arts & culture

:: Ibanag Dialect:
Potent Factor
in Cagayan's
Evangelization


:: Ibanag Folk
Literature


:: Cagayan Epic:
Biuag and Malana


:: Ibanag Poetry
and Songs


:: Ibanag Proverbs

:: Ibanag Riddles


 

Ibanag Folk Literature

Ibanag folk literature, like any other literature, is the expression of Cagayano's joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, love and hatred, the very ingredients that whipped up all the literary genre handed down to us.

The Ibanags, like any other groups of people, meet life in all its naked conflicts: man versus man; man versus environment or society; man versus himself; man versus his conscience, nay, man versus his God.

All these conflicts, since the glorious days of Ibanag legendary heroes, Biuag and Malana, and since the heroic times of Magalad and Dayag, have brought enmity, disunity, divisiveness, lust for wealth and self, and to use the words of a sociologist, ethnic violence and suicide.

This in the span of some five hundred years, Ibanag folk literary, and Ibanag balladeer, verzista, the Ibanag minstrel, rural folk and countryside mystics composed and handed down volumes of folk literature advocating love, peace, justice, honesty, unity, morality, reconciliation and betterment of life style.

Ibanag folk literature is didactic, moralistic, predominantly sentimental, romantic, socialistic, comic and spiritual--all aimed at uniting the Cagayanos, brave like the kasi or wild cock that challenges them to greatness at sunrise; mission-oriented like the Bannag on whose banks their forebears were rooted; graceful as the bamboo that bends in the winds of challenges; sturdy as the Manga in the typhoons of controversies.


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