Once upon a Muslim princess

Sarena’s Story: The Loss of a Kingdom

By Criselda Yabes

University of the Philippines Press 2010

Upon the reading the first pages of Cris Yabes’ UP Centennial award winning novel Sarena’s Story: The Loss of a Kingdom, one can’t help but feel a bit apprehensive at the slow burn of the proceedings, the writer taking her time at this shifting fictional history of the lost sultanate of Sulu, with a mother and daughter of the royal court as central characters and narrators. Yabes after all is better known for her journalism, having been a correspondent of the news wire agencies for a time, covering such events as the Imelda Marcos homecoming in the early 1990s, and serving as an apprentice of sorts of the great creative non-fictionist Ryszard Kapuscinski, long before his work was called creative non-fiction. It is thus understandable that readers might do a double take and wonder if the novel isn’t in fact of the aforementioned genre, until one realizes that the author is not a Muslim, and so rather qualifies it as a kind of double fiction.

But whatever it’s called, labels being the least of our concerns, Sarena’s Story soon warms to our attention, not so much because of a subject so exotic as to seem almost foreign, rather it rescues from the baul patented rhymes first heard from a grandmother who was one of the public school teachers at the onset of the American period, making the narrative of the lost princess sandwiching her mother the handmaid’s tale all the more poignant: “Goodbye my dears, goodbye, for I must now depart… And if I chance to die, it must not break your heart…”

Few people write like this anymore, and we don’t mean old school, but the dual point of view seems too unembellished as to be disarming, with occasionally crossover tenses that only reinforce the manner by which the characters think and express themselves: what’s past is present and vice versa. The back and forth in time and setting, from pre-war Zamboanga and Sulu to circa Flor Contemplacion Singapore where a princess is now something of an OFW as envoy, to the inevitable reunion of mother and daughter, speak of a history almost forgotten if not for this unexpected fiction, and for which we have Yabes to thank.

Granted the work is well researched, not only evidenced by that song lyric about departing and breaking hearts, but because the local color is of a piece with the characters: Dayang Dayang Piandao and Tarhata, Sarena and Umbra, the datus and their foreign guests and the walled city and salty sea breeze transporting us to a south hitherto only imagined.

A number of times the author reminds us that this was the Sulu before the advent of terrorism in the person of the Abu Sayyaf, though the bandit group is not mentioned by name, which all the more makes it relevant; a terror sui generis is even more terrorizing.

The writer’s prose for the most part takes few if any risks in storytelling convention, the language competent but not really remarkable. Yabes though has her moments, and in those places where she is particularly inspired regales us with intoxicating passages, to wit:

“I am going to water the roses and the frangipanis and the hibiscuses and the orchids and all the shrubs of bougainvilleas that are spreading like the skirts of the flamenco dancers from Grenada. This garden is how the princess likes it — the way the cactus flowers bend their slender stems and the peace she gets by the embracing presence of the plants.”

Sarena the mom we learn is a dancer, and it is her dancing that shapes her fate, gives her direction whether to love or not love; the daughter in contrast is hardly recognizable as the last vestige of a sultanate now crumbling even in memory.

What strength of fortitude then it takes for the narrators and the writer as well to rebuild that half-forgotten place, each day and night drifting farther away from a past receding like an island in the distance, each page written getting us closer to regaining it.

Yabes’ journalism background serves her in good stead, keeps her feet firmly in place and on ground, the tinge of realism given hues of a contemporary wash. In her biographical notes, Yabes is said to have spent her adolescence in Zamboanga, and we as reader can only guess what went on in those teenage rambles that helped shape the novel, even if subconsciously. Doubtless there was the singsong of Spanish pidgin that is Chavacano that inhabited her everyday world, a language unfamiliar yet soon enough picked up.

Just as there’s a passage here in French that is repeated like a refrain, something that Princess Tarhata had taught to her student the dancer, Sarena the elder. Les plantes reagissent au soleil en poussant; l’ame et le corps reagissent a la musique en dansant. While we don’t know what it means we can read it aloud and let the sound of the words wash over like waves on the beach. Not everything has to be translated, as if we are watching a movie and the customary lapse in the subtitles has to be taken in stride, and in context. Maybe it’s the plants that reside in the sun and soil, and love both physical and spiritual reside in music and dance.

But I am only guessing. Which is what good prose should make the reader do in withholding as much if not more than it reveals. In a roundabout, truncated, post-romantic way Sarena’s story tells of the nearness of Sulu like the pale moon that excites us as only lost kingdoms by the sea should.