Category Archive for: bayan

komentaryo

Freedom*

One rarely thinks about one’s freedoms until one feels it is being impinged upon, where one is being told of the price you pay for insisting on your right to free speech and independent thought.

In the course of this government’s reign in Malacañang, and despite its grand proclamations about how this is a democracy – for look at how they let critics critique and rallies happen! – I have thought more and more about the mortality of the freedoms we hold dear.

I realize that sometimes we so believe that oppression and repression can only wear the same clothes, invoke the same proclamations, that we fail to see how our freedoms are sacrificed as a matter of course, every day, in the more insidious ways that we do not talk about, sometimes, can’t even imagine. (more…)

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#YesAllWomen

i had watched the hashtag #YesAllWomen take a life of its own on Twitter, and was fascinated that while it didn’t trend in the Philippines, the tweets from elsewhere in the world (mostly the US it seems) resonated with this Pinay so removed from that context.

i’m the last to imagine universality to be a valid enterprise, imagining as i do that we are always more complex than just being / standing for / standing against one thing. yet it is feminism still — no matter how it is not named such, no matter that it denies this label — that i realize i fall back on, if not go back to. (more…)

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Wishes for the Pinay 2014

Women’s Month always gets me thinking about the women whose lives affect me every day, and I don’t just mean the few women friendships I keep, the ones who have become my younger sisters, the relatives that I grew up with, the nanay who is at the heart of who I am, the teachers whose voices resonate in my head.

The Pinay “other”

I also mean the Pinays I know only through images: those on billboards all perfected by technology, selling every from clothes to whiter armpits, kitchenware to new boobs. Those whose images dictate how women are defined and limited to certain roles. I mean the diverse set of women Senators and government officials who rise to the occasion of the news; or if you’re Miriam Defensor-Santiago (who I am not at all related to), who will actually ask the more difficult questions and assess the more complex assertions.

There too, are the Pinays I am distanced from by class, but who define how I live every day precisely because of this difference. Of workers in factories and malls, of every manang who works the markets, each one who works the underground economy to survive. That woman who takes care of land and family, who takes on more than her husband does; the Overseas Filipina Worker who knows to take on the task of leaving home, if only so home might become better.

This year, a set of wishes for all of us Pinays, given the common conditions we suffer under, and taking cognizance of our differences. (more…)

komentaryo

Activism* (or what is wrong with the STFAP and STS)

Activism, to me, has always been about daring to ask the more difficult questions. And wanting to do – and actually doing – something about it.

Anyone who thinks Kristel is being used for the cause of free education was obviously blind and deaf to the years of protests against tuition fee increases and the repercussions of the slow process of the State ceasing to subsidize state colleges and universities. So no, Kristel is not some mascot being used for this cause; Kristel is but proof that this cause is a valid one to take on, to engage in. Kristel proves that the current system kills, the spirit and otherwise. (more…)

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Rage* (or what is wrong with the STFAP and STS)

When I entered the State University as a freshman in 1995, I was part of an English block that was diverse by virtue of class. It didn’t take long to find that while some of us were from well-off families (I had a Romualdez in my class for example, and there were children of lawyers), and there were some of us who were versions of middle class; many of my blockmates came from poorer families, many from the provinces. Many of them, I later found, were dependent on scholarships, mostly from elsewhere other than the State U.  (more…)