It has been nearly 30 years since Dr Grace Nono released her first album on a new label, Tao Music, which she set up with her late partner, producer and guitarist Bob Aves. With her musical collaborator, she set about searching for her musical identity.
She travelled extensively in the Philippines, looking for storytellers, traditional musicians, oral historians, healers, and shamans. While recording her own songs -- Opo was released in 1995 -- she also recorded traditional women singers like Sindao Banisil and researched the social and cultural background of these musicians, healers, and artists.
She thus embarked on a long journey, which took her to New York University where she studied for a master's and then a doctorate in ethnomusicology. I have her to thank for introducing me to Dr Mick Moloney, the late Irish American academic, musician and Bangkok resident, for whom she was a teaching assistant while at the college.
Nono continued to perform, record and research. She published two books about her work and research on Philippine oral traditions, The Shared Voice -- Chanted And Spoken Narratives From The Philippines (Anvil Publishing, Philippines) in 2008, and Song Of Babaylan: Living Voices, Medicines, Spiritualities Of Philippines Ritualist-Oralist-Healers (Institutes of Spirituality in Asia, Philippines) in 2013.
Nono recently released a third book, Babaylan Sing Back -- Philippines Shamans And Voice, Gender, And Place (Cornell University Press, 2021), which synthesises her work over the past several decades and the result is a fascinating in-depth analysis of ritual oral traditions of "invisible" shamans.
Nono explains that the title was inspired by activist and scholar bell hook's book on marginalised groups, Talk Back, which encourages marginalised groups to "talk back" to those in authority. Nono's "tweak" to this idea is a call to "sing back" and call into question those who would appropriate these traditions; Nono wants them to be heard and to be seen.
Babaylan are "ritual specialists" according to Nono, who can contact "spirits" through song and heal through their "embodied voice". The term is from the Central region of the Philippines (also bailan, baylan, baliana, balyana and babalyan) but other regions, such as the T'Boli people of the South Philippines, call their ritual specialists, tau m'ton bu.
The author shows how more than 300 years of colonisation in the Philippines led to the demonisation and persecution of the babaylan by religious invaders. Nono notes how colonial authorities congratulated themselves on ridding the country of "evil". In more recent times, shamans have been appropriated as agents of anti-colonialism and feminism. Nono seeks to challenge both these positions, as she says in the introduction, by "the decolonisation of Native and non-Native social relations, dialogue, and reciprocal learning, in the service of the mutual survival of all".
The book is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 takes Nono back to 1989 when she discovers the marginalised and hidden talents of female shamans (baylans) in Manobo culture. She attends a panumanan ritual officiated by a baylan. She peels back the layers of history and tradition to reveal the history of the Manobo and the issues that affected them -- colonisation, development, violence (armed conflict) and marginalisation. Of great importance here, is Nono's assertion of agency through voice.
Chapter 2, "Shifting Voices and Malleable Bodies" moves to the stories of female baylan and the "human-spirit interaction" among the T'Boli people. This chapter discussed gender relations and power, including a discussion of contemporary sexuality and gender through transgender "ritual specialists".
Chapter 3, "Song Travels: Mumbaski Mobility and Rationality of Place" sees the author move outside the Philippines to consider the lives and work of Ifugao ritual expert Bruno "Buwaya" Tindogan and his son Mamerto "Lagitan" Tindogan who live and commute between homes in the Philippines and the US. Nono looks at how Lagitan was able to continue his shamanism and healing even as a migrant through redesigned rituals. This chapter also considers how communication with spirits and the spirit world occurs in modernity.
This book is not an activist's screed but rather the culmination of 30 years of performance and research (during her early days of travelling and recording women healers, she began to learn some of the aural traditions, and calls herself a "secondary oralist"). Her familiarity with many of the ritual specialists who appear in the book and meticulous research she has conducted over the decades provides a rich level of detail that adds to the reader's experience and understanding.
Nono wants us all to see and hear these ritual healers, and to recognise their agency. It is not enough to "talk back" to power and hegemony or to merely describe the world, the trick, argues Nono is to "sing back" and change the world.
John Clewley can be contacted at clewley.john@gmail.com.
