Rank-and-File Perspectives: Rebel Songs in Campo Muslim

A number of the political idioms that the rank-and-file fighters employed (in some cases self-consciously) in our conversations were identical to those advanced by rebel leaders. At the same time, it was striking to note how rarely any of the insurgents, in expressing their motivations for taking up arms or fighting on against great odds, made spontaneous mention of either the Moro nation (Bangsamoro) or Islamic renewal, the two central components of Muslim nationalist ideology.^[9] Direct interviews were not my primary means for discovering rank-and-file perceptions of the ethnonational rebellion. A richer source of information was the songs and stories of the rebellion that community residents shared with one another and repeated to me. Those narratives reinforced the impressions gained from interviews that unofficial understandings of the rebellion were not congruent with its official ideology.

One night in Campo Muslim I happened upon a performance of rebel songs in the house of Kasan Kamid. His elder brother was visiting on a short leave from his overseas job in Saudi Arabia and had arranged to make a recording of a performance to take back with him. I added my tape recorder, and over two nights I recorded almost three hours of songs performed by a young man with a splendid voice and a battered guitar.

I later heard some of the same songs performed in a variety of public settings: at political rallies, on Muslim radio shows, and on jukeboxes in Muslim coffeehouses throughout the city. Most of the songs had been composed between 1973 and 1977 (the period of the armed rebellion) by three renowned singers. All three were rank-and-file insurgents from lower-class backgrounds. One of the three was killed during the fighting. The other two became well-known after the cease-fire in 1977, when they began to perform the songs in public. Before 1977, they were sung almost exclusively in rebel camps to fighters. The man whose performance I recorded is an illiterate dockworker. Too young to have fought in the armed rebellion, he is a second-generation singer who was taught the songs by the most active of the original composers.

Rebel songs comprise a new and distinct genre of Muslim popular music. The songs share Western harmonic features and a common topical content, with all lyrics addressing some aspect of the armed rebellion. While traditional phrasings are occasionally present, all the songs exhibit a modern lyrical style. Some, especially those songs concerned with forced separations or unrequited love, are variations on a novel song form popular in the years prior to the rebellion. From the mid-1950s, local singers had put Magindanaon lyrics to the melodies of popular Filipino love songs heard on the radio (whose original lyrics were in Tagalog, Visayan, or English).^[10] These adaptations, especially popular among teenagers (Wein 1985), differed in lyrical style from traditional love ballads, which are distinguished by the obliquity of their metaphors. The new ballads are, by contrast, notable for their directness of expression. Rebel singers used these popular love songs as the basis for many of their ballads.

Other rebel songs, usually up-tempo, inspirational pieces, borrow motifs and melodies from contemporaneous Filipino or American popular music. The following song, "Mana Silan Cowboy" ("They Are Like Cowboys"), is sung to the melody of Glenn Campbell's 1975 American hit record "Rhinestone Cowboy."^[11]

Nineteen seventy-one
taman ku seventy-nine,
entu ba su lagun mayaw
su rebolusyon
siya kanu embala-bala
a inged u mga Moro.
Guden makating-guma
su Paminasakan.

Natadin su mga manguda,
lu silan natimu u damakayu.
Mana silan cowboy,
di magilek masabil.
Mawasa, mamala;
ulanan a sinangan
kanu mga lalan.
Namba su paninindeg.

From nineteen seventy-one
until nineteen seventy-nine,
those were the years when the
revolution was raging
throughout all the different
communities of the Moros.

It was the time when the
Destroyer had come among us.

The young men at first were scattered, but they gathered together deep in the forest.
They are like cowboys,
unafraid to be martyred.
[They fight] wet or dry;
they are soaked by the rain and scorched by the sun along the way.
These are the revolutionaries.^[12]

While putting Magindanaon lyrics to nonindigenous melodies is certainly not a new undertaking (it may be traced to the late American period), the combination of melodies, lyrics, and topics found in rebel songs does constitute a distinct popular genre that offers a source of grassroots expressions of support for the armed separatist struggle. As noted above, the songs are of two types. The majority are ballads of separation or loss, lamenting loved ones left behind by rebels gone to fight in the forest. The rest, as with "Mana Silan Cowboy," are patriotic songs, glorifying the struggle and extolling the virtues of the fighters and their commanders. The following introductory stanzas from two songs exemplify each type:

Song 1

Manguda a inendan sangat
I kamiskin nin.
Uway den u inendan
paninindeg ku inged,
Jihad pi Sabilillah.
Ayag tig i inendan,
sekami a paninindeg pimbulugan sa limu
na inenggan sa tademan.
Tademan di lipatan.

Uway den u inendan na
rasay rumasay kami
sa hadapan sa Kadenan
ka Jihad pi Sabilillah
taman den sa kapatay.
O seka papedtayan na
pamimikilan ka den.

The young man whom you rejected
was a poor man, it's true.
But now he's fighting for the homeland
and offering his life
in the struggle for the faith.

I whom you rejected say to you,
that we the fighters are shown mercy and are given recognition,
given recognition that will
never be forgotten.

Yes, you've refused me, it's true.
Yet we fighters suffer hardship
till we stand before our God;
we will sacrifice ourselves
for the sake of our religion
until the day we die.
Oh my beloved, please consider this.

Song 2

Aden maulad a lupa
a gadung a pedsandengen
na san bun ba i dalepa ni Hadji Murad.
Pagagayan, panandeng, ka pamagayanan nilan
i sundalo a pagukit ka di nilan kalininyan
madala su Agama.

Ka duwan nengka den, Marcos
ka di ka den makandatu ka inagawan
ka nilan ku bangku nengka matilak
bangunan sa Mindanao.

Behold in the distance
a wide green land.
That land is the abode
of Hadji Murad.
[The fighters] lie in wait
for the soldiers to approach,
for they never will allow
their religion to be lost.

Oh Marcos, you are pitiful
for you can no longer rule here.
They have seized from you
your splendid throne,
the realm of Mindanao.

These two sets of lyrics, typical of the discourse found in rebel songs, are revealing both for what they voice and do not voice about the objectives of the rebellion. Song 1 combines the themes of romantic redemption and religious struggle as a rejected suitor seeks to convince the woman for whom he yearns that the rebellion has introduced new standards of worthiness. It expresses in its opening lines a significant independent incentive for taking part in the rebellion: fighting as a

perceived avenue for poor men of low status to improve their relative social standing. As nearly all rank-and-file insurgents were drawn from subordinate classes, the composer, in framing this ballad as a poor man's entreaty, gives voice to social resentments and aspirations broadly shared by his principal audience.

Two central concepts found in most of the rebel songs—"inged" (community or homeland) and "jihad" (struggle in defense of the faith)—are textually coupled in the first song.^[13] The inged is the socio-cultural entity in need of defense. As a term referring to any sociopolitical collectivity larger than that found at a single residence site, "inged" is usually glossed as "settlement" or "community" but may also be used to refer more broadly to a "homeland." Though both terms reference political entities, "inged" and "bangsa" possess quite different connotative meanings. "Bangsa" may be glossed as "country," "nation," "race," "ethnic group," or "tribe" (Fleischman et al. 1981, 10). As used in the term "Bangsamoro," "bangsa" describes an imagined community—an ethnic nation . "Inged," on the contrary, denotes a familiar, territorially bounded, and, often, face-to-face community. In none of the rebel songs I recorded (some in multiple versions) did the terms "bangsa" or "Bangsamoro" ever occur. "Moro" appears only once, in the song "Mana Silan Cowboy" in conjunction with "inged" in a phrase referring to the geographical extent of the rebellion, which is said to be raging "siya kanu embala-bala a inged u mga Moro" (in all the different ingeds of the Philippine Muslims). While fighting for the inged is not alternative to fighting for the nation (bangsa), neither is it simply a subjacent goal. If it were, one would expect at least an occasional reference to the "bangsa" that has subsumed the various ingeds. These are not found in the songs, nor were they heard to any measurable degree in the many private and public conversations I had with rank-and-file fighters or their civilian supporters. Fighting for the inged is a collateral goal—one conceptually distinct from the nationalist project but germane to it.

In song 1, "inged" and "jihad" are thematically linked: the community being defended is the indigenous community of the faithful. Song 2 extends this theme. There, the inged to be protected is the homeland of Cotabato Muslims.^[14] In these lyrics, Cotabato is represented as the dalepa , or occupied territory, of Hadji Murad, the commander of the Cotabato rebels. The rebels have repulsed Ferdinand Marcos the invader (signified in the song "Mana Silan Cowboy" as "the Destroyer") and recovered from him his bangunan , the territory ruled by him in

Muslim Mindanao. The rebels are ready to repel all military counterattacks in order to preserve their religion. This second song expresses the fighters' particular notion of jihad—armed resistance to the specific aggressive actions of the martial law state, personified by Marcos. For rank-and-file rebels, struggle in defense of Islam was coincident with armed defense of cultural tradition, property, livelihood, and life. In this song as in the first, those sentiments are expressed in the language of locality and territoriality—"lupa" (land), "dalepa" (occupied territory), and "bangunan" (realm)—rather than in terms of nationality.