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.