VISAYAN LOVE

Alang kanimo mao koy tinguha,

Ning kalibutan duhay silimbahon,

Didto sa Langit, siya si Bathala,

Dinhi sa Yuta, ang imong kaambong.

Dili mahimo nga ikaw hikalimtan,

Akong Bathala sinimba sat ago,

Kay kon wala ka sa sulod ning dughan,

Unsa pay ako, Inday, unsa pay ako?

Silaw sa bulan, tipik sa bitoon,

Nga nagpabilin ning yutang malaay,

Kon daw buot ka nga dili simbahon,

Iuli sa Langit ang imong panagway.

Vicente Ranudo, Hikalimtan (1906)

¹    Talk of love and the “true-blue” Cebuano will recite to you passages from the poetry of Vicente Ranudo (1882-1930). And he will probably go on to say that here is the clearest distillation of “Visayan Love.”

²    Is there such thing as a “Visayan love,” and is this it – an emotion at once physical and metaphysical, delicious, self-conscious, steeped in the sweet melancholy of distances (and, one might add, the lyric juices of the love-struck poet)? Ranudo’s is a high note in the Cebuano language of love but it is not the only note.

³    One can cite other renderings from the early twentieth century, Ranudo’s time – as folksy, lewd, and irreverent as anything Max Surban and Yoyoy Villame can devise. Take this poem by the late Raon Durano (as naughty a poet as he was a politician) entitled “Ang Akong Gugma Kanimo” (published inBag-ong Kusog, 28 November 1924) and dedicated to a woman code-named: Flower, “tag-iya sa akong mga damgo, sa akong kalipay”:

⁴                     Busa kanimo hinalaran ug pinagga ko isaad,

Nga ako sa imong dughan kanunay maghalad;

Sanglit ikaw ang kalag sa akong kinabuhi,

Oh! Magpakamatay sa ibabaw sa imong kaputli.

⁵    Yet, the sentiment expressed in Ranudo’s poetry (and a host of other poems in the same vein) has fixed itself as the “quintessential” Visayan love – heightened, perfervid, self-absorbed, almost in love with itself.

⁶    “Visayan love” seems a vacuous and amorphous concept. Yet, the “anthropology of emotions” tells us that human sentiments are not a kind of universal keyboard that sounds the same across time and across cultures. The keys (like anger, shame, fear, grief or love) vary in tones and respond to different pressures. Cultural differences may be found in display rules (acquired conventions, norms or habits that dictate what emotion can be shown to whom and in which contexts), coping devices (cognitive and behavioral attempts to deal with the emotion and its causes), and elicitors (stimuli that draw out the emotion). To trace all these elements will require more space than I have here. (It might bore you no end as well.) A few suggestive ideas, however, can be explored.

⁷    What is Visayan gugma? While we can speak of a more or less distinctive configuration of sentiment, we deal as well with something far from static. If emotion is socially and culturally constructed, then gugmais as dynamic as culture itself.

⁸    Take Ranudo once again. The dominant ethos of love in Ranudo and other Cebuano romantic poets is less indigenous than nineteenth-century in character, already the product of many extraneous influences. Spanish influence saw the “romanticizing” of love. This arose out of Christian solipsism and guilt, and the deepening (moral as well as mystical) of the distance between the lover and the beloved, in what was often a miming of the distance between the sinner and his God. Love came to be clothed with the aura of impossibility. Changing conceptions of the self, individuation, heightened basis f introspection, and a whole array of moral strictures (particularly the repression of sexuality) – all these created “romantic love.”

⁹    There is a social dimension as well. Increased social stratification, population mobility, and the elaboration of social conventions created situations whereby there were more “distances” for lovers to cross. The problem of social or class distance is particularly prominent in popular Cebuano stories and poems dealing with love, in which the lover usually pines for a woman “forbidden” or “unreachable.” (Indeed, the man can be the “object,” but then most Cebuano authors were men.) The mystification of the object of love installed woman on a pedestal (where, deprived of agency, she mouldered).

¹⁰ Love takes on other romantic colorings. It is quarried as a special preserve of the poor and the disposed. In a kind of compensatory reflex, the poor mystified their condition by saying that the rich may have the gold, the poor man has “soul.” Emotion was seen as the site of uncorrupted, pure, or honest “humanity” in contrast with the wealthy’s calculated materialism or civilization’s artificial rationality. In the same way that poverty was often idealized in popular literature, so too was feeling as a realm in which the powerless could claim superiority. Woman became the locus for other meanings, a vehicle for repressed social desires. Her chastity – a dominant theme in vernacular letters – was deployed as a symbol, a kind of last redoubt for those who had been forced by social circumstance to surrender almost everything else.

¹¹ The “romanticizing” of love came from a confluence of social and cultural factors. Such factors created a vocabulary of desire that spawned a minor industry of love poems and popular pamphlets on the art of amoral and the billet-doux (mga sulat sa gugma). The vocabulary has remained persuasive to this day.

¹² It was not like always like this. Nor was Ranudo’s time exactly homogeneous. (Ranudo himself is not innocent of a certain slyness.) There were folksy poets like those who composed the jocular balitao andcomposo verses that tapped the less pretentious side of Visayan love:

¹³                  Kining akong paghigugma

  Sa bukog, Inday, mikagit

  Kong hinog ka pa lang sab-a

  Lamyon ko hangtod ang panit.

¹⁴ In the main, however, Cebuano love poetry was taken over by a kind of male narcissism, the elf-advertising display of “fine sensibility.” Women themselves were not wholly innocent: they willingly imprisoned themselves, corsets and all, in this manufactured image of themselves.

¹⁵ Reconstructing desire is a tricky thing. One can discern it only through what traces remain – poems, songs, charms, recorded practices and rituals. Still, one judges that the early Visayans were less prone to mystify heterosexual love. Seventeenth-century Jesuit chronicler Francisco Alcina speaks of Visayan males (often upon the instigation of women, he says) carrying women off to the woods, but to conjure the “caveman” image is not quite correct. There were precolonial sexual niceties and taboos as well as folk poetry that showed such emotion as Ranudo would have envied. If Alcina is to be believed, moderns  cannot quite match the delicacies f communication the early Visayans were capable of. Speaking of Visayan music, Alcina writes: “They gather and join together to look each other over, they make love to one another and court each other (using musical instruments like the kudyapi) with much more feeling or sensuality than by word of mouth.”

¹⁶ Still, love was not yet imprisoned in such thickets of inhibitions as grew later on. The missionaries were still somewhere else. “Christian guilt” had not yet been invented. Sex and the body were not an object of shame. Again, to quote Alcina: “I believe that either in ancient times nor now is chastity esteemed among them, nor before did they recognize it as a virtue.” They appreciated the body. They endured labor and pain to make themselves physically attractive (as witness the ancient cosmetology of tattooing). They underwent “erotic surgery” and invented instruments (such as the “penis-wheel” – a device that modesty prevents us from describing in graphic detail) to enhance what an early chronicler called “the pleasures of Venus” (in contrast to other cultures where similar practices were designed to restrain or repress, rather than increase, sexual gratification).

¹⁷ What is further interesting is that in this field of unabashed sensuality, women (practically all the early travelers and chroniclers attest) were more “sensual, vicious, and restless” than men. Australian scholar Anthony Reid argues that this illustrated the relative autonomy of Southeast Asian women: “Women took a very active part in courtship and lovemaking, and demanded as much as they gave by way of sexual and emotional gratification.” Women did not collapse in sighs, secretly wilting in unrequited love, they were active foragers for both sex and love.

¹⁸ This is a world away from the world of Ranudo. Love may be forever, but it does translate in many ways. Emotions are “a kind of language of the self – a code for statements about intentions, actions, and social relations.” They speak of something quite private, yet they speak as well of the public spaces we inhabit.

(VISAYAN LOVE by Resil B. Mojares, 1993)

Meet the Writer

RESIL B. MOJARES, trained in literature and anthropology, won several National Book Awards from the Manila Critics Circle for works in fields of literary criticism, urban and rural history, and political biography.

He has been a recipient of prizes for his short stories, a national fellowships in the essay from the UP ICW, and teaching and research fellowships from the Ford, Toyota and Rockefeller foundations, Fulbright Program and Social Science Research Council (New York).

He served as visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, University of Hawaii and University of Michigan.

He was honored with a Gawad Balagtas award by the UMPIL in 1997 for his contributions to the development of Philippine literature. Dr. Mojares is Professor Emeritus at the University of San Carlos, Cebu City.

(http://panitikan.com.ph/authors/m/rbmojares.htm)