Random Thoughts Unearthed
(While browsing my external hard drive, I chanced upon a file containing my miffed reactions to some of last year’s events. For lack of having something to do, not that I am not busy because I have a paper to finish–I just need to refuel my self before I go back to it with the ferocity of a beast–I’m posting them here.)
To Sing Or Not To Sing
Martin Nievera’s version of the Lupang Hinirang during the Pacquiao versus Hatton boxing fight drew ambivalent reactions. Some did not like the arrangement, others were so focused on the game that his style did not matter and the rest did not know what to make out of it. But when authorities from the National Historical Institute made it to Tonying’s Punto for Punto in ABS-CBN’s Magandang Umaga Pilipinas complaining against Mr. Nievera for changing the original arrangement of the Philippine National Anthem, the word HYPOCRISY barreled through my mind. African-American artists’ version of the Star Spangled Banner is resplendent of the R&B genre which they are known for. This was not the way the American freedom fighters sung their national anthem as they fought for independence from the British monarchy. But nowadays as the Star Spangled Banner rides in the bluesy and rhythmic style of African-Americans, you could not help but feel that for all the violent, the not-so-violent and the peaceful encounters that characterized their struggle for freedom and integration in a white-dominated country, every time a black artist belts out his/her version of the anthem to claim her ancestors’ land of bondage as her own place of freedom no one complained about it. No one made a fuss that befitted news coverage. The Star Spangled banner is adapting to the ideals of the new multi-ethnic, multi-cultural America and almost every one is enjoying it. Personally, I don’t care how Lupang Hinirang is sung. Dusty straight from the treasure box of our past, upbeat as the forward-looking young Filipino, it does not matter. If we can best express nationalism in the personal way we feel we should sing the song, there is nothing criminal about it. There is more to love of country and there is more to being Filipino than this.
But we’ve been told of a law that prohibits us to alter the way the national anthem is sung. So, there goes the kill.
Modern Ephesus
Admittedly, I watched Manny Pacquiao’s games and was quiet affected every time he gets a ribbing from his opponents. And so last Sunday there I was sitting in front of the TV enjoying the spectacle, I longed secretly for Manny to win and do Hatton a “dressing down” he could not forget. But honestly, all the time Manny tried to dodge Hatton’s punches and Hatton himself flinched under Manny’s gloved fists, I thought to myself “EPHESUS GOES TO LAS VEGAS.” Only the time and place has changed. We might have discarded the togas for shorts and sleeveless t-shirts, we might have left the Roman coliseum to the elements of nature and settled in our own little arena in front of this talking and projecting box we called television but we have not changed much. We still love blood and our very nerves are calling for it. The only difference is that today’s gladiators are even richer than their spectators.
On Casting the Stone
“Let the man without sin cast the first stone,” I could clearly make out Jesus Christ’s voice ringing above the sound emanating from the television where former president Joseph “Erap” Estrada was chastising the present administration for its alleged corruption and indiscretions. I admit I am not happy with the present order, and at night before I went to sleep, while trying to shun away from politics after half a decade of learning it, I yearn for a supreme body politic that is transparent and committed to serving the people. Yet, how ironic for Erap to criticize the present government, knowing how he charted that part of Filipino history that fell under his regime. Jesus should have added “and the man without sin should look at himself in the mirror before he stones the sinner.”
The Race for the Breaking News
ABS-CBN’s Umagang Kay Ganda hosts were the first to break the news of the tragic death of movie director Kathy Garcia-Molina’s husband in a vehicular accident to my utter dismay. I did not appreciate why the program rushed Garcia-Molina to a phone patch interview just minutes after she learned of the incident. It was so clear in her voice, she was trembling, restless, she was still trying to come into grips with what happened—I mean death of a loved one is a stupefying thing—and there were the program hosts trying to probe about the incident, trying to probe her pain. It did not help that Edu faltered and stuttered during the interview. He couldn’t seem to ask the right questions. I did not blame him…he was walking on tight rope—doing his duty as his bosses bade him do, at the same time, I got the feeling he was not so keen on interviewing her that very instant for the reason that he does not want to rub salt on her wound. These people—couldn’t they give others a space to grieve in private?
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Pacquiao-Hatton Photo from http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_kp2FrgCoRfs/Sf2Av6kx0xI/AAAAAAAAFNk/2yFJUkmo6I0/s800/pacquiao-vs-hatton-full-video.jpg
Daphne Unbound
To hell with this scarf that concealed my hair and hid my face! It robbed me of breath and made my skin itch. How I longed to flaunt these flamboyant red curls and shame the roses. I deigned for the sun to bronze and bruise my skin where no make up, no hand has ever touched. To hell with this scarf, this suffocating piece of rag! This time the breeze shall tangle every strand of my hair and I shall find no need for comb.
I’m done with this skirt that reaches far down my ankle. They caught thorns and dirt wherever I went. I longed to run down the hills in long strides, muscles quivering and tense. I dreamt of bare legs stretched on the grass smothered by the sun and wind. Where my steps are confined by the diameter of the hem, this time I’ll go as far as my eyes take me and shall need no cover.
I shall throw my slippers into the fire and never look back. Slippers are so thick and so bothersome I could not feel the earth’s warmth; I could not run. I planned to plant my bare feet into mud and coax the ants to bite my toes. I love the dirt to paint my feet, I love the feel of dirt. I will walk on beds of thorns and taint the soil with blood. This time, I shall not need those chains.
I am unhooking the bra that bound and pinched my breast! It is so tight and confining I felt it numbed my chest. I desire the pleasure of nipples hardening in the cold and of the rise and fall of breast with my every move. I hungered for the rain to trickle down my cleavage as goose-bumps rise all over my body. I shall allow the leaves, dust and sweat to caress it, and this time I have no need for shame.
*Photo of feet from http://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/feet-2jpeg
Theorizing Some Lenten Superstitions
There was a girl from grade school whom my classmates talked about in hushed voices, mimicking their mothers as they passed one dirty gossip upon another to neighbors. Her name was Eliza, she was in second grade when I was in grade one. There was nothing striking about Eliza. She’s got regular features, plain in a not-ugly kind of way. But what caught my classmates’ interest were the splotches of freckles on Eliza’s face which became more visible as you get closer.
Those freckles were what we were talking about one day when the sun hung in the sky at 4:00 PM. Jocelyn, in one of her adult-like acts whispered to Divina and Lailah as she settled on the ground and crossed her legs, “She’s got it last Lenten season.” Her whisper loud enough for me to hear and asked what is the connection between the Lent and her freckles.
“Her Lola told Nanay that she fried dried fish on a Holy Friday,” Divina interjected as if she made sense to me.
Sensing my incredulity, Analyn whose intelligence was beyond her age lifted her eyes from the book lying open on her lap and turned to me saying, “You are not supposed to fry anything on a Holy Friday. People ought to be fasting or eating simple foods. But because Eliza fried dried fish last Holy Friday, she got the curse…the freckles.”
I did not buy my friends’ stories that time. I was more convinced that Eliza’s freckles came out because she’s nearing puberty, like the pimples I saw on my brother’s face the time he reached 14. When it was already five PM and the classrooms were closing, we picked up our bags and tugged at our skirts thoughts of home heavy in our minds. Eliza and her freckles were forgotten but not until I told my mother her story. Superstition was what she thought of it. I thought so too. Nevertheless, I did not volunteer to fry anything during Holy Fridays since then.
It was not after a few months later, in an actual celebration of Lent, that I stumbled upon another “superstition”—no one should take a bath on a Holy Friday. Fresh and scrubbed I came over to my godmother’s house to play with her grandchildren when I asked if they have also taken a bath. My little friends Arnel and Gina shook their heads. “Why?”
Nanay Rosa, my godmother, who was busy stirring porridge in a clay pot drew me to her and explained, “Because Jesus died in Holy Friday and he wouldn’t be around to watch over and protect people from harm.” I wanted to reason “But Jesus died centuries ago and He’s now watching over us in heaven,” but decided against it or else my Nanay Rosa would get cross and forbid her children to play with me, a young ereje as Torquemada would have called me had he been alive. I saw pictures of the inquisition in my Mother’s book one time with the dungeons and instruments of torture that never failed to arouse terror.
As I gotten older I encountered even more “superstitions” that people adhered to during the Holy Week. Male neighbors, fathers most of them, would sit on stones by the roadside, exchange banter, draw figures on the sand with a twig in order to bring home a point. Noy Oscar, a guy with pink cheeks and golden beard whom I fancied looked a lot like Jesus would start the discussion. “This Friday is a good time for fulfilling the tahas.” Tahas is a Cebuano word that literally meant mission in English. But in the light of faith healing, black magic and supernatural powers, tahas referred to the set of rituals which include going to church during midnight, sleeping in a cemetery at night and going inside the cave that a young apprentice of oracion has to fulfill—sort of a rite of passage. Oracion is a Cebuano corruption of the Latin word for prayer which came to denote a person’s power to cure illnesses and rebuke evil spirits with the recitation of incomprehensible Latin prayers. “Oracion, devocium, seculare, secolorum…” And so it came to be known that Lolo Caciong, my mother’s uncle, visited caves during Holy Week in order to renew his healing powers.
Around this time too, parents fed their kids with stories of snake becoming even more poisonous and menacing so that no one and nothing was left stirring about the place except the leaves and the beetles up the trees.
These and many more superstitions I heard when I was a kid. To the modern and the urbane mind these things bordered from the silly to the preposterous. How many times in my youth had I laughed at and defied these beliefs in order to prove people wrong? For this, there was a time I thought I was way above my peers. I was like the young and over excitable student who stumbled upon a rich source of knowledge known only to a few. In my denunciation of those beliefs as primitive, superstitious and false, I was almost the semantic positivist who believes that the “only language that means anything is language which refers to things, events, and relations in the physical world.” If there is nothing akin to it in the physical world, then, it does not refer to anything and is therefore relegated to the realm of the meaningless and the nonsense. I failed to see that these same beliefs contain what Philip Wheelwright in his The Burning Fountain, A Study in the Language of Symbolism called “a set of depth-meanings with far-reaching significance within a widely shared cultural perspective”.
“Superstitions” are ways of understanding the world reflecting the mind’s efforts at integration where otherwise incomprehensible concepts of space, time, number, quality, cause, and law are fitted into a more flexible and organic manner. Kant propositioned that “all knowledge involves a synthesizing activity of the mind; that in the every act of knowing an object the mind contributes those lines of connection whereby the particulars of sense are combined into an intelligible unity.” Thus, in order for us to understand these “superstitions”, we have to look at them in the context of the place and milieu that engendered them.
Transposing this Kantian principle to existing beliefs, frying and freckles specifically, we know that there is a scientific explanation to freckles, that of photoaging and genetics. But a mind who cannot conceive of the combinations of cells that gave birth to the presence of freckles in some and the absence of such in others, and of the chemical interaction between the sun’s rays and the substances present in the skin, are bound to connect the appearance of freckles to the karmic effect (gaba) of defying the Catholic teaching of fasting, and of the more important teaching of penitence which calls for brief periods of ascetism as one’s offering to God (not taking a bath included). A very plausible explanation indeed more so for Eliza’s case where the appearance of her freckles coincided with the Holy Week providing a perfect timing and reason for people to make intelligible, simplified connections.
As for the poisonous snakes we know that the Holy Week falls on early summer when the earth starts to heat up after a long bout of rain. Naturally, snakes hibernating in ground holes and under tree roots and rocks would come out to cool themselves, to mate, to eat. Unsuspecting kids would be unlucky if they happen to cross path with an alarmed and hungry vermin. But sometimes kids don’t listen to parents’ admonitions. Summer is perfect for tobogganing down the hills anyway. And the wild berries are turning, not to mention the guavas one can pick along the way. But parents found that God inspires awe, reverence and fear among children. And when they used God’s death and words on them, children listen. Parents were only attempting to be good psychologists here, actually. This is culture in action, some of the events and thoughts that exist in our midst find themselves couched within bigger symbols with archetypal meanings. Things that do not make sense to the objective mind do exist and gain meaning within the larger context of culture. As John Middleton Murry remarked to John Clare’s description of the primrose—“crimp and curdled leaf…its little brimming eye…”—“it is surely an accurate description, but an accurate with an accuracy unknown to and unachievable by science.” And our superstitions are also accurate with the accuracy inconceivable to science.
As my young friend Analyn sagaciously commented that afternoon we sat on the Bermuda grass and talked about getting freckles from frying something on a Holy Friday, “It does not matter if you don’t believe it. But you don’t lose a thing if you observe it either.”
LET’S TALK ABOUT BREAST: Some Breast Cancer Facts
As we while away our time in the computer or with a favorite movie, a considerable number of women die of breast cancer around the world. Every year, 500,000 women worldwide die from it. In the Philippines, breast cancer remains to be one of the two leading causes of cancer death among women—the other one is cervical cancer—accounting for 13.3% of cancer cases in the country based on a DOH survey in 1998. Some estimates cited that 26 out of 100 females may develop breast cancer in the Philippines.
Normally, at risk persons include unmarried and married women in their 40’s to 60’s but recently, breast cancer has been observed to affect younger women. A population-based study by Esteban and his colleagues in 1998 pointed out that the survival rate of breast cancer patients in the Philippines was 44.4% which according to Dr. Mariluz Mojica of the UP College of Medicine was within the lower limits of survival rates in developing countries. A possible explanation for this is the fact that most breast cancer cases are diagnosed in the advanced stage.
The truth is breast cancer is highly curable as long as it is detected early. Mammography, an advancement of medical science, is one effective screening/detection method for abnormal lumps in the breast. If pre-cancerous masses are detected early on, combined with treatment plans, the chances of survival are increased. And yet, mammography is not readily available in the Philippines. How much it must be so for women in the rural areas who cannot afford costly medical examinations?
At present, there is only one method for detection of breast lumps among women specifically in the rural areas—breast self-examination. The breast self-examination involves regular palpation of the breast which can be done by the woman while she lay in bed or as she soaps her body during bath on a monthly basis. Husbands, familiar with their wives bodies, could also help detect lumps in the breast and armpit area. If in doubt, it is also necessary to have one’s healthcare provider conduct palpation of the breast.
One study conducted by Meyerowitz and Chaiken in 1987 cited that even American women are hesitant to perform breast-self examination. This was attributed to the degree of proximal risk associated to breast examination and mammography. Imagine yourself examining your breast and running the risk of finding out an abnormal lump in your breast. Most women would rather opt not to know, to be kept in the dark.
Yet, this should not be the case. Late detection, other than reducing the chances of survival, also calls for greater medical expenses and greater amount of care. This is the reason why breast cancer communication should embark on building self-efficacious behavior among women to increase their capability to handle and cope with the breast examination process and modify negative attitudes with culturally sensitive strategies aside from teaching them the breast cancer facts. Health care providers, from doctors in public hospitals and private clinics to the barangay health workers should be adequately trained not only in handling breast cancer patients but also in counseling and organizing communities to build strong social support system for breast cancer affected people. The government, particularly the Department of Health (DOH) could tap experts to help women with breast cancer heal through the use of creative pedagogies. Above all, the government should provide facilities and develop programs which are responsive and accessible to women. No amount of campaigns would work unless facilities for screening and treatment are available for everyone regardless of age and stature.
On Bebe Gandanghari
No other event in the Philippine entertainment industry today has generated such ambivalent feelings as the coming-out of Bebe Gandanghari and the ‘death’ of Rustom Padilla, the matinee actor of the 90’s. When Bebe sashayed in the Buzz all glam[med] up, all of a sudden gay activists have something to ponder, all of a sudden stand-up comedian and hairdresser, even Mother who rarely glances at TV, has something to say for Bebe. All of a sudden people are confused where to put Bebe in our well-ordered world of he and she where “he” covers everything male and “she” everything female.
“Abnormal,” my neighbor commented as Bebe relished her first interview in the Buzz, Ruffa and Kris paled beside the fresh and controversial face. Abnormal because like the millions of people who watched Bebe on TV, she did not know where Bebe fits into this whole order of penises and vaginas. If Bebe is neither he nor she, Bebe is an outsider, a pink spot in a black-and-white world.
Even Vice Ganda could not let go of the 90’s image that was Rustom Padilla. I do not blame him things like this take a lot of getting used to. Vice, half-jestingly, preferred the old Rustom over the new Bebe. Then the whole thing escalated into an issue of too much make-up (a violation of the lightly and naturally made-up look which the famous hairdresser himself was known for), mismatched clothes, overdressing, body weight (Bebe shedding off fats and muscles to achieve a thin, if not bony, body) and over kabaklaan.
But Bebe is more than just a clothes and make-up thing. Bebe is a political issue, as my gay friend declared. Unlike my neighbor whose concern is basic, where to find Bebe in a world defined by the penis and the vagina, my friend’s point takes the very issue a step higher—the identity of the bakla, the breaking of a world dichotomized by the male and the female where the bakla is not “the other.” As my friend commented, the struggle of the bakla movement to secure a space for the baklas where they are neither men nor women and yet equal to them is wasted with all the efforts at emulating womanhood. Dressing up like a woman and looking like one blatantly reinforces a world inhabited only by men and women and unforgiving of those in-between. “If you are not a man, who then could you be? A woman? But you are not!,” went the voice of someone who saw things through the barricade, my friend.
I am not well read on the theoretical underpinnings of the gay struggle other than the universal ones that hold true for all human struggles. Like my friend I saw a political incorrectness of being Bebe. I am uncomfortable with Bebe declaring Rustom dead without looking back. Rustom carried Bebe in his “womb” for years until by serendipity, a turn of events, he gave birth to Bebe. This whole other person is a product of Rustom’s struggle to protect what’s inside him so that Bebe could see the light. Bebe’s birthright is Rustom’s legacy.
And yet, how could it be that knowing all these, I felt so happy and light upon seeing Bebe pose for the photographers with slightly open and pouting “lacquered” lips? I see in Bebe a butterfly freed from its cocoon, gossamer wings spread into the sun. All the lines brought by years of living in the dark faded not only under make up but under the suffusion of light that comes with freedom. For all the things I failed to do, for all the little shocks in life I forgone for the deceptively safe well-ordered world, Bebe shamed me. Who am I to say there is a wrong and right way to fight through the barricades? My friend is right, Vice is right, above all Bebe is right. Each of us has our unique way of asserting freedom. In this well-ordered world where everyone struggles for a place, Bebe finds a very special way to assert a space. How I wish my friend could read this.
