THE AGE-OLD SCRIPTS OF PHILIPPINES’ TAGBANUA PEOPLE

Vanishing from Use

Text & Photos KATHERINE JACK

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Heritage + Conservation

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On a quiet hillside in the village of Makagwaq, on Palawan Island in the western Philippines, 71-year-old Antonita Bibas teaches her grandchildren an ancient script. Known only to few, the isolated mountains and coastlines of Palawan are home to a rich but fragile culture. The script – adopted by indigenous Tagbanua people many hundreds of years ago – tells of the intricate cultures that once thrived on Palawan.

Antonita is a Pala’wan. She grew up in a small mountain village, a three-hour walk from where she lives today in South-eastern Palawan. Sitting outside her bamboo house and surrounded by her extensive family, she recounts how her husband proposed to her. “He was sixteen then and lived in Tigaplan, a whole day’s walk from my village. He was very shy so he sent a message to me written on a banana leaf; I replied straight away,” she recalls.

The Pala’wan use a syllabary script – a set of characters representing syllables. It is traditionally written vertically, upwards or downwards but nowadays is also written horizontally, from left to right. The Pala’wans of the south adopted the script from the Tagbanuas of central Palawan around the turn of the twentieth century.

Antonita recounts how her uncle taught her and her brother to write when they were children, demonstrating how to etch the characters onto bamboo slats and banana leaves. “There were no old texts for us to refer to so we just copied the way we saw it written by our relatives,” she says.

When Spanish colonisers arrived in the Philippine Visayas in the mid-16th century, they reported islanders using a variety of scripts similar to those of the Malays. The writing, which varied from tribe to tribe, was so widespread that Spanish evangelisers printed quite a number of books using the native syllabaries. The Doctrina Christiana was the fi rst of these, printed in 1593 on rice paper. But as the Spanish hold on the Philippines strengthened, the Latin alphabet became ever more dominant. Today there are only four out of a documented seventeen scripts still in use – those of the Pala’wan and Tagbanua people of Palawan Island, and the Hanunoo and Buhid Mangyans of Mindoro.

According to palaeographers, although the exact origin of Philippine scripts remains uncertain, they are clearly part of the wider family of Southeast Asian scripts. These stem from the Brahmi writing of ancient India, which can be traced back to the Edicts of Ashoka, created around 300 BC.

Dr Nicole Revel is a French linguist and anthropologist who spent decades living with the Pala’wan, studying their culture. According to her, the script is disappearing not only because of the impermanence of the materials on which it written – primarily banana leaves and bamboo slats – but also because of the nature of its use. Pala’wans traditionally use their writing as a vessel for speech – to send messages

▴ Antonita Bibas demonstrates her native script on a banana leaf.

◀ Ribitu Matuar, a village shaman, writes in Tagbanua script.

Antonita Bibas recounts how her husband proposed to her, “He was sixteen then and lived a whole day’s walk from my village. He was very shy so he sent a message to me written on a banana leaf; I replied straight away.”

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between scattered communities and to post public notices. “As the function of the script is so specific, it will most likely be replaced by text messaging and the use of cell phones,” she says.

In 1996, the National Museum of the Philippines began a project to preserve the Tagbanua and Pala’wan scripts. They surveyed much of southern Palawan and found over 60 writers, most of whom belonged to the older generation. Individuals were then selected to become teachers, designated with the task of passing their skills on to the younger generation. According to project director Leo Batoon, his final objective was to incorporate the script into the national curriculum. But when project funding came to an end in 2002, this was still a long way off. “Cell phones are having a big impact. It is hard to persuade many people that the script still has a use,” he lamented.

Teaching younger generations within the family unit may still be the most effective way for the script to be passed on. Antonita has taught all of her eight children and thirty or more grandchildren the art. She has great pride in her culture and is adamant that the script must survive. “It is a tradition that we treasure,’” she says. “I want to pass it on so that my knowledge and skills remain long after I am gone.”

▶ Jose Apol (brother of Antonita Bibas) and his wife, playing traditional instruments.

▾ Pala’wan inscriptions are written on bamboo, and darkened with charcoal.

Pala’wan and Tagbanua scripts are listed on UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World’ register – highlighting their value and the need for preservation.

KATHERINE JACK is a British writer and photographer who has spent the past four years working on Palawan Island. Her current work focuses on native cultures and people’s interaction with the natural world, and can be seen on www.katjack.net.

But Antonita is an exception. As westernised Filipino culture has begun to reach even remote areas of Palawan, preserving indigenous traditions is not an easy task. Ribitu Matuar is a ‘babalyan’, a Tagbanua shaman who lives with his sons on a sparsely inhabited beach on the remote west coast of Palawan. His grandfather taught him the script when he was a boy and now, weak with age, he writes with an unsteady hand.

Ribitu is well known among local Tagbanuas for his in depth knowledge of their culture but it seems that he is unable to pass this on to his children. “I have tried teaching my sons the script,” he says, “but they show no interest – they complain that it is too strange and complicated. We Tagbanuas used to have our own identity, but nowadays everyone wants join the mainstream.”

Pala’wan and Tagbanua scripts are listed on UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World Register’, highlighting their value and the need for preservation. Nevertheless as cellular phone coverage extends across the island, the traditional writing is fast becoming obsolete. Disappearing scripts are but a fraction of Palawan’s vanishing traditions. As modern culture and communications take over, skills and knowledge that were once painstaking learned and passed down over hundreds of years are now slipping into oblivion. ▪

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