Category Archive for: kawomenan

kultura

Chicks Rule!

published in PCIJ i-report, special report on Literature and Literacy, of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 19 June 2007
http://www.pcij.org/i-report/2007/chick-literature.html

N.B.S.B. (No Boyfriend Since Birth). Love hurts. Hearts heal. Relationships are overrated. Marriage or living in? Promiscuity versus loyalty. Every girl needs a gay bestfriend. Better pay or fulfilling job? M.U. (Mutual Understanding). Shopping! Vacations. Self-worth and –confidence. Self-love. Single – not an old maid. Falling in love with your male bestfriend. The search for Mr. Right. H.D. (Hidden Desire). (more…)

komentaryo

INCREDIBLE KRIS

In what universe is Kris Aquino “api”? In what country can she be called hero? Not in this one where she has the gall to talk about her jewelry as “katas ng Hacienda Luisita”; where she has the audacity to talk about owning, and actually encourages us all to buy, 13,000-peso jeans (because they fit really well!); where she says of making commercials: “Wala lang, nagpapayaman lang”; and where, unhappy with her body, she has her boobs enhanced and her waist trimmed, and brags about it.

I understand the value of a woman of her stature coming out in the open about a violent relationship. I understand that she may be speaking for the 6 out of 10 women who are battered every day. But let’s be clear about something here: Kris was NOT a meek woman in this relationship. She was a powerful woman, she was hitting back. “Nagkakasakitan kami”, not “Sinasaktan ako”, an admission that she herself could be violent.

Of course there is absolutely no excuse for any man to hurt a woman physically, but this assumes that the women of this world have yet to turn violent on their men, and this presupposes that women do not and cannot tell lies about domestic violence. In the world beyond feminist and women’s liberation theory, in the real world where Kris Aquino and I live, not all women who cry wolf aren’t wolves themselves. Tell me how powerless Kris Aquino is when she has the sense to burn their bed and grab Marquez’s balls. Tell me why it isn’t possible that a woman of Aquino’s standing could threaten to ruin another person’s career and thereby prove that people will believe her more than any other.

Please. Let us not paint Kris Aquino as the victim here. It is she who made a victim of Alma Moreno and her kids; she made a victim of Joshua, she made victims of Cory Aquino and Noynoy Aquino. Most of all she made a victim of us all – her public, who swallowed her truth-telling act, her my-life-is-an-open-book dramatics, and who did not mind that she made a lot of money out of it. She said she was beating Marquez’s camp to the punch by talking about the violent relationship, the emotional battering, the STD; she said Marquez was out to ruin her credibility. I ask: what credibility? She herself ruined it. She had made us believe all this time that she was okay sa alright! – never mind the rules she was breaking. She had made us believe that she was THE woman of the millennium, the woman of achievement that we should emulate, and hers the life of the rich and famous that we should all aspire for. And now she hides behind the idea na “Tao lang, nagkakasala”? She sold us lies about her life, and now she’s being allowed to hide behind the stereotype of a battered woman, meek and silent, which she isn’t?

Please. Let us not make Kris Aquino a woman’s hero on the basis of an incident that we haven’t heard both sides of. She could be telling the truth this time, but it shouldn’t elevate her to some women’s lib hall of fame. The number of women reporting domestic abuse may rise, but it shouldn’t mean that she is now the epitome of what a strong woman should be. Let us not forget that this woman, whom everyone from Atty. Katrina Legarda to Gabriela’s Lisa Masa would like to call hero, sells whitening soap to a land of morena women, encourages us all to get breast implants and liposuction, and has already abused another woman – Alma Moreno, by ruining her and her kids’ chance at a family – just because Joey Marquez could be the man for her. (A party-list organization has joined the fray and encouraged Kris to file an official complaint against Marquez through their “Report-A-Mistress Campaign” – e, sinong ire- report ni Kris, sarili niya?)

Utang na loob. Let us not be blind to what Kris Aquino already is and will continue to be after all of these. She’s a media person who rakes in millions of pesos making commercials that raise women’s material needs, who batters women’s confidence by telling them to get whiter, smell better, have more boobs, and who parades her jewels, expensive clothes and shoes – flaunting her wealth, literally and tastelessly – on nationwide television in this poor Third World nation. This Kris is not and should not be seen as separate or distinct from Kris Aquino “the battered live-in partner”. Kris Aquino is one woman, and she makes this whole nation live with and suffer her adolescent contradictions every time she washes her dirty laundry in our faces.

In no universe should Kris Aquino be considered hero. In no universe is Kris Aquino “api”. And it is only in this mababaw ang kaligayahan Kris Aquino country – where activists jump at any prospect of a tactical alliance and where advocacy groups fish for spokespersons – that she will in time rise again and wrap us all aroundher little finger yet again. That is, unless we keep her from doing so. Unless we stop all these personalities – from Fidel Ramos talking about Marquez’s political career to the Fortun brothers rising from Jose Velarde’s ashes – from gaining any more media mileage out of the controversy. Unless we all – including the media – get smarter and wiser about this unsolvable, and embarrassing, problem that is Kris.

Let’s start by looking at the real heroes in all of these.

Let’s look at the woman that Alma Moreno is. She who didn’t badmouth Kris when news broke about the latter’s affair with her husband. She who had the good sense to keep quiet for the sake of her and Marquez’s kids. She who has endured the violence wreaked on her family by Kris Aquino, and who continues to endure it, having to explain to her kids why they are being teased in school.

Let’s look at Noynoy Aquino and how he has handled this situation with well-chosen words for Kris but not against Joey. How he is being the big brother that he has said he is so many times in the past, even when Kris would talk about him on nationwide television as the bane of her existence. How he has not sensationalized the issue and has kept it on the level of a family crisis, letting women’s advocates take it for what they think it is.

We want anyone to gain from this? Let it be Noynoy. For if there’s any Aquino who deserves the limelight, who is intelligent and level-headed, who can truly say that he can do something for this country, whom we would like to see and hear more of – if there’s one Aquino of whom Ninoy can be proud, it is Noynoy.

Let Kris Aquino rest from the limelight. And give this poor nation a rest from Kris Aquino. (Mga ten years.)

kultura

Where’s the Bitch? – A Review of Chinie Hidalgo’s Bitchy Poetry

published in the national daily newspaper Malaya, March 21 2002

What does it take for a book to be picked up amongst rows upon rows of confused (and confusing!) National Bookstore arrangements? A salesgirl who has the sense not to place a thin book tome-facing-the-customer on the shelf; a groovy cover that screams “different book! different book!” amidst conventional local book covers; and the word “bitch” in big colored letters.

Chinie Hidalgo’s TheBlair Bitch Project: A Book of Bitchy Poetry (2000) was apparently sooo successful (self-published as it was) that the author – or authors, as she’d make us believe – found the need and the market for a sequel, which was un-creatively titled The Blair Bitch Returns, Another Book of Bitchy Poetry (2001). Now, in a publishing industry where only Jullie Yap Daza and Margie Holmes are asked for sequels, and with a limited local reading and book-buying public that is wont to avoid poetry like the plague (think poetry, think Shakespearean sonnets or e.e. cummings – blame it on our educational curricula), Hidalgo’s achievement is hard to come by. I mean, when more than one student in a class of 20 submits Hidalgo’s book as a review topic, one knows that this is the closest anyone has ever gotten to this text generation’s “literary likes” after Jessica Zafra’s hayday. Hidalgo must have something going that others don’t. Or, like me, her book covers were just too hard to resist for the young Pinoy reader who rarely sets eyes on “bad words” in big bold letters – unless of course one has seen the walls of public bathrooms.

And relative to bathroom walls, Hidalgo’s poetry is only a tad bit better.

While I don’t agree with the kind of poetry that our educational system has subjected students to all these years since the Thomasites landed in Manila, I also don’t think that Generation X, Y, Z reading Hidalgo’s kind of poetry is any more promising. Given that this might be all of local poetry – if there’s any poetry at all – that this text generation might ever read, how terrible that what Hidalgo treats them to is poetry that’s stuck in the tradition of hickory-dickory-duck in bitch mode. This practically eradicates all the effort that Filipino writers in English, Filipina writers in English in particular, have worked so hard on all these years – poetry that has more than just rhyme and meter, but content that can change minds about and open eyes to this society’s nooks and crannies, dirty and grimy as they most often are.

Of course one might say that in fact, the bitchiness in these books is all about how this society is dirty and grimy. Because as we pretend that things are fine and dandy, we are stuck in familial ties that bind so tight it actually hurts and we are bound to societal rules of politeness that we have mouth sores from biting our tongues. One finds though, that as far as these books are concerned, this would be an over reading. As the introduction says, its bitchiness is really only about saying things that are usually left unsaid or, as far as I’m concerned, are said behind peoples’ backs. Why? Well, because these are mean things to say. And here lies the confusion. In a hypocritical Catholic country like ours, we are told to bite our tongues and say only good things about our neighbors, at the same time that we are taught that truthfulness and honesty are the virtues of a good person, and the pain that may be inflicted can only be for the better. But why the hell would you waste time in telling a mother who says that her baby’s the cutest little boy who has ever been born that she’s living in a dream? Kids will grow up and find out for themselves that they’re not as pretty or handsome as their playmates, and mothers are suppose to handle the insecurity at that point. To inflict pain on the mother’s ego by telling her that her son looks like a monkey (as the book puts it), is not only pointless, it’s also just downright mean.

And here lies one of these books’ biggest problems. It creates the stereotype of the bitch as a mean person, who is really only truthful and honest. Come on. The greatest bitches are those who don’t waste time griping about ugly children with proud mothers, or dates with bad English. Instead, they are women who have the capacity to be well-meaning and are well-grounded as they choose the words worth saying and the battles worth fighting. One doesn’t go about saying “hey, I’m a bitch, watch me roar about this terrible looking person with a huge zit on his face!” But one does go about living a life that’s truthful and fair, and that which has a point in critiquing (not lambasting) the way people live their lives and what those lives stand for in the context of a society that is impoverished. Those are the bitches that all Pinays can be proud of. Not the woman who’s really only, in common parlance, pintasera.

In the end, this is what Hidalgo reveals her concept of bitchiness to be. A person who is not critical of, just cynical about, people. A person who is so shallow she can’t go beyond a person’s looks, diction, or clothing as if that’s how the worth of a person is measured. A person who counts how much other people give her, and how much other people stand for. And a person who is just richer than everybody else that she can tell if what another person is wearing is fake, in the same way that she can tell if a person is a fake Fil-Am or not (as if that was the important thing to gripe about as far as Fil-Ams are concerned – but that’s another essay). And to say that the poems in both books were actually written by a lot of people who helped her with everything from topics to rhyming words, and pointing out that in fact she’s a nice person (even teaching religion!), just adds to the falsity with which this book treats its readers. A true bitch knows she is one, knows she has a point in being so, and won’t find the need to apologize for it – the way Hidalgo does in practically every other poem. So really, the poems can’t even pretend to be bitchy, as the writer (and apparently publisher) destroys the concept even before one starts reading.

What a lousy excuse for a book of poetry this fake bitchiness has turned out to be. And what a terrible way of revealing that one does not have a sense of Pinay history and literature of which any Pinay writer is inevitably part. Angela Manalang-Gloria must be turning in her grave.