history

From my bookshelves: The First Filipino, a biography of Jose Rizal by Leon Ma. Guerrero (Guerrero Publishing, Manila: 1998)

Rizal is the Philippine’s national hero, a true Renaissance man – writer, physician, scholar, sculptor, farmer, amateur boxer, and much more besides. Along the way to his martyrdom at the hands of Spanish colonial forces in 1896, he found time to write two revolutionary novels, poetry, essays, and reams of correspondence,  perform eye surgery on his patients, and fall in love with several women scattered in different countries.

A replica of Casa Redonda, Rizal’s octagonal hut in Dapitan that served as his eye clinic. Image here.

From a letter Rizal wrote while in Dapitan to his nephew Alfredo Hidalgo:

Go ahead, then; study, study, and think over well what you have studied; life is a very serious matter, and only those who have brains and a heart have a good life. To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to struggle. But this struggle is not an animal, material struggle, nor is it a struggle only with other men; it is a struggle with them but also with one’s self, with their passions but also with one’s own, with errors and with anxieties. It is an eternal struggle, [which one must sustain] with a smile on one’s lips, and tears in the heart. In this battlefield, a man has no better weapon than his intelligence, no greater strength than that of his own heart.

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A brahmin once asked The Blessed One:
“Are you a God?”
“No, brahmin,” said The Blessed One.
“Are you a saint?”
“No, brahmin,” said The Blessed One.
“Are you a magician?”
“No, brahmin,” said The Blessed One.
“What are you then?”
“I am awake.”

The Awakened One says:
You are far from the end of your journey.
The way is not in the sky.
The way is in the heart.
See how you love.
Buddha, Dhammapada

Image here.

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Another excerpt from my work-in-progress, a memoir. The setting is still the Bacolod City of my childhood. The section below follows this one. Another previously posted section is here.

Seafood was served only on special occasions – juicy crabs crammed with tasty orange aligue (crab fat), halabos nga pasayan (steamed shrimp) as big as my hand that turned violently pink after cooking, and sweet fat fish stuffed with tomatoes and onions and then grilled. I wondered why we had these savory treats so seldom, since Lola also owned a fishing fleet – surely we could have been plentifully supplied with crustaceans and fish? Perhaps she was avoiding the high cholesterol content of those foods.

She was a great believer in children’s nutrition by supplement, though – she made me drink an entire plastic Tupperware tumbler of Milo every single night. It was brought into her bedroom, where I slept, by a kitchenmaid on a tray along with a tumbler of water. I was supposed to drink both. It resulted in my waking up in the wee hours and going to the bathroom in the dark. To this day I can’t look at a Tupperware tumbler without feeling like I have to pee.

I don’t know why Lola and Lolo insisted I sleep in their room. I had my own room, but it was only where I kept my books and things and spent time during the day, mostly reading. At night, I lay on a mattress placed beside a wall at the foot of their bed, right on the green carpeting. Beside me was a carved wooden commode on which was placed the “over-over” – radio equipment to keep in touch with the fishing vessels – and a ceramic pig.

This ceramic pig was a family heirloom. No one remembers where it was bought or where it came from to begin with. But it was meant to be used as a coin bank – there was a slit on its top. It was about as large as a real pig, made from white ceramic, and encrusted all over with faux pearls, rhinestones, and other glittery bijoux. Its mouth was open in a smile; its tongue was of soft red felt and its teeth were pearl beads. I would wiggle my fingers into its mouth to touch the tongue, which was the only soft part of the pig, and run my hands all over its encrustations.

I didn’t give that pig a name; somehow it seemed beyond that, for I knew it was older than I was. It first belonged to Lola Bennett’s mother, my great-grandmother, who always wrote her name in her books thus: Dña Marciana Ledesma vda. de Lacson – and naming her pig would have been presumptuous on my part. That pig looms large in the family mythos. One creased color photograph from 1968 shows me, less than a year old, pink and chubby all on fours on a blue chenille bedspread beside that pig, wearing only a toothy grin. People who see that picture comment on the resemblance.

The radio squawked a lot in the early evenings, when the captains of the fishing boats would call in to report. I’d be in my pajamas lying on my mattress, dreading the arrival of the housemaid with the tray of Tupperware tumblers of Milo and water, and Lola would speak into the handheld microphone: “Benedicta I, Benedicta I. Come in, over.” Szquaawwk. “Ofelia I, Ofelia I, come in. Pila ka bañera sa inyo? Over.” (How many crates did you catch?) And so on for half-an-hour; sometimes I’d fall asleep listening to their choppy conversations, lulled by the hoarse voices coming in on the dark night over the speakers, punctuated by Lola’s “Come in. Over.” I do not know how she ended those transmissions – with “Over and out?” Something else? I never heard – I was always asleep by then.

When sleep was slow in coming, and I’d stare with wide eyes at the ceiling – or the pig – Yayay Mila would be sent for, and she would turn me onto my side, and pat my hip until I dozed off. It never failed to send me to sleep. To this day I cannot sleep except on my side.

Milo image here. Fish and crates from here.

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I’ve previously posted an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress, about the year I spent in Bacolod City when I was eight years old. Here’s another portion from that section:

I loved it in the province. I lived in Lola Bennett’s sprawling bungalow in Taculing, close to where the airport used to be, on a hacienda planted to tubo as far as the horizon. This was during the late 1970s but even by present standards that house would look fresh and contemporary. Constructed in a gated area behind high walls across the road from her tubohan, it stuck out from its surroundings like a crystal in the mud.

The house was built in the center of a large pond, slightly raised on cement pillars above the knee-high level of the water. There was a bridge one had to cross to get over the water to the front door and I thought that was extremely interesting and stylish. I have not seen such a house before or since. Orange-colored carp swam in the pond; this was decades before raising koi became fashionable. After dinner Lola Bennett, silver-haired but still vigorous in her early 60s then, would take a piece of sliced bread and go out for her “daily exercise” as she termed it. We would walk several times around the house, tearing bits of bread off and casting them into the water for the carp. The fish would follow us around, and the water would boil frenziedly with their activity as they fought over the bread.

Lolo Maeng was Lola Bennett’s second husband; he married her when she was a widow, when they were middle-aged; they had no children of their own. I was the child Lolo never had. On Saturdays he would take me to a clinic in the city for my hormone growth shots that a doctor in Manila prescribed because I was short for my age. He’d drive his snappy little red-and-cream Renault 14 himself, going very fast down the dusty backroads with the windows down and the breeze blowing our hair back, his salt-and-pepper and cut military-style, mine trimmed like a boy’s. (I was not allowed to grow my hair long until I was in college.) “Do you think we’re driving too fast?” Lolo would ask. All I could ever answer was a frozen grin. He would laugh and step on the gas even harder, making me tighten my grip on the leather seat. There were no seatbelts back then. He would only slow down when we reached the city where the streets were crammed with people and jeeps.

After I got my shot, Lolo would stop by a suki for roasted peanuts. Sometimes we would halt at Lopue’s bookstore and he would buy me the latest Nancy Drew mystery and a Stabilo Boss highlighter. The highlighters only came in yellow and were a newfangled thing. I’d shade the o’s in my Nancy Drews as I read along and the sunshiny dots spangling the pages would show me how many pages were left to read. The Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries were all hard-bound, as most of my other books were, the majority of them belonging to my mother; the only paperbacks I had were Enid Blyton stories.

Back home after a trip Lolo Maeng would take a large strainer and shake out all the salt from the peanuts and refill his garapon (an empty old jar of Nescafe coffee) that he kept in a cupboard in the “clean kitchen” of the house. (Food was cooked by kusineras in an outbuilding which housed the “dirty” kitchen and maids’ quarters. It was also where the ironing was done, with a weighty cast-iron plancha filled with glowing charcoal that I was absolutely forbidden to touch.) I was the only person allowed to share Lolo’s peanuts, and that made me feel special and loved. Come to think of it, maybe Lola just didn’t like peanuts at all.

Cane field image here. Renault 14 here. Adobong mani here.

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In our creative non-fiction writing class this semester, our professor Dr. Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo challenged her eight students to come up with CNF narratives. These could be memoirs, travel writing, or other forms; we had to “pitch” our ideas to her first. If they passed muster, we were told to proceed with writing. PhD students like myself had to write a work no shorter than fifty pages. I pitched the idea of a memoir and have written 53 pages so far, with the work still unfinished.

It’s a work in progress. Here’s an excerpt from my chapter on Bacolod City, where I lived for a year when I was eight:

In Bacolod we ate a lot of chicken because Lola Bennett ran a huge poultry farm in addition to the sugar cane plantation. On a couple of visits the foreman gave me undersized hen’s eggs that didn’t pass their quality control inspections. I kept several of them under the bed in my room, right on the orange carpeting. Some months later one of the maids found them. She called my lola, lifted the bed skirt, and pointed to them without saying a word. My little collection was taken away. “Eggs are not toys,” I was told. Too bad. I liked those eggs, some of them as tiny as quail eggs with pebbly surfaces of calcium carbonate in raised and ridged patterns, random as nature makes it.  I was never taken to visit the poultry farm again after that.

My Bacolod nanny, Mila, was scolded over that incident for not watching me carefully enough to know that I was smuggling home rejected eggs. I don’t think she was with us when we visited the poultry farms; she wasn’t with me all the time, as far as I remember. I usually saw her at bath time, when she’d take me to my white-tiled bathroom off my bedroom, switch on the shower, and try to whip up a soapy lather in the hard water which ran out of the pipes. At first I resented her bathing me because I told her I had been giving myself baths in Manila since I was seven years old. She smiled and said, “Your lola told me to,” and we both knew there was no arguing after that. I came to love the way she wrapped me up in thick white towels and rubbed me dry, giving me a quick hug before letting go.

After the egg episode Yayay Mila whispered to me, “Nugay nga hampang sang pagkaon. (Don’t play with food.) I know other things you can do.”  One night she handed me her notebook, about the size of a pocketbook, hardbound, and filled with smooth creamy pages half-filled with her notes written in flowing cursive with a black fountain pen. She opened to a page and pointed to the title at the top – “Moon River”. “This is a beautiful song,” she said. “Memorize the words and learn it.” She sang it to me in a light soprano. “Moon river, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style, some day…” I’ve associated that song with her ever since, although I have forgotten what she looked like. I wonder if she ever did find and cross her own moon river.

I deeply admired her notebook – all I had for school were the usual ruled spiral notebooks with thin cardboard covers and cheap paper – but I never thought to ask if she could get me one. Now I know what it is like – a Moleskine notebook – and the memory of this may explain why my stationery drawer is crammed with Moleys of different sizes.

Another time she took me out into the garden, bearing a basin of soapy water. She made for a gumamela bush, plucked a handful of its glossy leaves, and showed me how to pound the leaves in the soapy water with a rock. Making ‘o’s with our hands, we blew bubbles that were strong and did not easily pop, even when poked by leaves or sticks. I pealed with laughter, and for most of that afternoon blew myriads of rainbow bubbles into being, sending them down the garden path and up into the air to bounce in the light, as Yayay Mila beamed.

Mila also took care of feeding me. I was fed – usually with scrambled or sunny-side up eggs for breakfast, for lunch and dinner fried chicken and rice, no ketchup – in the “clean kitchen” off the dining area, which was furnished with 1950s-style folding metal chairs with red leather seats – a set of four – and a matching table. That kitchen was painted white and was always very very clean, since nothing was actually cooked there. That room glows in my mind, always flooded with light, because a screen door at one end let sunshine in during the day. Through it I could see coconut trees, ornamental plants, and the Bermuda grass of lola’s well-kept lawn. Green and white and brown are the colors I associate with Bacolod – the colors of sun and earth and garden and fried chicken.

Nowadays I can’t get enough ketchup.

Images: Egg in hand here. Ketchup here. Gumamela (hibiscus) here.

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POP GOES THE WORLD By Jenny Ortuoste for Manila Standard-Today, 3 February 2011, Thursday

Let My People Go

“Let my people go!”

So Moses demanded of Pharaoh when he led the Israeli nation out of slavery in Egypt, as told in the Christian Bible. The Israelites were groaning under the oppressive treatment of their Egyptian masters, for the most part living in sordid conditions and condemned to a lifetime of hard labor without the freedom to live their lives as they wished.

Finally fed up, the downtrodden people called upon their God to deliver them from their troubles, and he did so by raining down a succession of plagues that convinced the Egyptians that keeping the Israelites around to fetch and carry was more trouble than that free labor was worth.

The Book of Exodus goes on to recount how they spent the next 40 years wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land, but that’s another story.

Fast forward three thousand years. As of this posting, massive protests in the streets of Egypt have now been going on for over a week as citizens fight for their freedom from an oppressive regime and clamor for the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak, who has clung to power for 30 years.

Life magazine online has a photo spread of the leader titled “The Last Pharaoh”. Mubarak certainly has lived almost as royalty. A former air force officer, he was close to another Egyptian strongman, Anwar Sadat. Mubarak loyally served Sadat when the latter was leader of Egypt, and seized power only after Sadat’s assassination – and has not let go since.

Hosni Mubarak and Anwar Sadat viewing a parade in 1981,  moments before a hail of bullets cut down Sadat and ten others. Mubarak survived with only a hand wound. Image from Life.com here.

During his time in power, he has not had a vice-president, for fear of setting up a rival to his power base. He is now 81, and is said to be grooming his son to succeed him, something that does not sit well with the opposition.

Any repressive regime – think the Soviet Union, East Germany, even the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines – will restrict a people’s access to information and communication in order to control the populace and restrict movement and activity and funds from outside sources. The median age of Egypt’s population is in the mid-20s, and this younger, tech-savvy generation has had exposure to other countries by way of the Internet and are aware of the freedoms enjoyed in democratic countries.

Thus it was not entirely unexpected for the Egyptian government to respond to the popular uprising by shutting down Internet access in the country.

Still, in this day of broadband and WiFi, it was an unthinkable move. Tech analysts online scrambled to find out how it was done. All it took was for an order from the government, and all the service providers complied.

For a government to cut off a people’s means of communication is a curtailment of human rights that cannot – and should not – be ignored by the free world. People all over the planet have responded with resounding support. One of the most touching videos shows Juju, an eight-year-old Saudi girl, with this message for Mubarak: “I would tell him to remove that law, about that thing him being president forever, and to let the people of Egypt vote…and by the way, some of your police officers removed their jackets and they’re joining the people.” Yes, in case Mubarak hasn’t noticed just how widespread disaffection with his regime now is.

Over a quarter of a million Egyptians are still out in the streets calling for Mubarak to step down. Participation has swelled dramatically over the week as women, who usually are not physically involved in protests for reform, have also taken to the streets, courting risk of harm, receiving their share of injuries, and showing the world that a people fed up with oppression and fighting for their freedom will exhibit extraordinary bravery and courage, the kind that moves millions to act and topples dictatorships.

Cairo women take to the streets to protest Mubarak’s decades-long stranglehold on power. Image from Life.com here.

I wonder how our government is responding to this. Dedma lang. There has been no official statement from Malacañang so far on the crisis. What also concerns me is that the Philippine embassy in Egypt has not recommended that our citizens be repatriated for their safety. And this while looting and invasions are occurring during this time of high tension and conflict, as pent-up emotions are released.

My sister, who works with a property management company in Dubai, says that several malls in Cairo managed by their company have been looted and trashed, as have other establishments. There is no guarantee that people will remain safe. Now how are the Filipinos? Other countries such as the US and Finland have sent charter flights to take their people home. Not ours. Ours were told: “Ingat!”

The obvious parallelism is our own People Power of 1986, when girls stuck flowers in the gun barrels of soldiers and nuns prayed the rosary in the streets. A peaceful revolution dethroned a dictator and paved the way for a new era in Philippine politics. But circumstances are different in every culture. I hope for a peaceful end to the crisis, as the Philippines experienced.

The sentiment of the uprising. Image from Life.com here.

Mubarak still has seven months left to his “term”. He refuses to step down before then, pushing back the protests with rallies staged by his supporters, vowing to “die on Egyptian soil”. But the Egyptian people will have no more of that. How much longer before they achieve what they are fighting for?

Moses freed the slaves from Egypt. And now it’s the turn of the Egyptian nation to seek their own freedom from “the last pharoah”, and they are doing it right now. ***

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Earth Wind and Fire was an American R&B band formed in 1969 by Maurice and Verdine White. The band’s name comes from Maurice’s zodiac sign, Sagittarius, of which the primary element is Fire; Earth and Air are its seasonal elements.

The song “Serpentine Fire” was one of the hits from their 1977 album All n’ All. According to comments posted at the Youtube link for the song, like many albums of the time, there was a theme that tied the tunes together, and in this one the concept was the battle between good and evil.

Maurice was said to have been into Egyptology and metaphysics at the time, and the phrase “serpentine fire” refers to the Vedic concept of kundalini - Sanskrit for “coiled” – a person’s dormant creative energy conceptualized as a snake coiled three-and-a-half times around the sacrum (spine). Sacrum, by the way, is Latin for “sacred”.

Perhaps this music was meant to spark the awakening of a listener’s kundalini energy? At the very least, the song would make one want to learn more about this concept, as these are not empty-headed lyrics.

On the surface, the metaphysical themes are cast in the frame of a love song. It may be read that way too, as listening to music is an individual experience, and we bring our associations and frames-of-reference into play in order to understand it.

Waking up and seeing your beloved’s face glowing in the morning sun on the pillow beside you can bring this song to mind. <3

When I see your face like the mornin sun you spark me to shine
Tell all the world, my need is fulfilled and that’s a new design
As long as you’re near, there is no fear of a victory
But when I’m away, influences stray my mind to disagree
I wanna see your face in the morning sun ignite my energy
The cause and effect of you has brought new meaning in my life to me

Gonna tell the story morning glory all about the serpentine fire
Gonna tell the story morning glory all about the serpentine fire

oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah, oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah
I need to see your face like the morning sun ignite my energy
The cause and effect of you has brought new meaning in my life to me
The moments I find when I’m inclined to do my best
Negative wins when I give in and then I lose the test (not many times)

Gonna tell the story morning glory all about the serpentine fire
Surely as life begun, you will as one battle with the serpentine fire

oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah, oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah
Surely as life begun, you will as one battle with the serpentine fire
Surely as life begun, you will as one battle with the serpentine fire
Gonna tell the story morning glory all about the serpentine fire
Gonna tell the story morning glory all about the serpentine fire

EWF image here.

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From my bookshelves: Filipino Style (Archipelago Press, Singapore: 2007). With photographs by Luca Invernizzi Tettoni and Tara Sosrowardoyo; text by Rene Javellana, Fernando Nakpil Zialcita, and Elizabeth V. Reyes.

The book cover shows Philippine-style Art Nouveau decorations and furniture in the ancestral Bautista- de los Santos house in Malolos, Bulacan, “built in 1812, painted in tendrils and foliage in 1877, and re-conceived in Art Nouveau terms at the turn of the century.”  Art Nouveau, which was popular from the end of the 1800s until the 1930s, enjoyed a longer run here than in Europe. The style gave way to Art Deco in the 1930s.

First published in 1997, this book gives brief overviews of Filipino architectural and interior design style. Beautiful photographs make the articles come alive. Most notable are the spreads on bahay-na-bato of the 19th century, perhaps the architectural style most suited to the tropical climate. Such homes are characterized by certain elements: a stone or cement first floor, where horses were stabled and carriages kept; and a wooden second floor, the living area. Wide windows were covered by capiz-and-wood shutters; more windows below the sill, called ventanillas, ensured that practically the entire living area could be opened up to cooling breezes.

From the first floor, a polished and gleaming wooden staircase swept up to the open-plan second floor, designed that way to allow the free flow of air. Areas such as the drawing room (sala) and dining room were marked off by carpets and by arrangements of furniture. Wooden floors bounced light off their shiny surfaces, creating the illusion of  wide spaces. A mesa altar for religious images was prominently displayed. Bedrooms featured four-poster beds and elaborately-carved aparadors, almarios (pillow racks), and dressers. Walls often had filigreed transoms to allow the passage of air (and light and sound) through all the rooms of the house. Furniture was of carved wood, the styles imitated from Europe, but the seats, rather than being stuffed with horsehair and covered with dark fabric as in Victorian England, were covered with solihiya (woven cane), making them cooler, lighter, and airier.

From the chapter “Traditional Houses”, by Fernando Nakpil Zialcita:

Another aspect of Filipino style has yet to be recognized. This is what I call “a fondness for the translucent”. Filipino creations love to half-reveal and half-conceal forms and colors. Capiz windows pretend to block off the outside world but actually reveal aspects of it. Capiz catches the shadow of a branch swaying outside. The moods the shell panels create change as the sun passes; at one moment, they are quiet and still; at another they shimmer like the sea at noon. The oily smoothness of the wooden floors, often uncarpeted, reflect changes in the light and give the visitor a sense of walking on water.

Similarly the cloth favored for the upper garments of the national dress for men and women is made of translucent, rather than opaque, materials: sinamay is made from loosely-woven abaca, jusi is made from Chinese silk and pineapple, piña from pineapple gauze. The barong Tagalog delicately reveals the torso, while at the same time concealing it. Hre, as in the wood-and-stone house, the Filipino fondness for open tracery, called calado, adds elegance while daring the eye to explore the field.

The facade of Casa Manila in Intramuros. This is a bahay-na-bato turned into a museum and is a must-see.

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From my bookshelves: The Pillow Book (Makura no soshi) by Sei Shonagon (Penguin Books, London: 2006).

As a creative writer I am more comfortable writing non-fiction rather than fiction, and as a reader I find myself drawn to CNF books such as memoirs and biographies. In order to study the genre I’ve built up a collection of representative works, and this one is among my favorites.

Written by Sei Shonagon, one of the most lettered women of her time, the book reveals the mannered, elegant world of the court in 11th century Japan during the Heian period.

Shonagon was a woman of delicate taste and deep aesthetic sensibilty; the sight of an autumn leaf would send her into paroxysms of rapture. What set her apart from others of equally sensitive nature was her intelligence and immense writing talent, that allowed her to set down her thoughts into a work that is regarded as one of the gems of world literature.

The Pillow Book is written in diary format, but contrary to the popular definition of ‘diary’ as a private exercise to be seen only by the writer, Shonagon knew from the start, after she was given the gift of paper (see excerpt image above) that it would be seen by the public.

She was one of the stars of Queen Teishi’s court, invited to join it for the high esteem people gave her learning, wit, and talent as a poet. Teishi had assigned Shonagon to come up with a work that would show the accomplishments of her court, as opposed to the second consort Queen Akiko’s, which boasted another highly regarded writer, Murasaki Shikibu (author of the Tale of Genji).

Much of The Pillow Book is in the form of lists:

[84] Things of elegant beauty – A slim, handsome young gentleman of noble birth wearing court dress.
A pretty girl dressed somewhat casually…
A bound book of fine paper.
A letter on fine green paper, tied to sprig of willow covered in little leaf buds.
A three-layer fan. A five-layer fan is too thick, and the base looks ugly.
Long stems of sweet flag, laid elegantly on a cypress-bark roof that’s neither too new nor too old, are wonderfully fresh and green to the eye…
A charming cat with a white tag on her red collar walking along by the railing of the veranda beyond the blinds, trailing her long leash behind her, is also a lovely and very elegant sight…
A knotted letter of violet paper, with a long cluster of wisteria blossom attached…

[143] Things that make the heart lurch with anxiety – Watching a horse-race. Twisting up a paper hair-binding cord…
Your heart naturally lurches when you hear the voice of your secret lover in an unexpected place, but the same thing happens even when you hear someone else talking about him. It also lurches when someone you really detest arrives for a visit.
Indeed the heart is a creature amazingly prone to lurching. It even lurches in sympathy with another woman when the next-morning letter from a man who stayed with her for the first time the night before is late in arriving.

[160] Things that are far yet near – Paradise. The course of a boat. Relations between men and women.

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