ENGL 148

NONFICTION
Losing My Religion
by Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.
I'm writing this on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, something I may entirely have forgotten if it weren't for all those cruciform smudges on people's foreheads at the mall, where I had my lunch.
It got me to remembering my grade school days in the early 60s, at La Salle Green Hills, back when EDSA was Highway 54 and there was nothing on Ortigas Avenue but that green-pillared house, the school, and dusty vastnesses of scrubgrass and adobe in between.
Back then, a day like this would have been suffused with prayer and incense, and with as much ceremonious contrition as giggly boys could be made to muster. Back then, at about the same hour today that I was strolling past some food stalls and trying to choose between spicy chicken wings and beef on a bed of noodles, we would have been at Mass, poking out our trembling tongues for a wafer of a host, our bellies grumbling for more substantial fodder after a whole morning of fasting.
That host was the driest thing you ever tasted. It felt as large as a saucer -this was way before it became all right to snap it into halves or quarters-and it stuck to your palate like a stamp, and you sucked on it slowly until it came apart, bit by crumbly bit, mindful not to chew on it. That, said the priest, would bring Christ's holy blood gushing out from between the molecules of the masticated starch, to dribble out of the sides of your guilty mouth and onto your crisp white shirt. I saw no blood in all those years of post-Eucharistic swallowing, so I guess we all believed him.
This was a school and a time when, at flag ceremony, you could stroll between the rows of gangly pre-teeners and fatting kids and spot the likes of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Diosdado Macapagal Jr., and Roberto Manglapus-whose fathers were all after the same high chair in Malacañang-and, chubby and quietish, Stephen Mark Whisenhunt. We didn't mind them too much, because flag ceremony ended with more pleasant diversions than wondering about what you and your schoolmate would become in thirty years-such as the Twofus, aka Ronnie Henares and Jojit Paredes, belting out "From a Window" (you know: " Late yesterday night, I saw a light shine from a window." ) from behind the flagpole.
I remember that, and the La Salle fight song-which, I would discover years later much to my chagrin, had been lifted from Notre Dame's-but it wasn't the secular clarities of the place that stayed with me so much as the mysteries of our devotions: Tantum Ergo, Salve Regina, No mas amor que el tuyo , the faceless priest, the incense filling the hall with the smell of holiness, the roses for the Virgin Mary, the Glorious Mysteries, the maddeningly inescapable ubiquity of Sin, and opportunities therefore.
We all had little booklets in which we dutifully and truthfully ("God is Everywhere") catalogued our trespasses, mortal and venial-a "Bad word" here, an "evil thought" there-so much the easier for confessions. Looking back on forgone pleasures, I wish I could say that I mostly sinned against myself and with myself, but that came a little later. Those days we were happy enough to pee, and the most heinous social offense you could commit was to pee-or worse-in your pants, for which the nurse at the clinic thoughtfully kept a pair of Kairuz khaki shorts handy. Such was life in that privileged pocket of easy colonialism and hard religion.
And now, more than three decades later, those two a.m.'s when I realize that I'm staring at my beer and wondering, not too remorsefully, about how I could've made such a fine and glorious mess of my life, I think about those days when sinning was a Big Thing and yet it wasn't.
A few days ago, a friend asked me pointblank over lunch at the cafeteria: "Are you an atheist?" No, I said, but I also said-in the way many people of my generation might have-that I didn't necessarily believe in the bushy-bearded Roman Catholic God but in a God, a Great Someone or Something or Other.
And I told her that I was repelled by institutionalized religion and any kind of fanaticism that presumes to know what God thinks. That's right: I'll respect what other people believe in-Jehovah, Baal or Ashtar, for all I know-but I won't be told that theirs is The Only Way to Paradise, as if they owned the franchise and the TV rights, besides. I can't stand people who pray to God to help them with this prize or help them be Miss or Mr. That. I'd hate to think that God would be stupid or small-minded enough to evaluate basketball games and players and pick a side to win.
I think that the whole notion of having presumably celibate men lay down the dos and don'ts of sex is downright silly-and, when we talk of a whole population policy, criminally irresponsible. And I haven't gone to confession (or "reconciliation," as I think it's been repackaged) in something like eleven years, because I don't see why it has to take another man to get the sordid truth out of me; and besides, if I'd kept a list of everything and confessed to everything, I'd be in there for a week, reading from a chronicle of infamy the size of a phonebook. I don't know what God thinks of that, but I think He knows I'm sorry; I've told him so, many times.
And no, none of this virulent anti-Vaticanism means that I've been reborn, or "renewed," into a more convenient variety of Christianity. I don't even know that I can call myself a Christian (I can hear my mother groaning and praying for my salvation). What I do know is that religion has become a very different thing to me from what it was at La Salle Green Hills (don't snicker, Ateneans; you probably had it worse): priestless, non-sacramental, more private even than sex.
So why am I writing about it? Because I suspect that there are many of you out there who feel the same way I do. And I can suspect, too, what my devouter friends will say to all this: it was the brush with Marxism, it was Sartre, it was the marriage, it was the money, it was all those Playboy magazines, he never knew religion to begin with.
Maybe so. But I'll tell you something. Some days, some very quiet days, I stroll into the chapel, sit in one of the back benches, and carry conversations with all kinds of absent parties-even with that boy kicking up pebbles on the Greenhills lawn-and sometimes I remember how good it felt to sing a full-throated hymn with a hundred other hungry voices. Maybe in my old age, if I get there, I just might do that again-once more, with feeling.
19 February 1994
Gay and Catholic
by J. Neil C. Garcia
The Holy Week served to remind us just how Catholic we are. Perhaps, more than any other place in the world, the Philippines celebrates Lent with remarkable piety and pomp: with rituals, processions, crucifixions, and self-flogging enough to make the foreigner drop his jaw in amazement, or shake his head in disbelief. These mark us off from the rest of the Christian world because they are outward displays of religiosity, at a time when quiet contemplation would seem to be the more desirable mode of devotion to take.
Our seemingly great obsession with images of glorious suffering is something Catholicism found most endearing about us. When the Spanish introduced their religion into our islands four-hundredsomething years ago, they hardly had to placate us. They taught us the story of Christ, the God-Man who came down from the heavens to suffer for our sake. And our ancestors understood. More than that, suffering was something they may have secretly desired on themselves, as such would make them like the white-man's God. The first native, Catholic prayers are in fact the lyric narratives detailing the passion and death of Christ: the pasyon . And the pasyon became so popular among the masses that when finally a few native men and women decided that they had had enough of their Spanish overlords, they borrowed the language of their rebellion from the pasyon . (And many of their rebellions failed-probably because in the end Christianity, being transcendental, can only yield defeatist texts.).
Holy week also got me thinking about just how Catholic I am. And this is not something I can help: my childhood, come to think of it, was filled with so much religious fervor that I can only echo it in my present life. Specifically, in my poetry.
My earliest poems were about the saints, Jesuses and Marys that crammed my waking-and even sleeping-days as a child in a very pious household. My maternal grandparents, who stayed with my family ever since I can remember, taught me to value my faith in palpable ways: to sing it, to recite it, to flaunt it. They collected a menagerie of religious images, with which I became slavishly fascinated. I was like a child stolen by these icons and somber-faced likenesses that peopled my world. When I learned to play with modeling clay, my first and last figurines were precisely miniaturized versions of the crucifix, the Virgin of Lourdes, the Nazareno and the Santo Niño. I was especially fixated on the Holy Child, and only recently did I realize that the reason for this was that I was actually identifying myself with the image of the Santo Niño who, like me, I fancied a sissy: he doesn't look boyish at all, what with those long lashes and golden locks, the pink-rouged cheeks and ruby-red lips! I wanted to be the like him was why I fashioned so many clay versions of him, using my sissy, nimble fingers.
When my grandmother died, three years after my lolo , I turned even more spiritual: youngest of the family's apo , I somehow ended up closest to them, and was their shameless favorite. And when they, three years apart, passed away, death touched me, much more deeply than it did my siblings and cousins: I wanted to die, too, to be with my grandparents who loved me. But early death eluded me, and so instead I became a sacristan , joined the choir, and thought myself bound for the priesthood. In hindsight, I only turned more and more religious because of my desire to avoid getting teased a bakla by the neighborhood's roughish boys, who never really managed to make me one of their own. And because by staying close to God I thought I might ever be close to my lolo and lola whose spirits-I was convinced-hovered over me and kept me happy and safe.
It must have been in high school when I finally decided that I was different from the boys of my childhood, who kicked and punched and roughhoused one another silly: like my new-found friends, I realized I was gay (and that I can never be a priest because I enjoyed my newly discovered sexuality too much!). This epiphany happened to us not because we turned one another gay, but because together we finally were able to put to rest our common doubts, and vowed to face up to the consequences of this realization. We excelled in school, suffice it to say. And this made us impervious to the attacks of our school's intolerant heterosexual majority, who got a kick out of bashing just any old gay they happened to bump into. We weren't that, to be sure: not being just any old gays, we gloried in our collective pride, and even bullied the boys who weren't half as bright or popular as we were.
But since my high school was a Catholic one, I never lost touch with my obligations as a believer either. If anything, our being exemplary meant that we had to lead our classmates to the path of holiness. And the strange thing is, we were doing that rather well: despite being avowedly gay (we had crushes who knew that we liked them-and I must believe that some of them liked us back), we were the perennial conduct awardees, and served as lector during mass, sang in the choir, etc. There was hardly any conflict between our sense of who we were (males who were sexually attracted to other males), and what our theology classes taught us we should be (anything but who we were, basically). I have often wondered just why this was so.
And I wonder, too, just how come other gays I came to know much later in life didn't seem to have enjoyed their adolescence as much as my friends and I did. It must be because they were alone, or felt like they were alone: I must admit our being a relatively big group gave us some measure of (imagined) power over the rest of the high school population. And when I think of it, being gay and alone must be the worst fate anybody can have in this life. To know one's demonic difference is hard enough, but being the only who knows about it makes it all the harder.
I have a feeling that I can be confidently gay and Catholic because the kind of Catholicism I grew up in wasn't dogmatic about anything: like the devout Church-going usurer (or corrupt politician) in our society, I can continue being myself at the same time that I profess my faith in all sincerity. (Of course, this analogy is false because being gay isn't like being a usurer or corrupt politician at all!) I look around me and see basically the same thing: the faith-healers and soothsayers hawking their wares in front of the Quiapo church, the blood-weeping image of the Virgin of Agoo, the dancing sun, the miraculous in almost every little thing. they are proof of our ability to make our faith follow our needs, perhaps because our needs, being always human, can only be of a piece with our spiritual nature. Or perhaps, because Catholicism was never really understood by us, we have been able to make it understand us for a change. And so, the native revolutionaries rose up in arms against the Spanish frailes and governador-generales , quoting passages from the pasyon , with pig-Latin inscriptions on pieces of paper plastered fervidly on their chests.
I end this column with a note on suffering. And how gay suffering can be perfectly heroic, in keeping with the spirit of the "passionate" times. This is a poem I wrote around four years back. It's a prose poem, actually, and in it I try to explain why Lent bears heavily down on its persona, who is out to get the ashen cross rubbed onto his forehead, but ends up getting weighed down by something else instead.
Ash Wednesday
There is a cross yearly staked in the mind and people, remembering their own graves, carry it in earnest. Their heads weighed down are stayed by thoughts of the Passion that is come: planks of wood propped up on a Skull; nails riveting hands and feet; of thorns, a crown; water and blood drawn forth by a spear which stoked septuple a mother's great, inflaming heart, etc. It is, of course the season of passion. The coolth is gone from mornings as people show their warmth by wearing more the body than its cloth. The Pontius Sun is let to pass sentence on skins bared impassioned to its cat-o'-nine rays. And this becomes their mortification.
I repent with them, then, this day: people on whose faces the season casts the cruciform shadow of consecrated ash, that brings to bear on me much more than my own mortal load. As I heft the cross of death upon my forehead I carry not just this body's burden of dust to dust, ashes to ashes; but agonying in the skimpy shorts and hanging shirts of boys crucified in earnest to their summer's passions, I fall the fourth time under the terrific weight of mine.
Gilda Cordero Fernando, Cantadora
by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo
I first read Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker by Gilda Cordero Fernando when I was a sophomore in college. And from that moment, I knew who it was that I wanted to write like. Her characters were different from the ones I had encountered in the stories of other Filipino writers in English. They were people I could identify with-sensitive little girls like Wendy in "Hunger" and the girl being mercilessly bullied by Socorro in "The Eye of the Needle," or bewildered adolescents like Tia Dolor's niece in "Hothouse" and Victoria in "People in the War," or lonely expatriate students like Noli and the heroine of "Sunburn". And her plots sometime skipped blithely out of the real world into the magical one of goblins living under a hillock in the shadow of a fire tree in a "wild neglected spot of the garden, planted once long ago and forgotten," and ancient gypsies living in "a little village tucked in the apron of a mountain" weaving silk the color of "the translucent amber of centuries-old Amontillado, the ephemeral glitter of green on the wingtips of dragonflies, the elusive wisp of smoke in the crater of a dying volcano."
There was a picture of the author on the back cover, and I remember thinking, "Oh Lord, she's pretty too!"
A year or so later, when I was writing for the youth page for the Manila Chronicle , my boss, Amante Paredes, sent me a review copy of A Wilderness of Sweets , Mrs. Fernando's second book. I read it in one sitting, and wrote my review of it that same night. I thought it was an even better collection that her first book. "People in the War," seemed to me now an early study for the title story in the second book, "A Wilderness of Sweets"-a harrowing tale of a young girl's experience of war, evoked with deceptive lyricism. "The Dust Monster" a wilder, more whimsical, more enchanting version of "The Level of Each Day's Need". And "Early inn our World" a more painful story than anything in the earlier volume.
Some years later, I received, to my great delight, a complimentary copy of Culinary Culture of the Philippines , with a little note from its author, saying that it was not for reviewing, but for me to enjoy.
In these days of glossy coffee table books and regular book launchings, it is difficult for young people to imagine what an event Culinary Culture was when it first came out. To begin with, National Bookstore had only two small branches, and they only carried textbooks. Alemar's, Bookmark and PECO sold textbooks and foreign books. Popular, Erewhon and La Solidaridad had "Filipiniana" sections, which consisted of a shelf at the back of the room, containing a handful of novels and short story collections, anthologies used as textbooks, and history books. With the exception of Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Kerima Polotan Tuvera's The Hand of the Enemy (which were Stonehill grant recipients), and Carmen Guerrero Nakpil's Woman Enough , all were paperbacks, printed on cheap paper. Bert Florentino had come out with "peso book" editions of the classics. And when National decided to come out with compilations of Nick Joaquin's magazine essays, it packaged them as cheap pocketbooks with komiks -type covers and movie-magazine titles.
The appearance in 1976 of the handsome Culinary Culture , priced at 140 pesos, was little short of a miracle. Evan more miraculous was the fact that it was a hit.
Ah, I thought, she's a wonder worker too.
I finally met Gilda Cordero Fernando at the launching of the first two Joaquin essay books at the new National on Harrison Plaza. There was a big turnout, because, according to Chato Garcellano, " Akala ng mga tao, ikakasal daw si Nick at si Nora Aunor ." I don't remember who introduced me to Mrs. Fernando. And in that crowd, it was impossible to say anything beyond "how nice to meet you at last".
We ran into each other intermittently after that-at other book launchings, at openings of art exhibits, at a plant fair in the U.P. campus. But she did not become my friend until later. By then, I had reread her stories many times, had given them to my daughters to read, had taught them to my students. My personal favorites were still "A Wilderness of Sweets" and "The Dust Monster," but I had come to appreciate the subtlety and sophistication of all the other stories-the ones set in middle-class suburbia as well as those set in Pugad Lawin and the village of broken-down "bus houses".
In her autobiography, Simone de Beauvoir recalls that she had always imagined Han Suyin as Jennifer Jones, the actress who had played the heroine of Love is a Many Splendored Thing . When she actually met the Chinese-Belgian writer, de Beauvoir was astonished to find that she was more beautiful than the actress. In my mind, Gilda Cordero-Fernando was the heroines of her stories. And then I got to know her, and to my astonishment, she was more fascinating than all of them combined..
The assignment to do her profile for another magazine a couple of years ago (it never saw print, as the magazine folded up in the way of such magazines), convinced me that I still hardly knew her. I dialed her number, frantic for an "interview". I needed to collect the data that usually went into that sort of story.
Gilda was amused, but she obliged, as usual. We set a date. She remembered that she had tickets for Anton Juan's Salome at the CCP, and invited me to come with her.
"We can have lunch first," she said. "I'll pick you up. I know a place you'll love." As usual, she made it sound like an adventure.
While I waited for her, I tried to recall how she looked. It wasn't that simple, because she's the sort of person who looks different each time one sees her. At Nestor Mata's recital, for instance, she wore a long rose-colored skirt and a blouse she had made herself from an old camisa appliquéd with flowers from another terno , and her long hair was held with a clasp and draped over one shoulder. When she came to speak to my undergraduate class at the U.P., she was wearing a denim shirtwaist, a choker she hSad fashioned from chandelier crystals and antique beads, and frizzy hair.
For our lunch that day, she was dressed in black slacks and a black t-shirt.
I tried to find the word that would best describe her special quality. Again, it was nothing as simple as beauty. Beauty, certainly, but also radiance, vibrance, grace, laughter, tears, passion.
The place she took me to was Cosa Nostra, a tiny establishment on Adriatico Street. Very cozy and very chic. Though I have never been particularly partial to Italian cuisine, I found the pizza pezzo and the spaghetti with its vegetable sauce irresistible.
It was difficult to concentrate on facts like dates and degrees and number of siblings. We kept getting sidetracked. Gilda's interests are multifarious. Between bites of the incredible pizza, we talked about dream analysis, about manghuhula , about aerobics, about women's secrets, about women running away, about mutual friends-Julie Lluch, Sylvia Mayuga, Doreen Fernandez.
She gave me glimpses into her childhood in Quiapo. The street was called Escaldo. It was a tiny street, but the procession of the Nazareno never failed to pass that way, because her neighbors, the Nakpils, were the biggest contributors to the Quiapo church. During the Occupation and part of Liberation, she lived in Malabon. And after that, the family moved to Malate-Ermita, "the burgis part of town". There she spent her growing-up years. "And then, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I got married and moved away," she says.
Her relationship with her mother was a troubled one, she explained. But with her father, a professor of Medicine at the U.P., it was ideal. "He was always there for my sister, Tess (Pardo), and me."
I recalled her saying to me one time that she could not imagine writing her autobiography. "It I so difficult for a Filipina, isn't it?" she said. "You can't let it all hang out. People will get hurt." But, in fact, she had written a very touching autobiographical piece called "Motherhood Statements" (included in the anthology Telling Lives ) about the connections between mothers and daughters. And she and Mariel Francisco have since published a book which is a kind of "joint autobiography".
This project-like all Gilda's projects-was, above all, original. Two women writing about different phases and passages of their individual lives, which are also phases and passages of other women's lives.
We got back on track somehow. What about her schooldays at St. Theresa's College? I asked.
"Oh, I was not a good student at all," she said. "I was never in the honor roll. So the nuns never made me editor-in-chief of the school paper until I was a senior. In my time, the editor had to be the valedictorian." Sometimes, however, the valedictorian couldn't write. Nor could the nun who served as moderator of the paper. So Gilda did all the work: wrote, edited, did the layouts too, and the presswork. "That's probably how the publisher in me was born," she smiled.
This leads to an aside on karma. According to Gilda, the people with whom we form exceptionally close ties in this life are reincarnations of people whose lives were also linked to ours in previous lives. "Troubled relationships should be worked out. Otherwise you are doomed to be involved with each other again and again." Today, her mother and she have managed to become friends. "So have my husband and I," she added with a wink.
We talked of other relationships in her life. " Marami namang lumigaw sa akin ," she admitted with disarming candor. "But that didn't help my insecurity. I had no self-esteem to speak of."
At 22, she married a lawyer, Marcelo Fernando, who was 23. "I chose him because he did not make me feel insecure," she said. "And because I loved him, of course," she added, smiling again. "But it was very important to me that my partner did not make me feel even less sure than I was. I could never have married one of those cocky, arrogant, high-powered young men."
It took her a long, long time to get over that insecurity, a long, long time to even determine what the problem was. "I was Flora and Reve, those characters in my stories. I felt ugly and useless. I felt everything I did was unimportant."
This, despite her writing, for which she kept winning prizes. "It surprised me that people liked my stories. I was very touched that Franz Arcellana thought me good, that he wanted to spend time teaching me."
I remember telling Gilda one time about a critical piece on her stories done by Thelma Arambulo, a colleague at the U.P. It astonished her that anyone was still studying her fiction. "Do the students today take any interest in those old stories?" she asked. "They must sound so old fashioned. They were the work of a very young person. I stopped writing fiction 35 years ago. I don't even read fiction anymore."
But she read the book I gave her, a collection of my own tales, about which I felt unsure, never having written anything like them before. And she said such warmly encouraging things about it that my heart glowed like a bright red apple.
And when she agreed to come to listen to my students' analyses of "A Wilderness of Sweets,'" she was tremendously pleased. "They are so bright, so insightful. They make me feel good about my work."
While her children were growing up, she was a full-time housewife, thought she was also always a "working woman". She did not like the role of "corporate wife". Husband Marcelo, was a fast-rising Meralco executive, and she had to socialize with the business and society people. It was a strain. "I didn't dress the way they did and couldn't talk about shopping and restaurants and the latest trips abroad. It was more fun to go dancing, which I did with my gay male friends, at the Coco Banana , since my husband didn't much care for it." This phase is reflected in some of her tales, including "Magnanimity."
When she decided to work, she decided to do it at home. "I would have wanted to work for a magazine, which was what most writers did, but it would have meant neglecting my home and my children." Besides, she was reluctant to enter a world she could not share with her husband.
Intermittently for six years, Gilda wrote the column, called "Tempest in a Teapot," first for the Chronicle , then for the Observer , and then for Veritas . This is another thing she was insecure about. "My style isn't right for magazine columns and essays. I'm not organized. I tend to ramble. I write as I speak. My fiction is different. I don't know why."
I told her that this was the reason I could not believe she meant it when she declared she would never write fiction again.
Gilda assured me that she was serious about this. But she had agreed to allow Anvil Publishing to publish a new combined edition of her two story collections, both of which had been out of print for a while. ( Note: the book, titled Story Collection was published in 1994. )
Besides writing magazine articles, she corrected students' written analyses of "cases" for the Asian Institute of Management. This was boring work, and spoiled her eyes forever. She knew nothing about business, but was hired because she had mastery over the language, and enough horse sense to understand the point despite students' circumlocutions. For her part, she took the job because it paid well and because, again, it enabled her to work at home.
Early in her marriage, she also manufactured and distributed diaper bags, having gotten the idea from a pretty baby diaper bag someone had given her as a present, and discovered that all diaper bags were imported. She decided it would be a simple matter to produce a local version. She didn't know how to sew, but there were seamstresses she could hire. She would design the bats, choose the materials herself, going all the way to Divisoria-"remnants," they were called, bits of this and that-and lug them back in a jeepney. It was a matter of pride not to take a cab. The cab fare would have eaten into her profits. She employed three modistas and one "wrapper; "and supplied Rustan's, Aguinaldo's, Everlast, Makati Supermart, Manila C.O.D. (malls were nonexistent). The idea was pirated by others and soon ceased to be profitable.
Like the bag business, the legendary GCF Books was run from her house, a sprawling one-story affair on Panay Avenue, practically hidden by trees and a profusion of plants.
When she first invited me over for lunch, her house struck me as exactly the sort of place I had imagined as her "space." As the famous houseboat must have seemed inevitably Anais Nin's, and Monk's House unmistakably Virginia Woolf's. The sunken living room, watched over by Julie Lluch's sculptures, the large Bob Feleo piece against one wall, the old opium bed, the open corridor, which is really a little wooden bridge over a small pool, the den with its book-lined wall, the lanai with a hammock hanging from a huge bougainvillea tree, the old German shepherd called Boris, sleeping on a little hill of smooth gray stones (gone now, unfortunately), under a 25-year-old tree whose name Gilda doesn't know, but which sprouts the loveliest feathery flowers, white and lavender.
It is one of the airiest, sunniest houses I have even been in. Everywhere you look, you see gardens. Two steps, and you are within touching distance of a fat, leafy, contented plant. It is the first house to be build by Lindy Locsin. "He who had just finished the U.P. Chapel."
The GCF books "office" was a narrow room, one of its walls consisting entirely of windows. Another wall was covered with shelves. A long dining table (where she served me a delightful brunch consisting of champurado and tuyo , and a variety of the freshest vegetables) occupied most of the floor space. A door opened into a smaller room, from which Gilda produced several blouses which she was in the process of putting together, combining material from the camisas of different old ternos in lovely, unexpected patterns. This was her new thing: clothes designing. The blouses were to be given to her daughters and daughters-in-law as Christmas gifts.
Though she declared firmly that her decision to get out of publishing big illustrated books was final, the nostalgia was unmistakable when she spoke of her other "babies," the books she produced, children not just of her brain, but of her heart and soul. She called them "identity books," her contribution to the Filipino's obsessive search.
That was in the early 70's, before courses on "popular culture" or "folk culture" were being taught, before degrees in Philippine Studies were being granted. Gilda had worked as Associate Editor on the Philippine Heritage series, which ran to 10 volumes. This is how she learned to make books. She had, for some time, been running a small shop located inside Solidaridad Galleries on Padre Faura (her first experience as a tindera , she says). When it closed, she opened another antique/folk art shop called Junque, on A. Mabini.
She wanted to recall things she was about to forget, but which she knew were important-things people had told her-stories, legends, descriptions of lifestyles, riddles, proverbs, recipes. She wanted to pass them on, with intelligence and sensitivity and charm.
She rummaged through rare books and old magazines, even enrolled in a couple of courses at the U.P. "I guess when you have a vision, you will find the right people to help make the dream, come true."
She wanted to produce books that would be both beautiful and intelligent, researched in a scholarly manner but written in a popular style. The measure of GCF Books' success is that it lasted 13 years, and produced 11 books, each one a gem. "Its time is past. Now everyone knows how to do an illustrated book. And Filipiniana is in -I think I had a small part in that. I gave up fiction for that. Fiction writing to me is really just self-indulgence, too much of an ego trip."
Couldn't it also be a reaching out? I asked.
"Maybe it is. But even when you do reach some readers, even when you do touch them, they are so few! Admit it, how many people read fiction in English?"
She wanted to reach more people to teach them things through books. "But first, I had to learn them myself."
We had long since finished lunch, and were about to be late for Anton's play. Gilda asked for the bill, and we dashed off to the CCP.
After the performance, which, we agreed, was as original as all Anton Juan productions are, Gilda told me she wanted to inquire about ballet lessons.
"For whom? I asked.
"For me, of course," she laughed. "I've been wanting to choreograph a ballet with a friend. But I lack the technical skill."
The people in the CCP's ballet office were unfazed by Gilda's being 63. Dancing had nothing to do with age, they said. This delighted Gilda, as it is a favorite theme of hers.
She had decided, at this point, that we were going back to her house for ice cream. "Actually," she said, as we headed for Panay Avenue, "age does make a difference. I like my present self now much better than my thirty-year-old self. I don't know why people are afraid of growing old. It's nice to be old."
Perhaps, I said, that's why she didn't look old.
"The best thing about being this age," Gilda said, "is that one finally feels free. Free to be and do everything one would have been and done if one hadn't been too scared when one was younger. These days, I can be absolutely outrageous.
I asked for an example of her outrageousness.
"I will give you an example of what I was like before, and you will see what I mean." One time, she said, she asked Erwin Castillo, the writer-artist, to paint a mural on her bathroom wall. He painted, with great verisimilitude, three naked figures: a woman with green hair standing between a brown macho -type man and a yellow poet sort of guy. She was too embarrassed to live with it, and too embarrassed to tell Erwin of her embarrassment. "Do you know what I did? I edited it! I actually erased their genitals with paint thinner. Naturally, it didn't solve anything. The mural still made me uncomfortable. It threatened and irritated my husband. And it offended Erwin. After all, I had defaced his artwork. Now, that's the sort of thing that would never happen to me now."
Over ice cream, Gilda talked about her present. One phase was over, the book-publishing phase. It was time to move on. She was not sure what the new phase would be. An art-curating phase perhaps; or a costurera phase, or a dancer phase. Not knowing is part of the excitement.
A few days later, I was back in Gilda's house again, to fill in the blanks in the profile.
Gilda was in the middle of a meeting over her latest book, the "joint autobiography" she had written with Mariel Francisco. Babeth Lolarga (the editor) and Manni Chaves (the art director) were there. Gilda made room for me at the worktable and insisted on serving me a late breakfast of pancakes, hotdogs, and scrambled eggs.
It was like old times. They were deciding about illustrations. The book was to be a pastiche of many enchanting elements. memories, dreams, drawings by a grandson, old photographs, cartoons, greeting cards, sundry memorabilia. It was still title-less. Gilda liked "Two Quezon City Housewives," but Mariel was dissatisfied with that. And, Manni added, Gilda's title sounded too much like Krip Yuson's Confessions of a Quezon City House Husband .
"What do you think of Two Old Women in Tennis Shoes?" Gilda asked me. I thought it was wonderful. So did Babeth. But Gilda said Mariel would never agree. ( The book, released in 1995, was finally titled Ladies' Lunch and Other Ways to Wholeness .)
Corazon Alvina, invaluable part of the old GCF Books team, dropped in, and was also plied with breakfast even if it was now past 11 a.m. Gilda asked if she had some memorabilia that could be photographed, "like dried leaves, for instance".
Conversation turned to the art exhibit which Gilda had been asked by the Metropolitan Museum and the French Embassy to curate, then jumped to the sudden death of Boris, the German shepherd. Babeth asked Gilda what her next book would be.
Fiction? I suggested hopefully.
"Maybe fiction for children," Gilda said. "We'll see."
In the gaps, I managed to ask Gilda the questions I had come to ask. Some of them were answered by Corazon, who has a sharper memory for some details, including details of Gilda's writing and publishing career.
My last question had to do with children and grandchildren.
There are four Fernando children. "Our best achievement, Marcelo's and mine," Gilda said, beaming, "what we have to show for our long, not always calm, life together-four bright, achieving, happy people."
Teodoro is a lawyer like his father, and is married to Lanelle Abueva, daughter of Dr. Jose Abueva; Manolo, an executive at MERALCO, and an accomplished chef, is married to Lilli Ann Dim; Patricia is an architect and is married to Roy Regalado, an engineer/contractor; and Marcelo Jr. works for Citibank and is married to Ernestine Villareal, abogada de campanilla . The latter couple is referred to by their mother as "our rich neighbors". The houses surrounding Marcelo's and Gilda's in the compound belong to Marcelo (Arcus) and Ernestine and to Manolo and Lilli Ann. Both (and the Bey-Lanelle house in Antipolo) were designed by Patricia and built by Roy. At the time of our interview, there were 7 grandchildren.
Unfortunately, none of them were around. And I knew that a third visit could not be squeezed in before my deadline.
Gilda walked me to my car, and we lingered under the trees a while, talking about this women-in-their-sixties group that she belongs to, who call themselves "Woman Plus". What they all have in common, Gilda said, is a refusal to stagnate. They have regular discussions on different topics. Another group she belongs to is called "Inner Work". A third group was just forming, called "Mama's Girls," consisting of women with problem mothers.
"No wonder you don't age!" I exclaimed. "You don't have the time!"
"The important thing is to be in touch with oneself, to peel off the useless layers, the disguises, to get to the inner core. Then one does not waste so much time and energy. This is what being happy means."
Suddenly she remembered a book she said I had to read, dashed back into the house, and returned before I could find my car keys. "Here. It's really Mariel's book. She lent it to me. But I'm a slow reader. You read it first."
The book-which had not yet found its way into the shelves of National-was Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, doctor of multi-cultural studies and clinical psychologist, artist, cantadora , singer of songs, teller of tales. (The book was later to become a bestseller.)
Gilda Cordero Fernando smiled at me.
I smiled back.
Since our interview, Gilda has published Ladies' Lunch and Other Ways to Wholeness , presented "Jamming on an Old Saya," a smash-hit fashion show featuring her own designs and creations, and contributed substantially to the success of Writers' Night-the writers' reunion and fundraiser held by the U.P. Creative Writing Center held in December every year-by donating several lovely items from her own collection, including the first two antique santos she had ever bought. She now has nine grandchildren.
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I Owe Y’All Two Pages
Creative Nonfiction by Cecille LaVerne dela Cruz | Sunday, June 21st, 2009
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning: should I wear my hood in class on the fifth of January or should I wear my hood in class on the fifth of January? It’s a tricky question, given that we live in a democratic society. By democracy, I mean being surrounded by people who are as free as you are they’d sing Itaktak Mo over and over until you’d feel odd enough you’d be moved to remove your hood. Scandal has two sides after all: baring your head below, and covering your head above.
I do not wish to move the world. Not that I won’t dare, but how could I disturb the universe given the size of my breasts and my booty? A few years back, a fiction teacher said I was a promising writer. By that I think he meant I have the great talent for putting off one article after another for the next day. My reason is a humble one: I write because I want to play god; so then I could pare my fingernails.
Writing is not easy. True. How could it be given that sitting too much could strain your back? Besides, we need to confront every day the hard facts of life: what price tomatoes? who killed the porkchops? and how different is a quickie from a full-bodied fornication? I have no answers. How could I? After all I’m a modern brained Homo Sapiens and like any, am bugged greatly by the futility of a modern Homo Sapiens’s effort to comprehend this world.
And so each day I wait for divine illumination. I have never seen one. That’s because I was raised a Protestant and the problem with being raised a Protestant is that we tend to smirk at Catholic miracles all the time. Take my mom, who does not believe in bloody Marys and levitating priests. Everything seemed to be working fine when, months before New Year’s Eve of 2000, she ciphered from Revelation that Christ was to come eve of the new millennium. Don’t ask me how, but by October she was hoarding boxes of matches, salt, rice, and gasoline. Came the last day of 1999, there was enough supply to last five people through an eternity of darkness.
Mom sat us around the dinner table and made us wait.
The clock struck twelve. Firecrackers were blown and fireworks lighted the sky. The clock struck one. No star fell— they should have fallen: to signal the descent of Christ.
Holy Christ, did he not come! Imagine then the disappointment of my mom who, without a doubt, stood next to God in the Great Chain of Being. How could God dare snob her and exchange her for the people who were in the lowest rung of the holy scale— my father’s mother, for example? My brother swore, though, that she had fallen asleep when Christ showed up by her window.
(What’s great about Mom is that she’s not bothered by modern questions at all. She was born in the middle ages, raised during the Reformation, and lives in the days of our Lord. And so help me God.)
See, I share with my mom my great disability to see divine revelations. What more could be tragic than this.
Raging at my disability, I pace back and forth the long schoolroom. Then realizing the absurdity of my walking back and forth, I feel relieved. The feeling of being absurd is a modern feeling, the sellable theme of the century. Read the latest chick flick. Those about female journalists bloating their asses and who’d trip so often they couldn’t tell an ass from a dimwit Hollywood producer.
Of course we have our own J. Zafra, who’s also fat and who wears weird specs so she could write six books about her fat and her weird specs. Very absurd, indeed. This thing called writing from the body.
Of course, we forgive them. After all, how could we dare forget their genius? J. Zafra, for instance, has long known how to make another of herself before the geneticists have cloned Dolly. Fact is, she has made three of her: Me, Myself, and I. All fat, all wearing weird specs, all self-generating into more sets of Me, Myself, and I.
Given the fat ladies before me, and the suicidal romantics before me, how could I write something new, something that would make Shakespeare wish he was born after me? We have indeed reached a literature of exhaustion. True. It’s not at all alarming until I remembered I need to stretch this piece into six pages and am having a hard time reaching four.
Alarming, but not a problem. What really ails me as a writer is that I should write in relation to all the dead writers of the past. How could I know them all when I’m even having a problem remembering the names of classmates in my essay class? Besides, who wants to talk to a guy who wrote the way he did in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or Sir Patrick Spence?
(No, that was not what he meant at all. That was not it, at all).
After the strolls and the sunsets and the sachets of Extra Joss, I see the divine light. Four decades and three years ago, a society called Vienna Circle killed the Author. So the living could write not only with a full consciousness of the present, but of the past.
(That was not it at all. Ain’t what it meant, at all).
And so I have come to a crossroad watching two trees in the low sky and the train zipper down its track. I am at ease here with alien people clutching their purses. Teacher, mother, suffer me not to mock myself while I wander through the wasteland of Quezon City.
—-
UP Min alumna Cecille Laverne is finishing her MA Creative Writing in UP Diliman.

ENGL 300

TECHNICAL WRITING

Definition:

Is a written communication about a scientific or technical subject to specific reader or group of readers for the purpose of giving certain information. It is also called scientific writing because it deals with a topic in any of the sciences.

Stages:

A. PRE-WRITING

a. Selection of Topic
1. interestedness of the topic
2. limitedness/limited breadth of the topic
3. relevance to the writer’s field or discipline
4. familiarity of the writer with the topic
5. availability of materials
b. Writing of tentative bibliography
c. Determination of the purpose, scope, audience, and point of view
d. Outlining/Organization of ideas
TOPIC OUTLINE, SENTENCE OUTLINE, PARAGRAPH OUTLINE
e. Collection of information
1. Reading
2. Experimenation
3. Observation
4. Interviewing
5. Conversation/Chat
6. Internet surfing
7. Conducting a survey

B. WRITING

After undertaking the preliminary steps, the technical writer engages himself in the writing stage. He writes the first draft of his composition. This draft is also called a rough draft because it still contains errors which are corrected to make the draft “smooth”. At this stage, he documents his work by means of bibliography and footnote or endnote entries.

C. COPY READING AND PROOFREADING



Characteristics:

Principles:
1. Always have in mind a specific reader, real or imaginary, when you are writing a report; and always assume that this reader is intelligent, but uniformed.
2. Before you start to write, always decide what the exact purpose of your report is; and make sure that every paragraph, every sentence, every word, makes a clear contribution to that purpose, and makes it at the right time.
3. Use language that is simple, concrete, and familiar.
4. At the beginning and end of every section of your report check your writing according to this principle: “First you tell your readers what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, and then you tell them what you’ve told them.”
5. Make your report attractive to look at.

Properties:

1. Accuracy-An effective technical paper is accurate. An accurate work is devoid of errors. Its every word is precise. Care must be exercised in the selection of words to be used in the paper.

2. Brevity-An effective paper is brief or short. Technical men, for example, businessmen and scientists, are busy people. They don’t have the time to read long papers. The shorter the paper, the better.

3. Coherence-Coherence refers to the sticking together of ideas. An effective writer has a way of putting ideas together to form a coherent whole. He achieves this by using transitional or pivotal words properly, avoiding dangling and squinting modifiers, and constructing coordination and subordination structures correctly.

4. Directness-Refrain from going around the bush or the so-called roundabout construction. He also avoids long-winded introductions. In writing paragraphs, he normally begins with a topic sentence, develops the main idea with supporting sentences, and ends with a concluding sentence.

5. Emphasis-To emphasize is to highlight main ideas and downplay subordinate ones. To achieve emphasis, an effective writer makes use of parallelism, position, proportion, repetition, variation, conciseness, and other means.

6. Factuality-The information that it contains is based on facts; therefore, is provable, testable, and credible. It is not a product of man’s imagination, speculation, or hallucination.

7. Grammaticality-It does not violate grammar rules or standards of correctness of structures in the language. A writer who observes concord rules or agreement between subject and verb, pronoun and antecedent, syntax rules.

8. Heaviness-Inasmuch as the subject matter of a technical paper is serious, that is, a scientific subject or a technical topic associated with the sciences, technical writing manifests heaviness.

9. Intelligibility-Even if a technical paper contains technical or scientific terms, it must be easily understood.

10. Judiciousness-A judicious writer always exercise good judgement. His ability to discriminate between fact and opinion, between truth and falsity, between relevance and irrelevance, between materiality and immateriality, between goodness and badness, between ethicality and unethicality, is always put to a test.

11. Keenness- It is a product of a smart writer who makes use of his intelligence to satisfy his readers.

12. Logicality-It conformes with the principles of logic, the science of correct thinking and reasoning. It does not take a logician to show correct spatial, temporal, causal, genus-species, and other relationships of words and ideas.

13. Mechanical Correctness-It conforms with the various rules of mechanics. Mechanics involves the use of punctuation marks, spelling, spacing, indention, capitalization, italicization, margining, alignment, the use of numbers in figures and words, and the like.

14. Neutrality-It is not biased; it does not favor only one side. It is not partial; it takes into account all aspects or facets of the thing under consideration.

15. Order-The ideas are sequenced in such a way that they flow smoothly. An effective technical writer make use of an outline to organize his thoughts properly.

16. Personality-It is a reflection of the kind of person the writer is. A well-written work is an index of a writer who is careful and responsible.

17. Quality-A paper which lives up to standards and possesses only all the positive traits any technical writing must have is a paper of good quality.

18. Reader-friendliness-It is adopted to the readers’ needs, interests, and knowledge.

19. Specificity-Unlike literary writing, technical writing is written by a specific writer to a specific reader for a specific purpose. For instance, a sales letter is written by a sales manager to a prospective buyer or buyers for the purpose of promoting the product of the company and boosting its sales.

20. Thoroughness-It is a complete work, be it a letter, book, report, journal, article, or another form. It must be thoroughly done; it must not miss out anything that is essential or salient to its being.

21. Unity-Unity means consistency in purpose, idea, subject, voice, mood, number, person, gender, language, etc. A violaton of theses unities produces a disunified paper.

22. Veracity-It contains no lies and presents information coming from reliable sources. An honest writer does not plagaiarize. When the he borrows the words and ideas of other people, he give credit to them by quoting them.
23. Worth-It is valuable to its reader of group ofreders because it satisfies the reders’ need for information. Besides, it serves other purposes. For example, a contact renders the agreement between or among parties binding or an instructional manual helpds the reader use the equipment optimally.

24. X-Factor-X-factor stands for an unknown factor, that factor which makes a paper unique or distinct from other papers to the extent that it stands out.

25. Yuppiness-The term yuppy came from the acronym YUP which stands for “young urban professional”. It possesses the qualities of a young urban professional in the sense that it is characterized by newness or freshness, modernity, and professionalism.

26. Zeal-An eager or enthusiastic writer produces a paper with zeal.

Style:
Making Sentences Say What You Mean (p. 37, Walter)—




To be discussed on the board!

Mi Ultimo Adios

Mi último adiós

¡Adiós, Patria adorada, región del sol querida,
Perla del mar de oriente, nuestro perdido Edén!
A darte voy alegre la triste mustia vida,
Y fuera más brillante, más fresca, más florida,
También por ti la diera, la diera por tu bien.

En campos de batalla, luchando con delirio,
Otros te dan sus vidas sin dudas, sin pesar;
El sitio nada importa, ciprés, laurel o lirio,
Cadalso o campo abierto, combate o cruel martirio,
Lo mismo es si lo piden la patria y el hogar.

Yo muero cuando veo que el cielo se colora
Y al fin anuncia el día tras lóbrego capuz;
si grana necesitas para teñir tu aurora,
Vierte la sangre mía, derrámala en buen hora
Y dórela un reflejo de su naciente luz.

Mis sueños cuando apenas muchacho adolescente,
Mis sueños cuando joven ya lleno de vigor,
Fueron el verte un día, joya del mar de oriente,
Secos los negros ojos, alta la tersa frente,
Sin ceño, sin arrugas, sin manchas de rubor

Ensueño de mi vida, mi ardiente vivo anhelo,
¡Salud te grita el alma que pronto va a partir!
¡Salud! Ah, que es hermoso caer por darte vuelo,
Morir por darte vida, morir bajo tu cielo,
Y en tu encantada tierra la eternidad dormir.

Si sobre mi sepulcro vieres brotar un día
Entre la espesa yerba sencilla, humilde flor,
Acércala a tus labios y besa al alma mía,
Y sienta yo en mi frente bajo la tumba fría,
De tu ternura el soplo, de tu hálito el calor.

Deja a la luna verme con luz tranquila y suave,
Deja que el alba envíe su resplandor fugaz,
Deja gemir al viento con su murmullo grave,
Y si desciende y posa sobre mi cruz un ave,
Deja que el ave entone su cántico de paz.

Deja que el sol, ardiendo, las lluvias evapore
Y al cielo tornen puras, con mi clamor en pos;
Deja que un ser amigo mi fin temprano llore
Y en las serenas tardes cuando por mí alguien ore,
¡Ora también, oh Patria, por mi descanso a Dios!

Ora por todos cuantos murieron sin ventura,
Por cuantos padecieron tormentos sin igual,
Por nuestras pobres madres que gimen su amargura;
Por huérfanos y viudas, por presos en tortura
Y ora por ti que veas tu redención final.

Y cuando en noche oscura se envuelva el cementerio
Y solos sólo muertos queden velando allí,
No turbes su reposo, no turbes el misterio,
Tal vez acordes oigas de cítara o salterio,
Soy yo, querida Patria, yo que te canto a ti.

Y cuando ya mi tumba de todos olvidada
No tenga cruz ni piedra que marquen su lugar,
Deja que la are el hombre, la esparza con la azada,
Y mis cenizas, antes que vuelvan a la nada,
El polvo de tu alfombra que vayan a formar.

Entonces nada importa me pongas en olvido.
Tu atmósfera, tu espacio, tus valles cruzaré.
Vibrante y limpia nota seré para tu oído,
Aroma, luz, colores, rumor, canto, gemido,
Constante repitiendo la esencia de mi fe.

Mi patria idolatrada, dolor de mis dolores,
Querida Filipinas, oye el postrer adiós.
Ahí te dejo todo, mis padres, mis amores.
Voy donde no hay esclavos, verdugos ni opresores,
Donde la fe no mata, donde el que reina es Dios.

Adiós, padres y hermanos, trozos del alma mía,
Amigos de la infancia en el perdido hogar,
Dad gracias que descanso del fatigoso día;
Adiós, dulce extranjera, mi amiga, mi alegría,
Adiós, queridos seres, morir es descansar.


José Rizal, 1896