Early morning, before 9 a.m., 2016, the alarm wakes him up. It is 5:30. He has set, for today, a deadline earlier than the usual 12:00 noon. Today, he is traveling. This must be e-mailed before he leaves at
9 a.m. And he is wondering: Will the rest of the year be like this?
One must be careful talking about 2016. Everybody seems so expectant of her. Hardly three days old and she is rousing him up in the early morning wanting to get right down to business. No cuddling up waiting for the alarm to sound a second time. 2016 is a pregnant woman. 2016 is a woman dreaming awake.
And she dreams a dream about wanting to know the answer to this riddle: What is the essence of being a woman?
It is the riddle posed in the movie, “Miss Bulalacao,” by moviemaker Ara Chawdhury, proud alumnus of UP Cebu. The movie features some of Kinutil’s best friends, with whom he had the good fortune to do performance art with last year. He has not seen the movie. But he has seen the trailer in YouTube. And he was talking with Russ Ligtas last night, over wine, over dishes of couscous cooked by their friend Joanna Arong. And Estela, to whom he is married, was with them. And along the course of the evening they wondered: Is it at all possible to write about “Ms. Bulalacao” without first seeing the movie?
If one went by the idea that good writing must derive from an authoritative position, the answer should be immediately: No!
But why does text have to be “authoritative”? Can anything these days really be authoritative? What does authoritative even mean?
Oh, go look it up in the Net!
There he was, sitting beside Russ Ligtas, with the problem of an impending deadline scratching at his door, which deadline must be met by 9 a.m., the next day. There he was, with Russ Ligtas and two other women. He decides: This Kinutil must be even bigger than Russ. It must be about all of us. As indeed, it must be about woman. Even if he can only write about the woman in every human being: What, truly, is the essence of being a woman?
Well, there was his own mother. What was the essence of her? Did this essence obligate her to assume a particular role in life? This role being the role of a woman? What is the role of a woman? Was his mother a good woman? Is he, himself, a good woman?
He must accept, like Russ, how the dynamics between his parents shaped the design of his own essential “womanhood.” The computer neither accepts “womaness” nor “womanity.” The father behaved this way authoritatively, and the mother behaved this way, to them, the children and to each other. And overall, the person learns the elemental notions of gender. But does the person make a rational choice about the woman inside them?
Do they even accept she is there? And the person answering this? Does the answer come out different if he or she is a woman with a woman’s body? A woman with a male body? Or a man, who loves the woman inside him? Is there a universal set for what constitutes “woman”? What is this woman capable of? What could she do?
Beyond the obvious, of course, it seemed last night that everything has yet to be negotiated entirely. Everything has yet to be entirely talked about where woman, womanhood, womaness and womanity are concerned. It is a field for writing about. Not an easy field, to be sure, and fraught with danger.
As for instance, to ask: How does a man even really know the woman inside him? Could it be that there are men out there who have no concept at all of the woman inside them? So there, all of you, who have no woman inside you, raise your right hands!
But you would all be wrong. Or at least half of you would be wrong since as it turns out in “Ms. Bulalacao”: The essence of being a woman is…is…is… Motherhood!
It’s only 2016.
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