THE ANTONINUS JOURNAL

Abstract

The call for redefining the nation’s culture and tradition through literature is just one of the many attempts which literary scholars painstakingly working for the development of literature and cultural studies. The oral and written literary forms of the regions continuously establish its position in the mainstream frame. Oral poetry like tigsik (toast poem or folk speech) is a treasure of the Bikolanos for its reference of cultural practices and sensibilities. But there are only few writers who attempted to explore tigsik as a literary and cultural reference of the indigenous folks. Presently, the tigsik, as an oral text has experienced a millennial development; it is now practiced in two textual forms: oral and print. In this context, this paper interrogates the selected texts from a grounded-ethnograhic postcolonial perspectives using text analysis, personal interviews (PIs) and observation to paratigsik’s (poets’) performances. This investigation is inspired by Homi Bhabha’s Third Space, which is grounded on the struggle for power, Virgilio Almario’s argument on nativist-structuralism which liberates the indigenous philosophy of orag (wit) and dunong (wisdom). The selected poems posit the possibilities for the subalterns to speak and be heard in the attempt to maintain the indigenous practice despite of their received Western consciousness and influence of modernity. Moreover, the selected texts demonstrate that appropriation and hybridization reconstruct the disavowed sensibilities, memory and consciousness, and create a negotiation between the indigenous and modern Self/Other.