Monday, February 05, 2007 Gallivanting nun By Mayette Q. Tabada
THERE are many adjectives to describe a missionary sister in the 1960s.
Certainly “maverick” or “weird” are not the usual ones.
Not unless you are referring to Sr. Ma. Delia Coronel, ICM, Ph.D.
Visitors of the relaunched Folklife Museum of the St. Theresa’s College in Cebu will leave with this palpable impression.
The museum’s wooden santosa collection alone invites the visitor to wonder about the mind that had the prescience to preserve, decades before it became a nebulous thought in people’s perceptions, the handiworks of ordinary folk, unschooled in the so-called fine arts but creating nevertheless finer works of piety, beauty and identity.
After classifying the statues, the National Museum considers the STC museum as the country’s biggest collection of folk-carved Sto. Niños.
That is quite a leap from how it began, as a class project of Sr. Delia and her Philippine history students in 1965.
It was not to be the first and only time that this member of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (ICM) used the classroom to allow her students and collective memory to take off.
As assiduously as they hunted for artifacts, her students worked with her to listen to and collect folk tales from old folks and missionaries to mumbakis (Ifugao priests).
More than a hundred stories were published in 1967 by the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Press as Stories and Legends from Filipino Folklore.
The Doctor of Philosophy in Literature, who received her degree Benemeritus from UST, noted in the book’s introduction that “folklore should be preserved... (as) they are our last link to the heritage that always seems to elude us.”
From the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s, Sr. Delia chaired the folklore division of the University Research Center in the Mindanao State University.
She led her team in collecting and translating the Maranao epic Darangen (meaning “to narrate in song”), which has been compared to the Iliad and Odyssey of Greece and the Ramayana and Mahabharata of India.
By listening to village storytellers, such as the “old fishermen sailing near the forest in Pagadian,” and studying the kirim (Maranao handwritten song books), the MSU researchers preserved the epic in its original poetry, as well as translated this to English prose and poetry for modern readers.
The eight-volume, 26-book Darangen was given a special award for outstanding achievement by the Manila Critics Circle in 1990.
Sr. Delia became a folklore fellow in oral epics with the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. From 1977 to 1997, she was cited in the International Biographical Center’s “Who’s Who” of intellectuals, women leaders and workers in community service.
But the “poetess-scholar,” as an MSU colleague described her, was best known and appreciated by her students.
Dr. Amor Hernando, a former student, remembers a writer referring to Sr. Delia as a “gallivanting nun.”
Hernando remembers when Sr. Delia, along with a Franciscan nun, was kidnapped for two weeks while in the forests of Lanao during the late ‘70s.
STC librarians Jonas Arnibal and Annie Tenebro recall how she became a national sensation, partly because she was first kidnapped by one group of bandits, and later traded to another group.
After her release, she said she had former students in both groups, who allowed her to interview and teach them.
She later published her experience in a series of 12 articles in Philippine Daily Express and Mr. & Ms. Magazine.
The title of the latter article? “How to be kidnapped in style.”
