Prime Time Prima Donnas
Nicole Cadelina on Eunice Andrada
Every Sunday, a congregation of titas gather in the sala
①
Living room in Filipino.
to witness dramaturgy from their homeland—camp, gratuitous and excellent. Here, the working women devote their days of rest to ABS-CBN’s weekly program of teleseryes. They set their eyes on their disciple for the week: a villain in sultry satin, rising from her white-clothed table at a media dinner event. With her mayabang
②
Arrogant in Filipino; to describe someone conceited or boastful.
demeanor, her eagle eyes burn into an inferior opponent. She spits back, “You are nothing but a second-rate, trying-hard copycat!” before throwing a splash of water into her rival’s face.
Daughters worship their conceited screen idols, their lips mouthing a gospel of snubs. She resurrects in prime time: body motioning, edges blurring; an unflinching sovereign in liquid crystal. Once again, the kontrabida lives.
✷
In KONTRA, Ilongga poet Eunice Andrada turns her attention to the kontrabida, an archetypal character situated in screen fiction. As seen across Filipino cinema and teleseryes, the kontrabida is a woman of wealth who asserts her power through wicked, dangerously immoral schemes against her rivals. I grew up watching teleseryes and witnessing these screen antagonists during weekly visits to my godparents’ house, often with my mum and ninang ③ Godmother in Filipino. prepping our family dinners. In Andrada’s Author's note, she reflects on her own memories of Filipino telenovelas: “Watching teleseryes was one of my favourite things to do with my grandmother and aunts. We were a house of women watching other women.” Accordingly, Andrada illustrates this memory in one of the book’s opening poems, ‘Sunday Kontrabida’, where she recounts the women in the family gathering by the television for their weekly chronicle of melodrama and excess. Together, they watch a supervillain who “fails to exist in high definition”, her image refracted and lo-fi.
KONTRA is split into three sections: ‘KONTRA,’ ‘OPERÁ’ and ‘BIDA’. To split the ‘kontrabida’ splays the words into independent narratives—‘kontra’, meaning ‘against’ or ‘oppose’, and ‘bida’, meaning ‘main character’ or ‘hero’. The collection’s tentpole, ‘OPERÁ’, acts as a lexical guillotine, the title of which Andrada reshapes into a verb, referencing the “opera-” in “operation”, as in “to perform a surgical operation”. In Andrada’s opera, I imagine a scalpel penetrating the nouns and suturing them back together to invent new architectures of meaning.
From her debut collection Flood Damages (2018) to her sophomore TAKE CARE (2021), what’s most striking about Andrada’s writing is the refusal to overexplain her heritage and identity as an Ilongga woman from the Philippines. As Patricia Arcilla remarks in her review of TAKE CARE ④ Patricia Arcilla, Cleaning the Body with the Body,” Sydney Review of Books, 2022, , Andrada avoids a didactic approach to poetry and subsequently resists the role of ‘tour guide’ to her readers. As a Filipino writer myself in so-called Australia, I often consider the possibility of expressing third-space culture beyond the flattening novelty of coconuts, mangos and halo-halo metaphors. In the absence of such abbreviations, Andrada speaks through the possibilities of an ‘I’ that connects us—Filipino women in particular—closer to one another; in care, intimacy and solidarity.
✷
‘KONTRA’ anchors us into narratives of watching: what it means to be looked at and gazed upon, and how it interpolates the existence of Filipino women. The type of gaze that Andrada describes is predicated upon an oppressive presence. At times, the gaze is identified unambiguously as patriarchal, which provokes perturbation and resentment among those who are gazed at. In her poem ‘Ashfield’, Andrada relates an experience during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, wherein a male neighbour surveils her through an apartment window as she runs between rooms after a shower, and as her period drips upon the carpet floor. “No law / prevented his watching”, she writes, the man’s voyeurism beyond her control.
Yet there are other times where the gaze turns on itself towards one’s own imperialist construction of vanity. In ‘National Beauty’, Andrada writes of the exhaustive beauty routines that Filipino women are subjected to when committed to western standards. Like militia trained for combat, Filipinas equip their bathrooms with an arsenal of household products that whiten their kayumanggi ⑤ Brown in Filipino; typically describing brown or tanned skin. skin while flat noses are pinched outwards to “realign / pliant cartilage”. Andrada marks her acute awareness of being perceived by her titas, who comment that her “face is still in training”. To be admired by the masses requires her to succumb to the militant culture of colonial beauty standards imported by the US.
Through this poem, I consider Andrada’s mention of “the president’s daughter”, who “preaches papaya / glutathione, diamond keratin hair treatments”. She does not specify whose daughter this is, but Imee Marcos quickly comes to mind. Imee’s father, Ferdinand Marcos, terrorised a nation with his declaration of martial law for nearly a decade between the 70s and 80s while her mother Imelda partook in the complacency of state-sanctioned violence, the proof in her bottomless collection of luxuries. When Imee graced the cover of fashion magazine Philippine Tatler in 2015 ⑥ Anne Quinto, “Imelda Marcos's daughter's cover shoot has reopened old wounds in the Philippines,” QZ, 2022, , netizens erupted in rage, her poise and glamour undermining a family legacy of torture, militance and censorship. Like her mother, Imee adorns glamour in her brutally crimson Filipiniana in an attempt to assert her nationalism and undermine her family’s history of dictatorship. The Marcos women, by definition, would fit the kontrabida type as wealthy, antagonistic women of power. However, unlike traditional screen kontrabidas, the autonomy of these women exists in tandem with violent and corrupt men; one might even observe this in the Philippines’ present Marcos-Duterte tandem today. It’s a brand of Philippine beauty built on the same cosmetic facade as the very institutions that perpetuate cycles of corruption, as such conceiving a cultural amnesia of political violence.
The centrepiece of the collection’s first section lies in the poem ‘KONTRA — BIDA’, where Andrada begins the work of bifurcating the term. Here, she traces a genealogy of on-screen kontrabidas and their off-screen counterparts. In both stanzas, each story begins with the phrase, “then there was…,” recited like Bible parables collected in litanies. The first passage recounts the chronicles of the kontrabida, her motives rooted in wickedness; from torments against family matriarchs to fatal acts of corruption and terrorism:
However, the opposing stanza ruptures any semblance of feminist fantasy with a strikethrough. Here, as if viewing a mirror image, Andrada immediately turns tack and puts forth events of gendered violence.
But Andrada doesn’t linger on these violent images for long. Other stories unfold as readers find themselves immersed by women within and beyond our reach. We recognise celebrities in the contour of their rumoured details, such as with Angelina Jolie (“the bida who played opera / star Maria Callas because she could pass as Greek”) and Chin Chin Gutierrez (“the / bida who quit showbiz to be a Carmelite nun in Italy”). We also learn about the bidas whose lives are opaquely captured, such as “the / bida who fell in love and spent her entire life being in / love” and “the bida whose whole life was ahead of her”. Among them we uncover the lives of other bidas: DJ, mummy blogger, hospice nurse, software company manager, advice columnist, licensed hypnotherapist.
When we consider the Spanish loan word for bida—‘vida’ meaning ‘life’—we can understand the bida as a character enriched and sharpened by the textures of experience. While the bida is a far cry from her fabled kontrabida, she nonetheless acts as a stand-in for the everywoman. The bida is simultaneously working-class and well-off, managerial and motherly, alive and memorialised. She endures and embraces life, her surfaces a mirrored prism of fleeting encounters, legacies immortalised through invocation. Filipinas can take comfort in the company of bidas, yearning to comfort the ones who suffer.
✷
In the second section, ‘OPERÁ’, the only part of KONTRA containing a narrative poem, Andrada again plays with a sense of duality, producing two personas in tandem with one another. The first voice unfolds a haunting lineage of a woman in the Philippines traumatised by the male abusers and rapists in her family, while the second voice details another woman’s affinity with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, a sixteenth-century Baroqué painting encountered at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Within alternating pages, Andrada juxtaposes these dual personas through forward (/) and backward (\) slashes that mark the beginning and end of each vignette. Although conventionally read to punctuate a list of options, Andrada uses the slash as a tool to further her poetics of bifurcation, notching down the barriers of time and space between the two voices as we are taken backwards and forwards. Like Judith and her avenging sword in the original Gentileschi painting, the poet wields her syntax to annihilate two histories rooted in the pain that accompanies patriarchal oppression.
Presenting itself as a lawsuit, the first voice outlines the conditions of divorce as a married woman in the Philippines where divorce remains illegal—a law rooted in the Catholic Church’s austere beliefs that baptised individuals must, without legal or human intervention, remain ‘consummated’ for eternity. This voice is segmented into litigation clauses, numbered headings and alpha-numeric sub-items, as if Andrada intends to lift the victims from the impersonal grammar of court documents and mark progression in the timeline of trauma. Meanwhile, several ‘Operás’ appear intermittently in square parenthesis, prompting readers to perform actions alongside the poems. Important here is how Andrada treats ‘Operá’ as a verb rather than a noun, the same way a Filipino speaker might add prefixes (e.g. ‘mag-’) to manipulate nouns (e.g. ‘salita’, word) into verbs (e.g. ‘magsalita’, speak). Such directives force us to work through the persona’s repression under their spouse’s control. To split the “girl wound” and “woman wound” through the re-opening of the page, for instance, motions an injury that expresses pain on the persona’s behalf.
But the most harrowing aspect of this voice is not the discussion of assault and rape per se—it’s the aftermath and in-betweens of experiences that emerge from accounts that Andrada weaves together. In a later passage in ‘OPERÁ’, the persona suddenly inserts a male pronoun, confiding that “When he was away from us, I was at my safest”. Whether this ‘he’ refers to a father, uncle, guardian or another male figure, we recognise a betrayal. Akin to a Baroqué painting, we only perceive what is illuminated through words, never knowing what hides beneath the shadows.
The second voice in ‘OPERÁ’ acknowledges this diptych as one rooted in lyrical writing. Halfway, Andrada writes that “The truth of the lyric moment / is in the execution / of the lyric moment.” One can read “lyric” and consider the Romantic traditions of the lyric form, a genre that siloes the poet into the first-person ‘I’; then there is the “execution”, a word choice seemingly prompted by Gentileschi’s avenging scene of assassination. However, I am more allured by the ambiguity of the “execution” actioned here—does she intend “execute” as to perform the lyric, or to annihilate it? Nonetheless, the persona proceeds with both:
The genius behind these articulations of queerness lies in the control of detail. The poems in this section open a refuge where readers indulge in sexuality out of self-respect. The poem ‘Our Cock’ realises this. Here, Andrada visits an adult shop with another lover to purchase a sex toy—they pick out a phallic-shaped object described humorously as “a dull miracle” that, with dignity, “stand[s] / to attention like a retriever”. Later, far away from home, she laments an erotic memory, the two lovers engaged with the shared cock:
‘BIDA’ also reckons with the kontrabida, embodying its mythos as Andrada slips into the cracks of life and into new bodies across four poems: ‘Self-Portrait of the Poet as Kontrabida,’ a vignette of Andrada in her writing habitat; ‘Get Ready With Me (Featuring Kontrabida),’ a transcript of the kontrabida’s rigorous beauty routine, à la Vogue ‘KONTRA + BIDA,’ an expression of the ‘kontra’ and ‘bida’ in dialogue with one another; and ‘Transfigurations of the Kontrabida,’ a retelling of the kontrabida that traces her every reincarnation. This reckoning manifests the villainous figure in a concentrated unfurling of short poems. We forget the kontrabida is ephemeral in her fiction, and thus fleeting—her shape must be preserved the moment she is conjured, conceived by the poet.
Of all the poems in ‘BIDA’, ‘Transfigurations of the Kontrabida’ flourishes with radiant, absorbing aplomb. With its run-on passage in couplets, it honours the archetype as infinite in her Christ-like rebirths. But even through her many resurrections, the kontrabida remains far from pious, rooted in her sin and malice to pursue her womanly autonomy. She traverses through timelines and defies death through the miracle of immortality; her spirit reigns, even in the “stained-glass light” of a flung jello piece, prompting her to “follow the iridescence” and reincarnate into a nun at a convent. Even in the most holy of places, she is ultimately sacrilegious: sneezing onto Catholic paraphernalia before leaving the convent on a pickup truck with her girlfriend.
These transfigurations perpetuate the legacy of the kontrabida, ad infinitum, though it comes to a halt when the kontrabida leaves her pickup truck and walks past a group of lovers who perform self-flagellation rituals on a hill. It ends as:
✷
In the Filipino musical drama Bituing Walang Ningning (1985), the film ends with a concert showdown between two superstars: sampaguita ⑦ A breed of jasmine flower (Jasminum sambac) in Philippine Spanish, borrowing from the Tagalog word for jasmine (sampaga). seller turned singer, Dorina Pineda (Sharon Cuneta), and conceited veteran, Lavinia Arguelles (Cherie Gil). Just after Dorina finishes her first song, she announces her resignation, no longer desiring a lifetime of ego-driven ambition and success. She sings the first half of what would mark her final performance—the titular ‘Bituing Walang Ningning’—before inviting Lavinia onstage to sing the rest with her. Then, catching a sampaguita garland thrown by one of her fellow vendors, Dorina adorns it onto her idol’s neck. Together the two sing, “I’d rather be a star without its shine / Even if it means your love will last forever.”
This emotional wallop of a coda leaves us with a cathartic image of the kontrabida and bida, face-to-face. We no longer see two women pitted against one another; instead, they share a gesture of atonement through a duet. Their voices entwine in harmony, the lyrical ballad professing an expression of love that is everlasting. Most importantly, Lavinia, our kontrabida, gets what she wants: the limelight that would catapult her into stardom
In finishing KONTRA, I arrive at the belief that we are doing the same as Dorina and Lavinia—Andrada invites us to see eye-to-eye with the kontrabida and surrender to her previously-repressed desires. I also think back to the 2006 reboot of Bituing Walang Ningning, a 104-episode teleserye with added family arcs to both women characters: it reminds me of the kontrabida’s immortalising staying power, her affluence and bratty temperament revived by a new generation of actresses. We know that the kontrabida never dies—she revives herself in new stories, her faculties forever recognised and remembered.
As a work that is inherently structured on the triptych, it’s also apt to read Andrada’s oeuvre so far as such. All three books exist in dialogue with one another which, when read together, braid a narrative thread of cultural displacement, colonial violence and racial feminism. If Flood Damages introduces themes of imperialism and identity, and TAKE CARE conducts a suffering-turned-revenge fantasy against male oppressors, then KONTRA survives to tell its story in an operatic finale, with Andrada’s lyricism extending her first-person ‘I’ into a glimmering spectre that raises its glass to Filipino women, a mirror splitting the silhouette in order to tell its tale. We can now imagine its possibilities of control over our own stories. Yes, we too can become antagonists in our desires, ravenous for love, revenge and liberation.
✷✷✷
Daughters worship their conceited screen idols, their lips mouthing a gospel of snubs. She resurrects in prime time: body motioning, edges blurring; an unflinching sovereign in liquid crystal. Once again, the kontrabida lives.
In KONTRA, Ilongga poet Eunice Andrada turns her attention to the kontrabida, an archetypal character situated in screen fiction. As seen across Filipino cinema and teleseryes, the kontrabida is a woman of wealth who asserts her power through wicked, dangerously immoral schemes against her rivals. I grew up watching teleseryes and witnessing these screen antagonists during weekly visits to my godparents’ house, often with my mum and ninang ③ Godmother in Filipino. prepping our family dinners. In Andrada’s Author's note, she reflects on her own memories of Filipino telenovelas: “Watching teleseryes was one of my favourite things to do with my grandmother and aunts. We were a house of women watching other women.” Accordingly, Andrada illustrates this memory in one of the book’s opening poems, ‘Sunday Kontrabida’, where she recounts the women in the family gathering by the television for their weekly chronicle of melodrama and excess. Together, they watch a supervillain who “fails to exist in high definition”, her image refracted and lo-fi.
KONTRA is split into three sections: ‘KONTRA,’ ‘OPERÁ’ and ‘BIDA’. To split the ‘kontrabida’ splays the words into independent narratives—‘kontra’, meaning ‘against’ or ‘oppose’, and ‘bida’, meaning ‘main character’ or ‘hero’. The collection’s tentpole, ‘OPERÁ’, acts as a lexical guillotine, the title of which Andrada reshapes into a verb, referencing the “opera-” in “operation”, as in “to perform a surgical operation”. In Andrada’s opera, I imagine a scalpel penetrating the nouns and suturing them back together to invent new architectures of meaning.
From her debut collection Flood Damages (2018) to her sophomore TAKE CARE (2021), what’s most striking about Andrada’s writing is the refusal to overexplain her heritage and identity as an Ilongga woman from the Philippines. As Patricia Arcilla remarks in her review of TAKE CARE ④ Patricia Arcilla, Cleaning the Body with the Body,” Sydney Review of Books, 2022, , Andrada avoids a didactic approach to poetry and subsequently resists the role of ‘tour guide’ to her readers. As a Filipino writer myself in so-called Australia, I often consider the possibility of expressing third-space culture beyond the flattening novelty of coconuts, mangos and halo-halo metaphors. In the absence of such abbreviations, Andrada speaks through the possibilities of an ‘I’ that connects us—Filipino women in particular—closer to one another; in care, intimacy and solidarity.
‘KONTRA’ anchors us into narratives of watching: what it means to be looked at and gazed upon, and how it interpolates the existence of Filipino women. The type of gaze that Andrada describes is predicated upon an oppressive presence. At times, the gaze is identified unambiguously as patriarchal, which provokes perturbation and resentment among those who are gazed at. In her poem ‘Ashfield’, Andrada relates an experience during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, wherein a male neighbour surveils her through an apartment window as she runs between rooms after a shower, and as her period drips upon the carpet floor. “No law / prevented his watching”, she writes, the man’s voyeurism beyond her control.
Yet there are other times where the gaze turns on itself towards one’s own imperialist construction of vanity. In ‘National Beauty’, Andrada writes of the exhaustive beauty routines that Filipino women are subjected to when committed to western standards. Like militia trained for combat, Filipinas equip their bathrooms with an arsenal of household products that whiten their kayumanggi ⑤ Brown in Filipino; typically describing brown or tanned skin. skin while flat noses are pinched outwards to “realign / pliant cartilage”. Andrada marks her acute awareness of being perceived by her titas, who comment that her “face is still in training”. To be admired by the masses requires her to succumb to the militant culture of colonial beauty standards imported by the US.
Through this poem, I consider Andrada’s mention of “the president’s daughter”, who “preaches papaya / glutathione, diamond keratin hair treatments”. She does not specify whose daughter this is, but Imee Marcos quickly comes to mind. Imee’s father, Ferdinand Marcos, terrorised a nation with his declaration of martial law for nearly a decade between the 70s and 80s while her mother Imelda partook in the complacency of state-sanctioned violence, the proof in her bottomless collection of luxuries. When Imee graced the cover of fashion magazine Philippine Tatler in 2015 ⑥ Anne Quinto, “Imelda Marcos's daughter's cover shoot has reopened old wounds in the Philippines,” QZ, 2022, , netizens erupted in rage, her poise and glamour undermining a family legacy of torture, militance and censorship. Like her mother, Imee adorns glamour in her brutally crimson Filipiniana in an attempt to assert her nationalism and undermine her family’s history of dictatorship. The Marcos women, by definition, would fit the kontrabida type as wealthy, antagonistic women of power. However, unlike traditional screen kontrabidas, the autonomy of these women exists in tandem with violent and corrupt men; one might even observe this in the Philippines’ present Marcos-Duterte tandem today. It’s a brand of Philippine beauty built on the same cosmetic facade as the very institutions that perpetuate cycles of corruption, as such conceiving a cultural amnesia of political violence.
The centrepiece of the collection’s first section lies in the poem ‘KONTRA — BIDA’, where Andrada begins the work of bifurcating the term. Here, she traces a genealogy of on-screen kontrabidas and their off-screen counterparts. In both stanzas, each story begins with the phrase, “then there was…,” recited like Bible parables collected in litanies. The first passage recounts the chronicles of the kontrabida, her motives rooted in wickedness; from torments against family matriarchs to fatal acts of corruption and terrorism:
the kontrabida who orchestratedThese litanies invoke a folkloric portrait: like word-of-mouth anecdotes, the stories in ‘KONTRA — BIDA’ deliver lived-in mythologies, as Andrada narrates fables of fantastical women who rise to positions of unlimited reckoning. They kill their enemies and prey on their victims. And if they’re not acting on evil, then we hear their origins instead through fairy tale-like narration (“the kontrabida who became a kontrabida after she swallowed a golden slug”).
her daughter’s kidnapping …
… the kontrabida who cut up her
mother’s respirator machine
[...]
the kontrabida who bribed the mayor …
… the kontrabida who exploded a bus of passengers
However, the opposing stanza ruptures any semblance of feminist fantasy with a strikethrough. Here, as if viewing a mirror image, Andrada immediately turns tack and puts forth events of gendered violence.
There was theThe redaction of ‘kontra’ and ‘actress’ indicates that agency has been robbed; that the option to seek revenge on our oppressors has been taken away, even if there remains a desire to retaliate like our fictive equals. We’re brought back into the reality of injustice. Whereas the kontrabida embraces dominion, these two bidas endure it, their fates determined by their male partners.kontrabidaactresswhose husband
locked her in a closet, then there was the bida who was
electrocuted by her boyfriend in the bathtub
But Andrada doesn’t linger on these violent images for long. Other stories unfold as readers find themselves immersed by women within and beyond our reach. We recognise celebrities in the contour of their rumoured details, such as with Angelina Jolie (“the bida who played opera / star Maria Callas because she could pass as Greek”) and Chin Chin Gutierrez (“the / bida who quit showbiz to be a Carmelite nun in Italy”). We also learn about the bidas whose lives are opaquely captured, such as “the / bida who fell in love and spent her entire life being in / love” and “the bida whose whole life was ahead of her”. Among them we uncover the lives of other bidas: DJ, mummy blogger, hospice nurse, software company manager, advice columnist, licensed hypnotherapist.
When we consider the Spanish loan word for bida—‘vida’ meaning ‘life’—we can understand the bida as a character enriched and sharpened by the textures of experience. While the bida is a far cry from her fabled kontrabida, she nonetheless acts as a stand-in for the everywoman. The bida is simultaneously working-class and well-off, managerial and motherly, alive and memorialised. She endures and embraces life, her surfaces a mirrored prism of fleeting encounters, legacies immortalised through invocation. Filipinas can take comfort in the company of bidas, yearning to comfort the ones who suffer.
In the second section, ‘OPERÁ’, the only part of KONTRA containing a narrative poem, Andrada again plays with a sense of duality, producing two personas in tandem with one another. The first voice unfolds a haunting lineage of a woman in the Philippines traumatised by the male abusers and rapists in her family, while the second voice details another woman’s affinity with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, a sixteenth-century Baroqué painting encountered at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Within alternating pages, Andrada juxtaposes these dual personas through forward (/) and backward (\) slashes that mark the beginning and end of each vignette. Although conventionally read to punctuate a list of options, Andrada uses the slash as a tool to further her poetics of bifurcation, notching down the barriers of time and space between the two voices as we are taken backwards and forwards. Like Judith and her avenging sword in the original Gentileschi painting, the poet wields her syntax to annihilate two histories rooted in the pain that accompanies patriarchal oppression.
Presenting itself as a lawsuit, the first voice outlines the conditions of divorce as a married woman in the Philippines where divorce remains illegal—a law rooted in the Catholic Church’s austere beliefs that baptised individuals must, without legal or human intervention, remain ‘consummated’ for eternity. This voice is segmented into litigation clauses, numbered headings and alpha-numeric sub-items, as if Andrada intends to lift the victims from the impersonal grammar of court documents and mark progression in the timeline of trauma. Meanwhile, several ‘Operás’ appear intermittently in square parenthesis, prompting readers to perform actions alongside the poems. Important here is how Andrada treats ‘Operá’ as a verb rather than a noun, the same way a Filipino speaker might add prefixes (e.g. ‘mag-’) to manipulate nouns (e.g. ‘salita’, word) into verbs (e.g. ‘magsalita’, speak). Such directives force us to work through the persona’s repression under their spouse’s control. To split the “girl wound” and “woman wound” through the re-opening of the page, for instance, motions an injury that expresses pain on the persona’s behalf.
But the most harrowing aspect of this voice is not the discussion of assault and rape per se—it’s the aftermath and in-betweens of experiences that emerge from accounts that Andrada weaves together. In a later passage in ‘OPERÁ’, the persona suddenly inserts a male pronoun, confiding that “When he was away from us, I was at my safest”. Whether this ‘he’ refers to a father, uncle, guardian or another male figure, we recognise a betrayal. Akin to a Baroqué painting, we only perceive what is illuminated through words, never knowing what hides beneath the shadows.
The second voice in ‘OPERÁ’ acknowledges this diptych as one rooted in lyrical writing. Halfway, Andrada writes that “The truth of the lyric moment / is in the execution / of the lyric moment.” One can read “lyric” and consider the Romantic traditions of the lyric form, a genre that siloes the poet into the first-person ‘I’; then there is the “execution”, a word choice seemingly prompted by Gentileschi’s avenging scene of assassination. However, I am more allured by the ambiguity of the “execution” actioned here—does she intend “execute” as to perform the lyric, or to annihilate it? Nonetheless, the persona proceeds with both:
I enact the lyric moment.This voice covets more than a woman’s revenge narrative in ‘OPERÁ’—she desires the company of women too. This “rupture” of the lyric releases the persona engulfed by the lyrical ‘I’ and extends itself towards an impulse of desire, thereby reaching the book’s sapphic and celestial finale, ‘BIDA’. To enter a queerer (and assertively lesbian) dimension frees us from the oppressors that interpolate one’s existence; such a space embraces the camaraderie of women as romantic, intimate and platonic love collectively challenge the status quo. Poems such as ‘Jordan’ and ‘Falling Asleep Kissing You’ tease out the poet’s affections towards women who are remembered by their senses, be it through scented skin (“fresh spritz of candied body spray trailing after you”) or arousing touches (“the supreme good of your fingers / inside me, elaborating the arc”).
[…]
I try to rupture the lyric.
I try. I rupture
the lyric.
The genius behind these articulations of queerness lies in the control of detail. The poems in this section open a refuge where readers indulge in sexuality out of self-respect. The poem ‘Our Cock’ realises this. Here, Andrada visits an adult shop with another lover to purchase a sex toy—they pick out a phallic-shaped object described humorously as “a dull miracle” that, with dignity, “stand[s] / to attention like a retriever”. Later, far away from home, she laments an erotic memory, the two lovers engaged with the shared cock:
We would have felt it then, the gravityThe mystery behind these gestures proves more sensual than graphic. We never know what exactly is being sucked, how the “phantom limb” of a cock operates between the two lovers, or even the type of sex toy used. To “crumble at the limits of attachment” is particularly rapturous, capturing what is felt within the climactic reach of an orgasm. It is simple and intense, the economy of words removing itself from connoting an explicit encounter. There is enough obscured in this scene of lesbian sex to avoid the possibility of being watched—demystifying sex between women would otherwise expose itself to objectification or voyeurism. The mystery needs to be sustained out of necessity for both women to lust without scrutiny.
of our phantom limb pulling down between our legs,
the way I once sucked, asked you if it felt good,
and we crumbled at the limits of our attachment.
‘BIDA’ also reckons with the kontrabida, embodying its mythos as Andrada slips into the cracks of life and into new bodies across four poems: ‘Self-Portrait of the Poet as Kontrabida,’ a vignette of Andrada in her writing habitat; ‘Get Ready With Me (Featuring Kontrabida),’ a transcript of the kontrabida’s rigorous beauty routine, à la Vogue ‘KONTRA + BIDA,’ an expression of the ‘kontra’ and ‘bida’ in dialogue with one another; and ‘Transfigurations of the Kontrabida,’ a retelling of the kontrabida that traces her every reincarnation. This reckoning manifests the villainous figure in a concentrated unfurling of short poems. We forget the kontrabida is ephemeral in her fiction, and thus fleeting—her shape must be preserved the moment she is conjured, conceived by the poet.
Of all the poems in ‘BIDA’, ‘Transfigurations of the Kontrabida’ flourishes with radiant, absorbing aplomb. With its run-on passage in couplets, it honours the archetype as infinite in her Christ-like rebirths. But even through her many resurrections, the kontrabida remains far from pious, rooted in her sin and malice to pursue her womanly autonomy. She traverses through timelines and defies death through the miracle of immortality; her spirit reigns, even in the “stained-glass light” of a flung jello piece, prompting her to “follow the iridescence” and reincarnate into a nun at a convent. Even in the most holy of places, she is ultimately sacrilegious: sneezing onto Catholic paraphernalia before leaving the convent on a pickup truck with her girlfriend.
These transfigurations perpetuate the legacy of the kontrabida, ad infinitum, though it comes to a halt when the kontrabida leaves her pickup truck and walks past a group of lovers who perform self-flagellation rituals on a hill. It ends as:
she clicks out of her seatbelt, sloughs her heavy garb and foldsThere is a devastation to the image—for the rebirth to continue, the lover must be abandoned. In the kontrabida’s descent into the forest, we know that she will live a thousand more lifetimes, enduring death and mongering fear with her reckless schemes, forging new fables to be retold religiously. Romance is sacrificed in this instance, her lover’s gaze forcing her to avert hers from her significant other as she journeys into her new odyssey.
deeper into the bramble of the woods until her lover stops watching.
In the Filipino musical drama Bituing Walang Ningning (1985), the film ends with a concert showdown between two superstars: sampaguita ⑦ A breed of jasmine flower (Jasminum sambac) in Philippine Spanish, borrowing from the Tagalog word for jasmine (sampaga). seller turned singer, Dorina Pineda (Sharon Cuneta), and conceited veteran, Lavinia Arguelles (Cherie Gil). Just after Dorina finishes her first song, she announces her resignation, no longer desiring a lifetime of ego-driven ambition and success. She sings the first half of what would mark her final performance—the titular ‘Bituing Walang Ningning’—before inviting Lavinia onstage to sing the rest with her. Then, catching a sampaguita garland thrown by one of her fellow vendors, Dorina adorns it onto her idol’s neck. Together the two sing, “I’d rather be a star without its shine / Even if it means your love will last forever.”
This emotional wallop of a coda leaves us with a cathartic image of the kontrabida and bida, face-to-face. We no longer see two women pitted against one another; instead, they share a gesture of atonement through a duet. Their voices entwine in harmony, the lyrical ballad professing an expression of love that is everlasting. Most importantly, Lavinia, our kontrabida, gets what she wants: the limelight that would catapult her into stardom
In finishing KONTRA, I arrive at the belief that we are doing the same as Dorina and Lavinia—Andrada invites us to see eye-to-eye with the kontrabida and surrender to her previously-repressed desires. I also think back to the 2006 reboot of Bituing Walang Ningning, a 104-episode teleserye with added family arcs to both women characters: it reminds me of the kontrabida’s immortalising staying power, her affluence and bratty temperament revived by a new generation of actresses. We know that the kontrabida never dies—she revives herself in new stories, her faculties forever recognised and remembered.
As a work that is inherently structured on the triptych, it’s also apt to read Andrada’s oeuvre so far as such. All three books exist in dialogue with one another which, when read together, braid a narrative thread of cultural displacement, colonial violence and racial feminism. If Flood Damages introduces themes of imperialism and identity, and TAKE CARE conducts a suffering-turned-revenge fantasy against male oppressors, then KONTRA survives to tell its story in an operatic finale, with Andrada’s lyricism extending her first-person ‘I’ into a glimmering spectre that raises its glass to Filipino women, a mirror splitting the silhouette in order to tell its tale. We can now imagine its possibilities of control over our own stories. Yes, we too can become antagonists in our desires, ravenous for love, revenge and liberation.
WORKS CITED
✷ Patricia Arcilla, “Cleaning the Body with the Body,” Sydney Review of Books, 2022.
✷ Anne Quinto, “Imelda Marcos’s daughter’s cover shoot has reopened old wounds in the Philippines,” QZ, 2022.
Nicole Cadelina is a writer and critic living in Sydney on unceded Dharug land. Writing across reviews, essays and creative non-fiction, her writing has appeared in Rough Cut, Kill Your Darlings and KinoTopia. She was a recipient of MIFF Critics Campus and WestWords Varuna Emerging Writers' Fellowship.