Forgive Us Our Sins but not Theirs: On Kundiman

This essay is adapted from a lecture presented at the Bennington Writing Seminars in June of 2016.
 

Every few years I find myself in a spell of being unable to read fiction. A lot of the time I think it’s all frivolous, self-indulgent bullshit, anyway, trying at once to create worlds while most often disengaging from the one we live in. Though I guess this is only problematic if, through your art, you are trying to get to some deeper human truth that speaks for everybody (which I take to mean speaks over everyone else). I’ve had my share of English professors and writing teachers allude to that truth, say that delving for it is what makes for great literature. I can’t help but think it's some big scam or myth, especially since most these books in the western canon, supposedly rife with universal truths, are the same books that leave me buzzing with numbness.

Every time I spend a Saturday in bed enjoying a novel I feel terribly guilty on Sunday. I should’ve showed up at this or that rally (even though crowds of all types give me unbearable anxiety). I should’ve gone and engaged with friends or at least other humans, I should’ve, at the very very least, done laundry.

Fiction readers and writers also love to quote studies about how reading fiction improves empathy. I tire of this assertion quite easily, as what is empathy without action? How many white readers have read Rankine’s Citizen and still sit pretty in their white supremacy? How many books does it take to get the reader to actively cease oppressing? What is empathy if you spend all of Saturday in bed with a fictional character then don’t get out in the streets on Sunday? And let's be honest, I'll never buddy up to Jane Austen or Emily Bronte, though I tried to on and off for years and, because they're the greats, I believed my lack of interest to be my own deficiency. 

I am in such a spell now, reading only nonfiction prose, academic texts, theory, criticism and I’ll admit, a little poetry. I don’t know why they all get a pass, but right now, I simply find fiction revolting. I’ve found other necessary parts of myself revolting in the past, too.

I was in such a spell when I finally started reading filipinx lit, three or four years ago. I had been estranged from filipinx culture for years. I’ve never once visited the Philippines, I never learned Tagalog; I’d ceased to have any contact with the filipinx friends from my childhood. I'd spent the years prior trying to *get* those great white classics again. Yet for the first time since discovering Borges and Marquez in high school, I was excited about fiction again.

Kundiman Brings Back
All My Colonized Memories

It wasn’t until I read the works of Hagedorn, Rosal, Rosca, Apostol and others -- works that had  irreverent fuck-you attitudes, and caring attentiveness in turn -- that I felt in any way connected to my filipinxness again. My narrow, colonized vision of that other half of my being, neglected and malnourished for so long, began to fill out with each book. So much of this writing was referred to as kundiman, and for a graduate lecture at my MFA, I decided to trace the history of this obscure filipinx form.

We should first note the term’s derivation. Many scholars believe the word kundiman originates from the phrase, Kung hindi man, which means, “if it were not so”.

A preliminary Google search yielded quite a few filipinx music videos, many featuring songs from the 90s and aughts. They were unbearably cheesy, that makes-you-want-to-vomit kind of romantic. I guess I have a low tolerance for sappy music. Upon finding translations to some of the more popular kundiman lyrics, I became…embarrassed. Lyrics like: You are like sugar / You love so sweetly and You are like paint / My life - you colored it. And I guess my tolerance is even lower for such music when it comes from a culture that is at least, in part, responsible for my being. I closed my computer.

For days, the songs would remind me of my childhood excursions with my mother, to filipinx karaoke parties (set in the privacy of her friends’ living rooms), where everyone sang the most longing, over-the-top, melodramatic songs, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and their filipinx counterparts, totally off-key, with heavy accents, entirely unembarrassed. Contrasting these parties to those of my white father’s stern, critical, and unemotive family made made me feel even worse, and the feeling, over the course of childhood, evolved into a misdirected hate toward filipinxness, my own and of those I loved.

I couldn’t say what exactly I found embarrassing and to this day I still struggle with the feeling. It might have something to do with the fact that my mother and her filipina friends seemed full of longing on these occasions (even though she instructed me to never beg for anything), while my white father and his family appeared to never want for anything. Over the course of adolescence, I grew to believe much of what american white supremacy taught me about brown people from poor countries. It was filipinas, after all who cared for elderly whites, who cleaned houses for the rich, who were nurses and home caretakers and imported homemakers. It was filipina women who were targeted by misogynistic white male “marriage prospects” for their “natural” subservience and obedience. To top it all off, I watched filipinxs consume american culture ravenously, the same culture that preyed on them: the clothing, the music, the movies, the white western standards of beauty. To me it seemed filipinx’s existed to serve and be belittled by those they served. And as someone who has an entrenched and innate aversion to serving anyone (let alone elitist, imperialist assholes), I did was easiest: I ditched my heritage.

Researching the kundiman further, at first I could only find technical specifications. Meter, instrumental accompaniment, melody. Then, that it’s widely recognized as the Philippines’ original serenade. That its lyrics are always about love and longing. And given the patriarchal and machismo-rife culture it was born from, kundimans were sung by a man, about a beautiful young woman.

Looking even further, the first kundimans seem to be folk songs, likely originating in the Visayas region of the Philippines. They’re precolonial, which means they’re at least half a millennia old. So I’d have to take back what I said about the machismo-rife, patriarchal culture. If the songs predated colonialism, then we could be talking matriarchal culture.

 I couldn’t find any lyrics for precolonial kundimans. But between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the 20th, the kundiman was “rediscovered” and formalized as an art song, heavy with Western and Spanish influence. I listened to a few renditions and these art songs sound strikingly similar to their more modern counterparts: melodramatic, over-the-top, again, embarrassing. And the old poems I did find translations for seemed so one-sided, lacking.

When I finally discovered that kundimans were also coded anti-colonial songs, everything started to fall into place.

Lapu Lapu eradicates that colonizer Magellan at the Battle of Mactan

Kundiman
As Anti-Spanish Colonial Resistance

The Spanish colonized the Philippines between from 1521 to 1898. The Philippine Revolution began in 1896. Around this time, the kundiman form became a tool for expressing anti-colonialism and anti-Spanish sentiments.

What the Spaniards believed to be trite love songs were actually coded songs expressing nationalism and a yearning for independence. In 1874, a Spanish "scholar" named V.M. Avella described the Kundiman’s melody as "something pathetic but not without some pleasant feeling.”

It wasn’t an uncommon sentiment, the pathetic part especially. Spanish opinion of filipinxs was the typical, predictable, colonial sort: elitist, condescending, oh, these backward natives and their silly traditions. We must teach them culture, we must civilize them!  So it was with great joy that I discovered many kundimans were not exactly love songs. 

Jocelynang Baliwag (Jocelyn from Baliwag aka Kundiman of the Revolution), for example, is one of the first kundimans to be documented as a coded form of protest. Coded pro-nationalist, anti-Spanish to be exact. Though I couldn’t find a complete translation of the lyrics, the young woman from Baliwag who is serenaded in the song was a symbol of the beauty of the Philippines and its need for liberation.

 I’m unsure whether the Spanish colonizers ever discovered that these pathetic filipinx love songs were actually ways of spreading pro-nationalist, revolutionary sentiment. But as the revolution pressed on, kundiman lyrics began to explicitly name and address the Philippine nation instead of a young beautiful woman. Many attribute the switch to Jose Rizal, who is considered the founding father of a filipinx national literature. 

Here is his kundiman, written in 1891:

Kundiman-Jose Rizal (1891)

Now mute indeed are tongue and heart:
love shies away, joy stands apart.

Neglected by its leaders and defeated,
the country was subdued and it submitted.

But O the sun will shine again!
Itself the land shall disenchain;
and once more round the world with growing praise
shall sound the name of the Tagalog race.

We shall pour out our blood in a great flood
to liberate the parent sod;

but till that day arrives for which we weep,
love shall be mute, desire shall sleep.

Ok. I can’t say I’m a fan of the poem or of nationalist movements in general, and I feel a bit embarrassed reading this poem too. But in Rizal’s kundiman, he explicitly refers to a Tagalog race, he is naming country instead of using a metaphor for it, is a huge turning point, both for the poems and revolutionary praxis.
This is also explicitly not a love song, which would contradict the earlier claim as across the country, love has shied away. And I found these last two lines striking.    

but till that day arrives for which we weep,
love shall be mute, desire shall sleep.

Given that longing and desire are supposed to be defining elements of kundiman lyrics, and according to who you ask, of the Philippine peoples, that Rizal decides desire and love cannot and will not exist until the Philippines are liberated seems to me also a revolutionary practice. Much like a hunger strike, he called for a national denial of the very essence of filipinxness, even as that filipinxness was exactly what Rizal and his peers fought for.

Rizal takes a rigid stance against love and desire that reminds me much of my own stance against my filipinxness, and maybe that’s why I find the poem so cringeworthy. Caught up in our fantasy of  if it were not so, both Rizal and I were unwilling to engage what is so. In my case, how my filipinxness is very much a part of me, and in Rizal’s case, how desire, love and longing cannot help but exist, even under colonialism, imperialism, and other systems of oppression. I suppose this unwillingness to confront what is is a form of cowardice, an idealism that shies away from repairing actual damage.

Jennifer Laude, murdered by U.S. marine Joseph Scott Pemberton on October 11, 2014. Rest in Power

IV. Kundiman As Anti-American Colonial Resistance

After the Philippine Revolution, the Spanish left and the Americans replaced them. True national liberation was not actually happening, and a second nationalist movement sprung up. Bayan Ko (Our Country), was composed by the poet and lyricist, Jose Corazon de Jesus. It’s an interesting side note that the song is based on a Spanish poem, but nevertheless, Bayan Ko became something of an unofficial national anthem.

Here’s a translation of the lyrics:

Bayan Ko

Philippines beloved Land of mine,
Where the Gold and gorgeous flowers shine,
Blessing on her Fate did Love bestow,
Sweet Beauty's grace and Splendor's glow.
How her Charm so kind and tender,
Drove the Strangers to enslave her;
Nativeland, they forced their Will,
And made you suffer Still.

Even Birds that freely roam the Sky,
Loudly weep when not allowed to fly,
How more deeply will a Land most fair,
Yearn to break the chains of sad Despair?
Philippines, a Land I love so true,
All my tears and pains are weaved in you;
All that I desire,

To see you rise forever free!

Again, not a fan of this poem or of nationalist movements. Again, that strange feeling of embarrassment rooted in my childhood. Gold and gorgeous flowers aside, this poem, like Rizal’s kundiman, is only concerned with what could be if it were not so, and as such, it feels lacking, one-sided, naive. The pure and bountiful land is victim to the will of corrupting forces. The lines How her charm so kind and tender, / Drove the Strangers to enslave her reek of patriarchal rhetoric: this land, explicitly feminized, is so tempting others can’t help but exploit and entrap her! All that I desire / to see you rise forever free! is the end of this story, there is no love for what is, only for what has been and what could be.

But the next two kundimans we’ll read do not explore what could be if it were not so. Rather, they address what is violent, unpalatable, or unliveable in the now; they deal.

This brings me to one of the first kundimans I ever read, one that does not fit neatly into pure nationalist narrative, nor accept the patriarchal rhetoric that seems to come up so often in so many liberation movements.

V. What Is So

The filipinx-american novelist, playwright and poet, Jessica Hagedorn, released her novel, Dogeaters, in 1990 (dogeaters being a racist term for filipinxs, probably coined by the american military men who settled there). Set in Manila in the 1950s and the 1990s, Hagedorn’s book engages several narrators across race, class and gender to examine the legacy of not only centuries of Spanish colonialism, but the process of decolonization, the dictatorship left in its place, and the plurality of human life there after being colonized or oppressed by so many others.

Where the kundimans we just read are concerned with filipinx nationalism, nationalist sentiments usually being homogenous, about unity and oneness, Hagedorn’s entire novel grapples with the little inconsistencies and paradoxes of people living under many different, often opposing, systems of power. One of her main characters is Joey Sands, an orphan whose mother died when he was still young and whose black American father abandoned them. A neighborhood man named Uncle takes Joey and countless other children under his wing, teaches them to turn tricks, pickpocket, and scam, profits from their labor, and loves only his dog. There are other characters still, ones obsessed with American movies, others with shopping and beauty pageants, and we watch this array of characters consume colonial legacies. She ends the novel with a kundiman. It’s a long one, so I won’t share  it in its entirety, but I’ll just share  the first few paragraphs and a couple other lines that struck me.         

Our Mother, who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Thy will not be done. Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom never came. You who have been defiled, belittled, and diminished. Our Blessed Virgin Mary of Most Precious Blood, menstrual ephemeral, carnal, eternal. Rosa Mystica, Black Virgin of Rhinestone and Velvet Mystery, Madonna of Volcanoes and Violence, your eye burns through the palm of my outstretched hand. Eye glowing with heavenly flames, one single Eye watching over me, on earth as it is in heaven.

Dammit, mother dear. There are serpents in your garden. Licking your ears with forked tongues, poisoning your already damaged heart. I am suffocated by my impotent rage, my eyes are blinded by cataracts blue as your miraculous robes, I listen intently for snatches of melody, the piercing high-pitched wail of your song of terror.

Here, clues to your ghostly presence in the lingering trail of your deadly perfume: wild roses and plumeria, the dizzying fragrance of damas de noche, the rotting bouquets of wilted sampaguita flowers you cradle in your arms.

I would curse you in Waray, Ilocano, Tagalog, Spanish, English, Portuguese and Mandarin; I would curse you but I choose to love you instead.

Our mother who art, what have those bastards gone and done now? Your eyes are veiled and clouded by tears, veiled but never blinded.

Further on:

Dolores dolorosa. Spilled blood of innocents, dead by the bullet, the dagger, the arrow; dead by the slingshot of polished stones, dead by grenades, hunger and thirst; dead by profound longing and profound despair; spilled blood of ignited flesh, exploded flesh, radiated flesh; spilled blood of forbidden knowledge, bless us, Mother, for we have sinned.

And finally:

deliver us from evil, forgive us our sins but not theirs.

Hagedorn’s kundiman is a radical departure from what were once considered radical kundimans. Though the kundiman is written to a woman, it is not a woman young or even lovely. She is old, maternal. She is weary, she has been defiled time and again, she is not pure nor golden; there are serpents in her garden. She holds a rotting bouquet of sampaguitas. Most of all, she is not blind and I think this is key.

What are the sins referred to in Hagedorn’s kundiman? Could they be a lack of vision, a reluctance to see what is before them, one and the same with the naivete of the earlier kundimans that made me so uncomfortable?

Bayan Ko and Rizal’s Kundiman speak to a place that could be great if it weren’t for Spanish or American colonizers. Hagedorn’s kundiman says the Philippines is already great, though it's also hellish, and what hell the oppressors brought is somehow, against all odds, beautiful too. Hagedorn’s kundiman is an obvious riff on the Our Father, but in this kundiman, thy kingdom never came, and it’s a given (our mother who art, what have those bastards gone and done now?) The visceral descriptions of place, the fruits, the flowers, every bloody instance of violence, evoke a Garden of Eden-esque place, distinctly the Philippines, distinctly unheavenly, but utterly deserving of love. And to give that love, we must see what is before us, not just what could be if only it wasn’t so.

I Would Curse You
But I Choose To Love You Instead

Patrick Rosal, a New Jersey-based filipinx-American poet, also works with the kundiman as his form of choice. He calls the poems his love songs for America, but unapologetically tackles the many problematic aspects of American culture, including racism, anti-blackness, the prison industrial complex, immigration, assimilation and cultural hegemony. But his poems aren’t rants, and the awful things he witnesses or is subjected to seep into his psyche, he develops a strange love around the hate.

I want to go back to a quote from Hagedorn because Rosal’s poems, like Hagedorn’s novel, are not about if it were not so. They are about I would curse you but I choose to love you instead.

“I would curse you in Waray, Ilocano, Tagalog, Spanish, English…I would curse you but I choose to love you instead. Patrick Rosal uses this as his epigraph to open the third and final section of his book. What follows are poems about adolescent lies, the n-word, hoopties, an extra nipple, a macho and overbearing uncle, the micro aggressive slip of a white woman’s tongue in the presence of black and brown persons.

If we unpack the epigraph in full, we find that the narrator is worldly and learned, possessing seven tongues. There’s an understanding that her learning was either reluctant or forced, as she would curse them. But, as if the enforced worldliness, the centuries of colonialism, oppression, and aftermath, gave her a wisdom beyond that of just cultures and languages, she chooses to love regardless. As does Rosal.

Here’s my favorite of Rosal’s poems:

About the White Boys who Drove by a Second Time to Splash a Bucket of Water on Me:

“…there shall never be rest
’til the last moon droop and the last tide fail…”
—Arthur Symons

The first time they merely spat on me and drove off
I stood there a while staring down the road
after them as if I were looking for myself
I even shouted my own name

But when they cruised past again
to toss a full bucket of water
(and who knows what else) on me
I charged—sopping wet—after their car

and though they were quickly gone I kept
running Maybe it was hot that August afternoon
but I ran the whole length of Main Street past
the five-and-dime where I stole Spaldeens

and rabbits’ feet past the Raritan bus depot
and Bo’s Den and the projects where Derek and them
scared the shit out of that girl I pumped
the thin pistons of my legs all the way home

Let’s get real: It’s been twenty-five years
and I haven’t stopped chasing them
through those side streets in Metuchen
each pickup b-ball game every
swanky mid-town bar I’ve looked for them
in every white voice that’s slurred and cursed me
within earshot in every pink and pretty
body whose light I wanted to punch out

––and did To be honest I looked for them
in every set of thin lips I schemed to kiss
and this is how my impossible fury
rose: like stone in water I ran
all seven miles home that day and I’ve been
running ever since arriving finally
here and goddammit I’m gonna set things straight

The moment they drove by laughing
at a slant-eyed yellowback gook
they must have seen a boy
who would never become a man We could say
they were dead wrong but instead let’s say
this: Their fathers gave them their rage
as my father gave me mine

and from that summer day on we managed
to savor every bloody thing
that belonged to us It was a meal
constantly replenished––a rich
bitterness we’ve learned to live on for so long
we forget how––like brothers––
we put the first bite in one another’s mouths

In Rosal’s poem, alienation, longing, hatred and anger are inseparable from love. In this act of hate he stares at the perpetrators looking for himself, he is shouting his own name.

Even though it’s been twenty-five years he hasn’t stopped chasing them. Every time a white voice slurs and curses him he looks for them. Even though the bodies are pink and pretty he wants to punch their lights out. Even though the lips are thin he still schemes to kiss them.

It makes him absolutely furious. But what he learned from the act was that it was his own, and even if it was bitter, because it was his, he’d savor it.

Rosal is saying that this oppression, this violence, is so. Even though it could change shape, or be eradicated in the ways Rizal and de Jesus might have hoped, we must learn to live with it if we are to live with ourselves.
 

Forgive Us Our Sins
But Not Theirs

I’m trying to recall all the times I was too cowardly to confront what was so. All the times it was easier to dismiss my necessary parts. Not just the daily struggles against white supremacy, american imperialism and capitalism, but my internal struggles of decolonizing. And I am embarrassed for an entirely different reason.

I began this paper as a small endeavor: to define kundiman. But the form itself is too dynamic, and the people too full of contradictions to ascribe to a set of rules about rhythm, rhyme, or verse, to find set universal truths to put under our pillows at night. Rather, kundiman is a spirit of a work and people, an acknowledgement of the complexity of the object of love, and coming from a revolutionary tradition, love and hate, nurturing and resistance, cannot be untangled. Kundiman is at its base resistance, but at it’s best it’s also self-love and an acceptance that violent forces formed you.  

This is not to say I’ll ever love that so many filipinx’s are marginalized and disenfranchised, that they serve the desires of supremacists in order to survive, that so many aspire to the norms of their former colonizers, participating in and perpetuating a white american culture that harms us and teaches self-hate. An imperialist force so grand that a Saturday cannot be spent guiltless with a book in bed, even if it's a book written by one of our own.

I am trying to bring myself out of this spell.

After all, if it weren't for a lazy Sunday in bed with Hagedorn and her Dogeaters, I wouldn't now carry with me this wisdom, this admonition: forgive us our sins but not theirs.