Nowhere Woman's Place in the Sun

For openers, let me present the (formerly mad) nowhere woman who walked me through the process of setting up this blog. The following text also served as my introduction to her at the closing rituals of the second writing workshop the Baguio Writers Group conducted for students and young teachers at the Baguio Country Club yesterday. The group chose her to be the guest speaker primarily because of her youth (role model type) and in spite of it (she has written over a million characters with spaces).
She comes from a distinguished matrilineal lineage: her great-grandmother, Pilar Hidalgo Lim, was one of the first suffragists; her grandmother Gloria came from a family of educators that founded the Mapua Institute of Technology; her own mother Adelaida is a writer, culinary artist and cultural leader of Baguio City. The speaker herself was most probably conceived and, this next detail I know as a fact, born in this city.
I first learned of her existence from a series of photographs exhibited by her father Butch Perez at the Main Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in the mid-’70s. The photos showed her mother pushing a pram along the length of Session Road one Holy Week when vehicular traffic was forbidden on the main road and there was no island dividing it. Her father took the photos from the other side of the street.
I met her again in 1990 at the Baguio Convention Center. She went up to me, introduced herself and asked at what age I wrote the poems in my first book The First Eye (published by Kalikasan Press with a small print run of 200). Her mother bought a copy earlier for P60, and it must have reached the daughter’s hands.
I returned to Manila elated by that encounter and told my editor of The Sunday Times Magazine then, Rosario “Chato” Garcellano, about this slip of a girl of around 16 who had read my poems. Chato said I had connected.
Connecting is writing’s ultimate aim. Literary prizes, fellowships and writers’ residencies local and abroad, publication in prestigious journals, magazines and anthologies—all these are fine. But ultimately, connecting to the reader is what it’s all about.
In 1995, our speaker and I would be together again, along with one of our panelists, Luchie Maranan, as fellows of the Wika ng Kababaihan writing workshop. She wrote a memorable poem about the process of childbirth. I can still recall her reference to her waters bursting just before her baby popped out.
I want to stress that today’s speaker started out like you, too. Perhaps she was lucky to have had a head start because at age seven or thereabouts, her lolo required her to write a few paragraphs to narrate what happened to her during the course of a day. This is an example of the rigor, accuracy, precision and discipline that writing demands, qualities that our panelists have been talking about for the past two Sundays.
Our speaker has gone on to apply all these in her field of specialization—anthropology, particularly indigenous people’s rights and environmental issues.
Without further ado, here is Padma Perez!
(So to soon-to-be Dr. Perez--she is finishing her dissertation for the University of Leiden in The Netherlands--salamuchas [contraction of salamat and muchas gracias] for yesterday’s pep talk to the aspiring writers from our beloved Baguio and Benguet and the assist in putting up this blog in between mundane but necessary Monday chores.)