Jamil E. Mabandis

The very first thing that I can remember is the smell. It was a smell that lingered in the air like a hymn, blending itself within the morning light that filtered through the slats of wood that made up our kitchen. It was pungent with sakurab, rich with ginger, and burning with chilies. My Inakulay stood before the stove, her back straight, her hands firm. She moved with a poise I could never detect, as though every step was practiced by generations. Her hands carried the weight of tradition, and I, hungry-eyed boy, knew that I was about to see something that was not only food but memory itself.

She was cooking manok a piaparan. To describe it merely as chicken in coconut milk would be simplistic. Piaparan was chicken and yet more. It was the flavor of sea and land, the aroma of hills and woods, the shadow of voices long past but not forgotten. My Inakulay referred to it as “pegk’n sa pakaragyan.” Food in celebrations. But in her hands, it was also the food of remembrance.

I saw her start with the palapa. She ground the sakurab, ginger, and chilies in her mortar, the pestle cracking to the beat of a heartbeat. The air reeked with its raw smell. My eyes watered but I did not blink. She glanced at me once and smiled, curling the edge of her lips, as if to tell me, this is how fire turns to flavor. The palapa was always the starting point, always the catalyst that would bring life to the piaparan.

Now came the chicken, chopped in neat slices, sliding into the pot where the palapa crackled in oil. She poured the coconut milk, thick and white, a river that translated the sound of fire into the song of simmer. Gradually, the turmeric colored the broth with its hue, turning the milk into a sea of gold. The kitchen was converted to a color as if sunlight had been trapped in her pot. The piaparan was becoming gold, and I imagined sultans, crowns and torogans, although we were merely in a little wooden home. My grandmother was silent, but I was certain that the color of something spoke beyond its loveliness. It was royalty, not of crowns, but of lineage.

She picked the chicken pieces out of the broth, their skin drenched in golden colors. She then reached for the grated coconut. She browned it slowly, stirring with a wooden spoon, until the shreds became crisp and brown, their sweetness rising to greet the savory aroma of the broth. This was the papar, the last gem in the crown of piaparan. The roasted coconut stuck to the chicken like a second skin, richer, deeper, and alive with the scent of the fire.

I sat quietly, the boy that I was, not wanting to talk in case I broke the moment. Every noise counted. The crack of the coconut. The quiet bubbling of the soup. The scrape of her spoon on the pan. Even the movement of her breath sounded as though it was part of the recipe. She was cooking more than that. She was infusing memory into food, teaching me through unspoken words that land and people survive through the food they leave behind.

As she placed the complete piaparan on the table, the dish radiated. Golden, smelling, alive. The aroma filled the entire house, and I swear even the trees outside leaned in to smell it. The initial bite was an explosion, a flame ignited on the tongue that burned through into the soul. The palapa imparted to it a heat that was cutting but not brutal. Coconut milk mellowed the burn, covering it in sweetness. The turmeric had the taste of earth and the roasted coconut brought a depth like the voice of the elder speaking in a tale. It was a flavor that was not just good but truthful. It was flavored with our land, our rivers, our sun. It was flavored with home.

I sat with my Inakulay eating slowly, her eyes still and filled with memory. She rarely said much about the old times, but I knew that with each spoonful she was sampling her own mother’s kitchen, her own childhood, her own heritage. And there I sat, opposite her, sampling the same dish, feeling the same golden heat on my tongue, and wordlessly I understood we were tied by more than blood. We were tied by piaparan.

Days have gone by and the kitchen is not the same without her. The mortar remains, the wooden spoon still in its corner, but the hands that gave them life are no more. I have attempted to make piaparan myself, but my hands do not know their way with the same sureness. I fear that I will never succeed. Every time I attempt, I fear that I am pursuing something too holy to be grasped. But there are times, when the coconut milk turns golden and the roasted coconut lets out its smoke, that I sense her beside me. And I know that piaparan is not perfection. It is memory, keeping alive the strand that binds me to her, to my folk, to the land that nurtured us.

The golden piaparan, the color of royalty, is more than food on a plate. It is our table’s crown, our kitchens’ treasure, the wordless story we tell. To me, it is the recollection of a boy observing his grandmother stir coconut into a dish that lived longer than she did. It is the reminder that although she is gone, her taste still lingers, her memory bubbling over in every pot of piaparan I have the courage to prepare.

And so when I think of her, I think not only of her face, her voice, her hands, but also of the golden dish that shone like sunlight on our little kitchen. It is not just chicken. It is not just a meal. It is manok a piaparan, golden memory, royalty of our plate. It is my Ina Kulay’s gift, and it will be remembered as long as I keep eating it, as long as I keep recalling that the golden piaparan is not merely a dish. but the flavor of home itself.

Noor Saada

Moro is success. These days, the term “Moro” is a badge of honor especially for those who are in sync with the government of the day in the autonomous region, manifested in a line in the region’s hymn, “Bangsamoro’y tagumpay” (The Bangsamoro is success). It stands for a history of resistance and pride.

Yet for others, this very term raises hard questions about belonging, who speaks, and being spoken for. Though often associated with the 13 historically-identified Muslim ethnolinguistic groups in Mindanao, Sulu, and Palawan, the Moro identity extends beyond ethnicity, religion, and political boundaries to become an imagined landscape shaped by colonization, cultural translation, and the ongoing quest for self-determination.

Colonial Birth. The term was first used in the Philippine context by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, the Spanish conquistador, who arrived in the archipelago in the 16th century. Borrowing the term from Spain’s centuries-long struggle against the Moors of North Africa and Andalusia, Legazpi and the Spanish colonizers used Moro to label the largely coastal and insular Muslim inhabitants of the Philippine islands, particularly in Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan.

The term was used to mark not just religious difference but political defiance. These Muslims were different from the “heathen highlanders” and the “docile Indios” of the Christianized North. Unlike the highland Lumad or Igorot groups who lived outside the reach of the colonial church-state apparatus, the Moros had their own centralized sultanates, maritime networks, and transregional Islamic identities that connected them to the Nusantara (Malay world), and the Islamic ummah (global community).

In this way, the term began as an exonym, a name imposed by the colonizer to define the enemy. Over time, however, especially in the regime of minoritization, it was reappropriated by the colonized indigenous population as a symbol of resistance and constructed nationhood (bangsa).

Inclusion – Who are in. The post-colonial reassertion of Moro identity centered around the so-called “13 ethnolinguistic groups”: Badjao, Iranun, Jama Mapun, Kagan, Kolibugan, Maguindanaon, Meranaw, Molbog, Panimusan, Sama, Sangil, Tausug, and Yakan. These groups share not only a common Islamic faith but also a history of resisting colonization, firstly against the Spanish, then the Americans and Japanese, and finally the post-independence Philippine nation-state.

While useful in political and legal frameworks such as the peace processes and the creation of the regional autonomies, it also risks essentializing a complex and dynamic set of identities. It leaves out many others who share the same historical geography, religious beliefs, or cultural ties, but who do not fall neatly within the 13 ethnic identities.

Exclusion – Who Gets Left Out. What of the Teduray, Lambangian, and Dulangan Manobo, among others, who are indigenous to Mindanao but are not Muslim? They live within the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, yet their ancestral claims and cultural lifeways often remain peripheral in the dominant political discourse?

What of the Sama Dilaut (Badjao), seafaring, stateless, and often discriminated against, even by their land-based fellows?

What of the Jama Mapun and Molbog of Palawan, whose connection to Islam is deep yet whose marginality continues?

What of the mestizos, those born of Moro and Christian Filipino parents, or those who have embraced Islam through marriage or conversion?

What of Muslim reverts, Filipinos from Luzon or the Visayas, or even foreigners, who embraced the Islamic faith and chose to live among Muslim communities in Mindanao?

What about the descendants of the Lannang (Chinese), Arab, and similar Southeast and South Asian identities living in our midst?

Does a Moro identity requires bloodline? Land? Language? Or merely faith?

Blood, Faith, or Belonging. If being Moro is about blood, then we risk creating an exclusionary ethnonationalism that denies the hybridity and migration that have long characterized Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan.

If it is about faith, then we must ask: is every Muslim in the Philippines a Moro? Are Mindanawon converts or urban Muslims in Manila part of this imagined community?

If it is about lived cultural experience, then being Moro must include those who speak the language, participate in rituals, honor the maratabat (dignity), respect the adat (customary law), and uphold the collective memory of struggle.

If it is political, then the term becomes not just a cultural label, but a revolutionary one, an assertion of a historical grievance and a demand for justice, recognition, and self-rule. But what happens when the politics falter, when unity frays, or when governance fails to live up to the ideals?

How about those who assert the primacy of their ethnicity: they are Bangsa Sug, Bangsa Sama or Bangsa Iranun over and above their Moro-ness? Are they less of a Moro?

Reimagination.  An inclusive identity must reckon with these tensions. It must honor its history of resistance, but also evolve to reflect the pluralism within its region. The legacy of Legazpi’s colonial label must be undone not merely by inversion, that is, wearing it as a badge of honor; but also, by transforming it into an inclusive identity of justice, dignity, and cultural integrity.

To be Moro is not only to descend from gagandilan (warriors), membership in the revolutionary group or speak a native tongue, but to be part of a living history, of a people shaped by the ecology and the collective struggle, by the Quran and the kulintang, by adat and amanah (trust), by memory and movement.

Moro is a name we have adapted and reshaped to suit and define our collective struggle and quest for self-determination. It is an identity not just exonymically acquired, but lived, chosen, and contested. It is not a category closed by blood or birth, but an unfolding story of a people still becoming and coalescing.