Writing Lesbian: Pushing Against Boundaries Through Nonfiction in the Philippines

VOLUME 1: Dissertation

A project submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctorate of Philosophy

Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, 2001, De La Salle University-Manila Master of Arts in Language and Literature, 1995, De La Salle University-Manila Bachelor of Arts in Literature 1990, De La Salle University-Manila

School of Media and Communication

College of Design and Social Context

RMIT University

May 2020

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Declaration

I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the project is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed.

Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz 4 May 2020

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I am gladly indebted to the University of the Philippines for the doctoral studies grant that has allowed me to complete this PhD. Special thanks to the faculty of the Department of Humanities in the University of the Philippines Mindanao, for accepting the burden of my four-year study leave.

Lifelong gratitude to my supervisors Associate Prof. Francesca Rendle-Short and

Dr Michelle Aung Thin for their guidance and encouragement all throughout the program and the process. I had known and loved Francesca as a friend since meeting her in

Bangkok at a literary conference in 2012, and it was a distinct pleasure to come under her thoughtful supervision in this program. I would not have continued in the program after the first year if not for her compassion and guidance. Michelle started out as a daunting taskmaster who later became an empathetic one, and generously shared her personal best practices while undertaking her PhD. I am so grateful for her eagle eye and heart. I have been truly blessed with their brilliant minds and kind attention.

My appreciation also goes to the other faculty mentors in the program, Associate

Prof. Jessica Wilkinson and Prof. David Carlin, for their insight and support. It was also helpful to hear the input of our guest critics, Dr Adam Nash, Prof. Laurene Vaughan,

Prof. Bonnie Sunstein, and poet Nha Thuyen, but I would like to especially thank Dr Peta

Murray and Dr Ronnie Scott for helping shape my thinking around queer identity and writing practice.

Thank you to my PhD cohort, Alvin Pang and Laurel Fantauzzo for the constant encouragement and our shared journey in the program. I also acknowledge the support and inspiration provided by the other students in the PRS Asia program: Sandra Roldan,

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Joshua Ip, Marc Nair, Pooja Nansi, Terry Lam, and Khoa Trong Nguyen. Khoa, especially, for his empathy and friendship.

Much admiration and gratitude as well to my examiners, Prof. Nicole Walker of the University of Northern Arizona and Dr Nike Sulway of the University of Southern

Queensland, for their compassionate and incisive evaluation of my work on this PhD. I am particularly grateful for the guidance they have provided on possible paths for me to take in my future research. I acknowledge the proofreading that Jack Newbound did on this archival version.

I also want to acknowledge the editors of the journals and anthologies in which some of my creative works were previously published. Special thanks to the editor-in- chief of Mindanao Times, Amalia Cabusao, for giving my political writing a home for two years and allowing me to express my dissent against the despotic Duterte regime, as well as to explore creative ways to do it. I hope to be able to write for the local daily again in safer times.

Thank you to the members of the Facebook group ‘The Reading Room’ for the camaraderie and their personal insights each time I posted a shout-out about lesbian identity. I also thank the contributors to Tingle Anthology of Pinay Lesbian Writing, forthcoming from Anvil Publishing, Inc., for trusting me with their works. Let’s go, lesbians!

Love and gratitude to my dear friend, the komiks artist known as Emiliana

Kampilan for her illustrations of the Tarot cards in the piece, ‘Buying the House on

Macopa St.’ And for putting form to my concept of a shape-shifting non-linear essay,

‘Doors.’

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Thank you to the University of the Philippines Press for giving a home to my memoir, Abi Nako, Or So I Thought. I acknowledge Mags Z. Maglana for the many gifts of our former relationship, which formed part of the narrative of this memoir.

Irrevocable love to my children, Veda Sachi and Raz Hiraya, for their unwavering faith in me.

Finally, I thank my partner Camille Sevilla for renewing my faith in love and myself, and for testing it every day in the laboratory of our long-distance relationship.

Like in the essay as a genre, there is only try.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOLUME 1: DISSERTATION

page

Abstract …………………………………………………………………. 1

Chapter 1: Introduction ………………………………………………… 2 1.1 ‘Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy’ …………………………………………... 8 1.2 The Practice of Gender Passing in the Philippines …………………… 12 1.3 The In/Visibility of the Philippine Lesbian Writer …………………… 23 1.4 Lesbian Writing in the Philippines: A Provisional Survey …………… 32

Chapter 2: Contexts 2.1 Passing Through the Gates of the Philippine Literary System ………. 44 2.2 Women Writing in the Philippines ………………………………….. 58 2.3 Coming into Nonfiction …………………………………………….. 65

Chapter 3: Pagka- Becoming …………………………………………... 72 3.1 Pagka-Babae: Woman-Becoming……………………………………. 74 3.2 Pagka-Lesbiana: Lesbian-Becoming ………………………………... 77 3.3 Pagka-Essay: A Pitch for Essay-Becoming …………………………. 80 a. Opinion Column-Becoming …………………………………… 95 b. Memoir-Becoming ……………………………………………. 101 c. Playing Dress-up in Essay-Becoming ………………………… 115

Chapter 4: Lesbian-Essaying: In(ter)ventions ………………………. 126 4.1 Marilyn Farwell and Disruption in Lesbian Narrative Space ………. 128 4.2 Nicole Brossard and her Picture Theory of Lesbian Writing ………. 140 4.3 Non-linguistic Tools for Lesbian-Essaying: a. Graphesis ……………………………………………………. 145 b. Erasure ………………………………………………………. 147 c. Collage ………………………………………………………. 148 d. Non-linear prose …………………………………………….. 151

Conclusion …………………………………………………………….. 154

Works Cited …………………………………………………………… 156

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VOLUME 2: CREATIVE WORKS page

Part 1: Memoir: Abi Nako. Or So I Thought …………………... 1

Part 2: Opinion Column: Lugar Lang …………………………. 171

Part 3: Origami Zine: Doors ……………………………………. 236

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LIST OF FIGURES:

page

Figure 1: Colour-coded Index Cards System ………………………… 6

Figure 2 Sample Documentation in Index Cards …………………… 7

Figure 3: Field Notes Sample ……………………………………….. 24

Figure 4: Butch Boho ……………………………………………….. 27

Figure 5: Pretty Boho ……………………………………………….. 28

Figure 6: Creative Writing Journey Map …………………………… 49

Figure 7: Draft of Doors ………………………………………………… 152

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines how being a lesbian writer in the Philippines is a constant struggle to assert one’s presence when faced with the various levels of invisibility and oppression ingrained into our language and culture. I challenge this invisibility through my creative and critical work by discussing the concept of ‘passing’ as it relates to gender and sexual orientation and showing how it can be transformed into a strategy that can lead to greater visibility as a lesbian writer.

By reflecting on my past writing and my community of practice, I provide context for examining my present creative practice, specifically in the writing of a memoir, Abi Nako. Or So

I Thought, a newspaper opinion column, Lugar Lang, and an origami zine, Doors. Through this practice-led research I have found that a Philippine lesbian writer can use gaps in the way

Filipinos language the world, for instance in the notion of ‘pagka-’, as a potential space for becoming in a lesbian text. In order to explore this space for becoming, I employ the theoretical ideas of Marilyn Farwell and Nicole Brossard, specifically on the disruptive and radical lesbian space in writing, which provide linguistic and non-linguistic tools that can be used by lesbian writers as in(ter)ventions in writing nonfiction specifically as markers of lesbian subjectivity and textuality.

KEYWORDS: Lesbian, passing, gender, language, nonfiction, Philippines

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Chapter 1: Introduction

At the beginning of this offshore practice-based PhD program that RMIT University calls

Practice Research Symposium (PRS) in September 2016, I reflected on my writing journey of the previous twenty years in order to provide context for what later became my creative practice research concern: how my subjectivity as a lesbian in the Philippines shapes my writing of nonfiction. My creative intent was focused on writing a memoir about my move to Davao City in the major island group Mindanao, about 1,500 kilometres south of the capital Metro Manila, and how this move contributed to my growth as a woman and as a writer. I was concerned with making a new home for myself in Davao both literally and through my writing. I initially thought my practice was about place. Place not only as setting, where something ‘takes place’, but also

‘taking my place’ in it by showing how my writing helps shape this place I now call home. As a secondary creative project, I also started writing an opinion column in a local daily, which I hoped would directly demonstrate my role as a writer in my adoptive community. But through the various iterations of the research, my critical intent evolved to focus more on how my sexual identity played out in what and how I wrote.

At the start of the PhD program I was in a liminal stage. Neither here nor there, but sitting on a ‘limen’, a threshold to which I was being invited, and asking myself to decide whether I was going to stay where it was safe—doing what I knew how to do and coasting along without fanfare—or leave it for what I did not know. At that point, I had published a book of lesbian stories, had won an important literary award for my nonfiction, and had been teaching literature and creative writing for twenty-five years. It was a comfortable and stable place to be. And I knew what to do in order to sustain my modest success in the Philippine literary world, i.e. write the way the establishment says ‘creative nonfiction’ should be written, get published in

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mainstream venues, and maybe win another award for doing the same thing. If I kept doing what

I had been doing (along with completing a PhD), I’d eventually accumulate enough merit points to be promoted to Full Professor. I would have achieved my academic career goal. It would have been enough to pass as a Philippine writer-academic.

But standing on that threshold, I realised I didn’t want to keep doing what I had been doing. As a creative writer, I wanted to be seen—which I thought meant I needed to write distinctly, e.g. in terms of form. I wanted to write nonfiction in my own unique voice. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know if I had one because up to that point, I had only been following the writing standards set by the Philippine literary system, which I had learned through the national writers workshop circuit and my Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

Yet part of me still wanted to belong in my adoptive community. Thus, at the outset I focused on forging my ‘Mindanawon’ identity as an aspiration. It was the research concern of the initial proposal I wrote for this PhD, and the reason that my university approved my scholarship.

The creative work aspects of my research, my memoir and opinion column in a local newspaper, seemed to be directly connected to the creation of this purported Mindanawon identity, which is characterised by contributing positively to the aspirations of the peoples of Mindanao. I thought my memoir, Abi Nako. Or So I Thought, about my first ten years in Davao would show how I rebuilt my life after the failure of my heterosexual marriage, against a backdrop of my false expectations of myself. The title of my column, Lugar Lang, is derived from the Binisaya (the lingua franca in Mindanao), and is an expression used to signify that one is alighting from a vehicle and literally meaning, ‘at the right place’. In it I claimed that I would write about where home is—where I live, where I belong, where I love—and how my writing plays a significant

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role in my sense of home, particularly in Davao. Both projects would have allowed me to pass as a Mindanao writer; that is, someone who lives in Mindanao and writes about Mindanao issues.

In the early iterations of my research, I wondered whether my past writing as a lesbian, which came out as fiction, could be reconciled with my inchoate writing identity as a

Mindanawon, which comes out as nonfiction through my memoir and my opinion column. But my writing practice soon showed me that what I really wanted to discover through this PhD is how I could take my place specifically as a lesbian writer in the Philippine literary context.

While I do live in Mindanao, it does not really shape my practice at this point. I surmise that it is because so far my writing has tended to be inward-looking, concerned with inner landscapes rather than place.

This dissertation seeks to answer the following questions:

1. In the Philippine social and literary context, how can a lesbian writer

combat the systemic oppression that renders her invisible?

2. How can a lesbian writer use gaps in the way Filipinos language the

world, for instance in the notion of ‘pagka-’, as a potential space for becoming as a

lesbian writer?

3. Guided by the theoretical ideas of Marilyn Farwell and Nicole Brossard,

specifically regarding the disruptive and radical lesbian space in writing, what

linguistic and non-linguistic tools can be used in writing nonfiction as markers of

lesbian subjectivity?

To answer these research questions, I employ the creative practice research methodology described by R. Lyle Skains of Bangor University as ‘a combination of auto-ethnomethodology, reflection, and post-textual analysis of creative artefacts’ (85). This methodology begins with an

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existing and established practice, which provides the backdrop and impetus for an experiment aimed at expanding the practice as directed by a clearly defined research question that may be written initially in the form of a proposition.

Auto-ethnomethodology is defined as a ‘self-directed form’ of documenting the process of writing through research logs, drafts, and revision notes (87), by which the writer observes his/her activities in situ with the intent to analyse them in relation to the research question. The creative project is part of what Skains calls ‘empirical research’, and it happens alongside

‘contextual research’, which includes readings of related creative works and critical theory—the scholarly domain. When the creative artefact is completed, the researcher reflects on the process and the factors impinging on it. Then the artefact is analysed further to produce findings that form and substantiate the argument of the dissertation.

In the Practice Research Symposium (PRS) model of RMIT University, this creative practice research is done within an iterative and guided structure in which the student orally presents both the evolving creative and critical documents to a panel of critics composed of program faculty and guests. For instance, this version of my dissertation has gone through eight iterations of the PRS, in which my research questions, methods, and findings were interrogated and thus developed. In fact, I consider the papers I previously submitted, as well as the required post-PRS reflections, as part of my autoethnography.

Ideally, through this methodology, ‘that knowledge that has remained implicitly within the artist [is] made explicit and [situated]…within the context of the scholarly field’ (86). In this manner, the research findings become significant not only to the writer doing the research, but also applicable to others within their identified community of practice. In my case, this

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community is comprised primarily of lesbian writers, but also, to a certain extent, women writing nonfiction in the Philippines.

One of the methods of documentation or research logs that I employed for this process was a set of four colour-coded index cards divided into the categories ‘Or’: what I tried; ‘So’: what I learned from what I tried; ‘I’: matters of identity; and ‘Thought’: matters of theory and related literature. I based the categories on the title of my memoir, Abi Nako. Or So I Thought to remind myself that in creative practice research methodology, ‘the practice is the research’, as it is not the way I have been trained in the Philippines to do research. My scholarly research and most PhDs in the Philippines are geared toward traditional literary studies, in which a literary theory is applied to existing texts.

FIGURE 1: Colour-coded Index Cards System

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FIGURE 2: Sample documentation in Index Cards

I later encoded these handwritten cards into a Word file using the same categories.

More traditional documentation methods I used included two-column tables with creative writing on the left side and notes on the writing process on the right side. And revision notes handwritten on print-outs of the drafts.

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1.1 ‘Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy’

In the Philippines, we do not have a word for ‘lesbian’ in our major languages1. But it doesn’t mean that she does not exist. As a child I learned about gender and homosexual identities through a counting or sorting game that uses this chant: ‘Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy’, which determines what ‘gender’ a child is depending on his/her age. Girl corresponds to one, Boy to two, Bakla to three, Tomboy to four and the chant goes on until it stops at one’s age, e.g. an eight-year-old child is a ‘tomboy’, regardless of his/her biological sex. Here was also where I learned that nobody wants to be called bakla or ‘tomboy’ even in a silly children’s game. They become the butt of jokes because bakla is the word for male homosexual and ‘tomboy’ is a female homosexual.

The term ‘tomboy’ is derived from the English word, which simply refers to boyish behaviour in a girl, but is not necessarily related to being a lesbian. Its use in the Philippines, however, suggests that all lesbians behave like tomboys. The Filipino word for male homosexual—bakla2, which originally meant ‘confused’ and/or ‘cowardly’—suggests effeminacy, but J. Neil Garcia, the foremost Philippine gay critic observes that ‘over the past one hundred years, by virtue of American colonialism and neocolonialism, Filipinos have been increasingly socialized in Western modes of gender and sexual identity formation’ (2014, xxi).

This means that in contemporary times, the Filipino bakla does not have to be limited to the traditional expectations of effeminate behaviour in gay men. They can present as masculine and still identify as bakla; the term was once derogatory, but has now been appropriated to empower the gay community, which continues to struggle against discrimination. As the children’s game

1 Garcia notes that an unpublished master’s thesis in 1975 mentions the Binisaya word ‘lakin-on’, used to refer to mannish women in Dumaguete City in the island group Visayas, but it is not a widely used term (2014, xxix). It literally means ‘like a man’. 2 There are words for male homosexual in other Philippine languages, like ‘bayot’ in Binisaya, also suggesting effeminacy. 8

suggests, we do not have Filipino terms for queer, bisexual, non-binary, or trans, which is an argument used by homophobes to prove that these sexual identities are only a Western influence.

That said, among the indigenous group in Mindanao called the Teduray, they have a word, mentefuwaley, to refer to the transgender people in their community. Cultural anthropologist Stuart Schlegel shares his encounter with a transgender woman described as mentefuwaley libun or ‘one-who-became-a-woman’ (1998). The ‘one-who-became-a-man’ counterpart is called mentefuwaley lagey. Schlegel’s informant explains that these individuals do not only dress as women or men, but are ‘genuine’, real women and men through the process of becoming. But this word and community (with a population of only around 350,000) are the exception rather than the rule in the Philippines and its population of more than 100 million.

There is no word for ‘trans’ in the major Philippine languages, so we use the English word.

To be called ‘tomboy’ in the Philippines is derogatory, and it is a term used only for

‘butch’ lesbians, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as lesbians ‘whose appearance and behaviour are seen as traditionally masculine’. Women who have relationships with butches are usually called ‘femme’, or lesbians ‘whose appearance and behaviour are seen as traditionally feminine’ (OED), and are also called babae or female. That they are called babae suggests that in the Philippines, the femme is not perceived as a lesbian. Based on anecdotal evidence, to be the babae of a tomboy has even worse connotations, e.g. you’re a woman so ugly you can’t get a man, or if you happen to be pretty, you must be only using the ‘tomboy’ for her money.

Traditional butch-femme relationships in the Philippines replicate the dominant heterosexual male-female relationship paradigm.

This babae/female concept of the femme calls back Freud’s concept of the ‘contingent invert’, the one who is only homosexual because the ‘normal sexual object’ (of the opposite sex)

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is not available, further explained by Havelock Ellis as women who ‘are not usually attractive to the average man’ (quoted in Ahmed 93). But a cursory look at femmes in the Philippines will readily show that many are traditionally pretty, perhaps because traditional butches, who pattern their behaviour after men, do consider their femmes as trophies. And some, as expected, do need to take care of their femmes financially to keep them.

To make things worse for Philippine femmes, they are also generally looked down upon by the lesbian community because they are not seen as ‘real lesbians’. Philippine butches often worry that their femmes will leave them for a man eventually. In the US, in the 70s and through the 80s, the femme was ‘charged with the crime of passing, of trying to disassociate herself from the androgynous lesbian[…]a terrible misreading of self-presentation that turns a language of liberated desire into the silence of collaboration’ (Nestle 142). As a self-defined femme herself,

Nestle has an intimate understanding of the injustice of that misreading, asserting that the actual lives of femmes, e.g. being devoted to their butches, disproves that accusation of passing to collaborate with the heteronormative system. Since the 90s, however, femmes in the US have taken back the label to assert their subjectivity: ‘I am more than masculinity’s opposite, more than traditional femininity’s complement. Femme is subject: me writing about femininity, about femme, as the expert on my gender identity’ (Livingston 25). Viewed this way, femmes can transgress even notions of femininity itself depending on how they interpret it. They don’t depend on having a butch partner to define their being lesbian anymore. Yet, a femme ‘breaks the cardinal rule [of femininity]: her audience is female, not male’ (Johnson 397–398). She doesn’t present her femininity in order to attract males. In the Philippines, I am not certain if

Philippine femmes see it this way, though. I myself do not identify as femme because I do not want to bear the burden of its negative connotations in the Philippines.

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In the first book of lesbian and gay criticism in the Philippines, Tabi-tabi sa

Pagsasantabi. Kritikal na Tala ng mga Lesbiana at Bakla sa Sining, Kultura, at Wika3, editors

Eugene Evasco, Roselle Pineda, and Rommel Rodriguez use the term lesbiana instead of

‘tomboy’. They do not explain the choice in the introduction; I assume it is the more neutral choice that does not carry the butch connotations of ‘tomboy’. It is grammatically consistent with the practice in the Filipino language of adding to proper or borrowed nouns the suffix ‘a’ to mean female variant (or ‘o’ to mean male), e.g. Amerikana to mean female American and

Amerikano to mean male American. The slang word biyaning, derived from the ‘bian’ in

‘lesbian’ with the –ing suffix of the English present participle of verbs (thus referring to the act of ‘lesbianing’) is sometimes used as a euphemism for lesbian. Another slang word, tibo, is used to refer to lesbians, usually those lesbians from the lower classes; it is derived from the phonemes /t/ and /b/ of ‘tomboy’ and carries a similar derogatory connotation. I must note though that some college-educated lesbians have appropriated the term tibo or tibs as a signifier of an in-your-face attitude about their lesbian identity, similar to the appropriation of the term

‘dyke’ in the US. In a conversation about othering, human rights advocate Wisdom Powell affirms, ‘To call a thing a thing…is really important if you’re going to be made visible, to move from object to subject’ (Kerrison, Powell, & Sewell 20). With the lack of a term for ‘lesbian’ in

Filipino, our national language, these appropriations of English words by Philippine lesbians will have to do for us to somehow take control of defining who we are. That said, I will not call myself a ‘tomboy’ in the Philippine sense; it is too loaded with prejudice.

3 The English translation of the title in the CCP Encyclopedia is ‘Excuse the Slight: Critical Notes by Lesbians and Gays on Art, Culture, and Language’. 11

1.2 The Practice of Gender Passing in the Philippines

Expressing as butch in the Philippines exposes a lesbian to homophobia. She is exposed to violence in the streets and discrimination, particularly in the job market, where she is relegated to stereotypical roles like security guard, janitor, farmhand and stevedore, or is prevented from ascending to visible leadership positions. My perception based on personal experience is that the exceptions are university teachers and those who are born into wealthy families and who have their own businesses. The Philippines Country Report of Being LGBT4 in Asia (2014) published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) notes that ‘no statistics show the extent of employment-related SOGI5 discrimination in the Philippines’ (35), which reflects the lack of importance of sexual orientation and gender identity in mainstream discussions of labour policy.

Thus, when the Report states, ‘Lesbians who are masculine in appearance are also reportedly hired to do male jobs even if they are given the same lower wages as heterosexual females’ (35), its sources are anecdotal, individual accounts cited by LGBT organisations. Moreover, quoting sociologist Michael L. Tan, the Report affirms that ‘“acceptance” [of homosexuals] is conditional as long as [they] remain confined to certain occupational niches and fulfil certain stereotypes’ (25), e.g. gays as effeminate and lesbians as masculine. In other words, it is safer or more viable for a lesbian to express as feminine in order to not be easily identified as a lesbian and thus lose employment. A study done by the organisation Lesbian Advocates Philippines

(LeAP!) in 2004 showed that a dress code is invoked by companies selectively to ‘keep (butch) lesbians in check’ (Umbac para 11) by requiring all females to wear skirts and shoes with heels,

4 LGBT: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender 5 SOGI: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity 12

for instance. Consequently, femme lesbians in the Philippines pass as heterosexual women in order to protect themselves at work and on the street.

Creative writing, as a career or job, is not generally considered a secure means of employment or source of income in the Philippines. The few local magazines and journals that publish creative writing do not pay for it, or pay so little that the taxi fare to pick up the check may cost more6. Thus, most creative writers in the Philippines have a day job, usually in academe. Coming out and being visible as a homosexual does not result in a loss of income for a writer per se. But it can be used as a basis for discriminating against a teacher, especially in

Catholic schools. It affirms the idea that the ‘word “lesbian” has done all the things a writer fears it will do’ (Wilton 131, italics in original), e.g. it can threaten job security, disrupt family life and wreak havoc on one’s reputation.

In undertaking this practice-led research PhD regarding how my gender and sexual identity impinge on my writing of nonfiction within the Philippine literary system, I have found that for the past twenty years I have thrived by passing as a heterosexual woman and a heterosexual writer, not just as a result of the ways I presented myself physically, but also the way in which I wrote. Therefore, I posit that through my writing practice it is possible to transform this idea of ‘passing’ into a process of becoming or construction of identity that can lead to greater visibility as a lesbian writer.

Passing is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the ‘fact of being accepted, or representing oneself successfully as, a member of a different group’ (cited in Dawkins 1).

Dawkins, in her study of racial passing as a set of rhetorical strategies utilised in the construction

6 The exception is the Likhaan Journal, published by the University of the Philippines, which currently pays Php10,000 (AUD285) for articles.

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and reconstruction of identity adds that in general, passing refers to ‘the means by which nonwhite people represent themselves as white’ (1), but notes that the practice of passing is not limited to race. She argues, ‘Everyone passes, even for a moment’ (xiv) in our efforts ‘to be more accepted interpersonally and socially and to ensure that our goals can be achieved’ (3). Seen from this lens, passing is a mode of self-representation aimed at persuading others of one’s identity towards particular objectives.

Andrews et al. note that in African-American history, ‘passing refers to the act of crossing the socially constructed “color line” that separates white and black Americans’ (quoted in Volk 1), about which much literature has been written, such as Nella Larsen’s novel Passing

(1929), about which more than 200 scholarly articles and fifty dissertations had been written as of 20077 (Kaplan xiv). The commercial success of the graphic novel Incognegro (2008)8 by Mat

Johnson, which has given rise to a book series, shows that the trope continues to hold power in present-day America. Historically, passers cross the line in order to enter social institutions and spaces, including ‘education, housing, employment, politics and law’ (Volk 2), commonly denied based on ‘physical markers of race, class, sexuality, and gender’ (2).

Neo-Passing. Performing Identity After Jim Crow (2018) collects scholarly work about racial passing narratives written after the era of segregation. Editors Godfrey and Young and the book’s contributors posit that passing is not passé and that ‘contemporary iterations of passing…speak to and against present social circumstances’ (3) and thus need to be studied in order to ‘help to reveal the fault lines in contemporary American racial and social consciousness’, even in what is called the ‘post-racial’ era after the term of President Barack

7 Nella Larsen’s Passing is about two childhood friends who reunite as adults. Both of them are passing as white, although one of them, Clare Kendry, is doing it deliberately for her husband. 8 Mat Johnson’s Incognegro is set in New York in the 1930s and features a reporter Zane Pinchback who is passing for white in order to investigate the lynchings in the South. 14

Obama (11). They also assert that contemporary passing in America involves the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. This intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in passing resonates with Pamela Caughie’s argument about passing in her literary perspective on gender and sexual diversity9 that it ‘signifies the dynamics of identity and identification—the social, cultural, and psychological processes by which a subject comes to understand his or her identity in relation to others’ (italics in original, 203). Thus, whether it is race or gender or sexuality, the practice of passing highlights the indeterminacy of the categories and the ways by which they can be performed by the subjects according to their understanding of their identity and their objectives.

Gender passing is a common enough trope in literature, where women pass as men in order to gain access to certain privileges. For instance, in Shakespearean comedies like Twelfth

Night, Viola dresses as a man in order to gain employment. But it does not have to do with her sexuality, because she later falls in love with her employer, Duke Orsino. Or the story of Hua

Mulan, the warrior woman in Chinese myth, who passes as a man to take the place of her ailing father in a war. Or Yentl, who passes as a man to gain an education in Talmudic law. Ginsberg explains, ‘the cultural logic of passing suggests that passing is usually motivated by a desire to shed the identity of an oppressed group to gain access to social and economic opportunities’ (3).

Women pass as men because they desire the privileges enjoyed by men in a patriarchal society, and which have been denied them precisely because they are women. In these literary cases, women abandon their ‘weak gender’ for the ‘stronger one’ in order to accomplish their goals within the patriarchal system, highlighting the artificially constructed nature of gender.

Simone Chess examines male-to-female (MTF) passing in Early Modern English

9 Caughie’s study uses Michel Foucault’s memoirs of a 19th century French hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin (1980) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) to demonstrate her argument that passing is a way to defy the notion of fixed categories or identities. 15

literature and finds that while it is often depicted as shameful, male-to-female cross-dressing has also been presented as beneficial financially and socially. For example, in Ben Jonson’s

Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, a male character cross-dresses in order to marry a man for financial gain. In Sidney’s Arcadia, Pyrocles only gains access to Philoclea by dressing as a woman because she is barred from receiving male suitors. Chess’s analysis focuses ‘more on the social impact that [MTF cross-dressing] can have on dyads, communities, and broader social structures, like marriage, economy, and sexuality’ (3), finding that the episodes of cross-dressing are ‘relational exercises’ (9) that bring to the fore the ways by which the cross-dressers construct their chosen gender with and through their relationships, not in a vacuum.

The practice of gender passing is briefly mentioned in canonical Philippine literature in the long allegorical poem Florante at Laura by Francisco Balagtas, who is considered the greatest Tagalog poet during the Spanish colonial period. The work is taught in most high schools, but hardly any attention has been paid to Verse 36710, in which the character Flerida escapes a forced marriage by dressing in men’s clothes and fleeing to the forest in search of her lost beloved, Aladin. In addition, in a study of the image of the ‘protolesbian11’ in Filipino literature, Philippine Studies scholar Minerva Lopez found the war novel Erlinda ng Bataan

(Erlinda of Bataan, 1970) by Nieves Baens-del Rosario, in which the eponymous character dresses as a male soldier and fights in the war against the Japanese purportedly to avenge the violent death of her best friend Charing.

The trope of gender passing has also been depicted in mainstream movies like Facifica

Falayfay (1969), about a boy raised as a girl by his mother and who is later taught how to be a

10 ‘aking naakalang magdamit-gerero / at kusang nagtanan sa real palasyo.’ My translation: ‘I dressed as a soldier and escaped the palace.’ 11 Lopez uses the term ‘protolesbian’ because the literary works she studied were published before the English term ‘lesbian’ became known in the Philippines as a word and were not written by lesbians (134). 16

man by his brothers; hugely popular because it starred the Philippine king of comedy, (the heterosexual) Dolphy, who also later did the movie Wanted: Perfect Father (1994), in which he fakes his own death to claim insurance benefits and later passes for a female nanny in order to be closer to his love interest.

When it comes to sexual orientation, a person identifying as homosexual might pass as heterosexual in order to circumvent homophobia and retain or access heterosexual privileges.

Some pass while not yet ready to come out of the closet as homosexual in order to protect their privileges. Ginsberg asserts, ‘passing is about identities: their creation or imposition, their adoption or rejection, their accompanying rewards or penalties’ (2). Passing as heterosexual may give us rewards like societal acceptance and/or job opportunities, but it also penalises us because the act of passing is a rejection of our true identities, or who we believe we are. In a way, the choice to pass and the act itself are a manifestation of our internalised homophobia—our own thinking that if people could see who and what we are, they would deny us certain privileges.

Not an unfounded fear, but it is a betrayal of the self. Specifically, for a gay writer to hide one’s identity is to deny oneself the sense of belonging to one’s own community, as well as to do a disservice to this community. British scholar of lesbian studies Tamsin Wilton explains that

‘lesbian books often provide not only the first non-homophobic context within which a lesbian reader may begin to understand her existence but also the first lesbian “community”’ (121).

Being visible or coming out as a writer who is a lesbian allows one to stop hiding or dissembling, and then provide lesbian readers material that somehow validates their own existence, as opposed to homophobic mainstream messages.

Allyson Hobbs wrote a cultural history of racial passing in the United States in 2014 based on her dissertation. According to reviewer Aje, it is the first full-length historical

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monograph about racial passing in the US. Hobbs calls it ‘a chosen exile’ in her book of the same title. While passers do choose it for social advancement and access, Hobbs argues it is an exile because they had to leave their homes, families, family histories, communities; it

‘translated into a loss of intra-racial sociability and, to some extent, the loss of one’s self’ (Aje para 3). When one has to hide one’s racial identity (the one you were born in and raised in), one loses the connections to it and any sense of belonging, and ultimately one’s sense of identity, part of which is entwined with race. Thus, a person who decides to pass goes into a voluntary exile— voluntary because one chooses it for the perceived benefits, even when one was only mistaken for white. Some of her subjects ‘seized the opportunity’ after being mistaken, which is also a choice. As Hobbs puts it, ‘the core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from’ (18). Similarly, a homosexual person passing for heterosexual in order to gain social acceptance loses the support s/he could have gotten from the community with whom s/he truly belongs by virtue of sexual orientation.

In Filipino, the word for gender is kasarian, whose root word is sari, meaning ‘type’, though sari is rarely used by itself. But the word kasarian correlates more with the English ‘sex’ rather than ‘gender’. When Filipinos speak of gender as a construct of maleness and femaleness, we use the words pagkalalaki and pagkababae respectively. The prefix pagka- denotes a state of being, but it is also used to refer to an action that has just happened and will quickly be followed by another, e.g. the adverb pagkagawa, meaning ‘after doing (something)’. Another meaning is the manner by which an action was done, e.g. pagkakagawa, meaning ‘how it was done’.

Because of these other meanings, to me pagka- suggests something that is performed—not a given state. Thus, in my first language, Filipino, I can write my kasarian (gender) as babae

(female) but also understand it to be a set of routine behaviours associated with femaleness,

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which, in our patriarchal culture are feminine role expectations of pagkababae. Under normative circumstances, Filipinos also associate, even equate, femaleness with femininity and maleness with masculinity. I want to investigate in this dissertation and through my creative practice how the prefix pagka- suggests a potential space for becoming or identity construction even as it literally means a state of being. It resonates with Judith Butler’s notion of ‘forms of gendering’

(xi), that is, the performativity of gender, which refers to ‘a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame’ (quoted in Jagose 84). For Butler, gender is not a performance one freely chooses because its iterations are constrained by the patriarchal system in which we operate. But she adds that this notion of performativity makes gender ‘open to intervention and resignification’ (84). Seen this way, gender norms cease to be interpreted as natural or static. In the Philippine culture, which is strongly influenced by Catholicism, gender norms are not only interpreted as natural, they seem to be even more regulatory, associated with morality. For instance, a wife’s submission to her husband is demanded by the Bible and it is reiterated in every church wedding. To be a good Catholic wife, one must be docile; it is part of the femininity expected of women. So a woman may be dissatisfied or abused in a marriage, but she is constrained to do everything she can to endure it. Her family will demand it, too. But because of the feminist movement, heterosexual couples have interrogated this injunction and succeeded in removing that particular Biblical reading from their wedding ceremonies, changing the word

‘submit’ to ‘love’, which opens up the power dynamics in the marriage. But it is a fact that the

Philippines is the only country in the world that still does not have a divorce law.

Notions of my pagkababae or femaleness as a Filipino writer are intertwined with my sexual orientation and practice. For me, an understanding of and the sense of becoming a woman cannot be separated from my practice of lesbian sexuality. In turn, it is my lesbian sexuality that

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engenders my writing. My desire to be seen and recognised as a lesbian writer is consistent with the politics of identity and representation of minority groups. For instance, the editors of the book Lesbian and Gay Studies (2000) state that the basic criterion for a study to be relevant to the community is to ‘contribute, directly or indirectly, to improvements in the position of homosexuality’ (Duyvendak et al. 220). Because discrimination against homosexuals is still widespread in the Philippines, homosexual scholars and writers who want to be relevant to the community should try to address that discrimination through the work we do. Because I have managed to pass as a heterosexual woman and writer, it may be seen as not only not helping advocate for the community, but also directly contributing to lesbian invisibility.

As a Filipino lesbian who expresses physically as feminine, I am never mistaken for a lesbian. I am always assumed to be heterosexual, and thus I pass inadvertently until I actually say

I am not. While the femme-to-femme relationship has gained popularity among younger lesbians in the Philippines, particularly those who wish to dissociate from the traditional binary created by the butch-femme relationship, unless they directly identify as lesbians, femmes remain invisible as lesbians in Philippine culture. This particular femme invisibility has also been interrogated in the US, for instance in two volumes of the anthology Visible: A Femmethology

(2009), in which the contributors celebrate the many ways of being femme.

Before doing this practice research, I didn’t realise that in choosing to express my female gender as feminine, I passed as a heterosexual woman in the context of the Filipino culture in particular. I didn’t deliberately perform my feminine look in order to pass; sometimes I actually liked looking feminine: having long hair, putting on makeup, wearing dresses because I thought that made me ‘pretty’. As a Filipino female, I am subject to our rigid gender role expectations and standards, so I have been trained and constrained to think that in order to be pretty, I need to

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look feminine. As Butler suggests in her concept of gender performativity, women are constrained to repeat the acts expected of a female, even though we are aware of how some of these acts may be contributing to our oppression as females.

But in 1999, I did shave off all my hair to prove a point. Even with a buzz cut, my lesbian friends teased me that I was not ‘butch enough’ because I didn’t know how to play basketball or billiards, skills that were typical of butches in that community in Baguio City. It must have been a joke because it didn’t make sense to base identity on stereotypes among lesbians who claimed to be Marxist feminists, members of the organisation ‘Lesbians in Baguio for National

Democracy’ (LesBoND). Not all Filipino butches are athletic either. But even as a joke, it had an impact on how I conceived of myself as a lesbian at that time. I didn’t intend to be butch, but it seemed to me that in order for my lesbian community to consider me as one of them, I had to prove I was butch enough—because a femme lesbian cannot be trusted; she is always suspected of the potential to turn around and run away with a man. As the early sexologists who promoted their theory of inversion have suggested, a lesbian who doesn’t present as masculine is not exactly a lesbian—and as Lisa Walker confirms, ‘her authenticity as a lesbian must be questioned’ (6). I thought my buzz cut made me ugly because in the Philippines, women’s beauty is traditionally considered contingent on hair being one’s so-called crowning glory. Long hair is perceived as more feminine. It is a ‘loose, societally structured form of sexual dimorphism, or a trait that differentiates between the sexes’ (Whitefield-Madrano para 2). When

I shaved my head, following the logic of sexual dimorphism, I removed a trait that signified me as a female, thus removing me from the binary relation between male and female. What is more, a cut so close to the scalp removes a woman from the ‘male gaze’, which looks at women as sex objects. American cultural anthropologist Vearncombe explains, ‘looking at a woman’s face, at

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her hair, has conventionally been an exercise of desire, and of an assertion of male power’

(Friedman para 9). In this case, my baldness showed that I was refusing to subject myself to the male radar, ergo, I am a lesbian. Vearncombe adds that hair is ‘seen through the Freudian lens, wherein the whole head becomes a stand-in for sexuality’ (para 12), leading many to automatically assume that if a woman has short hair, she must be a lesbian, which is not always the case.

While gender and sexuality should not be reduced to hair styles, it surely did not help when I got pregnant and decided to get married to a man one year later. To the general public, that is, any stranger looking at my heteronormative family, I was, for all intents and purposes, considered heterosexual. To my lesbian community, I had simply proved what they had always suspected: Jhoanna is not a lesbian. I passed as a heterosexual because that was how the community interpreted my behaviour. Yet even though I didn’t practice passing as a heterosexual woman in daily life deliberately, my heteronormative marriage threw me into an exile from my writing. I couldn’t write within it, for fear that my writing, which dealt with lesbian themes, would threaten my marriage, which I still wanted to keep at that time. I silenced myself for six years and only wrote again after I had ended the marriage, when I became free to articulate my lesbian material again. Seen in the light of this self-imposed censorship, I did deliberately make myself pass as heterosexual in order to silence the lesbian writer in me. It wasn’t a case of writer’s block; I chose the exile.

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1.3 The In/Visibility of the Philippine Lesbian Writer

Lisa Walker, in her book Looking Like What You Are (2001), argues that ‘the passer, as a figure of indeterminacy, destabilizes identities predicated on the visible to reveal how they are constructed’ (10). The very fact that the ‘true’ identity of the passer cannot be determined by visual cues alone suggests that identities cannot really be ascertained visually. It brings to the fore the importance of process, of becoming, and of how identity is constructed over time and across cultures. If visible signifiers of identity are necessary, Walker proposes that more attention be paid to differences within the groups, that we avoid homogenising approaches that privilege what can be more easily seen, for instance in pitting butch vs femme, which replicates traditional gender hierarchies. This is why in this section I write the word ‘invisibility’ with a slash mark—in/visibility—to refer both to invisibility and the indeterminacy of using visibility as a measure of identity.

In this PhD I have problematised the way my feminine gender expression contributes to the invisibility of lesbians, particularly lesbian writers in the Philippines. I had always thought of myself as ‘out and proud’ as a lesbian since coming out in 1988 when I was eighteen years old.

When I accepted that my writing practice was more aligned with issues of sexuality than my identity as a migrant writer in Mindanao, which had initially driven my research goal, I threw my body into the process. I thought that bringing my body physically into the question of sexual identity and how it manifests in gender expression would shed light on my writing practice. In what I called my ‘Butch Challenges’, I dressed in what I thought were butch clothes and I moved my body in what I thought were butch ways of moving, e.g. hunched shoulders, walking in wide strides with my hips thrust forward. I hypothesised that taking on this ‘butch identity’, which was the opposite of my usually feminine presentation, would help me understand how these roles

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affected my writing, or not. What could my being visible or identifiable as a lesbian teach me about myself and my practice? Some of my field notes follow, in the form of a research log written on colour-coded index cards:

FIGURE 3: Field Notes Sample

Butch Challenge 1:

I don’t tell anyone I am doing research experiments. I wear my Nike golf shirt, my shapeless

‘boyfriend jeans’, and driving shoes. I put my hair in a low ponytail but still wear my day face make-up: blush, eyeliner, pink lipstick, as a matter of habit. I feel naked otherwise. I remember

Judith Butler and her set of repeated acts that constitute gender. I acknowledge this constraint, the power that makeup has over me.

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When my daughter sees me, she immediately says, ‘What’s up with the outfit?’ The fact that she notices the ‘look’ tells me that I routinely dress in a feminine manner, even casually.

‘I want to look butch today.’

She is silent for a bit then concludes, ‘You look like Tita M. I don’t like it.’

I don’t like it either. ‘Tita M’ is my domestic partner, and she expresses as butch. In fact, when I first met her, I thought she was ‘too butch’ and I was not attracted to her at all. I admit that a lesbian who looks masculine triggers my internalised lesbophobia, making me afraid that if I were in a relationship with someone like that, it would attract undue attention from the generally homophobic public. Looking butch (or like my butch partner) makes me feel ugly, not just physically, but in how I thought about lesbians. It shows me to myself. But why do I judge myself as ugly when I don’t look feminine? Ironic that all the pieces of clothing I wear are actually mine. The look isn’t a stretch for my normal wardrobe, but I have never worn them for the distinct purpose of cross-dressing.

Butch Challenge 2:

I try going butch again without my family seeing it when I do market duties. I wear a sports bra to flatten my chest, a t-shirt, my boyfriend jeans, and my driving shoes, plus a baseball cap. No makeup. I am afraid someone I know will see me. I am ashamed to be seen to be ugly. I feel ugly without my ‘usual face’ with some makeup, even though I also know this bare face is my actual face. I berate myself for being ridiculous.

In the market, I wonder if anyone will call me ‘Boss’, or ‘Bay’, which is what folks in

Davao usually call butch lesbians. Fail. They still call me ‘Madame’. Maybe it’s because they recognise me, being a regular customer. Maybe they respect me. I do bump into a former student and we talk for a bit. He doesn’t say anything about my ‘look’, but I still feel uncomfortable. 25

Butch Challenge 3:

Seriously considering getting a short haircut to make my challenge easier. When I tell my hairstylist about it, he says, ‘Well, it’s a commitment; you have to come back every month to maintain it. Like M.’ That solves the matter for me. I’m too cheap to spend on hair maintenance.

My long hair requires only three to four cuts every year. On the one hand, it seems like a simple and practical matter of how much time or money I spend on my hair; on the other, I wonder if it also has to do with my not wanting to be ‘like M’, my butch partner, revealing my need to assert who I am within our power dynamic. Because butch is associated with masculine, it derives power from it; M, in particular, likes to control me (and everything else). If I looked like her and behaved like her, it might mean that I relinquish my power to her. Yet, cutting my hair short would also show my direct resistance to her control over me—she prefers me with long hair. And maybe I don’t want to defy her completely. I don’t dare disturb the universe that way. I don’t want to risk losing my hold on her, either. It seems like I resist the forces trying to control me only to a certain extent that doesn’t show me as a total subversive. I don’t have it in me. This is also probably why I didn’t see my feminine expression or my writing in the beginning as a form of passing. I actually like following rules. It makes me feel safe. Like taking a well-worn path.

That, or I derived power from following rules.

For the third challenge, I hide my hair in the baseball cap, wear sneakers, and bind my breasts with the neoprene waist belt I use when I work out. It is hot and tight; I can barely breathe. My voice is husky because of the squeeze.

Still, people at the market call me ‘Ma’am’ even when I don’t buy from my usual vendors.

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Butch Challenge 4:

I take the boho-themed Christmas party at my university as a challenge and opportunity to take my butch look public to a community that has come to expect me to look a certain way, i.e. feminine.

I would have worn a hat, but I don’t want to carry it all night to the indie book expo downtown I was going to after the party. So I settle for a scarf to hide my braid. I wear an Indian shirt with khaki pants and vintage Hush Puppies. I think I am dapper enough, but I can’t imagine going to a party without lipstick so I ‘cheat’ a little. And why do I think looking butch does not include lipstick anyway? Even heterosexual men wear makeup for special occasions these days.

I ask my partner M to take a photo of me before I leave.

FIGURE 4: Butch Boho

She tells me I look great. And that she won’t break up with me. A few years before we met, M had read my book, Women Loving, and she thought I was butch based on the author photo, in which I wore my hair pulled back in a ponytail. When we met, she didn’t recognise me or associate me with the book of lesbian stories. It became a joke between us: that if I turned

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butch, she would break up with me. She’s a traditional butch who would never have a relationship with another butch.

The people in my university do a double take when they see me. They don’t recognise me!

I have to wave directly at some of my friends to make them acknowledge me. My ex-girlfriend doesn’t seem to recognise me even though I stand somewhere close to her to make her look. She doesn’t even glance.

Success. I think.

Then I go to the indie book expo, let down my hair, and wear my scarf differently.

Friends start saying, ‘You’re so pretty!’ When I reply, ‘But I’m supposed to be butch!’, they just smile in response. I suspect they want to say, ‘Who are you kidding?’

FIGURE 5: Pretty Boho

When I look at this photo, I see myself still doing the butch stance, with legs in a ‘man- spread’ and arms akimbo. But the long hair does throw the look off. When I am described as

‘pretty’, I note that this adjective is gendered to apply to feminine objects.

I see now that the point of doing these challenges wasn’t to be mistaken for a man. But if the illusion wasn’t successful, what was the point? What I certainly learned from doing the

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challenge was that butch isn’t me—it’s a drag, in the sense of being a burden. Not in the sense of going ‘drag’ as a performance of the opposite gender in a public spectacle. More important, as

Andrew Walker explains, ‘Drag is a political statement, rooted in a history of resistance and a reclamation of otherness’ (para 16). So the spectacle that a drag queen or king makes could be used as a critique of patriarchy. But my butch challenge was not a drag challenge. I took my masculine look out into the public, but it was not meant to make a political statement about my otherness. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, I failed the butch challenge I had set myself. Like my friends used to say, I’ll never be butch enough, and therefore, in the eyes of my lesbian friends, not a ‘real’ lesbian in the Philippine context. When I do wear masculine-identified clothes voluntarily, I am not doing it to say something about my sexuality. The fact is, I do not have to be butch to be a lesbian. Ultimately, what I wanted to find out is whether the way I expressed my lesbian identity impinged on my writing practice or not.

My significant insight from the butch experiment is that I rejected butch expression because I didn’t want to be seen or identified easily as lesbian by the general public. Lisa

Walker, in a chapter entitled ‘How To Recognize a Lesbian’ in her book about lesbian identity, states, ‘The paradigm of visibility is totalizing when a signifier of difference becomes synonymous with the identity it signifies’ (210). If a lesbian could be identified visibly as a lesbian, she would have to bear the weight of the heteronormative community’s mostly stereotypical ideas about lesbians as a group. I have been able to somehow avoid the burden of those stereotypes by expressing as feminine. But lesbians like me who do not exhibit the traditional signifiers of lesbian identity, i.e. butch or masculine expression, are further marginalised within the marginalised community precisely because we are not even seen. Just because I am not recognised on the surface as a lesbian shouldn’t have to mean I am not a

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lesbian, but that is how visibility works. My being an out and proud lesbian in the Philippines doesn’t seem to matter to the normative community that sees lesbians only through the butch signifiers of identity. It seemed I had failed the butch challenges, at least according to my terms, particularly in the sense that I still didn’t understand the power of butch expression even when I performed it. My discomfort with butch expression taught me that I actually prefer not to be seen by the general public as lesbian, despite my crying out to be seen and validated by the lesbian community. By expressing as feminine and thus passing as heterosexual, I wanted to keep myself protected from public discrimination against lesbians, but this passing invalidated my lesbian identity, which I consider a central aspect of my writing. This was a paradox whose implications

I sought to examine in my writing practice later in the PhD program. To show the timeline and research methodology, I did my butch challenges in the period between PRS 3 and PRS 4, while

I was also doing my creative writing (memoir and column). I tried to examine the relationship between what I found out through these physical challenges and my writing in the PRS 4 midcandidature paper for my second PhD milestone, but it wasn’t until the period from PRS 6 to

PRS 7 the following year that my argument regarding passing and how it relates to my practice was formed.

Fabello, an American feminist activist and educator who focuses on body politics, explains that femmes are privileged because ‘we are not immediate targets for verbal harassment, physical violence, or other explicit homophobia the way that more supposedly “visually obvious” queer women are’ (para 32). Our gender conformity somehow protects us from the discrimination and attacks suffered by women who are visibly not heterosexual. But she also believes that ‘being assumed to be something else, is equally as offensive and homophobic, stereotyping and discriminatory’ (42). We are only spared the violence because the public

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doesn’t really know who we are. Fabello puts it emphatically, ‘if you don’t fit the stereotype, then you might as well be straight’ (para 28) in the eyes of the heterosexual community, as well as within the lesbian community. And within the discourse of late-twentieth-century identity politics articulated by Lisa Walker, ‘to be invisible is to be seen but not heard, or to be erased entirely—to be absent from cultural consciousness’ (1). Given the Philippine concept of the femme as babae or the ‘woman’ of the lesbian, it becomes a kind of epistemic violence, an attack on the level of definition. It invalidates my specific experience of my sexuality and assertion of my lesbian identity. It renders me invisible as a lesbian both to myself and to my community. I might as well be straight. I literally have to shout to be noticed, or wear a statement t-shirt that says, ‘I am a lesbian. Deal with it.’ Or wear a butch partner on my arm like a placard, because that is, in fact, the only visible signifier that I am a woman-loving woman.

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1.4 Lesbian Writing in the Philippines: A Provisional Survey

How do these findings around the dynamics between my sexual identity and my gender expression relate to my writing? How could I say that I am a lesbian writer writing lesbian texts?

In the first place, even the term ‘lesbian’ is fraught with conflict about how it is defined, particularly in the Philippines as discussed above. While the easy solution is to say that a lesbian is a woman who has romantic and sexual relations with women, that does not reflect the historical struggle around the term, particularly prompted by Adrienne Rich’s concept of the

‘lesbian continuum12’, in which virtually all women can be considered lesbian by virtue of their commitment to women. As Wilton, a British scholar who examines this history in detail, finds, lesbian is ‘a word in constant flux, subject to continual negotiation and renegotiation’ (30) depending on socio-historical circumstances. What this suggests is that the term is not stable semantically, thus, the identity it is meant to refer to cannot be pinned down either. But it also means that each individual who identifies as ‘lesbian’ can negotiate what she means by it through her particular subjectivity. Wilton suggests calling it ‘les-being’ to focus on being lesbian as an activity rather than a static entity (49). A more contemporary iteration of this idea is held by Merryn Johns, editor-in-chief of Curve magazine, touted as America’s best-selling magazine for lesbians, who sees ‘lesbian’ as ‘a noun, an adjective, and as a verb’ (para 3), that it is not a stable identity but something she does, particularly by ‘acting upon my desires’ (para 3) for women. Both are consistent with my argument regarding the use of the Filipino prefix pagka- to suggest a potential space of becoming—pagka-lesbiana, or ‘lesbian-becoming’.

If we cannot even agree on what a lesbian is, particularly for us as Filipinos, how can we begin to say what a lesbian text is? As American lesbian critic Zimmerman explains, ‘classic’

12 This refers to ‘a range—through each woman’s life…of woman-identified experience’ (239). Rich also describes it as ‘forms of primary intensity between and among women’ (239), not limited to sexual experience. 32

lesbian theory has always been centred around questions of definition (2): What is a lesbian?

What is a lesbian text? Is it enough to say that a text is lesbian if it is written by someone who identifies as lesbian? That would be the easy solution. But that does not address texts written by lesbians that are not about lesbian experiences or issues. Or texts that repudiate lesbianism. I agree with Wilton’s contention that a lesbian text must create an ‘oppositional lesbian cultural presence in the world’ (131). Because the heteropatriarchy has long enjoyed the power to define what lesbianism is (e.g. framing it as abnormal and immoral, or non-existent), a lesbian text needs to write against that script and take control of the narrative.

Similarly, Marilyn Farwell, an American scholar, in theorising about lesbian narrative space asks specifically, ‘Where is the “lesbian” in the lesbian narrative?’ (6). She posits that in the twentieth century, the lesbian has expanded to ‘represent the woman who exceeds discursive and narrative boundaries’ (17), a metaphorical subject of excess that challenges boundaries.

Thus, a lesbian text also disrupts conventional and structural expectations in narratives, as she might also do in the way she lives. (I discuss narrative disruption more theoretically in Section

4.1 of this dissertation.)

While the content of my past writing was lesbian, i.e. it featured female characters who loved females, my lesbian-ness as a writer failed to show in the way I was using the form of the short story. For instance, in my fiction collection, Women Loving (2010), I wrote the stories in the way we were taught to write stories in creative writing classes, following straightforward rules of plot, particularly the linear and ‘classic’ Aristotelian structure, which was considered conventional. This drive to follow the rules reflected my academic objectives to get good grades, but also, in a deeper sense, my desire to be a ‘dutiful daughter’, as Adrienne Rich describes it, who obeys the father/patriarchy to gain approval. At the time I was writing those lesbian-themed

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stories (1998–2000), within the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program of De La Salle

University-Manila, I didn’t even imagine there was a different way to write stories. While I had read less conventional stories, for instance by Julio Cortazar, I didn’t aim to write stories like those. I had even sat in a Fiction Writing Workshop under a professor who required us to write a post-modern story as a final project, but I did not enjoy the exercise. It made me feel unstable, like I had no control over my material. The form of the traditional short story gave me the illusion of stable ground.

When I shifted to writing nonfiction in 2007, after ending my marriage and upon moving to Davao, I obeyed the same rules of writing ‘creative nonfiction’, which I learned in an MFA class, mainly around deploying fiction writing techniques in writing essays. I was rewarded for it with publication, a writing prize, and canonical stature through the Philippine literature classroom. At that time, I didn’t interrogate that shift to a different genre. It was only a matter of personal readiness to tell my story as factual, not fictional.

While I thought I was defying gender role expectations in my relationships, first in loving women and later by continuing to identify as lesbian within a heterosexual marriage, I took refuge in conventions of genre as a writer. I did like writing within the confines of genre expectations as defined by the tenets of New Criticism13 espoused by mentors in the national writers workshops and my MFA; it made me feel safe, the same way expressing as a feminine lesbian did.

But it was a false sense of safety. Expressing as feminine doesn’t make me less of a lesbian than those who express as butch; it only delays public perception of my sexual identity. I am out as a lesbian in my real life and in my writing through its content and subject matter. Even

13 This was a mainly American movement that started in the 1920s and focused on close readings of texts without referring to factors outside of the text itself, like the life of the author or the socio-historical context (Cuddon 544). 34

in my essay ‘Sapay Koma’ (published in 2008 in a Philippine anthology about relationships), which is mainly about the failure of my heterosexual marriage, I draw attention to the fact that I am a lesbian because I did not stop identifying as a lesbian in real life: ‘What was most ridiculous (though I refused to see it at that time) was that I was a self-proclaimed lesbian feminist. Despite all the tragic relationships I had had with women, I still believed that it was worth fighting for the right of a woman to love another woman’ (49). I added the modifier ‘self- proclaimed’ as a cheeky nod to lesbians who questioned my bisexual practice and lesbian identification. As a lesbian feminist14, I viewed this choice to continue identifying as lesbian as a political act. It was empowering for me to call myself a ‘lesbian’ and a ‘lesbian writer’ even within my heterosexual marriage. It didn’t turn me straight; I could still locate myself in Rich’s lesbian continuum. If anyone who knew me (or read my work) wanted to discriminate against me based on my sexual orientation, they could very well do so because I was not hiding it. So why did I think it necessary to be immediately visible on the page even without my stating it directly?

I wanted to try to stop passing as a heterosexual writer. I wanted to end the exile brought about by my practice of passing and rejoin my lesbian community, knowing that I may lose the privileges accrued from passing—for instance, publication. This desire to be finally seen came about with my realisation that I was not actually seen by the lesbian community or the literary community. Despite my open declarations about it, I thought my lesbian identity was generally perceived as an illusion, at best provisional, depending on the sex of my romantic partner. Terry

Castle, in her book about what she calls the ‘apparitional lesbian’ in modern Western culture, talks about how the image of the lesbian is ghostly and thus needs to be exorcised (6), but that this erasure leads lesbians (as characters and in real life) to exert more effort to be recognised.

14 Lesbian feminism aims to include lesbian issues within the feminist agenda of women’s equality by anchoring the struggle on a ‘critique of heterosexuality’, not just the patriarchy (Wilton 88). 35

‘The very feeling of being obliterated by one’s society may prompt a wish to assert oneself all the more aggressively—to enter more fully, as it were, into the larger scheme of things’ (17), she claims. In similar manner, my need to be finally, truly seen as a lesbian writer has led to my desire to make my sexuality visible on the page as form, not only as content.

In the early stages of my writing career, I imagined I would fill the ‘lesbian niche’, because I had lesbian experience as material for my writing. But also because at that time in the

Philippines (the late 90s), there seemed to be a vacancy—so few writers were ‘out’ lesbians, and those who were did not necessarily write about lesbian matters. I named it for myself as a ‘niche’ because I believed that lesbian writing had a role to play within the feminist project of creating a women’s literary tradition. I didn’t take note that in the Filipino language, we only use the word nitso, borrowed from the word ‘niche’, to mean the sepulchral kind, a tomb. I would later learn that in the Philippines, the ‘lesbian niche’ is a kind of nitso, where the system tries to silence and bury us.

I questioned why the major anthologies of women’s writing that were being published had no lesbians in them. In fact, even in a book published in 2003, entitled Filipino Women

Writers in English. Their Story: 1905–2002 and edited by the country’s foremost gynocritic Edna

Zapanta-Manlapaz, there were no lesbian writers featured. In her introduction Zapanta-Manlapaz does mention, along with other expatriate women writers, Nice Rodriguez and her book Throw It to the River published in Canada in 1993, but does not say at all that Rodriguez’s book is the first book of lesbian stories by a Filipina in the diaspora. It is an oversight that makes the only lesbian writer mentioned in the book invisible, in a book that makes it appear as if women write only about how they relate to men. Zapanta-Manlapaz notes that ‘the history of Philippine literature in

English spans more than a century, consisting of four generations of writers’ (4), with the women

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coming from the middle class, ‘most (of who) are married and have children’ or ‘separated from their spouses’ or ‘self-proclaimed solteras’ (single by choice) (7). So while Rodriguez identifies and presents as butch, and writes stories revolving around the experiences of butch characters, all this is silenced by the heterosexual feminist editor, forcing Rodriguez to pass as a heterosexual

‘Filipino woman writer in English’ just like the others in a book that purports to be definitive although not comprehensive, having sprung from the efforts of the executive director of the

Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings15.

In addition, a paper published in 2009 tried to map a preliminary historical survey of lesbian literature in the Philippines written in Filipino and similarly concluded that lesbians are invisible even within the feminist movement. Pangilinan, a Philippine Studies professor in UP

Diliman, argues that lesbians only become invisible ‘sa mga sadyang ayaw tumingin at makakita’ (218), i.e. only ‘to those who really don’t want to look at them and see them’ for fear of disturbing the status quo. She shows that there is no lesbian writing included in any of the canonical anthologies of Philippine literature, such as those edited by National Artist Bienvenido

Lumbera. The article adds that even openly out lesbian feminist writers like Aida Santos and

Anna Leah Sarabia, whose poems were included in feminist anthologies like Sa Ngalan ng Ina:

100 Taon ng Tulang Feminista sa Pilipinas (1997)16, suffered marginalisation and a kind of invisibility because the editor did not select their explicitly lesbian poems. In fact, ‘hindi man lamang nausad na sila’y kasama sa mga masigasig na tagakatha at tagapagtaguyod ng panitikang lesbiyana ng bansa gayong itinatampok pa naman sa aklat ang panunuring malay sa

15 Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz was executive director of the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings (ALIWW) from its founding in 1995 to 2003. ALIWW is an archival facility in the Ateneo de Manila University, which aims ‘to preserve written works by and about Filipino women in all areas, with emphasis on their contributions to Filipino cultural life’ (Zapanta-Manlapaz xii). 16 In the Name of the Mother: 100 Years of Feminist Poetry in the Philippines 37

kasarian17’ (226). Their work to advocate for lesbian literature in the Philippines was not even mentioned despite the anthology being explicit about its feminist intent. It seems that the heterosexual feminist editor Quindoza-Santiago did not recognise the importance of specifically promoting the politics of sexual identity and orientation within her feminist framework at that time.

In the same article, Pangilinan mentions the anthology Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino

Lesbian (1998) published by mainstream Anvil Publishing, Inc., which consisted mainly of coming out narratives by middle-class lesbians from the organization Can’t Live in the Closet

(CLIC) headed by Sarabia and four others from the diaspora, including Nice Rodriguez. While the book broke ground, being touted as the first lesbian anthology in the Philippines by its editor and publisher, as well as requiring their contributors to be out (as the editor notes in her introduction), it was essentially ignored by the Philippine literary community. It was not reviewed by the critics and it was not distributed widely. For research in this dissertation, it took me quite the effort to find someone who had a physical copy, short of asking the editor and contributors themselves. I didn’t find it in any university libraries in Davao City. I remember that

I had browsed it in a bookstore when it came out and decided against buying because the writing didn’t appeal to me as a literature teacher. As Sarabia shared to me in a personal message, ‘I knew what [the book] did in terms of visibility. But no one in the literary world seemed to care too much about it.’ I suspect it was because none of the writers in the anthology were ‘writers’— they were not products of the writers workshop system. Thus, it wasn’t deemed by the critics and academics as a literary publication; it was more of a political advocacy. Sarabia writes in her introduction: ‘we (hope) to purge the bitterness from our hearts and exorcise the ghosts of self-

17 My literal translation: ‘it was not even put forward that they were among the zealous creators and supporters of lesbian literature in the country even as the anthology features a gender-conscious analysis’. 38

pity from our souls’, which arose from the oppression of lesbians in Philippine society. She adds,

‘We have gathered our anger, our frustrations, and our joys. And we proclaim ourselves to the world’ (13). It was an effort to become visible in literature, but the system refused to look at the women who had laid themselves out for the cause of visibility. Sarabia concedes, ‘Maybe Tibok, in my mind, was more like an historical artifact (of the LGBT movement), in a way, than a literary achievement’ (personal message).

As Pangilinan asserts in her mapping of lesbian writing, it isn’t only a lack of representation in the anthologies; it is also that critics have not paid attention to the works of lesbians: ‘hindi naipapasok sa diskursong pampanitikan ang mga ito’ (228), ‘they do not enter literary discourse’. This renders them mute.

In the same vein of rendering the lesbian mute and seemingly invisible, four years before the Tibok anthology was published, Women Supporting Women Center (WSWC) convenor

Giney Villar and her partner at that time, Aida Santos, had published a joint anthology of their work entitled Woman-to-Woman (1994), featuring photographs, poetry by Santos, and prose by

Villar. Villar’s essays reflect on lesbian feminist politics, consistent with her advocacy work in

WSWC. Notable is a short erotic piece placed among her fiction. As far as I know, it is the first explicit literary description of lesbian sex published in the Philippines because the only other piece about lesbian desire was published in the erotica anthology Forbidden Fruit in 1993:

‘Tender Rituals’ by Rebecca Crisostomo (a pseudonym), which is a sensual depiction, seemingly aimed at elevating lesbian sex to the level of myth by ritualising it. It’s a shame that the circulation of Woman-to-Woman was so limited. Only the authors seem to have existing copies of it today; they said it was distributed abroad. No reviews were made of this book. This is further proof of Pangilinan’s argument that the lesbian does exist in the Philippines but is

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rendered invisible by the heteropatriarchal system that refuses to look and see, reminiscent of

Castle’s ‘apparitional lesbian’—there, but not there.

My book, Women Loving, came out only in 2010 even though I had completed the manuscript in 2000. It took a long and winding route to going public because I was protecting my heterosexual marriage from the impact of my publishing a book of lesbian-themed stories, and I didn’t want to submit it to any publishers. But when it was finally launched, I was disappointed by the response (or lack of response) to it. It wasn’t seen as a landmark in women’s writing, even though in fact it was the first sole-author collection of lesbian writing published in the Philippines. It was not reviewed by any members of the Manila Critics Circle18, not even by my own feminist writer-friends. I reasoned to myself that maybe they did not know how to read it, not being lesbians themselves. But it must have been part of the efforts to keep the lesbian invisible, which, as Pangilinan observes is because lesbians are a threat to the oppressive system for not complying with its binary and heteropatriarchal demands (218). My book suffered the same fate as the previous anthologies of lesbian writing. My publisher’s marketing manager advised me to write the review myself, and they would post it anonymously in book blogs. But I thought it was demeaning.

The book didn’t sell as fast as it could have (based on the dearth of Philippine books about lesbian matters), even though it was available in the major and mainstream bookstores across the Philippines. It took five years for its initial 1,000 copy print run to be sold out. Thus, my publisher didn’t think it was worth doing a second printing. I thought I had failed, both as a writer and as a lesbian. As a lesbian reader, I was hungry to read a book about lesbian experiences; I couldn’t find one in Philippine literature, so I wrote it myself. I thought there was

18 Founded in 1981 and composed of professional literary critics and newspaper columnists who publish their reviews in journals and newspapers. They also act as judges in the annual National Book Awards of the Philippines. 40

a gap I needed to fill. So I couldn’t understand why there seemed to be no excitement around it.

At that early point in my writing career, audience reception was an important factor in how I viewed myself as a writer.

Yet, the significance of such a book could not be discounted forever. Slowly, lesbian readers picked it up. Even though my evidence of this was anecdotal, I began to understand what my practice meant, outside of trying to be accepted by the literary establishment. Some years after its publication, undergraduate literature students began writing me to ask for interviews because they were using my stories for term papers and theses. Although as far as I know none of these papers have been published, knowing that my lesbian stories are being studied in academe gives them a kind of legitimacy. After years of being bypassed by literary gatekeepers, my readers were validating my work as a lesbian writer. The book did sell out eventually, and in

2015, the stories were given new life by a different publisher as an E-book entitled Women on

Fire.

My writing did reach my audience for the book: young women who were struggling with their lesbian identity. I know this because I later met young writers who told me how finding my book was crucial to their own turning points as lesbians and as writers who want to write about the lesbian experience from their own perspectives. As American critic Bonnie Zimmerman describes it, lesbian texts are like ‘sacred objects’ that not only affirm the existence of the lesbian community, but also help create it (quoted in Wilton 122). The award-winning Philippine comic book artist, Emiliana Kampilan (with whom I would later collaborate in a zine included in my creative work portfolio for this PhD), wrote me a letter sharing how as a college student, she had found my book in the UP Diliman library and thought it was a sanctuary. She told me that she considers me her muse, and named one of the main lesbian characters in her first book, Dead

41

Balagtas Tomo 1: Mga Sayaw ng Dagat at Lupa (2017) after me, tweaking it a little: ‘Diana

Lynn’. While Diana does sound like Jhoanna, it is also the name of the protagonist in my story,

‘Christmas Lights’. Kampilan uses my Diana and me as intertexts19 in her work, helping create our Philippine lesbian culture.

For young lesbian writers, it was crucial that there was a mainstream-published book in the Philippines about lesbian experiences, including explicit sex, which had not previously been tackled widely in Philippine literature. Women Loving may not have won any awards or rewards from the Philippine literary system, but it was something. It did something significant by giving voice and shape to what had previously been muted and invisible. It did the opposite of passing, as the hiding of one’s true identity in favour of another identity perceived as superior. It made me visible to those who wanted to see me—other lesbians and lesbian writers. In answer to the first research problem of this dissertation, from my previous experience with Women Loving, the first line of defence against the invisibility of the lesbian writer is publication; the second is cultivating a specific community of lesbian readers, which includes critics. With the publication in 2003 of Tabi-tabi sa Pagsasantabi. Kritikal na Tala ng mga Lesbiana at Bakla sa Sining,

Kultura, at Wika20, a substantial, albeit preliminary exploration of the gay and lesbian cultural field, we are assured that our efforts to put our work out there will not be ignored any longer. In addition, the world of social media has made these tasks of reaching out to our community easier than when I started writing in 1996.

Yet I have realised through the questions raised by my own practice research in this PhD, that while publication of Women Loving is my ceremonial ‘coming out’ as a lesbian author, I still

19 The term was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966 to mean the ‘interdependence of literary texts’, arguing that texts are not isolated phenomena (Cuddon 424). 20 The title is translated in the CCP Encyclopedia as ‘Excuse the Slight: Critical Notes by Lesbians and Gays on Art, Culture, and Language.’ 42

contributed to lesbian invisibility by writing like a ‘straight’ woman, that is, following the standards set by New Criticism through the writers workshop system and my MFA. (I discuss this issue in greater detail in Section 2.1 of the dissertation.) But passing in that way also allowed my writing, paradoxically, to become visible to the community. With the publication of that book and the E-book version, my material remains out there, being an ‘oppositional lesbian cultural presence’ (Wilton 131) available to those who need it. In fact, Women Loving somehow even made it onto a recommended list of ‘8 Books Featuring Asian and Pacific Islander Queer

Women’ from the website and online community Autostraddle, which is currently the ‘world’s most popular lesbian website, with over one million unique visitors and 3.5 million views per month’ (‘What is Autostraddle?’). Their ‘lesbrarian’ in Canada describes my book as

‘groundbreaking’, giving readers in the Philippines ‘a rare glimpse’ at what romantic and sexual lesbian love can look like (Stepaniuk).

As both Walker and Caughie argue, the very act of successful passing draws attention to the indeterminacy of identities, especially those with no genetic markers like class and sexual orientation, and in my particular case, the sexual identity of my writing. By placing less importance on visibility and more importance on the process of construction or becoming, passing can be seen as a potential mode of lesbian visibility, particularly in writing. This dissertation hopes to demonstrate more specifically how the process involving the paradoxical potential of passing plays out in my present writing practice in response to my first research question about combating the systemic invisibility of the lesbian writer in the Philippines.

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Chapter 2: Contexts

2.1 Passing Through the Gates of the Philippine Literary System

Trying to find my place as a lesbian writer in the Philippines is not only about gender and sexuality; it is also about literary gatekeeping in a system that promotes particular ways of writing. The Silliman University website states, ‘As the longest running among the nation’s writing workshops, the Silliman Workshop has trained several generations of writers, many of whom are now influencing the shape, direction, and development of Philippine literature’

(‘About Silliman’). It has trained over 600 writers, many of whom have gone on to teach creative writing across the country, edit and publish anthologies, as well as judge writing contests. The

Workshop doesn’t only teach about literary craft; it opens doors for fellows who want to carry on in the path of a writer. As the Silliman University website confirms, ‘it has now become a rite of passage for the country’s finest writers’.

I used to always say that I started writing in 1996. I marked it there because that was when I became a fellow to the Silliman National Writers Workshop. This was the workshop considered a ‘rite of passage’ for Philippine writers in English at that time; being part of it meant that you had potential, that if you followed the advice of the teaching panel you would become a successful writer. But I didn’t see myself as a writer when I received the fellowship. I was only a

Literature major and a young teacher who happened to write a few poems and one story as part of the requirements for graduate school, and then happened to meet Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, the founders of the workshop. They asked me personally to send them my works, which, fortunately, they accepted for the three-week workshop. I don’t remember any distinct lessons on writing from that time except the primacy of the literary text through the basic tenets of

American New Criticism, which were espoused by the teaching panel. But by the end of that 44

workshop, I had begun to think of myself as a ‘writer’; that was the sense of validation that came from simply being a part of it.

Ironically, that rite of passage also instilled a deep doubt in me about whether I really am a writer or whether I only got lucky. While other applicants needed to send their manuscripts blindly and compete for the fellowship, I was invited by the Tiempos themselves. What if I only happened to be a writer because the Tiempos had handpicked me? Thus, at the outset, every time

I wrote anything, I was trying to prove that I deserved that slot in the ‘writer-making’ workshop and was thus a ‘legitimate’ member of the Philippine writing community. My early practice revolved around trying to fill up that slot, showing I deserved it years and years after the workshop had ended in 1996. It was less about writing per se than about validation. I realise now that it was this need for validation, particularly from the prime movers of a literary system that I thought had ‘engendered’ me, that stunted my growth as a writer.

The Silliman Workshop may have been a door through which I entered the Philippine literary world, but it wasn’t really what opened the door of writing for me. It was my grandfather’s death two years prior. When I started doing this PhD, I was led back to reading

Hélène Cixous and her other work beyond what I knew as écriture feminine or women’s writing from my undergraduate studies, particularly Three Steps in the Ladder of Writing. In it she explains that becoming a writer requires entering the ‘School of the Dead’: ‘To begin (writing, living) we must have death’ and ‘the courage, the desire, to approach, to go to the door’ (1993,

7). My ‘School of the Dead’ was the physical death of my grandfather, which made me want to approach the door because I needed to understand somehow why he had tried to commit suicide and what it meant for me. In 1994, my grandfather slit his wrist and later died of diabetes complications. Being a Catholic family, we were taught that suicide is a mortal sin; in fact it is

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the gravest sin because it showed lack of faith in God. I couldn’t understand the despair my grandfather had been in to try to take his own life. He was the doorkeeper to my impulse to write, and the image of him lying unconscious in his divan with his arm limp, dripping blood into a basin was my ‘inaugural scene’. Even though I didn’t see it myself and was only told about it by my mother, my love for my grandfather was so great that I couldn’t find peace. I wrote my first poem as a result even though I didn’t know how to write a poem. It was more of a prayer.

LAMB OF GOD (For Grandfather)

She showed it to me in a clear plastic bag, coming to grips with Exhibit A. Even the little ones knew it was the pocketknife you had always used to hold your keys, and slice apples with, or slit vacuum-sealed packs. The ambulant vaciador always knew when to come to sharpen the blade.

That night, you discovered the true mission of the knife.

You asked for a basin, pretending nausea, and told them all to go and rest.

They later found the basin filled with your blood, the drops from your wrist still creating ripples, like onto the hollow receptacles for Holy Water.

Agnus Dei, miserere nobis…

Today, we shall dip our fingers in the crimson 46

pool and mark our forehead, lips, and hearts.

Agnus Dei, miserere nobis…

We will pour it over our heads and taste the bitter salt. Stained like this, we might begin to see:

This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

Agnus Dei, dona nobis pacem.

In this poem, it is clear that I saw what my grandfather did as a mortal sin because of my

Catholic upbringing but I didn’t want him to go to hell for it, so I depicted it as a sacrifice instead, similar to the sacrifice Jesus Christ made when He died for our sins. Grandfather was a kind of lamb of God who will save our family from our sins (which I imagined had led him to attempt to commit suicide). But I also prayed that Jesus, the true Lamb of God, would save him and bring peace.

My writing began as a way to heal the rift between us somehow, even though the rift had been made infinitely wider because of his passing. I did seek his forgiveness, but the only way he would give it was for me to forsake my lesbian identity. I lost him before he died. In continuing to disobey him and asserting my lesbian relationship at that time, he denied me his love. I didn’t even wonder why he couldn’t accept it if he truly loved me. I accepted it as the price I had to pay. At that time, I didn’t care for my mother’s acceptance, but the loss of my grandfather’s love and possible acceptance if he had lived longer was the end of a world. But as Cixous affirms, when one world ends, it gives us a chance to discover another one: ‘there is more than one 47

world’. Writing was a way to re-create what I had lost, or to fill up the space left by the lost loved one. I wrote several more poems from my memories about my grandfather in his old age, expressing my desire to keep him alive by writing about him. Much later, I would recognise this impulse in my practice of memoir. It seems as if my actions as a ‘dutiful daughter’ to the

Silliman Workshop system are correlated with my desire for my grandfather to put my picture back on his family wall even though I do not repudiate my lesbian identity.

My writing of prose had arisen a few years before even my first poem, born from desire. I wrote my first story because I longed for a woman I could never have. We were both in relationships with other women, and living in different countries. So I figured the only way to make space for this desire was in a story. If it was fiction, I could tell the truth about my love but also hide it behind the genre, thus protecting my relationship at that time. I wrote it in 1990 as a college student. The Filipino-American writer Bienvenido N. Santos, who was a guest in our classroom workshop, very kindly suggested I put the draft in a drawer and leave it there until it was ready to be written. I never took it out of the drawer and I hope there are no extant copies of it. But writing this work did open the door of fiction for me. I promised I would study the form of the short story so that I could tell my loving well. At least well enough to be taken out of the drawer (or the closet). Being an undergraduate student at that time, I was more inclined to look to my teachers as repositories of knowledge, whose words I had to obey in order to demonstrate learning, rather than interrogate. But I persisted because I knew I had stories that needed to be written.

Looking back, I can see that my past practice was grounded in my experiences as a woman, a daughter, and a granddaughter, focused through the lens of my lesbian desire, and all entwined within the Philippine literary system that housed it. What has prodded it forward is

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both my need for validation and my resistance to authority. I remind myself that the Silliman

Workshop was not my true ‘rite of passage’, because it was the rites of death and desire that truly opened the door, but the workshop surely played a significant role in the bigger system that has somehow prevented my writing from growing because of my need to be validated by it.

However, regardless of gender, it was clear to me when I started writing stories and poems, that in order for my writing to gain attention and be published, I needed to work within the existing literary system. This system engendered and promoted a certain style of writing through its mentorship and other rewards. This reflection on my past writing practice and its context was part of my initial autoethnography at the outset of the PhD program. To document it,

I created a map of my journey and my writing, both published and unpublished:

FIGURE 6: Creative Writing Journey Map

Poet and academic Conchitina Cruz, who positions herself firmly against what she describes as the patronage system perpetuated by the Silliman Workshop, explains that the Workshop’s

‘pedagogy perpetuates colonialist and classist ideas about language and literary production, which are camouflaged, if not naturalized, in the name of personal bonds and in the service of craft’ (2017b, 7). In an article about the institutionalisation of creative writing in the Philippines,

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she explains that because it descended from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was preoccupied with the tenets of New Criticism21, the Silliman Workshop’s faculty and students participated actively in disseminating outdated ideas about the primacy and autonomy of the literary text over context. And its insistence on the requirement of the use of English only in the manuscripts for the past fifty years (broken only in 2018 with the opening of two slots for poetry in Binisaya with

English translation) gave Philippine writing in the colonial language greater prestige than those in Philippine languages. Also, in the Philippines, English is used mainly by university-educated writers, which limited the field of possible candidates for the Silliman fellowship. I am not privy to the process that the Workshop administration went through in deciding to open the slots for writing in Binisaya, but I suspect that its location in Dumaguete City in the Visayas region, whose lingua franca is Cebuano or its variant Binisaya, had made the necessity finally obvious.

But what was more pernicious was the patronage system wrought by the workshop. Cruz describes it as ‘held together by personal and not political bonds; it is by nature homogeneous and unified, and it is by culture steeped in affection and deference’ (15). Because its founders asked to be called ‘Mom Edith’ and ‘Dad Ed’ by the fellows, who thus became their honorary children, it promoted an image of the workshop as a family. And if it is a family, then its members are connected by a sense of belonging, loyalty, and gratitude. This family later engendered a reward system for its favoured alumni in the form of opportunities for publication and recommendations to international writing programs and festivals.

In order to push my writing forward on the approved path for a young Philippine writer in

English, I conformed to the requirements of the system. After the Silliman National Writers

Workshop, I dropped out of the PhD in Literature program that I was enrolled in and shifted to

21 For the New Critics, only the text should be read and analysed for its deployment of literary craft, with no reference to the author’s life or socio-historical milieu (Cuddon 544). 50

the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing because I thought that was the only way I could learn to write better. A literary studies program had become irrelevant to me. I didn’t see myself as a critic or literary historian. I was determined to take creative writing seriously. In De La Salle

University, the faculty members in the MFA program were mostly alumni and panellists of the

Silliman Workshop. I got published for the first time in the now-defunct newspaper The Evening

Paper, whose literary page was edited by Alfred Yuson, one of the regular panellists of the workshop. I sent him my workshop story directly after I had revised it. He also published my other batchmates.

I patterned that first-time story, about a woman’s decision to leave her fiancé for her lesbian lover, on the plot structure recommended by the classic Freytag’s Triangle or Pyramid. It is a plot model based on German playwright Gustav Freytag who devised it in 1863, based on

Aristotle: Exposition-Rising Action-Climax-Denouement-Resolution (Thompson). I set up a clear epiphanic moment:

I got out of the shower and toweled off…The steam from the hot

shower had fogged up the mirror and I could barely see my face.

I had never bothered to wipe it off because the cool air would fix

it, I reasoned. Why should I interfere with the rhythm of things?

I thought that, if I simply let the world fix itself, then I would

never have to lift a finger, even in my own life. I could comb

my hair anyway, study my hazy reflection; that is how it has

always worked for me. But this time, I decided to wipe the mist

off the mirror. My own eyes looked back at me, scolding me for

not having done so sooner. I saw myself clearly. (Cruz 2010, 51

62)

In the story, the main character had been asked by her boyfriend to marry him and she had said yes even though she was having an affair with and was in love with a woman. The fogged up mirror represents her own thinking about the situation, and when she wipes the mirror clean, she sees clearly that she needs to break off the engagement—a clear indication of an epiphany.

After the climax brought about by the proposal and her epiphany about it, the denouement begins with her preparing to leave, seeing him as ‘an old man: rocking, rocking, but sadly fixed in place’. I then end the story with a symbol for the complete initiation of the main character, which is also the title of the story, ‘Christmas Lights’, bringing it full circle:

I moved resolutely now, out the door, my voice trailing behind

me: I have to go. I boarded the elevator, thinking, Tomorrow, I

shall write him a letter. I drew my jacket closer as the bell rang

and the doors opened. In the foyer, the lights of the building’s

Christmas tree flickered brightly, like a thousand eyes. (62–63)

The resolution is even signalled with the word, ‘resolutely’, just in case any readers miss it. The reference to writing the fiancé a letter is also a classic trope—the ‘Dear John’ letter, although I will argue that the fact that the letter itself is not included in the resolution is a kind of defiance of the convention.

This story was named Number 4 in a list of the ‘Ten Best Short Stories’ for the month by critic Isagani Cruz in his column in the now-defunct Philippine Star Sunday magazine. I felt validated. I was beginning to make a name for myself in Philippine literature. At this time, I downplayed the fact that it was a story with lesbian characters and a plot revolving around their

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love. In fact, in the Silliman Workshop, I don’t remember any of the panellists discussing the lesbian aspect of it either, except for Edilberto Tiempo joking that all stories should begin this way—with a sex scene. The rest of the discussion was all about craft.

I later applied to the UP National Writers Workshop and I received a fellowship in1999.

Some of the panellists were also part of the Silliman Workshop, but it had other senior writers who were connected with the Likhaan Creative Writing Center in the University of the

Philippines, which has its own press. These writers are considered ‘senior’ because they teach in the creative writing programs and in the national workshops, and they also serve as editors of anthologies and journals22. None of these writers in positions of authority were young. It seemed to me then that the only way to be published was for the senior writers to know who you were.

They wouldn’t read your work otherwise.

Even though it seemed to many in my Filipino literary community that I was on the prescribed writing path for Philippine writers, I knew I didn’t quite belong, even though I was not rejected outright. In regard to the literary structures characterised by the Silliman Workshop, the system did not reward me as much as I had wished. I was not one of those who received easy book publication deals, or invitations to be part of the teaching panels in the national workshops, or recommendations to international literary festivals. It could be that I wasn’t any good according to Silliman Workshop criteria. Or the padrino system, ‘whose mechanisms are so entrenched’ (Cruz 2017b, 15), simply did not favour me.

In his newspaper column, Alfred Yuson, who is one of the stalwarts of the Silliman

Workshop and a major Philippine author with great influence, has written an article in which he

22 I acknowledge that by these criteria, I have myself become a ‘senior’ writer, at least in Mindanao, but because I am aware of the old patronage system in the Philippine literary world, I am conscious about how I handle my purported seniority and ‘power’. 53

takes pride in the literary community fostered by the Silliman Workshop, describing it as a family. He uses the word ‘family’ five times in the short article and calls the workshop fellows

‘kids’. While many fellows really are young college students or fresh graduates, this has an infantilising effect that reduces the writers to a powerless position. He also confirms that ‘the prizes of a writing life aren’t always gained through competition…the torch is continually passed…as references and recommendations are generously given for whoever may be next in line in the circle of fellowship’ (G-2). Ironically, he goes on to debunk the idea of patronage by replacing it with an ‘all-too-welcoming band of sisters and brothers happy to pass on and share’

(G-2). What he is describing here is the same culture, of course, whether one calls it patronage politics or family. If you are not next in line, then you don’t receive the largesse, which he also calls ‘prizes’. They are prizes for one’s ‘perseverance’, not competition. But Yuson is mum in this piece about how exactly one might persevere in this ‘serial fellowship’. The way he describes the system does reveal the patronage in the system, and his calling it a ‘family’ doesn’t change that fact.

Conchitina Cruz herself was part of that Silliman family, having been a Silliman fellow in 1995, validated by Mom Edith as having ‘explosive talent’ (Cruz, C. 2017b, 10). But ever since she started criticising the institution that the Silliman Workshop is, Cruz has become one of the ‘black sheep’ in the family. Yuson describes critics like her as ‘fringe curmudgeons…that

(feed) on envy and antipathy’ (G-2). That is to say, their critique must stem from being envious of the rewards given to favoured literary children. We know exactly who they are because they become part of the Silliman workshop teaching panel, they become co-editors of anthologies, they are officially inducted into the elite literary organisations (especially poetry), and they

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represent the Philippines in the international writers festival circuit via the recommendations of senior Philippine writers.

I am not seen as a black sheep exactly, because I have not spoken directly and publicly against the system until now. But I may be one of those we call anak sa labas. In Philippine culture, notions of family are strongly influenced by Catholicism, which we inherited from our

Spanish colonisers, and which strictly defines family as being formed within the institution of marriage. The Philippine Family Code follows suit, defining children born out of wedlock as

‘illegitimate’. For such children, we use the phrase anak sa labas, literally ‘child from outside’ or

‘the child outside’. I may have had the privilege of calling the Tiempos ‘Mom Edith’ and ‘Dad

Ed’ but I never made it ‘inside’. Going back to Cixous’s School of the Dead, after my grandfather’s death, writing allowed me to create a new world. The Tiempos were part of this new world; they were surrogates to my grandfather.

I suspected initially that this writing illegitimacy arose because of my sexual orientation; the same reason my biological grandfather rejected me. But the Silliman family did seem to accept some male gay writers. As far as I know, there were no other lesbian writers at that time, so I was a kind of test case. Could my illegitimacy have been because I moved out of ‘imperial

Manila’ and ran away to Baguio City, and later to the even further Davao City? But they also welcomed some writers who had moved to other cities, even other countries. It’s a mystery, the power of this family to select whom they will take in, to decide who to define as anak sa labas, to make illegitimate, highlighting the futility of even trying to make it in. I didn’t feel like I truly belonged, which ‘demands full inclusion and membership in the economic, social, and political structure of society’ (Barkey 32).

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Like other anak sa labas—those who were not granted legitimacy for some reason or other (or for no reason)—we had to learn to fend for ourselves. We had to strive to carry on if we wanted to gain any success as writers, not just by continuing to write, but by creating our own opportunities—by putting ourselves at the centre of our writing endeavours. That is, looking at our writing as independent of the validation of the system, and even rejecting it by refusing to perpetuate it.

Having studied and taught in De La Salle University-Manila, I was in a privileged position from which to gain entry into the literary world, even without the blessings of the

Silliman ‘family’. I did have the blessings of Isagani R. Cruz, who was my mentor and friend.

He functioned as a kind of patron, who offered me various writerly projects. While he was an influential author and critic, he did not seem to be part of the Silliman system because he was not regularly invited to be one of its panellists. Through him, I was able to go to my first international conference in Hong Kong, albeit a small one, and not as a creative writer but as an academic. He gave me paying projects to write a textbook, to take photographs of writers for an anthology of interviews he curated, even hired me as a consultant in the Department of

Education when he was appointed as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Projects. I passed somehow as a writer within the literary patronage system.

Unfortunately, this relationship became detrimental to me eventually because when I won my first Palanca literary award for my full-length play in English, ‘Halakata, Ms. D!’ in 1999, he happened to be one of the three judges. I heard that some writers were saying I only won because of Isagani. Even though I knew how much work I had put in, writing that play for six months in the MFA program and putting the draft through two workshops and revisions, I also wondered whether indeed I had only won because of Isagani’s support. I never wrote another play. It is a

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well-oiled system determining who rises and falls in the Philippine literary world, although some writers are more susceptible to the destructive influence. Other writers would have fought harder to prove the negative insinuations wrong. One in particular, Miguel Syjuco, went on to be the first Filipino to win the Man Asian Booker Prize in 2008 for his novel Ilustrado (published in

2010), overshadowing his early mentors in the Silliman Workshop, which he attended in 1998.

Syjuco left the Philippines and did further studies in the US and in Australia, and lives abroad.

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2.2 Women Writing in the Philippines

When I began writing seriously, I did it with a heightened awareness of gender. I studied feminist literary theory in my literature major in college, in the same subject I would later teach every semester for five years. The 90s saw the rise of feminist groups in the Philippines and also a gynocritical interest in women’s writing; that is, an interest in finding or creating a tradition of writing by women. Anthologies of women’s writing were released by mainstream publisher,

Anvil Publishing, Inc., such as Ang Silid na Mahiwaga. Kalipunan ng Kuwento’t Tula ng Mga

Babaeng Manunulat23 (1994) for writing in Tagalog and Songs of Ourselves. Writings by

Filipino Women (1994) for English. There were also the slimmer anthologies, Kung Ibig Mo24.

Love Poetry by Women (1993) and Forbidden Fruit. Women Write the Erotic (1992), which I read with gusto because they celebrated women’s experiences of desire and love. I remember wishing I could have been in them, but at that time I wasn’t writing yet. The anthologies highlighted womanly themes such as the mother-daughter bond, marriage, family, and other relationships. Many of the works also used a conversational woman-to-woman tone. I thought that because I shared some of those experiences, I could write about them, too.

The efforts of Philippine women writers at that time were gynocritical, which, as Elaine

Showalter and other Anglo-American feminists espoused, had to do with creating a women’s literary tradition by finding our foremothers and showing how present-day women writers continued to be in conversation with this tradition of writing against their oppression within the patriarchy. The editor of Songs of Ourselves, Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz, affirms that the writers in

English ‘speak as women living in the specific culture that is the Philippines…(responding) submissive or subversive, to that culture’s construction of them as women’ (82). The writers in

23 The Mysterious Room. Anthology of Stories and Poems by Women Writers. 24 If You Want To. 58

the Filipino language underwent a similar process. Lilia Quindoza-Santiago, who edited a major anthology of 100 years of women’s poetry (1889–1989) observes, ‘Sa buong proseso (ng paglilinaw ng babae sa kanilang lugar sa lipunan) ay napapanday ang konsepto ng pagkababae’

(quoted by Torres-Yu, xiii), translated, ‘in the whole process of clarifying their place in society, they forged their concept of being female’.

But by the time I was doing my undergraduate thesis in 1990, I had become more interested in post-feminist critics like Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. It seemed to me that the gynocritical work of gathering material and delineating images of women in literature was passé.

Showalter’s groundbreaking work was published in 1978, after all. By this time, the anthologies

I mention in the previous paragraph had come out and the material was available for further study. I wanted to see how women writers could go beyond articulation of women’s experiences and even the subversion of their oppression to find or create a space beyond the binary. As a literature major, I was expected to apply more contemporary lenses to the literary texts. My thesis, in which I applied a Kristevan reading to Tagalog writer Ruth Elynia Mabanglo’s poems about Filipina migrant women was received positively and given the award for best thesis when I graduated. I also later published an article based on my thesis in the university’s research journal.

The article also later appeared in an anthology of the ‘best Philippine criticism’ from 1992–1997.

In the book Feminista: Gender, Race, and Class in the Philippines (2011), Arnado found in her survey of the streams of feminism in the Philippines, that Filipino feminist scholars lean more toward the paradigms set by Third World feminism than Western feminism. This is understandable, as our historical and social realities are more similar to other post-colonial countries than the First World. Thus, many Philippine feminists view post-feminist ideas put forth by Cixous, for example, as not applicable at best, and imperialistic at worst. But I disagree

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with that view. Despite charges of essentialism, I still think that examining the way women write as women (as opposed to how men write), and the relationship between gender and genre is a rich area of study. Like our use of English in creative writing in the Philippines, we can and do appropriate Western literary theories for our specific purposes. Filling this apparent gap in feminist scholarship in the Philippines is part of what has motivated me during this PhD to further push my interest in the form, rather than the content, of women’s writing, and in doing so help find my place as a writer.

My interest in showing how my particular subjectivity as a lesbian is evident in my writing practice was initially piqued by the work of lesbian Quebecoise author Nicole Brossard.

She herself provides a model for the language reinvention she demands of lesbian writing in her various and prolific work in poetry, fiction, essay and drama. For Brossard, only radical lesbian writing can make us visible within the system that tries to erase us. It is not enough to bring our experiences to light through writing because language serves the patriarchy and other hegemonic forces. Patriarchy has ‘penetrated into minds, spirits and bodies to establish the very structures…that determine what makes sense, what has value, what seems real, what acts are conceivable and possible’ (Forsyth 39). This penetration is done through language, but it can be challenged through radical interventions. What does it mean to be radical? Coming from the

Latin, radix, meaning ‘root’, suggests that the changes we make or want to make come from the root of the matter, not the surface. Brossard explains, ‘This task engages me to question language—symbolic and imaginary, from all angles and dimensions’ (Brossard 190). Language, after all, is the root of all writing. Writing cannot be done without the medium of language.

But as I’ve mentioned in Chapter 1, even within the feminist movement, lesbians were made invisible. Within this relative invisibility, the pioneering work of Nice Rodriguez had

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played an important role in my early motivation to write the lesbian into being in the Philippines.

But Rodriguez herself admits that when she was given the challenge to write the book Throw It to the River (1993), there was no one else to look to for community. In her keynote lecture to the

2nd LGBTQ National Writers Workshop, held in the University of the Philippines Diliman in

Quezon City from July 24–27, 2019, she shared how the book came about. She admits she is not a creative writer; she had been a journalist in the Philippines before she migrated to Canada. So she wondered whether she could write the book at all, which had been commissioned by the

Women’s Press, but she knew ‘only I could write it’. She claims she did it as a ‘public service, a civic duty, for representation’. But because it was published in Canada and not distributed in the

Philippines, it did not make a huge impact in the Philippine literary world. It is a rare collector’s item in the Philippines. I only got a copy because a former student of mine went to Canada and got one for me, but reading it felt a bit alienating for me because I do not identify as a traditional butch or masculine lesbian. I had unreasonable expectations that it would reflect my own experiences because of the scarcity of lesbian images in literature. Rodriguez herself admits that while she did see the book as a matter of representation, she did not have all the answers. Her stories were limited to her own experiences as a butch lesbian having relationships with femmes

(feminine lesbians) or straight women. In fact, she shared that some criticism was levelled at the book for being ‘not feminist’ because of the male-female role playing of the characters in the book. But this book surely gave me a material basis for imagining the role that my work might take, early on.

After I graduated from the MFA program in 2001 and submitted my manuscript for

Women Loving to De La Salle University (DLSU) Press, who had right of first refusal because of the scholarship I received from the university for my MFA, I didn’t have the confidence to

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submit it to any other press; even when I received permission from the Press to do so when they had to stop operations for a few years. I could have submitted it to Anvil Publishing, Inc., which at that time was the biggest publisher of literature titles, with the nationwide distribution channel through its National Bookstore chain. When Isagani Cruz took over DLSU Press again, he revived many of the shelved projects, including mine. It was a ten-year wait, but my book was finally published by DLSU and Anvil Publishing, Inc. Was it because of Cruz’s patronage? Not entirely. The manuscript did have to go through three blind reviewers. But I clearly could not have done it without his efforts to champion it, because I didn’t even dare.

But the Philippine literary system did not reward me for this book. Again, it could very well have been because it was not any good according to Silliman Workshop standards. But then again, I had written the stories exactly as I was taught in the MFA program. I received the degree on the strength of this collection of stories and my critical preface as thesis. It didn’t even get nominated for the National Book Awards, which was ridiculous because any book published within a particular year can be nominated by its publisher. Is it possible that my publisher did not submit it for consideration? Yes. But it is also possible that the board composed of members of the Manila Critics Circle had bypassed it. The senior writers in the University of the Philippines

Creative Writing Center didn’t nominate it either for the ‘Best First Book’ awards they organise annually. It was the first sole-author anthology of lesbian-themed works in the Philippines. But as far as the literary community was concerned, my book might as well have never come out. It was invisible. It was clear I was anak sa labas, the child outside, waiting to be let in.

The male gay authors who had blazed the trail many years before didn’t support it either.

None of them wrote a review about it; not even the one I gave a review copy to and asked directly. Perhaps Rich was right in assuming that the homosexual patriarchal culture was ‘tainted

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by profound hatred for women’ (369). Part of me does not want to believe this because I would rather see gay men as allies in the struggle, but why indeed did none of them offer any support in any form, not even a mention in their Facebook accounts? To make things worse, in the 2nd

LGBTQ National Writers Workshop held in July 2019 in UP Diliman, Workshop Director J.

Neil Garcia, in his response to the keynote lecture of Nice Rodriguez, rendered my work invisible by saying that no lesbian books followed after Rodriguez and the anthology, Tibok.

Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian. He had selected me to be one of the teaching panellists in the workshop precisely because I had written a book of lesbian stories. I did not understand why he publicly nullified my achievement in precisely the space where it should have been celebrated.

But I did not confront him about the slight because that would have been contrary to Filipino culture, which demands utang na loob, a debt of gratitude to someone who appears to have given us a gift—inviting me to be a workshop panellist. Instead, I spoke about my own work briefly during the two workshop sessions I moderated, correcting him without being confrontational.

In 2017, I was invited to become the Mindanao regional editor for the second edition of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. When I was asked to provide an initial list of notable books and authors, I boldly included Women Loving, indicating that it is the first sole-author book of lesbian stories published in the Philippines. But the Literature volume editor, a well-known feminist writer and critic, didn’t include it in the final list.

The CCP Encyclopedia was finally published in 2019. I was glad to discover that my book and I are, in fact, mentioned in the entry on fiction, even though the note about my story,

‘Comadrona’, got an important detail wrong. It states, ‘Their sexual encounter, which occurs in the “birthing room” of Lumen’s house, is suffused with tenderness, unlike the sadistic ways of

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her abusive husband’ (372, emphasis mine). There is nothing in my story that suggests that

Lumen’s husband is abusive. In fact, he even kindly offers to help Eva search for information about her father in the city archives. I made it a point not to depict the husband as abusive precisely because I did not want readers to think that Lumen is only having an affair with another woman as an escape. Did the writer of this entry even read my story?25

25 The encyclopedia also mentions the anthologies Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian and Woman-To- Woman. In addition, it specifically names the following writers as lesbian: Bernadette Neri, Minerva Lopez, Roselle Pineda, and Aida Santos. 64

2.3 Coming into Nonfiction

After I moved to Davao and I went back to writing after a six-year hiatus the length of my marriage, I finally figured out that the literary establishment was never going to let me in. I was literally ‘anak sa labas’, the child outside, and I had to make my own way. My physical distance from the capital gave me a different perspective from which to see my practice. Aside from my age and maturity (I was thirty-seven at that time), it is possible that the distance in time and space from my past as a writer gave me a sense of daring with genre. My initial attempts were at poetry, which I noticed became longer, more confessional, compared to the few dissembling pieces I had written during my ‘semi-retirement’. Then Alfred Yuson told me about a call for submissions to an anthology of essays about relationships and urged me to write about my marriage.

I had the material that I knew I needed to make sense of as a writer. And because the call was for essays, I sat down and wrote an essay. It was a pragmatic choice. In fact, after I had written the first draft, it was a more difficult decision to publish it than to write it, because of the ethical question of how it would affect my husband and his family. In the end, I convinced myself that the craft of the essay would trump the family ‘scandal’ it might cause, given the largely conservative indigenous community to which they belonged. I also thought it would not catch anyone’s attention in the Philippine literary world anyway, the same way they had virtually ignored my fiction.

By the time I won the prestigious Carlos Palanca Memorial Literary Award in the

Philippines for my essay, ‘Sapay Koma’, (3rd Prize, 2008), I was certain it was because of my writing. For one, my purported literary patron, Isagani Cruz, was not in the panel of judges. It won because I had written it by following the prescribed techniques of creative nonfiction as

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‘true stories well told’ using the elements of fiction. It fulfilled the readers’ expectations of what a literary essay should be. For instance, I treated my husband and myself as main characters in the story, I used scenes and appropriate dialogue, ‘show, don’t tell’, and symbols. I ended it with the requisite ‘I realised…’ moment:

I decided to cook paella for noche buena as if my life depended

on it. I thought it was simply a matter of dumping all the

ingredients in the pan and letting it cook – like the aftermath of a

failed marriage. The recipe was so difficult I ended up crying

hysterically, asking myself over and over, “what have I done?”

My kids embraced me and said, “Nanay, stop crying na.” But I

couldn’t. It seemed as if it was the first time I had let myself cry

over what I had lost. I noticed though, that the kids did not cry.

Embarrassed with myself, I picked myself up from the river of

snot that was my bed and finished what I had set out to do – as I

always have. It even looked and tasted like paella, despite the

burnt bottom. But next year we’ll just order take-out from Sr.

Pedro (Lechon Manok). (56)

I’m proud of this essay, which contributed greatly to making a name for me in the Philippine literary world, and which my book Women Loving did not. While I did write the essay to make sense of the failure of my marriage, it also showed me that I could write nonfiction well, and that

I was somehow prepared to write my life without hiding behind fiction as a genre. It was another door for my writing practice, which opened the possibilities of nonfiction as a genre for me.

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Even without patronage, it made its own way into literature classrooms across the country. The title of the essay refers both to my dog, who functioned as a metaphor for all that I had to give up in order to sustain my heterosexual marriage, but it is also an Ilocano phrase that in context refers to our good wishes. I end the essay with, ‘Each of us in this story nurtures a secret wish to have done things differently…but it takes less energy to wish it forward. Sapay koma naimbag ti biag yo dita—to hope that your life there is good.’ The success of the essay ‘Sapay Koma’ embodies an aspect of that wish for me. Giving me that seemingly necessary sense of closure in conventional narratives. I was closing doors to my marriage as well as my writing.

Initially, I thought shifting to nonfiction was a function of my aging process as a woman and a writer. When I was starting to write in my mid-twenties, I did not have the confidence to speak my truths directly; fiction was a genre that made me feel safe to write about my lesbian experience because if pressed, I could always say none of it actually happened. That I had imagined it all. In fact, when readers would ask me which parts of my book were based on real life, I would always reply, jokingly, ‘Only the hot parts are true!’ In the book Writing a Woman’s

Life, Carolyn Heilbrun affirms, ‘to write a woman’s life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; (or) she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction’ (11).

I called Women Loving fiction, but readers still assumed that the stories were based on real life.

And most of it really is.

But in my forties, I felt like I was more prepared to be upfront about my experiences, less afraid of judgement, so I shifted to writing nonfiction. My memoir, Abi Nako. Or So I Thought, which I finished writing in 2018 within this PhD program, and which I hope will come out in

2020 as I also complete the PhD, will usher me into my fifties. And as Heilbrun writes about her detective character Kate Fansler,

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she has become braver as she has aged, less interested in the

opinions of those she does not cherish, and has come to realize

that she has little to lose, little any longer to risk, that age above

all…is the time when there is very little “they” can do for you,

very little reason to fear, or hide, or not attempt brave and

important things. (123)

But it is not only growing older per se; it is aging as a woman, especially within the patriarchal

Philippine culture. I know that when my memoir comes out, it will expose me to judgement as a

‘loose woman’ (at best) as well as the threat of libel from my abusive senior writer ex-boyfriend, who may see it as an opportunity to hurt me again. But writing the book was more important to me than staying silent.

On the other hand, looking at the matter less from the biographical aspect and with a more critical lens, nonfiction (in the form of journals, letters, diaries) is a genre that has been found by feminist scholars as particularly welcoming to women, more so than the traditional genres that males dominate in, like ‘high tragedy, epic poetry, sermons, the philosophical treatise, criticism’ (Eagleton 57) and even fiction, which are all considered ‘great literature’26

(57). The diary as a private and domestic form of writing was apparently ‘suitable for women’ for various reasons, but mainly because of its ‘lack of an imposed form and of rules to follow’

(Raoul 62), as opposed to fiction, for instance. In her study of women and diaries in France,

Raoul finds that the ‘diary-form has been rediscovered and reappropriated by modern women

26 It must be noted though that Mary Eagleton’s study considers the novel as a ‘domestic form of production’ (60) during the Victorian period, unlike drama, and more suited to women of the time. It is different today, as the contemporary novel has moved into the arena of ‘great literature’ partly because a prestigious award like the Nobel Prize for Literature has been consistently given to novelists, and the Man Booker Prize only to novels.

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writers…to express, at the borderlines of autobiography and fiction, a specifically feminine experience of writing as process and voice-production’ (63). I believe that this border between autobiography and fiction is a possible area where the contemporary memoir by women can play.

While it was clear to me that my main project at the outset of my PhD studies was my memoir, Abi Nako, in August 2016, I was invited by the editor of the local daily Mindanao Times to write an opinion column. I welcomed it as another form of nonfiction that I could explore as part of my writing practice. I called it Lugar Lang precisely to express my need to find places to alight in:

When I first moved to Davao in 2007, one of the things that

struck me was that in public transport, passengers say “Lugar

lang” when they want to get off, instead of the usual “Para”,

which means “stop”. […] Eventually I learned that “lugar lang”

means to get out “at the proper place”. One cannot simply yell,

“Stop!” Because there are designated places for stopping.

I wrote first of all about where home is and how my writing plays a significant role in my sense of home as well as in sustaining this home:

To sustain my home, I need to define what makes me a

Mindanawon writer. Being a migrant to this island group and

having lived in Davao City for nine years, I know that it takes

more than physical presence to create an identity. How can my

writing grow from what it is now, which is inward-focused, into

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something that can be identified as Mindanawon beyond the

current function of Mindanao as setting for my personal

development? Lumad, Muslim, Dayo assume a diversity of

cultures and identities. There is not only one kind of

Mindanawon. I write in order to find my place in this mosaic. (9)

I asserted through this first piece in my column that I saw home as about more than place, that my physical presence alone in Davao was not enough for me to identify as a Mindanawon or a

Davaoeño. I wanted to help the community through my writing and I saw my column as an opportunity to do just that by helping draw attention to particular issues and how readers might participate in creating solutions. Two years later, in October 2018, I had to stop writing my column due to political persecution brought about by my criticism of the mayor of Davao City

(the president’s daughter). I was viciously attacked online by the Public Information Officer of the city and his troll army. I put together all that I had written for Lugar Lang and it came up to more than 80,000 words, a record of my political growth as a Mindanawon, as well as evidence as to how my writing developed as I was growing in confidence with the form and as part of my

PhD research.

In 2016, when I started to write my opinion column, I was also becoming more involved in the political milieu because of my relationship with an activist and development worker, and because the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte had begun. I was being exposed to the plight of the indigenous peoples who had evacuated from their mountain homes in Talaingod,

Davao del Norte to Davao City due to militarisation and killings. How could I stand back and not do anything as a caring citizen? What could I do as a writer? Could a writer really make a difference in this situation? In a way, I also thought that my situation as a migrant woman from 70

Baguio City to Davao was similar to the IP evacuees, locally called bakwit from the English word ‘evacuate’, and I wanted to be able to make a positive contribution to their plight. Having a choice in my displacement, I felt like I was in a position of privilege, so I should somehow do something to help them.

In the Philippines, the connection between literature and politics has long been established, with even our national hero, Jose Rizal, writing novels to protest the oppression dealt by our Spanish colonisers. Philippine author Jose Dalisay, Jr. affirms, ‘The country’s tortuous political history has given rise to many opportunities for direct engagement in political resistance by Filipino authors’ (para 8). This is evident in novels and poetry, as well as martial law memoirs. However, he adds that in our contemporary times, the focus of many Philippine writers has shifted due to the ‘decline of Marxist regimes and the fall of Marcos’. And while

‘Philippine poetry continues to be keenly political’, (para 22) it has become more personal, engaged in issues of the diaspora, gender, and sexuality, among others. The rise of the despotic

Duterte regime has led the country again to a profound moral crisis that behoves creative writers to respond.

One of my research concerns (not articulated as a specific research question) is how to connect the political writing I have done in my opinion column with the creative writing I do in my memoir, as a response to the call of the times in the Philippines. With the experiments I conducted regarding the space and form of the opinion column, I believe I have found a way for political advocacy to move beyond propaganda or its conventional spaces, toward a more literary approach grounded in my proposition that my lesbian subjectivity can be expressed in the way I write. (I explain these techniques in greater detail in Section 3.3.)

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Chapter 3: Pagka- Becoming

Beyond my MFA thesis, where I studied my writing process in one particular project of lesbian stories, what motivated me to further explore the relationship between gender and genre was a conversation I had with a writer from Brazil, Veronica Stigger, at the Ubud Writers and Readers

Festival in 2017. She told me that in Portuguese27, the words ‘genre’ and ‘gender’ do not merely share a root; the Latin genus, meaning ‘kind, sort, class’. They are the same word: genero, suggesting that both terms refer basically to a system of classification. And like all systems, they only appear to be systematic. As structuralist C.S. Pierce asserts, all signs belong to an arbitrary system of signification or meaning (Cuddon 805). A group of people develop and assign shared signs, then agree about what those signs or words mean. So meanings are not a given; they must go through what Ferdinand de Saussure calls a ‘signification process’ (805), or meaning making.

For instance, the word ‘tweet’ used to only refer to the sound birds make, based on an onomatopoeic use of language, but today, with the advent and popularity of social media website

Twitter, it has gained a new meaning; no longer onomatopoeic but derived from the name of the website and referring to short bursts of sound or activity from its users.

In relation to the words ‘genre’ and ‘gender’, Eula Biss may be right in saying, ‘I suspect that genre, like gender, with which it shares a root, is mostly a collection of lies we have agreed to believe’ (196). What we believe about genre and gender is not necessarily true or constant. It is only a matter of what a group of people believes in. We have seen it in how gender roles are now constantly being negotiated, and we are seeing it in how literary genres are evolving, even crossbreeding. Eagleton affirms that ‘any attempt to locate the specificity of women’s writing is fraught with difficulties’ (65), particularly in efforts to define whether there are ways of writing

27 It is the same word, género in Spanish and genere in Italian, to mean both ‘genre’ and ‘gender’. 72

that can be attributed specifically to a certain gender because it ‘ignores the ambiguity of writing’ (66). This ambiguity stems from her assessment that ‘both masculinity and femininity’ can be articulated ‘within the same text’ (66) if the writer aims to do so. She ends her study not with an answer, but a provocation: ‘Can we create a criticism which is non-essentialist, non- reductive but subtly alive to the links between gender and genre?’ (66). This dissertation tries to address that challenge, with particular attention to lesbian sexuality.

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3.1 Pagka-babae: Woman-Becoming

When I think of gender, I think of the ways by which I identify as female: biologically and socially. But I also know that both aspects are constructs in a patriarchal system, which is created and perpetuated within specific cultures and historical periods. Nothing about my gender identity is natural. In fact, I have constantly tried to challenge these constructs or role expectations, even as I do conform to them. Being a feminist, I live in heightened awareness of gender. I am both opposed to stereotypical notions of it and subject to them.

In a book of interviews of twenty women writing in Tagalog, the lingua franca in the capital and the island group of Luzon which is the basis for our national language, Filipino, critic

Torres-Yu affirms that gender as an ideology determines the way women behave and that these notions are so deeply entrenched, it is very difficult to become a feminist in the Philippines. She adds, quoting Lilia Quindoza-Santiago, who wrote a dissertation on 100 years of feminist poetry in Tagalog: ‘Sa buong proseso (ng paglilinaw ng babae sa kanilang lugar sa lipunan) ay napapanday ang konsepto ng pagkababae at mangyari pa, ang dinamikong prosesong ito ay bumubuo o humuhubog ng feminismo o perspektibang feminista…’ (174). Literally translated, ‘in the process (of understanding her place in society), [a Filipina woman’s] concept of femaleness is shaped, and this dynamic process in turn forms or shapes her feminism or her feminist perspective’. It is not a groundbreaking insight, but I cite it here for the word napapanday to refer to Filipino notions of gender. In Tagalog, the noun panday means a blacksmith; thus the verb napapanday means ‘to shape’, but also ‘to forge metal’. Its use in this quote could refer to how hard/strong as steel these gender concepts are, but it also draws attention to the ‘dynamic process’ that steel goes through to be turned into tools and weapons, for instance. Gender, pagkababae can indeed be a process of smithing. And feminism a weapon against patriarchy.

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While Philippine culture is decidedly patriarchal because of the strong colonial influence of the Spaniards who brought Catholicism to our shores, I see now that the prefix pagka- in the

Filipino language suggests a potential space for fluidity and becoming. To activate this potential,

I use it with a hyphen as a signifier of that space. It is correctly used without a hyphen, as in pagkababae, meaning femaleness, pagkalalaki, maleness, pagkatao, identity—suggesting a state of being, even essence. Used with a hyphen, pagka-babae, it will be detected as a grammatical error, which can thus draw attention to the space of potential.

In Judith Butler’s preface to the 1999 edition of her book Gender Trouble, which unsettled American feminism in the 90s with her ideas of gender performativity derived from

French post-structuralist theories, she explains, ‘what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, positioned through the gendered stylization of the body’ (xv). Thinking this way about gender contradicts notions that some traits are natural to certain genders or constant in particular cultures. Performativity suggests that gender is something we do repeatedly and thus actively create through bodily acts. It actually brings to mind Simone de Beauvoir’s famous conception, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’, although in her case, she posited that the patriarchal and oppressive culture teaches one how to become a woman through its notions about her body. For Butler, we participate in the process of becoming; we are not necessarily controlled by the culture. The repetitive process of gender construction ‘emphasizes the discontinuous nature of identity’, thus allowing us to ‘locate the possibility of resistance within the process of reiteration itself’ (Atkins 252). Each time a gender norm is repeated in performance, it allows for variations in the iteration, e.g. the wearing of long hair to express femininity in women is not static in every woman, not even in the same woman.

Moreover, the meanings of the norms are ‘recontextualized within the particular individual’s

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situation’ (254). For some women, their long hair may be their crowning glory, making them look attractive to the opposite sex, as shampoo advertisements traditionally promote. But when I did my butch challenges, I realised that the main reason I keep my hair long is my refusal to go to the salon for a monthly haircut to maintain short hair. I can say that my pagka-babae does not rest on this particular gender norm, it is merely a pragmatic choice and does not embody my gender identity. What this dissonance between a patriarchal norm and my personal interpretation of it highlights is that even when gender normativity seems compulsory, the concept of performativity does allow for a level of indeterminacy and agency as resistance, thus creating

‘gender trouble’. For me as a Philippine woman and writer, the space created by troubling gender can be expressed in my concept of pagka-babae, signified by the (ungrammatical) hyphen, which turns ‘being woman’ into ‘becoming woman’. The shift in emphasis to the process of becoming opens up a space of potential.

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3.2 Pagka-lesbiana: Lesbian-Becoming

American film scholar Teresa de Lauretis has shown through her analyses of how gender is represented in cinema and other media that gendered subjects are ‘constructed across a multiplicity of discourses, positions, and meanings, which are often in conflict with one another’

(quoted in Glover and Kaplan 19). It is these contradictions that provide discursive opportunities for fashioning alternative approaches to gender and sexuality, as well as accounting for cultural, class, and ethnic differences. In particular, her critical work on lesbian representation reveals

‘how lesbian writers and artists have sought variously to escape gender, to deny it, transcend it, or perform it in excess, and to inscribe the erotic in cryptic, allegorical, realistic, camp, or other modes of representation, pursuing diverse strategies of writing’ (de Lauretis, 53). Lesbians have this fraught relationship with gender because of their subject position outside the norms that require heterosexuality; they are ‘autonomous from men’ because their desire is directed towards women only (56). This apparent autonomy allows lesbian artists and writers to become more daring in their work because they are not directly subject to the power of heteronormative standards. But because of the way I came into writing in the Philippine literary system, I had not been able to access this sense of autonomy and daring. I was more concerned with gaining the approval of the system, so I passed as a heterosexual writer in the way that I wrote. For instance,

I inscribed my lesbian desire within the heteronormative standards of realistic fiction, which did get my work published, but it also cost me my autonomy as a lesbian.

In this spirit of non-normative gender attitudes, de Lauretis describes the writing of

Nicole Brossard as ‘formally experimental, critical and lyrical, autobiographical and theoretically conscious…crosses genre boundaries (poetry and prose, verbal and visual modes, narrative and cultural criticism) and instates new correlations between signs and meanings’ (59–60). This

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framework clearly privileges non-traditional modes of writing and requires a receptive audience, particularly lesbian, our ‘imagined community’ of woman-loving women as Benedict Anderson puts it. Yet even this lesbian audience cannot be assumed as unified. Neither is the lesbian as writer. In Section 3.3, I discuss in greater detail some examples of these non-traditional modes of writing in the work of some queer-identified authors alongside my own attempts.

In addition, in Marilyn Farwell’s theory of narrative disruption in a lesbian text, lesbian is what ‘disrupts narrative through the structural realignment of the narrative’s subject positions’

(20). She takes off from two major paradigms of the Western narrative as identified by feminist narrative theorists, namely the focus on a male character’s individuation and the heterosexual love triangle formed by (homosocial) male bonding, which positions woman as Other. Then she proposes that the lesbian narrative space is created by disrupting these paradigms, particularly by undermining the gender binary and relationship hierarchies. With this theory, she hopes to somehow reconcile the seeming opposition between traditional and experimental lesbian narratives, showing the potentially disruptive value of traditional approaches to writing vis-à-vis the more visibly disruptive formally subversive texts. Either way, for Farwell, the lesbian is found in textuality, but she also affirms that the context still requires either a lesbian author, lesbian characters, or undeniably erotic lesbian scenes (24).

In a similar manner, I posit that in my book of stories, Women Loving, which contains my genre-compliant narratives about my lesbian experience, and which I myself have identified as modes of passing as heterosexual in order to gain the associated privileges, I can still assert my lesbian subjectivity through the notion of pagka-lesbiana or ‘lesbian-becoming’, a space of potential for disrupting either gender or genre norms (or both). For instance, applying Farwell’s theory, the fact that my stories revolve around the development of central lesbian characters in

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narratives that do not end in a heterosexual marriage or death, resisting narrative closure, can be a basis for claiming my stories as spaces for ‘lesbian-becoming’.

Furthermore, the fact that in the Filipino language, there is no word for ‘lesbian’ can allow the Filipina lesbian more room for polysemy around our identities. We can call ourselves what we like and we do not have to subscribe to the classifications in place in the English-only- speaking world. Through the dynamic construction of identity suggested by pagka-lesbiana, I can validate my sexual identity as a lesbian outside of the closed binary butch/femme or the

Filipino binary tomboy/babae. For a lesbian writer, this space of potential for becoming is found in textuality. (I discuss how the process of pagka-lesbiana can be demonstrated in writing essays in Chapter 4.)

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3.3 Pagka-Essay: A Pitch for Essay-Becoming

If ‘genre’ and ‘gender’ share the same Latin root genus, which means type or kind, they also share the same spirit of setting up a system of classification. As I’ve mentioned in Section 1.2,

‘gender’ in Filipino is kasarian, whose root word is sari, which means ‘type’. But the word we use for ‘genre’ is uri. The word sari more commonly appears doubled as sari-sari, an adjective which means ‘many types’ or ‘assorted’. Thus, Filipinos do not associate gender with genre. But perhaps we might associate it with ‘many-ness’ or ‘various-ness’. There is not only one type of poetry, but many; not only one kind of fiction, but many; or they can be mixed in a hodge-podge as is commonly seen in our pre-colonial Philippine oral literature, particularly the epics, which contains narrative, poetry, riddles, songs, fantasy. Literary genre is something we inherited from our colonial masters, particularly the Americans, who came to our shores bringing English as an

‘official language’ and ‘[plugging Filipinos] into a cultural world in which American and, through American mediation, Western literary and intellectual traditions (as) the axis around which significant meaning (seemingly) revolved’ (Mojares 4). Since the early 1900s, English has been the favoured language of Filipino intellectuals, particularly in the essay form (37).

Yet as Filipino literary historian and creative writer Resil Mojares asserts, Philippine literature is ‘the story not merely of the reception of new cultural influences but also of creative adaptation or resistance to these influences’ (4). This resistance was more evident in writing from the various regions of the Philippines in their respective languages, but less so in writing in

English, which was heavily influenced by the Iowa Writers Workshop connection through the

Silliman Writers Workshop of the Tiempos. This influence has had a homogenising effect on the production and mainstream publication of writing in English in the Philippines.

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I have not problematised my choice of English in my writing practice and in this research because I have accepted the matter as a consequence of my education, particularly during the primary years when the medium of instruction was English, and students were fined for speaking in Filipino. Later, in my undergraduate literature course, we didn’t have any subjects on regional writing in the Philippines. I wish I could write creatively in my first language, but I can’t. While

I am fluent in Filipino, my first language, and I am conversant in the regional languages Ilocano and Binisaya because of my two adoptive communities Baguio and Davao, I remain one of those writers described as ‘those who have no choice but to write using the borrowed tongue, English being their only mode of expression, but who have remained committed to their nation and culture’ (Tope 262–263). Citing foundational post-colonial critics like Ashcroft, Griffiths, and

Tiffin, Tope affirms that Philippine writers in English can and do ‘stamp their identity on their master’s tongue’ (263) through various means of appropriation28. I think this post-colonial appropriation is evinced in my theoretical approach to gender and genre using Filipino linguistic concepts. It is also demonstrated in my memoir in various parts that riff on meanings of particular words in Philippine languages, but most clearly in my choice of the title, Abi Nako and the concept embodied in the Binisaya phrase as a thematic refrain in this memoir of migration and starting over. But my research concern in this dissertation focuses less on my use of English in my writing, but on my use of nonfiction as a literary form.

Various small independent presses have arisen in the past ten years to counteract the homogenising force of the Philippine literary system and to encourage more experimental or less conventional writing in both Filipino and English, and recently in the regional languages. Self- publication of chapbooks has also lost its stigma as vanity publishing among young writers who

28 ‘These include glossing, the use of untranslated words, the creation of an “interlanguage”, syntactic fusion, code- switching and vernacular transcription’ (Tope 271). 81

have chosen to bypass the literary establishment through the indie press expos called BLTX

(Better Living Through Xeroxography), which was founded in Manila in 2010 by Adam David and Conchitina Cruz and has since been held annually, currently in five cities (Quezon City,

Naga, Baguio, Cagayan de Oro, and Davao). In the BLTX manifesto, David encourages ‘literary patricide’ or ‘the divorce of artistic practice from the padrino system’ by seizing the means of production and distribution (quoted in Cabral and Ledesma). David explains in an interview that self-publishing was a way to circumvent the system where one could not be published if one had

‘no institutional backing by way of writer-teacher familiarity, no prizes won, no works published in the Philippines Free Press or Philippines Graphic’. Thus, their stand was overtly political and viewed self-publishing as ‘a means to insist that we create art for reasons other than pandering to a market or making a profit’, which is what mainstream publishers are concerned about.

Emphatically, David urges young writers to ‘kill our literary parents’ in order to become fully independent of them, think new thoughts, and thus create change. This family metaphor was originated by the Silliman Workshop tradition of calling the Tiempos ‘Mom and Dad’ and perpetuated by their ‘children’, who thought it an honour to be part of the writing family.

David’s reference to this literary patricide is a reference to that system. However, academic institutions continue to look down on self-publication and do not give merit promotion points for self-published work by faculty members regardless of the reputation of the writer concerned.

In a similar spirit, my efforts to deal with my being anak sa labas or an ‘illegitimate child’ of the literary establishment have brought me to this point of considering new thoughts about genre, without having to ‘kill my literary parents’ but simply to grow up by not anymore seeking their approval and acceptance. I suppose it is partly because of the Filipino concept of utang na loob or ‘debt of gratitude’ that I do not wish to commit literary patricide. I am, after all,

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a product of this system and while not a favoured child, I have also benefitted from it. I have passed, in the sense of completing a test by having become a workshop fellow. And also passed for a Tiempo child by obeying the writing standards they promote in the workshop, thereby getting published. This dissertation can show the extent to which it is possible for me to write against what I have been taught through the Silliman Workshop, my MFA, and my twenty years of practice within the Philippine system through self-aware, reflective, and theory-backed research on my practice of nonfiction.

If I can think of gender as becoming (and performative) through the Filipino prefix pagka-, then I propose a similar way of thinking about genre as a process of becoming, given their shared etymology in both English (genus) and Filipino (sari/uri). This thinking can be traced back to Jacques Derrida’s ideas about the ‘law of genre’, which is meant to announce

‘norms and interdictions’ (quoted in Anderson 9) that both writer and reader must respect and follow, and yet ‘can only operate by opening itself to transgression’ (9–10). The paradox lies in the instability of the outside markers of genre because they are necessarily entwined with the process of the text’s creation, always unstable, whether the writer intends to transgress genre or not.

But because the concept of gender in Filipino is more nuanced in the use of the prefix pagka- rather than the noun kasarian, I propose using the more dynamic implications of pagka-

(with the hyphen signifying the space for potential) for genre rather than the static sari or uri. For instance, pagka-essay as ‘essay-becoming’ rather than ‘essayness’ or being. Writing the essay with a view to discovering what it can become rather than writing it towards fulfilling what it is, according to genre conventions. I use the term ‘essay’ here to refer to what is being called

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‘creative nonfiction’ as the fourth genre (after poetry, fiction, and drama). I also use the term

‘essay’ for each of the stand-alone chapters in my memoir.

The essay as a genre has evolved greatly from its perceived beginnings in the work of

Michel de Montaigne, considered the ‘father of the essay’ because he wrote his thoughts in a prose form he called the ‘essai’, from the French verb essayer, which means to try or attempt, with ‘formal inventiveness, disarming intimacy, and rhetorical complexity’ (Lazar and Madden,

2). Because Montaigne wrote in the sixteenth century, some writers today might consider his work traditional, but he remains the ‘ur-essayist, the essayist essayists have started with’ (3), providing a model for what we conceive today as an essay. In a landmark anthology tracing the history of the personal essay, Philip Lopate reinforces the notion started by Montaigne that ‘the hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue—a friendship’ (xxiii). A personal essay is thus like a conversation with someone who is exploring his/her ideas with candour, in a voice that one can believe is telling the truth. Through this conversation, it allows the writer an ‘enactment of the creation of the self’ (xxxxiv), foregrounding the reflective process involved in the self-disclosure. As Montaigne ‘forewarned’ the reader, ‘For it is myself I paint…myself am the matter of my book.’

However, the essay has further grown beyond the hallmarks set down by Lopate in

1994. John D’Agata, in his practice and in the New History of the Essay (2015) has shown that the essay is not ‘stable, fixed, already formed’ because it is an ‘essaying, a trying, a perpetual attempt at something’ (xxxii), and thus always becoming. In his own introduction to the three- volume anthology, which he entitles ‘To the Reader’ as a nod to Montaigne’s own introduction

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to his Essais, D’Agata urges the contemporary essayist:

You have to push yourself, push your peers, push your readers,

push your critics, push your culture, push your forebears, push

your instincts and beliefs and fears. You have to be willing to

disrupt the history that you are already a part of.

That is what we owe to history: Risk.

And the courage to make the essay our own. (6)

With the force of this pushing, D’Agata makes a case for the essay written using multiple modes

(e.g. personal, biographical, critical, travelogue, journalistic)—complicated and layered—as well as exploring varied forms (including hybrid and graphic), according to each essayist’s objectives.

In a special issue of the Australian TEXT Journal on ‘The Essay’ (2017), editors Rachel

Robertson and Kylie Cardell affirm the ‘essay now’ as an evolving and ‘diverse and fluid genre’

(2), whose definition is constantly being challenged. Thus, emphasis has moved to ‘sites for essayistic practice’ rather than stable definitions of essayness, with each practitioner exploring how the form can be shaped to their various purposes. My concept of pagka-essay, ‘essay- becoming’, is well within these efforts to find an essayistic form or forms for my material as a

Philippine lesbian writer.

In the Philippines, the Filipino word for essay is sanaysay, which is a portmanteau coined by poet Alejandro Abadilla in 1938 for ‘pagsasalaysay ng isang sanay’, meaning ‘the narrative of one accustomed to writing’ or ‘nakasulat na karanasan ng isang sanay sa pagsasalaysay’, meaning ‘the written experience of one accustomed to narrating’ (Cruz-Lucero 216). While

Cruz-Lucero translates sanay as ‘being accustomed to’, I think at the heart of the word sanaysay 85

is ‘training’ because one can only get accustomed to something by constant training, which is surely related to the French etymology of the word ‘essay’— essayer, meaning ‘to try’. In 1950,

Abadilla classified the Philippine essay into these types: ‘the critical, satirical, political, social, historical, philosophical, didactic, spiritual, biographical, inspirational, reminiscent, literary, and humorous’ (216). These types continue to be relevant among Philippine essayists today, although they ‘may elide into each other into an essay with a mixed mode’ (216).

The essay began to be called ‘creative nonfiction’ in the Philippines through the efforts of its purported godmother, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, who published a manual and a reader on it in

2003, used widely in creative writing classes across the country. In her introduction to the manual and upon her own assessment, her qualifications for undertaking the project are her own works of ‘creative nonfiction’ (e.g. travel essays), her PhD dissertation on the autobiographical narratives of Filipino women writers, and teaching the first creative nonfiction course in the

University of the Philippines (xi). But as Guillermo and Villanueva, editors of a special journal issue devoted to the Philippine essay have found, her emphasis is on ‘writings whose dispositions seem greatly influenced if not predetermined in terms of length, behavior, and intent by venues like newspaper columns, lifestyle sections, and glossies’ (619), as well as the strong influence of Lee Gutkind’s directive to use the techniques of fiction in telling true stories well.

Editors and practitioners Guillermo and Villanueva argue that ‘the conventional Philippine essay in English smells of domestication more than any other contemporary form’, particularly because they are aimed ‘to please the English teacher looking over one’s shoulder’, adding derisively that

‘the derivative elegance, commercial sheen, and hyper-subtle refinements of the essay are often a camouflage for poverty of thought’ (624). I don’t agree completely with this assessment that conventional Philippine essays disguise poverty of thought with elegant language or techniques.

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But it is true that when I am writing an essay, I often find myself wanting to please the mythic

English teacher by following her every instruction, or else I express my disobedience so quietly that she won’t notice. In that way, I am domesticated because I want to get a good grade.

I know I can write that conventional Philippine essay described by Guillermo and

Villanueva in their journal issue, and described by Pantoja-Hidalgo as creative nonfiction. That is the secret behind the success of my prizewinning essay, ‘Sapay Koma’, published in two anthologies and taught in Philippine literature classrooms. I prefer not to think of it as evidence of ‘poverty of thought’. In it, I set out to provide a context to my personal struggles as a city girl marrying into an indigenous family, echoing a constant motif in Philippine literature. My essay alludes to the classic Philippine short story ‘How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife’ by

Manuel Arguilla, about a country boy bringing his city wife home to introduce to his family, drawing a parallel theme to my marriage, and thus providing a complex backdrop to the personal narrative. Deep thinking (and feeling) went into the writing of this particular essay about the role that Philippine culture played in the failure of my marriage.

I also admit to perpetuating this mode of writing the essay as ‘creative nonfiction’ in the regular short modules I have been giving in Mindanao as well as in my undergraduate class in

‘Writing the Essay’. This is the other reason I cannot commit ‘literary patricide’—I have myself somehow become a literary mother to a new generation of writers because of my academic career. A cog in the wheel of the Philippine literary system, albeit self-aware. But doing this PhD has made me see the practice of nonfiction in a different way—focusing more on what it can become, not on what it is.

In the Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, Cruz-Lucero classifies the memoir as a ‘subgenre of the essay’ (230). I surmise it is because the sample books she examined contained chapters

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that could be read as essays. Thus, my own project of classifying my book Abi Nako, Or So I

Thought as a memoir composed of stand-alone essays actually sits within this Philippine literary tradition. Based on my own readings of what is currently being published as ‘memoir’ in the

Philippines, I do agree with Cruz-Lucero that we do not really see memoir and essay as two distinct genres as much as they are in the Western tradition. Thus, I think American essayist

David Lazar’s proposals about the ‘memoirization of the essay’ and the ‘essayification of the memoir’ (2013, 49) in contemporary American prose writing have actually been practiced by

Philippine writers as a matter of course.

Reading the book To Remember To Remember. Reflections on the Literary Memoirs of

Filipino Women by Pantoja-Hidalgo would have once made me feel like I belonged. Instead it has now made me feel alienated from this community of women writers that Pantoja-Hidalgo has described as ‘transgressive’ for having ‘broken from the mold’ that Filipinas are expected to fill and for breaking their silence about family secrets (20). I suppose the three younger women writers she examines should form part of my community of practice, but her sundry reflections on their work have shown me quite the opposite. The standards Pantoja-Hidalgo has set for women’s life writing are clearly conventional in terms of form.

On the one hand, she seems to be expanding the definition of the literary memoir by including full-length autobiographies, short essays, collections of pieces from a lifestyle column, and a travel memoir. These types fall under the larger umbrella of ‘life writing’, which is an area

Pantoja-Hidalgo has been studying since her dissertation in the early 90s on Philippine women’s autobiographical narratives. She calls all of them ‘memoirs’ simply because they are nonfiction containing remembrances of the past. My difficulty with the nomenclature stems from my understanding that the word ‘memoir’ refers to a book-length narrative of particular and crucial

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periods in a writer’s life, like Pantoja-Hidalgo’s own examples of Joan Didion’s The Year of

Magical Thinking, about how she managed her grief over the sudden death of her husband, and

Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance, about her baby’s first year and her roles as both mother and writer. As Zinsser notes in his book on the art and craft of memoir, it focuses on a ‘time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid’ and was framed by ‘special circumstance’ like war or travel (quoted in Miller and Paola, 96). Therefore, I do not agree that a compilation of various essays from a lifestyle column can or should be called a memoir. Compiling newspaper or magazine columns into books is actually a ‘trend that started in the 1990s’ (Cruz-Lucero 230) in the Philippines and these books are labelled as essay collections.

But more than the matter of naming, what alienates me is her expectation that a memoir must present a coherent version of a woman’s life experiences. In various sections of the book, she praises the parts that present wholeness and meaning, and criticises the parts that are fragmentary or dropped ‘rather abruptly…and never (returned) to’ again (143). She concludes,

‘part of the agenda…is the authors’ desire to make sense of their lives, to explain to themselves, and to others…to clear up the mysteries, to solve the puzzles’ (160). In this she echoes Zinsser,

‘Good memoirs are a careful act of construction’ and writing one requires ‘imposing narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events’ (quoted in Miller and Paola, x). Thus, a memoir isn’t only an act of remembering, but also imagining and re-constructing a life as something that

(seems to) make sense.

Some of the essays/chapters included in my memoir, which I had written before embarking on this PhD, were written exactly like that, carefully constructed. I used to teach writing the essay with those same expectations. In my early forays into the genre, I simply followed what the textbooks said. That was my impulse as a good student (dutiful daughter); it

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made me feel safe, knowing I was doing it as prescribed. But by PRS 4, with the chapters written within the PhD program, my approach to writing nonfiction had changed because of my theoretical research and experiments with form. My desire as a writer of memoir was not anymore to solve the puzzles, but simply to present the pieces for their own sake as part of my evolving understanding of myself as a woman in general, and as a lesbian in particular, within my given geographical and socio-political context. I meant to show a portion of the picture and not the whole. I expressed it by writing in what I considered fragments initially, but which when completed still somehow connected in terms of the general plot, even though I had not intended to write them that way. I was subject to the tyranny of the Gestalt. I suspect now that it was because I insisted on calling it a ‘memoir’. I took refuge in the genre; I imagined it would help me pass as a ‘memoirist’ and also sell the book. Fredric Jameson identified this as the pragmatic function of genre—how writers ‘attempt to devise a foolproof mechanism for the automatic exclusion of undesirable responses to a given literary utterance’ (quoted in Anderson 10), adding that it is impossible. It helps readers recognise a text and thus read it ‘appropriately’. In my case, even as I consciously attempted to thwart certain markers of memoir as a genre, it still held sway over the finished product somehow. It was not as non-linear as I thought it would be. It had an accomplished narrative arc around my first ten years in Davao, a kind of Bildungsroman. And some of the chapters fulfil the need for closure in traditional narratives. As Wells explains in an article proposing to read Jo Ann Beard’s collection of essays The Boys of My Youth as a

‘memoir-in-essays’, in memoir, ‘the reader expects a clear beginning and end to the story, so the writer must build the narrative from beginning to end, linear or disjointed as it may be’ (2). The book-length narrative arc holds primacy.

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Moreover, Pantoja-Hidalgo praises the writers who found through writing, ‘a core of stillness and stability within themselves from which to reconstruct their worlds, and rewrite their stories’ (164). It may be that they did. It may be only how she views it. I am not the woman writer in the imagination of the Philippines’ godmother of creative nonfiction and publisher of memoirs through the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Press. I did not write my memoir from a

‘core of stability’ but rather a core of energy that constantly threatened to disrupt any sense of stability I thought I had about my past or my present. I know this might mean not getting published or recognised for my work—passed over yet again.

When I submitted my completed manuscript to the University of the Philippines Press, I was afraid that my memoir would not find a champion because I purposely didn’t write the new pieces in it in the prescribed form. But I assured myself that I had written it in the voice and style that I would like to foster in my present writing, which I intended to be distinctly lesbian. It contained how my writing has evolved in the past ten years, particularly in these last two of my

PhD research, during which I completed most of the manuscript. My Book held this unstable self together in its binding.

Of the three writers from my generation in the Pantoja-Hidalgo book—Jenny Ortuoste,

Rica Bolipata-Santos, Criselda Yabes—I find the work of Yabes most within my community of practice. Her travel memoir, A Journey of Scars (1994) broke ground because it was the first book of its kind: a travelogue that is also a chronicle of getting over heartbreak, but is ultimately about family healing of a kind. Pantoja-Hidalgo notes, ‘she is the first Filipino writer in English to use travel writing to these ends’ (137).

When I first read it, I found it jarring in the parts that drifted into childhood memory

(distinguished by italics) and the parts that seemed to tease the reader with a revelation but didn’t

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follow through. I felt that Yabes was holding back, trying to take control of herself as a character in the narrative, even as she seemed to have lost control in real life. Later, I asked myself why I demanded full disclosure from the memoirist, why I found the gaps discomfiting, and I realised that it was the way I had been trained to read (and write): always looking for closure. As Farwell notes in her study of heterosexual plots, a main narrative paradigm requires defined closure,

‘either in marriage or individual triumph’ (15). I felt uncomfortable with the book ending with no sense of the narrator’s triumph over the conflicts.

And yet I did not appreciate how in her prologue, Yabes writes sententiously, ‘I realised that burying the past meant coming back home’ (7), because I did not think her narrative warranted that conclusion, although she did literally go back home to the Philippines. I know now that every writer must make her own way. And the way is not always back home. When I completed my own memoir, I learned that my desire to find a home in Davao was foolish, even though I had literally built it; that the (lesbian) narrative was actually in my sense of displacement. But I didn’t state that as a conclusion in my memoir.

In ‘Queering the Essay’, American essayist Lazar posits that the ‘desire of the essay is to transgress genre’ (63), i.e. to resist categorisation, to stretch boundaries, to parody other forms, and to create new forms, as it has always done. He adds, ‘The essay is not, and has never been genre normative’ (63); the diversity of ways by which the essay has been written resists being taxonomised. Following this idea led me to Kazim Ali’s work, which more specifically spoke to my own ambition. The challenge is ‘not an explosion of narrative, but a new way of narration’

(Ali 35) born from the queer writer’s eros/riot or riotous desire. In an interview, he explains why he isn’t interested in narrative: ‘because you have to have an “I”, a coalesced personal self, in order to have story happen to that entity’ and for him, the lyric is how the story of the (queer)

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self coming together can be told (Hennessy & Ali 29). Here is where I began to refer to the standards of writing the essay set by academe as heteronormative and ‘straight’. Because I knew from writing my MFA thesis that my lesbian stories were written in a ‘straight’ form, i.e. following the academic standards like a dutiful daughter and being rewarded with a passing grade and publication, I thought I should now try ‘bending’ the way I write nonfiction for this creative practice research, and ultimately to move my writing forward, although not necessarily in the lyric mode, as Ali suggests.

In her preface to the anthology Waveform. Twenty-First Century Essays by Women,

Marcia Aldrich firmly sets the contemporary essay written by women apart from the standard set by Lopate in 1994 by saying, ‘The new hallmark of the essay is its versatility and range’ (ix), not intimacy. It is expansive, not conversational. It uses personal experience but also questions assumptions about it. Best of all, in the hands of women writers, ‘The essay is now a shape- shifting thing. It can do many turns, take on any subject, and assume any structure demanded by the writer’s aims and the requirements of the materials she wields’ (x). It suggests that the essay as a genre is alive and can become what the writer envisions it to be. My concept of pagka-essay,

‘essay-becoming’ is aligned with the idea of shape-shifting in the essay as a form. It is not necessarily a uniquely lesbian writing skill; the Waveform anthology shows that it can be demonstrated by women writers in particular. Aldrich adds, ‘The essay is today a site of invention and innovation’ (x), featuring experiments in form that have no generic limitations, even moving ‘beyond the layout of words’ towards graphic and video modes. One of the textual methods for innovation can be seen in the braided essay. The braided essay weaves together two elements which are not usually directly connected but can somehow be associated with each other. The technique is a surprising juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements. Nicole

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Walker further explores the potential of the braided essay by asserting that ‘the tension between two unlike things working against each other does, with enough stress and repetition, press out meaning’ (para 15). Meaning is somehow created by the friction between the disparate elements.

One of the methods I tried in my creative work for this PhD was daily writing, which I had never had the luxury to do before my study leave, and it revealed to me the power of fragments. By forcing myself to sit down and write something every day, I learned that one paragraph after another can be all it takes to move an essay along until the first draft is

‘completed’. It was the discipline imposed that assured me I was a writer. And by typing in the dates, which functioned artificially as separators of the fragments, I could skip to a different, sometimes unrelated thought. Then when I removed the dates for the PRS 3 creative work portfolio, I realised that the fragments somehow connected naturally to each other, some more loosely than others. The crafting of the drafts came later in revision. But the drafting was done by sitting down to write without thinking of specific issues of form.

The forward motion of the paragraphs was not entirely by chance. I had been reading

Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects, in which she talks about the power of things that happen:

‘the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences’ (1–2). Things that happen ordinarily like ‘impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating’

(2) affect us by the way they resonate and connect to each other. They feel like ‘something coming together’ (2) and thus making some kind of sense that is not necessarily a definite and articulated meaning. Being attuned to ordinary affects allows us to walk into ‘a tangle of potential connections’ (4), in which meaning is negotiated by the attention we pay to what has happened, no matter how disparate.

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I was particularly struck by her reference to the model provided by Roland Barthes and

‘his notion of the punctum—the wounding, personally touching detail that establishes a direct contact’ (6). This is indeed the beauty of the fragments in A Lover’s Discourse, his attention to the details that cut and draw blood. I began to pay more attention to these wounding details in my big story, for instance, the details of my experience of violence by women against women.

While my own impulse was towards fulfilling the narrative arc, which is why I still called my project a memoir, I opened myself to the power inherent in fragments and the currents of meaning that flow through them. It also changed the way I was remembering, because ordinary affect is a ‘mode of attunement, a continuous responding’ (127), including to events that happened years ago, something already slipping out of my grasp. In the last pieces I wrote, like

‘In the Fellowship of the Martyrs’ (page 117 in Volume 2), my experiment with the braided essay, the memories went as far back as my childhood in the time of martial law, which is not covered by the time frame of the main narrative of my first ten years in Davao. The fragments I wrote were connected like a daisy chain, the same way Wells describes how the essays of Beard were constructed: ‘like a chain of daisies: each piece is its own beautiful flower, but there’s a chink in the stem big enough to slip the next daisy through’ (4). a. Opinion Column-Becoming

In my pitch for pagka-essay or ‘essay-becoming’, in which I interrogate the ways by which the essay has been typified in Philippine literature, my opinion column was my laboratory. While I had downplayed the column in PRS 2, I began to see how it does form an integral part of my writing practice. It taught me the discipline of writing that requires no inspiration or special environments, just the requirement of submitting an article when it is due. More importantly, the space allowed me to vocalise and test the boundaries of the genre. Collected together, I could see 95

that the pieces do also add up to create a picture of my evolving sense of self as a Mindanawon writer, like a mosaic but without a specific design. It also assured me that my writing was growing alongside my rapid political development in the climate of the despotic Duterte administration.

In the first two years of my Lugar Lang column, I mainly used a technique I called

‘memoirising’ the opinion-editorial essay, in which I utilised my memories in order to make sense of a particular political issue I wanted to explore. When Lazar spoke of the ‘memoirization of the essay’ (2013, 49), he was actually bemoaning the domination of the autobiographical essay in the way the contemporary essay is practiced and taught in creative writing programs

(46). My ‘memoirising’ technique is inflected differently. My column appears in the Opinion page of the Mindanao Times, a space that demands socio-political analysis. At the time that I was publishing these columns, I was the only creative writer in the Philippines who maintained such a space on traditional print media; the others (e.g. Gilda Cordero-Fernando, Jose ‘Butch’

Dalisay, Alfred ‘Krip’ Yuson, Rica Bolipata-Santos) write in the Lifestyle section. I suspect my editor didn’t give me any specific directions on how to write the column because she expected me to know what it is, the way everyone thinks they know what something is based on its classification. But I took that openness also as permission to do what I liked with the space, meaning I was able to challenge the conventional persuasive mode of the op-ed piece by allowing for ambiguity, as opposed to driving home the clear incontrovertible point the way op- ed pieces are expected to do in the Philippines.

The conventional op-ed piece written for newspapers is formulaic; it even has a Wikihow page detailing the steps on how to write one. Traditionally expected to fulfil the rhetorical requirements of a persuasive essay—thesis statement – supporting details – restatement of thesis

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plus call to action—the form is so straightforward, its characteristics are listed in bullet points like this:

• It has a clearly defined point.

• It has a clearly defined point of view.

• It represents clarity of thinking.

• It contains the strong, distinctive voice of the writer.

(Seglin)

The same American journalist’s resource I cite above explains that the beginning should have a strong hook and argument about a timely issue, the middle should be substantiated with field or library/internet research, and the ending restates the beginning and ‘contains a final epiphany or calls the reader to action’. It is the standard form of a persuasive essay as taught in academic writing classes in the Philippines.

Moreover, in an early study of feminist opinion columns in the Philippines, which I did jointly with Isagani R. Cruz for a linguistics conference and later published in a De La Salle

University journal, I found that many female columnists who identified as feminists focused on the ‘personal and the everyday experience’ (Cruz & Cruz 13), using the first person point-of- view in a confessional tone. Yet they still used the standardised (male) form of ‘three

Aristotelian parts’:

The beginning contains the premise that she wants to prove, often

presented in terms of an anecdote. In the middle…she pursues her

argument logically and gives examples to explain the point,

preparing the reader for the end, in which she always restates the 97

beginning, or connects the two previous parts with a concluding

statement. (13)

This structure shows clarity of thinking and drives home the point. Some also provide the journalistic conventions: snippets of interviews, statistics, historical facts, and striking quotations.

Initially, my own column writing was influenced by this research about feminist columnists, and how some of them subverted the genre by consistently using a personal or confessional tone and cheeky parenthetical comments. I followed their lead and added aspects of memoir by highlighting the role that my memories played in the opinions I held. I wrote many of my pieces in that meandering style, which generally subverts the op-ed convention of clarity of argumentation. Some samples of this style are in my creative works portfolio.

For example, in my ‘Days of the Dead’ piece (page 182 in Volume 2), I wrote:

It wasn’t until I was 25 when I made my acquaintance with

death. And it would not be wrong to say that it was what opened

the door of creative writing for me. My first attempts at poetry

were my attempts to make sense of my grandfather’s attempted

suicide, which later led to heart failure and death. But I can

barely remember his death anniversary now; I prefer to

remember him on his birth anniversary, November 4, which is

also my grandmother’s death anniversary. That the day falls so

close to the national days of remembering our dead, November 1

and 2, is an arbitrary convenience.

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If I collected all the pieces in my Lugar Lang column in which I used this strategy, the anthology might be a companion volume to my memoir, Abi Nako. Or So I Thought. In fact, I also refer to these same memories quoted above in some of the pieces in my memoir, particularly in ‘Do Not

Resuscitate’ (page 83 in Volume 2) as well as in ‘Directions For My Care’ (page 164 in Volume

2).

In the same article, I take my personal memory further by applying the idea of how

Filipinos honour the dead to the extrajudicial killings in the country, which does what an op-ed piece is expected to do—take a political stand:

But this year, I will buy a large candle for our country. As of

latest count in the ABS-CBN death toll chart since May 10,

2016 when Rodrigo Duterte was elected president, 2,236 have

been killed in the drug war by police operations and unidentified

assailants. 161 of these were found away from the crime scene,

usually bound and wrapped in tape, with a cardboard saying

“Pusher/Addict ako”. News reports have called these deaths

“drug-related”, even without results of full investigations, which

may or may not be happening. Every day, there is a “drug-

related” death in the news, and every day there is cheering for

the “success” of the president’s war on drugs.

Aside from the information about the killings, I also reference the painting ‘Spoliarium’ by

National Artist Juan Luna as a companion analysis of injustice in Philippine society, as well as a visual collocation to the present-day photos of the killings in the news. I end the piece with: ‘I do

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not personally know any of the 2,236 dead, but today I mourn with their families. I grieve for my country that struggles to keep its morality and humanity alive in these trying times.’

By incorporating my memories within the political advocacy of the op-ed column, I memoirise the op-ed essay. As Miller and Paola explain in their creative nonfiction textbook, ‘To be memoir, writing must derive its energy, its narrative drive, from exploration of the past’ (96).

The past is explored in order to give ‘shape and meaning’ to the individual experience that might resonate with a larger community of readers. But in the case of the column, the process is somehow reversed because the larger socio-political context drives the essay; the memory of the past only serves to add a personal mode to the standard opinion piece. For me, adding the personal contributes to my distinct voice as a columnist, harking back to the call of Montaigne for the essay to paint a picture of the self in an intimate voice. This mode is signalled in the column with the standard linguistic markers of memory and time: ‘When I was…’, ‘Five years ago…’, ‘In 2011…’ etc.

This strategy of incorporating personal memory into a column article is sometimes used by Jose ‘Butch’ Dalisay in his column, Pen Man, which appears in the Art and Lifestyle section of The Philippine Star, but especially so by the women writers Gilda Cordero-Fernando and Rica

Bolipata-Santos. I am pushing the form here because my column appears in the Editorial page of the Mindanao Times, not in the Lifestyle section, where feature stories are expected to appear.

While it is in the putative ‘female mode’ I identified in my study with Cruz, I do not think it creates a specifically lesbian space.

By memoirising the space, I salvaged my memories from the wreckage of the past, which is appropriated for a political purpose. The irony lies in the new meaning of the word ‘salvage’ in

Philippine English, which is officially listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘to apprehend

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and execute (a suspected criminal) without trial’. Thus, when we say ‘salvage victims’, we mean victims of extrajudicial killings. It came about during the period of martial law under Marcos, when victims were fished out from rivers or dense thickets outside city centres. At present though, under the Duterte administration and his drug war, salvage victims are not even executed secretly; they are killed in plain sight, their bloodied bodies littering the streets. This is why I decided to stop writing my column in October 2018 after a barrage of online attacks on me by rabid Duterte supporters led by the Davao City Public Information Officer. While my friends assured me that these trolls only attacked online, I didn’t want to risk my life and the lives of my children for my writing. I didn’t want to be a Philippine salvage statistic. I could do more by staying alive than getting killed. b. Memoir-Becoming

In line with my proposition of exploring various ways of pagka-essay in my memoir, which I intended to be composed of stand-alone essays tied together by a narrative arc, my own notions of what a memoir was began to evolve, challenged by the way I was shaping my own memoir in my writing practice. At the outset of my practice research, I was interested in Kazim Ali’s ideas about genre as a ‘form of drag’ (29). At first it seemed congruent with my butch challenges to explore how I could go ‘in drag’ in my writing in order to gain deeper insight into the past and present life material I was working with in nonfiction. I thought it meant dressing up my essays in different forms, e.g. as a love letter, as a legal document, as a hospital ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ form. But I learned later that what Ali meant by genre as a form of drag was how the author or publisher can decide what to call a genre-queer text—a text that is ‘ungenred…neither accepting one category nor another’ (36) but demonstrating a ‘knowledge of poetic form’ (35) in prose. In this sense, I do not think my memoir as completed is a genre-queer text—it is still recognisable 101

as a memoir, with most stand-alone chapters recognisable as essays. It is only in the more graphic pieces that a reader might wonder about genre ambiguity.

Yet working with my interpretation of the idea of ‘writing in drag’ (although not exactly in Ali’s sense, nor even in the practice of drag per se) allowed me to explore ways by which to stretch the essay in the spirit of pagka-essay or ‘essay-becoming’. Some queer-identified authors from the US and Australia who showed me models of memoirs written in somewhat non- conventional forms were Dorothy Allison, Roxane Gay, Quinn Eades, Maggie Nelson, and

Barrie Jean Borich. I discuss these memoirs here to show how my reading them somehow influenced my writing practice.

One of the earliest lesbian memoirs was Dorothy Allison’s Two of Three Things I Know

For Sure, which delves into truthful detail about her family and growing up in rural South

Carolina. It is a slim book, especially compared to her bestselling novel, Bastard Out of

Carolina. In the memoir, she foregrounds the story aspect immediately by beginning with (and repeating throughout), ‘Let me tell you a story’. She explains that it is what she knows as a storyteller. ‘I’ll work to make you believe me…The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have’ (3). This signals that she approaches the form of a memoir conventionally, maybe like a novel.

But she thwarts the reader’s expectation when she also reveals that the story is not a constant and finished thing in the past, it ‘can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended’ (3). Through these metaphors, she allows the story to ‘become the thing needed’. It is how she is able to tell the trauma of having been raped by her stepfather when she was five. But it seems to me that it is a function more for the writer, not the reader. In PRS 3, I

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wrote that I wanted to write a protean essay that could shape-shift the way we can form a rubber band in the hand into a star, an X, a Y, an L, or a double star. I meant it as something that a reader can experience by interacting with the way the text is manipulated. I think I have done this in my third project, ‘Doors’, an origami zine (page 238 in Volume 2).

Allison uses the refrain, ‘Two of three things I know for sure…’ as a transitional device as well as to articulate the themes of the book in a kind of shorthand. The irony though is that she repeats it eleven times. So she knows at least eleven things for sure in this book, which is not only about her family but also about storytelling. In my memoir, I use the refrain ‘Abi nako, or so I thought’ in the title essay, but also throughout the book, to emphasise where I had been wrong in my expectations, but also what I know now. I also deploy the refrain in my essay,

‘Days like This, Mommy Said’ (page 4 in Volume 2) but in an ironic manner. I don’t use it to highlight the message of the essay but instead, I focus on what I didn’t want to learn from my mother. In a similar vein, the title, alluding to an old song, seems to evoke mother’s wisdom but in this case, refers to the ways that I thought my mother had been wrong.

In terms of content, ‘Days Like This, Mommy Said’ questions the power dynamics between a mother backed by a patriarchal culture and her daughter, now also a mother who is asserting her own ways of understanding and dealing with gender issues in her family.

I didn’t think I had it in me to become a mother. I didn’t have a

model in my own mother whom I judged harshly as having failed

me because she beat me until I was eighteen and old enough to

tell her to stop. Ten years later, when I had finally moved out of

her house and I confronted her about it, thinking she would ask

for forgiveness, she only said, “I never hit you.” 103

“Anak na pinaluluha, kayamanan sa pagtanda,” Mommy

said; assuring me that it was for my own good, the discipline. As

if the proverb about a child’s tears becoming the child’s future

treasure made any sense at all.

As if I had made it all up. Those times that I can still

vividly recall no matter how much I want to forget. I couldn’t

understand why she would deny it. It felt like she was pulling my

hair and slapping me all over again for lying, or hitting me with a

broomstick for disobeying. Later, to make peace, she sent me a

text message saying if she had spanked me before, it was only

because she was disciplining me. That if she hadn’t been strict

with me, I would have turned out “no-good” like my cousins,

whose mother I preferred. I replied, “Spanked?”

“Anak na pinaluluha, kayamanan sa pagtanda.”

Words of wisdom she too had heard from her own

mother. And she passed them down as if it had worked on her.

As if her own tears had turned into jewels.

The proverbs, which I may or may not have actually heard from my mother, represent the ways the Filipino culture perpetuates the power of parental authority. In this excerpt, the proverb that says making one’s child cry (by corporal punishment) will turn the child into a treasure (by obedience due to fear) highlights the way my mother failed me and how much I want to dissociate from her mothering methods, even though I learned no other options from her.

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Reading Haitian-American Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger showed me a way to write memoir that had a linear narrative arc, but spiralled upon itself. She summarises the narrative herself in the final chapter:

When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate

and ate to build my body into a fortress. I was a mess and then I

grew up and away from that terrible day and became a different

kind of mess—a woman doing the best she can to love well and

be loved well, to live well and be human and good. (423)

It is what she keeps going back to at every turn, showing how the narrative can expand through her own development as a woman.

Throughout the book, she reminds the reader of the ways in which her memoir thwarts expectations: how it isn’t a successful weight-loss story, how she cannot tell the story of her rape fully, how she has not been able to heal. Instead, she draws attention to the structure of ‘before and after’ that she will keep going back to: before and after the rape, before and after she got fat.

One of the sections that struck me was when she admitted that she was ‘writing around’ her story because it was too difficult to write about it directly. While she has not found it in herself to articulate the whole truth, she finds comfort in being able to write at all: ‘I all too often write around my story, but still, I write. I share parts of my story, and this sharing becomes part of something bigger, a collective testimony of people who have painful stories too. I make that choice’ (60). What does it mean to ‘write around’ for Gay? It is a refusal to describe all the gory details, and taking refuge in abstract or lyrical reflection.

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Similarly, one of the most difficult pieces for me to write was about the deaths of my brother and my mother, which I do in the essay/chapter ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ (page 83 of

Volume 2). Like Gay, I needed to find a way to ‘write around’ the pain in a spiralling manner.

To achieve this I used the hospital’s ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ (DNR) form as an organising structure. I hope it does suggest that my mind is turning upon itself. Here also I begin to explore the impact of political events like the Davao Death Squad, martial law, and the bombing in the

Roxas Night Market on my consciousness as a migrant to Davao. To begin each section, I asked myself how we would perform each of the actions listed in the form, e.g. cardiopulmonary resuscitation, on a relationship? I did research on each action to understand what goes on in the procedure and then allowed my own imagination to explore the figurative connotations.

Allow me to quote a long excerpt here to highlight the juxtaposition (or spiralling) of different elements: my mother’s past, my childhood, the Roxas Night Market bombing, and my relationship with my daughter:

Venous Cutdown

Galit sa pera, is what we commonly call spendthrifts. They act as if

they were so mad at money; they have to get rid of it quickly. But

my mother was not galit sa pera; she was bulang-gugo, an old

Tagalog term for it. Coined from bula, “bubbles”, and gugo, a “tree

bark” used as a shampoo, it means “profligate” because the lather

of gugo disappears quickly. Like the money of someone who likes

to show off wealth.

Mom was bulang-gugo towards her lovers but niggardly

towards me. Growing up, I had to endure wearing threadbare 106

socks and worn panties to school because she didn’t buy me new

sets at the beginning of each school year. I still remember how my

socks always slipped down into my shoes. I remember wearing

cheap shoes that made my feet stink especially when it rained and

the water seeped in through the cracks. I remember having to sew

my torn underwear. She justified it by saying all her money was

going to paying my tuition in that school for the rich she had

decided to put me in because education is the only true wealth

Filipino parents can leave their children. But there was not one

day in high school I wished I had gone to a school where my

classmates didn’t wear Marks & Spencer underwear that they had

bought in Hong Kong during their summer vacation.

Yet I knew it was only an excuse; she did have extra

funds. I saw how she would buy designer shoes and bags for

herself and her lovers. Even when she was only in her 40s, it was

how she expected to get and keep men. She often maxed out her

credit cards. She was still paying off debt in retirement, towards

which she asked me to contribute monthly. I did.

The first thing I bought when I started earning my own

money was a pair of lace panties from Marks & Spencer. I still

spend an inordinate amount of money on underwear. I have life

and accident insurance. And I got college educational plans for

both my kids. I have three savings accounts and one checking

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account. And zero credit card debt. Not quite a millionaire, but

my children will not suffer needlessly when I fall ill or die.

Thanks to my mother.

On September 2, 2016, a bomb exploded in the crowded

Roxas Night Market, killing fifteen and injuring many others. The

local terrorist group Daulah Islamiyah took credit for it later, and

President Rodrigo Duterte announced, “This is not the first time

that Davao City has been sacrificed at the altar of violence.”

My heart immediately rejected the metaphor and the idea

that the bombing was a necessity in a holy war—something that

had to be done to propitiate a mad god who had demanded the

sacrifice. Violence is not a god unless someone worships it, and

clearly, the Duterte administration does. On the other hand,

Islamic leaders were quick to denounce the bombing, saying that

the Quran prohibits the killing of innocent victims even in the

name of jihad.

That Friday evening, Sachi had asked permission to go to

the night market with her friends but they changed their minds at

the last minute. Only by the grace of God did my daughter escape

the tragedy. It would have driven me mad to lose her that way (or

any other way). Two of our neighbors did die in the bombing—a

young mother and her fourteen-year-old son. I didn’t know them

but it didn’t matter. I wept for the family, for whom the tragedy

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will never make sense, especially for the father, who survived the

blast.

Sachi later asked why some of the mortality statistics on

the bombing were labelled “Expired”. I explained that they had

been admitted to the hospital still alive and that’s where they died.

To expire means to stop breathing, from the Latin ex, “out” and

spirare, meaning “to breathe”.

“It’s so sad,” she said.

“It could have been us,” I kept thinking, but I knew I

didn’t have to say it.

The time frame escapes the narrative of my first ten years in Davao and goes back to different points in my childhood. I begin it with, ‘Our first house in Davao was on Block 13.’ And end it,

‘This is the long letter I promised my mother. I wrote it for myself.’ It does not aim to present a coherent whole. It doesn’t really provide any real comfort, even in the closure scene, which is a dream and only my own imagination interpreting it the way I want to. One of my first readers said, ‘It’s too dark and heavy.’ In revision, I tried to see how to ‘lighten’ the narrative, but I couldn’t. So I took refuge in words to ‘write around’ the pain. I wrote:

When I moved to Davao, I learned that in Binisaya, the word for

memory is handurawan, which means both “to remember” and “to

imagine”. What is it we imagine when we remember?

Another chance at our shared past.

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Six months after her death, I’ve realised that her being gone

means I can stop punishing her for all her failings. I can’t ignore

her messages anymore. I can’t refuse to call her or visit her. I can’t

pretend she doesn’t exist.

But I also know it was she who won this round. Because

she is freed.

I used to teach my students that a memoir should provide some illumination of the dark past, quoting famous memoirists about how writing is a path to healing. Maybe. But no writer should have to force the matter of healing because of genre conventions. Yet the title, ‘Do Not

Resuscitate’ does show my awareness of the necessity for me to finally sign off on what I have long perceived as my mother’s shortcomings.

Quinn Eades, a transgender Australian author, has also written a memoir about trauma, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, in which he mixes the vaguely linear narrative with poetry and literary theory, particularly Cixous, and his own theoretical take on writing the body as a person in gender transition. He calls it writing the body ‘from inside theory’ in an ‘interstitial form’ (Eades 41), ‘somewhere between poetics and theory’ (43). He shares, ‘I wrote at it, but I didn’t write it. I wrote the detail, but I couldn’t write the happening’

(Quinn 7). It is a defence against terror similar to Gay’s.

But he also admits, ‘What is required is a writing into this place’ (of the volatile queer I)

(9), which he names écriture matière, or ‘writing of the material, of matter’ (10). To write into the matter, he utilises fragments. He finds that only the fragment ‘responds to the ongoing protest of bodies in against – writing’ (11). The queer body protests against the coherence of the whole as expressed in genre and finds that the fragment is a space that can contain the plurality of 110

queerness and also invoke the whole. This is similar to the work of Maggie Nelson on The

Argonauts, called ‘autotheory’ in the jacket copy, that is, a theory of self rather than a memoir.

While I do not anchor my essay, ‘Staying Alive’ (page 26 in Volume 2) in literary theory, I think it achieves a similar ‘writing into the matter’ by presenting itself as a literary analysis and history. This essay explores a tradition of women’s writing around despair and survival to honour their memory and accomplishment, set beside my reflection on my own writing and despair as a woman:

Yet she (Maningning Miclat) also lives on in her poems, some of

which could have been her farewell letters, like “Testimony”:

I am the celebration of beginnings.

I, finally getting rid of my clothes.

I, weightless, without knowing what.

Between the sky and me is the wind.

…

I am no longer a victim of war.

I am acquainted with this war. I have waged it a few times with

myself.

In Davao, I have sometimes found myself wishing to die

when I felt overwhelmed by exhaustion from the burden of the

choice I had made to move. Sometimes I didn’t want to wake up

anymore so I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of having made the

wrong choices. In those moments, everything felt wrong; I couldn’t

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see beyond the circle of darkness engulfing me, making me feel

like I have lost all control.

This piece is my de facto suicide note, like the warning poems of the women writers who had actually committed suicide. The title, ‘Staying Alive’ is also a prayer that writing does save me from despair.

Barrie Jean Borich’s My Lesbian Husband. Landscapes of a Marriage is a memoir of her long-term relationship with and eventual marriage to Linnea Stenson. She describes it in her

Author’s Note as ‘a book of creative nonfiction in which I have mingled the sensory facts of memoir and personal essay with some degree of poetic license’ yet also admits that ‘I have worked to write within the bounds of the actual’ (10). Thus, the approach is fairly linear, although it is deliberately not told chronologically. The chapters are not arranged chronologically, but the narrative line is clear, especially with titles specifying ‘Year One’, ‘Year

Two’, and so forth. The narrative is broken by chapters entitled ‘Present Tense’, which bear the parts that may be considered ‘personal essay’, in which Borich writes reflectively about aspects of marriage, sexual identity, and gay rights. The lengthy final chapter, ‘Twelve Years and

Counting: Landscapes of My Beloved’ reads both like a novella within the book, as well as a capsule of the whole book, suggesting that it holds the previous chapters together like the clasp of a necklace. It highlights the lesbian wedding for narrative closure.

My memoir hews close to the way Borich wrote My Lesbian Husband in challenging the conventional form of the memoir, which emphasises narrative and coherence, although some of my pieces are more conceptual than the chapters of Borich. And while she separates the memoir and essay chapters, I prefer to merge the two within each chapter in my efforts to ‘essayify the memoir’ as Lazar puts it (2013, 49), focusing on ‘not just the thing itself (memory), but ideas 112

about the thing’ (50). For instance, in my essay, ‘Coming Home: A Study in Disaster’ (page 134 in Volume 2), which is a fairly straightforward narrative about me and my children returning to

Baguio City together after eight years to join a supposed reunion of my ex-husband’s family, I use the concept of disaster management to frame the trip. Using Anthony Oliver-Smith’s definition of disaster, I find, ‘Taken out of the context of natural disasters, it suggests that our trip back to Baguio wasn’t a disaster per se. Each of the events in that trip was part of a process that actually goes back in time, to my marriage and how it failed.’ And then I go back in time to

2007, when we left Baguio, to reflect on how my feelings about the end of my marriage have evolved after all the years of being away. By the end of the essay, I reiterate that the trip ‘wasn’t quite the disaster it had threatened to be. Every disaster is, after all, a matter of vulnerability. But after eight years, surely I had prepared myself for the onslaught of memories and the actual friction caused by our inherent differences.’ In a way, the essay passes as a sequel to ‘Sapay

Koma’, the one about how I decided to leave the marriage and move to Davao, but it does not really give the hopeful reader any comfort of a happy ending to the story, or a ‘reunion’ in the literal sense of reuniting with an estranged family. At the end of the trip, I confirm, ‘What my children and I lost in Baguio City was only the sunk cost someone had to pay.’

In The Argonauts, Nelson takes the device of the fragment she explores in her earlier

Bluets further. The acknowledgements page reveals that parts of the book have appeared as a talk, a zine, in magazines, and in the anthology After Montaigne, which features ‘covers’ or versions of essays by Montaigne. What that tells me is that this book-length essay is not one thing but many, and that to read it as one thing would be doing it the injustice of the Gestalt. This book has an overarching narrative about her queer family, but more important, it is a meditation on queer identity. The technique is the non-linear juxtaposition of theory with narrative. In an

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interview, Nelson reveals that she doesn’t consider this book a memoir at all, that ‘memory is not very interesting to me as a subject. I’m interested in performative writing…to feel like you’re moving with something’ (Prickett n.p.). I believe she achieves this through her conversations with theory to move the narrative outside of plot.

Although my memoir does not involve direct conversations with literary theory as The

Argonauts does, one of the things that struck me most in The Argonauts is when she writes,

‘Everywhere I go as a writer—especially if I’m in drag as a “memoirist”…’ (Nelson 114). It’s actually only a parenthetical statement in a paragraph (fragment) about the fears of writers. But to me it revealed her attitude towards her work in this book—that it is not a static identity; it is only one outfit she has chosen to wear for this project, in which she celebrates her own and her queer partner’s transformations. It somehow echoes my efforts to play ‘dress-up’ in my writing, for instance in the essay, ‘Learn To Dive in Nine Steps, More or Less’ (page 51 in Volume 2), in which I dress up the narrative about how to surrender to the challenges of love in a seeming

‘how-to’ piece about diving. In fact, anyone who does know how to dive knows one cannot learn it in nine steps, so the title only functions as clickbait, designed to attract attention and entice readers to read it. Or my essay, ‘How to Deal With a Secret or Two’ (page 65 in Volume 2), which pretends to be a how-to piece, but is dressed up as a travelogue about Angkor Wat, yet, at heart, is about my regret over secret affairs I have had with married or committed persons. If one were to reduce it to a how-to piece, then one could say the essay is actually about how to get out of that rut.

I explored this ‘dress-up’ strategy more clearly in the last few months of my opinion column and it is something that I haven’t seen in any of the columns of the other creative writers.

I initially thought of it as the op-ed piece going ‘in drag’, in the sense that Ali suggested when he

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referred to genre as a form of drag. But I’ve since learned that what I was doing wasn’t exactly drag; it was only playing dress-up. For Butler, drag means dramatising the ‘signifying gestures through which gender itself is established’ (1999, xxviii). It is about performing the opposite of one’s gender and taking it public as a spectacle, but ultimately as a form of resistance to gender norms that are presented as natural. The impersonation allows a ‘parodic recontextualization’

(176) of gender that displaces what we imagine as the meaning of a particular gender. Like my earlier butch challenges, which I later learned with more research were not really about drag but only cross-dressing, my writing project was ill-conceived. It wasn’t a political statement or a celebration of otherness; it was play—putting a different dress on the genre of the opinion column by borrowing different forms as part of my exploration of my practice of nonfiction. c. Playing Dress-up in Essay-Becoming

In the first edition of the creative nonfiction manual Tell It Slant, Miller and Paola break down the lyric essay into four main categories: prose poem, collage, braided essay, and a form they call a ‘hermit crab’ (107). The ‘hermit crab’ essay ‘appropriates other forms as an outer covering, to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly’ (11). It allows the writer to write about sensitive matters by using a different shell, e.g. poetry, fiction, or more mundane forms like a mail-order catalogue, a ‘table of contents, an index, an itinerary….that might work as the right container for your elusive material’ (113). They give ‘The Friendship Tarot’ by Nancy Miller as an example of the ‘hermit crab’ essay for using a Tarot card layout as a shell for her autobiographical narrative.

The ‘hermit crab’ essay is similar to my concept of ‘playing dress-up’ in the essay form, although when I originally wrote my creative work for this PhD, I hadn’t yet read this manual.

I’m glad for this because I wouldn’t have found my own way if I had read it. I think the 115

difference lies in the intention: the ‘hermit crab’ essay appropriates other forms, which means taking and transforming them for one’s own purposes; just like the real hermit crab that steals a shell because it doesn’t have its own home. That makes the essayist a kind of villain. My dress- up is done in the spirit of play, only borrowing the form for the nonce, dancing in it, and then returning it after use. I don’t see it as a ‘container’ for my material; I see it as a dress. If I removed the dress, the form I borrowed would remain intact.

With this technique of playing dress-up, my opinion column became my playground. My first attempt to play dress-up in my Lugar Lang column was in the form of a love letter. ‘Love

Letters from Women to Women’ (page 203 in Volume 2) was published in the Mindanao Times on March 20, 2018, almost two years after I started the column, demonstrating the shift in my practice because of the challenges of the PhD research. The day I wrote this piece, I also realised

I was finished with the relationship I was in at that time. I took a risk with this one, of my distrustful partner raising a fuss about how I wrote it, or what I said. But at that point, writing it had become more important than keeping the peace in our relationship, which would end by May

2018. In the piece, which is about the anthology Press: 100 Love Letters, edited by Laurel

Fantauzzo and Francesca Rendle-Short, I insert a love letter that goes: ‘I want. I want you. I want you to know. Everything is going to be all right. I want to be with you.’ I imagined I was carrying on the epistolary spirit of the anthology, but it was also a kind of coding for lesbian desire. Each line functioned as an unnecessary divider between paragraphs. It was a love letter passing as a book review of a kind passing as an opinion piece in a space conventionally meant for discussing socio-political issues in a local daily.

The editor of the Mindanao Times said, ‘I love it.’ But no one in my social media post sharing the column noted the strange way I had written it. I looked at the way the piece appeared

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in print, and saw that it appeared normal enough. My pagka-lesbiana escaped through the unsaid in the spaces between paragraphs. For some reason, the online version had more spaces between the italicised sentences and the paragraphs. I did not complain. They were like deep breaths of knowing and not-knowing.

‘Bye, Gadon’ (page 206 of Volume 2), published on April 17, 2018, is dressed up in the form of a legal document, a disbarment complaint against Atty. Lorenzo Gadon, a staunch

Duterte lackey who had behaved improperly and unethically as a lawyer in relation to his filing of an impeachment suit against then Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno. This was quite difficult for me to write as I not only needed to do serious research on the Code of Ethics for Lawyers, I also needed to find a sample document to base my piece on. Here is an excerpt:

I, the undersigned petitioner, Jhoanna Lynn Cruz, by myself and

for myself, as complainant in this case, most respectfully submit to

the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) Committee on Bar

Discipline an ethics complaint vs Atty. Lorenzo Gadon

(respondent) for committing violations of the Lawyer’s Oath and

the following provisions of the Code of Professional

Responsibility: Canon 7, Rule 7.03 and Canon 8, Rule 8.01.

CRITICAL AND UNDISPUTED FACTS:

(1) On April 10, 2018, during his appearance at the Supreme

Court Compound in Baguio City and encounter with protesters

against the impeachment complaint he had filed against the Chief

Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, Gadon was witnessed shouting

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profanity at the crowd. Video recordings show him shouting

repeatedly, “Mga gago!” (You idiots).

(2) Additionally, he curses, “P*tang-ina!” (Sons of bitches)

and “P*king-ina niyo!” (You motherf*ckers).

(3) Finally, he flashed the dirty finger and his ugly face at

the crowd.

Writing it surely gave me the pleasure of play, and I hope it drove home the point in a more emphatic way, although it will not stand in court because I included an aside with no evidence and a cheeky curse in the end: ‘Further, it is respectfully prayed that Atty. Lorenzo Gadon be removed from this earth, that we may all be saved from continuing to suffer the fact of his existence, effective immediately.’ It was trying to pass as a legal document, but it also thwarts itself. I did not consult a lawyer in order to write the piece. I was passing myself off as a lawyer.

I also enjoyed writing a piece as a speculative story in ‘Alt-Duterte Speaks Up on

Women’s Rights’ (page 210 in Volume 2), published on May 29, 2018, set in an alternative universe in which President Duterte has had a lobotomy. I wrote the story in the form of a speech by this Alt-Duterte, who apologises for his misogyny and reverses his political persecution of strong women leaders, specifically Senator Leila de Lima, Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno, and Vice President Leni Robredo:

He explained that he has since attended a Gender and

Development seminar and that the techniques used by the

resource persons have effectively changed his views on women.

He further revealed that one of these techniques was called a

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lobotomy. He shared that after the procedure, he felt like a new

man. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

“My dear countrymen and women, or better yet, citizens, I

apologise for the many anti-women statements I have made in the

past, even before I was elected president. I now realize that rape

should never be made a joking matter, and that the pernicious rape

culture in Philippine society must not be fostered. I will never again

promote violence against women. The change starts with me

because I know now that as president, what I say is construed as

policy. I have learned that women do not exist solely to fulfil the

sexual pleasures of men and that their physical appearance is not

always meant to entice men. Thus, I promise never again to make

references to the legs of the women in my cabinet as distracting. I

also promise never to compliment them on their beauty while also

touching them inappropriately and making other salacious remarks.

Part of the pleasure of this text was the play allowed by fiction. But that is also its pain—that it has no basis in truth and will never happen in real life. It is pure wishful thinking passing as opinion piece passing as a speculative story.

A piece that received a surprisingly strong reader response, based on the number of times it was shared online, is ‘Pepsi Paloma on the Right to Be Forgotten’ (page 213 in Volume 2), published on June 19, 2018, which I dressed up in the form of a dramatic monologue by a ghost.

Inspired by the tale of the ghost of the murdered man in Akutagawa’s ‘In a Grove’, I allowed the actor Pepsi Paloma’s ghost to speak up about her rape (and alleged suicide) and about how 119

Senator Tito Sotto is trying to expunge his role in her rape and unjust death. What I was trying to do was actually re-tell the details shown in the three articles that Sotto wanted to delete from the online news archive. Even though Sotto later succeeded in his request, I know my piece is still out there, doing its job of telling the facts about the matter through a creative stretch of the opinion column.

But I was raped. I did not give my consent because I was drugged.

And in case you missed it, I was 14 years old. Am glad that the

Anti-Rape Law of 1997 has corrected this grave injustice by

defining rape as a crime against a person, committed “By a man

who shall have carnal knowledge of a woman under any of the

following circumstances: a) Through force, threat, or intimidation;

b) When the offended party is deprived of reason or otherwise

unconscious; c) By means of fraudulent machination or grave

abuse of authority.”

...

I am not irrelevant. Maybe I cannot have justice anymore for the

crimes against me, but condemning me to oblivion is a bigger

crime. Remember me, Pepsi Paloma, born Delia Duenas Smith.

Protect my right to be remembered. Never forget.

In addition, ‘Placards I Wish I Saw at the Davao Pride March 2018’ (page 216 in Volume 2) literally featured drag queens at the march, but what I did here was to articulate the messages that

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had been silenced by the organisers of the event. This piece, published on June 26, 2018, passes as an opinion article, but was actually four placards saying: Stop Homophobia!, Equal Rights For

All, Justice for LGBT Victims of Violence, and Love Wins.

Published on July 3, 2018, ‘Yes to Ligaw-Tingin’ (page 219 in Volume 2) passes (or is dressed up) as a kind of book review, but is another love letter. Because the comic book of lesbian stories presents itself as a courtship of the lesbian-of-their-dreams individually and collectively, I end my piece with: ‘Ito ang matamis kong “Oo.”’ (This is my ‘yes’ to their suit.)

My yes only means I have bought and read the book. Still, it literally gave me pleasure to write this piece, imagining the relationship/s with the seven lesbian comic book artists whom I probably will never meet: ‘What Ligaw-Tingin achieves is not so much the easy satisfaction of a clear narrative arc in the pieces, but the opening up of possibilities between the characters.’ Here is a piece I would not have been able to write if I were still in my former relationship because she would have unreasonably suspected that I was having an affair with any or all of the artists.

Another piece that played dress-up is ‘Selfies with God’ (page 221 in Volume 2), published on July 11, 2018, which I wrote in response to the ridiculous challenge made by

Duterte to prove God exists with selfies. In it, I describe the three selfies and argue through each one for the existence of God. In another piece, I dressed a column article in a counselling session for a battered partner in ‘Cayetano as a battered (running) mate’ (page 227 in Volume 2), published on August 21, 2018. In it, I identify three patterns of abuse in a relationship to talk about Alan Peter Cayetano and his relationship with the abusive President Duterte as his running mate in the elections. I showed how these applied to Cayetano, but they do apply to all abusive relationships, and I hope readers in similar situations would be helped by the piece somehow. It is also a reminder to myself.

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While this strategy makes my use of the opinion column distinct from other practitioners by going against the expectations set up by the genre, it is also how I have used my voice to speak up indirectly and creatively against the tyranny of the Duterte regime. The attitude of play based on dress-up, rooted in the concept of cross-dressing that I had earlier explored in my body, and which I tried out in these later pieces from 2018, allowed me to explore and stretch the essay form within the conventional genre of the opinion column. Here, I was not passing to be invisible by following exactly what other columnists were expected to do by convention. I was using the notion of passing (by playing dress-up) in order to become particularly visible. On the page of the opinion column, I was able to celebrate my otherness with no fear, which I thought I had failed to do in my butch challenges with my body. In this space, which ironically exposed me to political persecution eventually (and led to the termination of the column), I was free and safe to play with the essay form. With these forays, I learned about pagka-essay as ‘essay-becoming’ through practice.

The only essay in my memoir that plays dress-up in the same way as I did in my column is the epilogue, ‘Directions for My Care’ (page 164 in Volume 2). I wrote this piece a year after I thought I had finished writing my memoir. I had needed to do major revisions to my PRS 6 dissertation to meet my Third Milestone, and it was this necessary struggle that led to the way I wrote this piece, in which I aimed to show how passing can be used as a writing strategy by dressing up the essay in a different form. In it I try to pass an essay off as a legal document,

‘Directions for My Care and in the Event of My Death’ (or pass a legal document off as an essay as the case may be), drawing attention to the way it performs itself as essay-becoming. I included it as an epilogue to my memoir to demonstrate the future direction in which I want to take my writing of nonfiction.

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In this piece, I juxtapose the actual text of my ‘Directions for My Care’ document with memoirised sections riffing off certain key stipulations in the legal document:

If at any time I have an incurable injury or illness, certified in

writing to be a terminal condition by my attending physician:

• my attending physician has determined that my death

will occur within a short period;

• the use of life-prolonging procedures (CPR, electric

shock, etc.) would serve only to artificially prolong the dying

process;

I direct that such procedures be withheld or withdrawn and that I

be permitted to die naturally.

I would like to die naturally. But what does it really

mean? Every dying is unnatural, if you examine eulogies. Nobody

wants to let go. No time is the right time. I would never say to the

grieving family, “It’s okay, it was time for her to go.” I didn’t

want to hear it said to me when my mother died, even though I

knew she was in a better place in dying than having dialysis twice

a week. Even in cases of prolonged illness, when you think you

have prepared for it, nothing prepares you for the actual moment.

But I would prefer to be given some time to get my affairs in order

before I go. A sudden death is not a natural death. My brother

Joel, who suffered a fatal heart attack at 34 died unnaturally. 123

Nobody saw it coming. And because of that, something died in all

of us. Naturally.

The legal document says ‘that I be permitted to die naturally’, but I really didn’t know exactly what that meant, legally. I didn’t consult a lawyer about the document. So I wrote about what I thought it meant. In this fragment, I call back themes from my ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ essay/chapter.

While this is the visible dress-up, in this piece I also include a fragment about what actually happened to the ‘Ten of Cups happy marriage’ I ended the memoir with without stating it directly. So it defies the time frame of the narrative arc of the memoir. The fragment passes as something that happened within the past covered by the memoir:

Betrayal hurts. Lying about the betrayal hurts even more. I once asked

a partner to lie to me so I wouldn’t have to deal with the truth. Instead,

she told me only part of the truth, and that part that remained untold

rankled. I suspect it was her way of staying in control, this withholding

of the whole truth. Even after the end she would still say she didn’t lie.

Really it could refer to any relationship. But it is also somehow my way of responding to lesbian poet Aida Santos, who had backed out of writing my foreword because she couldn’t accept what happened to my relationship with her friend.

This piece was inspired by a workshop I had attended on LGBT families and the

Philippine legal framework, which aimed to show how we could work with and around the current laws in order to protect our families. At present, the Philippines does not have any laws protecting LGBT individuals, much less their families. Our Family Code still defines marriage as

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between a man and a woman, and we do not have a divorce law. The law on succession stipulates ‘absolute community of property’, so when I die, for instance, half of everything that I own goes to my husband, including my inheritance. Only 25 per cent remains free for me to assign to my lesbian partner or anyone else, if I wanted to. It was a sobering day that made me feel the urgency of writing my ‘Directions For My Care and in the Event of My Death’ document at least. But it also made me question the integrity of my current relationship, which is why at the end of the essay, I write: ‘But to wear someone’s ashes so we might be together even in death? Add to cart. 10 pieces.’ This refers to a pendant that can contain the cremated ashes of loved ones. I say I will order ten pieces, rather than one, because I suspect my current partner may not be the only person that wants to keep some of my ashes. Maybe it’s a joke. Maybe it’s a wish.

I do use this document as my actual legal ‘Directions for My Care’, with the essay portions removed.

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Chapter 4: Lesbian-Essaying: In(ter)ventions

The previous section showed how I have tried to stretch the boundaries of my practice of nonfiction in ways that are identifiable within given genres. Passing as op-ed pieces, passing as memoir, but also asserting my lesbian subjectivity through certain moves within the structures of both genres. In this chapter, I seek to present my findings regarding my third research question on the linguistic and non-linguistic tools that a lesbian writer can deploy in writing nonfiction, guided by the theories of lesbian critics and creative writers Marilyn Farwell and Nicole

Brossard.

Historically, lesbians have often written in code. Lesbians are aware that ‘to be a lesbian is dangerous, so this is something she must hide’ (Wilton 121), but lesbian writers still found ways to tell their stories. Recently, the BBC produced series Gentleman Jack brought new life to the diaries of Anne Lister, who lived in England from 1791–1840 and is considered as ‘the first modern lesbian’. She started writing her diaries from 1817 and the archive has 7,720 pages, with around five million words, ‘one-sixth of it written in a code she created’ to hide the lesbian content, which included her sexual exploits (‘Anne Lister’). Helena Whitbread discovered the diaries at Shibden Hall and started decoding some of the pages written in what Lister called her

‘crypt-hand’, a code using Greek letters and algebraic terms. Whitbread explains, ‘She was on a mission to try and define and understand and interpret her own lesbian identity’ when ‘there was no language for that sort of sexuality’ (‘The Secret Life’). Thus, Lister somehow had to create her own language.

In a similar manner, even American poet Gertrude Stein, who wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) about their lives together as a couple in Paris used some code words for the sexual aspects of their relationship. Wilton describes the writing as ‘so densely coded as to

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render its sexual content obscure to say the least’ (126). Moreover, some critics argue that

Stein’s innovative poetry was a style she adopted ‘in order to be able to write about lesbianism safely and without censorship’ (127).

Thus, Farwell’s theory of lesbian disruption of narrative space and Brossard’s challenge to re-invent the world through experimental language (which I introduced in Section 3.2) are not an entirely new thing for our lesbian community. Our literary predecessors wrote in code because they wanted to reveal their lesbian stories but had to hide them. The difference today may lie in the intention—it is not to hide, but to draw attention to and reveal. Consistent with my own objective of combatting lesbian invisibility in the Philippines, I challenged myself in this practice-led PhD to make my writing distinct as lesbian through linguistic and non-linguistic

‘in(ter)ventions’, that is, both interventions and inventions.

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4.1 Marilyn Farwell and Disruption in Lesbian Narrative Space

Farwell’s examination of narrative is based on the idea that ‘marginal groups dispute the values of the societal norm and therefore challenge the narrative system which encodes those norms’

(41). The oppression of groups like homosexuals is not only seen in quotidian life, but also in narrative structure or how stories are told. Thus, in order to assert our own stories, we must disrupt the very system that perpetuates our oppression on the level of discourse. My memoir can be read as a woman’s journey from the failure of her heterosexual marriage to rebuilding her life, featuring in particular a disastrous relationship with an older male writer and the promise of a new lesbian relationship. Following Farwell’s theory of lesbian narratives, this content is lesbian even though part of it delves into my bisexual experiences because the narrative is focused on the female character’s individuation and thus repositions the male in the gender hierarchy. The narrative is not concerned with the development of the main male character, the ex-boyfriend, who is not named (for ethical reasons, primarily). I chose an X29 to refer to him as the unknown value, as in algebra, which nullifies his existence even though he is present in the narrative. It is also a homonym for ‘ex’, meaning former in English, but also meaning ‘from’ in Latin, suggesting how the female narrator goes from there to a better elsewhere in the narrative of her development. The male character is relegated to being only one of the stops in her journey. Here, the lesbian writer both ‘expands and shifts the narrative codes by securing a place for female narrative agency’ (Farwell 17), which is accomplished by casting the lesbian as protagonist and narrator. She has control over how the story gets told.

My memoir also foregrounds the lesbian relationship as a potentially liberating space for women. Despite the overarching narrative of my first ten years in Davao City, the narrative does

29 In an earlier version of the title essay, ‘Abi Nako, or So I Thought’, published in the Griffith Review in July 2015, I simply used his actual initial ‘R’. 128

not follow a neat linear path of development as in a conventional Bildungsroman30; instead it brings to the fore the ways by which the woman keeps failing due to her own false expectations about herself, other people, and starting over. This is emphasised in my choice of the title, Abi

Nako. Or So I Thought. It does not pretend to be a story about a woman’s redemption or defeat as narrative closure; it is clearsighted about her accountability and agency. Farwell explains that the drive towards closure is the ‘fulcrum of feminist narrative theory’ because it is in narrative closure, through either death or marriage, that the female character is ‘finally encased in the authoritative social/sexual/narrative system, never again to escape’ (48). By the traditional standard, any story written by a woman that ends clearly in her death or a marriage to a man defeats itself and sustains the patriarchy. With the essay ‘Buying the House on Macopa St.’

(page 146 in Volume 2), my memoir ends in a marriage-of-a-kind when the narrator-protagonist moves in with her lesbian partner, and it is described as the fulfilment of a ‘Ten of Cups’ tarot oracle: ‘Friendship, companionship. Family happiness that will last. Everything will work out for the best. Happy endings.’ But I thwart the happy prediction I so wanted to believe in by ending the essay with a more open-ended, ‘Or simply allow the house to expand and contract through the years.’ This signifies movement in space and time and does not point clearly to an ending.

In relation to Farwell’s position on the narrative paradigms set up by heterosexual plots,

French filmmaker and screenwriter Celine Sciamma believes that ‘Fiction is not a safe space for female characters…you cannot artificially free women in fiction’ (video lecture). So she wrote her lesbian film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) by challenging story conventions. For instance, she explains that ‘Portrait is not (written as) an impossible love story; it only tells about a possible love’ and moments in the narrative in which their desire is consummated. She

30 German word literally meaning ‘formation novel’; a novel that is an ‘account of the youthful development of a hero’ (Cuddon 82). 129

adds emphatically, ‘Of course their story is impossible, but their love isn’t.’ I think that embodies the point of creating the lesbian narrative space, which allows the lesbian love story to unfold.

When she says, ‘I decided to…leave the impossibility out of the room’, it resonated with my own desire to open up spaces of potential becoming in lesbian writing.

My memoir, which I envisioned to cover my first ten years in Davao and how I rebuilt my life from the ruins of my failed marriage, contains six pieces that I had written before the

PhD program, which show the way I wrote before I embarked on this research. I do not include these essays in my creative work portfolio, except the title essay. I divided the memoir into three sections, which correspond loosely to turning points in the ten-year period. But I did not put titles on them, in order to disrupt reader expectations. I use details from three nude portraits of me done by photojournalist Lilli Breininger in 2013, highlighting the role that my lesbian body plays in my living and my writing. She had taken them for her thesis on the LGBTQ community in the

Philippines for a photojournalism course in Denmark. I do not include the photos in Volume 2 of this dissertation for copyright reasons. I also added the Binisaya words that have played a significant role in my understanding of my life in Davao City. I place the definitions, but they don’t specifically define the sections that follow as section titles normally do. The words are laid out on the page as if they were ‘written on the body’, my intertextual homage to the novel by lesbian author Jeanette Winterson31. Section 1 features a photo of my profile and the words ginikanan, ‘parent’ and gikan, ‘from, depart, emanate’. Section 2 features a photo of my back and the words tagam, ‘deter; teach someone a lesson’ and da, ‘good for you!’. Section 3 features a photo of my leg and the word labay, ‘elapse; pass by; throw’. The photos form part of my non-

31 The novel Written on the Body (1992) won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction even though the gender of the unnamed narrator is not stated. It revolves around the affair of the narrator with a married woman. 130

linguistic interventions into the narrative, which I discuss more fully in Section 4.3 of this dissertation.

Farwell asserts that the lesbian as a subject in the twentieth century represents the woman who ‘exceeds discursive and narrative boundaries’ (17). She adds that in general, ‘the metaphoric lesbian subject stretches the narrative boundaries by the tension it creates between form and content, between the conventional system and its text images’ (18). In the spirit of exceeding boundaries as a lesbian writer, I have explored this tension between form and content through the technique of the braided essay, in which the conventional single-point structure of the essay as a genre is challenged. I propose here that the technique of braiding two or more narratives is inflected as lesbian when a lesbian writer uses it.

In a braided essay, the juxtaposition of disparate elements allows the writer (and the reader) to pop in and out of two (or more) realities. And each toggle reveals more about the other somehow, thus giving the essay texture. I think the looser braids have more potential to open up meaning because they push the reader harder. For Nicole Walker, ‘The further apart the threads of the braid, the more the essay resists easy substitutions and answers’ (para 21). It’s like finding a good metaphor for a poem, one that is new enough but also still recognisable, providing the keys to open the door.

Unexpected connections arise when two unlike things are juxtaposed or placed side-by- side. Even before I learned what it was called, I admired its use in Terry Tempest Williams’s

Refuge, a memoir both about her father’s cancer and the deterioration of the Salt Lakes. The voice of the narrator is the confessional I, but it also takes on the poet’s vatic voice in some parts.

This form opens up the space of the essay.

I didn’t know how to write a braided essay, but I challenged myself to essayer it to

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stretch myself as a lesbian writer. My first attempt is in ‘How to Deal with a Secret or Two’

(page 65 in Volume 2), in which I braid a trip to Angkor Wat with some secrets from my past that I needed to ‘deal with’. The epigraph from the film In the Mood for Love sets the perspective of the essay regarding extramarital affairs. Yet I am not the only subject of the piece—it is also about my mother and the married men (and women in committed relationships) I have had affairs with. It also uses popular culture and Asian mythology intertexts as a technique to layer meaning.

My trip to Angkor Wat was a pilgrimage, taken as a matter of faith.

I meant to release my secret into the sacred space and thus “be

shriven of my foolishness”. When I finally made it there in July

2015, I was so fascinated by the reconstruction of the temple

mountain that I forgot to release my secret into it. Perhaps it wasn’t

really that important; not as important as taking photos of the

World Heritage site.

It was only in the Bayon temple that my partner M

reminded me of my initial objective, and only after we had

examined the bas-reliefs carefully and done my trademark jump-

for-joy shots. We then searched for existing holes in the ancient

walls, not wanting to damage the structure unnecessarily. I posed

for the “secret” photo but all the shots looked awkward. M urged

me then to really whisper something into the hole. When I did, the

“perfect” photo was taken, earnest and ceremonious. We could then

move on to the upper tiers of the temple, with its famous faces of 132

the Boddhisatva Lokesvara, who had refused to ascend to

Buddhahood in order to continue helping people in the daily

struggle of doing the right thing.

…

Let it suffice that my secret was: I have done the wrong thing.

While it passes as a travel essay, it should also pass for a cautionary tale against taking up with persons in committed relationships. It is similar to the approach used by Yabes in her travel memoir, A Journey of Scars, although the structure of my piece is not as linear. The braid is composed of the present time context of the trip to Angkor Wat braided with aspects of the past relationship with the senior writer, a recollection of my mother’s past, my affair with a married man, my brief affairs with women who had relationships, and some lyric passages about the temples and Cambodian ancient culture. The narratives of the past are arranged in the order that they happened, but the time frame is broken by the travel narrative. It really is a tight and simple braid, but even that was a stretch for me, accustomed as I was with telling a story in a straightforward and plot-driven manner.

The disruption of linearity in a braided essay by the lesbian subject challenges narrative sequence because linearity entraps the woman in the forward movement towards closure, which, in traditional narratives is marriage or death, from which the woman cannot escape (Farwell, 48).

In this essay, however, even though I disrupt the sequence using the technique of the braided essay, I could not resist the closure demanded by the form of the travel essay. The trip must end somewhere. And just like the ‘dutiful daughter’ that I used to be, I ended this narrative with proper closure—a ‘marriage’ of sorts, by moving in together, although with a woman, and a thematic clinch I learned from the old creative nonfiction textbook: ‘I buried my secret in Indra’s 133

fingerprint and I was delivered from my iniquity into my new life.’ I feel uneasy now, thinking of the artifice in my choice of the word ‘delivered’, but I kept it in the version to be published.

This is one of the earlier pieces I wrote and it manifests the tension between my objective of transgressing the conventions of the essay and my old habits.

What I found compelling initially in Farwell’s theory of lesbian narratives is her assertion that there is no need to renounce conventional stories written by lesbian writers and then privilege non-conventional ones when emphasising textuality in our lesbian readings. Because postmodern theories assert the instability of the signifier and of identities, it would seem that writing experimental, non-linear texts is the only way to affirm the lesbian subject. But Farwell offers an alternative way of reading that can locate moments of instability even in conventional texts by defining the ‘lesbian’ as a disruptive force that ‘steals the narrative’ (16) from the heterosexual paradigms. It is not enough that the text is written by someone who identifies as a lesbian, or that the text features lesbian characters. For a text to be lesbian, it should create a narrative space for the lesbian subject to ‘interrogate the gender positioning of the narrative elements’ (23); it does not accept the old codes of narrative. For instance, it can reposition woman as lover, not beloved, which unsettles the traditional binary that defines the man as the lover. It can also restructure plot by rejecting the rule that events in a story need to be linked causally and by refusing the necessity of closure. Farwell acknowledges that these re-plotting moves—the ‘feminine disruption of sequence’ (48)—have also been deployed by feminist writers like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who are not necessarily lesbian.

I attempted the challenge of the braid again in my piece, ‘In the Fellowship of the

Martyrs’ (page 117 in Volume 2). In the first draft, I wrote fragments of my personal experiences of activism in my youth and set them beside fragments of current cases of extrajudicial killings

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of children and young adults to present the stark contrast and the necessity of heightened protest in our present political environment. But when the piece started taking shape, I realised that again, it was braided so tightly that it wasn’t actually a braided essay. It was only a disjointed narrative. I struggled to find a truly disparate idea to comprise the other element.

Then I stumbled on a tweet about St Lucy of Syracuse and how she tore out her own eyes to make a suitor stop. With more research I also learned that she is not only the patron saint of sight, but also of writers, because of her name, which derives from lux, Latin for ‘light’. It was a gift that opened me up to the possibilities of a braid. I read a condensed version of the lives of the saints and set some stories of the martyrs beside the fragments of my own narrative.

Of all the pieces in my creative portfolio, ‘In the Fellowship of the Martyrs’ is the furthest from the way I used to write essays. It explores the development of my political consciousness alongside the lives of some martyrs and the children killed in the drug war of

Duterte. It also plays dress-up as a litany, similar to the litany I perform after praying the rosary.

I purposely avoided my own desire to tighten the braid with clearly articulated transitions between sections, because I wanted the gaps between the paragraphs to speak on their own. It is one direction in which I want to take my practice—where my political advocacy and my material find an interface that showcases my new attention to the form of the essay as a lesbian writer.

The braided essay is particularly effective when writing about political matters because the technique allows a fresh take on an ideological stance that may be generally perceived as didactic. Nicole Walker explains, ‘The braided form expands the conversation, presses upon the hard lines of ideology, stretches the choices beyond right or left, one or the other’ (para 24) and thus disarms the reader, who cannot help but relax his/her guard.

July 6: 135

Maria Teresa Goretti (1890–1902) was killed by a

rapist at the age of twelve. Born of a peasant family in

Corinaldo, near Ancona, in Italy, she was left to take care of

the house while her mother worked in the fields following

her father’s death. A young man in the neighborhood made

sexual advances and, when she resisted an attempted rape,

he stabbed her repeatedly. Maria died the next day…but not

before voicing a word of forgiveness for her attacker…She

became the patron saint of the Children of Mary and of

teenage girls.

(McBrien 162–163)

St. Maria Teresa Goretti, pray for us.

I first heard of Maria Goretti when my daughter was

placed in a class section dedicated to her. In the Catholic school,

she was given to the children as a model of chastity, one who

fought a rapist even though it meant her violent death. But I don’t

know if it would be easier for an 11-year-old girl to succumb

instead. But the story of her attacker, Alessandro Serenelli is also

remarkable. Because he was a minor at the time, his sentence was

reduced from death to thirty years imprisonment, during which he

repented. He lived long enough to witness the canonization of St.

Maria Goretti and later became a lay brother in a monastery.

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More than chastity, I wish this story would be told as a story of

redemption.

Kian Loyd de los Santos, 17, wasn’t afraid of cops. He

wanted to become one. His parents had voted for Duterte for

president. When the police took Kian, he begged them to let him

go because he still had exams the next day. Someone should have

warned him about the police. But the country wasn’t under

Martial Law. Kian didn’t make it to his exam.

In the Philippines, the bereaved family places a chick on

top of the coffin when the death is unjust and unresolved. It is

said that the constant pecking of the chick will peck on the

conscience of the killers. But Kian’s killers, who made him kneel

or lie down and then shot him from behind don’t have a

conscience. Police officers Arnel Oares, Jeremias Pereda, and

Jerwin Cruz testified under oath that they killed the boy in self-

defense because he fired at them first. The neighborhood CCTV

footage says otherwise.

I was fifteen when the Filipinos revolted peacefully

against the Marcoses in what is now known as “People Power”. I

remember it because on the first day that people marched to

EDSA to support the rebel soldiers of the Reform the Armed

Forces Movement, we were having our Senior prom in a hotel in

Makati. My Marcos loyalist mom didn’t think it was a big deal, so

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she still let me go. After all, the revolution was happening far

away from our venue and she was certain the Marcoses had

everything under control.

When I sent my manuscript to Aida Santos, our most senior lesbian writer in the Philippines, for the preface she had agreed to write for me, she said she didn’t understand why the details about the saints were included in this piece. I didn’t feel like explaining it to her (or to any other reader). These sections are there to disrupt the narrative but also to extend it. Technically, I could remove the sections about the saints and the narrative would stand (which is what I do at poetry readings where I read only a two-minute excerpt), but that would mean my reverting to passing as a heterosexual writer. It would also be a less compelling essay without that braided layer of meaning.

Santos would later retract her promise to write a preface for me when she learned that I had broken up with M, who was her friend. She explained that she couldn’t write her preface in good faith knowing how things turned out (personal message). This showed me that just because someone is a lesbian doesn’t mean she will know how to read a lesbian text, in the same way that it doesn’t mean she will know how to write it. It begs the question, though. Who knows how to read in lesbian?

In my use of the techniques of the braided essay, I activate it as a site for lesbian disruption of sequence. When Aida Santos tells me she ‘doesn’t get’ why the lives of the saints are in the essay, I know that I have challenged the dominant mode of causality, thus opening up the space of the essay for polysemy. Moreover, ‘In the Fellowship of the Martyrs’ does not provide any closure to any of the narratives or the issues it raises. Just like the helplessness I feel in the face of the tyranny of the Duterte regime, the reader does not find in the fragments any 138

assurance that there will be an end to the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. When I end it with the lament, ‘Anybody, hear the prayer of my people’, I signify my own loss of faith in the very saints that I invoke in the essay. I frustrate my own concept in the braided essay.

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4.2 Nicole Brossard and her Picture Theory of Lesbian Writing

In ‘Theorizing Lesbian’, American scholar Elizabeth Meese explains how lesbian is ‘not all I am and it is in all I am’, like a shadow that ‘attests to my being there’ (70). In like manner, my lesbian is not all I am, but she was there even when I was in relationships with men, and was always there in my experience of sexual pleasure. She was there in my longing for her even within real-life lesbian relationships. And when I write, it is a love letter to this ideal lesbian who is inside me in my longing. Meese calls this ideal lesbian ‘L’. Brossard also asserts, ‘Writings make sense that begin with the declaration of love’ (quoted in Forsyth 49), as in love letters.

Brossard describes the ideal lesbian as the ‘aerial’ woman, the one who ‘orient(s) her desire and focus(es) her vision’ (Parker 305). She is the motive and the subject. For Brossard, she is a double: the object of desire and the channel for the passion, expressed through writing

(310). There can be no lesbian writing without this beloved. We are writing to get her attention, to make her love us. She is also the one ‘who knows how to read’ (Brossard 216), and this knowing ‘induces recognition, complicity, and possibly desire’ (216). It is the woman’s (lesbian) gaze that sees and desires the other woman. In a lesbian relationship, one is always the other woman, complicit in the illicit. For me she is the one that got away, as well as the one I’ve been waiting for all my life, an ideal that is always elusive. I desire her, write to her and for her, but I also know that she does not exist in the physical world. She is, as Brossard puts it, aerial.

Brossard takes this concept further when she asserts that this desire, which is transgressive of patriarchal demands of heterosexuality, must find a radical way to be articulated because language is a patriarchal system. ‘To write in lesbian…involves putting words on pages that evoke the voice and corporeal presence of a woman…whose passions carry her toward another woman and other women’ (Forsyth 46). Brossard expresses this em-bodied desire

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through ‘textual in(ter)ventions’ in the ‘lexicon, with syntax, grammar, and graphesis’ (Parker

305). She calls this strategy ‘Picture Theory’, in which ‘time and space merge so that thought itself is spatialized’ and thus ‘reality can be intercepted’ (311). More specifically, this interception is done through ‘wordplay, soundplay, syntactical inversion and reversal, and other manipulations that call attention to the surface…of the text’ (312). Playing with words and sounds may be more readily done in French, the language in which Brossard writes, because many phrases can sound the same but have different meanings. For example, in Brossard’s own work, she writes, ‘Je n’arrete pas delire’, which translates literally into ‘I don’t stop reading’.

But as Moxley, who writes the introduction to the Brossard reader, explains, de lire (reading) and délire (frenzy and un-reading) are both embodied when the sentence is spoken (17). I am certain this playfulness can also be done in Filipino and other languages. The key word is ‘play’. The sentence has been translated as, ‘I don’t stop reading/deliring’, word play that expands the target language by alluding to the English word ‘delirium’, even though it doesn’t have the same sense of ‘un-reading’ as in the source language. Even in translation, a Brossardian text spins language around, reinventing the world.

In a way, this is the spirit of my explorations of language in my memoir. For instance, the title Abi Nako is a phrase that means ‘or so I thought’, a refrain I use in the title essay and in the whole book to refer to my false expectations of myself and my move to Davao. But in the title essay, ‘Abi Nako, Or So I Thought’ (page 40 in Volume 2), I also refer to other meanings of the word abi to try to find a new way of looking at my migrant situation:

In Cebuano, abi means “to misread”. But they also have a word,

abi-abi, which means “to welcome someone”. Despite my doomed

literary romance, all was in fact well in the life I had chosen in 141

Davao…But best of all, I have found what I thought I lost. Davao

was large enough to welcome me and my wishes home. And it

taught me that I was truly something. Some woman.

I include this essay in my creative work portfolio even though it wasn’t written during the PhD in order to show the spirit of the word play and the thematic refrain of the memoir. It also demonstrates the way I used to write. In the excerpt above, for instance, the desire for narrative closure in the form of a happy ending is clear. When I wrote the essay in 2015, it was important for me to assure myself that ‘I have found what I thought I lost’. I realise now it is sententious and not completely true.

I also play with the Binisaya word labay in the essay ‘Buying the House on Macopa St.’

(page 146 in Volume 2):

In Binisaya, the word labay is used to mean three things: “to throw

away, to pass through, and for time to pass”. Depending on stress,

the phrase mga tuig nga nilabay can mean “the years that have

passed” or “the years thrown away”. By the time I moved to my

own house in Davao City, seven years had passed. And part of me

felt that in fact they were years I had thrown away because of my

foolishness.

The way I use word play directly draws attention to polysemy. I don’t think it draws attention literally to the ‘surface of the text’ as Brossard suggests, but for Filipino speakers, I hope it triggers them to question what the word means in their native languages. Speakers of Binisaya as a first language wouldn’t ordinarily note these phonetic and semantic details, but because I am a

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migrant learning a new language, I am attuned to them. I have three Philippine languages32 caroming inside my head, which are then translated into English in my creative writing, thus expanding the target language.

In her ‘Poetic Politics’, Brossard further explains that her writing practice of intervention arises when language ‘gives the impression of closing itself off, and when our desire clashes with common usage’ (182). She rebelled against the ways that language prevented her from articulating what she needed to, so she had to destroy what was standing in her way. She believes that ‘if language was an obstacle, it was also the place where everything happens, where everything is possible’ (183). Thus, she also blurred generic boundaries, writing the ‘genre- queer’ text before there was a term for it. I suppose we writers do feel like words fail us, maybe because of our own incapacity, but also because of their intrinsic nature. Writing in English as a second language often fails me, but it doesn’t mean that my first language, Filipino, will succeed.

I may speak it, but I don’t use it as a medium for my creative writing. These are times when I wish I could draw. And that impulse is fulfilled by the graphic interventions I have been exploring in my present writing. Farwell also suggests that the lesbian subject is what exceeds the narrative space, but she doesn’t take into account non-linguistic approaches.

And yet Brossard admits that she was writing these experimental texts even before she became a lesbian. She had always been a ‘troublemaker’. So is lesbian identity a necessary aspect of creating this language/genre-transgressive text? Yes, by her own reckoning. When

Brossard became a mother at the same time she fell in love with a woman, it brought her body’s experience to the fore: ‘my body was getting new ideas, new feelings, new emotions. From then

32 My first language is Tagalog, spoken in Manila where I was born. It is the basis of the national language called ‘Filipino’. Having lived in Baguio City for six years, I have had to learn the lingua franca, Ilocano. And then moving to Davao City, I have learned Binisaya. Most Filipinos would speak their first language, plus Filipino, and English. And those from Tagalog-speaking areas like the National Capital Region and Luzon would not know other regional languages. The Philippines has over a hundred living languages. 143

on my writing started to change. It became more fluid…but this time I had “carnal knowledge” of what I was investing in words’ (185–186). This carnality, as well as the politics of identity, made her veer further away from linear and binary thinking. It gave rise to her central argument about lesbian writing, embodied in the ‘cortex’, which is a play on corps/texte or body/text, and how writing arises from her body’s desire and at the same time feeds that desire. For Brossard, desire and pleasure are a point of departure in lesbian writing. They emanate from a woman writer’s lesbian body, which desires another woman, and lies somehow outside the patriarchy in her rejection of the male. I have always preferred to identify as a lesbian in my relationships and writing because I find it to be true in my body. Brossard gives me a theoretical anchor for my choice to identify as a lesbian writer and my efforts to inscribe this desire.

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4.3 Non-linguistic Tools for Lesbian-Essaying: a. Graphesis

Graphesis is employed in the work of Brossard as manipulations of white space that draw attention to book production and ‘move the poetry into other planes’ (313). Graphesis is a neologism coined by Johanna Drucker in her book, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge

Production (2015) and refers to ‘the act and study of representation in graphical forms’ (Rodgers para 2). It involves examining ‘tables, charts, maps, and diagrams, all of which both embed and interpret information’ (para 2). In Brossard’s work, visual images open up what the reader expects is a book of words (poetry, fiction, nonfiction) into a new space that can encode lesbian experience in a way that only words cannot. For instance, American scholar Alice Parker describes the function of spaces in Brossard’s book of poetry, Lovhers (1980), as ‘interlocking modes of perceiving, feeling, and thinking’ (324) in which desire and text interact, producing the writing/reading together.

In the piece ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ (page 83 in Volume 2), I introduce a spatial intervention when I reproduce the Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) form on the page. Being blank, it somehow invites readers to fill it out, allowing them to participate in the difficult decision- making process involved when deciding on end-of-life matters of a loved one.

In ‘Buying the House on Macopa St.’ (page 146 in Volume 2), which plays dress-up as an extensive Tarot card reading, I utilise a more ubiquitous graphesis intervention through the visual rendering of the Tarot cards. I wrote my fragment in my handwriting, which I think is one way by which I can em-body my identity into the essay, like a signature. I asked the lesbian

Philippine comic book artist Emiliana Kampilan (who has read the whole book) to illustrate the three Tarot cards and render the interpretation in calligraphy. While it is also true that I needed to

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ask her to do this for me because I cannot draw, I think our collaboration permeates the space with what our hands can do—a metonym for lesbian desire.

In ‘Nesting’ (page 2 in Volume 2), I present a combined graphic and found essay, from a book about birds and a National Geographic video script about barnacle goose chicks. In my first draft, I wrote it as a closed spiral to represent the nest. But in the revision, I chose to highlight the fact that the nest is meant to be abandoned when the eggs hatch and the babies are ready to take the leap. The video shows that some baby birds do not survive this leap/drop.

Figuratively, some of us who leap fall to our death instead of learning to fly. So I wrote the essay like a spiral with a drop that doesn’t provide the comfort of a clear and happy closure. Initially, I thought of using it as an epilogue to the memoir, but when I reviewed the copyedited manuscript from the University of the Philippines Press (a process which took a year and a half), I realised it was better placed as the first piece instead, to introduce the reader to the graphic elements of the book. It establishes the memoir’s unconventional approach and suggests the theme of building my new home in Davao City.

In her analysis of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?, American visual artist and academic Kay Sohini shows how powerful the Image-Text space is in allowing the writer not just to narrate the story but to simultaneously reflect on it. She adds, ‘The gaps between the panels […] extend an invitation to the readers to interpret through the act of projecting themselves onto the events unfolding on the page’ (para 13). Even though my graphic intervention in ‘Nesting’ does not exactly function in a narrative manner because it is more conceptual and metaphorical, I do believe it provides a space that readers can enter with their own interpretations. My use of the graphic intervention through illustrated Tarot cards in

‘Buying the House on Macopa St.’ is more similar to the use of the Image-Text space in Bechdel

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because the images are part of the narrative. The oracles somehow served to drive the way I thought about the situations I was in and the decisions I made. While I do provide fragments of how I interpreted the oracles, the space of the graphic intervention still allows readers to interpret the oracles on their own within the context of the narrative. b. Erasure

In my memoir, the piece ‘Dear Joy, erased, with thanks’ (page 49 in Volume 2), is an exercise in poetic erasure. As defined by the Academy of American Poets, it is a ‘form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains’ (‘Erasure’). I erased the last letter my abusive writer-boyfriend sent to me. I had never done erasure before except as a language game called ‘Cloze’ in class. But poetic erasure is different because it is not random; it has its own poetics. Brian Reed writes, ‘In the new millennium…many poets have resorted to redirecting language: appropriating others’ words, redacting them, and presenting them as their own…presumably in an effort to make readers rethink their assumptions about what the art form can and cannot accomplish’ (759). Erasure is one of the techniques used by conceptual writers to do this redirection of the words of other writers to create a new work. Even though it doesn’t entail creating something new from one’s own material, it does make both readers and writers reconsider what we think about authorship and genre. Is it a poem? Or is it plagiarism? Who owns the erased text?

According to Philippine poet Mesandel Arguelles, who has written whole books using erasure, ‘ang espasyong blangko/patlang ay maaaring hindi naman talaga ganap na blangko/patlang/kawalan—kayâ ang espasyo ay wika rin. Wikang hindi mapatatahimik kailanman bagama’t tila nananatiling tahimik’ (11). That is, ‘the erased space may not be a true 147

blank/space/emptiness—which is why the space is also language. A language that can never be silenced even though it seems silent.’ He adds that sometimes the space can say more than the words themselves. Referring to the work of Ann Lauterbach, he is guided by the idea, ‘Ang pagbubura kung gayon ay paghanap ng anyo ng tula sa loob ng ibinigay na teksto’ (14), that erasure is a process of finding a poem’s form within a given text. In my case, erasing the letter allowed me to find my essay within it: my piece, as in what I had to say about the matter, and my peace, by erasing the abusive narrative in a letter meant to deal a death-blow to me, and thus asserting my own narrative over it.

I based my erasure only on content, not prosody or metrics. I wanted to erase my ex- boyfriend’s version of me and thus give power to my version. It was both liberating to erase him, make him disappear, to release me from the stranglehold of his narrative and see my truth revealed in his own words. By erasing him, I reposition the male voice in the narrative, privileging mine.

First I blacked the words out, but to save on printing ink, I ‘whited’ them out instead.

And the meaning became clearer in the poem that appeared, with the erased parts not foregrounded. I think the erased text really can stand alone, and the spaces in between words filled with what is unsaid. My lesbian voice travelled freely in the spaces between the words remaining.

The piece signals the end of the first section.

c. Collage

Reading a first draft of the memoir chapter/essay ‘Buying the House on Macopa St.’ (page 146 in Volume 2) during the revision process, I found it boring and the narration of events too straightforward. I considered incorporating discussions of architecture or feng shui into it, but 148

they seemed too obviously connected to the subject, too easy. I was stumped about how to work around it. How about the archetypal aspect of house as person? How about the old Bachelard essay about the poetics of space? Or maybe something to do with seashells or creatures that carry their own houses? Still too straightforward and predictable.

Nothing clicked, so I just played with the essay by literally cutting it up. I cut it into strips, threw the pieces in the air, and put it back together with my eyes closed. It was both scary and liberating. No need to be afraid because I had the original file anyway; if the experiment didn’t work, I could restore the essay. But I didn’t want to restore it. I wanted to break it all up, to explode the narrative, and find a new way of telling the story.

It was a mess. My MFA-with-High-Distinction mind immediately replied, ‘That’s not how writing happens.’ But why not? Isn’t that how I cast my Runes? Isn’t that how I’ve actually made some major decisions in my life? By throwing Chinese coins in the air? Why shouldn’t I believe it can work wonders for my writing? It is only a matter of looking. It taught me what a truly non-linear narrative reads like, breaking my illusions about my own efforts to write one. As in real life, I didn’t like being lost in the mess of a story that wasn’t going anywhere. The paragraph fragments I wrote in my daily writing exercises were not true fragments, after all.

They needed each other in a particular order to make a whole.

After a few days of letting the matter sit, I retrieved the cut-up strips of my essay

(deconstructed, if I may), which I had inserted into the Bird book in the ‘Making a Nest’ section.

Intuitively, I took the paragraph about making a nest and wrote it into the shape of a nest. It worked like a mandala meditation, putting into greater focus what I needed to do with my essay—the way we look into a microscope by trying to focus with only one eye until the image becomes clear. Unfamiliar, but clear.

149

I reviewed the strips and selected the necessary ‘material’: what matters, what must take up space. Not narrative, but key words. Then I constructed them into the shape of a house on a black sheet of board paper. I trimmed the strips to fit the space in a collage. And then it was done. ‘The House on Macopa St.’ (page 145 in Volume 2).

This literally deconstructed and reconstructed house writes against what Pantoja-Hidalgo has said about women’s autobiographical writing in her dissertation: ‘In the woman’s consciousness, the house is not just a symbol of her identity and her position in society, but provides her with that identity and position’ (1994, 12). It may have been true for the women writers she had studied. But no, I am not my house. Even though I did buy this house about which I’ve written an essay, I refuse to be defined literally by it or by what it symbolises in society. This artifact/essay is evidence that I created this house—with my hands. I define it, not the other way around.

In addition, the cut-up strips signify the various displacements I have experienced while living in Davao as a migrant: losing my marriage, losing my old homes, separating from family, having to learn a new language, the break-ups and the deaths…It is in the parts that I have severed that my narrative of self is; it is not in the whole. In fact, the house is an illusion. De

Lauretis suggests that lesbians, by virtue of their sexual identity, necessarily experience this

‘displacement and self-displacement: leaving or giving up a place that is known, that is

“home”—physically, emotionally, linguistically, epistemologically—for another place that is unknown’ (74). And it is this displacement that enables lesbians to reconceptualise their subjectivity within given social realities, giving rise to what de Lauretis calls the ‘eccentric subject’, or Farwell’s metaphorical lesbian.

150

d. Non-linear prose

Philippine comic book artist Emiliana Kampilan and I took our collaboration in ‘Buying the

House on Macopa St.’ further in a new project, a zine. After I competed my memoir in 2017, I decided to work on another project that would even be more radical than the graphic but two- dimensional interventions I made in the memoir. Because it was a zine, I was able to free myself from the constraints of academic publishing, which likely limited the stylistic exploration I did in my memoir.

In this zine, which I call ‘Doors’ (page 238 in Volume 2), I explored the quantum theory of time and how the past, present, and future are happening at the same time. I initially planned to write versions of my breakup similar to the idea of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat in a Box’. In this experiment, a cat is placed in a closed box with a radioactive substance among other things, and the paradox is that ‘until the box was opened, the cat’s state is completely unknown and therefore, the cat is considered to be both alive and dead at the same time until it is observed’

(Kramer, para 4).

I wanted to design a zine with flaps on doors that open to the written text, which could be read in any order without affecting the narrative. I asked the help of Kampilan, who then riffed on what she thought was my flat design and created an interactive origami piece that allows the text to come full circle without having to be read in a particular order. This is the genre-resistant essay I have been imagining for myself—protean, shape shifting depending on the skill of the writer, like a rubber band that turns into a star, an X, a Y, or L, W, M, or a double star in the hands. Here, the artefact directed my writing process. I wanted to be equal to the interactive space Kampilan had designed. 151

The prototype of the piece she had envisioned based on my concept helped me create my non-linear essay. I wrote the piece in my journal with the fountain pen she had gifted me, with a nib she had honed herself to suit my left hand. It was an essay about my breakup with M, which somehow brought my memoir full circle, although it will not be part of my memoir. In this reality, on my eleventh year in Davao, M broke up with me and I didn’t resist it. I allowed it because I really did want to end the relationship. In my essay, I offer the different possible responses to the ‘offer’ to break up, just like Schrödinger’s cat. In different planes of existence there is a version of the story in which I argued about it, or refused to break up. The zine brings those realities forward.

FIGURE 7: Draft of Doors

Transcribed onto Kampilan’s origami, the narrative returns to the first door, and in fact can open to any door or any possibility, and goes back in a loop that defies linear time. When I wrote this piece, I intended to defy time, but it is the collaboration between two lesbian artists

152

that em-bodied the concept. Lesbian desire is imbued in the folding of the piece and the reader’s participation in how the narrative unfolds. I allowed the artefact to take over the narrative and resisted my own urge to make sense of the narrative. In my written draft, I just kept deleting the sentences I had written that tried to make meaning. In the end, I allowed the thing itself to be what it is.

Kampilan made two pieces of ‘Doors’. I asked her to teach me how to make the origami so I could reproduce the zine myself, but she refused, offering to do it herself. And then as collaborations sometimes go, she didn’t deliver on her promise. Until she does, ‘Doors’ will remain an artefact that opens continually, with no closure. It should make me angry and disappointed. But really it is a gift to each other that exceeds and disrupts my own narrative expectations.

These pieces with graphic in(ter)ventions are essays that deliberately resist genre classification in an effort to reinvent the world as a lesbian writer. Part of me still remains terrified at the possible reception of these non-conventional pieces, but another part, the lesbian who refuses to pass anymore and must be seen, feels proud of her achievement, especially the one in which she resisted her own old ways of thinking and writing. As Brossard says, ‘Writing is making oneself visible…The woman who writes thus finally enters’ (quoted in Forsyth 47).

153

Conclusion

Through this practice-led research, I have shown that to ‘write lesbian’ in the Philippines, one needs to push against various boundaries. First, against the boundary created by lesbian invisibility in the Philippines, set up by the lack of a word for ‘lesbian’ and then maintained by damaging stereotypes. Second, against the Filipino concepts of gender and sexuality, which are patriarchal and heteronormative. Third, against the constraints of genre perpetuated by the

Philippine literary establishment through the writers workshops, academe, and publication standards.

Prior to undertaking this PhD, my past writing practice was anchored on the notion of passing—passing as a writer, then passing as a heterosexual writer—which contributed to my invisibility as a lesbian writer. But I have also tried to stop passing by consciously declaring my lesbian self as a kind of bedrock of my practice through my choice of subject matter, which has played a significant role in the creation of a lesbian culture in the Philippines. Through this PhD,

I aimed to challenge what I knew how to do as a writer of nonfiction, so that I could find my distinct voice as a lesbian writer.

My practice of nonfiction sits within the wave of women’s writing Aldrich has referred to in the Waveform anthology, seeking new ways to express our distinct material and perspective as women. What makes my research significant is my specific subjectivity as a lesbian writing in the Philippines, with my cultural and literary context constantly impinging on my consciousness, requiring me to continually push against what I’ve been taught and what I’ve learned in order to find my own way. The backbone of my findings is in my opening up of the Filipino notion of pagka-, taking it away from the usual meaning of ‘being’ toward ‘becoming’. I applied it to gender, sexuality, and then to genre, which opened my writing practice to the possibilities of

154

pagka-essay or ‘essay-becoming’, which allowed me to take risks in the writing of my memoir,

Abi Nako. Or So I Thought, my opinion column, Lugar Lang, and an experimental zine, Doors.

Inspired by the work and challenge of Marilyn Farwell and Nicole Brossard, I reflected upon my ingrained ways of approaching the essay as a genre and found a set of tools to wield by which my lesbian subjectivity can be rendered on the page. The linguistic tools include Farwell’s disruption of narrative paradigms to create a lesbian narrative space and my own transformed concept of passing in writing by ‘dressing up’ an essay in a different form. Non-linguistic tools inspired by the radical work of Brossard include collage and other graphic in(ter)ventions for lesbian-essaying.

After having identified the contextual and generic challenges to my writing and theorising about lesbian writing in the Philippines, I hope to continue to assert my own ways of writing through the practice of essay-becoming, and to risk writing more in my newfound voice as a lesbian writer.

155

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