Sheilfa B. Alojamiento
Dawn. Light spreading its wings in the skies beneath my feet. The aroma of brewed coffee wafting in the air, spoons like chimes clinking against enamel cups.
I sat bolt upright. Are we here now?
Most everyone in the deck was up. The women opening their bundles and fixing their hair, men sitting across each other on their beds’ ends, a cigarette or enamel cup in hand. In the cot beside me Jack sat, knees apart, hands cupped before him, head bowed. The camera bag he cradled all night like a baby sat close to his side. He amazed me. How easy for him to glide in and out of things. Almost six feet and pale-complexioned and if not for his short nose he could pass himself off for a white man, a Milikan, but here he was, praying the Muslim way while the older Muslims just across us sat and sipped coffee. Nudge him and he would just say no deal. He’s interfaith dialogue in action, two hills same land; partake of the bread and you partake of God.
In another moment he was bringing his hands to his face thrice over and he was done. I wrapped my malong around my shoulders, sank my back against the deck side. The boys he went with in Marawi must have taught him well. They were mostly politicians’ sons, campus gigolos; surrounded by adoring girls, Muslims and Catholics.
We were now swerving inland and the low chatter, in the language I did not comprehend, was getting livelier. Oaths broke in here and there several decibels higher. Outside, the blue sea shimmered.
I moved up. Turned around and rested elbows and forearms on the railing. An approaching island rose to full view. It looked uninhabited, the white shore inviting, the green tops unmoving. A quiet seemed to shelter its virginal state.
Bangas Island. Paradisical eh?
Does anyone live there?
A few fishing families. They get their drinking water from Jolo and sell their catch there.
We glided past the island and I watched as fishermen with their families paddled along toward the direction we were going, their bare skin and the dark shapes they made so sharp and so stark in the morning light.
Bajaus.
He half-turned and smiled, then returned his gaze to the moving object at sea. It was like looking at a postcard shot coming alive.
We’re now here, Indah.
I pulled my malong over my head and began folding it. Jack was still standing on one end of the small space between two folded beds. His middle was pressed against the wood rail, his fingers loosely twined around a triangular web of taut rope that held the green canvas. He was looking skyward, to a towering blue mountain in the distance cradling in its lap what looked like tall houses leaning against its height.
That’s Bud Tumantangis. The Crying Mountain.
The trip was courtesy of the office, the staff house with the dialogue program where a core staff and several other volunteers shared quarters. It was my first travel to the islands, part of an exposure trip new recruits had to undergo, and I was a little apprehensive. I landed beside Jack like a piece of debris during a storm, and he would joke that I am probably as shell-shocked as Fatmawatti.
Fatmawatti was the local girl we both knew from college. She grew up in Jolo and will accompany us during the two-day trek. I would know that in 1974 when we were nine or ten, I was only standing back while soldiers shoveled up my grandfather’s shotguns from a trench in our yard; Fatmawatti, on the other hand, was running from one bomb crater to another while over her head above coconut trees, planes rained bullets and shrapnel all over. To comrades in the headquarters, Jack included, she was invariably a war-freak, a secessionist, queen of the Bangsa Moro struggle.
Jack saw me at home and invited me to join him in the volunteer brigades. He saw how everything was blown out where I lived, though no gun was ever fired, no grenade ever lobbed. His taking me out of there thus constituted a saving act. The movement was a plank of wood, perhaps a lifeboat itself that I caught and anchored on. According to Jack, Fatmawatti was a niece to an MNLF commander and herself a handful of a nationalist. At first, I did not understand the word. From grade school on I was taught it was a good thing, a trait one would associate with heroes. But the chaps in our headquarters spoke of it in a quite different tone.
Nasyunalis yun! MNLF yun!
What’s wrong with that?
Everything. Look what happened to their struggle.
Then there was Jack who liked mythologizing everyone he knew, nationalist or not. This comrade an Ibaloi princess; this handsome boy a great fellow a scion son to Maranao nobility; this cadre from an island you wouldn’t find in the map a Phil. Sci. scholar and a genius; this Chinese-Tausug beauty a descendant to the Sultanate of Sulu. It was his way of saying I’m in a great movement, with the best company one could ever wish for. Just the same, anxiety accompanied me all throughout. And if truth be told, it was the bombed place that fascinated me. It was what I was more excited about seeing. And this Susukan, the Moro warrior-revolutionary Jack and those who had been to his lair had been raving about. Accordingly, he rose to the command for having fought the longest. Unlike the other rebel commanders, he never surrendered.
A quiet humble man. You ought to meet him.
As for princesses and great beauties, they fazed me. If I were the frog, I would certainly be safer in a bog. Of course, I could not speak against our would-be host to Jack. His dear friend was the acknowledged and honored sovereign as far as the southwestern gate was concerned. She was rear guard, local guide, ally, ambassador of good will. I just promised myself to keep out of her way and kept praying that I would get in and out of her land unharmed.
That’s the Chinese Pier.
I leaned elbows and forearms on the railing. It was a sight to behold—the wooden architecture, the slender stake-like columns holding up gray thatches, the red and silver roofs, the flickers and splotches of colors in the wooden palings outside doorways and windows. At the docks, the shapes and movements of people were coming clearer, mostly men in their work clothes and fishermen’s caps, in different postures of waiting. Some stood with one arm suspended against a paling, others squatted with arms crossed on their knees. In the mix were several women wearing pants very loose in the bottom; others had their tube skirts strung on one shoulder.
The shoreline villages drew closer and the chug-chugging of the engine below us grew louder and jauntier. Here and there lone huts hoisted on thin limbs above seawater greeted us and a short distance across them stood islands of little houses, as poor and as bare, a banca or two tied to a post underneath. I tucked my malong inside my backpack. Jack was squatting on his heels, reaching for his pair of sneakers stowed between the boxes under our beds. When the boat gave out a long blast signaling its arrival on port, he was straining his neck for the sight of his friend at the dockside. He must have spotted her. He waved his hand vigorously.
Passengers were now moving toward the gangplank. One of the boat crew started folding the Army cots, stacking them one on top of the other. Port workers clambered up the rail and onto the deck, yelling and grabbing luggage pointed to them. Suitcases and boxes were dragged and lifted onto shoulders and backs. On the water below the deck, banca-riding families were raising their faces in supplication, jumping after the coins some of the passengers threw into the air. I watched as boys six and twelve years old broke the surface of the water, disappeared, then reappearing with a coin between their teeth. Jack pulled the two boxes of dry goods from under our beds and we joined the throng of homecoming passengers heading out.
My fear of Fatmawatti was greatly unfounded. As we stepped onto the quay, she and a handful of friends welcomed us. I hesitated a moment behind Jack’s shoulder, a few steps from the foot of the gangplank, as though I may turn around boatward just in case our host refused to have me. Jack turned a head toward me after a flurry of exclamatory reports just as Fatmawatti was about to turn away to see to our transport.
Do you know each other?
Fatmawatti nodded up to me, a faint smile freshening what I always remembered as an old woman’s face. Then a male cousin started carting our luggage and we crammed ourselves inside two waiting cabs. Jack sat behind the tricycle driver and held on to his camera bag, Fatmawatti and two others sat in the passenger seats, the cousin in the other cab with our bags and boxes of supplies: rice, canned goods, vermicelli, cigarettes. More exchanges of news went on over the roar of the speeding vehicles, the two other girls warmly exchanging courtesies with me.
Inah—Fatmawatti’s mother—met us at their door. Platters of dumplings and sweet cakes were laid on the long table in the living room and Jack took the trouble of naming each native delicacy to me, Inah and Fatmawatti’s two sisters helping him. The coffee was mighty good, sweet and strong, reminding me of home when Grandmother wasn’t so poor, a banana and coffee patch in the back of our yard, everyone coming for help, and Grandfather strong and wise beyond blame. Inah poured us another serving, then sent one of the men to the market for our provisions, another to the camp to see to our safe passage. It was toward midday when the advance party returned. We sat at another meal in the open yard, a feast of roasted fish the size of long platters, black soup which the male cousin cooked in a big black pot over fire, and fresh seaweeds of varied colors decked with sliced onions and tomatoes.
Not long after, we were on a long hike, Fatmawatti and her two male cousins leading the way. She and Jack filled each other with more news. About friends they used to know on campus, about the latest gossip from the ranks of the marchers in Manila, about teachers and confederates still around or gone, pausing only if Jack’s attention would be caught by an edifice of a big house with ukkil wings or by a graffiti on broken walls declaring war on Filipino colonialism. With his camera bag slung over one shoulder, the zoom lens held daintily in his lap, and the two of us taller than the average Chinese-Tausug or Sama-Bajau, Jack and I were rather marked out as foreigner-guests early on. Approaching the road leading to the mountain parts, we were met by a teenager who returned our Assalamu alaykum with a quiet alaykum wassalam, then with spark in his eyes and the shiest of smiles, he addressed Fatmawatti.
Dayng Pilippin?
Are we from the Philippines, he asked, to which Fatmawatti nodded and smiled with as much charm.
When the boy was several meters behind us, Jack forewarned me. You are now in Bangsa Moro Republik, Indah.
Bapa Omar was not given to talking. Having spent most of his life in the jungle, he could only converse in the local dialect. He had sad eyes and his left foot bore a big scar in the base between the toes. From a deep wound during one encounter, he told me when I asked, and no elaborate account was added. He was seated across me on the bamboo floor in an open hall, a rifle by his side leaning against the wall. Jack was his lively self as usual, full of good tidings and generous with praises. He was standing surrounded by men younger and older than him. It was his second visit to the islands and he must have shaken hands with them before. By and by the men were showing him Russian-made weapons, what each was called, how to hold and fire them. Jack nodded at me, and I joined the little inventory, the men letting me name and hold each weapon. Then Fatima summoned me. She just saw her two cousins off. They were on their way back to the highway to get a ride to town and see to their other errands.
The ground we were stepping on is a historical place, she explained. She was showing me around the camp, what remnants of stone structures still held there. I ambled beside her, awkward and unsure.
It used to be the fortress of a great sultan of Sulu. It is encircled by the river.
She pointed to the narrow stream below. Rocks scattered about along the copsy marsh and up to where we stood.
When the sultan was ruler, he required every farmer who came to the fortress to bring a piece of rock to help secure the place. When the crown was transferred to a relative in another town, the fortress was abandoned. In 1974 the military came, and the stronghold was destroyed.
I kept nodding my head, unable to find words that would give voice to the gladness and the confusion that I felt. It was my first trip out. It was also my first writing assignment. I did not fully appreciate or comprehend the secessionist struggle as yet, and I suspected that the office that took me in was not of one mind as far as the Muslim brethren were concerned. Glad as I was that Fatmawatti trusted me enough to be telling me such details, I was torn inside; fearful, too, that my long silence and lack of enthusiasm would be taken by her as ambivalence: that I did not sympathize but was there as a Bisaya, an adversarial agent, a critic-spy. Before I could mumble another stupid phrase, Bapa Jalah came strutting in, tip of finger touching his brow.
He was calling us to coffee, and we walked behind him, Fatmawatti a few paces ahead of me, head bent, silent in a sad way, as one would if we were still walking among the ashes of a lost kingdom. When we reached the clearing where the men sat, Bapa Jalah went straight to the boulder where he left his rifle. Jack was with Commander Ahmad and we joined the men around the bamboo table, cups of coffee going around laps. The unwalled shed was held together by bamboo poles, the ceiling made of marang leaves, and the weapons hanging around men’s shoulders and backs glittered, their possessors none too old to keep them firing.
If you stay here for a month, you shall learn to live as a guerilla, Commander Ahmad said to me.
A decade younger than Bapa Omar, Commander Ahmad looked more like a pirate than a farmer-turned-fighter. One of the women setting down the trays was his wife and the two-year old toddler romping around was his daughter. Her name, he said proudly, is Mujib Jihada. Jihad, Jack elaborated, is an Arabic word for holy war.
Beside Commander Ahmad Bapa Omar sat, quiet, his 70-years old face well-chiseled, eyes mirroring years seen. His mien made me think of Grandfather, the last one I would remember as a gentle peasant. He farmed and fought, Commander Ahmad said, catching me looking down at the dark skin cradling a rifle, the fingers light around the trigger.
Commander Ahmad’s men introduced us to the farmers’ sons and the women folks who came by. They asked, Mawis? Not without some warmth. It somewhat upset me. I then thought it was a dissociative appellation that did not go well with the Islamist tradition and the comradely affection with which we were received. I would know much later that before the MNLF became a name to reckon with, there was in the islands a Maoist movement and that Desdemona, the late wife of Misuari, was among its leading lights. By the mid-eighties however or around the time we went there, mawis somehow went out of usage and aktibis outfamed all else in preeminence and spread. Along with this, separatism in the islands also relied more and more on religion’s drawing power.
I was half asleep inside the commander’s hut when Bapa Jalah called from the door again, this time to where black soup, chicken broth, roasted fish, and pakupaku salad awaited. Fatmawatti rose beside me and we went down to join the men under the leafy roof. We ate with our bare hands, the soup warming our bellies, the spring water sweet and quenching. After lunch we got ready for another five-kilometer hike. We were to go to the camp where the mujahid Commander Susukan was anticipating our arrival.
We walked along scrubland, accompanied by around twenty-five men including Commander Ahmad and Bapa Jalah. Bapa Omar begged off. He was staying behind to do some farm work. He was well along wielding an ax when we took leave that afternoon.
Maglahanglahang! came a command from behind us, meaning, to walk a safe distance of a few feet from each other. By and by we came upon a cool shady place and the men slowed down. Sitting back from our path on one side was a shady spot where white cloths held in four corners by thin poles spread over square spaces. They were the graves of their dead comrades, the men told me. They died during encounters with the military, some from shrapnel wounds dropped by military planes. A little way further and I was greeted by open pits under big trees.
What are those?
Paksul they were called. Trenches. They made plenty all over, to jump into. With battalions of soldiers deployed in the islands, surprise attacks took place from time to time.
Folks on their way to work crossed paths with us, some bent under fruit baskets made of coconut fronds, others carrying farm tools. They would bow ever so lightly, mumbling prayers and good wishes. In one village that we passed an old woman with a headdress stopped from digging at the sight of us approaching. She rose, unwrapped and rewrapped the tadjung around her waist, a wooden trowel in hand. Unable was she to return our greetings as we each took turns wishing her Assalamu alaykum. When I glanced back before we made a turn behind trees, she was still staring after us, her eyes on me, mouth wide open. I did wonder what she could be thinking.
By and by we emerged from the thicket and a rusty Light Vehicle Tank greeted us. Bapa Jalah was atop the tank in no time, gesturing for Jack to photograph him. He was barely four feet, but stocky, and the squarish face between shoulder-length hair well-lined. The current state of the LVT was his work, Jack bragged. He had exploded not less than ten armor tanks and the one he was straddling looked at least a decade old. He liked saluting me, a quick touch of his brow and a nod of his head, which he seemed to prefer doing rather than shaking hands standing a foot apart from someone a foot taller than him. His wide grin on impish face and alert ways reminded me of Rumpelstilskin.
Be that he could turn rust into gold.
A little way up and we came upon an empty hall, the fence surrounding the yard full of holes and blackened in many places. It was what remained of the town’s municipal building after villages were burned down in the aftermath of the February 1974 uprising. When we reached the village, men surrounded us, exchanging embraces with the fighters. Wondering eyes followed me and Fatmawatti whispered to me, amused. With my malong wrapped around my waist, she said, people must have mistaken me for a mestiza Maranao-Tausug. That pleased me no end and I had to stop myself from hugging Fatmawatti. A Maranao for a mother and a Tausug for a father or a Maranao for a father and a Tausug for a mother? Either way it was a fabulous idea.
Jack had forgotten about us. He was busy taking shots at whatever he fancied, the women taking one step back as he aimed his camera’s lens at them. By and by he was in front of another 1974 wreckage, a mosque. A local chap, perhaps annoyed at his elaborate poses, his full height bending this way and that, sometimes kneeling on one knee or standing on an elevated structure, remarked, Filipino?
Fatmawatti hollered. Next time you come around, you should wear a sawwal, Utuh!
I laughed with Fatmawatti. And shoot around like a freak photographer!
We were soon directed to see the distinguished rebel leader in his lair. A passenger vehicle was procured and a handful of men stayed on to escort us. The rest, including Commander Ahmad and Bapa Jalah, were to return to their camp. Bapa Omar and the women would be waiting over supper, they said. We bade goodbye and rode the fiera, trudging through bumpy and muddy inroads, the vehicle rocking and groaning through rock-strewn and lopsided forest ground, until finally, we reached Commander Susukan’s camp. By then it was dusk.
A sputtering wick lamp lit the bare room and the shadow of a woman in the dark kitchen was groping for another gas lamp. We bent our backs through a low door, mumbling good wishes and shaking hands with the slight-framed and oldish commander. Our escorts remained on the yard, and the three of us had ourselves seated on the mat, our backs against the wall. Susukan spoke low, a slow deliberate monotone of one who had just so much to tell, so much to hold. A glint of brilliance radiated from his eyes, the deep look he sometimes fixed at some distance in the dark. He showed us copies of a publication he helped produce which he kept inside a carved chest along with his other precious belongings.
This is good, he said, as he lit a cigarette one of the men handed in from the door.
Angan-angan. Hope. At the day’s end it’s all that will keep us alive.
The woman in the kitchen set down a brighter lamp and more of his treasured items were brought into the light. Mimeographed texts; a red banner with a star, a crescent, and a sword; a chessboard and a typewriter. At the top of the tidy heap inside his trunk, in black leather case, the Holy Book, the letters on the cover gilded, and in a corner by his elbow, his rifle.
The Holy Koran extolls us to change our condition or God Himself will not change it, he murmured.
The Prophet, too, he went on, executed a long march, a protracted struggle during the hegira, the flight to Medina, before their victorious return to Mecca.
An hour later, he was still browsing over the pages of Liberation we brought him. I did not know then who were writing those very cogent texts and when later I would get to read Dolores Feria’s prison notes and barbed wire journals, I would be so astonished to know that the words of an American exile, a socialist and a feminist, should reach a glorious nobody in the far jungle of Jolo. At the time I also did not know yet about Maoism’s early success in the islands or that unlike the arms shipments from China which intellectual-revolutionists botched up twice over, Russia’s AKs and leather boots reached the MNLF camps largely undetected and unintercepted.
After supper of fried fish and green mangoes, I and Fatima rested our backs on the bamboo floor. Jack reposed beside Commandeer Susukan who went back to his corner by the blinking gas lamp, digesting his regular quota of required reading. The woman in the kitchen banished behind the door. As he pored over the text in his hand, he seemed to be scooping each word as he strained his eyes to grope each print, his brows close to the flame. I felt my chest tighten a little, warming to the glow of the flickering light.
Early the following morning, we retraced our path back to the village we stopped at the day before. The half a dozen men who walked with us proceeded to take a different path in the forest. As soon as they had us deposited inside another passenger jeep that would take us to town, they headed toward their camp. As we got nearer the outer road, Army outposts not manned the day before were suddenly thick with uniformed men. Fatmawatti and the women passengers bristled.
Laung ku awn ceasefire bihaun?
They stopped our vehicle though none took the trouble of making us come down on the road to be inspected. They eyed at our bags and contraband faces but that was all. Fatmawatti thundered on, in crisp vernacular.
Bahgu kunu, New Armed Forces kunu, sah, unu ini?!
By the badges on their sleeves, they were the infamous Philippine Marines, the felon of many atrocious crimes in the islands.
By five o’clock in the afternoon, Inah saw us off at the door, exchanging hugs and endless prayers and wishes for our safe journey back. Fatmawatti and her two sisters kept to our side, the male cousin faithfully trailing us, always several feet away at our rear or moving up to our side. Soon, we were again walking back to the port where a waiting ship was docked. I was feeling sad, held back by thoughts that were never there before.
I hugged Fatmawatti goodbye.
Jolo, Jolo. Wassalam, Jolo, Jack murmured as I sat in my cot. He was standing on the deck looking out, his hands on his hips, his eyes in the far blue mountain half-hidden by mist. Behind him on the deck an old man with a white cap was kneeling on a prayer rug, his head bowed, hands cupped before his chest.
I threw another look at the islands of houses sparsely scattered around me; I gazed at the tall mountain with its thick shadow looming high up above the horizon; at the bustle of men and women at the wharf and the children running on the ridges. I scanned the bright blue waters, the wooden structures that looked a beauty from offshore but a chaos of rough-and-tumble lives up close. I thought of the found friends I walked with in the forest.
Wassalam, Jolo, Wassalam, I muttered to myself.
The engine revved up and a blast announcing departure was sounded. Jack was waving his hands, at no one, or perhaps, at everyone in the port we were leaving behind and beyond. Goodbye, Jolo, goodbye, he kept on murmuring, which I found strange. You were not supposed to say goodbye to anyone, only to wish them peace whether they were coming or going.
As though you won’t ever get back here again!
But indeed, Jack never returned to the islands after that trip with me. It was as though he only brought me there so that I would know my way if I returned there in my own time to find out what I would with my own two eyes. It would be decades though before I could really go back and know with the soles of my feet the wounds of the land. By then the friends I met in the jungle were no longer there to see to my safety.
I never got to know what became of them. Soon after that trip, even our own office would be evacuated and we in the volunteer brigades would be dispersed, too, never to gather together again. I was past all hopes, alone, and myself a separatist of some kind when I finally got to hear from one I barely knew Susukan’s name. The speaker, a lady guard in a school where I taught, claimed that his father used to be Susukan’s right hand. The kindly commander died, she said, neither from a bomb dropped in his camp or from an encounter with government soldiers but from a gunman’s bullet. He was by then managing the use and distribution of fishing boats among poor fishing families, and someone, a rival, got in his way. This businessman with some wealth wanted the fishing boat for himself and Susukan refused to lend it to him, refused to give in to any inducement proffered him. The poor fisherman got his fishing boat, the lady guard said, but Susukan paid for it with his life. I did not hear anything more that would corroborate or belie this sad news as by and by I myself would have to leave the place for good.
I still ran into Fatmawatti every now and then after that visit with Jack, in the islands and in cities, but by then, as with Jack and the other comrades I used to share quarters with, we had stopped hugging, had stopped shaking hands, and had stopped wishing each other peace. We might as well had been ships stranded onto our own lost selves. It was as though we have become strangers to each other and strangers to our past selves, all the names and places visited and all the years trod now foreign lands once chartered but had better be put away in a place beyond recall, beyond recovery.