What became of the Moro today?
Search me, you're likely to say. Like someone is laying the
blame on you for the extinction of a rare breed.
While a few hardy souls may lament the passing of a bygone
era, the general attitude towards the Moro had always been a
let-sleeping-dogs-lie, always politically correct a stance. Yes, everyone is
curious about the Moro — perhaps one may even find a tad titillating — yet he
could be a trickster one dare not touch
with a ten-foot long pole.
In cocktails, risk dropping in the taboo subject and watch how everyone's eyebrows rise like birds
abandoning their perch. Very Pavlovian: It never fails in its expected response
like you have just spilled wine on someone's Oscar de la Renta and she has to
flee for the powder room. For your trouble, you're instantly marked a crank.
You might be grudged a token lingering diplomacy, but as everyone slips away
one by one, eventually you find yourself nursing your drink alone in a corner.
But isn't it safe now to be broaching the subject? After all,
the days when a puffed-up Moro could not be slighted were gone. The age when
you dare not stare at a datu's concubine or risk your head spinning off your neck is but a blurry memory. The days of the juramentado
running amuck in the midst of a fiesta had been relegated to romance stories
and bookended for good. Even the Colt .45 which, ostensibly, had been developed
to steam the onrush of the pesky brown berserker had long ago been officially retired by the U.S.
Army, now gathering dust in the museum.
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| Illustration: courtesy of Edris Tamano |
Yet it seemed surreally comforting being not reminded of the
Moro at all. In the reckoning of the country, he is an anomaly — a freak of
history. In our school books, you hardly get by past page five to warm yourself
on the subject when you're hurtled towards la-la land. Every subtle effort is
employed to erase any vestige of him in the landscape, subtle so that the
sleeping dog would not be roused. Snippets that over the years made colossal,
so that should the Moro finally awaken he would find that the rug had been
pulled out under him. One blogger, De
AnDA (not a Moro), for instance, was so unusually ruffled to remind everyone
that the entire province of Rizal was once called the province of Morong.
"They renamed the province after Rizal (as if he needs more publicity). It
baffles me why they changed the name? Morong refers to its former inhabitants,
the Moros, said to have lived in the peninsula’s mountainous parts. Could this
be the reason why? Were they (Americans and
Filipino leaders in the early 1900′s) uncomfortable with such a
name?"
In the Capital, the only vague reference a wide-eyed child
might espy of the Moro to note his passing is a billboard of a vinegar
advertisement. Well, at least, the name-changers in this country had left
something out to humor the Moro so that when he comes out of his long slumber,
we could point out to him that one lowly town had been retained to his name
after all (As though the rug had been surreptitiously cut out of his lying form
like a chalk outline of a body in a murder scene). But when you begin to
replace old names, a slice of history is sadly lost. That's why in 1991 the
Russians had the good sense to revert the name of their cultural capital back
to Saint Petersburg from Leningrad — the name given to Russia's second largest
city by the Communist government after the death of Lenin in 1924.
Jose Rizal himself,
mind you, if he were alive today, won't be too happy. Between 1889 and
1890, he spent a good deal of what precious funds he had to travel to Europe in
his quest to research the pre-colonial setup of the Philippines. He suspected
that his country used to be economically prosperous and politically sound to
deal with dignity and aplomb with the neighboring countries . He believed that
the native population held arts and literature worthy of their generation. He
intuited that the Spaniards were playing fast and loose with the minds of the
natives. That's why he was seeking a more independent source. Alas, given the
state of the world at the time, the best the good doctor could muster, holed up
in London's British Museum, was Antonio
Morga's work.
Today, in the dawn of the internet, the five-page sprint
still holds. I'm not about trying to reduce the nation to myself; every region
has its fair share in molding this country. But the Moro is singled out and
studiously doused. All along, we feign innocence of his presence in the
sanitized language of avoidance. This self-inflicted numbness finds most of its
practitioners in the government. It has a coterie of following in the sala of Congress and the Senate and even in a
long carousel of residents of Malacañan. But, as often happens, the thing we
dodge, the thing we pretend isn't there, has a tendency to hit us back — and
often — like a brick.
In the wake of the incursion into the islands of Sabah by the
loyal forces of the Sultanate of Sulu, a neighbor of mine in the Capital asked
me what's happening down there like the
kitchen was up in smoke — if I might bring him up to speed, because I'm a Moro
myself, and I'm supposed to be in the know.
I shrugged. "It's only a landlord-tenant thing," I
said, and said no more. My neighbor shook his head and walked away like I'd
just insulted him.
But I didn't. My reply was, in fact, succinct — blunt to the
point. I didn't need to tell him that around Lahad Datu, etc., there live
clusters of villages there who speak in almost perfect pitch the patois of my
folks in lowland Ranaū-Iranūn, though they're slowly being emulsified into
other cultures of the place. They're not
recent immigrants. They'd been there for centuries, the result of sea traffic
along the ancient slave-trading lanes.
I wasn't trying to be rude, but in the decades I'd been in
the Capital, I got the hang of shooting the breeze with people who only had a
token appreciation of how the Moro became a pariah in the land he dearly so
love and fought with life and limb for almost half a millennia. We couldn't be
bothered. We're not really emotionally invested in his struggle, because we
couldn't espy any foreseeable dividend in him. So we are apt to regard every
event in the South with statistic coldness like it has a shelf life in a
supermarket stand. It's like when bandits take hostage a few foreigners in the
South. For days on end, it would be the butt of news. There may even be a side
bar article on the perennial rebellion, nice as you please. But like the
typhoons that hit the country every year, once it had played itself out, the
region sulks back into the backwater of oblivion.
Don't get me wrong. The world isn't flat. I'm not into any
sort of historical dismantling. I'm not groping into skeleton closets hoping
for something I can employ to devastating use. I'm not out to convince everyone
to sympathize with the cause of the MILF or whatever rebellion may sprout out
in succeeding. I'm not a rebel myself and I don't square to the organization's
ideal. We're Filipinos the last I checked. But if we are to exploit the last
frontier of the country, if we are to turn the cove of the Moro Gulf into
another Singapore, we better play it right together.
So how do we get ourselves invested — or reinvested — in the
Moro? Do we embrace him like a long lost brother who had been separated by the
war? Do we celebrate with him a late KKK disco party to demonstrate we're not
afflicted by colonial neurosis? Do we invite the Chair of the MILF into our
barracks for a barbecue? Should Kaká Digong exchange his beloved Glock for the
Chair's Makarov in a ceremony of colors? Before the absurdity could continue ad
nauseam, one thing is incontestable: the Moro was never invited what he could
bring on the table in the shaping of this nation. As if his not surrendering to
the colonialists was his own undoing that now, coming from the back of beyond,
he has to play catch up and hobble himself into the rythm. He dangles like a
sore thumb. An afterthought. And Amaī Manabilang would have turned in his
grave.
When the Americans replaced the Spaniards in 1889, they
thought they were just routinely filling in a vacuum here. Worse, going through
the momentum of a handover, they thought they were merely tiptoeing a
blueprint. After all, they had just been through many wars with the American
Indian nations of the Great Plains. In fact, a few of the waves of conscripts
who shipped in to the Moro Provinces were fresh from the campaigns with the
Apaches and the Cherokees. So from their ships, they rolled out their Hotchkiss
mountain guns, their Vickers batteries, and unloaded their mounted regiment
like they were merely replaying to a script.
What the white man had failed to internalize, riding the
coattails of a mindset, is that the islands were not up for grabs (Or as a pop
song goes, "She's already taken" — and quite long ago). We were
already a cluster of thriving nations trading to the outside world even before
they came.
So now after the departure of the white man, what became of
the Moro? Did the late KKK disco party gyrate at all? I mean, really, whatever
happened to the Moro in the 21st century? Just who are now the present Moro?
Are they any different from the ones the colonialists found and then left? Or
are they merely spent shells smoked out of the spirits of their ancestors?
I had pondered how we had evolved and spent man-hours long
enough to put a factory line to a standstill. I was a young man then hungry for
any crumb of tale that I could splice in with what I read. I'd found out that
in the 13th century, Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago had been a
fledgling new frontier of the Majapahit
empire, the great pre-colonial empire of Southeast Asia centered on West Java.
What other bits of history I knew I learned at my grandmother's knee. I had
come to learn that the history of our people is encapsulated dominantly in oral
chants and in the tongues of our bards. But tongues curl to the contour of the
patron's wishes. And there arise the need to sustain the upbeat mood of the
population in the wake of long drawn out skirmishes with the enemies. So the
songs became a drug, a khat, laced with the concoction of actual triumphs and
imagined exploits. Soon all the losses were gently glossed over, and what
remained was a soothing lullaby intended to blunt the minds of those who
escaped with their tails between their legs.
Even then, we feel in the marrow of our bones that we are a
noble people, that surely the sĕlĕsîlah
would not lie, that we had an unbroken descent from the line of sage prophets,
however vague. Our sĕlĕsîlah— the forbidden book that our great, great
forefathers kept with the zealous secrecy of a Mossad agent bore this out. The
writ took great pains to connect us to the ancients, albeit in a convoluted way
verging on the fantastic. Unfortunately though, they do not bear the stamp of
time, largely because our ancestors dwelt in a self-contained world. They chose
their destinations in a largely uncharted sea in full flourish to test the
boundaries of endurance before the white men came to traffic. They had ventured past the Indian Ocean as
far as Madagascar at the mouth of the Red Sea.
These occupations were always fraught with danger. Sometimes,
a whole galley of our ablest men perished in battle in a far-off land never to
return. And a whole slew of village widows came as a result. And then the
children of the slaves come of age, and the population grows, and then a game
of taunt and teasing began. Where once we used to dip in a narrow gene pool,
now the cistern became a wide mixture of dubious uncertainties. And a maiden,
lonely that she is, would have no hesitation to kiss a tadpole to turn him into
her prince.
For a time the sĕlĕsîlah (written in jawi, a locally devised derivative of the Arabic script), become
a resource for clarifying blood lineage and the queue of succession in a
long-established system. But it too became corrupted and inconsistencies kept
creeping in. Over time, new sĕlĕsîlahs sprouted from different quarters
claiming nobility for its adherents, and it became a nightmare for the
succeeding generations to sift through the tangle to indicate which ones are
real and which are apocryphal.
The truth couldn't be said any simpler: We are a mixed bag of
tribes. The continuous Moro marauding of the water inlets of Luzon and the
Vizayan islands only came to an end by the introduction of the steamboat in the
dying days of the 19th century. By the time the Spaniards was quitting the
scene, half a pint of our blood trailed the islands and had been replenished by
those we have taken in captivity. Nothing stands still.
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| Photo courtesy: Maldamin Decampong. A page from the sĕlĕsîlah of Maginŭmong (Amaī Boga} of Bayang in the custody of Baì Samayà (Hadja Khaironesa) Cali Balt. |
It was the Americans who started the clock for us or rather
made us aware that time can — alas — be measured and narrowed down to a split
of a second and that life can be hastened with the flight of a bullet. In 1903,
when a wily group of Moro tribesmen in Lanao killed American soldiers of the
27th Infantry and then took several cavalry horses, General Chaffee demanded on
the datus of the lake to surrender the perpetrators and the return of the
horses. In spite of the ultimatum laid down after a nod from U.S. Congress, the
datus sneered at it and replied that they bow to no one but the Sultan of Rum
(Istanbul) like the world had not moved on, and that the Ottoman Empire had not
centuries ago been in decline.
For better or worse, the selective memory made us survive.
But once modern communications opened up, the childishness of our behavior were
exposed like a can of worms. We scrambled out of the clouds of our laid back
existence. When the smokescreens were removed, the Moro suddenly found himself
as another Juan de la Cruz — just another pair of hands — in a newly minted
Republic.
However he grudgingly allowed himself to be buffeted into the
mainstream of Filipino life, he was treated with suspicion and a cold, wary
welcome. His presence had only been little acknowledged. Gradually, the Moro
realized the import of the dissent and interpellations his forebears had made
when the Americans were pulling up stakes and left the scaffoldings of a
work-in-progress Moro Provinces dangling: the 1921 Sulu Petition to the 1935 Dansalan
Declaration.
Feeling the exhilaration of a newly independent nation, the
Filipino at the center felt that he was merely filling up the shoes vacated by
the colonialists. It was so convenient for him that he felt disinclined to
alter the setup one whit. And like the colonialists, he would not be denied his
villain. And what a cookie-cutter villain the Moro could readily make! A mutual
distrust soon developed which could not easily be bridged. Worse, doubting
Juans questioned the Moro's ability to commit himself, that he could not be
relied as partner in shaping this nation. Nothing could be farther from the
truth. The Moro may stand accused on a whole lot of sundries — may even be
guilty on a few of them — but never on failing to convey his side of the
bargain.
The National Hero himself, Don Jose Rizal y Alonso, knew that
the Moro could be counted upon in dire need, and in a thinly veiled hint, he
alluded to it in his defense addressed to the Spanish Court Martial on the
charges of sedition foisted on him: "…If I still had had intentions of
political activity, I might have gotten away even in the vintas of the Moros whom I knew in the
settlements…"
We couldn't be sure if the good doctor's revelatory statement
merely jumped him from the grate into the furnace, but surely he may had toyed
with such an idea in desperation. As it turned out, Rizal had thrown everything
including the proverbial kitchen sink to disown the revolution. The Moro at the
time was merely preoccupied with battling for his turf but who knows, if Rizal
had acted, history might have given us a totally different face then. The
commitment the ancient Moro puts his mind into anything is legendary, if
childlike. Once you have earned his trust, he would have no compunction to put
his life on the line if needed be, not even if his tourniquet snaps out. Not
too many years ago, in 1936, a Moro chieftain, so relieved that his son had ostensibly
been saved from malaria by an American, William Cobb, an archeologist who had
no formal training in medicine, gave the latter in gratitude a bewitching gift
that later turned out to be the world's biggest pearl, the gem now reputed to
command a price as high as $93 million.
As often happens, the Moro's trusting simplicity proved to be
his undoing. Now, enclosed in a world he barely understands, the once haughty
adventurer finds himself fiddling with the shackle of irrelevance. His modern
counterpart a mere curiosity, a countenance of domesticated neglect and
bewilderment. The modern Moro tries to reconcile his meager lot to the
complexity of the present and wonders what morsel is left of his pride. In a
world of semiconductors, plastic cards and nanosecond reckoning of time, he
finds himself crabbing for footing. Abandoned in the cold by the Americans, he
is tossed hither-thither, kowtowing to
whoever the powers that be.
Disoriented, he tries to retrace his steps. Along the
hollowed hallways of Malacañan he waits patiently by the corridors, and
whenever a manicured hand passes by, he ingratiatingly says a 'Good Morning,
sir,' a 'Good Afternoon, sir,' and a 'Good night, ma'am,' while clutching a
folder and a pen at the ready (Oh yes,
he eventually realized that the signing pen proved mightier than his kris). The next morning, you could see him in
the same demure stolid posture, so still, you could mistake him for an antique
jar.
Out of this, the modern Moro tries to rub himself off the
desolation. The pundits among us are in endless session of discussions of
what-might-have-been while the rest of the population wallow in the backwaters
of nothing-is-so-much-there. Our provinces are the most destitute in the
country. A few survived and never looked back. Others rediscovered their faith
and mummified their women with ninja outfits who could only watch the outside
world through the slits of their hijabs, as though viewing the world through
the periscope of a battle tank.
Still others took up arms only to sell their cause for a
paltry sum at the very next bend. Peace become something you have to buy afresh
at the wet market every day. The ponderous ones try to wait out the tide. They
attend endless peace talks with merry-go-round frequency. They nod their assent
that something has to be done while nothing is being done. On the negotiating
table they say their say and drink their coffee to the last dregs. When they
break, they gossip around the water cooler. When they return to their seats,
they add an item or two into the mishmash of words, call it a day, and adjourn
to the next round. When they go home, they bring to their spouses the
toiletries of every hotel they had been into.
It's not too late to start a truly honest dealing with the
Moro as it is not too late for anyone to take the first step toward
understanding him. And you don't have to start with grand schemes...
I was an impressionable kid some thirty years ago fresh out
of Pier 15 when I decided that in the Capital I would not be bothered by
anything 'Moro' and everything it stood for. In this way, I reasoned I would be
progressive and not distracted. I wore my jeans, drank my beers, eat my pizzas,
danced my parties and read my pocketbooks just like any wide-eyed youngster in
his formative years. I was flushed with hope, looking for my place in the sun,
relying on sheer guts, and excited that every day is a gift of discovery.
In the process, as the years dragged on, as I finished
college and started to earn a living, I had developed an undiluted loathing of
everything that my tribe stands for. I sneered at the seemingly rote melody of
my folks' aria though I embraced the sweet headache of jazz. I dismissed the
mocking gibes of the bayok sung
acapella, though I took a liking for the nagging taunt of Rap music. I devoured
Tolkien's novels in the 70s and other fantasy literatures but never cared to
open the fifteen loose bound volumes of Darangan scripts an aunt had bequeathed
to me in her deathbed, because, as she had always said, I was a gifted child. I could not be talked to — I
could not be bothered with things 'backward and trite.' I didn't realize I was
attempting to jump off my skin.
When the opportunity to travel opened up for me, my horizon
expanded. But then the years overtook and you begin to question the way you had
approached life. Reassessment. I was walking in downtown Manhattan, just
outside the Madison Square Garden with my friend, the five-time Illinois State
Chess Champion, Angelo Young, when he dragged me inside a boutique to look at
the shop's antique chess sets on display.
He had just won a sizeable betting from one of our forays in
Philadelphia and was considering buying a baroque Hungarian or Polish set but
he seemed could not make up his mind on the price. It was then that I spotted a
design that for some reason I could not put my finger on. I asked the shop
owner, obviously a connoisseur himself, about the set's detail. Looking at my
face, he told me that I should know it's from the Philippines. The set, whose
black pieces were carved out of a buffalo horn, he explained, came from Lanao.
And then it came to me. I had once seen similar set in my hometown during my
childhood. I told him I'm from Lanao and he seemed very pleased learning it.
But when I told him that chances are that he did not know how to play chess, he
seemed offended. He asked, "Why you said that?" I said, "The
opposing Kings are supposed to face each other on the same file." He
chuckled. "Now, I'm beginning to doubt if you're from the place at all, or
you should have known that the piece placement of the datus in your place follows
the Chaturranga which places the Kings on adjacent files — not the one favored
by modern tournament praxis." I was irritated. "Isn't it the Ajedrez
of the Spanish Governor-Generals that was introduced to us?"
To this day, I would never forget his reply: "My dear
fellow, the chess of the datus in your place predated the coming of the
Ajedrez. Check that out with your Federation."
This episode would not leave me and I was kicking myself.
More so, because I prided myself with my knowledge of the game. I'd perused
Yugoslav and Russian magazines and books. I used to own the complete volumes of
the Sahovski Informator in hard copy.
I'd travelled well. I'd slept on trains and Greyhound buses to get to the next
chess tournament. But to know nothing of my heritage, oh well.
It was the summer of 1993 and I had just turned forty. I had
a long think. I didn't want the police to one day find the lifeless body of a
broken man in some seedy pension house in Copenhagen. Even dogs go home to die,
so in 1996, because the brick kept hitting back, I went home to the
Philippines. I started to make amends to
those aspects of folklore that I had maligned. At first, it was strictly for my
own distraction and edification. Then I become enamored and then — at last — I
began to read the analects of my old folks. In a sudden reversal, I became a
mad bull inside a china shop devouring everything I could lay my hands on of
the arts, culture and history of my ancestors. In 2000, for a stretch, I went
under the tuition of an okir graphic
artist from Tugaya, a fellow named Bashier Hassan. The last of the
practitioners in the art, he taught me everything he knew about sigmoid designs
that form the spine of myriad vegetal patterns. I dig what I might learn in
parallel with other cultures especially the Celts of ancient Europe. What I
learned, I plotted in vector graphics on the computer. Then I dabbled in
writing stories and experimented with our art forms, thinking some ways how
they could be ported into 3D animations and wraparound soundtracks without
losing their identity into the props. I felt the excitement of an antiques prospector stumbling upon a
neglected armoire. To my delight I found that the heroes in the epic Darangan,
when doing battle, fly on their shields
long before Marvel comics could even come up with Captain America. Cool. And
this is even more cool: The Ayunan of Benbaran travels underwater in his boat!
Our ancestors, perhaps, had beaten to
the punch the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci
in dreaming up the submarine!
I didn't know I could recoup a portion of my youth. I walked
with a bounce to my feet, happy of my little discoveries. At length, I began to
take a liking of the things I see around. It cued me on the significance of
other cultural aspects of the country and broadened my perception — something
formal education would never have been able to provide. In Escolta, my eyes
were no longer restricted to shop-levels and travel up to the crumbling
gargoyles of old buildings smeared with soot and bird droppings. If I close my
eyes, I might hear the clopping of hooves on cobblestone as a calessa rattle
down a corner, and a shout from a Guardia Civil: 'Alto!' And watching the
sunset of the Manila Bay, if I squint my eyes hard enough I might make out the
sail of a galleon ship heading out to Mexico and the New World.
I began to take a liking — a fetish — for crumbling
neo-gothic structures and Spanish-inspired halls. "What are you up
to," Federico, a friend from way back in college, jokingly asked as he
flipped over the photos I had taken on centuries-old churches, "are you
going to bomb them over?" I said, "They'd been bombed enough during
World War II. I'd kick to Kingdom come the ass of whoever does it again."
More than any other, a place of worship provides a clue to the history of any
town, a city or even a whole continent. The breathtaking though odd bass relief
of the Rendición de Tetuan of the San Joaquin Church depicted a historic battle
scene of Tetuan when the Spanish thrashed the Moors with forty-thousand strong
soldiers. It was made in 1869 to rally the towns of Iloilo and Antique to fight
against Moro raids. Here lies the great secret of the staying power of the
friars in the colonies. A Spanish lieutenant might had decided he needed more
soldiers and ammunitions to fortify the defense of the coast that face the Sulu
Sea. On the other hand, with a few well-timed gestures, the friars prepared the
local populace emotionally and psychologically to beat back any would-be enemy
raid. This ability to operate on string
budget saved them from ouster in overseeing the colony despite the press for
reform. As articulated by Fr. José S. Arcilla, despite the anti-Church liberals
in Spain seizing power in 1839, the seminaries that trained missionaries for
overseas assignments were virtually left intact as they were far cheaper to
operate than military units.
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| Rendición de Tetuan of the San Joaquin Church depicted a historic battle scene |
Taking a cue on my interest in off-beat architecture,
Federico brought me to his clan's ancestral mansion in Bacolor that dated back
in the mid-18th century. I was instantly knocked out by the arches of stone portal that lead to a curtilage paved
with piedra china as we entered. The insides was even more impressive. Spanish
tiles known as azulejos was laid out on the anteroom. The play of shadows on
columns, portraits and corners lent a
smoky mystery to the place. My host toured me around until we had come to the
base of a narrow stairs and I thought I had my fill. He told me I might like to
go up alone in the turret. "Why, what's up there?" I asked Federico.
He said, it's the mirador tower, the climax of my tour. "What's a
mirador?" I said, suspecting it might be a prank. He said that it's where
the inhabitants used to have the lookout for Moro marauders during the raiding on
Lubao, Guagua, Bacolor and other places around Pampanga which only stopped in
the late1800s when the first steamboats came to be purchased from Hong Kong. So
alone I went up solemnly, doing my pilgrimage — my homage to the past. When I
came to the upper landing, I was greeted by a vista of the countryside. I saw
where the inlet of the sea split into channels. As a downdraft blew into my
face and tugged at my shirt, I closed my eyes in the half-light of the dying
afternoon. And in my mind's eye, I saw the glint of sweat running down the
sinewy broad shoulders of crouched Moro marauders, hairs marcelled by being in
the sun for months , sneaking their galleys through the low waters, their
moccasin feet hitting the sandbars before the church bells could toll their
warning…
But while I did all these, I saw others in exodus, heading
the way I'd been. I was on my trek back while they are headlong on a forward
plunge. I tried to caution them with the been-there-done-that routine. When we
travel, we think we're expanding our horizon, though, in all truth, we could
just be widening the walls of our captivity. Without the architraves that sense
of the past provides, our construct of the world would simply fold on itself.
But I was easily dismissed as belonging to the old school.
I won't quarrel with that. Whatever the future holds for this
country, I have a premonition that the Moro will not be denied a pivotal role
in it, and the Filipinos at large ought to welcome this. The time when the Moro
is a mere adjunct would no longer hold water. A well-oiled machinery does
splendidly when all the parts are working together. This should be the
direction we should be pushing to. There's no need for everyone to be embroiled
in a dust-up that would only serve to open up scabs of old wounds. There's no
need to either recreate or fabricate the past. Nothing morally comfortable can
be gained by trying to tidy up things into archetypes of monsters and victims.
We merely have to undo the blinkers. Both hero and villain living within us
all.
The Moro, for his part, has a lot of pedaling to do and he
will need some elbow room. Unless he can restore the grandeur of his arts and
culture and revitalize his traditional philosophies and principles, he will
remain a yucky egg shell of his former self. He will just be a legal
nomenclature defined in some half-forgotten Acts spawned from a tepid cup of
coffee. The world is getting smaller as technology advances. And the Moro
should be counted on for his steady hand and his passion to whip the blood into
a frenzy of creativity. To continuously forgo this untapped resource would be
the biggest mistake our policymakers could make.
We're not
out to tame the Moro with a diorama of a birdbath: relegate him to sit on a
branch of a tree, relieve him of the tension of his tourniquet, dangle his
feet, and strain our ears to the ululation of his flute; au contraire, we want to reignite his spark as
part of the Filipino's sense of self-rediscovery. There's no need to bleach our skin off the
traces of Rajah Humabon. He can buff us to a sheen so that our inner luster
could glow on the surface, instead. He can be a wonderful resource in
disabusing ourselves from the dizzy onslaught of modernization; he can lend
character to the drab pretensions of our skyscrapers and arrest the Styrofoam
shapes our cities are slowly turning into. He can motivate our protagonists for
he is an old hat in rescuing damsels in distress. He can convert the raw fuel
of life and fire our imagination with mystical inspirations in our arts,
architecture, and industry.
This is not all about running after the West, and
embarrassing ourselves in the process. Amidst "country branding" so
in vogue today, this is about strengthening the foundation of the nationhood
we've been busy building on; this is about reinforcing our cultural fabric so
that it could stand the wear and tear of time; and utilizing every known
resource at our disposal to put distinctness to our output. And why not? After
all, the sleek contour of the Lexus that just rolled off the assembly line is
nothing but the ingenuity of the samurai. In the decades that lie ahead, I
don't see how the kris should be any
different.
So let's get him off started — however crudely. Cut him some
slack, your Excellency. And dear honorable Mayor, give him leeway, give him
room on the sidewalk this Christmas for the odd trinkets he can sell. And dear
pedestrian, be wary and give wide berth to the red-juice spittle from his betel
nut chew. See, he is descended from the legendary warriors of Butig, Jolo and
Buayaan, of whom they said had the fortitude to wait out the slow crumbling of
any fortification. How long had he been struggling? Half a millennium, say?
Take more. He's far from being burnt out. He can't be impressive this sudden
though. He's trying to get his bearing, so allow a few banana-peel slips. A
slop of spilled milk. He'll recycle on his own; no need to walk him through.
He'll start small, but doggedly. A kindling, more imagined than seen or heard.
Not a pneumatic hiss. Or a flash in the pan. Just a rhythmic grinding and a
suppressed borborygmus. A rodent's insignificant gnawing, if you will. A beat that in the meanwhile you can tap dance to in
your head. Steady — until it catches and grows monumental.
