"Sa bangkito"

LIKE the “kabo (dipper),” the “bangkito (stool)” is a ubiquitous prop for the Pinoy’s art of making do.

It is cobbled from “retazo” wood, leftover pieces from a bigger construction project. In a country more intimate with dearth than surfeit, we learn to not just not throw away but also to put everything to use.  

Pail and dipper are necessities where faucets drip water by appointment and spew air the rest of the time. In the countryside, where meals are communal affairs, the “bangko (bench),” with its long plank of wood balanced on legs at each end, enables folks to squeeze in for meals by batches. 

The “bangkito (foot stool)” is an adaptation, a diminution of the bangko in size but not in resourcefulness. Before coronavirus disease (Covid-19) demanded physical distancing, public utility jeepneys squeezed in commuters on the bangkitos conductors pulled out from under the seats and positioned on the aisles.

Bangkitos also seat the vendors and patrons of “pungko-pungko (sidewalk-squatting meals sold by the plastic bags)” and other street hawkers of candies, cigarettes, lighters, newspapers, magazines, SIM cards, and face shields.

Papang taught my sister and I how to shine our school shoes like the boys in Colon, straddling a bangkito he painted in bubblegum pink (left over from another job). Is it because our center of gravity is close to the ground that the bangkito is a seat of repose? 

On a visit to Paete, I did not notice the bangkito in the corner of a large showroom of monumental, lushly detailed wood carvings. When the husband asked my opinion, I had to look twice at the reclining figure, so absolute in its stillness.

Barely two feet, the sleeping boy emerges from a stump of wood.  His shirt bares the uncircumcised penis, plump cheeks, and round legs ending in dingy soles.

Pillowed on his right arm, his head radiates ripples of wood. The unknown carver indulged the deep sleeper with a sea for a pillow. Only the splayed legs supporting each end of the stump reminds the viewer of a humble crib, a bangkito.

Every January, when the “novenario” begins for the Sto. Niño, the sleeping boy is not at the center or anywhere near the family altar.  This time, a spray bottle of surface cleanser keeps it company, a reminder of the universal, perpetual fight against the virus.

On the bangkito, the young-old face, slightly bruised around the eyelids, sleeps on.   When construction workers take a nap, they cover their faces with a shirt to keep out the sun or the gazes that catch them with their guards down. 

The boy bares his face, as an animal lies in its lair with exposed belly, the world with its appetites held in abeyance sa bangkito.

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

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

Picking guavas

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 27, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Renewals

AT 81, my mother is still a stereotype-buster. I was shaken awake at dawn by Mama making a video call via the tablet given by her siblings on her birthday.

Despite this being the first time in eight decades that she is dipping her toes in digital media, she is more omniscient than ever, empowered by Netflix and Messenger.

Did you quarrel your husband? she asks in greeting.

I check my husband—unharmed and sleeping—and tell Ma she should ease on the action movies before bedtime. She tells me she has not slept since she discovered Netflix.

She demands to know why she cannot see us on the screen. Is my husband really okay?

Except for projecting some murderous harpy’s designs onto me, Ma exploring the world wide web reminds me of the power of renewals and our rites to preserve them.

Last year, counting down to her 80th, I roped in my sister to the superstition of not mentioning she was 79 and rounding off her actual age to end with the good-luck figure of “0”. My nieces thought they were flying in from Sydney for Lola’s 81st birthday last year.

So this year, after my sister explained the mechanics of our “dagdag-bawas (add-minus)” scheme with Ma’s age, my older niece had only one conclusion: “fake news”.

“Pwera buyag”. According to the Sugbuanon advocate Lilia Tio, folks say this to protect the subject from a reversed blessing. When my sister posted that Ma looked girlishly happy holding her tablet in my aunt’s Facebook post, I muttered “pwera buyag” to ward off illness or any misfortune brought about by a passing “diwata (fairy)” overhearing the praise and getting envious of a mortal’s blessing.

I am too lazy to explain on Messenger to my logical nieces that what seems like “fake news” from the old country has a place in the age of Covid-19. When my younger niece started menstruation, her Ma tried to convince her to wipe that first blood on her face to prevent future pimples.

Predictably, this dermatologic heresy shocked my nieces, whom I love despite their rigid rationality, “pwera gaba”. According to Ms. Lilia, this is the reversal of “pwera buyag,” deflecting any punishment from a person who has uttered an unkind thought.

Yaya, who raised my sister and I as if we are her own, sprinkles her talk with these expressions. She also killed a chicken and wiped its blood on my sister’s forehead on her eighth birthday, “pwera buyag,” as well as carried out that first blood anti-pimple incantation on her (only after chasing and catching my sister, who squawked as if possessed by the chicken spirit).

Yaya never did that for me, I accused my sister. Yang loves you, too, she said. You were just hard to find among your books and drawings, “pwera gaba”.


Turning chicken? (Source of image: Shutterstock.com)



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 12, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Heart murmurs

RECENTLY I found myself humming again. I was pulling weeds in the garden. The puppies were tussling nearby after exhaustively planting their muddy paws on my pajamas and shirt, an early morning ritual they enjoy and I have come to accept.

The moment I noticed I was humming, I stopped. I was in time to see all eight ears pricked up, the K-pups as startled by the cessation of the humming as I was by its discovery.

According to ethnomusicologist Joseph Jordania, animals developed the evolutionary reflex to make frequent contact calls to each other, partly to locate separated members and partly to reassure that the herd was safe from predators.

Among humans, humming serves the same evolutionary purpose, theorized Jordania. Humming wells up from a deep sense of well-being. A humming person is content, if not happy. Humming reassures the listener (except if one is a spectator of a movie, waiting while a psychopath, humming, contemplates the victim).

I wonder what Jordania would say to my realization that humming happens below the radar of self-consciousness. I stopped when I caught myself humming. Does one ever hum on purpose?

In Cebuano, “hagonghong” is as related to whistling as talking to oneself is to delivering a speech. The melody I was humming is taken from Emil Losenada’s “Inday”: “Inday pinangga ko man unta ikaw/ Ngano bang gisakit mo intawon ako/… Pagkabangis gayud sa akong palad/ Kanunay lang intawon ako nga gipaantus mo…”.

That the singer’s agony and the beloved’s heartlessness percolate and bubble in my innermost well-being and escape as a hummed ditty on a bedewed morning is not so strange. This song is part of the collection “Visayan Greatest Hits Volume One,” which I first heard on and downloaded from Spotify.

All classic Sugbuanon love songs are steeped in regret. The pathos translates best when it is sung in inebriated company, for as long as someone can strum a guitar and there is a baritone that can recreate the fantasy that love to be ideal must be unrequited. Anything else is domesticity and banality.

In my late father’s household, his radio was fixed after Sunday dinner until midnight to an AM station that played dolorous Sugbuanon songs dedicated to unabiding affections and treasonous memories.

Rushing inevitably to finish school assignments due the following morning at 7:30 a.m., I was captive to this vocal self-flagellation. I felt deeply the singers’ wretchedness but vowed never to get entrapped in the similar torture of desiring the unattainable or chaining myself to the cruel and fickle.

Blood calls to blood. The Sugbuanon penchant for pain and regret? Listen to my hagonghong.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 01973226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 31, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Moving

TO READ is to be moved.

Yet, surveying the books remaining at home that have survived purges and “Hunger Games” (as a former student called those occasions when I gave away books to classes), two categories emerge, going by appearance: obelisks and sponge cakes.

Like cakes whipped from eggs and butter, these novels, comics, and illustrated books are soft all over, from cover to spine and page edges, obviously not just read but much reread. Sponge cakes open by habit to pages marked by pen and striking fancy, frowzy and matey from familiarity.

The obelisks are studies in dignity at first dusting, with nary a crease or dent. On second glance, I feel the pathos of holding a book I have barely read or even opened.

Read for instruction and rarely for pleasure, obelisks are untouched by obsession. I travel or ruminate in the toilet with sponge cakes; I require a table and a good light to open an obelisk’s pages and make notes. I take a sponge cake to bed; an obelisk puts me to sleep.

Physically moving books to outwit termites with a gusto for paper, I assembled the obelisks on a table, where they eyed me reproachfully like overaged babies still trapped in too tight christening suits.

Many of the obelisks are Filipiniana, a number on Cebuano studies. Nearly two decades ago, after editing an article written by Dr. Resil B. Mojares for the “Cebu Journalism and Journalists,” a magazine published during the Cebu Press Freedom Week, I left the newsroom and crossed over to the Cebuano Studies Center, then located at the P. del Rosario St. campus of the University of San Carlos.

I found his book, “Cebuano Literature,” continued reading his treatise on the symbiosis of Cebuano literature and journalism, and bought a copy of my own. Mojares was honored as a National Artist in 2018. His “pioneering work” surveying Cebuano writers and their milieu is now out of print, according to Dr. Hope Sabanpan-Yu, current Center director.

“There is an urgent need for enlarging the present critical awareness of vernacular literature in the Philippines,” writes Mojares. “… the Filipino, by virtue of an education weighted in favor of the assimilation of western culture, has found himself alienated from his native literature.”

Bought in 2002, my copy opened to a yellowed brochure of the San Carlos Publications; an official receipt for P65, the cost of a paperback copy in 2002; and a postcard of a central Kuala Lumpur bookshop discovered by S., guided by her inimitable nose for reading.

A deep lateral crease mars the face of the Father of Cebuano Letters, Vicente Sotto, on the cover of my copy. Even in 2002, despite my unknowing, reading about the Cebuano already moved me.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in the June 16, 2019 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Kitchen rules

SLOW conversations go with slow food.

We had Igorot friends visit for the weekend. For our last dinner, they prepared pinakbet and adobo, the Ilocano way.

It took a time to look for boneless bagoong from Pangasinan. And then more time was needed to slice the vegetables. The size of the pork cuts warranted another discussion. And the order of sautéing the garnishing.

Always, there seemed to be a Cebuano way and an Ilocano way. In a matter of speaking, there were significant differences in going about things.

And a spontaneous concurrence of what is good food.

Trying to combine Ilocano and Cebuano ways, we ate dinner at past 1 a.m. Somehow, all of us woke at 7 a.m. to whip up an omelet and then resume eating the pinakbet and adobo of undefined ethnicity.

Looking at the frothy mounds made by the whipped eggs, M. remembered that the omelet his mother made for him and his seven siblings was as thin and smooth as the film that floats to coat the surface when oil is poured onto water.

His mother warned all the children watching, round-eyed, as that omelet was sliced and distributed around the table that there was no need to ask for more.

Mealtimes where “more” did not exist taught M. and his siblings that rice was not a staple but a strategy. He said he buried his viand in a mound of rice. After everyone else had eaten, he dug out and ate his hoard.

He felt full, whether from consuming his share or being consumed by his sibling’s envy, he could not say.

R. said having too many mouths was also a challenge for researchers in remote areas. He and his fellows once bought a chicken from a farmer.

The native fowl was lean and compact, virtues for a boxer but not for the meal prospects of ten hungry youths. D. volunteered to cook the chicken.

Sliced and spiced, the chicken adobo ended up as the dish for no one except D. When R. complained that the dish too spicy, D. explained that pepper is the secret in cooking. Why, he now had an entire chicken to finish!

Sharing a meal reminds us that we have more than appetites in common. M.’s drunk father insulted his neighbors. Walking home, M.’s father was set upon and nearly beaten dead by the neighbor and his sons.

Months later, these neighbors visited M.’s family to apologize. M. recalled that when it was their turn to visit, these neighbors would cook and eat breakfast even when M and the family were still in bed. Isn’t this tolerated because it’s all in the family?

M. asked his neighbors: When one’s father becomes an ugly drunk, do you look the other way or knock out all of his ugly teeth?

To this day, M. and his neighbors still visit each other’s home on the other side of the mountain.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 17, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Kinatam-isan”

LAST week’s column (“Parsing Cebuano”) stirred up a hornet’s nest in the family.

After I posted on Facebook the article, first published in Sun.Star Cebu last Aug. 28, my sister and aunts reacted to Cebuano words for garden fauna.

One lives in Sydney; another in New Jersey. However, our mother tongue remains a puissant link across time, place, and even communication platforms.

The contentious stemmed from the disrobing of the familiar. When I wrote last week that “alindanaw” translates to dragonfly, an aunt expressed her confusion over the Visayan folk song, “Ako’y Pobreng Alindahaw”.

Many Cebuanos, or at least those of my generation, grew up hearing the lilting lyrics and melody of an “alindahaw” flitting among plants and flowers: “Ako'y pobreng alindahaw/ Sa huyuhoy gianod-anod/ Nangita ug kapanibaan, Ahay!/  Sa tanaman ug sa mga kabulakan”.

Based on the context of the song, I always assumed the song was about butterflies. Writer and fellow teacher Lilia Tio pointed out that “alindahaw” means a drizzle. Google validated with several articles and even a book that referred to an error that still flits across generations.

I wonder how Tomas Villaflor, credited in the Philippine Music Registry website as the song’s composer, immortalized the wrong word.

Yet, listening to a version sung by the Mabuhay Singers and uploaded on YouTube, I feel that the slip, though linguistically unfortunate, doesn’t mar the nostalgia that warms the heart of those who remember and often yearn for the Cebu of old—“ang kinatam-isang Cebu”—before traffic, Oplan Tokhang, and the unofficial but more feral Toksil.

Recalling how our family scrambled over the Cebuano words for spider, butterfly and moth, I remembered Lily’s observation that Cebuano is an earthy language.

Not only are many words in the vernacular rooted in agriculture and nature, our mother tongue is as uninhibited and robust in its literal and symbolic associations with desire, procreation and regeneration.

Listen to blogger, poet, and fellow teacher Jona Branzuela Bering’s dirge to the late Temistokles M. Adlawan, part-time “habal-habal” driver, “balak” poet and recipient of the First Taboan Literary Awards, along with Erlinda K. Alburo, Merlie M. Alunan, Resil B. Mojares, and Rodolfo E. Villanueva (also known as Renato E. Madrid).

In the second stanza of “Sa Imong Pagbiya (Alang Kang Nyor Tem),” Jona writes: “dinhi/ ang katri nakadungog / sa imong gipang-agu/ samtang gadamgog ugdo/ hamis, dughan, sampot”. And she concludes in the final stanza: “dinhi/ ang abog nahimong/ kabahin sa tanan/ ang tanan nahimong/ kabahin sa abog.”

In five short stanzas, the speaker invites the listener to revisit the latter’s home before departing. Only Cebuano can turn a short circuit of the earthly abode into a meditation on desire and decay, the fleeting and the enduring: “ayaw kalimtig tan-aw/ ang sulod sa imong payag/ hinumdomi, kini ang nag-inusarang/ saksi sa imong kaugalingon.”

“Sa Imong Pagbiya” is taken from “Alang sa Nasaag,” “balak” written by Jona from 2008 to 2015, published by Bathalad Inc. and launched last Aug. 27.

Thanks to her many lovers—Lilia, Jona, Nyor Tem, Bathalad, and binisaya.com—Cebuano endures and transports a yokel like me to appreciate the sublime nuances of sound and sense: “tam-ison (sweetish),” “tam-is (sweet),” “tam-is-tam-is (sweeter),” and “kinatam-isan (sweetest).”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 4, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Parsing Cebuano

“TOKHANG o toksil?”

Freshly minted from the jargon of politics and media, these two words show how extrajudicial killing (EJK) has come a long way.

The “Philippine Law Journal” carries an article discussing the dispute over the definition of EJK. Should the term refer only to state-sponsored acts? What about the killing and enforced disappearances carried out by others besides the police and the military?

But it is these two words in Cebuano that measure how EJK has traversed from a technicality to reality, from Marcos to Duterte, from the vigilantism in Davao to the culture of impunity threatening to take over the country.

“Tokhang” is a contraction and fusion of two words. In Cebuano, “toktok” means to knock; “hangyo” is to plead.

National media translate these words into “katok” and “pakiusap”. However, there is no catchy equivalent for “Tokhang” in Filipino, primarily because it is the official name of the Duterte administration’s anti-illegal drugs campaign, also known as the “War on Drugs”.

According to a MindaNews article, Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Ronald de la Rosa first “hatched” Oplan Tokhang when he was the police director of Davao from 2011 to 2013.

Countless Oplans have been hatched and passed without catching the public’s attention. Even Oplan Sagittarius is obscured in the infamy surrounding Martial Law.

Why would “tokhang” pass so fluidly and seamlessly from officialspeak to plain speech? Is it because the bodies of users, pushers, couriers, and other drug suspects have spilled from news photographs and footages into our streets and backyards?

Is it because the sweep of Duterte’s War on Drugs deprives the poor of their life and the right to clear their names, the very same class that ironically turns up in many presidential speeches and promises for change?

Or because “tokhang,” like social cancer, comes with an even more vile twin: “toksil”? According to the same June 3 MindaNews article, De la Rosa already foresaw the pincer strategy behind Tokhang before he implemented the nationwide campaign on June 30.

“We (knock and) appeal to you to stop. If you do not stop, we will stop you.”

It was not unexpected then to overhear during a Vhire ride two women, who were chatting in Filipino, fluidly switch to the Cebuano words when discussing the fate of a missing neighbor.

They speculated that if their neighbor did not listen to the knock-and-appeal “tokhang,” his fate had surely been decided by “toksil” (meaning knock-and-shoot; “pusil” in Cebuano means to fire a gun).

Porous and malleable, language is vulnerable, specially when barbarians are waiting outside the gates. Catching sight of my dragonfly pendant, Professor Lilia Tio, my colleague at the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu, taught me its Cebuano name: “alindanaw”. An award-winning writer, Lily teaches Cebuano writing and Sugbuanon literature.

More than grammatical usage, Lily instills an appreciation of the beauty and expressiveness of Cebuano. She pointed out the “alindanaw” is often mistaken for “alindahaw,” meaning a drizzle.

From Justiniana Catubig Tagayong, my yaya, I learned the uncommon Cebuano names for common garden creatures: “anunugba” (moth), “kaba-kaba” (butterfly), and “higop-higop” (small yellow butterfly).

My wish is for other Filipinos to discover there is more to Cebuano than tokhang and toksil.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in the August 28, 2016 issue of Sun.Star Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Secret tempest

OVER the long weekend, I took several books to Santander but read only one, from cover to cover, one sultry afternoon, as a bird’s egg blue chased orange then red and finally purple across the skyscape over Siquijor and Negros.

My copy of “kulokabildo” was given by Hope S. Yu, who edited the interviews her class made with 24 Cebuano writers.

During the launching of this book and Erlinda Alburo’s Dictionary of Bisayan Arts last April 3 at the Buttenbruch Hall of the University of San Carlos, I was struck by the passion this assignment awoke in the students.

Perhaps this first attempt at publication may account for some of that beginner’s effervescence.

Yet as I listened to the interviewers’ tribulations and triumphs in locating and conversing with the writers, the videotaped interviews, and the sharing and readings made by some of the featured writers on that rainy afternoon, I became curious about “kulokabildo”: what did the 24 say about the state of Cebuano literature?

After reading the book’s 354 pages, I reconfirmed two long-held realizations.

First, publishers should pay attention to those who write, in Cebuano or English, the stories that define us.

Second, while waiting for this publishing miracle to happen, readers must seek assiduously these writers, no matter how obscure and dwindling their niches become.

Yet, should you be one who thinks publication should respond only to market forces—specially the one that aggressively asserts the primacy of the homogenized pap that passes as popular culture nowadays—“kulokabildo” still exerts a magnetic storytelling pull as 24 different personalities explain how writing seduces them again and again.

While other writers wait fruitlessly for their Muse, Temistokles Adlawan narrated to Kiddie Marie A. Cabunilas how he discovered writing in the worst of times, in the midst of World War II. While feeding the family pig, the 12- or 13-year-old sharpened a twig and dreamily carved on young coconut palms words dedicated to an imaginary sweetheart.

When Tem confides, “Little by little I honed my tool of love for words with love-letter writing,” I reflected on how his wisdom echoes a golden rule in teaching writing to reading-resistant youths: what one does for love can never match what one submits for grades or out of fear of repeating the course with the same reading and writing requirements.

Love in all its splendors saturates the pages of “kulokabildo”: the game Isolde Amante’s mother devises to make a disastrous English grade jumpstart her daughter’s lifelong commitment to words; Ulysses Aparece’s empathy for his students’ hunger for learning and his desire that they “make use of imagination;” Melito Baclay’s balancing of seaweed farming and writing on the scales of desire (“The human heart must prevail”); Butch Bandillo’s creed for writing poetry (“a poor man’s way of acknowledging this gift (of life)”); and Richel Dorotan’s servitude to the imperatives of the Cebuano voice (“mahinungdanon kay kita mga tawo man sad nga may kaugalingong panilaw unsa ang katam-is ug kapait sa kinabuhi”).

But even if you happen to be uncomfortable in the presence of the overwrought, “kulokabildo” still harbors enough of the secret tempest that’s alluded to in that most restrained and subtle of forms, as can be witnessed from Adonis Durado’s poem, “Ang asawa sa madyikero”: “Gitarget siyag kutsilyo/ Sa gatuyok nga roleta./ Sa kahon gipriso;/ Gigabas kaduha./

“Gipalatay sa alambri—/ Panyo gitaptap sa mata./ Gipahadla sa tigre,/ Gipalabang og baga./

“Ug limod sa kasayuran/ Sa nanan-aw nga publiko/ Nga siya usa ka inahan/ Labihan ka ngilngig moluto./

“Maayo nga motangtang/ Og mantsa sa nilabhan./ Ug dali rang malisang/ Kung ang anak hilantan.”

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Apr. 12, 2009 “Matamata” column

Harvest of words

I DON’T recommend wet shoes, wet clothes and wet skin for sitting through three hours of academic talk.

But though last Friday’s flash downpour made me drip all the way to chilly Buttenbruch Hall, nothing could keep me from this book launching.

It’s not every day that you get two replacements when the sun hides behind a summer squall.

Last April 3, the University of San Carlos launched the “Dictionary of Bisayan Arts” and “Kulokabildo: Dialogues with Cebuano Writers.”

The publication of a new dictionary should be a matter of rejoicing. Next to politics and religion, finding the right word is the cause of great contentions.

The last time I sat before a work station as an editor, I had two invaluable references when it came to pairing meanings and words in Cebuano. Work mates Josua S. Cabrera and Leticia S. Orendain are artists of different persuasions, but both inhabit the language like their original skin.

The other reference, of course, is the writer. When a word or phrase in a contributed poem snagged my reading, there was sometimes no Jos or Sangay to holler for a lifeline. So I had no choice but to plunge into that vortex of sound and images and hope to find, like the missing treasure at the becalmed bottom, a glint of the poet’s vision.

Such strategy was not without risk, as I learned from repeated rereading of Richel Dorotan’s “Aliluyok.” Emerging from the fugue of vertigo I descended into, I realized that if poetry reading, like diving, is a treacherous business, it is not always due to the environs but the diver’s skills and experience.

Thus, for this enthusiastic but raw reader of native writing, Dr. Erlinda K. Alburo’s “Dictionary of Bisayan Arts” comes as a lifeline, thrown out to those floundering among words, native but unfamiliar in association.

The 308-page reference expands on the “Dictionary of Cebuano Arts,” which she compiled, edited and published in 2006. With grants from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Toyota Foundation, the Cebuano Studies director researched for 10 years, compiling Cebuano, Hiligaynon and Waray words—the languages representing the three sub-regions of the Bisayan islands—that will allow students, artists and cultural workers to talk about their art in their own words.

The first step in owning is naming. When radio commentators declare “tataw kaayo,” I interpret them as believing the matter is clear and open only for one interpretation. Under Alburo’s section on verbal arts, the term “tataw” refers to a condition in painting or writing when a color surpasses another or “some letters more than the others.” Since local radio polemicists argue that truth is not perception and selection but the clarity inherent in the argument, “tin-aw kaayo” may be more apt then since the word, according to Alburo, means “clear, transparent.”

Our native tongue has a multi-hued palette. “Tibangtibang,” in Waray, refers to the rainbow of colors that make a hammock or scarf a shimmering presence. “Tinggad” is the color that stands out for “vividness and luster.” “Tiriktirik” means being dotted all over.

The “Dictionary of Bisayan Arts” made me realize that our art and our language are not just “tumung” (dyed black) or “uburun” (white as the heart of a banana stem).

In the hands of Cebuano writers—specifically those featured in “Kulokabildo: Dialogues with Cebuano Writers” (more next week)— language, memory and identity coalesce into the weaving and summoning of “tibangtibang.”

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s “Matamata” column of Apr. 5, 2009