Several days ago, the Philippine Consulate General of Toronto hosted an art exhibition of the paintings of a Filipino artist, Rosalinda Roman. Her works featured the Philippine bahay kubo and the rare, awesome orchids, like the cattleya and the Waling Waling.
This art exhibit has already traveled to some cities in Europe and now in North America, starting in Toronto.
The paintings are not just works of art; they aim to showcase Philippine culture and the beauty of the country’s natural resources. This artist traveled from the northern part of the country, the Batanes to the most southern islands of Mindanao. “I want to show the world how beautiful the Philippines is, “ Rosalinda Roman explained when I asked her why she chose the “Bahay Kubo” and the “Dapo” (orchids in Filipino) as the theme of her paintings. “They are not only beautiful and representative of rural Philippines but they also vary from region to region.
` Indeed, the bahay kubo is part of the Philippine rural scene. When I came to Canada I brought a painting of a Filipino rice field with a bahay kubo in one side and a farmer plowing the field with the help of a carabao. I still have it hung in one of the rooms at home.
When I think of the bahay kubo, what comes to my mind is a one-room hut in the fields with an adjacent little kitchen with a “batalan” the term for bathroom in the area my mother came from. It is a one-story construction with bamboo posts and nipa sidings and roof. The floor is made of bamboo strips. This floor is well polished and scrubbed with a “bunot” a coconut husk.
In my grandfather’s bahay kubo in Bulacan, there was no table; we ate sitting around what was called a dulang. The “batalan” or bathroom was an open space so we took a bath wearing a loose gown called “pampaligo.” For a toilet, there was an outhouse about thirty meters away from the “kubo” My uncle would fetch water from a nearby water well and would fill two big clay jars called “tapayan”.
At night, the whole room will be covered with “banig” where we slept. It was a novel way of living that I enjoyed when visiting my relatives in the rural area.
My grandfather, uncle, aunt and cousins did not live in the kubo all the time. They only went there during the planting and harvesting seasons. They had another house in the village.
I have a suspicion that the word kubo came from the world “kueba” or cave, the first primitive home of the early people. The caves were used as homes during the nomadic period when people did not stay permanently in one place. When they learned to farm and manufacture equipments, they also started to build small homes. The kubo.
The kubo is the term from the Tagalog regions in the Philippines; there are other names given to this little hut according to the language or dialect used in the area. For example, the little tall houses covered with “kugon” grass in the Mountain Province are called “Ulog”. Rosalinda Roman has a beautiful painting of this home in the collection.
An interesting part of this art exhibit is how the artist was able to portray diversities in these homes according to the climate in the region and the availability of building materials. For example, in the Batanes, the houses were made of stones, bricks and shells. This is an area often visited by typhoons. In the lowlands, bamboo and nipa palms are plentiful; in the mountains kugon grass is often used for roofs and sidings. In the southern part many of these little houses are on stilts, built right on the water. Many huts in the coconut region are made of coco wood, from the trunks of coconut trees. The coconut palms can also be used for roofing.
This art exhibit portrays the reality that our environment plays very important parts in our lives. It is our source of food, clothing and shelter. The differences in our environment bring a variety of food produced according to the crops that are plentiful in a given part of the world. In the Philippines, we pickle papaya, which we call atsara; in North America and some parts of Europe, cabbage is plentiful in summer, which is made into coleslaw. Most of Filipino desserts are made of rice and yam; Western sweets are mostly from flour and fruits.
Rosalinda Roman painted different varieties of the cattleya and waling-waling together with the houses in the regions they are often found. I wonder that if each subject were depicted separately more appreciation would be elicited.
Keen observers would also notice that the artist illustrated the creativity of the Filipinos in the way they wove the bamboo strips to make geometric and other patterns.
Going back to the topic of the bahay kubo. I believe that the concept has changed. I may be wrong, but I think it was Imelda Marcos who lifted the lowly bahay kubo and make it worthy of the elite when she built that house which was a part of at tourist attraction in the Greater Manila Area.
Actually, the bahay kubo we used to know are now very few. More sturdy materials have replaced them. Most of them have electricity, running water and televisions. But they are still surrounded by vegetable gardens as in the song:
Ang halaman, doon ay sari-sari,
Singkamas at talong
Sigarilyas at mani
Sitaw, bataw at patani