Sheilfa B. Alojamiento
Book review of Asain Calbi’s Bride Price & Other Stories,
published by Xavier University Press, 2023
I had to go over the entire set another time, just to make sure I would find the gems I did not spot right on. On first read—a quick run-through—I slapped the book down quite disappointed. I much prefer the first story collection (Panunggud & other stories), I said, which I found more solidly traditional. A more careful rereading—after an interval of six weeks—made me appreciate each story better, including the cryptic flash fiction that closed it. Queer and folk and though a tad conservative, it really is saying more, seeing more, and showing more.
It looks out and looks up some: away from the engrossing confines of the home and the island, the worn fixation with the long-haired local maiden, the constancy and goodness of heart of the rural poor, and makes small dashes here and there, half of its foot wanting to be in the world out there: the town plaza, the ongoing conference in the metropole, the humming airport, those places in constant motion, where comings and goings are commonplace and almost by themselves inconsequential. Still, you get to see that wherever your reading takes you, there’s that abiding love for the long-held ones: old fidelities that hold things up, and hold the book together: filial loyalty, friendship, brotherhood, forgiveness, the naïve faith in the small essentials that make life endurable and ultimately redeeming.
It is not without humor, either. It is most warming when it is at its old-fashioned best, as when it casts a critical eye on folksy ways: the handsome man who visited the local market to shop around for a wife in between cruises in Jakarta, the looker female teacher he wanted to marry playing a bad joke on him; the old man the quack doctor who repays the offense of another man against his twin brother with a hook-shaped penis for a cut ear; the drunken skirt chaser, who got pierced with a safety pin in a movie house and got robbed during a foray to the big city; the newcomer, the Tausug settler-landgrabber and his greedy son on a buying spree, wanting all the land to themselves and evicting native farmer-occupants.
For the most part the stories are sadly cast: young love is tragically terminated, beauty and innocence corrupted, doomed; marital happiness a scarce thing, most unions are pragmatic arrangements, not romantic plunges; and interspecies friendship, even friendship between two small boys or two grown-up men cursed: death or separation is its twin. You wonder: Is it anti-marriage, anti-romance, anti-incest, or just anti-copulation? But it’s not anti-reproduction, is it. For one, it likes gifting its homies with a fecund parade of boys (Pah Jumadil’s issues are all boys; the ugly hag teacher is blessed with five good-looking sons; Saddang and Isnirayya also have five sons; all the other children characters are sons; and only daughters the pretty young ones and the most beloved are invariably meted with thwarted happiness).
Female protagonists are largely stereotypes. There goes another dutiful wife, another pitiful orphan, another dowry fetcher, another jealous warden. The rest are sketches of street inhabitants and urban characters with no memorable speaking parts. And while it can be quite frank at describing male anatomy up close, not a single descriptive sentence accompanies how exactly a particular hag looks like, only that people always give her a second look (she is “also a looker” in that people look at her “because she [is] ugly”). Is her nose pointy, the upper lip unreparably cleft, did she have a mole as big as a pingpong ball, is she pockmarked with acne, has a mouth shaped like that of a horse’s? For a lookist take, the narrative skips inches of necessary detail. But what a joke on a classic drama-and-action trope. On account of mistaken identity some men get shot, but this one gets lucky and gets laid after a long wait.
There are occasional mishaps in the dialogue and the description—which quick readings would otherwise not yield—but the stories, for the most part, are well-conceived. In a conversation between Ladjasali and his parents, the son tells his father, “[in] our culture, it’s taboo to turn [sarahakan tugul] down”(“Bride Price,” p. 7)—a bad translation of di katu’ di manjari in bihan. In an earlier scene in another conversation over supper in the same story, when Ladjasali first reveals his intentions, his father is described to have “stood up” but it is Ladjasali who “sat down again and took a glass of water” in the paragraph that follows (p. 3). The lapses notwithstanding, and the excesses—when a lecture is inserted—the prose is passably simple it is almost vernacular English.
In each piece, the characters and the setting, and the choice of names and places, are drawn with the justness and the precision of the native. You know that names like Isniraiyya and Saddang Arraji and places like Lungan Gihtung or Kabbun Jatih were not randomly plucked from air. The names are themselves characters: homely familiars that come alive by just being spelled out on the page, addressed, or let speak. And this is one amazing linguistic achievement unique to this book.
The inward gaze is always there, with the narrator as the mediating intelligence, the participant-observer who steps in and out of the story to reveal character and offer an opinion (that unavoidably intrudes in some places). There is also a surfeit of local vocabulary that sometimes rubs off on the text, but the recast cliches and metaphors court new interest as always, there is that utmost care of one who does not want to paint his country in a bad light. Despite the didacticism, the local speaker’s meticulousness and certitudes dominate, and the book on the whole is a successful attempt at writing for, rather than writing against.
“Bride Price,” the carrier story, remains the definitive Tausug classic with all the tropes associated with the Tausug character: parental control, male authority, land conflict, a fetish for guns; greed, family love, feudal bondage. The local maiden’s own wishes are immaterial; perhaps they don’t exist. Maimona is just a protégé, the property of the men around her. I first read this story in a 2018 edition of Mindanao Harvest and I have noted retouches in the text, particularly in the concluding paragraphs. In the 2018 edition the last two sentences in the second from the last paragraph reads” “He fell to the same spot where the first soldier lay dead. It turned purple as the spurts of blood from the two men mixed in it.” In this 2023 edition it goes: “He fell on the same spot where the first soldier was lying dead. The spurts of blood from the two men mixed and colored the river red.”
This is a queer reading, but I like the earlier version in that the blood that mixed did not drain into the river but seeped into fertile ground. The annulled union between the thwarted heterosexual lovers, the would-be couple Ladjasali and Maimona, had been supplanted by a union in death of two men, Ladjasali’s and the unknown soldier’s blood, the soldier he earlier saw cavorting in the water with his rival-assailant and would-be killer. He came upon the two in the hidden part of the brook, half-naked, soaping themselves and splashing each other with water, their laughter pealed—and if I may stretch a little the metaphor, with the innocence of children at play in Paradise—. The slightly homosexual vein is diluted in this newest edition, replaced by a vision of violence coloring the river. Thankfully, in his other stories in the same set, this theme of brotherhood pact and deep bond between two male friends keeps on recurring. That the author chose to close the book with this image gives hope that future stories would yield narrative possibilities in this direction.
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