They tell me that in Old Sagay, Negros, along the beach in a resort called Margaha, the Pacific wind is brute, sometimes harsh, but it is easily tamed by the warmth of the sea and the liveliness of the people there. I stayed there overnight last week, had the chance to be with the place and the people, and I can easily tell you that it is true.

I can tell you too, (and this I swear with my life), all the sweetness of the world could not compare to the language of the Negrense.

Last week, on a night deprived of cellphones and laptops, I listened as they told me many things, about Hiligaynon "balaks" and legends, about Margaha and how it came about.

The story goes that in one of the islands of Negros a long time ago, there lived a rich white girl who came to fall in love with a poor black native. It was a love that defied all tradition, defied parents and family--the world, because it happened at a time when the world was divided into black and white and there was nothing anyone could ever do to cross it.

But, like lovers of all fictitious fairy tales, they were defiant and swore never to leave each other, no matter what.

So very angry were the gods when they learned of this that they turned the lovers into ashes and scattered them in opposite directions of the Visayan sea, so they could never be together again. Cursed never to meet each other again, the lovers fell silent. But not without passing the curse of color into the places where their ashes fell: white sands on islands where hers fell; dark, almost black, on islands where his fell.

You will feel the love story if you travel through the neighboring islands, from Boracay where the sand is ethereal, soft, and white, to Sagay more than 10 hours after, where the sand is blackest, as though the gods themselves wanted it that way for the contrast to be evident.

When I came to Sagay, and into the resort whose name, Margaha, in honor of the man whose ashes fell there, I felt as though I opened my eyes for the first time.





The story I heard is not about love, but about suffering and about the fate of the common people unlucky enough to have been born in another side of life. Like in the Phlippines where all the wealth of the country is concentrated on the powerful few amid such ocean of poverty. Like in the haciendas of Negros where sugar is sweetest but most bitter to the the choiceless laborers, who work with pay barely enough to keep them living for the next day-




But the gods are not entirely cruel. It is in the same Margaha where I met national artist nominee and social realist Nunelucio Alvarado, his artist family and his community of brilliant painters called Pintor Kulapol (lousy painters in Negros language, but they're not lousy, I tell you) who work to alleviate this suffering by changing the minds of people through art.




In Margaha they did a month-long exhibit where guests do not only see the art of the exhibitors. They also get to participate by exhibiting their own art. The materials, all the "basura" they could find along the coast.

Ours must have been the most boring, but it was one that we did in 20 minutes, with only the handful stuff we could find. We painted a bamboo pole in black and listed there, in white paint, all the websites promoting Filipino prostitution. (This is all we could think of in 3 minutes, honestly. Forgive the simplicity.) There's so many that we ran out of space easily. But it should be enough to send the message.

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I have much to tell, but I'm running out of time. My thanks to Pintor Kulapol, to Visayan art, to Maharlika, to artists who use art for change.






And to the gods for Margaha and his love, for the blackest skin but purest heart, to the love story that is tragic but insightful.