IT takes an anthropologist, a good one, to restore “my nipa hut” into its proper place in the cultures of the land. Romanticized as a poor but “authentic” symbol of the country and simplified as the most basic of vernacular architecture, the nipa hut has always remained a tiny element, a nonessential part of the quest for Filipino identity.
The main reason for this restoration is a small book called Bahay Kubo, A Filipino Children’s Song. Excavated by the archaeologist, Stephen Acabado, the small house is not merely a structure but a space full of other things. These are vegetables that are considered the most ordinary in the universe of the average Filipinos. When we are asked therefore to come up with an image that approximates the everyday life of everyone, the Bahay Kubo is the purest of this anthem, the song that children understand and the verses adults can tell children.
Purity in the sense of a race is the claim of those who point to the song about the small nipa hut. What indeed is more Pinoy than the politics of smallness in a hut that, however limited, is surrounded by varied plants or resources? Those plants, our teachers in grade school have told us, are all native to the Philippines and we should be proud of them. Our bragging right is how in the demarcated ground so much local wealth is there for the taking and picking.
But for Stephen Acabado, the case of the bahay kubo is an example of what is called, in archaeology, as a homogenocene, the “widespread expansion of plants [and animals] brought about by the maritime exchanges which began with Columbus.” From this knowledge then we are taught new lessons—the fruits and vegetables around the humble abode have less humble origins. They have travelled complexly through times, their journey a struggle over periods of colonization and migrations.
Acabado’s first lesson is this: Of the plants and vegetables around the hut only upo (wax gourd),
bawang (garlic), and labanos (radish) “appear to be the only potentially local species.” The rest of the plants mentioned in the song, Acabado would tell us, come from the Americas, Africa, or mainland Asia.
There is another essay in the book and it comes from Kristian Sendon Cordero, writer and owner of the nearly legendary Savage Mind, a cultural hub and bookstore in Naga City. In his exegesis of a what must really be a complex song, Cordero brings us into the discourses of two other writers: Albert Alejo, SJ ( the poet, anthropologist and political activist) and Allan Derain (writer, academic and curator par-excellence of everything about Aswang.
In Alejo’s reading, the bahay kubo enables the persona to enter first the dwelling before he can view and introspect on the flora outside, blurring in effect the discord between the outside and inside. Derain’s thought resides on the verb “doon” and references an observer long gone from the field, the garden and its plant kingdom a memory. Cordero muses how nostalgia plays a role in the reckoning of the “native” land of the hut.
Working with Acabado, Cordero sought the artistry of Aldrin A. Camacho, a teacher and artist, and Mavreen Anne E. Romero, a graduate of Digital Illustration and Animation at the Ateneo de Naga University, to rework the song about the hut and the vegetables into a rhapsody on the Filipino, his natural and social universe, and the identities spawned by them.
Ultimately, however, the lesson that this small book offers comes from Acabado who speaks how “the idea of pure Filipino, discovered and civilized only by the Western colonizers, must now be laid to rest.” For Acabado, an archaeologist who heads the Bikol Archaeological Project in the Department of Anthropology in the University of California-Los Angeles, the book should bring us to embrace our identities that, like the mga halaman (the plants) in the munting bahay kubo (the little hut) are results of long history of living interactions, resulting to a sari-sari (a variety) layered and diverse cultural groups of people who continue to evolve, enrich, and emancipate.
The book is lavishly illustrated in the charmingly archaic and dense style of an almanac. Bahay Kubo, A Filipino Children’s Song, will be used by the Savage Mind as an instructional material leading to an even more ambitious project on decolonization.
As of this writing, 100 copies of the book was acquired for distribution to teachers and students in Pangasinan by Foad Manshadi. Twenty books were also donated to Abra by Narra Studio, a US-based cultural gift shop.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano