Bikol: A Language of Thought and Devotion

This selection of translated poems from the Philippines is dedicated to Marne L. Kilates, one of its translators, who recently passed away.

All poets in this selection are Bikolnon, an Indigenous people of the Philippines.

After three miscarriages, my parents decided to seek the intercession of San Ramon Nonato, one of the patron saints for expectant mothers, and of Inang Salvacion, a Marian statue popularly venerated in the remote village of Joroan, in Tiwi, Albay in the Philippines. Together with the other members of my mother’s family, they vowed that if their prayers were granted, and if the child would be a boy, he would be schooled in the seminary, and the community would help him become a Catholic priest. The supplication was heard, and I was born in 1983. They gave me the name Kristian to mark the beginning of this contract.

Two years after, another baby was born. She was given the name Filipinas because my sister was born during the country’s Independence Day anniversary. She always teased us later, saying that when she was born, there was a parade. And then came our youngest, Bhasier, a name given by my mother’s sister in honor of her first Arab boyfriend. My brother now lives in Abu Dhabi with his family, while Filipinas is in Valetta with her Maltese husband.

In the book Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines, Fenella Cannell explains that these contracts between the saints and the devotees are carried on by performing the novena or by doing a pilgrimage, especially when favors have been bestowed already. The promise or the covenant is completed by repeatedly performing these devotional tasks. But this covenant is done in the spirit of tabang (aid) and not of utang (debt) because the saints are considered to be immediate family members. In this Catholic world, I was treated as a sort of a special child because I am the incarnation of the incantation they made with the saints. I am the tabang.

Growing up, I was attracted to the idea of becoming a priest. I remember listening to the Sunday masses through the radio, which offered me some sort of consolation as I listened to the minister’s voice. The words were reverently articulated, the sounds and meanings all in perfect order. It was the kind of Catholic imagination that Carlos Ojeda Aureus described as sacramental, baroque, and always hopeful to a happy reckoning. After the broadcasted mass, I would summon the neighborhood children to attend my own version of liturgy. I would remember some parts of the mass, particularly the consecratory prayers that culminate with the victorious anamnesis: Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will return in all his glory. As we waited for this comeback, we mimicked our own mass. For the sacred host, we used a local biscuit called Marie and for the blood of Christ, we substituted the miraculous drink simply known as Coke. Looking back, I had a good attendance of churchgoers, and it kept on growing so that even children in a nearby village would come to our house to see me lead them in prayers and perform our Eucharistic meals.

My parents allowed me to do this role-playing until the expenses I incurred went beyond the budget of our family. Because I was only listening to the mass through the radio, I missed that there was an offertory when people were asked to donate money for the church. Despite the expenses for Coke and Marie, there was no direct prohibition from my parents. Instead, they brought me one day to the parish church and, together with so many people unknown to me, I attended a real liturgy. It was an event to remember—I felt at that time that I was seeing a heavenly vision, a total feast with singing and elocution, and, yes, incense. Grand were the images of the saints inside the church. Therese of Lisieux stood ten-feet high, so we eventually called her Teresang Higante; Maria Goretti was all ceramic white; while Martin De Porres had the kindest gaze, and black was his color. The tableau of the crucifixion displayed at the side altar was adorned with fresh and plastic flowers. Everything was illuminated as electric lights and votive candles shone through all corners of the church. And people were dressed up. Some women were wearing their church uniforms, which I would memorize eventually when I entered the seminary. The blue for the Catholic Women’s League, the green for the Saint Joseph’s Association, the brown for the Saint Anthony of Padua’s group etcetera, etcetera.

In that busy churchyard of ice cream vendors and balloon sellers, I would discover the booklets of devotions, the novenas for sale. Holding these booklets, it was as if I was seeing for the first time the ice in Marquez’s Macondo. Written in three languages—the standard Bikol, printed by Naga’s Cecilio Press, and some in Tagalog and English—with colorized covers printed by Aklatang Lunas in Manila, these booklets were my first sacred texts. In them, I would encounter the magical world of San Isidro Labrador, who has an angel for an aide, and the dramatic life story of Santa Rita de Cascia, whose forehead is punctuated by a small cut, a reminder of her consecration as a bride of the Suffering Christ.

These novenas were being sold together with luminous rosaries said to be blessed by the Pope himself, maroon candles of amorphous shapes, and bronze medals that are popularly known as anting-anting. The Santo Niño with erected penis was a bestseller. There were also other reading materials like a booklet of dreams and their assigned meanings called Prognostico (prognosis), weather guides, some folktales of Punay and Agbaan, adventure stories like the Siete Infantes de Lara, and other Bikol translations of Ibong Adarna, Snow White, Cinderella, and Romeo and Juliet. Every Sunday, my father promised to buy me a novena. In retrospect, I see how they greatly contributed to why I learned to see Bikol as a language of thought and devotion, equal to Latin and other world languages.

Of the novenas I collected, I remember the Letania Para Sa Mga Aking Sadang (Litany for the Unborn Children), which my grandmother asked me to pray with her for the three children, my other siblings who did not make it to this world. What is most striking in this novena is the valediction of the unborn child. Reading it, one feels how the unknown takes a voice and bids goodbye to the future. The unborn child has no face and claims to be undeveloped, but with this novena, it has received a voice, a voice that allowed me to place myself in such a position that I would never be, as I am the fulfilment of another novena.

Listening, reading, and praying were the first habits I learned from this kind of worlding, which has made me the writer that I am today. It is through the novenas that I collected and devoured that I encountered the miracle of staying in full attention. Reading the Letania as a prayer, I was made to feel indebted to these siblings. The first three children died, and the three of us live on. In Candaba, Pampanga, our father’s hometown, the three of us would occasionally pass by the cemetery and light a candle where our supposed eldest brother, named Pedro, was buried. The other is Juan, who was buried in our barangay chapel in Iriga, while the third one has no name and is believed to have been devoured by an aswang.

I was about to enter the primary school when we started praying a novena for my mother, this time to San Rafael, the patron saint for travelers. My mother was bound for Qatar. She applied for a work in the Middle East, a domestic help, a katabang to a Muslim family.

Without my mother, my grandmother and my aunt took care of us while my father continued to work in the local irrigation agency. Later on, in the mid-90s, he would also work abroad as a security guard in a shipping company in the United States. I remember asking him to wear a scapular.

Growing up with my grandmother, who was also the folk healer of our community, introduced me further to many things that would later inform my poetics. While my parents worked outside the country, my grandmother initiated me to the world of tawong lipod that coexists with the virgins and martyrs. She would let me tag along on her many pilgrimages to recharge her healing powers. I would also accompany her when she had to visit her patients and performed the act of santigwar (a contraction of santo agua or holy water), which is loosely translated in English as an exorcism. The striking difference however is there is no devil or evil to begin with in pagsasantigwar. Her patients were notably calm and peaceful. My grandmother did not call those who possessed her patients malignant spirits. There is no Baal or Beelzebub. No one is an adversary. Instead, the patients were advised to restore what they had violated. A case of trespassing was appeased by offering food for these spirits and by offering masses for the dead. In performing the Santigwar, my grandmother used a blessed candle, the coconut oil from the local religious shrines we visited, and a lusang plato, a quasi-porcelain plate. Drawing three crosses on the plate, she would begin by whispering her oracion, a secret prayer formula, which she guards with her life. Many times, we have marveled as to how she could read the figures formed on the plate. It looked like an X-ray, and she was like a doctor offering a diagnosis.

Named Natividad and fondly called Nanay Idad, her birthday falls on the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, September 8; she was not just a folk healer, she was also a trained midwife. In our barangay, I took pride in the fact that most of my classmates were all indebted to her. She delivered most of us. When my sister gave birth to her eldest daughter, it was our grandmother who served as her midwife. In my eulogy for her, I mentioned the fact that it was Nanay Idad’s hands that first touched me. She was my first human contact. When I asked her to model for my second book, she willingly offered her hands to be photographed.

In 2006, living a life outside the seminary (so the contract was not fulfilled), I published my second book of poetry in Bikol and Filipino, which I entitled Santigwar. The title is to honor my grandmother and my rector in the seminary who I consider to be influential in my early years as a poet. In this volume, I called for a new pagsantigwar, an alternative haliya (a moon ritual believed to drive away the moon-swallowing Bakunawa) that will exorcise the land. This young poet believes that Bakunawa symbolically represents the portent omens and ills that afflict our communities, the Bikol region, which remains one of the poorest regions in the country.

Writing in Bikol has given me the opportunity to look into how this language, long used in the church, can also articulate our other narratives, our other lives. While I remain in constant search for a language that seeks to see its own limits, and I have also ventured into translation, publishing, bookselling, and filmmaking, Bikol remains the province of my heart. Bikol is the language of my fiercest imagination and refers to people of my tenderest devotion. Abandoning the idea of becoming a Catholic priest, I decided to become a poet to continue to fulfill the initial contract. After the novenas I used to collect as a child, I started collecting books of poetry, which have become like sacred texts to me, inspiring and expanding this being. In poetry, I participate in a new communion. Through poetry, I continue to behold this magnificent feeling of the eternal, beatified and illumined by the memories of the unborn and the images of the unsaid and the unfulfilled.