A SOJOURNERS VIEW | BOOK REVIEW: ‘GAPNOD: A Personal Account on Love, Loss and Everything in between from Bohol to Mindanao and Back’

BOOK REVIEW: ‘GAPNOD: A Personal Account on Love, Loss and Everything in between from Bohol to Mindanao and Back’ by Oscar Labastilla
8 Letters Publishing, Cebu City, 2024

Karl Gaspar CSsR

WE ARE ALL GAPNODS!

“Ang palad sa tawo sama sa gapnod!” (The fate of a man is like a driftwood!) In a country which is an archipelago constituted by 7,641 islands and a total land area of 300,000 square kilometers (115,831 sq. miles), the gapnod is as ubiquitous as the coconut tree, especially for people living along the seashore.

Gapnod is now the title of an autobiography of Oscar Medidas Labastilla, born on March 13, 1946 in Tubigon, Bohol who spent part of his life in Agusan in Mindanao and who, years later, returned to his homeland. His original manuscript that has become this book—GAPNOD: A Personal Account on Love, Loss and Everything in between from Bohol to Mindanao and Back—is the rare autobiography that is truly a celebration of love embodied in a family tree whose narrative traverses across time and space.

That this book was written by a senior citizen during his retirement made it a stunning achievement. It took Labastillas seven years to intermittently write and finish the final draft of the manuscript, from 2016 to 2023.

One thing that is most impressive about the text written is the accuracy of the names, dates and places which contributed to this book’s detailed description of events. Considering memory lapses of the elderly and the absence of journals documenting one’s life through the years, it is such a wonder that Labastilla could provide the reader with the accurate details.

Through “text and memory” and the rigorous research he undertook, the reader is provided the family saga of the Labastilla-Medidas that traverses across five generations of his clan’s genealogy from the late Spanish period, through the important epochs of this country—including the American, Japanese, early Republic, the Marcos martial law and the post-EDSA eras—up to the contemporary times.

Like many Filipino families across the centuries who go back especially to the Austronesian period of the Neolithic epoch, the members of this Labastilla-Medidas clan migrated from place to place across this archipelago, settling mainly in Bohol. Caught in the need for survival and dreaming of finding their fortune in faraway lands, they moved from place to place even as the country’s history shifted across eras. From the north to the south, they joined the migration movements that mark our people’s desire to find the proverbial Land of Promise.

The book chronicles these movements. The most interesting chapters of their life as a family are those when they found themselves migrating to Mindanao, ending up in the forests of Agusan del Sur, when the “carabao logging” operations began. (It was so named because carabaos were used to pull round logs towards the river.) In this contentious location, as the explosive dynamics of economics and politics intertwined, where to survive meant to live by one’s wit, the Labastillas with eight children had to maneuver through the rough vicissitudes of a life as pioneers in a newly-opened territory. It is akin to those portrayed in Hollywood cowboy films like Yellowstone and Horizon, where white settlers moved west to secure lands.

It was in this vast territory where primal forests which used to be the Manobo’s abode but which attracted the attention of potential loggers, in a landscape punctuated with the tributaries around the Agusan marsh, including the big river waterways, that the Labastillas settled for a while, ensconced near the log pond. Commuting from Butuan towards the interior villages which were sites of logging camps involved riding the bawto (boats without outriggers) floating on deep, dark waters through rains and sunshine.

The log pond in the interior of Bayugan, in upper Agusan was located in a place where the Umayam and the Ihawan rivers ultimately merged with the wide Agusan River. Umayam and Ihawan were tributaries of Agusan River. In the log pond the logs were fastened together by a steel cable and towed all the way down to Butuan. There they were segregated, the export qualities were then brought to the estuary and loaded on boats to Japan. The others, called sawmill quality, were sawed for lumber or made into plywood.

Even as occasionally the rivers flooded the plains, this was the dream playground for adventurous kids. They could jump from one floating log to another which were clustered and tied together on which houses were built (complete with pig pens). However, this land of contrasts also witnessed the eruption of conflicts arising with the encounters of loggers and settlers with the aboriginal inhabitants, as well as the workings of dirty politics resulting in periodic occurrence of militarization and the ensuing human rights violations.

Labastilla’s GAPNOD is truly a remarkable piece of creative writing. Constituted by five parts—titled Tubig (Water), Bakwit (Evacuees), Mga Hiyas sa Banay (Family Values), Pakigbisog (Struggle) and Walay Pagbasol (No Regrets)—spread across close to 60 chapters, the book weaves narratives interfacing various levels of stories.

The most interesting level is the local history of the towns of Tubigon in Bohol and Bayugan in Agusan del Sur. In the last few years, among historians (globally and locally), there have been a thrust towards highlighting the importance of history from below and from the peripheries. In his book Out of Italy, published in 2019, Ferdinand Braudel wrote: “in the dialectic of the internal and the external” of the Italian renaissance… “it is sometimes said that the light shed from the margin is the best, that a complex whole may be best apprehended from its outer limits.” In a situation in which “every fact, every event has been minutely studied by generations of devoted historians, the vantage point of the periphery, of the diaspora, can provide new clarity to developments in the core.”

An aspect of local history which is most notable in Gapnod. One is the history of the logging industry of Agusan (even including parts of Surigao) with Democrito Otaza (D.O.) Plaza as the central character. He was born in another town in Agusan, namely, Talacogon. His wife, Valentina Galido Plaza, also joined politics later on. D.O. Paza launched his political dynasty that ruled Agusan del Sur for decades. Plaza’s carabao logging was the initial logging penetration to forested areas earlier occupied by the Manobo, which earned huge profits by cutting centuries-old lauan and other endemic trees. Such, indeed were the beginnings of logging in places like Agusan that would progress into the more advanced manner of using machines, and the more destructive ways of deforesting what used to be primal forests.

How the rivers flowed depended on the rains and movements of tides as well as other obstructions along the way. The disturbances created by harsh weather condition as well as the tensions arising in the logging operations impacted on the lives of the employees and workers, as well as their families who moved to be with their household heads. With the conflicts erupting with the aboriginal inhabitants plus the loneliness of living in the outback, life in these logging camps must have been such a Calvary for Labastilla’s big family.

But one thing is also made clear in this book, namely, that the local history is interlinked with how events unfolded internationally and nationally, as changes took place in terms of the different origins of the colonizers, the World War II events and its aftermath, the migration movements, the changes in administration and political dynasties at the top, the impact of martial law and the ensuing massive militarization in the countryside expanding the extent of human rights violations, the short-lived euphoria of EDSA and the workings of contemporary politics. The national and local histories are well interfaced and inter-connected in this book.

Another level—which would make this a must-reading for Mindanawon scholars and the general public living in Mindanao—is that the story is truly an exemplary example of what the migrant settlers experienced through the waves of migration from the central and northern parts of the archipelago, especially the Cebuanos, Bol-anons and Leytenos who all share the same language, generically called Bisaya and/or Cebuano. (Although a hybrid Mindanawon Cebuano has arisen because of the interfacing of various ethnolinguistic communities who migrated to Mindanao from the various islands of this country.)

There remains a dearth of literature on the migrant settlers population of Mindanao that shows the interaction of the push factors from their points of origin to the pull factors of the mythical Land of Promise that is Mindanao. There is certainly the need for more books to be published on this collective experience of tens of thousands of Filipinos/Mindanawons migrant-settlers as each story is unique. The Bol-anons of course have a distinct character and personality and they always stand out where they find themselves across Mindanao.

Thus this book will truly fill in the gaps of local history—from the lens of those who move out of their homes in search of their destiny for the advancement of their children’s lives—as well as provide a model on how to write a family saga. And where Mindanao is the location, considering that there have been original inhabitants across this island (some converting to Islam and the rest retaining their indigenous culture and belief system), there is bound to be an interesting encounter of various cultures and faith. The chapters dealing with the logging inroads into the forested areas of Agusan where the Manobos have lived since time memorial show an interesting view of how the indigenous culture would be impacted leading to the drastic changes in this location‘s demography and cultural landscape.

One other interesting aspect of the book’s texts is a bit of “magic realism.” Some of the chapters reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel-winning author from Colombia whose book, A Hundred Years of Solitude, is now a classic and required reading in Literature classes, although his book fictionalized his country’s historical events. There are stories about dreams, legends, myths and what others would pejoratively refer to as “superstitious beliefs.” Those who like magic realism would find it interesting to read the references to dreams, ghosts, ogres, the supernatural, the power of the mananambaw (otherwise known as mananambal or faith healers), and the efficacy of the rituals leading to being healed from illnesses caused by those whose spaces were transgressed in one way or another.

The use of GAPNOD as main title of this book is further amplified in the book’s Epilogue. When the readers reach the last page, they will read the author’s final reflection of his life’s journey (as he wrote this during a quiet moment by the beach after seeing a driftwood being tossed by the waves). This provides a most touching way to end the book’s tale, revealing a facet of truth. That we are, indeed, like gapnods! The author leaves the readers with a final note that “we are nothing but simply gapnods in the sands of time!”

(Published by 8Letters Publishing in Cebu City, GAPNOD will have its book launching soon in a number of venues. Copies are already available in Lazada or Shopee at P820/copy. If you order now, you might receive a copy with the author’s signature.)

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Redemptorist Brother Karl Gaspar is Mindanao’s most prolific book author. Gaspar is also a Datu Bago 2018 awardee, the highest honor the Davao City government bestows on its constituents. He is presently based in Cebu City.)