Leyte: A Forgotten Symbol
of Resistance Movements in the Visayas

 


By Prof. Rolando O. Borrinaga

 


(Paper presented at “Kasikasi ha Leyte 2000,” the 6th Visayan Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference, DECS Training Center, Palo, Leyte, September 25-28, 2000.)

 

 

I feel honored to have been invited to speak before your gathering of Visayan visual artists based in the Visayas.

 

The invitation sent to me mentioned that this conference would also feature papers meant to deepen the Visayan artist’s knowledge and appreciation of his history and culture, and enrich his/her visual vocabulary.  I was tasked to present a paper on the topic “Symbols in Resistance Movements in the Visayas.”

 

After contemplating the topic for some time, I decided to focus my presentation on events and circumstances around the name of your host province, Leyte.  I will discuss the evolution of this name and infer its forgotten symbolism for resistance movements in the Visayas.

 


Abuyo

 

As far as can be established, the name of our island at the Spanish contact was Abuyo.  The Villalobos chronicles in the 1540s still referred to this island as Abuyo, one of the three islands comprising the original Las Islas Felipinas.  The other two islands were Tandaya (i.e., Samar) and Mazzawa (i.e., Limasawa).

 

There is at present a town called Abuyog in eastern Leyte.  There is some reason to believe that Abuyog was an ancient trade center in this island.  But its name does not signify anything.  Local residents have resorted to wordplay for an explanation.  They theorized that miscommunication was a possible cause.  As their tale have it, some early Spaniards, who were asking for directions, were misunderstood by local informants, who instead gave the name of the local bee in mock surprise.  Thus, “Ah, buyog!” later evolved into Abuyog. 

 

The buyog theme might have won for Abuyog several street-dancing awards in the Pintados Festival, but the tale remains as fantastic as the tale of the “local bird and bee” immortalized in a song by the Beatles.

 

It is probable that the complete old name of the island was Abuyon, a Waray word that means “agreeable.”  At least the agreeable nature shown by the natives to the members of the Villalobos expedition earned for them effusive praises from their guests, who thought they were doing us a counter-favor by naming three islands in our geography after their prince.

 


Ila-Iti

 

Now, how did the name Abuyo evolve into Leyte?  The manuscript of Jesuit Father Francisco Alcina written in 1668 mentioned that the name Leyte was corrupted from the phrase “Ira Ete,” literally translatable in English as “belonging to Ete.”  However, I am of the opinion that it was the corruption of “Ila Ete,” the Cebuano reference to the same place, which went into the books.

 

Now, who was this Ete in the island’s name?

 

In a hypothetical profile I wrote of Rajah Bankaw sometime ago, I theorized that his baptismal name was Iti, which is still used in our interior barangays and towns as a nickname meaning “Good Boy.”  The present equivalents are Idoy, Intoy, or Dodong.

 

I have theorized that Iti was the son of Gara (the Show-Off), after whom the town of Kan-Gara, later Carigara, was named, and the grandson of Rajah Kolambu (the Protective Net), who met Magellan in Limasawa in 1521.  I also theorized that Iti assumed the name Bankaw after he assumed leadership of his family’s domain.

 


Bankaw Revolt

 

With this background, let me bring you back to an event that we think we already know – the Bankaw Revolt found in our books.

 

History textbooks cited Bankaw for a failed revolt in Carigara, Leyte, in 1621, the centennial of the Spanish contact.  The Bankaw Revolt was labeled as a religious uprising, with a gory tale about a beheaded native ruler and a chilly message implied by white men who carried the cross on one hand, and a sword on the other just in case things did not go their way.

 

However, the textbook accounts of Bankaw and his revolt bordered on fiction, and seemed to have been quoted from an official cover-up report.  The biographical “facts” they posited were not borne out by source documents.  And the “blow-by-blow” account of the fighting between Bankaw and his warriors on one side, and a Spanish-Cebuano force on the other, did not seem to concur with folklore, place-names and rituals that memorialized Bankaw’s dissent.

 


Disputed “historical” account

 

Most textbook histories about the Bankaw Revolt cited from an erroneous item in a history written by Jesuit Father Pedro Murillo Velarde in 1749, more than a century after the actual revolt.

 

The accounts had it that Bankaw feted the Legazpi expedition in Limasawa in 1565.  He supposedly received royal thanks from King Philip II through Legazpi, for the hospitality extended by the natives to the Spaniards since the time of Magellan in 1521.

 

However, the chronicles of the Legazpi expedition did not mention any meeting between Legazpi and Bankaw.  Legazpi’s men landed on a depopulated island, recently raided by the Portuguese, when they dropped by Limasawa in 1565.

 


Bankaw’s apostasy

 

Bankaw was converted to Christianity and became loyal to Spain.  But in his old age, he entertained the idea of returning to the religion of his forebears.  He reportedly incited his people to rise in the defense of their old gods and religion.  He was helped in his cause by his sons, particularly Pagali.

 

Pagali was described in textbook histories as a native priest.  He was the son of Bankaw, and a “good student” of the Jesuits in their Dulag boarding school.

 

Bankaw’s activities alarmed Jesuit Father Melchor de Vera, who hurried to Cebu and warned the authorities of the uprising.

 

Alcalde-Mayor Juan de Alcarazo sent a flotilla of 40 vessels, manned by some Spanish soldiers and hundreds of Cebuano fighters to Leyte.  Then the textbook account became semi-fictional again:

 

“The rebels were offered peace, but they spurned the peace offer, and fled to their fortification in the hills.  The Spanish-Filipino forces pursued them and defeated them in a decisive battle.  The aged Bankaw perished in the fight, together with his first son and Pagali [Pagali was the first son]; his second son was beheaded as a traitor; and his daughter was taken captive.  Bankaw’s head was severed from his body and placed on a stake and exhibited in public as a punishment for his infidelity and apostasy.”

 


The folk version

 

However, the official description of the battle is not corroborated by local folklore, place-names, and rituals – now acceptable as legitimate sources of historical data.  Two barangays of Carigara named Hiraan (i.e., verbal altercation) instead suggest a rowdy public negotiation between Bankaw’s camp and his armed visitors.  The hiraan might have been held to negotiate Bankaw’s return to the Catholic fold, and might have been conducted with the presence of all members of Bankaw’s family.

 

But the unwelcome guests seemed not interested in peace.  Indeed, the Spaniards might have already decided to get rid of Bankaw and his family, having had outlived their usefulness.  And the Cebuano fighters, excited about the possibility of settling old scores with the Warays, probably came for war with some help from Spanish soldiers.

 

Thus, what seemed to have occurred during the hiraan was the massacre of Bankaw and his whole family.  And the Spaniards reported an actual battle, which I mentioned earlier, to hide their treachery.

 


Tirana

 

The Spaniards officially tried to misrepresent Bankaw and his revolt, and to erase its traces from the people’s memory.  This included a taboo on the use of certain names such as Tirana, presumably the name of the wife that Bankaw retained after becoming a Christian.  But these efforts failed.

 

In Limasawa, a poblacion barangay was named Triana.  Local folklore has it that this was aimed to memorialize Tirana.  The switching of the second and third letters was made to circumvent Spanish restrictions.

 

In Barangay Palarao of Leyte-Leyte, there is a sitio named Maritana.  This might have been a corrupted form of Maria Tirana, again a deceptive term aimed to memorialize the tabooed name.

 

Tirana was the unreported victim of the Bankaw Revolt.  Without citing names, Fr. Alcina in 1668 wrote an aside about her in his chapter on bananas.  The Alcina account had it that the wife of the great chief of Carigara was “punished by God [read, executed] for her incontinence.”  Contrary to any civilized practice, she was buried wrapped in banana leaves, because a Spanish priest disallowed a decent burial for her.

 

There is no official account about how Tirana was executed.  But an old Visayan balitao (folk song) entitled “Tirana” suggests that she might have been drowned to death.  The song summarized her tragic life, thus: “Tirana bitaw’ng makaluluoy (Tirana, really the pitiful one).”  Its sad lyrics were interwoven in the lively music of a folk dance.

 

Despite the Spanish restrictions, Tirana’s name echoes to this day.  The available folkloric references suggest that she was blamed and unjustly punished for Bankaw’s “apostasy.”  Yet, official accounts did not even mention her existence.

 


Folk rituals

 

The word hiraan (in the barangay names of Upper Hiraan and Lower Hiraan in Carigara) is one memorial of the Bankaw Revolt.  The name Tirana, in corrupted place-names and a folk song, is another.

 

Two local rituals also seemed to have originated as protests to memorialize the Church’s culpability in the massacre of Bankaw and his family.  One ritual observed in Barangay Camansi of Carigara is the turugpo.  This was an annual festival of cock-fighting, carabao-fighting, horse-fighting and gambling every Good Friday, the holiest day of Christendom.  Now a tourist attraction, the turugpo was moved to Black Saturday upon the representation of the local bishop in the 1970s.

 

The other ritual used to be a phenomenon in Barangay Palarao of Leyte-Leyte.  Larao is the native word for mourning, and Palarao seemed to have started out as a community of mourners.  The original mourners might have watched over the burial ground of Bankaw and Tirana, whom I theorized were finally buried in Palarao according to native customs.  Their remains probably still lie inside some cave or cove somewhere in this village.

 

The natives of Palarao used to be known for their thieving and mischievous ways.  Their acts are deemed criminal by present legal standards.  Yet these same acts were privileges allowed for watchers of burial grounds of native great chiefs during ethnic times.

 

Strangers in the vicinity of Palarao were known to have been held up or harmed around 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.  Fishermen at sea were divested of their catch.  Passing vehicles were stoned, or their tires were punctured with twisted nails strewn on the road.  But only around these two hours.  Eight o’clock of course was the time for tolling the animas, the church bell sounds for the departed Christian souls.

 

These two night-hours (8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.) were probably observed as most solemn hours during the early years of Christianity in the Philippines.  These were the same hours that the natives of Palarao tried to desecrate, probably to memorialize the Church’s complicity in the treachery that befell Bankaw and his family.

 


This is Iti’s land!

 

Probably the most fitting memorial to Bankaw and his revolt was the name Leyte.  As I mentioned earlier, the island was formerly known as Abuyo.  It seemed to have been briefly named as Kan-Gara for a few years before it finally became Ila-Iti.  Ila is a possessive form in a collective sense, as “theirs” or “belonging to”; Iti, the Good Boy, appeared to have been the baptismal name of Bankaw.  Thus, Ila-Iti means this place belonged to Iti and his family.

 

Centuries before Hollywood popularized the song “This Land is Mine,” the theme of the movie Exodus, the natives of this island had been shouting, “This is Iti’s land!” with the vehemence of a Moses.  In “Ila-Iti!,” later corrupted as Leyte, they registered their continuing protest and resistance against the Spaniards for their ungrateful extermination of the “royal family” of Iti, the Rajah Bankaw of history, whose forebears and family extended acts of hospitality to the foreigners since the arrival of the Magellan expedition in 1521.

 

Sadly, the significance of the name Ila-Iti got lost and became forgotten during the passage of the centuries.  It is actually time to feel the meaning of the word once again.  Unfortunately, unlike the title and message of a Salvador Dali painting, we lack or have lost “the persistence of memory.”

 

Thank you and good afternoon.






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