VISAYAN LOVE
Resil B. Mojares
Alang kanimo mao koy tinguha,
Ning kalibutan duhay silimbahon,
Didto sa Langit, siya si Bathala,
Dinhi sa Yuta, ang imong kaambong.
Dili mahimo nga ikaw hikalimtan,
Akong Bathala sinimba sat ago,
Kay kon wala ka sa sulod ning dughan,
Unsa pay ako, Inday, unsa pay ako?
Silaw sa bulan, tipik sa bitoon,
Nga nagpabilin ning yutang malaay,
Kon daw buot ka nga dili simbahon,
Iuli sa Langit ang imong panagway.
Vicente Ranudo, Hikalimtan (1906)
1
Talk of love and the “true-blue” Cebuano will recite to you passages from
the poetry of Vicente Ranudo (1882-1930). And he will probably go on to say
that here is the clearest distillation of “Visayan Love.”
2
Is there such thing as a “Visayan love,” and is this it – an emotion at once physical and metaphysical, delicious,
self-conscious, steeped in the sweet melancholy of distances (and, one might
add, the lyric juices of the love-struck poet)? Ranudo’s is a high note in the
Cebuano language of love but it is not the only note.
3
One can cite other renderings from the early twentieth century, Ranudo’s
time – as folksy, lewd, and irreverent as anything Max Surban and Yoyoy Villame
can devise. Take this poem by the late Raon Durano (as naughty a poet as he was
a politician) entitled “Ang Akong Gugma
Kanimo” (published in Bag-ong Kusog,
28 November 1924) and dedicated to a woman code-named: Flower, “tag-iya sa akong mga damgo, sa akong kalipay”:
4
Busa kanimo hinalaran ug pinagga ko isaad,
Nga ako sa imong dughan kanunay maghalad;
Sanglit ikaw ang kalag sa akong kinabuhi,
Oh! Magpakamatay sa ibabaw sa imong kaputli.
5
Yet, the sentiment expressed in Ranudo’s poetry (and a host of other poems
in the same vein) has fixed itself as the “quintessential” Visayan love –
heightened, perfervid, self-absorbed, almost in love with itself.
6
“Visayan love” seems a vacuous and amorphous concept. Yet, the
“anthropology of emotions” tells us that human sentiments are not a kind of
universal keyboard that sounds the same across time and across cultures. The
keys (like anger, shame, fear, grief or love) vary in tones and respond to
different pressures. Cultural differences may be found in display rules (acquired conventions, norms or habits that dictate
what emotion can be shown to whom and in which contexts), coping devices (cognitive and behavioral attempts to deal with the
emotion and its causes), and elicitors (stimuli
that draw out the emotion). To trace all these elements will require more space
than I have here. (It might bore you no end as well.) A few suggestive ideas,
however, can be explored.
7
What is Visayan gugma? While we
can speak of a more or less distinctive configuration of sentiment, we deal as
well with something far from static. If emotion is socially and culturally
constructed, then gugma is as dynamic
as culture itself.
8
Take Ranudo once again. The dominant ethos of love in Ranudo and other
Cebuano romantic poets is less indigenous than nineteenth-century in character,
already the product of many extraneous influences. Spanish influence saw the
“romanticizing” of love. This arose out of Christian solipsism and guilt, and
the deepening (moral as well as mystical) of the distance between the lover and
the beloved, in what was often a miming of the distance between the sinner and
his God. Love came to be clothed with the aura of impossibility. Changing
conceptions of the self, individuation, heightened basis f introspection, and a
whole array of moral strictures (particularly the repression of sexuality) –
all these created “romantic love.”
9
There is a social dimension as well. Increased social stratification,
population mobility, and the elaboration of social conventions created
situations whereby there were more “distances” for lovers to cross. The problem
of social or class distance is particularly prominent in popular Cebuano
stories and poems dealing with love, in which the lover usually pines for a
woman “forbidden” or “unreachable.” (Indeed, the man can be the “object,” but
then most Cebuano authors were men.) The mystification of the object of love
installed woman on a pedestal (where, deprived of agency, she mouldered).
10 Love takes on other romantic colorings. It is
quarried as a special preserve of the poor and the disposed. In a kind of
compensatory reflex, the poor mystified their condition by saying that the rich
may have the gold, the poor man has “soul.” Emotion was seen as the site of
uncorrupted, pure, or honest “humanity” in contrast with the wealthy’s
calculated materialism or civilization’s artificial rationality. In the same
way that poverty was often idealized in popular literature, so too was feeling
as a realm in which the powerless could claim superiority. Woman became the
locus for other meanings, a vehicle for repressed social desires. Her chastity
– a dominant theme in vernacular letters – was deployed as a symbol, a kind of
last redoubt for those who had been forced by social circumstance to surrender
almost everything else.
11 The “romanticizing” of love came from a
confluence of social and cultural factors. Such factors created a vocabulary of
desire that spawned a minor industry of love poems and popular pamphlets on the
art of amoral and the billet-doux (mga sulat sa gugma). The vocabulary has
remained persuasive to this day.
12 It was not like always like this. Nor was
Ranudo’s time exactly homogeneous. (Ranudo himself is not innocent of a certain
slyness.) There were folksy poets like those who composed the jocular balitao and composo verses that tapped the less pretentious side of Visayan
love:
13
Kining akong paghigugma
Sa bukog, Inday, mikagit
Kong hinog ka pa lang sab-a
Lamyon ko hangtod ang panit.
14 In the main, however, Cebuano love poetry was
taken over by a kind of male narcissism, the elf-advertising display of “fine
sensibility.” Women themselves were not wholly innocent: they willingly
imprisoned themselves, corsets and all, in this manufactured image of
themselves.
15 Reconstructing desire is a tricky thing. One
can discern it only through what traces remain – poems, songs, charms, recorded
practices and rituals. Still, one judges that the early Visayans were less
prone to mystify heterosexual love. Seventeenth-century Jesuit chronicler
Francisco Alcina speaks of Visayan males (often upon the instigation of women,
he says) carrying women off to the woods, but to conjure the “caveman” image is
not quite correct. There were precolonial sexual niceties and taboos as well as
folk poetry that showed such emotion as Ranudo would have envied. If Alcina is
to be believed, moderns cannot quite
match the delicacies f communication the early Visayans were capable of.
Speaking of Visayan music, Alcina writes: “They gather and join together to
look each other over, they make love to one another and court each other (using
musical instruments like the kudyapi)
with much more feeling or sensuality than by word of mouth.”
16 Still, love was not yet imprisoned in such
thickets of inhibitions as grew later on. The missionaries were still somewhere
else. “Christian guilt” had not yet been invented. Sex and the body were not an
object of shame. Again, to quote Alcina: “I believe that either in ancient
times nor now is chastity esteemed among them, nor before did they recognize it
as a virtue.” They appreciated the body. They endured labor and pain to make
themselves physically attractive (as witness the ancient cosmetology of
tattooing). They underwent “erotic surgery” and invented instruments (such as
the “penis-wheel” – a device that modesty prevents us from describing in
graphic detail) to enhance what an early chronicler called “the pleasures of
Venus” (in contrast to other cultures where similar practices were designed to
restrain or repress, rather than increase, sexual gratification).
17 What is further interesting is that in this
field of unabashed sensuality, women (practically all the early travelers and
chroniclers attest) were more “sensual, vicious, and restless” than men.
Australian scholar Anthony Reid argues that this illustrated the relative
autonomy of Southeast Asian women: “Women took a very active part in courtship and
lovemaking, and demanded as much as they gave by way of sexual and emotional
gratification.” Women did not collapse in sighs, secretly wilting in unrequited
love, they were active foragers for both sex and love.
18 This is a world away from the world of Ranudo.
Love may be forever, but it does translate in many ways. Emotions are “a kind
of language of the self – a code for statements about intentions, actions, and
social relations.” They speak of something quite private, yet they speak as
well of the public spaces we inhabit.
(1993)
Meet the Writer
RESIL B. MOJARES, trained in
literature and anthropology, won several National Book Awards from the Manila
Critics Circle for works in fields of literary criticism, urban and rural
history, and political biography.
He has been a
recipient of prizes for his short stories, a national fellowships in the essay
from the UP ICW, and teaching and research fellowships from the Ford, Toyota
and Rockefeller foundations, Fulbright Program and Social Science Research Council
(New York).
He served as
visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, University of Hawaii and
University of Michigan.
He was honored with
a Gawad Balagtas award by the UMPIL in 1997 for his contributions to the
development of Philippine literature. Dr. Mojares is Professor Emeritus at the
University of San Carlos, Cebu City.
(http://panitikan.com.ph/authors/m/rbmojares.htm)
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