Is that Kurniawan?!

Yes, I can still remember correctly as we were going down the steps of that old ilustrado house on Calle Real and spotted this old well that reminded me of Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman," who killed herself by jumping into the family's drinking well. I briefly told Yuri about it before we posed for pictures and argued.
"That's my picture because that's my camera," Yuri said, grinning. "But Yuri," I said, grinning too. "That's also my picture because that's my idea!" "Okay, okay," Yuri said. "Just take my own photo alone, idea or not."
And so, we stood there--me, Prateeh, Yuri, a tiny drop of sun glinting on his nose. I thought we all looked like tadpoles.
But who's that other one? I can still remember Lilik, tinkering with Yuri's camera. But I could almost make out the face of Wawan!

On Campus

So, there. To spare myself nights of agony every time I misplace my flash disk, where this image of San Agustin Church is stored. To spare my partner Yuri of Jakarta's Antara News Agency whose camera I used, the trouble of rummaging through his files again just to retrieve one picture, this picture of an old Church somewhere on Calle Real, somewhere in the walled city of Intramuros, where the whole bunch of MA Journalism fellows went one Sunday in July, as a temporary reprieve from all the assignments and workloads we had on campus at the Asian Center for Journalism of the Ateneo de Manila University.

I’m sorry

These days, I’ve been trying very hard to break free, to force myself to write what I needed to write but an overwhelming sadness always cut me off in mid-sentence. This morning, when it was at its worst, I retreated to the sleeping room and dreamt of a little girl of about ten years old, wearing a pink dress that was already so faded it was already white. She was out on the streets, walking. Her hair was cut short almost like that of a boy. I was looking at her from a broken glass window.
Awake now, I wonder who that little girl was. I did not even see her face but I knew that this sadness that has been threatening to drown me for weeks may have something to do with her.

The Case of an Unhappy Hen

Was it Calvin Trillin who wrote that the best tasting chicken are those raised and allowed to roam freely in the range? One can only taste the sadness of those broilers, who spend their lifetime caged in a chicken coop, deprived of the sun and the taste of freedom, as can be gleaned from the blandness of their soup. I have turned into a very sad, unhappy hen. I'm thinking of ways how to get out of my cage.

Slice of Night

I found myself alone among abandoned files, crumpled towels in a chair, half-opened chicherias, half-opened books, unread newspapers, my favorite coffee mug filled with water. They did not forget to turn off the air con, this time, like they did the other night. I tapped on the keyboard and listened to the whizzing of the electric fan. I could hear the rumblings of distant jeepneys, the scream of a street girl, a whistle of a balut seller. But the hoot of construction workers, the thrashing and grating of metals, the roar of heavy equipment around the skeletal building being built across the street seemed to have stopped. In their place is an engulfing silence. I scooped my pants pocket for coins and kicked off my shoes. I could play DonMcLean in his 30s singing the American Pie over and over until the lizards tilt their heads an inch off the wall, nodding to its rhythm. Or, I could play Gorillaz, over and over, until my eyes get so drowsy, I could hardly open them. I could open my new tarot deck I have kept locked in the drawers and discover ancient wisdom. I could read F. Sionil Jose's "Poon," translated into Tagalog by Lilia F. Antonio when she was in Osaka. But instead, I think of my Ma and how, I have never given her a single gift ever since I was born.

The Magistrate

The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole. “Close it up,” I say. The guard bunches the opening together. It falls open. “They say that he hit his head on the wall. What do you think?” He looks at me warily.
---from JM Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” of the magistrate looking at the corpse that bore the marks of torture

The Magistrate's Monologue

“You feel that it is unjust, I know, that you should be punished for having the feelings of a good son. You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know.”
I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill-wheel, knew what was just: all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
“But we live in a world of laws,” I said to my poor prisoner, “a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.”
After lecturing him I sentenced him. He accepted the sentence without murmur and his escort marched him away. I remember the uneasy shame I felt on days like that. I would leave the courtroom and return to my apartment and sit in the rocking chair in the dark all evening, without appetite, until it was time to go to bed.
“When some men suffer unjustly,” I said to myself, “it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.”
But the specious consolation of this thought could not comfort me. I toyed more than once with the idea of resigning my post, retiring from public life, buying a small market garden. But then, I thought, someone else will be appointed to bear the shame of office, and nothing will have changed." ---from J.M. Coetzee, “Waiting for the Barbarians

A Glimpse of Tobias Mindernickel

I see Tobias Mindernickel roaming around the streets of Davao. His appearance is just as Thomas Mann had written, "eyecatching, quite odd, indeed ridiculous."
Out on a walk, he hauls his gaunt frame with the help of a cane, no longer up the hill, this time, but in an overpass reeking of urine and rotting garbage. He is no longer dressed in black from head to toe, in fact, he had changed into tattered rags that hang limply on his skeletal frame.
It must have been such a long and arduos journey for him from that small quayside town in Europe.
His mud-hardened hair covers half his face. He stares back at me with that gaunt look in his eyes as he hovers around the rows of stalls selling durian and pirated DVDs.
The sight of his sunken cheeks depresses me. I remember how Prof. Philip Van Peele back in Silliman U had pointed to us that Tobias Mindernickel is a perfect picture of Death.
He is lucky, no children come to tease him now. It's quite too far away from the street of Grauer Weg where he came from. Filipino children hardly know him at all.
Then, I begin to suspect that he is stalking me---or am I stalking him?
"Where is the dog?" I ask as soon as he is off the stairs of the smelly overpass, standing face to face with me on the ground. I am referring to that yellow dog, with one black ear and a black ring around one eye, that he bought from a man in Germany. A picture of sadness and remorse shows in his face. He had named that dog Esau.
"Where is the dog?" I ask again.
He began to sob. He did not reply.
"C'mon, tell me," I said, "What happened to Esau?"
His furious sobbing turn to a loud wail.
"What did you do to your dog?!" I said, loudly, this time, that passersby begin to notice.
Suddenly, he stops and squints a pair of bloodshot eyes at me. I could see sadness, but not guilt, in those eyes, before he scampers away and vanishes from my life forever.

In Search of the Lost Goddess

Some time in the previous months, I got the rare treat of finding my lost goddess in Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent." The whole novel exceeded my wildest expectation, a rewriting of the familiar account of the Bible in the point of view of a woman named Dinah, who--if you get down to it--was a mere footnote on the pages of Genesis. Diamant's book deserved to be talked about, if only because the God of Jakob, Isaac and Abraham, the only God I was borne to believe in and the only God I was made to believe existed, appeared strange and unfamiliar all throughout the book, while the household gods of Rachel, the rituals of the moon goddess and her daughter, the great mother Inanna, became increasingly familiar as I found myself getting drawn towards the lives of Jacob's daughter Dinah and her four mothers Leah, Rachel, Zilpah and Bilhah.
I would read the book again, if only to know the goddesses better; or get intrigued by the goddess ritual of Opening of the womb, as opposed to the display of virgin blood by the groom during the night of the wedding. Or, to rage against the clan of Jacob, against the brothers of Dinah, against patriarchy who regarded (and continue to regard) women as piece of properties to be exchanged or sold in marriage! The book is the Jewish equivalent of Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman," a story of how a woman's name was erased, the woman forced to live as an outcast, for crossing over to the borders of taboo. I first heard about the book on the Ms magazine's bookshelf, when the book hit the bestsellers' list in 2001 four years after it was published in 1997. The writer Patricia Holt recounted how the book was not really on a big sellers' list in big chain bookstores when it first appeared. It only started to hit the chart when independent booksellers started recommending it to customers. In Davao, you could hardly find a copy of it at the National Bookstore. I found mine somewhere else. Such a pity I only read it now.

On the Road to Monkayo

I feel so tired, body and soul.
Wednesday last week, I journeyed through the night with my boys from Butuan and thought I was perhaps the happiest mother in the whole world, making plans how to spend time with them, but even before I could get them settled in Davao the following morning, I had to leave them with JA to continue their trip to Bansalan while I embarked on a nightmare trip to the town of Monkayo. There, we rode the famous skylab (a motorcycle built with a contraption to allow the two-wheeled vehicle to carry more passengers), and made the daredevil journey to the sitio (subvillage) of Calinogan in barangay Casoon, where the Dibabawuns live.
The contraption was such a crazy structure that sometimes during the trip, passengers seated on it look down to realize they're already sitting on top of a cliff while the motorcycle negotiates a narrow road up the mountain.
It was not just the whole trip that made me so depressed but the nagging feeling that I was trapped. Back in Davao city, we received two PJR Report's copies, where the article on Life as Correspondent appeared and somebody, it was Gra, who said the story was--uhhggh-"inspiring." I felt even more depressed. It was not even half the picture of the life I had seen!

Poem from Paring Bert

A poem from poet-anthropologist-philosopher-Jesuit priest Fr. Albert Alejo. It's interesting to read a more elaborate discussion of his poem here.

Lakbay-Kamay

Ano't tila singlawak
ng lupaing pangarap
itong munti mong kamay
dito, mahal, sa aking palad?

Ang mga ulap sa iyong mga kuko
ang mga bangin sa mga daliri mo
ang manipis na batis ng iyong balahibo
at ang pagpapalit-palit ng panahon
ng init at lamig sa bigla mong pagpisil,
pagbitiw, at pagkapit ng ubod-higpit
sa bawat panaka-naka nating pagtatagpo
na kung bakit laging kailangang patago--
lahat ay tila kawalang hanggang
paano ba lalakbaying pilit
nitong nalulula, at nangingimi kong
mabilisang paghalik.

Little Swiss Shop

On a drizzling afternoon of January, I found myself in a crowd of NGO workers, dancing to the beat of a sacred music under the huge dome of the sky. Three Swiss women led the sacred dance (and I had a sudden wish it were a full moon) but of course, it was not, and it was not really that kind of dance!
The three Swiss women belonged to the women's group Theresa Ladeli (ladeli is the Swiss term for "little shop"), who auctioned unused items in Switzerland to send the proceeds to help poor communities in the Philippines. Later, Daday would tell me how boxes of pencils made in Switzerland and Germany would find their way to Aeta communities in Tapak or how boxes of Swiss knives would sometimes get into the hands of Customs officials who wanted to take some of them as "souvenirs."
Monica Baumann founded the group after the shock of her first visit in the country 16years ago. She has been coming to the Philippines once in every two years to see how far the group's assistance has been going; and this time, she was with two women companions, Lilly Wirz and Anna Rosa Gersbach.
Lilly was upset because she saw a baby died of pesticide poisoning in the midst of a banana plantation in Compostela Valley on the week of their visit. They also went to a house in between the huge tracks of land owned by the Zubiris and another landed family in Bukidnon, where a few months earlier, a nine year old child happened to eat a stolen banana (newly sprayed with insecticides) and died. (Later, I would also read what happened over a year ago to two women workers of a group that Theresa Ladeli was assisting.)
Lilly could not talk to the crowd without bursting into tears. I thought that Ana Rossa did not want to talk, too, because she did not want to show her emotions. But at the end of the program, she delivered this message:
"Maayong Hapon, my dear sisters and brothers," Ana Rossa began. "I say sisters and brothers because you did let me feel at home, you did let me feel being a member of a big family - salamat kaayo!
You gave me the chance to look behind the smile in the faces of the Philippino people and what I saw is more than sad and bad - it's unjust and unhuman.
After all I have experienced these six weeks, the last five and the first three weeks here in Mindanao, I do not go back home the same woman as I was before. I will go home half Swiss and half Filipino (not only because my skin did turn darker) and this half part always wants to come back to you again, because you became part of my life.
It's a privilege to have the choice--as all the people you serve--and this is unjust and unhuman. But you help them, you bring hope, you give all you have --your love--and you risk your life. I admire all of you and thank you for this very precious work. You work as NGO's, you do not go overseas. You have the choice to either work for a big company here and earn bigger money or go abroad but you made your choice to stay in your home country, to stand up for your people, to serve the poor.
On our way back to Davao city, our companion pointed to them a Swiss Deli we passed by on our way to Bajada.
"No, no," Lilly said, vigorously shaking her head. "We don't go looking for Swiss food when we're in Asia, we eat 'real' food," she said. "We eat Swiss food only when we get home and then, we know, that it's for real."
I nodded because I saw her eat with relish boiled eggplant and okra with bagoong that afternoon.

Life of a Gay-sha!

I was asked to do a story on the "Life of Correspondents," by the Philippine Journalism Review (PJR), but to my dismay, no one really wanted to talk to me about it. Bong told me to interview his bureau chief, instead; Esco did not want me to reveal which paper he was writing, Q was upset with his date and became very scarce, and except for Julie in far off Zamboanga city, everybody--from Nash to Jeoffrey to Grace---was silent.
I was lucky to find the gay-sha.
She set our interview inside the newly-opened Peace Café on Juna Subdivision where she was doing an interview with the café owner! Is it possible to interview somebody who is doing an interview? I asked.
But then, I realized this was how impossible the gay-sha was! After waiting for quite a time, while the gay-sha sipped her iced coffee, finished her ice cream, demolished her banana cake without even the courtesy of handing me a fork I could use to help him, peppered the café owner with questions before dismissing her, the gay-sha confronted me.
"So, what are you going to ask?" she asked.
"I don't know," I shrugged. "I don't want to ask anything."
The gay-sha sighed. "Maybe, you give me answers first, before I ask my questions," I continued. She sighed again. "This is an interview where the first question is, what is the question?!"
She understood that she was supposed to tell the story of our lives.
The gay-sha did not complain. In the news, Rep. Prospero Nograles was already voted as the new Speaker of the House and the Inquirer Mindanao Bureau was texting the gay-sha and me to gather the people's reaction about it. Nogie is from Davao, the political archenemy of Davao's tough-talking Dirty Harry. But the gay-sha stayed in her place, a picture of perfect calm. She knew how to act out her role, whether as interviewer or interviewee.
As she started to open her life, which was also our life, I had to wade through a forest of jargons to decode the language of the gay-sha. "You know what I mean," she'd say, "I don't believe in such fracka-fracka, do you understand?"
Of course, I did not understand. But I nodded. "I don't believe in such chuvanesque," she added. The gay-sha wanted to demolish the belief that there was no story worth dying for. "If no story was worth dying for, no story will get written in the first place. We might as well stop writing," the gay-sha raved. Like mad.

Caged Birds

I am no longer a stranger to jails, so, when I went to do a story on Davao city’s newest women prison facility (which, except for the high fence, did not look like a jail at all), I already knew how to strike a conversation with the women inmates.
“Will you talk about your case?!” I asked the woman who took the courage to approach me, the closest link she thought she can get to the outside world.
“Drugs,” she said, smirking. She got caught in a police buy-bust operation, she explained in a Tagalog I did not understand, because she was using the language of the trade.
“And you?!” I asked another woman beside her, “Drugs,” the woman smiled and nodded.
“About 40 per cent of the cases of women inmates here involved drugs,” said the first woman. “Except them,” she pointed to a handsome woman in her forties, whose voice---when she described the new facility as more “hygienic,” “well-ventilated” and less crammed compared to the old one---was that of someone accustomed to giving orders.
Her case was illegal recruitment, the first woman said. There were only eight or 11 of them here in every 40 of us, said the first woman.
The first woman introduced me to the 64-year old woman, with graying hair framing her sad, wrinkled face. The old woman said she was accused of theft, for stealing coconuts from her own land. The land was mortgaged for a pig, a goat and a can of rice for her wedding feast back in the 1950s.
Her husband tried to redeem the mortgage but their neighbor refused. Three years ago, she was harvesting coconuts from an adjacent farm when the coconuts rolled over to her neighbor’s property. She came to retrieve the coconuts but her neighbor accused her of theft.
“I won the case in the barangay and in the lupon,” the woman said, in a voice made stronger and louder by her belief that she was right.
She failed to show up in Court two times after she was summoned for a hearing. She said she was so busy selling vegetables in Bankerohan, she had no time for Court hearings. Her family depended on her, she said. After two Court summons that she largely ignored, the sheriffs came to detain her.
Over a year ago, I saw the insides of a jail for the first time when we paid a visit to Lex Adonis, the Davao broadcaster jailed for libel. The broadcaster was jailed largely because he failed to defend himself in the proceedings. He was tried in absentia. He was the only libel case in the sea of other criminal cases. I remember the first conversations we had with the inmates.
“So, what’s your case?” one of our companions asked the man that Lex Adonis introduced to us. “Murder,” the man replied.
We nodded our heads vigorously to hide our surprise.
“How long have you been here?” one of us, who recovered, asked.
“Seven years,” the man said, “Still waiting for conviction.”
“Seven years!” we chorused, no longer able to hide our surprise.
“What will happen if you get convicted for four years?” one of us asked.
“I don’t know,” the man said. “I’ll just do what they want me to do.”
Everybody reflected on the murder and the man.
“I did not regret it,” said the man, as if he could read our thoughts, “I killed the bastard who raped my daughter.”
We nodded again, slowly this time. The circle around us grew as more prisoners came to join the conversation. Most of their cases were murder, rape, drugs. We listened to another man who told us how he was mistaken for the murderer, after he found himself standing near scene of the crime just when the police were arriving.
I remember what I learned from all the prison movies I watched: Even in jail, no one is guilty. Everyone is innocent.

In Search of Ghosts

“People go in search of ghosts whenever they return, after a long absence, to a place where they once lived,” Philip Roth says, in an interview with New Yorker magazine’s Life and Letters. On the day that I arrived in Cebu after over 15 years of absence, I found myself not only looking for ghosts but also turning into one. (to be continued)

Santo Niño Cathedral

Coffee Break

This morning, as we sipped coffee and exchanged the latest trade gossips, we were surprised to know that two plainclothesmen went to Mindanao Times two days ago, demanding to see the reporter who wrote about the New People's Army statement on the killing of Davao businessman Vicente Ferrazini. They wanted the Davao paper to disclose the source of the information. Amy told them that instead of interfering with the affairs of the newsroom, they should go ask the city mayor, because he knew everything about the case!
Ferrazini, whose family owns the Merco food chain and icecream stores in Davao, was shot by unidentified men on A. Pichon St. (old Magallanes St.) on Saturday, February 2. He died two days later. The New Peoples Army owned up the killing, through a statement emailed to the media. Maybe, those plainclothesmen were not aware yet, how fast information can travel in the age of the internet, so, they went to the Mindanao Times office to ask the reporter how she got the information.
Isn't that a bit threatening? As if, there was an absence of law protecting the media against unnecessary disclosure of information? Republic Act 1477, as lawyers patiently explain to members of the press, provides that editors and newspapers are not compelled to disclose sources of news revealed to them in confidence, except in cases affecting national security.
Or, maybe, the government and military establishments thought the newsrooms as mere extension of their offices...? (photo courtesy of davaotoday)

Portrait of a Journalist

Our Editor's Note

On November 6, 2005, we came out with the maiden issue of Davao Today, which never diminished in value even over time. Maybe, it was because we invested sheer hard work in it; maybe, love's labors were never (and could never be) lost. A click of the mouse sort of brought me back in time, makes me long for the moment when everything was just beginning, when everything was still on the verge of being.

Full Moon over the Bat Caves

On our way to a bat cave on Samal island, I knew that I was destined to see the bats taking their circadian flight with a full moon rising as the backdrop. I simply knew it. It was like the feeling you get when you're playing that game called "mastermind," and you've already figured out the colors and the exact arrangement of the hidden chips. I was very sure of it. The fact that I was switched in between Ja and a passenger next to Barry inside a crowded bus on a ferryboat bound for the island seemed a perfect reason why I should see the bats taking flight on a full moon.
"No, they don't cover the sky like clouds," the American scientist Jim Kennedy patiently explained how the skies look like when the bats start flying, leaving their roost to look for food at night. "They're more like a stream, undulating against the red sky when the sun sets." I did not say anything because I knew the moon will show up for me that night. It was something I can only feel in my gut. Simply because I have faith in the moon when it is at its fullest and that I was there to visit nocturnal creatures like bats, I was sure I'd get to see the two fascinating events happening simultaneously before my eyes.
Even Ja's prediction of rain did not bother me. "You see those rain clouds from the east? No moon would show up tonight," Ja kept saying.
We did not stay long to wait for the moon over the island.
I texted Mrs. Monfort as soon as we got back to Davao, to find out how the sky over Samal looked like when we left. Was it covered with clouds? Was the moon even visible? She replied that at that moment, it was already covered. But earlier, she said, the moon was very big and beautiful.
The Goddess was always known to favour women. I simply knew how the sky will clear to allow me a glimpse of the full moon, when the bats are in flight, if I had only been stubborn enough to stay and wait.
I knew Ja was wrong simply because he's a man.