First Public Poetic Debate In Fifteen Years Ends With Standing Ovation For Mrs. Santos, Mayor Concedes On Flood Drainage

Reported for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, whose cultural desk has been quietly hoping for exactly this story since 2021.

QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES – A public Balagtasan – the traditional Filipino form of extemporaneous poetic debate in Tagalog – held Sunday evening drew a crowd of three hundred and concluded with a decisive poetic defeat of the current mayor by a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Emiliana Santos-Tolentino, 71, who had not, by her own account, prepared.

The Format

Two debaters argue opposing sides in metered Tagalog verse, alternating stanzas, with a moderator (the Lakandiwa) adjudicating on form as well as argument. The proposition: “The current state of Quezon City flood drainage is sufficient.” The mayor, perhaps unwisely, accepted the affirmative. Mrs. Santos-Tolentino drew the negative.

Her victorious closing stanza, translated, ran in part: “If the drainage is sufficient, let the mayor tell us why my neighbour’s sari-sari store, at the corner of Matalino and Maginhawa, still requires sandbags every Tuesday when it rains, a rain that was not, in fact, unusual even when I was a girl.” The stanza scanned. The audience rose. The mayor smiled, bowed his head, and conceded before the Lakandiwa could formally declare the round.

The Mayor’s Response

The mayor described the evening as “a wonderful reminder of our cultural heritage”. His press secretary, asked which specific points the city would act upon, said: “All of them, we think. We are still transcribing the verses.”

Mrs. Santos-Tolentino At Home

“I did not prepare. I do not need to prepare. You cannot prepare for Balagtasan. You prepare by living. I have been living.”

A Cultural Context

Balagtasan has, per the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, declined as a public form since the 1980s. The London Prat’s recent piece on the Pope and Trump compared meme culture to traditional rhetoric; Balagtasan is the older form, and on Sunday evening, the winning one.

The Recording

The evening is on the city’s YouTube channel. 48,000 views as of Tuesday, comments uniformly in favour of Mrs. Santos-Tolentino.

For more: Waterford Whispers News. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/