Because Lapu-Lapu is neither good only as a fish stew nor a lonely statue

You may take any true-blooded Cebuano out of the ground beneath his feet, but there's no taking away the homebound rhythm of his heartbeat. Wherever he may be, regardless how distant his corner under the sky may be and no matter if his mouth reeks and turns sloppy with the staleness of nostalgia in this age of diaspora, his tongue will always be tattooed with the taste of earth.

Recenly, I created an online hub--a sort of homecoming spot, a melting pot--for creative writers in Cebuano who've been riding the ripples toward the four winds in search of the so-called greener pastures. In strange lands, the ear keens for familiar voices that may be all we will ever need to hear our inner selves in the face of the goblin called globalization, to reclaim and remind ourselves who we were, to begin with, and who we will always be. To go far in the world, all we really need is to stay rooted, no matter the uncertain loam of elsewhere we've chosen to raise our stakes into.

Thus Kabisdak (Kalihokan sa Bisdak nga Katitikan) is born, out loud with something like a battlecry against the cold-blooded spawn of alienation spelled triple in scarlet letters: KKK (kalaay, kalimot, kamingaw). In the face of distance and displacement, may Kabisdak be a way as well for us to touch base with the magsusulat who choose to anchor the flight of imagination in the native shore. Our common ground. Our mainland of memory in the globe-embracing ocean of our saying and singing.

Na hala, dapiton ko kamo ngadto sa balayan sa Kabisdak. Ablihi lang ang ganghaan pinaagi sa pagtuktok-tuplok ning maong luna: www.balaybalakasoy.blogspot.com

why we need a kick in the head

PROGRESS DOESN'T ALWAYS pave the way for a smooth-sailing life. Road congestion continues to be the bane fo urban living.


Regarding this problem, here's a reprint of my opinion column in the op-ed page of Sun.Star Cebu (4th of September, 2007):








All the way


TOUGH luck, but it’s not totally berserk to bring the “tartanilla” back.

For many motorists in Metro Cebu, getting kicked by a horse might be no more tragic than being trapped in the midst of traffic. With the former, at least, one would hurtle away from one spot to another really quick. Broken bones, too, couldn’t be more dismal than the headache and heartburn triggered by mayhem on the road.

As it is, finding a way out of the woeful state of our major streets soon looks as farfetched as discovering a unicorn.

Putting the cart before the steed, it seems, has long been the way of Cebu’s movers and shakers gone helter-skelter in pursuit of progress. No wonder Paul Villarete, the Cebu City planning and development officer, must have felt like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were just a snort away.

“Almost as many cars run in Metro Cebu as in Manila, but Cebuano authorities are not improving the major roads,” Villarete rued in a recent forum on Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST). Only an escape artist like Houdini could have wiggled free from the cramped streets in Cebu City against these odds: at least 8,329 units of public utility jeepneys (PUJs); 5,788 units of taxis, and 952 units of buses and mini-buses.

Through all this, of course, the air doesn’t go straight to anybody’s lungs like mountain mist and ocean breeze.

Thumb your nose down, too, at Desiderata; there’s just no way you can go placidly amid uncollected garbage, flash floods during rain, the procession during fiesta, and the stream of mourners on the heels of a hearse. (Was the death due perhaps to road rage, cancer by recurrent inhalation of traffic fumes, or the burst of a blood vessel arising from existential anxieties only a traffic jam can cause?)

As if it’s not enough that there’s a shortage of new infrastructure improvements in the city in the face of its burgeoning motorists, making matters worse is the dearth of discipline: the uncurbed issuance of franchise for public utility vehicles, the surplus of motorcycles as public transport, as well as drivers and pedestrians who are up and about like they got nine lives.

Horse sense and time are of the essence, true. And while Villarete’s proposal for a “a high-occupancy bus” or mass transport system is long overdue, better count on the bureaucracy to get going in the back of the snail and the turtle.

And because such a proposal can be green-lighted only with the prerequisite of political will, could the vote-fueled leadership steel its stomach to buck the backlash from displaced PUJ drivers come election time?

Elsewhere in the world—particularly in Stockholm, London, and Singapore — the race is on to steer clear from clogged thoroughfares with eco-friendly innovations. By tapping the resources of corporations like International

Business Machines (IBM), these megacities have come up with the “biggest green initiative coming down the road these days,” according to New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tomas Friedman.

“Congestion pricing—charging people for the right to drive into a downtown area—is already proving to be the most effective short-term way to clean up polluted city air, promote energy efficiency and create more livable urban centers, while also providing mayors with unexpected new revenue,” writes Friedman.

Progress, in the long run, is about giving the will and imagination a full rein. So as not to be left behind, it’s up for Metro Cebu’s leaders to hold no horses with an open mind.

on their feet

WHO SAYS INCARCERATION is a drudge? Not the dancing prisoners of Cebu who recently went out in the open with their terpsichorean skills and caught the world's eyes.

Beyond the crowd-pleasing choreography, my opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (August 14, 2007 issue) zooms in:

Rhythm and reason

Postcard-perfect beaches, sweet mangoes, online dating and porn sites, guitars, and singers. These may have placed Cebu in the international map, but certainly nothing more sensational and unprecedented as the upbeat video of its dancing prisoners.

Such a welcome, if not well-choreographed, respite from recurrent headlines about the arrhythmic showdown between Cebu’s governor and the city mayor. It may not shake the viewers of YouTube and the media across the borders, but a Gwen-Tom tango might yet clinched for Cebu the international renown as an island of happy feet.

Or else, locked in their long-drawn-out hostility as if they were each other’s zombie, they’d become prisoners forever of their mutual disgrace.

Digression aside, one can shake off the straitjacket of downbeat expectations. Or so proved the eurhythmic inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) now reportedly rehearsing to the tune of “Electric Dreams” for another crack at global spotlight.

A good turn, of course, deserves another. And so what more uplifting flight of fancy than the CPDRC jailbirds adding one more feather in their caps—pardon the pun—as a contingent for next year’s Sinulog mardi gras. Though this scenario looks like a security nightmare, wouldn’t that be a hoot for tourism to drum up international interest once again?

Beyond the hoopla, however, the recent popularity of the prisoners is a good time as any to look at their dance as a twinkle-toed prelude to deliverance. The very notion of rehabilitation, after all, presupposes the propitious idea of the incarcerated finally breaking out to a new and brighter day after facing the music of their transgressions or their outcast state. It’s about turning over a new leaf, yes.

No less spectacular than the stunts of Cirque du Soleil, certainly, would be the grace of a convict or the accused up on his feet for a whistle-worthy personal transformation.

Prison, despite its deprivations and utter desolation, can also pave the way for a wider inner world. Regarding the epiphany of empowerment, the book “Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela” abounds with passages in which the political prisoners formed a “university” inside the Robben Island prison, where Mandela and his friends shared and primed themselves up with books by Tolstoy, etc. Read how they dance around embitterment as they found decency even in their cold-hearted jailers.

Then again, outside the walls of prison also looms a dead end. Where finding a new path and bending the back of an old and dark past can be as painstaking as limbo rock. Or, the dance of death. That’s what the ill-starred spirit of one ex-convict found out after he was gunned down by two masked men Sunday night in Barangay Tisa. (Police, according to the report, are still determining if the incident was the handiwork of vigilantes.)

How ready are we as a community to give reformed sinners a second chance?

If only making a new life were as tidy as learning a new dance step. “Without an effective support group and rehabilitation program in the community,” explains non-government organization (NGO) official, “offenders still run the risk of getting involved in crimes again.”

Civilization could be judged by the way it treated its prisoners, stated Winston Churchill. But it’s a sorry judgment on us when our society, with the orchestration of its prejudice and discrimination—out of the lack of imagination and faith—can only compel those seeking a new footing into our fold to dance, awkwardly and hapless ever after, alone.

aren't we there yet?

CAN'T TEACH old dogs new tricks, so it's said. Same thing, ho-hum, holds ever true for one of the Philippine's most doggone institution: the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Hereunder is a reprint of my latest opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (July 18, 2007):




Infernal affairs

One doesn't have to be bad to go to hell. Doing good, like coming to terms with your right to be a registered voter, would be enough for a soul-scorching ordeal.

Nope, the gospel of Matthews had it mixed up when he bid you and me to "enter through the narrow gate." Where heaven doesn't wait at the end of the queue, the portal of the local office of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) is neither wide nor broad, but it still "leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it."

Horror happens not only when the cold crawls up one's spine, but also when one's head shakes. Or pivots a la Linda Blair when one's eyeballs dilate at this jolly dreadful dispatch: “The first day of registration for the synchronized barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections in Oct. 29 saw an impatient and rowdy crowd jeering at Cebu City Commission on Elections (Comelec) personnel for the delay."

Mayhem ran loose, so the report goes. Registration process "took seven hours to finish for some…Priority numbers were distributed late in the morning, but not everyone lining up received one." Were they waiting for Godot?

Come along with an exorcist, quick. Brace yourself for the slow burn of boredom, if not the creepy probability of a demonic possession when elbowing your way through the Comelec throng. Restless, they might as well be smoking out of their ears and spewing sulfur at the Comelec personnel who must have been cowering at their wit's end as if confronted by a lynch mob.

“Dalawang bagay lang ang mahalaga sa mundo," the cuckolded clock-repair guy in Ishmael Bernal's classic Ikaw ay Akin waxes philosophic. “Paghahanap at paghihintay."

But searching for systematic process and waiting for deliverance proved for those who went to Comelec no less harrowing than waiting in line for the gas chamber. Literally so, if we reckon how many had to endure inhaling a whiff of lethal wind breaking from the bowels, let alone Comelec's miasma of mismanagement.

Digging up the dead does seem less dire than getting a grip on the poll body's rot—from its putrid process of registration to its worm's pace of counting the votes, no thanks to its failure to latch on to modernization and to computerize the election process.

Pray tell, what unspeakable wrongs have we, especially those voter-wannabes, done in our previous lives to deserve a purgatory via Comelec? Everything awful about it has been aired out ad nauseam, and yet it continues to roil up the throat like regurgitated vomit.

How, then, do you solve a problem like lining up at the Comelec?

Lest you'd resort to shouting fire or strapping yourself with a bogus bomb—God forbid, just because you want badly for the crowd to scamper out of your way—consider whiling away your time with these few options:

* Bring a copy of Proust's La Recherche Du Temps Perdu so that you'd hit two birds with one stone by savoring how to take things slow and remember things past as well as impressing people that you're an intellectual who knows cursing is more elegant in French.

* Lug along your videoke component and earn money by charging people for a chance to warble their ulcers out instead of jarring the air with jeers for Comelec's ears long deaf to the broken record called change.

* Lead the praying of the rosary, but concentrate on the sorrowful mysteries. These, heaven knows, are what unravel in Comelec any given day. It's in the direst circumstance, after all, that one can stretch one's capacity for being holy sort of foolhardy.

tomas the toughie

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE, Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña is a tough act to shrug off. By dint of any demeanor worthy of either a panegyric or caricature, he's been looming large in the Cebuano consciousness.

Not to be trifled, too, is his leadership skills which has been rewarded with a three-term vote of confidence despite the controversies hounding him: his barroom temper, his reported support of vigilante killing squads against alleged scums of society, his quarrel with the governor, etc.

That may help explain my seemingly endless fascination about the man for whom I devoted a couple of my recent opinion columns in Sun.Star Cebu (June 26 and July 3 issues). Reckon these reprints:

Call of the cool

When adults whom we look up to as leaders loom outsized with their public antics and their acrimonious statements, don’t you miss Kids Say The Darndest Thing with Bill Cosby and his cuddly guests?

If Mayor Tomas Osmeña saw that show, he might recall with a chuckle one particular episode wherein a little boy blurted out: “Love will find you, even if you are trying to hide from it. I’ve been trying to hide from it since I was five but the girls keep finding me.”

Playing hard to get, Mayor Tom might as well be a hermit in a cave. Or haul his heart out shut in a cage. Except that there’s now way he can keep himself from beating his chest to churn up the fire in his belly. Or hide from the cameras that go with the controversies.

See, the fact that he exudes the flair of a natural newsmaker isn’t hurting him so far as he can swagger about the votes of confidence from his constituency all through these years. Look, ma, isn’t he invincible?

They keep finding him, some girls. And sometimes they, as Mary Ann delos Santos and Gwen Garcia can tell, have found him darn perfect for their frowns and raised eyebrows. Don’t they wish he’d, for his sake and the city’s, grow up?

The meek may inherit the earth, but there’s just no way the mayor would shrug the ladies away—even if they happen to be mayor-wannabe or a governor—while they try—for better or for worse—to whittle down his sow’s ears of masculinity into a silk purse.

And who says only women got big mouths? Whether the matter is about constructing a school building or raising his stakes for a rotunda or a bus terminal, trust him to prove he’s the one who got balls and them women have no business bouncing it for him, thank you.

But what’s the manly thing to do when it seems the ladies would have you licking at their heels? When it’s sweet to sulk, can’t one take the cue of Incredible Hulk?

Oh, doesn’t the mayor—who makes no bones about booming out his intransigence and his tantrums— conduct himself like coolness a la Clark Gable and Humprey Bogart are passé.

In the face of his latest foes, it appears he can’t just grin and bear the slings and arrows of his mediagenic style of leadership and transmute stoicism into a science worthy of any grizzled gentleman by cooing, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Or, “Here’s watching at you, kid!”

Way he’s been behaving, it seems like he would gargle whisky and spew it in the face of anybody who’d dare tilt her chin up to his face. Probably not if they’d look like Ingrid Bergman and Vivien Leigh. Or Dame Margot.

Now that he has proven how utterly unbeatable he is—Man, he’s still lording over the city despite the cannonade of lemons hurled his way and not even his admission to the emergency room once upon a dizzy time can pull the rug from under his feet—perhaps the lady in his house can pat his forehead and gently remind him that, hey, can’t he take things easy? Just lie back and bask in the mighty fact that the scalps of his previous enemies have been brimming over his breast pocket, can’t he?

Or, with the blood from his political contender still shiny on his lips, isn’t it time to show he’s resilient enough to reinvent himself? That he, for a cool change, can show toughness laced with nobility and grace, and redefine for us what it really takes to be confident and secure as his buttons?

In fairness to the mayor, his equanimity with the missus could be proof-positive how fairly he can breeze through his feminine side. Which might be all it takes to disarm the Mary Anns and Gwens of this world, who knows?

See, even John Travolta—who’s been groovy playing a disco maniac, an alcoholic, an assassin, etc.—just proved he’s man enough to take on a roly-poly housewife’s role in the upcoming movie Hairspray. Darn it, mayor, isn’t it about time you let your hair down?

Or, as one of the kids in Cosby’s show enthuses: "Spend most of your time loving instead of going to work." Or going to war.

In the light of the last act

Anything but boring. Regarding the performance so far of Mayor Tomas Osmeña, even Aristotle—who hatched the basic idea of three acts in theatre—might as well uncork a Champagne bottle.

Indeed, there’s been more than enough of the mayor’s high-wire stunts and hysterics for Cebu—and for some Bisdaks like me now scattered all over the world--to stay riveted.

According to Aristotle’s sense of drama, the hero gets up a tree in the beginning until the second act would have him floundering up the branches while he goes higher. In the finale, he either climbs down or falls flat on his nose.

Now the last possibility would be delightful to the lady squinting from the Provincial Capitol.

Aside from the last installment in the Harry Potter series, what magical tricks the mayor may be up to in his third act would be worth the wait. Until the curtain goes down, he—despite his detractor’s observation that he’s full of himself—won’t definitely be wearing a cloak of invisibility.

His presence may be formidable, but the mayor says he’s not out to take a bow by his lonesome. Even with his awesome powers, Harry Potter is putty in the hands of his enemy without Ron and Hermione.

Thus his oath-taking oratory echoes an ode to teamwork. No, he avers, the limelight this time is not on him preening while declaiming about projects and plans. “In essence, we’re going to emphasize that this is one community that works well together,” he says.

“We are not for projects but for consolidating the entire community.” But, oops, with due exception to the empress in Capitol with whom he’s not in the mood to share center stage with while he goes about his monologue about “the future of Cebu.” Not even if community ought to be taken in the same breath as communication, no. He needs no leading lady as his tongue itches to intone abracadabra, to transform Cebu City “the most livable city in Asia.”

Where criminality doesn’t dance the can-can with a chorus line of derelicts and squatters at the sidewalk through garbage-littered and flood-prone streets. Where there’s enough parks and playground and pockets of greenery along the way. And, yes, more new books in the public library and more to behold at the zoo. Where heritage and culture, hopefully, will not be nudged aside to the backburner as the elbow room of investments prop up skyscraping proofs of a megalomaniac metropolis stripped of soul. Or the magic of connection, the wand of warmth.

Small in size, Cebu doesn’t have to be monumental like Mumbai or Calcutta where misery looms larger. Bigness can be a bane, so argues a 1969 article in Time Magazine on what it takes to be a great city. “After Tokyo, an undeniably great city despite its pedestrian architecture, Hong Kong is the most vibrant metropolis in Asia. It is, however, a city without a country—and therefore lacks greatness. Cairo is the capital of the Moslem world; but it lacks vitality.”

Truly, a habitable city can only be found with the compass of the so-called human dimension. “A city does not have to be comfortable to be great, but it nonetheless must have the amenities to make life tolerable,” explains the Time essay.

“It is hard to classify as great a city that limits human contact, either through political repression, like Moscow, or through distance, like Los Angeles… A city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations, confusing as they may be.” Quirky, certainly.

Yes, like Mayor Osmeña going out of character for a change by agreeing—apart from dreaming of a standing ovation—to sit down with Governor Garcia even for a cup of coffee.

wherever, whatever

APART FROM the heart, home will always be where the gut is. And purgatory is everywhere, yes. Here's a reprint of my recent opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (12 June 2007) :

Besides the chicken that crossed the road

Easy goes the green light for envy en route to any American city. It’s all it takes, hands down, to feel a sudden surge of empathy for stray dogs. Go ask any Third World drifter driving himself headlong into the dead-end of undue comparison.

Consider the commercial of a fast-food joint cranking up the condescending tone of a balikbayan matron. Sweating and fanning away the frustration off her face, she hissed at all the signals of the doggone state of our streets: “Walang ganyan sa States!”

Wringing that woman’s neck, however, may yet entail squeezing dry the threadbare fabric of one’s nationalistic streak.

For one preferring “a government run like hell by Filipinos,” our major thoroughfares are metaphors for a future that renders horoscopes way far better reading fare than op-ed columns.

What a relief, therefore, to run into Anne Lamott’s latest book of essays—
Grace (Eventually)—and to be reassured that the geography of what goes bad or wrong is our common ground. Regardless of race, yes.

“Nowhere is better than anywhere else,” writes Lammot.

Angels may fear to tread through the traffic anywhere in our country’s asphalt jungles, but even the world’s most affluent nation is neither a breeze through the boulevard.

Hardly a minute goes in New York at night, swear some expat friends, without emergency sirens blaring by. In Los Angeles, where road rage is rampant down the freeway, an unidentified man stalking the sidewalk has been caught on video cam lugging a baseball bat and swinging it down his victims’ head at random.

And here comes, where I’m helpless at waxing touristy at the camera-worthy pace of suburbia, this swerve of sobering news: A 16-year-old woman out from the mall was whisked off on the way to her car in the parking lot, her dead body found in a wooded area in the neighboring state three days after she was reported missing.

Reading all that, who wouldn’t rather scoot away into the tracks of Paris Hilton or veer off where Ruffa and Yilmaz exchange a flurry of toxic fumes?

Better yet, scratch one’s head at the sidelines while Cebu’s movers and shakers merrily rouse up sparks around and smack at each other as if they were inside bump cars in a children’s arcade.

Doesn’t the smash-up between the Capitol of Cebu and City Hall hit any Bisdak, displaced or not, as if—lucky us—we don’t have to bother anymore about global warming, the war in Iraq, and terrorism? Isn’t that entertaining enough to sideswipe us away from other pressing concerns like the lack of urban planning, the garbage-filled and flood-prone streets, the invasion of squatters in the sidewalks?

Oh, well, thank God for gawk-worthy dollops of distraction. Ignorance is bliss, right?

Where there’s mayhem in the streets to go with the caravan of political circus, sneaking online for nostalgic peeks at the homefront would be a chronic compulsion. As if it would be where I might stumble on the cure for cancer soon.

Of her city, Kerima Polotan notes the impossibility of getting intimate with it without the cocktail of “love and repulsion and sorrow.”

That, for all we know, is what the mayor imbibes in full measure while he looms large enough for both the affection of those who vote for him and the aversion of everyone else.

That, too, might explain why, even if it’s where her pet peeve holds sway, it’s no sweat for the island’s lady governor to swear, hand to her heart: “I love Cebu City!”

Come on, with all that drama worthy of a YouTube spot soon, my birthplace might as well be the center of the universe.

consciousness like continents

TO RECLAIM SPACE is to reassert one's place, according to poet Mary Oliver, "in the family of things." After a month of taking a detour from my comfort zone into the uncertainty of an alien landscape, what a relief to return where mind and heart limbers up in the light of the familiar: a chance to continue touching base with my place of origin and pivot for return, at least through my regular op-ed corner in Sun.Star Cebu.

Published last June 12, here's a reprint of my first column after a month-long absence in the spell of readjustments en route to retracing the tracks of my byline:

Sheltering under the same sky

It does sound like a broken record, but “to find one’s place under the sun” is here to stay. Indeed, it’s enough of a record-breaking feat to steer clear and weather away the burning temptation of a cliché. Or the cold comfort of familiarity.

True, strangeness becomes me where the pastures are not only greener but also wider. But here in the city of Topeka, the capital of Kansas, there’s no trite notion I find easy to engage in and try to dispel than displacement.

But now that the age of dotcom renders distance just a click away from the computer keyboard, nothing else make me feel at home than harping on variations on a theme.

Connectedness, for instance.

Reckon how reverie veers away like ripples in a pebble-stirred lake, concentric from where consciousness sprawls out between the navel of the Philippine archipelago and the heartland of America.

Where I’m aiming to keep alienation at bay, waves of familiarity are also up my neck with a recent online report just enough to strike a sensitive chord to this true-blooded Cebuano who, despite shrinking in the shadow of toxic fumes from news at the homefront, can stand tall about its guitars and singers.

According to a Yahoo dispatch, more than 1,680 guitarists gather in Kansas to tune up and take part in setting a Guinness world record for the most people playing the same song—Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water—simultaneously.

Never mind the smoke of politics in Cebu hot in the heels of the elections on top of the water-logged news to flush one’s summer thoughts down the drain: overflowing creeks and sewers, flash floods in the streets and mudslides in the mountains.

Nothing new under the sun, right? Then again, just when summer in Kansas rouses a riot of colors and fragrance from its galaxy of gardens, something of a novelty nudges my nose not to smell what the flies revel in Taboan as I sniff stardust out of Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s seemingly spaced-out scheme.

Never mind if the mayor doesn’t have the heart to prop up a school building in Lahug as long as he has the lungs to whoop out a wizardry: To carve out a river right in the middle of the city’s clogged roads.

Come on, the Yellow Brick Road may be a universe away from Cebu, but it smacks of magic for the mayor to conjure “street rivers” where traffic and floating rats render it cool to hitch a ride on a witch’s broom above it all. Quick, go notify the authorities at Guinness!

In the face of formidable odds, any Cebuano worth his pride of Lapu-Lapu’s legend is no stranger to the struggle of holding his ground. As if conquest were a congenital blessing, if not a birthright.

Like water, there’s no stopping back the Bisdak’s knack for survival. Or his free-flowing instinct for finding a way out of dire straits.

And for the throng out to find a foothold to the future in alien shores, uncanny as well how they might feel no farther than the plight of Cebu City’s squatters to keep their heads above water as the tides of progress sweep the metro like a Kansan tornado.

A relocation site is up in the pipeline, assures Mayor Tomas Osmeña, who plans to pave a road from the SRP to Poblacion Pardo, where he will build a “new barangay” of squatters uprooted from various parts of the city. (No, slum dwellers won’t be cast away like garbage under the bridge because they are potential voters, remember?)

Strangeness is a state of mind, indeed. And like the brain-like formation of clouds, the sky stays—wherever we go and raise our stakes—always overhead. That, at least, can never be relocated.

payt, bay!

NO LESS THAN survival of the species, if not its spirit. That's what the language issue ought to be for those waging war against the marginalization of the mother tongue and its imminent extinction. For all true-blue Bisdak, here's my latest column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (5 December 2006 issue) :

Our Own Enemy

Like a cat giving birth to a puppy, something is out of whack when all that caterwauling about caring for the mother tongue gets the speakers wagging their tails in English instead.

Pastilan, the Bisdak spirit is willing but the tongue is weak. Or so those who stood up to speak at the symposium (a component of “Dalit Bisaya: A Celebration of Cebuano Culture” at the University of San Carlos) waxed awkward and apologetic for their fluency in “speaking dollars,” the currency of our educational system.

Victim of circumstance, thus one reactor explained her plight as she recalled and reminded her listeners what every school kid has learned all along: The vernacular is verboten in the classroom, and it means having to say you’re sorry after getting fined for speaking it.

And who can blame us, dear reader, if you opt to be an English patient as you recuperate in the act of reading me?

Talking on “The Future of Visayan,” Dr. Francisco Nemenzo (former president of the University of the Philippines) has an uphill way to go as he called on Cebuanos “to help promote, dignify and intellectualize the Cebuano language and to revive interest in the Cebuano culture.”

Licking ash, however, is not an option despite the givens of globalization and the politics in the policy of our national language. Swallow it all, we can. But that doesn’t have to entail vomiting out and casting aside what’s intrinsically ours.

True, aside from the obligation to reconcile ourselves with our historical and geopolitical circumstances, it behooves upon every Cebuano worth his birthright to be rabid with the responsibility to rage. Yes, against the dying of our umbilical words without which we Cebuanos might risk an orphan’s identity or consign to oblivion a vital aspect of ourselves “in the family of things,” as one poet puts it.

Tongue in cheek with our colonized consciousness, we have so much humble pie to digest. “The prevalence of colonial mentality in the age of globalization is the biggest threat to the survival of Visayan,” Nemenzo sighed. “If the Visayans themselves prefer to speak English to each other and use Visayan only for trivial chatter, our language is bound to die.”

Where does that leave the rest of us licking our lips while gloating over the ascendancy of the English language? “The world is changing so fast that English, perhaps the most worldly of languages, is struggling to keep up,” warns David Graddol, a British linguist and author of 'The Future of English?'

Indeed, it’s foolhardy to be complacent if we reckon how the erstwhile dominance of Greek and Latin did not spare the “lingua franca” from passing away.

No matter how convenient, English cannot replace other languages in the world. More than a communicative tool, language carries the signature of a particular race or culture. We may learn to branch out linguistically as citizens of the world, but no way can we uproot ourselves by displacing our language or facilitating its erasure. Of betrayal, Eugene Gloria’s poem In Language articulates it exactly: “It’s in the act/ of cleansing that we kill the spirit— ourselves; every culture’s worst enemy/ is its own people.”

buffet a la bisdak

NATIVE SPECIALTY. That's what the University of San Carlos dishes out starting today as the Dalit Bisaya 2006: Cebuano Cultural Festival kicks off with an exhibit featuring slide shows, among others, at the Trade Hall of SM City.

Vicente Sotto's play Elena will also be staged as well as a free concert-- featuring Pilita Corrales, Dulce, Jimmy Marquez, local bands and USC's choir and dance troupe-- that will wind up the three-day affair.

But the most delicious part of the whole feast will be the Symposium on Cebuano Heritage on December 2 at 1:00 to 4:30 pm at the Theodore Buttenbruch Hall, USC Main. Slurp up to your ears, here are the papers to be presented:


1) "Ethnography, Blacksmiths : A Glimpse of Cebu’s Past” by Jocelyn B. Gerra, Executive Director of Cultural Heritage Ramon Aboitiz Foundation, Inc.

2) “Cebuano Tangible Heritage: Issues and Concerns” by Arch. Melva Rodriguez-Java, Director of the Conservation and Heritage Research Institute and Workshop (CHERISH) of the University of San Carlos

3) “The Future of Visayan,” by Dr. Francisco Nemenzo, former President, University of the Philippines

4) “Bisaya in the Global Filipino Nation” by Dr. Jose V. Abueva, President of the Kalayaan College in Marikina City

Kitakita ta, Bay!

In Search Of The City's Soul

TO MAKE Cebu worth the tourists' winks, those calling the shot for the metro have been at sixes and sevens about hosting the forthcoming Asean Summit. But there's more than meets the eye, or so fancies my recent column in the Opinion Page of Sun.Star Cebu (21 November 2006):


Where’s the Way to Sugbo Cultural Park?

What dreams may come for this so-called Queen City of the South remains to be seen, but City Hall is all eyes for no less than the spectacular. Never mind if the city’s overseer has been losing sleep in preparation for the Asean Summit; what matters is he wouldn’t wind up a somnambulist after going deep in trance for his visions of development.

All perked up for the forthcoming arrival of foreign guests and tourists this December, the city has been looking slick all the way. See, the center isle of the city’ major roads where the summit itinerary goes has been spruced up with the sleight of the landscape artist’s hands. Yellow paint has streaked out the sidewalk’s eyesores, too. And direct from France, a “state-of-the-art lighting technology” made of aluminum and glass will soon take the breath away of passersby and motorists along Fuente Osmeña to the Provincial Capitol.

Prospects are bright, too, for the relocation Department of Tourism (DOT) in a Banaue Rice Terraces-inspired edifice slated to rise at Kawit Point in the South Road Properties (SRP). With Cebu getting the President’s thumb-up as part of the Central Philippines super region, tourism is expected to take the city and the whole island by storm.

Upbeat about blazing cool sights in the city, the Mayor also mulls over the blueprint for improving Linot-od Falls in the mountain barangays of Taptap and Tabunan. Streamlining the scenery around it by putting up cable cars and other amenities would make it ideal as a picnic spot.

It’s a welcome possibility, indeed, in a city so short of parks and public spaces for recreation. So far, what comfort the city can offer to its denizens and tourists smack in its hustle and bustle (Plaza Independencia, Fuente Osmeña, Cebu Business Park in Ayala, and the Family Park in Talamban) is niggardly compared to the breezy vista of Luneta in Manila, for instance.

Now that City Hall is in the mood to set up landmarks that would raise the stakes for the city’s pride, why not aim higher and pave the way for a long-overdue oasis for Cebuano culture?

On this site will rise the Sugbo Cultural Park, or so this column wishes to see a billboard announcing soon its realization right in the heart of the city (perhaps somewhere in the SRP). Where green is the breeze whistling over the verdure and grass as the harvest of finest Bisdak sensibility gets celebrated. Where tourists and locals alike would gather not only to laze the hours away, but also to visit the park’s museums, art gallery, mini-theatre for a showcase of art films as well as poetry readings, play productions, concerts, etc. Where the trees would be renamed in loving memory of Cebu’s creators of literature, music, visual arts, dance, etc. (For example: Narra Vicente Ranudo, Acacia Martino Abellana, Molave Minggoy Lopez, or Mahogany Sandiego)

Beyond the cosmetic change of the city, indeed, there are more meaningful and enduring metamorphosis that would also spell its soul long after it has realized its dream for progress.

Adrenaline Overdrive, Anyone?

WHAT WAS that again about all that fuss that flushes up waste? Well, the go-getters for Cebu do appear like they know no better, headlong into their goal with horse's blinders on, about the Asean Summit this December. Here goes my rub again in my latest column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu:

In the heat of the haste

If it would make them look better, they could try jumping down the river.

Surge and swell up. Or so the pressure goes for the metro’s movers and shakers, flexing themselves for the forthcoming Asean Summit and hoping their heads would be above the flow.

Even the Niagara would fall short of the ferocity with which our leaders have poured out their resources just so that our foreign guests would be swept off their feet. A multi-million structure suddenly looms into view, and roads suddenly get spruced up with yellows enough to cause jaundice while shanties along the visitors’ way get coated over with cool green until the tourists’ eyes turn mint.

Hey, aren’t we so up to the challenge of making ourselves look cozy with urban development? But couldn’t we have done this entire proclivity for preening a long time ago and save ourselves of the nail-biting groan and grind of making things happen, spic and span, in the nick of deadline?

Ah, this adrenaline rush to level up to expectation. This would have served us in good stead if this were harnessed for honest-to-goodness urban planning for the Cebuanos’ benefit to begin with, and not merely because we have foreign guests to please.

Then again, with our “fiesta” mentality, hardly do we mind if we drown ourselves with debts as long we’re riding the waves of goodwill from our visitors until they puke their guts out of the glut of our preparations for their satisfaction.

Foresight, however, is a factor marked with X here this island now stooping its stressed-out head down its soles so it can prove what our foreign guests are coming into is no backwater. Yes, even if garbage clogs up the corpses of our rivers that abruptly rise with the downpour until they gorge up and gobble away youngsters along the rapids.

What happens when the Summit is over and done with? Would we still be as obsessed about making our metropolis look first-rate? Could we sustain this overdrive to appear decent even if only our homegrown eyes would be left staring? Would law enforcement still keep up with its level of hunger to pounce on and make mincemeat of felons who are ever so galling with their cold-blooded appetite whether or not guests are coming to dinner?

Hopefully, this burst of momentum to make sense of our urban muddle won’t be momentary. Flirting with progress is fine, true. It’s another story, however, to rouse ourselves with a band and tidy up for transients, to wink at them so we can make the most of our time together in the heat of a one-night stand.

If that’s sorely the case, wouldn’t we be better off jumping down the rampaging river? (7 November 2006, Sun.Star Cebu)

Our Days Of Disquiet

FOR THE LIVING who are no better than those who rest in peace, here's my All Souls' Day column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu:

Restless

If he were a ghost, his grimace seemed not enough to spook City Hall into action.

“I would like, at least, to have my complaints noted and my questions answered,” rues a certain Alvin John Osmeña who hopes for city officials’ attention so they can “address the recurring problem on noise.” All that sound—loud music played inside vehicles and highly sensitive car alarms—reportedly bothers him wherever he is.

Must he consign himself to wait until he’d be six feet under before he’d experience what it takes to be tranquil?

That his grievances have fallen on deaf ears is indication enough that City Hall ought to be reminded what Desiderata intoned so solemnly: “Remember what peace there may be in
silence.”

But as its ears register nothing less than high frequency of the forthcoming Asean Summit, is City Hall up to the challenge for calm?

Isn’t its desperate need to live up to expectation or to prove that the city is no cemetery of progress a symptom of modern world’s neurosis?

It’s supposed to be a luxury, but taking things slow has become a liability. The go-getting mania has rendered it quaint to quell the cliché and, yes, smell the flowers. The quick and the dead, alas, have one thing in common: Too unconscious to find loveliness in their ornate funeral wreath.

Who has time to catch a whiff of grace as we reek of rage throughout our constant brush with rush hours, deadlines, quotas? Blessed are the departed, indeed, for having gone past the zone of discomfort Thoreau scoffed at: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Indeed, pity the taxpayer in dire need for an accessible refuge in the midst of the city’s hustle and bustle. Where are our public spaces with trees to sit under? Breezy does it, if you ask the dead in memorial parks from which real estate developers are literally making a killing.

Indeed, anguish is when we have to puncture our eardrums to the feet-stomping tune of “Let’s Get Loud” so that we get a kick out of the doldrums. Ah, doesn’t that explain our private emergencies to lull ourselves with our iPod so can we insulate our head and shut the hysterical world out of our ears?

Hear, too, the prognosis from the World Health Organization: Depression will soon be the second leading cause of disability in the world where suicide ranks as the third leading cause of death among dismally spirited adolescents.

“Quiet is going extinct,” says Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who’s espousing a campaign on behalf of American parks called “One Square Inch of Silence” meant to protect a tiny spot of serenity from man-made sound. “I wanted to find a quiet place and hang on to it and protect it.”

Man, he’d better be dead than find himself fuming from both ears here this side of purgatory. (31 October 2006, Sun.Star Cebu)

To See Beyond The Surface

IT'S BEEN raining like crazy lately. And that might explain the certain dampness in my deadline-clouded view on such sunny matter as the Asean Summit in Cebu this December. Consider my recent column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu:

Seeing Surgically

Facelift does it. Or so the City Governments of Cebu and Mandaue raise the stake for the self-esteem of both cities now in the craze for cosmetic tweaking.

So far, maddening has been the metro’s clockwork for extermination of all eyesores as the Asean Summit draws near.

Where have all the lunatics gone? Look, a monkey wrench has been flung at the idyllic lull of the city’s mountain barangays while City Hall goes on an overdrive to beguile the tourists and delegates who are set to come in droves for the December summit.

As reported recently in Sun.Star Superbalita, City Hall has been weeding out derelicts off the streets and dumping them at the city’s hinterlands. Some have been left to drift mindless through the farms and other deserted places, according to Sirao Barangay Captain Jesus Bontuyan who’s worried over any untoward tact his constituents might take against those wandering deranged in their midst.

What if the people, suspecting them either as burglars or ghouls, would gang up or hack them? “Motuo pa baya ang mga tawo diri sa amo anang mga ungo,” explains Bontuyan. “Mahadlok pud maglakaw-lakaw ang mga bata kon makakita anang mga buang.” (People here still believe in vampires and ghouls. The kids are scared to go out when they see the crazies.)

But for the summit’s host, nothing is more foolhardy than scaring our sightseers off their socks with the ghastly proofs of our Third World plight: the demented whose aimlessness might as well hold a mirror at the city’s desperate drive to wear the glamour of development on its tattered sleeve.

There’s something unhinged, indeed, about the obsessive slamming of doors against evidence of desolation while winking out the window for all the world to come over.

Pretty soon, in accordance with the suggestion of the president of the National Association of Travel Agencies, Cebu City Hall will deal with the beggars near the Magellan’s Cross “in a positive way” by letting the beggars wear original Cebuano costumes and putting up well-decorated horse-drawn carriages. Tourists who want to take photos will be asked to put some coins in a basket. “Even alms-giving can be given dignity,” he hoped.

Then again, would these frantic efforts to spruce up our surroundings be enough to make urban blight like water down the bridge?

Last we looked, the water crisis still screams while the flood threatens to get out of our garbage-clogged drainage in times of downpour. Roofs of squatters’ shanties in Sitio Paradise Island under the Mactan-Mandaue Bridge will soon be coated with green paint. But is this bright enough a prospect to wash away the fact of poverty staring in the face of tourists?

So far, criminality looks like it’s not letting up its mania to paint the town red despite the yellows layered on the city’s lampposts and sidewalk fences. And, sigh, it still takes a surreal imagination to daydream against the dearth of public museums or galleries and parks and spaces for promenade.

Unfortunately, no matter how earnest the energy to please our visitors, there’s no blinking away the myopia of our movers and shakers about urban planning and long-term agenda for progress. You bet, what our guests see is not what we get. (24 October 2006, Sun.Star Cebu)

Off-Limits, Anyone?

DISPLACEMENT doesn't need distance. It's an urban commonplace where estrangement and enmity happen with the frequency of a fire alarm or the screaming siren of an ambulance. Here's a reprint from my latest opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (29 August 2006 issue):


Crash Hours

Thank the heavens we’re no planets, or we’d be on a collision course more often than we hear prophets of doom about the world’s end.

Long before scientists bumped off Pluto from the planetary clique, and whittled it down to size as merely a “dwarf planet,” our own world has been getting smaller. To the level of the trivial goes our trite tendency for turf wars and clan rivalries, after all. As if we were aliens among ourselves hardwired for each other’s invasion.

Why, here this side of the equator, even a parking space becomes a battleground. Or so it seems to the son of Cebu’s governor and the chief of the Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau (CIIB) who were in the mood for Star Wars in front of the entrance of an uptown bar one recent night.

Hotheads of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your cool.

True, it’s getting cramped in here up to a choking point, and spitting fire comes breezy where there’s barely a breathing space for a handshake. We’d never run out of bones for each other’s contention, and going to the dogs seems to be the only way to push borders, if not to stretch our threshold of tolerance or patience.

Finding a place or even a day unbroken by the usual outbreak of hostility looks like a blind wager while astronomers now get more elbow room to redefine and render obsolete our notion of the solar system.

Talk about finding a place under the sun, and we might as well cover ourselves against ultra-violent rays with newspapers perennially stifling and blood-stewing from the prerequisites of conflict.

Space is of the essence, but that sounds as esoteric as astral travel where there are hardly public places to sit down awhile under a tree and to let the ill wind stirring in one’s head to scatter in the manner of dry leaves.

If looking for a parking space gets as dizzy as steering one’s way out of labyrinths, as motorists can attest, finding a park could be the fastest way to reach a dead end. Or, to rub elbows with lovers, licit or otherwise, whose threadbare intimacy and privacy are frayed at the edges by the invasion of the city’s derelicts and perverts bracing for their prey.

Spaced-out. That’s what one intuits while loitering through the heart of the metro where the homeless, beggars, and vendors might as well have raised their stakes in the sidewalks and overpasses. The bottleneck, clearly, is not only down the road where rage goes with the exhaust fumes.

Getting into each other’s way, unlike planets in their respective orbits, there’s plenty of time and lot of space only for breathing smoke down each other’s necks.

Viva Bisdak!

GO KICK me with this shamelessly indulgent tidbit, and I don't mind at all if you take it with a lemon-twisted grain of salt.

It doesn't happen all the time, anyway: one's blog being chosen Cebu Site of the Fortnight (July 15 - July 31, 2006).

Bitaw bay, Wa'y Blima! Cebu (the leading web portal to Cebu) has singled out Beso Bisdak-- my online cauldron of creative writing in Cebuano-- "selected from the Cebu Web Directory on the basis of criteria such as quality of content, design, and relevance."

And all the while I thought only a stray cat gives a rat's tail of a chance to bother about anything that reek of Cebuano.

Therefore, allow me in gratitude to pay the previlige forward by recommending another site by a fellow who rocks and rolls with his Bisdak identity.

He needs no intro, my colleague Insoy whose band (Missing Filemon) has been at the rears and flanks of this tsunami in the local music scene. "Bisrock," it's called. Right off the bat, that's the talking point as Insoy's blog Insoymada launches a new section in Q-and-A format.

It's where Insoy keeps "important "conversations" with people and friends whose opinions matter, and those whose opinions are so trivial that they matter." For the maiden interview, my friend Januar Yap (who coined the word Bisrock) takes the bloglight. Na hala, padayon, labyog Bisdak!