ALAL BIMBANG: Aloha Oe and how Ms Nora Aunor now takes me back to My Little Grass Shack

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JOLO, Sulu (MindaNews / 17 April) —  “Aloha Oe.” The year was 1973 when this song hit the airwaves in Jolo Town. Me and my sister Rose unashamedly swayed our hips alternately sitting and standing when asked impromptu to dance a Hula. One of such occasions had been at our Uncle Ben’s house inside the “ bakod” (fence) of PC Compound during their Christmas party in December. Our most requested song from Uncle Ben’s phonograph was “ I wanna Go Back to My Li’l Grass Shack.” 

PC M/Sgt Benjamin Quiling was an enlisted man in the local security force. Perhaps he was a noncomm officer for I couldn’t remember if he had ever gone to actual combat fighting with the then very active Mawis insurgents (i.e. later we would know were also called MNLF for Moro National Liberation Front). But I remember he was an enterprising trader, as most Tausug men of his time were. He had been running a one- man traveling show. He owned all sorts of gadgets too techy and modern and perhaps advanced for an ordinary household to own those days. 

Uncle Ben inherited his trade from his father, who was a pioneer as Peace Corps teacher, hired along with hundreds from Luzon. He came from far Langiden, Abra (in Ilocos Norte), a young Tingguian professional, to help in setting up various boys’ schools to prompt up the then progressing Sulu Archipelago in the 1920’s such as Lapak Agricultural School and, together with the fondly remembered Dr. Arsenio Paber, they were once among the precursor of Tawi-Tawi Agricultural School (TANRAS). 

Uncle Ben carried with him a cassette tape recorder wherever he went, that, after asking us to pose for the photographs, he would often record us reciting poems and chanting nursery rhymes that we read from books even before we were enrolled in formal public school. Books were birthday gifts from our first teacher-at-home, Otoh Manjang (Ens. Emerson Lahaman), my Inah’s younger brother, a classroom teacher in Laminusa but, who like Uncle Ben, would soon become enlisted in the Navy, later, Philippine Marines and had his baptism of fire in an encounter in Tarawakan island in Tawi-Tawi in the late 1970s.

Year 1973 was a time of war, only months to go, Jolo town would be razed to the ground in February 1974.

There was a portable movie camera as well as a 33mm movie projector that Uncle Ben slung around and often on dark nights with only a full moon for light, he had screened away Pilipino and Chinese films that he kept stocked by the reels inside public school classrooms and public markets, for a fee. His retinue of toolboxes also included assemblages of still cameras the ancestors of today’s DSLR, for, every Quiling, from ancestor to progeny, were artisans and people of the crafts (as some of my present generation and those younger quietly practice as hobbies). 

Our male elders were all well-loved traveling photographers in Sulu. And while at it, they screened films on foot, too. Had the war not interrupted Sulu’s social and economic life in 1974, they could have prospered in the trade and became pioneers of screen tourism or what younger generation of today popularly call as vlogging in their parlance. 

My grandfather Lolo Mariano, my late father – a craftsman and vocational teacher, later became Supervisor of Region IX, and uncle Ben Quiling were all photographers who after work, would leave Jolo on summers and non-working holidays, traveling to the Sulu’s fringe municipalities serving outliers like Luuk, Siasi, Laminusa, Manubul and Sibaud, Pangutaran, Tabawan, Tandubas, Sibutu, and even to far Turtle island and Taganak, among many, while servicing as photographers especially during the graduation months of March to April, and on the side, they screened movies zipped in reels brought in from Jolo. 

My Papa, saddled with a growing family of eight small children, had been the less mobile between the two brothers. As crafts and vocational industry instructor in the local trade school in Jolo, he sidelined offering printing jobs for T-shirt, streamers, and diploma those days when tarpaulin and desktop printing were unheard of. As traveling film-screeners cum photographers, they were like gypsy artisans, who had to carry their own tools of trade, the projector and “darkroom” with the portable enlargers included to be able to develop the photographs right at the site and allow clients to claim them before they head on to the next island.

So in the turbulent times of 1973, Uncle Ben’s two-storey house inside the tall concrete fences of the PC Compound (also known as Camp Asturias) had been our sanctuary. Sporadic sparks of armed encounters sometimes interspersed with arson at the heart of downtown of Jolo often prompted civilians from the barrios (i.e. barangays) to temporarily evacuate and seek the safer shelters of relatives’ houses. 

There had been at least three airlines serving Jolo then: Air Manila, Swiftair, and PAL Bulilit (nightflight). Among their luggage, the ladies had packed away bundles of unsewn cuts of first class Batik cloth (called Battik Bariyya) smuggled from Sabah, sundry barter goods such as Maxam soap and Milo in cans, and “taro” cans lined with manila-paper were filled with native rice cakes and delicacies: Ja, Baulu, Kurubata, and Hantak. On other trips they would have carried sea-mantis and crabs steamed then roasted until dry. These, they confided to Uncle Ben were brought as “pasalubong” for Ms Nora Aunor. People in the house were awed and excited to learn that the ladies were travelling to Manila just to seek a meeting with the Superstar. 

Uncle Ben owned a phonograph and stacks of vinyl records. He had a complete collection of the local Philippine artists, Nora Aunor, on top of them. And the most requested song that we would agree to dance the Hawaiian to was “Pearly Shells” and “My Little Grass Shack.” The traveling showman he was, uncle Ben would have in his stash all sorts of props and trinkets where he would pull out leis and garlands made of ruffled crepe paper and glittery beads and colorful ribbons. Decked in all these, my sister Rose and I happily glided like wahines dressed in moomoos that Inah managed to rush sewing before she gave birth to our youngest sister, whose pregnancy craved for who else but the Superstar. 

Untiringly, we danced the hula for as long as the 33mm record kept turning, with only one condition, that Uncle Ben would let us pluck two of the biggest brightest deep red and fuschia Gumamela now in glorious bloom in his garden and bobbing out from his barbed wired fence and to tuck them behind our ears.

For growing up children and teeners of my time in Jolo, we would have known of Manila creative performers as artistes first – and perhaps only as singers and dancers – before we became educated enough to appreciate them as actors. The radio broadcasts were for most island people the most accessible and were for free. This was how me and my siblings became fans of Ms Nora Aunor. We loved her for her singing before her acting, or the other way of saying it: we watched her movies to see her sing. So that as we grew older, we remembered Nora Aunor as the artiste from the songs rather than as the actor producing award-winning films that contemporary cineastes rave for her sterling performances in the white screen.