Building a Gestalt

On September 10 of this year, the first batch of students at the AF3IRM Summer School of Women’s Activism graduated, each lighting a candle in memory of a woman of significance in her life.  I have witnessed this ritual time and again, seen the tense pause as each participant dove deep into her personal memory to find that person who summed up, with her own life and fate, the meaning of a commitment to women’s liberation.  As story after story is told briefly, often in a quivering voice -- of this woman from Puerto Rico, that woman from the Philippines, of the mother from Guatemala, or another woman from yet another country -- their images seem to rise in the circle’s center, witnesses to the eon-long struggle which had involved great-grandmothers, mothers, sisters.  This is the instant of connection, when a gestalt of history is created, when each woman stands with a long line of women stretching back to the dawn of history. 

            The class had started three Saturdays before;  I used  this poem: 

            At last I am free

            At last I am a woman free!

            No more tied to the kitchen,

            Stained amid the stained pots,

            No more bound to the husband

            Who thought me less

            Than the shade he wove with his hands,

            No more anger, no more hunger,

            I sit now in the shade of my own tree

            Meditating thus, I am happy, serene.

                                    Sumagalamata, 600 BCE, India

The poem seemed so alien in the 2011 mid-Manhattan summer setting of  AF3IRM’s school.  On the other hand, it was terribly familiar, underscoring the persistence of women’s vision, of a world where she could have “the shade of my own tree,” for space safe enough for her to be, independent of her mandated social roles.  The stories from the participants of their own mothers, grandmothers and aunts underscored the continuity of this struggle for women’s rights, equality and emancipation, and made this ceremony of remembering even more soul touching. 

(This essay appears in full at the www.rainandthunder.org journal.)

Limerick

Turned the caption of the picture below into a parody.

Sometimes I crack myself up. 

 

3 pigeons (alas) checked out the tree

this morning

are you ill, asked one

beak prodding a drying branch,

or are you just being

law-abiding?

Apres-Irene, the Hurricane

3 pigeons came this morning to inspect the tree and held a long discussion as to whether it was ill or simply being a law-abiding citizen. 

Piece at Ms Magazine blog

access here:  http://ow.ly/6e5wM%20#HERvotes

While doing research for this, I was struck by two things:

a)  Women workers had to create autonomous space for themselves even in terms of organizing as workers to be able to address the specific characteristics of their class oppression;
and
b)  How women organizing transformed the labor union movement, which in the aftermath of the militancy of women workers, opened its doors to both women workers and black workers. 

AMNESIA

(Written for the Atlas of Transformation, edited by Zybnek Baladran & Vit Havranek, published with the assistance of the Czech Republic and the City of Prague, available at www.artbook.com; 720 pp)

The world of healing pays scant attention to a different type of amnesia -- that which comes from a surfeit of memory, in contrast to the common medical definition of the disorder as a loss of what should be remembered.  In the amnesia of a surfeit of memory, thought processes are truncated, warped, aborted, so that one plus one never becomes two but rather, diverted from the path of completion by counter-propositions, arguments, labels, myths, artifice and polemics, one plus one remains forever one plus one…

Thus, 23 years after his overthrow and on the 92^nd anniversary of his birth, the dictator’s widow is treated to a tribute, whereby those in charge of codifying and preserving the best of the national experience labor mightily to produce a few minutes of “fabulousness.”   Opera singers strain their larynxes, prima ballerinas, their ankles while composers wring the last note of bathos from their storehouse of musical notes  -- so that this “fabulousness” can overlay the odor of blood, sweat and decayed flesh;  the echo of pain moans and outraged screams, and the redolence of a thousand pairs of shoes assaulted by mold.  The dead are thereby not simply forgotten but removed from having existed, despite the list of names chiseled into stone at a shrine of “martyrs,” alongside the statue of a goddess who, if logic were to be followed, should have been faulted with having allowed the travesty to occur in the first place, rather than praised for a victory wrested by 25 years of struggle.  It is a denial of the people’s ability to transform their own social environment by attributing their success to some mysterious higher power, preferably imported.  The subtext is the preservation of a people’s reliance on authority and of a people’s faith in their powerlessness.

The dictator’s overthrow, it would seem, had wrought finished to all of that, the judgment already hammered into stone but to a people and a nation constructed from a series of historical accidents and the desires of Others, a summing up does not sum up, the past is always malleable and neither truth nor lie are absolutes.  To such a people, amnesia is not a state of being; it is a willful act of conciliatory remembering, of preferring an artificial memory of pleasantness because it is unpleasant to recall the unpleasant and easier to pretend that life experience does not provide lessons.  Besides which, lessons are only derived from summings- up, or what Einstein defined as the schematic representation of experience.  The amnesiac cannot make the leap from perceptual to cognitive knowledge.

This willful substitution of a simulation for reality comes easy to a people who have forgotten even the name of their favorite and most common dish even at the instant of their chewing upon it, this repast of pork chunks and chicken pieces simmered slowly in a broth of soy sauce and vinegar, with a concoction of spices.  What is it called, what is its name?  No one remembers and all are reduced to referring to it by the Mexican term adobo which in truth is far from the dish as can be.  If food itself loses its designation, then there’s nothing out-of-kilter in towns, villages, streets changing names, or languages altering in accordance with every change in rulers.  This is not a frailty but a virtue; it is celebrated as an infinite capacity for adaptation.  Hence, in Japan, the women acquire local names and wear kimonos;  in Saudi Arabia, they don the hijab while in Europe, their children acquire hazel and blue eyes and light skins.  The men serve under flags of every sea-faring country in the world, spending their adulthood in unbounded oceans, their moorings reduced to portable memories:  photographs of wives, children, parents, a song or two...  This malleability is said to be what enables them to survive, even in the most perilous of the 198 “host” countries to which globalization takes them, chattering in Italian at the piazza where once a week, they gather to cease soul-shifting just long enough to enable their strangeness to surface and morph into familiarity by virtue of numbers. 

Soul-shifting from a surfeit of memory is peculiar to a constructed people who hold in their psyche several complete and competing operating systems, their worldviews swinging from one to the other to ensure survival.  A Japanese is; an American is and the French is French…  A constructed people, on the other hand, is always something more over and beyond their naked basic essence, carrying as they do an imposed history.   This soul-shifting has become engrained, because colonialism, occupation and neo-colonialism are drawn-out acts of genocide.  The authority of the Other remolds the subjugated into an image of the Other, reflective of His view of the world, and that process of recreation entails the destruction of a people’s sense of what they are.  Having experienced this dismantling of one’s being, the colonized understands that amnesia is necessary and soul-shifting is vital to survival.   It is a complex process done instinctively, without calculation almost, even though it is based on the most profound of calculations. 

On the day of the overthrow itself, even as the shouts of jubilation rise through the air, the process of forgetting is already underway.  The overthrow is hailed as a great victory for democracy and no one remembers anymore how the very system that is being hailed provided the dictator with his ladder to power and the ever-intensifying consolidation thereof, that the onerous impact of his rule was legitimized through the courts, which declared his “executive orders” legitimate and refused to rule on many challenges to his right to govern by decree.  His successor is re-painted as the victor of the just-past elections, this myth of a “democratic” system triumphant substituting for the intensity of the march of a million, two million, and the spontaneous refusal of the majority – clerks, vendors, teachers, farmers, workers – to participate in turning the wheels of social business this one fine day.  The successor won;  the dictator cheated; ignore that instant of stillness, incandescent as lightning and just as swift, that fell over the land when everyone chose to ignore the last decree. 

This affirmation of the correctness of corrupt systems and process of governance, those hailed as sure signs of a democracy,  must now entail the frustration of any thing to the contrary.  Unfortunately, some 10,000 misguided former residents of various detention camps run by the dictator filed a precedent-setting case against his estate – for he has, by now, peacefully and sans accounting, escaped through death’s door – and won, thus documenting for all of time the intolerable vile acts of perfidy and treason perpetrated by  institutions that now serve the successor.  That will have to be nullified, gently if possible, harshly if not.  And thus begins the long wait for justice and balance for the 100,000 who sojourned in the detention camps, as the new government exercised eminent domain and claimed all available wealth of the dictator and his various friends and relations, denying the right of the victimized.  Slowly, that issue is laid to rest because time is on the corrupt system’s side, as not a few of the victimized succumb at last to the wounds and stress of their torture and deprivation.

In this state of amnesia, it is possible once again to commit the same vile acts of perfidy and treason against the people for whom government is supposedly set.  The first decade of the new century is marked by political assassinations, disappearances and the inexorable fall of fear and trembling over the land.  Each successor after the dictator has driven the nation deeper into poverty, selling off land, sea and sky for quick profit, and when all natural resources are gone, then selling off the people themselves without shame, nakedly, and giving them the sop of a tribute as the new heroes of the economy, the better for them to endure their slavery.

By now, it should be clear that this is about the devolution of social transformation, the reversion of its most noble impulses and objectives to the single principle of power – the acquisition thereof, the monopolization thereof.  Because one plus one is never two but remains one plus one, tyranny and corruption are a constant, and the idea of a dictatorship lingers as both a sly temptation and objective.  It has never been thoroughly anathematized.  In due time, in ways big and small, the idea becomes flesh and throughout the archipelago, warlord clans accumulate power through the expediency of violence and corruption.  Each lords it over any one of the 150 ethno-linguistic groups which had been forcibly welded together into an alleged nation by historical accidents and by the desire, needs and greed of the Other.

Amnesia is tragic to a people who live on islands afloat on the ocean of storms and tsunamis.  The first thousand buried by mudslides caused by the denudation of forests were speedily forgotten, with the second thousand devastated by a typhoon, who in turn lost their hold on public attention with the third thousand murdered by a deluge, who must thereupon give up their place in the collective memory to the fourth thousand…  And so it goes, as the sea rises higher each year and enters villages deeper.  Though amnesic, the constructed people’s memory is swollen with fabulousness:  the hit tunes of now, telenovelas of today, outrageous romances, impressive displays of wealth, plastic surgery and skin whitening…

This madcap fabulousness that has replaced true memory makes it possible for a warlord clan in the third poorest province of the archipelago to game the system, build a private army and having accumulated power through the naked exercise of nepotism, build more than two dozen mansions for themselves, thus negating poverty as it were from their personal environment and then enabling the casual massacre of 57 people, including 21 women, two of whom were pregnant, and 30 journalists. 

It is a remarkable story which, in due time and much like the thousand other assassinations and disappearances post-dictatorship, will be overtaken by amnesia.  -- ##

Meditation on a Death

The first narrative seemed most fitting: he was armed, shooting, when his foes cut him down, a death deserved by a warrior, not perishing from kidney failure, starvation or diarrhea from the pestilential waters of a Third World ghetto, still acting as he preached, courage and kalashnikov in hand despite white hair and beard…

Since I’d gotten tired through the years of young men/women doing the killing and dying at the behest of old, older and one-foot-in-the-grave men, dying like an old lion in combat seemed appropriate to bin Laden -- an exclamation point calling into question a pattern to which we have somehow become habituated, ever since war was invented.

But then the second narrative arrived: he was unarmed, protected by two women, one of whom was shot in the leg, the other killed, as one bullet drilled his forehead and others stitched his chest. He fell on no magic carpet, wasn’t covered by an enchanted tapestry, did not hear the ringing of djinn bells. He died in an unaesthetic house.

After a second of feeling deflated, I realized that that this manner of dying could dovetail into any variation of the Austere Warrior Myth, evoking photos of his austere demeanor, of him barefoot, wearing that threadbare almost priestly robe, in the desserts of Afghanistan.

That led me to wondering just who were there when a Prophet breathed his last on the cross. Fifteen disciples, I found out – and, except for Jude and John Zebedee, all were women.

As in birth, so in death; women’s faces attend alpha and omega.  #

May Day Statement

AFFIRM THE VALUE OF WOMEN’S WORK!

From the Home to the Office to the Factory!

AF3IRM marches on International Labor Day 2011 in affirmation of the right of workers to self-organize, to collective bargaining, to conduct strikes and other means of struggle for just wages and safe working conditions and to resist ever-intensifying exploitation of labor by capitalists.

AF3IRM marches on International Labor Day 2011 to denounce the embedded racism and sexism that enables capital to inflict even more acute exploitation upon women workers. 187 years after the first all-women strike in 1824, women continue to suffer wage disparity. White women workers earn only $0.77 to every dollar a male worker earns; black women, $0.64 and Latinas, $0.52. Over a lifetime, women workers lose $380,000 because of wage discrepancy doing the same job as male workers. Only capitalists and Big Business benefit from social tolerance of racism and sexism.

AF3IRM marches on International Labor Day 2011 in condemnation of the continuing attacks on organized labor and labor rights. 186 years since the first all-women union was established in 1825 – the United Tailoresses of New York, Corporate America and its puppet US politicians are moving to dissolve and dismantle the ability of women workers to struggle for just wages and decent working conditions.

Women workers now comprise nearly 50% of all unionized workers in the US and half of them work in the public sector. From Wisconsin to Nevada to New Jersey, Corporate America and its puppet US politicians are terminating labor rights in the public sector, laying off teachers, child and health care givers, social service workers and more, while leaving male-dominated public sector professions intact or barely touched. By so doing, Corporate America hopes that the working class will be so rift by sexism and racism and thereby weakened as to be unable to resist its push toward enhanced exploitation.

Alongside the increasing numbers of unionized women workers is the increasing number of workers of color, of im/migrant workers – against whom Corporate America and its puppet politicians have launched xenophobic attacks. The latter are meant to keep the “undocumented” sans legal standing in the US, so they can be paid subsistence wages and inflicted with intolerable exploitation. 20% of “undocumented” workers in this country work in private households, as nannies and housekeepers.

AF3IRM declares that a man or woman who’s good enough to work in the United States is good enough to stay!

From the house to the office to the factory, women’s work remains acutely devalued by Corporate America and its puppet politicians.

We say ENOUGH! It is time to march and to denounce this effort to savage women workers, to weaken organized labor, eradicate the gains of the labor movement. It is time to march and denounce this continuing attempt to return women workers to 19th century working conditions – the same conditions which triggered the “uprising of the 20,000” – a strike by women shirtwaist workers in 1909 in New York City.

We say RISE AND MARCH!



PUSH BACK AGAINST CAPITALIST THEFT OF WOMEN’S WORK – from the home to the office to the factory!
GOOD ENOUGH TO WORK, GOOD ENOUGH TO STAY!
AFFIRM THE RIGHT OF LABOR TO UNIONIZE AND TO COLLECTIVE BARGAINING!
AFFIRM THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN WORKERS TO EQUAL PAY AND SAFE WORK CONDITIONS!
AFFIRM THE CORRECTNESS OF THE WOMEN’S STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION!
A WOMAN’S PLACE IS AT THE HEAD OF THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIBERATION OF HUMANITY!

Also on AF3IRM Website: http://www.af3irm.org/2011/4/may-day-statement-2011-affirm-value-women’s-work

Jollene Levid
AF3IRM National Chairperson
Email: chair@af3irm.org
Website: www.af3irm.org
Phone: (323) 356-4748
Association of Filipinas, Feminists Fighting Imperialism, Re-feudalization, and Marginalization (AF3IRM)

###

Desperately Seeking Antigone

The young heroine of a Greek tragedy elected to bury her younger brother, despite the king’s edict that he should lie dead and exposed to the elements.


Not burying the dead is violating their primal right: to lie buried, undisturbed-- Requiescat In Pace.

This was the core template for one of my short stories: Earthquake Weather. I wrote it in honor of several friends killed by Marcos’s military and left exposed in front of various town halls. Being left unburied was one of the direst punishments inflicted under martial law; the other, ironically, was being buried in unmarked mass graves.

What to make, then, of the phenomenon of the dictator himself refrigerated since his death in 1988. Occasionally, through the years, I’d wonder how much it cost, in equipment and power supply, to turn him into a corpsicle. In a country where 80% of mothers cannot afford to refrigerate milk and baby food, this human jerky was symbolic of the excessive self-adulation of the Marcos regime.

Freeze-dried or mummified, dead is dead. Let the corpse return to the elements.

It has also become expressive of the politics of absurdity in the Philippines as recently, following a court-ordered compensation to victims of human rights violations during the Marcos regime, the dead's clan, cronies and supporters have pushed for his burial in the Heroes' Cemetery. 

One would think that the senators, congressmen and governors of the Marcos family infrastructure would have better things to highlight:  good works done, nice legislation passed, lives of constituents made better. But no, it has to be about keeping alive the myth of Marcos and hence, ruling class invincibility, maintained by thought control, historical revision and an undercurrent of a message that tells the Filipino people they're too stupid to pass judgment on someone like Marcos. 


This view is that of a supremely malleable nation (i.e., stupid enough) to swallow hook, line and sinker even the most overt lies that would maintain authority, power and privilege for a few. We’re already seeing reverberations of this mental shifting:  reversals of rulings which had seemed indelible acts of justice in the Vizconde case, Lacson redux, etc.

The Geneva Conventions actually provide for respectful treatment of even the dead: “honorably interred…their graves respected…properly maintained and marked…”

In 2002, a French court decreed that Raymond and Monique Martinot, whose bodies were refrigerated by their son in their chateau’s basement, should be given proper burial – based on the timeless principle that the dead is entitled to Requiescat In Pace.

So the Philippines need an Antigone and frankly, I don’t care how she does it -- float the corpse on a raft in the ocean and give it to its fellow sharks, shove a blasting cap up its behind and disappear it like so many disaparecidos of martial law years, toss it down an unmarked grave in a ravine and let weeds and worms have it.

Just end this necrophilic obsession so everyone can start thinking about the politics of living. -- #

Just a Little Love Song

On International Women's Day!  All hail to Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai!


Click here to see what women of the Philippines are doing.

Arrivals/Departures Commemorative Poster

Click on photo to supersize.  To see more details, follow the link below:


http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=1204159&k=Z4EXX25QT55G6BFBXK4XTVXYRWJJ5Z3EP3&oid=155290314527623
 
Signed by all the artists, this will sold at the exhibit. 
 
I hope this post works.  Techie things cause me extreme anxiety. 

A Helpless Alien-nation

Under imperialism’s circular migration narrative, overseas Filipino workers are perceived as united in a globe-spanning nation, connected to a virtual homeland with family faces, concerns and issues digitalized into a two-dimensional quasi-reality fabricated from sentimental bonds.

Events in North Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the globe have constantly underscored the peril of this view: that by falling in with globalization’s creation of an internationally homeless worker population, we are complicit in depriving migrants of the right to acquire a country, to belong actively to a nation and to be able to engage politically wherever they are, so that they may protect and enhance the life they have managed to establish.

Less than 2,000 of the 26,000 Filipinos in Libya have managed to make it out of the county. It will cost the Philippine government $2.3 million to evacuate them and acrimonious debate is on-going as to how to do this.

Curious, I checked the number of Filipinos working in flashpoint countries and here are some figures -- only estimates, since some OFWs are undocumented:
• 40,000 in Bahrain
• 1,000 in Yemen
• 4,000 in Egypt
• 29,000 in Lebanon
• 25,000 in Oman, which just joined the Arc of Tumult in North Africa/Middle East
• 89,000 in Qatar
• 1,000,000 in Saudi Arabia
• 100,000 in Kuwait
• 6,000 in Iraq
• 500 in Iran
• 30,000 in Israel
• 15,000 in Jordan
• 300,000 in the United Arab Emirates

But less than a dozen in the Vatican City, whose dicta on divorce, reproductive rights and health are negatively impacting the rights of women in the Philippines! We can’t even use remittances as an excuse for obeying the Vatican as there’s nothing coming from there.

I am now wondering whether, if overseas work contracts contained the right to settle and integrate in the receiving countries for overseas workers, OFWs would not be as hapless, would be engaged actually in the struggle to rid countries of despots, rather than remain on the sidelines, fearful of reprisals from both sides. - #

Factoid

Despite a $77 billion GDP, 35% of the population of Libya lives below the poverty level. 

Poverty, as evinced in non-industrialized -- i.e., developing -- countries means having NO HOPE FOR A FUTURE.

Saudi Arabia oppositionists are calling for a Day of Rage with demands that include freedom for women.

Love it. 

Le Deluge Reprised

Son of his father, Saif al-Islam Al-Gaddafi, who holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, went public, saying that without his father, there would be civil war in Libya. 

As I said, it would sound so much better in French.   Or he could've tried it in British English.  Or paraphrased Duvalier's L'etat c'est moi. 

Ooops, I hope I remember that phrase correctly.

So chaos broke out -- precisely because his father refused to leave, creating the very nightmare his son says his father protects them from.

Suck on the teats of power and privilege too long and go mad -- ain't that a truth, in whatever institution, organization, agency one is?  -- ##

Why They Remain in Power

The hated French king Louie XV said:  apres moi le deluge.  Hosni Mubarak says, "If I resign today, there will be chaos."

Ain't even original;  it was more elegant in French though equally untrue. 

Tiresome really, were it not for the memory of me flopping down on a Louie XV chair at Minnie Osmena's Park Avenue residence a long time ago.  Or was it Louie XIV? 

Hah!   --#



 

Dream Slayer in the City of Time

Hard to believe that Mubarak was already head of state when I reached Cairo more than a decade ago.

Hard to realize as well that despite all computer modeling programs, “scientific” methods of socio/political analysis, the wave of turmoil now arching through the Middle East, from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Egypt was largely unanticipated. Hard to know how and where it will end but two things are palpable: overstaying in\at power destroys structures of governance and makes “orderly transitions” nearly impossible (Haiti is a prime example); and believing that only death can part one from power harms the very cause one espouses. Indeed, the Cause itself becomes subsumed to the issue of maintaining control and power.

I reached Cairo at the end of an inordinately long sojourn in the West. When I was awakened on my first day there by the 5 a.m. call to prayers blaring from loudspeakers in minarets all over the city, I realized how one dimensional my life had been. It was, I think, a factor in my return to Hatha/Ratha yoga practice.

It was here that a Palestinian publisher told me of how all these rich Arab women brought their children and nannies to a children's literature bookfair;  while the mothers sipped coffee, the nannies chose books for the children who spoke to them "in your language..."  All the nannies were Filipinas.  "Very soon," the publisher said, "Tagalog will be a power language."  I could only smile and say "it's a beautiful language," not adding fat chance of that happening, when we're experts at denigrating our own. 

Two persons I kind of knew were then under repressive attacks: the feminist Nawal El Saadawi, whom I was fortunate enough to have met at a European women’s conference, and the Nobel Literature laureate Naguib Mafouz, one of whose stories appeared in an anthology where one of mine (gasp!) was included. Nawal endured house arrests and death threats; Mafouz would be stabbed in the neck by fundamentalists in an assassination attempt.

Thus I was goggle-eyed in Cairo, trying to process as quickly as possible its many layers of history. Time was ascendant in the city – from the pyramids in the horizon to the Coptic cemetery of crumbing tombstones one stumbled upon to an 11th century breathtaking mosque where the attendant was kind enough to let loose with a chant to show off its acoustics. While buying souvenirs, I was asked where I was from and when I said Philippines, all the men (most shopkeepers were male) said, “yes, yes, we like Philippine women.” At which I asked what they thought of the city’s top imam saying that charity practiced and funded by the country’s top belly dancers was neither acceptable nor appropriate. Silence.

The Museum of Antiquity is impossible to describe; there was just so much wealth, not simply of gold and gems, but of art. I drooled over a pair of alabaster oil lamps, wanting to run my hand over them (not allowed) to see if a genie or two would appear. Through my half a day’s meanderings through the museum, the words from Bhagavad Gita looped through my mind: “I am Time, destroyer of worlds…” – a favorite quote since I was ten years old.

Hard to believe that in a city chockfull of relics of vanished powers, someone would believe that one could hold on forever to power.

The upshot is an accumulation of rage among people deprived of the right to their own vision. Because that is what dictators, power-hogs, self-centered cliques convinced that they alone know what’s good for a country, a nation, a people, do: they kill dreams.

And because dreams are based on hope, they kill hope as well.

It is the ultimate individualism. -- #

Split a Woman into Two

The sidewalks are clear, the snow has turned to mush and save for the cold that seems determined to dismember your body, joint by painful joint, little remains of the New York holiday snowstorm. I feel like the woman being sawed in half in those ubiquitous illusionist shows – which brings to mind the film The Black Swan which I saw in a Honolulu cinema house, one even slower Hawaii day, if that were at all possible. Talk about splitting a woman into two.


The movie left me ambivalent. I like Natalie Portman, since Star Wars and other films but I hated the story, was absolutely disgusted with its premise and kept thinking that perhaps viewed in another way, it could be an indictment of the masculinist narrative about passion and nice girls, and what it takes to be a great artist when you're female – i.e., from the male point of view, a woman had to be sexually “liberated” to be great. What a cliché, placing talent, dedication and discipline secondary to “losing control.” The end was expected: greatness kills nice girls.

That control came from the mother, rivalry from the female alternative dancer (another woman) and fate’s omen another dancer, aging and replaced by a younger one -- which together created a world of women extremely hostile to women, with women determined to do in one another for the chance to be the preferred “star” of a jerk of choreographer who had silver-haired into his function without judgment, his being a jerk excused because he was “brilliant,” his nature as a Svengali who destroys women masked.

The film left me distraught because of a recent encounter with another huge talent done in by the same social narrative and because I’d learned from reliable sources that a man’s wife had been saying I was trying to “sulot” (steal) her husband whom I hadn’t even seen in five years. The only response I could give was “if this were true, she’d be out in the cold by now.” 

Amazing how being a sexual outlaw is par for the course for a woman in the field of art – nay, it’s even encouraged – but a supposed death knell for a woman in politics. In the former, such a premise is a subject for discussion, the thorny issue of socially expected female role versus what is demanded by being an artist; in the latter, it’s only a bore. -- ##

Darkness Visible

Been spending time with a group of young women in Hawaii trying to unravel the thorny points of class, gender and sexuality;  of nationalism, regionalism and transnationalism;  of language and literature;  of what constitutes the politics of women in this age of globalization.  One asked what my writing process was -- and strangely enough, I'd been thinking about it -- for the long work specifically, since I tend to go on automatic with short pieces, sitting down and after hours of barely eating or sleeping, getting up only after the last punctuation. 

A long work often begins with an image, an idea, an event -- which becomes like a train ticket that I tend to place in a desk drawer somewhere in the writing room of my mind and try hard to forget -- until the day I can no longer procrastinate and open the drawer, pick up the ticket and embark on the journey toward another world, where I am another person.  I don't much like it, because it means going through the tribulations and stresses of a lifetime within a year or two;  and also because as I become the character and that world, my world, I resent intrusions from reality and become anti-social.

That is the process -- a journey through an unfamiliar and yet familiar universe;  where I am both main character and all characters at the same time and yet remain in total control of the evolution of events toward an end of which I have no inkling.

I've had great trouble with this last manuscript, because the real person keeps intruding between me and herself as character, returning me again and again to herself as a person versus herself as character, not understanding that my relationship is not with her but with herself as character, that I needed to deconstruct her, then reconstruct her, so that the angles of her being come out very sharply, acutely, rather than have circumstances grind them down to ordinary smoothness.  Her character may own me but she herself as a person does not.  I have absolutely neither desire nor need to have any personal relationship with her, once she has transferred her life to me.

How does one explain that to the subject of one's writings?

I am often tempted to snarl, "leave me alone -- I'm not interested in the present you but you as a sum total of your past."  Interested in what has been shaped, not in what is being shaped.  Not interested in your current crises but rather how these came about and what could possibly result from them -- mainly because every tale must have completion, even if that completion is also the beginning of another paradigm. 

In quantum physics, one sees what one is looking for only after it has gone. 

Recently, when faced by the difficulty of explaining such a conundrum to non-writers, I find myself hoisting my Nikon and taking photographs -- probably in an attempt how this freezing of the instant, the stopping of time, is so important to my writing process. 

Here's a photo I took on the night of the full moon, 21st December, from the 25th floor of a building in Honolulu.  I call it Darkness Visible.  Click on photo to supersize. 

Two Di-Ba's

Wearing anting-anting (amulets)....

Damn, I'm beginning to look like my mother.  Ha!

Hurry to the Wedding

Addendum

"...But first, we have to clarify who really are the victims," said President Benigno Aquino III, regarding compensation for victims of Marcos-era human rights violations. 

By admission of Marcos's own then Defense Minister, 100,000 people were arrested and imprisoned without trial;  they called it detention.

Less than 10,000 were plaintiffs in the Marcos tort case;  the Hawaii court's synchronized database is only 7,500. 

It's been 24 years and it's still not known who the victims are?  It didn't take that long to document the Holocaust victims who were in the millions. 

Don't hold your breath;  this is another 2+2=2+2, maintaining impunity alive.

Be outraged;  be very outraged.  -- ##

Response

Here's a response to the piece I wrote on the Marcos Tort Case:  http://www.gmanews.tv/story/206221/pnoy-vows-compensation-to-martial-law-victims

Let's see if 2+2 will be 4 this time. 

I'd like to be proven wrong on this one but I wouldn't hold my breath.

2+2 Equals 2+2 Forever

The Texas Court approved a $10 million settlement of a case linked to the Marcos tort case -- i.e., about 10,000 victims sued the Marcos Estate for violations of human rights and were awarded $2 billion. It's been 24 years. Did two stories on this while on the crest of an overwhelming sadness; here's one: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20101117-303660/No-President-keen-on-helping-Marcos-victims.

Sadness came from realizing this was one more unending story of the archipelago -- kind of like Gulong ng Palad (Turn of Fate), a radio serial drama that went on forever. At some point, I think, patience becomes a vice.


So in a way, the mid-year US election results had some positive aspect, if taken as a manifestation of people getting fed up. Unfortunately, Pres. Obama seems to have misinterpreted the message and announced more "bipartisanship."

The message to me was simply: "we're tired of seeing government take care of the rich and powerful while the rest of us go into bankruptcy."

I for one would like to get bailed out from usurious credit card companies, overcharging cable-internet-phone companies, surcharges from my residential coop, etc.

I'd like to see Antartica before it melts.

And this issue of human rights violations committed by the Marcos Dictatorship resolved before the sea drowns the 7,100 islands.

Trust me, it will.  --  ##

Is There A Civilians Day?

Marches, parades, bands, gun-salutes, white-glove salutes. 

Any recognition given to the civilians who died in wars, invasions, occupations, a hundred thousand armed conflicts?  The civilian dead likely number a hundred times the military dead.

As the Bob Dylan song goes, "how many times must cannonballs fly before they're forever banned?" 

The best way to honor Veterans, methinks, is to eliminate the causes of wars, invasions, occupations... 

I leave it to you to list such causes.

Character Calamities

The speechwriter of the President of the Philippines, Mai Mislang, tweeted, during a state visit, that the wine sucked in Vietnam – as though she had been raised guzzling Domaine Romanee-Conti.

Having been a French colony, Vietnam was likely amused by such judgment from a person of a country known for beer.

Ah, well, stupidity is a child of ignorance.

As if this wasn’t enough to upset one for weeks, one of the two women seriously injured at a grenade attack at La Salle university blithely forgave the assailant, whoever he was.  The two women lost limbs and nearly their lives. 

The grenade was thrown allegedly by one fraternity member to damage members of another fraternity – and by accident, collaterally damaged grievously two women whose lives are hereon changed in ways we cannot even conceive.

This readiness to forgive, in my perspective, does not necessarily make one a better person; it simply marks one as a patsy, who cannot even recognize the presence of serious evil.  Whoever threw the grenade was evil;  he knew and didn't care that he could not limit the damage to members of the other fraternity only.

Forgiving so easily allows evil to thrive; and this is probably why people known to have committed great crimes surface and re-surface, again and again, holding on to power, position and privilege, in the Philippine political world, as acts of injustice and terrorism remain un-redressed.

So, there’s the wine comment and the forgiveness comment and my comment: women of the Philippines can sometimes be arrogant and judgmental in petty matters and pushovers in really serious ones. -- ##

On Gilda Cordero Fernando

Prof. Gemino H. Abad of the University of the Philippines was kind enough to send me Volumes I & II of Underground Spirit – a compilation of short fiction from 1972 up. They are handsome volumes and offer quite a spread on Philippine short fiction in English, since the imposition of martial law.  I believe that more volumes are forthcoming.  Prof. Abad inscribed the volumes to me with the words "one's country is what one's memory owes allegiance to..."

Which reminded me that for years I had planned to write or say something about one of the great prose stylists of the Philippines, Gilda Cordero Fernando, who is constantly underrated as a writer, even by herself, methinks.  But then Gilda has never been one for the “struts and charms of trade” as Dylan Thomas puts in, so her literary presence tends to be constantly drowned out by those who do strut.

Her long story People In The War has no equal in Philippine literature. I read it when very young and it has never left me and it taught me, from the moment I finished it, that large themes like invasion, occupation and violence are comprised of small acts of humanity and inhumanity – both inflicted upon ordinary beings and into acts of which they are forced. Hey, to know how tremendous that was, think of how many words and pages it took Tolstoy to say that in War and Peace. This lesson from Gilda was the root of my oft-repeated thesis that one does NOT write for the people but rather one should write as one of the people, thereby undergoing the process of becoming declasse.

Once in a while, I am seized with the urge to read that Gilda story again and re-experience the seismic shock of understanding a Truth about human beings. Gilda reminds me of the equally underrated Katherine Anne Porter, whose Flowering Judas was a consummate treatise on revolution and betrayal.

Gilda’s writing world is a world of women – though not as didactically dry and self-pitying as Kerima Polotan’s; it is a world magical indeed, long before magic realism rose out of Latin America, imbuing with mythic resonance the small, the daily, the minutes, rather than the years, of Time. She has a housewife capture a duende (elf) ; a hairdresser create subtle narratives from hairstyles; and so on. From all these, one draws a sense of women’s quiet strength and Gilda was doing it before feminist values became the “common sense” for women even in the West.

Gilda was also the force in the creation of books on various aspects of Philippine history and culture, which brought together artists and writers, antedating the manga novel fad from Japan. Truly, she’s done crucial work but is under-recognized for it, and I am inclined to think that it’s not simply because she is female but because she is gorgeous and intelligent, to boot. Ah, well, every woman out there will understand that.

So, here’s to you, Gilda; let’s raise a glass of EF THEM! to all the dead and/or dying old men overrated as Philippine national artists – which of course you will never do, gracious person that you are.

My, this started out as a piece of recommendation that you all buy Underground Spirit – please do so – and became a short discourse on Gilda Cordero Fernando. But if you can manage it, please read People In The War. -- ##

It Is Done

From a character in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book: “I realized I’d change nothing by proving that the life we live is someone else’s dream.”


The sentence floated through my mind as I watched the fifty-some new members of AF3IRM, all under 30 years of age,  take their oath of commitment to principle, cause and organization after two days of intensive deliberation at the end of nearly two years of study. I wished then I could add a footnote to Pamuk’s book: “At least it gives one a chance to choose -- not to do so,  or to live a different dream or a dream built on one’s experiences.”

Some principles were debated and established during those three days, among which were a) one has the right to make history wherever one is – in accordance with the material conditions of one’s existence and the right to acknowledgement of that history; b) true social transformation encompasses transformation of gender power relations and an end to the relegation to the private sphere of obligations which should be and are social in character; c) as with other sectors, women have a right to theory-building. There were others but to me these were among the weightiest.

The last will likely be the most difficult but even ideology has to evolve.

We had good landmarks to go by. Prof. Johanna Brenner warned about an international movement to restore/maintain the hetero-patriarchy; Dr. Anna Guevarra exposed the deliberation behind the push for Filipinas to metamorphose into servants for overseas work; Charlene Sayo raised the rather bizarre Oedipal specter of second generation Filipina-Canadians having to deal with white male Canadians raised by Filipino nannies; Roma Amor, a trafficking survivor, traced her vulnerability to domestic violence in her Philippine marriage.

The strange thing for me was being able to play on the guitar, after the launch, without mistake the song “Good Night, Ladies.” This piece of music has strange resonance for me, since my nanny invariably tuned in to Ruben Tagalog’s radio program “Harana” (serenade) as she waited for me to fall asleep. The program ended, I think, with this song and to this day, I associate it with burdens laid down and preparations to voyage into the mythic realms of sleep.

As for the guitar playing, I took it up to learn to read notes. I’d picked up somewhere that learning a new language was the best way to forestall brain decrepitude. I thought music being a different language and having been an opera buff since I was 15 years old, I might as well learn how to read notes.

It’s been so difficult, what with slashes of calluses on the fingertips of my left hand (I once tried using my right hand on the frets but that inverted the guitar, silly me) that I kind of wish I’d chosen to learn Arabic instead. The brain processing is so different I find myself forgetting language and drawn to playing high math games.

The poor ewok Guapo curls up in pain whenever I practice, so terrible are the sounds. When a friend who’s a classical guitarist asked to look at my Martin guitar, I had to demand that he NOT ask me to play for fear he would suffer a stroke from laughter.

So now you understand why playing “Good Night, Ladies” without a single false note was so edifying.

I do not know to which ladies I was saying good night. Perhaps you do. But I do hope that this signifies a preparation to return to the mythic realms, from which I'd been diverted by politics.  -- ##

Enshrining Judas: 9/21

A hundred thousand were imprisoned without charges and without trial.


Hundreds disappeared.

Countless women and men were toyed with, tortured, violated.

The body count rose to 14 per day,

The fetid canal running through downtown Manila became the Estero of Death, as the summarily executed were dumped into it.

The looting of the public treasury was so massive it made the Guinness Book of Records.

The currency slid down steadily, destroying families, driving men and women to jobs overseas. 

The doorway to all that opened on September 21, 1972 with a simple act of betrayal – a betrayal of mandate, a betrayal of oath of office, a betrayal of the Constitution, a betrayal of the people and of the nation.

After the overthrow, 10,000 former “detainees” – a euphemism for those imprisoned without charges and without trial – took courage in hand and sued the ex-dictator, who had reigned as “president” for 22 years.

They won and were granted by the courts a billion dollars in damages. Not a cent would reach their hands, though that case became a precedent for so many other victims of human rights abuses who got indemnified.

One by one, the 10,000 grew old; some became sick; some died. Collections were taken for those who had no money for burial.

It would be good for the significance of this date to disappear. But it will not because the process of justice remains amputated, incomplete. No one has actually been made to pay for betraying mandate, oath and the Constitution. No one was held accountable for butchering people, raping women, stealing from government… Only the poor who fought grew poorer and realized the irony of the saying “you can’t eat principles.”

This is why impunity does not even amaze any longer in the archipelago. This is its taproot, the start of national demoralization, the enshrinement of Judas.

As long as the process of rendering justice to the imprisoned, tortured, disappeared and murdered remains amputated, futility will be the only lesson for the poor and the powerless.

The lesson will always be that the traitor always emerges victorious, with his 30 pieces of silver, fame and fortune intact, with a fake banner of “honor” waving over his heads and convinced that Judashood is a virtue.

Make no mistake about it: there are those who believe from the bottom of their hearts that the Filipino people are undisciplined, unruly, without honor and values, childish – and need an iron hand and that hand is theirs by right of birth, connection and power. They are biding their time. #

P-Noy's Entourage

President Noynoy Aquino of the Philippines will bring 57 men and women with him for his seven-day trip to the United States.  This junket will cost 25 million pesos or more than $500,000. 

The Queen of England, Elizabeth II, travels with an entourage of 40-70, depending on the visit's duration. 

Presidents of the Philippines, I think, should only be allowed to leave the country if they've solved pressing problems  -- as in, solve garbage collection problem, you get one trip;   solve illegal/legal logging = one trip;  solve water crisis = one trip;  solve flooding = one trip... 

No problem solved, no trip as everybody just looks foolish, begging for help before any effort is made. 

9/11

Code Pink has called for Read a Qu'ran Day and is asking for solidarity messages for the women of Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

On stressful days, I usually remember this passage from the Bhagavad Gita: 

Fear Not. What is not real, never was and never will be. What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed. 

Happy end of Ramadan.  Shantih. 

One Beauty Queen & Eight Dead Tourists

If one question were to define the character of your people and if two events were to be pivotal in defining the character of your nation – what question and what events would you choose?

Maria Venus Raj, 22-year-old Miss Philippines contender for the Miss Universe crown, likely did not anticipate she would be at the center of the above-mentioned situations. The question that became a character definition, not only for her but for her entire country mates, was whether she had committed a big mistake and what she did to correct it. Ms. Raj replied candidly that she’d never had a major, major problem and thanked her family for guiding her – not in perfect English, granted, but neither unintelligible nor incomprehensible either. I've heard worse from winners and losers alike. 

Ms. Raj placed fourth and thereby became the object of intense criticism, and a cause for a general self-abnegation on her country people's part, as if she herself, not the judges, chose Miss Mexico for the title. Or as though this was and will be the only chance at a beauty title for the Philippines.

Worse, ex-cop Rolando Miranda decided in the same week to hold hostage a busload of Chinese tourists and allegedly killed eight of them before offing himself. I say allegedly because with all those bullets flying, I prefer to wait for the forensics.

One beauty queen and eight dead tourists then merged into an absurd symbol of the character of the entire nation called the Philippines and an entire people called Filipinos – to wit, that they are flubbers, fumblers, incompetent, corrupt, stupid, murderous, etc.

And now there are rallies in Hong Kong with the Chinese demanding apology, compensation, etc., etc. It shouldn't surprise us when, at some point, there's a demand that the Philippine government reinstate the ZTE broadband project, which was scuttled for corruption under the previous regime.

Filipinos themselves are adding fuel to the fire by blaming Ms. Raj (in lieu of the judges who, btw, were never asked why they chose Miss Mexico), not even understanding the source of their own anger, which in my view is our common perspective on OFWs: bring home the bacon or else... Ms. Raj was born overseas of an OFW mother and an Indian father, hence by legacy is cloaked by the same expectations of OFW women.  Give those of us at home what we want or die trying.

Filipinos as well add to the fury over the eight dead Chinese tourists by immediately blaming one another, passing the buck, falling to their knees and smashing their foreheads on the floor in self-abnegation.

Get a grip, people. The Philippines has had and will have beauty titles galore. Beauty contests are judged on the basis of (1) how close to Western beauty models a girl is; (2) how appealing she and her country are to those looking for product endorsers; and (3) whether there’s a political and commercial advantage to recognizing her country.

Get a grip as well, people and P-noy, re: the eight dead tourists. While it is proper to apologize for this unfortunate end to this murderous madman's actions, enough already with the kowtowing and feeling bad and blaming yourselves.  Hong Kong never apologizes for the cruel and sometimes murderous treatment of Filipina domestic workers; nor did Beijing apologize for the crazed guy who hacked  Filipino father and daughter tourists. If the Chinese feel it’s too dangerous to go to the Philippines, then tell them to go elsewhere.

For the sake of the nation's self-respect, stop acting like the country with its 100 million population is a beauty title contestant and/or a Chinese suzerainty. - #

Flora Lansang

Ms. Flora Lansang, known to many University of the Philippines alumni, passed away last Monday.

She and her family were long-time advocates for national independence and social justice.  They were also stalwart participants in the resistance movement against Marcos.  And a very good supporter of GabNet. 

She inspired one of my short stories, "Our Apostle Paul."   The last time I saw her, which was ages ago, apropos of nothing, she gave me what looked like a tektite ring.

We will miss her. 

So many deaths these two years.  An era is ending.

One Nation Indivisible

The wind had become a cool river flowing through the neighborhood sun-tortured streets when the house ewok Guapo demanded a walk – meaning he skipped and hopped six, seven times on his hind legs, chased his tail four, five times and then dug forepaw nails into my knee, So I brushed back his forelocks, tied it into a topknot with a green ribbon and we sauntered out to join the Congregation of Small Dogs on the sidewalk for a brief orgy of sniffing, yelping and pouncing.

Judge Vaughn Walker had just ruled against Proposition 8 in California; even as, the Center for Reproductive Rights released its study on abortion in the Philippines and Engender Rights demanded the legalization of abortion.

The latter inspired the lawyer-counsel of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines to compare women seeking abortions to dope addicts even as Judge Walker was being outed and his ruling questioned, never mind that no one questioned the presumably heterosexual orientation of a court that previously upheld Proposition 8.

The CRR report tabulated more than half a million back-alley abortions per year in the Philippines, with 90,000 women suffering complications and a thousand dying.

I am of course in favor and in support of the entire range of women’s rights – from the right to equitably end unsatisfactory marriages, to the right to marry whomever one wanted who’s of the age of consent, to sex education in schools (which the bishops contend will cause “developmental harm”, unlike pedophilia which many priests consider as NOT breaking their vow of chastity), to reproductive safety and health, to full and equal representation in power institutions, organizations and agencies of whatever tendency.

Pwew! That was a long sentence. This range is indivisible.

The argument in California is that majority want marriage to be defined as between male and female only; the argument of the bishops is that the Philippines is a Catholic country by majority.  Both argue that the "will of the majority" should be respected, even as such a will rests, not on democratic logic, but on mutable social/religious norms. 

But the actual democratic principle is that no majority can impose its will upon a minority in such a manner that the rights, freedoms and privileges of the minority are restricted and eroded.

This is the same principle that protects the rights of ethnic groups (to speak their own language, for instance), of indigenous peoples and others recognized to have a different lifestyle from that of the majority.

In the Philippine case, the bishops/priest minority is actually suppressing the rights of a majority (women).

All these were running through my head as Guapo and I took a walk this early morning. The Congregation of Small Dogs was absent; there was only this white, middle-aged man with one of Guapo’s cousins and he was happy to see my dog. “A girl, ha? A girl?” No, I said, he’s male. “But the ribbon, his hair, why is it like that…” I said I didn’t know what to do with his hair, just to keep it off his eyes, never mind it was a gender-bender… “He’ll fit right in,” the man said. Say what? “Oh, you haven’t hcard, this is the new neighborhood for HOMOSEXUALS.” I thought my eyeballs would drop to the sidewalk, I was that shocked. “Yup, you haven’t seen them – the HOMOSEXUALS! This is their new area.”

I scooped Guapo up and ran. -- ##