The Search for Negrense Writers
By Robert Bragg and Mari Jo Acabal
How do you find the literature of multiple towns you’ve never been to, in a region neglected by the national literary scene and often in a language you can barely comprehend? Simple: field research. Field research — and the frustration, pain, danger, and the toll taken on your physical health that came with it. This is what my research partner, Mari Jo Acabal and I suffered under the sun for Prof. Ian Rosales Casocot’s pet projects: he wanted us to help him collect a body of local literature from Negros Oriental — a sadly neglected field in Philippine literary studies.
While most sane people would spend their summer vacation at the beach or relaxing with family, both of us toured Tanjay in a government vehicle, ploughed through the fields of Amlan, rode 90 degree angles on a habal-habal up Pamplona’s mountains, and battled heat stroke in Mabinay. Like synchronized hound dogs retrieving their hunter’s catch, we searched high and low throughout the second district of the province — covering the cities of Bais, Dumaguete, and Tanjay and the municipalities of Amlan, Mabinay, Pamplona, San Jose, and Sibulan — to uncover unknown literary artists and present our research findings to our graduate school literature professor. The goal was to unearth the local literary artists who are unsung, unrecorded, unresearched, which meant going beyond the usual suspects like Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, and try to find practitioners of the local balak, the balitaw, and such.
Our search began in Dumaguete. Mari and I have both graduated from Silliman University — in 2015 and 2016, respectively — so this was comfortable ground for us to get underway.
The obvious place to start with was the Department of Tourism. Here we were given a list of local artists and mambabalak from various barangay competitions. We interviewed the aging icon Nanay Ikit Alcaide for her balitaws and sat through the occasionally perverted balaks of Dions Manaban, DYGB-FM newscaster. Eager to share his art, and then some, he blurted out poetic fantasies about bathing beauties. In research you have to give and to take.
Although the literary artists of Dumaguete were relevant to our project, we wanted to dig deeper into the community and locate writers who had never before been heard of, in a manner of speaking. In Sibulan, we tried a different approach. Instead of starting with their tourism office, we made our inquiries on the streets of the municipality. We asked street vendors, habal-habal drivers, and even the homeless.
This turned out to be a big mistake.
“Naa mo’y nailhan nga mo-balak diri?” Mari innocently asked a habal-habal driver outside the public market. I followed this up with: “Excuse me, good sir. Could you possibly direct us to any local poets?”
Immediately there was chaos.
The spectacle of two fair-skinned students in shorts and tank tops — one of them British — using a combination of Bisaya and the Queen’s English caused a public uproar. It was as if the President had just arrived on his infamous jet ski. The habal-habal driver called over his friends from across the street; old ladies shopping for their weekly vegetable supplies craned their necks to gawp at us; passing tricycles slammed their brakes to join the pandemonium.
Suddenly the whole of Sibulan became a town of playwrights, poets, novelists, and literary critics. They all wanted to be included in our paper and many of them thought there was a quick buck to be made.
“Kani siya, o!” bellowed one man from the back.
“Bayran ko ninyo?” demanded another.
“Ako’y pinaka maayo mo balak diri!” declared a child in rags and plastic sunshades.
Enough was enough. We realized there was nothing for us on the streets so we slipped sheepishly away from the scene with our tails between our legs. The municipal hall was a much more sensible option.
Our next experience with a habal-habal driver was far more civilized and productive. In San Jose town, he took us to the beach, where we interviewed a Palawan security guard who writes about the ocean, and then seven kilometres inland to a man named Pantaleon Taguiam. Pantaleon was a local clown known around town for telling hilarious stories in his barangay. This form of storytelling involves several people contributing to the plot, and it can go on and on. The locals call this device of storytelling as “binutbot.” Other versions, as far as our research reveal, can be found in places as far-flung as Bayawan. “Binutbot” stories are often intimate and often communal, and Pantaleon told us he was afraid to share more of his stories with neighbouring barangays in case offended parties will “cut off his head.”
Proud of our findings thus far, we felt like reporters Lois Lane and Clark Kent as we flew to our next stop, Amlan. However, our findings there were far from satisfactory, and we spent more time searching through rural areas than actually collecting literary data. We had one lead named Mila Rendal, and the municipal tourism office was able to tell us she lived somewhere in Barangay Jantianon. We asked a disinterested vulcanizer along the main road for directions to her house and he pointed absentmindedly over some hills and said resignedly, “Diha.” Skeptical of his directions, we criss-crossed though a forest until we could look down over barren fields. A nipa hut protruded from some shrubbery in the distance.
By this time, it was growing late and the sky was getting darker. We trudged through uneven terrain slowly, the hut drawing closer. Finally, we ducked under some low-hanging branches and approached the front door. Tap tap tap. Mila Rendal stepped out in a flawless floral shirt with a striking pattern of sky-blue and royal-red. A ribbon dangled down her neck. And when we told her we were interested in her poetry, she welcomed us in and beamed with pride. It’s funny how happy you can make a hidden poet when you have travelled far to find them.
After returning to our lodging house to write up the day’s fruits, we set ourselves to Tanjay. We quickly learned there that this city deserves a more comprehensive study of its own. In this city, there are poets with poems about love, life, and religion, even songs remixed on Spotify about budbud, lyrics glorifying the town, witticisms and anecdotes compiled in newsletters, and most memorable of all, a collective pride in being a Tanjayanon.
Once we gave our usual queries around the City Hall, we found ourselves being ushered into the office of Wilfredo Calumpang. He turned out to be our veritable guardian angel. He knew of all the writers in town and hired us a government vehicle to bring us to their front doors. We found all kinds of artists, long gone and still living, young and old, local and international. They all had their own story to tell, and best of all, literary pieces to share.
We began with an aging teacher [and poet and historian] whose brother, he said, was tortured by the Japanese during World War II for his music. Then we found the lyrical renditions of the late Andrews Calumpang, which celebrate sticky rice, fiestas, and the town folk. We were also privileged enough to recover the expat-directed newsmagazine full of comedies, tales, and gossip among Tanjayanons working in the U.S. Soon we realized that the sheer quantity of creativity could not be contained in the time allotted. (For this reason, I call on other researchers to turn their attention to Tanjay’s literary heritage. Palanca award-winner David Martinez once called these people “champions of semantics,” and their stories indeed deserve to be heard.)
While the writers we needed to find for our research on Oriental Negrense literature practically found us in Tanjay, the search was far more difficult in Pamplona town. This was the only place where a recognized poet refused to speak with us — and also we had our third and final peculiar encounter with a habal-habal driver. This one was the worst.
The only mambabalak we heard about living in Pamplona was now a gardener. We met him in a park where he was trimming a bush shaped like an angry elephant, and of course we asked him our questions. Unlike all the writers we’ve met so far though, he was extremely deflective with our questions, and even refused to see us after his gardening shift. He said he had left behind his life of balak; he would rather garden. Our persistence only served to irritate him, and so we decided to leave the poor man in peace.
Just as we were leaving the park, his gardening colleague who had overheard our conversation stepped in and invited us to interview his aunt. Conveniently, she was apparently also a mambabalak. Wary with our previous experience in Sibulan, we were not exactly sure whether we could trust him — but we saw no other option. It was either go to his aunt, or move to the next town, and leave Pamplona empty-handed.
If our confidence in the man’s word was low, the location of the lead he was offering sank it through the ground. It was virtually inaccessible via tricycle or car, so the only option was another habal-habal. I personally am afraid of any vehicle with only two wheels so when he told us we were going up a ravine, my stomach did cartwheels. Mari, on the other hand, was thrilled. Surely he was exaggerating, right? I thought.
I reluctantly got on a habal-habal in Balayong with the excited Mari. Our destination was several kilometres from the town proper. The mere idea of a trip over the mountainous horizon that the driver was pointing towards actually made my skin crawl. (I didn’t want to show fear in front of Mari though.) This and the thought of failing our professor were the only things that made me get onto that bike.
Our odyssey started smoothly enough. We sped along the main road for about fifteen minutes, but at some point we hit a sharp right and bounced through a cow dung-infested field. Around trees and over mounds, we struggled up the mountain and my hands gripped the seat handles like granite. I could hear the motor’s groaning sputters of protest as sweat cascaded down my face and chest. At one point, we all dived forward over the handlebars as we took on a 90-degree cliff-edge. We were like a frail banca crashing through a tempest. A thousand wild heartbeats later, we slowed down and stopped at a wooden shack. We had arrived at our destination.
It turned out that the second gardener was telling the truth.
His aunt was also a mambabalak who used to perform her poems on the radio! She had stopped, however, because of the hazardous journey to and from town. At the peak of a mountain, in her humble house, she imparted to us her poems from memory — and we knew we had bagged a real literary talent from Pamplona.
The ride back was leisurely because we knew we had discovered another gem.
Things though only got more difficult in Bais. The Planning and Budget Officer at the City Hall gave us two leads. One was a mambabalak who was also a tricycle driver. He didn’t know the name, but knew that he had the registration number 013, and that he plied a route somewhere on Capinyahan Island. The other literary lead was an old song that guerrillas stationed in Bais in WWII used to sing. Both, I thought, were certainly hard to come by.
We hopped on a tricycle and rode up and down the streets of Capinyahan, looking for №013. Our own driver said he’d seen it before in these parts but didn’t know who owned it. His assurance that it was in the neighbourhood fuelled our hunt as we looked into front gardens, down side alleys, and checked every passing pedicab for the elusive number.
Approaching a junction in Lo-oc, we glimpsed a green cab as it crossed around twenty yards ahead. The split second we honed in on its number, we saw the numbers 0 and 1 and 3 — but we weren’t sure which order they were in.
“That way!” I hollered at our driver, and he gunned his engine into hot pursuit. We closed in on our prey, but just as we came close, its number smacked us in the face: it was №031 and not the golden №013.
So we drifted away to continue our mad manhunt. At some point, №014 rode past us, as if in mockery.
Around 45 minutes in, we were getting sick of the chase and our driver was losing his patience. In resignation, Mari suggested we try to find that war song instead, and we agreed that would be the best option.
They say the harder you work the luckier you get, and just as we were heading back to town, we saw the number, clear as day, dancing towards us: №013.
It was a blue and white thing of beauty, with two young lady passengers inside. It passed by us calmly, and glided towards the church.
We made a U-turn, and as №013’s passengers disembarked, we hopped out to claim our trophy. A 10 minute side-road interview later, we were done and we were ready to set our periscope on that Bais war song.
After a series of disappointments and a string of dead relatives, we finally tracked down one of the last remaining people who remembered the song that guerrilla soldiers sung when they were hiding from the Japanese during WWII. The sons of a former guerrilla leader, Juvenal Llera, could not remember the lyrics, and another son of a former soldier knew it but could not speak due to a stroke from years before. Luckily, a former English teacher who lived with her dogs in Barangay Glad remembers some of the verses. Her father sang them to her when he was a soldier.
The song is called “Cabanlutan Maiden,” and it was composed when the guerrillas escaped to Barangay Kabanlutan from Japanese attacks. It lyrically describes a beautiful maiden adored by the soldiers, and is thought to have inspired them on the battlefield.
We had now been on the road for seventeen days straight without rest. From May 7 to May 24, we had covered Dumaguete, Sibulan, San Jose, Amlan, Tanjay, Pamplona, and Bais. We’d slept in various hostels, living off of fast food and coffee, and now the effects were starting to kick in. By the time we got to Mabinay, we were cranky, sun-burned, and exhausted. The drive and enthusiasm we’d felt so far was wearing off, and we both just wanted to go home.
I remember calling home to my parents in the UK to let them know we were still alive. They are the ones supporting my graduate studies but when they heard we were quite fatigued, they instructed me to halt the research at once and rest in Duamaguete. My mother cautioned me about the NPA presence in Mabinay and my father cursed our professor for putting us through this over summer when I was supposed to fly back to England for the holidays.
On Mari’s side, it was the same story. Her father complained about financing this prolonged project as her mother traced our steps on Google Maps and wailed about dangers of kidnapping and riding a stranger’s habal-habal. Again though, neither of us wanted to fail Professor Casocot. So we pushed on to finish the project.
As always, we visited the tourism office of Mabinay, but regrettably the tourism officer was in Iloilo for a seminar. A new employee there directed us to the Department of Social Welfare and Development, and the people there gave us information about one mambabalak living in a nearby barangay.
Getting to him proved to be not too difficult as we had already gained much from our previous experience with locating vague figures, and we interviewed him without much incident.
Satisfied that the period for data gathering was finally complete, we returned to Dumaguete to write everything up.
In research, you must fully commit yourself to the goal and immerse yourself with the people you meet. Occasionally your respondents can be abusive or rude, and the conditions can be hazardous.
But the pleasure you give those who want to share their work makes it all worthwhile. Especially if they have never had an audience before.
Research is not just a quest for knowledge. It can be a two-way process that offers due recognition for those who have been left behind.
