Feelings
Paint the pain away
By Emmanuelle
You have heard of how Ina Foundation works. I have seen the Ina Foundation at work.
This is an extraordinary bonding of women whose sole requirement for membership – one has to have lost a child – I would not even dare to contemplate on. One would rather join others who celebrate having borne or adopted or saved a child. One would rather bond with others forever in joy than in sorrow. That is, if one has the liberty of choices, and if one does not have to deal with a predictably unpredictable God. And fate.
Like homing bees, the members would travel from all over – singly or in flock – to attend to an Inang Naulila ng Anak. They keep in touch with each other – landline or cellular – to inform, to remind, to give directions, to fix rotating schedules. They are needed; they take heed. This time, the grief is not their own and for their own, but the mourning still goes on. “I have been here before, I have gone on since; I will be here for you, we will go from here together.” The wounded, still-to-heal members of the female specie are tending to the wounding, far-from-healing.
In Bulacan, Bulacan, INA Precy presides over her husband’s wake. On his first term as the town’s mayor, he finally succumbed to cancer just a year after their healthy 6-footer daughter died in the USA from an undetermined cause. As condoling INA Emma Chan embraces Precy, an undefinable something cross over from Ina to Ina. The breath of a sigh, the brush of a touch. Eyes that dim, then shut, then blink anew to speak in silence of feelings beyond words. And a strength is renewed – a strength that had seemingly exhausted itself before with the struggle to survive a previous grief. It is sucked out from an Ina, pours forth, and attaches itself to another Ina. “My strength is yours; take it while you gather yours.”
I leave them alone, but alone they are not; theirs is a sisterhood to bind the suddenly unbound. I turn my attention to someone whom I had already taken note of – in a roomful of women, this someone stands out like a very sore thumb. This someone is a he, and he is watching over the INA women very unlike a predator hawk, but more like a protective, possessive mother hen watching over its chicks. A little smile, so out of place here, never leaves his lips.
He, too, had taken note of me. He offers me a seat beside him.
“I take it you are not the psychologist.”
“Not really, but sort of. I am their painting instructor, Jefrey Consumo. These women are my protTgTes. I teach them to paint their pain away.”
We discussed the different manners of painting I am more familiar with: realism, where paintings of everyday living appear even more like themselves than they actually are; impressionism, to which what is important is the impression an object makes on the painter’s eye; expressionism, where impression of how an object looks to the eye is not important, but how the painter himself feels about it; surrealism, that which depicts a world of strange dreams.
“So, what style works best for the Ina(s)? To paint their pain away?”
“Surrealism, as of Pablo Picasso’s.” Picasso is known for crisscrossing his art from abstraction to distortion, so variable, so inconsistent in his manners of painting and in many of them, so violent. I raise an eyebrow. He sees the question before it is asked.
“Not that period of Picasso’s life.” Ah, he must have meant Picasso’s Blue Period and Rose Period during his teens, named from the dominant blue and rose colors he mostly used to paint lonely and unhappy people, their sad faces in contrast with their gay costumes. And also late in his life, when he drew simple outlines of a mother and her child or bathers or a boy and a girl together, using only flat colors, and a touch that was tender and gentle.
“These women need to express the pain and the anger in their hearts, yet they feel they must retain or somehow bring back some semblance of order and calm and beauty into a life rendered upside-down by their loss.” He points with his eyes to Gina de Venecia. “She will be a great artist yet.” And to Precy, “One of her paintings is on the wall of the late Mayor’s office.” He presses his lips firmly, raises his jaws determinedly. We spend the rest of the time with more talks about the latent talent each of the INA members have.
We are so engrossed the Ina(s) from Manila and the far south leaves with me in tow.
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