Tag: Jhoanna Lynn Cruz

for Aida Rivera-Ford

On the eve of the Chinese Lunar Festival in October 2009, Aida Rivera-Ford invited me to her farm in Mintal to see sculptures of Nick Joaquin and NVM Gonzales made by National Artist Victorio Edades. I grabbed the chance to spend some time with her, a woman writer I considered a kind of literary mother for having paved the way for those of us who write fiction in English. I used to teach her story “The Chieftest Mourner” in my Philippine Literature classes and La Mujer Esa is an icon for me. As it turns out, Aida had a more interesting story to share. And it’s not the one about Don Jose Oyanguren, the Spanish conquistador who took Davao and whom she considers her soulmate.

Continue reading Staying Alive (Excerpt)

Tita Lacambra-Ayala takes her time with friendship. One might think her a forbidding presence in public, with her pursed lips and sharp eyes, watching over everything in all-knowing silence. She is a true Crone. In our initial encounters, I didn’t dare speak to her without being summoned.

I can’t say when she decided we could be friends, although she did come to the launching of my book Women Loving in December 2009, offering a newly-reprinted copy of her first book, Sunflower Poems in exchange for mine, saying that these were her Baguio poems. She meant to underscore something we had in common: living in Baguio City then moving to Mindanao to start anew. She also gave me a coco-bead necklace that clashed with my dress, but which I wore anyway like a talisman. When she placed it over my head herself, it made me feel like a graduate receiving a medal for academic excellence. Or maybe a medal of valor. It didn’t matter that nobody got me flowers.

I remember on International Women’s Day the following year after a meeting of the Davao Writers Guild, Ricky de Ungria asked her whom she was currently reading. Tita quickly replied: “Lilia Chua, Edith Tiempo, Marjorie Evasco, Ophie Dimalanta, Jhoanna Cruz.”

I had long been a feminist, but I felt like that moment had turned me into a feminist writer, joining a weave of women writing of their experiences as women and for each other. But regardless of the politics, I couldn’t quite get over the fact that Tita Ayala was reading me. Never mind those poetry anthologies that excluded me! I needed to keep writing because Tita was reading me. Continue reading Staying Alive (excerpt)

Last October 13, some members of the Davao Writers Guild (DWG) participated in Ilhanay 2016, the first literary festival of North Davao Colleges, Panabo City, through the initiative of faculty member Mohammed Nassefh Macla. Through Macla’s vision, the school’s former “English Week” turned into a celebration of contemporary Mindanawon writing, an unequivocal act of defiance toward the hegemony of English as a language of intellectual and literary pursuits in the Philippines. That day, it was clear that Binisaya is the language that speaks to and of the heart of the Mindanawon.

Panabo is a city in its own right, nestled between the larger cities of Tagum and Davao. Our trip there is part of the outreach activities of the Guild in order to ensure that aspiring writers from outside Davao also have the opportunity to meet and learn from more established writers. In the past, DWG as a group has gone to Samal Island, Digos City, Kapalong, Davao del Norte, and Bukidnon, and each time, participating writers came home inspired by the enthusiasm of the audience. In Panabo, I joined Noi Narciso, Darylle Rubino, Errol Merquita, and Macla in the usual forum and reading. What we didn’t know was that the students had actually prepared a treat for us.
Continue reading Ilhanay 2016: The Pleasure is Mutual

Two days before I was to leave for Palawan to join the first Adverbum Writers Retreat in Palawan, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Central Visayas at past 8 in the morning. Soon after, social network newsfeeds were filled with initial images of the destruction it wrought. Later, television news programs provided more details. It broke my heart to see the ancient Baclayon and Loboc churches destroyed, but even more distressing were the number of human casualties. The earthquake was also felt in Davao City, but to a lesser extent, and with no reported damage. Still, I couldn’t help but feel anxious to leave my two children for a week to do something entirely for myself.

It was a palpable anxiety that I had been feeling since I learned about the retreat. Last July, I received an invitation to the writers retreat from Almira Astudillo-Gilles of Chicago, who organized the retreat to provide established writers with “time and space for creative work.” On October 17 – 22, I was to join Jose “Butch” Dalisay, Ed Maranan, Ricky de Ungria, and Juaniyo Arcellana in a private and secluded villa in Sitio Bobosawen, one and a half hours by road from Puerto Princesa City. With no mobile signal whatsoever, a two-kilometer stretch of coastline, and a view of the mountains, it did sound like a perfect writer’s destination.

Continue reading Shaken and Stirred: The Adverbum Writers Retreat in Palawan

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Month in UP Mindanao is “Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures.” It is quite an honor for me to have been given this opportunity to deliver the keynote address. Yet, like Adrienne Rich, “I did not choose this subject; it had long ago chosen me” (15). This task has brought me face to face with my own disconnected, alienated girlhood, and forced me to think about how I shaped my futuredespite the betrayal of my mother.

Even though I lived with my mother in our ancestral house in Pasay City until I was 27, I have no fond memories of her. There were no bedtime stories, no lullabies. She was not a source of nurturing or comfort or validation, the way we are socialized to believe mothers should be. She had always been a career woman because my father had left her even before I was born. I always believed that she was simply too busy trying to be a father that she forgot the whole “motherhood” thing. And yet I know now that it was more than that. For how can motherhood be reduced to an algebraic equation? Rich notes that “motherhood is earned, first through an intense physical and psychic rite of passage—pregnancy and childbirth—then through learning to nurture, which does not come by instinct” (12). I remember feeling sorry for myself every time my grandfather told me the story of the first time I ran away from home.

Continue reading A Mother/Daughter Journey: Connecting Girls at a Time of Risk