Category Archive for: bayan

kultura

Kleptomaniacs*

I tend to imagine that these times of political and socio-economic crises demand of creative work an amount of relevance, where it is easy to pinpoint films and TV shows and writing that tends towards escapism, refusing to speak of issues that are urgent and important.

But escapism is also exactly what we need in times like these, when only the wealthy minority can live oblivious to the rising cost of basic goods and the utter lack of public services, when only the rich might navigate nation and not see the majority who are living below the poverty line. It makes sense to the rest of us who live each day struggling to make ends meet to want to escape by watching Transformers, or uh, Sarah and Coco in Maybe This Time (walang basagan ng trip). (more…)

komentaryo

Downward spiral*

On doctor-ordered isolation (nothing infectious, just radioactive, long story) and totally missed the June 12 rallies. I would’ve gone as an individual, probably brought along my parents, reminiscent of how we had gone to too many-an-anti-Erap- and anti-GMA-rally in the last decade or so.

But maybe it was good to have been kept away this time around, to have watched it happening without knowing exactly what went into the planning and organizing. It allows for a sense, too, of how limited and limitless the efforts, how diverse and different the groups are, and how it all looks and sounds from the outside.

And how those slogans and soundbites work vis a vis this government’s that has –admit it or not – turned more and more defensive at every turn. (more…)

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…)

komentaryo

#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…)

komentaryo

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…)