So many have called and emailed to ask "wha' happened?" For a more detailed account, please access http://www.womensmediacenter.com/.
Last week, there were some harassing phone calls which stopped when I returned them, thank heavens for caller i.d. I am tempted to publish herein at least one phone number which rung me up about a dozen times in less than half an hour. What do you think? Will you ring the number and give the person hell?
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
This Is Called Human Security?
In the ninth decade of her life, my mother had chosen to turn away from the world. Only when I called out –“Mama!” -- did the butterfly of her soul return from its fluttering from memory to memory; she would look out of her eyes and break into a smile, saying “o, ano? (How’s it?)” I would become five years old again, innocent of borderless wars, assassinations, disappearances, women exported into unspeakable conditions, life in another country…
This was what I lost when the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo government of the Philippines chose to harass three women, myself included, under its Human Security Act. The first impact of the HSA upon us was instant insecurity. In the middle of a typhoon, with everything flooded, I burned interview notes, documents and pictures – all moist, the air itself so laden with water matchsticks would not ignite – for fear of endangering those who had spoken to me. Afterwards as we ran through possibilities with GABRIELA Philippines, Gabriela Women’s Party and GABNet members, I was shocked to learn I was in the most vulnerable position. The consensus was I could be detained and/or arrested or assassinated.
Throughout meetings, all I could think of was my mother. Because I couldn’t stay for long periods at her house (it could be watched, could be raided; I could be ambushed), our interaction was reduced to a “hello, mama” upon arrival, “goodbye, mama” a few minutes later as I rushed out, carrying a change of clothes. I had planned to spend time with her, have the house repaired, pretend, as it were, that my fate had been that of a dutiful daughter, even if only for the week following the end of WISAP10, the bi-annual conference sponsored by GABPhil. Alas, it was not to be.
I had only one instance of sustained interaction with her. Still imperious in her wheelchair, she had watched as I drunk coffee and then pointed to the cup. I said no, this was bad for her. She pointed to it again. It’s bitter, I said. She pointed. I took a tablespoon of coffee to her lips. She sipped, made a face and then stuck her tongue out. Bitter, bitter. Thereafter, each time I said bitter, she stuck her tongue out. It didn’t matter that she barely recognized me. It was enough that she was happy even with the stranger I had become.
Bitter, indeed, was this recent trip to the homeland; shocking, indeed, to find it still in the grip of such poverty that tyranny had become a necessary component of the social order. A slow balkanization of the archipelago is underway, as more and more Filipinos leave for work overseas and more and more “foreigners” enter: a hundred thousand Koreans are in the school system; thousands more of Taiwanese; Mindanao has become the land of banana plantations edging out poor communities; educational tourism, medical tourism, sex tourism, military tourism (which is what the Balikatan exercises are), tourism everywhere while Filipinos watch television shows with unfamiliar faces, strange histories and different mindsets, imports from other parts of Asia, imports from the US, with Filipino actors re-cast in local versions of the American Idol, Big Brother, and so on. In the 7,100 islands, the process of dispossession is on-going, slow but certain.
Throughout all this, the Macapagal-Arroyo government's hatred remains directed at those who would affirm that there is such a country as the Philippines, such a people as Filipinos, such women as Filipinas, who are due genuine independence, freedom and rights.
Underpinning it all is the madness of the unjust, the puppetry of the greedy. It would not be far-fetched to think of the Philippines as slowly disappearing, an entire country disappeared, murdered by war and occupation and dispossession. Then, the souls of the millions of us scattered throughout the world will be as butterflies flitting from memory to memory, lovely but easily crushed. -- ##
This was what I lost when the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo government of the Philippines chose to harass three women, myself included, under its Human Security Act. The first impact of the HSA upon us was instant insecurity. In the middle of a typhoon, with everything flooded, I burned interview notes, documents and pictures – all moist, the air itself so laden with water matchsticks would not ignite – for fear of endangering those who had spoken to me. Afterwards as we ran through possibilities with GABRIELA Philippines, Gabriela Women’s Party and GABNet members, I was shocked to learn I was in the most vulnerable position. The consensus was I could be detained and/or arrested or assassinated.
Throughout meetings, all I could think of was my mother. Because I couldn’t stay for long periods at her house (it could be watched, could be raided; I could be ambushed), our interaction was reduced to a “hello, mama” upon arrival, “goodbye, mama” a few minutes later as I rushed out, carrying a change of clothes. I had planned to spend time with her, have the house repaired, pretend, as it were, that my fate had been that of a dutiful daughter, even if only for the week following the end of WISAP10, the bi-annual conference sponsored by GABPhil. Alas, it was not to be.
I had only one instance of sustained interaction with her. Still imperious in her wheelchair, she had watched as I drunk coffee and then pointed to the cup. I said no, this was bad for her. She pointed to it again. It’s bitter, I said. She pointed. I took a tablespoon of coffee to her lips. She sipped, made a face and then stuck her tongue out. Bitter, bitter. Thereafter, each time I said bitter, she stuck her tongue out. It didn’t matter that she barely recognized me. It was enough that she was happy even with the stranger I had become.
Bitter, indeed, was this recent trip to the homeland; shocking, indeed, to find it still in the grip of such poverty that tyranny had become a necessary component of the social order. A slow balkanization of the archipelago is underway, as more and more Filipinos leave for work overseas and more and more “foreigners” enter: a hundred thousand Koreans are in the school system; thousands more of Taiwanese; Mindanao has become the land of banana plantations edging out poor communities; educational tourism, medical tourism, sex tourism, military tourism (which is what the Balikatan exercises are), tourism everywhere while Filipinos watch television shows with unfamiliar faces, strange histories and different mindsets, imports from other parts of Asia, imports from the US, with Filipino actors re-cast in local versions of the American Idol, Big Brother, and so on. In the 7,100 islands, the process of dispossession is on-going, slow but certain.
Throughout all this, the Macapagal-Arroyo government's hatred remains directed at those who would affirm that there is such a country as the Philippines, such a people as Filipinos, such women as Filipinas, who are due genuine independence, freedom and rights.
Underpinning it all is the madness of the unjust, the puppetry of the greedy. It would not be far-fetched to think of the Philippines as slowly disappearing, an entire country disappeared, murdered by war and occupation and dispossession. Then, the souls of the millions of us scattered throughout the world will be as butterflies flitting from memory to memory, lovely but easily crushed. -- ##
Monday, June 25, 2007
Stories We Were Told, Stories We Will Tell
The last major battle in Cagayan Valley, Philippines, against Spanish occupation was waged under the leadership of a woman, a babaylan (priestess) of the Itawes tribe, by the name of Ines Carinugan. A friend emails her story to me, apropos of what, I do not know. Ines was also a mandyadyawak (a healer who also conducts rituals and dances, as oppose to the herbolario, who uses concoctions from plants and animals). I wonder now whether a mandyadyawak was ipso facto a babaylan, though the reverse may not hold true. In any case, the Itawes tribe contemplated rebellion on the heels of an uprising led by Magalat in the lowlands. Magalat's mother had convinced him to forego Catholicism and return to tribal ways, making my friend suspect she was a babaylan as well. Magalat's rebellion was so fierce it required treachery to defeat it; he was assassinated by "friends."
Undeterred, Ines led the Itawes into battle. With Spanish troops augmented by local collaborators (which is how Filipinos are, to this time, defeated), Ines and her warriors were captured. She was hanged (likely as a witch, as Gabriela Silang would be, a hundred years later) and all who followed her, executed. To obliterate her memory and all of her teachings/sayings, the Spaniards concocted the story of the Virgin of Piat -- a small brown statue brought by the Dominicans from Mexico to the Philippines in 1604. The statue, they claimed, instantly converted the Itawes (but only after killings and torture). Via this narrative of “superior magic," they obliterated the memory and teachings of Ines, replacing it with what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call a simulacrum of memory. There is a basilica in place now for the Virgin of Piat.
I had heard of the Virgin of Piat, of course, but knew nothing about Ines. How many constructs had I absorbed through the years and how many more do I still absorb, on a daily basis? When narratives are perverted for purposes beyond truth, or even against truth, how does one distinguish between a simulacrum of reality and reality itself? The eye, after all, doesn't see; the brain does -- and if the latter's processes are perverted, if an automatic mantra rises in the brain that says that one’s thoughts are not sanctified and hence in error, inferior to the infallibility of those who create matrices, even one of smoke and mirrors, what happens then?
If Man were the tool-making species, Woman -- I'd always thought -- must have been the narrative-creating species. The paintings in the Caves of Altamira were likely made by women, as part of the effort to understand and survive nature. The earliest named poet (as oppose to ubiquitous Anonymous) was Ehenduanna (ca. 2300 B.C.E.), high priestess of the moon goddess Innana in that now unfortunate place called Iraq. Narratives, at the dawn of human time, were meant to explain and codify the values/perspectives/practices that enabled humankind to survive. In the hands of women of pre-history, the narrative was both integral to and integrating of communal life, inclusive, not exclusive.
The narrative has become warped, of course, as most things female-invented have in the rise of sexual dominance and private property. The narrative began to serve other purposes. From the earliest slave society to the present, narrative construction evolved into the making of tales (and cultural products) cautionary of rebellion or of questioning the matrix. The Iliad, whose core is an echo of the struggle between women's rights and men's rights (really a vivid illustration of how slave society consolidated itself), teaches the futility of defying the gods, of trying to weave a life outside the construct. Weep and learn, you who read this, is Homer's message; Troy was destroyed because it accepted a woman's right to decide. But our modern construct is that Helen was "the face that launched a thousand ships" (reflective of what we think should be women’s prime quality) rather than Helen, the woman who chose, who defied an arranged marriage.
Now we have modern constructs, trying to create acceptance of even the most unjust acts and actions, like war and invasion. Jessica Lynch and Kevin Tillman bewail before the US Congress stories imposed upon them: the first, as a supposed "female Rambo;" the second, of the supposed heroic death of brother, Pat. Jessica explains she didn’t even fire her gun; and only doctors and nurses were at the hospital where the US military allegedly mounted a death-defying rescue mission. Kevin Tillman, whose brother was practically a military recruitment poster boy, agonizes over the discovery that Pat had actually been killed by "friendly fire," the whole incident covered up and a construct of bravery substituted. As he himself say, the narrative does not fit reality. The two try to delete these simulacra deliberately metastasized all over the world.
On the reverse side, Yoko Tojo in Japan is trying to change history's and popular judgment on her grandfather, Hideki Tojo, prime minister from 1941-1944, an architect of the carnage unleashed by that country upon its neighbors during WWII. He ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor and was hanged in 1948 by US occupying forces as a war criminal. Ms. Tojo offers a different narrative, with the claim that Japan went to war "in self-defense," since a US oil embargo threatened the country's survival. For the moment, she is a lonely voice, calling for Japan's re-arming, citing the Chinese threat. But who knows how far a "meme" could go, in its insidious assault upon consciousness? The grandfather of the current prime minister had also been a war criminal.
We think of the past as immutable but in the Philippines, some writers of children's textbooks are attempting to change the verdict on Ferdinand E. Marcos and his regime. They make the claim that his intentions were good, that his desire was for the nation's benefit, but he was just unsuccessful. Being a survivor of that unspeakable dictatorship, I suffer extreme angst, wondering whether, in due time, this simulacrum of memory will prevail, and all the dead, the tortured and the dispossessed will be, not just ignored or forgotten, but non-existent.
Hope comes from an unlikely source. Our building super, perched on a ladder in the backyard while fixing a window in my apartment, thrusts his head through the opening and in that delightful accent of a migrant from Trinidad, bawls out: "IS THAT WOMAN WITH THE SHOES STILL ALIVE?"
I had to laugh. Imelda's self-indulgence and lust for self-aggrandizement were just too loom-large; no construct wide enough nor thick enough could suffice to veil it. My super has just taught me that nowadays, one person's narrative is hardly ever solely about him/her; it inevitably encompasses his/her spouse, children, people close to him/her, friends and foes alike, their acts and actions impinging upon the main text of the story, providing unforeseen paths and channels by which reality can either deconstruct or reinforce legends of infallibility; or render myths -- well, less than interesting. It is a lesson both optimistic and cautionary.
In the shadow of the simulacrum that was the Virgin of Piat, the memory of Ines Carinugan was sheltered by a few who, under the lash of Spanish colonialism’s injustice and the arrogance and cruelty of its adjutants, the "black" friars, rejected the Dominicans’ “smoke-and-mirror” tale, choosing to honor Ines instead. Through 500 years, those who remembered dwindled to one, from whom an anthropologist got and wrote the narrative down in a book which itself was reduced by time to a single copy, which was fortuitously found and Ines became the name of a guerrilla squad operating in the area, both book and squad eventually lost in the turmoil of the post-Marcos era, but the story was remembered, jumping the ocean decades later, to this continent and, now, is sent to me who lives so far from the Valley. First, one mind held the narrative of Ines, then two; three now with me in the tally, and when you finish reading this...
Undeterred, Ines led the Itawes into battle. With Spanish troops augmented by local collaborators (which is how Filipinos are, to this time, defeated), Ines and her warriors were captured. She was hanged (likely as a witch, as Gabriela Silang would be, a hundred years later) and all who followed her, executed. To obliterate her memory and all of her teachings/sayings, the Spaniards concocted the story of the Virgin of Piat -- a small brown statue brought by the Dominicans from Mexico to the Philippines in 1604. The statue, they claimed, instantly converted the Itawes (but only after killings and torture). Via this narrative of “superior magic," they obliterated the memory and teachings of Ines, replacing it with what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call a simulacrum of memory. There is a basilica in place now for the Virgin of Piat.
I had heard of the Virgin of Piat, of course, but knew nothing about Ines. How many constructs had I absorbed through the years and how many more do I still absorb, on a daily basis? When narratives are perverted for purposes beyond truth, or even against truth, how does one distinguish between a simulacrum of reality and reality itself? The eye, after all, doesn't see; the brain does -- and if the latter's processes are perverted, if an automatic mantra rises in the brain that says that one’s thoughts are not sanctified and hence in error, inferior to the infallibility of those who create matrices, even one of smoke and mirrors, what happens then?
If Man were the tool-making species, Woman -- I'd always thought -- must have been the narrative-creating species. The paintings in the Caves of Altamira were likely made by women, as part of the effort to understand and survive nature. The earliest named poet (as oppose to ubiquitous Anonymous) was Ehenduanna (ca. 2300 B.C.E.), high priestess of the moon goddess Innana in that now unfortunate place called Iraq. Narratives, at the dawn of human time, were meant to explain and codify the values/perspectives/practices that enabled humankind to survive. In the hands of women of pre-history, the narrative was both integral to and integrating of communal life, inclusive, not exclusive.
The narrative has become warped, of course, as most things female-invented have in the rise of sexual dominance and private property. The narrative began to serve other purposes. From the earliest slave society to the present, narrative construction evolved into the making of tales (and cultural products) cautionary of rebellion or of questioning the matrix. The Iliad, whose core is an echo of the struggle between women's rights and men's rights (really a vivid illustration of how slave society consolidated itself), teaches the futility of defying the gods, of trying to weave a life outside the construct. Weep and learn, you who read this, is Homer's message; Troy was destroyed because it accepted a woman's right to decide. But our modern construct is that Helen was "the face that launched a thousand ships" (reflective of what we think should be women’s prime quality) rather than Helen, the woman who chose, who defied an arranged marriage.
Now we have modern constructs, trying to create acceptance of even the most unjust acts and actions, like war and invasion. Jessica Lynch and Kevin Tillman bewail before the US Congress stories imposed upon them: the first, as a supposed "female Rambo;" the second, of the supposed heroic death of brother, Pat. Jessica explains she didn’t even fire her gun; and only doctors and nurses were at the hospital where the US military allegedly mounted a death-defying rescue mission. Kevin Tillman, whose brother was practically a military recruitment poster boy, agonizes over the discovery that Pat had actually been killed by "friendly fire," the whole incident covered up and a construct of bravery substituted. As he himself say, the narrative does not fit reality. The two try to delete these simulacra deliberately metastasized all over the world.
On the reverse side, Yoko Tojo in Japan is trying to change history's and popular judgment on her grandfather, Hideki Tojo, prime minister from 1941-1944, an architect of the carnage unleashed by that country upon its neighbors during WWII. He ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor and was hanged in 1948 by US occupying forces as a war criminal. Ms. Tojo offers a different narrative, with the claim that Japan went to war "in self-defense," since a US oil embargo threatened the country's survival. For the moment, she is a lonely voice, calling for Japan's re-arming, citing the Chinese threat. But who knows how far a "meme" could go, in its insidious assault upon consciousness? The grandfather of the current prime minister had also been a war criminal.
We think of the past as immutable but in the Philippines, some writers of children's textbooks are attempting to change the verdict on Ferdinand E. Marcos and his regime. They make the claim that his intentions were good, that his desire was for the nation's benefit, but he was just unsuccessful. Being a survivor of that unspeakable dictatorship, I suffer extreme angst, wondering whether, in due time, this simulacrum of memory will prevail, and all the dead, the tortured and the dispossessed will be, not just ignored or forgotten, but non-existent.
Hope comes from an unlikely source. Our building super, perched on a ladder in the backyard while fixing a window in my apartment, thrusts his head through the opening and in that delightful accent of a migrant from Trinidad, bawls out: "IS THAT WOMAN WITH THE SHOES STILL ALIVE?"
I had to laugh. Imelda's self-indulgence and lust for self-aggrandizement were just too loom-large; no construct wide enough nor thick enough could suffice to veil it. My super has just taught me that nowadays, one person's narrative is hardly ever solely about him/her; it inevitably encompasses his/her spouse, children, people close to him/her, friends and foes alike, their acts and actions impinging upon the main text of the story, providing unforeseen paths and channels by which reality can either deconstruct or reinforce legends of infallibility; or render myths -- well, less than interesting. It is a lesson both optimistic and cautionary.
In the shadow of the simulacrum that was the Virgin of Piat, the memory of Ines Carinugan was sheltered by a few who, under the lash of Spanish colonialism’s injustice and the arrogance and cruelty of its adjutants, the "black" friars, rejected the Dominicans’ “smoke-and-mirror” tale, choosing to honor Ines instead. Through 500 years, those who remembered dwindled to one, from whom an anthropologist got and wrote the narrative down in a book which itself was reduced by time to a single copy, which was fortuitously found and Ines became the name of a guerrilla squad operating in the area, both book and squad eventually lost in the turmoil of the post-Marcos era, but the story was remembered, jumping the ocean decades later, to this continent and, now, is sent to me who lives so far from the Valley. First, one mind held the narrative of Ines, then two; three now with me in the tally, and when you finish reading this...
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
A Very Weird Day
Bambi was really frayed at the seams; it was time to replace her. Bambi was this deerskin shoulder bag bought in a little store in Banff a decade ago, for C$70 (US$35 at the time). The name came about because of the mock-horrified exclamations received each time I said it was made of deerskin: “what? You killed Bambi?” The bag had not been replaced because a) I liked it; b) a friend who had promised to take me to Banff again courtesy of an erstwhile knight in shining armor got into a tiff with him, and c) I feel guilty after shopping, berating myself for wasting resources which could’ve gone to yet another pamphlet or to food for empty plates somewhere in the world.
But Bambi definitely had to be replaced -- a sudden realization in the middle of Manhattan’s 34th street, between one appointment and the next. There was this seemingly apt revolving door into which I ducked before my mind could decide otherwise and presto, I was in a department store.
Wrong choice. This was Macy’s, which before Wal-Mart was the biggest store in the universe. Wrong time. This was three days before Mother’s Day, which started out as an anti-war day and was now the busiest business day in the universe. Wrong section. The revolving door gave into the perfume chapel where I was instantly bathed by moist air redolent of flowers, spices, and musk, accosted by tall-handsome men and women offering cardboard strips and perfume bottles, asking in seductive tones: “would you like to try it on your skin?“
They wouldn’t let me go, seeing the LSR stamped on my forehead (low sales resistance). At moments like this, my brain goes into dual processing mode. One half went “oooh, that is soooo nice! Honeysuckle, is it?“ while the other half began accessing my mental encyclopedia: “there are only four cosmetic companies in the world, they own/control every other brand; so each time a woman squirts herself with scented water, she likely adds a few dollars more to the income of that guy -- what’s his name, check database -- whose funky divorce from Ellen B (what’s B’s newest film, check database) was the talk of the town, he ran for mayor here and outspent everyone, though those millions didn‘t even come to one per cent of his income…“
Swear to god, this is how my leftsideofthebrain speaks when I lose control of it, a cascade of associations and data, clicking merrily away, drowning me as much as the scents wafting my way… Prada, Dolce & Cabbana, Lauren, all promising with one squirt to transform me into an odalisque in a garden of lilies. One woman spotted my increasing vulnerability and moved in for the kill, aiming a bottle at me and saying, “this is our newest.“
Rightsideofthebrain was inspired to come to the rescue, turning me supercivilized and making me say that that was really nice but I was looking for my favorite, the only perfume I use, had been using since I was 15. She arched an eyebrow. Coldly: “And what is that, ma’am?“ And I named the greatest perfume ever made, currently difficult to find: Joy by Jean Patou. “Ah,” she was impressed. “Where are you from, ma’am?” Rightsideofbrain spoke up: “France.” I had no idea why I answered that way. She did a double-take. I looked Asian, certainly. But then, I could be French Vietnamese.
She switched to French, saying no, they did not carry Joy. Now, I understand French but can barely speak it. Rightsideofbrain made what seemed to be a proper French gesture of regret: back of right hand to the brow. “But Lord & Taylor does.” Good. That was ten blocks away. Escape. I turned toward the revolving door. “Ma’am, better to go that way.” She pointed to the interior of the store. I said “merci,” aspirating my “r” the way my French teacher used to, breathing out “Mme, Rhoshca.”
I was congratulating myself as I walked past display cases, loads of merchandise, inching my way between men and women who were, I swear, salivating over goods when boing! I was in the bag section. Oh, good. Let’s look for Bambi’s replacement. Now, I like my bags pure and simple, geometric, more vertical than horizontal, preferably with a front panel into which I can stick plane tickets, passport, ID cards, Metrocards, a green tea chocolate bar, etc. Surely I could find a plain and simple one among what looked like a million bags. NOT. All the bags had straps, chains, buckles, studs, so much metal they barely kept from sprouting steering wheels and zooming away. Not a single plain and simple one; each seemingly inspired by an upscale bikers gang. One hour searching and I couldn’t find one.
So away; forget about it, look elsewhere. And there it was, inside a glass case, in a section remarkably bereft of shoppers, right near the front door. Voila! “Can I see that, please?” The saleslady took it out. I inspected the thing, opened it, removed paper stuffed inside, turned it upside down, rapped it with my knuckles, was pleased with it, said: “A little shiny, but won’t it crack?” “No, ma’am, it’s patent leather.” “It looks okay, how much is it?” “$799.95.” Anak ng tinapa! which translates to child of smoked fish! No wonder no one was shopping here. “It’s Louis Vuitton, ma’am. It’s a classic.” I was looking for something a little more practical, I said. “What kind of bag, ma’am?” “British,” rightsideofthebrain replied. “We Britons make sturdy bags, unlike the French.” I had acquired a British accent.
Having done shopping in the last five years on the fly, mostly at airport malls, I could hardly believe that people periodically go through days like this, days rendered weird by commodity fetishism. Oich veh! Sorry, Bambi, but I’m coming for your sister. ###
But Bambi definitely had to be replaced -- a sudden realization in the middle of Manhattan’s 34th street, between one appointment and the next. There was this seemingly apt revolving door into which I ducked before my mind could decide otherwise and presto, I was in a department store.
Wrong choice. This was Macy’s, which before Wal-Mart was the biggest store in the universe. Wrong time. This was three days before Mother’s Day, which started out as an anti-war day and was now the busiest business day in the universe. Wrong section. The revolving door gave into the perfume chapel where I was instantly bathed by moist air redolent of flowers, spices, and musk, accosted by tall-handsome men and women offering cardboard strips and perfume bottles, asking in seductive tones: “would you like to try it on your skin?“
They wouldn’t let me go, seeing the LSR stamped on my forehead (low sales resistance). At moments like this, my brain goes into dual processing mode. One half went “oooh, that is soooo nice! Honeysuckle, is it?“ while the other half began accessing my mental encyclopedia: “there are only four cosmetic companies in the world, they own/control every other brand; so each time a woman squirts herself with scented water, she likely adds a few dollars more to the income of that guy -- what’s his name, check database -- whose funky divorce from Ellen B (what’s B’s newest film, check database) was the talk of the town, he ran for mayor here and outspent everyone, though those millions didn‘t even come to one per cent of his income…“
Swear to god, this is how my leftsideofthebrain speaks when I lose control of it, a cascade of associations and data, clicking merrily away, drowning me as much as the scents wafting my way… Prada, Dolce & Cabbana, Lauren, all promising with one squirt to transform me into an odalisque in a garden of lilies. One woman spotted my increasing vulnerability and moved in for the kill, aiming a bottle at me and saying, “this is our newest.“
Rightsideofthebrain was inspired to come to the rescue, turning me supercivilized and making me say that that was really nice but I was looking for my favorite, the only perfume I use, had been using since I was 15. She arched an eyebrow. Coldly: “And what is that, ma’am?“ And I named the greatest perfume ever made, currently difficult to find: Joy by Jean Patou. “Ah,” she was impressed. “Where are you from, ma’am?” Rightsideofbrain spoke up: “France.” I had no idea why I answered that way. She did a double-take. I looked Asian, certainly. But then, I could be French Vietnamese.
She switched to French, saying no, they did not carry Joy. Now, I understand French but can barely speak it. Rightsideofbrain made what seemed to be a proper French gesture of regret: back of right hand to the brow. “But Lord & Taylor does.” Good. That was ten blocks away. Escape. I turned toward the revolving door. “Ma’am, better to go that way.” She pointed to the interior of the store. I said “merci,” aspirating my “r” the way my French teacher used to, breathing out “Mme, Rhoshca.”
I was congratulating myself as I walked past display cases, loads of merchandise, inching my way between men and women who were, I swear, salivating over goods when boing! I was in the bag section. Oh, good. Let’s look for Bambi’s replacement. Now, I like my bags pure and simple, geometric, more vertical than horizontal, preferably with a front panel into which I can stick plane tickets, passport, ID cards, Metrocards, a green tea chocolate bar, etc. Surely I could find a plain and simple one among what looked like a million bags. NOT. All the bags had straps, chains, buckles, studs, so much metal they barely kept from sprouting steering wheels and zooming away. Not a single plain and simple one; each seemingly inspired by an upscale bikers gang. One hour searching and I couldn’t find one.
So away; forget about it, look elsewhere. And there it was, inside a glass case, in a section remarkably bereft of shoppers, right near the front door. Voila! “Can I see that, please?” The saleslady took it out. I inspected the thing, opened it, removed paper stuffed inside, turned it upside down, rapped it with my knuckles, was pleased with it, said: “A little shiny, but won’t it crack?” “No, ma’am, it’s patent leather.” “It looks okay, how much is it?” “$799.95.” Anak ng tinapa! which translates to child of smoked fish! No wonder no one was shopping here. “It’s Louis Vuitton, ma’am. It’s a classic.” I was looking for something a little more practical, I said. “What kind of bag, ma’am?” “British,” rightsideofthebrain replied. “We Britons make sturdy bags, unlike the French.” I had acquired a British accent.
Having done shopping in the last five years on the fly, mostly at airport malls, I could hardly believe that people periodically go through days like this, days rendered weird by commodity fetishism. Oich veh! Sorry, Bambi, but I’m coming for your sister. ###
Saturday, April 28, 2007
A Visible Invisibility
Flying from San Diego to Los Angeles to Honolulu to New York to Boston is both exhilarating and exhausting. At each stop, there were young men and women beginning both life and involvement, more women than men, it seemed – which gave me a tweak of irony, as I was re-reading Rosa Luxemburg, trying to puzzle out as to why such a brilliant woman said nothing about the state of womankind. Neither do many of these young women who greet me at every airport; they can discourse with great aplomb on anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-imperialism, anti-racism topics but turn coy when it comes to sexism.
I wondered if this was a case of “exceptionalism,” -- the same that afflicted Ms. Luxemburg and which seems to afflict women when they rise to positions of power over mixed gender institutions and organizations. I wondered whether Ms. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo considered herself an exception as well, not subject to the vagaries of sexual discrimination that women in general are subject to on a day-to-day basis. In her case, more likely than not, her class status overwhelms whatever slim thread of solidarity she might feel with other women, enough for her to consent to the virtual release of a convicted rapist from jail.
A grad student presenting a paper on “black-face” minstrels -- “having the black body present without the black body" – made me think that, to some extent, a parallel development had evolved with the women's case. There are women with power, women of leadership, without the consciousness of womanhood. I wonder whether this is caused by pride: “I have risen and therefore, I am not like them.“ Not like the exported woman, not like the prostituted woman, not like the woman with five children trying to eke out a livelihood from selling small bags of peanuts on the sidewalk; not like the bruised and battered being who emerges from the darkness of domestic violence. .
Every woman, at some point in her life, must have encountered a sexual innuendo, a degrading remark. The worst I’d heard were “she needs a spanking” and “she needs to get pregnant,” both said in the midst of a political debate. Many women have assured me that this is not unusual and worse have been said to girls and young women. A GABNet recruit said that the school guidance counselor advised her not to try hard for her SATS, as she would just get married and pregnant.
Class and male dominance were from the same source, the rise of private property, which continues to divide humankind to this day. One would expect that, in this era where corporations hold sway, their heavily male hierarchies owning and controlling practically everything, women would be most aggressive in their advocacy for and defense of their rights and just due. This is not the case. Perhaps the winnowing process of leadership selection is so geared toward enabling men to attain power that when the "exceptional" woman manages to maneuver to leadership, she emerges degenderized -- i.e., alienated from a social reality that forms such an important aspect of her life and being (shades of "unsex me here"), becoming emblematic of something akin to the revisionist concept of "a whole people." To chance upon someone like Parvati of Nepal is therefore a pleasant surprise.
In the course of the past 20-day lecture tour, I was asked several times whether Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, erstwhile president of the Philippines, was a feminist. Well, no. A feminist holds the rights and welfare of the majority of womankind to be paramount in her thoughts and work; she works for an equal share, for womankind, not only of political power but of social wealth. The last is important, as women own/control less than one per cent of the world's resources while doing three-fourths of the work to keep the species alive. Unfortunately, feminist has been made to mean everything most men find unpleasant in women; hence, the use of the word with neither thought nor analysis.
So not all women who wield power do so even partially on behalf of their sisters and the current political scene is replete with this irony: that despite so many women active and engaged in a welter of political activities -- from grassroots organizing to teach-ins to managing organizations -- women's issues remain at the back burner and continue to be "secondary." The phenomenon has made women metaphorically invisible by their very visibility.
I wondered if this was a case of “exceptionalism,” -- the same that afflicted Ms. Luxemburg and which seems to afflict women when they rise to positions of power over mixed gender institutions and organizations. I wondered whether Ms. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo considered herself an exception as well, not subject to the vagaries of sexual discrimination that women in general are subject to on a day-to-day basis. In her case, more likely than not, her class status overwhelms whatever slim thread of solidarity she might feel with other women, enough for her to consent to the virtual release of a convicted rapist from jail.
A grad student presenting a paper on “black-face” minstrels -- “having the black body present without the black body" – made me think that, to some extent, a parallel development had evolved with the women's case. There are women with power, women of leadership, without the consciousness of womanhood. I wonder whether this is caused by pride: “I have risen and therefore, I am not like them.“ Not like the exported woman, not like the prostituted woman, not like the woman with five children trying to eke out a livelihood from selling small bags of peanuts on the sidewalk; not like the bruised and battered being who emerges from the darkness of domestic violence. .
Every woman, at some point in her life, must have encountered a sexual innuendo, a degrading remark. The worst I’d heard were “she needs a spanking” and “she needs to get pregnant,” both said in the midst of a political debate. Many women have assured me that this is not unusual and worse have been said to girls and young women. A GABNet recruit said that the school guidance counselor advised her not to try hard for her SATS, as she would just get married and pregnant.
Class and male dominance were from the same source, the rise of private property, which continues to divide humankind to this day. One would expect that, in this era where corporations hold sway, their heavily male hierarchies owning and controlling practically everything, women would be most aggressive in their advocacy for and defense of their rights and just due. This is not the case. Perhaps the winnowing process of leadership selection is so geared toward enabling men to attain power that when the "exceptional" woman manages to maneuver to leadership, she emerges degenderized -- i.e., alienated from a social reality that forms such an important aspect of her life and being (shades of "unsex me here"), becoming emblematic of something akin to the revisionist concept of "a whole people." To chance upon someone like Parvati of Nepal is therefore a pleasant surprise.
In the course of the past 20-day lecture tour, I was asked several times whether Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, erstwhile president of the Philippines, was a feminist. Well, no. A feminist holds the rights and welfare of the majority of womankind to be paramount in her thoughts and work; she works for an equal share, for womankind, not only of political power but of social wealth. The last is important, as women own/control less than one per cent of the world's resources while doing three-fourths of the work to keep the species alive. Unfortunately, feminist has been made to mean everything most men find unpleasant in women; hence, the use of the word with neither thought nor analysis.
So not all women who wield power do so even partially on behalf of their sisters and the current political scene is replete with this irony: that despite so many women active and engaged in a welter of political activities -- from grassroots organizing to teach-ins to managing organizations -- women's issues remain at the back burner and continue to be "secondary." The phenomenon has made women metaphorically invisible by their very visibility.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Divorce & the Imps of Feudalism
It was a delightful surprise when a thousand Filipinas signed up for a workshop on divorce – one offered by a women’s organization in North America. A thousand! This was shortly after the Honorable Liza L. Maza, congressional representative of the Gabriela Women’s Party, filed a divorce bill before the Philippine Congress. Had the bill gone well, the Philippines would’ve shaken off its dubious reputation as one of only two countries without a divorce law. The Republic of Malta is the other country without divorce. Malta is composed of seven islands in the Mediterranean and got its independence only in 1964. What Malta and the Philippines share is Roman Catholicism, one handy excuse for doing women in.
The response to the Divorce Bill was near- instantaneous, both within and outside the archipelago. For many overseas Filipinas, it was a sliver of hope. Many had had to tolerate sustaining, in addition to their own children and relatives, secondary families established by husbands too impatient to wait out their wives’ servitude abroad. Women who had managed to stabilize their residency overseas were faced with the dilemma of placing their family relationships on a rational basis. “I’d like to bring my children over,” said one domestic worker, “but Philippine laws will not allow that, if my husband does not give consent. He won’t give consent, unless I bring him over. I don’t want to bring him over. I will have to support him”
In Manila, however, placards created by religious fundamentalists bloomed overnight calling Rep. Maza “bride of Satan” and GABRIELA, “wives of Satan.” It seemed that the feudal imps worked overnight, driven to laughable frenzy by the word “divorce.” One never sees them denouncing the rich, the powerful and the well-known who do dissolve marriages – through overseas divorces, mutual agreement, church annulment and so-on. The feudalists grant the privilege of marital dissolution only to members of the ruling class and to hetaeras (women who make a living through entertainment, whatever that may comprise). There was hardly a peep when the daughter of former president Corazon C. Aquino took up with “separated” man and later, dumped him for someone else.
So it’s not simply religion but on a class and gender basis that divorce is denied to women of the Philippines. Men simply walk away (occasionally, women do but that’s rare). The working woman is not allowed the right to place her private relationship on a reasonable basis. Of the 5-plus million Filipinas working/residing overseas, a sizeable number have not seen husbands/children for five years. More, they know full well that their husbands have taken up with other women but are unable to make other, practical arrangements for their children. At the crux of this refusal to let the children go is the endless remittance.
I had to force a friend to take a day-off from her work as a domestic and to come visit me this February. She had worked non-stop for over two months (10-15 hours seven days a week), made almost $12,000 but had only $2,000 left. The rest was sent home. Even on this one day-off, the buzzing of her cell phone every 30 minutes would not allow her to relax on the sofa. It was a virtual inundation of text messages from Manila asking for money, more and more and more and more money. Threats of retaliation if the money wasn’t sent; stories of terrible crises, impending disasters, typhoons, tsunamis, meteor strikes, the moon crashing down… My poor friend looked so wan and so unhappy I had to sit on my hands so as not to yank the phone away and throw it into the snow outside.
Understand that this situation is a deliberate construct. The working woman has to content herself with wages calculated on her worth as an individual. But she is obligated to sustain a very complex feudal kin system. The Filipina overseas, on the average, maintain about 10 other men, women and children – relatives to the nth degree of consanguinity. The irrational marital laws of the country are central to this feudal bondage. Where women cannot place on a rational basis their most basic relationship, then there’s no way they can have either the will or the means to escape the rest of their feudal bondage.
The Divorce Bill was so “hot,” even some progressives were hesitant about lending support. Divorce is a knifepoint aimed at the knot holding working women in thrall to the semi-feudal component of Philippine society. And since women remit nearly $7 billion of the annual $12 billion remittance to the Philippines, the compulsion to keep her enthralled is tremendous. After all, government profits from the women’s feudal slavery, as do banks, shopping malls, corporations… etc., etc., etc. In other words, everybody, except the woman herself.
The response to the Divorce Bill was near- instantaneous, both within and outside the archipelago. For many overseas Filipinas, it was a sliver of hope. Many had had to tolerate sustaining, in addition to their own children and relatives, secondary families established by husbands too impatient to wait out their wives’ servitude abroad. Women who had managed to stabilize their residency overseas were faced with the dilemma of placing their family relationships on a rational basis. “I’d like to bring my children over,” said one domestic worker, “but Philippine laws will not allow that, if my husband does not give consent. He won’t give consent, unless I bring him over. I don’t want to bring him over. I will have to support him”
In Manila, however, placards created by religious fundamentalists bloomed overnight calling Rep. Maza “bride of Satan” and GABRIELA, “wives of Satan.” It seemed that the feudal imps worked overnight, driven to laughable frenzy by the word “divorce.” One never sees them denouncing the rich, the powerful and the well-known who do dissolve marriages – through overseas divorces, mutual agreement, church annulment and so-on. The feudalists grant the privilege of marital dissolution only to members of the ruling class and to hetaeras (women who make a living through entertainment, whatever that may comprise). There was hardly a peep when the daughter of former president Corazon C. Aquino took up with “separated” man and later, dumped him for someone else.
So it’s not simply religion but on a class and gender basis that divorce is denied to women of the Philippines. Men simply walk away (occasionally, women do but that’s rare). The working woman is not allowed the right to place her private relationship on a reasonable basis. Of the 5-plus million Filipinas working/residing overseas, a sizeable number have not seen husbands/children for five years. More, they know full well that their husbands have taken up with other women but are unable to make other, practical arrangements for their children. At the crux of this refusal to let the children go is the endless remittance.
I had to force a friend to take a day-off from her work as a domestic and to come visit me this February. She had worked non-stop for over two months (10-15 hours seven days a week), made almost $12,000 but had only $2,000 left. The rest was sent home. Even on this one day-off, the buzzing of her cell phone every 30 minutes would not allow her to relax on the sofa. It was a virtual inundation of text messages from Manila asking for money, more and more and more and more money. Threats of retaliation if the money wasn’t sent; stories of terrible crises, impending disasters, typhoons, tsunamis, meteor strikes, the moon crashing down… My poor friend looked so wan and so unhappy I had to sit on my hands so as not to yank the phone away and throw it into the snow outside.
Understand that this situation is a deliberate construct. The working woman has to content herself with wages calculated on her worth as an individual. But she is obligated to sustain a very complex feudal kin system. The Filipina overseas, on the average, maintain about 10 other men, women and children – relatives to the nth degree of consanguinity. The irrational marital laws of the country are central to this feudal bondage. Where women cannot place on a rational basis their most basic relationship, then there’s no way they can have either the will or the means to escape the rest of their feudal bondage.
The Divorce Bill was so “hot,” even some progressives were hesitant about lending support. Divorce is a knifepoint aimed at the knot holding working women in thrall to the semi-feudal component of Philippine society. And since women remit nearly $7 billion of the annual $12 billion remittance to the Philippines, the compulsion to keep her enthralled is tremendous. After all, government profits from the women’s feudal slavery, as do banks, shopping malls, corporations… etc., etc., etc. In other words, everybody, except the woman herself.
Monday, February 05, 2007
35 Is Too Old!
So wryly said the eight women gathered around a table, eyes intent, mouths grim. No, this had nothing to do with romance. Rather, this was the age limit, set by multinationals and contractors, for job hiring and job retention, in the burgeoning paradise for globalization that is the Philippines. These women had worked for decades, starting as child workers, sewing, cutting and ironing garments which litter the markets of the world. They had fudged their birthdates, starting jobs at age 15, because the family needed money. Now, they had aged out of the job market. They were members of Magkaisa (Unite), an organization of women workers, and we were meeting at the Gabriela Silang Displaced Women Workers Center in Alabang, Philippines.
Magkaisa battles globalization and its contract/sub-contract system which, through a systematic ladder of exploitation, ensure that those who work the hardest get the least reward, the least pay. These women sew high-end and bargain bras, panties, pajamas, nightgowns, bathing suits, few of which they themselves had had the means or the occasion to wear. Certainly, they do not cavort on the beaches of Boracay or in tourist-exclusive Mactan, Cebu where the ASEAN Summit was held. Perhaps some ministers or their wives at the Summit had on underwear or swimsuits sewn by women disposable at age 35.
“You get fired on your birthday. Early retirement without pension, without benefits.” So what does one do? “Starve to death. Find a way to leave the country; be a servant. Or mag-puta.” The reply crackled like gunfire. Their voices were both sardonic and sad. We spoke in Tagalog, the country’s lingua franca.
In the factories, they were “specialized.” One sewed bra straps. Just bra straps over and over again, at 50-75 centavos per bra strap. So how many bra straps to make a decent wage? “A thousand,” she said. “1000 bra straps per day.” To earn $15.00 max. I can see it: the woman sitting, spine curved over the sewing machine, arms practically hugging it, nose almost to the needle, foot on the pedal and sewing one bra strap after another. As fast as she can, one after another.
Now she was jobless. To find another job, however, meant spending money. “Before the interview by management, you have to have a medical exam. You pay for the exam. Or what we call hubad, tuwad, buka (strip, bend over, spread ‘em). I got through all the steps to the interview and then they saw how old I was. Patay na! (I was a goner.)” She was in her 40s. “Check out the classified ads; the age limit is there. Eighteen to thirty-five.”
Was this general for both men and women? Not really. Men, they said, couldn’t get a first job, because skills and experience were required. But women, no matter how young, were deemed “intrinsically skilled” – they could sew, embroider or had fingers tiny enough for the delicate work of assembling electronics.
There was nothing here to cushion capital’s drive to transform women into wage laborers for the sake of profits. The poor was an inexhaustible supply, drawn from the feudal, basically agrarian countryside, saddled with kinship obligations alien to the concept of “free labor,” body itself often assaulted by capital in that crude and rude form of capital accumulation called prostitution. And because the intricate system of profit extraction was highly developed, imposed from advanced capitalist countries, not organic to the local society, neither the labor movement nor the women’s movement had had time enough to fend off even the harshest manner of exploitation.
In this interface of class and gender, one finds the grim face of a hybrid society like the Philippines. The irony lies in how little we understand the pivotal nature of that interface to social transformation, and how readily we accept the view that women’s issues are “soft” rather than key to the resolution of contradictions within a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. -- ###
Magkaisa battles globalization and its contract/sub-contract system which, through a systematic ladder of exploitation, ensure that those who work the hardest get the least reward, the least pay. These women sew high-end and bargain bras, panties, pajamas, nightgowns, bathing suits, few of which they themselves had had the means or the occasion to wear. Certainly, they do not cavort on the beaches of Boracay or in tourist-exclusive Mactan, Cebu where the ASEAN Summit was held. Perhaps some ministers or their wives at the Summit had on underwear or swimsuits sewn by women disposable at age 35.
“You get fired on your birthday. Early retirement without pension, without benefits.” So what does one do? “Starve to death. Find a way to leave the country; be a servant. Or mag-puta.” The reply crackled like gunfire. Their voices were both sardonic and sad. We spoke in Tagalog, the country’s lingua franca.
In the factories, they were “specialized.” One sewed bra straps. Just bra straps over and over again, at 50-75 centavos per bra strap. So how many bra straps to make a decent wage? “A thousand,” she said. “1000 bra straps per day.” To earn $15.00 max. I can see it: the woman sitting, spine curved over the sewing machine, arms practically hugging it, nose almost to the needle, foot on the pedal and sewing one bra strap after another. As fast as she can, one after another.
Now she was jobless. To find another job, however, meant spending money. “Before the interview by management, you have to have a medical exam. You pay for the exam. Or what we call hubad, tuwad, buka (strip, bend over, spread ‘em). I got through all the steps to the interview and then they saw how old I was. Patay na! (I was a goner.)” She was in her 40s. “Check out the classified ads; the age limit is there. Eighteen to thirty-five.”
Was this general for both men and women? Not really. Men, they said, couldn’t get a first job, because skills and experience were required. But women, no matter how young, were deemed “intrinsically skilled” – they could sew, embroider or had fingers tiny enough for the delicate work of assembling electronics.
There was nothing here to cushion capital’s drive to transform women into wage laborers for the sake of profits. The poor was an inexhaustible supply, drawn from the feudal, basically agrarian countryside, saddled with kinship obligations alien to the concept of “free labor,” body itself often assaulted by capital in that crude and rude form of capital accumulation called prostitution. And because the intricate system of profit extraction was highly developed, imposed from advanced capitalist countries, not organic to the local society, neither the labor movement nor the women’s movement had had time enough to fend off even the harshest manner of exploitation.
In this interface of class and gender, one finds the grim face of a hybrid society like the Philippines. The irony lies in how little we understand the pivotal nature of that interface to social transformation, and how readily we accept the view that women’s issues are “soft” rather than key to the resolution of contradictions within a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. -- ###
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Letter to Nicole
Just a short note, by way of reminding all that at the center of all the legal, diplomatic and political verbiage on the Subic rape case, is a young woman, not only sexually assaulted and humiliated, but betrayed so thoroughly by those with the power and the responsibility to protect her and lend her justice.
I read about all the issues swirling around you, Nicole, in the various newspapers and Internet news services, and wish we could know you in all your fortitude. I wish we could say "we feel your pain" but we can't really, only imagine it.
I am tempted to say you have already made history; that at least, you got one convicted, at least you got a trial, at least you precipitated a crisis, at least… But that is a cop-out. Filipinos have been trained to live on the “at-least” level. I hear it all the time, from exported Filipinas: at least, you have a job; at least, you’re in the US; at least, you can send money home; at least, your amo (master) is kind; at least… It’s become our prime and only virtue: survival by whatever means, under whatever conditions. I hear it often from women who work 18/7 to enable parents, siblings and various relations to continue to exist in an archipelago so wealthy it’s globalization’s paradise.
There are no words of comfort to make up for this travesty, to you and to millions of Filipinas living lives of quiet desperation. The Philippines ranks fifth in the world in the number of women working. The first four are all Western developed nations, like Sweden, Denmark, etc. It is a painful irony that a country dependent on women’s labor does not have the political will to defend, protect and assert one woman’s right to redress of grievance.
What the US and the Philippine government have connived to teach you is imperialism’s most insidious lesson: that whatever you do is an exercise in futility, because you are a citizen of a client state, because your country is a claptrap Third World country without power, because your government is a failed government, because your country is not independent, because you are part of a “colored” race, and because there are among you people who prefer survival to dignity and honor.
This is the first lesson of slavery, of course: that sense of futility and helplessness, of powerlessness; of being always in the wrong and the master always in the right. Hence, the contemptible spectacle of some Filipinas lighting candles for a convicted rapist and the equally contemptible spectacle of a priest who had lived parasitically almost his entire life on the Church contributions of the poor of the Philippines denying the veracity of a court trial to defend a member of the master race. What makes this race a master is the equally contemptible willingness of the country’s so-called rulers to be enslaved, thereby dragging the whole nation into enslavement.
Do not accept this. Do not abide by this lesson in powerlessness. Do not internalize powerlessness. That is the first step to slavery.
The only thing we can offer, those of us who also work 18/7 scampering to correct each sliver of injustice, each instance of exploitation, each whiplash of racism in this country, are the words we live by: to the degree that you struggle against suppression, to that degree are you already free; to the degree that you resist imperialism, to that degree are you already liberated.
And if it’s any comfort, know that you were done in, not by the US marines whom you bested, but by a cabal of four-letter men and one five-letter woman masquerading as Filipinos.
So, go for it, girl, ignore the “at-leasts” and keep on truckin’ to victory, if not by way of the courts, then some other way.
Surrender is not an option.
I read about all the issues swirling around you, Nicole, in the various newspapers and Internet news services, and wish we could know you in all your fortitude. I wish we could say "we feel your pain" but we can't really, only imagine it.
I am tempted to say you have already made history; that at least, you got one convicted, at least you got a trial, at least you precipitated a crisis, at least… But that is a cop-out. Filipinos have been trained to live on the “at-least” level. I hear it all the time, from exported Filipinas: at least, you have a job; at least, you’re in the US; at least, you can send money home; at least, your amo (master) is kind; at least… It’s become our prime and only virtue: survival by whatever means, under whatever conditions. I hear it often from women who work 18/7 to enable parents, siblings and various relations to continue to exist in an archipelago so wealthy it’s globalization’s paradise.
There are no words of comfort to make up for this travesty, to you and to millions of Filipinas living lives of quiet desperation. The Philippines ranks fifth in the world in the number of women working. The first four are all Western developed nations, like Sweden, Denmark, etc. It is a painful irony that a country dependent on women’s labor does not have the political will to defend, protect and assert one woman’s right to redress of grievance.
What the US and the Philippine government have connived to teach you is imperialism’s most insidious lesson: that whatever you do is an exercise in futility, because you are a citizen of a client state, because your country is a claptrap Third World country without power, because your government is a failed government, because your country is not independent, because you are part of a “colored” race, and because there are among you people who prefer survival to dignity and honor.
This is the first lesson of slavery, of course: that sense of futility and helplessness, of powerlessness; of being always in the wrong and the master always in the right. Hence, the contemptible spectacle of some Filipinas lighting candles for a convicted rapist and the equally contemptible spectacle of a priest who had lived parasitically almost his entire life on the Church contributions of the poor of the Philippines denying the veracity of a court trial to defend a member of the master race. What makes this race a master is the equally contemptible willingness of the country’s so-called rulers to be enslaved, thereby dragging the whole nation into enslavement.
Do not accept this. Do not abide by this lesson in powerlessness. Do not internalize powerlessness. That is the first step to slavery.
The only thing we can offer, those of us who also work 18/7 scampering to correct each sliver of injustice, each instance of exploitation, each whiplash of racism in this country, are the words we live by: to the degree that you struggle against suppression, to that degree are you already free; to the degree that you resist imperialism, to that degree are you already liberated.
And if it’s any comfort, know that you were done in, not by the US marines whom you bested, but by a cabal of four-letter men and one five-letter woman masquerading as Filipinos.
So, go for it, girl, ignore the “at-leasts” and keep on truckin’ to victory, if not by way of the courts, then some other way.
Surrender is not an option.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Rage For Justice
On Nov. 1, 2005, a woman was dumped semi-conscious and half-naked “like a pig” by a road in Subic City, former site of one of the two largest ever overseas bases of the US military. This had been a naval base, the other an air force base located in the city of Angeles, Pampanga. Over the years, both had become ringed by restaurants, massage parlors, nightclubs, brothels, drug dens – a virtual artificial habitat of crime and decadence, all so that those who had been dispossessed of their farm lands and fishing grounds could survive their dispossession. Through the years, an estimated half-million women were chewed up by the sex trade mill serving the two US military bases and a hundred thousand children, hapas, were born without fathers.
Practically on the same day of Nov. 1, 2005, at 9 o’clock in the morning, women of GABRIELA Network took to the street in front of the Philippine Consulate in Los Angeles demanding justice for Nicole, the 22-year-old dumped “like a pig” by the roadside, demanding that the US soldiers be apprehended and tried for this violence against a woman, a city, a nation. The picketing was colorful, impassioned and yes, emotional as only women's political language can be.
Irony was redolent in the air. It had taken almost a hundred years and the combined might of activists and Apo Pinatubo to remove the two monkeys off the backs of the residents. But the Philippine government, true to its colors, did not dismantle those bases of iniquity and destruction, did not return the farmlands or the fishing grounds to their rightful owners. Instead, the bases were handed over to the Philippine military, which, in defiance of the Constitution, proceeded to host returning US troops in ever increasing numbers at the same sites. And now, we had Nicole.
To those with long memories, the stories of the residents’ humiliation still rankle. How the indigenous people were driven by the loss of their ancestral lands to scrounge at the base’s garbage dump for food and scraps. How occasionally, a boy would be shot by a US soldier who “mistook” him for a wild boar. How bullets from the firing ranges would hit houses. How fishermen were poisoned by some green glowing slick on the waters in the wake of nuclear submarines. How a 14-year-old girl died when the vibrator pushed up her by a GI broke and left a piece in her vaginal canal. How the clinics funded by the US AID would check prostitutes for disease, but not the GIs; would dispense antibiotics but not condoms or birth control pills, for “fear of angering the Church.”
No US soldier was ever prosecuted for crimes committed against a Filipino. In 2,000 cases, no one was ever tried much less convicted. Victims and witnesses alike were intimidated and bought off, once with a sack of rice and canned sardines. Culprits were “re-deployed” and evaded Philippine jurisdiction.
It took a woman to bring all that subservience to a halt. Nicole, whose father worked with US soldiers and who was therefore herself so trusting of Americans, began her fight on the very day of her rape and never let go. Emotional all the way, weeping and raging, once hitting one of the soldiers with her purse inside the courtroom, Nicole made sure that the violence inflicted upon her by foreigners remained constantly before the public eye.
It takes a woman to render instantly palpable the true nature of Philippine-US relations, and the true oppressive character of the Visiting Forces Agreement between the Philippines and the United States. One has been a medium for violence; the other, an instrument for the perpetration of violence.
And it took women to create the pressure that enabled the court to withstand the puppetry of the Philippine Department of Justice itself, with its psychotically rampaging Secretary of (In)Justice. It took the women of GABRIELA Philippines and all its sister organizations the world over; it took Congresswoman Liza Maza and the Gabriela Women’s Party; it took women from the entire political spectrum to create the thunderous voice that said, ‘NO MORE! NOT AGAIN! NOT EVER AGAIN!” For over a year, raging in their disquiet, they watched with due vigilance over this case and responded with militant action time and time again.
How nice to hear the verdict “guilty” for at least one of the accused, even though the other three were acquitted. So, though the fight is only half-way done, here’s the warmest hug possible to Nicole, the women of the Philippines and their allies. Onward to the abrogation of the Visiting Forces Agreement – a nine-page treaty, in contrast to the nearly 40 page agreement governing the presence of US bases in Germany and Japan, with intricate provisions for the protection of the community, rather than of foreign troops. The VFA is a treaty so unjust in its treatment of Filipinos, it will go down in history as a document of infamy.
What fine daughters of Gabriela Silang they all are, from Nicole down to the 18-year-old still wearing her St. Scholastica Catholic school uniform as she picketed in front of the courthouse. They make us proud to be women. and to be women of Philippine ancestry. Sulong, GABRIELA, laban, MAKIBAKA!
Practically on the same day of Nov. 1, 2005, at 9 o’clock in the morning, women of GABRIELA Network took to the street in front of the Philippine Consulate in Los Angeles demanding justice for Nicole, the 22-year-old dumped “like a pig” by the roadside, demanding that the US soldiers be apprehended and tried for this violence against a woman, a city, a nation. The picketing was colorful, impassioned and yes, emotional as only women's political language can be.
Irony was redolent in the air. It had taken almost a hundred years and the combined might of activists and Apo Pinatubo to remove the two monkeys off the backs of the residents. But the Philippine government, true to its colors, did not dismantle those bases of iniquity and destruction, did not return the farmlands or the fishing grounds to their rightful owners. Instead, the bases were handed over to the Philippine military, which, in defiance of the Constitution, proceeded to host returning US troops in ever increasing numbers at the same sites. And now, we had Nicole.
To those with long memories, the stories of the residents’ humiliation still rankle. How the indigenous people were driven by the loss of their ancestral lands to scrounge at the base’s garbage dump for food and scraps. How occasionally, a boy would be shot by a US soldier who “mistook” him for a wild boar. How bullets from the firing ranges would hit houses. How fishermen were poisoned by some green glowing slick on the waters in the wake of nuclear submarines. How a 14-year-old girl died when the vibrator pushed up her by a GI broke and left a piece in her vaginal canal. How the clinics funded by the US AID would check prostitutes for disease, but not the GIs; would dispense antibiotics but not condoms or birth control pills, for “fear of angering the Church.”
No US soldier was ever prosecuted for crimes committed against a Filipino. In 2,000 cases, no one was ever tried much less convicted. Victims and witnesses alike were intimidated and bought off, once with a sack of rice and canned sardines. Culprits were “re-deployed” and evaded Philippine jurisdiction.
It took a woman to bring all that subservience to a halt. Nicole, whose father worked with US soldiers and who was therefore herself so trusting of Americans, began her fight on the very day of her rape and never let go. Emotional all the way, weeping and raging, once hitting one of the soldiers with her purse inside the courtroom, Nicole made sure that the violence inflicted upon her by foreigners remained constantly before the public eye.
It takes a woman to render instantly palpable the true nature of Philippine-US relations, and the true oppressive character of the Visiting Forces Agreement between the Philippines and the United States. One has been a medium for violence; the other, an instrument for the perpetration of violence.
And it took women to create the pressure that enabled the court to withstand the puppetry of the Philippine Department of Justice itself, with its psychotically rampaging Secretary of (In)Justice. It took the women of GABRIELA Philippines and all its sister organizations the world over; it took Congresswoman Liza Maza and the Gabriela Women’s Party; it took women from the entire political spectrum to create the thunderous voice that said, ‘NO MORE! NOT AGAIN! NOT EVER AGAIN!” For over a year, raging in their disquiet, they watched with due vigilance over this case and responded with militant action time and time again.
How nice to hear the verdict “guilty” for at least one of the accused, even though the other three were acquitted. So, though the fight is only half-way done, here’s the warmest hug possible to Nicole, the women of the Philippines and their allies. Onward to the abrogation of the Visiting Forces Agreement – a nine-page treaty, in contrast to the nearly 40 page agreement governing the presence of US bases in Germany and Japan, with intricate provisions for the protection of the community, rather than of foreign troops. The VFA is a treaty so unjust in its treatment of Filipinos, it will go down in history as a document of infamy.
What fine daughters of Gabriela Silang they all are, from Nicole down to the 18-year-old still wearing her St. Scholastica Catholic school uniform as she picketed in front of the courthouse. They make us proud to be women. and to be women of Philippine ancestry. Sulong, GABRIELA, laban, MAKIBAKA!
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Writing Angelyn
Eight pages a day aren’t a shabby output, unless they’re deconstructed almost immediately. I edit out anything NR, leaving only Angelyn’s voice which murmurs at me daily from the bound diary of ten years as a housekeeper/cook/nanny. I read the diary first thing in the morning, last thing at night (except when Battlestar Galactica is on), re-programming my brain to speak in Angelyn. She’d kept the diary to learn English. Her language is a thicket forest through which I hack and slash, searching for pathways. This is the door:
Her first words were “the house is 10,000 sq. ft. total.” She didn’t need to add that it was surrounded by an extravagant garden, whose footpath to the kitchen door I had just walked. The house was cupped like a pearl on a upturned green hand. It was all white, outside and inside, neat and clean, the very fact of its costliness making color unnecessary. Though I said “yes, ma’am,” dutifully, I floated inside, imagining my children’s astonishment at their mother living in such a palace.
At first her voice was hardly the sound of a brook but it has become stronger and now sounds like tidal waves upon rocks, crashing in, drawing out.
Mrs. Cody said, as we moved out the kitchen to a back room, “we prefer hot breakfasts.” She said that only lower-income people had cold milk and cereal for breakfast. “Both father and mother have to leave early for work, that’s why.”
...
Nine months ago, I left the Philippines – I am tempted to say my country but that would not be correct; one doesn’t leave a country; one leaves a house, a neighborhood, a city; one leaves people and there’s no past tense to leaving people; each day one is away, one is leaving… I left in the middle of a life adrift.
...
These were my earnings and how I spent them: at $50 a day, I got on the average $1500 per month. A thousand was sent immediately to my family. It kept not only my children and my husband in good shape but also my mother and later, my father when he retired, as well as various aunts, nephews and nieces who seemed to be assailed by crisis once a month. That left me $500 augmented by my odd-job earnings of $100 per weekend for a total of $900 per month, depending on my health.
I run out of cigarettes. Run to the corner store. Coo at children playing on the sidewalk. At the next block, a light goes on in my head. NR doesn’t coo at children and pat their heads. NR coos at dogs and pats dogs’ heads. Children are like shrubs to NR. I’m fusing with Angelyn.
This was my schedule: 6 a.m., I made breakfast, washed and dressed the children, waited with them until the school bus showed up. I poured coffee into two mugs and took them to the master bedroom. Then I started cleaning the bedrooms and bathrooms until noon when I prepared Mrs. Cody’s lunch, poured her a glass of wine and served these in her attic office. … Laundry was next on my list until 3 p.m. when I started dinner preparations, putting out fish and meat to thaw. The children returned around this time and I had to deal with their mess – the schoolbag and shoes and sweaters and socks flung in the living room. If Mrs. Cody had to attend an event or a meeting for one child, I would have to watch the other. At 6 p.m., they had dinner. Then I gave the children each a bath, place them in sleeping clothes, combed and dried their hair and tucked them in bed… When the Codys had guests, which was often, I would have to wait until their departure, around 10 or 11, to begin cleaning. On the average, I went to sleep between midnight and one in the morning.
I’m so tired cleaning and cooking in Angelyn’s world a layer of dust overlays my apartment. The stove is cold and the carrots in the fridge are liquefying. In 72 hours I’ve eaten toasted bread, some macadamia nuts. Before that more toasted bread. I tell myself to leave the keyboard, stop staring at the monitor and go to the grocery. I’m dropping half a pound each day. Maybe I can get Zonechef to donate four weeks’ of food so I can survive this writing. Wait, Zonechef is diet food.
The first time I was to have my two days off, Mrs. Cody said “oh, Angelyn, we have to go to a dinner party. We’ll be back as soon as possible but you have to wait for us. The children cannot be left alone. Don’t worry; you’ll make it to the train.” … Okay. I read to Nadia until she fell asleep. Then I went downstairs where my overnight bag stood by the front door, as eager to scoot out of there as I was. Eight o’clock; nine. Ten o’clock. At eleven, I heard a car coming down the road and the garage doors opening. Oh, hurray, but it was so late; it was so dark outside.. I must have looked remonstrating because Mrs. Cody said to me: “It’s okay. It’s daylight savings time. So eleven o’clock is really ten o’clock. It’s not overtime. It’s still early.”
Remove all the anger, remove all outrage. At this point, Angelyn is merely accepting. Leave it all to God, bahala na.
Mrs. Cody and Anson, the landscaper from England, were in the office attic, discussing spring’s garden design. Mrs. Cody wanted her house to be selected by Architectural Digest, just like her arch enemy’s house down the street. Per her instructions, I poured two glasses of red wine, sliced some cheese, took some crackers and arranged all on a silver tray to take to the attic. But – omigod, here was Anson coming down the stairs as I was going up. He’s stark naked, his d**k swinging like a pendulum as he dashed for the bathroom. Omigod, I didn’t see this. Omigod, the British landscaper is doing Mrs. Cody. Omigod, Anson is effing Mrs. Cody and I KNOW! Omigod! I KNOW! The tray shook in my hands. She’ll blame me for knowing; she’ll terminate me; I will lose my job! Help!
Me, too: help!
Her first words were “the house is 10,000 sq. ft. total.” She didn’t need to add that it was surrounded by an extravagant garden, whose footpath to the kitchen door I had just walked. The house was cupped like a pearl on a upturned green hand. It was all white, outside and inside, neat and clean, the very fact of its costliness making color unnecessary. Though I said “yes, ma’am,” dutifully, I floated inside, imagining my children’s astonishment at their mother living in such a palace.
At first her voice was hardly the sound of a brook but it has become stronger and now sounds like tidal waves upon rocks, crashing in, drawing out.
Mrs. Cody said, as we moved out the kitchen to a back room, “we prefer hot breakfasts.” She said that only lower-income people had cold milk and cereal for breakfast. “Both father and mother have to leave early for work, that’s why.”
...
Nine months ago, I left the Philippines – I am tempted to say my country but that would not be correct; one doesn’t leave a country; one leaves a house, a neighborhood, a city; one leaves people and there’s no past tense to leaving people; each day one is away, one is leaving… I left in the middle of a life adrift.
...
These were my earnings and how I spent them: at $50 a day, I got on the average $1500 per month. A thousand was sent immediately to my family. It kept not only my children and my husband in good shape but also my mother and later, my father when he retired, as well as various aunts, nephews and nieces who seemed to be assailed by crisis once a month. That left me $500 augmented by my odd-job earnings of $100 per weekend for a total of $900 per month, depending on my health.
I run out of cigarettes. Run to the corner store. Coo at children playing on the sidewalk. At the next block, a light goes on in my head. NR doesn’t coo at children and pat their heads. NR coos at dogs and pats dogs’ heads. Children are like shrubs to NR. I’m fusing with Angelyn.
This was my schedule: 6 a.m., I made breakfast, washed and dressed the children, waited with them until the school bus showed up. I poured coffee into two mugs and took them to the master bedroom. Then I started cleaning the bedrooms and bathrooms until noon when I prepared Mrs. Cody’s lunch, poured her a glass of wine and served these in her attic office. … Laundry was next on my list until 3 p.m. when I started dinner preparations, putting out fish and meat to thaw. The children returned around this time and I had to deal with their mess – the schoolbag and shoes and sweaters and socks flung in the living room. If Mrs. Cody had to attend an event or a meeting for one child, I would have to watch the other. At 6 p.m., they had dinner. Then I gave the children each a bath, place them in sleeping clothes, combed and dried their hair and tucked them in bed… When the Codys had guests, which was often, I would have to wait until their departure, around 10 or 11, to begin cleaning. On the average, I went to sleep between midnight and one in the morning.
I’m so tired cleaning and cooking in Angelyn’s world a layer of dust overlays my apartment. The stove is cold and the carrots in the fridge are liquefying. In 72 hours I’ve eaten toasted bread, some macadamia nuts. Before that more toasted bread. I tell myself to leave the keyboard, stop staring at the monitor and go to the grocery. I’m dropping half a pound each day. Maybe I can get Zonechef to donate four weeks’ of food so I can survive this writing. Wait, Zonechef is diet food.
The first time I was to have my two days off, Mrs. Cody said “oh, Angelyn, we have to go to a dinner party. We’ll be back as soon as possible but you have to wait for us. The children cannot be left alone. Don’t worry; you’ll make it to the train.” … Okay. I read to Nadia until she fell asleep. Then I went downstairs where my overnight bag stood by the front door, as eager to scoot out of there as I was. Eight o’clock; nine. Ten o’clock. At eleven, I heard a car coming down the road and the garage doors opening. Oh, hurray, but it was so late; it was so dark outside.. I must have looked remonstrating because Mrs. Cody said to me: “It’s okay. It’s daylight savings time. So eleven o’clock is really ten o’clock. It’s not overtime. It’s still early.”
Remove all the anger, remove all outrage. At this point, Angelyn is merely accepting. Leave it all to God, bahala na.
Mrs. Cody and Anson, the landscaper from England, were in the office attic, discussing spring’s garden design. Mrs. Cody wanted her house to be selected by Architectural Digest, just like her arch enemy’s house down the street. Per her instructions, I poured two glasses of red wine, sliced some cheese, took some crackers and arranged all on a silver tray to take to the attic. But – omigod, here was Anson coming down the stairs as I was going up. He’s stark naked, his d**k swinging like a pendulum as he dashed for the bathroom. Omigod, I didn’t see this. Omigod, the British landscaper is doing Mrs. Cody. Omigod, Anson is effing Mrs. Cody and I KNOW! Omigod! I KNOW! The tray shook in my hands. She’ll blame me for knowing; she’ll terminate me; I will lose my job! Help!
Me, too: help!
Thursday, October 26, 2006
IMPLODING COUNTRIES, MURDERING NATIONS
Only once did my mother say anything critical of the U.S. of A. She was telling stories about WWII in Manila and recalled the 24/7 carpet bombing of the city which formed part of MacArthur’s “I shall return” endgame. “It went on and on, and you lost your mind,” she said, shaking her blue-black hair. The words return to me now, as Iraq implodes under US occupation, Iraqi falling upon Iraqi, the carnage spreading to man, woman and child. A recent study places the war dead thus far as between 400,000 – 900,000 out of a population of only 25 million. I will leave it to the math-smart to work out what that would mean percentage wise, had the population been equal to the recently achieved 300 million of the US.
Militias, insurgents, jihadists, etc., are being blamed for the spiraling violence. Occasionally, a rare voice would say something about US occupation. But why neighbors who had lived peaceably with one another for decades would suddenly fall upon one another – there seems to be no explanation for that. Nor for the unspeakable and deliberate cruelty with which these killings are done. Torture via electric drills?! The mind is boggled.
But this kind of mass psychosis is neither new nor rare. We have seen it before and are seeing it in various parts of the world. In Cambodia, for instance, where non-stop bombing and acts of war so defeated the Buddhist tradition of non-violence, the “killing fields” bloomed in the English language. Despite his doctorate from Sorbonne, Khieu Sampan joined in the drive to return Cambodia to Year Zero, in a futile attempt to eradicate the experience of brutalization. We see it now in various parts of Africa where otherwise rational men fall upon neighbors in unspeakable carnage; we see it in countries where occupation and colonialism had walked, ruining societies and murdering nations.
In the Philippines, history seems not to occur with a flourish but rather by a slow but steady accretion of seemingly insignificant events, decisions and actions. It took the Marcos Dictatorship almost a decade to reach the kill rate of 14 a day. This current government under Macapagal-Arroyo is inching to that figure at a faster rate but still not as dramatically as Iraq or Darfur or the Congo. Nevertheless, the occupation is happening and is ratcheting up the level of violence – though slowly, desensitizing the population and the world.
First, 3,000 of them entered the archipelago. This was five years ago. In between, discreet numbers rotated in and out from Okinawa. Now, 5,700 US troops are supposed to be exercising with 1,700 Filipino soldiers, ostensibly to better train the latter against terrorism. Why there are more trainers than trainees, no one knows. Why, if this were a defense of Filipino territory, there were more foreign than local troops, no one explains. Why this repeated “exercises,” whose lessons never seem to take, leaving the locals good only for assassinating unarmed civilians, no one explains. Nor does anyone know the exact number of these undocumented aliens in the archipelago at any given time. As Amirah Ali Lidasan of the Suara Bangsamoro explains: “we have to rely on ‘sightings.’ Community people tell us ‘a white soldier was sighted in the barrio over there; another sighting that-a-way.’ It’s like the UFOs.” What white solders are doing in rural villages, nobody explains. It’s all X-filed. Suffice it to say, that the level of violence has been going up, as psychosis creeps from island to island and we find both assassins and the assassinated wearing the same color skin, the same color eyes, the same color hair, speaking the same language.
Early in the Philippine-American War, Apolinario Mabini repeatedly advised Emilio Aguinaldo of the Philippine Revolutionary Army not to allow the US to land in Manila. The US Department of War (now Defense) had sent two spies disguised as shipwrecks before US warships appeared in the bay. Now George Dewey was offshore with his ships, having fought the mock battle of Manila Bay and he wanted shore leave for his men. With the rest of the archipelago in Filipino hands, Aguinaldo must have thought that a harbor, a shore, a single city would not make a difference. Aguinaldo’s cavalier disregard of one of his most loyal advisers would lead to one million Filipinos dead.
Women, who are daily subjected to a culture of mental, emotional and physical violence directed against them, know full well the direct link between the unjust accusation and full-blown murder, between non-personhood and the knife across the throat. Control, oppression and violence smuggle themselves into relationships on cat feet. They begin with a label, a word, a fantasy of threat, like “weapons of mass destruction,” “enemy combatants.” Holocausts begin with the sinister glee of kyrstalnacht. They must therefore be resisted and rejected from inception. So don’t tag women “emotional” when they protest at a decibel higher than what you deem appropriate. They’ve seen it all before and they see it all the time. A baseless accusation now fuels future paranoia. A shove against the wall today engenders the killing rage of tomorrow. -- ###
Militias, insurgents, jihadists, etc., are being blamed for the spiraling violence. Occasionally, a rare voice would say something about US occupation. But why neighbors who had lived peaceably with one another for decades would suddenly fall upon one another – there seems to be no explanation for that. Nor for the unspeakable and deliberate cruelty with which these killings are done. Torture via electric drills?! The mind is boggled.
But this kind of mass psychosis is neither new nor rare. We have seen it before and are seeing it in various parts of the world. In Cambodia, for instance, where non-stop bombing and acts of war so defeated the Buddhist tradition of non-violence, the “killing fields” bloomed in the English language. Despite his doctorate from Sorbonne, Khieu Sampan joined in the drive to return Cambodia to Year Zero, in a futile attempt to eradicate the experience of brutalization. We see it now in various parts of Africa where otherwise rational men fall upon neighbors in unspeakable carnage; we see it in countries where occupation and colonialism had walked, ruining societies and murdering nations.
In the Philippines, history seems not to occur with a flourish but rather by a slow but steady accretion of seemingly insignificant events, decisions and actions. It took the Marcos Dictatorship almost a decade to reach the kill rate of 14 a day. This current government under Macapagal-Arroyo is inching to that figure at a faster rate but still not as dramatically as Iraq or Darfur or the Congo. Nevertheless, the occupation is happening and is ratcheting up the level of violence – though slowly, desensitizing the population and the world.
First, 3,000 of them entered the archipelago. This was five years ago. In between, discreet numbers rotated in and out from Okinawa. Now, 5,700 US troops are supposed to be exercising with 1,700 Filipino soldiers, ostensibly to better train the latter against terrorism. Why there are more trainers than trainees, no one knows. Why, if this were a defense of Filipino territory, there were more foreign than local troops, no one explains. Why this repeated “exercises,” whose lessons never seem to take, leaving the locals good only for assassinating unarmed civilians, no one explains. Nor does anyone know the exact number of these undocumented aliens in the archipelago at any given time. As Amirah Ali Lidasan of the Suara Bangsamoro explains: “we have to rely on ‘sightings.’ Community people tell us ‘a white soldier was sighted in the barrio over there; another sighting that-a-way.’ It’s like the UFOs.” What white solders are doing in rural villages, nobody explains. It’s all X-filed. Suffice it to say, that the level of violence has been going up, as psychosis creeps from island to island and we find both assassins and the assassinated wearing the same color skin, the same color eyes, the same color hair, speaking the same language.
Early in the Philippine-American War, Apolinario Mabini repeatedly advised Emilio Aguinaldo of the Philippine Revolutionary Army not to allow the US to land in Manila. The US Department of War (now Defense) had sent two spies disguised as shipwrecks before US warships appeared in the bay. Now George Dewey was offshore with his ships, having fought the mock battle of Manila Bay and he wanted shore leave for his men. With the rest of the archipelago in Filipino hands, Aguinaldo must have thought that a harbor, a shore, a single city would not make a difference. Aguinaldo’s cavalier disregard of one of his most loyal advisers would lead to one million Filipinos dead.
Women, who are daily subjected to a culture of mental, emotional and physical violence directed against them, know full well the direct link between the unjust accusation and full-blown murder, between non-personhood and the knife across the throat. Control, oppression and violence smuggle themselves into relationships on cat feet. They begin with a label, a word, a fantasy of threat, like “weapons of mass destruction,” “enemy combatants.” Holocausts begin with the sinister glee of kyrstalnacht. They must therefore be resisted and rejected from inception. So don’t tag women “emotional” when they protest at a decibel higher than what you deem appropriate. They’ve seen it all before and they see it all the time. A baseless accusation now fuels future paranoia. A shove against the wall today engenders the killing rage of tomorrow. -- ###
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Templates & Chickenheads
Rapper friend Dreary/Weary just returned from touring Asia and he has tons of souvenirs, among them reproductions of the iconography of the 1960 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China
My generation remembers the GPCR with fondness, particularly the slogan “women hold up half the sky,” usually illustrated by images of women in militant poses, fists clenched, generically pleasant-faced and virginally wholesome. Despite having read Simone de Bouvoir’s The Second Sex, I had not known what to make of the explosive women’s movement of the West – until “women hold up the sky” blazed in the chaotic sky of the 60s milieu.
Aside from “women hold up half the sky,” two other hallmark of the GPCR affected me personally: “people-to-people friendship” and the 3-in-1 committee. Decades later, P2P friendship would inform the organizing model for GABNet*, as it seemed a way to preclude what was happening in the 1980s and the 1990s, when all and every institution and/or organization outside the archipelago – NGOs to church to labor – turned its back on the Filipino’s struggle. From the 3-in-1, on the other hand, we learned the necessity of mitigating hierarchies of power and control, of allowing rank-and-file the freedom to innovate and create in their turf.
China China Saipan as well as the global sex trade. It would seem that the new slogan is “women lie crushed by half the sky.”
The Chinese model is back, of course, with the admonition that we should lay to one side the issue of women’s oppression, leave it to a post-victory cultural revolution. As if qualitative change could be effected without an accumulation of quantitative changes; as if women’s oppression does not have materialist foundations and was merely a cultural thing!
Okay.
-------------
*See “GABNet: An Experiment in Transnational Organizing,” delivered at the Nov. 2005 conference at UCLA.
My generation remembers the GPCR with fondness, particularly the slogan “women hold up half the sky,” usually illustrated by images of women in militant poses, fists clenched, generically pleasant-faced and virginally wholesome. Despite having read Simone de Bouvoir’s The Second Sex, I had not known what to make of the explosive women’s movement of the West – until “women hold up the sky” blazed in the chaotic sky of the 60s milieu.
Aside from “women hold up half the sky,” two other hallmark of the GPCR affected me personally: “people-to-people friendship” and the 3-in-1 committee. Decades later, P2P friendship would inform the organizing model for GABNet*, as it seemed a way to preclude what was happening in the 1980s and the 1990s, when all and every institution and/or organization outside the archipelago – NGOs to church to labor – turned its back on the Filipino’s struggle. From the 3-in-1, on the other hand, we learned the necessity of mitigating hierarchies of power and control, of allowing rank-and-file the freedom to innovate and create in their turf.
The Chinese model is back, of course, with the admonition that we should lay to one side the issue of women’s oppression, leave it to a post-victory cultural revolution. As if qualitative change could be effected without an accumulation of quantitative changes; as if women’s oppression does not have materialist foundations and was merely a cultural thing!
Okay.
-------------
*See “GABNet: An Experiment in Transnational Organizing,” delivered at the Nov. 2005 conference at UCLA.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
To Be a Non-Person
The burkha made it to my neighborhood, hanging from a hook, innocent among the goods brought over by globalization, in a store that also sold shirts from Guatemala, baskets from China, wool from Romania, bangles from India… It called the eye, being black among the rainbow colors of the store’s wares. I made light of my shock, telling myself that likely, it was being sold for Halloween. Then because I am that kind of weird, I went in, bought the thing and dropped it over my head.
Instantly, the world narrowed to a little square space, that net-covered hole before my eyes. Sound became muffled. The odors of the cuisines of Korea, Argentina, India and Mexico disappeared. Neither wind nor sun touched my skin. I couldn’t look anyone in the eyes. Instead, passers-by gave me sidelong glances.
This is how it is not to exist, I said to myself. I was shuffling on the sidewalk, hugging building walls. The anonymity was complete. I felt both helpless and sinister; I could do anything since I was nothing; and conversely, anything could be done to me because I was nothing. After three blocks, the claustrophobia became overwhelming; I tore the thing off my body.
A squeal of brakes: a car nearly hitting a teenage couple. A male face loomed out of the passenger side window and screamed: “You moron, I’m going to take your dray and f-k her so her eyeballs pop!” Dray? In the wind of male rage, she teetered on four-inch heels. She wore a half halter top, butt-crack and pudenda peeping over low-rise jeans. She reached a hand out, stepped back to the sidewalk and clutched my arm. As threats charged the air, many promises of disaster to the female, we huddled closer to the building flanking the sidewalk, me half-shrouded, her half-naked. I wasn’t sure which the worse non-personhood was: to be exclusive property or common property.
It is disgustingly easy to render women non-persons; sometimes even a word suffices. It took GABNet a decade, for instance, to move the issue of mail-order brides from the private domain to the public. By simply calling such women “wives,” the sellers of women were able to move the issue to the private domain; it became a matter of “consenting adults.”
The Philippine government manages to hide its traffic of women by simply classifying all exported labor as “overseas contract workers.” Even though nearly 30% of the women exported end up in the sex trade (under the category technical skills), there has been general tolerance for this “development” tactic of the Philippine government supported by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
GABNet itself has been accused (quietly) of having an “incorrect political line,” in campaigns designed to turn it into a pariah, because it refuses to abandon opposition to patriarchy and sexism. As a organization of women, it has consistently considered such opposition as integral to the advancement of women’s liberation, integral to the struggle against imperialism and certainly, considering that women are among the poorest of the poor in the archipelago, integral to its support for the just struggle of the Filipino people for national independence and democracy.
Unfortunately, the mis-judgment persists (or is deliberately fostered) that being opposed to the exploitation and oppression of women detracts from a comprehensive progressive political position. How this is explained with any modicum of logic, I have no idea. Never mind that women do live in a climate of sexism and “patriarchialism” (a mindset based on the male dominance and hence, the marginalization and devaluation of women and the resulting devaluation and alienation of their labor).
Just as the conflict over land forms the stuff of the peasant’s daily struggle, or the high cost of education and poor job prospects form the stuff of the youth’s daily struggle, gender-based discrimination and exploitation permeate the lives of women, exacerbating and in many cases, molding the specifics of contradictions involving their sector. But many persistently deny that women have a specific sectoral reality, thereby withholding from them the right to expect non-sexist policies and practices from everyone.
Nevertheless, to paraphrase Galileo, like it or not, the world of women turns on this axis. The across-the-board devaluation of domestic work, for instance, in all 168 countries to which the Philippines export women, stems from the history of women as the first truly private property (in contrast to slaves who were tribally owned), hence from a historic devaluation of women, a historic devaluation of their work and skills, and hence, from the social perspective and economic view that household work creates no surplus value, requires no skills and is therefore subject to underpayment.
Women’s oppression and the apartheid against women are intensifying; the US-led so-called war on terror has steadily shrunk public space for women. Hopefully, women will not simply surrender to this trend but will commensurately increase their political engagement and activism, if only to relieve the claustrophobia of these times.Déjà Vu All Over Again
April is the cruelest month, especially way back in 1973, the 4th of the month to be precise, when Liliosa Hilao was murdered in the makeshift detention quarters of the (Philippine) Constabulary Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU). In the wake of Presidential Proclamation 1081, which imposed martial rule on the Philippines, CANU had abruptly given dope dealers, dope pushers and narcotics traffickers a unilateral truce, electing instead to go after activists, “leftists,” dissenters and a vast array of people who did not want Mr. Marcos to change the Constitution so he, his clan and cronies could rule forever.
Liliosa was 23 years old, a scholar at the City University of Manila and editor of Hasik, the school’s student newspaper. Later testimonies revealed she had been tortured, gang-raped, injected with truth serum. Then, because she wouldn’t be cowed and vowed to go after her brutalizers, they poured muriatic acid down her throat and killed her. Hers was the first death in the urban detention centers of the Marcos regime.
When her family tried to obtain justice, the military used all manner of harassment and threats, including raids, beatings and detention, to discourage her parents, her brothers and her sisters.
I never met her but she remains vivid to my mind. She was killed the night before my release and whenever April comes, I hear the whisper of a co-detainee, talking about her murder. “She was killed there,” my co-detainee said, in a hushed voice, pointing to the building across the street from where we were being held inside Camp Crame. My eyes slid away from the building, kept sliding away from it, as my mind repeatedly said, “it didn’t happen here; it happened in another city, in another province, in another island, in another country far, far away.”
Liliosa’s murder came at the end of a week of severe diarrhea and gastroenteritis in our own detention quarters. For two weeks in March, water had disappeared from our quarters (such a nice neutral word); eventually, despite our efforts, the place began to stink and we were ripe as well. One morning, the military parked a fire truck outside, stuck a hose through a window and poured water into a gasoline drum in the bathroom. Our relief was short-lived; the water was contaminated, probably deliberately to punish the women for complaining.
Water and Liliosa would be linked in my mind forever, a presage of murderous things to come, perverting Aquarius’s symbolism so much that to this day, I barely drink water. In the mid-1970s, when so many women (and men, though hardly anyone talks about this) were being sexually assaulted in military detention camps, I voiced my worries to a friend. His reply: “if you were picked up again, rape would be the least of your worries.” I understood. Liliosa was the tidewater mark. After her, everyone and anyone “picked up” was tortured, some murdered, because the military establishment got away with the first. This was how we learned the word “impunity” – from Liliosa’s fate and her family’s experience.
And now there’s PP 1017 by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, so low a number among presidential proclamations. Marcos at least waited until he got to 1081, being a superstitious nitwit who embedded in the number the year he would “lift” martial -- but not his -- rule, 1981. Does this mean Gloria will step down in 2017? As Charlie Brown would say, aaargh!
But then again, there is this so-called people’s initiative (who are these people?) to change the current Constitution. Then there are all these women and men charged with rebellion, five of them congress people who’ve had to accept congressional protective custody to avoid being arrested without warrants. And US troops are debasing Filipinas again, protected by government itself. Then there are the 556 assassinated activists, leaders and critics, the body count inching upwards to the 14 killed per day in the last years of Marcos’s rule.
Time seems to have looped upon itself, things devolving, the descent into darkness accompanied by the gloating chortles of fundamentalists, military men, warlords and landlords, corporate men and a host of women glorying in their own abjectness. Time has loop and is eating itself up.
I hear myself responding over and over again, to questions trite and significant, that I don’t have time; there is no time; no time at all, because the cloud in the crystal ball has cleared and forever is visible and there is no time left.
Another generation will drop out of school; take to the hills and risk life and liberty to make democracy more than just a word. Physicists, engineers, poets, young peasants, the tribal braves, workers, women, men and even children will forgo the amiable pleasures of an ordinary life to do something which shouldn’t be extraordinary but is – assert people’s rights and freedoms.
Another generation will leave their parents’ homes and take to the hills and risk life and liberty to make democracy more than just a word. Abandoning all that is familiar, they will learn the unfamiliar heart of poverty among 70% of the population and by so doing, become themselves ordinary, usual and familiar, transformed, as the village folks used to say, into nice people around.
Sometime in the future, a woman grown old in this never-ending enterprise to create a true nation will look at the sky with horror-stricken eyes and think: “a third of my generation was killed young; a third went to prison, went to the hills or both, and a third is scattered the world over in exile.”
And remember again, the words of a woman who joined the Tupamaros of Uruguay at the age of 15, spent two years in prison where the military destroyed her right arm, and the rest of her life in exile in Sweden: “there are things I regret having done, but never being there, at the moment of historic juncture, when everyone was engaged in a magnificent undertaking.”
It is said that the poet, Pablo Neruda died of a broken heart when the Allende government was destroyed by a CIA-supported military coup and replaced with a military dictatorship. But one remembers a childhood fairytale, where an honorable man looped iron bands around his heart, to stop its shattering at injustice, thus enabling himself to act.
Go and do likewise. There is no time anymore.
Liliosa was 23 years old, a scholar at the City University of Manila and editor of Hasik, the school’s student newspaper. Later testimonies revealed she had been tortured, gang-raped, injected with truth serum. Then, because she wouldn’t be cowed and vowed to go after her brutalizers, they poured muriatic acid down her throat and killed her. Hers was the first death in the urban detention centers of the Marcos regime.
When her family tried to obtain justice, the military used all manner of harassment and threats, including raids, beatings and detention, to discourage her parents, her brothers and her sisters.
I never met her but she remains vivid to my mind. She was killed the night before my release and whenever April comes, I hear the whisper of a co-detainee, talking about her murder. “She was killed there,” my co-detainee said, in a hushed voice, pointing to the building across the street from where we were being held inside Camp Crame. My eyes slid away from the building, kept sliding away from it, as my mind repeatedly said, “it didn’t happen here; it happened in another city, in another province, in another island, in another country far, far away.”
Liliosa’s murder came at the end of a week of severe diarrhea and gastroenteritis in our own detention quarters. For two weeks in March, water had disappeared from our quarters (such a nice neutral word); eventually, despite our efforts, the place began to stink and we were ripe as well. One morning, the military parked a fire truck outside, stuck a hose through a window and poured water into a gasoline drum in the bathroom. Our relief was short-lived; the water was contaminated, probably deliberately to punish the women for complaining.
Water and Liliosa would be linked in my mind forever, a presage of murderous things to come, perverting Aquarius’s symbolism so much that to this day, I barely drink water. In the mid-1970s, when so many women (and men, though hardly anyone talks about this) were being sexually assaulted in military detention camps, I voiced my worries to a friend. His reply: “if you were picked up again, rape would be the least of your worries.” I understood. Liliosa was the tidewater mark. After her, everyone and anyone “picked up” was tortured, some murdered, because the military establishment got away with the first. This was how we learned the word “impunity” – from Liliosa’s fate and her family’s experience.
And now there’s PP 1017 by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, so low a number among presidential proclamations. Marcos at least waited until he got to 1081, being a superstitious nitwit who embedded in the number the year he would “lift” martial -- but not his -- rule, 1981. Does this mean Gloria will step down in 2017? As Charlie Brown would say, aaargh!
But then again, there is this so-called people’s initiative (who are these people?) to change the current Constitution. Then there are all these women and men charged with rebellion, five of them congress people who’ve had to accept congressional protective custody to avoid being arrested without warrants. And US troops are debasing Filipinas again, protected by government itself. Then there are the 556 assassinated activists, leaders and critics, the body count inching upwards to the 14 killed per day in the last years of Marcos’s rule.
Time seems to have looped upon itself, things devolving, the descent into darkness accompanied by the gloating chortles of fundamentalists, military men, warlords and landlords, corporate men and a host of women glorying in their own abjectness. Time has loop and is eating itself up.
I hear myself responding over and over again, to questions trite and significant, that I don’t have time; there is no time; no time at all, because the cloud in the crystal ball has cleared and forever is visible and there is no time left.
Another generation will drop out of school; take to the hills and risk life and liberty to make democracy more than just a word. Physicists, engineers, poets, young peasants, the tribal braves, workers, women, men and even children will forgo the amiable pleasures of an ordinary life to do something which shouldn’t be extraordinary but is – assert people’s rights and freedoms.
Another generation will leave their parents’ homes and take to the hills and risk life and liberty to make democracy more than just a word. Abandoning all that is familiar, they will learn the unfamiliar heart of poverty among 70% of the population and by so doing, become themselves ordinary, usual and familiar, transformed, as the village folks used to say, into nice people around.
Sometime in the future, a woman grown old in this never-ending enterprise to create a true nation will look at the sky with horror-stricken eyes and think: “a third of my generation was killed young; a third went to prison, went to the hills or both, and a third is scattered the world over in exile.”
And remember again, the words of a woman who joined the Tupamaros of Uruguay at the age of 15, spent two years in prison where the military destroyed her right arm, and the rest of her life in exile in Sweden: “there are things I regret having done, but never being there, at the moment of historic juncture, when everyone was engaged in a magnificent undertaking.”
It is said that the poet, Pablo Neruda died of a broken heart when the Allende government was destroyed by a CIA-supported military coup and replaced with a military dictatorship. But one remembers a childhood fairytale, where an honorable man looped iron bands around his heart, to stop its shattering at injustice, thus enabling himself to act.
Go and do likewise. There is no time anymore.
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