Visayan Literature in Pre-Colonial Philippines
Spanish accounts are unanimous in saying that Filipinos did not use their alphabet for literary compositions or records keeping: the Boxer Codex states unambiguously that they used their script only for letters and messages. Visayan literature therefore was oral literature, and as such, was not recorded by friar chroniclers or ethnographers who would have considered the idea of oral literature a contradiction in terms. But it was well developed, sophisticated, and presented by artists rewarded for their skills. This is amply shown by Alcina’s (1668a, 3:20) chapter, “Concerning the alphabet and manner of writing of the Bisayans [and] the various and particular types of poetry in which they take pride,” which includes the full summary of what must have been an actual epic.
There is no evidence of any prose literature, but ordinary Visayan speech was itself rich with metaphor and colorful imagery, and their poetry must have been even more so. A high proportion of the dictionary terms have both a literal and figurative meaning, and a wide selection of pejorative terms to apply to common objects when angry. Men, women, and children are referred to by the names of birds and animals they resemble in appearance or behavior, or trees and baskets whose shapes they share. Somebody who is articulate and talkative is likened to luxuriant foliage, while one who speaks ill of his own relatives is like a big bat–because these creatures are believed to defecate in their own face while hanging upside down. The red-faced are like dapgap blossoms, an untattooed man is called, plain white, undecorated teeth, a chaw of coconut meat; and foreheads not sufficiently flattened as a baby, bulging or overstuffed. When irritated, a tired oarsman calls his oar a kabkab–the heart-shaped leaf of the malu-iban vine–and a cat is called musankag or mosaraw in such sentences as, “Damned cat stole my food again!”
Naturally, formal poetry had a special vocabulary of its own. Handoy, for instance, was the poetic term for damsel, and slaves were called guhay in epics and eulogies. But the essence of Visayan poetic skill lay not so much in a command of vocabulary as in the ability to use words figuratively to create subtle images. Alcina (1668a, 3:28-29) said,
“In their poetry, even if not with the variety of rhyme scheme and meters of ours though they do have their own rhymes somewhat different from ours, they no doubt excel us, for the language they use in their poems, even most of the words, is very different from what they use in common everyday speech, so much so that there are very few Europeans who understand their poems or rhymes when they hear them, even if they are very good linguist and know a lot of Visayan, because, besides the words and meaning which they use in verse being so different, even when using the ordinary words they sometimes apply to their courtesies, what they say in verse is so figurative that everything is the subtlest metaphor, and for one who doesn’t know and understand them, it is impossible to understand them in it.
To this may be added that less sophisticated Visayans were also unable to follow "deep” poetry, and that when two lovers sang to each other, their words became mere symbols that were understood by nobody but the two of them.
All this poetry was generally sung or chanted rather than recited, so our sources include songs in the same category as poems. Even real songs–that is, melodies with lyrics–were poetic rather than musical compositions: the singer set his words to common tunes known to all. For community respect, a man must have been able to participate in the spontaneous versifying that accompanied social gatherings; and for peer acceptance, youths had to compete in amatory jousts. The really skillful were practically professions: they wre eagerly sought after for weddings and prestige feasts and were rewarded not only with ample food, drink, and public acclaim, but with a payment called bayakaw. Many were said to be more articulate in verse than in ordinary conversation, and all were able to perform for hours at a time, even whole days or nights, “without dropping a syllable or fumbling a word,” Alinca (1668a, 3:30) said. Funerals, on the other hand, called for female eulogists able to improvise dirges which combined grief and laud.
The simplest form of verse, popular among children and adults of both sexes, was the ambahan, which used the ordinary vocabulary though often figuratively. It consisted of an unrhymed seven-syllable couplet which had to contain a complete thought–like a Greek distich–whose two lines could be interchanged and still make sense. Some people composed their own words, other repeated well known verses, and listeners could join in by repeating the couplet, either as sung or inverted.
The ambahan was also used in the balak, a poetic debate between a man and a woman on the subject of love. They might also accompany themselves with musical instruments–the woman on the korlong, the man on the kudyapi–but in either case they used many subtleties of speech which not everybody understood. The bikal was another kind of contest which used the ambahan form, a poetic joust between two men or two women in which they criticized each other’s physical or moral shortcomings, but were expected to harbor no hard feelings afterwards. They could continue for an hour or two, encouraged by raucous laughter and occasional help from the sidelines. Since the ambahan was a verse form almost as demanding as a Japanese haiku, its wide currency suggests an extremely poetic populace.
The noblest literary form was the siday or kandu. This was the most difficult of all–long, sustained, repetitious, and heavy with metaphor and allusion. A single one might take six ours to sing or the whole night through, or even be continued the next night, during which rapt audiences neither yawned or nodded, though the frequent repetition of long lines with only the variation of a few words struck Spanish listeners as tiresome.
Subject matter was the heroic exploits of ancestors, the valor of warriors, or the beauty of women, or even the exaltation of heroes still living. Alcina (1668a, 4:257-59) recorded the summary of one or two of them with tantalizing brevity, like the following from the Pacific coast of Samar he knew as Ibabao:
Kabungaw and Bubung Ginbuna
On the coast of Ibabao were two celebrated lovers, the man called Kabungaw and the woman Bubung Ginbuna. Before they were married, these two had been in love for a long time, and once when he had to go on a certain rather long voyage, in company with others who were setting out on a pangayaw raid, he left instructions with his sweetheart that she should go straight to his parents house to get whatever she needed for comfort. (He only had a mother or sister since his father had already died.) She went one time when she had to get a little abaca to weave clothes for her lover, but was so ill received by her swain’s mother and his sister, who was called Halinai, that after abusing her by word, they did not giver her what she had come to get, so she went back displeased and determined not to return there or even be seen by her lover again. He learned this as soon as he returned and asked if she had requested anything, and the bad sendoff she had been given instead, so after much brooding, he refused to go up into his house until he learned where and with whom his lady was living.
He did many things and particular deeds (which I am not putting down so as not to be too long-winded) until he learned that she was on a little island where she had fled with her slaves. He was almost drowned the times he went in search of her and escaped only by means of supernatural aid, until on the third attempt he reached there, and pretended to be dead near the house where she was living, until he was recognized by a slave who reported it to his lady. She went down drawn by love, and in her presence he recovered the life he pretended to have lost in her absence, and both rejoicing, they were married. They remained there as lords of that little island, which they called Natunawan in allusion to the love they had felt on first sight, because natunawan means that they melted together with happiness, or Nawadan, which means “lost footsteps.” There, they say, not only men followed them from the mainland, but even plants, attracted by the goodness of the land and the good reception from those settlers.“
The reason why the story of Kabungaw and Ginbuna is so badly truncated is that it appears in a chapter entitled, "Of the troubles which some famous princesses had in their antiquity to get married [and] the efforts of men to abduct others” (Alcina 1668a, 4:245). This the whole meat of what must have been an epic-length tale has been excised as being of no service to Alcina’s purpose–all those adventures which form the flesh of the Philippine epics that he did not put down so as not to be too long-winded: those heroic deeds, shipwrecks, and drownings, the intervention of deities, and the flight to distant lands to live happily ever after. Moreover, the incident of Kabungaw’s pretending to be dead sound suspiciously like a modernization in Alcina’s own day, since the magical revival of dead heroes by their wives or sweethearts is a common climax to Mindanao epics.
Source: Barangay: 16th Century Philippine Culture and Society by William Henry Scott, Chapter 5: Literature and Entrainment, pages 96-99.
