AN unusual kind of feasting is happening right now in Bicol. We call it the first Bikol Book Festival. The event has given me the chance to talk about my small book, which has been categorized as fiction. I call it ethnography. But no one, as far as I know, has acknowledged this intention of mine.
Books are unusual; they develop a life or lives of their own once they are released by the author and, it follows, the publishing house. We do not have to invoke the fashionable notion of the death of the writer to make sense of the fact that the voice of the person behind the prose, and the tales is unnecessary in enjoying—or understanding—the content of the book. The fact is the book suffices.
Which brings me back to my small book, The Last Sacristan Mayor and the Most Expensive Mass for the Dead. Tales from Ticao. It is a story about enchantment, not merely in the sense of unseen beings or elementals but more about the unexpected, that contortion at the end of a prose, or a fanciful stroke to describe the allure of a woman, the sensuality of a man.
Other writers can articulate their own meanings; I back off from that enterprise. However, I can be voluble about my methodology, the process whereby I listen to the field and engage the narrators, and write down what they share or question. Here enters my assertion about the book as really being ethnographic.
In the sessions that allow me to finally be personal about my book, I bracket the experience by underscoring my reason for compiling these short tales. They are my way of initiating a different approach to collecting what we comfortably call folklore although down there in the field, there is no differentiation between what is told by the collective and what is sorted, arranged and documented by the social scientist. But we soldier on—to classify is, after all, the most human of our frailties and strengths.
I cannot talk about enchantment without discussing how I came to derive experiences that are enchanting. Two words unite the disparate domains of my work: enchantment and ethnography.
Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life describes enchantment as “a state of wonder produced by a surprising encounter with something you did not expect.” Even as this standpoint has helped me more than ever in grasping the effect of the stories on my own person, I have always believed then that to come up with a book of enchantment, one must not lose sight of the fact that to be in awe, to feel the wonders of the worlds around, the writer should not render the stories as expressions of social realities, or as end-results. The stasis of analysis kills the shapes shifting in the narrator’s recollection of an afternoon in the forest, or a moonlit evening by the beach, or of the chill that runs down one’s spine as the grandchild listens to his grandfather talk about the lonely and cruel sound of the bells that send the devil scampering away from the deathbed of a sinful priest.
The other side of my book is the research method, which is called ethnography. This is a qualitative method that assumes cultures are diverse and that the approach is always immersive. It respects people and is not self-conscious about being too objective or less subjective. After being admitted into the community of a village or a small community, the ethnographer takes in the regular phenomenon around him. He lives long in that place, mingles with people until he—the researcher—turns into a fixture, a given, almost fly on the wall sometimes, observing without being observed. But there is a crisis in this approach, when does one become a documentarian with enough critical mind intact and a listener intensely captivated by phantom processions or of a man trying to balance himself on the edge of a palm frond?
Memory settles the problem between enchantment and ethnography. The book is, first and foremost, my own enchantment. These are my own experiences of how childhood is about memories. In my case, which is not unusual, this past, this childhood is also about leaving a place and connecting to the place. It is the child in a man, or the present persona, making sense of the many events in the past. It is also an approach to describing a community or a town. It is a way to critique a historical point without blaming politics or people, histories or human foibles but by transforming the tales into ethnography.
We allow the stories to unfold and there find a way to return home, to immerse in human experiences.
The book is a product of a long fieldwork. I had the luxury of indulging in the collection of tales almost unself-consciously: I was listening, in awe or in disbelief sometimes. Scared or having fun. Writing them down created a distance from the memories. But I do not call it objectivity. The act of writing also allowed me to rethink and think some more about the tales.
The gap between the childhood years and writing years was at first problematic. Then it became a free space for me to write through the tales, to complete them without a regard for the original narrators.
The tales are not mine. There were narrators—grandmothers, grand-aunts, my own mother, aunts who collaborated later. They are my interlocutors—people who participate in conversation, my collaborators. According to Paul Grice, in conversation there is always the principle of collaboration.
In this collaboration, we reveal folktales or mythologies that are relevant so long as humans are still relevant. The tales from the periphery, the wondrous tales of enchantment are more than a description of cultures of a particular place. They talk of ecology, of politics, and of race. They communicate to us about our notions of persons and communities. They remind us of how we should maintain balance with nature and the surroundings, and with ourselves.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano