S5E9: The Soul of the Mangyan Ambahan

In this moving and powerful episode of It’s About Language, host Norah Jones welcomes a panel of cultural advocates and storytellers to explore the poetic traditions and philosophy of the Mangyan people of Mindoro, Philippines. From personal stories to academic insights, guests Chiara Cox, Lolita Delgado Fansler, Resti Pitgogo, Zosing Evangelista, and Emily Catapang open the door to a living tradition of Ambahan—an ancient, rhythmic poetry written in the Hanunuo Mangyan script. This script, still used today, dates back before the 10th century and has withstood centuries of colonization and cultural pressure. What emerges is not just language but a deeply human worldview of connection, respect, and soul.

Episode Highlights

• The poetic and philosophical depth of Ambahan as sung poetry
• Chiara Cox’s rediscovery of her roots and cultural mission
• Lolita’s journey from volunteer to lifelong cultural champion
• Resti’s decades-long study of Ambahan and its symbolic wisdom
• Zosing’s life as a Mangyan and how Ambahan shaped his legal philosophy
• Emily’s enduring work in preserving the Mangyan script and traditions

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Transcript

0:00:06.4 Lolita Delgado: The Mangyan girl said, I told her, read the Mangyan. And she said, I can't read Mangyan. I said, have you ever read an Ambahan? Never. She didn't know she couldn't read the script. And she was from the same tribe. I never learned the script. I never heard of an Ambahan. I'm going to read it in Filipino, okay? So Emily's daughter read it in English and Filipino. And then she said, well, it's about the fish in a creek, basically just rewording the Ambahan. And then I asked the Mangyan girl, she only finished grade school, was in high school, even though they were both the same age, right? And she said she had never read an Ambahan. But then she said, but it's not about the fish. This was written by a young boy who likes a girl but couldn't tell her how he felt. So he wrote about the fish, which is the girl. Okay, so here it goes. Look at the fish in the creek. Okay? So he said, instead of saying, hey, I like you because you are fun to be with. You have a sense of humor which is full of joy and mirth and cheer, and then fine is the sand, white and clear.

0:01:35.6 Lolita Delgado: He said, well, he likes the girl because she has a good sense of humor and her skin is white and clear. No pimples, and it's fine like sand. She knew what it meant.

0:01:53.8 Lolita Delgado: For me, a Mangyan girl who never read or heard of an Ambahan, she understood what that Ambahan was, which Emily's daughter, as a lowlander and brilliant, right, a scholar, she was a college girl then, she read it, like all of us, that it's about a fish. Even the painter painted a fish. The painter didn't know that it meant the girl.

0:02:28.1 Norah Jones: Wow, what a story.

0:02:29.4 Lolita Delgado: So that is, where for me, it's in the soul of a Mangyan.

0:02:36.0 Speaker 3: Welcome to season five, episode nine of It's About Language with your host, Norah Lulich Jones. In this episode, you're invited into a powerful journey that explores one of the Philippine's oldest and most resilient cultural traditions. The Hanunuo Mangyan script recognized by UNESCO, has been in use since before the 10th century and it's still alive today. This script continues to preserve the voice of the Mangyan people through a poetic form known as Ambahan. But this is more than just poetry. Ambahan offers a window into a worldview rooted in harmony, humility, and human connection through the voices of scholars, culture, bearers and community leaders. You'll discover how this script survived colonization, how it shaped identity, and why it still inspires pride today. You'll hear live Ambahan performances, and stories of rediscovery, resilience and cultural awakening. This episode is a tribute to the enduring power of language, not only to preserve the past, but to shape how we live, relate, and understand one another today.

0:03:47.6 Norah Jones: Language forms identity, and the identity is formed through the culture in which language lives. And every time we hear a story, we understand ourselves better, as well as those around this diverse globe. Enjoy this fascinating story of the Mangyan cultural and linguistic history and ponder what you learn about yourself and the world through it. Enjoy the Podcast.

0:04:23.5 Norah Jones: One of the aspects that I would love to do here, my dear friends, and again, thank you for joining me from all sorts of locations. As a matter of fact, I would love to know where each of you are at the moment that you are speaking with us. But the six of us will have a chance to have a wonderful talk here about the Mangyan Cultural Center, about the language, about what you do with it. But I'm just going to be encouraging all those that are listening to this podcast to take a look at my website, fluency.consulting, and tap on the links to the Cultural Center. Watch the wonderful documentary that is narrated by Chiara Cox about the Mangyan Ambahan and about the Mangyan Cultural Center and about all of you. So, Chiara, starting with you, why don't you introduce yourself?

0:05:18.1 Chiara Cox: Thank you, Norah. First of all, I want to thank you for having us here with you and your podcast today. And I was introduced to the Mangyans by, I'm the Filipino American Association Music and Art Ambassador here in South Carolina, in Columbia, South Carolina. So I had a couple actually who volunteered with the Mangyans maybe two decades ago. And I create a lot of events here. And they said, please, we really want a Mangyan event here in South Carolina to show our community, our family and friends all about how beautiful the Mangyan culture is. So I connected with Tita Lolita through Marian Pastor Rosas, who was here in South Carolina giving a talk on textiles. And when I started reading her Bamboo Whispers, which the Mangyan Heritage center produced and Tita Lolita edited.

0:06:16.8 Chiara Cox: I started realizing how deep their poetry was and how deep the people are and how deep the, just their worldview is so beautiful that this started as a podcast, but I wanted it so that people could see the writing. People could see Tita Lolita, Resti and Uyan. And Emily's faces as they talked about their experiences with the Mangyan people. I thought it was very important.

0:06:47.2 Chiara Cox: And when I did that, I realized a textile that I had bought when my grandmother died. I never knew that it was from the Mangyans. And so it was full circle for me, the death of my grandmother, creating Filipino cultural events in South Carolina and then learning about this beautiful worldview that teaches us what Filipinos were like during the pre colonial period.

0:07:11.2 Norah Jones: What a beautiful introduction. And I would again like to make sure that folks recognize that that documentary that is on your cultural site, it starts out with that touching, touching story of the beginning when you recognized that beautiful embroidery, that cloth from your grandmother. So thank you for that, Chiara. I'm also looking at Lolita. Lolita, will you introduce yourself?

0:07:36.5 Lolita Delgado: Well, I'm just a mother who took over her son's job. My son was a Jesuit volunteer, and he was assigned to Mindoro, where he met Antoon Postma and Father Denter, and he fell in love with the culture. And so when he finished his one year of volunteer work, he asked Father Denter and Antoon Postma if he could set up a heritage center. Because Antoon Postma had all his research in the mountains. And for Quint, he was like, if there's a fire in the mountains. My son applied for a grant, got it from Toyota foundation to set up, to build a library with the materials, which were just copies of the books that Antoon Postma had. So he set up a board of trustees, and he put me there. Then we started having exhibits, and then the exhibit started traveling to the different schools and universities and museums here in Manila. Then we went to the province, and then the museum volunteers asked me to lecture. And when I did that first lecture at the museum volunteers, that's when my intellectual fascination with the Mangyans became a passion. And Bamboo Whispers, the book that Chiara showed, that one just happened again by accident.

0:09:23.7 Lolita Delgado: I met the Spanish ambassador, told him, the Philippine Pavilion in the World's Fair in Spain just won a gold. And I said, and we had Mangyan Ambahan there. I said, would you be interested? And he said, yes. And at that time, it was hard copies. So I showed him the hard copy of Four Mangyan Ambahans in Mangyan, of course, the script, in English and in Spanish. And he's like, my wife is a poet. Can she improve on it? And so he called his wife. She looked at the four poems, and she said, sure, I'll translate them. So then to thank her, I gave her a thin book that Antoon Postma had done, with 263 poems that he had translated from Mangyan into English. So I gave it to her to thank her for doing the four. And one day she called me and said, may I translate the whole book? So then I just kept on thinking about it, and then I said, well, we have the English. We'll have the Spanish. Resti was working on the Filipino. So I said, that's it, I've got four languages. That would be a book I could sell.

0:10:50.1 Lolita Delgado: And that's how Bamboo Whispers began. And it took me eight years to finish. And as I needed people to help, they came out. They just showed up. So 95% of that book was done with help from people who just gave their services.

0:11:13.4 Norah Jones: Lolita, thank you so much for that history. Resti, if I can turn to you, indeed, at this particular point when I was watching the documentary, it was wonderful to be able to, first of all, see you and hear the background. Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your work then with the Ambahan, with the language, with the script?

0:11:37.8 Resti Pitogo: Thank you, Norah. Excuse me. I started 40 years ago, my first encounter with Ambahan. I was a Jesuit volunteer in another cultural group of the Mangyans, because the Mangyans is a collect, there are eight cultural communities. So I work with one cultural community as a volunteer. But I saw that book, which is entitled Treasure of Minority by Antoon Postma. And when I scrolled it, I said, wow, this is beautiful. Because by nature, I'm a poet. I write Filipino poem when I was still in college. So what I did is expose myself to the community, kind of something like an ethnological study. But my purpose really is to immerse myself and to study the language, because the language of the Ambahan is not, it's not the ordinary language that the Hanunuo Mangyan use, kind of archaic. This is something more difficult to understand because the words there are actually dedicated for the Ambahan. So I observed how the Ambahan was sung and how the culture carriers explain the meaning of this Ambahan. So when I did my thesis on theological anthropology, I studied the 100 plus Ambahan collected by Antoon Postma. And that's a book, actually.

0:13:16.9 Resti Pitogo: And then from there, I tried to understand it. And I was surprised because I found out that there's a whole philosophy behind the Ambahan. And that's where my whole study went into. But the more I study the meaning of these symbols, the more I understand myself as a Filipino. And, well, what I heard, what I studied was that it was pre Hispanic, around 10th or between 8th or 10th century. And we don't have a history before the coming of the Spaniards. We don't have the written history. But I believe that when you study the indigenous cultural pieces, you will understand what happened before that. And that's the reason why I dwelt into the text. I saw it as an opportunity for the people to understand. I mean, the lowlanders, the Christianized Filipinos, to understand how beautiful the Mangyans, the culture of the Mangyans, specifically their values and the way they look at the world. Because I believe that no culture is dominant against another culture. So just one way of understanding that culture from its own dignity and its uniqueness, and that's where we learn. I call it a dialogue of culture or a dialogue of life.

0:14:45.6 Resti Pitogo: So whenever I recite or study the Ambahan, I always look at it as that. And, you know, it has been very enriching. After 40 years, I'm still here.

0:14:57.1 Norah Jones: That's beautiful, Resti. Thank you so much. And you know, you have been mentioning about the impact of the Ambahan. And again, I'm fascinated on behalf of my listeners, to encourage them to take a look at the website where, your website, where the Ambahan, through the life experiences, the different chapters and the translations that both you, Lolita, and now you, Resti, have spoken of. Renato Zosing, love to turn to you, because here you are a person who is a member of this group that has been using the syllabic script of the Mangyan. Your work, your life is embedded in it. When you have been a part of these stories that you have heard with your life, how has that all come together? Introduce yourself and how you bring what your background is and what your knowledge is to everything that we've been talking about here.

0:16:04.0 Zosing Evangelista: Okay, I'm Zosing. In my community, I'm called Zosing. Okay, But I got a Christian name already, the Renato Evangelista. That's even Spanish. Okay? But yes, you're right. I'm a member of the tribe. And all of these things like the Ambahan and how we use it in our daily lives or even I am a living witness on a daily basis. When I was a kid, okay, when I was a kid, how people in my community communicate, interact with each other through the use of Ambahan among the elders or even usually among us children, we use this Ambahan in a playful manner. Okay, but yes, the way I look at, well, I just saw Ambahan as an ordinary occurrence in my life as a child, when I was still in my community. But you know, after getting out of the community, being educated, that's when I started to appreciate the beauty of the Ambahan. It is unique in itself because it gives a setting that is set in the mountains, rivers, streams. But still it gives a universal message to the reader. Okay. Whether you are from a city or you're from a mountain, the message of Ambahan is universal.

0:18:00.8 Zosing Evangelista: Everybody can relate with it. Okay? And after coming out from the community, getting educated and even becoming a lawyer, my philosophy in life is influenced by what the Ambahans taught me, okay? How to relate to people on, not principally on the material things around you, things that you're happening. It's more on deep, it's more about soul, that the souls of peoples are interconnected. When we relate to people, that's what the Ambahans that I say. You don't look at people, us just an ordinary people. But you have to communicate, interact with them or be one with these people. Because our souls are like, can be united in one way or another. Because in Ambahan, we cover almost all aspects of life, okay, from birth, from a childhood, courtship, even until death. It gives me pride to share to them that we have this. We have our own identity. So that is very important. It gives me the identity that I should not be afraid or embarrassed of being an indigenous person because there are discrimination or they don't look at us very well because of the education level on the base. But the education level is like overpowered by this poetry because our people.

0:20:07.3 Zosing Evangelista: Have an understanding of life, of relationships that is beyond the material or the educational attainment of every person. What matters to the Mangyans that based on the Ambahan that we read is relationship to the nature, relationship to earth, relationship to your creator, relationship to your fellow people. That's what it teaches us. And then so I came to the conclusion that Ambahan is not far from good poetry of the mainstream literature. Okay? It's not just about literature, it's language, but it's about really the soul, the soul of the Philippine people, the soul of the Mangyan people.

0:20:57.0 Zosing Evangelista: And in my practice as a lawyer, I always, I have imbibed that because the peace, non confrontational approach of the Ambahan in dealing with problems, imbibe that as a lawyer. And so as a lawyer, I do not become too argumentative. I rather find a way for parties to end their conflicts. That's how it affects, it enriched my experience as a bearer of the Ambahan, the culture of the Mangyan.

0:21:41.1 Norah Jones: Thank you. Emily, I'm going to turn to you because you are currently the executive director of the Mangyan Heritage Center. Share with us about your background and about what it is that the Heritage center and your work as executive director are continuing to do for these stories.

0:22:01.3 Emily Catapang: Hi, my journey with the Mangyan started in 1992. So I'm from the northern part of the Philippines and I'm in Ibanag. It's one of the ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines. So in 1992, fresh from college, I traveled to Mindoro. So I started working in a Mangyan school located at the foot of the fourth highest mountain in the Philippines, in foot of Mount Halcon. It was a school exclusively for the Mangyans. So my love story with the Mangyan Heritage center is, started as a library, a research library. And then after a few years, we have implemented other projects like the Mangyan Awareness Program. So we had also the revitalization of the Mangyan cultural practices and research, documentation and publications. So one of the projects that I also handled is the teaching of the Mangyan script and the Ambahan in selected Mangyan schools. It aims to keep alive the Ambahan and the script among the younger Mangyan generations. So we partnered with the Department of Education and we tapped Mangyan teachers, so we call them script masters, to teach the script in Ambahan in Mangyan schools.

0:24:00.1 Emily Catapang: So another activity of the MHC to keep alive the Mangyan cultural practices is the revitalization of their other cultural practices like the cloth weaving, basketry, beadwork, embroidery. We help them, we encourage them to keep alive, to practice these cultural practices.

0:24:31.2 Norah Jones: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Emily. I'd love to have someone pick one of the Ambahan, especially evocative, as you have mentioned about the life growth, so that our listeners can get a sense of the beauty of what they will see when they look and the beauty of what they hear, both in the sound, but also the philosophy, because I was enriched just hearing about it. What stories do you have to tell and who would like to share one of the Ambahan in song and in description, if you would.

0:25:17.0 Zosing Evangelista: Well, let me try, okay? But to tell you honestly, I have not been reciting Ambahan for so long a time. The last time I recited the Ambahan was when I was still in high school, okay? But then again, this Ambahan is about friendship, longing for the company of, and it's a famous Ambahan. You will see that in most of the, in the book itself, Bamboo whispers. So let me, it goes like this.

[foreign language]

0:26:22.3 Zosing Evangelista: Okay, the translation is basically, what it says is that you, my friend, we are apart, okay? There is ocean between us, forest, vast between us. But when I think of you, it's just as if you are here by my side, talking to me. That's the meaning of the Ambahan and the poetry. But I did not put it in a poetic manner. It's just the translation of the message, but Kuya Resti has made a good translation of that in Filipino. And for us Filipinos, I mean, he was able to justify the beauty of this Ambahan from the Mangyan language and then translated by Antoon into English.

0:27:26.0 Zosing Evangelista: And mind you, translated further by Kuya Resti to Tagalog Filipino, and then also translated by Lolita, Tita Lolita to Spanish. Imagine that. That's all I can give to you.

0:27:48.5 Resti Pitogo: Yeah, I'm reading here the book, but I like this one. This is story of something like a vision, of a family. So if I, for example, I love someone and I like to offer a life for her. And that life is a vision. It's part of what kind of future I will give to my beloved. So here it goes.

[foreign language]

0:28:34.5 Resti Pitogo: You, my darling, sweet and fair, please do come along with me to the house that's over there. Everything we have is nice, whether it be plant or tree, beautiful.

0:28:52.7 Norah Jones: That's beautiful.

0:28:53.9 Resti Pitogo: So it's telling us a world, a perception of the world. How no matter how you look at so many problems around, the optimism, the aspiration, the hope of the Mangyan people is quite different from the way analysts would look at the world. A lot of analysts and researchers will focus on the world's problem, but the Mangyans will not look at it as a problem. They have a way of looking at bad realities or ugly realities, that there is some kind of beauty in it. And that beauty does not come from what, how events happen, but how they look at events based on their perception of the world.

0:29:50.7 Resti Pitogo: That they like to create. If we believe in the Ambahan, you will look at the world quite differently from what most or a lot of people would see the world, is becoming less and less human. The Mangyans would offer a different perspective of that world. And that perspective of the world is something coming deep within his heart and his love for his beloved. It's as simple as that. Don't worry about the world's problem. The question is, what kind of fulfilling life would you like to have and what would you offer your soon to be wife? Something like that. So I think what I learned is that the Mangyan has a better understanding of what a community life is all about, rather than what the modern civilization, specifically the Western civilization, can offer.

0:30:58.9 Norah Jones: Thank you. Chiara, I'm going to ask you here one of the things that you did when you described yourself, focusing on spreading positivity and inspiring pride and sparking curiosity because of the Filipino diasporic themes. And here seems to me that what Resti has just spoken of is that sense of by listening to Ambahan, by reading, by knowing this cultural things, that we have an opportunity to be invited into that kind of positivity perspective. Am I touching on some of the things that you have discovered in your work and the reason why you have brought this center to my attention?

0:31:44.7 Chiara Cox: Well, I grew up not being very Filipino because I grew up mainly in Hong Kong and went to school here in the United States and in the UK. My perspective on myself wasn't as a Filipino at all. And when my grandmother died, my rock to the Philippines was gone. And when that happened, I needed to recalibrate who I am in this world. And I realized, the culture that I have been pushing myself away from was exactly the culture I needed in my life to be. I always say we're like trees. We always need our roots to be able to bear fruit. And I was missing that root to the Philippines. And it seems like my fruit today is helping the diaspora connect with the Mangyans. And in my work to do this, I've realized a lot of Filipinos like me do not know anything about the Mangyans. And for me, the Mangyan Ambahan tells us so much about who we are as Filipinos that I needed to help that the Mangyan Heritage Center get that information out there. So it just boggles my mind that something so beautiful is not known by Filipinos in the world and also Filipinos in the Philippines.

0:33:13.8 Norah Jones: Emily, you also have that personal story of just continuing to engage others in understanding the heritage.

0:33:28.0 Emily Catapang: Yes. It's been 33 years that I've been working with the Mangyans, so I cannot see myself anymore working for others. I mean, I have dedicated myself with the Mangyan. We continue with our vision to promote, keep alive the rich Mangyan cultural heritage. Not just Ambahan or not just the Mangyan script, because there are eight different ethnolinguistic groups.

0:34:06.4 Norah Jones: I would love to do one more thing as we begin to close together. First of all, would love to hear an Ambahan that has to do with the kinds of life change or memory or sharing and the impact of, again, friendship already came up in the song. Friendship across space, across time. Love to know if there's another song that can kind of wrap up for us what that sense of is that we are all in this together and that there's so much to learn from our relationships.

0:34:48.4 Lolita Delgado: I'd like to ask Zosing, okay. Because he's the one who is the Mangyan among us. And he became a lawyer, when he told me he was getting married to somebody who was not a Mangyan, which is understandable because of his studies and exposure.

0:35:14.4 Zosing Evangelista: I only appreciated that when I got out of the community. Okay? But now it gave me a different perspective, a view of how to solve conflicts. If I can only infect my fellow Filipinos to think like a Mangyan, as what is reflected in our Ambahans, to avoid conflicts and resolve conflicts the Mangyan way, then that is the best that I can say. But this Ambahan really, even in my life as a married person, as a professional, now that I am able to influence not only the Mangyans, my fellow Mangyans, but even non Mangyans who are like my clients, I always tell them, do it the Mangyan way. You resolve the problem without going into head on with the conflict, rather you try to solve it.

0:36:25.0 Norah Jones: Thank you so much. 

0:36:25:24 Norah Jones: I'll mention too, that the listeners, when the singing of the Ambahan earlier that there was, everyone that is on this call was deeply moved. You could see the emotions emerge during that singing. And this touching of the deeper understanding and the touching of the emotions is something that I hope that this podcast will help listeners be left with, so that they'll search into this. Do we have one more song? Can Resti tell I'm staring at him right now?

0:37:06:01 Resti Pitogo: It's a story of friendship and hospitality. I will just read the translation of Antoon Postma. My dear friend, we welcome here where perchance did you come from? From the seashore ebbing below, from the bubbling water springs. If from the water source up, let us talk a moment here in a happy, friendly way. Even whoever you are, we like to be at your side. Now I will sing.

[foreign language]

0:38:09:19 Resti Pitgo: Thank you.

0:38:10:13 Norah Jones: Thank you.