Lengua para diablo by Merlinda Bobis

Lengua para diablo

(The devil ate my words)

I suspected that my father sold his tongue to the devil. He had little say in our house. Whenever he felt like disagreeing with my mother, he murmured, ‘The devil ate my words.’ This meant he forgot what he was about to say and Mother was often appeased. There was more need for appeasement after he lost his job.

The devil ate his words, the devil ate his capacity for words, the devil ate his tongue. But perhaps only after prior negotiation with its owner, what with Mother always complaining, ‘I’m already taking a peek at hell!’ when it got too hot and stuffy in our tiny house. She seemed to sweat more that summer, and miserably. She made it sound like Father’s fault, so he cajoled her with kisses and promises of an electric fan, bigger windows, a bigger house, but she pushed him away, saying, ‘Get off me, I’m hot, ay, this hellish life!’ Again he was ready to pledge relief, but something in my mother’s eyes made him mutter only the usual excuse, ‘The devil ate my words,’ before he shut his mouth. Then he ran to the tap to get her more water.

Lengua para diablo: tongue for the devil. Surely he sold his tongue in exchange for those promises to my mother: comfort, a full stomach, life without our wretched want . . . But the devil never delivered his side of the bargain. The devil was alien to want. He lived in a Spanish house and owned several stores in the city. This Spanish mestizo was my father’s employer, but only for a very short while. He sacked him and our neighbour Tiyo Anding, also a mason, after he found a cheaper hand for the extension of his house.

We never knew the devil’s name. Father was incapable of speaking it, more so after he came home and sat in the darkest corner of the house, and stared at his hands. It took him two days of silent staring before he told my mother about his fate.

I wondered how the devil ate my father’s tongue. Perhaps he cooked it in mushroom sauce, in that special Spanish way that they do ox tongue. First, it was scrupulously cleaned, rubbed with salt and vinegar, blanched in boiling water, then scraped of its white coating — now, imagine words scraped off the tongue, and even taste, our capacity for pleasure. In all those two days of silent staring, Father hardly ate. He said he had lost his taste for food, he was not hungry. Junior and Nilo were more than happy to demolish his share of gruel with fish sauce.

Now after the thorough clean, the tongue was pricked with a fork to allow the flavours of all the spices and condiments to penetrate the flesh. Then it was browned in olive oil. How I wished we could prick my father’s tongue back to speech and even hunger, but of course we couldn’t, because it had disappeared. It had been served on the devil’s platter with garlic, onion, tomatoes, bay leaf, clove, peppercorns, soy sauce, even sherry, butter, and grated edam cheese, with that aroma of something rich and foreign.

His silent tongue was already luxuriating in a multitude of essences, pampered into a piquant delight.

Perhaps, next he should sell his oesophagus, then his stomach. I would if I had the chance to be that pampered. To know for once what I would never taste. I would be soaked, steamed, sautéed, basted, baked, boiled, fried and feted with only the perfect seasonings. I would become an epicure. On a rich man’s plate, I would be initiated to flavours of only the finest quality. In his stomach, I would be inducted to secrets. I would be ‘the inside girl’, and I could tell you the true nature of sated affluence.

—Banana Heart Summer (Murdoch Books, 2005) ( Random USA, 2009) (Anvil Manila, 2005) 

 Reference:Merlinda Bobis. (2012). Retrieved August 11, 2016, from http://mascarareview.com/merlinda-bobis/

Apo On The Wall by BJ Patino

[21st M03] Apo on the Wall by Bj Patino

APO ON THE WALL 

1. There’s this man’s photo on the wall
2. Of my father’s office at home, you
3. Know, where father brings his work,
4. Where he doesn’t look strange
5. Still wearing his green uniform
6. And colored breast plates, where,
7. To prove that he works hard, he
8. Also brought a photo of his boss
9. Whom he calls Apo, so Apo could
10. You know, hang around on the wall
11. Behind him and look over his shoulders
12. To make sure he’s snappy and all.
13. Father snapped at me once, caught me
14. Sneaking around his office at home
15. Looking at the stuff on his wall- handguns,
16. Plaques, a sword, medals a rifle-
17. Told me that was no place for a boy
18. Only men, when he didn’t really
19. Have to tell me because, you know,
20. That photo of Apo on the wall was already
21. Looking at me around,
22. His eyes following me like he was
23. That scary Jesus in the hallway, saying
24. I know what you’re doing.

Reference:Teacher's Nook. (n.d.). Retrieved August 05, 2016, from http://teachersnookrai.blogspot.com/2016/06/m03-apo-on-wall-by-bj-patino.html

Padre Faura Witnesses the Execution of Rizal by Danton Remoto

Padre Faura Witnesses the Execution of Rizal
Danton Remoto

(for Beni Santos)

I stand on the roof
of the Ateneo Municipal,
shivering
on this December morning.

Months ago,
Pepe came to me
in the Observatory.
I thought we could talk

about the stars
that do not collide
in the sky.
Instead, he asked me about purgatory.

(His cheeks still ruddy
from the sudden sun
after the bitter winters
in Europe.)

And on this day
with the year beginning to turn
salt stings my eyes.

I see Pepe,
a blur
between the soldiers
with their Mausers raised
and the early morning’s

star:
still shimmering
even if millions of miles away,
the star itself

is already dead.

Reference:P. (n.d.). Tulaang-pampubliko: Padre Faura Witnesses the... - poetikbalang. Retrieved August 05, 2016, from http://poetikbalang.tumblr.com/post/136877470851/tulaang-pampubliko-padre-faura-witnesses-the

The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata [Excerpt] by Gina Apostol

From The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

“[1]  Enough, Estrella, enough. All readers of history are prey to this revolutionary postscript—dueling memoirs that rose from the ashes of war. Magdiwang writers jumped the Magdalo to the gun: Artemio Ricarte and Santiago Alvarez, both Magdiwang, penned the first memoirs. Then that elegant stylist, Apolinario Mabini, damned Aguinaldo in sublime dudgeon. “Miong” Aguinaldo never recovered from Mabini’s prose style. It took him six decades before he published the Magdalo version of events (though before that the historian Agoncillo did function as ventriloquist). He was too late: by that time he was a villain, a schemer, and a murderer in the eyes of many. The point is: he became so not necessarily because of established fact but because he did not frame the narrative. The question of why Aguinaldo took so long to publish—the Mystery of The Tardy Memoir—is thought-provoking. On one hand, his image as villain was convenient to Americans, the actual combat enemy. The Magdiwang case, the vilifying of Aguinaldo, suited the eventual occupiers (which does not mean that Magdiwang statements wereuntrue). Aguinaldo’s memoirs show he was perhaps an insecure egoist who lent his instability to others’ schemes. At worst, he killed not only Bonifacio but also Luna. So the Interesting Case of the Dueling Revolutionary Memoirs may be no postmodern mystery; the first president is, as we suspect, less than a hero, and his tardy recollections may be tacit acknowledgment of his sins. This does not lessen the following fact: Estrella’s agony is symptomatic, a fantasist’s angst. The Supremo’s death inscribed trauma—it is the emblematic wound of all Filipinos betrayed by fellow Filipinos. (One notes that Aguinaldo, in turn, was betrayed, though unfortunately  for him not killed, by a Filipino turncoat in America’s pay.) This duplicitous sense of self, the Judas wound, marks the country’s notion of its humanity, so potent in its history. Only in the story of Rizal is there no Judas kiss, which may explain why, given the country’s complex aversion to the past, it clings to the hero with implacable ardor. Rizal’s death is simple: Spain killed him. Filipinos are not complicit in his blood. Emilio Aguinaldo, on the other hand, is troubling—he is the man in us whom we prefer not to see: the sinner in our midst who is ourselves. Just as we will never see Rizal as a man because we idolize him, we cannot see Aguinaldo as a man because we vilify him. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New York, New York, U.S.A.)

” [2]  Whoa, Aramis de Michigan. Calm down. (Trans. Note)

” [3]  Dr. Diwata, let me explain the physical nature of my ‘implacable ardor,’ as you call it—though you do not deserve my patience! I recall distinctly when my illness began. It was late in June in the year martial law was lifted by the tyrant, and yet the country was no more changed than I was by the proclamation. I was a freshman in college taking Philippine History and Institutions 101. I’d always been a bookworm, an idealist—yes, as you say, a fantasist. As a kid, I used to collect the posters of the heroes and labeled them with their corresponding epithets, because I was a nerd with weird compulsions. When I learned about the political assassination of the Plebeian Martyr by the men of the First President of the Republic, I was not only surprised that I had never heard about it before in my high school textbooks: I went into septic shock. My breathing froze in that room at Palma Hall Annex, and my asphyxiated shriek before I slumped sideways from the graffitied desk onto the lap of my blockmate, a pale, kind of palsied kid from Panay, made the entire classroom go still (or so I was told, as I had gone into abasic atrophy, a kind of failure of the nerves). I remember (or fancy I do) the ambulance, the brief blur of flame trees in my rolling vision, the concerned face of my professor (the bifocaled, unwitting perpetrator of my nervous wreckage), as I was strapped onto a trundle, given emergency respiratory help, a blood pump, and whatnot. My classmates waved at me as if calculating already whether or not they could take time off to go to my funeral. It was a minor seizure whose source the doctors could not fathom—whether I was epileptic, schistempsychotic, or just plain pathetic, it was a mystery to them. I returned home for the rest of the term, and in those months all history books, even komiks versions, were banned; but surreptitiously I read. By the end of the year I was back at college, but this time armed with the weight of history—not to mention all the kilos I had gained from provincial puto. In this way I became a vessel of the country’s pain, a small price to pay for truth. If this is a symptom, then what is a country? A tumor of ideology?! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)”

Reference:“If this is a symptom, then what is a country? A tumor of ideology?!”. (2015). Retrieved August 05, 2016, from https://ginaapostol.wordpress.com/2015/09/26/from-the-revolution-according-to-raymundo-mata/