radikalchick.lit

my body, my life: my stake in the RH Bill

here, for good measure, is mine. when I speak of the RH Bill, these are some of the more consistent memories that I battle with, that I live:

(1) an act of infidelity brings me to a room in the middle of nowhere, as the other woman needed a friend while she got herself an abortion: i was her only friend. (2) I skip a pill, and think nothing of it; let me overdose and do the-day-after-thing I’ve read about online. I do not know of its probability of failing. (3) I am pregnant with a sick child and told that the dangers are unknown, it is unclear if it is safe for me, but I have no options. (4) I am pregnant and in pain and in suffering and in even more pain, I am told by doctors that they want to do a caesarean operation on me, forgetting to say that it will mean even more pain for my body, less chances of survival for my baby. (5) I am speaking to doctors who talk about my body and my baby as if we were machines that they can fix, as we were just broken and in the name of their science can be fixed, by golly! we can be fixed. (6) I am in the delivery room and I don’t feel a thing, but I am trying to get the baby out with all my heart and soul, that which every woman on that delivery table must have done before me, and I am thinking of this: please do not let medicine touch my baby, do not let one needle, one piece of cold metal, to touch her. (7) I am alive, it’s been two years, my body’s still battered by the painful pregnancy, by the even more painful uncaring words, said about me and my body and my being woman seeing as abandonment can only be contingent to the death of a child.

when I speak of the RH Bill I remember all these, not necessarily in this order, but always in quick succession, each one a death in itself, each memory I imagine possibly less about pain and loss, if only there were mechanisms in place to protect me — and every other woman — as a woman; if only there was a system in place that would treat my body as worthy of much love and care and respect, because it is mine, and I deserve it.

kultura

what needs to be said about Manny Pacquiao

No, my household didn’t spend that Sunday morning and the rest of the day excited about Manny Pacquiao’s fight. Papa was fast asleep and woke up only to leave for work. Mama woke up and asked: “May live ba tayo?” To which my answer was no, as always. Not one of the channels on our cable subscription could deliver a real live telecast of the Pacquiao-Margarito fight. Like the past eight other fights, we depend on over-acting super biased radio announcers on AM and FM radio to get a sense of what’s going on.
This time though my Twitter contacts kept me updated; Mama was looking at a live blow-by-blow on Yahoo; one of Mama’s FB contacts posted a link to some free live streaming of the fight – it was a dead link. The radio announcers were ecstatic and announced that the fight was Manny’s. Our TV was still on delayed telecast, showing an earlier non-Pacquiao fight: we were shaking our heads in disappointment. Manny’s advertisements came on one after the other; we shook our heads at the absurdity.

Even more so when it was tweeted that Mommy Dionisia had fainted, and the source of information was nobody else but Vicki Belo; even more so when the image of Jinkee, Manny’s wife, appeared on TV, in a slinky red dress and sleek straight hair, looking whiter than usual. Maybe just different.

All these inform this different perspective I take in viewing Manny, as I look at his particular celebrity and find that while it’s borne of his being the greatest boxer of our time, it is also extraneous to it at this point given its largeness, its breadth. Athletes like Manny are few and far between for this nation, maybe that’s why we don’t know how to reckon with what his fame has become, all-pervasive in the way that only a pop star’s celebrity is. Yes, even when we can’t watch the darn fight like the rest of the pay-per-view world.

the rest of “Pacquiao in Perspective” is here!

radikalchick.lit

the street of my childhood

is victory avenue, quezon city. where a big house still is, owned by family but barely, a space i haven’t seen in years, a street i haven’t even gone into in as long.

but on that street where i grew up, my notion(s) of the world began to be formed. between the padlocked gate, and the poverty beyond it; the old beetle that we played around and not within, and the huge garden that Lola loved; between the death of a rock star and my own cousin found hit and almost dead by one of our trusted impoverished neighbors beyond that padlocked gate; between who we were there, within family and the strangest kind of love, and what we became when we left, with all our things, a time that i remember clearly.

i would later find out that in fact the move was about the daring to strike out elsewhere, on our own as a nuclear family.

seeing this street of my childhood as i was getting P200 pesos worth of gas, because that’s all my wallet had; coming from many things and emotions of the past two years, but literally from five hours of volunteer work in a public school in one of those streets i will forget soon enough; worrying periodically about money and consistently refusing to worry; with much love, too much in fact, for the world; in between celebrating a birth and a death in the three and a half months of every year since 2008.

this street, a full two decades after, has to be serendipitous.

as it is a challenge, showing me what i want, what i need to do, where i must go, and how it shall be done. as it is about the past, even more so about the future. and the now of knowing to see the possibilities of daring.

that street is exactly where i’m at.

kultura

Layang Bilanggo frees us from the indie!

the discussions and debates on local indie films come from a place of uncertainty and spectatorship: who views these films, and therefore are we making them for those viewers? is the prevalence of sex and poverty and violence in the indie something that’s overly used to feed the first world’s need to validate themselves?  after all to insist on seeing the bowels of third world Philippines and saying bravo bravo! could also mean yehey! they’re still as poor as we’d like to think!

and then there are stories that are about poverty with some violence and some sex, that just get out of the rut that too many indie films are in. Layang Bilanggo directed by Michael Angelo Dagñalan and written by him with Ma-an L. Asuncion, Melchor DF. Escarcha (Kuwentista Productions), is exactly this story, without it being too self-consciously pa-artist or pa-difficult. instead what it is becomes what an indie should be able to do: speak of the times in a way that deems it as important as the past and the future, in situations that might be cliché but which are handled with a new perspective and a different voice.

because on the one hand, it’s clear that we know of the ex-con story, yet we rarely speak of how corruption within the police allows for the probability that the ex-con is freed, kept under the radar, and used as a hitman. because on the one hand, we’ve seen the story of the ex-con father seeking the abandoned child, yet we don’t know of the probability that this child’s life is so affected by the palpable absence that abandonment creates, making a reunion just impossible.

in Layang Bilanggo this basic story has a layer of what is both funny and tragic about age and aging, within the spaces of a provincial home for the aged, where the exchanges between nurses and boarders are always truthfully painful, making fun as they do of the absurd situation(s) that aging creates, that those who think they haven’t aged actually subsist on. it’s difficult now to think of any movie or TV show that has dealt with senior citizenship in the way that Layang Bilanggo successfully did, where the conversations, the moments of distress and anger, the emotional rollercoaster that abandonment and loneliness wreaks, are all so real. if not in our faces, reminding us of our own inabilities and incapabilities, reminding us how much of ourselves is in the ways in which we let our old get old, our senior citizens deal with age by themselves.

having said this, it must be said too: Jaime Fabregas, Pocholo Montes, Pen Medina, outdo themselves in the roles of senior citizenship, where the witty repartee is layered with a whole lot of disgust and distress at the way(s) they’ve aged, and why they’re within the space they’re in, where friendships are tongue in cheek, where the end is dealt with as a matter of fact, and not as something that’s unsaid.

that later on it is the ex-Metrocom officer who helps out the ex-con, that later on, this friendship will be tested in the decision to be captured again, do not run away it is said, becomes one of the more touching moments in the film. soon after, we are faced with an ending we don’t like or want or expect, and yet seems to be the only way a movie like this could end, with redemption only in the way of death, only the way that the person who survives holds a gun to someone’s head, and runs away through the forests that are unfamiliar.

and on concrete lies the man who only wanted to be forgiven, more for the crime that is abandonment versus any other one that the law speaks of. down the street, an old man is reading what’s left of the one who could only be a father until the end. within the gates of the old people’s home, a daughter doesn’t know the truth just yet, and will die a couple of deaths upon finding out who her father is.

and right in front of the movie screen, as the strains from the Johnoy Danao original theme song began, it was difficult to hold back tears. because there is no redemption, there is no happy ending. all that there is, we realize, is a world where abandonment is truth but rarely spoken of, a space where love can only be possible given a blanket of lies, where fathers and daughters are unbound but aren’t free, and the freedom we seek isn’t about walls or limits, but about what we aren’t allowed to become given the past we cannot shake off, given the future that can only be uncertain.

and then we realize that maybe the point isn’t to forget, nor is it to be forgiven. the point is to live now, and know to look peace in the eye, and take it on, even when we have yet to think we deserve it. the universe has its own way of judging us worthy. and letting us free.

***

note number 1: Layang Bilanggo won the Cinema One Originals 2010 best picture and best screenplay, with its director winning best director and lead actor winning best actor. and yes, the redundancy is killing me. Miriam Quiambao deserves some praise for acting that was truthful, she seems to be over her learning curve. Pen Medina as lead actor here isn’t just the best, he outdoes himself too, requiring a whole lot of bad words that only the most admirable would know to be about being overwhelmed.

note number 2: the last day of the the Cinema One Originals 2010 film fest was on a non-working holiday (November 16), and the filled theaters for Third World Happy and Dagim were unexpected for someone like me who’s been watching in half-filled theaters for most of the festival. suffice it to say that i was happy for these indie movies, but sad that i didn’t get to watch both movies.

kultura

war and wonder in Tsardyer

it might be easy to dismiss Tsardyer a reenactment of the Ces Drilon hostage taking, except that you’d have to be stupid, and half-blind, to see only that in this movie. because if its connection to the Drilon hostage taking is to even be discussed, it must be seen only as a spoiler here, i.e., so now you know that there will be that in this wonderful movie by Sigfreid Barros-Sanchez.

but it isn’t what all of it is about. there is a journalist, Leslie, and her two companions. they are kidnapped in the middle of Maguindanao because the journalist was careless about getting a story, thinking that all they had to worry about was whether or not their cameras’ batteries were charged enough. the layers of this story though happen extraneous to these media people, and within the lives of people within the war torn land that is Sulu. here we are shown how families aren’t just torn apart by death and violence and disorder, but also by the fact of two extreme poles that exist within it: the Muslim who wants peace Ahmad (brilliantly played by Neil Ryan Sese) is up against his brother-in-law Karim (hauntingly played by Pipo Alfad) who heads an Abu Sayyaf splinter group that holds their area of Sulu captive. a little boy Shihab is what links these two, son to Ahmad and nephew to Karim, who finds that he is tied down by his father in a way that his uncle would free him: let him run through the jungles of Sulu, give him a role in the fight against government soldiers.

the soldiers that Shihab had seen kill his mother, the one soldier whose face he remembers is the face of the military officer who enters their house without permission or warrant. it is clear why Shihab would rather be on the side of his uncle Karim.

but he arrives there and finds himself in the face of a kindness that is unknown to him, that he lost when his mother was killed by the evil face of the military that has remained in his head. all that Shirab is required to do in the terrorist camp is to go down the mountain, run to the nearest home with electricity, and charge the cellphones — the lifeline of the hostages, the line to money of the hostage takers.

and then Tsardyer becomes the story of life and death, the dynamic between family and childhood, the familiar and the strange, making the possibility of death even more stark, the loss of life even more possible. the hostages are forced to reckon with their own carelessness, their lives at real risk, their need for freedom. Ahmad goes on a journey to recover his son, get him back as a matter of being father, as a matter of life. Karim is static, but remains the main reason for action, his demands make the world of the hostages’ families move, his phone calls the reason for hope. Shihab goes up and down the mountain for the task of charging the phones, thinking it crucial to his role on Karim’s camp, but later and slowly seeing it as reason for keeping Leslie alive. all these happen with music that changes and shifts depending on whose perspective we are seeing; all these are given life through music, one of the many reasons to watch this movie, one of the many reasons its storytelling succeeds. it has imagined the way it would sound if these characters had a soundtrack in their heads, the songs that would make for their particular journeys to be only their own, separate from everybody else.

but maybe the most wonderful song here is one that speaks of the change in Shihab’s relationship with Leslie. this is unspoken and silent throughout the movie, and just might be the most beautiful thing to come out of it. because elsewhere in it, we are shown how war gives space, if not creates, the crazies, be they from the terrorist group or the military. because elsewhere in it, we are given a sense of how women are necessarily on the losing end, in the face of two other men taken as hostages. because elsewhere in it, we begin to know of the tragedies in war that we rarely see, given the truth of violence and how it affects the psyche of the people within it. in the midst of these, Shihab’s actions allow for a fact of love and compassion for a woman who could be his mother, and who spoke to him as if he deserved the conversation, as if he was the most important person in that terrorist camp.

in the final scenes where the one who was happy with the existing notion(s) of peace, the violent terrorist, the crazy military all kill and are killed literally and/or figuratively, the realization is painfully clear: in wars like this one, where the money transfers hands between the two sides, there is no one who is free.

Tsardyer in fact tells us that everyone, including us who are farthest away from it, is held captive in a war. that war knows no age, no position in society, no space: when it happens elsewhere in this country, it is ours to stop. when it happens in our faces, it is ours to demand peace, right now. otherwise, Tsardyer reminds us, war just continues to senselessly kill. as it has all this time.