Tingle: Anthology of Pinay Lesbian Writing

By Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

Most of the forty-nine works in the book were specifically solicited from the writers I know in response to the question, "What makes you tingle as a lesbian?" Literally, the sensation of "slight prickles, stings, or tremors," the excitement. I purposely didn't give any more qualifiers to that prompts. I wanted the writers themselves to define the terms and enact them on the page. And while the word "tingle" is a homonym for the Tagalog word for "clitoris," many of the pieces submitted were not about sex at all. But all the pieces are about a spark of recognition, whether at the beginning, the middle, or the end, that one loves a woman as a woman. Tingle is the flint.

Here we are taking our stories of women loving women in our own hands and making ourselves visible on our own terms. When the initial thrill of desire is past, the tingle is ultimately the recognition that what we have found cannot remain in the dark—we must love and be loved in the light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9789712736803

Book preview

Tingle_Lesbian_Anthology_eBook_Cover.jpg

Table of Contents

Introduction

How It Begins

Here Come the Women [Rayji de Guia]

Brrroom [Naro Alonzo]

Piko [Naro Alonzo]

Dalandan Season (An Excerpt) [Kate Pedroso]

Double O [Diandra Ditma Macarambon]

Rebirth [Kei Valmoria Bughaw]

Kalahati ng Langit Ko [Emiliana Kampilan]

Family Matters

Stopovers [Krista V. Melgarejo]

The Right Choice [Diandra Ditma Macarambon]

Daughter [Germaine Leonin]

The Venus FlyTrap [Nerisa del Carmen Guevara]

Welts (Latay sa Laman) [Melinda Babaran (translated by Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz)]

To Love and To Lose [Mary Liezl Raniel]

Rosary Fridays: A One-Act Play [Ria Valdez]

For Mama [Camille Rivera]

Passion

The Jacuzzi Party [Aida Santos]

Losa [Bernadette Villanueva Neri (translated by Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz)]

The Forgotten Anonas [Giney Villar]

Mango Avenue [Dandeljane Maraat]

Beep Beep [Nice Rodriguez]

Ocean Ghost [Nina Matalam Alvarez]

Eloquent Crevices [Roselle Pineda]

What I Think About While I Am Going Down On You [Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz]

The Party [Giney Villar]

Lake Trance [Clara Rita A. Padilla]

Unrequited

Lost in Cubao [Rayji de Guia]

The Gift of a Soul [Katherine T. Madlangbayan]

Footnotes to a Mixtape [Kate Pedroso]

Command: Stay [Vivialine Salve]

Rescue [Shakira Andrea Sison]

Landscape [Camille Rivera]

Consummate/d

Dear Woman Lover [Shakira Andrea Sison]

Toward Coffee [Laurel Flores Fantauzzo]

Be(d)side [Libay Linsangan Cantor]

Pulsars, You Tell Me [Ellaine Beronio]

Coming Up for Air [Early Sol Gadong]

Struggle

Our Bodies, Our Wellness [Giney Villar]

Suppressing the Tingle [Eva Aurora Callueng]

Lessons from the Lesbian Tent [Anna Leah Sarabia]

Ritual for Two Friends [Ruby Palma]

Our Kisses are Our Raised Fists [Cha Roque]

So I Left My Ilongga [Early Sol Gadong]

Stereotypes 101: How to Write a Pseudo-Lesbian Story [Andyleen Feje]

Institution

How It Ends

All That Remains of Summer [Sigrid Marianne Gayangos]

Notes on Love [Aida Santos]

We Were [Jocedel Zulita]

Delete [Dandeljane Maraat]

Directions For My Care [Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz]

About the Editor:

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:

Landmarks

Cover

Long have we waited for this, a robust and well-curated compendium of Philippine lesbian writing that at once represents and evokes, describes and inscribes, defines and complicates the lived truths and experiences of Filipino women-loving-women, despite or precisely because of the fact that their identities are not exactly reducible to this or that term . . . Of course, so much has passed in the vexed and freighted histories of gender and sexuality in our time that, indeed, the term lesbian must be increasingly understood in the way that woman is—as a performativity whose promise will always exceed its enactments, as a culturally efficacious myth whose power lies in its being figural and hypersemantic and in that sense ultimately transcendent of any and all referentiality. Reading these intersectional and sumptuously written texts, one comes away both tingly and tousled—which is to say, at once assured and disabused—for while they may provisionally answer to the name under which they have been editorially subsumed, like all polysemic articulations they finally confound the foundationalist politics that may have, in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, occasioned them . . . An ennobling, necessary, and entirely fabulous anthology, bracingly real, stippled with textual pleasures, and surprisingly succulent at every turn. Padayon, mga kapatid! Here’s to more!

— J. Neil C. Garcia, poet and critic, editor of the Ladlad series

Tingle: Anthology of Pinay Lesbian Writing

Copyright © 2021 by Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz-Daliling (a.k.a Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

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Book Design and eBook Conversion by JP Meneses

Cover Painting by Katrina Pallon

eISBN: 978-971-27-3680-3

TINGLE

Anthology of Pinay Lesbian Writing

Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

Introduction

To say that this anthology is much-belated and much-awaited is an understatement and a reprimand-of-a- kind. It is so belated that Ladlad Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing, edited by J. Neil Garcia and Danton Remoto, which first came out, nagladlad, in 1994, has since come out with two more volumes, plus a Best of in 2014. Tingle is so belated that some of our lesbian writers have either stopped writing or stopped being lesbian; I myself had gone into semi-retirement for six years, and then staged a comeback with my collection of lesbian-themed stories, Women Loving (2010). In fact, the daughter I had during that period has now turned lesbian without a diverse literary anthology to help usher her and her generation into the experience.

It’s a mystery. In all these years of the feminist and gay rights movement, where was the Philippine lesbian writer? She was there, but not there.

In the early stages of my writing career, I imagined I would fill the lesbian niche, because of my material as a lesbian. But also because at that time (the late ‘90s) in the Philippines, there seemed to be a vacancy—so few writers were out lesbians, and those who were did not necessarily write about lesbian matters. I named it to myself as a niche because I believed that lesbian writing had a role to play within the feminist project of creating a women’s literary tradition. I troubled the idea that major anthologies of women’s writing were being published but there seemed to be no lesbians in them. In fact, even in a book published in 2003 entitled Filipino Women Writers in English, Their Story: 1905-2002, edited by the country’s foremost gynocritic Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz, there were no lesbian writers featured. In her introduction, she does mention, along with other expatriate women writers, Nice Rodriguez and her book Throw It to the River published in Canada in 1993, but does not say at all that Rodriguez’s book is the first book of lesbian stories by a Filipina in the diaspora. It is an oversight that makes the only lesbian writer mentioned in the book invisible in a book that makes it appear as if women wrote only about how they relate to men.

A paper published in 2009 tried to map a preliminary historical survey of lesbian literature in the Philippines written in Filipino and similarly concluded that lesbians are invisible even within the feminist movement. Sharon Anne Pangilinan, a professor in UP Diliman, argues that lesbians only become invisible sa mga sadyang ayaw tumingin at makakita (218), i.e., only to those who really don’t want to look at them and see them, for fear of disturbing the status quo. She shows that there is no lesbian writing included in any of the canonical anthologies of Philippine literature, such as those edited by National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera. The article adds that even openly out lesbian feminist writers like Aida Santos and Anna Leah Sarabia, whose poems were included in feminist anthologies like Sa Ngalan ng Ina: 100 Taon ng Tulang Feminista sa Pilipinas (1997), suffered marginalization and a kind of invisibility because the editor, Lilia Quindoza-Santiago did not select their explicitly lesbian poems.

In the same article, Pangilinan mentions the anthology Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian (1998) edited by Anna Leah Sarabia and published by mainstream Anvil Publishing, Inc., which consisted mainly of coming out narratives by middle-class lesbians from the organization Can’t Live in the Closet (CLIC) and four others from the diaspora, including Nice Rodriguez. While the book broke ground, touted as the first lesbian anthology in the Philippines, as well as requiring their contributors to be out, only one review of it came out, written by Danton Remoto, in an academic journal. It was a collective effort to become visible in literature, but the literary system refused to look at the women who had laid themselves out for the cause of visibility. As Pangilinan asserts in her mapping of lesbian writing, it isn’t only a lack of representation in the anthologies; it is also that critics have not paid attention to the works of the lesbians: "hindi naipapasok sa diskursong pampanitikan ang mga ito" (228)—they do not enter the literary discourse, thus rendering them mute.

In the same vein of rendering the lesbian mute and seemingly invisible, four years before the Tibok anthology was published, Women Supporting Women Center (WSWC) convenor Giney Villar and her partner at that time, poet Aida Santos had published a joint anthology of their work entitled Woman to Woman (1994), featuring photographs, poetry by Santos, and prose by Villar. Villar’s essays reflected on lesbian feminist politics, consistent with her advocacy work in WSWC. Notable is a short erotic piece placed among her fiction. As far as I know, it is the first explicit description of lesbian sex in Philippine literature because the only other piece about lesbian desire was published in the erotica anthology Forbidden Fruit in 1993: Tender Rituals by Rebecca Crisostomo (a pseudonym), which is a sensual depiction of lesbian desire, nothing explicit. It’s a shame that the circulation of Woman to Woman was so limited. No reviews were made of this book either. This is further proof of Pangilinan’s argument that the lesbian does exist in the Philippines but is rendered invisible by the heteropatriarchal system that refuses to look and see, reminiscent of what Terry Castle calls the apparitional lesbian—there, but not there.

My book of stories and a play, Women Loving, came out only in 2010 even though I had completed the manuscript in 2000. It took a longwinded route to go public because I was protecting my heterosexual marriage from the impact of my publishing a book of lesbian-themed stories, and I didn’t want to submit it to any publishers. My marriage ended soon enough. But when the book was finally launched, I was disappointed by the response (or lack of response) to it. It wasn’t celebrated as a landmark in women’s writing, even though in fact it was the first sole-author collection of lesbian writing published in the Philippines. It was not reviewed, not even by my gay or feminist writer-friends. My book suffered the same fate as the previous anthologies of lesbian writing.

Yet, the significance and necessity of books about lesbian experience cannot be discounted forever. Our writing and courage have done something significant by giving voice and shape to what had previously been muted and invisible. We have made ourselves visible to those who want and need to see us. In the years that passed, younger women writers, now identifying as queer rather than strictly lesbian, began to come out, emboldened by a more liberating atmosphere fostered in part by the spirit of LGBTQ Pride and alternative avenues for publication that didn’t need the imprimatur of traditional literary gatekeepers.

So here we finally are. I first conceptualized Tingle in November 2015 over dinner in the company of younger writers shane carreon, Early Sol Gadong, Diandra Macarambon, and Roger Garcia, who all agreed it was time to gather the lesbians together in one book. shane and I agreed to co-edit and we issued the open call for submissions in 2016. Unfortunately, the submissions we received were too few and uneven in quality, so we had to shelve it in favor of our individual projects. From that open call, only four writers are included in this book: Villar, Dandeljane Maraat, Camille Rivera, and Germaine Leonin.

Fortunately, in 2018, under the leadership of General Manager Andrea Pasion-Flores, Anvil Publishing Inc. gave us the necessary push to finally bring Tingle: Anthology of Pinay Lesbian Writing out into the world. Most of the works in the book were specifically solicited from the writers I know in response to the question, What makes you tingle as a lesbian? Literally, the sensation of slight prickles, stings, or tremors, the excitement. I purposely didn’t give any more qualifiers to that prompt. I wanted the writers themselves to define the terms and enact them on the page. And while the word tingle is a homonym for the Tagalog word for clitoris, many of the pieces submitted were not about sex at all. But all the pieces are about a spark of recognition, whether at the beginning, the middle, or the end, that one loves a woman as a woman. Tingle is the flint.

Even in an essay about meeting the anonas fruit for the first time, Villar is lesbianing when she writes, What were the chances that I was going to find it, on this day, this time, this place, in its fruition, if not for a reason? Or in Bernadette Neri’s flash story about washing a cup. Or in Kei Bughaw’s NPA characters, who are not lovers, but are fired up with political resolve. Or in Katherine Madlangbayan’s story revolving around a woman marrying a man, where, without mentioning anything about being a lesbian, the character’s reluctance is a kind of recognition that like the hapless butterfly at her wedding, she has fallen out only to stay grounded there until it dies . . . which is soon. In these pieces, the tingle is expressed in the frisson created by what is elided.

But the lesbian tingle is more explicitly dealt with in most of the pieces, which I have arranged in seven thematic sections, although like many efforts to categorize, something remains arbitrary about my selections. Surely, the pieces can be arranged differently, and many of the themes do overlap within the pieces, for instance in all of the poems, and in the non-linear story of Nerisa Guevara, which melds issues of butch-femme identities, passion, the end and beginning of love, family.

I would rather draw attention to who is represented in this anthology. I am proud to bring together our foremothers, so to speak, the women who first brought the Pinay lesbian to light. Rodriguez gives us a butch character that some of us will hate, and others will pity. She even entitled it Beep Beep, perhaps to warn us of what’s to come. Villar and Santos reunite in the pages again, although they have long separated. Sarabia gifts us with a new piece in which she contemplates the past twenty-five years of her struggle for lesbian rights: What did we do wrong? Did we not work hard enough to keep gender equality and human rights universal principles to live by?

We have writers from across the country and across different age groups, with the youngest in their 20s. And because Anvil requested only writing in English, I translated the work of Neri and Melinda Babaran, to somehow also represent our lesbian writers in Filipino. Andyleen Feje, who usually writes in Filipino, offers a sample of her writing in English in a delightful meta-essay about how to write a pseudo-lesbian story. I tried to get all the lesbian writers I know together here (including my daughter), but some constraints proved too difficult to breach.

While Libay Cantor’s Be(d)side is the only piece that is specifically dedicated to a beloved, all the pieces can be read as love letters. The first section on How It Begins are paeans to the encounters that awakened us, some in our childhood, like Kate Pedroso’s tree-climbing, fruit-stealing best friend. The second section can be read as letters to our families, reaching out to them for understanding, or somehow offering forgiveness through a literary work, like Ria Valdez trying to break down a wall that both shut me out of their conversations and kept me in my own world that they would never speak of. Even the section on How It Ends can be read as epistolary farewells to our failed loves, or to the selves we thought we were. As Jocedel Zulita puts it, I will always love her. But perhaps not in the same way I thought I would. Better days came to an end and I thought I would never heal. But I did.

I am grateful and honored to be comadrona to this anthology. It fills a glaring gap in Philippine literature. Laurel Fantauzzo asks of the woman who will later become her wife, Who will find, decades from now, the detritus of our morning devotion? And it echoes our collective longing—to be heard, to be seen, to be found.

Here we are taking our stories of women loving women into our own hands and making ourselves visible on our own terms. Cha Roque knows: Now the loving gestures that I have learned to treat with secrecy and shame growing up, have become an act of resistance. When the initial thrill of desire is past, the tingle is ultimately the recognition that what we have found cannot remain in the dark—we must love and be loved in the light.

I am grateful to the whole Anvil team, especially to Vea Agaloos, for seeing this project through to completion, despite every obstacle on its path. Love to Prof. J. Neil Garcia and Trisha O’Bannon for their keen and generous blurbs, and to Katrina Pallon for allowing us to use detail from her painting Aquamarine for the cover. The contributors acknowledge the editors of the publications in which some of these pieces first appeared, details of which are in the notes about the contributors. I also want to thank the organizers of the GlobalGrace-UP National LGBTQ Writers’ Workshop, led by Director J. Neil Garcia for the network of queer writers it has fostered. In the same spirit, I acknowledge the women in the Facebook group The Reading Room, who have individually and collectively provided a sense of community to most of the writers in this anthology. It is always good to know that we are not alone on this path.

Let’s go, lesbians!

Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

Davao City

January 2020

Works Cited:

Pangilinan, Sharon Anne. Ang Pagdaloy sa Kasaysayan at Kasaysayan ng Pagdaloy ng Panitikang Lesbiyana ng Pilipinas. Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philipppine Literature 3 (2009) 217-231. http://www.journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/ lik/article/view/1607/1789

Note:

Some portions of this introduction were later published in a longer article entitled, Passing and the In/Visibility of the Philippine Lesbian Writer in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature 14 (2020) 288-305. https://www.journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/lik/article/view/7545

How It Begins

Here Come the Women

Rayji de Guia

Here come the women with their St. John!

- from The Summer Solstice by Nick Joaquin

Maragondon was an architect’s half-built nightmare and a historian’s half-baked delight—that town of a plaza constantly renovated for heritage and some century-old bahay-na-bato abandoned for modern dwellings—of hostile spirits driven away by prayer and mistresses cursed by brujas, of past and present often meeting as if in a skirmish.

Emilia Malan accidentally moved back to Maragondon with her three sons shortly after her husband’s burial. She had visited her parents, Luisa and Atanacio Hilario, out of grief—or loneliness, she wasn’t sure—and agreed with her mother that it was best for her family to stay. Luisa had then hired someone to help and accompany Emilia to pick up her family’s remaining possessions from their cramped apartment house in Laguna. The bags of clothes, folding chairs and tables, pots and pans, pillows, and flimsy foam mattresses had fit the backseat and roof of an old owner-type jeep without trouble. That had been in April, just in time for the boys to enroll in second, third, and fourth grade in the nearby public elementary school.

In the first week, Emilia noticed that the Maragondon she’d known had changed. There were more unfamiliar faces in the marketplace; the church’s façade had been renovated; and, surprisingly, there, beside the municipal hall, sprouted a tiny 7-11 convenience store that valiantly lit a small corner after everything else had closed down by seven. But even more so, their two-story house along Infante felt foreign. Once a cradle of her childhood, it now presented itself as unfriendly. Since her arrival that day, right after she had brought her kids to play with some distant cousins in Poblacion 1-B, when she broke down just as she stepped into the sala, she fully expected her father to scold her. Instead, he’d said nothing, and nothing consequently about her stay.

How much did you tell him? asked Emilia, slicing tomatoes into thin strips on the dining table.

Across her, Luisa cut up biko with a fork with difficulty. "Not everything, anak, she said, putting a piece in her mouth. Just enough, but—listen, I was just concerned."

It was four o’clock in the morning. Outside, it was dark, windows leading into nothingness, but from the distance, they could hear tricycles revving up their motors as they lined up by the plaza terminal. Everyone else was asleep. Emilia was left destitute after her husband’s death, and so she decided, with permission from her mother, to convert the garage into a small carinderia. The owner-type jeep was parked in front of the house on the street. Hardly any vehicle passed through Infante anyway.

Her lips pursed, Emilia slid the tomato slices onto a plate. Okay. She chopped onions next. Her eyes stung and she sniffed. So what exactly is his problem?

Oh, let him be for now. He’ll come around . . . Ay, Tana!

Emilia turned and saw the gangly figure of her father. His hair was wispy and white, neatly combed into a puff with pomade as always, and underneath, his big, wide ears stuck out. He adjusted his thick glasses over his eyes.

What are you doing up so early? he asked his wife.

"I’ll be helping Emilia set up the carinderia. There’s hot water over the stove, Tana."

"Good morning, ‘Tay," said Emilia.

The old man hardly acknowledged her presence, save for stepping aside as to not walk into her. He reached for a mug from an overhead cupboard and then sat on a stool far from Emilia.

At five o’clock, Emilia went up to wake her sons. At half-past five, one by one, the boys shuffled into the kitchen. They still wore the uniform polo and shorts that they had from their previous school, but Emilia had removed the school patches and had sewn new ones.

"Hi, Lolo Tana!"

You’re going to walk us to school, right?

You promised, Lolo!

He can’t— Emilia began but she was cut off.

Sure, of course, said the old man, grinning at the children.

Emilia sighed. Atanacio and the children left at around six.

In the garage, Emilia set up the assorted tables and chairs, enough for eight people, and tied a small tarpaulin print of Emilia’s Carinderia by the open gate.

No, no, don’t put it there, Luisa would say every now and then. Put it here, put it here!

And Emilia would nod, as she had nodded through her life.

At the back of the house was her parents’ hardware shop that opened up to Riego de Dios Street, so she pushed an old-wheeled blackboard to partially cover it from potential customers.

Luisa was spreading linoleum over table surfaces with thumbtacks when someone came in and asked: Are you just opening?

Yes, she said and went inside the house.

Emilia turned from the counter; she was putting out the last trays of food for the morning. The visitor was a woman who looked in her early thirties. She had hair down to her back, bleached to light brown. She wore red lipstick. Emilia thought she looked familiar.

Uy, Emilia Hilario! I haven’t seen you in a long time. When Emilia did not react in recognition, the woman added, It’s me, Amanda.

Anyone could consider everyone a childhood friend in Maragondon, and it was no different for the two women. Amanda Pareja of Row 1 was pretty and intelligent, envy of most girls in elementary school, and she was the first one to have a boyfriend in sixth grade. But Emilia’s mother, a member of the school faculty then, had said Amanda Pareja was "not