‘Kano’s’ story

EVERY TIME International Women’s Day comes around, this columnist is torn between celebrating womanhood and decrying the continuing “manifestations of gender oppression” that we see all around us.

Certainly, there is much to celebrate about being a woman, especially the gains women have won over the decades, the centuries. And yet, for every step forward women have taken, we have also had to confront the same-old, same-old. Legal barriers and moribund attitudes have served to halt us in our tracks on the road to equality, or else, as in Afghanistan, have actually reversed our steps, plunked us back to a place well behind the point where we started.

Today is a special International Women’s Day, marking 100 years since the deaths of women workers in the Triangle Shirt Factory fire sparked an angry march through the streets of New York that set off similar actions by workers around the world. Born of tragedy, International Women’s Day is a day for both celebration and protest, emblematic of the conflicted and ambivalent state of the world’s women today.

So maybe it’s only right that amid the many issues that call for discussion on this day, my thoughts turn to a documentary I saw recently that, I’m sure, leaves its audience confused, confounded, questioning and wondering.

I’ve written previously about “Kano: An American and His Harem,” written and directed by Monster Jimenez (daughter of my brother Bo and his wife Coratec who also happens to be general manager of the MMDA). Entered in the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam, “Kano” won the top prize in the First Appearance Competition and was also awarded Best Documentary in the Cinemanila International Film Festival. Monster was also recently honored by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, which was one of the institutions supporting the production of “Kano.”

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I DIDN’T get to view “Kano,” though, until last week, in a special screening that set off a month-long weekly screening at U-View at Fully Booked in Bonifacio High Street.

“Kano” tells the story of Victor Pearson, a retired American serviceman who saw action in Vietnam but who is now confined at the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa after being convicted of rape.

For decades after he decided to retire in the Philippines, moving with his first wife to a small and isolated barrio in his wife’s hometown in Negros Occidental, Pearson ran a literal harem. In a compound made up of a large main house and several smaller quarters Pearson housed many women, some of them related to one another, in numbers that ranged from about a dozen to as many as a hundred. According to the women, the Vietnam vet would regularly host parties where, aside from his women, “paid” sex workers would be invited to entertain him and his men guests. “But his women were out of bounds,” explained Monster in the “question-and-answer” exchange that followed the screening. “Only he could touch them, and only he could discipline them when they crossed the line.”

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IT WAS the “discipline,” which the older women merely shrugged off, that finally led a younger recruit to the harem to run away and report her rape and abuse, first to the parish priest and then to the local police. After police raided the Pearson compound, some of the women also volunteered to testify against the American, but by dint of monetary offers and a sense of loyalty on the part of the women, most of the witnesses recanted.

At the time “Kano” was being filmed, Pearson required the women in his extended household to visit him in the provincial jail every day, in exchange for what appears to be a daily allowance. They also took turns paying him conjugal visits. Indeed, in that small town, a monthly pension of around $3,000 goes a long way.

The women’s accounts of how they came to enter Pearson’s world and survived in it are by turns funny and shocking, ironic and sad. The older women have no excuses for their actions, and some confess to even feeling a bit of fondness and filial loyalty to Pearson. I was struck by how remarkably self-aware everyone interviewed in “Kano” was. The women make no pretense about their motives for staying loyal to the American, and Pearson himself seems entirely comfortable with buying the loyalty of his “family” members.

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“KANO” SEEMS to raise more questions than provide answers. One question foremost in our minds was: How could local officials have tolerated the goings-on in Pearson’s compound for so long? The obvious answer seems to be that these officials and prominent citizens benefited from Pearson’s largesse, as indeed the “pornographic tapes” would seem to prove.

But another angle is the willingness of the women not just to join the arrangement, but to stay in it and indeed maintain it. Save, that is, for the lone witness who managed to ignore the offers of money and the cajoling of her parents, who says she entered the compound (when she was only 11) as a house maid and was raped by the American.

In feminist discourse, it is customary to portray the female victim as an unwilling prey to a man’s power and oppression. Even when no physical or emotional force is employed, we explain away the complicity by citing poverty and how it could delude and confuse a woman into playing the part of victim. One uncomfortable sensation while watching “Kano” is the feeling that many of Pearson’s women don’t see themselves as victims, and are clear about their motives and loyalties.

Indeed, “victims” and “villains” have complex stories to tell. Monster tells us that what motivated her in the five years it took to complete “Kano” was a desire to tell a story. And the story “Kano’s” women tell is shadowed by doubts and uncomfortable truths.