Whispers From The Drawers

I opened a drawer. Inside I could hear a toddler crying while his mom and dad are quarreling in the other room.

I opened another drawer and an impoverished mother asked if she had went overboard in spanking her daughter, whom she just wanted to protect.

A couple was torridly kissing inside the next drawer, until the guy simply strangled his girlfriend. The girl noticed it, but she didn’t mind it and just went on kissing.

As I opened the next drawer, a five-year old girl wakes up from her sleep. Did I disturb her? No, she felt a hand inside her panties. It was her grandfather. She shoved his hand, but returned it inside later. She enjoyed what her grandfather did to her; when she grew up, she even fell in love with him.

I couldn’t help feeling a certain eeriness as I went through all thirteen drawers in the exhibit Family Secrets/ Bones in the Tansu by artist Yoshiko Shimada. Inside every drawer was a confession: dark, sad, or weird, but above all, real-life – as what Shimada claimed in the poster.

Lining the floor of every drawer was a layered print illustration: a sheet of acetate over a cardboard, each printed with grainy, rusty images of a house, a preschooler’s droll sketch of a scenery, or a face. Each illustration resembled an old sepia photograph, or several of those fused together, as if nearly decaying, through the years of being kept hidden. The pungent smell of wood and varnish crept into my nose, unlocking a bunch of memories.

While I was “contemplating” on every drawer, lots of others seemed not affected by the mystery, poetry, and subtlety of it all. They would shriek, giggle, or make sounds of disgust, like “ew” or “ngiii”. Someone, chancing upon an interesting drawer, even called his companions over, “HOY! HALIKAYO! TINGNAN N’YO TO!” The exhibit probably is the most well received of all that have been set up in the Faculty Center this year. As a period ended, one could see students crowding around the drawers, vigorously opening them, as if looking for their lost keys.

The other’s reactions made me look at the exhibit another way. The exhibit was stripped of the romance and was degraded into nothing more than a carnival, a public display of private lives to feed people’s voyeuristic appetite. What other reaction could I have expected from those people, with soap operas, reality shows, and sensational newscast churning on their television sets? Fortunately, the poster says that through this exhibit, the audience could “examine their own lives”. The exhibit, then, has a visceral purpose. I took those words for them.

Shimada apparently devised the exhibit with maximizing the audience participation in mind. A passerby at the FC might have at first thought of the exhibit as nothing more than drab antique drawers against the wall. Or he or she might not have even thought that it was an exhibit at all. The beauty of the exhibit would only be revealed if he or she would take the time to approach the drawers and open them. The wonder, or the shock, of discovering what’s inside engages the audience. Similarly, a person can probe deeper on another’s life, secrets and all, if he or she would take the time.

The world is shifting to an individualistic culture, but we Filipinos still value the company of others, especially that of our family. The family, as the innermost circle in our sphere of the intimate, serves as our support when conflicts arise from the outer circles. However, it also could be the most oppressive institution of social control. Thus, we bolt its dark secrets inside the baul of silence – a chest that has been handed down through generations as an heirloom that we cannot simply throw away with its smelly, monstrous contents. So when we hear or smell of secrets from other families, we revel on the gossip about them, to conceal the paranoia of having our own secrets themselves revealed. The exhibit made us wary, even for a while, of our own family secrets, our own bones in the tansu.

Beside the drawers was a booth enclosed in purple curtain. A chair and a desk, complete with notepads, pens, and a study lamp, stood inside. “Unload your own secrets here,” Shimada invited the audience. The guidelines on the poster remind those who would participate to avoid writing anything that could identify them. Nearby was a locked chest where the secrets would be dropped, through the slit on top. Once there was a girl who accepted the invitation. “Hoy, nobela na yata ‘yang sinusulat mo, a,” her companions kidded her.

As for me, I didn’t even think of writing my own family’s secrets. I tend to be obsessive-compulsive, and I don’t keep my secrets in drawers.