I am looking out of the window of this huge hotel I have been holed up in for some two days now. The rains have not stopped; there was a window of about an hour of sunshine but then it got stormy again.
Travelling to this frontier land- the last as we are told always-one always believes one is treading on a territory that is not ours. Or one that is separate, different from us.
The tendency is to try to define the inhabitants here, the name of the people who properly live on this island. Proprietary citizens, we may call them. But the question is not easy. There is the Palawan; and there is also, to the consternation of the native, the Palawano.
But we listen to songs and the dialects, for somebody mentions the Cuyonon, a regional Bisayan language identified by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and considered as lingua franca of Palawan. And before you could say Cuyo, there would be protests from the Batak and Tagbanua. For there would be other groups as well, each one claiming identity under the banner of Palawan.
Living on the island, however, brings us to contact with other groups. The Tausugs, for example, have ethnic memories of the Palawan as ‘Palawano Traan’ or those that have been scattered or ‘people in scattered places.’ Ethnography indicates the origins of these people from those found in the Tabon caves, a cave system located in Lipuun Point, Panitian, Quezon, in Palawan.
Reputedly the most popular cave system in the country, the Tabon Caves have been called ‘the cradle of civilization,’ due to the presence of the number of burial jars and prehistoric remains discovered in the area from the 1960s. The most well-known of the finds in this site was the ‘Tabon Man.’
Interestingly, the caves are named after the Tabon scrubfowl, a Philippine megapode, a medium-sized bird found also in the Philippines, northern Borneo and Sulawesi. The said bird, which nests on the shore near the sea, used to inhabit the area of Ticao island, which gave rise to the Tabon festival as celebrated on the said place. Whether there is truth to this origin myth or not, Palawan seems to hold a key to much of the mystery or history of the land.
Now, here I am looking out into the vast sea extending beyond the pools of this resort. I am tempted to look at the map because there is nothing out there except the sea. With the storm not abating, I sense now a country that is finding it difficult to mark its boundary.
The Spratly islands should be out there. Consisting of more than 100 reefs, islets and cays, and covering some 158,000 square miles, this composite should be an amazing resource for a country like ours. But the Spratly Islands have been disputed for a long time.
For one, the Spratly Islands are named after a British whaling navigator. With stakes in the islands are China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, and the Philippines. The islands, as a result of these differences and claims, have Chinese, Malaysian, Vietnamese, and Philippine names. Very much like the many inhabitants of Palawan, which are numerous and varied.
To add to the splendor of the land, one encounters the so-called ‘Taaw’t bato,’ which is often simplified into ‘taong bato, which literally means ‘people of the rock,’ a reference to those living in the southern interior of Palawan. One can go deeper and look for those who live in the upriver, pointing to those isolated from the rest. This categorization, of course, is common, even among other lowlanders when the direction of the stream divides the residents as to their residence.
I could belabor the point. This is a common affliction of one who is a stranger in one’s own island. Or of one who savors the loneliness or the allure of being a stranger in one’s island, where each day-each moment-a way of cooking and taste makes us wonder why we have lost our sense of self. Or, because beauty is such a vanishing tradition or one that is merely passing, and because even our own histories are phantasms we like to chase with modifiers and verbs that never make sense even to the native speaker.