Dumaguete

D

Passing through the national highway that connects “Junction One” and the San Pedro area in Puerto Princesa, I often remember another city. The portion of the road that passes the western edge of the airport is so uncannily similar to the national highway that passes the edge of the airport of another city located some 400 nautical miles southeast of P. However, the sensation of fast moving tricycles and multicabs passing through this primary artery that connects the city to the barrios seems to be the only thing that gives similarity to the two cities I am imagining. As I pass through this strip of national highway in barangay San Miguel of P, much as the two cities of my imaginings are both located at the edge of land, bordering the sea, I am temporarily split in space and time. Differences abound, but I could not immediately place myself in the correct Cartesian map at the precise moment.

I first came to Dumaguete during the summer of 1997. D was the terminal point of a three-day trip I was taking to reach the summer Mecca for the country’s best literary greenhorns; it was to be my home for three weeks. The first leg of my trip was an overnight boat ride from P. Our boat berthed in Manila North at 10 in the morning the following day. I only had ample time to pick-up some clothes in my rented room in Quezon City and hit the mall for some last-minute shopping. At four in the afternoon I flagged a cab and braved the midsummer Friday afternoon traffic to the old Manila Domestic Terminal 2 for my flight south, the second leg of my trip.

The red-eye flight to Cebu was a clunker. There were perhaps only 20 passengers on that day’s last flight to the “Queen City of the South” that I could only see five passengers in my section of the widebodied Airbus. An hour’s flight and I was in Mactan International. After an uncomfortable overnight stay in a stolid area of the terminal building (This was when I learned firsthand that having an overnight flight connection can be a bummer specially when the airport you are in shuts down at midnight. Connecting-flights can save you money, though. Back in 1997, the direct flight between Manila and D was almost a thousand bucks more expensive than a flight plan that passes through Cebu.), I boarded the next day’s third commuter flight out of Cebu 20 minutes before seven in the morning. The twin-engine turboprop climbed out over the eastern edge of Mactan island before banking right towards what was my first glimpse of Cebu in clear daylight. All I could see of the city the night before were orange blips that have been randomly scattered on a pitch-gray veldt. That morning I saw the patchwork of man-made structures and greens sprawled out on a coastal plain going up to a gently sloping inner land that abruptly stopped at towering mountain cliffs in a not so distant background. Such a place: from one single spot you can have a lucid view of the sea, the coastal plain, and the mountains. But this was not yet my destination. I was still on my way to D.

I was back in D in 2000. This time it was nothing out of literary whim. My brother and I were flying to D for another lofty purpose. Hard before the track of a tropical typhoon that eventually caused the death of my province’s most popular long-time political father-figure, we were making a paperwork swing through northern Luzon, Busuanga Island, and Negros Oriental in a back-breaking two-week road trip. Manoy D was laying out the groundwork for his cross-country field survey of an endangered crocodilian species. He needed to coordinate with local field scientists (of whom, the most famous is Dr. Angel Alcala of the Silliman Marine Laboratory in D).

My latest trip to D was in June of 2001. Of all the trips, this was the most unconventional as this was really an unscheduled one. I hitched on at moments notice. My brother woke me up at seven that Saturday morning. They were to fly to Cebu in the afternoon on their way to Negros Oriental for their continuing fieldwork. And suddenly he wanted me to be on the trip! They were carrying electronic instruments that needed to be hooked up to a computer before being deployed in the field, but he didn’t want to lug his computer to the mountains of Negros Oriental. (Battery guzzling equipment are practically not suited for a month’s work in the mountains, and expensive general-purpose electronic gadgetry like a notebook computer is an enticement for unlawful elements in the bush. It is better to take down field notes with pencil and weatherproof paper and reorganize later with a word processor. Even a palmtop PDA is impractical for this purpose because of so much dust and moisture out in the tropical jungle.) Kuya asked me to go with him as far as their jump-off point in the town of Basay southwest of D. That was where I was to set up their field instruments with the laptop which I would then take back to P for safekeeping while they do their fieldwork.

I didn’t learn actual science in graduate school seminars. It was my two elder brothers (two, because another brother was also involved in environmental field work before becoming a white collar public policy analyst) who confirmed to me my long-held beliefs about the vicissitudes of real scientific fieldwork: Days in the field are devoid of melodramatic scenes, of fashion panache and techno savvy. Nubuck-hide hiking boots eventually get soaked in water and crusted with mud. In time one decides to walk barefooted in mud swamps. A sixteen-satellite precision GPS unit reaches its maximum load of waypoint markers. Soon you have to recourse to writing down each dead-reckoning waypoint on paraffin-coated paper lest you get lost and go on an infinitely circular path in the jungle. On my way back to D from Basay, the expensive top-of-the-line laptop I was ferrying was resting on its canvass satchel safely tucked inside a decrepit black garbage bag.

At half past two in the afternoon of the following day, I was back in P. The searing afternoon heat off the tarmac was pushing me in quick strides to the familiar air terminal building, erasing from my thoughts my recent views of another island across the Sulu Sea.

Novels and Places

Novels and Places

Marseilles was ideally suited to Genet’s imagination. Like Brest, where he would set Querelle, it would be bombed severely during the Second World War. Once a place was destroyed, it became a suitable subject. Genet wrote about Mettray after it was closed, Brest and Marseilles after they were bombed, Montmartre after it no longer existed as a bohemian or criminal centre but had become a weekend tourist trap. Used materials ‘composed’ best; that is why novelists like to work with them. Only when subjects have lost their journalistic flashiness do they become suitably cool for serious fiction.
– Edmund White, Genet: a biography

MALTREATMENT OF MEDIA IN MANILA PEN TONIGHT

As a practicing journalist, as an editor of the country's most awarded environmental community newspaper, an active partner of the Center for Community Journalism and Development, the Center for Media Freedom andResponsibility, the Philippine Press Institute, and the BIMP-EAGA Media and Communicators Association, I join our fellow media practitioners tonight in condemning the excessive show of force of the Arroyo administration in keeping the Manila Peninsula standoff under wraps. I urge all my friends in this group to speak up to their colleagues and all members of the Philippine and worldwide community of freedom loving individuals about this unprecedented maltreatment of professional media practitioners who were arrested and brought to Bicutan, just because they happened to be in Manila Peninsula hotel doing their jobs.

While we may have biases, I know that we are always expected to maintain objectivity even when we come face to face with issues like this.

But tonight, I simply have to speak up if not for those who were actually arrested, but for my fellow media practitioners who are toiling in the provinces far away from the network support of bigger media organizations.

What happened to our fellow media practitioners tonight was unprecedented since EDSA 86.

If this could happen to colleagues who are working for manila-based and foreign-based news organizations, what sort of protection can community journalists depend on when they come to the same situation covering police and military stories in the provinces? To what recourse will we run to?

No onions for intellectual debates

Afternoon of September 29 started out slowly for me.

After lunch, I texted my two remaining close friends who shared the same sympathies as mine with regards to the debauchery that is slowly creeping up Palawan from its southern tip.

I was adamant in attending the UPAA forum scheduled for the afternoon.  For what could be a more incongruous topic for a fora than "responsible mining"?  I told my two friends, since nobody at our house (my mom studied in UP Diliman in the early 50s, while her four boys studied hard sciences in Diliman and Los Banos later on) got invited for the gathering, I've already told my mom not to attend.  We were in a boycott mode at the house so to speak.

But my two friends texted me back to attend.  I previously texted them, what the heck is the organization of UP alumni doing with the responsible mining bandwagon?

Turned out one my two close friends was scheduled to speak.  Upon their urging, I changed my mind and decided to attend the forum.  I told one of my friends, am only going there because of you.  She was asked to deliver the mining situation in Palawan from the anti-mining side.

First to draw his sword in the forum was Engr. Fuji Rodriguez, who is with the Narra Nickel.  Probably the longest and most parched talk of the day.  As parched as the mountain sides they have razored off in the south.  The engineer was boasting that he is in the company of what is probably the most intelligent group of men in Palawan during his time in the mining industry.  Duh!  (Let's compare our Stanford-Binnet's Mr.)  After a rather hyper-extended (just like men trying to augment their sexual inadequacy with huge, loud, shiny cars) introduction to his talk (f__k me, you've been introduced by the forum host already!), the mining engineer dived into the kernel of his talk about responsible mining: the reforestation blah, and the alternative livelihood blah for the affected communities.  He was talking about the gulayans for the community.

This was followed by a very raunchy (I hope you're intelligent enough to understand what I mean by this) deconstruction of the current Mining Act delivered by a witty old professor from Baguio.  My friend delivered her talk after the witty deconstruction that elicited a series of guffaws from the audience.

Everything was almost going fine (it was an intellectual discourse among UP alumni anyway), but the vice governor decided to react.

One of the informations brought out by my friend to the afternoon audience was the fact that as of now, there are 315 applications for mining in different parts of Palawan.

The vice governor said, based on his fact checking with the secretariat of the provincial board, there are only around 15 mining applications in the board.

Faced with the two incongruous numbers, he could not engage the intellectual discussion and asked where did my friend from Palawan NGO Network Inc (PNNI) get the data.  He was like a child appealing to the audience, this cannot be true.  This girl has taken my candy.  Although somewhere in the hyper-extended (Too!  They seem to share the same preponderance for boring the audience) reaction he issued a disclaimer that he was not lawyering (well, that's what he is, a lawyer) for the mining sector, his demeanor late in the afternoon was like he was the one worst hit by my friend's statements during the forum than the mining advocates.

Even the presentation of pictures of indigents near Rio Tuba (site of the Rio Tuba Nickel Mines) suffering from skin diseases right after an unloading of sulfuric acid was questioned.  The vice governor must have thought the audience composed of men and women who have TAKEN THEIR UNDERGRADUATE studies in the fertile rooms of UP are so delicate, they cannot be allowed to get exposed to such horrifying images.

But the vice governor should be aware that we, as the best and the brightest minds of the Philippines living and toiling in this corner of the country, have been trained for the horrors of work and society.  Matters of visual taste and "but we have tried our best" apologia are poor defenses in such intellectual exchange among the brilliant minds who have walked the holy halls of UP.

Looking Out

Because I was never a part of them, they exist at that moment just as I look up the clock face to find the second hand two ticks away from the zenith.

I could never hold the visions completely.

And in moments when am untruthful to myself, I also say the visions could never hold me because I was never a part of them.

But I keep coming back to take my surreptitious peeps at memory’s leaking hole.

These are glimpses akin to dreams of peripheral visions. Sidelong glances upon beautiful strangers one meets in busy passageways.

Soon the second hand arcs down… and things are no longer where they are supposed to be.

Pornography

This whiteness is an embarrassment.

It slaps me with the cold memory of the toilet tiles and those secluded moments of abandon when bodies are only concerned with bodies.

The real intercourse within these walls is not lightweight. It lacks sterility.

Contacts are always weighed down. Literally, by the book satchels hanging down the backs of college boys, the computer bags down the sides of some IT geeks, the shaving kits of urban soldiers who just happened to pass by the mall today.

Figuratively, we are pulled down by the weight of our loads: the fear that some ugly mall guard will suddenly crash into this unspoken chewing of the cud, that some straight brats (with a kinky show of flesh, some are not so straight after all) will enter the scene with their bad words about the brotherhood.

But, you ask me, why is it an embarrassment?

Because nobody wants to speak of it.

It’s only in poems where you get to read about them.

Chances are you don’t even have access to smut.

For my brother...

…you’re not brainy enough to notice that I don’t have the same skin tone as you.

I hate you for giving me a body hugging pink muscle-shirt for my 19th birthday.

It took you five more years to tell me you are gay.

You must have thought that every gay boy wants to wear pink; that every gay boy has a closet.

Kuya, we are so poor, we could not afford a closet for every boy in the family.

Didn’t you realize that?