Tales of the ‘sarimanok’

When in Singapore, I never fail to pay my respects to a bronze elephant given by Thai King Chulalongkorn to the then British colony as a souvenir of his visit. Gazing at this elephant provides a concrete connection with Jose Rizal, who described it in his diary. A stone’s throw away from the elephant is a historical marker that commemorates Rizal’s five visits to Singapore. I never fail to visit this, too.

To escape Singapore’s signature heat, I then visit the nearby Asian Civilizations Museum, which often displays some Philippine artifacts collected over the years. The last time I visited, it had significant objects from Mindanao: a chain mail, carabao horn armor, a borak (a mythical creature that consists of the body of a winged donkey with a human face that transported Mohammed from Mecca to Jerusalem), and a sarimanok. The quality of these objects is superb. You cannot find authentic specimens in Manila antique shops anymore.

The sarimanok drew my attention because you can date a Pinoy based on what he associates with it. Some Pinoy children today will mistake it for a chicken (manok) or a peacock; some people associate it with the logo of a cable TV channel; martial law babies will remember it as the logo of the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant that was held at the Folk Arts Theater in what is now the CCP complex. Tourists and Ermita souvenir vendors will recognize a sarimanok as sold in versions of wood, bone, or metal. It resembles a rooster in flight with a fish hanging from its beak or sometimes from its claws, as a bird of prey would clutch its victim. The sarimanok is quite impressive because it comes in a riot of colors within the palette of Mindanao ethnic art. We lowland

Luzon Christians tend to forget that to the Maranao, the sarimanok is not a tacky souvenir item but part of their culture, a symbol of wealth, power, and prestige.

The sarimanok is a mythical bird that figures in a number of legends, two of which were popularized by the prewar writer A.V.H Hartendorp. The first narrates the origin of the word sarimanok. Once upon a time, a sultan of Lanao threw a party for his daughter, the princess Sari, under a balete tree. Like all fairy-tale princesses, Sari was both beautiful and in distress. A rooster crashed the party and made off with the princess. There is no happy ending here, because Sari is never found. So the depressed sultan had a rooster carved in memory of that black day. That reminder became the sarimanok.

The second, more complicated, story retold by Hartendorp is as follows: Prince Radia Inarapatra discovered that the goddess of the moon came to earth every Friday to bathe in some perfumed well. Again, like most fairy tales, it was love at first sight that provided the problem: How does one establish union between a mortal and a goddess? One has to leave the world one was born in to live in the world of the other. And so the prince, while holding a golden bird from his treasury, asked aloud to be brought to the moon. The magic bird fulfilled his wish and he disappeared from our world. Like the first story, the subjects of the prince made replicas of the magic golden bird, the sarimanok.

Mindanao scholar Nagasura Madale notes that the name of Prince Radia is found in the long Maranao epic “Darangen,” but the story of the moon goddess is nowhere in the seven chapters of the 2,365-line epic. In the epic, the prince is snatched from his parents at birth by a mera bolawan (golden peacock) that does resemble but is not the sarimanok. The prince is not taken to the moon either, but to the region above the clouds. Oddly enough, the “Darangen” is cited by Daniel Villanueva for the story of Bantugen, whose soul is trapped in a bottle. His brother goes up to heaven, releases Bantugen, and on their way back to earth they take with them a sarimanok. The capture of the sarimanok, according to Madale, is nowhere in the “Darangen.” The epic states that a golden peacock brought the news to earth regarding Bantugen’s imprisonment.

Over time, the sarimanok story has been embellished and changed with each retelling, moving it further away from the original. We have another sarimanok story from Abdullah Madale that may have some historical basis and can probably be validated by further research: A certain Shariff Ali took a real, living bird from Arabia to Johore where he married the daughter of the sultan. The bird became part of the dowry and was inherited by their children, who later took the bird with them to Mindanao. When the bird died, a wooden replica was made. This was the sarimanok.

Many children today are reared on Western stories like those about Cinderella and Snow White. They are taught Mother Goose nursery rhymes, too, when part of any Pinoy childhood should have tales of aswang, manananggal, kapre and mangkukulam plus the many tales from Mindanao and the Cordilleras. Learning to be Filipino and forming a nation begin from the cradle, from the stories, myths, and legends we grow up with.

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Thanks to Tomas Gomez III and Ernesto Acebron, who wrote to correct an error in my last column: Basey is in Samar, not Leyte.

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