Searching for the Bisaya

Size matters. Raymund E. Fernandez’s “Kamingaw” stands that truism on its head.

The book is a near perfect cube, a foot on each side. It’s awkward to read in bed or bring to the toilet.

When I sat down to first open the book given by my faculty room neighbor, I purposely sat down at the desk that abuts the area of Raymund, a former mentor and now fellow teacher at the state university.

The book jacket carries the subtitle: “An Impressionist Portrait of the Bisaya Painter Martino A. Abellana”.

Under that subtitle, any book would stagger. It is not just the lengthiness or the art jargon. It is also the insinuation of “Bisaya”.

As Ino Manalo writes in the foreword of the book published by the University of San Carlos Press, “The term may seem innocent at first until one realizes that it not only marks geography but also implies a positioning in art production on a national scale.”

An outsider may view “Bisaya” with dismay, regarding the label as a dismissal, not just an appraisal.

Born and raised in Cebu, I am drawn to the word, which pulls like a beacon. Who is the Bisaya? What is his or her place in the story of the Filipino?

Raymund is the guide for such a quest. At first browsing, “Kamingaw” satisfies the expectations of art patrons and coffee table book collectors.

Its photographs of Abellana’s paintings and sketches are numerous, lush, and diverse, encompassing the portraits of Cebu elite that secured his reputation and the less known but more tantalizing sketches of the artist’s family, his Art students at the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu, and slices of Bisaya life.

When I covered the prominent and powerful of Cebu, I made one distinction to separate the old from the new rich: the former had a portrait by Abellana. Yet, the book’s most arresting photos, many of which came from the UP Cebu-funded catalogue compiled by Raymund and fellow teachers Cristina Martinez-Juan, Jovi Juan and Estela Ocampo-Fernandez, capture the profundity Abellana saw in the inconspicuous: an old man sitting on a box, a family knelt in prayer.

Raymund’s writing illuminates this discordance in Abellana’s subjects. Expecting to read art history or criticism, I pored over “Kamingaw” because it is personal and intimate on several levels: as a documentation on how pre- and post-war Cebu molded an artist; as a memoir of a maestro’s influence on his students’ art and life beyond the classroom; as a meditation on the artist caught in the crosshairs of society and mortality.

“Bisaya,” whether under the brush of Abellana or the pen of Raymund, is a beacon to probe the dark with.


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 22, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“A very bad man”

IN the strange saga of Ferdinand Marcos, his many burials should qualify for a citation in Ripley’s “Believe It or Not!,” an illustrated series about the bizarre.

While exiled in Honolulu, Marcos died on Sept. 28, 1989.

After President Corazon Aquino banned his remains from returning, he was stored in a refrigerated crypt in Honolulu.

Under President Fidel Ramos, the body was transferred from Hawaii to Ilocos Norte on Sept. 7, 1993. Marcos ended up in another refrigerated crypt, which became the major attraction at the Ferdinand E. Marcos Presidential Center in Ilocos Norte.

President Joseph Estrada resurrected the move to bury Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, but cancelled the planned burial on July 11, 1998 in the face of fierce public opposition.

In 2011, President Benigno Aquino III delegated Vice President Jejomar Binay, who recommended the interment of Marcos in his hometown of Batac, with full military honors. PNoy ignored the Binay proposal.

Last Nov. 18, 27 years after his death, Marcos’s remains were finally buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani during a “private burial” that took place at noon.

In this predominantly Catholic country, burials traditionally take place at 3 p.m., timed with Jesus’s death on the cross.

While workers broke off for lunch or stepped out to withdraw their yearend bonus before the weekend queues and monster mall sales began, Marcos slipped in to lie down with heroes, a place history denies him.

This actual “private burial” contrasted starkly with the mock public burial of the effigy of Marcos at the Inayawan Sanitary Landfill last Nov. 15.

I interviewed Linya Ocampo Fernandez, 17, who created with her father, Raymund, the effigy buried in the “Libingan ng mga Basura,” as well as the dummies of the nine Supreme Court magistrates who ruled that President Rodrigo Duterte was within the bounds of law in ordering the burial of Marcos at the Libingan.

Soft-spoken and calm, Linya often collaborates with Mons, the latest being the dictator’s likeness constructed from chicken wire, stuffed with garbage, and used clothes, including a fake medal.

On a rickety cart, the effigy of Marcos had its mock wake at the University of the Philippines Cebu’s Oblation Square before joining multi-sectoral participants of the mock funeral march and burial.

Given only three days to make the effigy, Linya recalled that she and her father were still enthusiastic about the commission. She said that, after living through Martial Law, her Papa did not want his children to go through a similar experience.

Linya learned about the Edsa Revolution from her elementary teachers but read little about “what actually happened” under Martial Law in textbooks. Now homeschooled by Mons, Linya understands that the late dictator was “a very bad man”.

She recalls tagging along with her father to a rally protesting against the vice-presidential bid of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. After listening to survivors talk about how their children and classmates disappeared during Martial Law, Linya realized how the late dictator was “much much worse than what I had imagined”.

“I heard that kids my age like Bongbong Marcos' s son who they say is very ‘gwapo’,” she emailed. “I think that if they had the chance to listen to victims, they would change their minds… I hope they won't vote Sandro Marcos for president.” 


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s November 20, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Now showing

I CAME home after three days of being closeted in research proposal writing. The decompression of one’s world jolts when, after three days of trying to read the code embedded in a piece of loom-woven fabric, the same pair of eyes scans the front pages of newspapers.

July 8, Philippine Daily Inquirer, page 1: “Probe of killings pushed,” “PH may become a killing field,” “Drug killings,” “Vigilantes kill Bulacan policeman,” “Rody names 3 Triad drug lords, pins Garbo,” “Inquirer ‘Kill List’,” “Drug-related killings hit 72 since June 30,” “Drug deaths add more life to funeral trade,” and my favorite: “Buhay na buhay ang negosyo ng patay!”

Death used to be a mystery; now it’s commonplace. Occasionally, the mind-numbing march pauses to allow a distraction: the coffin of slain drug personality Jeffrey “Jaguar” Diaz seems to float in a sea of mourners in Amper Campaña’s unforgettable photo splashed on page 1 of the June 28 issue of Sun.Star Superbalita (Cebu).

According to Arnold Y. Bustamante’s report, more than 2,500 people walked the 1.7-kilometer distance from Duljo Fatima, where Jaguar lived, to accompany the body to the cemetery in Calamba. The vivid imagery of Bustamante’s journalese rivals the Campaña banner photo and shames pallid translation into English: “Halos nahabwa and tibuok barangay nga nitahod kang Jaguar busa nagsugwak ang mga tawo sa simbahan…”

What more is needed for a blockbuster? A cast of thousands, a central figure who became even larger than life with his death and burial, the church, the police providing comic relief (the Mambaling police chief had to send officers for Jaguar’s spectacular exit “kase nagka problema na tayo sa ‘traffic’ doon, eh”) and, last but not the least, the drum and bugle corps leading the funeral procession.

In this wired word, an event is an event only when it draws a reaction. Watching the televised coverage of Jaguar’s funeral cortege, I overheard my companion mutter, “Why don’t they arrest all those drug users and pushers accompanying Jaguar? Look, they’re even in uniform(ed shirts). Are the police blind?”

The culture of death is creeping inexorably from the peripheries and the undersides to the center. Just like in a nightmare, our thinking and actions defy what we suppress when we are awake and aware. Those of us who think that the “others” should be “neutralized” to keep the world “safe” for “us” are as abnormal as those of us who gave a man labeled by the police as the no. 1 drug lord in Central Visayas a hero’s burial.

So, are we in a nightmare we need to wake up from? Or do we pretend death is just another movie and we can take a leak during commercials?

Last June 30, I was at the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu Digital Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab), watching an XO? performance.

Raymund Fernandez played a riff with the sax. Linya Ocampo Fernandez rolled inside a black swath of cloth, one hand swaying like a leaf. Aldrich Maligsa pantomimed with pursed lips, emitting the sound of a leaf being played like a flute. The XO? performance was dedicated to the passing of drummer Winston Rallosa Velez.

The performance ends with the destruction of artwork by the artists who created this. Long after the last banging reduces creation to waste, my heart still hammers. I never heard Velez play in life but I can hear what death silenced. And could not.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 10, 2016 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column