“Tabi”

INTERESTING to follow are two foreigners who documented Visayans and the superstitions they believed at the turn of the century. Published in the July-September 1906 volume of “The Journal of American Folklore” is the paper written by W. H. Millington and Berton L. Maxfield on “Philippine (Visayan) Superstitions”.

Millington and Maxfield hold that the beneficent effects of the free public education introduced by the American colonizers were overpowered by the pre-colonial belief system; the “lizards, rats, and bats” that “swarm(ed)” and took over local households when the humans were away; and even the questionable actuations of neighbors that indoctrinated in Visayans “in general” the belief in “three kinds of spirits: the tamawos, dwendes, and asuangs”. 

More often than not, the people—whether believers or skeptics—are more interesting than the belief. Millington and Maxfield scoff at the “half-educated people” who share the superstitions of the “lower classes” in our islands; in turn, I am as fascinated by these two authors who, in their unquestioning faith in rationality, education, and class, were not as different as they thought from the people they studied as specimens.

The second to the last page of their paper mentions that on the evening of Nov. 2 or All Souls’ Day, the superstitious Visayans—at least, “most of the lowest class”—prepare a sumptuous supper and put this on the ground as offering to the souls of their departed.  

Would Millington and Maxfield (or their shades) be interested to know that the practice continues on Nov. 2 more than a century later?  Did they speculate how poor Visayans could afford to lay out a “rich supper” for the unseen when they themselves were starving? 

I prefer the version taught to my sister and I by Yaya, born on Nov. 2 or “Kalag-kalag”. 

In feasts, the living take precedence over the dead. This woman taught us to light candles at twilight outside our home so the light would guide the “kalag (soul)” wandering on Kalag-kalag.

I thought this intent was risky after imbibing in her injunction to always say aloud, “tabi (excuse me)” when walking outside in the dark to avoid intruding into the spirit space Millington and Maxfield diminished into an offshoot of poverty and ignorance, stratified into the cultured but acquisitive tamawo prone to luring children into their glass castles installed under earth mounds; the seditious dwende who crash into people’s gardens; and the “cama-cama” who dwell in wells and covertly pinch black and blue couples courting by moonlight.

When I voiced my doubts aloud, Yaya assured us that the light from candles and prayers draws the right spirits to us. Tabi, tabi, po.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 7, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The long sleep

THE AIR-CONDITIONING inside Cine Adarna contrasted with the campus grounds, which already had more than a dry-as-summer whiff. Inside the cavernous Film Center of the University of the Philippines (U.P.) Diliman, I was in the audience, watching a silent film, “A Filipino in America”.

I had stayed up late writing, feeling an ant nest roiling behind each eye. The film was narrated in an unfamiliar language: silent scenes of two Filipino friends trying to make it in America, flashing a caption or two that expressed in English what the characters thought or said.

I dozed, woke up, nodded off again while the film rolled.

And yet, despite missing scenes during the movie’s approximately 30 minutes of playing time and patching sound quirks, scratched images, and disjointed storytelling, I found that Doroteo Ines’s 1938 pioneering silent film spoke volumes not just of the Filipino shuttling in the 1930s from being colonized to going independent but also of our people’s eternal suspension in the colonial, post-colonial, and neocolonial purgatory.

How does the colonial subject negotiate identity?

That was the tantalizing question raised by UP Film Institute professor Rolando B. Tolentino in the second part of the Pelikula Lectura 2019 at the Cine Adarna last Feb. 28. Entitled “A Filipino in America: 1930s Filipino Films, American Colonialism, and the Negotiation of Coloniality,” a revised title was presented by Tolentino that morning: “Lagi na kayong buntot sa kanilang pagsulong (you are always tailing their progress)”.

What do the centuries of being ruled by the missionaries and then Hollywood produce? Is it the colonized clinging to the hem of the colonizer’s robes? Or is it the independent and modern trajectory of a former colony that’s still shadowed by its master, who keeps the satellite within its sphere of influence no longer through military occupation but cultural domination and manipulation?

Tolentino discussed how film scholarship is challenged by limited extant materials. Poring over the same data because no other records survived or have surfaced, scholars must also contend with dwindling budgets and space that result in precious materials culled or junked.

“We can’t learn from history if we don’t save it,” Jacqui Banaszynski posted in Nieman Storyboard.

As great a threat is the pop culture we stay awake for and avidly consume without criticism and self-reflection. According to legend, Tantalus is a king condemned in Hades to stand neck-deep in a pool of water under boughs heavy with fruit. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, the fruits and water receded, leaving him eternally empty. As fraught as our search for identity.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in the March 3, 2019 issue of the SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”