Sheilfa's Thoughts

When I was a little bit younger (hehe), I met Shielfa, who was then so engaged in a research on the lives of Badjaos in Iligan city.
Years after, I saw her at MTS of Davao city where many non-government and media workers gathered to enjoy shows at whichever corner of that converging site of the city. We never got to talk to each other because we were in different group or peers that night.
Years passed again and facebook provided an avenue where we could share opinions and personal thoughts to circumstances surrounding us. She emailed me something-- her personal views of an unfurling circumstance.
So I asked her if I could post her mail and which she gladly consented.
This is a piece that has a controversial title and could rouse debate, so I decided to keep the title/subject to myself.


Sheilfa Alojamiento's Thoughts

No one has ever asked me, how I feel as a Christian woman living in Mindanao, land of promise and land of contesting and contestable land and territorial claims, being presumably chauvinist and privileged, which very likely I am, but I will take liberty anyway in asking and answering my own question.

It got me, when I saw at Facebook that one of my friends recently joined Bangsamoro. It felt like, isn’t she ashamed? She is a modern chic, with strong atheistic tendencies and though how she aspires to be politically correct at all times, she is a prejudiced shithead, with certain notions about the tribes and the mujahideens!

I know it is I who ought to be ashamed for saying this. Being what I am, conscientious objector, NGO-egghead and loyal compatriot of Mindanao Republic, that in the last three decades have been gathering its citizens around the so called tri-people unity banner, I ought to be supporting Bangsamoro nationhood as duty and conscience demand of me. It is the best expression of recognition and respect for their struggle for self-determination, as they say in the church and NGO circuit, it is the best manifestation of Christian solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the aforming Bangsamoro Republik.

My kneejerk reaction would be, I don’t even feel loyal to the Philippine Republic, I didn’t really truly thoroughly feel this country was ever mine or owns me as its own beloved daughter, how much more the emerging nation Bangsamoro Republik or the Lumad Republik for that matter?

Not being overly dramatic about my national or pseudo-national identity, dear reader. I have gone through all that since the day I was born, you know, singing Bayang Magiliw and reciting Panatang Makabayan¸and there must have been a time in my life when I would have willingly died for what I then thought was country and liberty, but right now I just feel like your cynic fag of a dyke and would rather listen to Edith Piaf’s No, je ne regrette rien, je ne regretted rien, or Cheryl Crowe’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah than wax nationalistic – it be democratic or Islamic, pardon me. But I did have my moments when I did think of it: how or where am I to stand as a woman, Christian, settler, liberal, nationalist, feminist, and whathaveyou. It began way back in the 1980s when we were in this Moro NGO engaged in human rights work and self-determination advocacy and our Moro friends and colleagues would accuse us of being Christians and as such should not be there intercepting solidarity and funding that should be going directly to Bangsamoro and Muslim organizations, and by God I would say they were partly right, except that. Except that while we were in that organization we had this pledge that we would work there for what we then called PDOES (the poor, the deprived, the oppressed and exploited and struggling), which at the time happened to be Moro, Christian and Indigenous! That was the first time when I really felt acutely the conflict, the tension, or in our wonderful vocabulary then, the contradiction. And some of my Moro and Christian colleagues would explain to me that this contradiction is ethno-religious, although the ones that I believed most was those who said that no, it’s class-based.

I believe that I have grown overly conscious since then and had many moments of rebellions against both these Christian- and Moro-informed configurations of the conflict and had at one time or another demanded that it’s about time we make a stand, too, what we think about all this Bangsamoro self-determination campaign we so much uphold and support, because then as now, we Christian crusaders were a little unwilling to say our piece. To say that one is a Christian and be proud of it, too, beside all the sins of the Inquisition, was to be on the wrong side of history, to be politically wrong, in the terms of the day. So when the Moro nationalists (represented then by the Moro National Liberation Front and later by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, even by the now defunct Moro Revolutionary Organization) issued manifestoes that said Christians can be part of the struggling and emerging Bangsamoro Republic too by taking on the “Christian Moro” citizenhood, we stood by that. Or at least did not speak up against it. To do so was tantamount to betraying and undermining the much besieged and the greatly outnumbered terribly disadvantaged and already much divided Moro struggle.

I mean, we don’t have to be too etymological about it, only a sense of history or a little of it will do. Didn’t they say they are Moros because their brave forefathers resisted the Spanish colonizers and we are Christians because our forefathers were wimps and cowards who vowed to the sword and the cross of the frigging friars and were conscripts to the anti-Moro wars, too? Now if later we rebelled against this historical participation and against these hundred years of Catholicism and chose liberation theology or what the indigenous now Christian-Protestant and Muslim West Papuans call contextual spirituality, that’s fine and very wonderful. And for believing that way that makes me a politically correct cross-bred of an ethnic pagan Christian, right?