Nakahinumdom pa ko Nimo;
Wa na Tika Naabtan

Performed by Nicole Anne Santangelo

Documented by Lavounie Doan

2022

Performance

Nakahinumdom pa ko Nimo; Wa Na Tika Naabtan is a performance where I reconnect with my ancestors by talking to the spirits of the deceased about what I learned about them from my living relatives and my sentiments toward them.

The Performance is reminiscent to a tradition in the Philippines called Undas, wherein families flock to the graves of their dearly departed, pray and tell stories about them.

In Carl Lorenz Cervantes’s book, Kapwa Spirituality, he stated that “when a person dies, they become a part of nature. They become Anitos”. Cervantes explained that the Anitos are ancestral spirits who joined other astral beings in a different realm. Through Cervantes’ works, I learned that Filipino spirituality heavily relies on anitism, comes from the Hispano-Filipino term “anitismo”, which is a worship of anitos or ancestor spirits. Despite being a mostly Catholic nation, Filipinos still practice Indigenous traditions and rituals that may be considered Pagan practice, one of them being Undas.

When I arrived in Canada, my family stopped doing the Undas tradition because the land was foreign. The only thing we were able to offer was our prayers. This is also the case with other Filipino people I’ve talked to. Being a foreign land, settlers are expected to assimilate into the culture of said land. Oftentimes, settlers, especially those whose children were born here, forget the traditions and cultures of their ancestral lineage. However, a lot of diaspora are trying to reclaim and decolonize themselves through remembering what they can about their culture

I used this performance as a technique to process my grief and guilt of being apathetic towards my ancestors’ absence until my grandfather died in 2021. I tried to remember them by asking my mother and grandmother how they were before they passed away. Using my native tongue as a way to reconnect with my ancestors and a way of holding onto a language that I’ve noticed slipping away due to not using it everyday.

1 Baclig, Cristina Eloisa. “Keeping Filipinos’ Undas traditions alive”, Inquirer.net. 02. Nov. 2022
www.newsinfo.inquirer.net/1688456/keeping-filipinos-undas-traditions-alive. Accessed 19. Nov. 2022
2 Cervantes, Carl Lorenz. Kapwa Spirituality. Gumroad, 2022.
3 Cervantes, Carl Lorenz. Spirits, Folk Belief, and the Filipino Soul. Gumroad, 2022.
4 Strobel, Leny Mendoza. Babyalan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous. Center for Babaylan Studies, California, 2010.

Nakahinumdom pa ko Nimo; Wa na Tika Naabtan

Nakahinumdom pa ko Nimo;
Wa na Tika Naabtan