Friday, August 22, 2008 Yap: Revivalist By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
THERE'S a Muslim streak in my family history, and I think my DNA is a tangle of cultural odds and ends. My father, he with the Chinese blood, had hopped through religions all his life. My mom is strictly Catholic; she was on her way to the nunnery when my erpats hijacked her flight to some divine destination.
My sister’s Protestant, by virtue of marriage. I am attracted to Buddhism, but I light church candles in the morning on the way to my Postmodernism class.
My niece, all of five years old, last time she went to Simala, she actually asked the Virgin Mary for “powers.” Decades from now, she’ll be senate president or chief justice.
The novelist Salman Rushdie puts it rather better. It’s nothing but the “baroque multiplicity” of today’s world, different strokes for different folks. My books report that ever since the West led the slaughter of Jews and played bowling in Nagasaki, the rest of the world finds the erstwhile cultural leaders suspect. That made western hegemony a crumbling idea, and paved the way for cultural assertion, people summoning history for solid grounding. “An unexamined life,” Plato once said, “is not worth living.” An unexamined national life is not worth the nationalism. Reread history, and you’ll find all the crazy distortions.
Something bothers my friend Dodong M. He says some radio commentators have a rather oversimplified opinion of the trouble in Mindanao. What do you expect, some of them argue with the complexity of instant coffee without creamer.
Well, Dodong knows a thing or two. He was in boarding school in MSU in Marawi and had Muslim classmates, intellectuals who knew their history deeply. It goes a long way back, he says about the Bangsa Moro. Dodong wants to join on-air discussions, but he’s afraid he might use up an entire program. It can’t be explained, he says, in a few minutes. The tendency would be a full-length lecture, and that might trigger a pocket civil war.
How many times have we been told about “Moro raiders” during the Spanish times? Some of our history teachers, benighted as they were by history written by suspects, pass on the idea that those bunch of balangay-plowing raiders were pirates who swooped on villages and burned churches. They were naval forces, my friend Dodong says. The raids were ways of resistance because the Spaniards posed a threat to them.
I agree. The Visayans were too friendly, and that is a rather friendlier term for submissive or subservient. The Muslims in Mindanao already had the better political structure in place, and of course weren’t comfy with all those pale boys in tights throwing their weight around. However, says Dodong, all those three hundred years of war and resistance wore them out.
Greater force outrun them and pushed them to the margins.
That takes time to explain, says Dodong, and he dunks his pan de sal on his coffee. While the crust softens in the heat, there is a burst of gunfire in North Cotabato. Villagers scamper across fields knowing death could whiz by any moment and claim any of them. The MILF is a revivalist, meaning it wants to rouse old ghosts that were ambushed by history and pushed to the margins.
There is something misplaced in the idea that it is our Muslim brothers who need some understanding about how our democracy works or what the constitution is all about. Something happened way before we could even imagine democracy as a nation.
I remember some tourism officers explaining how the original church structure in one town was burned by “Moro pirates.” There goes the term again.
