Writing into the future, part 2

–

Last Sunday’s featured works — the excerpts from Attriu Marcus Cabusao’s fiction and Kid Millado’s bricolage of Sandman and Batman — are just some of what readers of high art or popular literature are inspired to create.

And the inspiration does not always come from cultural artifacts from America or other foreign shores. Vanessa Almeria, a Creative Writing student of UP Mindanao, teamed up with Glen Obenza, a BA English student from MSU General Santos, to produce their comic book, GiMix UP.

Drawing from the popular Kiko Machine Komix, a compilation of comic strips originally published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and created by one-time Philippine Collegian Graphics Editor and Fine Arts graduate Manuel “Manix” Abrera, Van and Glen came up with their own cast of major and minor characters. One such character is the bully Rambo, seen here playing a prank on an unsuspecting professor. The joke might be a bit stale, but is given a fresh treatment with how it is told panel by cartoon panel.

“GiMix UP is a collection of cartoon panels that tell a joke or a story,” Van explained during her presentation. “Unlike Abrera’s Kiko Machine, it has three major student characters namely, Menggay, Rambo, and Abby. Menggay is an emo chick, Rambo is a bully, and Abby is a strong-spirited gay male. One of the major characters in Kiko Machine is used as a minor character in GiMix UP, but appears only once (Menggay and her admirer’s scene). The structure is also patterned after Abrera’s Kiko Machine. The jokes and stories are mainly about the tough and challenging life in UP Mindanao. Given that the issues are about the students’ experiences in the university, the scenes are all set in familiar UP Mindanao hangouts, say for example, Ate Ling’s, Kiosk, Canteen, CHSS-AVR, etc. We used Bisaya given that our target audience comes mainly from Mindanao. But we also used some Tagalog, Ilonggo, and English words and phrases, not to mention gay lingo, to show the diversity of the students’ lifestyles and attitudes.”

More original in conception, though still drawing from the popular manga, is Jasper Nikki de la Cruz’s Siatong: Gisaksak sa Puso, Mitulo ang Dugo. Adapting the popular manga format using ordinary games or toys to power a dueling narrative – Beyblade, Super Yoyo, Yugi-Oh, to name just a few – Jasper crafts a story about a group of friends who sets out to win the Tagum Siatong Championships.

Jasper provided this gist for his graphic story: “My story is set in Tagum ten years from now. Emos have been banned from existence. Siatong has also been recognized as the Pambansang Laro ng Lungsod ng Tagum. Four friends – Kate B. Kinse (a very kind-hearted kid), Drake You (the alpha-male bestfriend), MC Concepcion (the most skillful and underrated player), and Tangz (the strategist) – sign up for the annual Tagum Siatong Championships. But they have to win the Poblacion Qualifiers first. They meet up against Finding Emo, the Emo Revival Activists group lead by Ultiemoticon. What follows is a brutal combat of siatong as the Emo group cheats their way into the game by using loopholes in the rules.”

With his friends, Ivo Angelico Auxilio doing the art and Simon Ed Lusan providing the color, Jasper (in his own words) “attempts to abuse the archetypes and clichés of the genre,” but in the process also presents a riotous and sidesplitting adventure.

(Next week: Romancing the romance, Mindanao style)

Writing into the future

–

Over glasses of cool drinks in a downtown resto one balmy evening, Amy showed me her son’s writing drafts. I read a few pieces and was amazed by what Attriu, her high school kid, had written. Here’s a sample:

John Slowan was one of the fastest men I knew and the best strategist in the squad. By taking a hovercraft, we crossed the city through the sewerage system. Even when unused, the sewers had such a horrible smell. The dead civilians and dead orks we saw all piled up in the sewer gave the word “united” a foul meaning. Crossing the main ork line we encountered some ork patrols, but we were quick enough to keep them from detecting our position…. We have reported orks massing just three kilometers from our line….

I told her Attriu could give some of our Creative Writing students a run for their money. And I was not pulling her leg. While some college kids stumble over their grammar as they try to put together a story or a poem, here is this fifteen-year-old who plays around with characters he appropriates from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, from video games, and from movies, then – instinctively, or influenced by the language and storytelling techniques of the media – puts them together in an imaginary battle for the Emperor’s dominion.

I told Amy she should check out some of the fan fiction – for that is what we call the genre her son writes in – posted all over the Internet. Or perhaps buy some gamer magazines that publish stories like Attriu’s. Which soon got us to talking about putting up again the Ways of Seeing page that used to grace this paper a few years back.

I asked myself, why not? We could make it into a literary and arts page of some sorts, perhaps feature contributions from readers. And we could call the section Ways of Saying, not to depart too far from that old page, so we could highlight the different expressive art forms readers may want to submit works in and which – if we find the piece interesting – we would gladly accommodate on this page. Hmmm. Something doable, I thought.

We had some nagging doubts, though. Reading is supposedly on the decline, more so reading of literary texts. The 1982-2002 National Endowment for the Arts study, Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, shows a “dramatic decline” with fewer than 50% of Americans reported to have read literary works during the survey years. I think we can hazard the guess that the figures would be lesser in this country. So why put up a literary page?

The same study revealed that while readership had decreased, “the number of people doing creative writing increased by 30 percent, from 11 million in 1982 to more than 14 million in 2002″ (Reading at Risk, 2004). And if the number of Creative Writing students who enroll every year in our school is any indication, there is a sustained interest if not an increase in Creative Writing in this region.

Not surprisingly, the works our Creative Writing students produce are not so different from what Attriu does on his spare time. While some of our students have published their pieces in local and national publications or have presented these in national literary workshops, they most have fun doing stuff for their Pop Lit class.

One such work is Gabriel Millado’s “Knightmare,” which he presented last October 10 during the 2nd Popular Literature Forum sponsored by the UP Mindanao Creative Writing Program. Gabriel, or Kid as he is known among his friends, ripped the characters of Sandman and the Dark Knight and placed them in one graphic tale he entitled, in classic Batman fashion, “Knightmare” (see sample panel above). His story goes this way:

Batman is racing against time to rescue the kidnapped Jed Walker, heir to the Kincaid fortune. At the same time, Morpheus is also looking for the boy, who may be a dream vortex, and in whose mind a rogue dream is hiding. As the two collide, Batman will find out if his determination is strong enough to stand against the duties of an Endless: for if the Sandman is to secure his realm, he may have to destroy the boy Jed Walker….

But Kid did not just write his crossover narrative of Batman and Sandman. He created a bricolage made up of frames from the two graphic stories: The Dark Knight Returns and Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes. He took frames from each, rearranged them, erased the word balloons, and lettered in his own dialogues from the two tales.

Here is a sample (see the graphic above), the frame showing Rose Walker walking into a dark room to find Batman lurking in the shadows. In the original story, Rose Walker walks into a dark room to find the Three Witches who warns her about her fate. Using the digital technology available to him, Kid meticulously crafted the frames to create his own tale. Cool, right?

(More next week: Another graphic novel inspired by local creative artists.)

This is the first part of a series to start off our literary page, Ways of Saying, printed every Sunday on Mindanao Times.

Unexplored territory

–

What is the topography of the human heart? How does one map its peaks, valleys, tributaries? How measure its ebb and flow, its undertow?

Kerima Polotan shows us one way to plot the shifts of the heart. In her short story, “The Virgin,” Polotan introduces us to the character of Miss Mijares by indirect means:

He went to where Miss Mijares sat, a tall, big man, walking with an economy of movement, graceful and light, a man who knew his body and used it well. He sat in the low chair worn decrepit by countless other interviewers and laid all ten fingerprints carefully on the edge of her desk. (Polotan)

We get a sense of who Miss Mijares is through what she notices of the people around her, in the details that are highlighted in the description that — while told in the third person — apparently are seen through her eyes.

We ask, why does Miss Mijares notice these details? Well, the story’s title is “The Virgin” after all, and the main character’s civil status is foregrounded by the title “Miss.” So we get an inkling of how she might feel, and understand why she imperiously “pushed a sheet towards him, rolling a pencil along with it” and commands him:

“I shall be coming back quickly,’ she said, speaking distinctly in the dialect (you were never sure about these people on their first visit, if they could speak English, or even write at all, the poor were always proud and to use the dialect with them was an act of charity), “you will wait for me.” (Polotan)

And we understand why she has to justify her peremptory tone or the supercilious attitude she takes toward her clients at the placement agency. We can feel her loneliness as we see her sitting by her lonesome at a cafeteria table. And as Polotan turns to a more objective but still sympathetic description of Miss Mijares, we feel the desperation in the “poufs and shirrings and little girlish pastel colors” and “the thick camouflaging ruffles” that the 34-year-old Miss Mijares wears to soften and prettify her bony and angular and plain self.

And buried somewhere underneath her defensive ruffles and behind her haughty attitude lay a coquettish heart that would, perhaps in a moviehouse, allow itself “to sink into a seat as into an embrace, in the darkness with a hundred shadowy figures about her and high on the screen, a man kissing a woman’s mouth while her own fingers stole unconsciously to her unbruised lips” (Polotan).

But this heart had gone unpracticed and bitter through all the years Miss Mijares had to care for her mother. When her mother died, the love she thought was just around the corner was nowhere to be found. And then she meets this carpenter who, when she got back from her break, had fixed her paperweight

… an old gift from long ago, a heavy wooden block on which stood, as though poised for flight, an undistinguished, badly done bird. It had come apart recently. The screws beneath the block had loosened so that lately it had stood upon her desk with one wing tilted unevenly, a miniature eagle or swallow? felled by time before it could spread its wings…. ¶ [But he had fixed it.] He had turned it and with a penknife tightened the screws and dusted it. In this man’s hands, cupped like that, it looked suddenly like a dove. (Polotan)

And in the succeeding paragraphs, we see an apparently “giddy” Miss Mijares going out of her usual way to check on the carpenter’s progress and even bargaining with Ato the foreman to increase the carpenter’s wages. Lighthearted enough to lose her way the following week. And agitated enough when the carpenter doesn’t show up for a week.

When he does show up, she goes stern on the carpenter while asking him for reasons about his whereabouts. And she feels anger and bitterness upon learning that he had just lost a son, a son he had with a woman he was not married to.

At the end of that day of confrontation, a sudden thunderstorm brings redemption. On her way home, the carpenter boards the same jeepney she hops into. When the jeepney takes the same route of sidestreets just like the week when she lost her way, Miss Mijares finds herself on the dark sidewalk alone with the carpenter who followed her to give his apologies. And …

In her secret heart, Miss Mijares’ young dreams fluttered faintly to life, seeming monstrous in the rain, near this man — seeming monstrous but sweet overwhelming. I must get away, she thought wildly, but he had moved and brushed against her, and where his touch had fallen, her flesh leaped, and she recalled how his hands had looked that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her desk and about the wooden bird (that had looked like a moving, shining dove) and she turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted, in the dark she turned to him. (Polotan)

And it would seem that Miss Mijares would be journeying to another country, but a country familiar to her “secret heart.”

Would it matter what future lay there for Miss Mijares? And would she now call the carpenter by his name,* and how would her future be determined by such action?

How to map the human heart? This is just one way. Another story by Polotan or some other writer would be plotted differently. And your own experience would reveal its unique path, pulsing away its pattern of heartbeats on your life’s chart.

[*Notice how Polotan uses the pronoun to refer to the man, while she gives Ato the foreman a proper name. Why so?]