“picnic by the dark water” by Jen Mutia Eusebio
I.
One morning, several weeks into the dry season, my mother’s older cousin Markus, who lived on the island of healer-witches, crossed the choppy waters of the Bohol Sea to her coastal town at the foot of a sleeping volcano to announce the death of his father. So there, too, the usual rites might be observed: nine days of prayer to aid the wandering soul’s transition into the afterlife. This was during the 1950s in the Philippine countryside, when nobody in the family owned a house phone. Communication relied on the telegram office, hand-written letters sent by post, and word-of-mouth. Sometimes a messenger on the first ferry of the day, at dawn, was the quickest method of conveying news.
And so, gathering his sadness, Markus set off to Aloran. Yet rather than using the term namatay (meaning, quite literally, “he died”), Markus chose a phrase so archaic that at first his relatives failed to understand. Nabugto ang ginhawa! “The breath was cut!” As if it were this tough, braided thing. Strands fraying over the course of time. Language gives shape to the unseen, which begs the question: what is the shape, the texture of a life-force? In Cebuano, bugto is a verb that indicates an action of breaking or snapping, parting or sundering. The object of this action is typically a length of string or chain or rope. A rubber band stretched to the limit.
Like this, with a sudden release of tension, spontaneous and unwanted, the rigging of a ship breaks in the middle of a storm in the same way that a violin string tuned too high snaps at the bridge of its instrument. The physical body separates from life when our breath gives. The snapping is what untethers a soul from earth. Novenas and orasyon, threads of sacred murmurations, are all that keep it from spinning off into the wild cosmos.
II.
What we understand as abaca is a sturdy, versatile fiber obtained by harvesting the leaf sheaths of the abaca plant. While technically a species of banana, the fruits themselves are inedible. Thus, an indicator of the plant’s utility to us resides in its scientific name, Musa textilis—otherwise known as Manila hemp. Buoyant, resistant to seawater damage, and capable of retaining strength when drenched, it is a material well-suited to the production of rope.
During the nineteenth century, “Manila rope” was widely used as maritime rigging on trans-oceanic vessels sailing to Mexico and Europe, and on merchant and fishing barges throughout the archipelago. Abaca, as a twisted cord, has earned a reputation for bearing ponderous weight across broad distances. Then, upon reaching the end of its lifespan, the rope would get recycled, becoming “Manila paper” and the ubiquitous “Manila envelope.” Even retired from the sea journey, it still exists in perpetual motion. A vessel that floats language. Consider abaca as a carrier of words—alphabet, grammar, and song.
III.
But what if the animating force of a life is actually an invisible, underground lake siphoned up into a body? An hourglass in reverse motion. Time ends for a person once the spring dries up.
*
Long ago, my father bought A Study of Philippine Games from a secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles, mostly as a way to remember his own childhood in Pasig before the town grew and was eventually swallowed up by the Manila sprawl. True to his generation, my father’s memories were inflected by analog, postwar nostalgia. When the river was so clean we all swam in it, he liked to say. When children marched off to battle each other in the rice fields with bamboo pea shooters and woke up at dawn to catch spiders they’d keep as pets in empty matchboxes…
The book divides the games into type, such as “Games of Dexterity or Skill,” “Mimetic or Drama Games,” “Hiding and Hunting Objects,” and “Games of Chance.” What intrigues me is the section detailing games that children would play during funerary gatherings, as prayers segue into refreshments, gossip, diversions. A footnote issues a warning: “Many believe that games traditionally played during the pasiyam are connected with death itself and for this reason, some people make it a point to play them only when someone dies.”
One such game is “The King’s Bird,” where the players sit in a circle with a chosen “king” in the center. The girls take on the names of flowers, the boys of fruit trees, and upon commencing the king proclaims that his favorite bird has flown away. He asks a “flower” if the bird is with her. It is the task of the flower to deny possession and then point to a “fruit tree,” claiming that the bird is with him. In reply, the fruit tree rejects the statement as false and calls upon a different flower. To demonstrate—
King turns to Hibiscus and asks, “Is my favorite bird with you?” Hibiscus answers, “No, sir. The bird is with Guava.” Guava says, “Not here, my king! The bird must be with Orchid.” Orchid shakes her head. “Your highness, check the branches of Rambutan.” Over and over, back and forth. The tempo of this circular game of words increases with each repartee, becomes a tongue-twister. The players trip over their lines, forget each other’s assigned names, and the king deals punishments for each mistake: “Papaya, recite a love song!” or “Lily, do a headstand!”
The house of the bereaved overflows with activity. A wake is grief shaped like a party. While adults gather around tables of poker and mahjong, the young ones bloom into a garden. Grieving laughter waters the flowers, the fruit trees. It sinks into the cavity of the bone-dry lake where a life had been. A journey down and down into the core of the world…
IV.
Memory is a spiral movement, a dowsing into story. In certain mythologies of the Philippines, the sky was once so low, so close to earth, that women could sling the cradle-hammocks of their babies upon it. But a low sky made for a sun that loomed and scorched. To escape its heat, these early peoples are said to have dug cavernous holes into the soil where the cool darkness sheltered them. I once heard a theory of the Ancient Ones choosing to remain below forever, even when the sky rose to its current height. That they were, in fact, the first peoples and we who live aboveground are the second.
Creation myths are often stories of separation. Eventually, the distance between earth and sky would grow. For the Tagalogs, the creator god Bathala was the one who pushed up the heavens, giving us space to pull back our shoulders and elongate our spines. In other tellings, the sky agreed to raise itself after hearing the people’s complaints. Because of you, we can hardly pound rice without hitting the clouds! At times I wonder if we hurt the sky’s feelings. How heavy was the burden of closeness that we could no longer bear it? I imagine the wrinkle in the sky’s brow, the curling of twilight lips as they say—if that is what you truly desire.
The tale of this great divorce varies from tribe to tribe, but the fallout is similar: no longer intimate with heaven, our terrestrial existence became physically tolerable but spiritually lonesome. All that remains is ceremony. A lexicon of gestures coiled around this odd business of living; ciphers that remind us of a force beyond gravity and planetary orbit.
V.
On a cold night in November, one of our community elders in Washington, D.C., passed away in the same ICU where my own father had died two years earlier. His breath was cut. Their breaths were cut. But where did the breaths go? The elder was eighty-five years old, a respected doctor from Baguio, and a history-teller of all things pertaining to the islands. During the wake, members of the Cordillera Association gathered around the body and sang an Ifugao love song. Many of us attending were not familiar with the mountain language.
“But the meaning was pretty clear, don’t you think?” said my mother, who at once embarked on a search for a pair of scissors, fluttering through all four rooms of the funeral parlor. Then, returning to the casket with kitchen shears, she leaned over and cut the string of the wooden rosary in the elder’s hands. “So his spirit doesn’t get confused about where to go next.” Because the order of our universe relies on this tenuous separation from the thing beyond. Always, we must ask the sky to reverse its descent.
VI.
The best hour to visit the cemetery in Manila is after a hard rain that cools the air, when the wind is strong and the clouds make a person think of drifting ships. A well-tended graveyard is like a picnic area. Easy and peaceful. Shaded with banana trees. My niece lights the candles of the family mausoleum while I sit on the marble bench and sip hot coffee. I sink my teeth into fresh pandesal from the bakery and picture all of us gathering at a breakfast table, me and the ancestors, passing around bread and coconut jam. I often become hungry in a cemetery. But there are many kinds of hunger. The hunger for lost time is only one.
Over the years, I’ve become my family’s archivist. I map out genealogical charts. I read through newspapers stored in the Spanish military’s digital collections. I piece together bureaucratic memos from when the Philippines was a U.S. colony. How the hell did my very Catholic great-great grandfather’s death certificate end up with the Mormons? In a plastic grocery bag in a cardboard box in my mother’s basement: documents pertaining to the old farm, long since divided among children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
There is a century-old deed of sale for a horse, hardly deteriorated (Manila paper!) and marked with a Commonwealth notary stamp. Aunt Teresita’s elementary school report card. A church almanac from 1969. A letter of veteran’s benefits for the family of Great-Uncle Francisco, who was shot by Japanese snipers at the end of the war. An incomplete Philippine Airlines poker deck. Account books. Shopping lists. I have spent hours prying off rusted staples with the tip of a box-cutter. Luciano P.R. Santiago, the Filipino historian and psychiatrist, calls this “the art of ancestor hunting.”
Gradually, I’ve come to understand that an archive is a nourishing, life-giving thing. Not in the usual sense—which is to say biological—but in the way of collective being. To crave memory is to crave historical sustenance. Recollection invites the act of tapping into a buried source. We press our ears to the grass, scrabble through ruins and diaspora. Metamorphic time lodges underneath our fingernails as crescent moons.
VII.
In front of the family mausoleum, across the narrow pathway, laborers with shovels and axes chop down a plumeria tree and level out the terrain. They tell us that the owner of the lot has died and now they have to work fast. Only three days until the funeral. My niece and I gawk at the mountain of dirt, the rectangular plot of land which looks more like an archaeological dig than a grave. They say the mausoleum base will be completed first, that’s where the body goes after all, while the outer architecture can be added later. For the living, our needs in terms of shelter are typically the opposite—without roof and walls, we are naked to the elements. But sometimes even those are not enough.
Months later, after I am back in America, a series of powerful typhoons crosses the island of Luzon, flooding the living room and kitchen of my sister’s house. All valuable items are moved upstairs; she does not let the water touch our late grandfather’s paintings. Art is all we have left of him. My niece estimates that it will take over a week to clean up. Storms had pounded relentlessly for days and days. Mudslides buried neighborhoods. The rivers became swollen, the water gone crazy. Maybe we are the reason for its insanity. All that illegal mining and logging and damming. The sky throws its weight, no longer speaking to us in words but in thunder claps, the clicking of its tongue. Maybe our ancient contract has dissolved.
VIII.
Envision the cultural archive, itself a mountain, as a holding-keeping space. All parts closest to the summit feel sacred. All tunnels to the interior feel promising, dangerous. They carry the scent of an afterlife. I’ve read about one underworld—that of the Tagbanwa of Palawan—whose structure is an inversion of our living world. Where rivers flow backwards, from ocean to swamp to highland. Our planting season is their harvest season. When our sun sets, their sun rises. Sure enough, the boundary between life and death comes across as more hemispheric than absolute. Though I suppose the rain also falls upwards, and the deepest cave of our accumulated human knowledge is, in actuality, the sky of this subterranean kingdom.
The farther down you excavate, the more lost memories bubble up to meet you, speak with you, sing to you. Or: you are the rope they scale in order to reach the upper realm. You, who smells of beyond, who smells of light but also like them.
IX.
It is a balmy, winter day in the American capital. I meet with a childhood friend who brings her young children as we visit the Christmas market in Dupont Circle. A bright afternoon. We sling our jackets over our elbows. The two of us had grown up in the outskirts of this marble city. Yet even now, I don’t know how to describe Washington, D.C., except by calling it restless, like a tree branch flustered by high winds. Once, right before a presidential election, I’d been trying to find a sound therapy machine in a downtown Best Buy only to discover they were sold out. All anybody wanted was to close their eyes and pretend themselves elsewhere. Next to the rhythmic sea shore. In a summer meadow at night. In a train that crosses a desert, and then a valley.
It is a restless season. We are wandering along market stalls of holiday candles and gingerbread cookies. My friend pushes her son in a stroller while her six-year-old daughter holds my hand and jumps from one shadow to the next as if they are stepping stones and the sunlight is lava. I monitor our silhouettes, tell the girl to walk properly or else she’ll tumble into the street. I scold her for kicking off her shoes, but the child is all whirlwind and propulsion. I tighten my grip. Bless her soul…her universe is still abundant. Even the darkness holds, is tender.
And I remember when this girl was still curled up inside the womb of her mother, how I felt the barefoot kick as my friend held my palm to her stomach. At what point is the shadowland game an enactment of memory before recollection, before a life wakes up among blades of sunshine? Everything, even time itself, sprouts from the tender dark.
X.
To trace the source of a breath is to move in reverse. All inhalation is a return voyage. A paper boat floats upstream. My mother once told me of a particular custom among indigenous Teduray families of her town, in which the umbilical cord of a newborn is wrapped in a white cloth with ginger and charcoal, and then suspended upon a nail on the central pillar of a house.
Traditionally, the bundle would hang from the east-facing branch of a tree. A prayer that the child grows up strong. My mother suggested the ritual was altered to prevent stray dogs and climbing animals from eating the baby parts. But who knows? While her own family disposed of their children’s umbilical cords without custom, the placentas were a different story: “Those of us who had home births would bury it in the yard, under a tree.” This folk practice operates under the assumption of circularity, the Old Ways dictating that upon death a person should be interred in the vicinity of their afterbirth. While not necessarily in the exact spot, at the very least in the soil of the same village or island. All time on earth is essentially revolution.
Nabugto ang ginhawa!—and the breath-string which was cut must find a way back to the origins of itself, with all other breath-strings that had once exhaled themselves into flesh and come back home.
*
Perhaps I write about breath because its oceanic rhythms help me sleep at night. I think of breath as an ocean of words. My desk is piled high with dog-eared dictionaries, their pages smooth and translucent like onion skin. I love how words build into stories, and the way breath and story expand so I can crawl into them and feel myself cradled in sound.
Ginhawa, in my mother’s language, broadly signifies “breath.” But also “ease of being,” “relief from pain,” “restfulness,” and “satisfaction.” For the Tausug and Maranao tribes of her island, whose blood runs through ours, the meaning shifts. In the language of the Maranao, ginawa is “breath” but also “self.” In the language of the Tausug, the word points to an inner self. As in the thinking, emotive part of a human being. The core of their honor. Hence the breath of a person is not only their “spirit,” “mind,” and “intellect,” but also their “dignity.”
When we hold air in our lungs, we suspend the ego until it falls apart.
Perhaps I write to learn the shape of vanishing. To know what it feels like to lurk inside an empty well at the foot of a mountain, craning my neck to look up at a pinpoint of sun—or at you, looking into the well but perceiving only water. Or the stillness of your own reflection, now estranged because I am here below wearing your face. Imagine me as your ancestor, or your ghost. Time collects where I am. Lower the bucket, I will give you breath. Do you see now, after all that? There is no hunting what already sustains you.
Jen Mutia Eusebio is a Filipino American writer and scholar. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of the Philippines, Diliman where her research focused on the intersection of writing craft and cultural memory. Her recent work can be found in The Margins, Sundog Lit, Kritika Kultura, parts : whole, and Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature.