ALAL BIMBANG: Aloha Oe and the way Ms Nora Aunor now takes me again to My Little Grass Shack

JOLO, Sulu (MindaNews / 17 April) — “Aloha Oe.” The yr was 1973 when this music hit the airwaves in Jolo Town. Me and my sister Rose unashamedly swayed our hips alternately sitting and standing when requested impromptu to bounce a Hula. One of such events had been at our Uncle Ben’s home contained in the “ bakod” (fence) of PC Compound throughout their Christmas celebration in December. Our most requested music from Uncle Ben’s phonograph was “ I wanna Go Back to My Li’l Grass Shack.”

PC M/Sgt Benjamin Quiling was an enlisted man within the native safety pressure. Perhaps he was a noncomm officer for I couldn’t keep in mind if he had ever gone to precise fight preventing with the then very energetic Mawis insurgents (i.e. later we might know had been additionally referred to as MNLF for Moro National Liberation Front). But I keep in mind he was an enterprising dealer, as most Tausug males of his time had been. He had been working a one- man touring present. He owned all types of devices too techy and trendy and maybe superior for an bizarre family to personal these days.

Uncle Ben inherited his commerce from his father, who was a pioneer as Peace Corps instructor, employed together with a whole lot from Luzon. He got here from far Langiden, Abra (in Ilocos Norte), a younger Tingguian skilled, to assist in organising numerous boys’ faculties to immediate up the then progressing Sulu Archipelago within the 1920’s corresponding to Lapak Agricultural School and, along with the fondly remembered Dr. Arsenio Paber, they had been as soon as among the many precursor of Tawi-Tawi Agricultural School (TANRAS).

Uncle Ben carried with him a cassette tape recorder wherever he went, that, after asking us to pose for the images, he would usually report us reciting poems and chanting nursery rhymes that we learn from books even earlier than we had been enrolled in formal public college. Books had been birthday items from our first teacher-at-home, Otoh Manjang (Ens. Emerson Lahaman), my Inah’s youthful brother, a classroom instructor in Laminusa however, who like Uncle Ben, would quickly turn out to be enlisted within the Navy, later, Philippine Marines and had his baptism of fireside in an encounter in Tarawakan island in Tawi-Tawi within the late Seventies.

Year 1973 was a time of conflict, solely months to go, Jolo city could be razed to the bottom in February 1974.

There was a transportable film digital camera in addition to a 33mm film projector that Uncle Ben slung round and sometimes on darkish nights with solely a full moon for mild, he had screened away Pilipino and Chinese movies that he stored stocked by the reels inside public college lecture rooms and public markets, for a price. His retinue of toolboxes additionally included assemblages of nonetheless cameras the ancestors of at this time’s DSLR, for, each Quiling, from ancestor to progeny, had been artisans and other people of the crafts (as a few of my current era and people youthful quietly apply as hobbies).

Our male elders had been all well-loved touring photographers in Sulu. And whereas at it, they screened movies on foot, too. Had the conflict not interrupted Sulu’s social and financial life in 1974, they may have prospered within the commerce and have become pioneers of display tourism or what youthful era of at this time popularly name as vlogging of their parlance.

My grandfather Lolo Mariano, my late father – a craftsman and vocational instructor, later turned Supervisor of Region IX, and uncle Ben Quiling had been all photographers who after work, would go away Jolo on summers and non-working holidays, touring to the Sulu’s fringe municipalities serving outliers like Luuk, Siasi, Laminusa, Manubul and Sibaud, Pangutaran, Tabawan, Tandubas, Sibutu, and even to far Turtle island and Taganak, amongst many, whereas servicing as photographers particularly throughout the commencement months of March to April, and on the facet, they screened films zipped in reels introduced in from Jolo.

My Papa, saddled with a rising household of eight young children, had been the much less cell between the 2 brothers. As crafts and vocational business teacher within the native commerce college in Jolo, he sidelined providing printing jobs for T-shirt, streamers, and diploma these days when tarpaulin and desktop printing had been extraordinary. As touring film-screeners cum photographers, they had been like gypsy artisans, who needed to carry their very own instruments of commerce, the projector and “darkroom” with the transportable enlargers included to have the ability to develop the images proper on the web site and permit purchasers to assert them earlier than they head on to the subsequent island.

So within the turbulent occasions of 1973, Uncle Ben’s two-storey home contained in the tall concrete fences of the PC Compound (also referred to as Camp Asturias) had been our sanctuary. Sporadic sparks of armed encounters typically interspersed with arson on the coronary heart of downtown of Jolo usually prompted civilians from the barrios (i.e. barangays) to briefly evacuate and search the safer shelters of kin’ homes.

During one among these transitory stays along with his household, we met some younger ladies who had then simply arrived from Tabawan and Tandubas (Tawitawi, then nonetheless a part of Sulu) spending the evening at Uncle Ben’s earlier than they had been to take the flight to Manila.

There had been not less than three airways serving Jolo then: Air Manila, Swiftair, and PAL Bulilit (nightflight). Among their baggage, the women had packed away bundles of unsewn cuts of top notch Batik fabric (referred to as Battik Bariyya) smuggled from Sabah, sundry barter items corresponding to Maxam cleaning soap and Milo in cans, and “taro” cans lined with manila-paper had been stuffed with native rice truffles and delicacies: Ja, Baulu, Kurubata, and Hantak. On different journeys they’d have carried sea-mantis and crabs steamed then roasted till dry. These, they confided to Uncle Ben had been introduced as “pasalubong” for Ms Nora Aunor. People in the home had been awed and excited to be taught that the women had been travelling to Manila simply to hunt a gathering with the Superstar.

Uncle Ben owned a phonograph and stacks of vinyl records. He had a whole assortment of the native Philippine artists, Nora Aunor, on high of them. And probably the most requested music that we might agree to bounce the Hawaiian to was “Pearly Shells” and “My Little Grass Shack.” The touring showman he was, uncle Ben would have in his stash all types of props and trinkets the place he would pull out leis and garlands made from ruffled crepe paper and glittery beads and colourful ribbons. Decked in all these, my sister Rose and I fortunately glided like wahines wearing moomoos that Inah managed to hurry stitching earlier than she gave start to our youngest sister, whose being pregnant craved for who else however the Superstar.

Untiringly, we danced the hula for so long as the 33mm report stored turning, with just one situation, that Uncle Ben would allow us to pluck two of the largest brightest deep crimson and fuschia Gumamela now in superb bloom in his backyard and bobbing out from his barbed wired fence and to tuck them behind our ears.

For rising up kids and teeners of my time in Jolo, we might have identified of Manila artistic performers as artistes first – and maybe solely as singers and dancers – earlier than we turned educated sufficient to understand them as actors. The radio broadcasts had been for many island folks probably the most accessible and had been totally free. This was how me and my siblings turned followers of Ms Nora Aunor. We cherished her for her singing earlier than her appearing, or the opposite approach of claiming it: we watched her films to see her sing. So that as we grew older, we remembered Nora Aunor because the artiste from the songs quite than because the actor producing award-winning movies that up to date cineastes rave for her sterling performances within the white display.

(MindaViews is the opinion part of MindaNews. Mucha-shim L. Quiling is Sama from Sulu. She chooses the phrase ALAL BIMBANG to comprise her reminiscences and longing of Sulu of the previous and on the identical time conjure up its potent powers to configure the current. ALAL BIMBANG is Sinama phrase describing a state of being liminal. It is a state of crusing and of sailors caught in between the crossings of two seas of being and turning into.
ALAL BIMBANG is a sense switching between pleasure and disappointment. As once you depart from a spot, you are feeling disappointment for forsaking one thing or being unable to take it with you. Then when the island of vacation spot is on sight, you are feeling the enjoyment of arriving. But once you look again, the sensation switches to and from the nostalgia of leaving and the euphoria of arriving)

Vinyl

through MindaNews https://mindanews.com

April 17, 2025 at 04:43PM