Rajah Muda: A Novel

I’ve made some hints about this in one or two of my previous posts, but it is only now that I’m stating it openly: I wrote a novel. For eight months, from September 2014 to April 2015, I wrote a 435-page or 115,000-word manuscript. I finished my third or fourth revision of it this week, and it’s now ready for submission to publishing houses or literary agents, but I have not done any of that.

I’ve gone over the manuscript so many times that I’m sick of it. I can now understand if publishers or agents and ultimately readers won’t gush over it. I’m happy enough that the referees of Likhaan, the literary journal of the University of the Philippines, liked the excerpt that I submitted. The excerpt will appear in this year’s issue of the journal, which will be released this November. I learned from reading the past issues of the journal that being published in it is like winning a major literary award due to the number and quality of submissions and the rigorous process that they go through. I also heard that the payment is quite generous. I’m glad that my hard work is paying off.

Much of the novel deals with the sultanate of Maguindanao, but an important part of it has something to do with the Dulangan Manobos. The opening scene is even set in Kulaman Plateau. I believe it’s vanity to post an excerpt of the novel here, so in lieu of that, here’s the content of the acknowledgment page. The manuscript, after all, might not ultimately come out in book form. I had better say my thanks however and the soonest I can:

One challenge I had to face in writing this novel is the dearth of published materials on the sultanate of Maguindanao and my lack of access to them. I am thus greatly indebted to the resources I found online, most notably Najeeb M. Saleeby’s Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1905), made available by Project Gutenberg in 2013. Also quite a help to me was Thomas M. McKenna’s Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Before I discovered the books, I relied on the genealogy records posted by some members of the Maguindanao and Buayan royal families on their blogs and social media accounts. I owe many thanks to them. Likewise to the people behind the website of the Moro National Liberation Front and to Datu Amir Baraguir, who wrote “From Ascent and Descent towards the Revival: An Introduction to the History and Genealogy of the Maguindanao Sultanate,” which provides more details than most tarsilas.

I used the mentioned resources for the history of the sultanate of Maguindanao from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. The events thereafter that are depicted in this novel are fictional and not inspired by the experiences of any actual person. My apologies, therefore, to the present datus and dumatus for recreating their lives. Furthermore, factual errors that may be found in this novel are mine alone and not by my sources.

Gracielle Deanne Tubera walked with me in Cotabato City, and Rahyll Saga answered some of my questions on the practices of the Maguindanao people. To them I am also thankful.

The information about the Dulangan Manobos was based on Fr. Rafael Tianero’s Violence and Christianization in Manoboland (Cotabato: Notre Dame University Press, 2002), on papers written by Marcelino Maceda of the University of San Carlos, and on papers and books published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. I thank the authors and the institutions that made the researches possible.

Without the support of my family, I could not have written this novel. I owe my parents and my brother a great debt of gratitude. This book is for them.

Good Men Die Young

Last Friday, a barangay tanod was killed in our village. There was a bayle in a sitio, and he tried to pacify a drunk. The drunk stabbed him four times. I know only the tanod by his nickname–Pandoy. He was an extremely shy man, I think partly because he only had a few years of school. I had not exchanged more than a few words with him. Whenever my family had to stay out of the village for a few days, my father would ask Pandoy to feed our dogs, and he would, for a little more than a thank-you. He was known in our village as reliable and hardworking. He was in fact also hired as the official “water tender” of the village’s water system. He fixed leaking pipes and similar stuff, and for his labor, he was given P50 or so per month. As a barangay tanod, he was paid P280 per month. For an amount that most of us would consider a pittance, Pandoy served his community and even gave his life. I find it hard to believe that there there’s still such a person living in this country. Most of us think often of what we can get, not what we can give. Many of us even get as much as we can get away with. I thought I’d learned everything about service from the great men in history I’d read about. I didn’t know I had one more great lesson to learn—from a “lowly” barangay tanod, by example.