Playing with Water
Page 30
BANTAY: a guard or watchman. ‘Bantay salakay’ is a favourite adage, meaning ‘the guard invades’ and embodying the same irony as the rhetorical Latin question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
BANTOL: the venomous stone-fish, although the word is often used indiscriminately for the other camouflaged members of the same family (Scorpaenidae)
BARANGAY: effectively a village, the smallest administrative unit. Historically, the name derives from that of the long-boats in which the Malay settlers arrived in the Philippines. At that time such a boat-load would typically have comprised a headman and his extended family. Even today it is possible to find barangays which are still virtually single-family villages despite the effacing by countless outside marriages of the original family name. The office of barangay captain is elective and carries distinct local status as well as the power to settle disputes and right minor wrongs (barangay justice). It thus represents a great temptation to unscrupulous politicians to ‘job in’ their own supporters in barangay elections on the grounds that he who controls the barangay captains allegedly controls the country at grass-roots level. President Marcos’s KBL party was in effective administrative control of a majority of the country’s barangays until his downfall in 1986, so in the event this seems not to have helped him much. In any case the psychological significance of the barangay as a historical and selfsufficient unit persists strongly. The word is often misspelled ‘barangay’ even in the Philippines. See also the following entry
BARKADA: deriving from the Spanish word for boat-load or crew, this concept has great significance for Filipinos and its meaning varies according to context. At its most innocuous it can describe one’s workmates, one’s circle of friends, one’s drinking companions, which groups can command intense loyalty. In less savoury circumstances it means gang
BARRIO: see following
BARYO: district or subdivision of a municipality.
BAYANIHAN: the principle of doing one’s bit for a community project. Filipinos often cite this as evidence of a boundlessly altruistic national spirit. Not surprisingly the motives for someone giving his labour free range from neighbourly love to respect for majority public opinion
BAYATI: the fruit of a bush which I have not been able to identify. The fruit is cooked, pounded while still hot and can then be mixed with the meat of hermit crabs to make a poisonous fish-bait
BIBINGKA: sweet, flat, circular cakes of rice flour and coconut, properly leavened with fermenting tuba (q.v.) and most improperly with baking powder
BISLAD: sliced, salted and dried fish (syn. daing, q.v.)
BOLO: large knife, machete
BONAK: a name used indiscriminately to describe several species of coral-eating parrotfishes (family Scaridae)
BOKAYO: a sweetmeat made of grated coconut and sugar. The nearest English equivalent would be coconut ice.
BULAKBOL: truant
CALAMANSI: (see kalamansi)
CALESA: (see kalesa)
COGON: (see kugon)
KALAMANSÎ: a small, acid citrus fruit. It is round and no bigger than a marble
KALESA: a horsedrawn, two-wheeled high trap with a roof
KAMOTENG-KAHOY: cassava, manioc
‘KANO: Amerikano. Virtually any white Westerner
KAWAWA: pitiful. Hence ‘ay, kawawa!’ can mean (according to the amount of irony in the speaker’s tone) anything from a sympathetic ‘Poor sod!’ to an entirely unconvincing ‘Oh, poor darling!’
KAYURAN: a grater or rasp
KBL: Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (New Society Movement). The political organisation created by President Marcos as the main vehicle for his own support
KOMOKON: a species of small dove
KUGON: long coarse grass (Imperata cylindrica) much used for thatching
DAING: see bislad
DUHAT: the Java plum tree (Syzygium cumini) or its fruit. Also known as lumboy
ESQ: Extra Smooth Quality. This is the slogan on Tanduay Distillery’s rum and has become the name for the drink. See also lapad
HULI: catch. It can refer to animals of all variety, including fish, taken with any sort of snare, trap or device. May huli mo? addressed to an angler is the equivalent of ‘Any luck?’
LAPAD: lit. ‘broad’. As a noun it almost invariably refers to the flat 375ml bottles of ESQ which are commonly used as containers/units of measure for kerosene, cooking oil, fish sauce, vinegar, spices and a hundred other things
LAPU-LAPU: generic name for fish of the grouper (Serranidae) family
LUMBOY: see duhat
MALUNGKOT: there is no single English equivalent for this word since it means both ‘sad’ and ‘lonely’
MANITIS: commonly, the Indian goat-fish but can describe several other members of the Mullidae
MERYENDA: an afternoon snack often taken for elevenses as well for good measure
NINONG: a godfather or a sponsor at a wedding, confirmation or baptism
NIPA: leaves of the nipa palm (Nypa fruticans) used for thatching
NITO: thin, whippy vines whose tough outer layer can be stripped and used for plaiting, binding and decorative handicrafts
NIYUBAK: a heavy, doughlike mush made of pounded bananas, grated coconut and sugar. Many children appear to like it
NPA: New People s Army: the Communist guerrilla movement
PAKIUSAP: near enough the word for ‘please’ but used in the present context in its modern idiomatic sense of a favour done for any one of a dozen possible reasons.
PANÀ: bow and arrow, hence spear gun
PASALUBONG: a gift expected of anyone arriving after a journey, typically brought by people returning from a stay in Manila or by balikbayan, migrants returning from abroad
PETRON: the Philippines’ national brand of petrol
PORMA: shuttering used for concrete constructions
PULUTAN: snacks served with drink
SAHING: the ‘white pitch’ obtained from the sahing tree, otherwise known as the pili-nut tree (Canarium luzonicum)
SAMARAL: any of several varieties of rabbit-fish (Siganidae)
SAMPAGITA: the Philippines’ National Flower (Nyctanthes sambac)
SARI-SARI: lit. a mixture or variety. Sari-sari or general stores are the basic shop of the Philippine provinces
SAYANG: as an adjective it means ‘wasted’ or ‘lost’; as an interjection, ‘What a pity!’
SULIRAP: panels of woven palm fronds used for roofing and walling houses. Each frond, split lengthwise down the centre of its midrib, provides two panels. In this province a common variant is ‘surilap’
SUMAN: a delicacy made of slightly sweetened glutinous rice bound about with a leaf into the form of a sausage
‘SUPERWHEEL’: ubiquitous brand of blue detergent soap sold by the flat bar
TALISAY: a large and shady species of tree (Terminalia catappa)
TAPAHAN: a dryer or smoker for fish or meat
TUBA: the fermented juice/sap of the palm tree. It is drunk throughout the Philippines and surely qualifies as the National Drink. The juice is retrieved morning and evening. When it is still a few hours old it is generally quite sweet, but fermentation is continuous and the tuba gets progressively stronger in alcohol and more acidic. After eight or ten hours it is virtually undrinkable and, left to itself, gradually turns into suka or vinegar. Since there is no grape wine in the Philippines tuba vinegar is the only variety available although kalamansî juice and tamarinds can also be used for sourness in cooking
TUBLI: (root of a) vine which I cannot identify and which, pounded, is used for stunning fish. It is most commonly used for squirting into undersea holes where there are milling shoals of sumbilang, the catfish (Plotosus anguillaris) which is defended by venomous dorsal and pectoral fin spines
TUKO: the gecko
TUYUAN: a device or a place for drying firewood or fish
YAMAS: the residue after the milk has been rinsed and squeezed out of grated coconut, used for animal feed. True coconut milk, gata, is extensively
used in Asian cuisine and has nothing whatever to do with the dank water found in the middle of the nut, which the British call ‘milk’. No Pinoy (Filipino) would thank you for a glass of this rancid, elderly liquid which comes from the antique nuts with leathery flesh exported to Europe. Such are prime copra nuts, not eaters. They have nothing in common with young ‘eating’ coconuts, buko (hence bukayo), with their sweet, clear water and thin skin of slippery milky flesh beginning to form on the inside of the nut like the white hardening in the shell of a gently boiling egg
Notes
1. (p. 10) For a sidelight on the relation between poison and love I cannot resist quoting Francis Huxley’s brilliant and playful book about Alice in Wonderland, The Raven and the Writing Desk. Speaking of treacle as deriving from theriac, an antidote against snake poison, he writes:
For theriac only came to mean ‘medicine’ because it originally meant ‘snake-venom’, the medicine being nothing less than a homeopathic dose of more snake venom to cure the original poison. Venom, however, comes from the opposite direction, from venenum, a love philtre straight from Venus herself; just as poison comes from ‘(love-) potion’. To show the two movements involved we can express this simply as a proportion: Love turns to poison as poison turns to antidote
(pp. 105-6)
Ignoring the wholly illusory etymological similarity between the French words poison and poisson as a red herring, it is still interesting that I was once told of a cure for an unwanted tiwarik spell. This was that within nine days the true lovers should perform an act of copulation so brief it might last only a single stroke, followed by immediate withdrawal. This now seems to make sense for two reasons, the more pragmatic being that if the couple were not already married such an event should under all social convention result in marriage, which would presumably put the jealous spell-caster for ever on the wrong side of the pale of hope. But a further reason would be that it obeys the homeopathic principle, viz., that a small dose of fish can be counteracted by an even smaller (even though the species itself might be larger). Untreated, though, tiwarik’s venereal poison becomes incurable after nine days. Why nine, though? This remains a mystery, but one quite easily elucidated if we bear in mind the importance of (ecclesiastical) Latin in Filipino superstitious beliefs and spells. Treated topsy-turvily, as befits anything to do with tiwarik, the word novem re-arranges itself comfortably as venom. It will be objected that Tagalog speakers of Spanish times would not have known the English word ‘venom’. This is too pedestrian a quibble to argue about. Instead the objector should go straight on and ponder the significance of nine as the product of the magical three multiplied by itself which appears in all sorts of Tagalog spells and incantations.
2. (p. 89) Independent as people like Sising are, they still live within a money economy. Generally speaking, Sising’s income in hard cash comes from collecting and selling tuba, selling the occasional piglet or chicken he can keep from the clutches of the Widow Soriano, selling his labour for things such as lokad, or copra-making.
At the time of writing this (July 1986) the exchange rates, with rare convenience, are more or less US$ 1 = 20 pesos, £1 = 30 pesos. At these prices, then, his eleven tuba-producing palms cost him 17p each per month. Each must be climbed twice daily in all weathers and at all seasons. The amount of tuba a tree produces depends on the season as well as on the tree’s individual quality: July is a bad time whereas in February yields are higher. Sising is currently earning about 27p a day from his trees, which works out at a clear profit of some £6.25 a month.
Once a month, maybe even twice, he will work on making copra. This is an exhausting process which usually lasts three days, depending on the number and dispersion of the coco-palms. In recent years the price of copra – and hence the rate of pay of Sising’s labour, which is directly related – has been falling steadily. This is partly due to a weakening international market for commodities like coconut oil and partly to corruption under the Marcos administration of Cocofed, the Coconut Producers’ Federation, the net result of which is a situation of near-despair in a thousand places like Kansulay whose income, daily life and even culture centre largely around the coco-palm. The buying price of copra here is now down to around 3p a kilo and scarcely a centavo appears to have been ploughed back into the industry by its monopolistic representative body to induce landowners like the Sorianos to plant new, higher-yielding stock or encourage more efficient production. This is not merely a cause for lament: it is a cause for bitter anger amongst those like Sising who understand perfectly what has happened and who understand also that their three days’ backbreaking labour will earn them a total of 84p. A few representative prices will indicate how far this sum will go. In this province a kilo of rice, the staple belly filler, now costs l9p. The price of fish fluctuates wildly according to season, to whether the market has been flooded by a bumper catch or starved by a typhoon or adverse current. Insofar as there is a ‘standard’ fish here it is the tulingan, a member of the tuna family about the size of a mackerel which is caught practically the year round. In the past month the price of tulingan has veered between a low of 10p per kilo to 75p. It at once becomes apparent that for the inland-dwellers or non-fishermen of Kansulay many days are fishless. Eggs, depending on size, sell for about 5p each. A lapad of coconut oil costs 12p, one of vegetable cooking oil 14p. A lapad of paraffin costs 9p, one of ESQ rum 29p. The cheapest cigarettes are sold in paper rolls of thirty with a charming blurred picture of a Twenties Spanish-style couple on the wrapper. They are called Magkaibigan (Friends) and cost 5p. Otherwise cigarettes range upwards to 20p for twenty by which price they are all in the Virginia-tobacco-and-menthol bracket. Above that are American brands made under licence. Here twenty Marlboro cost 25p, twenty Camels 26p.
A thin cake of detergent soap, which is one segment of a three-cake bar (‘Ajax’, ‘Mr Clean’, ‘Superwheel’ etc.) costs 9p. Bini, like most of the other inhabitants of Kansulay, does her washing in the stream. Her cake of soap might be stretched to last a week. A quarter-kilo of brown sugar costs her 5p, white 9p. Finally, a box of matches is 2p but the village shop quite frequently runs out of supplies and it is then one sees people with burning sticks hurrying along, swinging them into curlicues and arabesques of aromatic smoke to keep them alive.
3. (p. 130) Where Malacañang was concerned even Nick Joaquin, writing in August 1968 – i.e. some thirty months after the Marcoses moved in – was oddly unwary in his essay ‘Art in the Palace’ which described Imelda Marcos’s ever-growing collection of objets. Those were the early days of the Marcoses when it was perhaps easier to accept Imelda at her own valuation as a humble aesthete and patroness eager to support Filipino artists and preserve the nation’s cultural heritage. But it should not have been easier at all, not for a wily old bird like Joaquin, a travelled and sceptical journalist who is quite capable of philippics when on the subject of his own countrymen’s failings (as in his essay ‘A Heritage of Smallness’). He ought surely to have detected the country-girl made good, the small-town Cleopatra speaking in the voice of the First Lady. His ears heard her homiletic and he evidently believed them:
‘As the President said, a government is like building a house. And he told me he would build the structure, I was to take care of the refinements, the trimmings, the details – like curtains, for instance. What kind of people will live in the house? Cultured people, good people. So then the President said: “That is the house I would like to put up.”’
The model could well be Malacañang as Mrs Marcos has transformed it – into a treasure-house of art and artifact. When she shows you around it she is sharing with you the rewards of a connoisseur, and that joy of walking in beauty brims over into amused commentary . .
If this lyrical description of the House Beautiful full of good and cultured people is at variance with the final reality it ought to have surprised nobody, least of all Joaquin who maybe has a little more Carlyle in him than he would care to admit. Inasmuch as the world will ever rememb
er Imelda Marcos it will recall the palace of Malacañang the Filipino crowds filed through eighteen years later: the video pornography, the three thousand pairs of shoes, the crates of scent.
And yet … Even as the Filipinos ascribe all their ills to those two decades of Marcos rule the unpalatable suspicion remains that the Marcoses were not alien monsters visited on their people by an uncaring fate but entirely typical of a certain aspect of the national character. Everything that ruthless dyad did and were in their guise as First Couple is to be seen on a smaller scale and scattered throughout their country. The vulgarity, the racketeering, the self-praise, the political chicanery, that special contempt for the law which only lawyers acquire and above all the endless clawingin of wealth and more wealth: all these are to be glimpsed in microcosm in the courts of certain provincial governors, mayors, landowners, judges, professionals and military men.
The only thing which need be added as a codicil to such an accusation is that nobody writing from the depths of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain – from that self-righteous slough of entropy, greed and anti-intellectualism – is in any position to score points about moral mediocrity and national character flaws. He can only observe that like any country, and for reasons of whatever sad permutation of culture and pathology, the Philippines and Britain have both had the governments they deserved. This being said, it of course remains true that it was American interference in their political system which effectively prevented the Filipino people from getting rid of their President earlier.
4. (p. 138) A paragraph in David Joel Steinberg’s 1982 book The Philippines gives a certain perspective to this sort of event:
Ferdinand Marcos has publicised the anting-anting he received from Gregorio Aglipay [the founder of Aglipayanism, the movement which broke with the Church of Rome at the turn of the century]. This talisman is a sliver of magical wood bequeathed across the generations, and it gives the owner supernatural powers. Aglipay, according to the Marcos official biography, inserted it in Marcos’s back just before the Bataan campaign in 1942. It protected Marcos, gave him magical powers, and confirmed him as both a man of supernatural power and someone graced in the peasants’ spiritual tradition. This link, one that Marcos has been keen to foster, suggests that the magical, local tradition is not so exotic or isolated a phenomenon as is often claimed. If the anting-anting is quaint superstition, it is also good politics.