Beauty

by Roger B Rueda

Most Filipinos esteem beauty as it makes life more charming and fair and diverting. We are in awe of beauty in whatever we do and see. Our mind's eye is keen on beauty as perhaps it is highly enchanting and eye-catching. We are intensely eager, indeed avid, for beauty. Unmistakeably, we have generated beauty pageant machinery as every culture upholds beauty. Miss Dinagyang or Miss Sinulog or Masscara Queen or our Miss Barangay stands an example for this. Hence, this year Miss World and Miss International have been won by the Philippines. Our country has become a marque of beauty all throughout beauty pageants in the world. It’d be incongruous for the Philippines not to be on the top 10 list as Filipino beauty queens are distinctively graceful and jauntily confident and know their own mind.

The beauty pageant has become a way of life to many of us as we weave it into our life as we celebrate the beauty of life in the midst of our struggles. It gives our people individuality and style, helping them boost their morale and their true selves and implicitly raise the value of life in every way we think to be beautiful.

As a country of cataclysms and misfortunes, the Philippines has to be irrepressible and dynamic, making beauty as a means to deflect itself from the ordeal and pessimism and defeatism. It has to use beauty to overcome the dreariness of life and the desolation of its people. It has to exploit beauty to keep its difficulties and predicaments forestalled.

I watched the Miss Universe 2013 twice over. I stayed up late for Miss World 2013. For Miss International 2013, I just saw some posts of my friends on Facebook. Quite frankly, I didn’t expect that Bea Rose Santiago would make it, so I didn’t bother to keep tabs on her. I was in a state of great excitement when I read her name entered on the shortlist of 10 and 5.

I really expected much of Ariela Arida, but her gown was a jinx, a hoodoo. She had a very good answer during the Q & A, but her tawdry gown made of some cheap material withheld her of the Miss Universe crown. She looked then like a fake Barbie doll, two a penny at Jaro plaza. It was really naff. Had she been given the best gown, she could have been adjudged Miss Universe 2013. It was a wasted opportunity.

What I like of Ariela is her piercing black eyes. She looks slender-waisted, resilient, and very beautiful. Her waist-length hair lustrously cascades as she does her catwalks. She appears poised and calm.

Before the Miss World competition, I happened to see Megan Young on GGV. I had a gut feeling that she would make it. Megan Young has a captivating allure. She’s got a nice smile especially because she has very pretty straight teeth. She has a gorgeously warm speaking voice. She is a confident woman who is certain of her views. Her mouth is seductively fat and full. I love her interview on my favourite BBC. She is the embodiment of a perfect Miss World. Proud to be a Filipino, she thanked her countrymen. Then, a great cheer went up from the Filipino crowd carrying Philippine flags. It was spine-tingling. A cry of pride and happiness broke from me.

Bea Rose Santiago is dazzlingly beautiful. Her skin is clear and smooth. She also has a milky-white innocent visage. Her smile is captivating; her looks, alluring. I love seeing her wear the mikimoto crown and a woollen cape. She is more modest and shy, yet she tends to have an inner force.

I reviewed the video of Bea’s speech before the announcement of Miss International posted on Facebook. Yes, it was beautiful. It is particularly impressive. Her answer goes beyond being a beauty queen but as being a vehicle for her humanitarian intents.

Indeed, I can say that the Philippines is a beautiful country – a queendom for beauty queens.  It is a place where beauty is prestige and treasure and as a symbol of resilience and transformation to combat poverty, inequity, and conflicts. It holds women dear and as they are received with adulation and value. Giving women the opportunity to flash about their beauty is a sign that we as a country are progressive and more caring and genial.

Beauty then proves to be a catalyst for change as it uplifts the mind and the spirit, so it has to be celebrated as it buoys our optimism and compassion. It speaks of our amazement and greatest admiration. It is paying homage to God for giving us all the beauty life can bring. It is what we yearn for as a human being as no one likes to be ugly and unlikeable. It is our muse that fuels our inspiration to live life with hopefulness and contentment. It lightens our discomfort and grief. It shields us against our horror and inexorable confusion.

A Read Before You Get Soaked Standing Out in the Rain

by Roger B Rueda

‘A Rain Scene’ is another poem by Alain Russ Dimzon which I like very much. The poem won First Place in the Home Life Poetry Contest in 1999. That year my fellow Generoso Opulencia at the 41st UP National Writer Workshop got the Second Place for his poem ‘Regarding Flowers from La Trinidad.’ ‘Paper Boat’ by Ulysses Aparece got the Third Place,’ so ‘A Rain Scene’ had to face stiff competition for the First Place as the shortlisted poems that year were very agreeable and illuminating, making poetry a vicarious form of social life and human predicament and delectation. I am sure it was difficult for the judges to vacillate on them. If I had been one of the judges then, my preference and taste would have been ‘A Rain Scene,’ too.

Dimzon’s poem is striking with slim splits and text cataloguing. It is artfully light, yet it is very deep – it is not easy to get to the bottom of it in the beginning. It seems it is saying no more than the literal truth, for it had, as if it was a taxi, a thick perspex partition between the passenger (the reader) and the driver (the poet). The reader has to go over the simplicity of the poem, then he/she can start taking wing to the world of feminism and womanhood or impoverishment or social inequality or whatsoever.

There seems a contradiction between its form and connotations. It is his way, inventive and cognisant as he is, of compressing a weighty and thoughtful material into a compact poem. His style is slick and visually artless, moving me, so my great idea starts with it as it simplifies the complex.

It gives an admirably succinct account of a woman fish peddler, a mother who will do everything for her children and a widow/a single mother who has to take care of her children by herself despite her implicit feebleness and lack of education. She is left with trials and tribulations of everyday life, taken unawares when her husband died. It shows how Filipino women in the countryside or coastal areas need empowerment to be able to be more spirited and prolific, in control and clever, fearless and impervious when their husbands die or leave them for whatever reason.

It signals the need of the government to pass laws that safeguard widows and give them resources to support their families. It points out how single mothers in the Philippines are ignored because how treacherous the weather is, they have to work to feed their children, for even the basics of support cannot be given by the government, so poor widows need to go from house to house to sell their fish/vegetables/wares by nightfall. They need to bear their poverty and inattention by authorities, in solitude, though we’ve known now how the pork barrel of some legislators has been plundered by depraved government people. Was the government money used as it should be and in all conscience, no Filipino would suffer from extreme poverty, no Filipino would become down-and-out.

The widow persona in the poem is a very strong and brave woman. She ignores the blast of the roofs though it drowns her voice as she yells out. Perhaps, she chooses not to beg because she doesn’t want to be an object of pity amongst other people and her neighbours. Perhaps, she wants to meet their needs indefinitely without degrading her pride and self-respect. Perhaps, she wants to put her foot down despite bad nature and adversity, for her love for all her children is unconditional. And perhaps to her, the only all-enduring and selfless love is that of a mother for her children. The reader can only speculate the consciousness of the widow fish peddler because the poet presents the poem like a painting or a photograph – everything can be worked out through a scene, graphic and peripheral, physical and definite, cynical and plain. The effect of the poem is purely analytical and then that is the time when emotion comes in.

The woman is ‘isang-kahig-isang-tuka’ (one scratch of foot in the ground, one peck at a grain) as she hurries, tracing the neighbourhood alleys. Thus, she needs to work even if she doesn’t feel well or even if the rain is about to bucket down. When a strong typhoon like Yolanda comes, her family can be trapped by hunger for days or weeks. This is the consequence, too, of having a lot of children and when a husband dies, no one but the wife will have to shoulder all the responsibility of the deceased husband. Worst, the husband has not taken out insurance on his life, covering payment for his children’s food and education. It shows the plight of Filipino families struggling for survival because the government is unresponsive and inattentive. It doesn’t give communities means of support.

The poem works like fireworks to me. It burns attractively to the different levels of my imaginings, revealing different designs and shades of colours and delight in the obscurity of my intelligence and common sense. Its simplicity is illusory because it lights in my mind with varied insights and social and non-physical involvement or connexion.

I told you then when I reviewed Dimzon’s ‘Breakfast’ that he is a feminist, because of the number of poems he has written on women. The focal point for him is the women who are under social circumstances and how they delimit themselves mechanically (like the carabao in my poem ‘Carabaohood’) or imperceptibly or unthinkingly and how they give away/fight out for their rights.

Its word-based arrangement is very accurate, forming enigmatic formulary for such a thought and awareness, so it is inspiring and perceptible to me who loves poems similar to those published in The New Yorker. Dimzon is one of the rare poets in this country whose philosophy is very forward-thinking and artistically new.

Anyway, here is ‘A Rain Scene’:

A Rain Scene
by Alain Russ Dimzon

Under a sky
That is ripped
By lightning
And is about
To cry,
The woman
Fish peddler
Mounts a basket
On her head.
On her head
She bears
The fish
And the tonnage
Of a lost husband
And the lives
Of her children.
Yelling
With a voice
Drowned
By the blast
Of the roofs,
She hurries,
Tracing
The neighbourhood alleys.

Miriam

by Roger B Rueda

Allegations of brutality and smuggling and tax evasion and illegal logging and corruption have been levelled at Senator Juan Ponce Enrile by Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago. So now everyone has been particularly scathing about all these accusations. We seem to feel how foolish we are to entertain doubts, but these are heavy allegations and everything she has told in her speech can be regarded as a serious matter because though a lot say that the senator is insane, she is still high-minded and honourable: She has not been involved in the PDAF scam and all her advocacies are obviously reputable as she always takes a principled stand. She has been shown as an intelligent, courageous, and virtuous lawyer, judge, government official, and legislator. Consequently, for all her uprightness that she has shown since then, it is easy for us to consider her contentions in this era of rationality. And to judge from her productivity as a legislator, no insane woman can be as prolific as Senator Santiago has been.

As a senator, she has access to a lot of classified information. For one, there are some things that are highly classified and only circulated to a very limited group of people in this country. Thus, the role of the government is to order an investigation into all that she has said and is claiming. We can’t just turn a blind eye to what she is talking about. The government can prod her to collaborate with them as they inquire into the affairs of the people mentioned in her speech. This is yet another slur on the integrity of the people she has involved in the issue.

Miriam is Miriam. A straightforward woman, she is a political icon of millions of Filipinos, being a genuinely witty speaker to whom one could listen for hours. She talks over issues well-kept by fear and ignominy, so most of us find what she says entrancing and astounding. She speaks like a crazy woman, but it is her way to confront anathemas or propriety, which defences and precludes truth from coming out. She knows well how to tip-toe to the verge of lawful and unlawful, thoughtful and facetious, sympathetic and hostile, ceremonial and casual, and this necessitates finesse, so it makes no sense to belittle the enormity of the issues the senator is exposing. She is a super intelligent woman, but she is not a deranged woman - it is so obvious. Only a PR firm can say that to slate her or to enrage her or to make people not believe her to ruin her integrity. She knows what she is doing as she doesn’t go to absurd lengths. Her agenda is not discordant, nor are they out of time with everybody’s.

I think our country needs more Miriams. She dredges up everything that our memory as a country has expunged for years because we are forbearing, superficial, lenient, unaware, or fraidy-cat. She sounds unmannerly or coarse, but the silence of anyone in the senate is inimical to transparency and scruples and can be perfidious to the Filipino people. She is not our adversary here, for she is our defender. None of what she says and does is against us if we analyse all that she uncovers. All she told us during her privilege speech is a can of worms some people didn’t want to open, and doing so she knows the risk it poses to her life and her family. It could have appalled all of us, yet it made us realise a lot of things. It has spurred us into making an opinion or taking an action.

Silence in the Senate could be a conspiracy of silence. Santiago v Enrile considered as a cat-and-mouse game is politically expedient at best. It was revealing and has made the two senators more popular and unpopular, lovable and unlovable, good and bad. It gives everyone a fresh idea of what is happening in our country and what the government do to address the problems our politicians and some citizens are involved in. It also shows who are pursued by the government and who are not, who are implicated and who are passed over. As a legislator, she has no power to solve the problems confronting us all, but she can drop hints about what is happening in this country. It is up to the justice department to litigate. The justice department, however, could unsurprisingly political. It could be selective or spiteful or excessive.

We don’t know exactly what has incited her hatred to Senator Enrile. It could be purely political or personal – or theatrical. This is the thing we cannot be certain of. All we can do is speculate about it. It could be because of misunderstanding or because she really hates the crimes she is accusing Senator Enrile of or she is really a sincere public servant. Whatever it is, however, the Filipino people deserve truthful legislators and statesmen.

It is time that we got rid of bad politicians. We need legislators who don’t need a PDAF and who honestly legislate not for themselves and their family businesses but for all Filipinos and this country. We need politicians who advocate for the progress of everyone in this country, divulging everything in the government especially if it is anti-Filipino and deceitful, making effective laws that protect the welfare of the majority and making sure that all taxes go to tangible and useful government projects and investments. Accordingly, this country needs more squeaky clean people for the government to fight shy of sleaze and corruption and exploitation of the Filipino people and the environment.

Sad to say, we have a lot of potential legislators, but no one can follow in Senator Santiago’s footsteps, for to be like the senator, they need to understand all the laws in principle and intelligently, they need to be daring and fearless, and they need to be strong, principled politicians.

Passionately championing the Filipino people, the senator disdains politicians who are corrupt and thoroughly venal, and we are lucky to have her in the Senate. She is a trustworthy and no-nonsense leader, for even her jokes and anti-jokes have social and political ramifications for everyone. We can’t change her deportment and her general demeanour, for an institution herself, she is a woman of great personality. All we can do is love her or hate her or ignore her but never change her.

Alpha

Fiction by Roger B Rueda

Alpha was a shy, quiet-spoken girl. When we were classmates at primary school, she was always polite and respectful. She never had an ambition, though. She wisely contented herself with her family and her love of nature. All of eighteen, her turf was their farm. Seldom would she go to Iloilo City. She seemed very innocent.

At weekends, she would go to the sugarcane field and pick tinôtinô, or she would go with her cousins and they would bite sugarcane off a bit.  She also liked eating bananas.

We would romp happily around the mounds of hays whenever she invited us to their house. I would throw hays at our other classmates.

Her family spent a lot of time rearing free-range chickens. Sometimes, her mother would cook us nice meals. I liked her chicken adóbo and  tinúla of chicken and green papaya.

Alpha and I remained friends until high school and even college. She did mass communications at a local college; I, creative writing in another city. She became very talkative. Her skirts were knee-skimming and flirty. She told me that she had been idolising Vega, the daughter of their neighbour, when one time we met at my grandmother’s house, which was along the road to their house on the farm. Vega grew more rebellious because her father left them when they were all young. Her mother’s permissiveness towards Vega and her siblings reflected the wild abandon of her own life.

Vega was marvellously cool, so Alpha, then a young innocent girl, admired the way she had coped life.

She’d got a lot of boyfriends. She’d flirt outrageously. She was very open in her attitudes about sex. Her parents, though, didn’t know what she was doing in their community.  Her parents were naïve and innocent. They were both illiterate.

I was speechless with shock when she showed me her chest full of kiss marks. She became a tart. She would go to the ROTC building all alone in the night to meet some guys there. Young men didn’t respect her, so I wondered a lot. When we took a tricycle to the busy plaza, the driver refused to take our fare, but rather he poked her in the ribs.

Alpha was deflowered by Vega’s brother, Manny, also a rebellious brat.She had a crush on him since she was all of ten, so when Alpha was all alone he pulled her to their house, which was also along the road to Alpha’s house. She never resisted him though she already knew that he might rape her. He was sort of a maniac. But to Alpha, it was an opportunity to have a relationship with Manny though she knew it wouldn’t be going anywhere.

I thought that Alpha only behaved stupidly. She had been a smart woman, and now she was perceived as vain, spoilt, and promiscuous. All her friends and classmates knew it. She just disregarded her friends’ advice to her. She wanted a different path and so she went and studied all alone.

One of her friends locked her and raped in the toilet in school. The man was trying to blackmail her into doing whatever he wanted.She was afraid that some photographs of her in the nude might be circulated all over the campus, it would really embarrass her and her family.

***

It was only an hour or so later that her father Lando discovered that Alpha was missing.The unexpected and sudden realisation briefly panicked Alpha’s family. Her father walked to the street corner and waited for her. It was late in the evening.

Lando seemed very worried. He couldn’t explain why he was feeling that way, however.

He and his wife walked in silence for some while. They kept a vigil in front of their house.  His voice trembled with emotion.

The next day dawned sombre and gloomy: Alpha came within minutes of bleeding to death after her wrists were slashed.She told her parents that she was held down and raped by their neighbours, while she was walking a few steps to their house. She couldn’t let out a scream because they gagged her mouth with a towel. She was trying to resist it, but her might was not enough: she was weak to move. Three men raped her, according to her. She seemed to be crying with anger and frustration.

Lando almost ran amok as soon as he heard that news from his daughter. It seemed that bombs fell in the town. He became a chaotic sort of person.

An hour later, two policemen arrived on foot. They immediately arrested the three young men in connection with the rape complaint. That came as a shock to three young men. They arrived in court handcuffed to two police officers.They became an embarrassment to their parents, who were professors of the university.

They were detained by the police after further questioning. Their case was a heinous crime and they had a slim chance to be in the clear. Alpha’s family, most of them lawyers, vouchsafed to help. Actually, because they had the same family name.

For months, there had been no talks between parties. Manny’s mother was depressed, and she’d do everything so long as her son would be cleared. She was willing to pay any amount, even if that’d mean borrowing money from a lending firm.

Alpha’s family were terribly cross. It seemed that they wouldn’t agree with any settlements the other party would offer.

Being poor was the other reason that they couldn’t just agree with anything. It was an insult to their whole family if they would just give in. So, the three young men had to be sent down. Or else, they’d no face to show in the town.

***
A year later, the three young men were seen at the university. Everyone was shocked to see them. Never had they seen Alpha since then. The remembering of her was thin to the point of non-existence.There was a lull in her life after what happened.

They all had agreed to try to settle their dispute by negotiation.Alpha had demanded a million peso-settlement. The three suspects then had been released from detention.

Their life continued as normal. They felt, though, incredibly ashamed of themselves for being indicted on a rape charge.What had happened ruined their reputation as it brought disgrace upon them.

Years later, the three started a family. All of the men left the village except for Manny, who was a philanderer, and he was quite brazen about his life, it didn't worry him.

***
The family left the farm, their landlord had sacked them. They moved to a nipah house near the highway. A year later, the simple house transformed to a mansion, the biggest so far in the town.

A woman alighted from a limousine. She walked into the municipal hall. It was only six months before the election that Alpha announced she would run for mayor.

She had been making substantial donations to charity. A lot of poor students were going to college on her scholarship. About three thousand people held a rally to support her candidacy. Nobody had known who Alpha Focker was. All they had known was she was just a public spirited woman.

Alpha’s coming completely altered the political landscape of the town.

A big banner was draped across one of the streets saying, ‘Welcome Ms  Alpha Focker.’

It seemed that everything that had happened to Alpha was likely to sink into silence.