OPINION: The Children of the Ever-Changing Moon

I remember from college an adage held as uncontested truth by one of my professors in a Humanities class. "National literature", according to my professor, is a privilege accorded to people who have fought for their own freedom to become a nation.

If literature then is the repository of all the aspirations and imaginations of a community, I am confident that Bangsamoro literature will be promising as long as there are writers who will continue to write about the nation.

Last week in Manila, I visited a bookstore to check for new books to devour after I return to Cotabato City. You must know that for us living in Cotabato, we need to travel to Davao City four hours drive away just to buy a book.

I was elated to see that "Children of the Ever-changing Moon", a book of essays published in 2007, was still in the bookshelves. Edited by film director and essayist Gutierrez Mangansakan II, the book carries 16 personal essays penned by young Moro writers 10 years ago . I read the book long time ago as a young college student but seeing it on the bookshelf last week made me smile as most of the writers in the collection are now my friends and colleagues.

Ten years after its publication, I think it is noteworthy to revisit the book. "Children of the Ever-Changing Moon" was a quiet victory for Moros in the first decade of the millennium that was marred by constant all-out wars by two succeeding Filipino presidents and several skirmishes that displaced thousands of people. These personal essays were, according to a personal friend quoting a Filipino poet, like "a gentle subversion" amidst the chaos and violence of that decade.

The book opens with an essay by Pearlsha Abubakar, A Letter to My Father. Abubakar writes about her father, the towering figure of her clan, and on her thoughts on being a Muslim daughter. In a poignant voice of a loving daughter, Abubakar explains to her father her own versions of marriage, filial piety, freedom as a young woman who just discovered music, poetry, and literature.

Gonaranao B. Musor’s What’s In a Name details funny experiences and the people’s struggle surrounding him to get acquainted to his name and nick name. “From Gonaranao, it became Gona…I remember my grade school peers singing to me the classing Electrolux jingle ‘I’m gonna knock on your door…’ When introducing myself back then, people would suddenly become deaf and say, ‘What? Donna?’ Names and naming then for Musor was act of getting integrated in a community where majority are non-Muslims.

Language as medium was the way for a Moro to be part of the community and blend with the people from different cultures and religions. In Sahara Alia Jauhali Silongan’s Language Barriers, she detailed her struggle to be acquainted in Bisayan, the language of majority people in Mindanao, as she was from a city where Maguindanaoan and a variety of Tagalog were being used by locals.

Although now we can see local news anchors and reporters wearing hijab or young Muslims like me writing for major media organization, this was almost unheard of when Samira Ali Gutoc started her career as a journalist, with her essay My Journey As An Empowered Journalist. Gutoc retells her stories on how she negotiated her spaces as professional journalist then writing for and about the Moros.

Sarah Matalam-Alvarez’s A Superpower’s Puff Girl is a story of a young Maguindanaoan woman’s experiences working for big foreign companies and donor agencies in Mindanao—and how discrimination, workplace inequality, and hypocrisy permeate the institutions.

Ayesah Abubakar’s A Malaysian Hariraya is narrative of displacements common among Moros in diaspora. But Abubakar’s displacement was "double" as she was twice removed from her roots; she was a Moro who grew up in Manila but celebrated Eid’l Fitr in another country. Zainudin Malang’s Ramadan Musings, on the other hand, details the differences between celebrating the Holy Month in Manila and in Cotabato. Malang explored how the spirit of Ramadan is present among the Muslim brethren anywhere, and the place is just an accident.

LGBT issues are seldom being discussed openly in Moro communities. In Pink Is The Color of the Crescent Moon, Allyson Banga-an detailed how his happy childhood in a madrasah, where he was performing well as a student, ended when he transferred to a regular Catholic school. Banga-an narrates the discrimination and intolerance he experienced as a young gay student in his new school. What is more interesting in the essay, Banga-an demarcates discrimination by the level of tolerance and acceptance he experienced between his madrasah and his Catholic school experiences.

Sitti Djalia Turabin-Hataman’s essay on Compromise was written by a young mother teaching his children on the virtues of sensitivity, principled flexible engagements, and tolerance to survive in this highly diverse world where people will tend to judge and discriminate because of their ignorance of other’s culture. “Teaching children the value of respecting other peoples, cultures, and faiths is important,” Turabin-Hataman admonishes. “Just because they are different from us does not mean that they are inferior, or that we are licensed to discriminate them.”

Essays from Ayesha Merdeka Alonto-Datu Ramos, Sittie Jamairah Disomimba, Nefertari Al-Raschid-Arsad who gave stories, images, and the flavors of Marawi and Bongao that only seasoned Moro writers can give these opulent details of the places. A common theme running in these three essays are the longing of the Moros to return to their homeland, their birthplaces.

Loren Halilah Lao’s narrative of a Moro teacher gave us a story of how a Meranao woman decided to enter a profession where she needs to balance and negotiate critical thinking and the preservation of her culture and traditions.

Violence and the narrow understanding of peace advocacies in Mindanao have genders—and it’s male. Mucha-Shim Quiling Arquiza strong epistolary essay was addressed to an unnamed "brother" was a persistent challenge to break the masculine wall that deters women’s participation in peace-building and on critical discourses on the Bangsamoro struggle.

While Farida Mending’s essay of a self-confessed "daddy's girl" gave us touching detail on his father's death. The essay will send someone to tears on how a self-made man, a responsible father and a husband, a community leader ended up being victim of a dangerous political culture prevalent in Moro communities, with politics dominated by men and framed by masculine violence.

It is more apt that the last essay in the collection was Gutierrez Mangansakan’s Salam! Motherland where he remembers both with nostalgia and tenderness Pagalungan, its people, of an old red house that was a living witness to history, his grandparents, and how these memories became part of himself like a second skin as he move residence from one place to another. Mangansakan writes as a Moro locating himself in the world, confident that he found the exact language where he can narrate the story of his people and his nation.

Children of the Ever-Changing Moon is a compendium of consciousness from emerging Moro writers that ask for an audience. It has been a decade since its publication and I wonder how far we have come as readers, as a nation, from thereon.