Dinagyang: profits, not culture

By Pet Melliza/ The Beekeeper

Dinagyang an expression of the “rich” Ilonggo culture?

I disagree if we defined “culture” as sum total of achievements that humanity or a faction thereof reproduces into varied forms of symbolisms – language, rituals, literature, attire, religion, beliefs, morals, dance, songs, poetry, and what not.

How we view our past and our future forms part of our culture. Thus, when a “tribe” of the Dinagyang -- this is the prevailing motif in the two-day festival -- exalts the White, Christian Male typified by the friar and his god, for saving the native from the evils of paganism and the “incurable” diseases carried by non-Christian beliefs, we are not purveying the “rich culture” of the Ilonggo but only collective ignorance.

Three hundred years of brutal colonial subjugation carried out by the Spaniards disappears like the dew that evaporates from the first rays of the morning sun. The Afro-Latino drumbeats in the streets only idolize the friar that patriots like Jose Rizal see as principal cause and target of collective wrath instead.

Every Dinagyang, we are treated to the scene of  the native stricken by an illness that appears incurable and has already exacted a heavy toll on the community. The shaman cries to the spirits  for mass healing but failed. Then a Spanish friar pops up from nowhere tugging the Sto. Nino. He raises it up and the stricken natives bounce back to life. To punctuate that mass ignorance, the native is made to dance and cry “Viva, el Senor Sto. Nino” repeated ad infinitum.

That “cultural” presentation merely reproduces the mass amnesia that Christianity promotes so the native would forget the role of religion in the savage subjugation of its people.  The native is doped into the idolatry of adoring the White, Male Christian god and its saints, and conversely, looks down on itself, its religion, as inferior.

Dinagyang reaffirms the  sado-masochism embraced by the doped native who prances, dances and gyrates in gratitude to its slave master. The victim thanks the tyrant  for the chain, the 300 years of brutal colonial rule, of mass dispossession that today persists in mass poverty and social unrest.

The Dinagyang purveys the native’s own version of racism with the myth of the ten Bornean datus who fled to Panay in the 12^th century, and who are now the ancestors of today’s Filipinos. The Malays are on top of the cultural food chain, we have been taught, with the “inferior” Indonesians and Ati below.  (Ridiculous: “Malaysian” and “Indonesian” are terms that came only after the Dutch, British and Spaniards in the 18th century, carved out their respective enclaves from what used to be the Malaccan archipelago.)

The 10 Datu yarn is capped by another myth, “Barter of Panay” where for a piece of golden necklace and headgear, the “rulers”,  the Ati, surrendered their island to the visitors. That is a farce replicated in the Dinagyang Festival. That happened at the period when the communities were “primitive communal societies” which as the term suggests, didn’t yet know private ownership of real properties. To the primitive communal societies, land belongs to the tribe, it cannot be owned much less sold: everybody partakes of the bounties of the land, rivers and seas.

If there were indeed the rich culture in the Dinagyang, it is the culture of the rich and famous. The festival is supposed to rekindle public knowledge of our ancestors, the Ati included. However, this early, a certain Jed Patrick Mabilog, alleged mayor of Iloilo City, issued an executive order declaring as social dregs the Ati, and all others begging in the streets – the Badjao from Basilan, street kids, and mentally distraught – thus must be rounded up and detained away from visitors and merry makers.

The culture that the festival carries prompts images of the Sto. Nino dancing in the streets alongside the mascots of commercial establishments and giant corporations whose owners deserve the gas chamber for their anti-labor crimes.

We will be seeing Iloilo City engulfed by bacchanalia.  We will be witnessing the city once more transformed to a giant toilet and garbage bin.

The streets the morning after will smell of human waste even though fire trucks already flushed away the filth in what used to be sites of movable toilets during the bacchanalia.