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| Literary Period |
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| Pre-Colonial |
| Early
Times - 1564 |
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Filipinos
often lose sight of the fact that the
first period of the Philippine literary
history is the longest. Certain events
from the nation's history had forced
lowland Filipinos to begin counting the
years of history from 1521, the first
time written records by Westerners
referred to the archipelago later to be
called "Las islas Filipinas".
However, the discovery of the "Tabon
Man" in a cave in Palawan in 1962,
has allowed us to stretch our prehistory
as far as 50,000 years back. The stages
of that prehistory show how the early
Filipinos grew in control over their
environment. Through the researches and
writings about Philippine history, much
can be reliably inferred about
precolonial Philippine literature from an
analysis of collected oral lore of
Filipinos whose ancestors were able to
preserve their indigenous culture by
living beyond the reach of Spanish
colonial administrators.
The oral literature of the precolonial
Filipinos bore the marks of the
community. The subject was invariably the
common experience of the people
constituting the village-food-gathering,
creature and objects of nature, work in
the home, field, forest or sea, caring
for children, etc. This is evident in the
most common forms of oral literature like
the riddle, the proverbs and the song,
which always seem to assume that the
audience is familiar with the situations,
activities and objects mentioned in the
course of expressing a thought or
emotion. The language of oral literature,
unless the piece was part of the cultural
heritage of the community like the epic,
was the language of daily life. At this
phase of literary development, any member
of the community was a potential poet,
singer or storyteller as long as he knew
the language and had been attentive to
the conventions f the forms.
In settlements along or near the
seacoast, a native syllabary was in use
before the Spaniards brought over the
Roman alphabet. The syllabary had three
vowels (a, i-e, u-o) and 14 consonants
(b, d, g, h, k, l, m, n, ng, p, r, s, t,
w, and y) but, curiously enough, had no
way of indicating the consonantal ending
words. This lends credence to the belief
that the syllabary could not have been
used to produce original creative works
which would all but be undecipherable
when read by one who had had no previous
contact with the text. When the syllabary
fell into disuse among the Christianized
Filipinos, much valuable information
about precolonial culture that could had
been handed down to us was lost. Fewer
and fewer Filipinos kept records of their
oral lore, and fewer and fewer could
decipher what had been recorded in
earlier times. The perishable materials
on which the Filipinos wrote were
disintegrate and the missionaries who
believed that indigenous pagan culture
was the handicraft of the devil himself
destroyed those that remained.
There are two ways by which the
uniqueness of indigenous culture survived
colonization. First, by resistance to
colonial rule. This was how the Maranaws,
the Maguindanaws, and the Tausogs of
Mindanao and Igorots, Ifugao, Bontocs and
Kalingas of the Mountain Province were
able to preserve the integrity of their
ethnic heritage. The Tagbanwas,
Tagabilis, Mangyans, Bagobos, Manuvus,
Bilaan, Bukidnons, and Isneg could cling
on the traditional way of life because of
the inaccessibility of settlements. It is
to these descendants of ancient Filipinos
who did not come under the cultural sway
of Western colonizers that we turn when
we look for examples of oral lore. Oral
lore they have been preserve like epics,
tales, songs, riddles, and proverbs that
are now windows to a past with no written
records which can be studied.
Ancient Filipinos possessed great wealth
of lyric poetry. There were many songs of
great variety in lyrics and music as well
as meter. Each mountain tribe and each
group of lowland Filipinos had its own.
Most of the may be called folksongs in
that there can be traced in them various
aspects of the life and customs of the
people.
Precolonial poetry were composed of poems
composed of different dialects of the
islands. The first Spanish settlers
themselves found such poetry, reproduced
them, and recorded in their reports and
letters to Spain. Although precolonial
poems are distinct from the lyrics of the
folksongs the said poems were usually
chanted when recited, as is still the
custom of all Asiatic peoples and Pacific
Ocean tribes. It is true that many of the
precolonial poetry is crude in ideology
and phraseology as we look at it with our
present advanced knowledge of what poetry
should be. Considering the fact that
early Filipinos never studied literature
and never had a chance to study poetry
and poetic technique, it is surprising
that their spontaneous poetic expression
had some rhythmic pattern in the use of
equal syllabic counts for the lines of
stanza, and have definitely uniform
rhyming scheme. Spanish missionaries
writing grammars and vocabularies had
made good use of these early beginnings
of Filipino poetry to illustrate word
usage according to the dictionary and
grammatical definitions they had cast.
Thousands of maxims, proverbs, epigrams,
and the like have been listed by many
different collectors and researchers from
many dialects. Majority of these
reclaimed from oblivion com from the
Tagalos, Cebuano, and Ilocano dialects.
And the bulk are rhyming couplets with
verses of five, six seven, or eight
syllables, each line of the couplet
having the same number of syllables. The
rhyming practice is still the same as
today in the three dialects mentioned. A
good number of the proverbs is
conjectured as part of longer poems with
stanza divisions, but only the lines
expressive of a philosophy have remained
remembered in the oral tradition.
Classified with the maxims and proverbs
are allegorical stanzas which abounded in
all local literatures. They contain
homilies, didactic material, and
expressions of homespun philosophy,
making them often quoted by elders and
headmen in talking to inferiors. They are
rich in similes and metaphors. These one
stanza poems were called Tanaga and
consisted usually of four lines with
seven syllables, all lines rhyming.
The most appreciated riddles of ancient
Philippines are those that are rhymed and
having equal number of syllables in each
line, making them classifiable under the
early poetry of this country. Riddles
were existent in all languages and
dialects of the ancestors of the
Filipinos and cover practically all of
the experiences of life in these times.
Almost all the important events in the
life of the ancient peoples of this
country were connected with some
religious observance and the rites and
ceremonies always some poetry recited,
chanted, or sung. The lyrics of religious
songs may of course be classified as
poetry also, although the rhythm and the
rhyme may not be the same.
Drama as a literary from had not yet
begun to evolve among the early
Filipinos. Philippine theater at this
stage consisted largely in its simplest
form, of mimetic dances imitating natural
cycles and work activities. At its most
sophisticated, theater consisted of
religious rituals presided over by a
priest or priestess and participated in
by the community. The dances and ritual
suggest that indigenous drama had begun
to evolve from attempts to control the
environment. Philippine drama would have
taken the form of the dance-drama found
in other Asian countries.
Prose narratives in prehistoric
Philippines consisted largely or myths,
hero tales, fables and legends. Their
function was to explain natural
phenomena, past events, and contemporary
beliefs in order to make the environment
less fearsome by making it more
comprehensible and, in more instances, to
make idle hours less tedious by filling
them with humor and fantasy. There is a
great wealth of mythical and legendary
lore that belongs to this period, but
preserved mostly by word of mouth, with
few written down by interested parties
who happen upon them.
The most significant pieces of oral
literature that may safely be presumed to
have originated in prehistoric times are
folk epics. Epic poems of great
proportions and lengths abounded in all
regions of the islands, each tribe
usually having at least one and some
tribes possessing traditionally around
five or six popular ones with minor epics
of unknown number.
Filipinos had a culture that linked them
with the Malays in the Southeast Asia, a
culture with traces of Indian, Arabic,
and, possibly Chinese influences. Their
epics, songs, short poems, tales, dances
and rituals gave them a native Asian
perspective which served as a filtering
device for the Western culture that the
colonizers brought over from Europe. |
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