A room of one's own

A room of one's own


Updated 05:12am (Mla time) Jan 16, 2005
By Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A1 of the January 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


FOR my 50th birthday (there, I've admitted it in public!), my sweet Tita Chul, youngest sister of my Papa, gifted me with wine, a breadbasket and a cheese board and an offering of books from other people. One book, "Women of Tammuz," was from novelist Azucena Grajo Uranza, a distant relative of ours who completed her tetralogy of novels on Philippine history with this volume. Three other books came as a packet "from a fan," as Tita Chul mysteriously put it. One of them came tightly wrapped in durable paper with the cryptic inscription: "An old book on Feminism..."

I never got the "fan's" identity from my aunt, but the book on feminism turned out to be a copy of "Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings," edited by Miriam Schneir (Vintage Books, 1972).

The book contains essays, fiction, memoirs and letters by "the major feminist writers," including several men; and it shows a bias toward American writers and activists. An exception proved to be Virginia Woolf, who was British, and was represented in the book by her essay "A Room of One's Own." I have not read the essay in full before, though I was familiar with its most famous line: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

I felt drawn to the essay, the final selection in the book, because, of course, I am a woman writer-but only of opinion and not of fiction-and also because I have recently been gifted with a room of my own.


* * *

WE call the room my "office," salvaged from our garage which used to be a storeroom for all sorts of household junk, and which now houses my "working" books (for lack of space, the ones my family reads for pleasure have been banished to another corner of our home), my formerly helter-skelter files, my very own wooden desk and all the technology a writer in this day and age needs or thinks she needs: fax machine, printer, scanner and laptop.

I have always loved those scenes in mystery thrillers, where a detective enters a victim's or suspect's home and tries to discern the personality, passions and perversities of the person from the titles on the book shelves. Just now, gazing at my (for now) orderly row of bookshelves crammed with books, I wonder what conclusions a stranger would draw from the titles displayed. Of course, there are books on my abiding passions: the women's movement, feminism, reproductive health, children, journalism. But there are also books on other interests: history, travel, literature and a boxed set of writings on sex called, of course, "The Sex Box."

What sort of woman do my books say I am? That I am a feminist, journalist, wife and mother. With an interest in history and literature. Who travels a lot. And who enjoys sex (or at least reading about it!). At 50, one can't ask for a better summation of one's life so far, right?


* * *

BUT my family and friends have not spared this "room of my own" from their commentary.

"Are you going to run for barangay chairman?" relatives wanted to know. They then drew up scenarios of our neighbors' queuing before my door, with battered women sobbing into my laptop, begging for help. Well, I do get my share of sob stories, but that's not why I got this room.

The reason, if you must know, is that my work as a columnist, particularly the constant flow of paper that accompanies it, had long overstepped the invisible boundaries of my workspace in the conjugal bedroom. I had a huge desk and generous counterspace, not to mention cabinets to hold my books and files. But every inch of available space have been colonized by papers that had flitted in like errant pigeons each time I would return from a conference, or pass by the Inquirer to pick up my mail.

This room then is as much banishment as shelter. We needed a place for the flocks of paper to roost in, so the bedroom could return to its original function as a place for rest, recreation and escape from the workday world.

But in this place of banishment, I also harbor hopes of generating not just reams of paper-press releases, letters, newsletters, research studies, newspaper clippings that constitute the basis for much of my material-but real fruits of honest labor. In this place of quiet and order (at least, for now), the writer in me hopes words will come with ease and felicity. It is space and silence I crave, not more public involvement and a queue of supplicants!


* * *

IT is not just space and freedom, and material security that Virginia Woolf meant when she issued her famous dictum. I would like to believe that her prescription for women writers also called for quiet and introspection, the luxury of shutting off the world from time to time, and the privilege of putting one's art, or work, or vocation, before anything else, including family, without being assailed by guilt or self-loathing.

As Woolf put it: "...if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves;...if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come..."

A journalist is trained to think and write amid any number of distractions, even falling bombs. But there comes a time when quiet -- even if only in one's mind -- becomes necessary for creation. And a room of one's own greatly helps create that state of quiet and peace.