Feeling Screwed Up

Last night, I finished Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and cannot stop cursing Henry James, because I thought I did not really like a ghost story, no matter how gothic; but in between, I thought, is Henry James’ narrator insane?  (It was much, much later, when I learned about Henry James’ ambiguity, that I realized, it was Henry James’ writing working in my head) but hearing me, Ja asked, why don’t you ask Henry James? Stop complaining to us. But Henry James is dead, I said.  Oh, Ja said. Then, he added, and how is the language? He’s a 19^th century author, why would you like to read him? I said, I came to open the page while I was waiting for that guy in B’la, and realized I could not put it down. The guy—who was supposed to put on the grills in the upper windows—did not arrive and so, I continued reading.  I haven’t finished it when I needed to go back here so I took the book along with me despite my earlier promise never to bring new books to the new house, which is very small, and already too crammed with books.  But I can’t help it.  I needed to lose myself in a book to fight the deep uneasiness already bogging me, creating havoc to my nerves. At home, Pa kept saying, he used to have a classmate who used to have so many books, he was so stupid. Bobo. Dull. I told him I met so many people, Pa, who never went to school and yet were very brilliant, they had super-first-class minds. I was thinking of the lumads, who were clear-headed in their thinking. He did not reply.  I also met a lot of people who went to school and graduated and who were very stupid, they didn’t know how to use their minds. He said, I used to have a classmate who had so many books but was so dull (bobo).  I said, maybe, he never read his books? He said, how can he read them, there were so many? He said he never had any book, only a notebook, and yet, he was very smart.  Later, I realized, Pa must have been talking about me: was he thinking I have so many books and is so bobo? I was horrified.

I was getting anxious because I felt I was already being left behind by the election stories that were going very fast, I had trouble keeping up. And yet, while my world was slipping away, leaving me behind, I got so stuck in B’la, where Ma and Pa kept staring in space, as if nothing was happening to the world, and Pa would suddenly say, I need to go to town, I need to drink beer in town, and Ma would be frantic, running after him.  Watching them, I get so confused, disoriented. I could no longer understand what’s happening to me.  Oftentimes, I have grave doubts why I’m even spending time in B’la, especially when Ma and Pa are behaving like they never really needed me there, resenting my presence.  I’d asked Ja, are you sure, there really is any worth to what I am doing? They don’t seem to like me there. Why am I doing this? Why do I need to spend time in B’la when they keep saying to me they don’t even need me there? Why would I go there when I really badly need to earn an income here? Why do I need to sacrifice days-without-income watching them, only to be snapped at, and to be made to feel I was a total failure just because I love books and I hate to drink alcohol?

Moving On

My right ankle is almost healed when we moved to the new house. This one is a smaller one, making me realize with horror how much garbage I have brought along with me.  I'm not yet talking about my books, which I don't consider garbage in any way, but a lot of the boxes we brought along with us are still stuck in the doorway, prompting the landlord to drop by this morning, offering us his bodega for storage, or a piece of canvass covering to protect them against the weather. But still, I can't help feeling guilty and helpless every time I open a new package. I have amassed such a huge volume of books, which I cannot let go, which, in turn, added to the weight I have to carry every time we move. 

What I'm missing

The torn ligaments take very long to heal. I already miss running the stretch of road from the mosque to anywhere in Nova Tierra, I already miss dancing the zumba, I already miss skipping the flimsy rope that I bought from the bookstore and which takes a lot of effort and a lot of timing to skip. I even miss the plain, leisurely unadulterated walking without a limp—as I wait and wait for my swollen ankles to heal.

Room to Write

Just to spite her, I quoted Celia Brayfield, author of "Deep France: A Writer's Year in the Bearn," and said, I could not possibly write in an ugly surrounding. I told her I needed to have a perfect angle of light in a well-organized and well-ordered room to be able to write. I could not write in an area where the light comes from all directions, it would be too confusing, too disorienting, too glaring to the eyes, it could never help in my thinking. It had to be in a room where the desk is placed at a certain angle by a big window, with ample light streaming from a single source outside. For she thought I can just sit anywhere with my laptop and write. She thought writing does not involve deep thinking. She thought writing is as easy as that.

The Thrashing

I sprained my ankle out of my dread for my father. He was abused as a child; and now in his old age, he is unleashing the last ounce of his strength to crush his daughter with the most ferocious abusive language. I wasn't crushed but it takes a lot of effort to see where I was walking or to realize I was already treading uneven ground. Under the Child Protection Act, child abuse comes in many forms. Neglect is considered a form of child abuse. Father suffered neglect as a child. As early as nine years old, he was made to work in the farm, which made his teachers exclaimed, "Why, where is the boy's father?!" They were so considerate, they spared him from all the hard work in school and took time to visit the farm where he worked somewhere in Binugao, which they described as "parang Luzon," for they came from a farming community in Ilocos and was transported only in Mindanao after the war. But midway through highschool, the boy that was my father was made to drop out of school to work full time in the farm and send three or four of his siblings to school. I need another language to describe how hard his life was at the farm. I'm still trying to understand what has turned him into a tyrant even as I try to recover from a sprained ankle.

Once Upon a Lunchtime in Cotabato

The No-Discussion Home

I wish I can write something good about home. After all, this was where I started my first education; and so, it deserved at least to be honored, to be praised. 
But right now, when I think of this particular home, all I remember are the things that my sisters say to me, and they are not exactly good things, nor the right or justifiable things, because they were things not scientifically verified but were born out of their own ignorance and biases. I remember, too, the things that Pa keeps saying to me nowadays, which reminds me of the things he used to say to me when we were children crouching in fear of his voice and his temper. I also think, every time I think of this home, all the things that my Ma doesn't want me to say; for Ma always wanted me to shut up to keep the peace in the house.  You see, even in my early days at  home, I was already cast as a troublemaker, a rebel.  Later, I'd learn, the activists have a name for this kind of peace: it's called the peace of the graveyard.  The peace of the dead.

So, it’s only now, decades later after I left home and returned, that I begin to understand. I was never really free to say anything at home. Not when I was growing up, not now, when I am [supposed to have) grown up. 
No matter how Ma used to expound in the classroom  the concept of a liberal philosophy, for I can think only of first taking that concept from her before I learned about it from other people. 
But at home, no one actually talked about things even when the family was in a grip of a very difficult problem because it was a home that never tolerated discussions. It was a home ruled by many tyrants or one tyrant, depending on the way you see it; and when you started a discussion there, everyone thinks you're starting a fight, and that's the reason I was a perennial outcast, always the odd one out, in that home, where I never really belonged.  No wonder then, that at 17, when everyone had their lovers and boyfriends, I ran away from home  looking for freedom; and luckily, found it somewhere else.

Is Destiny a Woman?

Destiny is not a woman--or is she?! They were waiting for Digong to walk into the lobby of the Apo View Hotel anytime that late afternoon of April to meet her.

Shocked and Awed

On my way back from Cotabato, I dropped by our old home which doesn't feel like home anymore, except for Oreo, the mother Cat and two of her four litters: Muffin and Shocklit. Earlier, I was planning to bring the other two kittens--Munchkin and BlackForest--to this place but seeing how Father whipped Oreo witless, I was thinking, no, I needed to find someplace else. I have to rescue the cats. 
Our family is crumbling; I could no longer talk to Father, who is always angry; nor to Mother, who could no longer make any sense of some ordinary things; nor to my sisters, who wouldn't listen, anyway, and who never seem to care whether the old folks are safe in the house or not, or whether they are safe going to town on their own or not. The old folks are becoming very weak. I could have quit my job to watch them at home but for my sisters' bullying, I was frightened: If they can bully me now that I still have 20 years of journalism as a leverage, an anchor of my identity, what would happen if I give all that up and be a beggar?    So, I refused to quit. 
Besides, do they really think I can just abandon my boys, just like that?
The whole house is a mess but I'm so powerless to clean it up, especially now when I'm in the mid of writing part of a book, and I don't have any choice but scratch my way to eke a living.
Father hates my books--the books that I collected and dumped in this old house which are quite many. He hates my cats and  he hates my guts. He told me in a voice that could turn my stomach inside out, I was maalam (knowledgeable), and he said it in a really deprecating tone, as if it was something I should be ashamed of, when I only warned him against eating corn that must have been contaminated by genetically-modified varieties growing in the neighborhood. He said, "maalam ka lagi," and humiliated me in front of the maid. Of course, he could not crush me. I realized that if I were an ignorant daughter, he would do the same to me.   He also castigated me for talking to my cats.  He   asked,  "Why don't you take them back to your house?" I don't have such a house, I replied. We were only renting an apartment in the city and there's nowhere else for us, nor the cats, to go. Ma regarded my books--which included my Doris Lessing collections--as garbage. When I complained I no longer have enough time to read and re-read my books, she smiled, as if to say, "What can you expect? What's the use of reading a book?" About my Latin diploma, she asked, "What are you going to do with that? Can you convert that to cash?" But this was many months ago. Now, Ma has lapsed beyond caring and disdain.
Then, adding insult to injury, sisters said, "Why don't you quit your job so that you can spend time in the farm?" Throw away 20 years of your life's work to risk an uncertain future, without the blessing nor encouragement, and with only what I can see a mocking and disdainful resistance of a wily Father. I can project myself into the future, and I can hear them say, we never asked you to sacrifice, in the first place!
Though my future here is uncertain, too, I am not the kind who would want to be crucified. After the previous Christmas party, I saw some of my books ruthlessly dumped, their spines cruelly distorted, inside cases of empty beer bottles. I went as berserk  as Jesus when he discovered the people had turned the temple into a marketplace. I said, how they're treating my books only showed what kind of people they are: real barbarians! I was thinking not of Father when I say that. I was thinking of all the drunks  at my sisters' party. I bet they only knew how to gulp beer but never read a single book in their lives! "Why did you brought them here in the first place?" Pa asked, still referring to my books. He loved those beer parties that much.

Sean unfriends me

But does it hurt? Not really because he still talks to me in person, he still kisses me good night, good morning; he still listens to me when I talk to him. He still tells me about his young troubles, his classmates including the ones he likes best and the ones that pisses him off, particularly the boy who scored high in the exams because he cheated and posted his score on Facebook, so that his mother can see and share it with other mothers. He still asks me to bring home some really sweet things, including his favorite which should be our secret. He even asks me about how is it to be ostracized, which I often experienced in the past, and then, told me, yes, some of the boys also form societies like that; just like Lord of the Flies and they pressure their friends to like what they like and dislike what they dislike and sometimes, it's better for him not to be part of them  if they start acting weird like that. He also tells me he also wants some space sometimes, a little bit away from parental eyes just like the way I hate somebody snooping at me when I am writing my journals.

Delirium

Halfway-through Hanif Kureishi’s Black Album, I asked, what is happening to me? I could no longer lose myself in the story the way I used to get lost in the whole universe of words and their meanings. Is it because the camera is already replacing an old passion, rubbing away the old pleasure, replacing it with another one? Is it because I have finally lost all zest for life, and that what is left now is the empty shell of an old longing? Is it because of the blurring eyesight? Is it because I am sick? On Wednesday, while waiting for the President to walk inside the SMX function hall filled with the yellow crowd chanting Oras na, Roxas na, I discovered I had trouble breathing. Ruth handed me a piece of paracetamol she faithfully kept in her wallet, because she said she was also prone to being ill these days. I managed to go out to look for a glass of water, when I came upon Edith R., who again saved me, helped me get some hot water from the jug that stood in the corner. I did not know if the story that I sent to the papers made any sense to those who read it because I was already in such pain and in such delirium, as soon as I reached home and plopped myself to bed, I discovered I was having a really bad chill.  Maybe, I could not stand the yellow crowd. In my half-asleep, half-awake state, I was singing, “Break it to me, gently,” thinking I were Brooke Shields trying to move on from a really bad, devastating love.

Days Without You

Why I Write What I Write

I wrote my last story in 2003; which earned me a slot in the Iligan national writers’ workshop, usually held in summer in the city of Iligan, where I spent about a week with the most amazing mix of young poets and fiction writers from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao; and some unforgettable awestruck moments before the great names in Philippine Literature, who sat as our panel of critics.

Until then, I realized that no matter how often and how many people abused the term, not everyone can actually be called writers in the real sense of the word until you go through a “rite of passage,” that is called the “writers’ workshop,” and come up with something that you can call your body of works afterwards dealing with serious stuffs.

Yes, serious stuffs.

The workshop, in itself, was an experience. Just think how it is to sit in wait for judgment as critics (most of them belonging to the Philippine literary canon) scrutinized what you’ve written to its tiniest bit of detail.

First, you get the feeling that you are lucky enough to get admitted inside that chosen circle, just for having written something good enough to be chosen over the rest of the manuscripts that did not make it to that workshop.

But just as you thought you’ve got the taste of heaven, you finally found yourself in a series of sessions where each manuscript gets scrutinized for every detail, motive, innuendos, nuance, by all critics and fellows present. Our usual preoccupation, every break of the session and in the evening before we sleep, was to go over the roster of stories and poems to be read next, trying to figure out the author’s name behind the pen name, and trying to guess more as you read the story.  The author’s identity used to be withheld until after the manuscript was read in the session and everyone has given her comments. His identity revealed, the author can finally say something in return; but usually, it didn’t really sound good to defend ones work against criticisms, so, we deemed it best to keep mum and think about everything in silence.

Every moment of the workshop actually felt like a stretch of the Green Mile, every one of us heading towards the guillotine, a terrible execution chamber from which there was no escape.  “But even if they kill every bit of my soul, they could never get to that part of myself where the poems come from,” I remember what a young poet named Duke Bagaulaya said during our darkest hour in another writers’ workshop, the UP national writers’ workshop in Davao; and that was how each of us found the real meaning of what it was to be a “writing fellow.” I remember the elevator ride with the beloved fellow alien named Ava Vivian Gonzales, when our manuscripts were about to be read; the last ones to be scrutinized towards the end of the workshop. Ava and I and the third fellow Janis had taken to calling ourselves “aliens” at this time after our realization that we have been perennial outcasts in the world and its celebrity culture whose shallowness we abhor. We realized we could no longer belong anywhere except to ourselves.

Contemplating our impending doom, I told Ava, I felt like I was about to deliver a baby for the second time, and knowing the impending pain, I wanted to escape from my own body and run. But Ava had put up a good fight during the scrutiny. I remembered her calling the critics an offensive name I can’t recall.

Afterwards, I felt an urgent need to tear the whole manuscript to pieces, except that it was already accepted by a literary editor of a national magazine for publication, which made me feel even worse.

Since then, I thought I haven’t written anything.

But that’s not true! I’ve written many things since then. News stories, long features, a chapter of a book, journals, blogs, diaries, instruction manuals, foreword and afterword, an introduction of a book, a preface of a book that came out last year, introduction of another book I edited, a preface, love letters to my mother, accusatory letters to God, emails, etc.,

But they did not count because they were not the kind of things I wanted to write about. But what are the things that I want to write about? I don’t know.  I must have forgotten.

How I Fared in that American University

[This is an excerpt from a Journal.  I really did not think of posting this here until this time when sisters are bullying me to give up journalism, where I'm earning a pittance, to spend the rest of my life at the farm.]

Sometime in 2010, as soon as I got the Latin diploma for Magistratum Artium (MA) mailed to me from ADMU, signifying my successful completion of the MA in Journalism fellowship programme at the Asian Center for Journalism (ACFJ) at ADMU, it was not my Ateneo grades that that got me very excited upon opening my transcript but something else.

I already knew how I fared in the journalism class, so, it was not the reason why I gasped, half-anxious, half-intoxicated, as I opened the transcript. 

It was my excitement over the fact that I’d finally be seeing the part of the transcript I hadn’t seen before: the part which showed my performance in the MA in English major in Creative Writing programme I took at Silliman U several years earlier.  

I never had the chance to come up with the Fiction Collection demanded by my thesis; and so, I have left that part of my transcript half-finished; and yet, I was wondering how I was faring among the subjects I had loved so much that I crammed myself to the brim with long readings during my brief stay at Silliman U: Literary Criticism and Creative Writing, Contemporary Novel, Asian Feminist Writings, etc. 

Touting itself as an American university that pioneered the longest running creative writing tradition in the country, Silliman U kept a grading system that is quite different from other universities I’ve gone to.  Instead of the usual 1.0, they kept the highest grade at 4.0, which is an equivalent to an A+. This must be why, getting a 3.5 from the American professor Dr. Law once flustered me, because in the previous universities I attended, 3.0 already carried with it the stigma of failure. And yet, looking closer at SU’s unique grading system, I checked and realized that a 3.5 actually meant an A-, which was not so bad after all. I was in the lowest point of my life at Silliman U that I decided to get back through my grades.

So, that day I received my ADMU transcript, I went over my records for Contemporary Novel, Literary Criticisms, Contemporary Drama, and my heart leaped with delight. The lowest grade I got from the university, which I always look up to as the only university that really introduced me to Art and Letters, was an A-, and in some other really difficult subjects, I even managed to post an A+; not really that it mattered so much in life, but I remember standing side by side with journalists, who thought there was only one way to write a story, I can’t help recalling how, in one of those creative writing classes, we were allowed to write about one subject, and each of us came up with totally different stories. Remembering how I straddled the totally alien world of journalism and the world of writers, poets and artists, I realized it was not so bad at all; not really half so bad after all.

Some shocking things I encounter

The past few days, I’m holed inside my room transcribing interviews for the story of a life of a man. I’m holed in, too, for a purely online class on How To Write Fiction with the University of Iowa, which gave me pure delight at some time, and pain and torture the next. But now,  realizing what I’ve done, I’m asking myself, why-oh-why didn’t I remember getting Prateesh, and even Sheilfa, to sign into this as well when I signed in a hurry one deadline day the previous months? We could have been into this together! And they would hate me when things get rough and love me when they find such brilliant and inspiring writers such as what I felt when I heard the Russian writer Alan Cherchesov say in the introductory lecture, “to learn how to write, you have to learn how to not write, how to keep silence, to think and to observe.” I’m sure they would have plenty to say about the whole thing that’s why I miss them so much.

Yet, I also think I was a little crazy for signing into this thing when I have rarely been online the past months, when I was always running after some elusive news stories every day, the kind of stories which increase my skin rashes and irritate my nose, causing sudden bouts of sneezing when I interview my sources, embarrassing me and alarming Pamela, who immediately taught me how to irrigate my nose the other day, using Indian technology with some improvisation she learned on the web! 

I never knew she’s a magician, this Pam Chua, and it’s beautiful when you get a taste of such magic at the most difficult time of your life, when I’m always shuttling back and forth to Bansalan and here, keeping an eye of my old folks, unobtrusively because they do not want to be kept an eye on, “like hapless children,” father says, so, I keep going back and forth, keeping an eye on them without making them feel I’m keeping an eye on them; but as a result I’m quite shocked and horrified of the things that I discover there.  
What shocked and horrified me most are my sisters, who think the old folks will live forever and so, they trust them to strangers, instead of informing me so that I can properly take action for their safety.  It really horrifies me that the helper’s judgment is better than those of my sisters, what a shame, when my sisters, were supposed to be, “educated,” Titing didn’t even go to college, but she knows how to deal with the world, she has wide-open eyes, not blinded with delusion or wealth, she has both feet planted firmly on the ground, and not on the steering wheel of a car.  But looking back, I realized, it must have largely been the sisters' mis-education, the kind of education that is prevailing in the country before and now, who can blame them? I was quite unlike them. I was the odd one out in the family. Owing to my extreme unhappiness, I left home at 17, to study in the University of Life.  I disappeared and learned many things in a life of simplicity and struggle. They stuck to their boring lives and now, they social climb. Their kind of friends are not really my kind of  friends, and now they end up totally trusting and naive, and this really is quite a shocking thing to me.

When I see the mess at home, I get the feeling that we’re back to the Stone Ages, or was it the Stone Ages, before such thing as political organization was invented? Was it the reason that our people were easily conquered, subjugated, because we are so disorganized, and we let emotions rule over our mind? They’re so irrational and you can’t even talk sense with them!

When the island wakes up to the news about a kidnapping

This morning when I wake up

The road that leads to you is nothing fancy

A particular Monday morning

The Myth called B'la