MOPPIYON KAHI DIID PATOY: Readings in Kidapawan History: The Poetry of Rita Gadi

KIDAPAWAN CITY (MindaNews / 23 April) — Despite the hectic schedule, I managed to find time last month to meet Rita Gadi, Kidapawan’s poetess. It was our second meeting.

The author and Rita Gadi.

Although currently based in Manila, Ms Rita has deep roots in Kidapawan—both her parents had served as mayors of the town.

Her father, Dr. Gil F. Gadi, was mayor from 1956 to his resignation a year later when he ran for congressman. A Bataan Death March survivor, Gil was a founding figure in the Nacionalista Party in the undivided Cotabato Province.

Her mother, Dr. Emma Gadi, was mayor twice: briefly in 1963 and again from 1967 to 1971. Emma was the first Kidapawan mayor to win an electoral dispute, and was the second mayor (after Alfonso Angeles) to win re-election. She is to date Kidapawan’s only woman mayor.

Rita herself grew up spending summers in Kidapawan, and it colored her formative years. When her mother was mayor, she moved to Kidapawan, eventually being appointed municipal secretary. As her mother’s health deteriorated in her last years in office, Rita effectively functioned as the town’s mayor.

Kidapawan, unsurprisingly, occupies a special place in her poetry, which are major works on the Kidapawan literary canon.

She is one of the first creatives to make art out of the Kidapawan Pine Trees, some of which her parents had planted. They appear in the end of one of her long poems, “Mid Year Notes,” as icons of memory:

And the pine trees still line the center of the main street,
as memory continues describing the confirmation
of my thoughts, amazingly vivid, exactly the way
the changes did not change the portrait of a past
that never leaves, never will, any more than how
the map remains a sanctuary within my soul,
indelibly charting every journey I have made
beyond, and back, somehow, again and again

But in no work is Kidapawan more explicitly celebrated than in her poem “Kidapawan in My Heart”:

(The movements of my tribe climb
up or down the mountains, but always
in the mountains when unmoved, as eagles
dwell the habitat of clouded peaks.
We are formed from the voices of the forests
and have no speech. Our eyes
keep the secrets of our lips; the colors
birds fill with celebration
the beginnings of our songs.)

Imagine all the names I have called
you, all the figures I have shaped
to design your face, all the memories
that never arrive because
they are not past, all the trying
to recognize what would please
you, all the windows I have gazed at
looking for reflections of you,
all the words never written to you
who are almost invisible,
chanced upon, vanishing
and sometimes reappearing perhaps
the same and not the same,
walking my landscape
through separate evenings, when
only you can take the stars
and give me the moon, while I assemble
all the reasons why I love
you this way. Still.

The historical value of Rita Gadi’s poetry for Kidapawan lies in how it introspects into the dynamics of humanity as it unfolds for the town’s people. In this poem’s case, it is the experience of the diaspora which is being articulated. The poem’s first half, a romanticized memory of the indigenous, is followed by a present that reflects on the refusal to forget, and on how the act of remembering often leads to a distortion of what is remembered.

It is a reality that the many who are from Kidapawan but who have had to leave it know all too well—how remembering the town despite the distance, despite the years of not living life in it, leads us to imagining what was perhaps never there to begin with. The town also we find illusive, as perhaps the present life we live renders the town “almost invisible, chanced upon, vanishing and sometimes reappearing perhaps the same and not the same.”

But in the end it is the act of remembering—or rather, of refusing to forget—which matters most. The poem tapers to a note of possible return, the persona “assembling” the reasons to still love the town.  

Attachment—and its fundamentally existentialist nature—are also the main theme underlying another poem, “His Mangosteen”:

(for the farmer of Birada)

In the fields of his life he planted a drea
once untended before it had the space to grow
A difficult fruit, he was forewarned, its birthing seemed
too long a period of weary wait, he would not know
how much of heat or wetness the seed expected
What is the way of caring if remembering were enough
to prune, to weed, and, in its youth, keep shaded
until its branches knew exactly where to go:
for it was his, first, and he would be
the last to celebrate its ripening fame
while in the interval, within his heart, the tree
took root beyond the hunger of its intent
to reap the harvest of seasons without end
the way his love survived the secrets of its name

Effort engenders attachment, a reality which is particularly palpable for Kidapawan’s settler communities, whose attachment to the land is not based on indigenous primacy but on the toil they and their ancestors have and continue to exert to shape the town in the image they wish. Where the poem shines is in its celebration of the value that this toil per se imparts on what is being toiled over, a value that goes far beyond the expected reward.

This attachment is easy to imagine for someone like Rita, who not only inherited the labor of her parents, but has herself shed much sweat and tears for a Kidapawan which today barely remembers the Gadi name.

I have often been asked why I continue working on Kidapawan and caring for it—a question to which Rita has been no stranger too—and this poem is the answer: we have worked too hard for it already to hate it. We no longer need to reap its fruits.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Karlo Antonio G. David has been writing the history of Kidapawan City for the past thirteen years. He has documented seven previously unrecorded civilian massacres, the lives of many local historical figures, and the details of dozens of forgotten historical incidents in Kidapawan. He was invested by the Obo Monuvu of Kidapawan as “Datu Pontivug,” with the Gaa (traditional epithet) of “Piyak nod Pobpohangon nod Kotuwig don od Ukaa” (Hatchling with a large Cockscomb, Already Gifted at Crowing). The Don Carlos Palanca and Nick Joaquin Literary Awardee has seen print in Mindanao, Cebu, Dumaguete, Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, and Tokyo. His first collection of short stories, “Proclivities: Stories from Kidapawan,” came out in 2022.)

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On this Day in Kidapawan History

5 April 1979 – The Rural Health Unit was ransacked, the first crime committed on government premises in Kidapawan history.

6 April 1957 – The Municipal Council passed Resolution 21, the first comprehensive list of Kidapawan’s barrios. The resolution names 89 barrios, and in its wording does not create them per se but recognizes them as already extant and makes them official.

11 April 1985 – Fr. Tullio Favali, OMI, a priest attached to the Diocese of Kidapawan, was killed in Tulunan by members of the paramilitary group Ilaga, led by Norberto Manero.

13 April 1973 – a group of petitioners, led by Engr. Gaudencio Ortiz and sponsored by councilor Joseph Sibug, appeared before the council. Ortiz and his group were petitioning for Pendatun Street to be renamed to “Senator Gaudencio Antonino Street,” complaining that they were being labelled a Muslim community because their street is named after a Muslim—a problem at the time given the ongoing conflict

16 April 1951 – Siawan Ingkal was appointed Special Agent to the Governor by Udtog Matalam, forcing him to vacate his seat as Vice Mayor. The President appointed Datu Bulatukan Lambac of Malasila to take over.

17 April 1954 – The Municipal Council expressed opposition to the formation of Makilala, passing Resolution 56. Later they would agree to it on condition that the border be set along the Malaang river.

22 April 1966 – Labuo Elementary School’s name had been changed to Antonio Jayme Memorial Elementary School, after the patriarch of the family which donated the land (primarily motivated by the separation of Del Carmen, where the school was located, from Labuo as a separate barrio).