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!