Bakukang

RAYMUND FERNANDEZ

Bakukang is the black horned beetle native here where we have forests of coconut trees. They are not pests. They have at best a neutral effect on the environment such that we wonder why they are there at all. The beauty of moths and butterflies justify their existence. Even if they can be harmful while they are still caterpillars. And if you have ever been “touched” by a hairy caterpillar then you would know how it feels to have allergic rashes and welts spreading all over your skin. Bakukang are so much more benign. You would have to look very closely to see how beautiful they are, how they have tiny touches of orange hair. They are armored, quite big as bugs go. They seem too heavy to fly. But they do. They are not sleek like cockroaches. They are dark mysterious creatures.

But where I grew up, the local kids would tie a length of string around Bakukang and watch it fly tethered to their hand. They found a measure of glee from doing this to the poor creature. I still cannot understand why. Why the glee? I mean. What’s so big with doing this to a creature who means you no harm?

It was a sentence of death. Bakukang never lived long after being tied this way. And I always wondered: Where and what place Bakukang was headed to before falling into misfortune? Home to mother?

But the bigger mystery is why innocent little kids did this? Who or what taught them this was any fun? Where’s the fun in taking away another creature’s freedom? And it may well be that it is we, not Bakukang, who are dark mysterious creatures. Could this explain why we are what we are?

We should ask why the issue of martial law recurs over and over again. Why do we still wonder whether the dictator Marcos was a hero or not? He was a crook. In times of social stress, why do we always revert back to the old logic that our problems can be traced back to our people having too much freedom? Why do we always think our problems would be solved by taking freedom away from our people? But seldom ever our own freedom. Never the freedom of all people. Just certain dark mysterious people who go by many names, which names often change with the seasons: addicts, thieves, snatchers, activists, communists, gay, useless people, rebels, the poor and marginalised, the troublesome… Bakukang.

We should begin to wonder if it is not freedom itself that we fear.

Less than a century ago, we were little more than colonised slaves. Only after the last world war were we technically an independent state. But we were never culturally so.

Consider how there were only a few Spanish here throughout the 400 years we were their colony. It was even worse for the Americans. Given that condition, it seems logical for them to teach us, the colonised, to be wary and even afraid of freedom. Throughout our colonial years the expression of freedom was always punished with incarceration or death. Remember Bonifacio, Rizal, etc. Consider Leon Kilat.

Could it be that nearly half a millennium of being slaves have turned us into our own colonisers, so afraid of freedom that we now consider ourselves and most of our people Bakukang? And then treat them accordingly?