Editor’s note: Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz teaches creative writing in the University of the Philippines Mindanao. Her book, “Abi Nako, Or So I Thought” (2020, UP Press) is the first lesbian memoir published in the Philippines.
In the Philippines, we do not have a word for “lesbian” in our major languages. But it doesn’t mean that she does not exist. As a child I learned about gender and homosexual identities through a counting or sorting game that uses this chant: ‘Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy,’ which determines what “gender” a child is depending on his/her age. Girl corresponds to one, Boy to two, Bakla to three, Tomboy to four and the chant goes on until it stops at one’s age, e.g. an eight-year-old child is a “tomboy,” regardless of his/her biological sex. Here was also where I learned that nobody wants to be called bakla or tomboy even in a silly children’s game. They become the butt of jokes because bakla is the word for male homosexual and tomboy is a female homosexual.
Later, I learned to identify as “lesbian,” but even the term is fraught with conflict about how it is defined, particularly in the Philippines. While the easy solution is to say that a lesbian is a woman who has romantic and sexual relations with women, that does not reflect the historical struggle around the term, particularly prompted by Adrienne Rich’s concept of the “lesbian continuum,” in which virtually all women can be considered lesbian by virtue of their commitment to women. The continuum refers to “a range — through each woman’s life… of woman-identified experience.” Rich also describes it as “forms of primary intensity between and among women,” not limited to sexual experience.
When I first realized that I was a lesbian, I was a Literature major in college, and so I sought refuge and understanding, as usual from literature. (Two years later, I wrote my first lesbian story.) But I couldn’t find any lesbian writers in Philippine literature. It’s not that they did not exist, but that they were invisible. The erasure of the lesbian is so systemic, that even in anthologies of women’s writing published in the ‘90s, the lesbian writers were not identified as such. Maybe it was a function of the authors themselves who were in the closet at that time, or the heteronormative bias of the feminist editors. So, I had to find the lesbian in the Western tradition.
If any queer anthology truly shaped me, it would be “Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present” edited by Lillian Faderman. Yet even with the mountain of literary pieces available to her, she admits the problem with the term “lesbian,” which she describes as anachronistic. She emphasizes that “many of the women writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries… would not have considered themselves lesbian — even had that word been available to them.” Thus, as an anthologist, she decided to use the term only “to signal content about female same-sex emotional and physical relationships — though it is not a word other eras would have been likely to employ.”
It was through this anthology that my imagination opened up to what Faderman calls the literature of romantic friendship and of lesbian encoding, which led me to reading the work of early Philippine women writers such as Leona Florentino as lesbian texts. Florentino, the mother of Isabelo de los Reyes, wrote many love poems for women, which Ilocano literature scholars have described as merely “commissioned” work. More importantly, the 1994 anthology introduced me to what Faderman calls post-lesbian-feminist literature, which, even then, she coded as “queer” (though derisively, I think). It was this section of the anthology that opened me up to creative possibilities in writing the lesbian experience that I would only realize in my own writing 25 years later, when I did my creative practice PhD.
I’ve always wished there were a lesbian anthology ever since the first “Ladlad” volume of Philippine gay writing came out in 1994. And there was! In 1998, Anvil Publishing Inc. published “Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian,” edited by Anna Leah Sarabia. But when I gained more experience as a literary writer and editor, I realized that I should put together the lesbian anthology I wanted to read. And this dream only came to fruition in 2021 when Anvil published “Tingle: Anthology of Pinay Lesbian Writing,” much belated, much awaited.
READ: A new Filipino anthology shines light on stories by women loving women
But before “Tingle,” the University of the Philippines Press published in 2017, an Asia-Pacific anthology, “Press: 100 Love Letters” edited by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo and Francesca Rendle-Short. The call for submissions was for letters from women to women. And while the queer angle was obvious, the anthology included more than that. Each letter in the book celebrates love and desire between women, in different stages and ways. But it really must be read as a queer women’s anthology, breaking ground in the Philippines, making space for women naming their desire for what they can have, or can’t have, for what they used to have, or what they do have, and even what they never had. The contributors from the Asia-Pacific (mostly Australia and the Philippines) took the prompt and found a variety of forms to embody this desire: poems, essays, illustrations, playing cards, photographs. They literally made love with their hands.
“It is an urge that is primordial in me as a lesbian — this writing of love letters and the making with my hands.”
It is an urge that is primordial in me as a lesbian — this writing of love letters and the making with my hands. The Quebecoise lesbian writer Nicole Brossard asserts, “Writings make sense that begin with the declaration of love” (quoted in “Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works”). There can be no lesbian writing without this ideal beloved.
In their epistolary introduction, Fantauzzo and Rendle-Short give us an intimate glimpse of the way they themselves journeyed with the project. We read it and we feel as if we know them, or they know us. That if we read the book, we are sharing in what Rendle-Short calls “Desire lines of travel present here on these pages.” Fantauzzo talks about the Philippine context of the love letter, referring to Rizal, the kundiman, Catholicism. Rendle-Short affirms, “The letter is a declaration. The letter is an exhortation. The letter is a report. The letter is a plea. The letter is a tenuous bridge.” Putting the book together, they asked, “What happens when women write to each other, for each other?”
We name our desire to each other and call it forth collectively.
Aside from letters to the beloved, the book also contains letters from daughters to mothers and mothers to daughters — the first love a woman knows, the one that is most instructive. And sometimes devastating. In my own early writing of lesbian fiction, I imagined, as a “motherless” child whose mother failed my expectations, I was mothering desire, desiring mother. In the accomplishment of “Press,” we call back the lesbian continuum, and find our place in it as women who love women in all the ways that we know how.