Abstract / Excerpt:

Near Fuente Osmeña one morning walked a young girl. She had a male companion, a foreigner. She looked demure, except for one thing-her navel was showing. And as we approached each other I noticed that it was enhanced by tattoo of what seemed little acanthus leaves.

Full Text

Near Fuente Osmeña one morning walked a young girl. She had a male companion, a foreigner. She looked demure, except for one thing—her navel was showing. And as we approached each other I noticed that it was enhanced by a tattoo of what seemed little acanthus leaves.

I realized now that this was the fad, and that my reaction—raised eyebrows — was pointless. If I had considered the record, I would have found, to the delight of my patriotic soul, that she was in a sense merely being true to her Cebuano roots. Historians tell us that the chief bodily ornament of her ancestors was a sign of nobility and courage. Well, I don't know about nobility, but it certainly takes courage to have the navel scored with a needle.

Perhaps the saying—the more things change, the more they remain the same—also applies to the Cebuano character, as demonstrated by the bare-bellied miss.

A portrait of the traditional Cebuano emerges from the folk art, notably from a song-and-dance act—the balitaw. "In the balitaw we find spontaneous and informal expressions of the Visayans' real nature and spirit," wrote the researcher Maria Colina Gutierrez.

The balitaw is itself an indicator of a Cebuano trait, a predilection for music. Magellan's chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, commented on the native's fine musical sense, a virtue that has survived the longueurs of the centuries. That explains why a guitar invariably hangs on the wall of a Cebuano home, and in the entertainment industry Cebuano musicians and singers are in a class of their own.

Basically about courtship, the balitaw features a man and a woman dancing as they debate, singing their arguments in verse, extemporaneously, not stopping until one turns the tables on the other. The balitaw seems as old as time itself, discovered by scholars, along with the cundiman, the comintan, the saloma, and others, in the early Cebuanos' bag of acts. But it reached flowering during the later part of the 19th century and was most fashionable in the Visayas, notably Cebu. The Cebuano that emerged from the lines of the balitaw is a fellow who works hard and who does not mind putting up with drudgery. This flies in the face of Western accounts depicting the pre-Spanish Visayan as an indolent, a shortcoming blamed on the oppressive heat, as well as on the kind surroundings (which always put comestibles within reach of the starving — coconuts in the backyard, a shellfish on the beach).
The Cebuano works hard. And for what?
For love.
Courtship in old Cebu took a long time- ten, sometimes twenty years, and the suitor must labor in order to save for the buggy or dowry, which could be as high as the value of a farmland or a carabao, or as low as the cost of replacing the thatch on the roof of the but of the girl's parents. This last, a pittance, to pay for the girl's mother's milk at least. In any case, he had to toil during the pangagad, the years when he would be serving her parents and the latter would be rigorously sizing him up. In other words, to get a wife, he literally must sweat it out.

Babaye: Kon ikaw, Dong, mangasawa
Si Tatay ug si Nancg may sultihi
Kay kinsa bay mosaka sa kahoy
Nga sa punoan dill moagi?

Lalake: Matuod ikaw mao ang bulak
Sa usa ka maambong nga kahoy
Dili ko maagi ang punoan
Kon dili hagdanan sa among kalooy

(Girl: Talk to my father and mother
If you want to marry me
For without passing the trunk
Can you climb a tree?

Boy: True you are the flower
Of a fabulous tree
But to climb its trunk I need
The ladder of your sympathy)

Lovers, laborers. But it was not always a labor for love. Then as now, life was harsh, even for lovers. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Cebu, which had been a market favored by Asian traders, missed most of the lucrative Galleon Trade and diminished into a backwater. The lot of many of its people did not appreciably get better in the latter part of the 1800s when the ships of the sugar-craving, tea-, coffee- and rum-drinking world docked at its port and the island enjoyed a boom, because this was profit mostly to capitalists and middle-men. For cash the folk gave their farms in hock to the mestizos, who seized their lands when the debts were due and unpaid. Eventually the farmers and their children found themselves up only by working as helpers in the households of their creditors, a situation that, to a certain extent, has continued to the present.

This social heartbreak, along with other heartbreaks, configured many of the songs of the folk.

Kaming bukidnong kabos
Nga nagpuyo ning dapit
Nga labing mamingaw
Nag-antos sa kapait
Lapoy kining lawas
Sa init sa adlaw,
Giantos namong tanan
Bisan ug mapait
Wala tagda ang kalapoy
Kay many sago sa palad
 Na amo ang kainit
Ug ang katugnaw

(We the poor of the mountains
Who live in a place
Of deep solitude
Suffer from hardship
Our bodies wither
In the heat of the sun
We bear everything
NO matter how heavy
We do not mind the weariness
Because fate so decrees
That to us should belong the heat
And the cold)

This was just the fallout of the fever of commerce that seized the towns, which drew heat from the Chinese mestizo capitalists of the Parian district, who towards the close of the 19th century all but cornered the local trade.

Parian was the financial district of 19th-century Cebu, and the residence of the dominant and influential offspring of the Chinese traders who, in the 16th century, took advantage of the Galleon Trade's brief dalliance with Cebu, and pitched their homes in the area by the estuary along the Calle Colon. Parian inspired a tradition of entrepreneurship that has grown with the years, nourished by the system of free enterprise and the island's abandonment of farm effort, to which the soil had not been hospitable.

Cebu's position as a key player in the country's economy has kept the spotlight on the business sense of the Cebuano and his reputation as a talented and tough worker, helped not a little by the first emphasis that the unpropertied family traditionally puts on schooling.

Kay mag sugo sa palad. Because fate so decrees. Ingrained in the Cebuano of the balitaw was a fatalism. The line, "because fate so decrees," or its equivalent, emerges in most every song about pain. This was the source of the Cebuano's fortitude, how he explained away grief and toil, and managed to run tight ship in a sea of troubles.

Even when pushed to a corner, his fatalism got the better of him, consoling him with the thoughts of an avenging divine law, and urging him to fight injustice with prayer rather than power.

Lalake: Hinaot nga ang imong mapahitas-on lamdagan
Nga magmaaghop ang ilang balatian
Ang pagpanlupig unta bingkalimtan
Kay ang kinabuhi to ato man king inuslan

Babaye: Bisan unsa usab nato kabahandianon
Kon anaa kanato ang kamadaugdaugon
Wala gihapo'y bili ug kapuslanan

Sa kahitas-an usab kita pagasiilotan

(Boy: We pray for light for the arrogant
Light that will tame their wild hearts
And take their thoughts of abuse off their
minds
Because this life is just a borrowed life

Girl: No matter how rich we are
If we have it in us to wrong others
It is of no value and of no use
Heaven will punish us too)

No matter how forbearing, the Cebuano nonetheless was not beyond doing a burn, however slow and protracted. It took almost two years for Cebu to get into the stream of the revolution against Spain, which a Cebu-based newspaper initially reported as mere disturbances caused by a "disorganized band of malefactors" in the outskirts of the capital. (The delay might have been caused largely by the fact that there was in Cebu only one newspaper, a weekly, which was in the Spanish language and owned by the pro-Spanish elite.)

But definitely things could go up in a blaze. On 3 April 1898, Palm Sunday, Cebuano rebels led by Leon Kilat (Pantaleon Villegas) captured a large part of the city. The rebels withdrew on Holy Thursday when Spanish reinforcements from Iloilo arrived on board the Don Juan de Austria, and the next day, Good Friday, Leon Kilat was slain in Carcar. On Easter Sunday, three Cebuanos were marched out of Fort San Pedro by their Spanish escorts and brought to Carreta to be shot.

Anthropologist Sally Ann Allen Ness attributes the Cebuano's resilience to water. Taking cue from a missionary who visited the island in the late 1600s, she surmised that "Sugbu," the name of the place, meant "being thrown into the water."

"Life in Cebu City," Ness writes, "has traditionally arisen from and returned to the water."

The world of the Cebuano is a water world. The rhythm of Cebuano life is the rhythm of water. This is apparent in the way the holidays are celebrated, particularly the fiesta of the Santo Nino, the City's Patron Saint. Fiestas begin and end not with a bang but a whimper. Gradually, the activities intensify in the week before, and gradually they slacken in the week after climax. They surge and fade, "like a wave." The start is no "burst of energy." Neither is the end a "wild finale."

In this is the Cebuano's art of survival- fluency, resiliency, not much strength, or determination.

Despite his destitution, the balitaw stresses, the Cebuano was not avaricious. He put virtue over wealth, which anyway just drifts away like smoke.

Babae: Apan ang salapi biya ug bulawan
 Sa takulahaw laming mawagtang
 Santa nga ang kahumot sa bulak mahanaw
 Mangalaraggayod sa kainit sa adlaw.

Lalake: Unsaon man nato ang bulawan
Kon nagkalapok ang !Yang kagikan
Mao lamang utryg pagahisgotan
Ang kaagi sa atong kaliwatan

Wala na unyay matahom nga handumanan
Dinhi sa ibabaw sa kakbotan
Kon sa kadungganan lamang mag-amping
Ang mairyong buhat magpabilln sa kasingkasing

(Girl: But keep in mind that money and gold
Can disappear in an instant
As quickly as a flower can lose its scent
And wither in the heat of the sun

Boy: What will we do with gold
As it came from filth
Nothing about us will be told
But the stain on our family

No more beautiful remembrance
Can we leave on this earth
Than that of a name fostered and cared for
The truly good work is in the heart.)

Anyway, back to love.
The Cebuano struggled to gain the love of his heart. Now that he had won her, he must fight again -contend with the economics of maintaining his marriage and family, a bigger and often a losing battle.

Lalake: Ayaw taksa, Inday, ans kalisdanan
 Kay bulag na man kita sa ginikanan
Antuson ta gayod ang mga kapaitan
Kay ato man kini nga tinuryoan
 nga tinzgoan Kay ato man kini

Babae: Mao ba gyud kini ang magminyo
Ang tanang santos atong masampit
Mao ba diay ang magptgo
Nga ma,gsagubatig sa mga kasakit

Apan wala ako, Dong, magmahay
Kay ato man kitting duhang gusto
Asdangon lamang gayod kini kanumay
Ang langit ug ang impyerno

(Boy: Love, do not measure our problems
We now have no parents and are on our own
Let us suffer them all
Because this is the life we want

Girl: Is this what happens when you marry
You get to call all the saints
Is this what life is
You have to bear its blows

But I'm not complaining, honey,
Because we both have chosen this
We just have to continually take on
Heaven and hell)

Even as getting her as a wife was laborious and costly, a woman once married belonged to the home, and could not leave the door without her husband's say-so. Always in house dress, she reeked of housework. And if she dressed up, put on lipstick, dabbed her forehead with eau-de-cologne, the husband would suspect that she was seeing someone else, and she would be the talk of the town.

If a breakup happened, it was bitter and not messy. Quietly, the wife would pack up her things and, when the husband's back was turned, drag the children along to return to the house of her parents. There she would wait for Courtship, Part II, hoping that, after some reflection, the husband would set out to woo her back.

Whenever the couple quarreled, the parents would step in. In fact, in various ways they still took care of their married children as though they were still members of their household.

Amahan: Unsay gitugon ko kanimo, Antonio,
Nga dili mo pasipad-an ang anak ko
Kay kon wala ka na niya'y gusto
Ayaw kahadlok sa pag-uli sa mga kamot ko

Angay nimo kining hibaw-an
Wala ako makasamad sa iyang balatian
Kay kon gani si Pasing nga pasipad-an
Tadtaron ko ikaw sa akong sundang

(Father: What did I say to you, Antonio,
That you should not abuse my daughter
For if she no longer gets your affection
Don't hesitate to give her back to me

This you should realize
I have never hurt her feelings
And if you should ever maltreat Pasing
I will chop you with my long knife)

Sure, marriage was not at all Sunday Park. Much of it was a minefield too. But their union made in heaven, the couple, brave hearts, must negotiate conjugal space and time with care and buckle down to meet its dangers.

Much has been said about the Cebuano's joie de vivre, his love of life. For one thing, as this balitaw shows, he loved songs and dances. He still does. His passion for the fiesta is well-known, not the least because it accords him a chance to gamble.

Next to his wife, the Cebuano of the balitaw loved his cock. In this, he was no different from other Filipinos, who, according to the Spanish Father Chirino, "are passionately fond of cockfighting and spectacles of all sorts." The artist's depiction of the Filipino, said Sir John Bowring, the English Governor of Hong Kong, who visited the Philippines and traveled through the islands, was invariably of someone "with a gamecock under his arm." During a fire, he maintained, the Filipino would turn his back on his wife and children but never on his rooster.

Babaye: Pamati kay ako kanimong isulti
Aron imo nga hibaw-an
Nganonggiburot mo ang kwartag pildi
Didto, Antonio, sa sugalan

Dili ba ikaw akong gimaymayan
Sa dili pagtambong sa mga sugalan
Mao unya kiru ang sinugdanan
Sa paspigo to nga wally kahusayan
 
Lalake: Hinaya lamang ang imong sulti
Tinuod nga ako, Day, napildi
Apan kon nakadaogpa kaha ako karon
Ayha ko riga ang baba mo matak-om

(Girl: Listen for I'm hoping to tell you
So you will finally mind it
Why you lost all the money,
Antonio, in the gambling pit

Did I not repeatedly warn you
About going to the gambling joint
I fear this might be the start
Of our life losing its point

Boy: There is no need to shout
I lost, yes, you are right
But you would shut your mouth
Had I won in the cockfight)

If truth be told, it is not the cock so much as the double moral standard favoring the male in Philippine society that afflicts the Cebuano wife. She was required before marriage to be chaste, and now that she is married she is duty-bound to be faithful to her husband. But no such requirement is imposed on the man.

Those were the days, the days of courtship. She was then the focus, the apple of her man's eye. But after marriage, the importance must shift to the husband on whose capacity to earn will depend the survival if not the comfort of the family. He sits at the head of the table. He makes the decisions. On him the wife must dance attendance, catering to his every whim, making her body available to him whenever he pleases, even if she herself gets no pleasure from it. Indeed, she herself must not show any desire for sex without being "bad."
Because the husband is the provider and often comes home tired, he must not be bothered with housework and the discipline of the children, unless their misbehavior becomes serious. Besides, these are the matters that are properly the wife's province, in which, often as not, she will brook no interference from her husband.

While she can leave the home only to go the market or church or to visit relatives, he is often out. In fact, this is expected of him, for the outside world —the workplace and community — is his arena, just as the house is that of the wife. From outside the home comes the siren song of the barkada. And when men friends gather, there is banter and there are drinks and there are girls, and chances are the husband will find a woman younger and wilder in bed than his wife. Certainly, this does no harm to his traditional image as a man.

The wife might get wind of these one-night stands but she is likely to curb her tendency to flare up, knowing the male in her culture to be like that-a philanderer. But only if he remains an accidental philanderer. For if the affair gets serious and, worse, permanent, why, this is another ball game, and like a wounded animal she will bare her fangs and pounce on the other woman. And then, to put off a scandal, if not a murder, the family must step in and talk to the husband into pulling out of and withdrawing from the affair, and return, like a beaten dog, tail between the legs, to his wife and children.

Mothering is the Cebuana's being. Life to her is nothing if not given to nurturing her children, to clothing and feeding and caressing and hugging them. When a grown-up son visits her aging mother, she asks, not how he is doing, but if he is hungry, and then goes on to spread a meal on the table.

When it comes to safety of her children, the mother is absolutely paranoid. To her danger lurks at every corner for her brood, especially the girls (the boys can take care of themselves), and so she will keep the little ones under her care for as long as she can, which can be a long time, and can stretch even beyond adulthood.

But the children have no choice. Father is mostly out and mother mostly in, and clearly the latter gets the jurisdiction and becomes their bridge, their means of negotiating with the world.

In 1928, playwright Piux Kabahar wrote the song Rosas Pangdan, that describes the Cebuano of the time:

Ania si Rosas Pangdan
Gikan pa intawon sa kabukiran
Kaninyo makituban-uban
Ning gisaulog ninyong kalingawan
Balitaw day akong puhunan
Maoy kabihn sa akong ginikanan
Awit nga labing karaan

Nga ,garbo sa atong kabungtoran
Dikadung, dikadung, dikadung,
Ayay sa along balitaw
Manindot pa rrg sayaw
Dawyamos nga kabugnaw
Dikadung, dikadung, dikadung
Intawon usab si Dodong
Nagtan-aw kang lnday
Nagtabisay ang laway

(Here comes Rosas Pangdan
From her humble place in the mountain
To mingle with you
In this festival you're celebrating
Balitaw is my only possession
An heirloom from my parents
A song most old
The pride of our hills
Dikadung, dikadung, dikadung
Ayay for our balitaw
How beautiful its dance
Cool like the dew
Dikadung, dikadung, dikadung
Poor Dodong
Looking at Inday
With saliva dripping)

Balitaw day akong pahunan. Balitaw is my only possession. Tradition, the old values such as, according to another song by Piux Kabahar, Awit ni Rosa, "Ang pagbantay gayud  sa atoang/ Kabuyang ug sa atoang dungong/Kay ang bulak nga mapulpog/ Dili na gayud ikapaibug... " (To be ever watchful of our / Frailty and our honor/ For a flower crushed / Can no longer be displayed)

But the times, they are a-changin'. Rosa the farm girl now works in an office or a factory at Mactan Export Processing Zone, or serves as help in a Riyadh household, or lives in Berlin with a retired German border guard. Dodong the farmhand runs a shellcraft shop, or drives a habalhabal (a motorcycle for hire).

The old values still have their pull, but no longer are as strong as before. Despite his muscles and aggressiveness, Dodong cooks supper and feeds the dogs, and sometimes washes the clothes, especially since Rosa now works as a secretary. Still Rosa does housework whenever office duties allow her, and manages to massage Dodong and hug the children and tell them stories. Dodong has an active public life, so does Rosa. Whenever the occasion calls for it, Rosa joins rallies protesting abortion and sexual harassment.

Sure, there are those whose lives have remained a balitaw and those who have strayed so far from tradition as to write a new balitaw, Balitaw sa Bag-ong Rosas Pangdan (Balitaw of the new Rosas Pangdan), the title of the poem by Don Pagusara, which opens with the following lines:

Ako bitaw ang bag-ong Rosas Pangdan!
Nangita kog kaparaygan
Aron akong ikapahungaw
Kining balitaw sa akong kaulaw,
Apan lami beya tunlon ang kaulaw,
Kay morag ice cream
Kay putiong kubal sa langyaw!

(Yes, I am the new Rosas Pangdan!
I'm seeking someone's confidence
So I can pour out
This balitaw of my shame,
But shame, you know, is sweet to swallow,
For the pale hard skin of the foreigner
Is just like ice cream!)

This was perhaps the balitaw whose text was tattooed on the navel of the young girl I met near Fuente Osmeña one morning.

The balitaw is a debate between man and woman, the exchange to continue until one turns the tables on the other. Really it is a debate between tradition and change. The debate has not stopped even if we no longer hear the songs, even if time has turned the tables on the balitaw.

Info

Source Journal	Tambara
Journal Volume	Tambara Vol. 19
Authors	Simeon Dumdum, Jr.
Page Count	7
Place of Publication	Davao City
Original Publication Date	December 1, 2002
Tags	Cebu, Cebuano, Dance, Sings, Song, Tambara

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