Monday, July 27, 2015

More Fiction Here

Note: I wrote this in May, and I’ve changed my mind about a few things here. For one, I’m no longer posting my newly written short stories on this blog because the publication venues for them turned out to be not too few after all. I’m thinking, though, of trying my hand at flash fiction and sharing my outputs here. They will be set in Kulaman or have Manobo characters! Though some parts of this post no longer holds true, I decided to push on with its publication because much of it is about my views on writing and what I want to do for my region. This is perhaps the most personal of my posts in this blog, too hard to discard, too taxing to revise, so please bear with me.

At least once a month for the next few months, I’m posting in this blog some of my unpublished short stories. No, I’m not doing it because I can’t wait for them to appear in legitimate venues, so to speak, such as magazines, journals, and websites that are dedicated to literature or have a literary section. I’m doing it simply because I’ve written several stories recently and there has been no enough publication venues for them.

One of my lifelong writing goals is to write at least one hundred stories, set mostly in Cotabato Region. Being published (in the traditional sense), getting paid, or winning awards for them is not my primary concern, though I wouldn’t complain if I happened to achieve any or all of those three along the way. In fact, I always do my best whenever I write so that the story would be worthy of any or all of those three, but if none of them happens, I don’t get discouraged—not anymore, anyway. (I believe I know now how to handle rejections and criticisms, but this topic requires another post.) I enjoy the process, the journey, including the not-so-enjoyable parts of it, so I no longer give so much attention to what happens to the output. If you want to, you may read it, publish it (if you’re an editor), pay me for it, or flatter me for it. If you don’t want to, or if you feel the story or me doesn’t deserve it, it’s fine. You don’t owe me anything. I prefer to write a new story rather than wait on an old story to get some recognition.

In connection to my goal to write a hundred stories, I’ve made a change to the page about me in this blog. The list of my fiction works now contains all the stories that I’ve made available to the public, by means of traditional publications and otherwise. I’ve written at least thirty stories so far. They’ve helped me get into five writers workshops, win a minor literary award, and earn almost nothing. It’s not a bad record, I believe, considering that I started to be serious about writing fiction just five years ago. An average of six stories per year isn’t prolific, but those five years included a year of working full-time and not writing any new story, a year and a half of writing drafts of two novels, days of writing updates for this blog, and months of dabbling in projects and ventures that are too trivial to specify. Anyway, back to the short stories: while I don’t care much how far or high the individual stories go, I hope to be judged by the lifelong effort I would give to Cotabato Region and its literature. I aim not only for quality but also for quantity, so do count with me.

Monday, July 20, 2015

A Bird’s Nest


I found a bird’s nest—with two eggs in it! Now this isn’t really news in a mountainous area that still has considerably lush vegetation. If you set out here to look for a bird’s nest, your quest will end in less than thirty minutes. What’s special about the nest I discovered is that it’s cuplike, which is getting rarer to find nowadays. The nests here are commonly that of a sparrow’s—ball-like and has a small circular opening at the side.

I found the nest in the school across our house. I was taking a late-afternoon walk, pretending I’m Charles Dickens exploring the streets of London, when I noticed a sparrow’s nest nestled in the newly trimmed hedges. I happened to have my camera with me that time, so I decided to take a photo of the nest. The mouth was clearly exposed to passers-by, but the whole nest was intact because whoever spruced up the plant either had a good heart or had the artistic sense to include the nest in the design. After I took just one shot, a tiny bird flew away in fright from inside the plant. I brushed aside the tiny leaves and branches, and found the beautiful cuplike nest. I peered closer into the nest, and to my delight, I found two unhatched eggs.

The eggs were maroon or purplish. I could not tell for sure because it was getting dark. I took a photo of them, and I hope my camera processed the color right. I also did not see the color of the bird that fled from the nest; it just appeared to my eyes as a brownish blur. As I know from experience, though, cuplike nests are built by yellow hummingbirds (yes, the kind of bird that can fly backward).

I checked the sparrow’s nest, and as I had assumed, it had already served its purpose. The eggs had hatched and only shells were left there. I got worried that, just like what happened to me, the sparrow’s nest would attract passers-by and inadvertently lead them to the other nest. So I took the used nest and threw it away. I wished that the eggs would hatch soon because June was coming and regular classes would start again. The eggs or the hatchlings would surely not survive in the hands of mischievous students.

I wondered if the person who trimmed the hedges had seen the second nest. Maybe he didn’t, for the nest was well-hidden inside the plant and he must have been working fast. Maybe he did and he was really good-hearted so he left it there untouched. In any case, I was glad that it was safe. Soon, two lives would be born in it, and then fly around and liven up the air with their music.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Book: Children of Tulus

In last week’s post, I made mention of Stuart Schlegel’s Children of Tulus, the book that inspired me to write a short story about the Tiruray people. It occurred to me that some readers of this blog might want to get a copy of the interesting and well-written book, so I’m posting here more details about it.

The book, subtitled Essays on the Tiruray People, was published by Giraffe Books in 1994, and I bought my copy in Cebu sometime in 2013, as indicated in the note that I wrote at the back page of the front cover. I’m sure that I bought my copy at Book Sale, but I can no longer remember if it was in the SM branch or in the Robinsons branch. I believe both outlets—indeed, all Book Sale outlets—have copies of the book until now. Here in Cotabato Region, there’s a Book Sale stall in KCC Mall in Koronadal City and one or two in the malls in General Santos City.

Though the book is twenty years old now, my copy was brand-new when I bought it. The cover and the inside pages didn't have any crease. That’s because Giraffe, apparently, has been keeping tons of its books in a warehouse. As far as I know, the publishing company has stopped operating for about a decade now, and it decided for some reason to clean its warehouse just a couple of years ago. Book Sale, which sells pre-perused books, has been there for a while, but Giraffe books appeared on the shelves of the store just recently. I wonder if Giraffe authors still get royalty from the sale of their books; though the books are sold for the first time, their prices are for second-hand items. I got my copy of Children of Tulus for just sixty pesos, if I remember it right. Some titles, especially by Filipino authors who are no longer active in the literary scene, sell for as low as twenty pesos.

Below are the contents of the book. I hope the table will guide you if you are you are doing a research or entice you if you are simply looking for a good read. Whatever your intention may be, you must get a copy of the book. It’s worth your time.

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Tiruray and I

Chapter 2
Tiruray-Maguindanaon Ethnic Relations: An Ethnohistorical Puzzle

Chapter 3
Tiruray Morality

Chapter 4
The Traditional Tiruray Zodiac: The Celestial Calendar of a Swidden and Foraging People

Chapter 5
Tiruray Gardens: From Use-Right to Private Ownership

Chapter 6
From Tribal to Peasant: Two Tiruray Communities

Chapter 7
Tiruray Traditional and Peasant Subsistence: A Comparison

Chapter 8
Diet and the Tiruray Shift from Swidden to Plow Farming

Chapter 9
Repercussions of Naive Scholarship: The Background of Local Furor

Chapter 10
The Many Social Worlds of Southeast Asia

Chapter 11
The Anthropologist as Outsider

Chapter 12
The Customs of the Tiruray People
Written by Jose Tenorio (Sigayan) in 1863 and translated and annotated by Schlegel in 1969
I. Concerning Tiruray Houses and Food
II. Concerning Their Beliefs, Their Religions, and Beliyan
III. Concerning Their Divinities and Supernatural Beings
IV. Concerning a Variety of Superstitions and Charms
V. Concerning Their Clothes, Weapons, and Adornment
VI. Concerning Killings and the Causes That Motivate Them
VII. Concerning Their Marriages
VIII. Concerning Anniversaries of Weddings and Births
IX. Concerning Other Ways of Seeking a Spouse
X. Continuing about Marriages
XI. Concerning Births
XII. Concerning What They Do with the Sick and the Dead
XIII. Concerning the Clearing of Land and Cultivations
XIV. Concerning Songs and Dreams
XV. Concerning Their Leaders and Their Mode of Government

Author’s photo and profile on the back cover of the book. I owe a lot to the efforts of people like Stuart Schlegel. I hope my writings will be the same to future writers and researchers.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Fiction: The Talisman

My first story with Tiruray characters, “The Talisman,” was published a few months ago in Dagmay, the literary journal of the Davao Writers Guild. I didn’t really want to write a story about the Tiruray people; I just wanted to focus on the Dulangan Manobo since they’re the main indigenous tribe here in Kulaman Plateau and I get to interact with some of them once in a while. A book, however, made me fascinated with the practices and beliefs of the Tiruray, and while reading it, a story was conceived in my head and would not let me sleep until I wrote it. So write it I did.

I had reservations, though, about writing the story. One chapter of the book, Children of Tulus: Essays on the Tiruray People, is devoted to a “naive” article written by a history professor and the “furor” it caused among educated Tiruray. The article, published in a magazine in the late 1960s, contained inaccurate statements about the tribe, portraying them as much less cultured than they actually were, and Tiruray professionals were “aroused to address letters of adamant protest and corrections to the editors.” I got a little worried that some Tiruray might feel the same way about the story I would write. I knew nothing much about the tribe, aside from the facts and insights Stuart Schlegel had set down in his book, and I wasn’t sure if my brain had processed correctly all the information. Was I qualified to write a story about Tiruray people (whom I had not had any interaction with) and set in Upi, Maguindanao (in which I had not set foot)? Wouldn’t my story just help perpetuate misconceptions about the tribe?

In the end, the desire to tell a story won over my qualms regarding accuracy. I told myself I was writing a work of fiction, not an academic paper. Before anything else, my duty was to create interesting characters caught in an interesting situation. My aim should be emotional truth rather than factual truth. In any case, I feel that some clarifications about the story are in order. I’m setting them down here.

First off, I took some liberties on how the Tiruray use charms or amulets. In my story, the main character asks for his father’s priceless ungit, or hunting charm, so that he can use it to seduce a woman. When an ungit is used as a love charm, it is very effective, but the problem is that it will lose forever its efficacy as a hunting charm. The ungit in my story is a tiny piece of cloth containing an assortment of tiny objects and hanging on a rattan string, the ends of which are tied to the wearer’s ears. According to Schlegel’s book, an ungit is “a charm employed in hunting or fishing.” The example of an ungit given in the book is in the form of a dukah, which is “any of several kinds of charms that are made using the sap of trees,” burned to produce smoke, much like incense. Tiruray hunters make their dogs smell the smoke, and the smoke is believed to make the dogs “bite wild pigs and deer.” From these definitions, I assumed that not all ungits are in the form of a dukah and not all dukahs are used as an ungit. So I made my ungit a pendant tied to a string instead of an incense. Furthermore, I made my ungit hanging on the person’s ears instead of loped around the neck. I did it because I got fascinated when I read that some Tiruray wear their charms “hanging from their ears, passing below their jaw.” The image is unusual and therefore striking, and I couldn’t resist using it in my story. The Tiruray, though, have several ways of wearing their charms on their body. Most likely, it’s difficult to find an actual Tiruray who has an ungit that is described in my story.

Another thing that I’m uneasy about is my depiction of the main character’s homeland. The landscape degrades too rapidly from a lush rainforest to balding farmlands. As I know, based on the situation here in Kulaman Plateau, such a change takes at least a decade to happen, not two or three years, as what can be deduced from my story. I have no excuse for such inaccuracy, though I must say that many readers would probably not mind, for with so many and so much environmental issues today that humanity faces, no environmental destruction seems anymore to be too rapid or too bad to be true.

My qualms notwithstanding, I’m glad to have written a Tiruray story. I hope I will also be able to write at least one short story each on the other indigenous tribes living near Kulaman Plateau—the T’boli, the B’laan, the controversial Tasaday, and the Lambangian, whose identity as a tribe seems to be not officially recognized yet, for it is composed of Tiruray and Dulangan Manobo who intermarried. I won’t make a conscious effort, though, to write a story about them. I read nonfiction materials on indigenous peoples simply because I like learning about them. I like learning about Mindanao, and indigenous peoples are an integral part of the history and culture of this vast island. I don’t read to look for a story idea. I read for fun and to increase my understanding of life, and every so often along the way, a tiny detail in the text would delight or disturb me, and would not let me sleep until I weave an entirely different story, an entirely different world, around it. That’s one of the few ways stories come to me. That’s how I came to write “The Talisman.”

At 241 pages, Stuart Schlegel’s Children of Tulus is thin—yet packed.