Chapter 1

Oral Lore from Pre-Colonial Times

The first period of Philippine Literary history is the longest. We often lose sight of this fact
because circumstances of our history had forced lowland Filipinos to begin counting history
from 1521, the first time written records by Westerners referred to the archipelago later to be
called “las islas Filipinas.” However the discovery of the “Tabon Man” in a cave in Palawan
in 1962 allowed us to speak now of a prehistory that goes as far back in time as 50,000 years
ago. The stages of that prehistory show how early the Filipinos grew in control over their
environment until, at the beginning of the Christian era, “they knew the use of gold and
textiles, and how to smelt iron and make glass, and probably spoke a language or languages
from which all modern Filipino tongues are derived.” Thus are we now in a better position
than Filipinos 20 years ago to gauge the breadth and depth of cultural traditions on which
rested the colonial cultures brought by Spain in 1565 and by the United States in 1898.

A historian writing about the “Hispanization of the Philippines” concludes his study by
noting that what transpired could be more accurately summed up as “Philippinization of
Spanish Catholicism.” John L. Phelan’s remark is actually a recognition of the tremendous
bulk of prehistoric Filipino culture with which a transplanted culture came into contact. The
impact of Western culture was to grow in intensity with the passing of time spent under
Spanish and American control, but the pervasiveness of the oral lore of the early Filipinos
would continue, surfacing at certain historical moments, but most of the time remaining
unobserved because submerged in the culture of colonizing power.

The scholar William Henry Scott observes “a considerable discrepancy between what is
actually known about the prehispanic Philippines and what has been written about it.”

Scott is referring to the fact that much that has been said about precolonial Filipinos is
misleading, when the amount of verified information turned up by the studies of
archeologists, ethnologists, and anthropologists has certainly been considerable.

From accounts by chroniclers writing during the early years of the Spanish conquest, we
learn that the early Filipinos lived in villages frequently found along sea coast and river
banks, close to the major sources of food and the most convenient transportation routes. They
were fishermen, jungle farmers and hunters, a folk versatile at finding their livelihood where
they could. When they chose to live in the interior, their houses were built on stilts for
security and health reasons, on promontories and ridges, in widely scattered communities.

Describing the extent of cultural development of early Filipinos on the eve of colonization,
Scott says:

“…Filipinos were wearing bark and woven cloth and gold, bronze, stone and shell hair
ornaments, earrings, pectoral disks, bracelets, finger, and mined and worked gold for rings
and imported beads, and mined and worked gold for jewelry and iron for tools and weapons;
they filed, stained, blackened or chipped their teeth and decorated them with gold and had
been chewing betel nut for 3000 years; they owned tens of thousands of valuable Chinese
porcelain jars and plates but cooked in a type of local pot with a history going back to 1000
B.C.; they deformed skulls, removed them, preserved them, and buried their dead supine,
prone or flexed in caves, graves, jars, or coffins, and disinterred them, reburied and venerated
their bones.”

Present-day students of Philippine literature are fortunate in that they no longer have to go by
“myths” of precolonial Philippines, thanks to researches and writings about Philippine
prehistory which have appeared during the past two decades. These studies , much can be
reliably inferred about precolonial Philippine literature from an analysis of collected oral lore
of Filipinos whose ancestors were able to preserve their indigenous culture by living beyond
the reach of Spanish colonial administrators and the culture of sixteenth-century Europe.
These Filipinos –variously referred to as “natives” “ethnic minorities”, “tribal Filipinos” etc.
- have been able to preserve for us epics, tales, songs, riddles, and proverbs that are now our
windows to a past with no written records we can study.

As literary works created in the setting of a society where the resources for economic-
subsistence – land, water, and forest – were communally owned, the oral literature of the
precolonial Filipinos bore the marks of the community. The subject matter was invariably the
common experience of the people constituting a village – food –gathering, creature and
objects of nature, work in the home, field, forest or sea, caring for children, etc. This is
evident in the most common forms of oral literature like the riddle, the proverbs and the song,
which always seem to assume that the audience is familiar with the situations, activities and
objects mentioned in the course of expressing a thought or emotion.

The language of oral literature, unless the piece was part of the cultural heritage of the
community like the epic, was the language of daily life. At this phase of literary development,
any member of the community was a potential poet, singer or story-teller as long as he knew
the language and had been attentive to the conventions of the form. Perhaps it was the singer
of the epic that had to have a special gift – that of prodigious memory and of melodic
inventiveness – but that was because the epic was a form of oral literature, the content and the
composition of which had their roots in the past.

The conventions of the various oral literary forms, like formulaic repetitions, stereotyping of
characters, regular rhythmic and musical devices, were aids to the performers who were
better able to recall the pieces because of these conventions that facilitated the transmission
of poems, songs, tales and sayings and insured their survival into later times as they moved
from one individual to another, one community to another, and one generation to another.

Because ownership of a literary composition by the originating individual is not emphasized

in the process of oral transmission, it is conceivable that the receiving performer of a song or
a poem often feels that the work he is performing or delivering is expressive of his own
beliefs, attitudes and emotions. In this way we may speak of communal authorship of a given
piece of oral literature.

In settlements along or near the sea coasts, a native syllabary was in use before the Spaniards
brought over the Roman alphabet. The syllabary had had three vowels (a,i-e, u-o) and 14
consonants (b, d, g, h, k, l, m, n, ng, p, s, t, w and y) but curiously enough, had no way of
indicating the consonantal endings of words. This lends credence to the belief that the
syllabary could not have been used to produce original creative works which would all but be
undecipherable when read by one who had had no previous contact with the text.
When the syllabary fell into disuse among Christianized Filipinos, who were later to
constitute the majority of the population, much valuable information about precolonial
culture that could have been handed down to us was lost. Fewer and fewer Filipinos kept
records of their oral lore, and fewer and fewer could decipher what had been recorded in
earlier times. In time, the perishable materials on which the Filipinos wrote were left to
disintegrate and those that remained were destroyed by missionaries who believed the
indigenous pagan culture was the handicraft of the devil himself.

There were two ways by which the uniqueness of indigenous culture survived colonization.
First, by resistance of colonial rule. This was how the Maranaws and the Taosugs of
Mindanao and the Igorots, Ifugaos, Bontocs and Kalingas of the Mountain Province were
able to keep the integrity of their ethnic heritage. Second, by virtue of isolation from centers
of colonial power. The Tagbanwas, Tagabilis, Mangyans, Bagobos, Manuvus, Bilaan,
Bukidnons and Isnegs could cling on their traditional lifeways because of the inaccessibility
of their settlements, It is to these descendants of ancient Filipinos who did not come under the
cultural sway of Western colonizers that we turn when we look for examples of oral lore that
possibly closely reflect precolonial literature.

Riddles and proverbs are the simplest forms of oral literature. In them, we get a sampling of
the primordial indigenous poem, at the heart of which was the talinghaga (analogue,
metaphor or figure). The riddles and proverbs that we know now are commonly drawn from a
1754 Tagalogt-Spanish dictionary on which work was supposed to have started early in the
seventeenth century. Pedro de Sanlucar and Juan De Noceda’s Vocabulario de la lengua
tagala is one of the rare Spanish sources that provide us with samples of early oral lore
obtained direct from the people. As such, the book is a rich collection of riddles, proverbs and
short poems that gives us a clear picture of oral literature among the Tagalogs in precolonial
times.

Monoriming heptasyllabic lines appear frequently enough in samples from the Vocabulario
and in oral poetry from many tribal Filipinos to warrant saying that much of precolonial
poetry probably employed single rimes and seven syllables per line. The ambahan of
contemporary Hanunoo –Mangyans might very well be illustrative of the form and technique
of indigenous precolonial poetry. A Tagalog poetic form found in the Vocabulario, the
tanaga, being a stanza form with a fixed number of lines (four), would seem to be a
Hispanized descendant of the ambahan or a related poetic form. It is important to note that
the ambahan is often chanted (without a predetermined musical pitch or musical
accompaniment), a phenomenon that might explain why vernacular Philippine poetry is
invariably performed in a sing-song rhythm, at a pitch above the tone of conversation.

The ancient Filipinos possessed a wealth of lyric poetry. The Tagalogs, for instance had as
many as 16 species of songs, each one deriving its particular character from the occasion for
the performance. An early Spanish chronicler noted the social function of these songs when
he pointed out that the political and religious life of the people was based on tradition
“preserved in songs they have memorized and which they learned as children, hearing them
sung when folks have rowed, worked and made merry and feasted and mourned their dead. In
those barbaric songs were told and fabled genealogies and vainglorious deeds of their gods.”
Many of what would now appear to be poems probably originated as songs whose melodies
were lost when the lyrics were transcribed without the accompanying music.
As in other oral cultures, prose narratives in prehistoric Philippines consisted largely of origin
myths, hero tales, fables and legends. Their function in the community was to explain natural
phenomena, past events and contemporary beliefs in order to make the environment less
fearsome by making it more comprehensible, and in more instances, to make idle hours less
tedious by filling them with humor and fantasy.

Drama as a literary form had not yet begun to evolve among the Filipinos when the Spanish
conquest took place. From the evidence of anthropological and ethnological studies, it
appears that Philippine theater at this stage consisted largely in its simplest form, of mimetic
dances imitating natural cycles and work activities. At its most sophisticated, theater
consisted of religious rituals presided over by a priest or priestess and participated in by the
community. Of these rituals, the Ch’along of the Ifugaw is an example of how rite, when
combined with plot could develop in time as full-fledged drama. The Ch’along is a part of a
wedding rite, involving the propitiation of evil spirits who might bring harm upon the couple.
The rite centers around the goddess Bugan’s revenge for an insult to her family who were not
served at a wedding feast. A boy plays Bugan and three men play the husband Wigan and the
two sons. Dancing to the rhythm of beaten shields, the four journey into the mountain where
they build a hut for the spirits who need propitiating. Bugan’s revenge is accomplished by
distributing among her enemies food on which a curse has been pronounced. The four players
then return to the wedding feast and purification rites are performed.

The dances and rituals now found among Filipinos in the hinterlands suggest that indigenous
drama had begun to evolve from attempts to control the environment. Perhaps, if
missionaries, who labored hard to stamp them out, had not intruded into what would have
been a normal process of development, Philippine drama would have taken the form of the
dance-drama found in other Asian countries.

The most significant pieces of oral literature that may safely be presumed to have originated
in prehistoric times are the folk epics. E.Arsenio manuel has surveyed those “ethnoepics,”
and in his 1962 study, he was able to describe 13 epics found among pagan Filipinos; two
among Christian Filipinos; and four among Muslim Filipinos. Common features of the folk
epics as described by Manuel are:
a. narratives of sustained length
b. based on oral tradition
c. revolving around supernatural events or heroic deeds
d. in the form of verse
e. which is either chanted or sung
f. with a certain seriousness of purpose, embodying or validating the beliefs, customs,
ideals, or life-values of the people.

Four representative examples may be briefly summarized in order to give a glimpse of the
variety of content among the 19 pieces mentioned by Manuel. Lam-ang was first recorded
among the Christian Ilokos in 1889. It relates the adventures of the hero Lam-ang, who was
born already endowed with the power of speech and with supernatural strength. His quest for
the beauteous Ines Kannoyan involves him in several tests of strength until he finally marries
her amidst a splendid feast. Sometime after the wedding, Lam-ang goes fishing according to a
ritual observed in his town. He is eaten up by a monster fish called rarang. His bones are
recovered, heaped together, and his rooster and his dog bring him back to life.
Tuwaang is a pagan epic discovered by Manuel in 1956 among the Manuvus of Central
Mindanao. The first song published by Manuel was called “ The Maiden of the Buhong Sky”
which tells of Tuwaang’s adventures in his mission of giving protection to the “maiden”
being pursued by a rejected suitor, a giant who wreaked havoc on her country. “Tuwaang
Attends a Wedding,” recorded in 1957, is about the unlooked for adventure that Tuwaang
finds himself entangled with when he is invited to the wedding of the maiden of Monawon.
Tuwaang finds himself pitted against the bridegroom when the bride decides it is Tuwaang
she wants to marry. An awesome duel between the two warriors takes place, which
culminates in Tuwaang’s victory after he smashes the golden flute in which the bridegroom
keeps his life.

Hinilawod is also a pagan epic, recorded only in recent times among the Sulod of Panay. It
consists of two parts, the first one about Labaw Dengan, his sons Aso Mangga and Buyung
Baranogan, and his brother Buyung Humadapnon and Buyung Dumalapdap; the second about
Humadapnon (to be distinguished from Labaw Denggan’s brother in the first part) who seeks
out the beautiful Nagmalitung Yawa, marries her and almost loses her because of jealousy.
Considered the longest epic so far recorded in the Philippines, Hinilawod is specially notable
for its richly inventive narration and magnificence of its fantasy.

Bantugan is a Maranaw epic, its central character being the most popular hero of the Muslim
darangan or epic song. Bantugan is a prince who excels not only as a valiant warrior but also
as a fabulous lover. More than 15 songs are said to detail his exploits in love and war.

On the basis of this brief account of precolonial literature, it might be concluded that prior to
the Spanish conquest, Filipinos had a culture that linked them with the Malays of Southeast
Asia, a culture with traces of Indian, Arabic and possibly, Chinese influences. Their epics,
songs, short poems, tales, dances, and rituals gave them a native Asian perspective which
served as a filtering device for the Western culture that the colonizers brought over from
Europe.

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*The Instructor claims no ownership to everything that is presented in this module. The content of
this module is sourced from Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology by Bienvenido Lumbera
and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera.