criticism

The Writer and Her Roots^*
by Marjorie Evasco

A little trail winds deep into the forest and reaches a hidden clearing where a handful of women are gathered around the fire. From a distance I hear them chanting the old rhythms of shared stories. As I come nearer, I see that their raised arms are marked by enchanted signs. I know they must be the pintadas, tattooed women of my past who continue to bear witness to the poetry of living, celebrating through their songs and their gestures, the power of the word in the magical utterance of true-seeing and transformation.

Dream Journal, 1984

Thus with this dream began my conscious search for the pintadas[1] of Philippine literary history. It was this image that I brought with me to the various libraries I had visited in connection with De La Salle University’s long-range research project on the Literary History of the Philippines. Last May, at Cagayan de Oro’s Xavier University library, I felt a strong numinous response to the data I found. In

Kinaadman,[2] I read some of the tribal epics of Mindanao gathered by various anthropologists. In many accounts, the anthropologist acknowledged a woman storyteller or poet as the chanter of the epic. And in almost all of these cases, i.e. among the Suban-ons and Manobos, the women storytellers had learned to sing the story of their tribe’s epic heroes and heroines from a long line of maternal talebearers.

Such a phenomenon, however, is not isolated in Mindanao. For among the mountain tribes of the North, the epics have always been sung by women. Among the Ifugaos, it is believed that “folk epics may be sung only by women because legend says that ascended folk heroes appear only to women as intermediaries.”[3]

It is this figure in Philippine tribal communities which ties tenuous bonds with the pre-colonial figure of the priestess-poet in the accounts of Pigafetta and other chroniclers. These holy women were known as the babaylan of the Bisayans and the catalonan of the Tagalogs.[4]

The respected anthropologist, F. Landa Jocano, in the book he edited in 1975 entitled The Philippines at the Spanish Contact, notes that the babaylanes occupied a position of power in pre-colonial barangays. They were the holders of wisdom, being the spiritual leader, counsel and healer of the community.[5] Their psycho-spiritual functions were directly related to the survival and growth of the community. Theirs was the burden of memory in the continuum of life. They were the ones who kept the values and beliefs alive in the ways of the people. From the planting season to the harvest, from the rituals of birth to the burial wake, these women gave voice to the ancient truths of the human condition in their prayers, spells, lullabies, stories and poetry.

But the vision of the long-haired women with enchanted marks on their arms, holding aloft the first grain of the year’s harvest, flickered after the initial impact of colonialization was felt by the Filipinos. These priestesses were the first to suffer the brunt of Spanish domination; they were the ones who led the earliest uprisings against the Spaniards. After the loosely recorded accounts of sporadic attacks on the pueblos led by the babaylanes against the Spaniards,[6] the records of history bear scant witness to the women who struggled to be heard by their people. Their story became submerged in the deluge of the new patriarchal order.

Spawned by patriarchal Europe, the Spanish conquistadores, with their imperialist obsession to expand the territories of their king and their god, brought with them the other plague of medieval Europe: the burning of wise women at the stakes. When they destroyed our old places of worship, burned our anitos, replaced our gestures of prayer and changed the language of our memory, in a deeper sense they were burning our wise women, the pintadas of our communal order, and condemned them for centuries into the depths of our forests and inner vastness of our mountains.

Five hundred years after, women writers of this century try to trace their ancestors to as far back as they can remember or dare to dream, for like them they carry upon their arms the enchanted marks of words which may enable them to continue to hold up half the sky of legend and worship. But the re-tracing is arduous and fraught with peril. Not only is there the deadly silence of four hundred centuries to contend with; there is also the overwhelming patriarchal order which may threaten them into a more deadly silence.

What then is the task of women writers in search of their roots? Cut off from the awesome tree of history, do they quietly wither away with the grief of not being able to find their mothers, grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers? Or do they plant themselves into the rich soil of their womanhood and dream of growing, so that in their growing they will find their way into the depths of their story and connect with the great tap root of their ancient mothers?

The task clearly implies a conscious choice of direction. The process of arriving at this choice is the central concern of this paper. And because literature offers the complex realities of life as Filipinos live it, it is this mirror that will be used for this introspective journey. This paper, however, concerns itself only with looking into the images of women as women writers themselves project or shape them. This critical view is based upon the radical framework that is beginning to change and re-shape the understanding of women’s literature all over the world. It enables writers and readers of literature to take the works of women as clues to the historical context and ideological patterns which influence the way women live, how they have been living, how they have been led to imagine themselves, how their language has trapped them or liberated them; and how they can begin to see – and therefore live – afresh.[7] Images of women’s lives, both as writers and as literary characters, then become the focus of this study.

Forbears of the Tradition

The establishment of the feudal/patriarchal socio-economic and political system obliterated the role of the babaylan, the woman as priestess, healer and poet for the next four hundred years. And it was not until the late 1890s and after the turn of the century that the Filipino woman poet re-emerged. Of these rare women forbears, we know of Leona Florentino of Ciudad Fernandino of Vigan, and Magdalena Jalandoni of Jaro, Iloilo. They were the subjects of a study “The Filipina as Writer” by literary scholar and critic, Dolores Feria.[8]

Feria sifts through the meager facts and stories about Leona Florentino and laments that despite Florentino’s being our first full-time Filipino woman of letters, we only have 22 extant poems gleaned from what was a prodigiously active creative life. But the poems offer us the evidence with which we gauge the position of Leona Florentino in our literary history. Feria affirms that Florentino provided for us the bridge between the purely oral expression of folk poetry and the written phase of the later women writers.

The twenty-two poems were compiled by Leona’s son, the revolutionary journalist Isabelo de los Reyes, who sent them to Madame Volska in Paris. These were published in the Bibliotheque Internationale Des Ouevres de Femmes and exhibited in the Exposicion General de Filipinas in Madrid. More than anything else, these verses reveal to us Florentino’s primary achievement, her breaking away from one of the patriarchal traditions which demand that “one’s life must be firmly disconnected from one’s writings if the feminine gender is involved.” Judged within the context of her time, Leona Florentino’s rebellious life cannot be dissociated from her poetry. She had dared to choose her poetry over and above her husband, the alcalde mayor, when he demanded that she give up her poetry or lose him. Sent away to live alone in An-annam, Bantay, she took on again her maiden name and continued to create her verses. She even wrote erotic poems dedicated to Castora, her wine seller, at a time when patriarchal codes of behavior held women captive in repressive sexual taboos.

Unlike Leona Florentino, Magdalena Jalandoni, the first woman novelist of the country, wrote purposely for publication. But like her contemporaries in the west, she first had to hide behind a pseudonym because in the early 1900s it was considered unbecoming for a woman to write for publication. The new American regime brought the ideas of freedom and equality but the system was still patriarchal in essence. Magdalena Jalandoni was indeed a brave women to survive the censure of her widowed mother, who, because of years of patriarchal training, felt that her daughter’s “masculine traits,” i.e. writing, being brilliant in school, being an eloquent orator, were dangerous. The beatings from her mother did not stop Magdalena Jalandoni from writing secretly at the age of 15 her first novel, Ang Mga Tunok Sang Isa Ka Bulak.

Soon she began to write under her own name on subjects which were not yet open to women. For example, she wrote impassioned verses which scandalized her mother, and an article on the women’s suffrage movement, even after her mother forcibly prevented her from joining the few women who demonstrated at the public plaza in Jaro, agitating for the Filipino woman’s right to vote. Jalandoni also went against the traditional destiny of women when she insisted on remaining single unless she found “a man with the soul of an artist… and as a first test, the man must first write a good novel.”

For 71 years, she wrote 24 completed novels and 70 volumes of corridos in Hiligaynon. And when she died on September 14, 1978, she had an unfinished novel on her desk. Of this lifelong involvement with writing, she says: “… As I think out my novels in the deep of night, I forget while writing that I am an old woman… My love for writing seems to be… a feeling which is only lent to me during those holy moments when I am writing.”

Magdalena Jalandoni succeeded in becoming the Philippines’ first long-term woman of letters. She fulfilled what she demanded of herself early in her creative life; “To be perfectly free to write as I please.” But her success, like Leona Florentino’s, entailed a life of isolation, made even lonelier by the fact that outside Panay she is still virtually unknown by many Filipino writers, teachers, students and scholars in literature.

The price paid by these early women writers for their love for writing proves beyond doubt that the deep social prohibitions against the acknowledgement and fulfillment of a woman’s creative power has had a long history. For many contemporary Filipino women, this struggle is still in the semi-feudal/patriarchal matrix wherein the traditional roles and values associated with women and the traditional ways of fulfilling them are fixed. There is little room for them to go beyond these patterns either because of sheer fatigue from the unabated denial of self, or the irrational fear of self-exploration and adventure towards self-fulfillment, born out of years of subjugation to the male voice of authority. As a result, they have come to see themselves as frail, timid, domesticated and subservient creatures, convinced of their own inferiority and intrinsic weakness.

Mater Dolorosa: Woman as Martyr

The silently suffering martyr is one of the most dominant images projected by women characters in early Philippine literature written in English. As mother, wife, lover, sister, or daughter, she is molded after the image of the ideal woman: the Virgin Mother who suffers in silence and denies her wounds for the sake of love. This silent suffering or martyrdom has its own compelling power because of its psychological implications. For in the face of powerlessness in a society where the men make the choices for her, she affirms her strength by enduring her pain and her loss.

For instance, women characters like Julia Salas in Paz Marquez Benitez’s “Dead Stars”[9] or Soledad in Paz Latorena’s “The Small Key”[10] assume heroic proportions when we find them living their pain through the act of self-denial. The act of giving through self-denial is taught to women very early in life as a virtuous thing. But these stories seem to imply that it makes of women pyrrhic heroines. We find Julia Salas transformed from a spirited, articulate young woman into a lusterless maid in her hometown. The stars which were her eyes are now dead, a metaphor for the deadening life she has chosen to live because she has lost the man she loved to a social order that bound them both to duty and propriety of conduct.

On the other hand, we find Soledad, the second wife of Pedro Buhay, in bed with a sudden fever after she buried the clothes of Pedro’s dead first wife while Pedro was away in the field. Soledad’s fever is psychosomatic, indicative of her guilt and her fear. The act of burning the dead wife’s clothes started as an act of survival but one which risked the anger and displeasure of Pedro. Faced with these consequences, Soledad falls sick, her spirit not up to the challenge of confronting her husband. Thus she is incapacitated by the fever of her own powerlessness.

Niñas Inocentes: Woman as Victim

Giver her conditioning towards accepting pain, loss and fear, it is easy to see women become the victims of their own circumstances. While the martyr heroine at least makes the semblance of a choice in the endurance of suffering as a strategy for survival, the woman as innocent victim lives in limbo, pathetically unself-conscious of other alternatives to living.

Rosa in Estrella Alfon’s “Servant Girl”[11] is twice a victim of society in her poverty and in her being a woman. Vulnerable to sexual harassment by the muscular male, Sancho, she is even more vulnerable to her own fantasies about Angel, the gentle cochero who comes twice to her rescue like the medieval image of the knight in shining armor. Rosa lives a miserable life as a servant continually battered and nagged by an alcoholic mistress. In the last part of the story, Rosa makes her bid for freedom when she decides to run away. But this bid is foiled because she meets Angel on the road. And between the uncertainty of fulfilling her dream of happiness with Angel, she submits to the sweet temptation offered by the possibilities of love. Thus, we find her ending up where she began, back in the house of her cruel mistress, “forgetting all her vows about never stepping into it again.”

Another image of the victim is Miss Mijares in Kerima Polotan’s “The Virgin.”[12] Miss Mijares at 34 is a pathetic figure because she believes that the range of her choices had considerably narrowed as she grew older. She has had to fulfill society’s expectations of the dutiful daughter. And the mother she took care of, took “too many years to die.”

Missing her chances at getting the man of her youthful dreams, she eventually finds herself attracted to the newly employed carpenter who was “graceful and light, a man who knew his body and used it well.” The week after the carpenter thanks her for the half-peso raise she managed to work out for him, Mijares loses her way home. This becomes a metaphor for her condition, echoing her fearful dream of losing her head over the man.

She later discovers that the carpenter has a son but the man is not married to the mother of his son. Miss Mijares thus realizes the absurdity of her feelings for this man whom she has idealized. And yet the unrelenting loneliness that plagues women who remain unmarried, not out of choice but out or circumstance, is too much to bear. In the end, she gives herself up to her need for the man, no matter how monstrous she knows it is.

The Bitch: the Angry and Bitter Woman

It would seem then that to the majority of Filipino women, attaining the love of a man and marrying him are the panacea to all of life’s problems. But the portrait of the married woman in literature is hardly the image of bliss. In some of these women, the martyrdom and victimization come to a critical point and the image that breaks out is that of the angry and bitter woman who bitches at life and others. This image also serves to reinforce the images of the martyr and the victim by presenting the negative aspect of the aggressive or strong women who pays the terrible price of alienation or utter frustration in exchange for her short-lived sense of power.

In Aida Rivera Ford’s story “The Chieftest Mourner”[13] we see through the eyes of a dead poet’s young niece the situation of two women: one the legal wife and the other the querida. We also see the interaction between these women and the people around them. Both women came to the funeral rites of the man they loved. The people have mixed reactions to both women and soon the tension breaks when the women relatives of the dead poet gang up on the other woman for her lack of delicadeza. There is an ugly confrontation and the other woman, in a loud, angry voice, justifies her right to be at that funeral, if not out of the love she had for the poet, at least for the jewels she had sold to support him, and the time she had spent peddling the poet’s work to publishers. The self-righteous tone of the mistress sounds powerful and her words successfully unveil the sham of the relatives’ dutiful mourning.

But the women relatives know where to hit another woman right where it hurts most. They call her “shameless bitch,” la mujer esa, putting her in the only place given to non-virtuous women in society. In a final burst of anger and bitterness, the other woman lashes out at the relatives of her dead lover: “All right… all right. You can have him – all that’s left of him!”

Many of the women characters in Kerima Polotan’s stories are angry or bitter women. Emma Gorres in “The Sounds of Sunday”[14] is one of them. She sees her husband going deeper into the rut of corruption and she fights with him about it. Emma is strong in both her anger and her choice to leave her husband. She writes him: “I have left you because I can not live without you…” but she soon finds out with bitterness that Doming is not bereft without her. It is bitterness that makes Emma vulnerable to the illicit intimacy offered by her rekindled relationship with Rene Rividad. And we are left with an ambiguous denouement which makes us wonder whether Emma will choose to go “Over the edge, ah! Down the precipice, and sweet disaster,” or keep faithful to her husband, mindful of society’s definition of what is licit and illicit, what is right or wrong, as the definitions apply to women.

Kerima Polotan herself explains why she never gives her women characters the full measure of joy out of the choices they make or are contemplating to make. In her essay “The Woman As Writer” she says:

Perhaps I am one of those who feel that no matter how high a woman soars, or how far her reach takes her, she is in the end shortchanged for it is in her nature to be shortchanged. That is the reason we all become bitches in the end. Against the day of betrayal she must be moderate in her happiness, taking only brief guarded sips, keeping the entire cup at arm’s length – joy is not to be trusted. Though the nectar be sweet, it is bitter at the bottom, and no matter what honeyed words are spoken by the man whose hands hold it out for us to drink whether he be father, husband, son, brother, lover, friend, we must drink warily, closing only one eye in bliss, but keeping the other wide open, ready for when the blow comes. Then when it falls, we summon hidden resources of courage and strength, for we must overcome again and again.[15]

Perhaps the young writer, Fanny H. Ba. Llego, says it all in a satiric poem that exposes the typical attitudes and behavior of men towards the women they love, marry, or intend to marry. The poem is sharp comment which succeeds in bringing home its points by a clever reversal of expectations. The poem, “A Prayer of Great Expectations”[16] has a strident tone despite its humor, and it is meant to give some men the “shock of recognition” for its sheer chauvinism:

There’s no doubt about it I need to get hitched:
I need someone to scratch me whenever I itch

Or give me a backrub whenever I want it
(Who’ll pout only a little when someone else does it);

Someone on whom I can vent all my frustrations
And who is supportive in trying situations;

Who’ll extol all my virtues, forget all my faults
And would always submit to my sexual assaults;

Who’ll bring up my children the way they should be
Yet still be entirely devoted to me,

Who’ll always obey me, my word being law,
My logic perfect, my thinking, without flaw,

My sexy cheerleader, housekeeper, accountant,
Secretary, nursemaid, unflagging assistant;

Brought up and moulded to think that success
Is found in the home: nothing more, nothing else.

O, Mother Goddess, I need in my life
A man willing to be the perfect little wife!

The Kasama or Kapatid: Woman in Transition

While anger is forceful, many women have come to realize that it is also a psychologically draining process. In the late 1960s many women writers learned to harness the force of their protest against the status quo by involving themselves in the people’s struggle for national liberation. If they did not take arms side by side with the men, they took their pens and wrote about the need to re-evaluate the present system and change it.

The women’s movement of this period adopted an ideological framework within the nationalist cause. In the struggle to reclaim their rights, women identified four feudal-patriarchal authorities from which women suffer: political, clan, religious, and male.[17] By participating in the nationalist movement the image of the kasama or kapatid emerged. This signaled the beginnings of the transition of women’s perceptions of roles from traditional ones to the radical alternatives for self-fulfillment.

Lorena Barros, a young anthropology instructor at the University of the Philippines, wrote a nationalistic poem entitled “Sampaguita,”[18] which focuses on the asses’ struggle for freedom and justice. The persona in the poem addresses a comrade, a word that suggests her own sense of kinship, equality, and her awareness of a new order wherein mutual respect and protection between human beings, regardless of sex, status and creed is possible. Lorena Barros was killed in 1976 in Mauban, Quezon. Her death was not only a loss to the people’s movement but also to the masses of women who have been inspired by the courage of her life and her writing.

A more contemporary figure is Mila Aguilar, who, in the volume of poems entitled Why Cage Pigeons?”[19] puts to the questioning light of the conscienticized sensibility the structures of power in our society. In “Pigeons for My Son” the persona is the suffering mother, symbolic of the mother country and representative of all women whose husbands, sons, brothers, lovers and friends are imprisoned, maimed and killed. The persona shares her son’s act of setting the pigeons free because in her own cage, she too desires freedom. Aguilar is a credible voice because she is one of those women who have braved imprisonment, rape, torture or murder for their political beliefs.

The people’s movement, however, gave emphasis to socio-political and economic issues which were class-based, relegating women’s issues to the backseat. Thus, while many women worked equally hard for national liberation, they continued to suffer injustice and discrimination as women. Out of this experience women began exploring ways of developing a framework for their struggle and basing their theories for liberation on the Filipino woman’s situation in Philippine society.

Marra Lanot, a poet at the forefront of the feminist movement in the country today, gives us a deeper dimension of the image of the women in transition. In her poem “Tribeswoman”[20] the persona begins to see with clearer eyes her traditional roles, characterized by hunger and self-sacrifice, and articulates with a questioning and hopeful voice some of the major issues of women:

My body contains
The dream of my father
Sweat of my husband
Hope of my children…
But
Could it be possible
It is wrong to stand and wait
Like this – a heal of ribs,
A forsaken idol –
As my foremothers
Did before me
Many moons ago
In the shadow of the mountains?
Could it be possible
It is wrong?
Could it be
Possible?

While the woman-persona celebrates the immanent power in fulfilling traditional roles, she also questions the traditional framework which demands of her, more than her husband, father or children, immense sacrifices that leave her physically and psychologically drained. The versification and repetition of some lines are interesting because these literary devices allow the questioning voice to surface while juxtaposing it with an evaluative judgment: “It is wrong.” The last line therefore reverberates with meaning, opening possibilities for the women who question, evaluate and propose alternatives.

The Warrior and Healer: the Woman Coming to Terms with Herself

The realities of women’s issues have become highlighted during our times, when more women writers are becoming increasingly aware that they have to use their own terms in defining the way they perceive their own lives and the realities of the human condition. Today they write of love, motherhood, sex and marriage, with the new perspective that these issues are not less valid than their stories and poems documenting or commenting on the political, economic and social issues of our times. For at a deeper level of understanding they realize that these political, economic and social issues are not things outside of women’s lives: these are very much within their condition as mothers, wives, lovers, sisters, daughters, or simply persons complete unto themselves.

Indicators of this consciousness newly shaping are found in very recent works of women, which issue from a clearly defined woman’s perspective. Among these works are the poems of Grace Monte de Ramos and Lina Reyes. Both poets re-define the verities of womanhood in radical terms. In Monte de Ramos’ “Brave Woman”[21] we confront the reality that when fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers and friends go off to the slaughter of war, it is the women who suffer most. This young feminist poet gives us the image of the mother-persona grieving for her two soldier sons and the dissident son who died. But this is more than the image of the traditional grieving mother because the mother-persona transcends her grief by defining its cause in uncompromising terms, and reaches a new level of awareness of community with other women all over the world who recognize that their nurturing spirit is wasted by an order which devalues life and other basic human concerns:

Silent, I mourn a woman’s
Bitter lot: to give birth to men
Who kill and are killed.

Another young feminist poet, Lina Reyes, wrote about the war waged by Filipino soldiers against the Isnegs of Sanchez Mira in her poem “What Are They Like?”[22] This poem was written after Lina went with the fact-finding mission that investigated human rights violations in Cagayan Valley and Kalinga Apayaw. She headed the documentation team and wrote voluminous reports. This poem, however, demanded to be born because she “could not be satisfied by mere abbreviations of feeling.” For her this poem was “an act of liberation from my own sense of powerlessness in the face of what I saw and experienced.”

The question-and-answer structure of the poem, adapted from Denise Levertov’s poem about the war in Indo-China, suggests the dialogue between two personas looking at realities using two different frameworks: one, the mechanistic framework of facts used by the reporter or the soldier obeying orders, and the other, the humanizing framework of the intuitive person, verily the healers, poets and spiritual adepts in our midst. Both frameworks articulate with unflinching realism the rifts between our peoples because of an order that thrives on violence and fear. The questions open areas for deeper understanding; the answers empower this understanding to move towards radical change. And the poetic sensibility succeeds in bringing home the truth that the two frameworks need not be warring opposites in our society. Hopefully, through the writers’ nurturing sensibility, their deep understanding of the human condition and their refusal to participate in an order that is destructive of human lives and basic human values, the healers and warriors can join hands and hearts in the never-ending battle for freedom, justice and equality.

What Are They Like?
(after Denise Levertov)

1
Do the Isnegs of Sanchez Mira
Circle around the bonfire or light
Lamps for the evening meal?

Sir, they gathered hushed in the dark
Here, in the domain of forest
Fog, the votive warmth begins
Within. In their bosoms, the fire
Crackles freedom! Night is seeding
Mind—paddies ready
For what shall come
Forth and flower from these
Last glutten measures gleaned
Of the sower; the burrowed
Warrior, emerging.

2
What treasures do they hold then that
Battalions pursue them in earnest?

Do not look for treasures, Sir, though they have
Women of long lashes, sun-blacked hair.
Think instead of the proud way they once lived –

This is what this veteran thieving
Takes away. Think of

Why, there was, between the eyes, a throb
They nicknamed “pain” as they taught
Their children the hows
Of fleeing, forgiving, lying low. Think of

How, when all else failed, they taught them
Why they shall carry a gun.

Think of
Why there is
pain, as the children, tall as shrub

Of one rainfall, trigger the evening watch, gun
In hand like a lantern dilating the dark.

Think of yourself, my friend, profile of an obedient
     soldier
Honed to stalk and kill because yours is a career of
     orders.

Think of ourselves, Rolly, not knowing

Why we aim our sight at countrymen, at
Friends with whom we must share meals and wine while

The mutual enemy, the remote behemoth, heavy and full
Of the profits from high-quality plywood, cheap
Labor and the steady delivery of guns, tanks, and
     Sikorsky helicopters

Sleeps a pleasant sleep
Dreaming of consistent, sustained peace.

The Healing Vision: Individuation and Connectedness

The babaylanes led their people in uprisings to protest against the desecration of their faith and the imposition of an alien creed. It is this image of the warrior who is at the same time a healer which offers women of today an alternative to the patriarchal framework, one that will enable them to break out of the molds into which they have been calcified by colonial experience. It is also this alternative which is essential towards fulfilling the vision of the transformation of women’s lives so that they will truly become productive and creative human beings who are free and equal partners of men.

In fulfilling the healing vision, Filipino women need to awaken to the psychological processes of individuation and connectedness. Individuation involves the woman’s conscious assertion of the awakened self in order to fulfill the natural human impulse to grow, to create anew, to explore the depth, breadth, and height of inner space, and to expand horizons of achievement. On the other hand, connectedness is the process by which women consciously examine the images of their past and forge a stronger sense of community with each other and with other creative forces in society in order to destroy old and destructive structures and establish new ones.

Today’s writers, particularly women writers, carry the burden of articulating women’s experiences as they go through these processes of change, to enable more and more women, as well as men, to wrestle with the ghosts and monsters of their lives, whether these monsters and ghosts are in the past, the present, or the future. For women writers, the task to remember is also the task to dream. They must not only be able to find more babaylanes in the past, the Leona Florentinos and Magdalena Jalandonis who wrestled bravely with the monster of silence and actualized their creative power. They must also enable more women in the future to use their strong, clear voices in order to affirm their womanhood and enrich the experiences of our shared humanity.

Hopefully, their own daughters, granddaughters, and great granddaughters of the 21st century will be able to live through holocausts and revolutions and read that their foremothers did their task well so that they too might write more freely as human beings and live more fully as women. The present women’s struggle to assert identity and to create a stronger sense of community shall have been for the survival of the very young writers who are now doing their first exercises at the babaylan’s altars and worktables. They must be encouraged to go on and fulfill themselves. For the sacred clearing in the forest and the vision of pintadas could still be lost to women if they are not wakeful. If they remain mindful of the memory and faithful to the vision, it is possible that every time a young woman writer comes to join that circle of women chanting the rhythms of the fire, she will learn to re-affirm what earlier wise women demanded of themselves ages ago: to celebrate without guilt the gift for the healing words of power.

NOTES

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* First published as “A Dream of the Pintadas” in Solidarity (nos. 104 and 105, 1985), under the byline Marjorie Pernia.

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[1] According to the Spanish chroniclers, the Bisayans (both men and women) tattooed their bodies with paintings for adornment as well as to signify feats of bravery or status. The women had very elegant tattoo marks only on their arms. In a metaphoric sense, I use the term to signify the burden of words that women of letters carry on their arms.

[2] Kinaadman is a Bisayan term that translates to wisdom. This term is used as the title of the Journal of Southern Philippines, edited by Miguel A. Bernad, S.J., and published by Ateneo de Davao, Ateneo de Zamboanga and Xavier University.

[3] Dolores Feria, “The Filipina as Writer,” Celebrity, May 31, 1984, p. 10. See also Anthology of ASEAN Literatures: Epics of the Philippines, ed. Jovita B. Castro, et al. (Manila: ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 1983).

[4] F. Landa Jocano, ed., The Philippines at the Spanish Contact (Quezon City: R. P. Garcia Publishing Co., 1975), p. 41.

[5] Babaylan, n.d., p. 2.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” Adrienne Rich’s Poetry, ed. Barbara Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1975), p. 90. See also Marilyn L. Williamson, “Toward a Feminist Literary History,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, 10:11, Autumn 1984, pp. 136-47.

[8] Feria, series of articles in Celebrity, May 31, June 15, June 30, 1984. Data on Florentino and Jalandoni are taken from this study.

[9] Paz Marquez Benitez, “Dead Stars,” The Development of Philippine Literature in English (since 1900), ed. Richard V. Croghan (Quezon City: Alemar-Phoenix Publishing House, Inc., 1975), pp. 18-29.

[10] Croghan, pp. 36-39.

[11] Croghan, pp. 140-146.

[12] Patricia S. Torres (Kerima Polotan), “The Virgin,” Philippines Free Press, February 16, 1952, pp. 12-13, 48-49.

[13] Croghan, pp. 232-236.

[14] Croghan, pp. 237-248.

[15] Kerima Polotan, “The Woman As Writer,” Focus Philippines, November 22, 1975, p. 8.

[16] Fanny Llego, “A Prayer of Great Expectations,” Breaktext: Caracoa 7, ed. Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC), p. 9.

[17] Aida F. Santos Maranan, “Do Women Really Hold Up Half the Sky?” The Diliman Review, 32:3-4, May-June, July-August, 1984, p. 48. The same issue has a special report on women.

[18] Lorena Barros, “Sampaguita,” Caracoa V (Sub Versu), ed. PLAC, p. 11.

[19] Mila Aguilar, Why Cage Pigeons? (Manila: Free Mila Aguilar Committee, 1985).

[20] Marra Lanot, “Tribeswoman,” Caracoa V (Sub Versu), p. 43.

[21] Grace Monte de Ramos, “Brave Woman,” Caracoa V (Sub Versu), p. 53.

[22] Lina S. Reyes, “What Are They Like?” Caracoa V (Sub Versu), pp. 61-64.

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