Just a Glimpse of Iligan

We climbed up the top floor of the other building (what do you expect if you're with an excited bunch of photojournalists?) Pam, whose friend showed us the way, was always willing to climb anything; she's the type who won't think twice of climbing the highest tree in a jungle just to get the vantage point of a photograph, any photograph; as she did when she climbed the unfinished building inside the MSU campus to take a perspective shot of Lake Lanao. Here, we took what Ja and Sean would refer to as the sniper's view of the Iligan City Hall; even as I was trying to suppress my inherent fear of heights as we inched closer and closer to the edge.

Anatomy of Pablo

I was trying to organize my files when I came upon the photographs I've taken in one of the series of stories I covered in the aftermath of the typhoon Pablo. The photographs showed me something that I did not see at the time I was covering the stories. Years after the killer typhoon that ravaged Mindanao towards the tail-end of 2012, I feel the need to look back and bravely take account of what I did and what I failed to do in those stories.

Another View from Our Office Window

Everybody is looking forward to the weekend while I'm still trying to cope with my writing backlogs.

Jeepney seen from a Jeepney

I know that if I show this picture to Ja, he would stare at it very briefly and then, swiftly, he would look away.  Oftentimes, he'd let out a sigh. A long,long sigh. If I'd ask him, what's wrong? Isn't this picture cute? Ja would not even utter a word. He would just give me one long, sorrowful look, and then, he'd go back to his business. Ja is my photo-critic and I exactly know what he wants in a picture.  He wants a picture that tells a story; the kind of pictures with people in them doing some actions; of course, I don't need to say that they should be well composed, the rule of thirds and all, you know, the kind that gets published in newspapers. But I don't know how to make myself want to take those pictures to please Ja. I only want to please myself.

Learning to breathe

I said I have to run more often and delight at the stares of women at the pharmacy after I enter their air-conditioned premises, rivulets of sweat streaming down my face and neck, wetting my shirt. Do I really love to shock people? I should run round and round the park only to test how stubborn and how hard-headed I could get. If I give up that easy, I'd be a wimp; running would save me from being one. Just think of them men, who takes to speed and running to measure a person's worth. I should run. I should make it a point to run--or walk? If only to study character, in reality and fiction. Should I listen to people as they talk while they walk? Can eavesdropping be a kind of brainstorming? I should talk to myself. I should study my breath as I run, discover my own pace, listen to my body to avoid injuring a foot or a leg. Talk to my body, calmly and quietly, just like the way you talk to your soul. If you have one. Breathe.

Reading Maryanne Moll

In her blog, writer Maryanne Moll talks about the passing of her grandmother she fondly calls Bita, and then, I discover a lot more about Bita in her Palanca-winning story, "At Merienda" that I did not notice before, since I've only been a distance reader; though, for quite a time, I've been faithfully reading her blog, which I discovered years ago when she wrote something that really made me cry. I've been searching for what it was that she wrote--it must have been something about writing and the self, which used to be my biggest angst--but I could no longer find that early post that really introduced me to her. She had a way of deleting her posts sometimes, immediately after posting them (which, I understand, because I also do it a lot of times), but my all-time favorites are her posts on Lost Ground about her attempts to write in the Bikol language (again, folks, Bikol is not a dialect!); My Street, Myself, where she described a particular street in Manila where she lived for a while; and other really sensual kind of writing such as this. 

Where we stayed in Iligan

It did not feel like a mobile newsroom at all; with its spacious living room, complete with a cozy sofa, its kitchen we used as the function room, separated by a glass wall from the living room and the small corridor that led to our rooms. The whole thing almost felt like one huge summer vacation house; and even with the opening of classes in June, it was not really too difficult to believe  that and we would have enjoyed the idea, except that our favorite editor was there with us, always reminding us of our schedules and the (impossible) deadlines to meet; and so, my intestines started to knot; and I bumped my head and body on the glass walls many times on my way to my room as I struggled, body and soul, to let the stories out.

Suddenly missing Marawi

I spent the whole week last week tagging along our group of photojournalists involved in Panglantaw Mindanao's mobile multimedia newsroom in the cities of Iligan and Marawi.  After our trip to  Lake Lanao on the third day, I remember the downcast skies, the ramshackle buildings hovering over us, the sudden darkness blanketing the streets as the car  inched through the thickness of the Marawi traffic. At our back, PM editor Luz Rimban telling Toto, seated in front, what kind of photos she would need; and as our vehicle stalled in the traffic, I heard the urgent clicking of camera shutters, rhythmic and fast; the din of excited voices from the road mingling with the sounds of the market. I looked up to see Toto and Mick sticking their heads out of the car windows to capture whatever pictures they can take of the busy public market, the children cheering at the sight, the people streaming out to the streets, rushing home under the threat of impending rain. The experience contrasted with the total calm, the peace and quiet of the King Faisal Mosque as soon as we reached the Mindanao State University campus.

Mother Tongue

Somebody commented how hard and how awkward I've been talking in Tagalog with Pam, which jolted me a bit because I did not realize I was already talking in Tagalog, and that was very bad. I've switched again into a strange language instead of sticking it out with my own mother tongue, which is pure Bisaya, oftentimes referred to by the miseducated and the unlettered as a "dialect," instead of a language. But why is it that every time I hear someone talk in that other language imposed upon us by the central government in Manila, a language that is totally alien to me, my mind automatically switch into default mode and I end up talking in a language which I have no control?  I only got to meet Pam inside our office, where she hangs around,  and also as part of the photojournalists' group in Mindanao, where I happened to be the odd one out; and although Pam had somehow gotten used to the language spoken in Bukidnon and Davao after staying here for maybe a couple of years, she still continue to use the tongue she used to grew up with in Binondo.  Colette and I used to talk about this before.  Colette, who left the university life in Manila for an adventure life in Davao (or was it really an adventure, Colette?) used to tell me, albeit secretly, how to intimidate an overbearing Bisaya. She used to revert to her Manila Tagalog in a subtle, almost natural way, and almost unconsciously, the overbearing one would revert into Tagalog, expressing it so badly, she'd end up humiliated and out of control.  How we used to tease C for failing to master Cebuano despite her years of staying here; and how convenient it is for her to suddenly revert to her Mother Tongue to conquer an enemy! As we used say inside Dr. Ceres Pioquinto's class in Silliman U, "language is a power game."  Where in that power game is Cebuano, and what does Tagalog do to keep its dominance?

This was what the awardwinning writer Lakambini Sitoy once said about the English language, the invisibility of Cebuano and the dominance of the so-called national language imposed upon us by the central government in Manila. (By the way, Sitoy, who made this speech in 2001 before a Dane audience, writes her stories in English):"I write in English not for political reasons, not to make a statement, but because this is the only language that I am really good at. Because I grew up in the Visayas, my other language was Cebuano. However, because the central government in Luzon dictated that "Filipino", the national language, be based on Luzon's Tagalog, "Filipino" was always an alien language to me. I learned it through my grammar books in grade school but it was never a valid way to express the way I felt. I only learned Tagalog -- conversational Tagalog -- at age 22, when I moved to Manila. Up to now I cannot speak nor write in formal Tagalog: our educational system puts a premium on English, which was always a ready fall-back. And as for Cebuano, it is invisible, virtually expunged, from the educational system. Quite unfair, since more Filipinos speak it than any other indigenous language. I can speak it, but was never taught the formal rules of spelling, syntax, grammar -- nor were we exposed to exemplary writing in Cebuano while in school."

Stewed Pieces of Slippers and Shards of Broken Glass

Political Activist Remembers the Soeharto Era

 

Jakarta, Indonesia--At first glance, the painting on the wall showed the feet of what must be a sick man, covered by a blanket, beside a small basket of corn grains, next to what could be a bowl of soup. ButTedjabayu Sudjojono, 70, son of Indonesia’s renowned painter, shook his head and said this was not what the painting is all about.

The man whose feet were shown sticking out of the striped blanket was not just any other sick man. He was a political prisoner, jailed for his political beliefs under the Soeharto regime.  He was probably ill but the bowl of soup next to his feet did not contain nourishment to eat.

Sudjojono, who spent 14 years of his life in prison under the regime of former Indonesian president Soeharto, said the painting depicted a political prisoner imprisoned on Buru island, a large prison camp used to house 12,000 political prisoners after Soeharto came to power. Beside the prisoner’s feet, the small basket contained 120 pieces of boiled corn grains, the only food the prisoners were made to eat the entire day, every day during their stay in prison.

Instead of a delicious soup, the bowl contained stewed pieces of slippers and shards of broken glass that the prisoners were made to eat or sip. 

He said they had to endure this ration day after day, throughout their stay, so bad many of their friends died and only a few of them survived.
Of course, he said by way of explaining it, who would sip or drink the water that had pieces of dirty slipper parts and shards of glass floating in it? But after long hours staying handcuffed and all, they became so thirsty that they began sorting and taking out the shards of glass from the water in their desperation to drink--and that was how slowly, they began to die.

Tedjabayu, who took us to his house in the outskirts of Jakarta two days after the April 9 general elections, said a former political detainee gave the painting to him as a gift on the day of his son’s circumcision in Java, long after they were released from prison. “About 2,000 of them came, I was so surprised,” he said.

The painting reminded them of theordeal they once shared: how, in their hunger, they had to sort out and take away the shards of glass and the slippers, hoping to drink from a bowl of soup. “We used to joke about it, because without the joke, we only had death and the grave,” he said.

An estimated 1 million people died, most of them suspected Communists and their sympathizers, when Soeharto assumed power in 1965, overthrowing the Soekarno regime.

Still a student activist when he was picked up and brought to prison, Tedjabayu had endured Buru island for four months before he was moved on to Nusa Kambangan, a maximum security prison off the southern coast of Java island and then, on to a series of other prisons and finally to the military prison camp called Ambarawa until his release in 1979.

As Indonesians trooped to the polls on April 9 this year for the general elections, the outcome of which would determine Indonesia’s presidential polls in July, Tedjabayu expressed concern over the prospect that personalities associated with the old Soeharto regime would usher in the military’s return to power.

At least two of the top three contending parties in Indonesia are fielding personalities with links to the previous regime; namely: Soeharto’s former political party Golkar; and its breakaway, the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), which will be fielding PrabowoSubianto, a former special forces commander and former son-in-law of Soeharto, as its political bet for president in the July elections.

Indonesia’s election law only allows political parties which win 25 per cent of the votes in the national elections, or 20 per cent of the total seats in the House of Representatives (HR), to field their presidential candidates for the presidential elections.

“This election is important for us,” said Tedjabayu, who admitted he did not vote in Indonesia’s previous three elections, disappointed by the failure of the reformasi to usher meaningful change to the lives of Indonesian people. “I did not vote because in doing so, I would only support a government that is not pro-democracy and leaders whose commitment to the people was not clear,” he said.

But this time, he said, not to vote would be a sin.

“This election will decide the future of Indonesia. We don’t want to give the presidency back to the military and to the corrupt generation,” he said.

A popular uprising may have ended Soeharto’s 30-year-old rule in 1998, propping up a popular presidency that ushered in Indonesia’s reformasi, or the era of openness and reform.

But the failure of the reformasi era to institute meaningful change to the lives of average Indonesians, and allegations of corruption that followed the succeeding regimes, eroded people’s confidence and estranged them from taking part actively in the country’s elections.

In Indonesia, the people’s disillusionment has given rise to the phenomenon known as “golput,” short for “golonganputih (white group),” a group of Indonesian voters who refused to vote, as a way to keep themselves clean from the stain of politics they already perceived as dirty.

Reports by the civil monitoring election network JRRP, a multi sectoral interfaith nongovernment organization, showed an increasing percentage of Indonesia’s voting population have stopped participating in the polls. “We want everyone to participate in the elections,” says Afif, the group’s national coordinator, as he urged citizens to take active part in the polls. “This is our challenge because in the last three elections, we’ve been having a decreasing participation rate.”

While voters’ turnout registered a high of 92 per cent in the elections of 1999, or the year after Soeharto’s overthrow, the numbers plummeted to 84 per cent in 2004 and plunged further to 71 per cent in the 2009 elections.

Reports said voters’ turnout was back again to 75 per cent during the April 9 polls this year, thanks to the campaign to encourage people to vote. “Many people are discouraged, because of the bad image and reports of corruption,” Afif said, “This is a challenge.”

But among those who refused to vote, journalist AneguraPerkasah,who covers the business and human rights beat for the Indonesian paper Bisnis Indonesia, said he is disappointed by the energy policy of the government, which allowed big business to set up coal mines in his hometown in Kalimantan, displacing people from their land, polluting the air and water, and depriving people of their livelihood and access to drinking water. “I do it as a form of protest,” saysPerkasah, raising both his hands to show fingers untainted by indelible ink, on the day of the April 9 general elections.

But he was equally aghast at the people’s failure to remember the past.

Although Jakarta Governor JokoWidodo, the presidential bet of the Megawati Sukarno-led opposition party PDIP, continues to lead popularity surveys, following behind him is PrabowoSubianto, the commander of the special commando force under Soeharto.

Prabowo has beenlinked to the abduction of student activists in the time of Indonesian riots in 1998, 13 of those activists remained missing up to this day, their family members holding silent protests every Thursday in front of Indonesia’s state palace, asking for justice for their missing kin.“It seems that people easily forget,” said Perkasah, referring to the relative popularity of Prabowo in the polls.

But Tedjabayu still remembers, and his memories even go three decades further back, when Soeharto just assumed power. He recalls having to bury four of his friends at one time, he had trouble carrying them, one in front, two at his side and another one at his back. 

“The first time we heard our friend died, we stood and bowed our head, as a sign of respect,” he said, “Then, the following day, another news of another friend came, and we could no longer stand up. We were so weak and in pain.”

“There was a time the death all around us have made us so numb, we could no longer feel anything.”

Tedjabayu divided the history of Indonesia into three eras: The first era belonged to the generation of his father, the 1945 generation who fought the Dutch and freed Indonesia from foreign power; the second era, his generation,persecuted bySoeharto’s new order; and the next generation, whom he said, will be the future of Indonesia. “If I’m not going to vote it will be a sin for the future,”he said, “I will vote to save the new generation, to ensure that the next president will not come either from the military or from the corrupt politicians.”

As if recalling the taste of stewed slippers and shards of broken glass, he says he knows exactly how it feels for the country to lose its freedom.This year’s election should be no time for golput, he says. Indonesians should vote to say never again to military rule.   

GermelinaLacorte is a journalist fellow of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (Seapa) sent to observe Indonesia’s general elections on April 9, 2014.

The man who happens to see Franz Kafka

The media advisory that reached us from the Eastern Mindanao Command early in May said the mining activist who claimed to be Romeo Rivera was actually Felix Armodia, a ranking member of the Communist New People's Army operating in Davao del Sur and surrounding areas. The Eastmincom said Rivera was but an alias of Armodia. I did not immediately brush aside this claim by the military until I had the chance to go to where the prisoner was detained and had the chance to ask him. "Who are you?" I asked, staring at his face. "What is your name? Are you Felix Armodia?" "No," he said. "I am Romeo Rivera. I have a father and a son, who are both my namesake. I am Romeo Rivera, Jr.," he said again, "I have a father whose name is Romeo Rivera Sr., he is confined in a hospital in Tagum city, you can check that out," he said, "Please check that out. I have a son whose name is Romeo Rivera III; he works in a call center in Manila; I am Romeo Rivera Jr., how can I have any other name?" I walked away as shaken and horrified as he was.

Why?

Now, I'm seriously wondering why she quit that office. Was it only only because she had such a lucrative offer she can't refuse? Or was it because the things they made her do there had already grown so outrageously and unbearably, overwhelmingly sickening, she had to get out of there or else she would die? Was she on the verge of killing herself? Or was it only her imagination? Was she bothered by a bad conscience? Or mounting debts? Or laundry piling up? Or her son's failing grades? Was she harassed by a stalker? A lover? A motocycle-riding madman? A police? A priest? Or a rebel? Why did she leave? Wasn't she happy with her life? Was she happy with her lovelife? Who should I ask now that she's gone?

Thinking of something else

Old houses have stories to tell

And I really want to discover them.

Dealing with Data

This was last Saturday, (figure out the date, it's Thursday today, although it already feels like a century ago) when I joined the Data Journalism Training given by Vera Files editor Yvonne Chua, sponsored by Mindanews, and held inside the Journalism Lab on the fifth floor of the Ateneo de Davao University (What building? I could no longer remember, but I can find that out). This was the same JournLab where I used to hold classes in the previous semester with third year AB Mass Comm students, three of them also joined the training. The one raising his hand here below is Walter, I don't know why he was raising his hand. I just happened to snap the shutter exactly at the time he did it, so, I think, he was really very smart to do that, but I'm smarter because I was the one who took this picture. (Guffaw). I learned a lot from the training but the most important thing that I learned was that I was dumb. One thing that really struck me from this training: that I'm really grateful for all the Maths I learned. Ms Yvonne simply remind me of my former Math teacher, the way she speaks and the way she loves Math. I also remember Maritess Villamor, my first editor, the one who really taught me how to write a business story, how to deal with sources, and everything that you need to know as a reporter. She charted my beginnings. Now I'm learning new things.

What did I do last summer?

I’ve been looking for a folder full of articles, probably marked May 2013, to see what I was  doing at about this time last year, only to find out that I never had such a folder. Instead, I found another folder, marked May Elections 2013, which yielded pictures taken at the height of the political campaign, because May 2013, I remember now, was an election year; and so, it was a month of my allergies and boils and probably hard coughs, as my body strained and struggled to catch up with impossible deadlines. I know you understand the feeling: the racing heartbeat, the choking and then the sinking sensation in your gut as you realize that no matter what you do, the work you’re doing won’t amount to anything. Last summer, I was too busy even to open a new folder to mark the passage of time. 

Music and Memories

I told Karl and Sean I don't have a memory of sounds. No matter how I like a particular music, no matter how I want to listen to it over and over again for days and weeks, I know that once that music stops, I would remember nothing of it, except for three notes. Three notes! They shake their heads in disbelief. Once, I told this to Tu Nguyen Ngoc, who stared at me, not knowing what to say, until I told her I used to listen to Yanni and the Classics until I forgot all about music because the house chores had a way of stealing my life. It's only now that I discover my memory is disintegrating because of the absence of music in my kitchen. I never had a chance to know Tu for long because my music is broken and I'm really trying very hard to fix it, hoping that doing so would allow me to recover memories I have lost through the years.

Journal of Journals

Once, I was amused when I discovered in Miguel Syjuco’s, “Ilustrado,” [[thanx to Mick!]] a character who had so many diaries: a poetry diary, where all her poems were written; a dream diary, where she recorded all her dreams, and a diary diary.
For years, I have taken to writing journals. Ja used to ask, "What?! You're writing a journal?" As if it's the most degrading thing to do.  "What are you going to do with that journal?" he asked. "What are you going to eat?" But I continued doing it anyway and it went on and on and on through the years. There are so many things I learned from writing journals. First, it can be a writing classroom, where I learn to write my sentence. If I know how to organize it and how to write it well, it can be a valuable reference point which can help me locate myself at certain moments of my life. Sometimes, it can be a window to new story ideas. What am I going to eat? I will learn to eat paper.

When the book is made flesh

Simply for the love of horses

They were not mistaken when they asked me to cover the country's longest running horse show and competition at the Riverfront Stables in Maa, which opened today and will run in the next three days. By acting just like an ordinary journalist, I get to ask questions and know more about these most magnificent and fascinating of creatures. For a long time now, I have secretly nourished this love for horses.

An important piece of women's writing in Indonesia

The book first revealed itself to me in the midst of a conversation at ISAI (Institute for the Studies on the Free Flow of Information). It was lying on the table, in the midst of all the other books in a room full of books--shelves after shelves of them behind us as we talked--and so, I took shots of it, just as a matter of course. The conversation was hard and heavy, Yan Naing's questions about radio broadcasting in Jakarta were heavy ones, I had a hard time grappling with radio frequency terminology; and so were Ryan's questions, freight with the weight of the Bangsamoro identity, but I found myself scribbling on my notes, "Who was Sudjojono dan Aku?" The answer suddenly came three days later, when Indonesian political activist Pak Tedjabayu Sudjojono suddenly showed us another version of the same book, telling us the writer was his mother; and Sudjojono was his father, the renowned Indonesian artist who was not content with painting beautiful scenes in Indonesia, he painted scenes depicting the Indonesian people's struggle. The book's title actually meant, Sudjojono and me, referring to Sudjojono, the artist, who left her. But the son, it seemed, had forgiven him. "Despite the fact that he left my mother, he was still a good artist for his people," Pak Tedja said. His mother, I perceived from our conversation, was also an equally, perhaps, even more than an extraordinary woman. I sense that what she had written here, and in that other book, "From camp to camp," depicting her life as a political detainee in Soeharto's Indonesia, should be an important piece of women's writing in Indonesia. I would like to read it one day and right now, it is still available in Bahasa. [I was also surprised to know that this very extraordinary woman, whom Pak Tedja said oftentimes think in Dutch, actually translated Dr. Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo in Bahasa when he was still a 12-year-old child.] Pak Tedja read its English version at 15.

Departures and Arrivals

Sleepless in Jakarta

But this was four or five nights ago, already too long and far behind me now, I'm already back in Davao, survived the sudden onset of malady and weakness that sent me in panic while I was on transit, have taken a long rest and have at least finished my story, which I just sent to Seapa, and am now preparing myself to go back to my normal routine, going back to the office, checking my emails, etc.

Dreaming of eggs sunny side up

Craving for the tastes of home, I went to the nearest McDo, don't blame me, where else will I go? At least, they have eggs, in their most basic form; though they only serve them scrambled, with salt in sachets. I love them sunny side up, you know that, with the yellow already a bit cooked but not too cooked as to lose their lovely orangey color; but still, I don't mind the scrambled ones for a while, with the Teh Tarik, so hot and glorious! It's election day in Indonesia, so, that must be why most tables are taken, they've lots of polling places in the Thamrin area, one or two of them only one or two blocks away. I took my tray upstairs and headed straight to the veranda, where smokers lounged, bodies reclining, a foot or two on a chair, naked knees and tattered jeans at the table, puffing cigarettes, sipping coffee, giving the whole place a leisurely air. Even with the news of the storm approaching the Philippines (I hope it weakens), it's a hot Wednesday morning here! I can actually order eggs, cooked in any which way I like, back at the hotel, but they really charge in dollars. I'd rather stop whining and start writing.

Dawnbreak in Jakarta

Awake at 4:23 am, trying hard but simply unable to write, staying by my window, looking out to the lightening sky as BBC talks about the slow-moving storm approaching the Philippines, expected to bring about heavy rains in the central parts. Oh, never again, please. I hope Karl took note of what I've been warning him about; would stay away from his boarding house in case the water gets too high. If he won't, if he forgot, please tell him again. He will listen to you. Whisper to him, even as he sleeps. The dark sky turns so blue so fast. My lids feel very heavy. I promise I will be writing here the whole day. I'll stop running around, looking for stories, when the stories are only right in my body. I won't gorge myself with too much information I can't digest. I look forward to the whole day of writing, locked up inside this room, moping, calculating. I can hear the calls for prayer from some distant mosque.

View from an Office Window

Patterns on the Wall

The old house used to be full of patterns: repeated lines and shadows that the sun paints in the morning on the wooden walls facing the wooden jalousie windows; and later, in the afternoon, as it descends upon the coconut fronds in the backyard, and gets swallowed behind the mountainous horizon. The pattern reveals itself to me as I lie in bed in the morning of Christmas Eve, turning my gaze away from the disintegrating plywood on the ceiling and the embarrassingly misshapen state of some of the walls. Just then, I chance upon the curving patterns on the blue mosquito netting, as the sun casts its harsh morning rays upon the windowsill. I shake Karl and Sean awake. I wish Eve and AiAi would discover it and amuse themselves with it, even as we grapple with the reality of the disintegrating state of the old house, where we grew up and spent our childhood. I wanted them to discover the patterns on the walls, the illusion and magic that such moments create in our drab, very ordinary lives.

Prayer to the Father

Oh. If you only knew how I’ve been longing to go home to that place where people grew up in order to escape, perhaps, you might want to listen, even for just a split second, to my soul’s rumblings, before everything in this world could turn upside down. Why can’t you show any mercy? Why can’t you just show a sign—a sparkle in your mocking eye, a twitch of that wrinkled, old mouth, and I’d drop everything—the breaking news, the ratlife on Palosapis street, the daily press conferences, the days like this when we are running out of rice because I bought books from my rice budget, the lots of elbowing around with stupid, by-line hungry wannabes — and I’d follow you underneath the coconut groves, you no longer had to bother loading the tired back of that old, beloved horse of yours to carry basket loads of coconuts to the awaiting pugon. I would gladly take its place. I’d manually haul the huge baskets and carry them straight to the oven, where they’d be cooked into copra—if only to prove to you what I can do as a woman who wants to have a writing life of her own. What’s that incredulous look on your face? Think! Show mercy! Take, for instance, my expanding waistline—do you think they’re the pleasant remnants of leisure and happy life? They’re my unhappiness stored through the years, of serving the whims and caprices of machines and cold-hearted institutions; of being powerless and out of control; of having no money and no life of my own. Why can’t you just hear me above the mad hissing of coconut fronds, swaying to the breeze of a sunny Sunday morning? Why can’t you see the image of what I am trying to say? Why can’t you just say something?

A Room of Ones Own

I’m still trying to organize my very cluttered life so I know I won't be writing here for quite a very long time. I just realized, however, that after years of hankering after it, I finally found a room of my own, the sort that Virginia Woolf once said the women need to write fiction. This used to be the room I shared with Karl and Sean; until Karl chose to be independent two years ago and had been doing very well in it, so far; and Sean and I had frequented the part of the house that we shared with Ja, so, that the room had been left totally to itself, with all the things that are strictly mine and should be kept strictly away from Ja's reach. [Ja's order had always brought about total disorder and chaos to my mind, so he must have understood perfectly well why he had been barred from the room, although he still kept arranging things, which caused our friction, once in a while]. But it dawned on me these days that I have not been visiting the room quite as often as I wanted to. It had its twin windows and door directly facing a neighborhood mansion, two or three houses away; and in the mornings, I open this door very wide to enjoy the sudden burst of sunlight, the kind that is so magical for reading, and ideal for my failing eyesight. On lazy Saturdays and Sundays, I enjoy the sun and solitude of this room, with a book before me; and on harried weekdays, I pass this room with a pitcher, full of dripping water, to water my beloved herbs outside. I often stop and gaze at the mansion outside, and the mansion's windows would gaze back at me, with a look of sympathy (I guess) and commiseration over my inability to write (fiction). But the sun and the books are a luxury and a balm.

Press Freedom Indonesia

Beloved Characters: Real or Imagined

Let me tell you some of the characters I can't resist; beginning with the Master in Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche's "Half a Yellow Sun," described in the opening lines this way: "Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings and had too much hair." You need to continue reading to find out more about the Master, but in this opening paragraph, the Master already intrigued me. When I read further, he had so many books on the floor, on the shelves, on the table, in the bathroom, even near his toilet bowl, and so, that even pushed me further to read because--it almost felt like home! Another character: the academic who grew up in the city all her life but who suddenly drops and leaves everything behind to live and work as a shepherdess, as Gretel Ehrlich described herself, in “The Solace of Open Spaces,” “curled in a sagebrush, the way my dog taught me to sleep,” while “trailing a band of two thousand sheep across the stretch of Wyoming badlands.” Mercalia, in Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News,” after she “had thrown down her thesis,” and “had gone blue collar, enrolled in long-distance truck driving school, graduated summa cum laude, hired by the Overland Express in Sausalito.” Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, particularly the part where Jude taught himself to read Latin, on top of a horse, while peddling the cakes from his Aunt’s bakehouse: “As soon as the horse had learnt the road, and the houses at which he was to pause awhile, the boy, seated in front, would slip the reins over his arm, ingeniously fix open, by means of a strap attached to the tilt, the volume he was reading, spread the dictionary on his knees, and plunge into the simpler passages from Caesar, Virgil or Horace, as the case might be, in his purblind stumbling way, and with an expenditure of labour that would have made a tender-hearted pedagogue shed tears...” Amarzan, in Janet Steele’s “Wars Within,” who spent years as political prisoner in a penal colony of Buru Island in Soeharto’s Indonesia and taught himself how to write as a journalist of Tempo. “Where did you learn to write like this?” asked the Tempo editor and poet, as soon as he read what Amarzan had written after he was freed. “In Buru.” Very soon, my friend Wahyu just told me, I'll get the chance to talk to the Amarzan. There are other beloved characters I haven’t written, yet; and still others I can’t write about. I’m living with very interesting characters around me every day.

Why Can't I Write Fiction?

What Struck me about Argao

Long ago, as a five-year-old girl visiting my mother’s hometown for the first time, I found everything about the place so enchanting: the gleaming limestone rock overhung with vines over a bend of the Jomgao river, the rocky soil on the hard sloping path leading up to grandfather’s house, the big windows that gave a sweeping view of the sea, the century-old mango trees, the reclining seneguelas, the running spring water, where everyone drinks and takes a bath, and most especially, the white beaches and the sea only a few-minute-tricycle-ride away. Seeing those boy cousins for the first time, teasing their 19-year-old uncle, their father’s younger brother, in one of the reclining seneguelas, when we first arrived one summer in grandfather’s house near the top of the hill. The afternoon sun had softened as it slanted down the hillside; and the uncle, brother of their father, was lying on the reclining trunk. They were laughing. The 19-year-old's head was turned away, only a part of his long and angular face visible to us; resplendent skin, turning pink where it was sun-kissed and bruised by the tree bark; his hair flowing in fair brownish curls reaching below his ears; his long, bony arms sticking out of a white cotton sando, revealing soft golden hair; the faded pair of maong he wore. Among other things that really struck me in Argao that summer was the discovery that I can actually draw the face of a man, without having to resort to stick figures, and to find out that someone hanging around a reclining seneguelas tree can be that good to look at!

Bracing against Agaton

Move over, Annie Proulx, I have to stop reading for a while, I'm worried about this.

A View from Casa Leticia

Deep Impressions

Sometimes, I simply can’t stand the horror of it, the horror of talking to people like him, you know, I’m no longer used to it, so, the mere encounter really gets into my nerves. He stood there, asking, “What?! You don’t like music? You don’t like to watch dance?” motioning towards the television set, where some stupid variety show featured some stupid actors or actresses, trying to move their stupid bodies, and they call that dance? They reminded me of my students, who stopped doing their works in my classes in the previous semester simply because they had to devote all their energy and time to their variety show performance, I had wanted to ask, “Whaaat? Did you enrol in a four-year-course just to do a variety show? You don’t even need a college degree to do that, do you?!” But they can’t tell the difference.

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!