THERE is a certain kind of tourist that comes to these parts. They thrive on the underdeveloped, hoping the place remains in a standstill, like a carefully-preserved specimen.
This is the part of the narrative I guiltily leave out. Whereas Mark longs for escape, his cage is built by the economic enablement of tourists like myself who push him back, and make him stay.
Ancestry. Lineage. Obligation. Such baggage. He seemed to hate it all.
Empathy for Mark, and all young T’bolis, who long for lace instead of T’nalak, fries instead of fak - native frog - is temporarily forgotten as I set foot at the School of Living Tradition.
The gono bong in the school, a two-sloped house on stilts made of cogon and kawayan, is a bed and breakfast on one side, and weaving center on the other.
It is ode and lament to the dying, to a culture that has come to rely on strangers to appreciate its existence. They resign themselves to the over commercialization of their kind, to national artists that dance on ferry boats to survive.
Mark drops me off, refusing to come in, insisting to wait across the road, where the karaoke is.
The school is run by Ate Maria, a cultural worker that parallels preservation as a defense of the ancient from the transient.
There is a discussion about cultural sensitivity on the top floor. Students dressed in malongs and T’nalak find their place in the tier. The younger ones in front, and the college students, the five who attend anyway, at the back. They hide behind the wooden beams, heads dropped, waiting for the inevitable sermon about their sneakers and jeans.
Ate Maria shows a film about brassmakers and wood carvers, musicians and dancers. And almost immediately after, plunges into the perils of forgetting.
There is nothing new in this discourse. Everyone in the room has heard it before. But there is a stress in her demeanor. The more educated the young seem to be, the more detached they become to their lumad origins.
She is convinced that the screech of the tahao bird, the dreams of the weavers, the poetry of the lamingon will only return if its people also return to where they are rooted.
“You need to go back, kids,” she lashes. “You need to look back.”
The enemy is right across the street. Mark’s amplified rendition of Marco Sison’s My Love Will See You Through cuts through her lecture. It serves as timely case to everything she takes active resistance to.
Taking opportunity of the distraction, the students go down one by one to the ground floor, exiting in the quietest way.
The restaurant across the school insists on throwing me a sendout. The cook nets five tilapia from the artificial pond. He prepares it in all the ways he knows how: grilled, fried, sweet and sour, paksiw and in clear soup, tola. He gives his customers free beers to take part.
I am too conscious to invite Ate Maria, to let her participate in the very thing she stands against. I ask the host if I can invite Mark and his family instead.
“Ah, the festival winner. Good voice,” he tells me, then adds as afterthought, “But he has forgotten how to be a T’boli.”
Mark comes alone. The beer and gin elevate his woes, turning them to desperate pleas. Or perhaps it is the prospect of me leaving, and his non-leaving.
Please, take him away. His first wife cheats. His second too, with her uncle. His third, with his first cousin. The fourth is tucked away in Klubi. And the fifth is heartless. Doesn’t cook or clean; lets him do all the chores after a backbreaking day.
Please sponsor my kid, Angelo. Or take me. Save me. Save my family.
In the crumbling duality of Cebu and S’bu, I realize he could very well be me, and I him. I am stuck by the randomness of our fates.
The room darkens, one of the many brownouts of the day. The lake below deepens in its signature purple haze.
In the distance, a rooster crows, setting off a sequence of other crows. And it is in this distance, away for a time, that something tells me that while I want to save him, save all the displaced, I cannot.
An askal sleeps at the foot of my bed in the communal room that accommodates 12. The sloped window allows a view of the highway where a bygone tune, and the work chatter of women, drift in.
I like this sense of community, could picture the gono bong in mountain tops where T’boli elders sleep together; husbands, wives, and children, with no need for borders. Bonol - small fish from streams - and banalon - gabi cooked in leaves - are passed from hand to hand.
This is not idyllic to the modern sensibility, of course. The deity of progress, Tomorrow, offers a more promising prospect: that in its landscape, anyone can find a niche of his own, a place where individuality isn’t bound by culture, or condition.
My phone lights up to reveal an unanswered greeting. Hyu h’lafus. Good morning.
I’ve ignored many Hyu h’lafuses since then.
Each time, I summon the higher beings, Dwata if need be, to ask the people in the world of water and glass to stay, to stay.