Panangusar iti Kontemporaneo a Diksionario

Panangusar iti Diksionario

Suroten daytoy a diksionario ti kontemporaneo a wagas ti pannakaisurat ti pagsasao nga Ilokano.

Bubuklen daytoy a wagas ti pammigbig kadagiti amin nga uni ti daytoy a pagsasao a kas ar-aramaten iti agdama.

Dagitoy nga uni—tallupulo ti kadagupan dagitoy—ket dagiti sumaganad, agraman ti ejemplo ti pannakabalikasda.

a, ama

b, babai

c, Cordillera

ch, China

d, daniw

e, elefante

f, federalismo

g, Gaddang

h, Hawaii

i, Ivatagan

j, Jose

k, Kailokuan

l, law-ang

ll, Llanes

m, mangga

n, nanang

ñ, niño

ng, nganga

o, oras

p, pisos

q, Quezon

r, rebelde

s, santo

t, talibagok

u, ulo

v, vinta

w, waig

x, xerox

y, yarda

z, zero

Iti panagaramat kadagitoy nga uni, makita a saanen a nagpakulong ti baro a wagas ti panagsirig iti pagsasao nga Ilokano kadagiti nariingan a wagas a mangibagbaga (a) a nasken ti panagrespetar iti tradision ken (b) a nasken a sumurot ti pagsasao nga Ilokano iti wagas ti kunkunada a nailian a pagsasao a nakabasar iti Tagalog.

Saan a mamati daytoy a kontemporaneo a diksionario kadagitoy gapu kadagitoy a rason: (a) nagbaliwen ti langa ti pagsasao nga Ilokano sipud pay idi maipablaak iti Ilokano ti patarus ni Fray Lopez a katekismo ni Cardinal Bellarmino, ti Doctrina Cristiana; (b) addaan bukod nga energia ti pagsasao nga Ilokano iti labes ti energia ti Tagalog (a basar ti makunkuna a nailian a lengguahe), energia a nagtaud iti agdama a padas ni Ilokano iti man Ilocos wenno kadagiti amin a komunidad nga ayanna, iti man Filipinas wenno kadagiti diasporiko a komunidad; (c) addaan sirmata iti panagpampanunot maipapan iti pagsasao nga Ilokano, ket daytoy a sirmata ti mangiduron iti daytoy a kas universal a mangibabaet iti di agressat a panagmennamenna ni Ilokano kadagiti amin a nabugas a padasna; ken (d) addaan akem ti pagsasao nga Ilokano iti mamagwayawaya gapu ta kritikal nga edukasion dagiti amin nga Ilokano, partikular ti akem daytoy iti panangipapilit a dinto kaano man makadur-as ni Ilokano ken ti komunidadna no saan a mangrugi iti panangpadur-as iti nakemna nga ibabaet dagiti sorpresa ken kinapudno nga adda iti lubong ti bukodna mismo a pagsasaona.

Saan met a mamati daytoy a diksionario iti ballaag dagiti purista a mangibagbaga a ti pannakabagi ti maysa a pagsasao ket ti rurogna—rurog a makita laeng sakbay ti kolonisado a padas, wenno sakbay ti padas iti interaksion kadagiti sabali a kultura ken pagsasao.

Ketdi, deskribiren daytoy a diksionario amin a padas ni Ilokano, iti man Ilocos wenno iti sabali a lugar a pakairaman dagiti posible a dialekto a rimkuas ken rumrumkuas kadagiti nagkaadu ken nakabakbaknang a padasna iti panagallaallatiwna—iti panagbayanggudawna iti labes dagiti nakipet a komunidadna iti Ilocos, a pinakipet ti managallaalla a kananakemna.

Iti panagbulod, ken panangbigbig iti kastoy a panagbulod, dua a wagas ti inusar daytoy a diksionario: (a) buloden ngem paggarawen ti binulod a kas natural a balikas iti pagsasao babaen ti panangipatarus iti daytoy iti natural nga uni dagiti balikas, wenno (b) buloden a kas kompleto a sao, ket pagbalinen a natural babaen ti panangsansan iti panagaramat iti daytoy.

Adu dagiti nakautangan ti pagsasao nga Ilokano tapno agbalin daytoy a nabaknang a kultural a rekursos ni Ilokano. Sumagmamano kadagitoy a bubon ti makita iti baba:

Akk, Akkadiano

Akl, Aklanon

Ap, Apayao

Ar, Aramaic, wenno Aramaiko

Arb, Arabic, wenno Arabiko

Arw, Arawakan

Aus, Australian (Ingles)

AusA, Australian (aboriginal)

Az, Aztec

Bag, Bagobo

Bgo, Bago

Bik, Bikol

Blt, Balti

Bal, Balinese

Bor, Borneo

Ber, Berber

Bol, Bolinao

Bon, Bontoc

Cant, Cantonese

CenAm, (variedad a Central nga Americano)

Cham, Chamorro

Chav, Chavacano

Chk, Chuukese

Chn, Chinese

Crb, Caribe

Czk, Czech

Dyk, Dyak

Dch, Dutch

Egp, Egipso

Eng, Ingles

Esp, Esperanto

Eth, Ethiopian

Ew, Ewe

Fij, Fiji

Fn, Fon

Fr, French

Fuk, Fukien, wenno Fukien a Chinese

Gad, Gaddang

Gal, Galician

Ger, Germanic

Grk, Greek

Haw, Hawaiian

HaP, Hawaii Ilokano, wenno Ilokano a Pidgin 

Heb, Hebrew

HGer, High German (wenno Aleman a pangliterario)

Hil, Hiligayon

Hok, Hokkien                                                                    

Hnd, Hindi

Ib, Ibanag

Iba, Ibaloi

If, Ifugao

Igb, Igbo

Ika, Ikalahan, wenno Kalanguya

Ilg, Ilonggo

Ilk, Daan nga Ilokano

Ind, Indonesian

Ir, Iranian

Itn, Itneg

Is, Isinay

It, Itawis

Ital, Italian

Ivt, Ivatan

Jap, Japanese

Jav, Javanese

Kag, Kagayanon

Kal, Kalinga

Kly, Kalanguya

Kan, Kankanaey

Kap, Kapampangan, wenno Pampanga

Kin, Kinaray-a

Kor, Korean

Kuy, Kuyunon

L, Latin

Lao, Laotian

Mag, Maguindanao

Mal, Malay

Malb, Malabar, wenno Malayalam

Man, Manobo

Mng, Mongolian

Mang, Mangyan

Mao, Maori (iti Cook Islands)

Mar, Marshallese

Marq, Marquesas

Maw, Maranao

May, Mayan

Mex, Mexican (a variedad ti Español)           

Nhl, Nahuatl, wenno Aztec 

OFr, Old French (wenno Daan a Frances)

Pal, Palauan

Palw, Palawanon, dialekto iti Palawan

PEP, Proto-East-Polynesian

Per, Persian

Ph, Phoenician

PhE, Philippine English (wenno Ingles iti Filipinas)

PMP, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian

Png, Pangasinan

Prt, Portuguese

PrtB, Portuguese Brazilian (wenno variedad ti Portogese idiay Brazil)

PrP, Proto-Polynesian

Rot, Rotuman

Rus, Russian

Sata, Satawalese

Sam, Sambali

Samo, Samoan

SCre, Santiago Creole

Sin, Sinhalese

Sk, Sanskrit

SLt, Samar-Leyte (syn. Waray): Samar-Leyte ti us-usaren daytoy a diksionario

Sub, Subanen

Sul, Sulu

Sum, Sumerian

Sur, Surigaonon

Sp, Spanish

Swed, Swedish

Tag, Tagalog

Tgbn, Tagbanua

Tah, Tahitian

Tai, Taino

Tam, Tamil

Th, Thai

Tgn, Tingguian

Tib, Tibetan

Tibo, Tiboli

Tong, Tongan

Trk, Turkish

Tsw, Tswana (wenno Setswana)

Urd, Urdu

Viet, Vietnamese

Vis, Visayan, Bisayan, Sebuano, wenno Cebuano Visayan

Yak, Yakan

Yap, Yapese

Yid, Yiddish

Yor, Yoruba

Zam, Zambali

Ipakita dagitoy a nakautangan ti pagsasao nga Ilokano a saan a nagbalin a mangurkuranges daytoy gapu iti panagbulodna.

Ketdi, iti panagbulodna—ken panangtagikuana kadagitoy a binulodna iti wagas ti apropriasion—bimmaknang ti panagipeksa ni Ilokano iti expansivo a padasna iti biag, iti komplexidad ti kontemporaneo a panagbiagna, ken iti komprehensivo nga istruktura ti pannakilangenlangenna iti sabali.

Ti sirmata daytoy a diksionario ket ti agtultuloy koma nga apropriasion manipud kadagiti sabali pay a bubon tapno iti kasta ket makapudno ti maysa a diksionario nga Ilokano a mangiladawan iti padas ni Ilokano iti agdama.

Iti panagipresentar kadagiti balikas, imbasar daytoy a diksionario ti panagilista babaen ti mapattapatta a produktivo a kapabilidad ti maysa a balikas.

Dua a kapanunotan ti nagsukog iti presentasion: ti panangsirig iti pagsasao nga Ilokano iti lente ti produktivo nga aspekto (a) dagiti balikas a pangtignay ken (b) dagiti balikas a pangnagan.

Iti daytoy a diksionario, ubog ti pagsasao nga Ilokano dagitoy, ket dagitoy ti naikkan iti importansia iti panagilista kadagiti balikas, gapuna a namarkaan ti adu kadagitoy iti ‘the act of’ (nga indikasion ti verbal a karakter dagitoy), ‘a situation’, ‘the condition of’ (ken dadduma pay a pangmarka tapno iti kasta ket mapagtimaanan ti agbasbasa nga adu ti posibilidad ti maysa a balikas.

Adda dagiti ejemplo kadagiti dadduma a balikas, kas wagas ti panangisuro numan pay mabilbilang laeng dagitoy; kasta met nga adda dagiti balikas a naikkan iti wagas ti panangtingiting kadagitoy iti angkla ti derivasion tapno laeng maipakita dagitoy a posibilidad, ken tapno maikkan dagiti agad-adal iti lengguahe nga Ilokano iti idea no kasano nga aggaraw ti maysa a balikas.

Amin dagitoy ket naaramat iti daytoy a diksionario gapu iti maysa a rason: kangrunaan a panggep daytoy a diksionario ket maiyadal kadagiti agad-adal dagiti komplikado a wagas ti panangipateg iti maysa a pagsasao, iti bukod a pagsasao.

Adda pay dagiti marka a naaramat tapno maisuro kadagiti agad-adal dagiti komplexidad ti pagsasao nga Ilokano: 

abb., abbreviated form, abbreviation; kasta met a cont., contraction: para iti balikas a naiyababa

ant., antonym: kasungani a kaipapan ti maysa a balikas; saan unay nga adu ti adda iti daytoy a diksionario

alt., altered: maysa a balikas a nagbaliw. Kas pagarigan: ‘demontres,’ fr Sp ‘demonio’ fr Grk ‘daimonia’ 

bib., biblical: manipud kadagiti konsepto iti Kristiano a Biblia

br., brand; a trademark: nagan ti maysa a produkto, wenno kompania

BCE, before the common era; kaibatogan ti before the Christian era, wenno sakbay ti panawen a Kristiano

CE, common era; kaibatogan ti Christian era, wenno panawen a Kristiano

cf., confer, refer to; wagas a panangipakita iti nabaknang a panaggaraw ti maysa a balikas, kas koma ti panagbalin daytoy a pangtignay iti nadumaduma a forma, wenno panagbalinna a substantivo, wenno pangnagan; mairaman pay ditoy ti posible a sinonimo

cont., contraction, cf. abb., wenno pangababaan

der., derivative: balikas a posible a naggapu iti kaarngi a balikas, wenno ramut, wenno sanga

dim., diminutive: panangipakita iti kalidad a bassit, kas koma ti Manolito, a bassit a Manuel

dlt., dialectal, Hawaiian Ilokano: ti partikular nga aramat ti Ilokano kadagiti diasporiko a komunidad kas koma ti komunidad dagiti Ilokano iti Hawaii

dlt., Ilk. dialectal: ti variedad nga Ilokano kadagiti komunidad dagiti Ilokano iti Filipinas

ex., example: por ejemplo, kas pagarigan

exc., exception: saan a mairaman, wenno malaksid  

exp., expression: Hoy!, Psst! (Limitado kadagiti kultural a padas dagiti Ilokano; no dadduma, namarkaan dagitoy nga inj, wenno interjection, no adda posibilidadna a dakdakkel ti sakup ti nasao nga expresion, iti labes ti kultura nga Ilokano)

eup., euphemization: eufemisasion, ti panangiyebkas iti isu met laeng a balikas, ngem iti wagas a nabalbaliwan bassit, tapno taeng mapalag-an ti dagsen dayta a balikas

f., feminine: feminino, iti parentesis nga (f) kalpasan ti entrada

fig., figurative: baro a kaibatogan ti balikas, binulod man wenno indigeno, ngem kaibatogan a partikular kadagiti Ilokano; mainaig iti idex

folk., folk: maipapan iti indigeno a filosopia ken epistemologia dagiti Ilokano

fr., from, derived from: naibasar iti, nakabasar iti, wenno naggapu iti (dayta a balikas)  

idex., idiomatic expression: balikas wenno frase a ti kaibatoganna ket rumkuas iti literal a kaipapanan dayta a balikas tapno iramanna ti kultural a padas dagiti Ilokano; makikabagian iti fig, ngem ti fig ket limitado iti baro a kaibatogan ti sao, islang, wenno frase

i.e., id est, that is to say: kayatna a sawen, kas koma, iti daytoy a kontexto, iti kastoy a kontexto 

inj., interjection: arkos ti dila, arkos ti sao, kadawyan a pagsasao

int., intensified interjection: nakarkaro pay nga arkos ti dila, intensifikado a kadawyan a pagsasao

lit., literal: ti literal a kaiyulogan ti maysa a balikas, wenno frase

m.,  masculine: maskulino, iti parantesis nga (m) kalpasan ti entrada  

med., medical: mangipakita nga adda relasion daytoy iti mediko, wenno salun-at

meta., metathesis: panagbaliw ti urnos dagiti letra iti isu met laeng a balikas

nct., not certain: di sigurado

neg., negative: negativo (a kaipapanan)

neo., neologism, portmanteau: neologismo, wenno baro a balikas manipud iti napagtibnok a dua wenno ad-adu pay a balikas

nom., nominalization: nominalisasion, ti panagbalin ti maysa a balikas a kas pangnagan   

off., offensive: ofensivo: makapasakit a kaibatogan, wenno makaperdi iti sayaat ti panagdengngeg

ono., onomatopoeia, onomatopoeic: manipud iti uni ti aglawlaw, wenno uni ti nakaparsuaan a nagbalin a pangtulad a balikas   

philo., philosophy: aggapu iti filosopia

pop., popular, wenno aggapu iti kultura a popular, kas koma ti Pidgin Ilokano. Kas pagarigan: ‘da kine,’ (the kind) ‘bader,’ (bother) ‘kol-ap’ (call up)  

pos., positive: ti positivo a kaipapanan ti balikas, saan a negativo 

prl., plural: dua ken ad-adu pay

prob., probably: a possible etymology; also poss., possibly, in other entries: posible a naggapuan ti agdama a balikas    

prov., proverb: proverbio

pte., popular term: ti popular a pannakaaramat ti balikas

sing., singular: maysa, maymaysa

str., stress; syllabic stress, presented as follows: str 1, 2, 3 4: panangipakita iti wagas ti panangibalikas iti maysa a balikas, a posible nga indikasion ti panagbaliw ti kaipapananna. Kas koma:  ‘str. 1, 4’: ti panangipadagsen ket iti silaba 1 ken 4

syn., synonym: sinonimo: isu met laeng a kaipapanan

s. n., scientific name, binomial name: nagdua a nagan (iti Latin) nga indikasion ti nagan ti mula wenno ayup kas aramat ti sientifiko a komunidad  

tech., technical, technological: teknika, wenno teknologikal, aramat a balikas iti teknologia ken siensia  

translit., transliteration: transliterasion: ti pannakaisurat ti maysa a balikas iti wagas a  letra por letra manipud iti uni (iti sabali a lengguahe)   

var., variety: variedad, wenno sabali a pannakaisurat

Ilokano Language Series-1

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, PhD

The Ilokano Language Speaks the Ilokano People

First of a Series

To write two dictionaries is not a walk in park. It is a commitment of a lifetime. Once it is begun, the work is endless.

Even a native speaker like me has to contend with the difficulty of coming to terms with the ambiguous and the impossible. Indeed, the native speaker is not necessarily the best authority of his language.

There are two things I used to account the thoughts and wisdom of the Ilokano people through the twin works I lately wrote: the Contemporary English-Ilokano Dictionary (2010, 2011) and the Kontemporaneo a Diksionario nga Ilokano-Ingles (2012).

In embarking on these projects, I faced a fundamental difficulty: how to be true to the linguistic ways of the Ilokano people, and how to push those ways to account the complexities of their contemporary life.

I tried to solve these issues by following two approaches.  

The first approach is to describe how the Ilokano people exactly use their language everyday given a variety of possibilities. These people have moved from one place to another, have moved out of the Ilocos, and have interacted with other communities, cultures, and countries. This interaction has reshaped their language, even as it has reshaped their way of looking at the world that has become larger, much larger than the Ilocos they know, or used to know.

There are two movements in this act of describing the Ilokano language in the attempt to understand what is it all about: one, the fact of the matter in the field, and two, the changing, almost shifting, character of the everyday life of the Ilokano in all the times and climes where he finds himself.

The second approach is how to push that description to account a renewed vision on how the Ilokano people can fully exploit the Ilokano language in order to mediate a vision for the evolving of their own contemporary language that speaks them and speaks about them.

Part of that vision is to make sense of the Ilokano language as a universal medium for the articulation of that ever-rich and ever-changing Ilokano experience.

It is a vision that is bold and daring as it is no longer confined to the declarations and pronouncements of the Ilokano linguistic police people, but assures the speakers a recognition of the legitimacy of their speech first and foremost, a speech that is self-reflective. But it is also a speech that recognizes the fundamental requisites of education.

Education here is meant a cultivation of the mind, of the faculty of thought,  of the faculty that is discriminating and critical, of consciousness that is mindful of the continuum of the time of the Ilokano experience, the time of the human experience, the time as fused in an ever-continual way, the time as dialectical and exploratory, time asa fusion of all the tenses: past as present, present as  present, and present as future all rolled into one, marking all of the Ilokano words, marking what constitutes the contemporary Ilokano language. This means that we locate Ilocano language within the matrix of this notion of time, a location in a future that is grounded in the past-as-present.

Which leads us to the need to tease out the Ilokano language from this continuum of time and push it to the limit of that which is possible so that we can have all the time to make the Ilokano language at the service of all the Ilokano people everywhere.

There is thus the need to locate the contemporary Ilokano language within at least two times: the past-as-present, and the present-as-future.

We thus need to wean the Ilokano language away from a romanticized view of its past, from its fossilized form. I have done this in the recasting of the kur-itan, the Ilokano system of writing it shares with other indigenous cultures of the Philippines; I have removed the kur-itan from its ‘old’ syllabary form to account an alphabet which is less equivocal, and more to the point in terms of accounting the minutest of all the sound elements of a language.

In preparing the almost innumerable list of words for these dictionaries, I was guided by this respect for the past, and yet, I was also drawn into what can be done to the Ilokano language to serve as a springboard—a platform indeed—for the production of a liberating consciousness for the Ilokano people all over the world.

There are several things that must be underscored here—and these are all in keeping with the ambivalent nature of being a speaker of one’s own language, especially when in that act of speaking, the speaker has been bombarded with official acts of nonrecognition of your own speech, relegating your word—and thus, your language—to the margins, to the shadows, to the periphery.

You act like like a thief, snatching a second you can snatch to make you utter just one word of the language whose truths, music, cadence, and power you were accustomed to when younger but now have to push it to a space-time where there is safety because  there, in the hidden recesses of the private life where your language has been relegated, you have not broken the rules of an internally colonized Philippine world.

(To be continued) 

Observer, August 2012

Redemption- Chapter 11

Redemption

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

Chapter 11

The news  of your death, mother, opened up the old wounds in me.

Cory Aquino has died too, her vital organs failing her. Life failed her too, in the end. And the country is in the doldrums, as it has always been.

There will be mourning. There will be weeping in the streets.

Death is the story of the fragile lives we lead, as is our country’s.

It could have been different, not running parallel, Cory Aquino’s death and yours.

But mother, you chose to die on her death day, making your death hers too.

Or hers, yours.

And to think that you never mothered close to ninety million docile and uncomplaining people like what she did.

Your mothering was just a bunch of five women who now have come of age, unto their own, looking for ways to define their own individual lives much unlike your own of desire and passion.

And emptiness.

You have tried to fill up the vacuum of your heart.

You have tried to fill up the vacuum of your soul.

And you thought you suceeded, mother.

But you never did. I swear to God, you failed.

And in this death of yours, you will longer have the chance to succeed.

Your failure is final.  

I see your desires, wanton and yet true, crumble.  

Now you have just the spent passion of a woman who has known what love is a number of times, scarred in some, wounded in some others, and terrorized in that last one that meant only wretchedness and pain, and the promise of redemption.

The news of your death brought me deep sorrow.

It was like a knife, its pointed end thrust into the core of my heart.

For I have not known you, and now you are gone.

I remember the last time we met.

I came home from America for the first time to see you after years of being away, years of longing and yearning for you.

You have begun to lose your mind then.

The country was in chaos, and so was Cory Aquino’s reign.

Coup d’etat became a byword of the country.

The rogue soldiers, first moved by a genuine feeling of reform in the way the country was run by elites who never knew what hunger was, acted as if the country was theirs for the keeping.

Each time country people heard of coup d’etat, they would just shrug their shoulders and go on with life’s daily business of running after jeepneys to hang on to either to go home, or to go to work.

The dead president had it all coming, including her death this time.

Was she called the reluctant heroine, preferring to bead her rosary in a genuine way unlike a madonna who had all those black beads gleaming for the television cameras to capture and feed onto the screens of unsuspecting cerrado Catolico viewers?

I accosted you of faking your having lost your mind.

I accused you of faking it all, this chance to not to know anything at all so that you can escape what memory cannot accept, what fear cannot turn into courage.

The beatings you had from him must have scarred you to death. They must have made you believe you were dead.

One twilight in that wretched thatched house of yours, I remember it all, I saw him hitting you hard in the face, in the cheeks, in the head.

Do you love him? he asks you, his voice harsh and hard, the voice of a man damned, one coming from the regions of hell.

Do you love him? he repeats, and the spanking begins, first on the left cheek, then on the right.

You were just there, in one corner of that wretched thatched house, slumped like a sack devoid of its contents.

I was in the grades when I first saw those beatings that became frequent until I thought they were the most normal thing one kept woman had to go through.

For you were his concubine, now I know. And fully so.

You gave him children one after another, and you remained his paramour.

It is like our kept country, kept forever by its leaders, kept forever by its colonizers, kept forever by its neocolonizers.

You stayed with him, mother, and during the good times, there was laughter in your house, the one you kept for him, one poor house with a thatched roof that you kept for him, even as the meals in that house were no longer coming as regularly as they should.

I was the last of your daughter when you came back to my father after you ran away for the first time.

You bore your first bastard daughter before, before you came back to my father.

But so few knew of the circumstances of that birth so that at first glance, ours was the most normal of all poor homes in that village of ours.

You came back, with your bastard daugther in tow.

You ran away, remember?

You ran away when you had her, Manang Ria.

You ran away so that no one would ever come to know.

You ran away to your father in Isabela, in those newly formed towns of homesteaders who also ran away from the famine Ilocos knew.

You ran away to your father in his homestead to hide what cannot be hidden.

You brought her there, your bastard daughter whose own life would be one of turmoil and terror.

Manang Ria would shake off the stories of the barrio people about her not being the daughter of my father.

She had the looks of the daughter of another man, and whoever that man was, that man who promised you what paradise was, could have talked in his drunkenness for the idle talkers of the barrio to know.

He could have said that he had you in the banks of rivers, in the fields, at the top of those hills surrounding our place.

He could have said he would meet you while on your way to church at the break of dawn.

You were young mother, and everything was possible.

He was young too, and everything was possible.

We were living in interesting times, and those times were times of need, deep and urgent, and your love for others could have been one of those needs.

And so you came back to my father. You came back because your own father told you to come back.

He had come to my father, yours.

He had come to know the truth about your leaving my father.

He had come for his own understanding.

He had come for his version of truth about the many lies you told your own father to cover up for all the misdeeds you had done in your youth, one you never had, because even as you were about to begin to understand what it meant to be young, you had your firstborn.

And soon your own father had to send you back, your bastard daughter in tow.

It was Manang Ria.

I would hate her.

She would remind me of the wayward life you led, one without kindness and compassion for father, one about real passion without any responsibility.

How could you have done that, this act of loving without even a thought about a future however vague for all the children that would come out of your womb?

We were not your guaratees for a good future, mother.

But you made us just do that.

We were the pawns to a life of slavery in a new form.

In much the same way, ours is the story of the country too, one led for a time by Cory Aquino whose death now you share.

Now, let me go back to those beatings that I saw.

He would beat you in the twilight hours, and your voice would be loud, telling him, Puñeta!  

But your cussword had weight only in the beginning. Or so I thought.

Your man did not understand any letter of that word.

He did not understand Spanish.

You did. The Spanish cusswords, you did.

All those Spanish-acting family of yours, with the lands they grabbed in Pangasinan, they spoke those cusswords with much gusto, and you picked them up.

But your lover who came from the boondocks of Ilocos, in those far-flung places, did not know what that was, and he kept busy with his hands on your face, landing each slap on those cheeks that could only speak of vehemence.

He would slap you, pushed you agains the wall, pushed you to a corner, and there, in your unsafe littler corner of a thatched roofed house, you ended up in whimper, with your whimper.

I would watch you from there even as a president talked about a country becoming great again, even as politicians talked about roads to be paved, bridges to be built, rivers to be forged, fields to be furrowed, and dining tables becoming filled with food again.

Most of the time, the radio would be on to drown you cries and I would listen to the promise of politicians, and the promise of redemption of your cries.

But hunger stared us in the face, and the twilights reminded us of the kind of life that we would have to go through.

I saw him beat you and I promised myself I would never allow my man to even touch me if I did not want to.

The ritual would be the same in those twilights: he would beat you, and he would love you right after, his anger calming down, and you making him believe you love him so, that he was the only man you love and no one else.

His loving you would be fierce and brutal, but one heck of a love just the same.

The nights in those good times were nights of dreams, this you would tell me one time, unsure whether I would ever understand.

And now, mother, you are dead.

And Cory Aquino the president died with you.