By ELIZABETH LOLARGA

SCHOLAR Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, a fictionist and essayist in her own right, describes the state of literary biography in the Philippines in her latest book “Six Sketches of Filipino Women Writers”  as “a wide, arid stretch, with a few patches of grass, and perhaps a tree or two.”

She seeks to rectify the situation in her portraits of six contemporary writers; she prefers the words “sketches” or “cameos” for their fragmentary nature to qualify that what she has written is not a full-length biography.

Hidalgo points out why there is a dearth of information on writers—the academe prioritizes literary theory over literary history in training writing majors. This she considers “a pity” because “beginning writers …should be familiar with the entire landscape before they can stake their own claim to one portion of it, or venture beyond its borders into fields unknown.”

Merlin Alunan, Sylvia Mayuga, Marra Lanot, Barbara Gonzalez, Elsa Martinez Coscoluella and Rosario Cruz Lucero are not only united by their being female but also by being post-war babies who were raised in the stable 1950s. They saw the rise of student rebellion in the 1960s, lived through martial law in the 1970s and throughout all these, have continued to write actively.

She acknowledges past volumes that have attempted to record the lives of the country’s literary ancestors through the research and writing done by the late Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre, by Edna Zapanta Manlapaz’s biographies of Angela Manalang Gloria, Estrella Alfon and Lina Espina Moore, by Manlapaz and Marjorie Evasco’s oral history of poets Manalang Gloria, Trinidad Tarrosa Subido, Edith Tiempo, Virginia Moreno, Ophelia Dimalanta and Tita Lacambra Ayala.

In the last few years, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Gilda Cordero Fernando have come up with their own autobiographies by way of setting records straight.

Hidalgo agrees with feminist biographer Linda Wagner-Martin that her subjects must be involved in the biography so readers can appreciate their lives in their full context.

Apart from communicating with her subjects through the technological convenience provided by e-mail, Hidalgo puts them at ease. The telling of their stories has the intimacy of two women friends, who haven’t seen one another in years, catching up over a cup of coffee and slices of cake, and lingering way past the café’s business hours.

Like the author, half of the subjects (Alunan, Coscoluella and Lucero, and for a time, Lanot) have found refuge in the academe to support their writing projects as they realize that despite the joy in creating poems, fiction and essays, Philippine society does not provide a stable economic support for this.

Lanot, in the blunt, to-the-point style that her poems are noted for, says, quoting family friend Nick Joaquin: “You don’t do hack writing, you write and try to write well all the time, whether the pay is high or low or nil.”

Lanot offered piano lessons to young neighbors when her husband Pete Lacaba was in the underground and later jailed on subversion charges. Lucero gave ballet lessons to aspiring young dancers who could be accommodated in the sala of a rented house to stretch the family budget. Mayuga was employed in print and broadcast media.

Gonzalez rose to become one of the country’s few women advertising executives when a marriage failed. She continues to paint and craft handmade jewelry to sell at weekend markets.

Although she married into a hacendero’s family in Negros Occidental, Coscoluella went on to write and submit an epic poem or a full-length drama to national literary contests and win. She served as a vice president of the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod. Her duties included running the university press apart from expanding the Institute of Culinary Arts, managing a master’s program for police officers, among other things, making her recent retirement not fully realized yet.

Wifehood and motherhood are not romanticized, although that would be how machos would portray them—the be-all and end-all of a woman’s existence.

Alunan wrote of the exhaustion and frustration she felt as a young mom: “Your brain will turn into putty if you go on this way, you can’t be doing this all your life, how long can you put up with this…The watching half of me complains and scolds, angry and resentful for the time and space it had lost to this selfish demanding little beast that all infants are, jealous and envious of all the attention it takes for granted as an inviolable right…”

Throughout their narratives, these women did astonishing balancing acts: they bore and raised children, held down regular jobs, struggled with difficult partners and wrote for expression and for the freedom it gives in circumstances far from what Virginia Woolf required that a woman who wishes to write should have a room of her own.

Because of these writers’ efforts and the critical recognition they’ve received, they have cleared a path for younger sisters who dream of making writing not just a worthy hobby but a lifelong occupation and a commitment.

“Six Sketches of Filipino Women Writers”  is published by the University of the Philippines Press, 2011.

By ELIZABETH LOLARGA

WHILE a bloody encounter was playing out on a field in Basilan, journalist Cathy Babao Guballa was in the midst of preparing what Lorna Kalaw Tirol, a veteran editor, calls a “landmark book.”

On the eve of its launch, she was returning home from work when she saw the C-130 “bearing the bodies of 19 brave, young men who died fighting for what they believed in” land on Villamor Air Base.

She said at the book launch: “I think …of all their 19 mothers who now find themselves on the threshold of this journey that I and the 18 other mothers in this book began at different points in our lives. I hope that in some way, someday, this book will find their way to them, and that they find the comfort and hope in our struggles, as they begin to start their own difficult journeys.”

The 208-page book Between Loss and Forever (Anvil Publishing, Inc.) took the author 13 years to complete after her four-year-old son Migi died from complications of a heart surgery.

The title is drawn from the poignant question he asked of his mother as he was wheeled into the operating room: “Will you be with me forever?”

Guballa kept that promise by becoming active in the fields of children’s health advocacy, grief education and counseling and an emerging field called thanatology (or “the study of death and dying, especially in their psychological and social aspects”).

After Migi’s death, she discovered that “there was no local literature available specific to the study of the grief experience in relation to the loss of a child…no local journal article that specifically centers on the Filipino bereaved mother’s experience of grief over time.”

The research and interview that went into the book — as part her M.A. requirements  in family psychology and education at the Ateneo University, involved getting the confidence of 18 mothers who lost their children under different circumstances: illness, accidental and traumatic deaths, and suicide.

These valiant 18, who described in painful, minute details from the time they received the news or even witnessed a beloved child’s death to the long time it took for them to climb out of the chaos of shock, disbelief, anger and other dark emotions to a semblance of what a few called the “new normal,” are Beth Adan, Thelma Arceo, Raciel Carlos, Alice Honasan, Isabel Lovina, Fe Montano, Mano Morales, Noemi Dado, Chiqui Mathay, Monique Eugenio, Aileen Jiao, Jo Ann Larrazabal, Alma Miclat, Vivian de la Peña, Trixie Cruz, Lissa Moran, Bai de los Reyes and Baby Tiaoqui.

Guballa wrote how mothers, with the special bond they form with their children as early as when they realize they are pregnant, are “shaken to the core” because “the death of a child goes against the natural order of the universe.”

What aggravates the sorrow is “the very nature and manner by which it usually takes place–sudden, dramatic, unexpected, and untimely.”

Jesuit Manoling Francisco, who contributed pointers on coping, paraphrased the poet Ovid, that “parents ought not to outlive their children. Parents ought not to bury their offspring.”

What happens when the order of the universe is upset is, in Arceo’s words, “Your grief never leaves you. It never ends. You just learn to manage it.” (Her collegiate son Ferdie was shot and killed sometime in the martial-law years.)

After a period of what some mothers called a zombie-like existence, reason and compassion win out. They move on admirably, reaching out to the community in creative and healing ways to keep “the bond and the memory of the loved one alive.”

Dado learned to blog to share how she recovered. Moran, Cruz, Eugenio and Jiao put together memory scrapbooks. Miclat founded the Maningning Miclat Art Foundation that recognizes outstanding poets and painters. Honasan went to graduate school and resumed teaching apart from learning to forgive the young fraternity boys who killed her son in an initiation rite. Arceo was at the forefront of an anti-fascist group, Mothers and Relatives Against Tyranny.

Other parents put up scholarships in their children’s name or support groups like The Compassionate Friends. There are the exceptions—marital ties that unraveled under the weight of a family tragedy.

Miclat’s wake-up call came when younger daughter Banaue cried, “I wish I was the one who died and not your favorite daughter!”

The outburst made her “realize the complexities of life and the need to rise above one’s affliction and embrace others.”

Between Loss and Forever is not serene reading on a quiet Sunday. But walking the journey with Guballa and the other mothers through their vale of tears can lead, for those with deep faith, into seeing that there is life and joy after the storm of mourning.

THE Diliman Book Club, which meets every Saturday at the ROC Restaurant at UP Balay ng Alumni at the Quezon City campus, usually discusses social sciences and politics with the author of the moment.

These meetings start mid-afternoon, but stretch way past the restaurant’s closing time because the members are an argumentative lot.

The discussion over Mario Miclat’s controversial historical novel Secrets of the 18 Mansions (Anvil Publishing Inc.) was no exception.

Henson Laurel, a retired philosophy teacher and club organizer, gave the book’s précis for those who hadn’t cracked open a copy yet: It is the author’s experience with the communists from the time the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was re-established to the time he and wife Alma left for China.

He described Miclat as one of the writers of the party paper Ang Bayan. He was also a part of its translation bureau and educational department.

The novel chronicles the stay of the CPP group that was sent on exile to China.

Laurel explained: “Jose Ma. Sison wanted to ensure that the CPP leadership would continue by having a Party group on permanent exile in China. That way, if officers and others in the Philippines were either arrested or killed, the survivors in China would take over.”

Miclat denied criticism that the writing of his novel was a way of pagbubuhat ng sariling bangko (a Filipino expression that literally means “carrying one’s one bench” or “tooting one’s own horn”).

He said he wrote the novel “from my heart based on the real stories of real people, not people in the abstract, not caricatures of courageous peasants and oppressive landlords. It is the story of individuals who define a generation. It shows the dissonance between revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice.”

He continued: “If personal safety was my consideration, I wouldn’t have written the book or have it published. I wrote it for love of the masses, for the nation and the truth.”

Miclat consciously came from a long tradition of Asian authors who depicted a parallelism between real-life events and the authors’ lives like Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged, Han Suyin’s A Many-splendored Thing and Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber.

He has in his gloaming years proceeded to enjoy his life since he has realized that it is short. He said. “This is life—it can be intimidation or a true concern.”

Miclat, who teaches at the UP Asian Center where he also serves as dean, saw it was the ripe time to write his novel after he joined then UP Chancellor Sergio Cao on an official trip to China a few years ago.

The younger Cao had asked him who Jaime Florcruz, Eric Baculinao and Chito Sto. Romana were. The three, former Filipino activists who also lived in exile in China until they decided to live and work there, had invited their group to dinner.

He described their life in China as “very privileged,” saying: “I thought we would be living in communes. Later, the authorities allowed me to live with my wife in the countryside but as guests of the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee. We lived in a compound made up of underground communist movements in other countries. As guests, we were free compared to the typical Chinese. Our toilet was huge—you can put a ping pong table in it and play comfortably.”

The novel has generated controversy and alienated Miclat from former comrades because he has been accused of giving a false portrayal of the CPP and Sison, who is disguised with the initials “A.G.”

Miclat said: “I just wanted to tell a story. I wasn’t disputing anybody. I don’t have personal enemies. I don’t tend to accuse people or talk badly about people. I described a situation, why it has reached a point because of so many factors.”

The novel took him six years to write because there were many historical asides and with history, he had to be “very factual by looking at the archives and the libraries. I reviewed a lot of incidents, going back to the picture of a boy who died at the Plaza Miranda bombing.”

Still, the novel is a “product of the author’s imagination, a story despite the research for facts,” he said.
The book club members agreed that a novel must stand on its own, but since the author was present, they could ask him what his intention was and if he succeeded.

Miclat said he tried to adhere to Plato’s statement on the classical “greater truth” by telling the truth in telling the story.

A YEAR ago today, Filipino journalists had pinned their hopes on newly elected President Benigno Aquino III to put a stop to the killing of media persons, which had risen to record levels under his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. But the journalism community was in for a disappointment.

In the year since Aquino took office, six journalists were murdered, added to the 60 or so killed under Arroyo’s watch. The rate of conviction of assassins and masterminds remains very low. Impunity persists. Journalism remains a dangerous profession.

This is the reason the indie movie “Deadline (The Reign of Impunity)” resonated, at least among the would-be journalists—students of mass communication from the University of the Philippines and other schools—who watched it at UP’s Cine Adarna Theater on June 28.

Directed by Joel Lamangan, written by Bonifacio Ilagan, and produced by Ariel Inton, the film tells the complicated story of journalists who face death writing about powerful people. It was inspired by the Ampatuan Massacre on Nov. 23, 2009, when the warlord Maguindanao clan killed 59 people in broad daylight, 32 of them media persons.

The movie follows a group of journalists as they encounter violence in the course of doing of their jobs. There’s the activist reporter Henry, the government mouthpiece Ross, and the aggressive TV reporter Greta, all of whom are based in the city. And then there’s another group of reporters, community journalists this time, who are based in the fictitious province of Abdul Rabb in Mindanao: the local editor James and his reporters, Azad and Claire.

All had, at one point or another, affixed their bylines to a story about the warlord governor of Abdul Rabb, Muntazir Ghazi (played by the actor Tirso Cruz III), who hates journalists and can’t stand them poking their noses into his affairs.  Ghazi responds the only way he knows how: through the barrel of a gun.

The film is rife with killings and dead bodies. Aside from the gunfire involving the main actors, the movie is also peppered with scenes of journalists being killed in different parts of the country, from Cagayan to Bicol to Pampanga, to drive home the point that too many journalists are dying.

But depicting the killings is not the same as explaining them, and here’s where the movie’s storyline falters. It shows death after death, but does not backtrack to describe the conditions that drive the masterminds to blind rage, enough to order the killing of journalists. The film does not venture beyond showing news articles about the governor’s corrupt practices or a radio commentator rant about illegal logging just before he gets shot inside the radio booth. In short, the journalists’ daily struggle to search for and uncover the truth, and then get it out to the public—the act that puts their lives on the line—is missing from the movie.

Producer Ariel Inton

The movie is titled “Deadline,” which to journalists is the hour at which they are supposed to turn in their reports for the day, the end of a pressure-packed cycle by which time they had run after stories and sources, gotten the facts and verified them (or tried to at least), and written everything up into something called a news story or a TV report.

But the kind of writing the journalists Henry (Luis Alandy) and Ross (TJ Trinidad) do in the movie is either to plagiarize (when Henry publishes as his own the story about the governor written by the Mindanao journalists), or to praise (when Ross writes a puff piece about the editor’s “client”).  Indeed, the protagonist-journalists in the film are portrayed as activists or have connections to rebel groups or were once part of them (could be partly explained by the fact that the film’s writer and director have activist backgrounds).

In real life, the majority are ordinary reporters who eke out a living churning out their own, sometimes flawed, accounts of actual events and issues day in, day out. Which is actually the sad part. Filipino journalists survive on salaries so low, doing something that can be so dangerous. Why they persist in doing it is something the movie fails to answer.

“Deadline” points the finger at Gloria Arroyo, but the connection is tenuous. There is reference to the rigging of the 2004 elections, and to an “FG” who orders a news blackout. The audience is left to its own devices to figure that out. And then there is Gloria herself in a cameo appearance, so to speak, and that is a high point in the movie.

Journalists planning to see “Deadline” should not expect a local version of the must-see movies about journalists facing up to the powerful—”All the President’s Men,” “The Insider,” “Good Night and Good Luck.” Neither should they expect a peek at the workings of the profession like in such films as “The Paper” or “Broadcast News.”

But Filipinos should nevertheless grab the chance to see “Deadline,” a valiant attempt to tackle a complex subject using an approach Filipinos understand: guns and violence. Filmed in 10 days on a budget of P5 million, “Deadline” features a number of actors who were persuaded to appear in it for token talent fees: aside from Cruz, Alandy and Trinidad, Ina Feleo, Lovie Poe, Allen Dizon and several character actors.

Together, the people involved in the movie managed to, at least for an hour-and-a-half, make viewers focus on the reality that the Philippines remains a dangerous place for journalists and remind them that, given the body count, the administration of former president Gloria Arroyo was the most hostile to the press.

By ELIZABETH LOLARGA

HOW does a pet lover grieve when a cat in his menagerie passes away?

It was the wrong question to ask of a pet lover like Victoria Rico Costina, author of the recently launched book Those Who Love Cats and a literature professor at the University of the Philippines Baguio.

Costina looked away, her eyes filling up with unshed tears, paused for a few minutes before slowly answering, “Someone once said that when cats die, the place to bury them is in your heart.”

She had taken leaves without pay and a sabbatical to attend to her manuscript, find the right artists to illustrate the cover (Czarina Calinawagan) and inside pages (Rishab and Costina’s husband Ruel).

She is not above declaring that her late cat Ziggy was her soul mate along with another cat, Chico. She has a “heart connection with them that is maybe stronger than what I feel for my husband,” she says with a laugh.

The book derives its title from a verse by poet Francis Scarfe: “Those who love cats which do not even purr, / Or which are thin and tired and very old, / Bend down to them in the street and stroke their fur / And rub their ears and smooth their breast, and hold / Their paws, and gaze into their eyes of gold.”

The professor in Costina cannot help but discourse on the flyleaf’s inscription, saying, “It refers to cat lovers who’re drawn to the scrawniest, dirtiest cat they can find on the streets, and yet they get to see the cat’s eyes of gold that are its quintessence.”

The book also carries a strange dedication. It’s normal for an author like Costina, an only daughter, to dedicate her first book to her mother Nenita, but a cat book to a dog named Hubert?

Costina explains that Hubert, a long-faced mixed-breed dog with a gash on his leg, was adopted by her family after it hung around their gate waiting for the scraps of her cats.

When Hubert became part of the family, the cats would sleep on him or lie on top of him. He was with them for 10 years until his death.

Costina  has divided her slim book into four parts: 1) personal essays of “a life spent on cats;” 2) profiles with matching pictures of special cats in her life, including those who have moved to cat heaven; 3) a review of assorted books of cats, including children’s books by Filipino authors and illustrators, May Sarton’s The Fur Person and Marge Piercy’s Sleeping with Cats (the last two being full-length creative non-fiction about the esteemed writers’ co-habiting with cats); and 4) “Basic Cat Care for the Filipino Home” where she persuasively argues for euthanasia for over-aged, incontinent or seriously ill cats who can no longer eat or drink.

She writes: “…(T)he humane thing to do is to have it put to sleep by your vet. This is a very difficult decision to make, but is likewise the more merciful option to prolonged suffering for your cat…Stay with your cat. Caress its coat, speak its name, your love and thankfulness, to the very last.”

To Those Who Love Cats is also a revelation of what a fine essayist Costina is. Our favorite of her essays is the first, “Three Homes in Baguio,” which follows the odyssey of her family in the small city of Baguio.

The first cats in the young Costina’s life were the ones inherited from a Spanish mestiza neighbor who used to feed the hungry child strawberry jam and butter sandwich to which she became addicted. She became a fixture outside the neighbor’s door, waiting for her sandwich ration.

When said neighbor had to leave, Costina writes, “Mrs. Ryan’s legacy was one of kindness to a little girl and a spread of cats.”

As she matured, Costina acquired the solitary habit of taking walks that took her to the boundary dividing Baguio and La Trinidad. She writes with such vividness, “A long line of cats followed me each time, lifting their paws in the tall grass. I would stop where the afternoon breeze was strongest, overlooking the hills much farther off. Then we would head back home, the cats taking their time, smelling the air.”

She narrates the under-handed schemes she has done to rescue mistreated cats that are tied, mishandled, underfed. She has already rescued one such cat under the nose of a police sub-station.

What Costina has done with her life and her book is to follow the instruction in the Book of Job which she quotes as saying: “Ask the beasts to teach you, the birds of the air to tell you. Who among them does not understand that behind all this is God’s hand?”



ONE hundred twelve years after the Philippines declared itself an independent state, questions on the width and breadth of Philippine territory are still a subject of intense debate.

The latest book of distinguished diplomat Rodolfo C. Severino, Where in the world is the Philippines?, tackles this issue comprehensively, tracing the confusion to the colonial days when the world was divided between two maritime powers, Spain and Portugal, up to the present with countries delineating their territorial boundaries guided by the “veritable constitution of the world’s seas”–the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Severino’s book shows that despite several revisions and laws related to territory, the most basic question on the area of Philippine jurisdiction remains ambiguous. As a result, he says, “Philippine law-enforcement agencies have not been sure of what to allow and what to prohibit where, particularly by way of sea passage, overflight, fishing activities, and environmental protection.”

He further says, “The protection of the resources in the purported Philippine EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) has been uncertain, inconsistent and ineffective. The Philippines has been unable to negotiate with neighbors on overlapping maritime jurisdictions on anything like a sound footing.”

He says these have consequences on people’s lives and communities such as “the integrity of the marine ecology, the ability to fish, the availability of energy resources, the capacity of the sea to sustain life in its many forms, the responsibility for search and rescue in case of maritime accidents, the safety and viability of coastal communities and so on.”

Severino, in his book, discusses the baseline law and two contentious subjects: the Sabah claim and the South China Sea. Although refraining from taking a stand on the Sabah issue, the arguments presented suggest the author’s bias toward dropping the Sabah claim.

Severino says, “The maintenance of the Philippine claim to parts of North Borneo remains a thorn in Philippine-Malaysian relations and hampers the operation of cooperative schemes involving Sabah, like the Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East ASEAN Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA), which ties together all of Brunei Darussalam, eastern Indonesia, East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak), and Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan.”

Since previous attempts to set up a consulate in Sabah were opposed because it had the effect of dropping the Sabah claim and, some legal minds say, violates  the Constitution, Severino says this prevents the Philippine government from adequately extending assistance to the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos there.

“It also withholds from the heirs of the Sultan of Sulu and/or the wider Sulu community whatever monetary compensation Malaysia offers in return for the withdrawal of the Philippine claim,” he adds.

Severino also believes “it is highly unlikely that the jurisdictional disputes in the South China Sea will be resolved anytime soon, if ever.”

The claimants, he says, consider the South China Sea as vital to their strategic interests. He explains: “Malaysia has to have some degree of control over the vast expanse of sea that separates–and connects–East and West Malaysia. Brunei Darussalam seeks to secure for itself jurisdiction over its exclusive economic zone and continental shelf, which cuts right across Malaysia’s claimed EEZ, and the right to exploit the resources in them.

“The Philippines would feel threatened from the west if it did not push out the frontiers of its jurisdiction to its claimed Kalayaan Island Group and Scarborough Shoal. China seeks control of the South China Sea in order to avoid being ‘contained,’ pressured or even attacked from the southeast, as it was in the past, and to increase Beijing’s influence on an important passageway for international trade…Vietnam would be hemmed in by Chinese power if it did not have a foothold on the South China Sea.”

Severino also says nonclaimants, including the United States, Japan and South Korea, have a deep interest in peace and stability in the region of the South China Sea and in freedom of navigation on and overflight over that body of water.

Severino’s straightforward style makes easy reading of the complex  territorial issue.

Former foreign secretary Roberto R. Romulo, chairman of the Carlos P. Romulo Foundation that co-published the book together with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, said in his remarks at the recent book launching: “Those of us who know something about Philippine history and public affairs, know only too well how issues, long buried in the past, can unleash debates that are endless and exhausting.”

He surmised that was really Severino’s intention in coming out with the book. “He means to waken public and national interest in an issue that has been consigned to the recesses of memory and the back-burners of government files,” Romulo said.

WITH upbeat tunes like “Feels So Good” and “What a Wonderful World” played at the launch of Margarita Go-Singco Holmes’ Down to 1: Depression Stories, a guest wondered aloud if the condition discussed in the book is being trivialized.

Perhaps, that is the program’s point: the beast called depression can be understood and licked. What comes after is a realization that life can be given another chance.

Holmes, a clinical psychologist who has been identified with bestsellers on Filipino sexuality, summed up the condition, with help from her colleagues at the University of the Philippines psychology department, in this spoofy song to the tune of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicion”:

“Every time I wake up, I wonder what my life is good for / Every time I wake up, I wonder why there isn’t more / Why should this be so painful to me, the ex life of the party / Starting to think ‘Oh, what’s the use?’ Am I really hopeless and what’s more, just crazy / Depression torments my heart / Depression tears me apart / Depression, what can I do?”

Karina Bolasco  of Anvil Publishing, the book’s publisher, said it took them 10 years  to put together  Down to 1 as they wanted to show that  far from being “a happy smiling, singing people,” many Filipinos suffer from clinical depression.

But, she added, these Filipinos are “conveniently dismissed as genetically crazy. Have you ever noticed how parents always try to trace the family origins of anybody a son or daughter is likely to marry? First, the place of origin to establish regional traits, then the family of origin, to make sure walang lahing sira-ulo (there is no history of insanity).”

The title refers to a depressed person’s severe feelings of aloneness, even of abandonment–that no friend, partner or any other being could possibly understand what he or she is going through. Three of the 10 storytellers in the book went onstage to describe depression as a “condition too painful to bring on the table.” It is one where one feels “faith vanishing in the desert” and “looking into the abyss and knowing you don’t want to go there.”

Called the FCD 10 (formerly or currently depressed), psychology professor Kay Añonuevo, bankers Roman Azanza and Jeremy Baer, film director Peque Gallaga, writers Alya Honasan and Babeth Lolarga, restaurateur Nina Poblador, TV director Lore Reyes, author Mike Santos and fashion designer Patis Tesoro openly and bravely reveal what it’s like to be, or to have been, depressed. Some detail their suicide attempts, their medication, what helped and what didn’t in getting them out of the condition that is beyond what Bolasco called “the blues that affect most people in the course of normal life.”

Holmes, who acknowledges suffering from the condition periodically, guides the timorous reader looking for help through a simple test. The score can be interpreted to find out if one is within the mild or severe clinical range of depression.

In her forthright manner, she demolishes commonly held beliefs and myths about suicide. To the quasi myth that “no one but God decides when your time is up ,” she writes, “This is claptrap because many don’t believe in God, even more don’t believe in a God that insists one suffers needlessly.”

Best is her definition of depression: a thief that “takes away your joy, sense of wonder, the taste of your favorite food, even the smell of freshly washed hair…Most painfully, depressions steal you away from yourself. For many, one of the worst things they fear is whether their real selves will ever come back.”

The FCD 10′s first-person tales of surviving depression resonate long after one has put down the book.  Añonuevo states with the force of truth: “While sadness is ordinary, not wanting to live isn’t!”

With admirable candor, the British Baer, Holmes’s husband, talks about the anti-depressant Prozac, how it reduced his libido (down to one from a high of making love 52 times a week) and how he and his doctor arrived at a combination of medications that is satisfactory to him.

Still on medication, Honasan musters her strength when she hears of people calling her “unstable” because she was on Prozac. She writes, “I don’t hang around them anymore. Experiences like this can teach you a lot about who you should keep in your life.”

Tesoro writes candidly about her addiction to Valium to control her rages and how she overcame it. “I got worse and worse, but when I wanted to throw that pair of scissors, not just to vent but hoping it might hit its mark, I stopped all my medication cold turkey.” Today, if she takes medication, she only has half a pill and has calmed herself through gardening and walking the land.

If anything, Down to 1 assures the suffering that they are not alone.

WHEN Manang Bolabola came out, there was a new doll in her secret room, with eyes the color of twilight that had been grazed by the twinkle of the first evening star.

Manang Bolabola is  a character  in Doll Eyes,  the award-winning story of Eline Santos,  now a book published  by the Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development (CANVAS), a nonprofit organization that promotes awareness for Philippine art and culture.

Doll Eyes takes place amid the colorful and bustling streets of Quiapo on the eve of the Feast of the Black Nazarene, the  spectacular religious event  held every 9th of January. Thousands of devotees join in the procession, desperately attempting to touch the  image of  “black” Jesus’ image. Many believe that even a towel that had rubbed the statue is imbued with  healing powers.

The protagonist in Doll Eyes is Tin, a street child who seeks to rescue her best friend Ella from the shop of a witch who turns children into dolls.

Manang Bolabola would sit outside her little shop, eyes half-closed, as if sleeping. But the truth was she saw, smelled and heard everything. She was watching and waiting for the right kind of material to make her dolls with.

Witches, soothsayers, manghuhula (fortune tellers) and mangkukulam (faith healers) are not rare in Quiapo. Just a few steps from the historic Plaza Miranda, where, in the past, political fortunes were made and lost, and Quiapo Church—home of the most venerated Black Nazarene statue—churchgoers can avail of horoscopes, palm readings, healing massages and tarot cards right after mass  from mystics asking for just small donations ranging from P50 to P500.

One can even avail of the services of professional prayers, people who pray for other people for a fee, who quietly do their business near the church entrance.

Quiapo is the heartland of Filipino superstition. Scapular and rosary sellers mingling with anting-anting (talismans) vendors and palm readers surround Quiapo Church. Filipinos and tourists alike flock to the sidestreets of Quiapo to quench either their beliefs or their curiosity. Some go there for miracles.

Not even the Catholic Church’s condemnation for the practices of fortune-telling and following “false” prophets, could stop Filipinos from purchasing talismans with Latin inscriptions—even during the Holy Week—to repel evil or bring good fortune.

Aside from the supernatural consultations available in the area, Quiapo offers other kinds of  services. Felix R. Hidalgo street, where a few remaining old colonial houses give a glimpse of a genteel past, is now a photographers’ haven, with shops offering all kinds of cameras and  photo accessories.

In Quiapo: Heart of Manila, Dr. Fernando N. Zialcita, head of the Bahay Nakpil-Bautista Foundation, says, “The heart of major cities abroad is not the shopping mall, not the gated communities but districts like Quiapo, where the rich, the middle class and the poor mix together, where your place of work is close to where you live, where the streets are lively throughout the day, and where there are beautiful historical landmarks.”

Quiapo is a labyrinth of stores that sells everything from the mundane—such as stolen cell phones and seventy-five-peso slippers—to the arcane .

And if you cannot find the store where you once bought a black chicken to make your son grow taller, it might be that the store decided to move—as mysterious stores are likely to do.

Quiapo is a place of ironies and contrast. Faith and fate mix at the doorstep of Quiapo church. The fading elegance of the houses on Hidalgo Street is captured for posterity by photographers. History, evoked by Plaza Miranda, blends  with  the current and constant, such as Filipino fixation with luck.

The Filipino attitude of “wala namang mawawala kung maniniwala” (“nothing to lose with believing”) plays a key role in our culture of accepting superstition in our daily lives.

Filipino superstition and religion can exist peacefully not only in Quiapo but in the general Filipino society because both belief systems can coexist by respecting each other. The mystical amulets and fortunes can provide people with comfort that perhaps they can even slightly influence their fates or perhaps be guided with some “suggestions.”

That was when Ella noticed that a few of the dolls shifted ever so slightly. She could feel her own fingers bend somewhat though she could not clench them, even in her fear and anger.

What happens when you are forgotten?

Then you are frozen forever. There is no chance of escape.

Like Quiapo, Doll Eyes offers charm, magic and a sense of danger.

Doll Eyes will be  launched in December with an exhibit by artist Joy Mallari of her interpretation of the book.

The 10th children’s book to be produced by the five-year old CANVAS,  Doll Eyes was the winner in the 2008 Romeo Forbes Children’s Book Storywriting  Competition.

The competition is in honor of Romeo Forbes, who had as his first and only one-man show, an interpretation of  Augie Rivera’s “Elias and his Trees” in 2005, organized by CANVAS.  Romeo  died of  cancer in  early 2006 at  24.

To honor his memory, CANVAS renamed its annual writing competition as The Romeo Forbes Children’s Story writing Competition.

By KHRYSTA IMPERIAL RARA

EVERYONE likes a thriller, especially one that is based on fact.

Watching the documentary film The Cove is like watching a James Bond movie, where the main characters resort to secret tactics and weapons to outwit the enemy. But unlike James Bond movies which are fiction, The Cove revolves around a gruesome fact: the yearly mass slaughter of dolphins in Japan.

The film documents the annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, the smallest town in Japan’s Wakayama prefecture. The Taiji people say whaling is their tradition; they do it for seven months every year, starting Sept. 1 and ending March the following year.

During this time, local fishermen herd migrating dolphins into the isolated cove in Taiji where they are netted and killed. It is called the drive hunting method.

The Cove documented that hunt, but did so in high-tech secrecy since neither the government nor townsfolk would allow outsiders to film it. And this is how The Cove becomes an extraordinary environmental thriller.

The Cove, which has won 46 international awards, was shown recently to an audience of 900 students, teachers, professionals and environmentalists at the University of the Philippines Film Institute in Diliman, Quezon City.

“What happened at the screening was overwhelming. The people were teary-eyed as they left the theater,” said Trixie Concepcion, regional director of the U.S.-based Earth Island Institute (EII), a nonprofit organization that campaigns to save the planet’s ecosystems.

“Majority of Filipinos don’t know that the Philippines imports dolphins from the hunt. When people see the film and are enlightened, they will want to stop going to dolphin shows in Subic and elsewhere and this will break the financial backbone of the hunt,” Concepcion said.

Carlos Borromeo, 21, a student at the UP College of Architecture, said the film did well in exposing the high-level mercury poisoning among the dolphins which makes dolphin meat toxic. “Most people are not aware of this scenario due to media coverups, even the people in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka are not aware, as mentioned in the movie,” he said.

Borromeo is president of UP Ibalon, an organization of Bicolano students founded 35 years ago in the country’s top state university. The group co-sponsored the screening of the movie with EII.

“I think the movie is a must-see film. It is a powerful documentary that exposes the incognito killing of dolphins in Taiji, Japan,” Borromeo added.

The Oscar-winning documentary is the first film of director Louie Psihoyos, a scuba diver, environmentalist, National Geographic photographer and co-founder of the eco-group Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS).

But it was dolphin crusader Ric O’Barry, EII’s marine mammal specialist, who convinced Psihoyos to take on the project. A former actor and trainer of the five bottlenose dolphins used in the hit 1960s TV series Flipper, O’Barry is better known now as an activist who goes around the world liberating dolphins in captivity.

The documentary

The documentary begins with the crew’s arrival in Taiji and its preparations for filming. Psihoyos then explains how he and his crew of experts in different fields filmed the slaughter in secrecy because the Japanese government had refused to give them permission for the project.

The Japanese police tailed the crew throughout their stay in Taiji, constantly interrogating them about their activities, especially O’Barry whom the authorities knew all too well.

A former U.S. Navyman, O’Barry became a dolphin trainer in the early 1960’s and spent 10 years of his life building the dolphin captivity industry and became very rich in the process.

It was only after his favourite dolphin, Cathy, died that he declared war on the industry he once profited from.

In The Cove, O’Barry called Cathy’s death a suicide because dolphins, unlike humans, are not automatic breathers. Breathing is a conscious and voluntary act for them. Like other cetaceans, they have to open their blow holes to let oxygen in. At that instant, Cathy swam to O’Barry and as he cradled her, she opened her blow hole one last time then died in his arms.

Psihoyos and his crew used high-tech equipment for the project, including a drone and a helicopter for filming from the air.

Hidden cameras allowed the viewers to watch and listen to O’Barry’s conversations with the authorities. A thermal camera documented the team’s movements as they went about setting up the hydrophones and the specially designed rocks that camouflaged the cameras on the cliff overlooking the cove.

Access to the cove was impossible during the day. Barbed wire fenced off the area, which is a national park, and police were on constant patrol. All their attempts to film were physically blocked and mocked by the local fishermen. So they resorted to covert tactics—they studied the schedule and the plate numbers of the cars that tailed them and sneaked into the forbidden terrain at night.

Dolphin slaughter

Dolphins are acoustic creatures and Taiji fishermen create deafening noise by banging on tubes underwater to disorient them. The fishermen then choose the young females for oceanariums which pay as much as $150,000 for each animal used in their dolphin shows.

Those that are not chosen are then speared and stabbed to death. The dolphins suffer because they do not die instantly. The Cove films them all bloodied, yet leaping into the air while gasping for breath and trying to swim away.

In one heartwrenching moment, the camera captures a bloodied dolphin that managed to break away from the group. The dolphin is fatally wounded and obviously panic-stricken. It seems to be heading toward the film crew, then dies before he reaches shore. The camera catches its last few breaths before it sinks to the bottom of the sea.

Taiji authorities and fisherfolk claim they supply dolphin meat to the rest of Japan. But the film crew did man-on-the-street interviews in Tokyo and other urban areas where pedestrians were unaware and surprised to hear of the dolphin slaughters in Taiji. Many claimed they didn’t even eat dolphin meat.

The OPS team also had some of the dolphin meat tested. Results showed high levels of mercury contamination.

Japanese reaction

In Japan, ultraright wing groups mounted protests and tried to prevent moviegoers from entering theaters.

Last week, O’Barry formally handed to the U.S. Embassy in Japan two weeks ago some 1.7 million signatures from people of 155 nations calling for an end to the dolphin slaughter.

In a recent emailed message to Concepcion, O’Barry wrote: “We have turned up the heat in Japan and turned another corner in getting positive media coverage, thwarting Japan Fisheries Agency efforts to paint us as imperialists and outsiders just bashing Japanese people.”

“We have reports from all over the world that the Japanese embassies and consulate offices are being bombarded with messages to stop the dolphin slaughter,” he said in his letter to Concepcion. “If enough people around the world learn about this barbaric and anachronistic dolphin slaughter, they might take action.”

Film Title: The COVE
Genre: Documentary
Running Time: 91 minutes
Directed by Louie Psihoyos
Written by Mark Monroe
Produced by Tisher Stevens, Paula DuPre Pesmen
Awards won: 46 international film awards including Best Documentary Film at the 82nd Academy Awards in March 2010, the U.S. Audience Award at the 25th annual Sundance Film Festival in January 2009 and Best Documentary Feature at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards in December 2009.

FILIPINOS are generally known to have an aversion to reading, and educators often despair at how difficult it is to make students appreciate the printed word. Given a choice between books and films, most Filipinos would opt for the moving image rather than text.

Filmmaker and teacher Nick de Ocampo offers a solution: Why not make students learn from the best Filipino movies?

That is exactly what he hopes will result from his new book, SineGabay: A Film Study Guide. A listing of 100 of the best Filipino movies, the book helps teachers and students “read” films, decode the messages they contain, and learn lessons to supplement what they learn —or fail to—from books.

SineGabay literally offers the gamut of Pinoy movies from A to Z. It starts with the very apt 2001 film “Abakada Ina” starring Lorna Tolentino as the illiterate mother who becomes obsessed with educating herself after realizing how the lack of education has caused her and her family a multitude of problems. The book ends with “Zamboanga,” a film made in 1937 starring Fernando Poe Sr. and Rosa del Rosario, and discusses the travails of a young Muslim couple in love and overcoming the odds.

The book catalogs each film and provides basic information: the year of production, producers, length, cast, synopsis. It then offers areas of study to which the film can be useful. In “Abakada Ina,” the recommended areas of study are children and young people, education, family, values education, women. For “Zamboanga,” a film produced during the American occupation of the Philippines, de Ocampo suggests colonialism/neo-colonialism, Filipino-American relation, Muslim life and faith as areas of study.

De Ocampo then lists objectives for studying the film, and guide questions corresponding to the areas of study. He also points out each film’s cinematic focus, as well as whom to contact to obtain a copy of the film.

Such a structured study of film aims to provide students with what de Ocampo calls film literacy, which he defines as “the act of acquiring knowledge and values through the use of movies.” In this context, literacy means enabling a person “to ‘read’ audiovisual symbols,” going beyond understanding the film to adopting “a more comprehensive regard of media in their contents, form and functions.” “To be film literate,” de Ocampo says, “is to be able to use media for personal or social development rather than to be merely used or manipulated by media.”

De Ocampo offers guideposts in analyzing the elements of a film—the shot, cut and movement, aside from the usual ingredients of story and character, design, editing, sound and music. Aside from these, he urges students and teachers to be informed about the film’s context, which includes studying its significance as well as the social and political situation during the period in which it was produced.

SineGabay’s listing contains not just feature films produced by the film studios but also documentaries as well as the recent crop of “indie” or independently produced movies. De Ocampo included documentaries such as “Bunso” and “Minsan Lang Sila Bata” directed by Ditsi Carolino, and a 2007 Cinemalaya entry “Endo” directed by Jade Francis Castro.

In the end, what the book really espouses is critical thinking on the part of an audience whose love for movies often dulls them into blindly accepting what they see and hear. National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera has this to say about SineGabay in the foreword: “SineGabay is a guidepost for historians, critics and filmmakers. Its listing of Filipino films available for viewing make it an excellent introduction to the study of the forms and concerns of Filipino film production. Film criticism classes can profit from the catalogue which lists a wide variety of feature productions on which young critics can hone their critical tools.”