The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
sympathies made him unpopular with the army—it was no secret he knew the local NPA units, having grown up with many of its members. Once he came close to being salvaged. One day, soldiers in ski masks appeared at his doorstep looking for him. By a stroke of luck, Tom was playing basketball with a group of young men at the town plaza, and hence was saved by the favorite sport in a country of short men, an oddball legacy of America’s nearly fifty-year occupation of the country.
Other than its remoteness, Kankanai clannishness was a major reason why the town had resisted the numbing effects of soulless shopping malls, video-game parlors, and pollution-causing traffic jams. It had resisted the indiscriminate logging and the slash-and-burn method of farming (or kaingin) that was devouring forests elsewhere in the country. One night, sitting with Tom and several others by a bonfire in someone’s garden—in the winter months, Sagada nights can become chilly from winds that blow down from Siberia—I ask him about the pine forests here, an essential part of Sagada’s wealth and beauty. He says they have remained intact because the Sagada clans don’t sell land to outsiders. The fact that some years back, a prominent family leased some land to an outsider still generates much talk and resentment.
Nevertheless, the assault on native traditions has been incessant, as Christina Aben, the owner and caretaker of the Ganduyan Museum, is quick to point out. A big-boned, handsome, gracious woman, she operated the museum out of one end of her café cum bakery, showcasing the regional artifacts she’d collected over time. About twenty years ago, three American students in Sagada for a vacation had asked her to buy on their behalf any artifacts she thought worthy of purchase. She agreed and gradually acquired an eye for unusual articles: baskets, body ornaments, harvest tools, rattan backpacks, spears, shields, etc. Eventually, however, she decided to keep what she had bought instead of selling and had, over the years, built up an impressive collection. Subsequently, wealthy collectors had expressed interest in buying the collection—one Frenchman offered her $50,000, a huge sum in these parts—but she repeatedly resisted cashing in on what was clearly a labor of love. She had sold some items to pay for her children’s education, but to part with the lot was unthinkable.
The artifacts on display are unusual for their beauty and for their design, so far above the usual kitsch tourists buy in the big cities. The ways in which wood was carved or rattan woven bespoke skills suffused with love, rendering them talismanic. Christina often talks about strong traditions. There are always a few individuals, she says, who add their own distinctive touches, creating unique works. It was unfortunate that commercial buyers looking for the standard weave wouldn’t purchase those that were set apart by difference. According to her, “They see the objects just as products to be sold.” She smiles, remembering when a Manila institution, the Philippine Design Center, sent a so-called expert to teach weaving to the residents of one nearby village—a folly akin to sending a diving instructor to the Badjaos, sea gypsies and pearl divers of the southern Philippines! Such misplaced earnestness concerned her; she wondered about the durability of native traditions.
But it was really in the introduction of a cash economy where Christina believed the real threat, the danger of subversion, lay; she particularly feared for the disappearance of age-old rituals involved in the planting and harvesting of rice. Rice itself would live on, but would that sense of sacredness with which it was regarded, the almost-mystical aura about it, vanish? Would the rice deity, the bulol, continue to exist, stern and powerful as a totem, or would it simply become a relic? She shakes her head; tradition nowadays was an endangered species.
Some of the most eloquent manifestations of folkways on the verge of disappearing were eloquently expressed as black and white ghosts in the remarkable stills of Edward Masferré, a renowned Spanish Igorot photographer. Masferré, who had lived into his eighties, had, over the decades, documented facets of highland culture. On the walls of the Sagada studio run by his family are prints of village scenes, tribal elders, tattooed women, warriors posing with their spears, and vertigo-inducing shots of rice terraces. Masferré’s works have a simple, intimate, expressive power—expressive because of the photographs’ very naïveté, and powerful, because of the power in the subjects themselves. They look at the camera, at us, unblinking, recognizing us for what we are: their sons and daughters adrift in a rudderless world.
My Manhattan eye, accustomed to edifices that disengage themselves from the landscape, has a hard time spotting the clumps of houses that, with their earthen tones, are set among bamboo, limestone rocks, and pine trees. Along with three companions, I am at a wedding feast, in a bare room overlooking some rice terraces. We have been invited inside by district elders, wizened men clad in loincloths and jackets. Outside, the newly married bride and groom sit quietly on a bench, graciously receiving visitors.
Inside the room, we squat on the edges; some of the men are smoking pipes, and some of the pipes have lighted cigars inserted into them. A single glass and a bottle of tapuey, rice wine, is passed around. We take handfuls from bowls of steamed rice and salted pork. The tapuey makes me smile beatifically at the elders. Noel and Angel, Filipino American brother and sister from New York, studiously take everything in, the voluble Angel uncharacteristically subdued, clicking away with her camera. The elders are aware of the mechanical eye but carry on, as indifferent as the landscape is to an outsider’s gaze. Only Jaime, the goateed Manila painter who had travelled with me to Banahaw, speaks Ilokano, the dominant regional tongue, and engages the men in animated conversation.
In another part of Sagada, another wedding—that of Tom’s cousin—is also being celebrated. The feasting will go on for several days, with the whole town shuttling happily back and forth between the two celebrations. Later, an inebriated, ebullient, sated quartet treks through gleaming rice terraces to the other feast, just across the road from Tom’s house. Pigs and chickens have been slaughtered, vast quantities of mountain rice, vegetables, tapuey, and basi set out. When we arrive, men and women of varying ages are doing a stately circling dance with intricate, hand-and-foot patterns, to the steady rhythm of gangsa, or gongs. We join Tom and his sister Lita at a table and drink basi steadily. At one point, five freshly severed hogs’ heads heave into view. A drunken hallucination? Not at all. Two men walk close by, carrying an enormous basin. There they lie in pig-death, snout to snout; some of them are in me. I am a pig, a bowl of wine, a stick of hash, a pot of rice, coffee. All these petty deaths I call me, I of mud and divinity. I get up to join the dance. Delirious, I’m never as sane or as delighted as at that moment when I crook my arms and stick my right foot out, waiting for the beat, waiting to propitiate the gods behind the gongs.
No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction.
—Salud Algabre
organizer in the Sakdal peasant uprising, 1935
“PEOPLE POWER,” THE DEFINING PHRASE of a government that in 1986 had taken over when the enfeebled dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, and his wife Imelda fled for the balmy seclusion of an expensive Honolulu villa, had held out the promise of a more equitable life and the end of a feudal system that had been so much a part of life for so long. It was a promise that, for a year at least, seemed vibrant, real.
During that unprecedented bloodless uprising, about a million people from all walks of life had taken to the streets surrounding the military camps where officers and their soldiers who had turned against Marcos were under threat of attack from pro-government units. The massive crowds acted as a buffer between the two forces, importuning, pleading with heavily armed soldiers who were poised for an assault on the camps to join the revolution. Images on television of middle-aged housewives, street vendors, students, shopkeepers, senior citizens, and nuns standing in front of tanks, praying the rosary, gripped the world’s imagination. (I often wonder if that daring Chinese man barring a tank’s movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had been inspired by these images.) In Manhattan, I was, like everyone else, transfixed by this drama of Corazón Aquino, the righteous widow of a man who had opposed the Marcoses, standing up to a desperate regime. That it ended with virtually no blood spilled gave it the trappings of a latter-day fairy tale. And, like any fairy tale, it was too good to be true: the strain of disaffection that had always been part of the Philippine psyche grew even stronger in the years of nominally democratic rule under Aquino’s reluctant leadership.
The cynics, of course, were not surprised.