Bamboo carving is a traditional writing technique of the Mangyan people of the Philippine island of Mindoro. When Spanish Jesuit missionaries arrived in the 16th century, they remarked on the practice, noting, “[The natives] write on bamboo canes and palm leaves, using pens that are iron sharp. They write their own letters, but also ours on paper and with very finely cut pen. They have learned our language and pronunciation and write as well as we do, if not better because they are so clever, they learn anything with great ease.”

Despite this tone of respect, the Spanish destroyed written mythologies and genealogies, beginning a sad history of marginalization that continues to this day. Most of the Mangyan scripts have not survived the imposition of the Latin alphabet.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the traditional agricultures and sacred grounds of the Mangyans were overrun when land on Mindoro was offered to settlers from other islands. In 1903, the population of Mindoro was some 40,000; now over a century later, it is more than a million, of which only about 10% is Mangyan. More recently, the sale of mining leases has pushed the Mangyans farther and farther up into the mountains, forcing them to abandon their ancestral lands. As recently as the 1950s, Mangyans could vote using their own writing, but that is no longer the case.

Carving Ambahan

Despite these challenges, the Hanunuo Mangyans — one of eight Mangyan ethnic groups — still practice their traditional calligraphy for a particular purpose: to carve ambahan into bamboo.

Ambahan (emphasis on the second syllable) are sung poems. They make use of rhyme, and also a rhythm that fits well with the language and script. The language is heavily syllabic, the script is a syllabary, and — as each line consists of seven syllables — every ambahan consists of a varying number of rows of seven characters.

Their poetry is clear, moving, and local in the richest sense. Simply calling them poems (or songs) is to underestimate how much the poetry, the script, and even the bamboo mean to the Mangyans.

For one thing, though written, they have much in common with oral poetry traditions. Ambahan were never signed by an author because they were seen as community property to be read, repeated, and adapted by someone else. As such, they became part of a collective wisdom, and were recited whenever appropriate.

Ambahan often act as expressions and celebrations of spiritual beliefs, with analogies about connecting all living beings with each other, their surroundings, and the divine. Likewise, the bamboo is not only a readily available writing material, but also an opportunity to connect the human and natural worlds.

I suspect that some of you — accustomed to the elegant curlicues of Western calligraphy, the intricate letter-shapes of the Arabic tradition, or the dramatic brushstrokes of its Asian counterpart — may be asking, “Can cutting letters into bamboo really be calligraphy?”

The fact is the word “calligraphy” means different things in different cultures. To me, calligraphy is writing that has more than a simply functional purpose: it calls for skill and concentration; it is executed with forethought, intent, and possibly training; it is written for the eye as well as the ear; and it is respected within its culture for its aesthetic values and often its spiritual charge. By that definition, there are cultures around the world that practice calligraphy on silk, stone, woods, and even human skin.