Women empowerment a day at a time

We, women, are said to be attached in some way to the baggage of our past.

In pre-colonial times, we were trained to be community organizers. But the Spanish relegated us to domestic chores – tied to the 3Bs: “balay” (house), “bana” (husband) and “bata” (child).

There was a time when we were hounded with a motley of double standards: we can’t vote; we can be cheated but never should we, in return, cheat; we can’t be chief executive officers but the stage in the “casa” is ours to take.

The umbilical cords that connect each of us to these empty and artificial times grew thicker, like the plot of a murder-mystery thriller, across a thousand and one summers. But indeed, we have come a long, long way that our recent achievements are of epic proportions – counting in that of Kathryn Bigelow hailed recently as first woman director to win an Oscars in its 82-year-old history.

And these elegies and celebrations are the very emotions from which we draw strength for every stroke of our brushes and every time we give birth to poems. We have come this far to share how passionate, attentive, informed and seasoned we are with analytic understanding.

Such technology of poetry and the visual arts, evolving to suit to specific purposes, was used as a powerful tool by women painters (Koki Olario Miano, Palmy Pe-Tudtud, Betsy Alterado, Lyn Deutsch, Maria Victoria “Bambi” Beltran, Anya Lim, Glenkarren “Karby” Beloy, Minette Ramo, Marivel Galan, Arlene Villaver, Odessa Kaye “Oding” Bulahan) and poets (Marlinda Angbetic Tan and Chai Fonacier) in the “Babayeng Buhat” event at the Anthill Fabric Gallery along Mariposa Street, Gorordo Avenue last week. Successful couturier Arcy Gayatin was asked to be a guest of honor for the event.

This, not only to express feelings rapidly and memorably nor to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal, but foremost to “share” the feeling of liberation from all forms of burden and inspire those to come after us.

Despite a world immersed in too many things to do but with so very little time left to achieve all, the need to continue freeing the woman from the shackles of oppression, mental slavery, inopportunity, and discrimination remains a global concern. Consciousness for such can be raised through the said art forms – fundamental and life-giving.

In our poetry-writing workshop once, it was tackled that “poetry wrenches around our ideas about our lives; that poetry will always pick a quarrel with the found place, the refuge, the sanctuary; that even though the poet, a human being with many anxious fears, might just want to rest, acclimate, adjust, become naturalized, learn to write in a new landscape or a new language, poetry will go on harassing the poet until, and unless, it is given away.”

Poet Jane Cooper, for example, said that: We are not separate.

I guess this observation fits perfectly on how a woman sees women. We will never be separate. And the work for all of us must begin with the “stripping down of words, with listening, with acknowledging our fear” – churches against condoms, men expecting us to be whores in bed but to be meek lambs in public; beauty pageants turned mote bridges to meet moneyed men; women exported to either provide sensual pleasure or to be domestic managers, making poverty a potent excuse; women turned mannequins cursing at their skin pigment.

Women are called to move toward connectedness – as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the surface of the water to reach out to more women; thereby encouraging all of us to work and respond in the same wavelength of consciousness.

Women must learn to detach, to let go not of the thing but of the need for a thing. To detach is to let go of the dependency on a person, but to hold on to the preference for the person. To detach is to release the old you and embrace the new you.

If we can teach ourselves these, and create ripples to reach out to fellow women, we can be “empowered one day at a time,” thereby, living everyday an International Women’s Day.