The Rising of the Dawn

I was born at around two o' clock in the morning of the seventy-second year of the twentieth century, as I have been told by my mother. If hospital records would concur, then this must be the fact. My mother once told me that she had a reasonable difficulty in her labor that it took her towards the beginning of dawn before I first breathe the air of this mortal world. That day, all Moslems went to the community mosque because it was also the day in the Hijrah Calendar to be the commemoration of the birth of Prophet Mohammad (P.B.U.H.), the feast of the Maullud-din-nabi.

I had a very special affiliation with this coincidence because when there is nothing more to say, I always mentioned to my friends that indeed I was born on the day Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) was born. To be born in the day a known prophet was born may be a sign of some bigger things for me ahead I thought, something grand that I had a sentiment of grandeur because of the coincidences of my birth. There was some sort of pride in this; perhaps I was just like any Christian born on the twenty-fifth of December.

So I celebrated two birthdays each year. My aunt Minda would prepare me a feast and my cousins would savor upon Chinese ramen and chiffon when April came. My grandfather, Imam Unih, a Muslim preacher, on the other hand, would always hand me some money to celebrate my birthday when Maullud-Din-Nabi comes which I always used to buy lots of toys instead of a grand feast.

Mine was a very unusual childhood. As far as my memory takes me back, it had seemed that the first consciousness I have gotten was to be a child living with my grandfather, those memories where my grandfather was always there when I was still an infant. My grandmother, Hadja Daihanna, passed away when I was about three year old or so that I really had no substantial memories of her except to see her sitting stoically in her rocking chair for hours and hours, all day long due to general paralysis. I remember quite well that in my pre-school ages, I always dream about her (those dreams where I always fall from my bed; having that feeling of falling endlessly from a cliff).

I dreamt that I was flying furiously through the woods terrified from being chased by this being who looked like an old woman with graying hair l like wire fences on her hair and she had wings blacker than the night. And it was really uncanny that she looked like my grandmother, at least the stringed hair was similar as I observed her when sometimes she let her long hair spread out in order to dry it up after a bath. I had this kind of dreams and the winged old woman sometime had companions and they kept on chasing me. In one of those dreams, I also had these companions who looked cherubic and whose hair where curly like American babies. It was because of these dreams that in my waking hours, I felt some discomfort every time I stared at my grandma, though at that early age, I have learned to dismiss those dreams to be merely dreams and nothing more.

I had this particular dream that left me really screaming in the deadest hours of the dawn. Again as usual, I was speeding through the night forests being chased furiously by those dark winged creatures that looked like my grandmother Hadja Dayhana. I would bend my arms in front of my face in order to protect my body from the branches of the trees that I went into in my flight from the flying specters, speeding into nooks and caverns. As I escaped from the woods, I blurted into the wide-open night sky and lost those who were chasing me. I was huffing and puffing from the furious chase and flew to a nearby gathering of trees and there I found my companions, those cherubim with faces of infants. Without speaking in words, they instructed me to be quiet while we had a view of a assembly of people encircling a huge campfire. They were all kneeling and I saw some familiar faces, the ones who were chasing me, being part of the group, chanting and singing and howling as they faced the burning woods in the middle of the circle. It was a ritual. I was awe-stricken by the unusual event before us when suddenly, something from behind us moved and the winged serpents found us again and we scurried hurriedly, to flee again. When I woke up, I screamed my hearts out and my grandfather had to make me drink cool tap water.

These were the familiar nocturnal dreams that I had when I was so young and little. Each time I woke up, I always felt so surprised to find myself in bed instead of the caves and forests that were inside those dreams, as if I really was in those dreams that in fact whenever I fell in a dream, from trees and cliffs, I also fell from my bed.

Of cherubim I always had memories the most vivid of which was me afloat the clouds with many of them trotting throughout and food fell from the sky without end and we held baskets to collect the manna from heaven. I remember these dreams for they were happy dreams.

I died once when I was a child. I profess to these because now as I grew older, I realized that memories are there to remind us of things that happened in the past and not to put fabricated events in our mind. How could one for example imagine past events that are so vivid that they recur incessantly whenever we see things that remind us about such incidents, refreshing our memories towards the growing years. For example, whenever I see rice fields I always go back to the days when I and some other children would scour the wetlands and hunt for birds with our slings. The smell of coffee now takes me back always to the moments when my grandfather would always retreat to the front yards and sip hot ground coffee while sitting in his rocking chair, wiling away the afternoon without uttering any word while reading Arabic jottings he had written himself in miniature notebooks.

Dying was a matter of darkness. Death is all of darkness, just like sleeping. When we sleep, we close our eyes and slip into darkness and unconsciousness sets in. Such was dying. Darkness was like a tunnel, like being caught in the body of a huge cannon. My body floated towards higher ground like a speeding rocket coming out of the dark tunnel. I had a feeling similar to skateboarding and of being carried in a Ferris Wheel, lifting my entire soul into a maze and into a circle. At the end of the tunnel, I appeared so suddenly into the open air that made my skin tremble a bit. And lo and behold, I found everything to be brighter than any sunlight that I have experienced before. Above me was pale bluesky, a kind of hue that was so sweet to my eyes and below me were clouds thick as foam. I felt a sudden gush of joy that my heart flew and skipped a bit. In the air was the spine-tingling sound of strings possibly that of a clarion or a banjo guitar and my eyes swelled with tears as I felt an overpowering outpour of divine happiness. I floated and floated, letting the wind control my body, leading me towards the thicker clouds that lies ahead. Within the clouds appeared angels with curly blond hairs and faces that one imagines the biblical David have. So handsome and so pure in white raiment and wings so white as they flutter through the clouds. They seemed to be full of jest, disappearing suddenly and appearing at the other ends of the walls of clouds. As I hovered through the clouds, I could see a figure that took to be the shape of a white castle, as I go nearer, I affirmed that they were really castles afloat the clouds, my first sight of a castle with high turrets and towers; years before I saw an illustration of such in children's books. Before I could reach the castle, I suddenly woke up and found myself atop the table in the living room of my Uncle Mameng's apartment, the eldest child of my grandfather who we were living with, and I could see my bloated stomach as I regained vision slowly and slowly. Initially, my vision was dull and could only appreciate the sight immediately in front of me until I regained full view. I could see my father worriedly scurrying near me but with a great sigh of relief in his face while the others smiled. I heard the man whose name I could not really remember now, living next door, saying to my grandfather, "See, I told you he would be alright". And then I still remembered my grandfather's face with tears on his face. That was the only time that I saw him cried and never ever again.

It was a fever so high that almost took my life in my infancy. I had frequent fever attacks then that often, my grandfather would perform a sort of ritual with a blade in one hand and a candle on the other, reciting Arabic prayers in order to cure me of my fever. Of the many times that I remember him doing such ceremony is how I reckoned how in my early years, I was often afflicted with high fever.

I felt so harassed by the heat every time during those bouts that my head was aflame and my skin was torching. In such infantile consciousness, I always remembered how my body was burning with extreme temperature that my consciousness would somehow separate from my own body. When my body became numb and isolated, the burning sensations were not as disturbing anymore.

My grandfather was a busy man that he had to be concerned with my frequent fever attacks while at the same time lulling my grandmother away from her recurrent malady.

Once I had asked my grandfather about my grandmother's weakness and general immobility. He told me that it was indeed because of a disease that afflicted her and that she would not be able to speak so well anymore. What I really wanted to asked him was why she would scream at times into the midnight that everyone in the house would be awaken. What kind of disease would let one scream into the night was the thing I wanted to inquire upon. But as a toddler, I bet there are things that we do not even know how to ask, when vocabulary would not be enough to elucidate our inquiry. Everytime she was attacked by such "disease", Uncle Mameng and the servants would come and help my grandfather calmed her down, to reassure her that everything was all right. She was always murmuring about some person she was afraid of; a one she calls "the jinn".

"There are no jinns. You are just imagining" my grandpa always assured her while she would lay there wide-eyed and trembling. From the looked on her eyes, pity was the natural thing I could feel for her. She was like a child afraid of something.

"I have checked the whole house and there was no Jinn around" my uncle would add to further reassure her.

At times the attacked on her nocturnal sleep would be so serious enough that in the stillness of the dawn, we would packed the necessities and head for the hospital, staying there for nearly a week every time.

At such a young age, my grandmother's predicament affected me so much that I had always hoped then that I was already grown up and be able to help her, wishing earnestly to appease her. Those dreams of flying had made me somehow distant from her, a little bit wary of her and somewhat disturbed that the winged old woman in my dreams somehow looked like her. And yet, I felt so much for her. Besides those were merely dreams.

Once I decided to investigate the cause or causes of the "weakness" of my grandmother. I was relatively confident that I would find some answers however tender my mind at that time. It was in the apartment's bathroom with its yellow darkened light and perpetual wet floor that she had pointed to be the place where she had seen the "jinn". The bathroom had malfunctioning equipment that always had that pungent smell typical of aging lavatories, full of slime and fungi stuck to walls and corners giving it a dark green shadow all over, from the floor to the ceiling. What augments the general dimness was the decision of the household to put a bulb of the weakest power that even at daytime, I would always feel like it was already midnight whenever I enter it. There was desperation written all over it that anyone who went into the toilet would realize immediately that it was a place where the smell would remain even if best efforts to clean it up would be undertaken.

As I relieved myself, I tried to stay longer when the apartment was quiet and everyone was either asleep in the afternoon or were out for work. I examined the ceilings for some clue and stared at the walls for holes and cavities to where the jinn might be hiding. When I convinced myself at that time that there would be no such signs of the unknown being, I stepped back and headed for the door. As I turned my head, suddenly I saw in the corner of my left eye a huge shadow of a man that goes from the floor towards the ceiling, the shape of its head folding into the surface of the ceiling. The hairs at the back of my head stood up and I felt my skin trembled. Despite such apparent terror however, I gathered all of my strength to focus my stare into the wall but the shadow was not there anymore. I went quickly outside and found the afternoon very still as usual.

I went to the garden in the front yard where I usually enjoyed my solitariness when the sun was readying to fall towards sunset and played in the gardens, picking some leaves and mangling some stems. My cousins would be asleep in that hour of the afternoon while I did not developed such habit, allowing me so much time alone to play with whatever my mind could think of. As I put some stones into holes that I have previously dug in the ground, I pondered upon the shadow in the toilet. Was it the shadow of the "jinn"? It was a huge being I thought and the image of the shadow was vivid enough that I was able to surmise that it wore a g-string garment on its body and had a strip of clothe wrapped around its head while its hair was shoulder length, like an ancient warrior. He must have held spears and knives but such things did not appear to me.

I kept on digging holes and putting stones and coins into them and then covering back the holes, ironing out the surface to look as if the soil were never disturbed. Such was the kind of solitary games I played. I have reckoned then so early in my life, when I dug up the stones and coins the day after, that plants and trees could grow from the ground and flowers multiply too; but stones and money would not.

I had perhaps had a very strong desire to tell my grandfather about the shadow but somehow I did not had enough inclination to put them into words while my grandmother kept wailing in the middle of the night every now and then. Then after a while, her predicament eased towards serenity that she just stared and sat in her rocking chair until she died in the hospital one day while I was looking after her. My Aunt Julpa cried first and asked me what have I done that she died. Of course, I did not know what to say but her asking was etched so much into my mind that every now and then I would ask myself if indeed I had done something to hasten her death. But as I child that I was then, the disturbance of Aunt Julpa's inquiry just faded into memory till now that I earnestly attempt to recollect those events so far into my childhood.

There were a lot of card games played while the family was mourning the death of Hadja Dayhana and the smell of brewed coffee permeated as the men would take turns in making the coffin. They were in jest as they kept on putting one up against each other about who is the better carpenter. My father attempted to drive a nail into its rightful place but the rest laughed that Salip Hussin could never become a sharp carpenter. This had somehow eased my apprehensions about Aunt Julpa the day before. Every one was in a light mood that everything must have been all right and done with. Dying in the latest of ages seemed to be most acceptable to all. But when my grandmother was finally rested to the ground, as the men held her body so gently and tucked her into the crevices of the ground, almost everyone was teary eyed and Aunt Julpa was even talking to my dead grandmother while we throw soil to cover the grave, about why she had to leave, about her being not able to come and visit her frequently. How could she talked to a dead person I thought? Would her cries and words be heard and not flow into the rural wind of Taluksangay? This had somehow recuperated the apprehensions I had about her.

There must something in my grandmother that gives spark and liveliness to the house that after she died, there was a gradual silencing of the household and everyone was more incline to frown, more inclined to be introspective that conversations became lesser and us children played lesser games, as if a great lonely shadow was cast over the household. If anybody missed her among the members of the house--including the servants--no one could tell, the least myself. It was the newfound serenity of the surroundings that everyday I had wished that all those who played card games in the mourning of my grandmother would come and played those card games again and again, to make the noise stifle the sadness of the gardens and of the front yards, to fill the air with coffee smell again and of rice cakes. But this was never so. And so in the afternoons, I kept playing in the garden, careful that the traces of stems mangled and flower picked would not be apparent enough less my Aunt Nene would call upon to inquire upon the suspects and then the guilty malefactor, which would be either one of my cousins or me. I went about to pretend that I was like the older men who did the coffin thinking that I might become a good carpenter, unlike my father. It was in sunny days that I loved to play alone in the yards when the air was a little yellowish and everything seemed to glow, like the image of those pictures not developed properly and everything in the picture would be bright yellow. I smelled the air and they were thick that almost I could see the wind swooping by, and caressing my hair so gently. I smelled such air so smoothly they seemed to be delicious, like chicken or chiffon cake thickly covered with butter. In one of those sunny afternoons, I had looked towards the sky and observed the sun. I tried to examine if the sun had come nearer towards the ground that everything looked brighter. And my mind got stoned when suddenly the clouds move so agile that a hole in the sky formed, like a gate opening. And then I saw a very colorful image coming into the center of the hole. What a beautiful kite it was I said that it had the bluest of blue and the greenest of all green. It was a horse with the head of a woman with its hand waving at me. A kite would not do such things I told myself. And the gate in the sky closed and the technicolor horse disappeared.

I wanted to ask my grandfather if kites could stare back and waved at us while in the sky but somehow, I did not ask anymore. It happened in those very early years where my vocabulary was not yet efficient to elucidate every thought I had then.

(From my unfinished autobiography "A Prophet's Life".

My Grandfather Unih & the Alligator at Sea

When I entered high school my grandfather took me back and paid for the expensive fees of my catholic schooling. He had become weaker and weaker that perhaps, he needed someone to tend over him when weakness consumed him altogether. He had bouts with asthma that often, we both slept in the hospital for days. The hospital became my second home during those years while I struggled with my studies.

In his healthier days, he would give me Arabic lessons and great myths of old. Being a Moslem preacher that he was, he was always writing some Arabic scribbles into his minute notebooks and I would ask about them.

"It is the mysteries of the world." He would always say. I wanted to ask if for who does he writes it for when almost nobody could understand Arabic but I did not.

I would observe him scribbling all afternoon like a well-versed scholar on composing his post-graduate opus. He had an apprentice whom he always consults every now and then, a young preacher named Abirin, who was also our relations. I would go along with him to these frequent visits and indeed they compared notes. I observed so keenly how they relate and strangely enough, they do not speak as much to each other but they would smile and grunt as if they understood each other. One time, they had this ritual where they lit up a candle and Abirin was holding the Tasbi, the Moslem prayer beads, and held it up that it lay there static in a hanging position. There was no one around except the three of us. Both of them continue to mumble Arabic verses that they both seemed to fall into a trance, including me that my sight got plastered into the hanging Tasbi. Then all of a sudden, the beads swayed back and forth, about forty-five degrees from left to right. Then it went forth in wild circular motion without the hands of Abirin moving. Then if stop so abruptly that even at that age, it must have been impossible. When after a while, the Tasbi stopped completely in a forty-five degrees position, for a bout sixty seconds and this had astounded me so much for I know this is not how gravity actually works. My hairs stood up and felt a sadness so deep that I wept there so hard, and tears flowed from my eyes like a river. Both of them pacified me telling me that "it's alright. It's all right. Stop your crying". And they were both smiling at each other without conversing in dialogues.

One of the manuscripts that Hadji Unih was writing one afternoon was a wide paper with shapes in them. It was so wide that he had to fold it before tucking it into his black leather case. In the middle of it all was a circle and at each side were three rectangular shapes. At each corner was a triangle and within the shapes were Arabic verses. I was particularly mystified by the work that I asked him its meaning and consequences. "It's the mystery of our existence," he would vaguely answer again. I imagined those writings to be charms that I had a keen eye on them, coveting them in my heart that I planned to tuck them away. I daydreamed that they would give me powers of the supernatural kind. One that could make me disappear perhaps and become invisible or one that would afford me extreme luck and plow in mountains and mountains of money and other riches. But it was only after he died that I have got hold of the paper that I wanted most. Not by stealing it away as I had planned but by just appearing in my sight several nights after he had died. All his garments and materials were distributed among the relations including all his writings and paraphernalia. It was only the one that I coveted much that I found in the empty closet that we both used to share. I was so consumed with sadness that after putting the paper in my bag I just forgot about it and did not mind it much until years later. His death meant that I had to go back to my mother and started the "silent years" of my life.

The death of Hadji Unih was like the world falling down on me. I awoke to a newer set of reality where the very person that almost became everything to me, to be the father and a mother, to provide every garment and every toy, suddenly disappeared. My body became literarily wobbly that uncertainties of future things cast a huge gloom into my mindset.

I became the more introspective and the change was so abrupt that my classmates once took notice of this change and ask if something wrong was happening to me. I said there was none.

As I visited his tomb every now and then, I would take a stone from the surface of the ground where he was buried thinking and hoping that his spirit would into the stone and guide me throughout my life. I would be like a man gone out of his head as I spoke to him while my words just flew into the wind. Extreme introspection was the consequence of his death to my person but sadness was not so. A week after he died, my mother and many others would still cry, especially my mother who even months and years after, she would wake up in the middle of the night to sit by the dimly lit kitchen of Hadja Saniya and cried. But I did not cry as much. Weeks after his death, I was playing basketball with so much fire that I excelled in it. I cried once and then never again. My body became lighter that despite the abrupt change in the things that I have, as compared to the things he had been affording me, I never cried so much over him. As if somebody was lifting me up and protected me from longing so much for him.

And yet, the lack of things was a something that I had to struggle with and took me a long time to adjust.

Years later, he would appear in my dreams. One of those dreams I quite remember so well. We were walking along the bridges and planks of a Moslem community by the sea, like typical communities of Samals. It was unlike any community that I see or that I have been. As we were walking, his footsteps became faster and faster, leaving me a little behind and struggling with my own footsteps. Then he walked faster that the distance between us became wider and wider until he ran suddenly forward. I was teary-eyed calling out for him, not to leave me behind. I could see him run and suddenly dived into the water below and swam towards the deeper sea. I was flooded with tears as I ran after him and I also jumped into the water. I struggled to swim as water poured in through my mouth and suddenly he appeared from under and carried me while he swam like a swooping tornado. When we were in the middle of the sea, he suddenly became a crocodile. I did not mind it so much as the ride gave me a serene exaltation, and a wide grin was on my face. The dream ended as we approached the beautiful orange sunset against the blue horizon.


There was a time when my grandfather was telling me the story about "the man in the moon". In moonlit nights, long after my grandfather died, I sat and merge with the cold wind and studied the geography of the moon's surface. He called the man Taberlok, a scary name I surmised then. He rode the sky in a magic broom and had a pointed trumpet-like hat. He comes down once in a while my grandfather said, looking out for kids who did bad things and taking them away into some other world, never to return again. I shriveled at the proposition that I gained some distrust against my grandfather. How wicked Tamberlok was I thought for children only wanted to play and laugh all day long.

But Tamerlok was not a one-dimensional freak after all as my grandfather continued. On the other hand, according to the old man, a good kid was given a wild and happy ride across the stars and beyond. And it would be a very enjoying ride my grandfather always reassured me.

As I grew older, I reckoned this tale to be purely made up but somehow I kept staring at the moon when the moments were perfectly at hand. I had hoped very much that my grandfather was the real "man in the moon" in order that he may come and took me a ride across the meteors and along side those speeding comets. If he was the moon man I thought, I would gain the wild and happy ride, because I had been generally good with him, at least as I had believe then.

When he was alive, he would always take me with him whenever he had to go downtown or visit some relations. It was a happy walk always that before we went home, we passed by the store to buy some toys or new garments.

At times I stared at the moon so fervently that at one time or another, I saw a face with a huge grin pasted on it. The moon was sometimes a person, living and breathing. They say when it was at its fullest, ghosts and winged serpents would appear and roam the sky and the earth, but to me, it was another chance to summon the man in the moon.

I called upon the spirit of my grandfather also whenever I pray, after calling out to God. It was extremely difficult for me to memorize those Muslim prayers that after trying my best, I gave up and decided that I should settle with the prayer of the beads which only three words were muttered in Arabic. I conformed then to the idea that every prayer, as long as it was genuine, was good enough. There was this Tasbi that my grandfather had which I kept until now as a remembrance and I used it in my nightly calls to Allah. Since he died, my night calls gained sufficient frequency. I called on Allah and confessed all the things in my heart. The things I did in the day and all the things I did not. I felt so sinful then that not at one instance merely that tears would flow down easily from my eyes. "I am despicable", I admitted always. I call upon God and sometimes I could interchange Him with my grandfather unknowingly that my tone for my meanderings were indistinctive, regardless if I was confessing before God and summoning my grandfather.

In the Middle of Nowhere

Panampangan Beach, Sapa-Sapa Municipality

It was a huge disappointment to find out that although dried fish processing was rampant in our island hometown, there was just too much buyers of the goods that I could not possibly penetrate the cartel in so short a time. Traders from as far up north in Pagadian City, about five hundred miles from Zamboanga, would come and negotiate with the local fishermen and cornered the market there. I was advised that seizing a sufficient amount of the goods would entail some patience and a lengthened stay in the islands. This was an untenable idea for me. The urban man in me would be so hard pressed to slide into the virtual desolation of rural life, to be "the man called Friday" and away from the honking noise and pollution of the city. While the serenity of the islands provided me a great breather, it was imaginable for me then to succumb into general silence of a rural environment. There would be just too much silence that it would border the deafening.

The wide and miles and miles of stretch virginal beaches consoled my frustrations and led my mind away from the profits that I nearly counted already and yet the ones that would not be obtaining, at least not with that trip. We took small boats and scoured the nearby islands. The breezy seascape had regained my trust in nature, quelling every suspicion that nature has finally and absolutely lost its battle against the industrial advancement of humanity.

There was this over-stretched patched of sand in the middle of two islands that really caught my amazement. It was not of course very unlikely that such natural accumulation of sand would concur in an area full of shores in the first place; but have you heard of a beach in the middle of the sea? One could not help but surmised that Atlantis might have been similarly situated as that particular beach, once rising to the surface before it got sunk into the pit of the ocean.

I walked almost the length of the half-mile patch of the whitest of sand and wondered why nothing grows except some marine plants attached like mildews to rocky corals. I picked some shells and stones and felt somewhat mesmerized that there were sea stones that were embroidered with the most perfect shape of a star. My cousin King told me that they sell well with Japanese tourist, the ones they make into beads. My eyes squinted to examine the stones more forcefully and I almost concluded that God must have some industrial factories up there that stones like those could be sculptured with some design that only machines could afford. The perfect symmetries were there and the lines were straight.

I stared upward and the sky was clear of any cloud and it was the kind of place where you could view the entire sky from one end, towards another, at any angle you gained sight. Funny that I felt reassured that in that place, I would not hear the sound of radios, nor the cacophonic slur of television, neither the honks of cars and motorcycles. There was no smell but the salty fragrance of the sea and I was assured that any fumes or dusty accumulations of factories would never ting the air. No matter how trivial was such realization but I could not help appreciating the newfound belief that despite of everything, there is still a place where the hands of urban life, with its many gadgets and equipments and convoluted industrial mazes, could not reach.

An excerpt from my Autobiography "A Prophet'S Life".