My mother, my motherland

There are times when my editor, Millet Mananquil, asks me to write something special — in this case about our matriarchal society, Filipino mothers and my mother for Mother’s Day. For some time now, I really wanted to do this. The memory of my mother had long evoked in me this most profound regret — that I was unable to reciprocate the great love she gifted me with. Looking back, I was much too involved with my work, my vanity. In those few moments we were together before she died, I used to hold her hands — gnarled and callused by manual labor — and kiss them. At the very least, I think she knew I truly loved her.

I called my mother “Inang” in the manner of rural Ilokanos. She was tiny, she looked like an ordinary peasant woman — the kind I don’t see anymore even in the barrios of the Ilokos. For one, she never wore western dress — always the Ilokano hand-woven skirt, the baro at saya. She never cut her hair and it was quite long, down to her waist. She tied this into a knot at her nape, pinggol as the Ilokano women call it. I once watched her wash her hair not with shampoo, or soap, but with the water strained from burnt rice straw. She never wore shoes, just those embroidered slippers with thick heels called cochos. I don’t see them anymore. Once, she did dress up for a cousin’s wedding; she had a starched panuelo, and she looked regal, just like the wealthy women in town for whom she would sew dresses.

Mother was extremely industrious. I’d wake up at night to the sound of her Singer sewing machine. She made rice cakes to sell at school, among them ukoy which my wife occasionally buys to remind me of my boyhood.

She went to the rice fields to help in the harvest — hard work which she endured. During the hungry months of the planting season, the gawat as we Ilokanos call it — June to September — our neighbors who were mostly tenant farmers would be eating only twice a day. We never missed a meal!

Some of our neighbors were illiterate. My mother was not; she told me that her first teacher was an American soldier with a red beard, and that their first schoolhouse was under a tree. She finished grade seven and in those days, elementary school graduates were allowed to teach for there weren’t all that many teachers then.

Years later, when I had foreign guests, I would introduce my mother to them and my children were surprised at her impeccable English. I recall one funny incident though; like most elderly women in the barrios, she smoked those long La Yebana cigarettes, the lighted end inside her mouth. A visiting American friend brought out his lighter, much to her surprise.

When she found out I loved reading, she would go around town, borrowing books for me. In our barrio, children who read were considered lazy. My mother never bothered me when I was engrossed in a book.

For all my naughtiness as a boy, my mother didn’t punish me. When she was displeased she would get a bamboo slat and whip one of the posts of our little house, or the ground. I knew, of course, that it was not the house post or the ground that she was whipping — it was I.

But there was one time she did whip me and it really hurt — the welts on my legs lasted more than a day. It had happened that year I learned how to swim and every day, instead of going to school, I went to the creek beyond the town and swam there. My grade school teacher, Ms. Soledad Oriel, reported me to the principal and the principal called my mother to ask why I was absent for a week. She followed me surreptitiously that morning and watched me frolic in the water for some time, then she came out of her hiding to confront and whip me.

My mother broke her hip when she was in her early 80s, and after that, her health quickly deteriorated. When she died, I did not want to look at her — I wanted to retain in my mind how she had looked, alive and so caring.

All our languages are earthy and spiced with explicit sexual imagery. Our cusswords which articulate our basest emotions and anger often refer to mother. The common Tagalog expletive “putang ina mo” (your mother is a whore) is viciously insulting compared to the Ilokano equivalent “okini nam” — your mother’s c**t. Addressed to a friend in a soft voice, it is even a term of endearment.

So we have all these aphorisms that dignify motherhood, as the beginning, as the most faithful and loving of human beings, the epitome of loyalty and forbearance. “He had a face only a mother could love.” “The mother (origin) of all scams!” The final arbiter and redoubt.

        My mother tongue — alas, I have lost competence in it although I love it no less! As that great Indian writer, Khushwant Singh, quipped: “I use it only when I write to my mother.”

When I was conceptualizing the Rosales Saga, the indomitable figure of Rizal’s Sisa haunted me. I had to reincarnate her, to recognize her and her sorrow. I learned slowly to regard her as a heroic figure — the “eternal heroine” as Igor Podberezky, my Russian translator, called her. Soon enough, I regarded Sisa as a symbol of my own mother — Tia Nena as I finally called her.

Indeed, the second major influence in my life as a person and as a writer is none other than Jose Rizal, our national hero. I read his two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo when I was 10 years old, in fifth grade. Let me remind the young today that grade school then consisted of the whole day, from 7 a.m. to 12 noon and 1 to 5 p.m. When I was in fifth grade, I read the Greek myths, memorized Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and was very much impressed by it, his affirmation that all men are created equal.

When I reached that portion in Noli where Sisa worried about her two boys, Crispin and Basilio, being accused of stealing by the Spanish friar, I was so touched by the injustice of it all, I cried. My novel, My Brother, My Executioner features Tia Nena as the mother of two sons trapped in the quagmire of the Huk uprising in 1949-53. She appears again in the last novel of the saga, Mass, where she regains her memory and works as the cook of Father Jess.

Her last appearance is in the concluding two-act play of the Saga, Balikbayan, where she mourns the passing of Pepe Samson, the young activist turned revolutionary. Finally, she symbolizes Filipinas, my unhappy country.

Inang Bayan, this is what we call Filipinas. Our motherland, an extension of Mother Earth — life giver, lifesaver.

Unlike other Asian societies, we have always elevated our women to a high pedestal, maybe because we are Christians, but even before the Spaniards came, the women in these islands were leaders, priestesses. Legend or not, there was Princess Urduja of Pangasinan, the babaylans of old who were teachers and faith healers. Our women were never held in low esteem, as they were in India, China, Japan. In these countries in the past when girls were born, some were killed outright because they were bad luck, because it was the men who were considered precious as inheritors of the family wealth.

Our women fought in the Revolution of 1896, in the guerrilla war against the Japanese. Tandang Sora (1898) and Josefa Llanes Escoda (1943) are just two names from the list of thousands of courageous Filipinas.

Why should most men surrender their pay envelopes to the mistress of the house? In other societies, it is the male who holds the money. The explanation is simple: Filipino society is matriarchal but most macho Filipinos don’t know it. And our women let them glory in their ignorance.

When Women’s Lib in America was willfully adopted by some of our women, I always thought it was irrelevant, but then American fads are soon transported here without much thinking. Our women have never been repressed in their pursuit of status. They always were held in high esteem — just recall the letter of Rizal to the women of Malolos.

They were suffragists long before many western women got the vote.

It was too bad that our two women presidents, Corazon Aquino and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, turned out to be disasters — Gloria particularly, who wasted 10 years and dragged this country down through corruption and incompetence.

And before both, there was Imelda and her dreams of regal pomp and identity. We should never, never forget that the “conjugal dictatorship” stole billions of our money and stashed it abroad, not to mention killing, imprisoning and torturing thousands!

I can recall several illustrious women who could have easily been better presidents — Senators Mary Katigbak, Geronima Pecson, and of late, Eva Estrada and Letty Ramos Shahani. Now there is a clamor to have a woman succeed P-Noy.

Mothers who love their children are ever ready to sacrifice themselves for them. As a matter of fact, in that most miraculous of human events — childbirth — her one foot is already in the grave. This is what my father-in-law, a doctor, told me way back when my wife delivered our first son. I’ve always remembered it. And more than this, it is from this angel, this wife and mother, that this tired old hack received the most understanding in his hapless — if hopeless — pursuit of truth and its ethereal beauty.

Those of us who love truly know instinctively that the logic of love is sacrifice, whether that love is for one’s wife, mother, or the motherland. To know that we are loved in turn is to be blessed — but how many of us really love this motherland enough to sacrifice for her the way Rizal did?