Tao Po! Poem 7

Yo, this was really hard. The assignment was to reflect on a social myth as if it were a folktale – to write about how it began, what makes it plausible, how it might change or end the more times it’s retold. Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor goes on to tell me in a separate email that we do not have to believe in social myths, but that reexamining and rearticulating them is part of the process of dismantling them. Here, I think that if I tell this story with absurdity and tragedy, perhaps the reader will also see the social myth’s absurdities and tragedies.

–

Why Girls Do Not Speak

You are wondering why some girls have lost their voices, when this one here continues to babble, to rush her words as if she were a brook, engorged with monsoon. In fact this story does start at the flowing water’s edges. At Agos (or perhaps it was Sapa), a girl once stopped to fill her canteen. She had come down from Bundok with her father’s ashes. Because her father had no sons, an unusual occurrence, the task came upon her to scatter his ashes into Dagat, which the lowlanders called El Mar.

As I have said, it was unusual for men of Bundok not to father any sons. If one woman into whom he planted his seed, could not give him one son, the man would simply plant his seed into a different woman. And if she could not give him a son, he would continue planting his seed into other women until a son resulted. Many girl children were born this way, discarded and forgotten by their fathers.

But her father was of a different sort. He loved his child and because he could not bear to cast her away, he cropped her hair to her skull, and taught her to hunt. Like a man, she learned to spear fish and to build bangka, to chisel their deities in wood. She kept vigil with the other hunters, and yes, she also took heads. She came to tell stories of the hunt, and the people loved her stories best. Few knew this young storyteller was a girl.

Now, about the girl children of Bundok. Pale men from the coastal lowlands came to Bundok. They had heard stories of the women far outnumbering the men. They came and they found so many fatherless daughters, so many weaving mats, so many cooking meals, so many learning to tell story, some sitting idle, somber, in boredom, for there were more girls that needed to perform all of the daily work. When the elders explained to the pale men there were not enough of their own men to marry all of these young women, the pale men promised to supply many good husbands, to which the elders responded with relief and joy.

What the pale men did not tell the elders is that they forbade their women from stepping outdoors lest the sun darken them. The pale men forced their women’s once bare feet into narrow, pinching shoes, shut their women inside exquisite whalebone birdcages, which broke the wives’ ribs, and which did not allow them to draw air. Faint, the wives could no longer sing, and eventually lost their ability to speak. Those wives who were still able to utter few words the pale men beat properly, as their fathers and mothers had taught them, as they would teach their sons and daughters. The wives learned silence was their only shield. When our young storyteller arrived with her father’s ashes at Dagat, she asked the wives to return with her, but they pretended not to recognize her, and so she returned to Bundok alone.

–

Addendum: also, to be clear, this is fiction. That is, I have made up a folktale and folkways that do not necessarily exist. I do not want to create any kind of perfect indigenous society here, in which gender inequity is non-existent.

Advertisement