Let history set the date: today is the 2006 first-ever roundtable discussion between the Mariano Marcos State University System thru its Board of Regents and the University of Hawaii Manoa's Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program. The discussion is centered on two things: the resistance of the onslaught of hegemonizing forces that inaugurate the death of Ilokoness and Amiananness, and the reclaining of the Ilokano and Amianan sense of self, others, and community in a concerted, communal effort to transcent the homogenizing power of a globalized, internationalized, and nationalized--and therefore, naturalized--cultures that make it certain that minority because minoritized cultures do not have the right to exist and survive and live on.
The discussion was worth it, with minds and men and women in their best understanding of what missioning and visioning and goal-setting is all about.
Maituloyto, apo....
Ti Taltalanggutangen ti Tangatang iti Tantalus
Didigra ti dimteng iti alingget ti derraas iti Tantalus. Di pay bimmara ti patongko idi maysa dakes a damag ti nangdusa iti Oahu iti maysa nga aldaw. Mano a biag ti nayatang iti altar ti panagkibor ti utek, ti pannakapukar iti simbeng, iti kinaawan iti panangutob-nakem? Nakakaskas-ang a pasamak, nakasasaem--ken mairaman ditoy dagiti imigrante a kas kaniak.
Kastoy ti pakasaritaanna:
Kastoy ti pakasaritaanna:
Ti Arasaas ti Waig iti Manoa
Kadagiti naglabas ng aldaw, inkarik manen iti bagik: ti inaldaw-aldaw a panagtaraytaray ken panagpagnapagna kas pangar-artiok iti lasag a nabannog, iti nakem a napuyatan, iti isip a dandanin aglusdoy gapu iti kaadu ti tamingen. Saan a kas karina ti agbalin a maysa a bato a tulid a tulid iti daga a nakaipalpalladawan. Nangruna ta iti daytoy baro nga obligasionko ket obligasion nga utangko kadagiti sumaruno a henerasion ni kina-Ilokano.
Mariknak ti rikna nga umuk-ukuok kada Jun Alupay, Elinor Alupay, Tito Tugade, Sinamar Tabin, Cris Inay, ken Loring Tabin: daytay rikna a panagagawa tapno iti kasta ket masarkedan dagitoy a pannubok ti panagidaulo tapno iti kasta ket mariing manen dagiti nakem dagiti kakailian a nakalipaten wenno agdudungsan wenno ingkisap a nangtallikuden iti kina-Ilokanoda. Adu dagiti kakastoy kadagiti ili a nakaipalpalladawanda, ket iti Amerika, aglalaok ditan dagiti karakter iti kastoy a dramaturhia ti kinaexilo.
Adda dita ti estoria ti maysa a bakbaketan nga awan nakemna a, kalpasan a nairuarna ti kinasitisenna ket binalbaliwanna metten piman ti kinaasinnona. Idi ket naasawaan nga Ulep kano ti kinataona; itan, saanen, ta maysan isuna a Madam McCloud. Anian!
Adu pay nga estoria. Agsasamusam a kinanakem ken agsasamusam met a kinaawan-nakem. No makangngegka iti manangisalakan nga estoria, punasam a sililimed ti igid ti matam ta maluyaanka.
Idi kalman, kinasasaok iti telepono ti maysa kadagiti maipagpannakkel ti puli a nobelista a nabayag a nagbayanggudaw iti Amerika, nagtawataw a di nangibati kadagiti uray man laeng koma manglimlimo a tugot a pagilasinan no sadinno a lubong ti nakakitaanna iti ungto ti bullalayaw. Dekadekada a nagawan a kunam la ko maysa nga asuk ti salamangkero nga iti apagapaman ket agbalin daytoy nga ulep nga itayab ti angin kadagiti pantok dagiti bantay ket dimonton makita. Kasta nga aramid ti ibatbati daytoy a nobelista iti pakasaritaan ti literatura Ilokana. Kasla maysa a tudo a dumteng kadgiti kalgaw a saan koma a dumteng iti inna itataud manen, Maysa a narungsot ken napinget a tudo--saan nga arbis, saan nga arimukamok, saan bisbisibis laeng--no di ket maysa a tudo mangdalus kadagiti rugit dagiti mannurat nga aginsusurat, dagiti mannurat a mannurog, dagiti mannurat a mannurot--dagitay man mannurat a nakasurat laeng iti maysa-dua a singguarding nga obrada ket kunam laengen no kasla .
Ngem saan a daytoy ti punto ti sursuratek ita: ti punto ket daytoy a tao ket agingga ita ket dina pay laeng mairusok nga ingato ti imana tapno agsapa iti pannakipagilina iti pagilian a nabayagen a nangadaptar kenkuana. "Agibit ti pusok," kunana. Adda tigerger iti bosesna iti ungto iti linia.
"Saan a siak ti immuna a nakangngegak iti kasta," kinunak, saan a kas panangtubeng iti kaririknana no di ket pananganamong nga adu pay laeng dagiti kadaraan a di makaaklon a tallikudanda maminpinsan ti ili a namunganayanda.
Immangesak iti nauneg.
Iti panunotko ket dagiti agsasalisal a kapampanunotan maipapan iti kinaasinno, iti agdama, ken iti masakbayan dagiti amin nga exilo a pakairamanakon ita.
Nag-klik ti ungto ti linia ket ad-adda manen a tinagikukuanak ti agsisinnanggol nga idea nga impasngay ti ipapanaw a dimo masinunuo no agsublika pay. Iti kadaanan a kapampanunotan dagiti Ilokano, nasin-aw ti maysa a kananakem kadagiti amin a pumanaw: agkawilida amin.
Pumanawak ngem agkawiliak, kunada, ti balikas mismo a nagtaudan ti nagan ti pangamaan a naggapuak.
Pumanaw dagiti rumbeng a pumanaw ngem agkarida nga agsublida tapno iti panagsublida--iti panagkawilida--salaysayendanto nga ibuksilan ti linas ti pakasaritaan ti padasda a nagtalawataw, nagkalkallautang, pimmanaw.
Masirmatak ita ti sibibiag a ladawan daytoy a seremonia ti panagsalaysay: adda ti agsalsalaysay--ti tao a nagkawili--iti temtem wenno puor a paginuduan no kasta a dumteng ti lamiis, palikawkawan isuna dagiti dumngeg. Palikawkawan met ti agsalsalaysay ken ti masalsalaysayan ti apuy ket sadiay, manipud iti apuy adda baro nga apuy a mapartuat--ti apuy ti mawarwar a pakasaritaan ni nagkawili, ti apuy a mangbuksil iti baro a sursuro maipapan iti umno ken umiso a panagbiag, daytay panagbiag nga addaan iti urnos, talinaay, kinalinteg. Manipud iti temtem wenno puor--sadiay nga aggubbuay daigiti riwriw a derrep ken darang a mangtagikua kadagiti agkabannuag tapno surotenda met ti dana ti panagkawili--ti ipapanaw a panagsubli met laeng.
Amin dagitoy nga imahe ket imulak iti isipko. Biagek iti nakemko, pagrutingek, pagrangpayaek. Masapulko ti pakasaritaan tapno makasursuroak kadagiti adal nga ilemlemmengna, dagiti adal a para laeng kadagiti sindadaan a manglukat kadagiti kananakemda, dagiti adal a para laeng kadagiti markado, kadagiti agregget, kadagiti mayat a masursuruan.
Ita a malem, alaek ti sapatosko, agpellesak a para iti sagrado a darikmat ti panagwatiwat, darikmat nga inkarik nga idatonko iti bagik manipud ita nga aldaw. Kayatko a masaksian ti apuy ti panagsalaysay dagiti agkawili, dagiti agsubli iti ili iti nairanta a panawen.
Alawek ti riknak ket rugiak ti agtaraytaray. Mangngegko ti orasion dagiti billit iti Mailey Way. Agpakannawanak iti East-West Road ket surnadak ti arasaas ti waig iti Manoa. Iti musika a gubuayen ti agay-ayus a danum, isawangko ti orasion ti panagkawili dagiti amin a pimmanaw.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nob 25/06
Mariknak ti rikna nga umuk-ukuok kada Jun Alupay, Elinor Alupay, Tito Tugade, Sinamar Tabin, Cris Inay, ken Loring Tabin: daytay rikna a panagagawa tapno iti kasta ket masarkedan dagitoy a pannubok ti panagidaulo tapno iti kasta ket mariing manen dagiti nakem dagiti kakailian a nakalipaten wenno agdudungsan wenno ingkisap a nangtallikuden iti kina-Ilokanoda. Adu dagiti kakastoy kadagiti ili a nakaipalpalladawanda, ket iti Amerika, aglalaok ditan dagiti karakter iti kastoy a dramaturhia ti kinaexilo.
Adda dita ti estoria ti maysa a bakbaketan nga awan nakemna a, kalpasan a nairuarna ti kinasitisenna ket binalbaliwanna metten piman ti kinaasinnona. Idi ket naasawaan nga Ulep kano ti kinataona; itan, saanen, ta maysan isuna a Madam McCloud. Anian!
Adu pay nga estoria. Agsasamusam a kinanakem ken agsasamusam met a kinaawan-nakem. No makangngegka iti manangisalakan nga estoria, punasam a sililimed ti igid ti matam ta maluyaanka.
Idi kalman, kinasasaok iti telepono ti maysa kadagiti maipagpannakkel ti puli a nobelista a nabayag a nagbayanggudaw iti Amerika, nagtawataw a di nangibati kadagiti uray man laeng koma manglimlimo a tugot a pagilasinan no sadinno a lubong ti nakakitaanna iti ungto ti bullalayaw. Dekadekada a nagawan a kunam la ko maysa nga asuk ti salamangkero nga iti apagapaman ket agbalin daytoy nga ulep nga itayab ti angin kadagiti pantok dagiti bantay ket dimonton makita. Kasta nga aramid ti ibatbati daytoy a nobelista iti pakasaritaan ti literatura Ilokana. Kasla maysa a tudo a dumteng kadgiti kalgaw a saan koma a dumteng iti inna itataud manen, Maysa a narungsot ken napinget a tudo--saan nga arbis, saan nga arimukamok, saan bisbisibis laeng--no di ket maysa a tudo mangdalus kadagiti rugit dagiti mannurat nga aginsusurat, dagiti mannurat a mannurog, dagiti mannurat a mannurot--dagitay man mannurat a nakasurat laeng iti maysa-dua a singguarding nga obrada ket kunam laengen no kasla .
Ngem saan a daytoy ti punto ti sursuratek ita: ti punto ket daytoy a tao ket agingga ita ket dina pay laeng mairusok nga ingato ti imana tapno agsapa iti pannakipagilina iti pagilian a nabayagen a nangadaptar kenkuana. "Agibit ti pusok," kunana. Adda tigerger iti bosesna iti ungto iti linia.
"Saan a siak ti immuna a nakangngegak iti kasta," kinunak, saan a kas panangtubeng iti kaririknana no di ket pananganamong nga adu pay laeng dagiti kadaraan a di makaaklon a tallikudanda maminpinsan ti ili a namunganayanda.
Immangesak iti nauneg.
Iti panunotko ket dagiti agsasalisal a kapampanunotan maipapan iti kinaasinno, iti agdama, ken iti masakbayan dagiti amin nga exilo a pakairamanakon ita.
Nag-klik ti ungto ti linia ket ad-adda manen a tinagikukuanak ti agsisinnanggol nga idea nga impasngay ti ipapanaw a dimo masinunuo no agsublika pay. Iti kadaanan a kapampanunotan dagiti Ilokano, nasin-aw ti maysa a kananakem kadagiti amin a pumanaw: agkawilida amin.
Pumanawak ngem agkawiliak, kunada, ti balikas mismo a nagtaudan ti nagan ti pangamaan a naggapuak.
Pumanaw dagiti rumbeng a pumanaw ngem agkarida nga agsublida tapno iti panagsublida--iti panagkawilida--salaysayendanto nga ibuksilan ti linas ti pakasaritaan ti padasda a nagtalawataw, nagkalkallautang, pimmanaw.
Masirmatak ita ti sibibiag a ladawan daytoy a seremonia ti panagsalaysay: adda ti agsalsalaysay--ti tao a nagkawili--iti temtem wenno puor a paginuduan no kasta a dumteng ti lamiis, palikawkawan isuna dagiti dumngeg. Palikawkawan met ti agsalsalaysay ken ti masalsalaysayan ti apuy ket sadiay, manipud iti apuy adda baro nga apuy a mapartuat--ti apuy ti mawarwar a pakasaritaan ni nagkawili, ti apuy a mangbuksil iti baro a sursuro maipapan iti umno ken umiso a panagbiag, daytay panagbiag nga addaan iti urnos, talinaay, kinalinteg. Manipud iti temtem wenno puor--sadiay nga aggubbuay daigiti riwriw a derrep ken darang a mangtagikua kadagiti agkabannuag tapno surotenda met ti dana ti panagkawili--ti ipapanaw a panagsubli met laeng.
Amin dagitoy nga imahe ket imulak iti isipko. Biagek iti nakemko, pagrutingek, pagrangpayaek. Masapulko ti pakasaritaan tapno makasursuroak kadagiti adal nga ilemlemmengna, dagiti adal a para laeng kadagiti sindadaan a manglukat kadagiti kananakemda, dagiti adal a para laeng kadagiti markado, kadagiti agregget, kadagiti mayat a masursuruan.
Ita a malem, alaek ti sapatosko, agpellesak a para iti sagrado a darikmat ti panagwatiwat, darikmat nga inkarik nga idatonko iti bagik manipud ita nga aldaw. Kayatko a masaksian ti apuy ti panagsalaysay dagiti agkawili, dagiti agsubli iti ili iti nairanta a panawen.
Alawek ti riknak ket rugiak ti agtaraytaray. Mangngegko ti orasion dagiti billit iti Mailey Way. Agpakannawanak iti East-West Road ket surnadak ti arasaas ti waig iti Manoa. Iti musika a gubuayen ti agay-ayus a danum, isawangko ti orasion ti panagkawili dagiti amin a pimmanaw.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nob 25/06
An Exile's Post-Thanksgiving Languor
So many poems get into my head these days, so many metaphors I do not understand because they are as ambiguous as my sense of emptiness on thanksgiving day. I think of thanksgiving as some remnant of the Peregrine Days, when people were kinder and more attuned to the earth and to the universe--and to themselves. I think of the earthy metaphors here: of rain raining down on the green grass, of top soils coming fown from the mountains to fertilize the valleys, of a picture perfect scene out of an early morning of crystal dew at the tip of a rose bud.
I heave a sigh, finding in the sigh the healing that I need. I heave some more.
I have gone through four thanksgivings in the United States, practically all on my own, avoiding as much as I can any form of a crowd. Holidays in the land of exiles are all oxymoronic to me: they do not make sense because I cannot understand how an exile has to have a holiday. Or I refuse to understand, this refusal a resistance, this resistance an insistence on the right of all exiles to be by themselves during holidays like this thanksgiving day yesterday.
On thanksgiving day, I chose to be alone, leaving the house before lunch after having stuffed myself with the obligatory breakfast that reminded me of home: sliced fresh tomatoes and a couple of newly fried smoked Indian mackarel.
I ate with my hands, imaginging that the rite of eating is held with grace and gusto in my humble home in Marikina, the home I remember most, the home I know so well, with the living memories of children growing up and knowing only that home as well.
There is that smoked fish because the sister I live with knows I hate meat--or I avoid it and so each morning, she tries to look for leaves or fish or anything that she thinks would win me back and make me sit down at her dining table. Otherwise, off I run to beat the horrendous traffic that is twin to H-1 or H-3, the two freeways I need to navigate each day to get to work.
The Marikina home is a geography of joy--and now also a geography of sacrifices. There, the memories are intact, solid, ever-fresh, etched in stone.
I remember that the oldest of the three children remembers the Apartment D where we lived for some months before we moved to our Marikina home. Then again, our Marikina home is where he grew up and where he brought his girlfriend so we would get to formally know her. I remember how well he authoritatively told the tricycle drivers where we would go home to when he was just three or so: Sunnyville 2, po, mama.
This Marikina home, a humble abode of love and longing, is one of beautiful memories of parenthood: how the newspaper whacking had to be called for several times when hard-headedness stood in the way of their reasonableness, and how, as soon as the children were grown, would recall the same event with derision and insult and triumph as if the whacking father were a Mr Bean doing the unncessary and the idiotic. For them, I was Mr Bean incarnate, with all the funny stupidity and lousiness of that TV character on Skycable. This is the home that we all remember and which, in the four thanksgiving holidays that I have had the chance to celebrate in this country, I would always go back to, in memory as well as in speech, thanksgiving or no thanksgiving day.
Yesterday, I just sat down, like a Zen monk in all the consciousness of the universe I could muster.
No thoughts, wayward or otherwise, just that act of letting go, of allowing the energy of the universe to come flow through me, and releasing that same energy I have got to the wind, to the trees, to the young evening that was my witness to what, indeed, thanksgiving meant to an absent father like me.
Or an absent family, if I had to be kinder to myself, but the family's absence more of the immigration requirement to wait for the petition to be approved, go through the process of waiting for the visa to come about, and pray that sooner or later, all things will fall in place as planned.
Or I would read and read and take down notes, reminding myself that I have to write two talks for next week's activities, one a joint administrator's conference between the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the Mariano Marcos State University, and a roundtable between the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the university and the MMSU-Philippine delegation.
I took down notes, mentally planning what to say, how to structure my talk, how to sell the consortium program between and among universities, with UH Manoa's Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program taking the lead.
When things got to be heady, I closed my books, set aside my 5X6 cards duly stapled and which I used to take down notes, and I got out to watch the mountainside turn to a deep hue as the dark gathers.
Today, I came back to work, on my own volition. The Spalding is all mine, all four floors, and there is the quietude that I so enjoy in the evenings that I chose to stay late and keep working. I know one thing: that I have to keep on writing about the sorrows of exile and the pain of going away so that the nation we left behind will not forget: that it will not forget us and our sacrifices.
Of course, I went back to my table and prayed: That one thanksgiving day--and in all thanksgiving days that will come after-- no father or mother or child would ever spend the day alone, in sadness, and in the United States.
I ended my prayer with Amen.
Now I think of a poem and a metaphor to capture all these thoughts in order to drive away forgetting, the huge forgetting.
A Solver Agcaoili
U of Hawaii at Manoa
Nov 24, 2006
I heave a sigh, finding in the sigh the healing that I need. I heave some more.
I have gone through four thanksgivings in the United States, practically all on my own, avoiding as much as I can any form of a crowd. Holidays in the land of exiles are all oxymoronic to me: they do not make sense because I cannot understand how an exile has to have a holiday. Or I refuse to understand, this refusal a resistance, this resistance an insistence on the right of all exiles to be by themselves during holidays like this thanksgiving day yesterday.
On thanksgiving day, I chose to be alone, leaving the house before lunch after having stuffed myself with the obligatory breakfast that reminded me of home: sliced fresh tomatoes and a couple of newly fried smoked Indian mackarel.
I ate with my hands, imaginging that the rite of eating is held with grace and gusto in my humble home in Marikina, the home I remember most, the home I know so well, with the living memories of children growing up and knowing only that home as well.
There is that smoked fish because the sister I live with knows I hate meat--or I avoid it and so each morning, she tries to look for leaves or fish or anything that she thinks would win me back and make me sit down at her dining table. Otherwise, off I run to beat the horrendous traffic that is twin to H-1 or H-3, the two freeways I need to navigate each day to get to work.
The Marikina home is a geography of joy--and now also a geography of sacrifices. There, the memories are intact, solid, ever-fresh, etched in stone.
I remember that the oldest of the three children remembers the Apartment D where we lived for some months before we moved to our Marikina home. Then again, our Marikina home is where he grew up and where he brought his girlfriend so we would get to formally know her. I remember how well he authoritatively told the tricycle drivers where we would go home to when he was just three or so: Sunnyville 2, po, mama.
This Marikina home, a humble abode of love and longing, is one of beautiful memories of parenthood: how the newspaper whacking had to be called for several times when hard-headedness stood in the way of their reasonableness, and how, as soon as the children were grown, would recall the same event with derision and insult and triumph as if the whacking father were a Mr Bean doing the unncessary and the idiotic. For them, I was Mr Bean incarnate, with all the funny stupidity and lousiness of that TV character on Skycable. This is the home that we all remember and which, in the four thanksgiving holidays that I have had the chance to celebrate in this country, I would always go back to, in memory as well as in speech, thanksgiving or no thanksgiving day.
Yesterday, I just sat down, like a Zen monk in all the consciousness of the universe I could muster.
No thoughts, wayward or otherwise, just that act of letting go, of allowing the energy of the universe to come flow through me, and releasing that same energy I have got to the wind, to the trees, to the young evening that was my witness to what, indeed, thanksgiving meant to an absent father like me.
Or an absent family, if I had to be kinder to myself, but the family's absence more of the immigration requirement to wait for the petition to be approved, go through the process of waiting for the visa to come about, and pray that sooner or later, all things will fall in place as planned.
Or I would read and read and take down notes, reminding myself that I have to write two talks for next week's activities, one a joint administrator's conference between the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the Mariano Marcos State University, and a roundtable between the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the university and the MMSU-Philippine delegation.
I took down notes, mentally planning what to say, how to structure my talk, how to sell the consortium program between and among universities, with UH Manoa's Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program taking the lead.
When things got to be heady, I closed my books, set aside my 5X6 cards duly stapled and which I used to take down notes, and I got out to watch the mountainside turn to a deep hue as the dark gathers.
Today, I came back to work, on my own volition. The Spalding is all mine, all four floors, and there is the quietude that I so enjoy in the evenings that I chose to stay late and keep working. I know one thing: that I have to keep on writing about the sorrows of exile and the pain of going away so that the nation we left behind will not forget: that it will not forget us and our sacrifices.
Of course, I went back to my table and prayed: That one thanksgiving day--and in all thanksgiving days that will come after-- no father or mother or child would ever spend the day alone, in sadness, and in the United States.
I ended my prayer with Amen.
Now I think of a poem and a metaphor to capture all these thoughts in order to drive away forgetting, the huge forgetting.
A Solver Agcaoili
U of Hawaii at Manoa
Nov 24, 2006
Avian Angelus on Treetops
I have always wanted to write about this miracle each afternoon on Maile Way, on Moore, on East-West Road, and on the trees near the Catholic Church on Newman Center. The chirping of the birds is one of roosting, and the joy in the birdsongs captures that nameless joy I feel when the vision of going home and be with my family becomes concrete.
I took a long walk this afternoon, the first in a long while. The Nakem Centennial Conference took all of my time during the last two months and I never gave myself a break, not for an instant, pushing myself harder and harder each day, sitting before my computer, working on the conference programs, editing manuscripts, and coordinating many of the details that we cannot leave to fate.
So this afternoon, I made good with my promise to myself: to walk the walk one more time, to the hills in the north, to the foot of the mountains in the east, to the trails with no trailblazers. I changed from the usual work wear to walking shorts and put on my sturdy Nike that had seen all of my immigrant years in America.
Now I run down the steps from my fourth floor office, look at the mountainside awash with the orange glow of the late afternoon Waikiki sun, take a deep breath and turn on Maile Way towards St Francis School, towards the heart of the Manoa Valley now filled with houses and market stalls and Starbucks and McDonald's. This is fastfood nation and I remind myself this.
The orange sun turns reddish and the vegetation takes on a rich verdant hue: green as in the color of moss, as in the color of the earth that welcomes all the blessings from the heavens, the earth that gives all the harvest of fruits and hopes that we need.
It is the Day of Thanksgiving, I tell myself. You count your blessings. No sad tunes, I say.
So I look at the music of leaves, the lyrics in the gardenia coming into a bloom, the tunes hidden in the blades of wild grass dotting the sides of a less traveled path I take.
The late hours come so fast. The afternoon becomes purple so I head back to the Manoa campus whose lay in the vast valley I have yet to memorize after months of having stayed here day in and day out.
I take the East-West Road and right on the dot, the bridsongs fill my heart.
No sad songs at this hour, I tell myself, even if you feel so damn alone on this day of thanksgiving.
I linger on the shade of the trees and listen some more to the gaiety around me, the gladness and robust happiness from the branches of trees moving and shaking and delirious with life and the lithe limbs of birds hopping, jumping, flying, perching, roosting.
Roosting, I tell myself. This is their song for roosting, for homing, for coming back home after a day's work. It is their angelus, their recognition of the endless power of the universe, the eternity of life. This is benediction, I tell myself one more time, and the benediction of birds.
I close my eyes. I see my children. I am roosting.
I pray I will have this grace.
The night turns from deep purple and then to dark and I walk back to Spalding, up the fourth floor to imagine this magic moment and to write this piece.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nov 23/06
I took a long walk this afternoon, the first in a long while. The Nakem Centennial Conference took all of my time during the last two months and I never gave myself a break, not for an instant, pushing myself harder and harder each day, sitting before my computer, working on the conference programs, editing manuscripts, and coordinating many of the details that we cannot leave to fate.
So this afternoon, I made good with my promise to myself: to walk the walk one more time, to the hills in the north, to the foot of the mountains in the east, to the trails with no trailblazers. I changed from the usual work wear to walking shorts and put on my sturdy Nike that had seen all of my immigrant years in America.
Now I run down the steps from my fourth floor office, look at the mountainside awash with the orange glow of the late afternoon Waikiki sun, take a deep breath and turn on Maile Way towards St Francis School, towards the heart of the Manoa Valley now filled with houses and market stalls and Starbucks and McDonald's. This is fastfood nation and I remind myself this.
The orange sun turns reddish and the vegetation takes on a rich verdant hue: green as in the color of moss, as in the color of the earth that welcomes all the blessings from the heavens, the earth that gives all the harvest of fruits and hopes that we need.
It is the Day of Thanksgiving, I tell myself. You count your blessings. No sad tunes, I say.
So I look at the music of leaves, the lyrics in the gardenia coming into a bloom, the tunes hidden in the blades of wild grass dotting the sides of a less traveled path I take.
The late hours come so fast. The afternoon becomes purple so I head back to the Manoa campus whose lay in the vast valley I have yet to memorize after months of having stayed here day in and day out.
I take the East-West Road and right on the dot, the bridsongs fill my heart.
No sad songs at this hour, I tell myself, even if you feel so damn alone on this day of thanksgiving.
I linger on the shade of the trees and listen some more to the gaiety around me, the gladness and robust happiness from the branches of trees moving and shaking and delirious with life and the lithe limbs of birds hopping, jumping, flying, perching, roosting.
Roosting, I tell myself. This is their song for roosting, for homing, for coming back home after a day's work. It is their angelus, their recognition of the endless power of the universe, the eternity of life. This is benediction, I tell myself one more time, and the benediction of birds.
I close my eyes. I see my children. I am roosting.
I pray I will have this grace.
The night turns from deep purple and then to dark and I walk back to Spalding, up the fourth floor to imagine this magic moment and to write this piece.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nov 23/06
Pag-iisa sa Panahon ng Pasasalamat
Kailangan kong itakda ang araw na ito sa talaan ng aking marami at masalimuot na gunita.
Sa gunita ang lugar ng aking pagkasino bilang imigrante at exilo. Dito nananahan ang samut-saring damdamin na ang iba'y limot ko na, ang iba nama'y pinipilit limutin, samantalang ang iba ay nagsusumiksik sa mga saknong ng aking tula, sa mga parilala ng aking exilong isip.
Panahon ng pasasalamat ngayon subalit kagabi pa'y dumapo na sa akin ang ibayong lungkot, yung walang pangalan, yung di mo alam kung saan nanggagaling. Papauwi na ako noon at malalim na ang gabi. Tumigil ako sa hagdan, humarap sa balangkas ng bundok na tumatanod sa akin at iniilawan ng malamlam na liwanag ng mga kabahayan sa kanyang paanan.
Kahapon ay ihinatid na namin ang ilan sa aming mga huling bisita sa Nakem Centennial Conference at kasama sa paghahatid ang magkahalong rubriko ng lungkot at ligaya: lungkot sapagkat tinatapos na namin ang sinimulang layon hanggang sa pupulutin namin muli sa dibdib, sa hiraya, sa panaginip; at saya sapagkat alam namin na nagsimula nang tumubo ang pangarap. Sa pag-uwi ng aming mga kapanalig ay dadalhin nila ang ideyang ito na pag-aaral sa nagbabago at pabagu-bagong pagkasino ng mga exilo.
Nandarayuhan ang aking damdamin sa sentenaryo ng mga seremonya ng paghahanap ng kagampan. Alam ko: marami pa ang aalis. Subalit marami din ang magbabalik tulad ng pagdami ng mga bumabalik at nagbabalik. Sa mga umaalis ay ang pagtatangkang mahanap ang hindi makita-kita sa sinilangang bayan. Noon, ganito na ito. Ngayon, ganito pa rin. Mga tanong ito na palaisipan, mga palaisipan na tanong din. Sa Nakem Centennial Conference ay ang napakasakit na pagtatanung-tanong.
Maaga pa kahapon ay ginising ko na ang himbing pang ulirat. Kailangan habulin ang mga sandali, uunahan ang umaga sa daan. Kinakailangan kong lakbayin ang milya-milyang pagitan ng Waipahu at Manoa na lalong pinapahaba ng inip sa freeway, sa trapik, sa nakabubulag na sinag ng araw na kung tumira sa mata ay kinakailangan mong kumurap-kurap.
Dala ko ang balikbayan box ni Manang Lilia, nagtungo ako sa Alawai mula sa Nimitz. Binaybay ko ang tulog pang Waikiki at mamula-mulang bundok sa silangan sa banda ng Diamond Head. Banayad ang mga alon sa dagat at ang dalampasigan ay tila iniwanan ng mga magdamag na nagpasasasa sa kanyang kandungan, inabandonang parang di na babalikan muli. Sa kabila nito, nananatili ang paanyaya sa akin ng Waikiki, paanyaya sa kanyang pangakong gabi, paanyayang di ko pa pinauunlakan.
Binagtas ko ang dulo ng kalsadang nagmamay-ari ng mga hile-hilerang gusaling ng kalakal para sa mga maperang turista ng Estado: mga otel, mga restoran, mga boutique. Nararamdaman ko ang aking sarili--ang isang lungkot na nagsasabi na hindi kailan man ako babagay sa lugar na ito, itong palaruan ng mga mamayayaman, ng mga taong hindi kinakailangang magbanat ng buto para mabuhay. Di katulad ko na pinamumuhunanan ang kalusugan, lakas, at konting talino. Ramdam ko ang pundamental na pakiramdam: hindi patas ang buhay, hindi marunong maglaro ng patas ang buhay.
Kinabig ko ang manibelang pakaliwa, patungo sa mga nagtataasang gusali ng Alawai. Doon ko kakaungin ang Manang Lilia, doon ko dadalhin ang kanyang balikbayan box na pinakisuyuan kong kanyang pagsisidlan din ng dalawang manikang nagsasalita at umaawit para sa aking bunsong iniwan ng matagal.
Nitong huli naming pag-uusap, tinanong ako ng bunso, "Malamig na diyan, papa?"
"Malamig na," sabi ko, ang aking tinig ay nababasag.
"Dito malamig na rin," sabi niya, ang masayang tinig ay sa isang musmos na hindi pa gagap ang damdamin ng iniwan. Nahihiwa ang aking dibdib, ginigripo ang aking puso. Sa aking isip ay galon-galong dugo na bumubulwak sa aking mga tama sanhi ng mahabang panahon ng pag-alis.
Walang gamot ang ganito--matagal ko nang alam ito.
At minsan, minsan, nagsisisi akong sa aking pag-alis. Pero kapag sumagi sa aking isip ang pagkakataong ibinibigay namin sa mga supling, nagigising ako, nagbabalik sa tamang ulirat, nakakapag-isip muli, at nasasabihan ang sarili na, Konting tiis, konting tiis.
"A malamig na! Ibig sabihin, malapit ka nang umuwi, papa?" May ganap na ganap na galak sa kabilang dulo ng linya.
Naramdaman ko ang pamamasa ng aking mga mata. Gabi noon, at sa aking kinatatayuan, laganap na ang dilim sa bundok na aking natatanaw mula sa maliiit na bintana ng aking upisina.
Nilunok ko ang bara sa aking lalamunan. Pumikit ako. Papaano ko sasabihin sa aking bunso na hindi ako makakauwi, na may mga dahilan na kinakailangan isaalang-alang, at may mga prayoridad na kailangang gawin?
Ilang pasko na? tanong ng kabiyak. Alam kong may luha doon sa kanyang mga salita. Nakikita ko doon ang mukha ng kalungkutan sanhi ng layo ng aming mga pagitan, ako sa Honolulu ng mga Araw ng Pasasalamat na araw din pag-iisa, at sila sa Marikina ng Araw ng Paghihintay na araw din ng pagbibilang sa mga darating na umaga ng pagkikita-kita muli.
Wala nang pinakamasaklap na naganap sa bayang pinagmulan kaysa sa ganitong tuloy-tuloy na pagkakahiwa-hiwalay ng mga mag-anak, naisip ko. Pero naisip ko rin, dito rin nasusukat ang kakayahang makibaka sa buhay. At dito tayo natututo sa kung ano nga ba ang ibig sabihin ng matatag.
Ngayon ay pahapon na nitong Araw ng Pasasalamat. Naisagawa ko na ang paglalakad sa paanan ng mga bundok na pumapalibot sa Manoa, ang aking ehersisyo sa araw na ito. Isusulat ko ito upang mananatili sa alaala ang lahat ng mga masasalimuot na nararamdaman, araw man o hindi araw ng pasasalamat.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nob 23/06
Sa gunita ang lugar ng aking pagkasino bilang imigrante at exilo. Dito nananahan ang samut-saring damdamin na ang iba'y limot ko na, ang iba nama'y pinipilit limutin, samantalang ang iba ay nagsusumiksik sa mga saknong ng aking tula, sa mga parilala ng aking exilong isip.
Panahon ng pasasalamat ngayon subalit kagabi pa'y dumapo na sa akin ang ibayong lungkot, yung walang pangalan, yung di mo alam kung saan nanggagaling. Papauwi na ako noon at malalim na ang gabi. Tumigil ako sa hagdan, humarap sa balangkas ng bundok na tumatanod sa akin at iniilawan ng malamlam na liwanag ng mga kabahayan sa kanyang paanan.
Kahapon ay ihinatid na namin ang ilan sa aming mga huling bisita sa Nakem Centennial Conference at kasama sa paghahatid ang magkahalong rubriko ng lungkot at ligaya: lungkot sapagkat tinatapos na namin ang sinimulang layon hanggang sa pupulutin namin muli sa dibdib, sa hiraya, sa panaginip; at saya sapagkat alam namin na nagsimula nang tumubo ang pangarap. Sa pag-uwi ng aming mga kapanalig ay dadalhin nila ang ideyang ito na pag-aaral sa nagbabago at pabagu-bagong pagkasino ng mga exilo.
Nandarayuhan ang aking damdamin sa sentenaryo ng mga seremonya ng paghahanap ng kagampan. Alam ko: marami pa ang aalis. Subalit marami din ang magbabalik tulad ng pagdami ng mga bumabalik at nagbabalik. Sa mga umaalis ay ang pagtatangkang mahanap ang hindi makita-kita sa sinilangang bayan. Noon, ganito na ito. Ngayon, ganito pa rin. Mga tanong ito na palaisipan, mga palaisipan na tanong din. Sa Nakem Centennial Conference ay ang napakasakit na pagtatanung-tanong.
Maaga pa kahapon ay ginising ko na ang himbing pang ulirat. Kailangan habulin ang mga sandali, uunahan ang umaga sa daan. Kinakailangan kong lakbayin ang milya-milyang pagitan ng Waipahu at Manoa na lalong pinapahaba ng inip sa freeway, sa trapik, sa nakabubulag na sinag ng araw na kung tumira sa mata ay kinakailangan mong kumurap-kurap.
Dala ko ang balikbayan box ni Manang Lilia, nagtungo ako sa Alawai mula sa Nimitz. Binaybay ko ang tulog pang Waikiki at mamula-mulang bundok sa silangan sa banda ng Diamond Head. Banayad ang mga alon sa dagat at ang dalampasigan ay tila iniwanan ng mga magdamag na nagpasasasa sa kanyang kandungan, inabandonang parang di na babalikan muli. Sa kabila nito, nananatili ang paanyaya sa akin ng Waikiki, paanyaya sa kanyang pangakong gabi, paanyayang di ko pa pinauunlakan.
Binagtas ko ang dulo ng kalsadang nagmamay-ari ng mga hile-hilerang gusaling ng kalakal para sa mga maperang turista ng Estado: mga otel, mga restoran, mga boutique. Nararamdaman ko ang aking sarili--ang isang lungkot na nagsasabi na hindi kailan man ako babagay sa lugar na ito, itong palaruan ng mga mamayayaman, ng mga taong hindi kinakailangang magbanat ng buto para mabuhay. Di katulad ko na pinamumuhunanan ang kalusugan, lakas, at konting talino. Ramdam ko ang pundamental na pakiramdam: hindi patas ang buhay, hindi marunong maglaro ng patas ang buhay.
Kinabig ko ang manibelang pakaliwa, patungo sa mga nagtataasang gusali ng Alawai. Doon ko kakaungin ang Manang Lilia, doon ko dadalhin ang kanyang balikbayan box na pinakisuyuan kong kanyang pagsisidlan din ng dalawang manikang nagsasalita at umaawit para sa aking bunsong iniwan ng matagal.
Nitong huli naming pag-uusap, tinanong ako ng bunso, "Malamig na diyan, papa?"
"Malamig na," sabi ko, ang aking tinig ay nababasag.
"Dito malamig na rin," sabi niya, ang masayang tinig ay sa isang musmos na hindi pa gagap ang damdamin ng iniwan. Nahihiwa ang aking dibdib, ginigripo ang aking puso. Sa aking isip ay galon-galong dugo na bumubulwak sa aking mga tama sanhi ng mahabang panahon ng pag-alis.
Walang gamot ang ganito--matagal ko nang alam ito.
At minsan, minsan, nagsisisi akong sa aking pag-alis. Pero kapag sumagi sa aking isip ang pagkakataong ibinibigay namin sa mga supling, nagigising ako, nagbabalik sa tamang ulirat, nakakapag-isip muli, at nasasabihan ang sarili na, Konting tiis, konting tiis.
"A malamig na! Ibig sabihin, malapit ka nang umuwi, papa?" May ganap na ganap na galak sa kabilang dulo ng linya.
Naramdaman ko ang pamamasa ng aking mga mata. Gabi noon, at sa aking kinatatayuan, laganap na ang dilim sa bundok na aking natatanaw mula sa maliiit na bintana ng aking upisina.
Nilunok ko ang bara sa aking lalamunan. Pumikit ako. Papaano ko sasabihin sa aking bunso na hindi ako makakauwi, na may mga dahilan na kinakailangan isaalang-alang, at may mga prayoridad na kailangang gawin?
Ilang pasko na? tanong ng kabiyak. Alam kong may luha doon sa kanyang mga salita. Nakikita ko doon ang mukha ng kalungkutan sanhi ng layo ng aming mga pagitan, ako sa Honolulu ng mga Araw ng Pasasalamat na araw din pag-iisa, at sila sa Marikina ng Araw ng Paghihintay na araw din ng pagbibilang sa mga darating na umaga ng pagkikita-kita muli.
Wala nang pinakamasaklap na naganap sa bayang pinagmulan kaysa sa ganitong tuloy-tuloy na pagkakahiwa-hiwalay ng mga mag-anak, naisip ko. Pero naisip ko rin, dito rin nasusukat ang kakayahang makibaka sa buhay. At dito tayo natututo sa kung ano nga ba ang ibig sabihin ng matatag.
Ngayon ay pahapon na nitong Araw ng Pasasalamat. Naisagawa ko na ang paglalakad sa paanan ng mga bundok na pumapalibot sa Manoa, ang aking ehersisyo sa araw na ito. Isusulat ko ito upang mananatili sa alaala ang lahat ng mga masasalimuot na nararamdaman, araw man o hindi araw ng pasasalamat.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nob 23/06
Chaminade, the Fil-Am Question, and Jasmin Trias
I do not know her from Eve but I know her from Adam: she is the Filipino American insulted by Simon Cowell in that American Idol episode and he told her pointblank: You have got to tell all the Filipinos out there to vote for you so you will remain here in your spot which you do not deserve in the first place.
Of course, I am exaggerating--that is not exactly how the guy said it but the sarcasm must have been the same, at least the way I understood it at that time so that even in my misery and want, in that Los Angeles life that I had in my first years of US Mainland life of hungering for more of the American Dream that was elusive, I dialed the number flashed on the idiot box and sent in as many votes as I could.
It was my way of vengeance, this sending of my votes at something close to one dollar per vote just to spite the man and to show him as well that this Jasmin Trias had all it takes to be an American Idol.
I would have to tell this to my closest friends afterwards. And to my family as well, more to my first daughter who is always immutably enamored by the stars, starlets, and silver-screen wannabes.
And then she came, this Jasmin Trias.
She came to my presentation, to the presentation of Eva Lindstrom, and to the presentation of Kamu Kahua Theatre of the excerpts of "Who the Fil-Am I?"
I would not have known it was her, for heaven's sake, were it not for the courteous, respectful, and Chaminade hospitality of Eve Lindstrom, who, like me, talked about the aesthetic, theatrical, and socio-historical contexts and possibilities of the play.
Chaminade hospitality is that learned, acquired, second skin Catholic sensibility of kindess to strangers, aliens, immigrants, vagabonds, vagrants, infidels, prodigals, pretenders, and ex-communicants.
I am not prone to taking pictures, preferring to take in all the memory in the album of my mind, let the images lay there for a while and until then, let them hibernate for all time so that in there, they become accessible to my consciousness, handily recalled when the blogging bug hits me hard like this hour. In this way, I can write about them, these images of the memory that binds, these pictures of the past that makes me come to terms with my mind in its everydayness. So I did not ask for a photo op with Jasmin Trias afterwards. But she was there, listening and listening intently to all of us--or so I thought.
Eve said I talked with some authority, my voice projecting something with sense, my talk complementing hers in an ever-new light. Powerful voice, she said.
I said, Thank you.
I could have reminded her: That is always the way I deliver my lines. The performance level way. Da-da, da-da!
I do not know. But some people tell me that I talk with force, that I can have the ability to persuade when I want to, that my voice comes off solid, dramatic, bombastic, theatrical, stage-like.
The open forum/discussion came and I could have dominated the repartee were it not for the fact that I was on the premises of those Catholic brothers, the Marianists, and I would not want to be kicked out, not infront of every intellectual and artist in town.
So I restrained my critical comments, issuing out rebuttals about motherhood statements about the ancestral homeland and reminding each and everyone that the Philippines is not a special country as if 'a special child', that America has a hand in the making and performance of this country's history, and that the Filipino people will endure no matter what.
I thought that Jasmin Trias was listening when I said those indicting comments.
But I saw clearly all those intellectuals nodding their heads when I shifted to a lecturer's mode with illusions to a 'Tonite, I give the greatest performance of my life.'
I am thinking of becoming a stage actor now. For a change. I can probably beat those lousy actors down the road with the kind of bombast that I know.
And the empty boast of a bored playwright. That is me.
A Solver Agcaoili
U H Manoa, right after the Chaminade presentation
10 PM, Nov 21/06
Of course, I am exaggerating--that is not exactly how the guy said it but the sarcasm must have been the same, at least the way I understood it at that time so that even in my misery and want, in that Los Angeles life that I had in my first years of US Mainland life of hungering for more of the American Dream that was elusive, I dialed the number flashed on the idiot box and sent in as many votes as I could.
It was my way of vengeance, this sending of my votes at something close to one dollar per vote just to spite the man and to show him as well that this Jasmin Trias had all it takes to be an American Idol.
I would have to tell this to my closest friends afterwards. And to my family as well, more to my first daughter who is always immutably enamored by the stars, starlets, and silver-screen wannabes.
And then she came, this Jasmin Trias.
She came to my presentation, to the presentation of Eva Lindstrom, and to the presentation of Kamu Kahua Theatre of the excerpts of "Who the Fil-Am I?"
I would not have known it was her, for heaven's sake, were it not for the courteous, respectful, and Chaminade hospitality of Eve Lindstrom, who, like me, talked about the aesthetic, theatrical, and socio-historical contexts and possibilities of the play.
Chaminade hospitality is that learned, acquired, second skin Catholic sensibility of kindess to strangers, aliens, immigrants, vagabonds, vagrants, infidels, prodigals, pretenders, and ex-communicants.
I am not prone to taking pictures, preferring to take in all the memory in the album of my mind, let the images lay there for a while and until then, let them hibernate for all time so that in there, they become accessible to my consciousness, handily recalled when the blogging bug hits me hard like this hour. In this way, I can write about them, these images of the memory that binds, these pictures of the past that makes me come to terms with my mind in its everydayness. So I did not ask for a photo op with Jasmin Trias afterwards. But she was there, listening and listening intently to all of us--or so I thought.
Eve said I talked with some authority, my voice projecting something with sense, my talk complementing hers in an ever-new light. Powerful voice, she said.
I said, Thank you.
I could have reminded her: That is always the way I deliver my lines. The performance level way. Da-da, da-da!
I do not know. But some people tell me that I talk with force, that I can have the ability to persuade when I want to, that my voice comes off solid, dramatic, bombastic, theatrical, stage-like.
The open forum/discussion came and I could have dominated the repartee were it not for the fact that I was on the premises of those Catholic brothers, the Marianists, and I would not want to be kicked out, not infront of every intellectual and artist in town.
So I restrained my critical comments, issuing out rebuttals about motherhood statements about the ancestral homeland and reminding each and everyone that the Philippines is not a special country as if 'a special child', that America has a hand in the making and performance of this country's history, and that the Filipino people will endure no matter what.
I thought that Jasmin Trias was listening when I said those indicting comments.
But I saw clearly all those intellectuals nodding their heads when I shifted to a lecturer's mode with illusions to a 'Tonite, I give the greatest performance of my life.'
I am thinking of becoming a stage actor now. For a change. I can probably beat those lousy actors down the road with the kind of bombast that I know.
And the empty boast of a bored playwright. That is me.
A Solver Agcaoili
U H Manoa, right after the Chaminade presentation
10 PM, Nov 21/06
Ti Aldaw Dagiti Napasag a Pabo
1.
Imbati dagiti peregrino
a pakalaglagipan
daytoy panagngurungor
iti pabo wenno panangdutdot
aginggana a ti timek daytoy
ket agallangugan kadagiti bakras
ken rangrangkis dagiti tagainep
dagiti isu amin
nga agkatangkatang
kas kadakami amin
nga exilo ita
nga aldaw ti panagyaman.
2.
Maikapatkon a tawen ditoy
a disso ti panangmalmalanga
iti sango ti tinurbo a pabo
a nagbagis kadagiti amin a kita
ti maisakmol nga ibit, ila, kawa
daytoy a makan nga iti laeng
komedor dagiti babaknang ti ili
ti pakasarakan, butiakanda piman
ti boksit, sadanto salaan iti kaniaw
wenno ti tadek a pakasalamaan ti regget
kas iti pannakasalama piman
kadagiti agragut a mangmangkik
ken agpuerong a di katatawan
no maribngas kenka ti gasat
a sinsinan ken agimut
dagiti duogan nga orasion
daytay panangdawat iti panagdegdeg
koma ti apo iti maminsan pay a tig-ab:
kas daytay aggapu iti mansanas
a nalabaga, kurabkuraban a prutas
ni laing a kamaris ti dara
ginalon a dara manipud kadagiti gerra
kadagiti bala ken kanion dagiti merkader
ni patay ken wayawaya ken demokrasia
sibibiag a dara kontra sibibiag a dara
umang-anges a lasag kontra umang-anges a lasag
umis-isem a rungiit kontra umis-isem a rungiit
idinto nga irakrakurak met
ti maminribu a pammunpon
ti ebanghelio ti pannakaisalakan
kadagiti amin a kita ti limlimo
iti man anniniwan nga agawan
agpasugnod iti nagpanes a lawag
wenno agbati kadagiti sellang
ti bigat a manglanglangan
maulila kalpasan ti ritual
ti panaginraragsak ken panaginkakatawa
iti aldaw dagiti pabo nga arkos
ti maidiaya a pangrabii
dagiti estranghero a balabala
dagiti prinsipe ti ili a di agyaman
isuda nga ama ni kinapimpiman.
3.
Ditay met ngamin makasursuro:
pang-aw a sao laeng
ti ibalestayo, kawaw a balikas
ti sungbat kadagiti kinaranggastay
iti lalaem dagiti maidasar
nga ilado a pabo a nginurungor
ti kinamanagimbubukod dagiti kutsilio
bendision kampay-idi kadagiti malak-am ita
gulib kadagiti maidiaya a kanginaan a pino
datayo amin a sibubussog a di met nabsog
datayo amin a malmaltotan a di met simmubo
datayo amin nga agtultulakak a di met nakiranod
idinto ta iti sabali a suli
iti padaya dagiti isu amin
a mapadpaidaman a kakailian
agyamanda iti nalabon a kinakisang
urnongenda dagiti maregmegtayo
yatangda iti altar ti lua nga awanan salakan.
A Solver Agcaoili
Honolulu, HI
Iti aldaw ti panagyaman, Nob. 24, 2006, UH Manoa
Imbati dagiti peregrino
a pakalaglagipan
daytoy panagngurungor
iti pabo wenno panangdutdot
aginggana a ti timek daytoy
ket agallangugan kadagiti bakras
ken rangrangkis dagiti tagainep
dagiti isu amin
nga agkatangkatang
kas kadakami amin
nga exilo ita
nga aldaw ti panagyaman.
2.
Maikapatkon a tawen ditoy
a disso ti panangmalmalanga
iti sango ti tinurbo a pabo
a nagbagis kadagiti amin a kita
ti maisakmol nga ibit, ila, kawa
daytoy a makan nga iti laeng
komedor dagiti babaknang ti ili
ti pakasarakan, butiakanda piman
ti boksit, sadanto salaan iti kaniaw
wenno ti tadek a pakasalamaan ti regget
kas iti pannakasalama piman
kadagiti agragut a mangmangkik
ken agpuerong a di katatawan
no maribngas kenka ti gasat
a sinsinan ken agimut
dagiti duogan nga orasion
daytay panangdawat iti panagdegdeg
koma ti apo iti maminsan pay a tig-ab:
kas daytay aggapu iti mansanas
a nalabaga, kurabkuraban a prutas
ni laing a kamaris ti dara
ginalon a dara manipud kadagiti gerra
kadagiti bala ken kanion dagiti merkader
ni patay ken wayawaya ken demokrasia
sibibiag a dara kontra sibibiag a dara
umang-anges a lasag kontra umang-anges a lasag
umis-isem a rungiit kontra umis-isem a rungiit
idinto nga irakrakurak met
ti maminribu a pammunpon
ti ebanghelio ti pannakaisalakan
kadagiti amin a kita ti limlimo
iti man anniniwan nga agawan
agpasugnod iti nagpanes a lawag
wenno agbati kadagiti sellang
ti bigat a manglanglangan
maulila kalpasan ti ritual
ti panaginraragsak ken panaginkakatawa
iti aldaw dagiti pabo nga arkos
ti maidiaya a pangrabii
dagiti estranghero a balabala
dagiti prinsipe ti ili a di agyaman
isuda nga ama ni kinapimpiman.
3.
Ditay met ngamin makasursuro:
pang-aw a sao laeng
ti ibalestayo, kawaw a balikas
ti sungbat kadagiti kinaranggastay
iti lalaem dagiti maidasar
nga ilado a pabo a nginurungor
ti kinamanagimbubukod dagiti kutsilio
bendision kampay-idi kadagiti malak-am ita
gulib kadagiti maidiaya a kanginaan a pino
datayo amin a sibubussog a di met nabsog
datayo amin a malmaltotan a di met simmubo
datayo amin nga agtultulakak a di met nakiranod
idinto ta iti sabali a suli
iti padaya dagiti isu amin
a mapadpaidaman a kakailian
agyamanda iti nalabon a kinakisang
urnongenda dagiti maregmegtayo
yatangda iti altar ti lua nga awanan salakan.
A Solver Agcaoili
Honolulu, HI
Iti aldaw ti panagyaman, Nob. 24, 2006, UH Manoa
One More Time, Who the Fil-Am We Are, Really?
(Talk prepared for the Kamu Kahua Theatre’s presentation of the play Who the Fil-Am I? or Never Judge the Buk-buk by Its Cover-cover, Chaminade University, November 21, 2006, Honolulu, HI.) ¬
I have to admit one thing here as I come into an encounter with this play, first in its stageable written form, and now its staged form. A play to be a play, for certain, needs to be translated into the magical and mysterious ways of the stage. There is where the tropic enchantment and symbolic seduction come about—there is where that sense of catharsis may come about and in this play, while we do not see clearly the resolution to the questions raised about the identity issues, we are contented and we can rest and sleep the sleep of the just. For in the land of exile, as in other lands where the children of immigrants come face to face with the past of their parentage and ancestors, the questions asked and formulated properly are far more potent than the pretensions to an answer to a question about Filipino-Americanness.
The Fil-Am, we must say, is a hybrid, the trope coming from the admixture of two identities, like two varieties of the same plant coming into a healthy fusion, presumably far better than the previous varieties. Because this hybridity which is twin to the facticity of coming into a land and searching for a life in that land is both a boon and a bane—a curse and a blessing, an opportunity and a loss. All these add complexity to the always-already complex life of children of immigrants, they who are always-already pulled by at least two extreme and bi-polar forces.
It is a boon because the children of immigrants get into a variety of worlds made possible by their access to both of these worlds, and their residency in a third one, the world of hybrids, of hapas, of aliens-but-not-really-so, of strangers-but-at-home-as-well. They are the People of the Hyphen—the people with the hypen, that hyphen signaling ethnic origins and yet at the same time suggesting a destination country for the immigrant looking for home, although not necessarily completely a homeland.
On the other hand, there is a bane in this neither here-nor-there condition of self-naming: there is here that constant to-and-fro, that uncertainty, that eternal ambivalence, that perpetual negotiation of sides, extremes, polarities, binaries, the negotiation on the lookout for the possibilities of oneing but the circumstances may not warrant the same result.
In the Filipino-American literatures of exile, we witness these same engagements of the expatriated consciousness, the expatriated culture, the expatriated sensibilities, the expatriated memory—and all these we see clearly in the Who the Fil-Am I? The reference to the buk-buk in the sub-title, for instance, evokes this sense of expatriation of the many things that has been lost in memory, a trip back in time when the Filipino was seen as a reliable farmhand, one of those hands the agricultural economy of the United States wanted so bad in those times, at the turn of the 20th century, when the ‘Philippine Islands’ were decreed by the gods of faith and fate that they were to be under the benevolent guidance of the Americans who were just freshly coming from their own stories of war and colonization and oppression from the mother country. The motif of the journey—and the witnessing of the ‘wretchedness’ of the home country through the sub-plots of stories of deprivation, misery, want, and oppression—makes us see the journeying back to the ancestral homeland as a necessity—and the trip back to the adoptive homeland is of urgency and expediency born of the need to reconnect with that which is part of the contradiction of the Fil-Am’s soul.
In the characters are powerful symbols using the wisest economy of expression, with each character revealing those things that are not easily said—sayable, yes, they all are, but they are difficult to say because we are not at home saying them, talking about them, much less making them as part of the aesthetic discourse.
I am personally struck by the discourse it opens up in terms of the exiles’ obligation to go back to the terra firma of the languages of the peoples in the ancestral homeland. There is an energy in this discourse as it indicts whole and entire the negligence and omission of those Fil-Ams in the revisiting of—and may I say, in the residing in—the language of the ancestors. In talk as in discourse—two components of the same liberating use of language—we do not deal here with language in general but language as understood by the ancestors, by our own people, by the everyday life of those who can call the ancestral homeland as their country as well.
This is where homing is possible, if one were to be honest with the sacred sacrifices of those who have come here to pave the way for all these benefits that the Filipino American immigrants receive at this time. I quote Tomas—the Tomas Immakulate Consepcion prefiguring the White American: “A people’s language is the saving grace that binds them together through sex, age, and economic strata.” This Tomas also says: “Filipino Americans must retain the knowledge of their language. In that basic respect, they retain what is truest and most honorable to their people and their culture, lest they fade into the nebulae that is America.” The admonition is wise—and timely.
Then again, we need to remember that the Philippines as an imagined and a real territory of memory and experience is not a monolingual country unlike many parts of the Western world, but a country united—and divided as well—by its multilingualism and multiculturalism, which makes it to be richer, blessed in many ways, as these languages and cultures it has provide its people the many and variegated windows through which the people see and understand and interpret the world.
You do not get to like the characters initially, as they tend to be kilometric in their speeches, so talkative in many ways. But the fact they are familiar makes you comfortable with them, and this logic of comfort makes you see clearly the issues raised and the contradictions awaiting synthesis and resolution. To provide an answer to these questions is not an easy task, this I know.
To insist on the need to redeem the Fil-Am of this whole scale amnesia of who is a Fil-
Am and where does he come from takes a hundred years to heal perhaps. But we may need a lesser number of years to completely forget—and this is where the questioning of self and selves, of identity and identities, and of destiny and redemption becomes relevant. In short, it is far easier to forget than to remember—and the Fil-Am must be forwarned. And no exception.
The project to remember is always more difficult, as is the case, because in re-membering—of becoming a member again—we have to re-member the language of our people, the languages that talk about their dreams, desires, despairs.
We look at language this way—the language that is the abode of the Filipino American soul, the language that is the indwelling of the Fil-Am spirit trying to call out to his wayward spirit again, the language of his past as present, the language of his present as present, and the language of his present as future. In short, it is the language of the timelessness and endlessness of his quest, his wandering, his wondering—the language of the ancestor who came to seek this land and who did not wait for the land to seek him.
There is no reversing back the history of the Filipino American as the play reveals in a manner that is more apocalyptic than the Apocalypsis itself. The power of history is absolute and it can never be undone. But to make sense of the layered identity of the Filipino American is to make sense of both the past and future that are both unknown and unfamiliar to us, hence, the need for the productive and privileging perspective of the present.
To me, this is what this play, Who the Fil-Am I or Never Judge the Buk-buk by its Cover-cover, is offering to us: its gift to all those who see that condition of the Fil-Am, that condition of him making sense of the small empires within and outside his Filipino American self, the condition of the primal loss of the primal experience of the ancestral homeland, and that condition of invisibility however much he tries to create a space for his language, self, discourse, memory, identity. In this land of exile, the Fil-Am will always remain and exile, plus or minus.
He may no longer be the buk-buk of old, but he would have to outgrow that name by going through the rite of renaming himself.
November 21, 2006
I have to admit one thing here as I come into an encounter with this play, first in its stageable written form, and now its staged form. A play to be a play, for certain, needs to be translated into the magical and mysterious ways of the stage. There is where the tropic enchantment and symbolic seduction come about—there is where that sense of catharsis may come about and in this play, while we do not see clearly the resolution to the questions raised about the identity issues, we are contented and we can rest and sleep the sleep of the just. For in the land of exile, as in other lands where the children of immigrants come face to face with the past of their parentage and ancestors, the questions asked and formulated properly are far more potent than the pretensions to an answer to a question about Filipino-Americanness.
The Fil-Am, we must say, is a hybrid, the trope coming from the admixture of two identities, like two varieties of the same plant coming into a healthy fusion, presumably far better than the previous varieties. Because this hybridity which is twin to the facticity of coming into a land and searching for a life in that land is both a boon and a bane—a curse and a blessing, an opportunity and a loss. All these add complexity to the always-already complex life of children of immigrants, they who are always-already pulled by at least two extreme and bi-polar forces.
It is a boon because the children of immigrants get into a variety of worlds made possible by their access to both of these worlds, and their residency in a third one, the world of hybrids, of hapas, of aliens-but-not-really-so, of strangers-but-at-home-as-well. They are the People of the Hyphen—the people with the hypen, that hyphen signaling ethnic origins and yet at the same time suggesting a destination country for the immigrant looking for home, although not necessarily completely a homeland.
On the other hand, there is a bane in this neither here-nor-there condition of self-naming: there is here that constant to-and-fro, that uncertainty, that eternal ambivalence, that perpetual negotiation of sides, extremes, polarities, binaries, the negotiation on the lookout for the possibilities of oneing but the circumstances may not warrant the same result.
In the Filipino-American literatures of exile, we witness these same engagements of the expatriated consciousness, the expatriated culture, the expatriated sensibilities, the expatriated memory—and all these we see clearly in the Who the Fil-Am I? The reference to the buk-buk in the sub-title, for instance, evokes this sense of expatriation of the many things that has been lost in memory, a trip back in time when the Filipino was seen as a reliable farmhand, one of those hands the agricultural economy of the United States wanted so bad in those times, at the turn of the 20th century, when the ‘Philippine Islands’ were decreed by the gods of faith and fate that they were to be under the benevolent guidance of the Americans who were just freshly coming from their own stories of war and colonization and oppression from the mother country. The motif of the journey—and the witnessing of the ‘wretchedness’ of the home country through the sub-plots of stories of deprivation, misery, want, and oppression—makes us see the journeying back to the ancestral homeland as a necessity—and the trip back to the adoptive homeland is of urgency and expediency born of the need to reconnect with that which is part of the contradiction of the Fil-Am’s soul.
In the characters are powerful symbols using the wisest economy of expression, with each character revealing those things that are not easily said—sayable, yes, they all are, but they are difficult to say because we are not at home saying them, talking about them, much less making them as part of the aesthetic discourse.
I am personally struck by the discourse it opens up in terms of the exiles’ obligation to go back to the terra firma of the languages of the peoples in the ancestral homeland. There is an energy in this discourse as it indicts whole and entire the negligence and omission of those Fil-Ams in the revisiting of—and may I say, in the residing in—the language of the ancestors. In talk as in discourse—two components of the same liberating use of language—we do not deal here with language in general but language as understood by the ancestors, by our own people, by the everyday life of those who can call the ancestral homeland as their country as well.
This is where homing is possible, if one were to be honest with the sacred sacrifices of those who have come here to pave the way for all these benefits that the Filipino American immigrants receive at this time. I quote Tomas—the Tomas Immakulate Consepcion prefiguring the White American: “A people’s language is the saving grace that binds them together through sex, age, and economic strata.” This Tomas also says: “Filipino Americans must retain the knowledge of their language. In that basic respect, they retain what is truest and most honorable to their people and their culture, lest they fade into the nebulae that is America.” The admonition is wise—and timely.
Then again, we need to remember that the Philippines as an imagined and a real territory of memory and experience is not a monolingual country unlike many parts of the Western world, but a country united—and divided as well—by its multilingualism and multiculturalism, which makes it to be richer, blessed in many ways, as these languages and cultures it has provide its people the many and variegated windows through which the people see and understand and interpret the world.
You do not get to like the characters initially, as they tend to be kilometric in their speeches, so talkative in many ways. But the fact they are familiar makes you comfortable with them, and this logic of comfort makes you see clearly the issues raised and the contradictions awaiting synthesis and resolution. To provide an answer to these questions is not an easy task, this I know.
To insist on the need to redeem the Fil-Am of this whole scale amnesia of who is a Fil-
Am and where does he come from takes a hundred years to heal perhaps. But we may need a lesser number of years to completely forget—and this is where the questioning of self and selves, of identity and identities, and of destiny and redemption becomes relevant. In short, it is far easier to forget than to remember—and the Fil-Am must be forwarned. And no exception.
The project to remember is always more difficult, as is the case, because in re-membering—of becoming a member again—we have to re-member the language of our people, the languages that talk about their dreams, desires, despairs.
We look at language this way—the language that is the abode of the Filipino American soul, the language that is the indwelling of the Fil-Am spirit trying to call out to his wayward spirit again, the language of his past as present, the language of his present as present, and the language of his present as future. In short, it is the language of the timelessness and endlessness of his quest, his wandering, his wondering—the language of the ancestor who came to seek this land and who did not wait for the land to seek him.
There is no reversing back the history of the Filipino American as the play reveals in a manner that is more apocalyptic than the Apocalypsis itself. The power of history is absolute and it can never be undone. But to make sense of the layered identity of the Filipino American is to make sense of both the past and future that are both unknown and unfamiliar to us, hence, the need for the productive and privileging perspective of the present.
To me, this is what this play, Who the Fil-Am I or Never Judge the Buk-buk by its Cover-cover, is offering to us: its gift to all those who see that condition of the Fil-Am, that condition of him making sense of the small empires within and outside his Filipino American self, the condition of the primal loss of the primal experience of the ancestral homeland, and that condition of invisibility however much he tries to create a space for his language, self, discourse, memory, identity. In this land of exile, the Fil-Am will always remain and exile, plus or minus.
He may no longer be the buk-buk of old, but he would have to outgrow that name by going through the rite of renaming himself.
November 21, 2006
Panagkasir ti Lenned iti Bannawag
Agkasir ti lenned
ket iwarsina ti sipnget,
kas iti panagmurumor
ti mannalon
iti bunubon iti nakem ti rabii.
Agsaknap ti manto
a pagan-anay
ti agpatnag
nga agladladingit.
Miraen ti bannawag
ti bengkag
iti puso ti tao a kusit
ket sadiay,
iti labes dagiti kinelleng
ken aripit,
sadiayna a lapunosen
iti lawag
ti barukong
ti aldaw a naulpit.
Ta agbilang
ta agbilang ti lenned
kadagiti bendisionna iti kanito
ket uray ti raya
nga ipabulod ti init,
daytay mangted iti dengngep
iti pispis nga agkuykuyegyeg,
isaldana piman iti ahensia
ti naipatawid nga ayat,
antigo koma iti kinasudina
ken nasudi koma
iti kinaawan-nagan daytoy
ngem, a, ta agbilbilang met
iti supli a sagbibinting,
wenno agrag-o iti killiing
dagiti maisubli a kusing
iti appupo,
iti malmalday a lukong dagiti palad
a kinalamri ti panagkapuyo
ti mabanbannog a puso.
Agkasir ti lenned
iti bannawag,
agdawat iti agsapa
a maibayad
iti panangtagikuana
kadagiti oras
a panagisem sa panagkatawa
santo panagsasainnek
a sandi ti panagmalmalanga
kadagiti mabirdabirday
a panagmaymaysa.
Piman ti lenned
ta panawan ti bannawag,
agsubli daytoy iti arpad
dagiti makaammo iti nagan
ni manangngaasi nga ayat.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nob 21/06
ket iwarsina ti sipnget,
kas iti panagmurumor
ti mannalon
iti bunubon iti nakem ti rabii.
Agsaknap ti manto
a pagan-anay
ti agpatnag
nga agladladingit.
Miraen ti bannawag
ti bengkag
iti puso ti tao a kusit
ket sadiay,
iti labes dagiti kinelleng
ken aripit,
sadiayna a lapunosen
iti lawag
ti barukong
ti aldaw a naulpit.
Ta agbilang
ta agbilang ti lenned
kadagiti bendisionna iti kanito
ket uray ti raya
nga ipabulod ti init,
daytay mangted iti dengngep
iti pispis nga agkuykuyegyeg,
isaldana piman iti ahensia
ti naipatawid nga ayat,
antigo koma iti kinasudina
ken nasudi koma
iti kinaawan-nagan daytoy
ngem, a, ta agbilbilang met
iti supli a sagbibinting,
wenno agrag-o iti killiing
dagiti maisubli a kusing
iti appupo,
iti malmalday a lukong dagiti palad
a kinalamri ti panagkapuyo
ti mabanbannog a puso.
Agkasir ti lenned
iti bannawag,
agdawat iti agsapa
a maibayad
iti panangtagikuana
kadagiti oras
a panagisem sa panagkatawa
santo panagsasainnek
a sandi ti panagmalmalanga
kadagiti mabirdabirday
a panagmaymaysa.
Piman ti lenned
ta panawan ti bannawag,
agsubli daytoy iti arpad
dagiti makaammo iti nagan
ni manangngaasi nga ayat.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nob 21/06
Dumanonkayo iti Nakem
(Daniw a panagpadanon nga imbitla ni A S Agcaoili idi Nob. 10, 2006 iti pormal a panaglukat ti 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference, Unibersidad ti Hawaii iti Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, a dinar-ayan dagiti gasut-gasut a delegado a naggapu iti Filipinas, Hawaii, Mainland USA, New Zealand, Japan, Australia, ken Canada.)
Dumanonkayo iti nakem, kakadua
Dakayo a kasingin dagiti sirmata
Dakayo a kamang dagiti darepdep
Dakayo a saksi daytoy a tagtagainep.
Dumanonkayo a mangimatang
Kadagitoy nalukag a parbangon
Inlilitayo a riniing iti narnek a puso
Minurmuray iti benditado a sao.
Dumanonkayo, dakayo a kadaraan
Kabunnuligmi iti panagkatangkatang
Kaduami kadagiti agpuypuyat a rabii
kabagismi kadagiti amin a panagtagibi.
Ti nakem ket panangiyinaw iti datdatlag nga ayat
Daytoy a taripnong a pannakiginnasanggasat
Pannakisinnugal kadagiti karkarna dagiti tudo
Pannakisinsinnanggol kadagiti panagmamayo
Iti man barukong wenno iti lipat iti gasut a lagip
Wenno kadagiti bannawag kadagiti an-anek-ek
Ay, wen, dumanonkayo kadagiti sardam iti sabong
Umunegkayo a lumaem kadagiti iliw iti barukong.
Dumanonkayo, ngarud, dumanonkayo
Dumanonkayo, ala, ta imatanganyo
Ti panagkakammaysa dagiti samiweng
Panagkakammayettayo manen ken manen.
Testiguantay ti panaginnala ti regta ken rugso
Ti panagkanaig natakneng nga isip iti appupo
Panagallimpatok dagiti dallot ni ayat iti sellang
Panagariangga ni derrep a maibiat iti law-ang.
Ayna, dumanonkayo ta saksiantay a maminpinsan
Panagumbi dagiti kananakem a paulo ti darang
Agpatagibi kadagiti isip a di maiwalangwalang
Agapon iti balitang ti naipasngay a kaipapanan.
Makariknakayo man iti kalamri iti panunot
Addakami ditoy a kaing-ingas ti gutigot
Sindadaanakami a mangsaranget lamiis
Mangidaton iti beggang ni gasat iti arbis.
Ditoy a yatangtayo bullalayaw dagiti pakabuklan
Ditoytayo nga aguray iti mabigatan a salakan
Tay rikna a maidaton kadagiti an-anito ti kaputotan
Tay aglipias a ragsak a gubuayen ti pinnagayam.
Dumanonkayo ngarud ta agtaklinkami
Dakami nga agpasangpet iti ila ti puli
Dakami nga agkamang iti pannakaawatyo
Iti pagkurkurangan ti exilo a kinadungngo.
A Solver Agcaoili
U ti Hawaii Manoa
Honolulu, HI
Nob 10/06
Dumanonkayo iti nakem, kakadua
Dakayo a kasingin dagiti sirmata
Dakayo a kamang dagiti darepdep
Dakayo a saksi daytoy a tagtagainep.
Dumanonkayo a mangimatang
Kadagitoy nalukag a parbangon
Inlilitayo a riniing iti narnek a puso
Minurmuray iti benditado a sao.
Dumanonkayo, dakayo a kadaraan
Kabunnuligmi iti panagkatangkatang
Kaduami kadagiti agpuypuyat a rabii
kabagismi kadagiti amin a panagtagibi.
Ti nakem ket panangiyinaw iti datdatlag nga ayat
Daytoy a taripnong a pannakiginnasanggasat
Pannakisinnugal kadagiti karkarna dagiti tudo
Pannakisinsinnanggol kadagiti panagmamayo
Iti man barukong wenno iti lipat iti gasut a lagip
Wenno kadagiti bannawag kadagiti an-anek-ek
Ay, wen, dumanonkayo kadagiti sardam iti sabong
Umunegkayo a lumaem kadagiti iliw iti barukong.
Dumanonkayo, ngarud, dumanonkayo
Dumanonkayo, ala, ta imatanganyo
Ti panagkakammaysa dagiti samiweng
Panagkakammayettayo manen ken manen.
Testiguantay ti panaginnala ti regta ken rugso
Ti panagkanaig natakneng nga isip iti appupo
Panagallimpatok dagiti dallot ni ayat iti sellang
Panagariangga ni derrep a maibiat iti law-ang.
Ayna, dumanonkayo ta saksiantay a maminpinsan
Panagumbi dagiti kananakem a paulo ti darang
Agpatagibi kadagiti isip a di maiwalangwalang
Agapon iti balitang ti naipasngay a kaipapanan.
Makariknakayo man iti kalamri iti panunot
Addakami ditoy a kaing-ingas ti gutigot
Sindadaanakami a mangsaranget lamiis
Mangidaton iti beggang ni gasat iti arbis.
Ditoy a yatangtayo bullalayaw dagiti pakabuklan
Ditoytayo nga aguray iti mabigatan a salakan
Tay rikna a maidaton kadagiti an-anito ti kaputotan
Tay aglipias a ragsak a gubuayen ti pinnagayam.
Dumanonkayo ngarud ta agtaklinkami
Dakami nga agpasangpet iti ila ti puli
Dakami nga agkamang iti pannakaawatyo
Iti pagkurkurangan ti exilo a kinadungngo.
A Solver Agcaoili
U ti Hawaii Manoa
Honolulu, HI
Nob 10/06
The Night the Governor Came
The night the governor came was cool, the mountain air conniving with us organizers of the 2006 Nakem Centennial Centennial.
The year is the 100th of the coming of the first 15 sakadas to Hawai`i to work in the sugarcane plantations owned by the haoles, the while plantation owners who had seen the economic promise of sugar in the world trade. Hawai`i, the much touted tropical paradise, did not know peril in those times except those peril in the fates of those who came to work in the vast tracks of land to assure the plantation owners of the steady supply of cheap and reliable labor.
The governor is the newly reelected Governor Linda Lingle, who, in her desire to explore the possibilities of the economic partnership between the Philippines and the State of Hawai`i, had in January 2006, led the delegation of businesspeople and civic and cultural leaders who went to the Ilocos and many parts of the country to see for themselves social reality of the tie binding the country and her State.
She spoke of the Filipinos with fondness, her ten years of staying with a Filipino family in Maui giving shape and form to her estimation of that Ilocano spirit. She handily won a reelection and her coming over, right after the day of election when victory was still in the air and the euphoria of success was intoxicating, was to the delight of the delagates of this first-ever Nakem Conference. That was, indeed, a generous gesture.
I now view all these episodes of the "Dumanonkayo Ceremonies" in my mind, the scenes coming in like quick flashes of the memory that, in a rather chronological way, began with that invitation for her to come please come and meet up with the Nakem people, those who think that something, indeed, can be done to commit to memory the sacred sacrifices of these sakadas, who between 1906 and 1935, had swollen to about 120,000.
We go by the multiplier here--and we realize how, despite the cruelty of the circumstances embedded in plantation village life, this exodus of men, memory, and muscle, something good came out: something close to redemption as these sakadas helped bankroll the Philippine economy.
Governor Lingle certainly endeared us by her presence and the graciousness in her is evident. She talked stories: of the Filipino family that took care of her for ten years when she decided to relocate to Maui, of the trip that took her to Santa, Ilocos Sur and the other cities and towns, of her meeting with kind Filipinos.
Her stories are endless--and our stories of her coming will be the same as well: endless, with many versions coming from the delegates.
We can only remember that graciousness now as we wish her well with her second term as our leader in these islands of our hopes and desires.
A Solver Agcaoili
U of Hawaii at Manoa
Nob 9, 2006
The year is the 100th of the coming of the first 15 sakadas to Hawai`i to work in the sugarcane plantations owned by the haoles, the while plantation owners who had seen the economic promise of sugar in the world trade. Hawai`i, the much touted tropical paradise, did not know peril in those times except those peril in the fates of those who came to work in the vast tracks of land to assure the plantation owners of the steady supply of cheap and reliable labor.
The governor is the newly reelected Governor Linda Lingle, who, in her desire to explore the possibilities of the economic partnership between the Philippines and the State of Hawai`i, had in January 2006, led the delegation of businesspeople and civic and cultural leaders who went to the Ilocos and many parts of the country to see for themselves social reality of the tie binding the country and her State.
She spoke of the Filipinos with fondness, her ten years of staying with a Filipino family in Maui giving shape and form to her estimation of that Ilocano spirit. She handily won a reelection and her coming over, right after the day of election when victory was still in the air and the euphoria of success was intoxicating, was to the delight of the delagates of this first-ever Nakem Conference. That was, indeed, a generous gesture.
I now view all these episodes of the "Dumanonkayo Ceremonies" in my mind, the scenes coming in like quick flashes of the memory that, in a rather chronological way, began with that invitation for her to come please come and meet up with the Nakem people, those who think that something, indeed, can be done to commit to memory the sacred sacrifices of these sakadas, who between 1906 and 1935, had swollen to about 120,000.
We go by the multiplier here--and we realize how, despite the cruelty of the circumstances embedded in plantation village life, this exodus of men, memory, and muscle, something good came out: something close to redemption as these sakadas helped bankroll the Philippine economy.
Governor Lingle certainly endeared us by her presence and the graciousness in her is evident. She talked stories: of the Filipino family that took care of her for ten years when she decided to relocate to Maui, of the trip that took her to Santa, Ilocos Sur and the other cities and towns, of her meeting with kind Filipinos.
Her stories are endless--and our stories of her coming will be the same as well: endless, with many versions coming from the delegates.
We can only remember that graciousness now as we wish her well with her second term as our leader in these islands of our hopes and desires.
A Solver Agcaoili
U of Hawaii at Manoa
Nob 9, 2006
The Nakem Conference is our Witness
The recently concluded 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference is our witness to the intensifiying critical consciousness about what is it to be a people of the Ilokos and Amianan.
More than a hundred speakers came to town--to the University of Hawaii at Manoa--to share with us what they think about the many issues affecting us as a people in the Philippines and in the diaspora.
With 48 parallel sessions going on one at a time, we could just imagine the kind of knowledge production going on at the same time, the sessions ranging from the articulations of what is it to be a people of Amianan to the zany ways through which Ilokanos and the peoples of the Amianan are thought to be known of.
We can only have a quick enumeration of the specialists here, those people who know us despite the fact that they are never from us: Lawrence Reid of Japan and New Zealand who is an authority on many Amianan cultures and languages; Itaru Nagasaka from Niigata International University who knows Piddig and Ilokano more than anyone from the place; Jesus Basuel from Canada who is an authority on assimilation and immigration; Ana Marcelo who spoke of the 150 years of restaurant culture in the United States, a culture the Ilokanos are part of; and Gary Singh who spoke on the issues of Filipino immigration.
Hundred others came including the Philippines' National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera who delivered the main keynote speech on the anomaly besetting the selection of National Artist for Literature, the process, he says, effectively easing out and excluding writers from the regions because of the selection committees' inability to have access to these writings from the regions. The feminist poet and novelist Lilia Quindoza Santiago came and shared with us her concept of Amianan literatures, the Northern Philippine Literatures. So also Marot Flores, the foremost cultural mapper of Northern Philippines, an authority of the popular culture sorrounding the Virgen of Manaoag.
The two countries' foremost Ilokano writers--the pillars of respectable Ilokano writing--also came: Amado Yoro from Honolulu; Loring Tabin from Salt Lake, Utah; Terry Tugade from South San Francisco; Pacita Saludes from Salt Lake, Hawaii;
CJ Ancheta from Maui, Hawaii; Brigido Daprosa from Gumil Hawaii; Artemio Baxa from Maui, Hawaii; Amalia Bueno from Honolulu, HI; Lilia Santiago from Manila; Ely Raquel from Gumil Ilocos Norte; Peter La Julian from Isabela; Joel Manuel of Ilocos Norte; Jaime Raras and Marcelino Soria of Ilocos Sur; and Alegria Tan Visaya from Ilocos Norte.
With the 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference, we feel that we have been so blessed. We feel that there is a small history here--and we all owe it to the anitos of old, the anitos of the puli.
The Nakem Conferences will go on and on, and in 2007, it will go to where it also belongs--to the Philippines. In 2008, it will come back to the United States, and it will be hosted by the UH Leeward Community College.
To all those who had the nakem to join us: mahalo and aloha.
A Solver Agcaoili
U of Hawaii at Manoa
Nov 12/06
More than a hundred speakers came to town--to the University of Hawaii at Manoa--to share with us what they think about the many issues affecting us as a people in the Philippines and in the diaspora.
With 48 parallel sessions going on one at a time, we could just imagine the kind of knowledge production going on at the same time, the sessions ranging from the articulations of what is it to be a people of Amianan to the zany ways through which Ilokanos and the peoples of the Amianan are thought to be known of.
We can only have a quick enumeration of the specialists here, those people who know us despite the fact that they are never from us: Lawrence Reid of Japan and New Zealand who is an authority on many Amianan cultures and languages; Itaru Nagasaka from Niigata International University who knows Piddig and Ilokano more than anyone from the place; Jesus Basuel from Canada who is an authority on assimilation and immigration; Ana Marcelo who spoke of the 150 years of restaurant culture in the United States, a culture the Ilokanos are part of; and Gary Singh who spoke on the issues of Filipino immigration.
Hundred others came including the Philippines' National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera who delivered the main keynote speech on the anomaly besetting the selection of National Artist for Literature, the process, he says, effectively easing out and excluding writers from the regions because of the selection committees' inability to have access to these writings from the regions. The feminist poet and novelist Lilia Quindoza Santiago came and shared with us her concept of Amianan literatures, the Northern Philippine Literatures. So also Marot Flores, the foremost cultural mapper of Northern Philippines, an authority of the popular culture sorrounding the Virgen of Manaoag.
The two countries' foremost Ilokano writers--the pillars of respectable Ilokano writing--also came: Amado Yoro from Honolulu; Loring Tabin from Salt Lake, Utah; Terry Tugade from South San Francisco; Pacita Saludes from Salt Lake, Hawaii;
CJ Ancheta from Maui, Hawaii; Brigido Daprosa from Gumil Hawaii; Artemio Baxa from Maui, Hawaii; Amalia Bueno from Honolulu, HI; Lilia Santiago from Manila; Ely Raquel from Gumil Ilocos Norte; Peter La Julian from Isabela; Joel Manuel of Ilocos Norte; Jaime Raras and Marcelino Soria of Ilocos Sur; and Alegria Tan Visaya from Ilocos Norte.
With the 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference, we feel that we have been so blessed. We feel that there is a small history here--and we all owe it to the anitos of old, the anitos of the puli.
The Nakem Conferences will go on and on, and in 2007, it will go to where it also belongs--to the Philippines. In 2008, it will come back to the United States, and it will be hosted by the UH Leeward Community College.
To all those who had the nakem to join us: mahalo and aloha.
A Solver Agcaoili
U of Hawaii at Manoa
Nov 12/06
Ilokano, Amianan Studies and Northern Luzon Cultures
Ilokano and Amianan Studies, Northern Luzon Cultures,
and the Universities from the Regions:
Towards a Theory and Praxis
Aurelio S. Agcaoili
University of Hawaii-Manoa
A Hermeneutics of Mixed Purposes
My take on the issues that enmesh the concepts and realities of Ilokano Studies, Amianan Studies, the cultures of Northern Luzon, and the role of the universities from these regions is admittedly pre-shaped and pre-formed by my advocacy interests to preserve, perpetuate, and promote Ilokano and Amianan languages and cultures. The voice of about 30 million people that trace their heritage from these languages and cultures has largely been stifled and marginalized through the centuries and it is high time this voice was heard.
There is an inseparable tripod in the attempt to resist and reclaim: to resist the onslaught of hegemonic cultures and languages and to reclaim ownership of a language and culture—even to languages and cultures—that somehow partly defines the claimant. In the context of Ilokano Studies, the language and culture is specific to Ilokano. In the context of Amianan Studies, the languages and cultures that we are here committed to preserve, perpetuate, and promote are the languages and cultures of all the peoples of Northern Philippines so that while we acknowledge the position of Ilokano in this part of the country as the lingua franca, we recognize at the same time the right of other languages and cultures to co-exist with this lingua franca. The commitment thus of Ilokano language and culture and its advocates is to respect and assure the non-Ilokano communities their fair share of a democratic cultural and linguistic space afforded by any self-respecting nation-state that, among others, advertises itself as ‘democratic.’
I admit that my being a culture and language teacher is itself a perspective that provides some biases and prejudices in the way I look at this emerging body of knowledge we call Ilokano and Amianan Studies, and these biases and prejudices are built-in from the logic of such a perspective.
I recognize that this is itself a kind of an intellectual ‘uma’ in the Ilokano and Amianan sense, a ‘lichtung’ in the Heideggerian sense—a clearing—through which I get to see the world from the forest of ideas, and the seeing is about (a) what is it to be an Ilokano in an ever-changing world; (b) what becomes of an Ilokano in an ever-changing landscape and topography of experience; and (c) what is it and what becomes of an Ilokano in an ever-changing geography of pain and struggle and sacrifices both in the ‘ili’ and the ‘pagilian’—the town and/or country—that is both a physical and psychical territory, a memory and emotion, a sense of affiliation and a sense of reference, a parameter and premise for belonging to a group.
We extend the very same logic of the issues raised about the Ilokano to account the bigger context in which we locate him, and the questions are ever-constant, recurrent, persistent, insistent: (a) what is it to be a people of the Amianan; (b) what becomes of the people of Amianan in an ever-changing landscape and topography of experience; and about what it means to be a people defined and determined by a certain linguistic identity. For a people is defined and determined, first and foremost, by the kind of language that they speak and that, the claim about bloodline and gene pools do not what an ethnic group finally makes.
I must admit, however, that my long years of cultural advocacy work in many fronts, such as teaching in the University of the Philippines and now at the University of Hawai`i and experiencing what is it to be a teacher of an ‘othered’, marginalized language and culture, have given me that rare privilege of being a messenger to an Ilokano Everyman.
Searching for a Framework
The experience of ‘marginalization’ whether as a teacher or a student—and I have been both—in the context of a hegemonic positioning of a dominant culture, is a multiple struggle, endless and everyday. In the Philippines, as in all the lands of exile of the Ilokano, Hawai`i included, this marginalization despite claims to diversity and multiculturalism and multilingualism, is as subtly sinister as the unwanted epistemologically tragic consequences of neocolonialism. Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of Earth” has talked about this and points to us the evolving of a social agent and actor that acts as the new lord and master, even if the former colonizer is long gone; Renato Constantino’s many essays on the effects of what he called ‘neocolonization’ including his work on the need to form a liberating critical consciousness, “The Miseducation of the Filipinos,” reminds Filipinos of the need to be always on the guard for that which mis-shapes and deforms and misinforms consciousness, including the ‘Englishization’ of the mind-sets of the Filipino people, with such Englishization bringing about the erasure, in a systematic fashion, of the native consciousness that could have provided a measure of looking at possible alternatives to a captive consciousness without necessarily invoking a grand past that is not there but only imagined and held on to as a symbol of a collective memory; Zeus Salazar’s theoretical proposal for a “P/Filipinolohiya”—studies about the Philippines—that is framed by a recovery of the essentials of the ethnos, the ‘lahi’, the ‘puli’; Prospero Covar’s “Araling Pilipino” frames a notion of an ‘anthro’ that is both respectful and respecting of tradition and chance and posits the dynamic of political engagement; Bienvenido Lumbera’s courageous and daring act of re-claiming of the aesthetic, literary, and cultural experiences of the ‘native culture’ almost erased by the apparatuses of multiple colonial experience; Paulo Freire’s notion of a pedagogy of liberation not only “for” but also “by” and “with” the people; and Virgilio Enriquez’s concept of ‘liberation psychology’ that, among others, returns to the site of personhood and community defined by the terms of Philippine culture and world view, and thus by a specific Philippine language and the terms offered by that language—all these and more provide the theoretical impetus for a rethinking of Ilokano and Amianan Studies, herein referred to as IAS.
IAS is thus a form of studies that is grounded on a political and clearly epistemological intent: one that is intended to re-name the Ilokano and Amianan experience whose name was erased because of many national and extra-national factors, including the factors of extraterritoriality that attends to that aspect of this same experience that is rooted in exile and diaspora. The role of the universities that have interests in this form of knowledge, some of them as a matter of both cultural and moral duty, is to provide a venue for the fermentation and production of such a body of knowledge, with the view that such a body of knowledge ought to be, in accord with a liberating dialectical hermeneutic framework, ‘open in its closedness/closed in its openness.’ As such, this body of knowledge is not to be taken as an end in itself but always to be seen as part and parcel of a bigger whole, and always sensitive to issues and concerns that have something to do always—without any exceptions—with studies about the Philippines. In effect, what we are talking about here is that Ilokano and Amianan studies must have that inherent capacity to re-connect—to have that ‘connectivity’—with other studies about Philippine society, culture, and politics.
Re-framing ‘Studies’
In articulating the ‘studies’ in IAS, there is a need to return to some premises and principles by way of definition. This form of ‘studies’ in the IAS is essentially pre-formed and pre-shaped by the hybrid nature of contemporary knowledge, with an avowed acknowledgement of the cognitive effects and consequences of cultures coming into an interface—of cultures coming into a connection/connexion—such that the nexus of these cultures can no longer be claimed by a single owner but becomes a shared knowledge available for appropriation by a culture needing it.
There is a certain idealization in the notion of ‘nexus’ here, as if ‘domination’ and the ‘empire’ and the ‘colony’ are by-gone realities of contemporary life. IAS holds that domination is ever-present; that the ‘empire’ is much around in various ruses and guises and transformations, and the colony is still as real as the medieval times when the whole world was still in the hands of two superpowers, Spain and Portugal. The dominance of each of these ‘rulers of mankind’ may be a foregone conclusion, but the effects of their rule of that ‘other’ of the world remains intact, albeit in more subtle forms. But the subtlety of these forms does not guarantee the healing of the ‘souls’ of the nations, countries, and other body politics the colonizers, imperialists, and invaders ravaged. Another thing: Spain and Portugal have granted independence to their colonies but other contemporary superpowers have re-claimed the economic, political, linguistic, cultural, economic, and aesthetic spaces these former colonizers vacated. It remains true to say, therefore, that there exists, and in a more sinister form, dominant and dominating cultures and their effects on ‘dominated’ and ‘subjugated’ cultures are layered and multi-hued, in effect made tacit and implicit, but nevertheless not necessarily less powerful, less coercive, less oppressive.
These lead us to the ugly realities of a particular country and nation-state that went through a long history of subjugation by at least three colonizers and invaders like the Philippines. We speak of the almost irrecoverable power of triple linguistic and cultural erasures that produced and reproduced the truths—and by extension, meanings—manufactured and produced by the colonizers and invaders. Following Constantino’s historical accounting of the formation of a new breed/hybrid of colonizers—the ‘neocolonizers’—the logic of colonization gets a refurbishing in the very logic of a systemic realigning of the same subjugating power of neocolonization and made more powerful by the access to economic resources limited and made accessible only, to a powerful few, essentially an elite economic class, whose class extends to politics, the media, and all other cultural forms, including the imposition of a language of power, commerce, and education.
It is in these difficult structural realities of the Philippines that we come to see ‘studies about the Philippines’ as windows through which we can have a critical reflection of ourselves as a people and as a nation, and through which we draw segments of the same studies in keeping with some acknowledged fidelities and loyalties to the particular culture and language a Filipino finds affinity. In effect, we are here advancing the idea that the twin and complementary ‘studies about the Ilocos and about the Amianan’ are first and foremost part of a body of knowledge, and this body of knowledge, much bigger in scope and political and epistemological direction, is the ‘studies about the Philippines.’ Conceptually and logically, IAS is a slice of ‘studies about the Philippines’—‘Philippine Studies’—and cannot be outside it as it draws from it the very seed of its creation, production, formation, and sustenance, inextricable as it is from its tree and ground, even if it is at the same time allowed to grow and bloom and mature as a branch of the same tree, and in that same ground. What we need to do here is to assure ourselves—those who will venture into this form of knowledge—that the felicities and faith in what we are doing are in there and ever-present: the many form of felicities that we have to forge with other disciplines and knowledge/s and the faith that what we are doing is for the greater good and in keeping with the obligation to contribute to the pursuit of the ends of community building as required by the social contract of which, as inheritors of Ilokano and Amianan languages and cultures, we are signatories.
Even as we say that IAS finds its ‘connect’ with Philippines Studies, herein referred to as PS, some clear premises must be stated: (i) that IAS, like PS, must be oriented to a theory and praxis of a liberating world view, away from the neocolonizing effects of consciousness pre-formed and pre-shaped by a neocolonizing way of life authored by, and perpetually reproduced by the apparatuses of a neocolonial state; (ii) that IAS, like the PS, must look at itself as a whole strategy of re-claiming what were erased or made to disappear or destroyed by centuries of systematic oppression, brutal occupation, and
‘satellization’ by other countries or cultures that have played a ceaseless game of domination against the cultures of the Ilokanos and of the peoples of Amianan; and (iii) that the key issue about a Philippine ‘national culture’ must be subjected to interrogation in an effort to account the reality of multiculturalism and multilingualism—a reality that points to diversity and at the same time requiring, for political purposes, unity. How to keep this ‘meson,’ the healthy balance in all of these, is difficult but it is not impossible. Here we deny the equation of difficulty and impossibility, arguing that in the building up of an imagined nation—an imagined political entity that serves as the instrument for the pursuit of common ends for all the ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines and the various Philippine communities in the diaspora—it is, indeed difficult to come up with a balance between all these opposing realities but nonetheless, there is the political and ethical obligation to find that balance as is demanded by the social contract, and which, in itself, one of the organizational bases of the social contract.
Forms of Knowledge and ‘Knowledges’
One of the key problems of the ‘scientificization’ of the current understanding of knowledge is that when ‘knowledge’ does not go through the rigor of what is generally understood as ‘the scientific method’ that begins with a problem and the search for that predictable, calculable, and repeatable procedure to subject the problem into ‘anatomical’
parts, such a body of knowledge must be rendered ‘unscientific.’ This kind of a position brings into the extreme the ‘shanghaiing’ of knowledge by today’s positivistic science and arrogating unto itself all claims to knowledge that follows the rigid scientific procedure that is hewed on prediction, calculation, and repetition. We register here an objection to this view of knowledge and propose the broad understanding of what human knowledge is all about and the even more democratic possibility that, in fact, human knowledge cannot be one and entire and whole even if this is the ideal but is, in reality, plural, tentative, exploratory, more-or-less, fluid. In looking at human knowledge this way, we are able to give a discursive space for other knowledge/s apart from the kind of knowledge that is familiar to us, and thus, is convenient and comfortable to us. It is discourse that we are after here—that reality that we have to guard in the coming into a conversation with all ‘others’ that are not really ‘others’ in the grand political project to create unity in diversity, a sense of the ‘et pluribus unum’ that allows the co-existences of all forms of expressions of human life.
In IAS, we reject this subtle tyranny of this model of ‘scientific knowledge’ that marginalizes and erases the sincere and honest attempt of the ‘studies on the human and the social’ to make us understand what is it to be human and what is in human society that makes that society ‘human.’ This rejection does not reject the constructed truths of
the ‘studies on the natural’ which studies is sometimes referred to as ‘the hard sciences’ or, in some instances, in its most extreme form, ‘the real science.’ In IAS, as in the PS, we see the creative connection, the constructive interface of both models of human knowledge, seeing that one needs the other for insight, and the other needs the other for explanation. For indeed as it were that ‘the studies on the human and social,’ also called ‘the studies of the cultural,’ presents to us insights that require explanation while the ‘studies of nature and physical world’ presents to us explanations of phenomena but such explanation needs re-framing so that we can draw from it an insight into what the world as ‘kosmos’ is all about. In practical terms, we ask the question: Does IAS need ‘the hard sciences,’ to wit, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, botany, genetics, botany and the like? The answer is yes. Corollary to this question is: Does botany have to have a nation? The answer is no, but it pays to have botany that makes use of itself in a particular culture, language, and body politic. For what would the use of botany if it cannot even tell the floral diversity of a place and therefore a culture or a language that have something to do with botany in the first place?
At best, our understanding of modern science today must have to be reformulated and brought back to its conceptualization that roots itself from the notion of the Latin ‘scire,’ to know. There is this act of knowing—this ‘to know’—in the cultural studies as there is in the studies of nature, if, for some reason, we recognize the tentative split of these two forms of knowledge. But in recognizing the beginnings of human knowledge as we understand it today, human knowledge with a broader, more encompassing strokes—in recognizing these two broad forms—we realize that there is no set logic that prohibits and prevents us from looking at other forms, other models, other possibilities. This is also in keeping with the fact that ‘the science of nature’ has yet to give us a full explanation of what is in there in nature and so is ‘the science of the human and the social’—also called ‘the science of the cultural.’ A re-reading of many cultures and societies and their models of human understanding and thus, of their own version of ‘human knowledge’ would make us realize that human knowledge comes in various forms and packaging depending on so many variables, including the variables of the cultural and the linguistic.
IAS as Resistance and Re-Claiming
The relevance of IAS is that of its project and program to resist and to re-claim.
Resistance is seen here in the context of appreciation of the plurality of cultures and languages, and the plurality of societies and thus the need to draw up guarantees in order for this plurality to not become homogenized and ‘massified’ in the end. The idea of homogenization of languages and cultures may be a grand political project that has some genesis in the need for the ‘nationalization’ of a language, for instance; or it may mean the need to ‘purify’ a society, and thus the culture of that society by going the route of ‘Aryanism’ and thus the eventual ‘Dachauwization’ of all that is impure, which could be those related to immigrants and exiles, and those of the margins, those that are not part of the mainstream—or of anything not held sacred and dear by the holders of power.
While the project to ‘nationalize’ a culture or a language, for example, is a political necessity for the survival and unity of the ‘national’ body politic, the act of ‘nationalizing’ is not value-free as it carries with it the burden of recognizing one culture and thus, one language, against all those ‘other’ cultures and ‘other’ languages. In effect, there is something laudable in the effort to bring together seemingly disparate groups of people in a nation and country by reason of their various ethnolinguistic heritages so that a ‘national’ conversation could come about. But here we have to safeguard the inherent rights of the ‘othered’ cultures and languages in a nation to exist, to survive, and to view the world and human experience in accord with the lenses provided by their ‘othered’ cultures and languages. If in the ‘nationalization’ of a language and a culture results in the death of the ‘othered’ cultures and languages, such a nationalization becomes a self-defeating because self-destructive exercise.
This is where resistance comes. We can project this scenario and account here the aggression and invasion of global, imperialistic, and international cultures and languages and the ‘othered’ cultures and languages of a nation suffer another death after a rigor mortis. We add here the histories of colonization and neocolonization and we can only guess why cultures and literatures and languages from the margins ought to raise their voice, already muffled as it is by the dominant culture and language, and demand a fair share of space in the national conversation and national discourse. This is re-claiming of the right of marginal languages, literatures, and cultures to be—as well as their right to become. IAS, as in PS, is thus a crucial issue linked with the indispensable issue of the being of the Ilokanos and the peoples of Amianan and their response to the challenges of that which is ahead of them, their becoming.
IAS as a Strategy for the Struggle to Survive
The dialectic of being and becoming in IAS is grounded on the reality that with the invasive consequences of national, modern, and global cultures, the ‘minoritized’ peoples and cultures must be vigilant of their right to survive and thus, would need to strategize their way of survival. The consequent extinction of any culture as a result of the domination of a more powerful because mainstream, and more politically and economically entrenched culture is bad enough. But the terrible end of any culture as an exhibit of the museum of the culturally extinct and thus irrecoverable is an unforgivable result of cultural aggression of a dominant culture or cultures.
The Role of the Universities in IAS
Universities, by nature, are state apparatuses, marked for that ideological role of producing and reproducing citizens that ought to know their civics. The universities work with the reproduction of consciousness and operate, in a rather tacit way, through some established canons of human knowledge, generally accepted, or at times, legislated. There is in the universities that propaganda about them being the ‘marketplace’ of ideas, but that is only true for a certain extent as they, unwittingly, become agents of the same manufactured truths and meanings produced and reproduced by society itself.
It is in this context that the universities can either become agents of change or perpetrators of the same ruses and guises and artifices of a dominant culture. The continuing use of a foreign language in the Philippines as the measure of knowledge learned and acquired in the school system is one example of a lopsided view of what human knowledge is all about, the human knowledge that is ‘human’ because it opens doors to liberation, discourse, and emancipation from the bondage of ‘mass’ thoughts and mindsets. The continuing denigration of a native culture and language by the very same people who are expected to nurture, sustain, promote, preserve, and perpetuate their culture and language happens in the very sacred and august halls of the universities, the alma mater of knowledge that has not allowed the virtue of critical reflection to set in.
The question thus for the universities in the Philippines particularly those from Region I, Region II, and the Cordillera Administrative Region is this: How ready are they to take part in this duty of equipping their educands with the skills and tools necessary for critical reflection?
A Note to an Exploratory Conclusion
IAS as a form of knowledge will go the way of interrogation, as it should. It does not purport to possess all the answers to the questions to be raised. But it will have to exhaust the means to raising the questions well and from there, draw the germ to some tentative, exploratory, dialectical answers. The more important thing to do at this time is to prepare the ground for the endless dialectic of question and answer to come about with humility and freedom. If IAS shall have raised the right questions well, then more than half of its task is done. It is the raising of the right questions that matter most in human knowledge that is ‘human’ because it is ‘critical’ and it is critical it is not content with the answers based on the logic of convenience and truth produced and reproduced by a society that does not have the boldness and daring to do what is just and fair to its people. IAS, thus, in some, is also a work in the pursuit of social justice and cultural democracy.
References
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Nationalist Studies, 1982.
Covar, P. Seminal Essays on Philippines Culture. Manila: National Commission for
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Enriquez, V. From Colonial Toward a Liberation Psychology. Quezon City: U of the
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Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. R. Philcox, with commentary
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Lumbera, B. Tagalog Poetry 1570-1898: Tradition and Influences
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of Praxis and Contradiction in Philippine Writing. Quezon City: University
of the Philippines, 1984.
Salazar, Z., ed. Ang P/Filipino sa Agham Panlipunan at Pilosopiya.
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Salazar, Z., ed. The Ethnic Dimension: Papers on Philippine Culture,
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and Caritas Association of the City of Cologne, 1983.
and the Universities from the Regions:
Towards a Theory and Praxis
Aurelio S. Agcaoili
University of Hawaii-Manoa
A Hermeneutics of Mixed Purposes
My take on the issues that enmesh the concepts and realities of Ilokano Studies, Amianan Studies, the cultures of Northern Luzon, and the role of the universities from these regions is admittedly pre-shaped and pre-formed by my advocacy interests to preserve, perpetuate, and promote Ilokano and Amianan languages and cultures. The voice of about 30 million people that trace their heritage from these languages and cultures has largely been stifled and marginalized through the centuries and it is high time this voice was heard.
There is an inseparable tripod in the attempt to resist and reclaim: to resist the onslaught of hegemonic cultures and languages and to reclaim ownership of a language and culture—even to languages and cultures—that somehow partly defines the claimant. In the context of Ilokano Studies, the language and culture is specific to Ilokano. In the context of Amianan Studies, the languages and cultures that we are here committed to preserve, perpetuate, and promote are the languages and cultures of all the peoples of Northern Philippines so that while we acknowledge the position of Ilokano in this part of the country as the lingua franca, we recognize at the same time the right of other languages and cultures to co-exist with this lingua franca. The commitment thus of Ilokano language and culture and its advocates is to respect and assure the non-Ilokano communities their fair share of a democratic cultural and linguistic space afforded by any self-respecting nation-state that, among others, advertises itself as ‘democratic.’
I admit that my being a culture and language teacher is itself a perspective that provides some biases and prejudices in the way I look at this emerging body of knowledge we call Ilokano and Amianan Studies, and these biases and prejudices are built-in from the logic of such a perspective.
I recognize that this is itself a kind of an intellectual ‘uma’ in the Ilokano and Amianan sense, a ‘lichtung’ in the Heideggerian sense—a clearing—through which I get to see the world from the forest of ideas, and the seeing is about (a) what is it to be an Ilokano in an ever-changing world; (b) what becomes of an Ilokano in an ever-changing landscape and topography of experience; and (c) what is it and what becomes of an Ilokano in an ever-changing geography of pain and struggle and sacrifices both in the ‘ili’ and the ‘pagilian’—the town and/or country—that is both a physical and psychical territory, a memory and emotion, a sense of affiliation and a sense of reference, a parameter and premise for belonging to a group.
We extend the very same logic of the issues raised about the Ilokano to account the bigger context in which we locate him, and the questions are ever-constant, recurrent, persistent, insistent: (a) what is it to be a people of the Amianan; (b) what becomes of the people of Amianan in an ever-changing landscape and topography of experience; and about what it means to be a people defined and determined by a certain linguistic identity. For a people is defined and determined, first and foremost, by the kind of language that they speak and that, the claim about bloodline and gene pools do not what an ethnic group finally makes.
I must admit, however, that my long years of cultural advocacy work in many fronts, such as teaching in the University of the Philippines and now at the University of Hawai`i and experiencing what is it to be a teacher of an ‘othered’, marginalized language and culture, have given me that rare privilege of being a messenger to an Ilokano Everyman.
Searching for a Framework
The experience of ‘marginalization’ whether as a teacher or a student—and I have been both—in the context of a hegemonic positioning of a dominant culture, is a multiple struggle, endless and everyday. In the Philippines, as in all the lands of exile of the Ilokano, Hawai`i included, this marginalization despite claims to diversity and multiculturalism and multilingualism, is as subtly sinister as the unwanted epistemologically tragic consequences of neocolonialism. Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of Earth” has talked about this and points to us the evolving of a social agent and actor that acts as the new lord and master, even if the former colonizer is long gone; Renato Constantino’s many essays on the effects of what he called ‘neocolonization’ including his work on the need to form a liberating critical consciousness, “The Miseducation of the Filipinos,” reminds Filipinos of the need to be always on the guard for that which mis-shapes and deforms and misinforms consciousness, including the ‘Englishization’ of the mind-sets of the Filipino people, with such Englishization bringing about the erasure, in a systematic fashion, of the native consciousness that could have provided a measure of looking at possible alternatives to a captive consciousness without necessarily invoking a grand past that is not there but only imagined and held on to as a symbol of a collective memory; Zeus Salazar’s theoretical proposal for a “P/Filipinolohiya”—studies about the Philippines—that is framed by a recovery of the essentials of the ethnos, the ‘lahi’, the ‘puli’; Prospero Covar’s “Araling Pilipino” frames a notion of an ‘anthro’ that is both respectful and respecting of tradition and chance and posits the dynamic of political engagement; Bienvenido Lumbera’s courageous and daring act of re-claiming of the aesthetic, literary, and cultural experiences of the ‘native culture’ almost erased by the apparatuses of multiple colonial experience; Paulo Freire’s notion of a pedagogy of liberation not only “for” but also “by” and “with” the people; and Virgilio Enriquez’s concept of ‘liberation psychology’ that, among others, returns to the site of personhood and community defined by the terms of Philippine culture and world view, and thus by a specific Philippine language and the terms offered by that language—all these and more provide the theoretical impetus for a rethinking of Ilokano and Amianan Studies, herein referred to as IAS.
IAS is thus a form of studies that is grounded on a political and clearly epistemological intent: one that is intended to re-name the Ilokano and Amianan experience whose name was erased because of many national and extra-national factors, including the factors of extraterritoriality that attends to that aspect of this same experience that is rooted in exile and diaspora. The role of the universities that have interests in this form of knowledge, some of them as a matter of both cultural and moral duty, is to provide a venue for the fermentation and production of such a body of knowledge, with the view that such a body of knowledge ought to be, in accord with a liberating dialectical hermeneutic framework, ‘open in its closedness/closed in its openness.’ As such, this body of knowledge is not to be taken as an end in itself but always to be seen as part and parcel of a bigger whole, and always sensitive to issues and concerns that have something to do always—without any exceptions—with studies about the Philippines. In effect, what we are talking about here is that Ilokano and Amianan studies must have that inherent capacity to re-connect—to have that ‘connectivity’—with other studies about Philippine society, culture, and politics.
Re-framing ‘Studies’
In articulating the ‘studies’ in IAS, there is a need to return to some premises and principles by way of definition. This form of ‘studies’ in the IAS is essentially pre-formed and pre-shaped by the hybrid nature of contemporary knowledge, with an avowed acknowledgement of the cognitive effects and consequences of cultures coming into an interface—of cultures coming into a connection/connexion—such that the nexus of these cultures can no longer be claimed by a single owner but becomes a shared knowledge available for appropriation by a culture needing it.
There is a certain idealization in the notion of ‘nexus’ here, as if ‘domination’ and the ‘empire’ and the ‘colony’ are by-gone realities of contemporary life. IAS holds that domination is ever-present; that the ‘empire’ is much around in various ruses and guises and transformations, and the colony is still as real as the medieval times when the whole world was still in the hands of two superpowers, Spain and Portugal. The dominance of each of these ‘rulers of mankind’ may be a foregone conclusion, but the effects of their rule of that ‘other’ of the world remains intact, albeit in more subtle forms. But the subtlety of these forms does not guarantee the healing of the ‘souls’ of the nations, countries, and other body politics the colonizers, imperialists, and invaders ravaged. Another thing: Spain and Portugal have granted independence to their colonies but other contemporary superpowers have re-claimed the economic, political, linguistic, cultural, economic, and aesthetic spaces these former colonizers vacated. It remains true to say, therefore, that there exists, and in a more sinister form, dominant and dominating cultures and their effects on ‘dominated’ and ‘subjugated’ cultures are layered and multi-hued, in effect made tacit and implicit, but nevertheless not necessarily less powerful, less coercive, less oppressive.
These lead us to the ugly realities of a particular country and nation-state that went through a long history of subjugation by at least three colonizers and invaders like the Philippines. We speak of the almost irrecoverable power of triple linguistic and cultural erasures that produced and reproduced the truths—and by extension, meanings—manufactured and produced by the colonizers and invaders. Following Constantino’s historical accounting of the formation of a new breed/hybrid of colonizers—the ‘neocolonizers’—the logic of colonization gets a refurbishing in the very logic of a systemic realigning of the same subjugating power of neocolonization and made more powerful by the access to economic resources limited and made accessible only, to a powerful few, essentially an elite economic class, whose class extends to politics, the media, and all other cultural forms, including the imposition of a language of power, commerce, and education.
It is in these difficult structural realities of the Philippines that we come to see ‘studies about the Philippines’ as windows through which we can have a critical reflection of ourselves as a people and as a nation, and through which we draw segments of the same studies in keeping with some acknowledged fidelities and loyalties to the particular culture and language a Filipino finds affinity. In effect, we are here advancing the idea that the twin and complementary ‘studies about the Ilocos and about the Amianan’ are first and foremost part of a body of knowledge, and this body of knowledge, much bigger in scope and political and epistemological direction, is the ‘studies about the Philippines.’ Conceptually and logically, IAS is a slice of ‘studies about the Philippines’—‘Philippine Studies’—and cannot be outside it as it draws from it the very seed of its creation, production, formation, and sustenance, inextricable as it is from its tree and ground, even if it is at the same time allowed to grow and bloom and mature as a branch of the same tree, and in that same ground. What we need to do here is to assure ourselves—those who will venture into this form of knowledge—that the felicities and faith in what we are doing are in there and ever-present: the many form of felicities that we have to forge with other disciplines and knowledge/s and the faith that what we are doing is for the greater good and in keeping with the obligation to contribute to the pursuit of the ends of community building as required by the social contract of which, as inheritors of Ilokano and Amianan languages and cultures, we are signatories.
Even as we say that IAS finds its ‘connect’ with Philippines Studies, herein referred to as PS, some clear premises must be stated: (i) that IAS, like PS, must be oriented to a theory and praxis of a liberating world view, away from the neocolonizing effects of consciousness pre-formed and pre-shaped by a neocolonizing way of life authored by, and perpetually reproduced by the apparatuses of a neocolonial state; (ii) that IAS, like the PS, must look at itself as a whole strategy of re-claiming what were erased or made to disappear or destroyed by centuries of systematic oppression, brutal occupation, and
‘satellization’ by other countries or cultures that have played a ceaseless game of domination against the cultures of the Ilokanos and of the peoples of Amianan; and (iii) that the key issue about a Philippine ‘national culture’ must be subjected to interrogation in an effort to account the reality of multiculturalism and multilingualism—a reality that points to diversity and at the same time requiring, for political purposes, unity. How to keep this ‘meson,’ the healthy balance in all of these, is difficult but it is not impossible. Here we deny the equation of difficulty and impossibility, arguing that in the building up of an imagined nation—an imagined political entity that serves as the instrument for the pursuit of common ends for all the ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines and the various Philippine communities in the diaspora—it is, indeed difficult to come up with a balance between all these opposing realities but nonetheless, there is the political and ethical obligation to find that balance as is demanded by the social contract, and which, in itself, one of the organizational bases of the social contract.
Forms of Knowledge and ‘Knowledges’
One of the key problems of the ‘scientificization’ of the current understanding of knowledge is that when ‘knowledge’ does not go through the rigor of what is generally understood as ‘the scientific method’ that begins with a problem and the search for that predictable, calculable, and repeatable procedure to subject the problem into ‘anatomical’
parts, such a body of knowledge must be rendered ‘unscientific.’ This kind of a position brings into the extreme the ‘shanghaiing’ of knowledge by today’s positivistic science and arrogating unto itself all claims to knowledge that follows the rigid scientific procedure that is hewed on prediction, calculation, and repetition. We register here an objection to this view of knowledge and propose the broad understanding of what human knowledge is all about and the even more democratic possibility that, in fact, human knowledge cannot be one and entire and whole even if this is the ideal but is, in reality, plural, tentative, exploratory, more-or-less, fluid. In looking at human knowledge this way, we are able to give a discursive space for other knowledge/s apart from the kind of knowledge that is familiar to us, and thus, is convenient and comfortable to us. It is discourse that we are after here—that reality that we have to guard in the coming into a conversation with all ‘others’ that are not really ‘others’ in the grand political project to create unity in diversity, a sense of the ‘et pluribus unum’ that allows the co-existences of all forms of expressions of human life.
In IAS, we reject this subtle tyranny of this model of ‘scientific knowledge’ that marginalizes and erases the sincere and honest attempt of the ‘studies on the human and the social’ to make us understand what is it to be human and what is in human society that makes that society ‘human.’ This rejection does not reject the constructed truths of
the ‘studies on the natural’ which studies is sometimes referred to as ‘the hard sciences’ or, in some instances, in its most extreme form, ‘the real science.’ In IAS, as in the PS, we see the creative connection, the constructive interface of both models of human knowledge, seeing that one needs the other for insight, and the other needs the other for explanation. For indeed as it were that ‘the studies on the human and social,’ also called ‘the studies of the cultural,’ presents to us insights that require explanation while the ‘studies of nature and physical world’ presents to us explanations of phenomena but such explanation needs re-framing so that we can draw from it an insight into what the world as ‘kosmos’ is all about. In practical terms, we ask the question: Does IAS need ‘the hard sciences,’ to wit, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, botany, genetics, botany and the like? The answer is yes. Corollary to this question is: Does botany have to have a nation? The answer is no, but it pays to have botany that makes use of itself in a particular culture, language, and body politic. For what would the use of botany if it cannot even tell the floral diversity of a place and therefore a culture or a language that have something to do with botany in the first place?
At best, our understanding of modern science today must have to be reformulated and brought back to its conceptualization that roots itself from the notion of the Latin ‘scire,’ to know. There is this act of knowing—this ‘to know’—in the cultural studies as there is in the studies of nature, if, for some reason, we recognize the tentative split of these two forms of knowledge. But in recognizing the beginnings of human knowledge as we understand it today, human knowledge with a broader, more encompassing strokes—in recognizing these two broad forms—we realize that there is no set logic that prohibits and prevents us from looking at other forms, other models, other possibilities. This is also in keeping with the fact that ‘the science of nature’ has yet to give us a full explanation of what is in there in nature and so is ‘the science of the human and the social’—also called ‘the science of the cultural.’ A re-reading of many cultures and societies and their models of human understanding and thus, of their own version of ‘human knowledge’ would make us realize that human knowledge comes in various forms and packaging depending on so many variables, including the variables of the cultural and the linguistic.
IAS as Resistance and Re-Claiming
The relevance of IAS is that of its project and program to resist and to re-claim.
Resistance is seen here in the context of appreciation of the plurality of cultures and languages, and the plurality of societies and thus the need to draw up guarantees in order for this plurality to not become homogenized and ‘massified’ in the end. The idea of homogenization of languages and cultures may be a grand political project that has some genesis in the need for the ‘nationalization’ of a language, for instance; or it may mean the need to ‘purify’ a society, and thus the culture of that society by going the route of ‘Aryanism’ and thus the eventual ‘Dachauwization’ of all that is impure, which could be those related to immigrants and exiles, and those of the margins, those that are not part of the mainstream—or of anything not held sacred and dear by the holders of power.
While the project to ‘nationalize’ a culture or a language, for example, is a political necessity for the survival and unity of the ‘national’ body politic, the act of ‘nationalizing’ is not value-free as it carries with it the burden of recognizing one culture and thus, one language, against all those ‘other’ cultures and ‘other’ languages. In effect, there is something laudable in the effort to bring together seemingly disparate groups of people in a nation and country by reason of their various ethnolinguistic heritages so that a ‘national’ conversation could come about. But here we have to safeguard the inherent rights of the ‘othered’ cultures and languages in a nation to exist, to survive, and to view the world and human experience in accord with the lenses provided by their ‘othered’ cultures and languages. If in the ‘nationalization’ of a language and a culture results in the death of the ‘othered’ cultures and languages, such a nationalization becomes a self-defeating because self-destructive exercise.
This is where resistance comes. We can project this scenario and account here the aggression and invasion of global, imperialistic, and international cultures and languages and the ‘othered’ cultures and languages of a nation suffer another death after a rigor mortis. We add here the histories of colonization and neocolonization and we can only guess why cultures and literatures and languages from the margins ought to raise their voice, already muffled as it is by the dominant culture and language, and demand a fair share of space in the national conversation and national discourse. This is re-claiming of the right of marginal languages, literatures, and cultures to be—as well as their right to become. IAS, as in PS, is thus a crucial issue linked with the indispensable issue of the being of the Ilokanos and the peoples of Amianan and their response to the challenges of that which is ahead of them, their becoming.
IAS as a Strategy for the Struggle to Survive
The dialectic of being and becoming in IAS is grounded on the reality that with the invasive consequences of national, modern, and global cultures, the ‘minoritized’ peoples and cultures must be vigilant of their right to survive and thus, would need to strategize their way of survival. The consequent extinction of any culture as a result of the domination of a more powerful because mainstream, and more politically and economically entrenched culture is bad enough. But the terrible end of any culture as an exhibit of the museum of the culturally extinct and thus irrecoverable is an unforgivable result of cultural aggression of a dominant culture or cultures.
The Role of the Universities in IAS
Universities, by nature, are state apparatuses, marked for that ideological role of producing and reproducing citizens that ought to know their civics. The universities work with the reproduction of consciousness and operate, in a rather tacit way, through some established canons of human knowledge, generally accepted, or at times, legislated. There is in the universities that propaganda about them being the ‘marketplace’ of ideas, but that is only true for a certain extent as they, unwittingly, become agents of the same manufactured truths and meanings produced and reproduced by society itself.
It is in this context that the universities can either become agents of change or perpetrators of the same ruses and guises and artifices of a dominant culture. The continuing use of a foreign language in the Philippines as the measure of knowledge learned and acquired in the school system is one example of a lopsided view of what human knowledge is all about, the human knowledge that is ‘human’ because it opens doors to liberation, discourse, and emancipation from the bondage of ‘mass’ thoughts and mindsets. The continuing denigration of a native culture and language by the very same people who are expected to nurture, sustain, promote, preserve, and perpetuate their culture and language happens in the very sacred and august halls of the universities, the alma mater of knowledge that has not allowed the virtue of critical reflection to set in.
The question thus for the universities in the Philippines particularly those from Region I, Region II, and the Cordillera Administrative Region is this: How ready are they to take part in this duty of equipping their educands with the skills and tools necessary for critical reflection?
A Note to an Exploratory Conclusion
IAS as a form of knowledge will go the way of interrogation, as it should. It does not purport to possess all the answers to the questions to be raised. But it will have to exhaust the means to raising the questions well and from there, draw the germ to some tentative, exploratory, dialectical answers. The more important thing to do at this time is to prepare the ground for the endless dialectic of question and answer to come about with humility and freedom. If IAS shall have raised the right questions well, then more than half of its task is done. It is the raising of the right questions that matter most in human knowledge that is ‘human’ because it is ‘critical’ and it is critical it is not content with the answers based on the logic of convenience and truth produced and reproduced by a society that does not have the boldness and daring to do what is just and fair to its people. IAS, thus, in some, is also a work in the pursuit of social justice and cultural democracy.
References
Constantino, R. The Miseducation of the Filipino. Quezon City: Foundation for
Nationalist Studies, 1982.
Covar, P. Seminal Essays on Philippines Culture. Manila: National Commission for
Culture and the Arts, 1998.
Enriquez, V. From Colonial Toward a Liberation Psychology. Quezon City: U of the
Philippines Press, 1992.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. R. Philcox, with commentary
by Jean Paul Sartre and Homi Bhabha. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Freire, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Berman Ramos. New York:
Continuum/Seabury, 1970.
Gadamer, H.G. Truth and Method. Trans. J. Wensheimer and D. G. Marshall.
London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
Habermas, J. Communication and the Evolution of Human Society.
Trans. with introd. T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1979.
Ileto, R. C. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements
in the Philippines, 1840-1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila U Press, 1989.
Kuhn, A. The Logic of Social Systems. Foreword K. E. Boulding.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1974.
Lumbera, B. Tagalog Poetry 1570-1898: Tradition and Influences
in its Development. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila U Press, 1986.
San Juan, E. Toward a People’s Literature: Essays in the Dialectics
of Praxis and Contradiction in Philippine Writing. Quezon City: University
of the Philippines, 1984.
Salazar, Z., ed. Ang P/Filipino sa Agham Panlipunan at Pilosopiya.
Manila: Kalikasan Press, 1991.
Salazar, Z., ed. The Ethnic Dimension: Papers on Philippine Culture,
History, and Psychology: Cologne: Counseling Center for Filipinos
and Caritas Association of the City of Cologne, 1983.
Kind Words in an Unkind Climate
If I was forced to name five Ilokano writers in this land of exile who have grey matter between the ears and thus who matter, I would easily recite their names without thinking twice: Ella Pada Taong, Loring Tabin, Sinamar Tabin, Terry Tugade, and Amado Yoro. They are all, veritably, my manong and manang, the words the magical ones when one grew up in that part of Ilocosland where not showing respect for the elderly means simply that your parents did not know how to instill in you what was called in those times as good manners and right conduct. I remember that this was the famous GMRC that we were supposed to know and that which would help us form ourselves in accord with, yes, among others, the verities and virtues of being human and humane.
In a way, this is an essay that will document the goodness of these five people. Even in my status of being fresh-off-the-boat, a term my first daughter reminded me with sarcasm one day compared to them (among them could be almost two hundred years of what we would call 'an experience of living the American dream'), I felt like an oldtimer when I am with them. I could see them eye-to-eye and in those images in there, I could tell them right off that this is one writer who does not know the meaning of argumentum ad populum and that flattery is not for me.
SO SORRY FOLKS, I HAVE TO RUN TO WORK FIRST!!!!
ITUTULOY-
In a way, this is an essay that will document the goodness of these five people. Even in my status of being fresh-off-the-boat, a term my first daughter reminded me with sarcasm one day compared to them (among them could be almost two hundred years of what we would call 'an experience of living the American dream'), I felt like an oldtimer when I am with them. I could see them eye-to-eye and in those images in there, I could tell them right off that this is one writer who does not know the meaning of argumentum ad populum and that flattery is not for me.
SO SORRY FOLKS, I HAVE TO RUN TO WORK FIRST!!!!
ITUTULOY-
Anglem para iti Lagip
Seggedamon ti anglem, anak
Tay anglem para iti lagip
Paadaywenna dagiti sabong
Inin-inaw dagiti sinal-it.
Sindiamon ti anglem, tatang
Anglem para iti lagip
Paadaywenna dagiti kurarapnit
A makidangdanggay iti alutiit.
Sindiamon ti anglem, nanang
Anglem para iti lagip
Rubrubam iti rubrob
Paksiatenna ti sangkagimongan
A sangasiglo a sagubanit.
Ne, pusiposem ti buyuboy
Ipasangom iti tawa, baket
Samo sindian dayta anglem
Yaw-awanna ti maudi a malem.
Dika agkatawa, anak
Anglem dayta para iti lagip
Nauneg ngamin unay ti sugat
Iti pannakapukaw iti palludip.
Sindiam ti anglem, anak
Bugawbugaw iti karsel ti ili
Anglem a nagrutingan ti plumak
Nagsampagaan dagiti dakulap.
Seggedanyon, seggedanyon ti anglem
Anglem a para iti lagip
Pangontra iti pannakabalud
Ubing unay a tagainep.
A Solver Agcaoili
Tay anglem para iti lagip
Paadaywenna dagiti sabong
Inin-inaw dagiti sinal-it.
Sindiamon ti anglem, tatang
Anglem para iti lagip
Paadaywenna dagiti kurarapnit
A makidangdanggay iti alutiit.
Sindiamon ti anglem, nanang
Anglem para iti lagip
Rubrubam iti rubrob
Paksiatenna ti sangkagimongan
A sangasiglo a sagubanit.
Ne, pusiposem ti buyuboy
Ipasangom iti tawa, baket
Samo sindian dayta anglem
Yaw-awanna ti maudi a malem.
Dika agkatawa, anak
Anglem dayta para iti lagip
Nauneg ngamin unay ti sugat
Iti pannakapukaw iti palludip.
Sindiam ti anglem, anak
Bugawbugaw iti karsel ti ili
Anglem a nagrutingan ti plumak
Nagsampagaan dagiti dakulap.
Seggedanyon, seggedanyon ti anglem
Anglem a para iti lagip
Pangontra iti pannakabalud
Ubing unay a tagainep.
A Solver Agcaoili
Kasangay: Iti Aldaw ti Panagtaom
(Ken Leah, kasimpungalan. Ngem dina mabasa daytoy.)
1.
Sagpaminsan a manglangan
dagiti maseggaan nga apros
ken mabibbibi nga agek
iti agur-uray a balitang
dagiti maikawkawawa
a pananglaglagip, o ayat
Kayatko man a ballasiwen
dagiti kayyanak a taaw
kadagiti kanito ti panaginnaddayo
dagiti bara iti barukong,
dumteng dagiti alikuno
a mangabalbalay iti kakaisuna
a riknak, kas ita.
Awanka ngamin kadagiti rimat
dagiti bituen iti sardam
ita nga aldaw a nakedngan
a panagkasangay koma
dagiti main-inaw nga ubbing
a padeppa iti law-ang
ti dua a puso a napagkaysa.
Kunam no kua a dimo maawatan
dagiti sarita
a kabinnulig dagiti darisayen
a kebbakebba
Di kadi ta uray iti isip
agatang met dagiti baak
a buteng
agayab kadagiti rikna,
manutsutil, mangar-ariek?
Ngem di kadi ta
makirinrinnabak met dagiti gasat
iti agsapa dagiti ila
nga ikut dagiti panagpakada?
2.
Ala wen, rambakam ti kasangaymo
iti pantok dagiti ayug
a mangbirbirok kadagiti sagut
dagiti mayatang a palab-og
pangsilok ita kadagiti iliw
nga ipaanod ni pannakilantip
iti sabangan dagiti rebolusionario
a paripirip
ti mabirdabirday a balikas
ti manglaglagip.
Agsala no kua ti ladawan
ti selebrasionmo
iti maledleddaangan a puso
Ken wen, sinno
ngata ti kaabrasam
iti maiparit a kanito
daytay kapinnalludip
iti mannakabalin unay nga alikuno?
Agimon met, ayat, dagiti
marabrabian a pampanunotko
mail-ilada sagpaminsan
iti biag kadagiti isemmo
A Solver Agcaoili
1.
Sagpaminsan a manglangan
dagiti maseggaan nga apros
ken mabibbibi nga agek
iti agur-uray a balitang
dagiti maikawkawawa
a pananglaglagip, o ayat
Kayatko man a ballasiwen
dagiti kayyanak a taaw
kadagiti kanito ti panaginnaddayo
dagiti bara iti barukong,
dumteng dagiti alikuno
a mangabalbalay iti kakaisuna
a riknak, kas ita.
Awanka ngamin kadagiti rimat
dagiti bituen iti sardam
ita nga aldaw a nakedngan
a panagkasangay koma
dagiti main-inaw nga ubbing
a padeppa iti law-ang
ti dua a puso a napagkaysa.
Kunam no kua a dimo maawatan
dagiti sarita
a kabinnulig dagiti darisayen
a kebbakebba
Di kadi ta uray iti isip
agatang met dagiti baak
a buteng
agayab kadagiti rikna,
manutsutil, mangar-ariek?
Ngem di kadi ta
makirinrinnabak met dagiti gasat
iti agsapa dagiti ila
nga ikut dagiti panagpakada?
2.
Ala wen, rambakam ti kasangaymo
iti pantok dagiti ayug
a mangbirbirok kadagiti sagut
dagiti mayatang a palab-og
pangsilok ita kadagiti iliw
nga ipaanod ni pannakilantip
iti sabangan dagiti rebolusionario
a paripirip
ti mabirdabirday a balikas
ti manglaglagip.
Agsala no kua ti ladawan
ti selebrasionmo
iti maledleddaangan a puso
Ken wen, sinno
ngata ti kaabrasam
iti maiparit a kanito
daytay kapinnalludip
iti mannakabalin unay nga alikuno?
Agimon met, ayat, dagiti
marabrabian a pampanunotko
mail-ilada sagpaminsan
iti biag kadagiti isemmo
A Solver Agcaoili
Interogasion Dos Kalpasan ti Kudeta
1.
Nangina unayen ti rosas
wenno butonsilio
wenno kararag para iti sibibiag
para iti natay
para iti sibibiag a natay
a pinatayen ti biag:
aglakoda idiay Quiapo
iti rurog dagiti ar-aria
anniniwan ti kaasi
iti nagan ti ama
iti nagan ti anak.
Katibnok ti namnama ti alipugpog
agkuadrado
agsalsala
agmalmalanga
nakaparintumeng
iti rebulto ti bato
rebulto ti kayo
rebulto ti ayat nga ayat
met ti rebulto
napulagidan
pinulagidan
pagpulagidan
dagiti agmartsa
iti umuna-a-maudi
a demonstrasion
dagiti maupaan a sao
sao nga upaan
namarsua iti tagainep
linugaw a kaasi.
2.
Ania kadi ti ayug ti ladingit
a kumpasan ti panaginkukuna
ti napudno, natakneng, nasudi
a panginaen, dadaulo iti agnanayon
a panangay-ay iti ay-ay, pananglitup
iti agpang ti pudno ken saan
iti rikna, iti pakasaritaan
rikna ti pakasaritaan
ti puli, daytoy nga anak ti ranggas
daytoy nga anak ti lidem
anak ti lawag
iti sabali manen a lidem
sabali manen a sao--ti Sao?
3.
Ania kadi a katik ti marereg a limos
iti barukong ni Juan
uni ti simbeng a napaidaman
ulimek ti killiing
ti basol, basol ti killiing iti kursada
iti panangliput ti Legarda iti Forbes
iti pannakinaig ti Magsaysay
ken dalan-Malakaniang
iti panagsali ti kaing-ingas
ni Ama Macliing
iti kada patit ti ganggang ni liday
kararua ti tribu
a pinarugma
ti sinantao a bantay
arit ti inauna a wingiwing
panagbabawi a dimmanum
rinunaw ti rag-o para ken Juan
a nakamassayag?
4.
Ania kadi ti kaaarngi ti dara
daton ti buteng
bunga ti ayat iti rabii?
Ania kadi ti apros ti saning-i
dagiti mabati iti katangkatang
ti Makati a daradara
dagiti umel a testigo
partera ti isasangbay
ti ulep kadagiti nadaraan
a bulong, napasag a sabong
ti sampagita
iti nakem ti napasag met nga ubing?
Ania kadi ti dung-aw
a kanta met laeng ti kolonel
a barbasan
kaedad ti silpo-ti-riro
agur-uray iti maitabon
di makatuttutor
di mapmapnekan?
Nangina unayen ti rosas
kas araraw dagiti sibibiag.
A Solver Agcaoili
Marikina, Filipinas/Honolulu, HI
Naisurat idi 1989, gapu iti maysa a nakadardara a kudeta iti pagilian
Nangina unayen ti rosas
wenno butonsilio
wenno kararag para iti sibibiag
para iti natay
para iti sibibiag a natay
a pinatayen ti biag:
aglakoda idiay Quiapo
iti rurog dagiti ar-aria
anniniwan ti kaasi
iti nagan ti ama
iti nagan ti anak.
Katibnok ti namnama ti alipugpog
agkuadrado
agsalsala
agmalmalanga
nakaparintumeng
iti rebulto ti bato
rebulto ti kayo
rebulto ti ayat nga ayat
met ti rebulto
napulagidan
pinulagidan
pagpulagidan
dagiti agmartsa
iti umuna-a-maudi
a demonstrasion
dagiti maupaan a sao
sao nga upaan
namarsua iti tagainep
linugaw a kaasi.
2.
Ania kadi ti ayug ti ladingit
a kumpasan ti panaginkukuna
ti napudno, natakneng, nasudi
a panginaen, dadaulo iti agnanayon
a panangay-ay iti ay-ay, pananglitup
iti agpang ti pudno ken saan
iti rikna, iti pakasaritaan
rikna ti pakasaritaan
ti puli, daytoy nga anak ti ranggas
daytoy nga anak ti lidem
anak ti lawag
iti sabali manen a lidem
sabali manen a sao--ti Sao?
3.
Ania kadi a katik ti marereg a limos
iti barukong ni Juan
uni ti simbeng a napaidaman
ulimek ti killiing
ti basol, basol ti killiing iti kursada
iti panangliput ti Legarda iti Forbes
iti pannakinaig ti Magsaysay
ken dalan-Malakaniang
iti panagsali ti kaing-ingas
ni Ama Macliing
iti kada patit ti ganggang ni liday
kararua ti tribu
a pinarugma
ti sinantao a bantay
arit ti inauna a wingiwing
panagbabawi a dimmanum
rinunaw ti rag-o para ken Juan
a nakamassayag?
4.
Ania kadi ti kaaarngi ti dara
daton ti buteng
bunga ti ayat iti rabii?
Ania kadi ti apros ti saning-i
dagiti mabati iti katangkatang
ti Makati a daradara
dagiti umel a testigo
partera ti isasangbay
ti ulep kadagiti nadaraan
a bulong, napasag a sabong
ti sampagita
iti nakem ti napasag met nga ubing?
Ania kadi ti dung-aw
a kanta met laeng ti kolonel
a barbasan
kaedad ti silpo-ti-riro
agur-uray iti maitabon
di makatuttutor
di mapmapnekan?
Nangina unayen ti rosas
kas araraw dagiti sibibiag.
A Solver Agcaoili
Marikina, Filipinas/Honolulu, HI
Naisurat idi 1989, gapu iti maysa a nakadardara a kudeta iti pagilian
La Tertulla sa Intramuros
(Komisyonadong libretto para sa apat na vignette. Kinatha para sa pagdiriwang ng Sentenaryo ng Pagdating ng mga Sakada sa Hawaii. Unang itinanghal sa Filipino Community Center, Waipahu, HI, noong Pebrero 2006 sa direksyon ni JP Orias).
Vignette 1: Pangangarap sa Nililiyag
N-1
Sa usaping pagmamahalan, alin ang dapat umiral
Sa bagay na ito alin nga ang hayaang daratal
Ang puso bang masusunod, ang tibok ang pakinggan
O ang isip na nakakaalam kung ano ang mainam?
N2
Sa paksang itong hain sa hapong ito ng palatuntunan
Alin nga ba ang mahalaga sa pagsuyo yaring tingnan
Ang dibdib nga bang ang kalabog ay sa sinta
O ang ulong ang turo ay malayo sa pariwara?
N-1
Tunghayan ang kuwento ng pag-ibig sa hapong ito
Arukin sa mga palabas ang mukha ng pagkalito
Tingnan sa mga halibawa ang laan sa landas
Kilatisin ng maigi ang dulo ng mga pahimakas.
N-2
Pagsintang totoo ay di nangingilala
Hindi nang-aabiso ng pagdurusa
Hahayaan ang dumaloy ang luna
Matuto man sa hirap ng mga hiwaga.
N-1
Ha! Puso kong puso subalit kay baligho
Sapagkat ang dapat ay sa utak ang puno
Ng lahat ng pagpapasiya pati ang pagsuyo
At hindi kailan ang darang ng hita mo!
N-2
Puso o puson, alin man ang tugon
Puson pa rin ang talinghaga ng layon
Sa puson ang buhay, simula ng init
Sa puson ang galak, dulo ng akit.
Mauricio: (Nangangarap, dream scene, hawak ang paniolito)
Caridad, Caridad
Caridad ng aking sinta
Caridad ng aking buhay.
Lucio: (gugulantangin si Mauricio)
Hoy, Mauricio, amigo, ikaw nga ay magising
Ikaw nga ay magtitino nang di pakakamalasin
Perico:
Ha ikaw nang masilo, Lucio, O Lucio
Mapana ng matalas na pana ng Kupido
Ikaw nga ang mangarap sa dambama
Mangarap na magpapakasal ang mutya.
Lucio:
Siya, siya, ako na nga ang binata:
O pag-ibig, pag-ibig na mahika
Sasalamangkahin ang noo, hita
Paduduguin ng paduduguin ang hahahahaha!
Mauricio:
Mga salawahan, kayo nga ay magtigil
Ang mga puso rin ay manggigigil
(Aambahan ang dalawa)
Caridad: (Dream scene, tangan ang panyo ni Mauricio)
O Mauricio aking buhay
O Mauricio aking pakay
Mauricio, Mauricio
Buong-buong pagsuyo.
Dona Caridad:
Esta Caridad, tayo na sa simbahan.
Magdasal ng magdasal sa kaparihan
Magsabi ng niloloob kasama ang kapintasan
Idagdag na ang panunukso ng kalalakihan.
Caridad:
Opo, mama, manalanging tunay
Lumuhod sa Poon, humingi ng pagnubay
(Pabulong)
Kung alam mo lang, mama, kung alam mo lang
Matagal nang nararamdaman ang ganitong kalituhan
Si Maurcio ang aking mahal at di nino man
Siyang sinasabi ng niloloob kahit kailan.
Manong:
Ke init-init nagkakadikit (pansin sa mga kabataan)
Ke sasagwa ang pang-aakit.
Manang:
Mantakin mong walang patawad
Kahit sa simbahan nagdidikit ang palad.
Don:
Que sin verguenza, kaaga-aga e naglalampungan
Ang harutan nga naman iba nang pagmasdan
Dona:
Sssshs! Masdan ang salita, ang puna ay pigilan.
Madali at tayo ay manalangan para sa mga lapastangan.
Madali at makapagkuros, humingi ng kapatawaran.
Mga batang naglalaro:
C-1
Pagsuyo, pagsinta, aako.
C-2
Aako ang pagsuyo
Aako ang sinta ko
C-3
Sinusuyo ang sinta ko
Sinisinta ang sinusuyo
Aako ang sinisinta
Aako ang sinusuyo.
(Maglalakad sina Caridad at Dona Aguda papasok sa simbahan)
D-A:
Madali, Caridad, ang misa ay sisimulan.
Huwag nang ang tingin ay kung saan-saan.
Caridad:
(bubulong)
Kung alam mo lang, Mauricio, ikaw ang tibok ng puso
Kung maisisiwalat ko lamang na ikaw ang pagsuyo.
(Kasunod sina Mauricio, Perico at Lucio)
D-A:
Ang utak ang pairalin, Caridad sa buhay
Hindi ang puso na sanhi ng mga lumbay.
Tingnan mo ako, tingnan ng isa pang ulit
Ako na iyong ina na ang kakabal at pait.
Hala, lumarga at pumasok sa simbahan
Magdasal sa santo, sa santa gumalang
Humingi ng basbas, bendision na tapat
Puhunan sa buhay, karugtong ng ulirat.
Caridad:
(Pabulong)
Ako na ay nagmamahal
Ako na ay may kasuyo
Di natuturuan yaring itong puso
Ang itinitibok itong si Mauricio.
(Pabulong)
Babasan mo ang aking panyolito
Poon ng mga nagbabagang pagsuyo.
(Ilalaglag ang panyo).
KANTAHAN----
Vignette 2-Hele-hele Bago Quiere
N-1
Kapag hindi tapat sa pagsintang tapat
Mananatili ang pagsisisi kapag dumilat.
N-2
Kapag hinayaang lumampas ang pagtibok ng puso
Mangyayari at mangyayari ang pagpapanibugho
N-1
Damdaming tunay ay sa ilog na ito
Ang agos ay sa karagatan ang tungo
Dadaloy at dadaloy sa kandungan ng lupa
Tutungo at tutungo sa dagat ng payapa.
N-2
Nasasagkaan man ang daloy ng pagsuyo
Hindi sa habang panahon ay nanunuyo.
N-1
Tulad ng agos, maghahanap ng daan
N-2
Aalpas at aalpas tungo sa kagampan
Sa malusog na kandungan ng hirang.
(Sa tahanan ng mga Cervantes)
Conching:
Pasok, pasok.
Ramon:
Seniorita Conching. Magandang hapon sa iyo.
Simon:
Narito ang magandang dilag ng Cabildo. (Magkukurno).
Magandang hapon sa iyo, binibining marikit.
Jose:
Maligayang pagkikita muli, Conching.
Mario:
Ikinagagalak kong makita ka muli, magandang Conching.
Conching:
Hay, kayong apat, magtigil kayo.
Ramon:
Pasensiya ka, ako lamang ang matino sa aming apat.
Simon:
Aa, ang binata sa kanyang pagbubuhat ng sariling bangko.
Jose:
Ang Ramon sa kanyang pagmumurang kamias.
Mario:
Si Ramon ay namumutla, naghahayag, nagmamahal, nangangarap.
Ahem, ahem.
Conching:
Kayo talaga. Parang kayong mga payaso. At apat-apat pa.
Hindi na ako maniniwala sa inyo.
Ramon:
Puwera biro, umaakyat ako ng ligaw kahit sa kalagitnaan ng araw.
Jose:
Aa, ang binata.
Aa, ang binata
Kay aga-aga ay dumidiga.
Simon:
Yan ang aking tandang.
Ramon:
Hindi ako tandang. Tanungin natin si Conching.
Marion:
Aa, ang binatang tandang.
Dumidiga sa aking harapan.
Conching:
Kayo talaga, puro kayo biro.
Ramon:
Conching, Conching.
Conching, ako’y lingunin.
(Parating ang Norma at Servando; palitan ng paggalang)
Shift to:
Tiya Petra and Conching
Tiya Petra:
Ikaw nga Conching ay mag-iingat
Sa mga bibig na masarap mangusap.
Itong si Ramon ay di ako nakakasiguro
Parang ang pag-ibig ay ginagawang laro.
Kapag nagpahaging ay halata mo
Walang seryoso ang salita ng puso.
Conching:
Ay Tiya Petra, ako’y lito
Tuliro sa tibok ng puso
Mahal ko ang Ramon, siya ang gustong-gusto
Subalit di pangunahan nitong damdamin ko.
Maghintay sa takdang oras at araw
Maghintay sa kupidong maligaw
Pakahihintayin ang panahon takda
Aasahan ang ligaw na pag-asa.
Di ako magpapahiwatig ng ano mang nais
Di ko sasabihin ang pagsintang matamis.
Pakahihintayin ko si Ramon sa gabi
Pakahihintayin ko ang dampi ng labi
Kami sa pagsintang langit ang saksi
Si Ramon na sa dibdib siya ang hari.
Vignette 3-Alamat ng Ilog Pasig
N-1
Ang mutya.
Ang dalagang marikit sa diwa.
Ang kagandahan sa isip.
Sa mga gabing ang pag-iisa ay kay lungkot.
Sa mga batang umagang kaytanda na ang panahon
Sa paghihintay ng kabuuan ng pag-ibig.
Nimfa. Mutya.
Ang pagmamahala sa pusod ng ilog.
Nimfa ng hiraya.
Hiraya ng nimfa.
Hiraya ng lahat ng mga pagsuyo
Sa lahat ng panahon, sa lahat ng purok.
Minsan siyang nagmahal.
Minsan siyang nangarap.
Itong si Nimfa, ang mutya ng ilog,
Ang mutya ng Pasig.
Sa isang mortal siya nagmahal.
Sa tulad nating lahat na may darang sa dibdib,
May baga sa laman.
May apoy sa mga palad at labi
At kandungan.
Ang nimfang mutyang mutya ng pag-irog
Na tapat.
N-2
Pagusuyong kay dalisay
Sapagkat walang muwang sa pagbabaka-baka
Ng irog na mortal tulad natin.
Sa lalaking mortal nabihag,
Sa puso nito nasilo tulad
Ng pagkasilo nating lahat.
Parang bihag, isang bihag
At sa pangako ng isang mortal,
Doon siya umasa,
Doon siya nabuhay,
Doon siya nabubuhay.
N-1
Sa pag-ibig na di wagas din siya nagalit,
Nagtampo,
Nagtanim ng ngalit sa puso
Sa kaibuturan
Hanggang sa kaluluwa
Hanggang sa mga talulot ng mga bulaklak
Hanggang sa dulo ng mga dahon
Hanggang sa hagaspas ng hangin sa ilog
Na dumadampi sa mga banayad na alon
Hanggang sa ang alon ay naging marahas,
Naging ipu-ipo, naging daluyong
Upang manira, manlipol
Magbibigay ng paghahatol.
N-2
Hindi mamamatay ang pag-ibig na dalisay
Kahit mamamatay ang mga umiibig.
Mananatili ang puwersa ng pag-ibig sa ulan
Sa pagpatak nito sa bukiring uhaw
Mananatili sa sinag ng araw
At kakambal nito ang darang na alay.
N-1
Mananatili sa mga hanging ligaw na sasamyo
Sa mga puno, sa balikat ng mga bundok
Sa pisngi ng langit hanggang sa muli itong
Mabubuhay.
Vignette 4-- Ang Kasal
Nobyo:
Ang pagsinta ko’y wagas, irog ko.
Nobya:
Pakamamahalin ko ang iyong pagmamahal.
Nobyo:
Pakaiingatan ko ang iyong pangako.
Nobya:
Saksi ko ang langit.
Saksi ko ang buong mundo.
Saksi ko ang Poon pinagkakautangan ng buhay.
Ako’y mamatay irog kapag ako’y iniwan.
Nobyo:
Pangako, pangako.
Pangako, sinta ko.
Yaring buhay ay iniaalay.
Hain ang huling hininga,
Ika’y tanging iibigin.
Nobya:
Magpakailan man?
Nobyo:
Magpakailan man!
Ama ng Nobio:
Basbasan kayo ng makapangyarihang Maykapal. Maging maligaya habambuhay.
Ina ng Nobyo:
Inyo ang aming bendision. Nawa’y magsasama habampanahon.
Koro:
Mabuhay ang bagong kasal.
Mabuhay ang bagong kasal.
Ibang boses-1:
Mabuhay ang bagong sakal. Hahahahaha!
Ibang boses-2:
Mabuhay ang nagpapasakal! Hahahaha!
Ibang boses-3:
Dalawang puso na naman ang nagpasakal! Hahahaha
Ibang bose-4s:
He! Magsitigil kayo mga walang modo.
Koro:
Mabuhay ang bagong kasal!
Ina ng nobya:
Patnubayan kayo ng Poong Maykapal. Biyayaan kayo ng masayang tahanan.
Ina ng nobya:
Biyayaan kayo ng isang dosenang supling. Ako ang mag-aaruga ng isang dosenang supling.
Koro:
Hahahaha!
Ina ng nobya (patatahanin ang asawa):
Magtigil ka!
(Kukurutin ang asawa sa tagiliran).
(Tawanan ang lahat).
Finale
N-1
Sa tanong kung alin ang mainam sa pagmamahalan
Ang puso o puson ang kailangan
Ang tibok ng nararamdaman ba
O ang sipa ng katwiran
Alin, alin nga ba ang panghahawakan?
N-2
Napagmasdan natin ang dula ng buhay
Nasaksihan ang paglalaro ng diwang tunay
Tunay ngang mahirap pakaisipin
Kung alin, kung alin ang tatanggapin.
N-1
Puso man ang mangusap at naggalak
Kung ang hiraya ng diwa nama’y salat
Wala ring silbi ang pagsintang wagas
Kung wala ring darang na kasingsukat.
A Solver Agcaoili
Honolulu at Waipahu, HI
Peb 18/06
Vignette 1: Pangangarap sa Nililiyag
N-1
Sa usaping pagmamahalan, alin ang dapat umiral
Sa bagay na ito alin nga ang hayaang daratal
Ang puso bang masusunod, ang tibok ang pakinggan
O ang isip na nakakaalam kung ano ang mainam?
N2
Sa paksang itong hain sa hapong ito ng palatuntunan
Alin nga ba ang mahalaga sa pagsuyo yaring tingnan
Ang dibdib nga bang ang kalabog ay sa sinta
O ang ulong ang turo ay malayo sa pariwara?
N-1
Tunghayan ang kuwento ng pag-ibig sa hapong ito
Arukin sa mga palabas ang mukha ng pagkalito
Tingnan sa mga halibawa ang laan sa landas
Kilatisin ng maigi ang dulo ng mga pahimakas.
N-2
Pagsintang totoo ay di nangingilala
Hindi nang-aabiso ng pagdurusa
Hahayaan ang dumaloy ang luna
Matuto man sa hirap ng mga hiwaga.
N-1
Ha! Puso kong puso subalit kay baligho
Sapagkat ang dapat ay sa utak ang puno
Ng lahat ng pagpapasiya pati ang pagsuyo
At hindi kailan ang darang ng hita mo!
N-2
Puso o puson, alin man ang tugon
Puson pa rin ang talinghaga ng layon
Sa puson ang buhay, simula ng init
Sa puson ang galak, dulo ng akit.
Mauricio: (Nangangarap, dream scene, hawak ang paniolito)
Caridad, Caridad
Caridad ng aking sinta
Caridad ng aking buhay.
Lucio: (gugulantangin si Mauricio)
Hoy, Mauricio, amigo, ikaw nga ay magising
Ikaw nga ay magtitino nang di pakakamalasin
Perico:
Ha ikaw nang masilo, Lucio, O Lucio
Mapana ng matalas na pana ng Kupido
Ikaw nga ang mangarap sa dambama
Mangarap na magpapakasal ang mutya.
Lucio:
Siya, siya, ako na nga ang binata:
O pag-ibig, pag-ibig na mahika
Sasalamangkahin ang noo, hita
Paduduguin ng paduduguin ang hahahahaha!
Mauricio:
Mga salawahan, kayo nga ay magtigil
Ang mga puso rin ay manggigigil
(Aambahan ang dalawa)
Caridad: (Dream scene, tangan ang panyo ni Mauricio)
O Mauricio aking buhay
O Mauricio aking pakay
Mauricio, Mauricio
Buong-buong pagsuyo.
Dona Caridad:
Esta Caridad, tayo na sa simbahan.
Magdasal ng magdasal sa kaparihan
Magsabi ng niloloob kasama ang kapintasan
Idagdag na ang panunukso ng kalalakihan.
Caridad:
Opo, mama, manalanging tunay
Lumuhod sa Poon, humingi ng pagnubay
(Pabulong)
Kung alam mo lang, mama, kung alam mo lang
Matagal nang nararamdaman ang ganitong kalituhan
Si Maurcio ang aking mahal at di nino man
Siyang sinasabi ng niloloob kahit kailan.
Manong:
Ke init-init nagkakadikit (pansin sa mga kabataan)
Ke sasagwa ang pang-aakit.
Manang:
Mantakin mong walang patawad
Kahit sa simbahan nagdidikit ang palad.
Don:
Que sin verguenza, kaaga-aga e naglalampungan
Ang harutan nga naman iba nang pagmasdan
Dona:
Sssshs! Masdan ang salita, ang puna ay pigilan.
Madali at tayo ay manalangan para sa mga lapastangan.
Madali at makapagkuros, humingi ng kapatawaran.
Mga batang naglalaro:
C-1
Pagsuyo, pagsinta, aako.
C-2
Aako ang pagsuyo
Aako ang sinta ko
C-3
Sinusuyo ang sinta ko
Sinisinta ang sinusuyo
Aako ang sinisinta
Aako ang sinusuyo.
(Maglalakad sina Caridad at Dona Aguda papasok sa simbahan)
D-A:
Madali, Caridad, ang misa ay sisimulan.
Huwag nang ang tingin ay kung saan-saan.
Caridad:
(bubulong)
Kung alam mo lang, Mauricio, ikaw ang tibok ng puso
Kung maisisiwalat ko lamang na ikaw ang pagsuyo.
(Kasunod sina Mauricio, Perico at Lucio)
D-A:
Ang utak ang pairalin, Caridad sa buhay
Hindi ang puso na sanhi ng mga lumbay.
Tingnan mo ako, tingnan ng isa pang ulit
Ako na iyong ina na ang kakabal at pait.
Hala, lumarga at pumasok sa simbahan
Magdasal sa santo, sa santa gumalang
Humingi ng basbas, bendision na tapat
Puhunan sa buhay, karugtong ng ulirat.
Caridad:
(Pabulong)
Ako na ay nagmamahal
Ako na ay may kasuyo
Di natuturuan yaring itong puso
Ang itinitibok itong si Mauricio.
(Pabulong)
Babasan mo ang aking panyolito
Poon ng mga nagbabagang pagsuyo.
(Ilalaglag ang panyo).
KANTAHAN----
Vignette 2-Hele-hele Bago Quiere
N-1
Kapag hindi tapat sa pagsintang tapat
Mananatili ang pagsisisi kapag dumilat.
N-2
Kapag hinayaang lumampas ang pagtibok ng puso
Mangyayari at mangyayari ang pagpapanibugho
N-1
Damdaming tunay ay sa ilog na ito
Ang agos ay sa karagatan ang tungo
Dadaloy at dadaloy sa kandungan ng lupa
Tutungo at tutungo sa dagat ng payapa.
N-2
Nasasagkaan man ang daloy ng pagsuyo
Hindi sa habang panahon ay nanunuyo.
N-1
Tulad ng agos, maghahanap ng daan
N-2
Aalpas at aalpas tungo sa kagampan
Sa malusog na kandungan ng hirang.
(Sa tahanan ng mga Cervantes)
Conching:
Pasok, pasok.
Ramon:
Seniorita Conching. Magandang hapon sa iyo.
Simon:
Narito ang magandang dilag ng Cabildo. (Magkukurno).
Magandang hapon sa iyo, binibining marikit.
Jose:
Maligayang pagkikita muli, Conching.
Mario:
Ikinagagalak kong makita ka muli, magandang Conching.
Conching:
Hay, kayong apat, magtigil kayo.
Ramon:
Pasensiya ka, ako lamang ang matino sa aming apat.
Simon:
Aa, ang binata sa kanyang pagbubuhat ng sariling bangko.
Jose:
Ang Ramon sa kanyang pagmumurang kamias.
Mario:
Si Ramon ay namumutla, naghahayag, nagmamahal, nangangarap.
Ahem, ahem.
Conching:
Kayo talaga. Parang kayong mga payaso. At apat-apat pa.
Hindi na ako maniniwala sa inyo.
Ramon:
Puwera biro, umaakyat ako ng ligaw kahit sa kalagitnaan ng araw.
Jose:
Aa, ang binata.
Aa, ang binata
Kay aga-aga ay dumidiga.
Simon:
Yan ang aking tandang.
Ramon:
Hindi ako tandang. Tanungin natin si Conching.
Marion:
Aa, ang binatang tandang.
Dumidiga sa aking harapan.
Conching:
Kayo talaga, puro kayo biro.
Ramon:
Conching, Conching.
Conching, ako’y lingunin.
(Parating ang Norma at Servando; palitan ng paggalang)
Shift to:
Tiya Petra and Conching
Tiya Petra:
Ikaw nga Conching ay mag-iingat
Sa mga bibig na masarap mangusap.
Itong si Ramon ay di ako nakakasiguro
Parang ang pag-ibig ay ginagawang laro.
Kapag nagpahaging ay halata mo
Walang seryoso ang salita ng puso.
Conching:
Ay Tiya Petra, ako’y lito
Tuliro sa tibok ng puso
Mahal ko ang Ramon, siya ang gustong-gusto
Subalit di pangunahan nitong damdamin ko.
Maghintay sa takdang oras at araw
Maghintay sa kupidong maligaw
Pakahihintayin ang panahon takda
Aasahan ang ligaw na pag-asa.
Di ako magpapahiwatig ng ano mang nais
Di ko sasabihin ang pagsintang matamis.
Pakahihintayin ko si Ramon sa gabi
Pakahihintayin ko ang dampi ng labi
Kami sa pagsintang langit ang saksi
Si Ramon na sa dibdib siya ang hari.
Vignette 3-Alamat ng Ilog Pasig
N-1
Ang mutya.
Ang dalagang marikit sa diwa.
Ang kagandahan sa isip.
Sa mga gabing ang pag-iisa ay kay lungkot.
Sa mga batang umagang kaytanda na ang panahon
Sa paghihintay ng kabuuan ng pag-ibig.
Nimfa. Mutya.
Ang pagmamahala sa pusod ng ilog.
Nimfa ng hiraya.
Hiraya ng nimfa.
Hiraya ng lahat ng mga pagsuyo
Sa lahat ng panahon, sa lahat ng purok.
Minsan siyang nagmahal.
Minsan siyang nangarap.
Itong si Nimfa, ang mutya ng ilog,
Ang mutya ng Pasig.
Sa isang mortal siya nagmahal.
Sa tulad nating lahat na may darang sa dibdib,
May baga sa laman.
May apoy sa mga palad at labi
At kandungan.
Ang nimfang mutyang mutya ng pag-irog
Na tapat.
N-2
Pagusuyong kay dalisay
Sapagkat walang muwang sa pagbabaka-baka
Ng irog na mortal tulad natin.
Sa lalaking mortal nabihag,
Sa puso nito nasilo tulad
Ng pagkasilo nating lahat.
Parang bihag, isang bihag
At sa pangako ng isang mortal,
Doon siya umasa,
Doon siya nabuhay,
Doon siya nabubuhay.
N-1
Sa pag-ibig na di wagas din siya nagalit,
Nagtampo,
Nagtanim ng ngalit sa puso
Sa kaibuturan
Hanggang sa kaluluwa
Hanggang sa mga talulot ng mga bulaklak
Hanggang sa dulo ng mga dahon
Hanggang sa hagaspas ng hangin sa ilog
Na dumadampi sa mga banayad na alon
Hanggang sa ang alon ay naging marahas,
Naging ipu-ipo, naging daluyong
Upang manira, manlipol
Magbibigay ng paghahatol.
N-2
Hindi mamamatay ang pag-ibig na dalisay
Kahit mamamatay ang mga umiibig.
Mananatili ang puwersa ng pag-ibig sa ulan
Sa pagpatak nito sa bukiring uhaw
Mananatili sa sinag ng araw
At kakambal nito ang darang na alay.
N-1
Mananatili sa mga hanging ligaw na sasamyo
Sa mga puno, sa balikat ng mga bundok
Sa pisngi ng langit hanggang sa muli itong
Mabubuhay.
Vignette 4-- Ang Kasal
Nobyo:
Ang pagsinta ko’y wagas, irog ko.
Nobya:
Pakamamahalin ko ang iyong pagmamahal.
Nobyo:
Pakaiingatan ko ang iyong pangako.
Nobya:
Saksi ko ang langit.
Saksi ko ang buong mundo.
Saksi ko ang Poon pinagkakautangan ng buhay.
Ako’y mamatay irog kapag ako’y iniwan.
Nobyo:
Pangako, pangako.
Pangako, sinta ko.
Yaring buhay ay iniaalay.
Hain ang huling hininga,
Ika’y tanging iibigin.
Nobya:
Magpakailan man?
Nobyo:
Magpakailan man!
Ama ng Nobio:
Basbasan kayo ng makapangyarihang Maykapal. Maging maligaya habambuhay.
Ina ng Nobyo:
Inyo ang aming bendision. Nawa’y magsasama habampanahon.
Koro:
Mabuhay ang bagong kasal.
Mabuhay ang bagong kasal.
Ibang boses-1:
Mabuhay ang bagong sakal. Hahahahaha!
Ibang boses-2:
Mabuhay ang nagpapasakal! Hahahaha!
Ibang boses-3:
Dalawang puso na naman ang nagpasakal! Hahahaha
Ibang bose-4s:
He! Magsitigil kayo mga walang modo.
Koro:
Mabuhay ang bagong kasal!
Ina ng nobya:
Patnubayan kayo ng Poong Maykapal. Biyayaan kayo ng masayang tahanan.
Ina ng nobya:
Biyayaan kayo ng isang dosenang supling. Ako ang mag-aaruga ng isang dosenang supling.
Koro:
Hahahaha!
Ina ng nobya (patatahanin ang asawa):
Magtigil ka!
(Kukurutin ang asawa sa tagiliran).
(Tawanan ang lahat).
Finale
N-1
Sa tanong kung alin ang mainam sa pagmamahalan
Ang puso o puson ang kailangan
Ang tibok ng nararamdaman ba
O ang sipa ng katwiran
Alin, alin nga ba ang panghahawakan?
N-2
Napagmasdan natin ang dula ng buhay
Nasaksihan ang paglalaro ng diwang tunay
Tunay ngang mahirap pakaisipin
Kung alin, kung alin ang tatanggapin.
N-1
Puso man ang mangusap at naggalak
Kung ang hiraya ng diwa nama’y salat
Wala ring silbi ang pagsintang wagas
Kung wala ring darang na kasingsukat.
A Solver Agcaoili
Honolulu at Waipahu, HI
Peb 18/06
Dallot ti Panagyaman ken Panagserra iti Parang
(Sinurat para iti 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference Dumanonkayo Ceremonies, Nob. 9, 2006, UH Manoa, Hon, HI; indallot da Roxanne Taylan ken Chris Mallanao, agpada nga agad-adal iti UH Manoa)
Babai:
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Ta intay ngarud itan saksian
Ti panagserra iti daytoy a parang
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Lalaki:
Napintas a panaglilinnangen
Nakaay-ayo a laglagipen
Babai:
Daytoy a panagkammayet
Nabayag nga imbagbaga di saltek
Lalaki:
A no agsaltek ket kasla tumarektek
Nabayag nga impadto ti pusa
Babai:
A no aglana ket uray la nga
Ngem kakabsatmi ngarud ida
Lalaki:
Gagayyem a sangapada
Amin a naggapu iti sabali
Babai:
Sabali a lugar ken ili
Agyamankami kadakayo
Dueto:
Pagyamananmi ti panakidanggayyo
Kasta met a pangyamananmi
Ti gobernadora ti ili
No Gobernadora Linda Lingle
Nga immay nakiabrasa
Kasta met dagiti mamaingel
Ni Doktor Lumbera a pagtamdan
Iramantay ni Doktor Lilia
Tay Santiago ti apilyedona
Kasta met ni Doktor Marot
Dagiti sabsabong a kappuros
Flores ti apilyedona, babai a naemma
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Lalaki:
Dagiti diputado ti ili
Isuda a nagdaliasat iti rabii
Babai:
Nagdaliasat iti rabii
Nga immay mangyeg kaasi
Lalaki:
Isuda a pagtamdan
Pagsakduan iti nakem
Babai:
Pagtawingan iti kinaimbag
Pannakaawat iti biag
Lalaki:
Dagiti mamaestra a kadua
Pagbulodan iti sanikua
Babai:
Daytay gameng iti panunot
Gameng a di marunot
Lalaki:
Dagiti mannurat a nakikappeng
Nga agparpatuat manen iti imahen
Babai:
Isuda dagitoy ti saksi
Ti ngayed ti taripnong
Dueto:
Daytoy a taripnong nga aglaylayon
Agtultuloy nga agnanayon
Isu ngarud a rekpantay itan
Daytoy a parang a kinayawan
Dagiti musa dagiti bantay
Iti Manoa nga agpayapayapay
Agyamankami ngarud, kakabsat
Kadagiti adu a ragragsak
Sapay ta daytoy ti rugi
Ti adu pay a panagilili
Panagpipingki dagiti utek
Panagsaltek ti bautek
Ti panagariangga ti saltek
Tapno ti regget maipasnek
Agimbag a rabiikamin
Ta ti bagi paginanaen
Dueto:
Naimbag a rabiiyo amin
Dakayo amin a gagayyem
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nob 2, 2006
Babai:
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Ta intay ngarud itan saksian
Ti panagserra iti daytoy a parang
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Lalaki:
Napintas a panaglilinnangen
Nakaay-ayo a laglagipen
Babai:
Daytoy a panagkammayet
Nabayag nga imbagbaga di saltek
Lalaki:
A no agsaltek ket kasla tumarektek
Nabayag nga impadto ti pusa
Babai:
A no aglana ket uray la nga
Ngem kakabsatmi ngarud ida
Lalaki:
Gagayyem a sangapada
Amin a naggapu iti sabali
Babai:
Sabali a lugar ken ili
Agyamankami kadakayo
Dueto:
Pagyamananmi ti panakidanggayyo
Kasta met a pangyamananmi
Ti gobernadora ti ili
No Gobernadora Linda Lingle
Nga immay nakiabrasa
Kasta met dagiti mamaingel
Ni Doktor Lumbera a pagtamdan
Iramantay ni Doktor Lilia
Tay Santiago ti apilyedona
Kasta met ni Doktor Marot
Dagiti sabsabong a kappuros
Flores ti apilyedona, babai a naemma
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Lalaki:
Dagiti diputado ti ili
Isuda a nagdaliasat iti rabii
Babai:
Nagdaliasat iti rabii
Nga immay mangyeg kaasi
Lalaki:
Isuda a pagtamdan
Pagsakduan iti nakem
Babai:
Pagtawingan iti kinaimbag
Pannakaawat iti biag
Lalaki:
Dagiti mamaestra a kadua
Pagbulodan iti sanikua
Babai:
Daytay gameng iti panunot
Gameng a di marunot
Lalaki:
Dagiti mannurat a nakikappeng
Nga agparpatuat manen iti imahen
Babai:
Isuda dagitoy ti saksi
Ti ngayed ti taripnong
Dueto:
Daytoy a taripnong nga aglaylayon
Agtultuloy nga agnanayon
Isu ngarud a rekpantay itan
Daytoy a parang a kinayawan
Dagiti musa dagiti bantay
Iti Manoa nga agpayapayapay
Agyamankami ngarud, kakabsat
Kadagiti adu a ragragsak
Sapay ta daytoy ti rugi
Ti adu pay a panagilili
Panagpipingki dagiti utek
Panagsaltek ti bautek
Ti panagariangga ti saltek
Tapno ti regget maipasnek
Agimbag a rabiikamin
Ta ti bagi paginanaen
Dueto:
Naimbag a rabiiyo amin
Dakayo amin a gagayyem
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Nob 2, 2006
Dallot ti Panagkararag ken Panagpadanon
(Sinurat para iti Dumanonkayo Ceremonies, 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference, Unibersidad ti Hawai`i iti Manoa, Honolulu, HI, Nobiembre 9, 2006, ken indallot da Roxanne Taylan ken Chris Mallanao, agpada nga agad-adal iti Unibersidad ti Hawai`i-Manoa)
1. Panagkararag
Babai:
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Agrukbabtayo iti Namarsua
Iti sidongna mapantayo kenkuana
Ta isuna ti pakabuklan
Ti amin a kaipapanan
Sumurnadtayo a pinarsua
Datayo amin a sangapada
Ta daytoy ti rumbeng
Ti nasken nga aramiden
Ti panagtamed ti iringpasen
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Lalaki:
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Ti nasken nga aramiden
Ti pananglagiptay aminen
Kadagiti parabur a laklak-amen
Ta amin dagitoy ket aggapu
Iti nalabon nga ayat ti Apo
Ti namartuat iti biagtayo
Ti namartuat iti kiredtayo
Ti namartuat iti piatayo
Ti namartuat iti regtatay
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Dueto:
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A. ta daldallot duminidallang
Agtamedkami ngarud kenka ita
O Apo a bubon ti kararua
Dakami nga umar-araraw
Itdemkadakam ti rayray ti aldaw
Itdemkadakam ti bang-ar ti puso
Itdemkadakam ti lung-aw iti appupo
Itdemkadakam ti lag-an iti babantot
Itdemkadakam ti dur-as iti saklot
Tapno iti kasta ket malak-ammi ti daton
Nga inrantam kadakami a tallaong
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
2. Panagpadanon
Babai:
A, ta dallot ay, duminidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Kasta met nga inkam kablaawan
Dagiti amin a nagsangpet a pagayam
Gagayyem a mabigbig iti sabali nga ili
Madaydayaw ken malalaki
Dagiti dayag a nalalaing
Dagiti bisitami a nasanting
Amin dagitoy a kakaduami
Iti daytoy a taripnongmi
Ta dakkel a pakaidayawanmi
Ti pannakikammaysayo kadakami
Pannakikammaysa a pakalaglagipanmi
Pannakikammaysa a pakautanganmi
Pakautanganmi iti naimbag a nakem
A bayadenmi met iti naimbag a nakem
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot, duminidallang
Lalaki:
A, ta dallot, ay duminidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Dumanonkayo ngarud, apo
Sumrekkayo iti tallaongtayo
Kaduaendakami iti daytoy nga aramid
Rambakantayo daytoy a patawid
Ta daytoy a patawid ti bendision
Ta pakaigapuan daytoy a punsion
Daytoy a panagkakamammayet
Pannakaur-urnos ti kinasingpet
Panangisagut met iti sayaat
A kasingin ti pudno nga ayat
Ti ayat a nasudi ken natarnaw
Nga imulatay iti ballasiw-taaw
Tapno gibusantay ti pananglipat
Kandado ti lagip makeltat
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot dumininidallang
Dueto:
A, ta dallot ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Itedmin ngarud kadakayo amin
Ti panagtamedmi iti laing
Ti panangbigbigmi iti kananakem
Nakaim-imbag a kababalin
Amin dagitoy nga insangpetyo
Awatenmi amin a sipupuso
Sinanama iti panangipategyo
Dumanonkayo ngarud, apo,
Sumaklangkayo amin iti numo
Dispensarenyo ti nagtenganyo
Ta ti barukongmi ti sangladanyo
Ditoykayo a lumaem ken agindeg
Iti barukongmi ti subad a pammateg
Ti panagyaman a madagdagullit
Ti panagisem a nakasamsam-it
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, daldallot, duminidallang.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa, Nob 2/06
(Sinurat para iti Dumanonkayo Ceremonies, 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference, Unibersidad ti Hawai`i iti Manoa, Honolulu, HI, Nobiembre 9, 2006, ken indallot da Roxanne Taylan ken Chris Mallanao, agpada nga agad-adal iti Unibersidad ti Hawai`i-Manoa)
1. Panagkararag
Babai:
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Agrukbabtayo iti Namarsua
Iti sidongna mapantayo kenkuana
Ta isuna ti pakabuklan
Ti amin a kaipapanan
Sumurnadtayo a pinarsua
Datayo amin a sangapada
Ta daytoy ti rumbeng
Ti nasken nga aramiden
Ti panagtamed ti iringpasen
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Lalaki:
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Ti nasken nga aramiden
Ti pananglagiptay aminen
Kadagiti parabur a laklak-amen
Ta amin dagitoy ket aggapu
Iti nalabon nga ayat ti Apo
Ti namartuat iti biagtayo
Ti namartuat iti kiredtayo
Ti namartuat iti piatayo
Ti namartuat iti regtatay
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Dueto:
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A. ta daldallot duminidallang
Agtamedkami ngarud kenka ita
O Apo a bubon ti kararua
Dakami nga umar-araraw
Itdemkadakam ti rayray ti aldaw
Itdemkadakam ti bang-ar ti puso
Itdemkadakam ti lung-aw iti appupo
Itdemkadakam ti lag-an iti babantot
Itdemkadakam ti dur-as iti saklot
Tapno iti kasta ket malak-ammi ti daton
Nga inrantam kadakami a tallaong
A, ta dallot ay, dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
2. Panagpadanon
Babai:
A, ta dallot ay, duminidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Kasta met nga inkam kablaawan
Dagiti amin a nagsangpet a pagayam
Gagayyem a mabigbig iti sabali nga ili
Madaydayaw ken malalaki
Dagiti dayag a nalalaing
Dagiti bisitami a nasanting
Amin dagitoy a kakaduami
Iti daytoy a taripnongmi
Ta dakkel a pakaidayawanmi
Ti pannakikammaysayo kadakami
Pannakikammaysa a pakalaglagipanmi
Pannakikammaysa a pakautanganmi
Pakautanganmi iti naimbag a nakem
A bayadenmi met iti naimbag a nakem
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot, duminidallang
Lalaki:
A, ta dallot, ay duminidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Dumanonkayo ngarud, apo
Sumrekkayo iti tallaongtayo
Kaduaendakami iti daytoy nga aramid
Rambakantayo daytoy a patawid
Ta daytoy a patawid ti bendision
Ta pakaigapuan daytoy a punsion
Daytoy a panagkakamammayet
Pannakaur-urnos ti kinasingpet
Panangisagut met iti sayaat
A kasingin ti pudno nga ayat
Ti ayat a nasudi ken natarnaw
Nga imulatay iti ballasiw-taaw
Tapno gibusantay ti pananglipat
Kandado ti lagip makeltat
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot dumininidallang
Dueto:
A, ta dallot ay dalidallang
A, ta daldallot duminidallang
Itedmin ngarud kadakayo amin
Ti panagtamedmi iti laing
Ti panangbigbigmi iti kananakem
Nakaim-imbag a kababalin
Amin dagitoy nga insangpetyo
Awatenmi amin a sipupuso
Sinanama iti panangipategyo
Dumanonkayo ngarud, apo,
Sumaklangkayo amin iti numo
Dispensarenyo ti nagtenganyo
Ta ti barukongmi ti sangladanyo
Ditoykayo a lumaem ken agindeg
Iti barukongmi ti subad a pammateg
Ti panagyaman a madagdagullit
Ti panagisem a nakasamsam-it
A, ta dallot, ay dalidallang
A, daldallot, duminidallang.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa, Nob 2/06
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