Chacharatsa Para iti Ili

“Putang ina! ... Patayin ang Gloria-forever Cha-cha na ito!" Senador Mar Roxas, iti rali iti Makati, Disiembre 12, 2008, Inquirer, Dec. 13, 2008

Kastoy ti agsala iti cha-cha, kabsat:

Iwidawid dagiti ima a paragammat

Santo isabukel dagiti rapas a dakulap

Iti nauneg a kaban dagiti pada nga arrap.

Idinto nga ar-aramiden amin dagitoy,

Ummongen aso a karuprupat' baboy

Bilinem dagitoy kas uken ti ili

Ikkan iti taldeng kas saluad supadi.

Titit para kadagiti senador a gamrud

Sutsot kadagiti diputado nga ulbod

Dorobo kadagiti amin a buyot 

Siiigam man wenno sitatakrot.

Agkalawikiw uk-uken, sungoda iti dapan,

Lak-amen buyok ti amo a di mangiramraman.

Daytoy a buyok ti bangbanglo ti aribai

A darukadok, nga iti rali di makangirsi.

Kasla mira ngamin ken insenso ti padi

Ti angot iti asawa a pimpiman kaarngi 

Batido kadagiti amin a linalangsot

Dagiti teddek ti pagilian a baningrot

Naktisal-it a talaga ti kakastoy, 

No ti aribai ket isuna ipabus-oy:

'Nian ta namnama koma ti sangapagilian

Ngem ta dadaulo met dagiti garamugam.

Ugaw iti isakmol kas iti derrep nga itantan

Ta namak pay nga ibalin ti rikna nga awan

A ti pannangan mamitlo ket pananglangan

A ti pannakapnek ket panagbubussog lattan 

Kasano koma a mamati dagiti umili

Iti panggep no kinnusit ti aramid ti aribai

No dagiti tuta ket ukenda a pasalsali

Arrabis ti nasken wenno latigo ti pagi.

Baliwan amin a paglintegan a kas rumbeng

Ngem saan nga iramraman bukod a gagem

Bay-an a ti kaaduan ti manghusgat' aramiden

Ta pagimbagan nakurapay ti pudno ken nasken.  

Dis 12/08

Hon, HI

 

Ilokanos in the Americas Writing, Part 1

(Note: This work is part and parcel of the continuing discussion on the need to reframe Ilokano Studies in light of challenges to the preservation of intangible heritage. This prologue--and abstract--has been submitted, refereed, and accepted for presentation at the Sharing Cultures 2009: International Conference on Intangible Heritage to be held in Azores, Portugal, May 30-June 1, 2009. This part 1 commences the series on this topic.) 

A Solver Agcaoili, U of Hawai'i

The paper explores the poetic and political negotiation and contestation continually being done by Ilokanos in the Americas in the writing of their tangible heritage and culture, particularly in their poetic practices in and from Ilokano, their mother tongue. 

The recognition of heritage language use as site for this poetic and political act and performance in exile provides a critical framework in the examination of such practices especially in the light of emergent heritage aesthetics vis-à-vis dominant cultural practices from the center.

Ilokano, the language of the Filipino diaspora, in the Americas as in the many parts of the world where more than ten percent of the Philippine population have gone on exile as temporary overseas workers or residents—or even as naturalized citizens, as in the case of the many of those who are in the United States and in Canada—has been historically threatened by two forms of colonization, one, external (the ‘Englishization’ of Philippine knowledge systems) and another, internal (the ‘Tagalogization/Filipinization’ of aesthetic and cultural practices). 

Despite all these systemic forms of cultural domination from the center, both in the homeland and in the diaspora, a cultural domination that has led to the possible extinction of a heritage of almost 20 million Ilokanos and Ilokano-descended people all over the world, the Ilokanos in the Americas—in the entire United States and Canada—have continued to produce critically conscious and exemplary literary works that are, at the same time, works bearing inchoate discursive practices of heritage and culture affirmation.

Poems by Ilokano immigrants in the Americas writing in and from Ilokano provide the material for the exploration of this critical ‘poetics of diversity, displacement, and diaspora’—a form of poetics that demonstrates the kind of commitment and affirmation performed by Ilokano poets in their continued writing—in and from Ilokano—of their immigrant and exilic experiences.

The paper demonstrates that the physical and psychic distance afforded by exile does not necessarily lead to the impoverishment of intangible heritage and culture and the annihilation of a linguistically-grounded imagination but may provide the hermeneutic ‘double remove’ to see the connection between the intangible heritage in the original place, and that same intangible heritage, however polluted, in the new place. 

The analysis of the writing of an intangible heritage in and from the mother language as poetically performed in and from exile is framed by three themes that are relevant in the discursive practices of immigrant life, especially as these practices bear upon issues of poetic and political imagination: diversity, diaspora, and displacement. 

The intersection of these themes in the exilic poetic works of Ilokanos in the Americas reveals to us the virtues and vast possibilities of cultural pluralism and the opportunities for sharing cultures, thereby leading to an informed understanding that heritage and cultures are not liabilities but social assets and resources. 

 

Siak, iti Pagilian Dagiti Maskara

Mask Exotica. A street dancer adjusts his intricate mask shortly before the opening ceremony of the 29^th Masskara Festival, which has earned for Bacolod the title “City of Smiles.” R. Zamora, Inquirer, Oct. 2, 2008

Dagullitentayo dagiti pasamak

Kas iti sariugma: am-ampog a di mamingga

Ti kastoy a pannakilantip iti ayab

Ti kalsada kas iti tinawen nga agbuybuya

Mangtingiting no kasano nga ikinni ti bagi a mabisin

Ti tulang nga uray la agkutukot iti ut-ot

Ta adda ngudo ti imuko iti bain a mangkolor iti rupa

Ken iti lusiaw a kudil, maris ni ay-ay.

Dakami a mamirmiraut ti agpabuya.

Ipakitami ti pammarpardaya dagiti panawen

Ken ti rikur kadagiti amin nga estoria

A saan a dakami ti bannuar wenno arkanghel.

 

Aramiden ti umuna wagas

Ti panangipakni kadagiti amin a pagkurangan

 A babak iti man kada danapeg dagiti mautoyan

A saka wenno kadagiti luppo nga agpiskel

Ti bukot a mauma nga agkumpas iti dugudugdog

Dugudugdog ti gimbal nga idi un-unana ket patigmaan

Dagiti agpapauyo a gasat. Kasta met ditoy

Bacolod dagiti amin a panagidiayami

Kadagiti lukong ti palad tapno kadagiti urit 

Ti agur-uray nga ima

Ket mabirokanmi dagiti mansanas, kastanias, ken ubas

Kas iti isem iti laksid ti limdo ken ling-et

Amin dagitoy a tagilako itatta iti kakastoy

A panagsisinnarak dagiti agragut a makalipat

A kas kaniak, iti daytoy nga agmatuon 

Dagiti aglabonlabon nga arapaap ti punsion

Dagiti innapuy nga agrigrigat.

 

Siak, tarimaanaek bassit ti akkub dagiti dagensen:

Dagiti maris ti saning-i ket iti nalabaga a nayurit

Manipud iti tengnged agingga iti puso.

Ti asul ket ti immakulada a kararag

Tapno iti sakaanan ti naganak a Virgen

Ket ti misterio dagiti amin a padas

Kas iti panagpanaas ti rusok, amin a maris

Nga ikutan ti pangilinged iti rupa

Tapno kadagiti kolor ket ti parabur iti sangapada

Maibando kas kadagiti aldaw,

Maidagup kadagiti mabugiaw a malmalanga.

 Iplastarko ti apput ti ngiwat tapno diak

Makasao, diak maipalnaad ti pudno

Kadagiti kalsada nga addaan iti bibig

Ken lapayag ken mata. Awan patinggana ti kastoy

A pabuya ti kinamalas. Sandi ti rigat

Dagitoy a pananingiyentablado iti pia

Kas iti karadkad. Itay, sakbay ti yuulog

Iti aglaladut nga agdan, pinatiray-okak

Ti pinggan: impusiposko nga impauddog

Ayatko la a masukal ti agkabannuag a bisin

Kadagiti kalkulado nga askaw. 

Namak pay a makusbo datao,

Matalimudaw bayat ti panagpandanggo

Iti kainaran dagiti agbuybuya a mata

A kas met iti di mamakawan nga aldaw.

 

Isu a palugodandak nga ipuestok manen daytoy

A sallukob dagiti amin a pangta ti panawen

Kas iti pannakipagili: agkumpasak iti dugudog

Dugudugdog ti mapatit a tambor iti pammati a mabugiaw

Dagiti di met mapadso a kabusor:

Kadagiti dulang a malmalday kas kadagiti bulsa

Iti daytoy mayentablado a pabuya. 

 

Hon, HI

Oct 2/08

BUT THOSE WERE THE BEST OF OUR DAYS

(for Ka Loren and Brainteaser, whoever you are...)

     I never realized that some statements I wrote with the frenzy of fingers in a mad rush  to write a comment on the nostalgic piece of a former student on his remembered life in the walled world of the seminary would make sense for another blogger who responded with sensitivity to the comments that took on a life of their own away from—and autonomous of—yours truly the writer.  

     But the statements work their magic, some would say, and one Brainteaser, a blogger, says s/he likes the twists and the turns of the phrases that came from those fingers when one hour between breaks of lectures on the filmic possibilities of a people's revolution, I sat on my computer and catatonically wrote what came to mind, the small truth of the moment more important than anything else. And for a small-time, small-town writer on the lookout for the first affirmation early in the morning when blog opening is akin to early prayers for the early hours of the morning--those matins of birds that talk of dawns breaking in the summer sunshine--such a comment was a salve. It still is--and the kinship in language is forever sealed with all the Brainteasers of the world.     

     These days, the blogging world—the world we call virtual, cyber, and some other techie terms—opens up a world for us to explore and see and experience, a world of expansiveness, with the consciousness going way beyond the comfortable and convenient boundaries we have always known, much not unlike the comfortable and convenient logic we have always used to argue for the case of our comfortable and convenient existence that is as middle class as the Pharisees and the Sadducees of the Old and the New Testament combined, what with their luxury of abstraction about the coming of either the Son of God, or a prophet, or a mere messenger of the Good News.

     Or this new world—brave and brutal as it is—is not new at all, as we have always known that there are other worlds out there whose horizons we have yet to grasp and grapple.

     In the faraway lands that have claimed our everyday lives, this virtual world could signal emptiness. Or vacuity of the soul no one can ever understand as we keep trying to pursue some ways to fill up that world only to end up with some other vacuities that are both familiar and strange.

     The thing is: we create and recreate each day out of the nothingness of our empty lives—empty because we are everywhere and we are nowhere, and as such, our roots reside, tentatively and constantly, in that territory where there is that recognizable and palpable restlessness of our soul. This is, indeed, the cyberspace world, and memory takes up our cause, that memory that remembers or makes us remember the many things that we have left behind like the scent of  burned human skin and flesh one morning when salvaging—or summary execution in the early days of EDSA People Power when then President Corazon Aquino had all the power of the pulpit and the freedom constitution to reform the cancerous society we incidentally call the Philippines.

     Her daughter, then in her grade school twinkle-twinkle hairdo, came to cut the ceremonial ribbon that would pave the way for awakened seminarians to come and say, Here, here I am, Lord, I come to do your will, and before the altar would frustrate themselves and offer everything they have got including their nothingness and being ala Jean Paul Sartre. The seminary ritual is one of self-oblation as is the ritual of the cyberworld. It is a box of chocolates, Forrest Gump says so, and indeed, it really is, what with priests and their allies always on the lookout for the dregs so these priests could have a reason to exist and for those dirty and drunken dragons lurking in seminary closets so they could have a reason to redeem. Here—in the cyberworld and in the seminary--you get to meet anonymity including yourself.

     But it is one anonymity that sometimes hits you so darn hard you want to cry a river—or an ocean—depending on the severity of that sorrow that visits you while you state blankly on a screen that is so blank with emptiness and yet seducing you to keep going with the pointless attempt to clone your mind so that those who are like you might discover some of the sparks of being kindred in that sorrow all sorrowing people ought to know.

     And so, here is my comment to that blog entry of a former student who has remained faithful to the cause of social justice, to the struggle to make our life in the islands of the Philippines better: “But those were the best of our days, I suppose, when the beautiful were in the contradictions we saw, in the conflicted lives we lived, in the poems of radicalism we wrote, and when salvaging was common in the hills of that seminary (where the priests-to-be studied their Coppleston and Glen and Summa Theologica and metaphysics and the dread of living. But there is hope in Marcel as in the Marx you know before the Marxists would mangle him, including those from the Philippines who called themselves communists). The guns fired against the helpless would signal the crack of dawn, and would crack the dark silence of the hills.”

     That inaugurated a response that made me realize how words could be so charmingly powerful as to invite action and reflection from others.

     I thank Florentino Lorenzana and the fans of his blog—hanseman.wordpress.com—for this miraculous opportunity to take part in the making and remaking of the cyberworld.

 

Honolulu, HI/ September 26, 2008