Iloilo has always been a favored island in memory. I have not lived in Iloilo for many years for the place to solder an existence in my mind; in fact, I have not lived at all in Iloilo. But each short visit to the place is always an incursion into a space that seems to go away forever. It is maybe because every time I am in Iloilo, I am conscious of an era that is gone.
Iloilo as a city is the kind of site cultural historians aim to preserve, but you know it will never happen, this restoration, this preservation. And so you make do with what you have, and what you see: a turn-of-the-century building that huddles close to its modern reincarnation.
I was in Iloilo once more upon the invitation of Elvert Bañares, festival director of Cine Kasimanwa. Indefatigable and radical, which I like, Elvert was turning over the management of the said film festival to the neighboring province, Capiz.
Cinema has always been my passion and to lecture and to serve as jury are two opportunities that I always look forward to. But to give a talk and to judge while in a place that has a surplus of nostalgia and memories is another matter. To be in Iloilo and to be with Elvert and his group of filmmakers is to drive around the city and annotate on changes and development.
Iloilo is changing fast. The former airport in Manduriao is now a tony place with cafés and malls glistening and grand in their minimalist splendor. There are buildings demonstrating bad taste, but who cares? These other buildings can strike a chord that makes you think and look back at those structures with great designs. The old schools have retained their façade even as new structures announcing technologies mar their surroundings.
Everywhere, the bakeries in Iloilo are sweet entanglements of more memories. The visitors can bring back their own thoughts of childhood and milestones with these bakeries that seemed to have preserved all kinds of bread and cookies. Like the stores of yore, these bakeries are labor-intensive when it comes to the number of sales clerks and vendors. Then there is the river—clean where the other rivers of this nation are dank and defiled. Bridges cross parts of this river; mangroves are lush when one expects mud and blight.
In Iloilo, I was part of the Sandaan Expedition, a term that is a bit colonizing but is really aimed at creating the spirit of adventure. The said program is about the 100 years of Philippine cinema and we are giving lectures and talks to commemorate the cinema, which began, for plain reckoning, with the production of Dalagang Bukid by Jose Nepomuceno in 1919. What is that film without talking of Atang de la Rama, the zarzuela superstar who made the move from theater to film and succeeded. Atang would be declared a National Artist, joining her husband, Ka Amado Hernandez, poet and labor activist.
From Iloilo, we traveled by land to Capiz.
It would be my first time in Capiz, a place that I remember as coming into our living room in my grandparents’ home in Ticao Island. When a storm raged, for some reason I do not have an explanation, the airwaves would clear and we could listen clearly to the programs in Roxas City. The language of Hiligaynon would cease to be strange as the voices floated into our conversation. We would recognize the similarity to the language of our small island. The radio would then play some songs and my grandmother would hum then.
Long after my grandmother, Emilia, passed on, I would surf the YouTube and listen to these songs and discover them, identify them to be the music of the islands of Panay. And I would hear myself humming the selfsame songs.
Those songs were not there when the van ferrying Elvert and I entered Capiz. The trip was not that long but we were tired and counted the kilometers at night.
“Capiz na po,” the driver said. I looked out for the usual welcome arch common in Luzon towns. I did not see the arch, instead I told Elvert, I could see a cow.
“Are you sure, it is a cow, sir?” “Remember, this is Capiz,” Elvert was teasing me and encouraging me what he presumed correctly to be my scholarly interest and obsession in the “folk” and the “supernatural.”
The morning, during my lecture on women filmmakers from the beginning of Philippine cinema to the ’80s, I mentioned the cow.
The mostly teachers in attendance were amused. I was not apologetic. I felt I was not insulting the Capiznon and their cultures. I talked about how Aswang in the Bicol culture was not really evil but was in the pantheon of divinities. As with all kinds of colonization that infiltrate the mind, the Spanish conquistadores with the Spanish/European church they were bearing had to create a new image for the powerful deities of the native. Thus a powerful god was transformed into a malignant being; the “Babaylan” or “Asog” (in Bicol) who were men dressed as women and were potent sources of energies and power became demonized. Their craft were termed the works of witches and their strength the sources of malice.
And yet, Capiz, when culturally mapped, would yield more enchantment beyond its sea and fishes. National Artist Jovita Fuentes, who conquered Europe with what critics call “sublime interpretations” of Puccini heroines was a Capiznon. The grande dame of Philippine theater, Daisy Hontiveros Avellana, another National Artist, was from this part of Panay Island.
These artists of the putative nation and the many artists in film and arts are the true, trenchant meanings of witchcraft in this island and the other islands of the archipelago.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com