{"id":6552,"date":"2026-03-17T21:32:28","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T13:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/?p=6552"},"modified":"2026-07-11T19:55:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T11:55:26","slug":"remembering-jabidah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/remembering-jabidah\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Jabidah"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teng Mangansakan
\n<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The legacy of the Jabidah massacre refuses to fade away and sticks with each generation like a name that\u2019s always on the tip of the tongue. It shows up in pieces, slipping between what people say out loud and what they choose to keep hidden. And from those scattered pieces, we try to build a story for ourselves, and sometimes even a future.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a Moro, I have inherited its legacy too, like someone who hangs around the edges, picking through what\u2019s left unsaid, listening for echoes that travel even to the remotest places. My grandfather, Datu Udtog Matalam, did not have the luxury of such distance. When Jabidah erupted into the national consciousness, he responded not with metaphors as writers are predisposed to invoke but with one sweeping movement. He founded the Muslim Independence Movement, an act that was at once grief and defiance, a declaration that history had reached a point of no return. His revolution was urgent and carved out of outrage. Mine, I have come to understand, is quieter, slower, almost hesitant. It is a revolution in the mind, where memory is both weapon and wound.<\/span><\/p>\n

For years, I have circled Jabidah without quite entering it, like an island seen from afar, its shores too thick with meaning to approach directly. But in the last two years, I found myself traveling repeatedly to Tawi-Tawi, drawn by a need I could not fully articulate. There is something about islands that insist on isolation, but they also promise a form of clarity. In Simunul, where the story of Jabidah is said to have begun its quiet gestation, I felt the past not as something concluded but as something waiting patiently, like some unresolved business.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was there that I encountered the story of Sophia Mirkusin. It did not come to me like history from authoritative textbooks or the brittle certainty of archives. Instead, it arrived as a love story told in fragments. Sophia, they said, had loved a man named Eduardo Martelino, a man whose presence in the narrative of Jabidah is often reduced to rank and function, but who, in Sophia\u2019s remembering, existed first as a bearer of promise of everlasting love.<\/span><\/p>\n

He arrived, as such men do in island stories, with the aura of foreignness. He carried with him the weight of a nation that had not yet learned its own fractures. In Sophia\u2019s telling, he was attentive in ways that suggested he was the right one. He spoke of return as though it were inevitable, as though distance was only a temporary inconvenience. Love, he told her, could easily overcome this. In that fragile space between encounter and departure, she allowed herself to believe in a future that extended beyond the horizon. She dreamed beyond the uncertainties that already hovered over Simunul.<\/span><\/p>\n

But history, like the tide, does not honor such intimacies. It intrudes, takes what is private, and subjects it to violence in the open. When Martelino left, summoned back into the machinery of a state that was itself unraveling, he carried with him not only his obligations but also the silence that would come to define his absence. He did not return. Or rather, he returned only in stories that contradicted one another, every version clashed with the next, in a history that has never been settled.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sophia waited.<\/span><\/p>\n

This waiting, I have realized, is not incidental to the story of Jabidah but is central to it. Because what is Jabidah if not a prolonged act of waiting? Waiting for truth. Waiting for acknowledgment. Waiting for justice that never arrives in the package one desires. Sophia\u2019s vigil became a quiet mirror of the Bangsamoro condition itself, a testament to the endurance required to live with histories that do not resolve easily.<\/span><\/p>\n

She waited through the slow sedimentation of myth and rumor, through the shifting narratives that alternately obscured and exposed the contours of the massacre. All the while, the man she loved became increasingly drawn into those stories. People kept mentioning his name, making him feel both close and impossibly far away. And then, at some point, no one can say exactly when, she decided to move on, though even that phrase feels inadequate, as though it suggests a clean break where none existed. What does it mean to move on from something that has never properly ended?<\/span><\/p>\n

In Sophia\u2019s story, I began to see Jabidah not only as a political rupture but as an intimate one, a crack that extends into the most private corners of human experience, reshaping love, memory, and the very possibility of closure. Her waiting was not passive, but an active engagement with absence, a refusal to let the story settle into the neatness that history often demands.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is perhaps why her story found its way into my own work, why it lingered at the edges of Island Fever<\/em>, why it haunted the imagined conversation between Lina, a journalist, and Jabidah survivor Jibin Arula, who returned from the Hereafter. Because even in that speculative space, where the dead are allowed to speak, the questions remain unresolved. The journalist seeks answers, but what she encounters instead is a series of echoes, bits and pieces of memory and afterthought that never quite come together.<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing that story, shaping it through long conversations on the many questions of identity, history, and the burden of memory, I began to understand that my work is not to resolve Jabidah but to inhabit it. To sit with its ambiguities. To allow its contradictions to breathe. This is perhaps the quiet revolution I have chosen, not to simplify and make a chronicle of some sort, but to stick around and allow the tangled stories that make up Bangsamoro identity to unravel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because, really, this isn\u2019t just about how we remember Jabidah. It\u2019s about how we see ourselves in its shadow. Are we just carrying old wounds, stuck in this endless cycle of anger and payback? Or are we keepers of memory, holding on to the hard truths of the past without letting them swallow us whole? Sophia\u2019s story doesn\u2019t reconcile any of that. If anything, it makes the questions heavier.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, I keep coming back to the image of the tide. Jabidah always comes back through different faces and voices, even in silence. It keeps shaping Bangsamoro\u2019s future. It keeps shaping the Filipino imagination, too, even if we pretend it is the least of its concerns. And in Sophia\u2019s waiting, in the way she loved a man tied to a history that won\u2019t let him go, I see the tide at its most personal. It\u2019s not just in our politics or our shared memory, but also in our quietest hopes and the things we want most.<\/span><\/p>\n

And in that, perhaps, lies the real weight of inheritance, knowing that every time we write, every time we remember, we\u2019re still waiting and listening, still trying to figure out a story that has no neat ending.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teng Mangansakan The legacy of the Jabidah massacre refuses to fade away and sticks with each generation like a name that\u2019s always on the tip of the tongue. It shows up in pieces, slipping between what people say out loud … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6552"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6916,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6552\/revisions\/6916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}