Bangungot

Ang Salumpuwit ni Aputiktik

Religious Fanatics

Fried in our own lard

Starry, starry night

The P word

M. L. Tan

My column last week, "Ang Salumpuwit ni Aputiktik", brought back memories for older friends, who recounted the debates over purist Filipino in the 1960s and 1970s. They recalled how, Filipino-style, the acrimonious debates were offset by jokes over salumpuwit, including the coining of other words whose translations I leave to the imaginative reader: salungsuso, salong-guhit, salongbola and salonganisa. (I just had to add one more derivative: salong-talong.)

All these salacious uses of "salo" bring me to a play staged last month by the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA). Last year, PETA produced its first "Libby Manaoag Files" play, focusing on domestic violence. This sequel, written by Liza Magtoto and directed by Maribel Legarda, is entitled "Libby Manaoag Files: Ang Paghahanap sa Puwertas Prinsesas". The title pretty much tells you the play is about women, but it’s really more specific, about women’s reproductive rights.

Reproductive rights? It’s one of those loaded terms endorsed during the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. Loathed by conservatives as much as it is hailed by women's rights advocates as the way forward, reproductive rights is actually quite difficult to define in a few words. I’m going to attempt a definition drawing on bits and pieces of ICPD resolutions – these would be rights of couples and individuals as they relate to decisions on reproduction, including the decision not to reproduce, or if they do want to reproduce, to right to decide on the number and spacing of their children. An extended definition is the right to access information and services that allow a person to make these decisions free of discrimination, coercion and violence.

That’s still a lot to digest, right? It takes a group like PETA to make the words come alive. Libby Manaoag is a television announcer who, while out on a shooting assignment, stumbles on a gruesome chop-chop case. Various body parts of a woman, show up, each with its own grisly tale. The first body part to be found is a burnt hand, which, we learn was the result of a husband’s rage over his wife’s insistence on family planning.

A foot shows up next, playing on the Tagalog saying about every pregnant woman having a foot in the grave. This segment talks about what pregnant women have to go through, including problems of insensitive staff at family planning clinics.

Family planning forms the backdrop to PETA’s play, as their fine actresses (and two actors) wage their battles in and out of the bedroom. But it’s not just the issue of family planning here. PETA reminds us that reproductive rights encompasses many other issues besides family planning, issues that "polite" society brushes under the rug: domestic violence, prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases. There are, too, issues pushed into dark closets, such as lesbianism.

 It’s for you to watch the play to find out what the other stories are, and which body parts they're associated with, but I can tell you the play does feature women’s breasts and, eventually, the vagina.

Notice how much easier it is to use the English word vagina. There is in fact another play, this one American, called The Vagina Monologue being staged at the Music Museum. Everywhere in the world, local terms related to sex and sexuality – such as the p-word – tend to be seen as vulgar and using a foreign language, English in our case, allows us to distance ourselves. The first time PETA’s stage vagina introduced herself, in Filipino, the audienced roared in a mixture of feigned outrage and mirth. By the time the segment was over, there was still scattered giggling every time "p" was mentioned, but people had obviously become used to the word.

Which is why plays like PETA’s need to be supported. PETA has a way of forcing people, gently, to dare to utter the unspeakable. During the Marcos era, PETA was among the few brave theater groups that dared to dramatize social issues. Today, with plays like Libby Manoag, PETA seeks again to subvert the status quo, this time in relation to sexuality.

PETA describes its play as informance, a hybrid of "information" and "performance". It’s not an easy medium, mainly because of the tendency, all too common in Filipino theater, to become too didactic, too lecture-type. The PETA play tends to bombard you with too many statistics on women’s health. But the play does manage the "entertainment" component quite well, mixing vaudeville routines and Filipino humor – you must watch the play if at least to find out what they fish out of the vagina, no pun intended -- without trivializing the issues.

The play’s strong point is that it acknowledges there are no easy answers to many of our women’s vexing problems. For example, the play pushes for family planning as a woman’s right, but also protests against government and groups that push family planning mainly as a form of population control.

There’s much more to the play than dancing breasts and talking vaginas. PETA presents a Woman’s Pasyon, a litany of tribulations as well as a demand for action.

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PETA is preparing to take their play on a nationwide tour, and are looking for groups that might want to co-sponsor the play. For more information, call 410-0822 or 724-9634.