The Visayan Titan of Letters

The Visayan Titan of Letters

One of my greatest concerns regarding the History curriculum taught in school is the apparent lack of focus on the local history and culture of Cebu. As a student, I have been more knowledgeable to the history and culture of Japan and China than to my own native place which is where my whole life revolves into. Thankfully, one of the greatest masters of Philippine literature, in the embodiment of Dr. Resil Mojares, has made my worries dissipate by writing numerous books on the history and anthropology of not only in Cebu but also for the whole Philippines.

Dr. Resil B. Mojares, the first-ever Cebuano National Artist of the Philippines in Literature, is a Filipino historian known for his works in literary criticism, urban and rural history, and political biography. Due to his immense contribution to Visayan Literature, he is now acclaimed as the “Visayan Titan of Letters.” He was a former SunStar columnist and a distinguished professor in Literature and History in the University of San Carlos. Dr. Mojares has a bachelor’s degree in English, a master’s degree in Literature and postgraduate studies all at the University of San Carlos. His doctorate in Literature is from the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Dr. Mojares was the director of the Cebuano Studies Center, which Dr. Erlinda Alburo now currently directs, since its founding in 1975 until 1996.

Dr. Mojares is a multi-awarded historian receiving honors from various institutiions such as the highest recognition for artists in the country, Tanglaw ng Lahi, Carlos Palanca Awards, Grant Goodman Prize for History from the Association of Asian Studies, and the Fok Ying Tung Southeast Asia Prize for his contribution to the development of civilization, culture and science in Southeast Asian countries. All of his success took root in his humble beginning. He is a son of public school teachers, in a town in northern Mindanao, he early dreamed of being a writer and a teacher. One of the turning points in his great understanding and love for the society is the declaration of the Martial Law. He said that he finds great joy in writing and sharing his learnings and wisdom. Dr. Mojares also noted , “I suppose one can say that in personal terms my interest in historical and cultural studies is a way of summing up a life.”

Dr. Mojares’ works has prominently emphasized Philippine culture because according to him, “for one who writes about the Philippines, lives in the Philippines (and not having thought, even once, of actually leaving it), nationalism is not something abstract and intellectual; it is deeply existential… this may seem too personal, but this feeling of solidarity, of “horizontal comradeship,” of communitas, is precisely what gives rise to a nation and sustains it.” His works have been granted the  Philippine National Book Awards. His books include Aboitiz: Family & Firm in the Philippines; House of Memory: Essays; and Isabelo’s Archive.

In Isabelo’s archive, he was inspired by folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes’s quixotic project of compiling an archive of a promising nation, he experimented in various writing styles in literary history. One of the compiled essay of the book is entitled “A History of Shame.” It talks about how the Bisaya has came up with the word “ikog” for shame which is also the word for tail. He explores the possible connection between the two with his well-researched evidences that came from the first Cebuano dictionary, Javanese culture, works of Pedro Paterno and Teodoro Calaw, and so much more. I was greatly enthralled with his wealth of information and who would have thought that the simple curiousity for the word “ikog,” could span an 11-page worth of history that awesomely connects to how shame can complete us as an individual and society.

Overall, Dr. Mojares is an extraordinary writer that should be considered as a modern Cebuano hero. It is no wonder that he became the first Cebuano National Artist, he has created a path for interest and knowledge to my own culture, which I have almost taken for granted.

A HISTORY OF SHAME: Excerpt from “Isabelo’s Archive”

There are many names for shame. The emotion that defines – so it is said – what is it to be human. Curiously, in Bisayan, it is called ikog (literally, “tail,” from Malay ekor). By what strange transformation has the notion of having a “tail” become a mark of the human?

The connection between tail and shame is not clear in the history of the word. The Bisayan dictionary of Mateo Sanchez (1617), the earliest known dictionary of the language, does not define ikog as scruple or shame. By the nineteenth century, however, and presumably earlier, ikog already denoted shame. In his nineteenth-century Bisayan dictionary, Juan Felix de la Incarnacion records a confusing definition. However, by associating ikog with the action of vexing a person with one’s stupidity or rudeness, he points, if vaguely, to the current meaning of the word.

Apart from semantics, there does not seem to be a completely convincing explanation for the link between “having a tail” and “having a sense of shame.” Mythology does not provide a clear answer. The Philippines does not have, for one, an indigenous tradition of a monkey god, as in India, where a tail has moral associations – it is a mark of greatness, evidence that one has ascended from the monkey-god Hanuman.

There are local stories, however, of the origin of the monkey that associate the condition of being tailed to violations of norms of conduct. An example is related in the seventeenth-century account of the Bisayan islands by the Jesuit Francisco Alcina. “The natives (Bisayans) say about them (the monkeys) that they were people, but because they did not pay the tribute and conform in other matters, they went off to the forests where they lost the power of speech.” This account has survived in a widely distributed cautionary tale that has, for its core plot, a lazy, ungrateful and disobedient child who is punished by a curse to live in the forest as a monkey. A rod, spinning-stick, a ladle, or some such object thrown at the erring child becomes his or her tail.

It is plausible to think of the story as an archetypal tale of the birth of shame, that being tailed signifies the notion of violating a “proper” norm of conduct, as well as the need to be sensitive to such norm.

This remains an exercise in fancy, and it does not seem to carry us any further.