Still Dreaming of the Rainforest

Sunday in Upper B'la

Memories of Kampung Ensika

Did anyone ever remember me in Sarawak? Did anyone ever think of me once in a while in the Iban Kampung of Ensika, where I once braved crossing the mighty Sadong Jaya river and another smaller river filled with crocodiles, to fall in love with a community of people, whose women so jolly and so warm, had guarded me against the terrible consequences of the tuak (pronounced tua) handed to me by their men. "Not too much, that's enough," I hear them whisper to each other in their own language, a language I could not understand, as the indigenous sweet wine was being poured into the glass. Their hands in a protective gesture, the look of genuine concern on their faces, those Malaysian women were enough to make me feel so safe and warm. In contrast, a woman in a Christian household back in Kuching, wanted me to drown under her tuak, offering me glass after glass of it, I had a hard time refusing her. A tuak is a gesture of hospitality among the Ibans, refusing it was supposed to be considered rude; but remembering the Iban community whose women had protected me, I took the courage to refuse. Now, I still think of those women, their brown faces smiling at me, saying things I don't understand, eternally amused by whatever I do in their village. Where could they be now? What could they be doing in the kampung, so far away from the city, accessible only by boat during high tide? I may have forgotten their names, which were so strange and very difficult to pronounce, but I could not possibly forget their faces. Good memories of them I carry with me whereever I go.

Sunset at the Kuching Waterfront

Yes, that’s the Harbor View Hotel, when the sun’s last rays strike its rectangular shape before finally setting in the west to rest. I used to watch the sunset here, while the crowd of people saunter into the waterfront, taking advantage of the evening breeze. I would be thinking of home, as I watch the light hit that side of the building, giving it a radiant glow before slowly fading away, and then, dying, dying in the onset of night. My heart would ache for Karl and Sean as strollers, teenagers and twenty-somethings pour into the waterfront, walking on the brick pathways under the trees. I'd stay for a while, listening to their laughter, before walking around the street corner, where the Anglican Guest House, rises from a slopy, elevated ground, almost like the image of Christ after the resurrection. Curiously, the compound sits opposite the quaint Tua Pek Kong temple, whose smokes coming from numerous incense rise up to the heavens at all hours of the day. I almost forgot the name of the guesthouse where I used to stay but here suddenly it pops up again--St. Thomas! Thanks, I remember you, St. Thomas Guesthouse, once my home inside the Anglican church compound just a few paces away from the waterfront. Once home for girls of a century-ago who studied there under the tutelage of the nuns. What happened to them afterwards? I remember climbing up the wooden stairway, my feet making creaking sounds at their every step. I could still see the shiny, wooden flooring, and the quaint smell of old sweat, body heat and old cigarettes. Ignoring the Caucasian backpackers, I would continue walking the dim interior of the bare living room and walk straight to my room. They still used this stick, skeletal old-fashioned keys which I had trouble inserting into the keyhole. I can still see the common baths and how it smelled of freshly-opened soap. Why is it that sometimes, in my memory, I sense that I was not alone in that room? That somehow, Sean or Karl, or even Ja were actually with me? Why didn’t I ever get the sense that I was alone? But I was alone in that room. I did not have a companion except for my thoughts and my cellphone. I would smell the dry odor of ancient cigarettes that refused to leave the linen no matter how many times those linens must have been washed. It was the Chinese professor in a university in Kajang, north of KL who told me about the place: very cheap, over a century year old wooden guesthouse full of ghosts from the previous century, rooms so tiny and homely, with sheets that smelled of old cigarettes. Surely, it would be within your budget. In the morning, I used to wake up to the strange calls of an Asian fowl, that resemble the chanting of monks somewhere in Bangkok.

It's been a long time since I've been to my garden

Ah, Doris Lessing!

a photo grabbed from NewYorkTimes, October 11, 2007 issue. So, what did the journalists do after they all crowded around you the day it was announced you won the Nobel Prize for Literature and Associated Press photographer Lefteris Pistarakis took this photo? Did you talk about Art and Literature? Did they ask you about Life? Or did they ask you about Art? Did you dismiss them all after you stood up from being slumped in your doorway like that, sitting on the steps, surprised and yet not surprised at all for winning the Nobel, after having been in the shortlist for about two decades? What else did they ask you? Did you return to them after you took the calls and the phone finally stopped ringing upstairs or did you just dismissed them right away just like how other people dismissed doves straying into their balconies? Did you invite them in for coffee, dinner or tea? Mother may not have heard of you but in the different corners of her house, were strewn pieces of your writings, carefully wrapped in plastics to protect against the dust. Over the weekend, I found an old copy of Women&Fiction, and started reading your story, "To Room Nineteen," feeling all over again it was my story you were writing.

Somewhere in some forgotten corners, your autobiography, "Under my Skin," and your other books, "The Golden Notebook," "The Grass is Singing" and several others, exist like some quiet creatures in an existential universe, waiting to be discovered. When I think about them, I think of this picture of yours, the day the announcement came. Slumped on your doorstep, reporters crowding around you, you showed what a writer ought to feel towards society's approval of ones art. You hardly cared at all. It was not the Nobel that propelled your writings.

That Old Letter

I could no longer find that goddamned letter. No matter how I tried or cried, I could no longer find it. The last time I saw it, I was either in that state university where I first saw you strumming the guitar, walking in from the rain, water droplets in your hair; or, maybe, I was home in B'la, and that letter was in a box. I said, the letter could never get lost here, the box was my only possession and I hid it from Mother, and since there was no place in the house that Mother could not see, I was secretly hoping that Mother would not open it. She should not because it was mine. The box contained the only things a girl could possess in the world, some notebooks and foolish writings, memorabilias from the barricade line and being such a small, humble, unassuming box, it was very easy to rummage, no letter could ever get lost there. So, I placed the letter in one of the pages of my old notebook, thinking I would go over it again and again, I will never get tired of reading it, especially when I was alone and Mother was not looking, and Nani, my cordon sanitaire, was not around, tucked away conveniently from my life. I said, I got to read that letter. I got to savor the feeling of being adored by those amazing pair of eyes and feel the blood tingling in my veins. It was not everyday that I felt my blood tingle. But I was still young and thin and lean and innocent and in love for the first time and too naive to know that the letter, being made of paper, could also get lost in a corner or get blown away by the wind as I was whisked away from there to places I've never been to; far away, very far away from you.

Hunting shells in Penaplata

Rummaged from the Shop

Identity Crisis

I like it when they call me Germelina. I happened to sit in the poet Allan Popa’s class, “Malikhaing Pagsulat,” in the summer of 2009 and I was not “Ma’med” there. I was with a bunch of undergraduate kids--they called me Germelina. When we had poetry readings, and they were whispering to each other whose poem was being read, the guy named Mike or Cedric or any such name, would tell his classmate, “That’s Germelina’s” and I felt like I was one of them, young again—am I fooling myself? So, who is this woman they call Ma’m now? Sitting here at a table, with a wyteboard pen and eraser in her hand, pretending she had some intimate knowledge about the world? What comes to mind was Reina, my editor, the second editor I ever had in my life, when I was still a young reporter and now, I’m not that young anymore, but still I remember that poet-writer-columnist the first beautiful real feminist I ever encountered. She used to tell us inside the newsroom, “Don’t call me, Ma’m, call me Reina,” and that’s how we called her Reina; though we were uncomfortable about it at first, because she was so ahead of us in years and intelligence, she deserved to be Ma’med. But Reina was not that ordinary kind of Ma’m. She was fond of wearing shorts and thick glasses, and she had her Walkman always, the tiny wirings dangling down her ears somewhere, and once or twice, she jaywalked to cross the street to Sunstar office at Jones Avenue(this was in Cebu) without using the pedestrian lane and got caught by the traffic enforcers, whom she wrote about in her column the next day, praising them for doing such a good job of catching her. One time, as the story goes, the guard at the UP campus in Lahug, where she handled a journalism class, refused to let her in because she was wearing shorts and her usual T-shirt, complete with a Walkman, with the earphone on her ears, and those sunglasses. In her class, she also told her students, “Don’t call me, Ma’m, call me Reina,” but I heard she did not last very long there because the students petitioned her, they said she smoked in class and uttered expletives, which people were saying was okay at Diliman but not here in Cebu, it’s the province, the barrio, you see. I did not Ma’m Maritess, my first editor, the editor I can always claim to have taught me how to write a story. I did not Ma’m her because—well, she had a way of telling you something and you can't do anything else but obey and the first thing she told me, as I sat near her desk, where she edits her stories, was not to call her Ma'm—she was just three or four years ahead of me when I was still a reporter fresh out of school, entering a newsroom, feeling uncertain about the world. Though Maritess deserved to be Ma’med every inch of the way: the way she imposed the editorial discipline, the way she taught me how to deal with sources, I owed it to her my beginnings in the newsroom. “Tell that source of yours, if she wanted a copy of your story, tell her to talk to the editor," she would say, with the usual pout in her mouth, her head tilted at an angle, "Or better tell her, we don’t do that in the newsroom, we have our editorial standards, but if you are really so desperate to read my story before publication, talk to the editor.” And I know some of them did not but some of those who did must have suffered such a lashing.

Reading Rebecca West

When things were becoming almost unbearable, I came upon Rebecca West's "The Fountain Overflows" tucked in a shelf under Karl's table. Paper-wrapped, and still inside the paper bag when I bought it, the book features a painting of a woman before a piano,and several other smaller paintings on its cover. I started reading, and immediately got immersed into another world: the world of Rose and her twin sister Mary, their sister Cordelia and baby brother Richard Quinn, their philandering no good of a father and the mother they love so much. At least, I forgot about my pain, if only for a moment.

Blogs That Keep Me Whole

Sometimes when things turn totally insane and horrifying, I turn to blogs. Some people tend to dismiss blogs, but I find some deep sense of connection with these few blogs that I follow. At times, when things really go crazy, I turn to them to make sense of my world. I never mentioned this to anyone before. This used to be my best kept secret. But today, I honor these blogs for keeping me alive: Daryll Jane's Free Migrant paints a turbulent inner landscape, something that I can identify with and freely enter; Prateesh's Room With a View is a refuge, Sheilfa's Tumbang Preso, another sanctuary fenced by sharp objects, Maryanne Moll's "Sensibilities," particularly her "My street, myself," or "I, watcher," a dream. Sometimes, when I feel particularly sad and disturbed, I turn to Ma'm Merlie's poetry, and end up crying but no longer sad; and Ninotchka Rosca's Lily Pad, helps me get back my bearing; helps me think. To all these writers and bloggers, thank you for writing what you write, thank you for making sense of the world.

The Guy whose back was turned to me and Prateesh

Early in June, as soon as we stepped out of the cab inside the Ateneo campus, the puzzle was finally resolved. The man in robes, whose back we can see from the windows of the Rizal Library, where Prateesh and I used to look out, wondering and trying to figure out who the guy in robe was and never had enough time to find out until it was time for us to fly home, was actually St. Thomas More, the best friend of Henry VIII, who died in a guillotine upon Henry VIII's order. Near the statue, an epitaph said something about Thomas More, a loyal friend to the King of England, but a more loyal servant to God. I came upon Thomas More, not through the eyes of faith, I used to be an agnostic and now I am a pagan; but I came upon Thomas More's story through my depraved fascination of Henry VIII, the decadent monarch. Standing upon the grounds of Ateneo, carrying in my hands a box of Davao golden pomelos, which they said were the sweetest on earth, I realized how small a world it was, for Toto and I were going upstairs the social sciences building to see dr. V, Thomas More's memory right before me, and I wish Prateesh were there with me.

The Fool as the First Card

What am I doing here?

For two or three times now, at a particular hour at night, I have watched myself multiply four or five times before the wall as I took my descent from the fifth floor of this university building to the ground floor. I see the images of myself—five of them, of the same height and build—staring back at me, with a look that asked, “What are you doing here?” I did not know the answer. But the mirror on the wall seemed to be telling me what I certainly feel: I was only getting myself sliced; cut up to pieces. The stairway looked dark and abandoned. Everybody still around at this time of night was rushing toward the elevator. Everything about the whole place looked squeaky and clean, which to one more accustomed to chaos like me, felt quite alienating. If I had to work like this, would there be enough time for me to write? Would I even be able to talk about narrative techniques in a class still about to write a breaking story? I was actually thinking of another university very close to the sea, whose turn-of-the-century campus was lined down by dark-limbed acacia trees, and the wooden buildings, particularly Katipunan Hall, looked like the exact place where Andres Bonifacio might just have held a meeting to overthrow the government of Spain. Was it Sheilfa, or was it Claire, who once said it was the only university that celebrated madness as a sign of genius, the madder you think there, the more accepted you get. Am I exaggerating? Is my own memory playing tricks on me, just like the mirrors on the stairway wall? But from the windows of that university’s huge library, near the shelves and corners darkened with the languishing volumes of Balzac and Voltaire, I used to watch the green soccer field teeming with young athletes. I, too, considered myself mad, and remember that university with fondness. In the place where I am now, they try hard to suppress madness. They ask you to dress well, to conform, to comb your hair, get a husband, make a happy home, such things. Sheilfa was mad, schizophrenic even, that’s why she’s really a good writer. Unlike me, she’s not afraid to offend. The greatest thing she ever brought to the office was a copy of Granta featuring an old rat. I loved reading about that rat, I can’t help crying at the end. Yet, Sheilfa was seized by sudden madness, and thought I found her anguish hilarious. She thought I was laughing at the sight of her hauling her delightful books near the office sofa. Perhaps, I was writing so badly, the meaning of my text spread beyond its original intention. She never knew I lived the same life on the edges, and a delight offered by her books, made me last one more day.

Trip to Samal Island

The Marble Console that Reflects my Life

A Reading Journal

On the way to a Rainforest

We went to what I called the secret rainforest in Upper B'la, where the land sloped abruptly down to the Balawanan river about 100 to 200 feet below. I can't be exact about its height. Actually, I can't even tell a foot from a banana, so, don't trust me when I say 200 feet, maybe, it's even higher. But the cliff always had this effect of making me feel breathless as a child, both for its sheer height and for the landscape it offers. It had the same effect on me now. When I was a child, I remember coming down here with my Pa, seeing the water falling by the steep slopes of the cliff, gushing like little waterfalls. I used to see gigantic bird's nest fern and other giant ferns as big as banana stalks thriving by the wayside. I remember the clear, rushing waters of the Balawanan, the pebbles the color of granite we used to play with. Now, the ferns were almost gone and the river was heavily silted, an island of rocks and debris had formed in the middle. But climbing down this place was such a great moment for me. The gigantic timber trees thriving near the rocky brook that ran its course through the ravines felt as solemn as a cathedral. I would love to come back here over and over again.

Sickbed

It was a rare pleasure to have Sean read to me while I was sick. He would have refused but I said, "When you were a baby, you used to stop me and wrestle with me every time I read a book. So, now, it's your turn to please me. Just one page, please." I closed my eyes and listened to the first paragraphs of Milan Kundera's "The Great Return," published by old Granta. First his voice sounded diffident, unsure. Then, he developed confidence and became daring as he gained paragraphs. My headache started to subside. Eventually, his eyes began to jump. "Voluntarily, not voluntary," I corrected. He turned to me. "How come you knew it was 'voluntarily,' not 'voluntary'?" he asked, "Your eyes were closed." "I simply knew it," I said. I was about to explain but quickly he cut me short. "If you already knew everything, even with your eyes closed," he said, "Then, I don't have to read to you at all." He put the book down and walked away.