First week of Advent

"The people who walked in darkness

    have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep

           darkness--

on them light has shined."

        Isaiah 9: 2

“Bukamata” means “open eyes”

I WROTE my last column, “Matamata,” which SunStar Cebu published last Nov. 21. For more than 21 years, I met a deadline, missing this only once.

A habit of writing is one of the perks of writing for the legacy media, a term used in academia to refer to the trimedia—newspapers, radio, and television—in the age of digital media. 

While I was writing to submit earliest by Saturday noon a column that was published in the paper edition on Sunday (and much earlier on the website), I hardly thought of “deadline writing” as a perk. 

As disruptions go, the break in my weekend routine opened my eyes. I took stock of more than half a century’s involvement with writing. In grade school at the St. Theresa’s College, my teachers sent my compositions for class—poems of stodgy moralism—to the school publication. 

Reading my name printed on a page was not just pleasant; my parents gave me books as presents and overlooked my tendency to disappear behind a novel more often than bury myself in class references.

As a college undergraduate at the University of the Philippines (U.P.) Cebu, writing fell into two categories: for love and for lucre. I wrote about subjects close to my heart for campus publications, official and underground, and earned a few pesos from occasionally writing for a local magazine that mixed travel and lifestyle with progressive causes. I never read this magazine, which seemed dazed and confused in its orientation, but liked having pocket money for more books.

I was a young mother and a college instructor torn between academia and journalism when my former U.P. Cebu Journalism teacher, Eileen Mangubat, invited me to write a Sunday column for Cebu Daily News, which had invaded the Cebu turf ruled by The Freeman and SunStar Daily, along with another upstart, the Independent Post.

Ei said I should write about issues I feel strongly about. For the first time, a mainstream newspaper was interested in my views, my personal take on subjects of interest to its readers. As a newspaper intern and occasional contributor of features to local dailies, I was often encouraged by editors to write for the body politic or the market.

In 1998, when I started writing “Fisheye” for the Cebu Daily News, newspaper column-writing was predominantly male, political, and critical. It was the print version of the popular “bombastic” style popularized by AM radio commentators or komentarista, who did not pull their punches in lashing out against personalities and issues in the political arena.

Eileen’s encouragement to write about my experiences and insights was eye-opening to me as a reader and a writer. For the first time, newspaper columnists were writing about topics that had often been relegated to other pages outside of the influential main opinion-editorial pages. In Cebu Daily News, politics jostled with ecology, women, literature, spirituality, humor, and marginalia in the op-ed section.

I carried this mentality when I edited for SunStar Daily in 2000 and was later invited by my editor-in-chief, Atty Pachico Seares, to write a Sunday column and later, the unsigned Monday editorial on social issues.

I titled the Sunday column, “Matamata,” which means an “estimate” or a “guess” in Cebuano. I like the duality of the images and meanings of using the “eye” in my column titles. 

Writing begins with seeing. The eye is not a perfect instrument; it is limited by vantage point and the superficiality of appearances. The eyes cannot be totally relied on as these can be blind from disease or bias. 

Yet, for the writer, the eyes are the jump-off points. A journalist will use other references, like interviews and documents, to validate her observations. For an essayist or a columnist, the eye is the portal, the ways of seeing connecting the ways of feeling and thinking to the ways of expressing.

“Fisheye” refers to the special camera lens that takes a distorted image that the human eye rarely registers. Because of the extremely wide angle it uses, resulting in a hemispherical image, the fisheye lens induces the photographer and the viewer to see the world differently.

When I wrote “Fisheye” essays for Cebu Daily News, I wanted to show different ways of seeing what was personal and familiar. For women, the personal is as dramatic and insurgent as the political. 

It is the timeless call echoing from the second wave of feminism: the personal IS political. This was the realization in the late 1960s that the personal issues experienced by women, from housework to child-bearing and career guilt, are connected to the social and political structures men dominate and control.

As a passionate carnivore, I believe that few parts of its anatomy, except perhaps for the portions near the fins and tail, which are always mobile, can rival the sweetly succulent eyes of a fish.

Eyes became the motif again when I chose the Cebuano word for approximation in my SunStar column. When a word is repeated in Cebuano, it is a diminution, not a consolidation. So “matamata” means a dilution of certainty because the views of a columnist or an essayist is just that, one person’s perspective or subjectivity.

Contrary to some readers’ matamata take, the column title of “Matamata” is not a contraction of my nickname, “Ma(yette) Ta(bada) Ma(yette) Ta(bada)”. I am not that fond of my name.

After putting to bed finally after 21 years the “Matamata” column last Nov. 21, I wondered what I would do. I thought I detested deadlines until the rug was pulled out from under. 

I decided to make a blog and, in keeping with my affection for eyes, created a blog title that continues to play with the image and meaning associated with my favorite part. 

From my Indonesian classmate Reny Triwardani, who teaches me phrases of Bahasa, I learned that “membuka mata” has the same meaning in Cebuano, “buka mata”. In both languages, the phrase means “open eyes”.

The digital is a platform I am exploring. A habit of writing for print means a lifetime of quirks and reflexes that I am still detecting and tweaking for online reading and, I hope, engagement. 

However, whatever the portal, our writing reveals our ways of seeing. A cat figurine I bought for P25 from a store selling Japanese surplus is my talisman in exploring the digital. 

Curled up and exposing its vulnerable belly, the ceramic cat mimics what, in a living cat, reveals utmost trust and vulnerability. That is what writing means to me, the moment of expressing and revealing, crossing over from sleep to wideawakeness. Buka mata.

Banagbanag (let the light in)

    In Cebuano, the word means "daybreak".

    This view, from the window, comes after I find good news in my inbox.

    My first post, too, for this young blog.

    A break or a cut lets the light in, said Rumi.