A Critique of Macario Tiu’s Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory, 2nd edition
Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory, 2nd edition
Author: Macario D. Tiu
Research and Publication Office, Ateneo de Davao University, 2021, 571 pages
Postcolonial feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman’s revelatory essay titled “Venus in Two Acts” (2008) probes the politics and limits of the archives: how they can distort and silence narratives of African girls in a slave ship. The archives have been cruel in erasing and muting the personal histories and memories of the African girls. In a cogent analysis, Hartman offers a new way of looking into the archives by “straining against the limits ... to write a cultural history of the captive, and, ... enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration . ... this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation” (11).
The fraught imagination of Hartman’s method, therefore, demands dissecting the gaps and filling in the closures to the wounds left by the colonial and state orders. One should partake in making and remaking the archives that will interrogate, challenge, and in Hartman’s utterance, critically fabulate. The outcome of the fabulation is deemed to be a “recombinant narrative,” which would converse with the lifeworlds enmeshed in the conjugating tenses of the past, present, and future.
Hartman’s critical fabulation resonates with Macario Tiu’s concept of “reconstructed history,” which makes use of local narratives and speculations in framing and reframing, presenting and representing, and constructing and reconstructing history by using the sources that can be culled in the communities such as oral traditions, folk stories, legends, Muslim tarsila (genealogies), gossips, testimonies, and other forms of folk lores and pieces of knowledge. This method
already has its traces evident in Tiu’s early work Davao 1890-1910: Conquest and Resistance in the Garden of the Gods, first published by the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies in 2003, but is fully exhausted in the first edition of Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory published by the Research and Publication Office of the Ateneo de Davao University in 2005 and winner of the Manila Critics Circle’s National Book Award. In the two books, Tiu uses the people’s stories and memory documents to fabulate and engage with history and archives.
In 2021, Tiu embarked on the effort to rework the knowledge, values, and quality of discourse by expanding, revising, and reprinting the second edition of Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory. At the heart of the new edition is the opportunity to rectify certain errors, contribute further information in the production of knowledge, and search for alternative critical locus and locution in updating Davao history. The new, revised, and second edition has additional 180 pages with interesting details that Tiu has continuously gathered from the communities 15 years after the first edition.
The heft of the anthology still resides in Tiu’s objective to “theorize” in Mindanao Studies by speculating the roots and tracks of conquest and state formation using our own folkloric materials and sometimes borrowing from the influences of Louis Althusser, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and other Marxist theorists. What the book tries to pose in this theorizing is the imperative need to decolonize Filipino nationalist historiography, and one way to do it is by mapping out the connections of Davao and its adjacent regions to the various events in Philippine colonial narratology. One may also infer that Tiu is encouraging researchers and scholars to accord Davao and its nearby regions the same way the mainstream discourses pay attention to the events and details in the national capital.
The introduction to the book implicitly sets a direction that is coordinated with the entire structure of the project. It suggests historiography that “deconstruct the pernicious biases of a colonially-motivated history and reconstruct it based on our people’s point of view” (xviii). The design of the anthology is to listen closely and search for the kernel of historical facts and truths in the so-called “naive stories” othered by traditional historical sources. Tiu is of the mind that the stories in the Indigenous and settler cultural communities should be decoded, evaluated, and interpreted not against but along the grain as they can supplement clues needed for a fuller and clearer understanding of history amidst its convoluted syntax and erroneous construction.
The second edition is still divided into five chapters. The first chapter details the historical highlights in the Davao region from the precolonial period up to the presidency of Rodrigo Roa Duterte. The part reveals the archeological excavations in Talicud Island in Davao Gulf and Davao Occidental, and highlights how the Davao region extending to the Balut Island in the southeastern part of Mindanao could formerly be attributed as part of the Magindanaw Buayan sultanate.
The succeeding chapter provides rich data and discourse on the various “tribes” that inhabit the Davao region.
It is interesting to stress how Tiu retained the nomenclature “tribe” to refer to the Lumad (Indigenous peoples). On the one hand, the Latin origin and Roman Republic imagining of the word “tribe” has evolved into a derogatory term for non-European people as it now connotes “fossilization.”
On the other hand, one may deduce that Tiu’s usage of the word “tribe” is a product of rigorous and careful research that is judicious in its assertions. Tiu veers away from using “ethnolinguistic group” because the data in the community say that some Indigenous groups may have different identifications and belief systems but still speak the same language, such as the Ata, Matigsalug, Langilanon, and Talaingod Manobo. That said, categorizing groups according to their “ethnicity” and “language” (ethnolinguistic) would be limiting and reductive; in addition, the Indigenous communities called themselves “tribes.”
The third chapter recounts the stories of the settlers who are imagined not in the traditional simplistic and summarized presumption of being the “culprits” of the “minoritization” of the Indigenous cultural communities but also as agents of how the Davao region has evolved and contoured its present shape.