Eunice Andrada: a note on KONTRA

Multi-award-winning Filipina-Australian poet Eunice Andrada  reflects on KONTRA (1 October 2025), a collection that tests the tightrope between ‘feminine’ goodness and deviance, desire and refusal, reverence and repulsion.

After the bare vulnerability of my second book TAKE CARE, I wanted to explore writing from persona to see how my poetics would shift if the speaker of my poems was very different to me. When one of my favourite actresses Cherie Gil died in 2022, I found myself returning to the figure of the kontrabida – the villainess of Filipino teleseryes – whom Gil embodied with such ferocity and glamour. Watching teleseryes was one of my favourite things to do with my grandmother and aunts. We were a house of women watching other women. There was the bida, the main character, then her counterpart the kontrabida, together on screen each night.

As a child, I was always more drawn to the kontrabida than the heroine. The kontrabida was ornamented and magnetic – everything the women around me, widowed, separated from their husbands, and struggling, couldn’t be. But the kontrabida was always presented in a one-dimensional manner, with her interests rooted in attaining a man’s love. And similar to stage operas, the fate of the kontrabida is set among limited possibilities: she doesn’t get what she wants and is humiliated, or she gets what she wants and then she is murdered or commits suicide by the end. Her desire always leads to punishment. It was years of watching actresses like Cherie Gil play a fiery character in a teleserye, then die in the finale, then come back reincarnated in another role, only to be punished once more, stuck in a dead-end cycle.

I’ve since been thinking about the kontrabida and thinking alongside her. In my head, it was a back and forth between her and I – what does she think about beauty, desire, romance, lineage, power, privilege, wrongness, being watched, her own repressed queerness? What do I think about these things?

The kontrabida always arrives fully formed, without a backstory. I couldn’t find out what she thought by going off the information that was presented through teleserye storylines. Through poems that oscillate between her and I, I wanted to piece together her lineage, and in doing so, look at my own. I was thinking about my blood lineage and my poetic lineage, the women who have hurt me and healed me, and the poets who shaped me. I’m forever changed from getting the chance to work with writer, performer, and scholar Merlinda Bobis, whose work has shaped me since I was a young poet. Over many months, we talked about these poems and what it means to be a Filipina poet writing and being read on this continent.

KONTRA is, in many ways, a surgical operation on lineage, on language, on desire. This project engages the canon I grew up with – the kontrabida as she exists in Filipino media and her cultural equivalents across the world: women punished for wanting. It is also a reflection on what it means to work with and within language as a Filipina writer. A contribution, perhaps, to an ongoing lineage in the Filipina poetics of refusal. To KONTRA is to oppose. To KONTRA is to refuse the injustices of the present. TO KONTRA is to work towards another future.

KONTRA is, in many ways, a surgical operation on lineage, on language, on desire.