Words are powerful. The Gospel of John begins thus: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”
It is because we have the word God that we can conceive God in our minds. Otherwise, God could not exist for us.
“In the beginning was the word, and word was with, and the word was…” The line could still mean something in the sense of poetry but it does not have quite the same meaning.
Our best proof of God’s existence is really the fact of the word itself. The fact the word “God” exists tell us how important the entity itself is for us. But it is important as a single general concept covering many particular identities under it. If the world only had one God, then God would come by only a single proper noun, a particular name. Any name will do. Even Manny, if that was the name God chose to go by. The particular name, Manny, would cancel out the necessity of the more general name, God.
Only if another God came along, coming by another name, any name, would we need once again the general name, God. Which word puts them both under the single general category-God.
This fact tells us immediately how wonderful it is to have a world with various conceptions and many names for God. If we had only one God, we would not have need for the word itself. Our name for God would be a single proper noun, a name, any name. And we would lose out on so many things. And the loss of them would be told by the loss of so many other words. Words like religion, freedom, choice, and perhaps even the word, individual. Even the Christian Bible has many names for God.
But this only proves how important words are. Any change in the history of the world is marked by the birth of the word to signal that change. The word Impressionism was coined by a French journalist denigrating the first exhibition of the “Color Divisionists” movement. The word stuck. Many Western history books point to the Impressionist movement as the first of Modernism.
Which facts in turn tell us why the word “Bisaya” is important for us. Equally, how important it is that the word is spelled with a B, since that is how we were taught by our elders. Important also to remember, how inclusive the tendencies of that particular culture are. Bisaya is not about race, not about the color of skin, not about the place of one’s birth, not even the fact of language for we speak many including Tagalog. Bisaya is not about the issue of national language. It is all about a place where a variegated people live, love, intermingle and work to become stronger on the basis of their cultural diversity rather than homogeneity.
The Bisaya is exemplified truly by the Bisaya dog, who, being a mix of various genes is impervious to the perils of the streets. The Bisaya persists where dogs of a less faceted breed would certainly die from diseases coming by such esoteric names as Parvo and Distemper.
Some say the word “Bisaya” is insulting. And it is true that in the past the Bisaya were fooled into believing this claim. But this stems only from the old colonial attitude that anything local is always inferior to the foreign, this claim covering a profound range of entities from language to chicken. Only with great effort has the culture managed to realize how the Bisaya chicken tastes so much better and safer to eat than the “Bantres,” the same being true also with hogs and everything else; especially as with the culture in general.
If a word is not used to a culture’s advantage, the word would be used against it. This was what happened to the word Bisaya. And the story of the post-pop culture Bisaya is really the story of how the Bisaya reclaimed that word for itself and turned what was once an insult into a proud claim to one’s own roots.
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