BAMBOO WHISPERS
By: Lolita Delgado Fansler

“There is scarcely a man, and much less a woman, who cannot read and write in letters proper to the Island of Manila.”
The quote is attributed to Fr. Pedro Chirino, a noted Jesuit historian who wrote on the early years of Spanish colonization in the Philippines. Every Filipino today ought to be proud that in the early 1500s through 1600s, when the Spaniards established a stronghold, most Manila inhabitants, especially women, were literate. They were using their own script before the conquistadors arrived in the more than 7,000 islands.

A dozen syllabaries

The Spaniards eventually identified about a dozen syllabaries existing in the islands when they came. The list did not include the scripts of the Buhid and Hanunuo Mangyans from Mindoro and of the Tagbanuas from neighboring Palawan. The Philippine government declared the latter syllabaries as National Treasures in 1997 and consequently got them inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Registers in 1999.

Today, these three indigenous peoples (IPs) – Buhid, Hanunuo Mangyans and Tagbanuas, as well as the Palawano (from Palawan) who use a more recent variation of the Tagbanua script – are the only ones who continue to use their native syllabaries in the country.

Why have these three IP groups retained their scripts while the rest of the Filipinos lost theirs? It is because these IPs lived undisturbed for a much longer time. They avoided contact with lowlanders as well as foreign colonizers. They fled to the mountains when Chinese and Muslim pirates raided their islands. Thus, their traditions flourished with hardly any outside influence.

A historical landmark

A muddy, rolled up copper sheet dredged up from Laguna de Bay in the 1980s proves that 621 years before the Spaniards arrived, people living in the Philippine islands already had a written legal culture.

Called the Laguna Copperplate Inscription (LCI) and on exhibit in the Philippine National Museum, this metal fragment contains ten lines of script and ends in mid-sentence. It relates that the Chief of Tondo (a current Manila district) forgave a man his debt of about Philippine Pesos 700,000 (at today’s prices). It also refers to places (Tondo, Binwangan, Pulilan, and Paila) well known to modern-day residents of Manila. A Dutch linguist and longtime resident of the Philippines, Antoon Postma transcribed and translated the LCI, concluding that it is, indeed, a Filipino document.

Postma points out that the landmark metal plate, written in a unique mixture of Sanskrit, Old Javanese, Old Malay, and Old Tagalog scripts, bears the Sanskrit date 822. This is equivalent to Monday, 21 April 900 AD.

The script, and more, are gone

The syllabic script in this copperplate is rich and sophisticated, yet it has vanished. Many things could happen over time. Natural disasters, pirate raids, war, epidemics and migration could cause settlements to disappear even if they had flourished for centuries. Fortunately, although those early Filipino settlers lost their script, the places mentioned in the LCI still exist today.

The Spanish colonizers, who came to the islands to look for gold, spices and souls to convert to Christianity, thought that to “civilize” the ancient Filipinos, it was necessary to destroy anything considered contrary to Christianity. This belief resulted in the destruction of early Philippine artifacts and written documents, as well as the prohibition and discouragement of pre-Hispanic culture, including nature worship, music, martial arts, and many other indigenous customs and practices. Providentially, not everything has been lost. Oral tradition helped preserve Filipino ancient knowledge, heritage and traditions through stories, myths, legends, and other forms.

But the blame cannot be attributed solely to zealous Christian missionaries eager to save souls. The Philippine ancestors used readily available materials that were perishable. They wrote mostly on bamboo: bamboo plants along the trails, bamboo poles and slats, bamboo containers where they kept tobacco leaves or lime for their betel-nut chew. They also inscribed the old scripts on their bodies, clothing, baskets, house posts and walls, or a fallen tree trunk. Because these materials are perishable, the oldest copies of the Mangyan script are just over 200 years old.

Romanization took over

Although ancient Filipinos retained their indigenous languages and dialects, they gradually replaced their Indic-derived syllabic script with the Roman alphabet of the Spanish conquerors. Why? It was more phonetically exact. It was easier to write with a pen than a knife, on paper than on bamboo. Furthermore, with all the different variations of the Indic syllabic script, it was more practical for neighboring provinces to have one common alphabet. 

It is interesting to note, however, that many 18th century Filipinos were still writing in the syllabic mode, even in Spanish-controlled areas. But by the beginning of the 19th century, most of the different Filipino languages and dialects were already being written in the Roman alphabet. By the late 1800s, only a few upland communities retained their syllabic scripts. While colonization had negligible influence in the far recesses of the mountains where the indigenous peoples lived, commerce and trade must have convinced the early Filipinos to adopt the Roman alphabet.

In the 1900s

At the end of the 19th century, a French explorer in Palawan and some German researchers in Mindoro reported that the tribal populations in these islands were still using their syllabic script to write messages and record their literature. In the 1900s, Fletcher Gardner and Harold Conklin also wrote about the Mangyan script.

Then one day in the late 1950s, scholar Antoon Postma, a missionary living in Mindoro, saw a long-haired young man in a G-string scratching something on bamboo with the sharp point of a knife. “I’m writing a letter to my wife,” the man told Postma.

It was a poem, with seven syllable lines, telling his wife in an allegorical way, when he would return home. The Hanunuo Mangyan left this bamboo slat by a tree along the path, where it could easily be seen. He knew that the next passerby would read the message and carry it to the next point, until his wife would eventually receive it. No privacy, but the letter would surely reach the addressee in one to three days. For free.

Postma, an anthropologist, was intrigued. Thus began his 50-years commitment to the Mangyans and their culture. At 78, he continues to do research and write. He has collected, preserved, researched and written the most materials about the Mangyans. He is considered the authority on Mangyan script, poetry and culture.

Origins in Indian Brahmin script

Postma says that Surat Mangyan and the scripts, which are still being used in India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Indonesia, proceed from a common parent -- the Brahmin script of India which became popular with the spread of Buddhism. Each country eventually adapted this script to the phonetic peculiarities of their respective languages.

The Mangyans speak eight of the more than 100 languages and dialects spoken in the Philippines today. Among the eight Mangyan groups which have distinct languages and cultures (Alangan, Bangon, Buhid, Hanunuo, Iraya, Ratagnon, Tadyawan, Taubuid), two continue to use the Indic-derived syllabic scripts.

The island is administratively divided into Oriental Mindoro and Occidental Mindoro. However, language-wise, Postma classifies the two still-in-use Mangyan scripts into the Northern Script of the Northern Buhid and the Southern Script of the Southern Buhid and Hanunoo-Mangyans.

The Northern Script has 18 basic syllables, more rounded in shape and more closely related to other ancient Philippine syllabaries. The Southern Script has 18 angular syllables. Unlike the alphabet which is composed mainly of single vowels and consonants, a syllabary contains characters representing full syllables, i.e. a single vowel or a syllable made up of a consonant and a vowel.

Characteristics of the script

Besides not needing commas, periods and capital letters, another interesting thing about the Mangyan script is the direction in which it is read. Is it left to right, like English or right to left, like Chinese? Both, and more!

The writing direction depends on the writer and on the material he chooses. If he uses a live bamboo tree, the direction is vertical: from bottom-up, the way the tree grows. If it’s a bamboo slat, the writing strokes would be directed horizontally, away from the body, in case the knife slips. This would be read from left to right if a right-handed person carves the script. But if the writer is left-handed, the script would be carved from right to left, with the characters inverted. Hence a Mangyan could easily read a book in Roman script -- upside down!

Will these three scripts survive the onslaught of a global world, when the Roman alphabet is more widely used and the youth struggle to learn Pilipino and English?

The Mangyans do not force their children to learn anything, even the script. Mangyan adults believe that when the youngsters are ready, they will ask. When asked about the future of Mangyan language and script, an old Mangyan expressed his sentiments:                             
                   

Probably only the Southern Mangyan script has a chance of surviving since its related culture is now part of the curriculum in Mangyan schools. Furthermore, several teaching materials have been produced, such as the following: A Primer to Mangyan Script, Kultura Mangyan, Mangyan Folk Tales, Mangyan Treasures (collection of poems), and Indigenous Peoples’ Community Organizing: The Mangyan Experience. If there’s a problem that the Mangyans face, it’s the lack of Mangyan teachers. The community is trying to address this concern.

Living poetry

The peaceful, gentle Mangyans (numbering just over 100,000) don’t have the word “war” in their vocabulary. Not materialistic, they don’t have numerals; they spell the numbers in words, if needed. More importantly, besides being caretakers of an original Philippine script, they express their deeper sentiments through ambahan, a form of poetry with seven syllable lines in measured rhyme. Poems of birth, infancy, courtship, marriage, farming, death and other themes abound, showing how poetry is a part of a Mangyan’s way of life. Antoon Postma has collected over 30,000 Mangyan ambahan.

The adults teach their children indirectly, by example or allegorically.

A love-struck Mangyan left this “graffiti” on bamboo growing along the trail:

An old Hanunuo-Mangyan inscribed this on a bamboo slat for his wife:

Besides Postma, the Mangyan Mission (MM) headed by Fr. Ewald Dinter, a German missionary who has been living in the Philippines for forty years, is involved in current Mangyan concerns - education, health, livelihood, environment and ancestral domain.

Mangyan Heritage Center

In 2000, a young Filipino-American volunteer, Quint Fansler,
co-founded the Mangyan Heritage Center (MHC) with Postma and Dinter. Together, they built a tiny library in Calapan, Oriental Mindoro, which now houses the world’s greatest collection of materials on the Mangyans.

The Mission, the Center and other institutions are doing their best to work with the Mangyans in preserving the old script and their precious traditions. The MHC aims to raise awareness of the old script and the ambahan among Filipinos who do not know about their existence, and among young Mangyans who do not appreciate the value of their culture.

The MHC has a traveling photo-and-artifacts multimedia exhibit doing the rounds in private and public museums, schools, hospitals, markets and international trade fairs. Visitors can practice writing their names in Mangyan script, listen to chanted ambahan, and buy crafts.

The MHC also offers lectures and spearheads culture training and cultural festivals. Success in sales of Mangyan cards, T-shirts, and crafts is encouraging young Mangyans to weave their textiles, make jewelry out of beads and write on bamboo.

There are also increasing efforts to acknowledge and appreciate the contributions of Mangyans to Philippine heritage. Premio Ambahan is a yearly competition open to students of the De La Salle school system, in both Filipino and English. It is also open to students of Mangyan schools who write in their original script and language.

The B.N.S. Creative Writing Center of De La Salle University, a major Manila-based university that has a presence in several provinces, organized this event to raise the consciousness of students on the importance of indigenous poetry. It also aims to upgrade the Philippine ambahan to the stature of the Japanese haiku.

Highlighted in a World Expo

During the 2004 Expo in Aichi, Japan, an ambahan was featured at the façade of the Philippine Pavilion for six months. The ancient Philippine script, interwoven with translations in Japanese calligraphy and English letters, was executed as laser-cut perforated elements, no longer on bamboo, but on an aluminum surface. But the poem, lit from within, seemed to echo still, in lingering ancient whispers, the Expo’s theme of “Nature’s Wisdom.”

Lolita Delgado Fansler

©2007 Mangyan Heritage Center