“Butong”

NOTHING different sets apart the husband’s “suki (preferred seller)” for coconut, the family’s shack surrounded by an oasis of dark green coconuts and browning husks beside the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay Road.

Ever since a Laguna pioneer returned home from working as a helper in the U.S. and used the plentiful coconut as substitute in making the local version of apple pie, “buko (young coconut in Filipino)” pie is a favorite “pasalubong (present)” in these parts. 

Due to its white sugar and condensed milk, though, buko pie can only be an occasional treat, not daily fare. Paring down to the basic and essential, the husband bought buko from this couple in their 30’s and was pleased to find that a coconut sold for P20 yielded about two liters of “water” and “meat,” a leap in savings from the P100 bottle of coco juice only sold in supermarkets. 

In Cebu, coconut fetches P40 to P50 a piece, especially during holidays when buko strips are popular for fruit salads. 

Beneficial for many ailments from diabetes to kidney stones, coconut is ideal as a snack or even a meal. The Cebuano “sagbay-luwag” that slips from the still pinkish coco shell to throat and gut has a less literary, ruder translation in Filipino: “malauhog” or mucus-like. I cannot think of anything else that looks and feels slimy but tastes so good. 

According to Binisaya.com, sagbay-luwag is the stage between “dalinog” and “butong”. Dalinog refers to a white and creamy substance surrounding a coconut sprout. As a child, I was often given “buwa,” a spherical, spongelike bulb found in germinating coconuts. Despite its strange appearance and texture, buwa is juicy and delicately sweet.

Cebuano is rich in capturing the diversity of desirable young coconut meat: “balatungol (tender),” “kuyamis (soft),” and “lamog (meaty)”. Between the Bisdak husband and the Silang-born suki, there is no loss in translation because the wife (her husband is often away on buying trips, as well as takes on tree-felling and -cutting) performs the time-tested technique of “reading” coconuts: knocks the coconut and listens to the echo to determine if the meat is young or mature.

A coconut between butong and “lahing (mature)” is called “bagatungol” or “ungol,” the latter term also meaning “grumble”. Shaken, the lahing rumbles. Harder and thicker, mature coconut meat is more filling, a bit akin to the consolation of accepting our easily peeved older selves.

When the suki recently sold a load of coconuts to a buko pie maker, she gave the husband and other buyers free water since the entrepreneur only needed the meat. Sweeter than butong is the kindness of strangers, unforeseen and thus, more exquisite.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 31, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Not a ghost story

UNLIKE the rest of the country, Cebu City will keep cemeteries open to fully vaccinated individuals during the “Kalag-kalag” days of Nov. 1 and 2. 

Defying the national government may make waves in the political realm. For souls, the closure of cemeteries is not an issue. There is no quarantining the dead.

Clay covers of secondary burial jars from pre-Hispanic times feature two human figures in a boat, the rear figure rowing. A museum curator told me that the ancient Filipinos believed that after death liberates the soul from its corporeal casing, the immortal continues to the destination it has been journeying in its lifetimes.

Raised as a Catholic, I believe Jesus will return and judge the living and the dead. Meanwhile, the dead are not in crypts and columbaria but among the living. 

A few nights ago, a flickering bulb brought back a nearly forgotten memory. It was near midnight when I cleared my work and switched off the lights at home, one by one. 

Downstairs, the flickering light bouncing from the toilet broke the dark into intermittent shards that hurt the eyes. Even more strangely, the set of bulbs that automatically shut down in power fluctuations all worked except for the one in the toilet. 

The shadows cast by that flickering bulb reminded me of a weekend when my cousins and I were playing “tago-tago (hide and seek)” in my grandparents’ home. Not eager to be found first and take the place of the “It” who had to find all the players, I ran inside Lola’s small dark storeroom, which we were forbidden to enter and thus, seemed to be the perfect hiding place.

Crouching in the dark, I waited for my cousin to shout that he had flushed out his brothers. Before this happened, though, a shadow was silhouetted against the door’s vents: Lola. Caught in the forbidden, I bolted out of the storeroom, got more than an earful from her, and, of course, became the next “It”.

The morning after, the bulb worked perfectly, as if it had never flickered in an icy toilet where the jets of the shower were only a degree less cold than the chill that certainly did not come from the small window closed for the night. The husband confirmed that the bulb worked when he had his shower earlier in the evening.

Power fluctuates, he said.

I stared for a time at the bulb in the morning light that mocks and dispels all fancies. I learned later that Mama, 82, made a turnaround and consented to a hospital procedure that she was earlier set against. My mother is Lola’s eldest and the most contrarian of her children.

In the journey of the living, the souls of our dead stay at the helm. The immortal steer and row, steer and row.

Wikipedia image of the lid of the Manunggul Jar at the Philippine National Museum of Anthropology

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

 * First published in the October 24, 2021 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Memorabilis

THE DAY Kitkat’s last litter of kittens found their climbing legs meant a catastrophe of sorts for my books. She moved her four kittens to a corner near a bookshelf, where they broke their 24-hour napping and nursing to explore the vastness of our half-a-duplex unit.

One of the books dislodged by feline curiosity was a slim volume that slotted perfectly between the shelf and a sack of rice where it opened like an accordion of newsprint pages, which Mo, Mongha, Heart, and Q decided was a good repository for piss and poo.

So when I had to check again Julian Go’s “American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism,” I found the fallen volume reeking unmistakably of kittens but fortunately spared their claws.

Cleaning off the worst of the kittens’ memorabilia, I wondered if Q and company had used their toilet break to browse through Go and left their tokens as proof of their opinions on: a) the U.S. colonizers, b) Filipino politicians at the cusp of their tutelage in the oldest profession of selling their nation for lucre and power, or c) the historian’s take on a contested past.

History is anything but objective and dead. I only have to scroll Facebook for five minutes to be bombarded by the War of Colors blooming among advocates for politicians making their bids for 2022.  

Underneath what is dangerously veering to become a pissing contest of hues and tints are attempts at conversations on how the past relates to the present and the nebulous future everyone, no matter their color preference, has in their sights.

I went back to Walter Benjamin (fortunately, filed digitally), a thinker whose reflections before World War II have bearing on what seems to be trending, from Facebook to Twitter: “what really happened in the past”.

For Benjamin, the view of the ideal to be achieved in the future reduces the present to an “anteroom” where “one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity”. Yet, one can also view “historical time” as “constituted… via the existential modes of memory, expectation and action”. 

Agreeing with him that the present is an “interruption of history” or an “arrest of happening,” I see it as a grievous mistake to focus on current disagreements and throw away communication and relationships. 

After the winners and losers are tallied in 2022, are we restarting life with people sharing our beliefs and biases? Unless culling takes place, the current motley company, human and feline, continues. The present is more than kindling for the future, beneath the piss and poo.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 17, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Passage

THE FIRST time I stood outside the Lepanto chapel dedicated to the Birhen sa Sto. Rosario, the farming community of this upland barangay in Alegria, on the southwestern portion of Cebu, was preparing for fiesta.

In the 1980s, I worked with communities to pilot a community wall news. It was my first job after college. A colleague handling community theater had the young and old flocking to the skits held by passionate amateurs at weekly “tabo (market gathering),” as if gods descended from the top-rating AM radio drama dominating the airwaves.

In contrast, it seemed that my main job was to explain till I was blue in my face the strange idea of a news wall that featured photographs of local farmers and was moved around the sitios. Finally, local leaders of Lepanto expressed interest to start a “hatud-balita (deliver the news)”.

At that time, Lepanto was connected by a road that was treacherous in rain or in drought, with gullies of loose rocks that made travel on horseback safer than any other means. The local horses despised me so I chose to walk and cover the sitios.

Information about the latest in forage systems and integrated pest management does not travel faster than word-of-mouth about a local worker and a certain young woman “from the city” seen walking around even before roosters have flicked the dawn dew from their cockscomb. 

When the two are again seen doing the same thing—“walking!”—before the doves roost in the gloaming, it is no longer information that is transmitted but a drama serial. I don’t know when the “hatud-balita” became “hatud-Mayette” because no one told me, certainly not the local counterpart I was training to hand over devcom duties.

I had my re-education about information in the interstices of community life: judging a beauty contest, washing clothes with other women, never refusing a dance in the fiesta, never saying no to an offered glass, even if the liquid smells like vinegar, tastes like orange, and uncoils like a snake.

No one is needed to deliver news. Information will grow legs and do the walking where there are ears.

Recently, I found myself again outside the Lepanto chapel being prepared for the October feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Boys ran around. I was happy until I noticed they were firing toy guns with the ease of TV police hero, Cardo Dalisay.

According to communications experts, the elections in 2022 will be waged and won online. I followed the boys in their pretend games of slaughter before joining my son and husband, who the gossips and bet takers foretold I would marry because we were seen, from dawn till dusk, walking.

In many places, digital still knows nothing to the murmurs from the ground.

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the SunStar Cebu’s October 10, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”  

Angels and demons

WHY cannot the Filipinos forgive and forget what the Marcoses did? It is the Christian way to forgive the sinner and condemn the sin. Ferdinand Marcos did some good for the nation, too. And he is long dead.

My tita expressed these views online and in public. She gives me pause because she is not a troll, a web ‘bot, or a social media influencer. 

When she wrote, “Am a Marcos loyalist,” Tita made me think of the Angel of History, the “Angelus Novus” in the Paul Klee painting first owned by Walter Benjamin.

I believe that Ferdinand E. Marcos (FM) is the author of the darkest and bloodiest chapters in the history of our “democracy”. My tita thinks that FM is the best president this country had. 

I was born in 1965, the year FM moved into the Palace. Bongbong Marcos (BBM) aspires to become the 17th president of the country and follow the footsteps of his father, the country’s 10th president. 

If the son succeeds, there is the number 7 that conjoins son to father in the history that will be rewritten again by the Marcoses. In numerology, seven means perfection. 

According to 6.7 million sites (rounded off, the figure is 7) turned up by Google to my search in 0.53 seconds (just 0.17 away from the number 7!), people with 7 in their “angel chart” have an angel sitting on their left shoulder, whispering answers, and making their life profound and meaningful.

The Angel of Numerology is not Klee’s emissary. Looking not so much disheveled as battered by the storm called “progress,” the angel is stupefied by the past but remorselessly drawn to his appointment with history, as the philosopher Benjamin theorized in the essay, “On the Concept of History”.

Nazism, with its mad dream of the Master Race and the campaign of genocide that erased six million Jews who fell short of Aryan perfection, affected the work of Klee and Benjamin, as well as claimed the life of the latter. 

As Benjamin wrote, “A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm… propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”.

Despite Klee’s apocalyptic depiction and Benjamin’s depression and seeming surrender to racism and authoritarianism, the Angelus Novus (New Angel) emboldens the viewer to sustain the struggle resisting inhumanity and contesting the abuses of power.

Weary but not defeated, citizens must sift through the rubble of lies “piling wreckage upon wreckage” in BBM’s recasting of our future in his father-and-son narrative. 

The father may be buried but he is not dead. In 2022, the dead should stay dead.

Source of image of the “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee: sfu.ca

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 3, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”