'Toy napigket nga daga
Pitpitenmi nga umuna
Danggayanmi't kankanta
Takkiagmi a napigsa
Kettang ken bannogmi
dikam igingina 

     Mannamili
     Ilokano Folk Song

SARITAAN KEN SUKISOK

1.

            With the 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference, the pursuit of a huge dream has begun. The pursuit has something to do with that elusive nakem, the very consciousness of the Ilokano, the core of his being and becoming as the reality behind the concept speaks both the everyday and the future.

            In a sense, nakem is what gives us grace—this “us/we” as agents of goodness being multiplied, of greatness being attained, of the ethically plausible being acted out. While nakem can be a state of being—nanakem—it can also be a state of becoming—agnakem—with the flux in between both the energy and the eros—the gagar, the derrep, the rugso—to drive the actor to seek the meaning of life within him and outside him. For nakem is a ground to be covered; it is a goal to be met. But it is also the same instrument through which that ground could be covered, the same instrument through which the goal could be attained. It is both means and an end—the means to an end; the end to the means.  

            It is in this light that this first volume of conference proceedings has been thought of, with the prospect of coming up with a more definitive volume of proceedings right after the conference. The task of documenting the proceedings of this conference is not only historically urgent but also an ethical imperative, a categorical one at that.

            Because this task is rooted in the duty to resist—this duty to resist everything and all things that make us less human.

            Because this task is also rooted in the duty to re-claim that which is lost, gone astray, gone into wandering, like the karkarma or the kararua—the spirit—of the exile, the Ilokano who has had to find some ways to eke out and scratch out a life somewhere else other than the home country.

            Because this task is rooted as well in the duty to revolt—metaphysically, linguistically, and culturally—and stage that revolt for all to see so that in doing so, we are able to put together a collective memorandum and issue it out for all generations to benefit from including this generation of two kinds of Filipinos—and thus, also two kinds of Filipinos:  those who remained in the home country and those who went away to seek that which is hardly found—or cannot be found—in the home country. Somewhere, there is the saying that says about seeking that which ought to be sought, like the country that is hard to find. In the seeking, there is that declaration, as is said by others seeking: “I am going home to the country where I know I always belong.”

            But the country here is the language as well, apart of course from the country in the memory, in the imagination, in the land yonder and in the land left behind. The country is also a territory of the psyche, the soul, the kararua, the nakem, the kinatao, and the personhood that is both an ideal and a project. For, like the question of being and becoming, language operates this way, a residence so to speak, but a residence that demands some felicities and faith from the resident.

            The test of felicities and faith comes as more urgent to the resident who goes away. In the strange land, the sounds and sense of the familiar language haunts more and more—and more so when in the act of dreaming the mother tongue escapes the resident of the strange land even if we also acknowledge that in the home country, this inability to dream in the mother tongue but in other tongues does also happen. And when we factor in the social experience of layers and layers of colonization and neocolonization, in the truth of the fictions of our collective lives as well as in the fiction of the truths of our individual lives, we see more of the need to have this concerted effort to come together and definitively commence the ceremony for a real, honest-to-goodness saritaan and sukisok—for discourse and research.

2.

            The return to saritaan is both a rite of resistance and re-claiming. It is discourse through and through, premised on trust for what the word can do to open up new worlds, new vistas, new truths that are as tentative as the very power language offers to its owners, users, residents, indwellers—but premised as well on the kind of symmetry needed for a genuine speech to come about, for a real saritaan to come to a completion and thus, fruition.     

            The core of the saritaan is word itself—the sarita—sacred and magical, enchanting and seducing. Yet the sarita as language, as in other forms of language, is also a ruse, a trick, like the trick of that messenger who, in times past, was said to have invented it as a matter of necessity by force of his commerce, among his many interests. It is our duty, then, to make that ruse and trick act to our advantage by making them speak the truth even if the truth is of the more-or-less kind, offering to us approximations that we can hold onto in order to navigate the road to that famous search for that which is with sense and with meaning—or that which has meaning because, in part, it makes sense to us. The rule of the game in the saritaan is that sarita has to come about and those involved in its enchanting possibilities have to take part in its speaking the word, even if at some point, the word is unsayable, unspeakable, forbidden.

            This is where saritaan intersects with sukisok, that act of searching and re-searching in order for knowledge to come about, come anew into the consciousness, so that when present in the consciousness, knowledge gives light, the illumination bursting forth with other lights until all the lights bring about a luminescence that presents to us truth and meaning in their glory, that very truth that we seek, the very meaning that we are on the lookout with our act of naming the world, our experiences, our relationships.

3.

            We have said about the 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference as our collective act to bring into focus the various critical practices of the Ilokanos in the Philippines and abroad and to reflect on these practices under the prism of the nexus of cultures of global cultures, the urgent need to affirm minority cultural rights in the face of the hegemonic positioning of dominant cultures, and the need to articulate the silences in the narratives of struggle and survival of the Ilokanos.  The conference seeks a co(n)text with the centennial of the coming of the sakadas—and as such it aims to contribute to the reclaiming of the memory that attends to the sakada experience. With saritaan ken sukisok coming in as both a means and a method to this critical knowledge of Ilokanohood and Filipinohood, the conference hopes to contribute to the drawing up of a cure to the systematic amnesia that besets exile and diaspora, the latter the lot of many Ilokanos and Filipinos in many countries.

            Let this saritaan ken sukisok then testify to this search in order for the sweet salving of the word and memory to come about. It is only through this that the exile of language and country can go back and call out to his name again. It is only here where a genuine healing can ever commence.

University of Hawai`i

November 2006

Nakem Centennial Conference Secretariat
E-mail: nakemconference@yahoo.com or precye@aol.com
Phone:  808-956-8405.  FAX:  808- 956-5978
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