Paglalagom.

Maayos ang 2011 ko. Mahirap para sa akin ang aminin ito; marahil dahil nahirati na rin sa mga hindi magagandang bagay, at parang pagta-traydor sa mga hindi mapapalad na kaibigan at kakilala ang pag-angkin na maganda ang taon mo. Siguro dahil finite nga ang kasiyahan (tulad ng natural resources), at sa pagkuha ng higit sa nararapat ay waring ninanakawan mo ang iba.

Pero maayos nga ang 2011 ko.

Sa susunod na ang mga partikularidad. Sa simpleng paglalagom, maayos ang naging takbo ng taon. Bago magsimula ang 2011, naalala kong na-interview ko para sa isang raket si Joy Lim, ang wagas na supplier ng charms and crystals sa mga artista. Maswerte raw ang mga Tiger sa 2011. Binigyan din nya ko ng bracelet para sa kalusugan (na ibinigay ko sa Lola ko), at pinaalalahanang laging magsuot ng pulang sapatos at magdala ng gunting. Ewan ko lang.

At sa kaayusan ng 2011, dalawang taon nang magkasunod na maayos, dahil OK rin ang 2010 (at kung paniniwalaan ang ilang Chinese horroscope, magiging maayos din ang 2012 dahil magkaibigan ang Tiger at Dragon). Bahagyang hinihipo ako ng sabik tuwing iisipin ang paparating na taon, dahil mukhang sumasaya ang mga bagay matapos ang pangit na 2008 at 2009. Baka nga nagiging positibo na ako sa buhay. Naku.

*May dalawang taong nagreklamong masyado na raw seryoso ang blog na ito. At nakaka-miss ang LJ. Ako rin, namimiss ko ang kahangalan ng LJ ko.

Sakuna.

Nasa Cagayan de Oro ako noong Oktubre; sa Dumaguete, noong Mayo. Madali akong mahirati sa mga lugar. Ibig sabihin: madaling mapamahal. Marahil, dahil masarap isipin na may mga bersyon ng buhay Pilipino na umiinog sa ibang lokalidad, sa ibang paraan. Bahagyang katulad ng sa 'yo, pero kakaiba pa rin, kung tutuusin (o bahagyang kakaiba, pero katulad pa rin, sa dulo). Hindi ito romantiko at arbitraryong pag-i-invoke ng "bansa" sa panahon ng delubyo; sa halip, patunay ito, para sa akin, na nag-iisa, kahit magkakahiwalay, ang naratibong hinahawan ng bawat Pilipino.

At nakita natin na ito ay naratibo ng pag-igpaw sa mga sakuna, sa mga pesteng umaalipusta sa "normal" na mga tunghuhin, sa mga karahasang isinasalimpad ng kapalaraan sa araw-araw. At sa mga pangyayaring tulad nito, na kumitil sa higit isanlibong katao, dumungis sa mga lungsod na dati'y walang bahid, madaling mahirati sa emosyonal na tawag ng bayanihan, ng pagtutulungan para sa mga nasalantang kababayan.

Ngunit, lagi't lagi, ipinapaalala sa atin na ang bansa bilang bagay na nahahawakan, nakikita, natutulungan, ay hindi lamang umuusbong sa panahong tulad nito. Pinapatingkad marahil ng sakuna ang mga pakiramdam, pero ang pagiging bansa ay higit sa kawang gawa, labas sa usapin ng minanipulang damdamin. Wala mang kagyat na tulong sa mga nasalanta ang pagpapanagot, marahil marapat usisain: bakit nangyari ito, at bakit dapat umabot sa ganito?

Sa mas konkreto, wagas ang galit ko kay Noynoy sa 'di pagsasalita agad hingil sa isyu. Hindi ko alam kung bakit, pero nang papataas ang bilang ng mga biktima, una kong hinanap sa Google News kung may inilabas na bang pahayag ang Palasyo? May sinabi na ba ang pangulo? Nagpunta na ba siya sa hilagang Mindanao? Sa sobrang galit ko sa kanya, ilang Tweet rin ang naipadala ko kay Abi Valte para magtanong. Anong aral ang napulot ng lideratong ito sa nangyari sa Ondoy? Paanong pinagbawalan si Noynoy na lumipad patungong CDO gayong laksa-laksang media at aid workers na ang andoon sa bukang liwayway ng Sabado? Mukha ba kaming tanga?

At nang, sa Martes, ilang hatinggabi matapos ang trahedyang kumitil sa isanlibong "boss" niya, ay nagsalita na si Noynoy, waring naging SONA't pagbubuhat ng bangko ang talumpati. Naglabas ng ganito kalaking pera. Natulungan ang ganito karaming pamilya. May ganitong kapabilidad na ang PAGASA. May isang maliit na pangungusap na sa unang banda'y umaako ng responsibilidad, pero sa huli'y naging "tayo" bigla ang maysala: "Hindi ko po yata matatanggap na nagawa na namin ang lahat; alam kong may kaya pa tayong, at dapat tayong gawin."

Ang inaasahan ko lamang mula, at hinihingi sa, umano'y ama ng bayan, ay ilang pangungusap ng pangungumusta. Hungkag na retorika, marahil, sa isang banda, pero sa panahong walang sagot ang maraming tanong, nais mo lang ng isang siguradong boses. Na magiging maayos ang lahat. Na maiigpawan ito. Na may amang nag-aasikaso sa mga anak na hilong talilong sa mga alalahanin, hindi nakikisaya nang parang walang nangyari. Nang parang walang mga putikang bangkay na isinasalansan sa minadaling mga libingan. Nang parang walang bansang nangungulila na naman.

Inuman.

Mula rito

Sa Kyusinero

Ni Paul Timothy Escueta*

I can drink a case of you, and still be on my feet.

- Joni Mitchell, A Case of You

Pag-inom ng alak ang paborito nating libangan. Sa Kyusinero sa Matalino St., kabisado na ng mga kuya ang hilatsa ng pagmumukha natin at paboritong pwesto. Kasabay ng pagsayad ng puwit sa upuan kung ilapag nila sa mesa ang bucket ng Pale Pilsen. Tapos ash tray. Tapos tissue. Tapos Pulutan Platter A, na may sari-saring pika-pika, gaya ng French fries, calamares, nachos, chicken lollipop, at pipinong lumalangoy sa suka.

“Kamusta love life?” tanong mo.

“Um, kamusta ka ba?”

“OK naman.”

“Edi OK ang love life ko.”

Pero syempre sa kalagitnaan pa ng inuman uusbong ang ganitong mga usapan. Kailangan munang paspasan ang ilang bagay sa simula: ang pag-aaral, ang Kulê, ang Peyups, ang girlfriend mo.

Ang dami na ring babae sa buhay mo ang mas natagalan ko, banggit mo minsan, habang nakangisi. Wala ka naman talagang ibig sabihin dito; may mga sandali lang talagang dinadapuan ka ng lambing, at ako ang nasa iyong tabi. Punong-puno ka kasi ng pag-ibig; kaya minsan, kahit hindi mo sinasadya, may mga napapadpad sa aking direksyon.

These things that are pleasin’ you can hurt you somehow.

- Eagles, Desperado

Naaalala mo ba noong nasobrahan tayo ng inom minsan – tig-siyam na bote ‘ata – at sa pag-ba-bike mo pauwi ay bigla kang nasuka? Grabe pa rin ang balance mo at tuloy-tuloy ka lang sa pagpepedal, kahit minumura ka na ng mga tambay sa tabi ng daan na natalsikan ng suka mong may pira-pirasong patatas at pipino.

Ako, hindi marunong mag-bike, at sa una’t huling beses na sinubukan mo ‘kong turuan, ang una mong paalala ay, “Kailangan mong mag-let go, Paul.” Literal ang ibig mong sabihin, pero hawak mo kasi ang likod ko at hinihipo ng amihan ang ating mga pisngi, kaya iba ang sumagi sa aking isip. Lalo na nung kinagabihan sa Kyusinero’t sinabi mong, “Siguro, kung babae ka, mag-se-sex tayo mamaya.”

Puta naman. Walang ganyanan. Lasing na lasing ka na nga marahil. Sinabi mo rin kasing maganda ang gupit ko, at bagay sa ‘kin ang maikling buhok. Kulang na lang, sabihin mong ang cute ko, at “Pa-kiss nga.” Sa kasamaang palad, nawalan na ng malisya para sa akin ang mga ganitong tagpo’t palitan. Hindi ba sabay nga nating pinanuod ang video ni Hayden Kho at panay ang batikos mo sa performance niya?

“Guess she gave you things I didn’t give to you.”

- Adele, Someone Like You

Like what? A vagina?

Biro lang. Alam mo namang hindi ako rah-rah sa gay cause, pero noong gabing iyon, naisip ko sa kauna-unahang pagkakataon kung papaanong humahadlang sa mga gusto natin ang ilang bagay na dala lang ng simpleng pagkakataon, gaya ng gender. Sabi nga ni Chokoleit, “Para ‘yun lang?”

Pero sinabi mo dati na naniniwala ka sa reincarnation at past lives, at baka nga mag-syota tayo sa dating buhay natin, o sa susunod. Ewan. Marahil naaalala ko lang ang isang lumang pagnanais na maging higit pa sa kaibigan mo. Pero para saan pa ba ang alak kung hindi sa panandaliang paglimot sa mumunting kirot? Hanggang sa susunod na inuman.

*Walang kwentang pagkubli.

Piolo.

Closet Quivers*
Glenn L. Diaz

All we need to know in this unfolding narrative are these: there was a crying girl, an ex-boyfriend, an emotional breakup. The girl, they say, is pretty, although a bit mannish, excused by the fact that she is cut from showbiz royalty. The ex-boyfriend is the “ultimate heartthrob,” although whispers had long persisted that it’s not exactly vaginas he has been causing to throb.

Throw in a bespectacled host’s series of “deretsong tanong” on a lazy Sunday afternoon and we had the makings of a veritable Pinoy saga; one for the books, apparently, evidenced by the fact that it was inescapable, rivaling news of a former president who’s on the brink of incarceration and at one point becoming a trending topic on Twitter worldwide.

The implications of this saga are multifaceted, but the trajectory of the jokes that it birthed appears to be one-tracked. There is a reference to another actress, who married an actor who turned out not only gay but, some say, even prettier than her. There is a joking speculation as to the heartthrob’s real motives, and some say he just wanted to get close to his ex-girlfriend’s goodlooking, if not morally ambiguous, father.

But outside good-natured Pinoy humor, the debacle revives age-old questions regarding the real state of the LGBT sector in the country. For while surely, “winning” the heartthrob to the gay cause might prove to be a step forward, the reaction that his potential outing spawned reveals that it isn’t as clear-cut as that.

‘The reign of telling secret’

That the whole saga is unfolding before the public eye at a time when social media had enabled the unbridled sharing of opinion has, in so many ways, blown things out of proportion.

“To the fine antennae of public attention,” writes foremost queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, “the freshness of every drama of (especially involuntary) gay uncovering seems if anything heightened in surprise and delectability, rather than staled, by the increasingly intense atmosphere of public articulations of and about the love that is famous for daring not speak its name.”

And so while there may be undeniable strides in the way homosexuality is displayed and perceived, it doesn’t diminish the seductive nature of people being yanked out of the closet. In the case of our heartthrob, the idea of his outing seems utterly irresistible, at least judging from the rabid, almost vitriolic calls from all sides of cyberspace.

The mob-like desire has ready justifications, too: that, for one, he reduced his ex-girlfriend to tears on national television; and, two, that he is a public figure and therefore fair game for butchery and accusations.

‘On their own’

But we simply don’t have the right to out other people, says J. Neil Garcia, UP professor and renowned expert on queer theory.

“We need more masculine representations of gayness … to balance out the sissy stereotypes that local showbiz is constantly dishing out, but even then, or precisely here, the ethical question regarding outing remains utterly germane.”

“The wish, of course, is for more and more masculine gay men to come out on their own – in mass media, if possible, since its stereotype-countering effect will simply be more potent, by virtue of the nature of mass media themselves. But we simply cannot out these guys. They need to come out on their own.”

Tangentially, the particularity that the case brings to the discourse hinges on his construction as a “bankable actor” and the changes, if any, that his outing will result to. There are speculations, to cite, that while the ex-girlfriend’s tears were true, there was still an attempt at damage control, which explains why the interview was taped to begin with, contrary to how most sensational tell-all’s are conducted.

It is interesting, therefore, to note how mass media, while largely profit-driven and prone to typecasting, can in truth serve as a vital platform in which to break the stereotypes it had contributed to perpetrating to begin with.

Sadly, judging from the jokes in the aftermath of the interview, including all the name-calling and the homophobic slurs, our heartthrob is not breaking any stereotype. The stereotypes are instead being hurled pointblank against him.

‘A defiant move’

Outside the glitz of showbiz, however, what steers the very premise of outing is heterosexism. Outing announces unequal power relations. To weaponize a potentially liberating act is premised on the belief that someone will fear being outed because it is a demotion, a downgrade. To threaten a public figure with being outed is to equalize homosexuality with the risk of utter downfall.

But voluntarily coming out of the closet, instead of being forced out of it, is a defiant move. It demonstrates a steadfast bravery that knowingly exposes one’s self to stigma. After all, outing demands resocialization; a paradigm shift from the “default” heterosexual identity with which everyone is raised. And so implicit in the act of coming out is the rejection of the ideology that posits the primacy of heterosexuality as the only acceptable orientation.

That may be true, and it probably is, but to end there is to ignore the larger issue with which the supposedly private love story is laced.

Because in our heartthrob’s case, coming out of the closet seems to offer very little incentive. Given the slightest chance at hating, there are those who pounce, instantly and with little deliberation. So for as long as people have a good reason for staying in the closet, we understand that our heartthrob will need to maintain his handsome silence.

*Apologies to J. Neil Garcia

Sources:

Hunter, Sky. Coming out and Disclosures, Routledge, 2007.

Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet, University of California Press, 1990.

Novel-writing.

Let it be said for its absurdity: I am trying to write a novel. A month ago, this would have sounded preposterous, but see what an academic requirement (and therefore an unsaid threat of a middling grade) can do? B had given us an option to do a novel in lieu of the 40-page short story he normally required. It is suddenly doable. For some reason, it suddenly seems something I can actually do before I turn 27 (because Rizal published Noli at 26, and I have serious competitiveness issues).

It was a good thing then that I got to read nice novels in the past month or so, including Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Franzen's The Corrections, and Atwood's Alias Grace (and a fantastic nonfiction book on the Rwandan genocide from L). Fat novels. I am clearly still learning how to do this. The largeness. The worlding. The measured pace. The requisite depth of introspection. The Proustian detailing. The nouns. I just passed the 6,000-word mark, which puts me at 7.5 percent of my set 80,000-word target (it actually sounds something when you put it in percentage).

Since my workshop slot is somewhere in the middle of January, I have around 5 weeks to churn up around 5,000 more. But since I want to take advantage of the rare chance to have B critique a novel manuscript, I obviously want to do more. I have set up a modest 1,000-word-a-day requirement for myself, something that is turning out to be not so modest after all. It is hard. I write quickly when it's for work and critical papers, but when it's this -- and I, like B, am relying for the most part on gutfeel and a hazy plot in my head - I am absolutely slow. And with my obsessive need to reread and rewrite, I am taking ages. These, of course, all considering that I have very little social life and absolutely no professional life, other than guest-editing for the Collegian, to speak of.

Do I harbor delusions that it might be a nice piece of literature? Well, I don't know. But otherwise, what would be the point?

December.

From here. Made me wish my last name was Abalos so would have been sandwiched between Gemino Abad and Rio Alma, two old geezers who also happen to be very good poets. Supposedly. Yay.

Cubao.

Wrote this essay for my nonfiction class. Two nights ago, met up with Melane and Victor. After dinner at My Thai, we had DQ blizzards and found ourselves standing-sitting by the rails opposite Shopwise. Cubao. O Cubao.

Cubao

Born and raised in Manila, I am accustomed to its noise, its quotidian chaos. Once or twice, when its violence unnerved me, I found myself wishing I lived in Bacolod or Dumaguete or Roxas instead. Slow cities. And calmer, birds chirping in the morning and crisp air that sharply fills the nose. But after a few days there, I would crave for the madness of Manila. The roaring engines. The reek of diesel. The itinerant vendors hawking their wares. In my city, there are busy intersections that, with neither traffic light nor cop, would witness no road accident for years on end. Foreigners call it Third World disorder. I call it skill, a temerity, a spider sense-like keenness that one acquires after living through the mess. If my city were my room, I like its comforting disarray. I know where everything is.

But a woman sitting across me on a jeepney one night panicked and writhed helplessly in her seat, freshly realizing her purse was slit open, her face misshapen under the red glare of the jeep’s tiny incandescent bulbs. The following day, a bomb ripped through a bus along EDSA, killing five and severing several pairs of legs. I was reminded of Pierre Bourdieu, my best friend during my theory-lathering days with the Philippine Collegian, UP’s student paper. Violence is harshest when it is most normalized. Violence is most effective when it is made invisible.

This violence of the everyday, the everywhere is most palpable in a place like Manila. The traffic, the pollution, the off-chance that the bus you’re riding will explode into smithereens one innocent Tuesday. That bombing rattled me, its sheer nearness. The bus exploded a few meters away from the Buendia station of the MRT, just outside the stories-high earthen walls of posh Forbes Park. I take that route every once in a while, coming from Makati for a writing assignment or from Batangas for a quick getaway to the beach. And so I realized it could have been me or many of my friends who work in Makati. I remember mouthing a silent prayer, then, and soberly thinking, we are survivors all.

These days, as a graduate student, my normal route is from my house in Manila to UP in Quezon City via the Aurora Blvd and Katipunan route. Every time I make that trip, I pass by Cubao, the bustling geographical center of the metropolis. For many wide-eyed adventurers and desperate breadwinners from the province, Cubao is their first real glimpse of the big city, its grimy bus terminals and impure air, its incessant noise and unlawful song. For city dwellers, Cubao is just Cubao. It is there, just like the city, not to be scoffed at or rebuked, but merely to be endured.

I wonder then if I’ve been made immune – enamored, even – to a violence that is rendered unseen by its ubiquity. There is no question: I love my city. But does it love me?

In Cubao, for instance, there is always a need to shout above the din.

“You cannot hear yourself think here,” yelled my friend Kris, a college instructor and Cubao resident for all her 22 years. It’s something a foreigner would say, I shouted back, if said foreigner were similarly sitting on this busy Aurora sidewalk in between parked motorcycles and cars, observing. The British edition of men’s magazine Esquire recently came out with a piece on Filipino cuisine and, tangentially, navigating Manila’s streets. It reached a pleasant enough conclusion, but in prefacing the revelation, the Philippine capital was called, among others, “a fucking armpit,” “a hell-hole,” “a city with a pockmarked face and a horrible limp.” How unkind, I thought, but in the middle of Cubao, surrounded by grime and seeming lawlessness, I had to admit: it wasn’t completely unmerited.

In a National Geographic documentary, where the host visited the slums built atop graves in the South Cemetery and the communities inside the Muntinlupa City Jail, Manila as a city was lauded for its – generous euphemisms, aside – “energy.”

There was, of course, a ready defense, as any Filipino with a cursory knowledge of history should know. Manila was the Orient’s first true melting pot. Aggressively traded with its Asian neighbors, then colonized by Spain for more than 300 years. In its 1945 liberation from the Japanese, it was leveled to the ground, government buildings and churches and schools, along with the priceless gems inside that date back to its founding 420 or so years ago. In the month-long devastation, almost everything was lost, irretrievably, the severe insult to the injury that was the 100,000 death toll.

What, then, of ugliness? We were victims of history!

A few meters away from where we sat, a locksmith idly tinkered with some random lock, his gamut of keys and tools laid out like many little trinkets for sale. The signage advertising his trade is darkened by soot. He’s been there, he said, in his little, dark corner of Cubao for more than two decades now. In throaty Filipino, he added, “Nothing has changed.”

What has not changed is this: there is always a bottleneck in Aurora Blvd approaching EDSA, always a parking lot situation along the underpass, always some obstinate jeep in the middle of the road going to E. Rod. From Araneta Center, there is always a long line of jeepneys waiting to exit and dissect Aurora, from that narrow street between Aurora Tower and Mercury Drug to that even narrower road on the other side, where dingy gay club Palawan is across the similarly decrepit beer joint Bang-bang Ali. More cars crawled elsewhere, on the street where the bawdy “European-inspired” inn Eurotel fronts the gold-decked worship building of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (in the right rooms in Eurotel, you part your curtains, and the first thing you’ll see is one of the several bible verses inscribed on the Christian building’s walls). All around: piles of trash, bevies of scantily clad girls in the midst of negotiation, a vagrant or two. Overhead, one of the busiest train stations in the city looms over the road it tried to decongest, the pall so depressing and permanent, black wires dangling like wayward pasta, the medium-rise structures caked with grime.

What has changed is this: a few minutes’ walk away, in glimmering, upscale Gateway mall, there are places like Cibo, Italianni’s, and Gumbo, which offers “a taste of New Orleans.” There’s Burgoo, Café Adriatico, Kenny Rogers, Krispy Kreme, Le Coeur de France, and the first and one of only two Taco Bell in the country. Posh hotel chain Mandarin Oriental has even set up an al fresco café and deli right smack in the middle, complete with palm trees and various terra cotta greenery that cut across all five floors. Gateway is a pocket of First World in Third World Cubao, while Mandarin is a pocket of nature in the pocket of First World: both are artificial and contrived.

The Aranetas, the clan whose war-era industrialist patriarch Don Jose Amado found the original, radio antennae- and grass-strewn 35-hectare plot on the outskirts of Manila, are trying to catch up with the pace with which the other families have galvanized their turfs. Let’s face it. Makati had become Makati and Ortigas had become Ortigas, while Cubao, well, remained to be Cubao. Left out. Lowly. But with the slew of infrastructure projects in the pipeline, Jorge Araneta, Don Jose’s son, is promising a “renaissance.” Manhattan Garden City, its flagship residential project alone, consists of 18 high-rise towers, 3 of which have already opened. Set to be the pièce de résistance, a giant communications structure called the Manila Tower is envisioned to rival Paris’ Eiffel in height, grandeur, and iconic evocation.

“Sir, if you go to Cubao nowadays, it’s had a major refurbishment from the old and scary, decrepit place. It is now being managed and developed by Megaworld Corporation. The area is flood free and now very safe.” This is the promise of real estate broker Karen Manangquil, who’s affiliated with major property developer Megaworld. She’s part of the squadron of annoying, fake-smiling, flyers-bearing, heavily made-up boys and girls who accost unsuspecting shoppers walking along Gateway’s crowded aisles. If they hand you a flyer and ask for a minute, it means you: (1) look old enough to be a home owner, and (2) appear rich enough to afford the price tag that comes with a unit, the lowest pegged at P2.3 million.

Or, she later stressed, you evoke that inimitably magnetic OFW vibe.

The Araneta group is injecting a multi-billion peso investment to try and reconfigure Cubao into an urban enclave similar to the flourishing Bonifacio Global City in Taguig. After all, Araneta Center was a pioneer mixed-used complex not just in the Philippines but in the world. In the 1960s and 70s, Araneta Coliseum, Ali Mall, Farmers Market, and Fiesta Carnival were all, to a certain extent, notable: biggest indoor stadium, first enclosed shopping center, biggest wet market, and first entertainment center of its kind.

But if the Fort is accessible only by private vehicles, cabs, and the occasional yuppie-filled Fort bus, Cubao is found on the signages of scores of public utility vehicle, from jeeps plying nearby Quezon City Circle to buses traversing unpaved roads in far-flung Tabaco in Albay. Two elevated train lines run through it: one, through the city’s main artery, the other, leading to the University Belt. Jeeps: to Libis, Taft, Cainta, Fairview, Cogeo, Quiapo, Antipolo, Kalayaan, Angono, Divisoria. City buses: to Baclaran, Letre, FTI, Tungko, Sucat, Malanday, Leveriza, Alabang. Provincial buses: to Baguio, Bangued, Tuguegarao, Naga, Laoag, Tabaco, Lingayen, Catarman, Catbalogan, Iba, Aparri.

Cubao is the byword for accessibility. It is democratic. It is egalitarian. My best friends from college, who come from Marikina, Taytay, and Novaliches, and I, from Manila, often compromise and make do with Gateway. We are not alone. Data from the Metro Manila Development Authority say daily pedestrian traffic on the EDSA-Aurora Blvd footbridges exceeded 150,000 in 2009, the third busiest in the metro. By Araneta Center’s estimates, close to 1 million of Metro Manila’s 11 million people visit its premises every single weekday, even more on weekends. Cubao is no-frills. Cubao is people.

And in the eye of the enterprising capitalist, people means profit. If consumerism is a cornerstone of capitalism, Cubao is a pioneer, too. It paved the way for the rabid, large-scale consumption that we know today, with our midnight sales, billboard-laden skies, and the predictably impossible traffic in the vicinity of malls. The now worn-out Rustan’s in Araneta Center used to be Rustan’s Superstore, the first time a department store and a supermarket were combined. SM in Cubao was the second to open after the original branch in Quiapo. And as this country’s history of consumerism is almost, I would argue, concurrent with the history of Henry Sy’s empire, Cubao is, once again, a veritable forerunner.

It makes sense, then, that when it started to lose its mall-going public to Makati and Ortigas, Araneta Center came up with Gateway.

My friend Scott, a Denver native who now curiously lives in a street in Cubao called Albany, told me over coffee how surprised he was at the centrality of the mall in Filipino life. Sipping his half-decaf latte in one of Araneta Center’s three Starbucks, he said where he came from, “most [malls] are found on suburban real estate lots. No more than two floors, usually just one. Can you imagine that?” Gruffly, he added that malls in the US have free parking.

I noted that the nucleus of communities in the Philippines used to be the plaza, flanked by the church and the town hall. Does this, I wondered out loud, indicate a shift in the prevailing value system of Filipinos, from theocracy to blatant consumerism? Not quite used to polysyllabic words that end in ism, he added that e-commerce had not been kind to American malls.

The goal, it seems, is to make malls vital, instead of optional. They are placed where volumes of people predictably amass, taking into account foot traffic and transportation routes. Insatiably, they extend endlessly, a monster eating everything in its path. SM in North EDSA, the biggest in the country and third world-wide, used to be just SM North EDSA. Today, there is The Block, The Annex, North Link, Warehouse, and the Sky Garden. Communities have risen out of malls. From them, high-rise condominiums emerge, promising to put all of modern man’s needs under one roof: shelter, dining, leisure. The malls of today offer beyond the customary trades. One can go to a mall to hear mass, view art exhibits, get a perm, buy a book, get a haircut, attend class, deposit a check, get your laptop repaired, attend a convention, even breast feed your baby or undergo minor surgery like liposuction.

But even without Gateway, Araneta Center has embedded itself into the Filipino psyche with Araneta Coliseum. Two spectacles that perpetually bewitch the Filipino mind – basketball and beauty pageants – have found homes in the Big Dome (recently renamed Smart Araneta Coliseum in yet another not-so-subliminal encroachment of big business on cultural iconography). Leagues: the Philippine Basketball Association, the University Athletics Association of the Philippines, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Pageants: the annual Binibining Pilipinas and the one time Miss Universe was held in the country in 1994. Those who have graced Araneta Coliseum include Bon Jovi and Andrea Boccelli, Kylie Minogue and Akon, Nat King Cole and Kobe Bryant, Lady Gaga and Pope John Paul II. Having come from UP, I’ve been making a trip to Araneta at least once a year since 2002 for the UAAP Cheerdance Competition. Its 2008 edition attracted a record crowd of 23,448 people, unsurpassed by any PBA Final, Ateneo-La Salle game, or Sarah Geronimo concert.

Cubao, then, is inextricably linked with the Filipino city, the Filipino sense of entertainment, which is fine, I reasoned, except when such connection is commodified and taken advantage of. For instance, desperate for Cheerdance tickets and my Collegian press ID powerless in the eyes of Big Dome management, I succumbed once or twice to scalpers, who sold general admission tickets at 1,000 percent mark-up, from the original P50 to P500.

Conscience-deficient human beings aside, in Cubao’s margins lie places and things that has endeared it to an entirely different market and sensibility. Cubao Ex, the former Marikina Shoe Expo, is on the fringes of Araneta Center and has attracted a new, almost hip crowd. The close-knit, village-like complex is shaped like a horse shoe and plays host to specialty restaurants, art galleries, and stores selling the strangest, most fascinating things: old chandeliers and telephones, funky clocks, vintage wrist watches, antique furniture, secondhand books, old comic books, wooden sculptures, bargain shoes, and one-of-a-kind graphic tees. At night, the unofficial banner spot in Cubao Ex is Mogwai, a restaurant cum drinking joint cum events place. There is always something happening in Mogwai: Peter Folk films on the cozy screening room at the second floor; reggae band Brownman Revival performing upfront; or filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, a regular, guzzling his bottle of Red Horse. With its battered marquee-style signage, mismatched furniture, fabric-lined mini-chandeliers, and employees cheekily named Mogwaiters, Mogwai’s vibe is the closest I can find to that of Sarah’s, the iconic drinking place on the outskirts of UP in Krus na Ligas. In Sarah’s, where on certain nights you’ll find yourself sitting beside a National Artist or a famous band vocalist, the ambiance is bring-your-own-ambiance. In Mogwai, with its yellow-tinged lights and quiet whirr of conversation, the ambiance is gentle and laidback. This, while a few kilometers away, Cubao raged on until the dead of night.

“Sinong hindi mai-inlove sa Cubao sa gabi? Malakas ang appeal, mahirap matimpla, maraming lihim. (Who will not fall in love with Cubao at night? Its appeal is intense, it’s hard to figure out, it’s got secrets.) ” This is Mixka, a playwright whose Streetlight Manifesto was recently staged in Tisch School in New York. During our Collegian days, we held section meetings in Sarah’s. After graduating, Mogwai is a top choice during meet-ups. But already, the more protective of the Cubao Ex regulars feel that their haunt, after being deigned “cool,” is now being invaded by wannabe hipsters who just want to be seen.

Conflict. Cubao is witness to constant conflict. “Cities,” wrote urban theory scholar John Short, “give physical expression to relations of power in society.” In Cubao, the air-conditioned LRT coaches run above the din and confusion of Aurora. In Gateway, the most high-end shops are found on the top floors. In Araneta Coliseum, the expensive patron seats are closest to the action. In Cubao, things go progressively worse from the center. From traffic to air quality, from roads to dining options, from waste disposal to security. Absent my romanticizing gaze, Cubao is a landscape that typifies the deep-seated stratification of Filipino society. I am tempted to use “microcosm” here, but such will be erroneous: there are no factories in Cubao, no farmers, no fishermen. Even the development theory of dependence (positing center-periphery power relations) is inadequate, as Cubao is not a site of production, but mere consumption.

I am prone to nostalgia, and I can easily invoke childhood memories of going to Fiesta Carnival or anticipating the puppets at the COD display during Christmas. After witnessing my first pickpocketing incident, however, I realized that nostalgia is useless without engagement. Plunged headlong into a life – student then, now professional – that is cutthroat and obsessed with achievements, the city I move around in is typically bypassed and excused as inherently chaotic. Of course, traffic is horrible. This is Manila. Of course, the streets are not safe. This is Manila. Of course, there will always be poor people. This is the Philippines.

But the invisible violence in my city is suspect, possibly defended by institutions that are supposed to dismantle it. For instance, the MMDA, faced with the gargantuan task of easing Manila traffic, thought of footbridges (its color – from pink to green – changing alongside dispensations). Once separated, MMDA argued, both vehicular and pedestrian traffic would flow unhindered. Commuters would perhaps disagree, burdened as they are with the need to climb an extra flight of stairs or walk an extra 10 meters or so to and from landings. Motorists, on the other hand, are spared from one delaying traffic light. This bias is despite a Metro Manila Urban Integration Study revealing that 84 percent of all trips in Manila are made via commute or walking, with only 16 percent made using private vehicles. If 4 out of 5 people then are pedestrians at one point in their journeys, shouldn’t policy concerning urban space take them into account?

Exclusion. Cubao seems to be the everyman of places. There’s something for everybody. For Kris, there’s the reassuring noise; for the locksmith, there’s the possibility of business; for Karen, there are condo units to sell; for Scott, there’s gourmet coffee and semblance of First World amenities; for Mixka, there’s allure and mystery. For me, there’s the realization that as with all things deafening, it is better, in the case of Cubao, to examine its silences. The exclusions it makes. The larger system that permits it.

During the time of the EDSA bombing, I was in the thick of writing a paper on a collection by the poet Mabi David. You Are Here is an interrogation, at once historical and personal, of the Battle for Manila. It purposely collides the two, and the result is a crystallized understanding of the crucial junction. Its central thesis – which asks if future generations, safe from the crossfire of battle, can rightly claim solidarity with their ancestors based merely on being born on the same city – has been an ongoing preoccupation for me as an aspiring fictionist and poet. Some realm of experience, I realize, have more ramifications than others, and I’ve constantly wondered whether those that identify me – my “exotic” Filipino roots, my “alternative” sexuality, even the long history of my people – is ethical material for the written word; whether everything, really, is fair game.

In this manner my city becomes material, inevitably: as in writing as in life.

And so in negotiating what I feel for my city, I also clarify my stance as a writer. On one hand, I feel its violence; on the other, I recognize the only way to survive is to embrace it, like the 11 million dwellers who wake up at 6, brave the early morning commute, work for the better part of the day, then brave rush hour traffic at night for a little respite, before doing the same thing again.

On the way to Cubao Ex one typical Saturday night, I noticed that the Araneta Center Bus Station had been transferred. The area where it used to sit is now cordoned off, the high fences draped in tarpaulins vowing great things to come for Cubao. The sound of heavy machinery, near-indistinguishable from the impatient honking and engines raring to go, forebodes of something that operates like clockwork . The violence, just like Cubao, never sleeps.

Victory.

'My child, we have won'

Won: because it is war. It is bloody. There were casualties. There were spoils. And child: because it has gone on for generations. Because it has gone on long enough.

That said, there is little to gain in romanticizing the Supreme Court's decision to distribute the land of Hacienda Luisita to its farmer-beneficiaries. The machinations of the the powerful are complex, and their ways are many. There are accusations that the decision is more vindictive than just; an attempt to spite rather than to end -- and begin -- a too long a saga to give people what is rightly theirs.

We will never know: what it's like to work ten-hour days for P9.50, to have the sun on your back and neck and arms, to have sweat drop from your brow to the arid land, and to bear the unkind knowledge that this life -- of so little joy -- will also be your children's life, and their children's life, and so on. We will never know.

And so we cry. We, well-meaning middle-class city folk who have neither planted nor harvested a sugar cane in our lives. In our comfortable posture chairs, in our carpeted offices, our twin beds, in our shelves with a history book with a cursory chapter on feudalism, and in our classrooms that echo an indignant rejoinder to a classmate who found the cinematography of "Sa Ngalan ng Tubo" too bright.

But once or twice, our journeys may have brought us to places beyond our comfort zones, our perfect worlds. It doesn't take a lot -- in fact, a mere opening of eyes, the upturning of ears -- to see and hear what had been normalized, what some attempt to disguise. In Hacienda Luisita, there are mini-chandeliers in the McDonalds outlet. Kris Aquino, the "queen of all media," had said, with absolutely no remorse, that her jewelry are "katas ng Luisita." The hacienda is two and a half times as big as Makati.

While this victory is not ours, us in our trifling motions in our uninhabitable cities, let us bask in it for the future that it conjures: a society where grueling work is afforded grueling gifts.

Anger.

So: Student leader disrupts Clinton forum in Manila

The terrain of US-RP relations is a tumultuous one. We need not look too far to realize that Uncle Sam's hand is a long, sticky tentacle; that indeed when the US catches a cold, the Philippines sneezes. And so do not tell me about civility and there being a proper forum for everything. There is no "proper forum" when Guatemalans were intentionally infected with syphilis as part of a medical experiment, no "civility" as generations of Vietnamese suffer through the devastation of Agent Orange, no "decency" with some 80 million unexploded landmines remaining in the Laotian hinterlands, and, most oppressive of all because it is most invisible, no "decorum" involved when it comes to how aid entrenches and perpetuates, rather than alleviate, poverty. Good conduct is foolish in the crossfire. Righteous indignation is rightly indignant and never apologetic.

But lest we be accused of mindless sloganeering, we proceed to a theoretical framework. You see this is well within the same discourse that governs lighting rallies at graduation ceremonies, graffiti, boycotts, and even the Occupy movement. This is about power, and seizing - willfully, by force - power because we have been rendered powerless. In a public forum where such trivial things like the contents of Clinton's purse and her fondness for Pacquiao take centerstage (a relief, we're sure, to this insecure nation), a passing mention of the Mutual Defense Treaty and a pertinent call for its abrogation - shouted angrily, from the sidelines, from a young person's mouth - are welcome, if not necessary, departures. It is a repudation of the apolitical nonchalance that organizers wish to gloss over the event by calling it "Conversation in Manila." Manila: this city with a death toll that reached hundreds of thousands in World War II. This city that saw the consistent, and permitted, intereference of foreign powers. This city that is now, as a result, on its knees: "a fucking armpit," "a hell-hole," "a city with apockmarked face and a horrible limp." Conversation: this supposedly civilized discourse. The burden of civility - all things given - is yours.

And so to condone the many sins of the US, symbolically represented by Hillary Clinton, against the Philippines and the world just because we need an ally in the face of supposed aggression by China (although what other country has historically shown a hunger, a capacity for aggression more than US itself?) is cowardly opportunism at best and dogged subservience at worst. It naively turns a blind eye to the historic struggle of Filipinos to clip the wings of imperialism, be it in Balanggiga, in Olongapo, in Manila Bay, indeed, in the thousands of call center facilities in the country. It is an uneven relationship to begin with: talking will have to wait.

Imagination.

Stuff:

• Met up last night with Kule's (all-girl) kultura section, which I agreed to guest-edit for remainder of term (was in Zambales over the weekend for consolidation activity). Slightly missed this: brainstorming for possible topics and frameworks. Like Occupy Movement and politics of space, Manny Pacquiao and Barthes, and political correctness and the Other.
• Tried to insert imagination discourse in Occupy article, mainly based on Zizek assertion expressed in this manner: "Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism." See? Brilliant. What has happened to our collective imagination? What has shaped it to be such? A new writer, pretty and from CBA, noted that with capitalism so entrenched, an alternative doesn't seem to exist. Exactly.
• Enroled yesterday. Subjects this sem are poetics workshop (under JNG) and fiction workshop (under BD). In spite of myself, quite excited, especially to have T as classmate in both subjects. Now have guarantee that at least one person will understand projects/intentions so will no longer go crazy over disconnects.
• Restless fortnight. Restless only word to describe it, mostly about work and finances. Last stretch of 2011 - just one year, I told myself, to endure without a full-time job - appears to be putting up a belated (but spirited) fight. Suspect now that prolonged talking with friends have taken away novelty of issue and is now nothing but a bore. But restless fortnight: wish to remember you in the future, either as cautionary tale or lesson not learned.
• Will also say this here: was rejected for a job I really, really liked. Apparently, willingness to receive minimum wage for an 8 to 5er not enough. But such is only one among trove of recent failures, in this year that is clear to have prematurely, if at all, peaked.
• Can't wait for 2011 to be over (without, of course, bypassing Christmas, first time in a while am actually looking forward to December; those who matter know why). Will try to be/do better in 2012, to make 2012 better, although as it is preceded by the year when I got fatter, poorer, and lazier, it is sincerely hard to imagine how it cannot.

Dedication.

Right now, I am sure of only two words on my future first book (if ever); on a nice, clear page after the title. To Sophia.

Escape.

I wish I can say I was an overworked city boy who needed the break, but alas - the most valid wear and tear I can protest is a bad back; not, sadly, from grueling manual labor but from a combination of (1) bad posture, (2) aversion to pillows, and (3) the type of baggage one cannot check in. Ha ha. And so when, after five days of gallivanting in Mindanao, a sheep-voice announced via the airport's PA system that my flight back to Manila was canceled because of "issues" (self-esteem? series of bad partners? turning 30?), I felt tired, but not really and, lining up to check in at the hotel the airline assigned us, I gave myself a mental kick in the shins to the tune of "There is nothing/no one waiting for you in Manila," and "This is actually nice."

It was actually nice.

But it is not as if the Five Blissful Days began with bliss: while waiting for my boarding call, my name was ordered to report to the nearest gate. My heart, naturally, pounded and my mind raced with explanations, only to be asked, nicely, if I was willing to move to another seat as weight distribution on the plane was unequal (as if one's 160 lbs - give or take - was enough to tilt aircraft to one side). The next five days went by in a daze, and if one was to assign a focal point to the blink-like pace in which it passed, it would be the divan. Our divan. From where we looked on to the verdant mountain slopes beyond. Where I gave Philline a foot massage after she cooked a veritable fiesta on our last night. Where we read on opposite sides. Where we, I hope, came to the type of conlclusions one arrives at only from a certain vantage point, i.e., distant.

This is distance: wild tango music, wide wooden floor boards that obediently creak, high ceilings, chandeliers, worn-out rugs, a chaise longue or two. This is distance: the smell of durian, a riot of stars (copyright Roger Garcia), a firefly in hand, mayas pecking at leftover rice on the table.

Five days hence, I have three new shirts, four new books, and the priceless memory of traipsing through steep, muddy slopes, after bathing in a tub no bigger than a dining table, where Philline had to tell me to lean my head back while she poured and poured until no suds remained, where she and Roger sang - in total plakado fashion - Separate Lives, and I realized, half-naked and dripping wet, this is not bad.

And here is our nice, little family for five days: "a perfect cast." On the plush chair, Lina Sagaral Reyes, whose poem was an item in the final exam of a Philippine literature course I took last year. On the morning when we left, she told me how that poem came to be, complete with girlish giggles, a gift among a trove that included a signed book, some gossip, and a casual inquiry whether I was willing to return and maybe stay a little longer next time.

Violence.

How's this for violence: pigsa sa pwet.

Hilarity/oddity of paradigm struck me on Monday while writhing/writing introduction for poem sequence due that day. Because am feeling lazy, will post excerpt instead of explain:

There are two (equally violent) geographies navigated by the persona in Crawlspace. More blatantly vicious, although not less problematic, is the physical city, specifically Manila, beset by manmade and natural catastrophes and practically uninhabitable. Intersecting with the terrain of the city, its exploding buses, flood-prone streets, and indiscriminate apathy toward the self, is the brutality, potentially and nearly always, of love.

And so the sequence asks: how does one find love in this city, and how does one find solace in that love? How does one live in this city, and how does one love against this backdrop? There is a deliberate attempt to collide the two, as the dual paradigms typically inform how one lives – and loves – in Manila, this throbbing city of great energy and contradictions.

What, really, can be more violent than something that makes the mere act of sitting a terrible agony? Any movement an agony. A roadbump while inside a crowded jeep an agony. There was point while writing (v. brief) essay when thought, Fuck it, theory is useless in face of immense pain (hmm, interesting SP Lopez-style thought).

Thinking about it, not sure where pigsa sa pwet fits in whole city-self dichotomy. Surely, since it occurs on the body, it should be part of self, but then, is also result of bacteria-laden surroundings, and therefore, on epidemiological level, can fall on city. Then again, self is product of city, and vice-versa, so whole thing is moot, and this paragraph is useless tautology.

Got to whole groove of thinking of "project" (as in for MA Thesis, and self) on Monday as met up with T and E in school after submission. Poem sequence (about city and self) was last requirement for sem. Other two were about, for fiction, reconfiguration of city and self post-US hegemony and, for nonfiction, violence of Cubao and violence of Coke/colonization. Realized, then, am quite thankful that have got project figured out as early as now. Will perhaps rethink it over next two years, but am sure it will include these, well, concerns. Will most likely include class component. Or maybe gender.

Good news is, pigsa is now all but gone. Whole family was up in arms over it (to protect the kids, etc), but is v. supportive, too (to what lengths is too gross to discuss). At least can now sprightly jump and bump shoes in mid-air on Sunday, when will leave for Cagayan de Oro, knowing that an amazing lady will be waiting for me at the airport.

Recordings.

Writing non-fiction piece about Coke (and colonization, go figure). When first draft was workshopped, was told, predictably, to hike up you (or I). See, this is exactly what don't like about nonfiction, the exhortation to put you (or I) on page. Like, blatantly. Unlike in fiction when everyone knows it's about you but you can always say sod off, it's not. It's my, brr, imagination.

And so, was thinking of something more substantial to put in paper other than relevance of Coke to weight issues (surely, one's belly has little neo-colonial ramifications) and hanging out with lola in living room, when she started talking about her old store and memories of cases upon cases of Coke being hauled from 10-wheelers to our front yard. Discreetly placed phone near her mouth to record. Voila. Legwork.

Now have absolutely fantastic liberation-era story about Coke.

Was listening to recording early this morning when remembered once ardent desire to do this: record our conversations (for fiction material). About her childhood in Masinloc, Zambales; about her early teaching days in barrios; about the outbreak of war; about 1950s; about Martial Law. Used to have fits of urge to convulsively jot things down, but eventually decided against it. Will have to rely on memory; and if not, then is not worth writing. Perhaps.

She turned 90 last Sunday.

Unfastenings

Mabi David has been on my mind recently. Something about Ondoy and trying to render the experience poetically. What experience? Exactly. I cannot claim to be a victim of Ondoy. For surely, being a victim constitutes more than being stuck in your house while playing cards in candlelight. The challenge, said my professor, was to find a proper form to dramatize, well, water. Lots of it. And attempt to find/build solidarity with a city changed forever without co-opting and, worse, reducing its experience to poetic fodder.

Blurring the divide in You Are Here

This place after / all has held graver unfastenings.

- You Are Here (She has yet to learn to find her way), Mabi David

Mabi David's project of historical interrogation in You Are Here oddly involves little recollection of the pertinent events. Instead, what hovers above the poems is a pervading sense of dislocation, an unmistakable feeling of distance and a pain that is so intensely personal. Against this backdrop, the stage -- and the page -- is set, as it were, and so when the historical is unveiled here and there, its junction with the personal is so tightly interwoven, so masterfully laced that there is little separation between the somber narrative of a war that killed hundreds of thousands and a private tragedy that injured only one, but acutely; that each travail benefits from and informs the other like two sides of a coin.

This is no mean feat. The attempt to tackle both all too often ends up sacrificing one for the other, if not crumbling in the face of the gargantuan task. A grave historical import can, for instance, lend a work of art a naked political project that some deem "unpoetic," while a fictive persona that sure-footedly engages history can be accused of tokenism or, worse, shameless co-opting.

The trajectory of the poems in You Are Here dodges these bullets by coming clean, by admitting that the personal shrinks powerless in the face of something massive -- "impenetrable" even -- but at the end of the day can be "describable" although not without uncertainty and second-guessing (David, 51).

This attempt to collide the personal with the political is evident in the fact that, for instance, the whole collection is couched in the seemingly innocuous holiday itinerary of a woman, perhaps David herself, very much private on one hand because of its preoccupation with solitude in a foreign land, then alternately problematizing topics of perspective, cosmopolitanism, spatial place, and The Other. In "Soliliquy (When my friend)," the framework is almost romantic:

    getting him to get you,

               wandering into

where words, i.e., to hold

           a thing in your freezing

hands, is not the currency,

           but that someone holds

you, you are held in place,

          the world is unmindful

of you, little, little walkers,

    that he holds you (25)

The narrative, blatant in its attempt to engage with history, is pursed with highly personal turns, including episodes involving her father's death. In "Postcards (At the Nature Sanctuary)," what starts out as a foray into terriotoriality and habitat transitions quite jarringly into one such recollection, the two intersecting only in their points of origin. Always, there is an awareness of the persona's position, including her individual history. As a result, the flow of the narrative, both in individual poems and in their succession, is always tentative, only gaining a convincing voice whenever it asserts (and indeed she had called it an "imperative") that "you are here" ("Tourist"):

It insists on the contemporary individual’s implication in this historical inheritance, fixes him in the here and now if there is to be an active and meaningful engagement of it ... I wanted to explore in the book how one might be able to arrive at the condition that transposes the contemporary self from the mediated past into an immediate, living present and presence.

This engagement she lays out rather thickly in "Itinerary, Day Five (Tribute to the Survivors of the Battle for Manila, Fort Santiago)":

Look at you, listening. Listen to yourself as you listen to your

self speaking out of an actor's mouth, feeling more spoken of, also

at, the unique experience that brings you here becoming an alienation.

Being narrated, the narrator is wrenched from his story (13).

"Itinerary" is only the second poem in the collection, plunging us headlong in her universe after a seemingly (and perhaps purposely) timid piece of situating with "Accommodations." Already, there is an attempt to engage beyond the normal route, a seeming disclaimer after the whirlwind journey that took place, the seeing, remembering and contemplating in the first four days of the itinerary: from promenading along historic Unter den Linden in Day One and imagining trapped World War II soldiers jumping to their deaths in Day Two, to listening to the sound of limestone drilling in Simacolong, Siquijor in Day Three and contemplating on the need to forget after a disastrous war in Day Four.

In describing the interaction between history and the contemporary individual seeking to look back, she further asserts this persona position, and in the process elucidating on its almost circular quality that, to a certain extent, allows union in spite of the distance:

History has a cruel prepositional gaze: it fixes you. It mounts you

its students come for you, your transparency a visible thing to look at,

over, then through, to not forget what must not to be forgotten, that grief

a tunneling predicate fixing everyone in their place in that auditorium.

Look at you looking back. Heroic composure. What elegance (13).

Is the purpose, then, to situate the persona -- and us -- in the narrative of history, to reassert that it is ours, despite being absent in its unfolding? It certainly seems that way. After all, she ends that section with, "Either way, first person, singular." But then darkness follows, and the brand of witnessing that we are allowed to experience is revealed to be problematic in Day Six (Malinta Tunnel Evening Tour):

but the dark -- unintelligible disinterest

-- disables all knowing interrogation that is

our presence, then my unknowing

heartening as a kind of sight, and the body

is a membrane of sightless intelligence (14).

Problematic is perhaps too simplistic, but how can an "unknowing" be "a kind of sight" when dealing with an historical subject? 

Does this mean that their suffering is ours as well? Comfortably distant and safe from the crossfire during the Battle of Manila, is it right to claim kinship with the tragedy and therefore speak for its real victims based merely on being born in the same group of islands? John Berger writes, "The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation betweeen a present and its past ... Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. If we saw the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history" (11).

David's way of bridging the gap is acknowledging it and coming to terms with its insurmountability. In "Repository (That it has to depict the experience)," two "capsules" are presented, both inadequate to delve thoroughly into the past and resonate with vigor to the future (32). The attempt and eventual inability, the falling short in the gargantuan "expectations," is demonstrated with the poem's long sentences, heavily enjambed but nevertheless conjuring forward movement, such that you feel out of breath after reading. There is a fleeting sense of futility there, but by insisting on parallelisms, history becomes personal and therefore less remote.

In the face of the unknowable, we settle for anything familiar. Lost in the labyrinth of history, we grapple for signs that we recognize. Dramatized in "You Are Here (She has yet to learn to find her way)," the persona realizes that the place is "reminiscent / of her old one," but the comfort is short-lived when she finds out that "the names of / of streets have changed" (26). Some time passes and another figure emerges, one who has "come a long way / from when it was all foreign to him" (28). Again, there is an attempt to bring up "similarities," this time between home and a foreign land. Unsuccessful, there is no shame, for, "This place after / all has held graver unfastenings. We honor these / clefts no less by not naming them" (30).

In "Repository (Lamplight on, cone of curiosity)," the abyss that separates the acts of experiencing and speaking is made more pronounced and even antagonistic, but paradoxically, the connection between the two is never more heartfelt:

all that they carry too much for this dark

            meager bar; fifty years

                        later there are forms for "breaking

           

their silence" Were any of your relatives and/or friends

           killed during the battle for the liberation?

                      If so, please

name your victim, your relation to the victim,

             the approximate location of your victim's death,

                        your victim's manner of death

[please check]: by

            crossfire or

                       shelling or

bayoneting or

          burning or

                     torture or "others,"

the blanks below accept

           every imaginable manner, meaning

                      if we fail to mention it, here are your blanks to fill, (37)

"With your research," she asks, harshly, later in the poem, "are you finally in their shoes?"

This interogation dismisses verisimilitude and empathy, virtues that are typically lauded in fiction, and indeed in all of "humane" literature. They are not only futile, but insensitively assuming as well. It is a repudiation of any claim at solidarity with victims (and poetic subjects), all too often reduced to faceless names, alongside a catalog of dates and events lumped wholesale as history. The tension ensues, then, right in the middle of the collection because we, after accepting our position as sympathetic outsiders to the events, are now complicit in reducing them to, at best, mere statistical data, and, at worst, material for art.

The accusation is perhaps prompted by the formalist overdependence on the powers of "creativity" absent critical engagement of a material. "But imagination," Edel Garcellano writes, "grounded on materialist ground, can not be allowed to transmogrify into pure abstraction" (11). 

As David navigates the murky task of merging the political and the personal, she intentionally blurs the divide even more, a move that results in a kind of crystalization. By elucidating on the terrain of experience -- its limitations as well as opportunities to create new meanings and directions because of such limitations -- we know that we are "here," and we are not completely powerless after all.

WORKS CITED

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin and the BBC. London. 1972.
David, Mabi. You Are Here. High Chair. Quezon City. 2009.

----"Tourist". High Chair Online. July-December, 2009. Web. 22 March, 2011.
          <http://www.highchair.com.ph/issue12/12_tourist.html>

Garcellano, Edel. "Extra Memo" in 24/7 The 2004-2005 Philippine Collegian Anthology. LJA Printing Press. Quezon City. 2005.