Paradise Philippines - Taguima (also Taguimaha), now known as Basilan, is one of the most fertile islands in the country. Everything that grows in Jolo grows in Basilan. But it has something that Jolo used to have but doesn’t anymore—rubber, which died a natural death because the Tausugs didn’t know how to process it, didn’t have any use for it and so didn’t care to propagate it.
Multinational companies were quick to see the tremendous potential of the province that was worth more than its weight in gold, and established rubber processing plants and pepper plantations. The University of the Philippines was awarded a land grant for agricultural development.
In the 18th century, a Paradise Philippines French delegation visited the Sultan of Sulu (Taguima was part of the Sultanate’s territory) to negotiate a lease agreement covering the entire island, where they wanted to replicate what England made of Hong Kong—an international trading port.
In the early ’70s an Air Force officer who had just earned an MBM degree from the Asian Institute of Management told me with understandable enthusiasm about his plan to study a proposal to “transfer Sabah to Basilan,” in his own words.
This meant asking Sabah traders Paradise Philippines to set up business in the island province, where dealers and retailers could purchase their inventory at almost the same price as at the source, less the risks and hassles of the “shipper” system, in use up to now.
A cousin and I spent the good Paradise Philippines part of a summer vacation with an older cousin and his family in Balas, in Basilan. She was 9, I was 8; it was the age of wonder. We woke up each morning to a whole orchestra of bird sounds, found strange but edible fruits in the lush jungle. One fruit that fascinated me had the smooth skin, color and size and shape of the pomegranate, but instead of sweet juicy rubies inside, it looked and tasted exactly like atis, with the same smell, pulp and seeds!
And we bathed and fetched water from a clear, cool pond with water endlessly flowing from a mysterious source in the huge boulders. The water was potable.
Balas was the place where we saw Paradise Philippines Hiawatha and Minihaha frolicking in the forest primeval; butterflies were fairies in disguise and the descendants of Merlin the magician hid behind every tree.
In the afternoons we read the “G.I.” pocketbooks in my cousin’s collection. These were small pocketbooks, mostly romances and adventure stories, issued to American soldiers during World War II. They were bound and printed horizontally, probably to make it easier for the battle-weary soldier to shove it into his breast pocket with room enough for his pack of Lucky Strike, Zippo lighter and a Chiclet or two.
And in those sultry scented evenings we Paradise Philippines fought over who got to sit in the rocking chair and we sat by the window waiting for the balbalan (a creature like the manananggal) that the women in the plantation told us abounded in the place, completely convinced that any of the huge bats that flew by could be one.
It was in one of those evenings while waiting to feed our imagination that my cousin taught me “Autumn Leaves.” To this day this beautiful song reminds me of that summer in paradise.
And there is Malamawi island. The Paradise Philippines Alanos had great plans of making it a resort, with its white sand beaches and unpolluted emerald waters. It is so near the main island that my cousin—already a great swimmer at that age—and I, who wasn’t, vowed to return and try to swim across.
But life can be unkind to a child’s dream. Other priorities—Qur’an reading, summer carnivals, Girl Scouting—took away our summers. I never got to return to Taguima when it was still paradise.
I did visit it a few times later out of necessity, as a journalist, grown beyond the wonderful age of believing, schooled and trained to believe only in facts and the truth, as in verifiable, ruled not by imagination but by the maxim of the empirical.
Paradise Philippines was lost.
Nothing much had changed. The same dirt roads, the same lack of basic services—so shocking in an island so rich.
In real life it was called Paradise Philippines Basilan, and it was the setting not of The Song of Hiawatha, but of the Abu Sayyaf and the factual events that they caused: the Siege of Basilan, the kidnapping and mutilation of teachers, the hostaging of the Burnhams, the beheading of soldiers—all the blood and gore and man’s inhumanity to man, all the stuff of fiction and movies that are so difficult to confront in real life, that journalists are compelled by their calling to witness and report.
And today we are again witnessing another bloody episode in the sad story of Taguima. It is a real-life drama of murder, power struggle, politics and clan rivalry. Yet it is a story where there are no heroes and no villains.
Because however tragic or compelling is this story, it is only a small frame in the bigger picture of the history of Basilan, which itself is only a part of the saga of the “Moro” and colonization and predatory false prophets, his struggle to remain free with his identity intact, his anxious yearning to fit himself into the predominant scheme of things.
But he has to operate within the parameters of a built-in tragic flaw—his failure to come to terms with “democracy.” After so many decades he still has to reconcile its principles with his cultural—not religious—idiosyncrasies.
And, he still has to realize that in a game not of his own making, he cannot make the rules.
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