The search for Sigbin

In writing this mini-series inside the bigger serial-narrative that is Kinutil, the Maker wondered if he should use the word “sigbin” as proper noun or use instead the phrase “the sigbin” to indicate it as a classification of many creatures whose specific identity is always linked to the person who “owns” it. This question is important for there are many sigbin, as many as there are localities and people on these islands. Each locality has its  own stories, its  own descriptions, its  own myths. The sigbin might be a shape-shifter, looking like a kangaroo to some and to others merely a handkerchief. It has been described to look like a cat or a dark dog and still to others a bear-like marsupial.

Whatever it looks like, it is missing in all the current statues of Leon Kilat. But it is right that the hero’s likeness is equestrian or always including a horse. But he should not be astride the horse. In his mind, the Maker imagines Kilat standing on the back of his horse balancing himself against the wind with his cotton bulletproof vest flying.  The hero dodges Spanish bullets that whiz past him in the fields of Fort San Pedro where now stands Plaza Independencia.

He imagines his sigbin as a shadow around the horse’s hooves. How his followers must have laughed at the whole spectacle. For that is what Bisayans are wont to do. They laugh at anything and everything, including death. Kilat’s narrative must therefore be a narrative of a quaint humor. It must be comic-tragedy for that is how the Bisayan tales are always told, tongue-in-cheek and in the form of post-modern parody. That is how Yoyoy Villame, our consummate post-modernist balladeer, would have told it if he were only alive. It makes sense that Budoy tells his own Kilat story the same way.

The Kilat narrative is important for us not just as a mere chapter of history. To tell the story of Leon Kilat is to reclaim our right to make our “own” art and write our “own” literature unbound by the often tyrannical constraints of what is supposed to be historically right and what is supposed to be factual. The story of Kilat is a continuing narrative that must eventually contain the story of how we find ourselves and our own identity finally liberated from the impositions of past colonial masters. The history of Kilat is there. But it is a story writ in part if not by academic bias then by the allegedly universal rules of history writing. But history writing is really a form of “fiction” that leaves out many things. Specifically, those things that cannot be proven by documentation. In any case, it works only for past things or for things now dead. Otherwise, it works only for things that are “other” to or removed from the history writer.

This explains why the story of Leon Kilat can only be written truthfully in song or dance or verse or painting or sculpture or as a story told from the heart and by someone who “owns” the story. It cannot be a story of somebody else or of a people of a past time now only remembered. That type of storytelling is only a translation that loses its meanings.

To tell the story of Kilat well, one must start from the premise that all stories are told for the purposes of the storyteller. The story itself is flexible; it is a shape shifter just like the sigbin. The storyteller has the right to fib or come close to lying, as was the suggestion of Pablo Picasso who said: “Art is a lie which tells the truth.”

And Venancio, the Maker’s late father, may as well have been Picasso when he sat on his favorite art-deco chair decades ago in the half dark of his late father-in-law’s grand old house in Dumanjug. His children sit on the floor at his feet. There is no electricity, no television and, yes, no computers. He is not yet sick, not yet overcome by work, which would take him almost daily to the city 73 kilometers away, traveling on the Autobus with a conductor named Mameng.

Imagine him now in the darkness quoting this incantation: Si Leon Kilat / Naglatay-latay sa dagat / Walay laing gisugat / Gyera ug gubat (Leon Kilat walking over sea / Does not meet anything / But battle / And fighting). He implores his children to repeat the verse as his hands flail away at the story, Kilat’s horse galloping, the bullets whizzing by and suddenly his finger pointing into the shadows where truly his sigbin of power hid. Did our eyes search the darkness? Did we indeed see something there? Did it move? But whose sigbin was it? Do we carry the sigbin with us still?

The story of Kilat and his sigbin is not a finished story. It is a continuing narrative that measures and in a sense does document our deepest desires as a people and the things we dream of: Our need to travel ideally without a visa, our struggle for liberation against our deepest fears, our fear of death and the way we reconcile with it in the end, the way we surrender and finally pass on to those we love those things we hold most dear in our hearts;  in other words, those things that truly define us as a people.

And these are things we have not found in history books, try as we would. To tell the story of Kilat well, one must reclaim for himself or herself the right that came so easily to Venancio, the right to “lie” in a way required of all fiction if fiction seeks to come as close as it can to truth. That is the true power of the sigbin.

Sigbin lives! It hides in the shadows of song and dance and of a story retold every which way.