Encountering the ‘engkanto’

Ang dakit usa ka dakong syudad ug ang kawayanan tupad niini usa ka lapad nga hi-way.” (“The banyan tree is a big city and the bamboo grove beside it is a wide highway.”) The artist-poet Josua Cabrera opens his tale with a mother saying these words to her son as he lies down on a makeshift bed of bamboo and straw mat.

He falls asleep and wakes up finding himself standing in the middle of a highway before a black limousine. A woman with golden hair and skin as bright as the moon comes out of the car. She invites him to go with her to the city glittering with lights. Lechon, chicken and fruits are laid on the small table inside the car. It excites him but when he eats the roast pig, he is surprised that it tastes a bit bland.

He asks the lady for salt but the mere mention of it causes her to scream so loud it wakes him up from his dream. He finds himself in his airconditioned room in his condominium. On the table beside his bed stands a framed picture of him and his dead parents taken when he was still a child. He then looks out the window to see the forest of buildings around his condo.

Except for his added twist in the ending, Josua’s story is actually a retelling of the usual account of mino, or the state of being lost as a result of enchantment. According to this urban legend, mino is usually caused by an engkanto or a supernatural being who lives in a parallel ghost city not so unlike the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

The engkanto is usually described as having Caucasian features: tall, white skinned, with golden hair and often dressed in expensive clothes like an amerikana (a suit) or a white gown. He or she seems to come from or dwell in a very technologically advanced city, often appearing in a nice car or, in the coastal areas, arriving in a big boat.

In contrast, those who claim to have encountered the engkanto are usually ordinary folk  from poor rural communities, like a village of peasants or fishermen. As in Josua’s story, the spell comes as a nightmare as the victim is seduced with  all kinds of pleasures for the senses: lights and sounds of modernity, food, and even subtle eroticism. With these delights comes the threat of completely being lost, of not being able to return. But strangely all this is broken with the mere mention of salt, which the engkantos hate or fear.

As an artist and writer, Josua finds a lot in this story that tells about us. The state of mino reflects how the native has been seduced by the dazzling gadgetry, material wealth, and sensual delights of colonial culture. We find ourselves suddenly displaced in the urban jungle, unable to adjust to its strange and often frightening ways.

Josua tries to undo this sorcery with the use of art, perhaps inspired by how the surrealists used contemporary psychoanalytic theory to free art from the constraints of reason. Creating a series of rubbercut prints and big paintings for his next solo exhibit entitled “Tadlas” (“to cross”), which will open Thursday, April 25 at 6p.m. at Qube Gallery in Persimmon Suites in Mabolo, he recounts the common experience of mino with his usual penchant for using familiar visual metaphors.

For instance, Josua applies the technique of overlapping to suggest the fusion of the physical and the supernatural, rural and urban. Figures of people are superimposed with outlines of buildings or forests to suggest not only a sense of confusion as they are being swallowed by the “other” world in the background. Viewers repeat the experience as we are also forced to find the figure out of the human subjects juxtaposed in the maze of outlines.

And like salt, which had the power to break the spell of enchantment, the artist uses organic substances to remind us of our old connection with nature –  plant dyes, soot, and the red stain of tuba or coconut wine.

Art then becomes the crossroads where we may have glimpses of the distant magical world of modernity and the less dazzling enticements of rural life.