10 Do all mothers have an unconditioned way with words to show their unconditional love, Mimi C.? Que se joda. A pungent phrase from my childhood. For my mom, may she rest in peace, that meant, I do not care, do as your conscience sees fit! And so I would learn not to disobey—except in my dreams. Later I learned the words meant something else. In this way my mother condemned me, nga birat ka, or silibanco pa man, buot dida, inday, in loving tones that made me buotan: that is, a beloved though bruised daughter. Ave Maria! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
11 Ah, but is it not so that the cases of our affection are also matters of our split [mis]identifications, Professor Estrella? The above church-going anti-clerical Masons are specimens of humanity, are they not, just like our contemporary Filipinos: who are homophobic gay-lovers and matriarchal misogynists? As a wise proverb of an otherwise secular genius goes: That he is a trinity tells us even God is empty—a divided self [Claro Mürk, Proverbs III]. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Manila, Philippines)
12 A colonial dish of ox tongue, made by my mother with tons of peppercorn and olives. Cooks from other regions—and they know who they are—ruin it with sugar. Shame on them! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
13 Yes, Estrella, one may call that lengua a suspect yet indivisible part of the Filipino stew simmering in the tongue—smothered with soy sauce and garlic, braised later in an American brew: English. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Manila, Philippines)
Addendum*
*Dr. Diwata Drake’s Inspiring Defense
First of all, I’m not blonde. Yes, I read the Finnish-Peruvian philosopher retired to the jeweled coasts of Provence—Claro Mürk.
Guilty!
I would wish that crime on my enemies!
However, more pertinently, I’m an American. Of mixed heritage. A Midwestern mongrel. But I’m Filipino on my mother’s side. Okay, half-Filipino on my maternal grandmother’s side, but the Viking ancestors in my father’s Milwaukee line might add Eskimo, so there!
Blondeness is only a pharmaceutical indulgence in my family.
In other words, and I never confessed this to anyone but my first love, who then promptly abandoned me: I’m a bottle blonde, Clairol Spungold #34.
That I have a nervous disposition, I will allow.
As Mürk says, and I paraphrase, to each llama his own symptom.
My papers on the psychoanalysis of the Filipino independence movement are no accident as my own analyst has betrayed to me. The seed was my experience in the Wisconsin public schools. I wanted so much to be part of their group—the dairy-damaged cretins who pulled at my brunette braids and once hung me from the gym rafters in a rug while singing the theme song from Fiddler on the Roof.
I’m not Jewish, I kept saying; but I was in a rug, and they couldn’t hear me.
My interest in the Philippines was inevitable.
The country has a history of self-loathing that may not be necessarily unfounded.
Estrella Espejo, a scholar from that academic oasis a.k.a. the Republic of Diliman, is a case in point. Her form of victimhood has sad physical reverberations. Let me state here, once and for all, that the publisher Trina Trono asked me to take over the reins of Estrella’s editorship as Estrella unraveled from the strains of her malaise.
There was no boat on Kowloon harbor, no bamboo to attack, no Peking duck—all desperate delusions handy for her version of the world.
She was on leave from her university, and who knows what fever dreams she had in her snow-bound apocalypse during her sabbatical in Kalamazoo, wrapped up as she was in the parkas of her estrangement and typing her letters to me with numb fingers, “as moribund in whiteness’s spiritual ice as the Abominable Snowman,” quote unquote. Estrella was attending a conference and emailed me that winter from a hotel room in Michigan.
She had read my papers on the revolution, e.g., “Sublime Paralysis: Sadomasochism in Mabini’s Decalogue” and “Sticks and Stones: The Masonic Fetish,” chapters of my monumental, unfinished tome, You Lovely Symptoms, tentatively subtitled The Structure of the Filipino Unconscious, Not Really a Langue, or a Parol[e].
She admired my “way with footnotes,” as she put it.
Let me add that while Estrella herself, like classic hysterics, resists analysis, she is fatally attracted to pathetic versions of quack therapy.
The signs of creeping astasia-abasia were evident when we first met at that diner in Kalamazoo to discuss perplexing features in the Mata manuscript. She repeated to me—she had flown in from her sickbed! from her historic hometown of Tacloban! to attend this cold, cold, cold, so cold! conference—and I imagine she did not mean only the weather. She spoke in the quivering staccato of seasonal-affective disorder that only a depressive from the tropics will fail to recognize.
It was so critical to her profession, if not her health, she said—to attend this midwinter panel on postcolonial dread.
Yes—it was she who contacted me.
I was innocent from the start.
Just check her sabbatical calendar on Google!
At the diner, a nondescript, strictly Americana affair of linoleum tables with warped, dust-eaten edges and tin-can vessels for cheap utensils, Dolly Parton coming from the jukebox in the corner, Estrella could barely move her fingers to enclose her hamburger. Pickle relish and mustard kept jumbling out from her fist. I told her it was only a sandwich, not a battle with imperialism. Eat! By the time the ruins of ketchup and lettuce practically reduced the deli waitress to march us out of the premises, Estrella could barely walk out the door.
It seems that random encounters with Western forms cause outbreaks of her illness: she can take Philip Morris cigarettes (especially menthols) but has adverse reactions to Hershey bars. She is allergic to Texas but not New York. She has done very well in Paris. As if in a trance, she kept humming to all the songs on the jukebox—The Eagles, The Carpenters, and especially Journey: she sang the chorus of Don’t Stop Believin’ with a yodeling throb. It was quite affecting. (I believe other symptoms, such as
