Rational Insanity
You are what you were
I have had countless remarks about my being so young yet uncannily knowledgeable and unconventionally interested in history and the past.My retort would usually center on the non-existent relationship between a person’s age with the interest and knowledge of history and culture.It is our responsibility to know where we came from and how we came to be.To most people culture and most especially history are boring but if we just take time to read, talk to people who are well-versed in such subjects, and digest these things they can actually be very interesting and enlightening.Interesting to the point of actually finding out things that we don’t normally get out of the usual inquiries we routinely make to accomplish a report or finish a thesis.
Most people of my age nowadays don’t probably even know the difference between a terno and a traje de mestiza or the reason why most traditional families would still prefer cooking with wood coal instead of LPG units.For the latter, convenience would be the most obvious, but there is another reason – old Filipino families claim that the wood used in cooking food lends a subtle, most of the time, unnoticeable taste, to the food being cooked.Then there is the practice of most Visayan households of putting a stone into a pot when tenderizing or cooking something.The stone that was used was an implement that was passed on from generation to generation and aside from its main purpose of shortening the cooking time when tenderizing meats, it also lends a distinct flavor to the food being prepared.Scientifically, the ‘stone in the pot’ technique could be explained by the equal distribution of heat in the contents of the pot, and the subtle flavor lent by the stone is usually due to the trace amounts of minerals that are found in the stone.Most families usually used a certain kind of mountain stone for this particular custom.Still in line with tenderizing meats, the term ‘binakol’ comes from ‘bakol’ which means ‘to beat’.Early Visayans actually beat the chicken to death when it was to be made into the chicken stew we now know as ‘binakol’ because they believed that the meat of the native chicken became tenderer this way – remember, native chickens were the only options way back then, and so extra measure had to be taken to make them more palatable.
Now, to the more serious matter of ancestry; most Visayans, especially in the island of Panay can trace back their roots to the Spaniards and the Chinese who were among the first settlers of the island.The intense religiosity of the people here started out as fear.Since the Spanish friars were the king makers as well as the discreet and unspoken executioners of the time, this struck fear in the hearts of Indios and Indias (terms referring to early Filipinos), and so they were pressured to submit to whatever religious practice the friars directed them to follow, if not only to save themselves from unrequited scrutiny, to also work themselves up the social and political ladder.When the Spaniards left, the fear left also, but the practices remained.For those who sought to flout the abusive directions of the Spaniards, they were unjustly labeled as ‘aswangs’, ‘manughiwit’, ‘demonyos’ or ‘panulay’.Yes, ‘demonyos’, remember, the early Filipino did not have a concept of evil before the Spaniards arrived.It was Christianity that gave the ancient Filipino a materialized concept of evil – the devil.Some of these things in the past have served to make us better individuals, but some have remained to become ingrained eccentricities for many of us.The custom of having our house-help or maids eat separately from their wards came from the Chinese.Helpers were never allowed to dine along with their wards or eat the same food for that matter.Food was a very important aspect of Chinese culture and as a result, those who belonged to the lower class were not allowed to eat anything that was prepared for the upper class or sit around the same table where their upper class wards dined.
There are many other snippets of history and culture that define what we are now that we most likely don’t know of yet and it helps to be aware of these things if even only for the purpose of defining what the true, unadulterated Visayan is actually like.The ‘mundos’ of the mountains of Tapaz who are the only remaining cultural community in Western Visayas earned their tribe name from the Spanish word ‘Vagamundo’ which is synonymous with fierce, wild, or undomesticated.They earned this name simply because they defied Spanish rule and took to the mountains.Later, because of contextual considerations, they became the ‘Suludnon’ or ‘Panayanon Sulod’ which means ‘coming from the interiors’, and later they were called ‘Binukot’ because of a certain practice that is worth another column.This is a clear demonstration of how times change and how we, as human beings, inherently good, want to heal the wounds of the past and rediscover what we truly are.Learning our history is not really a matter of shedding off the thick mask that we have put on through the years like the Donya Victorina of Noli me Tangere – it’s a matter of rekindling within us the flame of ancestry and heritage and using our intellect and rational thought to pick out which of these things made us animals and which of these things made us human – it’s entirely up to us as to which of these things we would decide to preserve.
Be rational; be insane… every once in a while!TTFN!I love you all dear readers!!!Love yah – code name kuno- hehehehehe;-)
Thanks to Marcel for some of the facts for this column.