Sinaluan

In one of those lazy Sunday mornings, I decided to perk up my day by going on a look-see at the Yakan Weaving Village located on hilly ground alongside the road to the west coast of the city. The sheer blaze of colors, imagery and atmosphere that greeted me there did wonders to brighten up my day.

One of the first things you’ll notice is the jovial and friendly people in this village. You’ll soon find out that they are in one way or the other in kinship to one another. They are Yakans, one of the moro tribes people of Mindanao, originally from Basilan who have resettled in this area. 

Their houses are simple wooden structures, some noticeably with ornate folk-Islamic designs on their rafters. The fronts of their homes invariably serve as shops for their handcrafted arts and designs ranging from shell inlaid wooden chests, Kris dagger and swords, brass ornaments, shell trinkets and of course, a dazzling array of their famous hand-woven fabrics and their derivative products.

Yakan weaving is awe-inspiring, formed from various patterns like rainbow, python skin, diamond and bamboo reed; rendered in interplay of colors; creating designs that may be similar in basic patterns but each uniquely its own. The Yakans are truly gifted people with a passion for their art, an art that is somehow thriving but caught in the crossroads of the past and the present.

After taking ample shots of their display and shop-hopping from home to home, I got into a casual conversation with one lady shop owner while viewing one of the most intricate cloth pieces on display. I learned that this piece of design is called the “Sinaluan” one of the finest and hardest to weave among their tribe treasures of woven cloths. This cloth is used to make the traditional pants of their menfolk.   

I also learned that it is now rarely being done by any of their weavers not only because it is painstaking and arduous but the threads available now are of the slippery texture and no longer of the quality that makes for this fine weaving.  

She confided that her mother is one of the very few living artisans who can make this kind of weave and that she herself has not taken the art from her mother. The children of other weavers she knows from here or in Basilan have likewise chosen not to continue their parents’ craft in favor of more lucrative jobs in the nation and abroad.

I cringed at the thought that the art that created that beautiful piece of fabric on my hand will one day no longer be available. My sense of regret turned to a longing for the preservation of this art, a wish that this art will be handed down to the next generations. But how do we do that? I’m afraid we are in a dilemma. Yet my hope is we can find a viable solution while there’s a fighting chance, something that will uphold the proposition that “a stitch in time saves nine.”