(With apologies to Gabriel Garcia- Marquez)
It can be said that many years later, not a few Negrenses, as they faced death, like Col. Aurelio Buendia, was to remember that distant day when their fathers took them to discover the katubuhan.
That katubuhan or sugarcane field is as ubiquitous then as to Facebook accounts now – a symbol for the rich and colorful stories of Sugarlandia when seen as verdant, seemingly endless blankets from above.
Not so long ago, the mga katubuhan (plural in Hiligaynon) stretched up to the fringes of Bacolod, now the highly-urbanized capital city of Negros Occidental province that used to be the base of many an hacendado (sugarcane plantation owner).
In some villages of the city, a sugarcane field can be found outside the gates of plush gated subdivisions and along highways lined with seedy bars through which trucks loaded with sugarcanes pass and where drivers while away time in seedy bars to wait for the right timing to head to sugar mills.
Often, the “guest relation officer (GRO)” that serves the drinks, often called the waitress (witris as it is often pronounced) are damsels who grew up in the haciendas and have gone to the dakbanwa (big town or city) to look for better earnings with the help of make up and cheap perfume.
It is where the hacendados used to wait for many months for the sugarcanes to mature and yield its sweetness that have made many of them rich and powerful.
From below, the fields represent different things at different stages of growth that could also be seen as allegories to the growth of the sugar industry – the sweet reed that made the domestic economy flourish – tightly intertwined with the history of Negros and the deep social inequities and the carefully-crafted narratives that bred a culture of hate for Negros itself and the sugar industry among Negrenses.
The early growing stage of sugarcanes, seen as the promise of a new harvest, spring from the patdan or new cropping – the planting of fresh canepoints – or from the kalaanan or ratoon, fresh crop allowed to grow from the roots of the old one.
Growing amid verdant vistas of seemingly endless plains amid skies and mountains, the early growth denotes a sense of calm and a promise of prosperity.
As the canes start to grow, the heat around the tracts of land planted to it start to rise, usually coupled with the searing heat that comes with the summer months that also signal the start of the dead season or the stop of the kultibo or the cultivation season, more dreaded by its local term: tigkiriwi, also known in Spanish as tiempo muerto.
The sugarcane fields planted on large tracts of land known as haciendas are usually rimmed with the houses of the dumaans (literally old-timer) or regular farmworkers, most in varying states of disrepair where a few relatively lucky workers live out their days in varying states of fortune or misfortune – often signified by their viands, from ginamos (shrimp paste), sometimes not cooked at all but just mixed with vinegar, ceviche style, during the leanest of months.
Sometimes it would be dried fish (uga in Hiligaynon), often sardines or tabagak thrown directly on the raging woodfire that gives it the smokiest of flavors and the blackest edges.
Pork or beef is a welcome interlude during the tapas or the harvest season, when wages are higher, unless the father spends it all on a lapad of rum, or during the town or barangay fiesta or when the campaign for the elections (considered as the grandest of fiestas) roll in, usually in the midst of the tiempo muerto.
But the usual pasayod (commercial break) to the uga-ginamos episode are the canned goods (literally de lata or “in a can” or steel body in street lingo) – often canned sardines or tinapa.
By the time the sugarcanes reach the 10th to 12th month, the stalks become more prominent, like the gnarled hands or feet of the workers who tend to it, usually the time when organizers of Communist front organizations become more active in tending to the hacienda chapters of their union as an increase in the payment of dues is expected.
Too, the armed guerrillas in their mountain lairs stir, readying for the coming harvest season by identifying planters who will be in their list of those in their Rebolusyunaryong Buhis Sa Kaaway (RBKS, literally Revolutionary Tax on Class Enemies).
