Mindanao as her own metaphor

Christine F. Godinez Ortega · Oct 8, 2019, 12:20 AM

Mindanao’s new voices and the so-called old guards answered the call for submissions to this present anthology, and the editors hoped to show a unified front for the literatures of Mindanao transcending political and personal biases.

A few objectives in putting together Mindanao Harvest 4 (MH4): A 21st Century Literary Anthology (FEU Publications, 2018), edited by Jaime An Lim, Ricardo M. de Ungria and this writer, were to compel writers to write memory and, most significantly, to fulfill a need for materials in the teaching of the literatures of Mindanao.

In the last five decades, Mindanao writers had always attempted to identify and feature young generations of Mindanao writers in anthologies such as Tita Lacambra-Ayala, Alfredo Navarro Salanga, Antonio Enriquez, Leoncio Deriada, Aida Rivera Ford, Macario Tiu, An Lim, De Ungria and this writer, encouraging the young to write.

During our initial stages of discussions, we discovered that there were a few Mindanao writers who either missed the deadline, snubbed the call or simply withdrew their contributions for their own reasons.

Christine Godinez Ortega, Ricardo de Ungria and Jaime An Lim signing books.

Teachers attended the launch of the latest “Mindanao Harvest” anthology.

The editors did not hit the target of featuring 70 or more of the island cluster’s writers but 63 is a good number for the world to glimpse the richness and inexhaustible trove of narratives, poetry and songs of Mindanao, sources that today are only beginning to be tapped, the surface, if at all, barely scratched or dented.

More often than not — trust this writer’s 35-year experience with teachers and writers around the island cluster — it is best to discuss materials that are close to home. Students become involved in discussions, understanding and respecting each other’s aspirations, beliefs and practices as reflected in the writer’s works, the creations and recreations of various narratives based on traditions and on contemporary social realities summed up as Mindanawon writing.

If there is a need to define terms, Mindanao, beyond geography or land mass, is her own metaphor for “Mindanawon” (writing) as a collective noun is a writer’s metaphorical relationship with the island.

And much is demanded to teach the literatures of Mindanao and, as someone said, literature is the most intellectual of the arts. Teachers teaching regional writing must therefore discuss it for its dynamics, meanings and significance, as well as the writings from other regions, for that matter.

Editors, authors and guests during the launch.

Understandably, no one writer can claim to know everything about Mindanao, an island fraught with mystery, composed of peoples of various beliefs, languages and cultures living on natural wealth not fully known by Mindanawons themselves, how much less for the rest of the country?

Many cultural, geographic and linguistic factors explain why most of Mindanao’s complexity and diversity of its being are seldom known or written about.

If you have 23 lumad groups, 13 Islamized groups and thousands of third and fourth generations of descendants of settlers, the only way is to get natives to speak for their own peoples. Being born or raised in the island is not enough as one would need to be a member of the indigenous group he is writing about to put everything in proper context.

Sure, you can argue that it is a human truth being forwarded but good research for fidelity to material is basic.

Aside from this, the mindset of the rest of the country is that the island is on fire, a war zone — brought on by news stories, mostly unfavorable, in the center’s mass media outlets which the uninformed base their biases on in defining the island and its inhabitants.

MH4 is part of a series that attempts to show the island’s beauty and complexity by writers spanning several generations some of whom passed away before the anthology could be released — Deriada, Enriquez, Gumer Rafanan, Francis Macansantos; and the living, so-called old guards, Tiu, Cesar Aquino, Calbi Asain, Said Sadain, Anthony Tan, Marcelo Geocallo and the younger set from various regions of Mindanao writing in Filipino, English and Cebuano and in Binukid, Maguindanawon, Meranaw, Mandaya translated into Filipino or in English.

Absent in this anthology are the writers in Mindanao’s hybrid languages spoken in Butuan, the Davao areas, Cotabato City, Sultan Kudarat and other nearby areas which is worth a volume. Most importantly, the hybrid languages and other varieties must not be subjected to any Tagalog, Cebuano or Hiligaynon grammar as it happened once during the Iligan National Writers Workshop.

A writing fellow’s short story in the Cebuano variety spoken in North Cotabato was not well-received by some panelists and a long debate ensued over what is standard, colloquial or slang Cebuano.

One challenge is for a visitor to listen to someone from South Cotabato speak one of these hybrid languages, say a combination of Manobo, Hiligaynon, Tagalog, Cebuano and Ilocano. Promptly, he will be confused unless he is a linguistics scholar who observes and studies the phenomenon and not just be a mere purist-gatekeeper.

MH4 is a bold attempt therefore to show the island’s cultural diversities and languages embedded in the narratives, plays, poetry and essays. All editors had lengthy discussions which materials to include, score sheets popping in and out of personal emails.

Mindanao Harvest and Mindanao Harvest 2, both edited by An Lim and this writer, were published in 1996 and 1997, respectively, by New Day Publishers. Seventeen years later, Mindanao Harvest 3, a retelling of Mindanao tales, which I edited, was published in 2014 by the MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology and the National Commission for Culture and Arts, and four years after that, Mindanao Harvest 4 was realized.

The editors of this anthology did not always agree on “writing from the periphery” but it has been probed that a writer’s future changes if he is based in the center where publishers and influential patrons could help his career to glorious heights, whatever that means, of course.

It is to the credit of the publisher, the Far Eastern University, to offer the best deal in publishing this anthology, all of its 346 pages showcasing what Mindanao is today and what it holds tomorrow. Perhaps, this time around, Mindanao should further strengthen ties with its neighbors, the Southeast Asian countries, because Mindanao shares more than cultural and religious affinities between land mass or over seawater.

The future seems bright for many of the island’s scholars and writers who have affirmed during the “Seminar on the Teaching of the Literatures of Mindanao” that followed the book launch to push for the formulation of its own critical theories from the ground up for credibility in reading texts as western literary theorists have done for their own.

The possibilities are endless for these literary theories to be formulated starting with Tiu’s nascent lumad literary theory that should yield more intellectual discourse, more translations of works within the island and for cross-cultural and critical studies between Southeast Asian countries and Mindanao’s traditional and contemporary literatures.