The following are women who used their creativity to actively engage the society, from empowering and capacitating the marginalized sectors of their immediate communities, to laying down their lives for a higher cause.

Kerima Lorena Tariman

Writer. Warrior. Woman.

Artists are never removed from society, despite their best efforts to be distant from it. Their craft evolves from and is refined through the triumphs and tribulations of the world that moves with and around them. Art is revolution. And the artist is a revolutionary.

This embodies the life and the art of Kerima Lorena Tariman, a poet and activist born in Legazpi City, Albay. She witnessed the grayness of a society burdened with injustice and inequity and used her pen and her voice to bring fire to it.

Ka Ella lived her struggles on both the battlefields of the mind and the mud. She wrote not from the comfort and conveniences of echo chambers but from the grit and grime of endangered communities. Her life’s work is a protracted arc that chronicles an endless campaign against oppression–from the colonial imperials to the contemporary familial dynasties.

She left this world as she might have lived it, with the brilliance, warmth, and defiance of a flame from spark to ember. Artists, writers, revolutionaries never truly leave this world. The body breaks, but the spirit rises like sparks taking their place among the stars.

Dee Jai

Georgia O’Keeffe once proclaimed that she could say things with color and shapes where words are either absent or insufficient. Throughout her life, she navigated the road between her artistic career and her station at the forefront of the modern feminist movement.

That legacy continues with the emergence of young, talented, and socially-conscious artists in Bikol. One noteworthy artist is Dee Jai, an Albay-based visual artist who has become recognizable not only through her aesthetics but through her influence in social and cultural work. Her works on canvas have been translated and transmitted into other mediums and platforms, and she continues to be a prolific artist confident and secure in her visual signature and in her audience.

But she has also leveraged her influence as a creative to initiate and engage in projects that benefit society at large. When Typhoon Kristine devastated most of the Bikol Region, Dee Jai was among the first to recognize and address trauma and mental stress as critical post-disaster areas of engagement. Her art therapy sessions did much not only to draw attention from charitable elements to the plights of those impacted by the typhoon, but also to use the power of art as a platform for emotional and mental support.

The reputation cultivated through her creative prowess has become a springboard for social media engagements that directly benefited the economically and socially-impacted sectors of our society.

BidiBidi

Baao-based creative and “artepreneur” BidiBidi exalts life and love to the fullest in her art.

At the center of her creative energy is the celebration of women and their role as keepers and stewards of nature and the community. From her vivid depictions of local flowers and vegetation to her colorful, geometric, and minimalist depictions of womenfolk, BidiBidi expounds on the quality of the feminine as an ideal that permeates across all layers of life–from the immediate and corporeal to the abstract and essential.

BidiBidi’s art celebrates the community. She recognizes her creativity as a platform for empowering and capacitating the community of women as capable and masterful makers of beautiful things. She embraces innovations, understands the market, and finds effective approaches to match her brand of art with benchmarks of industry.

Her designs have been translated into platforms and merchandise that cater to the global taste, yet remain rooted and informed by hyperlocal sensibilities, experiences, and aesthetics.

BidiBidi has become a symbol for a younger generation of women-artists who seek to translate their craft into purposive projects that can potentially uplift communities.

Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis is muse and artist, all at once. She sings, dances, performs, and writes about a world in constant motion. She celebrates movement, from the layered rhythms of the natural world to the ebb and flow of social and cultural tides, to the movement of people across both geopolitical and spiritual borders and places.

Now residing in Australia, Merlinda continues to incorporate elements of her Bikolnon and Filipino heritage in her works, enriched through the eyes and experiences of an immigrant. Time and memory are the measurements of movement that permeate through her poems, short stories, and novels. “Banana Heart Summer” is an ode to memory, of a mind and a spirit that recollects the obstacles and rough patches of life from its formative to its fertile years and how the simple passion for food and cooking becomes both the compass and the vessel for navigating these gaps.

“Fish-hair Woman” is a flowing narrative. It is the flow of the river hoarding the dead without the hospitality of Styx and the comforting forgetfulness of Lethe. It is the flowing hair of the eponymous woman used to recover corpses. It is the crossing currents of lives intertwined through familial ties yet sundered by political and ideological loyalties, and by the toll of war. It is the meandering of tales as they shift from the realm of myth to the bounds of the real.

Merlinda Bobis is an oracle and orator. Her heroines, whether they be the old and wise, or the youthful and curious, mirror the insightful and insipid dimensions of our natural thoughts. Whether she writes about dystopias or memorials, she is capable of speaking to and through us about our own unspoken turmoils and tendencies in the context of a history shaped by these.

Liliosa Hilao

A speck of light always burns brightest when the night is at its darkest. During the dark years of the Martial Law era in the Philippines, Liliosa Hilao was among the first to share and shed her light.

A Bikolana born in Sorsogon, Liliosa Hilao is considered to be the first woman and first prisoner to die in detention after the series of arrests of activists by the agents of the State. The authorities ruled her death as suicide, but her remains showed evidence of abuse and torture. This was not an isolated case as those who expressed dissent against the State were subjected to harassment, incarceration, and physical and psychological harm.

Liliosa Hilao was a campus journalist who wrote insightful and critical pieces that discussed the problematic institution of martial law. She lacked the physical fortitude to participate in street protests and used the pen to speak her mind instead. A few weeks after her death at the hands of State forces, her school posthumously conferred her with her degree, and with honors.

Even as her young life was extinguished by agents of the State, her flame remained vibrant. At this point in history, the traditional image and social role of women were being challenged. The perception that women were mere housekeeps, martyrs resigned to a life of submission and glorified suffering, or objects of the male gaze were greatly criticized by activists and academics alike. Liliosa Hilao, the first woman to rise up against the injustice of the Martial Law, paved the way for succeeding generations of women of courage and mettle.

The header features a collage of images: (L) the art of BidiBidi and Dee Jai, (center) stylized depiction of Kerima Lorena Tariman and Liliosa Hilao, and (R) cropped cover art of Merlinda Bobis’ book “The Kindness of Birds.”

About the author:

DENNIS B. GONZAGA: Writer, critic, and academician. Former Humanities faculty at Ateneo de Naga University. Curator of The 416 Art Space in Naga City. Advocate for local culture. AB Political Science graduate, Ateneo de Naga University; MA Asian Studies graduate , University of the Philippines.