Lately while taking
a break from the writing of my Monsoon Riders
Series (ahem!), I noticed that I hadn't blogged on old proverbs in quite
a while . Reason is, I had mourned – black cloak and all – the death of Ashari
Tamano's Maranao dictionary on the internet. See, as I've already confessed in
one of my earlier blogs, I'm not an expert on the vaunted art of Ranaū-Iranūn
discourse. I'm no Edris Tamano; neither am I a Datu Ontay. My bread-and-butter
is a John D. McDonald, Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Jr., and a host of
other fantasy, sci-fi and zombie writers. So, for much part of the deciphering
process on the deeper meaning of Maranao words I had relied on Tamano's
dictionary whenever the signal on the phone of my old folks of Basak gets
choppy. I basically used Ashari's because, unlike other Maranao dictionaries I
had sampled , he knows the nuances of the language better and his translation
in English always hits the mark. While other Maranao dictionaries are
crammed-heavy with nouns, Ashary's are profuse with verbs, adjectives, and
difficult to handle words. I just wished he resurrect it – or even better publish it (and I'll be its first
customer).
Be that as it may,
sans any crutch, here we go again.
Makasōdi si baöng na
lêbi sêkanian bó.
The gourd is mocking when he is so full of it.
A baöng before the
pre-industrial age is a gourd, usually a coconut shell for holding water
(traditionally rainwater) used in cleaning the toilet and other dirty objects
in the house. It's not something you want your visitors to see in the living
room prominently displayed, so it is stowed away hidden out of sight in the
backroom or left in the backyard exposed to the elements.
Coconut shells are
plentiful in the Philippines so they are
a throwaway item among the folks in the countryside (Don't worry, they're
biodegradable). But not the tin cans and plastic containers in the cities, which the word baöng had come
to embrace, which instead of being thrown away is retained to hold water for
washing the car, flushing the toilet,
and cleaning the yard. The baöng, therefore, is a lowly item and its absence
(or presence) is never noticed. Anytime it would be thrown into the garbage,
and no one mourns its loss.
The baöng in the
proverb is personified as someone in society who pretends to be
holier-than-thou. Perhaps, he or she is a nouveau rich, a social climber who is
relishing the novelty of his milieu, basking in his new mansion (though the
neighborhood association suspect the source of his income), and treating his
former peers as though specks of dust, peeking at them only on the side mirror
of his BMW X5 SUV.
Perhaps, he is
someone who failed to graduate his Arabic studies in the Middle East, and now
comes back to the country, and bitter from having not been successful, preached
with top-heavy lectures, indiscriminately lashing out at everyone he sees as
someone destined to the hell fire, while brandishing his boarding pass awaiting
his flight to heaven aboard a synthetic Tabriz carpet, to the tune of "A
Whole New World" sung by Lea Salonga.
The English
equivalent is obviously:
The pot calling the kettle black.
The pot is accusing
the kettle of being sooty when the pot itself is thoroughly covered in it. This
is one of the rare occasions when we get an apple-to-apple correspondence with
the target language. I like the clipped
economy of the Maranao saying which is the hallmark of a quality proverb. No
defect is mentioned, just implied in the "mocking" accusation.
The proverb can be
traced back to Jesus. Speaking on the subject of judgmentalism, in
the Gospel of Matthew 7:3, he is quoted as saying, "Why look at the speck
of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no heed to the plank in your own
eye?"
Perhaps the
baöng-gourd in our proverb was having its bliss of ignorance because it didn't
have the benefit to see itself in the mirror.
One man did. He sang, rather than said it: “I’m starting with the man in
the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways." The song may not be
Michael Jackson's biggest hit, but it became a fitting anthem of his passing.
Everyone is accusing
everyone of not doing much to the environment. The big nations of the world are
bullying the smaller ones about industrial pollution but they themselves are
so sooty of it.
Corollary to this is
yet another clipped interrogative proverb of the old folks. "Sorong ka sa
pagalungan, na antona aī mīa ilay ngka?" Have
a peek in the mirror, now what do you see? This is an implied admonishment not to be
unduly critical of others.
So goes our proverb:
Makasōdi si baöng na lêbi sêkanian bó.
The gourd is mocking
when he is so full of it.
