ALAL BIMBANG: Fishing out for IP attention

JOLO, Sulu (29 October / MindaNews) —  October,  the Indigenous Peoples Rights Month, is soon to close. This year’s 2024 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (IDWIP) theme was “Protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact.”

But who knows who are these Indigenous People who have chosen isolation from the mainstream society? Who remembers the sea-nomadic boat people whose lives were witnessed and shared by lucky anthropologists like H. Arlo Nimmo and Cynthia Zayas who saw and photographed their last boathouses sailing away into the mists from the edge of Puh Si Tangkay – as once upon a time were the authentic Sama Ma Dilaut Sulu who were free and sovereign than anyone else alive in those pre-civil war times in Sulu archipelago precisely because they were on “voluntary isolation”?

Who cares? No one seems to have memories of them anymore. All that we know now are “Badjao, Badjau, Bajau, Sama Bajau” who are urban scums who beg in the streets and dive for your coins that triggers in many the health-buff instincts to give on-the-spot a good bathing and shampooing until they shine squeaky clean — although NOT even their efforts at trying the labor and stevedoring “clean services” seem deemed clean enough to deserve this lowest of low collar job as ‘mag- lebol’ to us arriving passengers and our disembarking ships, as these too have to be grabbed out of their hands by the more brusque and brute bullyish of Other boys.

They are those whom with noble intentions we document and give papers to, to become visible and be recognized as legitimate urban poorest. All we know now are these “poor, mendicant, cowardly and meek illiterate pagans” need us to save them and civilize them out of their isolation.

Succession of governments including those that purported to bring Peace and Development and had listed out the Badjao as one among their 13 ‘Bangsa’ have not much to offer. One could assume that the only sustainable project for them is to be the target of poverty-reduction and to be the faces perennially in the list but whose names are never called out.

The best projects so far that the best of Philippine technocrats and development specialists could provide are devising traps and cages to fish them out.

There were those fancy sedentarization plans of the Peace Process years of 1990s such as “Ahon Badjao” (Fish out the Badjao) and “Liberating IP from Indignity (LIPI)”, never-you-minding if these were patronizing and having-no-qualms nonchalantly condescending. Anybody out there who remembers these? Anything else that came in later years followed the same menu and formula. And these are the kind of “protection programs” where your taxes went that sought to divest the sea nomads of their sovereignty and facilitated to deprive them of their freedom so that their beautiful islands, reefs and coves can be privately titled or sold to the highest bidder and turned into picturesque resorts and mouthwatering touristic sand-and-sea attractions.

These projects and its policies successfully created the “Badjao beggar” and “Badjao girl” as subjects, molded as recalcitrant images of poverty and illiteracy made them into plastic pliable subjects of development and modernity. And, as both recipients and ends, the Badjao indigenous figure is an object of fetish and egoistic obsessions: from missionary and philanthropic classical patronizing of the ‘60s and ‘70s, though often forgotten but to sometimes become the ice cream topping in halo-halo programs of consumerist-developmentalist and human rightists’ advocacies for individualistic entitlements of the ‘80s-‘90s, to academic cultural essentialism of the 21st Century. And anyone who thinks otherwise and counter-writes these policies is an outlaw, outside, expelled out of institutions of rationality and ‘politeness.’ One becomes an intellectual pariah in the tradition of luwa’ an itself.

But luwa’an incites the Luwa’an to live. The luwa’an is a way of knowing and a way to live the virtual, intellectual, and spiritual sovereign-hood and freedom. As the genuine sea nomads and boat people taught us to know and live. Alanyap na bangsa, mba’ alungay ma dyalom bissala. Their race may banish but they shall never perish in imagination and discourses.

The Luwa’an lives on in us, in our values, in the spirit of our writings.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mucha-shim L. Quiling is Sama from Sulu. She chooses the word ALAL BIMBANG to contain her memories and longing of Sulu of the past and at the same time conjure up its potent powers to configure the present. ALAL BIMBANG is Sinama word describing a state of being liminal. It is a state of sailing and of sailors caught in between the crossings of two seas of being and becoming.
ALAL BIMBANG is a feeling switching between joy and sadness. As when you depart from a place, you feel sadness for leaving behind something or being unable to take it with you. Then when the island of destination is on sight, you feel the joy of arriving. But when you look back, the feeling switches to and from the nostalgia of leaving and the euphoria of arriving)