Karisma Kasilag-Sison, 31, is a contributing writer at Total Woman Magazine and a freelance editor. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts major in English degree from St. Scholastica’s College Manila. She is a former elementary teacher and executive producer for TVCs. She is married with two sons.
In 1994, one of my college friends chose Toni Morrison’s novel Sula as the subject for her final research paper. I hurriedly dismissed it as a book about the black American experience, which I could not relate to. Five years later, I picked up the same book by the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature at a bargain bin and fell in love with it instantly. The novel is rich and moving. It traces the lives of two black heroines – from their childhood friendship in a small Ohio town through their contrasting paths to womanhood, to their ultimate conflict and reconciliation.
As children, the two black women bond like sisters, only to be separated in adulthood. Nel Wright chooses to remain in the place of her birth, to marry and raise a family, while Sula Peace escapes to college and immerses herself in city life for 10 years and comes back to her hometown. Nel discovers her husband Jude and Sula naked together in bed and cuts all ties with her childhood best friend. Jude leaves Nel and moves to Dayton, Ohio.
Sula has a relationship with a man named Ajax, who ends the affair when Sula begins acting more like a wife than a lover. Nel sees the dying Sula for one last time and goes home. Twenty-five years after Sula’s death, Nel cries in sorrow for her dead friend and terrible regret for the long, lost years of her own adulthood.
Between the two protagonists, I am more like Nel, who has chosen a life of acceptance and accommodation as a wife and mother to two children. Even while admitting that I’m a lot like her, I refuse to be confined and restricted to the mother role. There are other facets of me that I have yet to explore. While there are many joys to this life I chose, I can’t deny that there are places I wish to go to. My two biggest dreams are to be a writer and to travel around the world. While I may not be that successful in other people’s eyes, I’m the type who counts the little blessings as much as the bigger ones.
I have already seen the fulfillment of my aspiration. That leaves me with my one unfulfilled dream – to travel. It nags me incessantly, leading me at times to label my husband as the murderer of my desires, for he did not share my wishes because of his phobia of flying. I’m afraid to be like Nel, staying at the place of her birth her entire life, having only one isolated trip to New Orleans as a child. "The many experiences of her trip crowded in on her. It was the last as well as the first time she was ever to leave Medallion...For days afterward she imagined other trips she would take, alone though, to faraway places. Contemplating them was delicious. Leaving Medallion would be her goal."
Aside from Sula and Nel, Morrison’s book has extraordinary characters. Among them Eva Peace, grandmother of Sula, who is an inspiration to me. Suffering from inferiority complex for most of my life, I have vowed as a mature woman to eradicate shame for my atresia microtia – the "little ear" – a congenital defect that my son inherited from me. I will not hide what God gave my child and me. I’m going to push away the voice of my mother, commanding me to hide my deformity because she feared that others would mock and ridicule me. Let them laugh, Mother, for I want to be like the one-legged Eva, who bore her misfortune with grace and dignity.
"Whatever the fate of her lost leg, the remaining one was magnificent...(She did not) wear overlong dresses to disguise the empty place on her left side. Her dresses were mid-calf so that her one glamorous leg was always in view as well as the long fall of space below her left thigh."
I don’t know about other women – maybe they’re just luckier in relationships than I am – but I have felt the same way as Sula. "It took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be – for a woman."
I am certain that my comrade is myself – no man can make me complete; only I could be my perfect lover. I never get lonely even if sometimes I don’t feel the deep connection that I have daydreamed about in my younger years with the man I married, and the secret is that our children provide a companionship that is beyond words. I am moved to have a meaningful existence because I have them, and they keep us together.
Sula stresses that it is important for a person to be productive. God has given gifts to all of us for us to use. I know that to continually strive to improve my craft and to devote time and energy to write are important to prevent the biggest downfall of all – a life utterly messed up, like Sula who lived wantonly. "Had (Sula) anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous."
As soon as my two-year-old son goes to sleep, I open my laptop and develop an idea that I’ve been meaning to write about. After ticking off priority chores in my to-do list, I leave my boys to my husband so I could go to the gym or mall, watch a movie or meet up with my friends. I make good use of snippets of personal time, however minute they are for a busy mother like me, to live because I don’t want to be totally like Nel.
"She had been really active in church only a year or less, and that was because the children were grown now and took up less time and less space in her mind. For over twenty-five years since Jude walked out she had pinned herself into a tiny life."
Even now as I spend half of my time running after my kids, I’m fully aware that my totality does not limit me to motherhood. I need to have a large and splendid life. I still got to live my dreams –I only got two of them anyway.
In the end, Nel realizes that she misses the "tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation." It is a pity to regret the years gone by when one has not lived. For life is just not all about doing what we have got to do. True, we never run out of responsibilities, obligations to others, but we also need to do things for ourselves.
As Sula has said on her deathbed: "I don’t want to die like a stump – I want to "[go down] like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world."