In the ‘70s there was a popular radio program in Legazpi City which featured tigsik either recited live, phoned in, read from sent in mail or hand carried contributions. Every stanza began with Tinigsik ko . . . . Some time in 2010, I was asked to judge a tigsik competition in a local university. The participants were faculty members in one group and students in another. What were performed were not tigsik but rawit-dawit opening with Tinigsik ko . . . . Earlier, in 2009, I heard a lady “pararawit-dawit” deliver her “tigsik” in rap. This one gave me the cold feet.
Beginning a stanza with Tinigsik ko hardly makes a tigsik. In 1989 we published in the Bicol Folio (Vol. I Number 3, Year 1989) what tigsik is and how it should be performed. We hoped to help set matters in their proper perspective. Through the Bicol Folio, Jun Belgica and this writer revisited tigsik to come up with Tigsik of the Bikols hoping to foster a better appreciation of this ancient Bikol oral literature. Perchance to stop its spurt into the void where, sadly, harakbotan or Kristiyanong Turog now are.
Tigsik deserves to be snatched away from the woeful shoves of malpractice and indifference if we are to be serious with the recreation of memory in community life; if we are to put meaning to heritage and pride; if we are to believe that oral tradition is the core of creating new ideas; if we are to keep track of our story to consequently nurture life in our history and culture as a people.
Tigsik is definitely an oral tradition though not essentially testimony or oral history or orality but its rendition can be gifted with the nuances testimony or oral history or orality possesses. For instance, tigsik can be an exchange of personal memories and even histories of those who experienced historical eras and events as in testimony or oral history or it can be an exchange of thoughts and its verbal expressions where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the population as in orality.
But the more sobering question is: Have TV and radio, computer games and Facebook killed tigsik? Not yet maybe. But the poor thing appears to be down to its four limbs. The beatings are simply too much and too severe. Let us blow life into tigsik.
Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, puts it this way: “We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves.”
Our Tigsik should continue unfolding Bikol’s and the Bikolanos’ never ending stories unless we wish upon ourselves the forfeiture of our rightful sphere in the national and universal time and space of tradition and culture. Once upon a time, our stories had been told through Tigsik, faithful to its fashions, blissful with its pleasures. So be it, today and tomorrow.
Raffi Banzuela
October 18, 2011
(Introduction to TIGSIK OF THE BIKOLS, Banzuela, Belgica & Guanzon, Legazpi City, J & E Printing Press, 2011)
I am a student,taking Language Research my group decided to focus our study in Tigsik but we couldn't cope up with a good title. We need some suggestions.Thank you
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