Begnas di Yabyab (Written last Nov 2013)

 

Little cutie all dressed up for the Begnas di Yabyab

It was not strange to find the street empty. Thousands of miles above and away from the lowlands where I was raised, the people of Sagada rose before the sun did, and at almost 8am I had already missed them by hours. It was the morning after a storm, and plants that had been too weak against the rain and wind lay helplessly in the mud. The air hung warm with the steam of the wet earth, relief from the cold. Minutes ago, a friend had said brusquely through the phone, to come out by the road and wait. Not knowing what to expect, I drifted into a nearby weaving shop to pace, first out of faith, and then desperation. The storeowner, amused at my unease, later took me aside, asking if I was there to watch the indians, and, confused, I stood with him by the door as he explained what warranted my waiting.

                "Are you alone?" I was asked, and laughing I quickly shook my head no. It was the first of November, when even the dead were not alone, and there I was in the one of the most popular resort towns of the North, during peak season. My friend Ruel, whom I stayed with to wait out the storm, was working and always kept his Sagada home full of people, enabling me to deny alone-ness, ignoring the solo room I had rented in the other side of town, in an inn isolated from view behind one of the towering walls of bluish rock that adorn the sides of the road.

Locals begin gathering in front of their houses. "The indians are coming," they tease quietly among themselves as the sound of chanting comes closer from over the hill. Indians, indians, chime in the children, parents pulling them from the road as local men dressed in full costume walk by in a line with their spears, howling their chants into the morning, the rest of us invisible. "That one," the storeowner who had introduced himself as Ezra, motions to the old man who walked last in the line, small, stooped, and the most decorated, "is like their obispo." He explains how the world stops once the line moves through town on their way to the old village, Demang. The main road, bordered by shops, restaurants, and things with all the potential for convenience, was now off-limits to vehicles and people that once jostled for space. Back in the day, they had been told to turn away as the line passed, believing that there were other participants visible only to those who had gone into the mountains to spend the night awaiting omens to begin the thanksgiving festival, known locally as Begnas di Yabyab.

Pinewood set aflame at a grave at the Panag-apoy

Elsewhere in the country in the beginning of November, entire clans pack themselves into mausoleums, tents, or underneath the shadow of tarpaulins avoiding the sun and its resentful heat. Family reunions are celebrated over tombs, with wanton singing and feasting, picking up again upon the return home. In Sagada, the living light pyres for their dead, and dusk is drowned in dark smoke, pierced by tongues of orange flame. "Hell is here! In Sagada!" the locals are fond of telling tourists, in jest. Remembering death is no solemn affair. The pinewood sap, easily catching flame, cast an almost pleasant smell over the town, lingering in my hair, and my clothes.

                "That big guy, with the beard?" Kuya Ruel says of my host, chuckling impishly after I attempted to describe where and with whom I was to be staying for Begnas, forgetting that everyone in Sagada knew wach other, and Kuya Ruel had been going to Sagada to document its festivals for a decade. As the storm Vinta whipped its wrath around in the night I listened to him tell of how the men would go into the mountains to the Babawian, traditionally the outposts of warriors, to spend the night and pray at dawn. Women were not allowed in the Babawian, but I flew to those mountains then with only the words to hold on to in the dark, and saw the Isagada men of his recollection, huddled before a fire, wishing for the rains to pass, the dawn grey before them. Vinta left as October did, with only good omens, and November came to Sagada with bright skies.

My host and his vivacious two year old, Den-ey, leads the way through Demang

                "Begnas begins at the Babawian," My host, John Magwilang later agrees after I return to Ambasing, to Hidden Hill Inn which he manages. A great bear of a man, he speaks with slow, precise words and moves with a careful seriousness. He divides his time between Hidden Hill, and guiding tourists to the caves and hanging coffins that have made Sagada famous. A week prior, he invited me to participate in the ritual, knowing I might have wanted to write about it. "Everybody writes about the pies and the caves," he told me then, "but maybe you'd like to come see what we do in the old village, before the planting season."

               The morning of the ritual, I tuck a borrowed tapis and bakget (belt) into my sweater as I follow Manong John into the old village. "You will have an Igorot tail for a day," teases his wife Manang Angie, who lent me her traditional garments for the ritual. She was to stay behind to watch the Inn and its newly arrived guests. The garments are strong to the touch, the colors bright, and I wonder for how long it has stayed that way.

              The old village, Demang, is hidden well behind the resort facade and its landscape of inns and souvenirs. From the main road, it could be seen in the distance as a collection of tiny, silvery patches wedged tight between sections of fields and hills, beyond nodding heads of little native sunflowers that bloom late during the year. Houses are lined with the silver-blue sheets: Galvanized iron has replaced wood as material of choice for home exteriors in Sagada--even in the old village-- for its capability to withstand the harshest of the elements.

             The house in Demang is busy with the men preparing to leave. Once in their wanes (g-strings), headscarves, Manong John, his brothers, and nephews head off first to start the rituals, taking their spears by the door. Their Nanang, a big, sturdily built woman with strong arms and an easy smile, wraps me up in the tapis, pulling the bakget tight around my middle. She speaks to me in Ilocano, a language common to the peoples of Northern Luzon, of which I had meager knowledge and barely any mastery. "Too tight?" She asks, and I muster a small "no," and telling her thank you. Everything in the house is placed a certain way, each item well accounted for, nothing lost in the corners. "This igorot house is too dirty, no?" Nanang clucks, sweeping wayward bits of dust out the door, and I think back to my home thousands of miles away where we are always losing our things to carelessness.

              At 9am, Manong John's younger sister Dom-ya, dons her own tapis and bakget and we head to the rice fields, carrying baskets of Tapuy (rice wine) and Tupig (sticky rice cakes wrapped with sugarcane leaves). We wait and watch on a deck, where an old lady in full regalia--tapis, belt and ancestral beads and snakebone circlet-- introduces herself as Nana Tallip before pointing out the error with how my tapis was wrapped. "The flap should be to the left," she tells me grimly, "yours is to the right. do you know what that means?"

              "What does it mean, Nana?"
              "We wrap it that way for the dead!" she cackles, and the other women laugh at the mistake.
  

(No thanks to my horrific picture-taking skills) The men head to the chosen Dap-ay from the sacred tree.

               The sky and the mountains are in the fields, mirrored in the water. Across us, the men are beginning to descend the mountain in a trail of red against green. Manang Dom-ya points to a tree with dark leaves towering over the others, towards which the red line crept. "They will go to that sacred tree, and kill a pig," she says, adding that it was called the Patpatayan. The pig will then be distributed evenly among the thirteen Dap-ays, along with all the food offerings. We could hear them chanting all the way across the fields, falling silent as the pig is led to the slaughter. "Wa-wuy, they are yelling, wa-wuy," Nana Tallip says before adding with a laugh, "I don't know what it means, only the men know!"

Women make their way to the Dap-ay with baskets of rice wine and bundles of rice cakes.

             We sample bits of Tapuy in varying stages of fermentation in different baskets. The red, fermenting rice tastes like a bite of berries, tart and sweet. "Ours is newly cooked," Manang Dom-ya compares our sticky Tapuy to that of Nana Tallip's, which was in more advanced stages, the rice almost melting in the pinkish liquid. "You eat too much, you get drunk!" Nana Tallip quips.       

The festivities begin 

When the men have arrived at the Dap-ay, the women make their way slowly across the narrow pilapil of the rice fields. The men take up their gongs and start playing shortly, and the elderly women are the first to join the circle. Locals and guests alike join in, arms raised like birds poised for fight. I stand along the edge of the celebrations with Manang Dom-ya, watching, and cursing my tagalog Hiya. The Kankana-ey have no need for Hiya, prizing initiative over meekness. There is always work to be done, and time is spare. Life is hard, they bemoan, but waste not one minute of it. Forbidden to work the fields during Begnas di Yabyab, a time to celebrate the beginning of a season in which all new things are expected to grow, free time is spent with family, houses noisy with children shrieking in the rooms and the kitchens alive with cooking and chatter. 

              The next day, I left for the bus stop while the stars were still out and the roosters still dreaming of morning. Above the silence, I could hear gongs playing in Demang. "The guests that I take to my mother's house, are new siblings," Manong John said before I left, the memory warming my hands and ears despite wondering how they could consider someone so strange and silent and unmoving like a sibling. I wonder the same of my own relatives I was returning to, most of whom I had little in common with but thought of before I slept, the only time I was truly alone in Sagada, on the only Undas I had ever missed my entire life. I will never know how people bind themselves to each other, but it is a comfort to know that next year there will be more people to think of, remember, and celebrate knowing, when cold, cold November comes around, venturing a lick at the warmth we spend our whole lives collecting.