Ever since I can remember, my mother always seemed to have the right
words to bolster me. “Pag-aram hin maupay
Iday kay tinamay kita. Tinalumpigos kita salit kapot kamo hin buot. Pitad
tipaunhan.”
It was my first week in Cebu then and Mother had seen fit to remind me
of why they let me go. She had probably gotten wind of my relaxed first week in
CNU and my preliminary exploits of Cebu and so she told me those same words she
always tells me when I seem to move astray. Those same words that were exactly
what I needed to hear.
I conveniently forgot those words a week after, when I didn’t have
time to indulge feelings and was only driven by the all-important aim of
accomplishing my everyday to-do list in teaching. Needless to say, my exploits
were now relegated to the background because I had my demos as priorities. I
knew those words anyway, for all they’re worth. I bumped into those words
countless times and I knew just what they meant. And for the most part, I chose
to forget them, as soon as my mind interpreted the letters. I had almost
forgotten why we were ridiculed after all. I chose not to remember. Why?
Because those words touch me in places that hurt.
But I am going to speak of that now; I am going to speak of the places
that hurt – to cut the wounds deeper, to heal. Those places are the crannies
where a person tries to stuff out the questions of roots and belonging, the
places a person tries hard to escape from to prove himself, the places he
yearns for to find himself back.
The first thing that I wanted to forget about my mother’s words was
the obligation. I did not want to remember because I had nothing to remember. I
wanted to bury their ghosts and leave it behind me. I had not directly
experienced the import of those words after all. My mother and her sisters did.
In her youth, my mother and her sisters worked odd jobs to earn money. They
went about town selling rice cakes and the rattan baskets they wove. Theirs was
an average middle class family, but when my grandfather and my two uncles were
sent to jail for circumstantial evidence, they became infamous. The women in
the family, especially, my grandmother, my mother and her sisters, being the
ones who were left behind, were the ones who faced the humiliation. My mother
knew the smarting pain of hardship and understood the life it meant; my duty
was to bear the scars and learn from them.
But the ghost of memory is more persistent than the nags of
obligation. What I feared most was to look back and remember that those words
were true, after all. My sheltered world would be gnawed away by remembrances
of things that have long since passed and I would be left with a self I cannot
compartmentalize, a world of ghosts that I cannot control. This was frightening
for me. Even as I had a good memory, I wanted only to remember the things I
went through and conquered; I had no patience for ghosts that were not even
mine.
It is said that a person searches the world over and comes home to
find what he is searching for. This person goes out into the world to make a
name for himself, to be a man of his own invention, to search for the place he
belongs to. But in order to find his niche, he must scour himself first, and
reconcile with history. To do this, he must be prepared for the persistence of
memory.
For years, mother would tell us stories of the way they were. These
intermittent stories would lodge themselves in my mind and form a single
narrative of their story. For years, whenever these stories were told, I would
only wonder with amazement at what they went through, the wonder of one who was
born not so long ago to know that they were true, and the apathy of one who was
born too long ago to care. I had the gift of an excellent selective memory; I
could forget the remembrances that I could forget, I could disregard those that
I couldn’t. But as the poet Voltaire Oyzon wrote, the act of forced forgetting
is an act of constant remembering in itself. Somehow, I knew the taste of my
mother’s words, as someone who tries to forget sometimes succeeds at not
remembering, but always fails at forgetting. Ignoring the ghosts was not the
answer. To forget where you come from and what your predecessors have been
through is to forget an essential part of who you are.
I did not want to remember because I cannot live down the thought that
my hardships were nothing compared to the trials my mother went through. I
thought that my mother would not understand the innate love of ease and
inability to cope with physical trials that I was born with. Yet it was my
mother who labored to give us the comfort we enjoyed. She spoke of how they
were like then, but she didn’t dwell on what she felt, knowing that her
daughters would never understand what they went through.
What I have achieved now is partly thanks to the fact that I had a
mother who never failed to remind me of who we are. She knew what it was like
to earn every penny, to fight for respect, and yet she was discontented enough to
want a better life for us, a life that I’m afraid is too far removed from
theirs to be able to remember. This discontent was what propelled me here, to
study and have a more comfortable life.
But the provincial mouse who gets to the city will not have a
comfortable life. She lives in the province, far from the center of things, and
this fact she will carry everywhere. I tell you now that I will always be a
Talaloranhon. My name, just as any other person’s name, will always be associated
with where I come from, although this has become rather a sore point over the
years. I come from the rural areas: the infamous backwoods town, Talalora, one
that carries with it the shadow of witchcraft and other supernatural beings. From
the sixth-class municipality where I live, we don’t have Internet access, let
alone a decent library. We don’t even have a means of land transportation. But
yes, we can achieve these things after all.
But what is the measure of an achievement? If Henry Ward Beecher
speaks the truth when he said that, “We
should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they
have travelled from the point where they started,” then this is certainly
an achievement, for to have come from our backwoods town and come out at the
top is something. I have always felt off center, that a richer and more
exciting life was waiting just beyond the periphery in our town. Yes, the life
I choose will carry me in places far from my town, but those places would not
have been possible without the necessary harbour that is my home.
What is achievement? Is achievement found in beating others? Is it in
making your choices and sticking with it till the end? Or is it in racing with
destiny and giving it a hell of a fight? How does it feel to be at the
mountaintop anyway?
Ever since I can remember, my mother always seemed to have the right words to bolster me. “Pag-aram hin maupay Iday kay tinamay kita. Tinalumpigos kita salit kapot kamo hin buot. Pitad tipaunhan.”
It was my first week in Cebu then and Mother had seen fit to remind me of why they let me go. She had probably gotten wind of my relaxed first week in CNU and my preliminary exploits of Cebu and so she told me those same words she always tells me when I seem to move astray. Those same words that were exactly what I needed to hear.
I conveniently forgot those words a week after, when I didn’t have time to indulge feelings and was only driven by the all-important aim of accomplishing my everyday to-do list in teaching. Needless to say, my exploits were now relegated to the background because I had my demos as priorities. I knew those words anyway, for all they’re worth. I bumped into those words countless times and I knew just what they meant. And for the most part, I chose to forget them, as soon as my mind interpreted the letters. I had almost forgotten why we were ridiculed after all. I chose not to remember. Why? Because those words touch me in places that hurt.
But I am going to speak of that now; I am going to speak of the places that hurt – to cut the wounds deeper, to heal. Those places are the crannies where a person tries to stuff out the questions of roots and belonging, the places a person tries hard to escape from to prove himself, the places he yearns for to find himself back.
The first thing that I wanted to forget about my mother’s words was the obligation. I did not want to remember because I had nothing to remember. I wanted to bury their ghosts and leave it behind me. I had not directly experienced the import of those words after all. My mother and her sisters did. In her youth, my mother and her sisters worked odd jobs to earn money. They went about town selling rice cakes and the rattan baskets they wove. Theirs was an average middle class family, but when my grandfather and my two uncles were sent to jail for circumstantial evidence, they became infamous. The women in the family, especially, my grandmother, my mother and her sisters, being the ones who were left behind, were the ones who faced the humiliation. My mother knew the smarting pain of hardship and understood the life it meant; my duty was to bear the scars and learn from them.
But the ghost of memory is more persistent than the nags of obligation. What I feared most was to look back and remember that those words were true, after all. My sheltered world would be gnawed away by remembrances of things that have long since passed and I would be left with a self I cannot compartmentalize, a world of ghosts that I cannot control. This was frightening for me. Even as I had a good memory, I wanted only to remember the things I went through and conquered; I had no patience for ghosts that were not even mine.
It is said that a person searches the world over and comes home to find what he is searching for. This person goes out into the world to make a name for himself, to be a man of his own invention, to search for the place he belongs to. But in order to find his niche, he must scour himself first, and reconcile with history. To do this, he must be prepared for the persistence of memory.
For years, mother would tell us stories of the way they were. These intermittent stories would lodge themselves in my mind and form a single narrative of their story. For years, whenever these stories were told, I would only wonder with amazement at what they went through, the wonder of one who was born not so long ago to know that they were true, and the apathy of one who was born too long ago to care. I had the gift of an excellent selective memory; I could forget the remembrances that I could forget, I could disregard those that I couldn’t. But as the poet Voltaire Oyzon wrote, the act of forced forgetting is an act of constant remembering in itself. Somehow, I knew the taste of my mother’s words, as someone who tries to forget sometimes succeeds at not remembering, but always fails at forgetting. Ignoring the ghosts was not the answer. To forget where you come from and what your predecessors have been through is to forget an essential part of who you are.
I did not want to remember because I cannot live down the thought that my hardships were nothing compared to the trials my mother went through. I thought that my mother would not understand the innate love of ease and inability to cope with physical trials that I was born with. Yet it was my mother who labored to give us the comfort we enjoyed. She spoke of how they were like then, but she didn’t dwell on what she felt, knowing that her daughters would never understand what they went through.
What I have achieved now is partly thanks to the fact that I had a mother who never failed to remind me of who we are. She knew what it was like to earn every penny, to fight for respect, and yet she was discontented enough to want a better life for us, a life that I’m afraid is too far removed from theirs to be able to remember. This discontent was what propelled me here, to study and have a more comfortable life.
But the provincial mouse who gets to the city will not have a comfortable life. She lives in the province, far from the center of things, and this fact she will carry everywhere. I tell you now that I will always be a Talaloranhon. My name, just as any other person’s name, will always be associated with where I come from, although this has become rather a sore point over the years. I come from the rural areas: the infamous backwoods town, Talalora, one that carries with it the shadow of witchcraft and other supernatural beings. From the sixth-class municipality where I live, we don’t have Internet access, let alone a decent library. We don’t even have a means of land transportation. But yes, we can achieve these things after all.
But what is the measure of an achievement? If Henry Ward Beecher speaks the truth when he said that, “We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have travelled from the point where they started,” then this is certainly an achievement, for to have come from our backwoods town and come out at the top is something. I have always felt off center, that a richer and more exciting life was waiting just beyond the periphery in our town. Yes, the life I choose will carry me in places far from my town, but those places would not have been possible without the necessary harbour that is my home.
What is achievement? Is achievement found in beating others? Is it in making your choices and sticking with it till the end? Or is it in racing with destiny and giving it a hell of a fight? How does it feel to be at the mountaintop anyway?
That mountaintop is not so much built on the defeat of other people as the defeat of your other selves. Aptitude and a good memory is not enough. There are things you have to work hard for, like battling your inner sluggishness. There are moments of weakness when the dark impulse is more tempting, when you realize the futility of struggle because every stroke in the sand gets lapped up eventually by the sea. What would it matter anyway? What are we really striving for?
The dust of dreams. But what sparkling dust it is that we would do so much to have that moment when the light finally shines on you so blindingly and you only see yourself, standing. The quiet instant of victory.
To do this, one must battle with the self. Once in a while, one must oppose the pure, spontaneous moment of creation, and impose habit and practice. One must subdue the self and subject it to the stern ways of discipline. The self must be threshed, sifted, ground and kneaded to get to the dust of dreams and be worthy of it. The aim is to struggle, to strive albeit blindly, for to do otherwise is simply unthinkable.
But we are not alone in the struggle. More importantly, we are never alone in the mountaintop. There stands behind us the shadow of the people who have all pushed and pounded us to reach the peak – the thing we call community. Each life affects the other; we are all links in a chain. The peril is to fall into the delusion that you can do it alone, because you can’t, no matter how hard you try. We were not made to be solitary; we were made to walk the path of life together. People grow wiser, stronger and braver in the company of one another, as they learn that when each one does his role, everything will fall into place. It’s like dancing, so much more fun when you’re not alone.
I’m limited. Darkness comes into my life, and sometimes even my sturdy spirit gets worn thin. Having roots, I wanted to grow wings, wanted desperately to go and venture into a new world where dwells the fog of the unknown but comes with it the certainty of hurt, and eventually, learning. And in that new world there is a lonely road, a road clutched by night where you fly alone, a road far from home. There is the struggle to get through every day.
Yet there are also others who face a hard battle. Teachers who willingly go back to the classroom every day to teach, teachers who set your sights to greater heights, teachers who believe in you and do all they can to help you become who you were meant to be. Students and pupils who have let me hold their hands, who have trusted me with their minds, who have given me a sense of purpose, who challenged me to be better. Classmates and fellow student teachers who diligently plod on through the ladder of learning, who, even though some are not academically gifted, know and appreciate the cost of every day they spend at the university, who taught me the value of gratitude. Friends who won’t let go of you in times that you literally don’t see the light of day, friends who clutch your hand to stay together, to stay alive, friends without whose presence beside or behind you your success would not have possible. Family, the ones that don’t leave you behind or forget you, a father that pulls you up without a word and cradles you in the nook of his strong arms, a mother who fights your fight with you, sisters who understand you and let you be, relatives whose belief in you rallies your own spirits and gives you one more reason to go on. And the countless other faces that I see in every day, nameless faces that may be in the IGP Park, the meandering lanes of Cebu, the dusty roads of our town, or maybe at the acacia tree outside the university walls on Juan Luna Street, faces that have taught me the worth of every little life, and the importance of giving a fight. You are all too many to mention. But I want you to know that you have touched my life, and enriched it in more ways than one. You are with me when I crossed the collegiate finish line. When darkness fell, you have helped me to be strong.
Whatever I may decide to do, I will always sail towards new horizons, will be always leaving shores once they have become familiar to search for ever elusive places, and fundamental truths. I am, after all, a wanderer, a seeker of meaning, that ever changing silhouette that I’m afraid will be forever beyond my grasp, but is all the more enticing because of it. That is why I’m afraid there will be a time that I will not be so successful as the others, that while they hurry to their offices or classrooms to start the day ahead, I will only be heading to sleep, having been up all night to watch the silent, enduring stars, or wonder at how the moon could stay the same, or having my fourth cup of coffee while typing away at my laptop. However, I shall have gotten something by then, something unnameable as to stay in dreams and be forgotten as soon as I wake up. But then I’ll be happy. As said in the movie Mona Lisa Smile, not all who wander are aimless, especially those who seek truth beyond tradition, beyond definition, beyond the image.
I have no regrets; I don’t think that way. I have come a long way from home, have made my choices and tried to be true to them. I have strived for passion, for what I loved, and given freely of what I could and what I had. And although there are some who have tried to cut me down to size, I have trudged on, with hope, faith and a burning optimism towards freedom, and the light of day.
Here’s to defying gravity.
