What’s in a Nickname?

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Hello everyone! Kumusta ka! Welcome to today’s episode, and it’s like I was just in your feeds. Because I pretty much was. <aybe especially so if you’re subscribed to other Miscellany Media Studios productions. Info on them  in the description.

But yeah, if you saw the show notes last week, My #hugot is getting another schedule adjustment. New episodes will now be posted every other Friday, and this is the reset week to make sure the posting days land where I need them to. And if you didn’t see the show notes, I feel that. I don’t always read them either. 

But regardless, here I am. With another episode. An episode that might not be what you were expecting because it’s certainly not what I was planning. Or at least not yet, but sometimes my brain makes weird connections, and when it does this, these aren’t the sorts of connections I can easily shake off unless I talk about them, so I’m going to talk about some stuff in this episode as a way to set up for the next episode in two weeks. 

If you think that means this episode is skippable, that’s on you. But I don’t blame you for anything. How could I? I don’t actually know you.

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But okay, here’s the actual thing. So a couple of weeks ago, while I was working on… various things. Let’s put it that way. I had about thirty tabs open on my web browser. And that’s not even me exaggerating, though I wish I had a screen cap to serve as some sort of receipt for that claim. Anyway, I was working on a few different projects. Some of which will have to be currently unnamed and undescribed.

But of the ones that I can talk about. For one, I was looking up various Filipino heroes to prepare some episodes on them leading up to the Filipino holiday National Heroes Day on August 31st. Also, I needed to verify a term for The Mountain’s Heart that my family used all the time, but I had never heard another Filipino use, so a lot of insecurity on that front needed to be dealt with. But it was a super hard term to verify because it’s not just an honorific. Maybe. At least, I didn’t think it was. I thought there was some affection there, and that was complicating things. Like, it made it harder to get some sort of evidence on so I fell down a few rabbit holes simultaneously. Hence the thirty tabs open in Google Chrome. Which was not great. 

Seriously, not great. This might seem like a recipe for disaster to you. Like what if music started playing? Or a really loud ad? How was I going to find out which tab it was in? You see, this is not my first rodeo, so I muted the laptop outright until I was done. Protips: you don’t expect to find them on this podcast, but there you go.

While I was doing that, while I was knee-deep in a bunch of… largely unrelated research or so I thought because… crossroads happen.

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Now, this story that I’m going to try to tell you is almost entirely speculation, which is fitting. But I basically don’t remember the actual order of events partially because when you’re juggling 30 internet tabs, you are not going to remember how any single one came to be. Especially if you’re tired enough to think that there’s a (quote) “better” organizational method than whatever your computer instinctively did. Telling you to not do that would be more of a protip than anything I actually did in the moment. 

But Teresa Magbanua ended up being at the intersection of these things. On a list of heroes I wanted to draft episodes about and the bearer of a term I wanted to verify. Regarding the latter, if you listen to The Mountain’s Heart, you’ll know that Nanay was a term I wasn’t so sure about. My family uses it in the context of older woman who are… Mom-adjacent, I could call them. Like I’m not a direct descendent of your Nanays, but they are the cousins or sisters of my grandmother. 

And that makes sense, right? You can even see the word ‘Inay’ in Nanay, but at the same time I’m super insecure about anything within the Tagalog language, and I didn’t want to make a really bad mistake, so I was trying to look it up to verify. And this Teresa Magbanua figure--a Filipina revolutionary warrior --is also known by Nanay Isa. 

And, like, great for her, objectively and in the context of my life it was pretty great too.. That was some other verification I got that calling a character Nanay in The Mountain’s Heart makes sense. But then again, on the subject of nicknames, it raised another question because Nanay Isa has another nickname. The Visayan Joan of Arc. And for some reason, it didn’t entirely sit right with me.

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Now I know who Joan of Arc was. Don’t most people? She was a French girl who led French forces against the English during the Hundred Year’s War. And if you’re religious or even if you just acknowledge that other people are without making a commitment to the notion yourself, you’ll point out that the common claim was that God was guiding her and telling her to take the lead. And that claim led to a politically motivated trial for heresy, and she was burned at the stake. As a martyr because the trial thing was essentially a sham. Or that’s the way history tells it. 

And yes, I omitted a lot of details in that retelling. I’m somewhat relying on you to know what I’m talking about. But even The Simpsons did a reference to her at some point, right? Or am I imagining that? Lisa played Joan in that episode, I think. 

On the other hand, Teresa Magbanua was a patriot for her country, which is where I would say the connections end. Now, I want to give Teresa a longer episode going over her entire history because I have a lot to say. But for now, I want to talk about the title “The Visayan Joan of Arc,” so I’m just going to give you the details I think you need to get through this question I have.

Basically, Nanay Isa was originally trained as a teacher in Manilla, but then she married a wealthy businessman with a bunch of land. And that’s a life of relative luxury. Like she would not have been working in the same way. Or she didn’t have to. She chose to be connected to the people that worked under her. The point is that she certainly would not have been under the same financial constraints. So she ended up learning marksmanship and horseback riding. Not exactly as hobbies but kind of close.

I mean, in terms of hobbies, the horseback riding would make sense. The marksmanship is a harder selld, but I will revert to the relevant coop out that Teresa’s uncle was a general, and her brothers were pretty quick to join the uprising against the Spanish, so there was a family inclination. Let’s go with that.

That made put her in a position to join the fighting, against her husband’s wishes but with her uncle’s help. And she led a group of troops to victory during pretty important battles like the Battle of Barrio Yoting and the Battle of Sapong Hills. Battles that were incredibly important relative to the liberation of IloIlo City. So I guess there’s another connection to St. Joan of Arc, but at the same time, that connection still does not sit right with me.

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For one, the theology major in me seems to be screaming because either the religious undertones of the tale of St. Joan of Arc are being downplayed or religious undertones are being inserted into Nanay Isa’s story that I haven’t been able to find overtly in anything, so that’s actual fodder for either a heresy or a not necessary church grounded prejudice. But on the other hand, well, isn’t this just a lazy connection?

Which might not be fair to say. Joan of Arc died in 1431, and Teresa was born in 1868, so clearly Joan of Arc came first. And that isn’t a matter of cultural relativism. This is just how the calendar works, and isn’t all that different from comparing the younger sibling to the older, but doesn’t that assume they are from the same family? Follow that metaphor to its natural end, and I don’t know if I can say that here. It’s assuming a connection that, like I said, I hesitate to see. The skeletal structure is there, but we all have comparable skeletal structures. And sometimes comparisons really aren’t fair to make.

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But it’s also a quick way to convey a narrative, right?. Here you have two women who both rejected societal conventions in favor of patriotism. And soft asterisk on that patriotism because of Catholicism for Joan of Arc. She was an ardent Catholic, and even if some of the details of the story aren’t ones you are willing to get behind, that much is true. Joan of Arc was a Catholic who had no tolerance for heresies at all.

And that leads to concern number two. In an increasingly secular age, are we looking back at history and imposing a different meaning onto events than what the actual participants would have cited as their motivations? In much the same way that those who practice religion might add a little extra God in there just to be sure a point gets put across. And there was religiosity in that event. Her answers to the questions posed to her at her trial would not be something something at her station in life would be able to answer, and this was a fairly recorded event.

But, no, this isn’t a podcast about the Catholic saints or French history. There are plenty of them out there, you know. What I mean is, no matter what story you’re telling, there are parts of you in the narrator’s voice and what details you include, exclude, or fall knee-deep into. Especially if you try to use shorthand like by saying Teresa Magbanua is the “Visayan Joan of Arc,” and don’t worry about the details. The details definitely do matter in this case. That part I think we can all agree on, so that’s what next episode is going to try to be. 

But I’m only human, so what details I leave out, supposedly for the sake of time might be a story in and of themselves. But really, the only sort of answer I have to uncomfortable nicknames is change the narrative a bit.

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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Thanks for listening! Find more information about our shows at miscellanymedia.online or follow us on Twitter @miscellanymedia for updates on current and future projects.

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