DJ WORKZ: Non-Fiction

Good-bye, Flipper

By DJ Workz - November 28, 2017

GOOD-BYE, FLIPPER

Simeon Dumdum, Jr.

¹They’re looking for a little girl who was photographed squatting beside a dead dolphin. the photograph—captioned, “Good-bye, Flipper”—had won a prize in a contest. Touched by the picture, someone has offered to give the girl gifts.

²of the creatures of the sea, the dolphin probably comes closest to the heart of a child. Hollywood has much to do with this, thanks to the many films and television series in which the dolphin, predictably named “Flipper,” plays a child’s best friend. the dolphin’s entrenchment in our affections, however, is not entirely the work of show business. The creature is naturally friendly and intelligent. Constantly smiling (the beak gives the impression), it swims alongside ships and regales everyone with its somersaults. And its popularity with people goes back a long time. the ancient Greeks and Romans mentioned the dolphin in their mythologies and portrayed it on their coins, pottery and walls.

³How the dolphin in the photograph died, we do not know. (If a picture speaks a thousand words, it can also ask a thousand questions.) did the fish (or mammal) get itself beached after its sense of direction fouled up? Did a heartless fisherman spear its heart? Whatever happened, a little girl was there to mourn its death.

⁴She reminds me of Bidasari, the girl in a Malay poem mentioned by Sir James Frazer. A merchant and his wife had seen her when she was a baby, and (being childless) adopted the little angel. The merchant had a golden fish made and into the fish he transferred Bidasari’s soul. He put the golden fish in a golden box and hid it in the pond in his garden.

⁵In time Bidasari grew into a lovely woman.

⁶The queen of the kingdom heard of Bidasari’s beauty, and, afraid that the king might take her as second wife, lured Bidasari into the palace and there tortured her. But Bidasari could not die because her soul was in the fish. Unable to bear the suffering, she told the queen, “If you want me to die, you must get the box in the pond in my father’s garden.”

⁷The queen had the box brought to her and had it opened. In the box was the golden fish. “My soul is in that fish,” Bidasari said. “In the morning, take it out of the water, and in the evening put it back again. Wear it around your neck and don’t leave it lying about. If you do this, I will die.”

⁸So the queen did a told. Whenever the queen removed the fish from the water, Bidasari would collapse, and would revive when the fish was put back in the water. The girl now in her control, the queen sent her home.

⁹The parents brought Bidasari out of the city and housed her in a lonely and desolate spot. There she lived alone, going through the sufferings that coincided with the sufferings of the fish which had her soul.

¹⁰One day the king went out hunting and came to the house and found the unconscious Bidasari and was smitten with her beauty. He tried to wake her up but failed. Towards evening of the next day he returned, and still he could not revive her. But when night came, Bidasari came to herself and told the king the secret of her life.

¹¹When the king returned to the palace, he got the box from the queen and put the golden fish back in the water. Bidasari recovered, and the king married her.

¹²The girl in the photograph is little Bidasari. In a sense her soul was in the fish, and the girl died with the dolphin.

¹³So far the girl is nameless, which makes her every girl, everyone. Just as Bidasari’s soul was in the golden fish, so is everyone’s soul in the environment, in every fish and beast and tree. The ancient peoples knew this. Before they would go out fishing or hunting, they would purify themselves to be worthy of the catch. They would preach to the fish to come and be caught and not be afraid, because they would not burn their bones but would throw them back into the sea, there to become fish again.

¹⁴He who seeks to console the girl with gifts shares the spirit of the ancients. He wants to restore her life. But to do this he—and the community—must assure her and everyone else that no dolphin will ever die again, that all of creation, which has all our souls, will endure. This in effect is to say to the dead Flipper, not “Farewell,” but “Fare forward.”

Meet the Writer

SIMEON DUMDUM, JR. is a widely published and anthologized poet. He was born on March 7, 1948 in Balamban, Cebu. His impressive educational attainment include degrees in Law from the University of San Carlos, Cebu City, 1976, Theology from the San Carlos Seminary, Makati City, 1970 and Philosophy from the Cluain Mhuire and University College, Ireland, 1969. He works as Senior Attorney for the Atlas Consolidated Mining and Development Corp. He is also a columnist for the SunStar, a Cebu City daily newspaper.

Dumdum has attended writers’ workshops and conferences in the Philippines, Singapore, and England. He was also panelist Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers Workshop. His awards include Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (Third Prize, Selected Poems, 1981; Third Prize, Axioms, 1983; Second Prize, Masbate, 1982 and Second Prize, Gossamer, 1984). He has also garnered Honorable Mention from the CCP Literary Contest and a Citation, Philippine Literary Arts Council.

His poems appeared in Focus, Jose, Solidarity, Mithi, Midweek, Caracoa, Philippine Studies, Versus, Kamao, and Tenggara. Dumdum’s volumes of poetry are The Gift of Sleep (1982) and Third World Opera (1987).

(http://panitikan.com.ph/authors/d/sdumdum.htm)

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Literature 1

Visayan Love

By DJ Workz - November 27, 2017

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)

¹Talk 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.”

²Is 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.

³One 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”:

⁴Busa 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.

⁵Yet, 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.

⁷What 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.

⁸Take 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.”

⁹There 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).

¹⁰Love 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.

¹¹The “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.

¹²It 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:

¹³Kining akong paghigugma

Sa bukog, Inday, mikagit

Kong hinog ka pa lang sab-a

Lamyon ko hangtod ang panit.

¹⁴In 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.

¹⁵Reconstructing 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.”

¹⁶Still, 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).

¹⁷What 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.

¹⁸This 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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Good-bye, Flipper

Visayan Love

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