In the mail

I AM totally wiped out, with a bad cold from two weeks of living out of the suitcase so I’m going to do a light column today using some of the e-mail I received in response to recent columns. It’s something I haven’t done in a long while and might do more regularly. Whether corrections, clarifications, questions or additional insights, all these reflect an interactive readership.

The historian and economist Benito Legarda Jr. wrote in to clarify that the American “Liberation” of Manila was indeed “ghastly” but there were no aerial bombings. I had written about the toll in human lives and mentioned aerial bombings. Mr. Legarda wrote two books on the Japanese occupation, “Occupation ’42” and “Occupation: The Later Years.” For readers interested in more information about this era, he recommends Lourdes Reyes Montinola’s “Breaking the Silence” and Alfredo Roces’ “Looking for Liling.”

Ben Capistrano wrote in also about the Second World War, wondering if the Pearl Harbor bombing should be commemorated on Dec. 7, which was the date in Hawaii when the bombing happened, or Dec. 8, which was the date in Manila when Pearl Harbor was being bombed. I used Dec. 8, but stand corrected. In historical texts, we use the date in the place where an event occurred.

I had a column to commemorate the 29th death anniversary of Dr. Bobby de la Paz, assassinated in Samar when he was serving there with his wife, Dr. Sylvia de la Paz. Sylvia forwarded to me a letter from former Senator Rene Saguisag, who was with the legal assistance group MABINI at the time of the assassination and who says we must need to keep telling the story of Bobby.

Cecilia Bahrami e-mailed to say that the column about Bobby reminded her of her own father, Dr. Jose Lugay Sr., who served for many years in Guiuan, Eastern Samar. Her letter arrived just as I was leaving for Tacloban, to deliver a commencement speech at the UP campus there, where I began my speech referring to Bobby, and then mentioning that there were many other unsung heroes, physicians who chose to serve in the difficult areas of Samar and Leyte. We hear too little about these selfless individuals, and the difference they made.

Still related to my travel across the Visayas, I had a column “Binisaya,” an adaptation of my commencement speech in UP Cebu, where I called for more Bisaya pride. A former student, Jesson Allerite, wrote to share many examples of the richness of Cebuano, and I’m saving his information for a future column.

Sweet Gumba e-mailed to point out Paracale is not in Camarines Sur as I wrote but in Camarines Norte. Paracale appeared in my column because I was quoting Fr. Ignacio Alzina from his 17th-century account of the Visayans, and how they had spread throughout the archipelago. Paracale is rich in gold, and continues to be a center for fine gold jewelry.

Origins of Visaya

Roel Mendoza wrote in wondering if Bisaya might have been derived from Vaishya, the caste of commoners, and mentioned that in Sulu, the term is extremely pejorative, synonymous with slave. I checked with historian and UP Professor Neil Garcia and he said that the connotations of slavery came out of the Moro raids that were common during the Spanish colonial period, where Visayans would be taken as “slaves.”

Neil emphasized that the raiders were not pirates, as they are often depicted. There were many reasons for the raids, sometimes as simple as needing to get food during times of famine. Moreover, it wasn’t just Moros raiding Visayan Christian communities but also Visayans raiding fellow Christian and Muslim areas.

The Ateneo de Manila has a webpage where it notes the Tausug use of “Visaya” to mean slave, but points out this came much later, as a result of the raids. Ateneo notes that the origins of the name “Visaya” are “nebulous.” One possibility is that it came from “Sri-Vijaya,” the name of a maritime empire that existed from the 7th to 12th centuries, with its sphere of influence extending into the Visayas. Alzina is also mentioned, with speculation that it might have come from “aya” or “caya,” meaning a happy person.

Let’s move away from “Binisaya” to a column I did on the rondalla, where I mentioned that while the Octavia and the laud still carry their European imprint, the banduria seemed to be distinctly Filipino. Nikos Ibarra Mante, who is the musical director of the UP Manila Chorale, wrote in to say that the banduria is related to the Spanish bandurria, the only difference being the number of strings. I should have known better of course, given that the name of the instrument already sounds so Castilian. At any rate, Nikos acknowledges that even these three instruments still show their European influence, they do reflect the way Filipinos were able to adopt these instruments and transform them.

Nikos’ e-mail did get me thinking of a certain “ecumenism” in musical instruments. The rondalla instruments only represent a small sample of the many plucked instruments to be found across cultures, in all regions of the world, and music scholars still look into how cultural exchanges figured in the emergence of these instruments … and music. Glocalization, a term that combines globalization and localization to show how these exchanges involved adaptation, began many centuries ago, long before jet age travel.

Looking up, looking down

Let’s move to flowers and trees, the subject of two of my columns. I wrote about the flowering trees of summer, especially in the UP Diliman campus. Ma. Flor Garcia, a wall-to-wall UP product (elementary, high school, college up to law!) e-mailed to say how she loved those trees …. as well as the “brown and dry amorseco grass during the dry season, and the verdant green and abundant colors during the wet season.” That was a good reminder that there is much to appreciate not just up in the trees but on the ground as well. I did check out the grass one afternoon with my children in the Sunken Garden. It was hard though getting the kids to appreciate the grass: they were like birds that had been let out of a cage, running and jumping and creating an impromptu soccer team. (Thanks to the nameless student who was hanging around and graciously lent his soccer ball to the kids).

Last item from my mail: I wrote about a grade school textbook published in the 1930s called “Our Friends in the Flowering World” and lo and behold, I get an email from the daughter of one of the authors, Catalina Velasquez-Ty. The daughter said they had a large golden shower tree in their garden, grown from a seed which her mother had received while writing the book. I was thrilled getting the letter because the daughter is Linda Ty-Casper, one of our best women writers in English. Not only that, the day I got her mother’s book, I also picked up an old copy of an anthology of women’s writing published by UP Press. You guessed it: one of the contributors was Linda Casper-Ty. A double treat that day from the writings of a mother and her daughter.

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