Foot and Fire

I was happy that I was able to spend time with the Panay Bukidnon in 2015. One of the good things I miss there is the Saturday school of children being taught chanting. Panay Bukidnon is known for their oral tradition and the Sugidanon or epic, among others. See of my blog posts on the Epic that was published by UP Press.  Funded by NCCA as I learned later, Teacher Romulo “Amang Baoy” Caballero taught the children chanting and it was fun listening to them. Aside from the chnating of the epic, I heard them sang a folk song on domestic life that's both funny and tragic. I wished I can go back and enjoyed more.

  It has been in my mind for quite some time now the fact that one day, I will be telling my readers about my travels through the necklaces and braceles I bought along the way. Here, I quickly run down some favorites. I divide the story into two, Philippines and outside the Philippines. This is the first of the two-part story.  In 2015, I had a chance to observe four ordinary days of the Panay Bukidnon of Calinog, Iloilo. It was an immersion of sort. Nothing is extraordinary at face value unless one looks closely with one's heart. The community struggles to survive amidst the challenges of modernization. But I am happy that the tribe still try hard to preserve the culture like the Panubok or embroidery and it is still hand-made as opposed to all things made by machines and the easy entries of ukay-ukay. I bought a set of sash, bracelet, choker and arm band which at that time I am thinking of wearing as accent to my office clothes. And I am happy I did. Found a remar...

At the house. One day, Bulawanon engaged the help of Tikum Kadlum, a hunting dog with the gift of sensing the spirits, in cooking rice for his husband Paiburong and his brother Dumaraog who will be going hunting. When the rice was cooked, the brothers ate fast. Then, while Bulawanon packed the betel nut for her husband, Paiburong and Dumaraog dressed themselves, with Dumaraog suggesting they match their sashes and belts, since he is his brother's loyal protector. To complete their hunting preparations, the two brought out their long-bladed sharp knives, shields, spears, and lances from their gold chest and wall hanger. When everything is set, Paiburong bade goodbye to his wife, Bulawanon, who reminded her husband to be careful as he might meet in the forest one named Makabagting, who is accompanied by a man-eating woman called Muwa. Makabagting is a nobleman and a warrior who is widely known as having tasted human flesh. Paiburong went out of his house, and he heard a sound. It...

Tikum Kadlum is the first epic out of ten epics of Panay as told by the Panay Bukidnon of Calinog, Iloilo. This is my first read. There are ten (10) books all in all which are all interrelated. I believe each epic can be told independently of the others but the whole story can be appreciated if read according to the sequence of the series. Like when I finished Tikum Kadlum, another character Amburukay is introduced and thus, the book two is titled in her name. The book is presented as a transcription of the chants as told/sang by GAMABA Federico Caballero and his sister Teresita Caballero-Castor in archaic Kinaray-a. In a table form, the archaic kinaray-a is then translated to contemporary kinaray-a, then Filipino, then English. The single best accomplishment of this book is that it is a published documentation of the chant in archaic language. I am not sure if it can hold the interest of those who reads in Filipino or English because as for me, I appreciated the reading...

Belarussian journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich's body of work consists of nonfiction but she specifically got this year's Nobel Prize for her book, Voices from Chernobyl. Originally written in Russian which follows her country's oral tradition, the book gave voices to the victims of the largest technical disaster of the twentieth century. I was able to read a short but already riveting portion of the book in Paris Review, and I quote here the portion which I believe can represent the pain of 2.1 million people: I was twenty-three. Two months later I went back to Moscow. From the train station straight to the cemetery. To him! And at the cemetery I started going into labor. Just as I started talking to him—they called the ambulance. It was two weeks before I was due. They showed her to me—a girl. “Natashenka,” I called out. “Your father named you Natashenka.” She looked healthy. Arms, legs. But she had cirrhosis of the liver. Her liver had twenty-eight ...

Submersion of Panay Bukidnons: A Call for Salvage Aside from the imminent fact that the Jalaur River Dam shall submerge portions of their ancestral domain, the Panay Bukidnon's cultural heritage also faces submersion Sunburn, scratches from blades of grasses, and scars from insect bites are among the souvenirs I and a friend got from our three-day immersion with the Panay Bukidnons of Brgy. Garangan, Calinog, Iloilo. We slept and lived with them in order to hear stories about stars and gather recipes of their traditional cooking but we ended up hearing more pressing matters, about the dam project and the struggle to keep the heritage vis-a-vis the daily needs for survival. On our second morning, we traversed the mountainside planted among others with coffee and cacao trees owned by our host family, with the end of reaching Jalaur River where a megadam project is to be implemented. Along the way, we traversed at least ten live streams including Karangayan and Bukay Ng...