pox all over his body. He couldn’t bear the treatment at the boarding house, perhaps, he felt a little betrayed and aghast at all his friends avoiding him; so, he decided to go home to Tacloban. But running a high fever and with such a bad headache, he decided he might find it hard to take the trip alone so he asked me to go with him. Yes, I was the last remaining friend of the Dork at his moment of distress. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from my student activist years, still very recent at this time on my first trip to Tacloban, was never to leave a friend in distress; though, I wrongly applied it on the Dork. He appeared grateful at that time, of course! Who would not be? He should have thanked the students’ movement, instead! We traveled all the way from Cebu to Tacloban, the Dork, wearing a jacket; and eventually wrapping his head and face with a blanket, while strangers on the boat, and at the bus line, stared at him, turning away in disgust when they caught a glimpse of all the blisters on his face. Yet, we managed to find our way and reached the gate in Tacloban. A seasoned writer usually knew she had to stop writing exactly at the point where she was supposed to stop. I did not have this wisdom at that time. I should have left the Dork at his doorstep, hurried back to Cebu as fast as I can, and went on with my life as usual. But I did not. The Dork made a speech about gratitude, respect, and such abstract and motherhood things, persuaded me to stay when what I really wanted was to run away. I was too boneless to say no, however. The moment they opened the gate, and took both of us inside, everything went wrong. Very wrong, indeed!

What is happening to me?

I was walking with Tu Nguyen Ngoc along San Pedro street last Friday when I told her we were about to pass by a good bookshop I have not visited for a long time. She said she wanted to go. So, walking past the security guards who poked into our bags as if we were hiding something, we entered one of the shops of Lachmi, a (pseudo)mall along San Pedro, and entered the lone bookshop whose titles on the shelves engrossed us as soon as we arrived: the first books that caught my eyes were on climate change and changes in the weather, before I strayed again and caught a glimpse of Sidonie Gabrielle Colette’s “Gigi,” a translation from French, of course. Tu and I were so absorbed with the books before us when suddenly, we felt one or two teenagers arriving, scattering some of the books in the bin. Then, just as suddenly, the whole place was already swarmed by noisy teenagers looking for something. Do you have a title by Shin-Shinwa, what’s his name, Shinwa Abebie? One of them asked the bookstore owner. “Chinua Achebe?” I asked, looking up from Donald Hall’s “Eagle Pond,” “Yes, yes, that’s it,” the girl said, turning to me, “Have you seen it, Ma’m?” “'The Man of the People,’ Mam?” “How about the book by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ma’m?” Another one asked, so, I replied, “I saw the Scarlet Letter, somewhere over there,” pointing to the shelves where a mix of classics, contemporary and even business and economics titles were displayed. “But I’m looking for "The House of Seven Gables, Ma’m.” “I haven’t seen the House of Seven Gables, so far,” I said. “What is it about, Ma’m?” she asked, as another one said, “I’m looking for ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ Ma’m, have you seen it?” “The novel by Victor Hugo?” I asked, wondering about whose translation, and if high school students were already made to tell the difference of one translation from another. “Yes, yes! By Victor Hugo, how come you knew, Ma’m?” “Are you a teacher, Ma’m?” “How come you knew all these things?” I was taken aback.

Required Reading

But before this, I still have some unpleasant things to do: Enter the university gate and find the way to the Library. Face up to what I failed to do 17 years ago. Chat. Go down to the ground floor, finding the way to the bookstore. Ask whatever questions needed asking. What are the latest books they have? Go back and find the way to the CR. It wouldn't be too far. Find out whatever it is you need to find out. Swallow the bitter pill. It couldn't kill. You simply needed to swallow something to cure the pain or the itchiness or the scalp problems. It won't last a minute, anyway, and it wouldn't be that bad. After that, the pain will be gone. It would work out fine, you'd be better for it, I promise. So, take it, take it, you, reluctant self! You'd be okay!

My Growing Book Pile

Remember Ampatuan

Just Plain Selfie

Life Moves On Very Fast

It's now the start of another semester but I can't yet return to ruminate about life in the university because I am simply assailed by quite a number of writing assignments and other things I need to do before the end of the year. After November came with the news of typhoon Yolanda, life simply moved on very fast I really had some trouble catching up. A day or two after Yolanda (international codename Haiyan), German journalist Martina Merten, who used to be my Health Journalism teacher at ADMU, emailed, asking for some news about the typhoon's impact in the Visayas because she said, they were only getting almost the "same kind of stories" in Germany. I wonder what she meant by the "same kind of stories" they were getting, and I never had the chance to ask her where in Germany was she reporting from. I merely provided her links to some coverage by journalists who actually covered the disaster because I was only here in Davao, and it took a long while before the stories from the typhoon's survivors came flowing in.

The Saddam of Sitio Calinogan

Over a hundred people hid under this Saddam truck at the height of Supertyphoon Pablo (international codename Bopha) in this hinterland sitio Calinogan, barangay Casosoon in Monkayo town of Compostela Valley after the typhoon made its landfall in Baganga, Davao Oriental. I did not believe it at first: over a hundred people squeezed themselves together under this truck? I asked again after they told me. “Yes,” said one or two women, while the men nodded. “There were whole families there, children, women, everyone! We can’t find any stronger structure around, the wind was very strong, threatening to blow away our houses. Some of us who were near the cliff, squeezed our bodies against the cliff wall so that we won’t get blown by the wind,” said the villagers who have lived in the area for so long but had never experienced being buffeted by a typhoon.

Pablo came upon this elevated sitio (how many thousand feet?) overlooking Nabunturan. The Dibabawuns live here for centuries. At five to six in the morning of December 4, 2012, they said, it was so dark (or white?), they could not see anything, they can only feel the very strong wind. I listened to their heart-breaking story of the storm: the houses that were blown away, the desperate search for food and water, the hand to mouth existence while they waited for their livelihood to recover. When I saw the devastation of Tacloban in the aftermath of Supertyphoon Yolanda (international codename Haiyan), I remember this community and their Saddam truck. How long can our people recover now that we are being buffeted by typhoons and other disasters, year after year?

Thank You, Reader!

I'm about to surpass the highest number of posts I've ever done in the history of this blog.

Remembering Doris Lessing

When I told them at the breakfast table the sad news that Doris Lessing has passed away, Sean suddenly looked up, asked me what it was that she wrote that he was familiar with? I started. “You? Familiar with Doris Lessing?” He said, yes, nodding his head. “She is very familiar, what was it that she wrote?” So, I thought: What was it that she wrote that a 12-year-old must have heard? She wrote The Golden Notebook, which I did not finish reading, so, it wasn't very likely that a 12-year-old could be familiar with it; or Martha Quest, which I kept hidden among my books at home; or, was it, The Grass is Singing? But it was a woman's story, how could a boy be familiar with it? Or was it Under my Skin? which was an autobiography? Or, some of the African Stories? No, I never shared anything about Africa with him, I could not understand Africa so well; besides, there were a lot of strange names that he might have found funny when the stories were quite serious. “The Grass is Singing?” I asked. “No,” he said, “Something you kept talking about. Something you never could stop talking.” Aaaaaaah, I said, finally remembering. “Briefing for a Descent into Hell!”

The Story of Kialeg

Years ago, in the course of researching the town of Magsaysay for a Canadian-funded book project focused on Mindanao's five poorest towns, I came upon the story of Kialeg. He was a B'laan warrior-hero whose legendary exploits his people remembered well. I reveled at this discovery because I knew the old name of Magsaysay used to be Kialeg; and despite the government's attempt to replace the town's name with that of a Philippine president who died in a plane crash, people never stopped calling the place Kialeg. I thought that in a place like Magsaysay, the government may have imposed another history upon the people, but in the people's heart, Kialeg lives. I could no longer remember whether I heard about what Kialeg did for his people that his name continued to stick. But a river running its course somewhere in town was also named after him. In fact, some town officials who never knew anything about Kialeg, the B'laan hero, thought that the old town was named after a river. But I had a discovery when I visited Pa's farm in Upper B'la last Sunday: The creek, we previously thought as dead because it was often dry most months of the year; the creek that cuts across Pa's piece of land, is actually Kialeg on his way downtown! Nice meeting you, warrior hero!

Carried Away

Sometime in 1992, when I made a total mess of myself, I half-expected, even fervently wished, my family would bail me out from a monster called Fax Elorde. Of course, you could never expect such a thing so, I suffered the agony in silence. Mirisi. I did not say that to myself, though. I was still too young to understand I was in a real big trouble for life. I put up a brave face, invented stories, pretended everything was all right although Fax Elorde was a total asshole, so stuffy, so full of himself, so full of hot air. It’s only much, much later when his son would describe him as “just a practical guy, totally devoid of talent” that I enjoyed a hearty laugh; but at that time, I particularly wished I had a rich Uncle to kick him out the door, turn him upside down, cover his whole body with catshit, tell him to go to hell and get lost forever. I toiled from eight o’clock until midnight and walked the deserted street home, tense, anxious, worried and always went to bed totally exhausted.