My Way

 

my way
is not an all-tricycle way—
my way
is not an haciendero’s son’s
        topdown pop over one
        kinky-haired Negros O. heart
down the top overlooking
        coconut ideas
        sugar-coated Negrense view
of a lovely tagay, this sweetened
        pastime of Tagalog-haters¹

lovely pour because gentle,²
        unabused
        therefore acacia-
                content.

my way
is not of a motorbike print on
        my shirt
my clothes are not even for tennis,
I wear the colors of unseemli-
        ness, and
art’s deviations are not so cursed
        not sneered at in Dumaguete
but still curious—
        not because bad,
        just pointless.

maybe my way:
indeed life’s way,
to be as a budbod cabog³, millet
        cigar, a dark
sikwati/suman in the mist, Duma-
        guete market—
pick a corner, non-Bisaya
        savor the morning
with a cheap budget on fruits of
        her and your own cheap labors;
not ‘cheap’ really,
        but, yes by
        another way.

my way?
what is my way?
        do you hate Americans, Kilat?⁴
        d'you hate corrupt Protestants⁵
        do you have a crush
                on a Moslem princess
                at Silliman⁶?
my way, non-Bisaya,
is the way of the flesh
        (Apo I.’s⁷ sharks see it)—
which is death
        (A. Nobel⁸ plants despise it)—

ah! this departure from rough-
        ness’ boredoms⁹
where I come from
leading to my visit,
springboard for my fellowship to
        the dinaguit diaries of
literature people¹⁰,
here where Americans assemble each
        coup d’etat hour¹¹

to the way of, say, Dumaguete:
        tricycle air—
        motorbike city of joy rides,
                speechful rides
        almost speedless, or
speedbike city of hacienda sons:
        bodyguard on girls
        body beach girls,
        body
of water without winds¹², with-
        out water’s
        waiver
on my time’s slow-water vis-
        it—
                not really ‘without’,
                        but, yes.

by another’s easy way. . . .

 

 

—3 Sept./88 (Dumaguete City) to 29 Aug./91 (Palo, Leyte)

 

 

 

——————————————

poet’s footnotes:

I dedicate this poem to the poet Edith L. Tiempo and her husband fictionist, the late Edilberto K. Tiempo. The couple founded and ran the Silliman University Writers Workshop¹⁰ in Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental, and took this young poet in to become writing fellow to the 26th such workshop in the summer of 1987, then later in the first semestral workshop in 1988.

Dumaguete was such a small city then, mostly asphalt roads instead of concrete, mostly tricycles for within-city destinations. Negros Oriental, the province, was—like much of Negros Island—still a sugar-producing province, lined with sugar or coconut haciendas (large land properties for such crop-planting). The province is named after the indigenous negrites (small blacks) who now constitute a tribal minority in the hills.

The local drink (tagay-tagay means lazy drinking among friends) is tuba, from coconut saps. Here it is usually drunk fresh, i.e. sweet, unlike in Leyte Island (where I come from) where it is aged for months with a barok bark soaked in.

Dumaguete was then a lazy town, though at the same time youthful and athletic; being a university town, provincial yet ‘cultured’ in the Western sense. Jose Rizal is believed to have tagged it as the "city of gentle people"², purportedly when he passed by here on the way to his Dapitan exile. Hopefully, it’s still that acacia-lined city which had been declared a Visayan bird sanctuary of sorts.

Here was a city where upper class people converged with middle and lower class elements. Art here was mostly Western. The Luce Auditorium of Silliman U. presented performances by visiting Manila-based and foreign artists, and local or Mindanao talents. Apart from the Creative Writing Program, there was the university’s School of Music and Fine Arts.

Of course artists with unconventional modes of dressing were still frowned at, as they would be even in Manila, but sneers were minimal compared to Cubao in '88. Provincialism would often take a background role, perhaps as overwhelmed by the ‘cosmopolitan’ air of its being a stopover city and by the university mood (Silliman is spread over the city—involving a Silliman farm, a Silliman beach, a Silliman camp site beside a beach, a Silliman housing, roads owned by Silliman, not to mention private residences serving as alternate dormitories for Silliman students). Students practically owned the city during schooldays. It seemed to me in 1988 that there were more young people in Dumaguete than older ones, except when I was at the airport or the capitol area or among the provincials in the market area. The shopping districts, the restaurants, the beach, drinking areas, and so on, were all subsumed by the young, and even late-thirties women were looking sporty in their shorts. Soccer, swimming, scuba diving, archery, tennis and basketball were the city’s too-conspicuous sports activities, not to mention the chessboards that lined a sidewalk (which the poet/chessman Cesar Ruiz Aquino frequented).

To me it was a city that needed no art, my ‘London punk’ ways and fashion sense seeming out of place though yet insisted on by my pretentiousness. The whole scene seemed to me then a poetic utopia, where art functioned as mere artifice of culture, whatever culture meant.

Food was cheap. Memorably, fruits were cheap. But the wages were also low, even the university teachers’, slightly higher perhaps than the whores’.

The budbod cabog³ in the poem is a stick of ‘birdseed’ (‘cabog’ means hawk) cereal, i.e. corn millet cereal formed into a cake in stick form and wrapped in leaves. We would find this in the marketplace eateries, supposedly lower class stuff but the elite love it too. Sikwati is Bisaya for chocolate, although certain locals insist it’s ‘chocolate’ (pronounced Spanish-style). Elite locals are rather sensitive to linguistic distinctions like this, proud of their mestizo-ridden past culture. For example, Bisayans in Cebu have "wa" and "tuo" for left and right respectively, while Dumagueteans use "de silya" and "de mano" in instructing drivers. Apart from that culture, there is the sheer regionalist pride, evident in a recurring insistence upon the language to be called Bisaya instead of Cebuano. (You can just imagine the reality of the recurring complaint against Tagalogs for not speaking the Roman language whenever they’re in Rome)¹.

Another suman is a ‘budbod’ using sticky rice but is unsweetened. But unlike in Bulacan, here you dip this in sweetened chocolate, native cocoa delight, and this alone is breakfast. The native highland coffee is aromatic, one product the "foreigner" can feast on.

European-blooded Filipinos (mestizos) seemed numerous there. Americans were aplenty; though some were probably marine biologists, most were either rumored to be Vietnam veterans, or associated with the university past, or with Protestantism (for Dumaguete had become the Protestant center of the Visayas), certain of these rumors even going so far as to hint the circle of a drug trade or the circle of CIA agents—my brother and I, armchair leftists, suspected this last, too. On that last note, let me specify. My brother observed that Americans he’d seen often in Tacloban he would also see in Dumaguete everytime the coups d’etat of the Aquino era were activated. Some of these whites I’d see drinking, or simply converging, at a corner store with tables under a technological school—the initials of which school would spell ‘CIA’.¹¹ I befriended one of these mysterious persons, but I never got the chance to ask him about his presence in the country. However, all these were pure speculation, which should tell you for all intents and purposes what kind of poem the above piece is.

We writers were often at a beach market cum eating place at a southern village of a town, from where we’d see Apo Island⁷ across the water. Apo is an islet surrounded by shark-infested water, but a scuba-diving favorite of science students and sport enthusiasts. Malatapay was the village (of the municipality of Zamboanguita) where this beach market was held; from Dumaguete we’d pass two towns and an Alfred Nobel plant—dynamites!⁸ South of Zamboanguita is Siaton town, birthplace of the revolutionary general, Leon Kilat⁴.

The United Church of Christ runs the Silliman U.⁶ But a lot of Protestant sect churches⁵ have established in Dumaguete. Islam, however, is equally felt, this city being the southernmost city of the Visayas region and therefore nearest Mindanao Island where most Moslems are found. I had a crush on a Mindanaoene student rumored to be a Moslem princess. She had no head cover, tall, and with exotic looks. Totally beyond me, I thought.

Legend has it that the name Dumaguete derives from daguit, which means "a giant hawk’s picking up something by its talons while in flight"—in allusion to the Moslem raids that used to haunt this city in the Spanish period. A tower lookout attests to this past. And so visitors get hooked here, a reverse daguit, while lovers look more joyful here. Speaking of joy, I remember going along on one joyride—oh, the popular joy rides about the streets and boulevards of the city!—wasting gasoline on a jeep with its top down. And they called such rides "action".

Now, contrast this city with Waray-speaking Tacloban,⁹ "where I come from." Alunan would say of my city, "that’s a rough and tough town". Some would reference the moody waves of the Pacific which Leyte Island faces.¹² I would say it’s just the education-thing with Bisaya-speaking Dumaguete, a city Europeanized and Americanized perhaps more than any other provincial city, except Baguio. But the reality is that the rest of Dumaguete is just Tacloban—ultra-lowbrow, provincial (read: ignorant), envious, contented, angry, criminal, heckling.

This poem I wrote as an homage to a city I fell in love with (though I’m sure I don’t want to settle down there), the way I fell in love with Jaroslav Seifert’s girls beside the river and on the parks of Prague.

Obviously this is more of a private than a public poem, photographing my impressions—likewise suspicions, as it were—on this spectacle; ‘my way’ the Sinatran phrase personally gaining significance for me as alluding to my quasi-Marxism (though moderate, was often frustrated with its moderateness) and near-sympathy then for the underground war-mongering of both the RAM-SFP right and the CPP-NPA left. The ‘other way’ was Dumaguete’s slowness, its contentedness, its feudal acceptance, and its Americanness (Europeanness?). Here my Marxism was disciplined by a confusion that involved: 1.) my avant-art and -style proclivities, 2.) the happiness I derived from simple girl-watching (girls whose mere glances would cook me red), 3.) the unabusive luxury of upper middle class friends, and 4.) the contentedness and stupidity of these complaining cowards we call the poor. Disciplined, it was, not towards this socialism’s eradication but toward a moral rationale for it, ridding myself of socialist grumbling and desires for revenge from a position replete of envy and anger, and, quite significantly, being rid of expectations for this socialism to derive from the ignorant poor.

Here was formed my view of socialism not as an ideology of war but as a method for peace, not as a policing formula but as a moral plan, not a utopian book but a dynamic system of policy-making for justice and equality. Not, even, as capitalism’s enemy, but—in the American Democratic sense—as its maintainer i.e., through the virtues of socialized education and educational opportunity primarily, socialized wage policy, a socialized justice system, etc., capitalism would be guaranteed of a longer life on the national shelf. I saw it, therefore, as something that could philosophically strengthen the security of free enterprise, beyond empty slogans, through the eradication of lower class crimes when the necessity for these crimes became near-nil, rendering therefore any form of rebellion unreasonable.

So the final "another’s way" was my new way, opening me up even for a later appreciation of the economics of the Chicago School (Milton Friedman, Jeffrey Sachs, etc.). But that phrase gained further personal significance for me when I found help from Taoism in 1989, servicing too my politics. And with this new combination, my war-mongering gradually found new enemies in vengeance, envy, and leftist closed-mindedness, albeit my emotional nature had to struggle with the new position. I became, horror of horrors, a moral socialist like the now-ignored Solzhenitsyn. Line 6 of hexagram 30 in the Book of Changes shows a "king employing (the line’s) subject in his punitive expeditions," adding that "achieving admirable merit, the latter breaks only the chiefs of the enemy. Where the prisoners were not their associates, he does not punish. There will be no error." This paragraph speaks, I suppose, not so much about persons in a war, but about the necessary intellectual restraint for the conduct of it, hexagram 30 being the hexagram of the intelligence. Capital punishment would be an easy thing to swing, for example, any unthinking warrior can take that. . . .

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 1999, 2004 Vicente-Ignacio Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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