There is a saying among the Arabs that hiding one’s thoughts is a sign of deep intelligence. In playwright-director Steven Patrick Fernandez¹s
short but ambitious work "MingMing", which ran for less than two hours at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP)Huseng Batute on February 22 as
part of National Arts Month's Mindanao Week, the characters are forever drawing circles around each other.
That "MingMing" is a love story set in Muslim Mindanao makes the play very interesting to me (and to most Pinoys), given our hopelessly quixotic
nature; set in a culture that I have never fully understood, it makes for a compelling psychological drama whose suspenseful quality recalls the
favorite game of our childhood.
The whole suspense lies in the fact that the play doesn’t unfold in a linear fashion. It begins in the end, in the death of MingMing. Like the
throngs that gather at the scene of a crime, the audience describes the stage in an almost perfect circle. Surrounding the stage are gauzy white
curtains where images of war and Mindanao are projected in between acts and on whose flimsy surfaces faces of veiled women and knife-eyed men stare
back at you in neon chalk.
As more people arrive in a steady stream, two snow-white gods glittering in one corner of the stage laugh and snicker while making some languid
body movements, as though dismissing everyone¹s presence, and if you happen to be extra-paranoid, you¹ll be hurling your bottle of mineral water at
them in no time. But the truth is, they are laughing at everything and nothing in particular.
According to veteran writers Chari Cruz Lucero (fresh from a victory at the Philippines Free Press) and close friend, Christine Godinez-Ortega
(fresh from Legaspi City after attending the Second Bicol Writers conference), who were watching the play with me, these mischievous figures are
called tonongs or spirits who look on with a smirk as we humans live out our crazy lives (in retrospect, both of them actually remind me of these
tonongs!)
Anyway, we are watching the play unfold behind the gauzy veil that surrounds the stage, lending a dreamy quality to our experience. I feel like a
peeping tom, and perhaps the rest of the audience watching behind these sheets feel the same, and there is a kind of sensual energy rippling through
the crowd. This is something they have never seen before.
This is the rip in the fabric of Maranao-Muslim culture. Almost directly across from where we are (this is a very intimate stage), a few feet from
the tonongs, three figures, one male and two females, are seated on a table, immobile, their faces lost in an eternal expression of worry and regret.
You know right away they are MingMing’s relatives -- the older woman is her grandmother (Venus Tan), the younger, sprightly woman, her mother (Jinggay
Peñola), and the grim-looking bearded man in fatigues (Al Fay Vintola) is some avuncular relation of hers with a death wish.
At the heart of this drama is radiant MingMing (Elaine Macamay), who is, quite inevitably, lying dead in the center of the stage, wrapped in a
white shroud. This, by itself, is already very disturbing to behold. More so when thelights dim and the projections of mosques and Abrams tanks on the
curtains transport us to Muslim Mindanao (somewhere between Maguindanao and Lanao, a professor in the audience later informs us during the open forum
after the performance).
As the spotlights return, the tonongs lift the shroud of death from MingMing, who wakes up and utters her first line. The grandmother does the
same, then the mother, then the uncle, and so on, but their lines aren’t directed at any one person. They are screaming and crying their thoughts out,
but no one among them is listening to the other. The character¹s lines, always spoken passionately, convey to us some semblance of a plot, and we are
compelled to string them together into a story. In a sense, the play works as an interactive piece as we react, not after its conclusion, but during
the process of its unraveling (and this almost renders moot the open forum after the performance).
Through the bits and pieces of lines spilling out, we learn that the grandmother is married to a scion of a powerful political clan to end a family
feud; the bearded man who is her secret lover and brother-in-law!) deliberately falls sick by eating a live lizard on the day of her wedding, and
becomes a militant fundamentalist, fighting off the modern ways slowly impinging on the old. To save the dwindling family fortune, the grandmother
eventually marries her daughter to a blueblood who turns out to have an appetite for young boys. Ostensibly, the daughter seeks affection some place
else, and MingMing, kept in the dark about her real father¹s identity, is the love child, the tear-stained accretion of these poisonous tragedies.
The things I know about my culture -- the honor, the chastity, the womenpowerless in love, and even less so in anger; the beauty and the horror of
Koran-reciting men in army boots, ready to slay a wayward brother or sister to uphold the maratabat (pride) — thrash about me like a fish out of
water, yearning to throw themselves into the sea of lines being spoken by the characters: "Ayoko na! Huwag! Makinig naman kayo sa akin!" The mind
tries to situate the disjointed lines in familiar contexts (is it an honor killing? Did her uncle kill her?) and something in me moves. The effect is
gunfire-bursts of insight in the dead calm of endless questions.
But how about the rest of the audience? Surely they must be experiencing these bursts as well! I look at their faces, mostly those of young
students probably stunned out of a lazy weekend for this one class requirement, and realize that it is enough that they get even the slightest sense
of this hopelessness, that oppression is not the property of any one culture. Like an arrow pushed very far back against the bow, the slightest sense
of tension will propel the audience¹s minds across a great distance, and somehow make them understand: What the hell is going on here?
Consider a line spoken by the bearded man (Vintola): "Hindi dapat nag-aaral ang babae." At first, he appears to have spoken it out of spite, but
later on, you get a sense that he is driven by motives more profound than just sheer anger, when you realize how the very notion of dialectical
discourse has no place in a culture whose very essence is submission.
In the end, it is their articulate intelligence, fed by years of study in Manila¹s finest schools, that actually drives MingMing and her mother
ever closer to the edge of their sanity, that eventually claims MingMing in a death that is not just literal, but eternal.
Given the postmodern nature of the play, the actor’s performances, while deeply moving and passionate, are no longer the whole point. The point is
not in getting answers, but in unearthing more questions. The point is in the hide and seek. The play works because it perplexes.
When there is a gap between two cultures (in this case, Manila and the Muslim South), everybody tends to rush out and build bridges of
understanding. Endless forums and interfaith discussions abound. But with MingMing and with all their other creative meditations on Mindanao cultures,
the Integrated Performing Arts Guild, which is based in Iligan City, has succeeded in breaking new ground that might just make bridges a thing of the
past.
