Introduction Isagani R. Cruz Ir politics is the art of the possible, as Otto von Bismarck famously remarked in 1867, then cultural criticism is the art of the prob- able ‘The term “art of the probable” had already been in use in the jeld of immunology, but the literature professors at Massachusetts, te of Technology (MIT), offering a course in “Literature and 2007, may be credited for making it fashion- able among critics. What the MIT dons have in mind, however, pales in comparison with what Rosario Cruz Lucero has in mind Lucero’s thinking is closer to that of Aristotle, who declared that poctry (by which he would have meant, were he alive today, cverything, as in “theory of everyting”) was more philosophical than his and by history the lowest. Today’s barbershop or beauty parlor idits put it much more simply, though just as scathingly: the west creatures on the face of the earth talk about people and ts (wl ff the probable because it deals the logic is not exactly the two- Intoduction on earth, cultural critics take the whole world as their arena, Jing discourse into struggle sucero believes, like most postist crit She writes about, predictably, “literary” , Angel Magahum, and Magdalena ;crary imagination, metaphors and sym- jols, and narratives, but she also writes about things not found jerely ingrained in the collective If everything is indeed a text, so is this col other texts, its beauty must be T could say, for the sake of earning my keep as an introducer of someone needing no introduction for scholars in the field of culture, that there are disqui i the sense the word “disquieting” that the essays make me uneasy, make me lose my make me shake off the complacency that tempts taken, but in the sense ibrium, hardened masses of our people, and yes, thés, these deep-seated critical be- liefS have some truth to them, but they need to be fleshed out, qualified, and even deconstructed for them to have any practical ‘That, exactly, is what this collection does. Lucero works toward the beachhead of truth from the grains of sand, preferring hard larly data to footnoting merely translated, often just abstracted, mostly overrespected foreign critics. She discards the laziness ig beyond the words on the page to the the author. Always, she works from texta Introduction cb of intertextuality that mirrors the com- Ie contextualize and to root everything in iden jot mere nativism or the tendency to overvalue ion or the tendency to assume that we (ors and not original thinkers, but a genuine pétism word), able to transcend petty local, regional, national, rests for the sake of, yes, literature the being upon which the essays are grounded have to accept Raymond Williams's deconstruction the English term “literature” in order to do her research. In- stead, she takes a typically Filipino trait~complexity (as in complexity theory)—to promote her thesis that there is no bre literary tradition from the beginnings of our cultural life (which ‘can be traced back to the pre-Christian era) to today, whether that life is lived outside the imperial centers of Washington or Manila If. Everything , because everything is iterature, or more precisely, mn, including truth, The Music of Pestle-on-Mortar hoe oftthe. creation stieislanithes BapSbp tsibeaiaulbelstoryitt ‘Tuglibong, the female leader of the mythical beings who inhab- ited the earth first before the human race. In their time, the sun land sky were so low that the carth was scorched. To cool them- selves, the mythical beings hid in the pits and crevices of the earth. One day Tuglibong scolded the sun and sky while she pounded the rice with her pestle; and so the sun and sky flew up. “This myth expresses two themes that offer an explanation for two fundamental aspects of our culture. The first one is still com- monly known among us today. It is the belief that mythical beings we now call by the Spanish word encanio) reside in the earth’s cracks and fissures, through which the people’s erops and plants iardians, we offer prayers and ritue als, ranging from the simple “tabi-tabi kaninyo” to the elaborate planting and harv second mytheme is the narrative of how an inhabjtable world was created by much scolding and chiding to the rhythm. of pestle ibong who created the world as habit it now by reasoning with hostile cosmic forces. And this she eine This piece wom the Ist prize, Palanea Memorial Award forthe Essay in English, 2003 1‘The Music of Pestl-on-Mortar did while simultancously creating the music of peste hitting mortar in the preparation of food. We may usc this myth to define the basis of Ph re: that logos, or the act of reasoning, is twin sister to arf and both are inextricably ingertwined with food production, or the basic skills of survival Hence, the act of rice pounding is the symbol for the creation of art (rhythm), agriculture, and reason. All three human activities reasoning, creative work, and working for survival~are what keep the sun and sky in place, hence maintaining cosmic order. Without them, life is sterile or barren. When the Bagobo people cover the mouth of the mortar wi a board and they strike this board with a stick in rhythmic fas ion, they are converting the pestle-and-mortar into the musical instrument called the bolang Belang; and they are converting the act of rice pounding into the act of music making, Hence, what is a purely utilitarian instrament for the production of one of our basic necessities—that is, food—is transformed into a cultural instrament to celebrate the people’s oneness with the cosmos, During their festivals, which are occasioned by the cycle of plant- ing and harvesting, the Bagobo dance to the music of the bolang dolang, just as Tuglibong danced to the rhythm of pestl-on-mortar a long time ago to prepare the earth for the coming of the hu- I we go by the myth of Tuglibong to explain the roots of our Intellectual and creative traditions, we will sce that we want our creative verbs to be transitive. We create art not only to present eternal truths in a startlingly new and pleasurable way but create a world that is inhabitable because things are jusly in their x place. Or, t0 put it in the discourse of a modern Philippine , iis only when we are deeply rooted in our own intellec- tual and creative traditions that we can create an art and literature that will make a mark on our economic structures in a more pro- found and radical way than technological and political changes can ever do. We can use the rest of Tuglibong’s story to expand on this pos- sibility of an indigenous Philippine poetics. “Tuglibong had a daughter and a son, Mebuy: One day Lumabat decided that it was ‘The Music of Pesle-on-Mortar e Mebuyan, went up to heaven, But Mebuyan declined, for she preferred to go into the underworld called Gimokudan. The two quarrelled, Mebuyan filled a mortar with rice and then sat on it. It started spinning into the ground and Mebuyan, still sitting on it, strew grains of rice by the handful onto the earth. Each grain rice, she said, represented a human life that would go down with her into Gimokudan. In this underworld, a lemon tree stands. Whenever Mebuyan shakes this tree, somebody up on the earth . Mebuyan’s whole body is now covered with nipples, which ‘ad babies and children not yet weaned suckle until they are old enough to cat rice, Then they transfer to Gimokudan, where they will be among the spirits of their dead relatives. Mebuyan and Lumabat’s quarrel marks a new phase in the life the mythical beings that were first headed by Tuglibong. It is \e beginning of mortality for the inhabitants of the earth. In the Id state of affairs, before Tuglibong’s quarrel with the sun and mythical beings lived in a hostile environment but were at least reassured of immortality. In the new state of affairs, brought by Mebuyan and Lumabat’s quarrel, the earth is made more fertile and abundant, but its inhabitants have evolved into the human race as we know it now—hardworking and mortal. Thus, with these two creation myths—Tuglibong’s and Mebuyan-and-Lumabat’s—we have an explanation for how the jperworld, the earth, and the underworld came to be. All three vers of the cosmos came about because these two powerful and ‘ring women stood up for themselves and consequently for us, \cir children, and they stood their ground against whoever would fess them and us. Hence, our cosmic and psychic space and its boundaries were ed by these twin dispositions of toughness and tenderness. Mebuyan’s and Tuglibong’s stories represent the binary vocabulary art and literature: they express, on one hand, our toughness the face of catastrophic and cataclysmic events in our lives and, ur tenderheartedness toward all life on earth. because they wanted to give us, their fe and the gift for problem solving—besides beset by trouble and grief‘The Musle of Pestle-on-Mortat Like Mebuyan’s spinning mortar, our artandeliterature is both movement toward and movement within, buoyant and reassuring, insisting on solutions to problems that the Western mind would despair over as the inevitable human condition or as indomitable cosmic forces. What the Western culture insists we can only tran- scend, our indigenous culture insists we ean solve. juen aber _ Pethaps the never ending debate in our literary circles between form and content, or social consciousness and art for art’ sake, derives from our alienation from our cultural roots, Because of the sort of postcolonial Hiterary education we are stil having to submit to une questioningly, we are immersed in the Western attitudes of nihilism and despair, of ennui and angst (or, in Visayan translation, buangt ‘And yet, we find ourselves remaining suspicious of, and uneomfort- able with, them. “The racial unconscious,” “national identity,” “nativism—call it what you Tiké; but something in our soul eries for a way of ordering the universe that neither the gods of Mount (Olympus nor the heroes of Homer nor the antiheroes of Hemingway nor even the chocolate-drinking, levitating priests of Garcia Marquez can provide to our full satisfaction _.. This is not to say that a turning back (o our indigenous roots will finally heal all wounds and setde all wars. It is an irony of tragic proportions that the most battle-scarred spot of our nation is that part which we proudly point to as the showcase of all that is indigenous in us, untouched by Hispanization or America tion. This showcase of the indigenous, hence the purely in us, is Mindanao, It is an irony of global proportions, in fact that what begins as a people’s effort to stand up for their ethnic and religious identity and to stand up against the extirpation of it resulls in a series of massacres and pillaging and other such un- speakable crimes. And this local irony is duplicated many times over in Bosnia and Iraq, in East Timor and Northern Ireland, -Croatia and in New York, However, such affécious acts of ethnic {cleansing are more the result of military invasions aiming to eradi- cate the indigenous for the purpose of material exploitation than for the salvation of savage souls. Ethnic wars do not—nor sho lthey-negate the importance of our indigenous tradi preservation of our national spirit, As bearers of « our indigenous traditions provide us with the psychic equipment ‘The Music of Peste-on-Mortar Sag to defend ourselves against the forcible imposition of traditions that are foreign and inimical to our lives. In my island of Negros, there is a little known savage act of nic cleansing that occurred in 1856. ‘Two Spanish failes went ‘a mountain in the remote region of Kabankalan for the pur- pose of reduccion. Afier these two missionaries had succeeded in fying the Carol-an tribe and preparing them for settlement debajo de las campanas, the governor Don Emilio Saravia then abused the trust of the Garol-ans by entering their territory with army of 450 police and 60 guardias civil who were armed with fles and two cannons. The Carol-ans, however, had learned of je governor's treacherous plan, and so had built a fort made of .es and were ready with their weapons of spears and arrows. ‘After a brief but fierce battle, with superior arms on one side and primitive weaponry on the other, the Carol-ans retreated to their ‘wooden fort, which enclosed three large nipa houses, in which the non-combatant Carol-ans, that is, the women and children, were sheltering, They all shut themselves up in these thatched houses and set fire to themselves. To the very end, as they were dying of asphyxiation and burns, they continued to defend themselves. fanish officer who tried to enter the fort as the flames engulfed \¢ Carol-ans was killed by a spear that was hurled through the window of one of the burning houses. ‘The Spanish chronicler of this event, named Robustiano Jhauz, ends his narrative, in his book Apuntes de fa Isla de Negros 894, trans. by Donn Hart, Skeiches of the Island of Negros 978], 74) thus: ew memories remain, ‘The indios will forget because they are very ible to reduccion if peaceful methods and the policy of wh and compliant attraction ingrained in our system of mare used, In this system the sword is to be used only Jrcumstances demand. In this system the plow and work wry demonstrates the double- cleansing is achieved.The Music of Peste-on-Mortar ‘The Carol-an tribe of Kabankalan, Negros, was eliminated from the human race not only by rifle and cannon fire but also by hise torical amnesia brought about by the peaceful institutional~though we cannot say nonvi ses of Spanish colonialism. An Hongo writer of the 1930s, Leopoldo Alerta, has described such apparatuses as hunal nga ualay labud (blows that leave no mark) We today are as much the victims of this massacre in Kabankalan as the Carol-ans were in 1856. If we do not remember, much less know, in vivid and concrete detail how our people fiercely and nobly fought to preserve the integrity of their spirit and to defend the validity of their own trad is commonly believed to depic image of the Christ Child being borne on the shoulder of St. Christopher in the midst of the flora and fauna of the region." It is the showcase of our ability to ial masters by continying to preserve our true (¢ the Hispanization process. However, inside underneath the baptismal font, still shrouded coward the sea. Nowhere ao church is there implies the discovery of acts and occurrences of a scan- . the people in charge would rather consign n. There is a quaint word for the trapdoor leading to this sort of tunnel—the oubliette. It is a trapdoor that has been shut tight for so long that the tunnel underneath it and what might be hidden in that tunnel have long been forgotten. Etymologi- the trapdoor of forgetfulness. g0 back to their nalize them, admi ‘The Music of Pestle-on-Mostar i be one with them, speak for them—this is not to sentimentalize the savage” in us. This is not a call for the romantic revival of jaic forms, especially those forms that were produced in re~ the need of the times and thus were valuable for and their temporal nature. (Although T must allow, t00, ‘constant need for such spontaneous forms in whatever place ) ‘Our indigenous roots are living and dynamic traditions. They fare the narratives of our people’s historical experience, albeit told in the language of mythology. Creative writers are, or should be, ing in postmoden Lis a historical and political truism that the Philippines is con- currently a country of premodem, modem, and postmodern societies. ‘Our rural areas, small communities, and villages, while we may Jy characterize them as premoclemn, possess at the same time 1 of the trappings of postmodern cities like Manila, Los Ange- or Paris, In a secluded barrio in the province of Antique, for mice, there has been for decades a folk ritual held every Black lay of Holy Week, revolving around a giant wooden phallus see that the wooden phallus that T had heard being described in mpressive hyperbolic language had shrunk to merely life-size and \was in fact disproportionately small for the giant size of Judas’s effigy. e barrio ombudsman explained that he had prevailed upon the people to keep it down to modest size because cable TV had ly added a pornographic or a postmodern story, with the au- ‘a rural but globalized village named after San‘ ‘The Music of Pesle-on-Mortar or whom the cock crowed three times)—but which strangely Pedro in favor of that despicable traitor Judas and his, spine microcosm. Right here among he material we need for our premodern, . OF postmodern stories. Like Mebuyan’s spinning mortar, our Center is what gives impe- version of Tuglibong’s story is that which we heard or read in our childhood and which gave us our first answer to how the star formations came about. Once upon a time, the sky was so low that a woman who was about to commence hher chores hung her pearl necklace and bracelet on the sky. Then, as she pounded the rice in the mortar, her pestle repeatedly hit the sky so that it began to rise, carrying her jewelry along until it was out of reach. To this day, our elders say, we can see the woman's necklace and bracelet as the star formations that the Westerners, call the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. Practically every people in the world has a myth that explains the various star formations in the sky. The story of Andromeda and Philoctetes for the Greeks is for us the story of the old woman and her pearls. This is to imply, conversely, that a country insisting on the temporal and local specificity o producing inferior, or even non-, literature. Well speak for their own country's ‘The Music of Pesle-on-Mortar 3 sources and borrowings of our cultural traditions. There is, for nce, the swallowing of Lam-ang by the giant fish berkakan. is tale, we surmise, must have been influenced by the story of ‘ah and the whale, or even by Pinocchio. The story of how a tribe in Mindanao became so materialistic that it was punished by storms and floods so that Lake Lanao now lies where those sinful people once resided must have been appropriated from the story Sodom and Gomorra. And then there is the abundance of the ich must have been de- flood myths all over our archipelago, rived from the story of Noah’s Ark, We have, however, an epic—belonging to the Manobo tribe Mindanao—that explains why nations all over the world have rary motifs in common. A long time ago, the Manobo prince Baybayan, who hated war but loved only to sing and dance, was sent by his grandfather to travel around the world seven times, ging of the history and greatness of his people. We can there- 1c that Baybayan sang his stories in India, in the Europe, in Australia, and so on. And these regions lers in turn passed them on to their own children. This 1e world, there are narrative and musical poetry, is the source of all the world’s [At the end of his journey, Baybayan was lifte limba, where he now reigns in one of its seven layers as the of Poctry, Music, and Dance. And there he lords it over Rabindranath Tagore, William Shakespeare, Sappho, our owr Leona Florentino, and Jose Rizal, besides a host of all the artist lence tha \e root word of his name, baybay, means “to spell” in severa ‘sayan word for poetry i binalaybay. Our balete is « venerable tree with a broad trunk‘The Music of Pestle-on-Mortar 10 and innumerable roots sunk deep into Philip- soil. But is roots are also aerial roots, and we have no need to sever them in order to fly, to soar around the world seven times through our aristic creations. ‘The birth of the future that our first ancestress, Tuglibong, desired for us was made possible by her creation of the music of cour everyday life. Not to love our own people and our own music is akin to being deaf in a land of musicians, | Singer on the Mango Tree On a recent visit to a litte coastal town on a Visayan island, I gazed up at a bell tower of a church perched atop a hill. My host, an crudite history buff, was delivering the familiar spiel about bell towers doubling as lookout sites for Moro marauders sailing into view, The indio lookout would then ring the church bells, he said, thus providing ample warning for his family, fellow villagers, and— only perhaps incidentally—the detested padre, too. I had heard it several times before in history classes, with teachers’ performances ranging in modes comic to soporific, and on similar such visits to other towns and other islands. From where we stood, at the foot of the tower, all the pieces of such a story fell neatly into place. Even there on the ground, with our backs to the church, we could gaze out to sea all the way across to another island, which carved a hazy blue outline in the distance. So, when I decided to climb the rickety wooden stairs spiraling up to the top of the tower, it was not so much to put my friend’s instant history lesson to the test, as to travel back in time and imagine what it must have felt like to be that young indio lookout, on whose alertness of sight and mind depended the lives of his fellow indios and the white god, the padee. Stepping out onto the pe narrow balcony encircling the tower’s diameter, I gazed out; and iy litle gasps for breath converged into one sharp exclamation—Singet on the Mango Tree for several yards (like Pinocchio’s nose when he was blocked much of the sea from my view. If there were tower, it could only be of the neighboring island. But there was a narrow balcony that was obviously for walking around the tower, so what was I might add, for the balustrade had broken away in parts—t other side, and there, this time with my back to the sea, I faced the whole town sprawled all around the foothill, From where I stood, I could see into the open windows of Spanish-period bakay na ato. It was high noon on a summer's day, and so the streets were deserted. Otherwise, I would have es oF with the help of gaslights on lampposts, anyone standing on that baleony woul min slinking in the shadows. Later, from the large, open window of the cura’s comvento— Singer on the Mango Tree know that they were being spied on, and did on an elaborate show of sweet Catholic innocence for his sake? Converging at the tiangge, they would pretend to be singing about their wares but, knowing they were out of earshot, were exchanging bawdy Joas about his pomegranates bursting with fu- ile seed or about his hapless plough. Perhaps this was a signal for the village beauty to sit by her window, undo the topknot of her hair, and bathe it with agridulce and the oils of oloraso and sampaguita, And she would wink at her mother inside the house out of the fraile’s range of vision, as they waited for the wind, bending the sugarcane beyond, to waft her hair’s sweet fragrance up toward her people’s Spanish tormentor now turned tormented. Litle indio boys, between sturdy farmers’ legs and then—shooed out ol between coconut trees beyond the tiangge clearing, Fro the fraile might have watched with satisfaction at their moro-moro their epic hero Buyung Labaw Donggon and the great Sun-god iyung Saragnayan, fighting to the death over the lovely and ys especially if you tower, Beyond the village road and ses was the ocean of green cane interspersed with ised squash and alugbati, jackiruit and mango trees; above were the clouds that gathered color before the light went; and covering the horizon, the mountains stood where the cane and helping them- ves to anything , while the fraile an alcoholic stupor. The morning after such a raid, the le railed against them from the pulpit, spewing out a litany of vituperation: remontados, brutos, infieles, cimarrones, vagamundos, tulisanes, salbahes! And finally, buyungs! Only then would the indios not at these enemies of the fraile, but at the lacerating tone in which he spat out this sacred word, buyung, It was the ti ved only for the most revered of datus, their epicVv Singer on the Mango Tree cause-and-effect wordplay that should appeal most conventional or postmodern. Grocodile Chief is a fixture in the Pilandok series. With- our trickster hero would have no one to draw the boundary ie. But without him there would be no dire lecides to capture for himself a companion. He chooses to give that honor to the chief’s wife, who lives across the sea. How then Reaching the chief's yard, Pilandok climbs a mango tree un- der cover of night and entices the chief's wife with a song. The woman becomes enamored with what she thinks is a magical bird and goes to the mango tree to capture him. It is she who is cap- tured by Pilandok instead and the chief shouts for the servants to retrieve her. ‘The comic pursuit ends at the edge of the sea, where the crocodile chief is waiting for Pilandok and its reward. Of course, we, having the reader’s godly omniscience (which the secular ony), already know from the tale’s very has yet to learn: that Pilandok al- ways reneges on his promise. ‘To emerge from isolation into human action is to plunge into language games. ‘The sultan’s servants recapture the woman but now Pilandok himself is in trouble with the Crocodile Chief. It leaves its watery domain in hot pursuit of the man whose sole offence was to offer words anchored on no reality but carrying infinite poss bliss. Hence, between Pilandok and the Crocodile Chic the greater evil is not Pilandok’s spur-of-the-moment The truths of Pilandok’s fantasy she has to work out for herself, Pilandok the interloper is not a fixed political idea Singer on the Mango Tree o When Pilandok climbs the mango tree and begins to sing his song of enchantment, the sultan’s wife is undoing the topknot of her hair as she sits by her window, its “sweet fragrance” mi that of the mango. Charmed by the bird’s song, the sul search of the bird. When she finally comes upon. tree-sap has suddenly glued their eyes together ‘greetings, and it is “like ;. Being a marriage between art and its ind endlessly deferred, illicit and perfect, mania ‘only recognized, with a jolt, that it was a tsu- nami that this Sharif was surfing when I saw the tsunami’s attack on Phuket Island on TV news two years ago. ‘The first time I heard the myth being chanted up in the Cotabato mountains, i¢ was to me Angeles would have put it, except that this was on a grander scale.Singer on the Mango Tree wreckage of shanties sprawled beside the tourist cs of my own people’s suffering hovered in the back- ranging all the way back to my ancestors desperately digging in a parched land and then standing paralyzed with fright of a whole ocean hurtling toward them. 1am certain Plandok, the god of pragmatic survival, walked among the flecing lumad as they traversed the mountains, Among ‘our ancient heroes and gods, only Pilandok has kept his head above the water through all the centuries of foreign plunder. Our diwatas, more trustworthy and admirable for their rigid integrity, died one by one as the Spanish muertos, duendes, encantos, and ok over our Caves and earth mounds and forests and trees. e androgynous diwata of Makiling survived, becat transformed itself into a seductive nymph, her long brown hair waving in the wind, her Andalusian nose cutting an angular sil houeite in the wwilight as she sat stock still on a rock and dipped her lovely pointy toes into the Laguna. And then, for a coup de grace, she appended “Maria” into her place of became the fairy godmother Mariang Makiling haps the first sex chan, ~ Before tors had tured for simple reverence for its virgin forests. Only when the Spanish con- uistadors came did the people's entreaties take on a s demanding more and more things that she did not have power to give: porcelain crockery and silverware, table napkins and candlestick holders, golden nuggets and diamond ringsall Singer on the Mango Tree ee katoos, bears, lions, reindeer, and other such animals that we in the 200, and in the most abject conditions at that. Not so Pilandok, who once upon a time, before he evolved 0 the human tickster, was just a clever little mouse-deer, the allest creature at the very bottom of the forest food chain. ‘The pilandok the mouse-deer st survivor. Among the Subanen (literally meaning “people of the rivers"), Pilandok is a hero after whom their main River Palandok is named. Here is where he perished, crushed by a giant eel, with its deadly « sion of speed and deafness. But Pilandok lives on as the Muse/Music-and-Mischief maker of the tribal people's beklug ceremony, which he graces with his presence. Their ct : Td ile enough to walk along a sugarcane leaf. He so long that he will even lie curled around an earthen rice pot.” ‘The tsunami story, on the other hand, I heard from Baha Lambay Beliyan, who is the voice of the human race living in obscurity in a village of the Cotabato mountain range. In these van “the name of a mountain “Manobo” does n of the count “manobo” means simply “humar fore, you and I are as manobo as he is. An are only more or less evil than each other, as manobos from across the seas have demonstrated. ‘To get to Baha Lambay Beliyan from Manila I hopped on a plane to General Santos Ci took the FX van to Tacurong, took the bus to Kulaman, rode astride must keep -yond the end of bad roads, penetrable places, there are more secrets waitingSinget on the Mango Tree 20 And they come from him, who cannot read or svisest man I have ever met, because he is the keeper hence human, knowledge. A week later, on the bus winding round the mountainsides on back from Kulaman, I sighted a mountain peak that soared ‘ops ranged round ws. rected him without a moment's thought. But now, no longer one to shatter anyone’s mythology, T kept my own personal data bank to myself. liyan was the name of the mountain that the Manobo epic hero (and descendant of that flecin his people up to as they fled language of the first time Mount ing of all those epic formulas we had Odyssey: grandeur, hyperbole, Hom and-in recent decades with the Latin American boom—magic realism. How could Agyu’s people have carried up to that formidable peak one boul- der and a tree trunk each, as he bade them do? Impossible though that feat may have been to my limited modern mind they obvi- ly inventing themselves and the world, so that I could employ such indigenous concepts as metaphors for my and reading. Thus, instead of floundering in ess 1ad hoped to find my roots in lassical mythology. ing on that bus, beside a newfound friend hy Singer on the Mango Tree tenses past, present, and future—a buyung hero, enjoying from hi: Jookout mountain tower the unimpeded view of ent to their doom; a mother singing her baby to sleep: an mischief twinkling in his eyes, seducing us with tales of Pilandok singer on the mango tree.