The incurable longing of one's own culture

Inguma kano!

Get in. Dive in. The water is fine.

Don't tell me you don't know how to swim. You call yourself a Maranao-Iranūn, better live up to the name. Don't hesitate. You won't drown. We'll walk you through the ropes, and, if need be, we'll grow you fish-scales and fins and gills to breathe through. Your amphibian god-ancestors, buccaneers extraordinaire, saw to it that you can soar and ride the high waves even as you can roll with the punches. It's in your genes. We may be guilty of a whole lot of sundries but boresome is never one of them. We'd rather court a fiery phosphorescent end than endure the long monotonous sameness of the days. It's reflected in our choice of colors, our actions, and our haughtiness even in the face of death. So don't even deny it, and let fly.

Hello. I've decided to do snippets of surgical dissection of our literature not because I consider myself a supreme authority on Maranao culture and its vaunted art of discourse, never mind the Ranaū-Iranūn complex in general. Far from it. Yes, I could stitch a few canned phrases every now and then, but until now, it had been my well-guarded secret that I had never written a good-old fashion alamat-sorat-ako-i-giraw letter to anybody in my life. Ever!

Have you?

I did writings here and abroad, essays and fictions, guidelines and corporate proposals, year-end financials, feature articles, lead-ins in newspapers and a few whatnot but I had never dabbled in anything remotely Maranao. I was born in a conservative clan of ustaz, ulama, and guro-aleem. So exposure to bayok, kirim, tuba-tubad, kandaunga, sakeba were kept to a minimum—if not zero. Whenever a feast or some social happenstance was bubbling somewhere, my mother, ever mindful of my father's stature in the Dar el bohoth al Islamia and Majlis so shoora, would discourage me to go. My sin was that I had never been able to synchronize the beat of my agong to the tune of the kulintang to this very day.

Now, whenever I found myself in a typical Maranao setting, I would gape askance at the kalalagan as they belt out their orations, employing a language I claim my own yet could not fathom. The ancient kirim is replete with words and phrases today's Maranao is hard put to understand. Yes I would perk my ears in an attempt to decipher and get the gist of the talk, but try as I would, I might as well be trying to crack a coded message of a U-boat crossing the Atlantic during World War II.

The very frustration was consuming me mad. I'm so disgusted with myself that you might as well impale me on a post, cut my head off and jam it on a spike. I would then serve as an example of someone who had been unmindful and ungrateful to his cultural roots.

Whose fault is it? Mine?

I think the blame is a collective one, and, worse, a collaborative one at that. We have not been able to properly preserve our living heritage because we took the miscue that killing our old folks' ways—andang sa muna—means giving our religion a full sway on the playfield. In other words, we are even encouraging the process.  I believe this is so misguided and is herding us all unto the edge of a cliff.

If anything, it's on account of our ancient ways that helped preserve our faith, never the other way around. Long before Islam found its way into our shores, our forefathers were cultivating a fledgling civilization as the farthest frontier of the Majapahit empire in the Pacific.

I built this site because I was disturbed by a terrible nightmare that Omacan the giant (remember the stories in the pre-Godzilla era?)  is trying to drain the deepest lake in the country of its water in the hope of finding the magical ring. Oh no, I'm not talking about the ring of Sauron in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It's the ring pitched by the brother of the mighty Indrapatra into the middle of Lanao which until now remained unclaimed from the deep.

 

So join me and let us explore what mettle the Ranaū-Iranūn is made of, and what secrets the lake has in store for us. Who knows, we might find the coveted ring and beat Omacan at his game.  We would be doing the lake dwellers a service and nature itself a favor. There isn't much time, if you ask me. From what my betel-nut chewing aunt had told me long ago, Omacan is so humongous that he could just drink up the lake through a straw a lá soda.

Hello, my name is Nasser Sharief, and you can find about me here. I hope you'll find here stuff that will kindle you with inspiration to do things for the betterment of mankind. Here I'm trying to offer facets of the Maranao that are hitherto virtually untouched. So I hope what you get in this site will make you confident in carrying the greater Iranūn race. I hope you'll find here things you'd be proud stapling on your chest. For others, I hope you'll discover items here that will clarify your notion about the Iranūn complex.

Why this site? We live in a cynic world. These days, supportive gestures are regarded with suspicion. A kind word could be a disguised mousetrap. People are apt to throw you a curve but a lifejacket. We live in a time of information overload, so a young unformed person tries to find an anchor lest he be overwhelmed and swept away in the deluge.  Tariris iniběmběr!

Maybe you found us because of the keyword Maranao, Iranun and Moro. Well, I'm glad you find our hole-in-the-wall among tens of millions of flotsams out there. There's one caveat though: this site is not for the fainthearted. We have no-holds barred so you won't find any back-scratching niceties here neither. We'll be as brutally honest as can be, and yours truly has a penchant for poking fun on our misadventures and miscues. In short, we don't put on kiddie gloves. But in so doing, I hope you'll be the richer and feel the deep resonance of hearing the unexpurgated truth.

There is a dominant presumption that to talk about the Ranaū-Iranūn is to talk about being a Muslim.  We have to scrap this presupposed correspondence here. While we are Muslims, we only touch that aspects that bear on the arts and culture. We do not promote or discuss religion here per se.  So you won’t find here an answer to where to terminate the hemline on your hijab, or when you should break your fast, or some other knotty knickknacks questions. If you dig chicken-or-egg philosophical discussions, you’d be better off going somewhere else. Again there are tons of that debris floating out there.

We need to be clear about this from the get-go. This site is not about to be diluted by religious notions or the raison d'etre of our exploration would be defeated. The Darangan literature, for one, is replete with sensual allegories and steamy episodes in all its gore and glory. Paramāta Lawanen and Bantogen, one of the principal protagonists in the multi-volume epic, were siblings who bore a common offspring.

Our culture is slowly being pulled under us mostly due to our own undoing. Here, we hope to rekindle interest in our literature,  history and the arts, and put to rest all the nonsense being said in its name. There's barely time. Our oral historians are being claimed by mother earth one by one. The last time I checked (Ramadhan 2015), Kakaī Bantog, one of the last genealogy canters still alive, was a mere shadow of his former self. Be that as it may, let's start with a few kernel with this site, and hope to grow it and reclaim what's ours.

Lastly, If you got something to broach, a material to submit, or some ideas and suggestions, no matter how gonzo-esque, do email us. Who knows it might led us to new heights and open up new adventures. As we go along, we'll average the direction we want to be heading to in our voyage, sink or swim. Nothing, aki and oki, is cast in stone.

So having rid a few asides, off we jump headlong into the deep..