The Portable Dominatrix

Sunday, March 7, 2021



When I think of all the Jessica Zafra pieces I loved and admired and stolen ( as in Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist) over the years, it’s a disappointment that I haven’t written a decent piece about her. Of course, this is not an assurance that this will be decent because decency is overrated. 
 
My apologies. Deep, seething apologies. 
 
Let me begin by saying that I am not worthy to write about her. And even if I already am a published writer myself, has authored a collection of short pieces/essays which admittedly have tinges of her reverb and verbs, I am inadequate and I bask at my inadequateness. In a way, I love that I haven’t tried ( up until today where I berated myself to high heavens) because I know that I am not opening a threshold of pent-up frustration and wretched failures. Writing about a personal idol is something I haven’t attempted for as long as I started transferring all the swirling thoughts in my head to a metaphysical form. The words simply won’t materialize to my liking, the ideas sucky and hazy like caught inside a smoking area where smokers puffed and huffed at the same time. Here’s a caveat: I can still do better than this in a hundred years. At least, I have inscribed this here for the record: I am going to write a better Jessica Zafra essay.  I am going to write a better Jessica Zafra essay. I am going to write a better Jessica Zafra essay. Repeat and rinse. 
 
But in the celebration of #Twisted25- a collection of the crème de la crème think pieces off her iconic Twisted books, I simply have to even if it kills me, even if the attempt thinks that I tried too hard.
 
My first introduction to Jessica was through my English teacher back in high school. I was a voracious reader then ( I like to think I still am now but the Internet vaporizes it for me, darn it) and so he thought that I might enjoy her. I judged the book by its cover and as if caught by a whiff of strong, awful smell, probably of distaste ( you have to forgive me for my ignorance but I grew up reading Sweet Valley and Nancy Drew so the cover did not thrill me), didn’t even bother reading the blurb so instead of burying it to my face with a flashlight and heavy mattress the way you saw it in the movies where a tween sneaks reading way past his bedtime, I buried the book, next to historical romances of Cherokee Indians where the covers’ skinship is way too graphic for my age, and not to return to actually reading it until my teacher asked me his copy. Which I probably returned in its most haphazard state: much dogeared, much dirtied, much halfway folded. I was even tempted to engrave copious footnotes even if I don’t how footnotes work at that time. He knew that I loved it because I dramatically feigned a straight face when I should be teeming with embarrassment from ever returning a book which appeared as if the soul has been sucked out of it. I might have quipped a discreet apology and still managed to ask if he still has more Jessica Zafra. 
 
So here’s an oblique retelling of the oral history of my prodigious regret that I am still amending up to this day: by reading all of her published pieces and absorbing all the stings and lashes and whips that I inflict upon myself for ignoring her for the first time when her book Twisted 3: Planet of the Twisted was introduced to me. I even had it signed by her years after my good friend gifted me a nondiscount copy of the same book that I wore out like a favorite jeans. 





For Ryan acisseJ arfaZ. The note read. Her name written in reverse, so uniquely Zafraesque, in distinctive violet ink that still appears to be freshly signed as if she just had her book launch yesterday in a post-pandemic Manila and I was weeping to finally be meeting a writer to whom my future articles will carry a smidgen of her voice interloping with sentences, gallivanting with the internal narrative arcs, and reinvigorating dead-end paragraphs with wit, vivacity, and bravura. Not that my essays have the trifecta covered because I am not her but if at least if one of my essays that you read has that effect on you, then you have Jessica Zafra to thank for.
 
Planet of the Twisted has 7 chapters or parts or loops of crazy-cool which to think about now is a tour de force akin to movies that she tried not to despise. She never minces her words whether she reviewed all of the movies and collectively titled them as: Sometimes They Just Suck or speechified her frustrations having to dwell in the place that we call home in I Live Here. And as a disciple to her cult following, I found myself agreeing as if under a karmic trance to all that she had chosen as subjects. Whether it be the horrible sad plights of fairy tales’ antagonists in ‘Tales from the Sisters Grimm’ or the astrology as read by someone under the influence in ‘Horrible Horoscopes’ or the dissection of human intelligence in Evolution… or Moronization?. 
 
I am always the proverbial reader who laughs out loud when a book is uproariously funny. If, back in the days, one of you thought I’ve gone insane because I sniggered alone and smiled that may have the Cheshire cat meowing in recognition, I just hope you had the decency to check whether I was clutching this book or any of her books that I collected over the years looking for stray copies in the Filipiniana section of National Book Store. If being crazy is attributive to having understood the acerbic observations that she repletes on the pages because it made you snicker out loud and people obsessed with assigning labels start to brand you as such, then call me the crazy gay-man who rubs his nose with a book, with dark-rimmed spectacles, and with strong urge to opine. I’ll always take it over a crazy ‘man’ who rubs his member and dry hump a pole, with dark sunglasses to cover his bloodshot eyes and with an even stronger urge to sow what it can in brute force. 
 
Sorry about the burst of paroxysm but this is me justifying that reading her many celebrated essays turned me into being hypercritical of issues that have marred and derailed this daily existence. We wish we could turn them into something riveting, something unapologetic, something less uneventful so we can distill this infuriation into excellent pieces that people still rave after 25 years or more. 




 

That’s the yielding power of Jessica Zafra. She opens your eyes to dark, grim realities, suspends your disbelief of the everyday absurdities, and turns you into a cackling, messy but well-read, well-informed, and well-versed dominatrix in-training. 





Xoxo, 



Credits: 


Collage Art: Nichi app

Jessica Zafra image: Anvil website

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