Friday, March 13, 2026

7:00 PM | Let's Get Lit!

It’s the weekend, and I can honestly say the past week has been one of the busiest weeks I’ve had since the year started! A ton of academic work [with a looming graduation ceremony bearing down our necks.] And a lot of literary campaigns for the Dumaguete UNESCO City of Literature, particularly, and especially for the upcoming Dumaguete Literary Festival this April.

Today, March 13, we had a school caravan at NORSU, but last Tuesday, March 10, we did the same for Silliman University where I gave a talk educating Sillimanians about what it means for Dumaguete to be a UNESCO Creative City of Literature. Alana Narciso helped out by sketching the influence of Edilberto and Edith Tiempo on Philippine literature, and Kaycee Melon was part of a panel on AI and writing. Patch Puengan is the firebrand behind the Let’s Get Lit campaign. Medyo kapoy baya, pero padayon!









[Photos from The Weekly Sillimanian, slightly modified by me]

Labels: city of literature, dumaguete, dumalitfest, literature, philippine literature, UNESCO

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Tuesday, October 14, 2025

2:46 AM | A Kick-Off in Frankfurt

This was from early this morning, at the kick-off brunch for all the Philippine delegates to the Frankfurter Buchmesse. I'm glad I met so many people from various corners of the Philippine literary world. Still keeping track of all the names and faces, which is quite overwhelming. All of us will be busy in the next few days for what essentially is a work week in behalf of Philippine literature.

For more updates, please go to the The Philippines as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025 website.

Labels: books, literature, philippine literature, writers

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Saturday, July 26, 2025

3:53 PM | Mo’s Literary Lunch of Second Acts

There is a peculiar myth we like to tell ourselves about life, and the way it unfolds to us in a single, linear trajectory: birth, education, work, success, retirement, death. But real life, like good fiction, rarely obeys the tyranny of the straight line. Life spirals, life collapses, life restarts. And somewhere in that unexpected loop lies the second act, or even a third one—something that is redemptive, often frightening, always exhilarating. They are new chapters where everything changes.

Second acts are the province of reinvention. They are what we choose when the first act either fails us or fulfills us too quickly. Let’s say, a woman who once defined herself through motherhood, making a return to painting. Let’s say, a corporate man who abandons his cushy privileges to open a small café by the sea. Let’s say, a writer, silenced for years, finds her voice again after heartbreak. These are stories not just of crisis, but also of courage. They are narratives of listening to the quiet hunger inside all of us that the world tells us to ignore.

In literature, the second act is often the richest. It is where the protagonist is undone and then remade. Think of Elizabeth Gilbert shedding her life in Eat, Pray, Love, or Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, stepping into the unknown. In second acts, we lose certainty, but we also gain character. We discover not who we were told to be, but who we are willing to become.

We speak of literature in this particular case because we were invited not too long ago to a literary lunch that had as its theme the subject of “second acts.” The instigator for that special meal last June 28 was a friend, Mohammad Malik, a Pakistani who has, since the pandemic, found a home in Dumaguete—a young retiree from the hustle of corporate life who has since become a sometime poet and a full-time farmer [and slow food enthusiast] whose stead is found in the foothills of Valencia.

The small gathering was of friends as well. There was Esther Windler and son Ramon. There was the visual artist Hersley-Ven Casero and filmmaker wife Toulla Mavromati, who came with another visual artist Paul Benzi Florendo. There were the both of us, Ian and Renz, joined in by Mo’s significant other Finola Uy, and Mo’s righthand woman and all-around genius, Ana Maria Danid, whose hands prepared the luncheon. When we arrived at Mo’s farm, we found Ana at the dirty kitchen in front of the house, busy tending the burning firewood as well as the calderos, bubbling with steam, above the fires’ tongues.

Mo greeted us at the door with platters of appetizers and pitchers of drinks—and we opted for a cup of hot coffee [for Renz], and a glass of iced kamote tops juice [for Ian]. On a plate on the kitchen counter, we found pan de bisaya with kesong puti and garlic honey—and over these overflowing appetizers, everyone was abuzz with greetings and conversation. But soon we settled for the luncheon itself, Mo calling us over to the dining table, where we sat at our designated spots with placeholders drawn with each of our names.

And then the literary lunch began with Mo reading from an essay he has written for the occasion, titled “Second Act”: “In the realm of storytelling,” he read, “the second act plays an important role in the development of the plot. Whereas the first act normally involves world-building—introducing us to the protagonist, understanding her motivations, and setting up the conflict or challenge that must be overcome, the second act is where things really start to unfold: the plot thickens, tension builds, and through a series of obstacles and challenges thrown our way, we see the main character step up and advance closer to her goals.”

Mo told us about leaving his corporate job in Manila in 2019, and arriving in Dumaguete with no plan, “just dreams.” “My first act was centered around the universal question, what is the meaning of My Life? … I experienced boom and bust relationships. I tested the boundaries of authority. There was joy and grief, experiments in living that ended in success and in failure… It usually takes a dramatic turn of events for a story to enter into a second act… When I left my job and the big city [for Dumaguete], I didn’t know with certainty what I wanted to do, but I had a general vision of what was important: I wanted to have a control of my own time; I wanted to live a creative life, to do creative things; I wanted to spend time in and around a natural setting; I wanted to prioritize physical and emotional well-being.”

He also said he had an intuition that food would play an important role in that second act. He learned how to grow and cook local produce for their health benefits, and soon food became a medium for him to explore other parts in his life. He learned more about the differences and similarities of his home [Pakistani] culture and Filipino culture. He found that home-cooked Filipino food can be lean and delicious and chockful of vegetables. He learned to befriend other enthusiasts for local cuisine. Food sparked his passion for this new life. Which was why he wanted to solidify that intuition with this luncheon with friends—and he did so with full assist from Ana Maria Danid, who left a life in Bulacan to join Mo in his new chapter in Dumaguete. This is also her second act.

Mo and Ana’s main entrée for our noontime meal was a delightful surprise: fried inun-unan, or pritong paksiw na isda. “I can’t think of a better way to introduce myself than through a recipe that I learned from my mother,” Ana revealed. “Pritong paksiw is a clever way to use your leftover paksiw na isda. The flavor is deeper because it was cooked one day earlier, and when you fry it, it somehow becomes fresh again. So, with one dish, you have now enjoyed two different meals!”

This was the concept of “second acts” personified in a dish!

Ana first simmered a whole tamarong in a stew spiced with ginger, black peppercorn, laurel, and siling espada. Then she added sukang paombong—vinegar from the sap of the nipa palm—which gave the inun-unan a distinct sweet tang. After the fish absorbed the sharp vinegar flavor, it was battered with cassava starch and then fried until crispy.

The crispy batter and skin contrasted with the tender flesh inside, a mellow sourness prodding our mouths to salivate. Served beside the dish was a sawsawan with the sukang paombong as the base, mixed with minced onion, garlic, and siling labuyo to liven up the vinegar, and muscovado and diced cucumber to tame it. Sautéed mustard greens and pechay freshened up the table, with crispy fried garlic chips offering a punch of bitter sweetness.

We ended the meal with a white chocolate strawberry mousse cake topped with crushed Oreos. The rich creamy mousse paired well with a warm brew of mint and butterfly pea flower tea. A roll of pili nut turon was passed around the table for a clean nutty bite.













We closed the luncheon with Mo handing over to us a zine to commemorate the lunch, which contained the essay he read at the beginning, as well as Ana’s recipe for the fried inun-unan.

Second acts are invigorating circumstances, we realized. There is, of course, fear when we confront it, but to begin again is really to risk. It is to admit that we are still unfinished. But perhaps that is the most human thing of all — this refusal to be fixed in place, this insistence that even at 40, or 60, or 80, a new story is still possible. For Mo, it was possible. For Ana, it was possible.

In a culture obsessed with youth and early success, second acts remind us that time is not our enemy but our canvas. That sometimes, it is only after the intermission—after the job ends, after the separation, after the silence—that we can finally begin to speak in our own voice.

Mo’s lunch taught us to honor the second act, to see it not as failure, but as freedom. Mo’s lunch made us understand that the self is a draft, constantly revised, and that the truest stories, like the truest lives, do not end at the first plot twist, but bloom in the pages, or in the next meals, that come after.


[Written with Renz Torres for Culinary Cuts]

Labels: dumaguete, food, life, literature, writers

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Sunday, April 13, 2025

9:00 AM | Four Days of Stories, Four Days of Literary Fellowship—A Litany of Thanks

As of this writing, it has been eight days since we started the 2nd Dumaguete Literary Festival, and five days since we saw it come to a very satisfying end. We’ve had some rest, and we’re still basking from the plethora of thanks we’ve been getting from our guests and from our attendees. The most satifying one has to come from the novelist Jose Y. Dalisay Jr., who sent this missive post-festival: “Mabuhay at salamt! One of the best literary festivals I’ve been to (and I’ve been to a lot!) Simple lang, pero masaya!”

We were gunning for that, truth to tell—the simplicity of it all, but one with an ambitious programming—so that remark from Sir Butch felt like a validation. Ever since we attempted to mount the first one last 2024, we wanted to have a literary festival that celebrated books and writers, but also favored extensive discourse. And we also wanted to do it the Dumaguete way: chill lang. No mall to host us because that feels so capitalistic—so we invite you to a heritage house. No formal clothes kay init kaayo—so please come in shorts and tsinelas. And to take our guests around, we have the tricycle. [But vans are also available, of course.] I think it was that vibe that made the literary festival such a huge success.

From an organizer’s point of view, this was a lot of sweat and hard work and sleepless nights. [But no tears! Because the team behind this—Gayle Acar, Ernest Acar, Tara de Leon, Renz Torres, Kaycee Melon, and I, which we call The Circle—somehow worked at all these via our twice-monthly meetings over pizza and pasta and liempo and sushi and laughter at the Acars’—which was our constant headquarters. Our synergy was synergizing well!] The six of us represented Buglas Writers Guild, Libraria Books, Backpack Solutions, Arts and Design Collective Dumaguete, DumAlt.Press, and the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center of Silliman University, all of them the presenting organizations of the literary festival. But we also got tremendous help from the Belltower Project and Indievided. [Hello, Jan V. Barga! He was really the seventh member of The Circle].

Our gratitude to our partners, DTI Negros Oriental [especially Nimfa Virtucio and Anton Gabila], the Dumaguete City Tourism Office [especially Katherine Aguilar], Cebu Pacific Air [especially Michelle Eve De Guzman], UNWND Boutique Hotel Dumaguete [especially Marla De Asis Fresnido], CHADAA [especially Louise Remata Villanueva], and Buglas Isla Cafe [especially Carmen Teves-Lhuillier], all without whom this would have been impossible to organize. Our presenting partners also included Inspiro-Dumaguete [especially Suzanne Lu-Bascara], Florentina Homes [especially Gabby Del Prado], Pinspired Art Souvenirs [especially Jane Spiridinova], Talecraft [especially Ria Lu and Maita Lu], Asia Brewery [thank you for the Tanduay!], the Film Development Council of the Philippines, and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts [the National Artist Office].

But without the writers who came, there would have been no literary festival. So thank you to the writers of Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, and Siquijor for coming and participating [as panelists, moderators, and presenters] and for making the Duma LitFest your home. And thank you to all our other literary guests from all over the Philippines [Manila, Cagayan de Oro, Iloilo, Zamboanga City, Cebu City, Davao City, etc.] for accepting our invitation to be part of this festival, especially National Artist for Literature Resil Mojares, public historian Ambeth R. Ocampo, and novelist Jose Dalisay Jr. Even food writer Ige Ramos joined us and celebrated his birthday here! Thank you as well to our lone come-backing panelist Mina V. Esguerra, whose RomanceClass will always have a table at Duma LitFest.

We also ate beautifully this year, courtesy of Adamo [thank you, Edison Monte de Ramos Manuel!], Beans and Barrels [thank you, Pam and Ed Celesios!], The Dining Room [courtesy of Leon Gallery — thank you Jaime Ponce de Leon and Nadia Teves!], and the Dumaguete City LGU [thank you, Mayor Ipe Remollo!]. Busog kayo mi!

Thank you to our benefactors—regular Dumaguete people who believed in our vision and who chipped in—from Golda Benjamin to Gideon Caballes, from Jenny Lind Dales-Elmaco to Eugene and Niña Kho, from Arlene Delloso to Luis Sinco, from Pristine Raymond to Virginia Stack, from Zara Dy to Beryl Delicana, from Sally Maghanoy to Honeylet Tuanda. Daghan pa kayo. I am touched when friends unexpectedly pitch in to help in significant ways, just seeing how their contribution can actually make things better. On the eve of the LitFest, Marikit Armogenia saw our white monobloc chairs, and she was like, “That won’t do. Use the chairs from my catering.” Thank you, Kit! Then there was also another friend, Renaldo Norman, who saw our brownout problem last Sunday, and provided an extra generator for us. There are many others in the community who have pitched in like this, unbidden—and we are so grateful. This kind of generosity feels very Dumaguete.

Lastly, thank you to Cil Flores whose art beautifully captured the essence of our theme this year. What also made this year’s edition special was the painstaking effort made by Ernest Acar [of Just Guhit ], Kiko Miranda [of KikoMonster], and Elbert Or [of Pushpin] who listened to all the literary panels, and produced graphic recordings of everyone’s thoughts at the end of every panel. Truly amazing.

It truly took a community to present this undertaking, to make true the vision of Dumaguete as a City of Stories. Salamat sa tanan. Padayon sa 3rd Dumaguete Literary Festival on April 2026!

Labels: dumaguete, dumalitfest, literature, philippine literature

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Sunday, April 06, 2025

9:00 AM | Realizing a Dream of Books and Writers

Like many things in my life, a literary festival set in the veritable literary cocoon that is Dumaguete was always a pipe dream—something you loudly wish you could make happen, but is always something elusive, and largely undone. I hate pipe dreams.

Dumaguete has always been a city of letters. Writers have long walked its streets like saints in a procession over many decades, their words carried by the sea breeze, mingling with the scent of tempurahan smoke and the occasional whiff of nostalgia. It is a place that cradles literature, a city where books and poetry and fiction feel as necessary as the salt in the air. And yet, for all its storied past—its heritage as the birthplace of great Filipino letters, its reputation as a refuge for writers in search of clarity—there has always been something missing. A literary festival, a true convergence of minds and voices, a space where writers and readers could gather, not just to commemorate history, but to create new legacies. This always felt like a dream, distant, unreal.

Last year, we made the first edition of the Dumaguete Literary Festival happen, but that one felt like a crazy dream. Did we really do it? And if we did, can we ever do it again? The new pipe dream is making this literary festival stick, and be sustainable.

But pipe dreams do not become real unless you have significant support from institutions, like the Department of Trade and Industry-Negros Oriental and the Dumaguete City Tourism Office, willing to have a stake in what you envision. Without them, we would not be able to do the things we do. And I’m glad we have added other institutions to the mix, like Cebu Pacific.

That is the truth of any grand endeavor. Vision is one thing, but execution demands resources, logistics, structure. And yet, in this city, sometimes bureaucracy or complacency is more labyrinth than lifeline. How does one convince a city office that literature is an economic asset; that a poetry reading can bring in just as much as a cultural show; that writers, too, are cultural ambassadors? The miracle, perhaps, is that sometimes you do not have to. Sometimes, someone on the other end of a desk understands, someone who loves words as much as you do, someone who has been waiting for a project like this to say yes to. And when that happens, the door inches open.

Pipe dreams do not become real unless you have friends who tell you they are there to help you realize them for real, like Ernest, like Gayle, like Tara, like Renz, like Kaycee.

No festival is built alone. And this, more than anything, is the soul of literature in Dumaguete: community. It is the quiet power of an offer, a “How can I help?” that turns an idea into a movement. It is Ernest Acar of Backpack Solutions managing logistics with the ease of a conductor leading an orchestra. It is Gayle Acar of Libraria Books drawing up schedules with military precision, and finding ways to bring in people that I often cannot. It is Tara de Leon of Dum.Alt.Press securing venues and volunteers and musicians with her signature dispassionate charm. It is Renz Torres, also of Dum.Alt.Press, tirelessly rallying various kinds of people to chip in and help [and also comforting me in my cycles of stress]. It is Kaycee Melon of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center finding ways to bring in new voices, finding out-of-the-box means to solve a quagmire. It is everyone saying, “We can do this,” even when it feels impossible. Because literature—the writing of it—may be a solo act, but the cultural work of literature has always been a communal one. One person writes, another reads, another is moved, and a chain begins. This festival is no different.

Pipe dreams do not become real unless they reflect a real need—and Dumaguete needs this literary festival.

For all its prestige, for all its literary history, the city has long needed a space for literary celebration. There is the annual Silliman University National Writers Workshop, the oldest creative writing workshop in Asia, but is it enough? We have long needed a space that is not just an academic exercise, or an homage to the past but a declaration of what is happening now. There are young writers here, voices sharpened by the waves crashing against Rizal Boulevard, by the drone of motorbikes on Hibbard Avenue, by heartbreaks unfolding in the nooks of Daddy Don’s or El Amigo. They need to know that their words matter. That there is an audience waiting. That they are part of something larger than themselves. And the older ones—those who have shaped this city’s literary landscape—need to see that the work continues, that the words they have planted are growing, thriving.

Pipe dreams do not become real unless you are willing to take the risk of failing.

Because what if no one shows up? What if the funding falls through? What if, despite everything, the dream collapses? These are the fears that accompany every grand idea. But fear is not an argument for inaction. Literature, after all, has always been about taking risks. Every poem is a risk. Every novel, every story, every essay—each one is an offering to an uncertain audience, an act of faith that someone will read, someone will care. And that is what this festival is, in the end. An act of faith. In the city, in the writers, in the people who believe in the power of words.

And so, the dream begins, again.

Labels: books, city of literature, dumaguete, dumalitfest, life, literature, writers

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Monday, March 03, 2025

8:55 PM | Nahuman Ra Jud

Now that  I’m somewhat rested and have gotten my post-application massage [a combo of body and foot], and now that I’m about to eat my first real [and intentional!] meal in days, I think I can pahungaw a bit: truth to tell, this UNESCO application, which lasted from December to now, took such a toll on my mental and physical health, and by February, I found myself getting sick a lot. I tried to persevere [I made sure this did not affect my academic and tourism work], but the anxiety was sometimes just too much to bear. There were promises I made I couldn’t quite keep because of sheer exhaustion, although I still intend to fulfill my obligations now that the big dragon has been tamed. Was it the sheer ambition of the end-goal, the “internationality” of it all? I guess so. I was so exhausted and anxious I couldn’t even entertain some of the minor blowbacks to the effort from people you would think would be the most supportive. [Some people actually think we are applying for grant money? Where will the money go daw? Like, no, that’s not it. We tried to reach out to the most representative stakeholders that we could contact, and explain what this effort all means. In the end, you really cannot control divisiveness, or miscommunication, or benign disinterest. But most people have been so kind and supportive, even with last-minute asks.] In my darkest moments, I actually felt I was so alone. That’s not true, of course. In the end, it was a coterie of friends and associates who pulled me out of darkness and together we made it to the deadline. If there is one person to thank, it would be DTI’s Anton Gabila, who was the steadfast keeper of our light, the rock to all our efforts, never mind the mixed metaphors. Again, I will take the road of gratefulness. Thank you, my friends. You know who you are. You are my light in an anxious world. I have always believed in the primacy of trying instead of wishful thinking; this is our attempt. Here’s wishing all of us luck on October.

Labels: city of literature, dumaguete, life, literature, UNESCO

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Sunday, February 02, 2025

9:00 AM | Why We Read Together

Once a month since last July, we arrive—mostly quietly—with our books at the Arts and Design Collective Dumaguete along E.J. Blanco Drive, home of Libraria Books. One by one, we come—all of us readers in Dumaguete—some early, and some late; we settle, we say hello; we nod, and smile. We filter into some cozy corners of the old house, or on fluffy chairs, or on the floormat, each of us carrying a book. Some bring fiction, some poetry, some nonfiction. Once in a while, some even bring college textbooks. [Not kidding. For our January session, someone brought Nigel Benson’s The Psychology Book.] Most would bring actual books, although some are content with electronic devices, like a Kindle. Some would first go to Fermentina Café to get drinks, or to Mister Saigon to grab a quick bite.



And then, when 6 PM comes, Libraria’s Gayle Acar welcomes everyone. She is the host. She reminds us of a few rules to begin the session—you can bring any book of your choice; you need to keep your phones on mute; you will read in two 30-minute blocks of reading time [with a 10-minute break in between]; you don’t have to expect a book discussion because this is not required.

And then a shared silence takes hold. A novel opens, a page turns, a deep breath is taken, and then we read. It is a ritual as simple as it is profound: a group of people choosing to read together, not for discussion, not for obligation, but simply for the joy of reading.

This is a fairly new thing in Dumaguete, even though the city has always had the rhythm of a literary town that it is. It is a place where the written word is as much a part of daily life as the sea breeze that drifts in from the Rizal Boulevard. Writers and readers, students and teachers, artists and dreamers all find a kind of quiet solace here, whether in the century-old halls of Silliman University, in the pages of a book borrowed from someone’s personal library, or in the unhurried conversations that unfold over coffee in one of the city’s many small cafés. Literature thrives here—not just in the texts produced by its poets and novelists but also in the way people live with books, in the way reading itself is woven into the city’s fabric.

It is no surprise then that Silent Book Club has found its place in Dumaguete. This global movement has grown into a phenomenon spanning cities and continents, and in a place like Dumaguete—where reading is already an everyday act—it feels like a natural fit. Unlike traditional book clubs that revolve around assigned readings and structured discussions, Silent Book Club offers something more flexible, more personal. Readers gather in a chosen space, settle in with their books, and read in shared silence. There is no required novel to analyze, no expectation to articulate a critique. Just the simple joy of reading, alone but together.

Dumaguete’s literary reputation is deeply rooted in its history. The Silliman University National Writers Workshop, the oldest of its kind in Asia, has shaped generations of Filipino writers, drawing emerging voices from across the country to engage in critical discussions about craft and storytelling. Beyond the workshop, Dumaguete has long been a hub for literary gatherings, from poetry readings to book launches, from late-night conversations about writing to impromptu storytelling sessions in quiet corners of cafés. [Last year, we initiated the first Dumaguete Literary Festival, and its second edition is slated on April 2025.]

Silent Book Club, in its own way, continues this Dumaguete literary tradition while offering an alternative space for local readers who simply want to immerse themselves in books without the weight of critique. It acknowledges that literature is not just about discourse but also about presence, about companionship in solitude. And for a city that already embraces literature in all its forms, this quiet movement feels like an extension of an already thriving culture.

The concept of Silent Book Club was born out of a simple need: to create a reading community without the pressures of traditional book clubs. Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich, two friends in San Francisco, started meeting in 2012 in a wine bar with their books, realizing that they enjoyed the presence of others who were similarly engaged in quiet reading. What began as a small gathering soon spread across cities worldwide, with each chapter adopting its own unique approach to hosting reading sessions. In the Philippines, beyond Dumaguete, there are Silent Book Clubs in Manila, in Iloilo, in Baguio, and in Cagayan de Oro City.

Unlike structured book clubs that require a commitment to specific titles, Silent Book Club welcomes all kinds of readers. It is inclusive in its simplicity: anyone can join, bringing whatever book they are currently reading, staying as long as they like. There is no need to finish a chapter by a deadline, no obligation to offer insights—only the act of reading itself.

I think this stance is perfectly right in the kind of word we live in, which constantly demands engagement—whether through social media, work, or the general busyness of life. Silent Book Club, in a way, offers a kind of resistance to this expectation of contemporary life. It is a reminder that reading can be a slow, deliberate act, and one that does not need to be productive or performative. It is merely enough to sit with a book, to lose oneself in its pages, to turn the act of reading into a shared but deeply personal experience.

For Dumaguete’s readers, this is particularly significant. The city has always been a refuge for those who seek quiet contemplation, and Silent Book Club reinforces that legacy. It provides a space where reading is not just a solitary pleasure but a communal one, where book lovers can gather without the need for conversation, simply enjoying the presence of others who share the same love for the written word.

I asked Ina Tizon why she comes every month. “John and I both decided to join Silent Book Club 6200 so we can finally get around to reading our backlog of books,” she says. “Though to be honest, our main purpose was to go out of the house and socialize with our friends and other like-minded individuals. And we got to tick both of those boxes when we attended, we also get to meet new people and have long chats afterwards.”

I asked Pia Villareal the same question. “I joined because it was an excuse to read somewhere silent that wasn’t just the same four walls of my room,” she says. “It’s also easier not to get distracted when there’s outside pressure to keep doing the thing you want to do, which in this case is reading. And lastly, it’s just a really convenient way to be among people who appreciate books and have the decency to stay quiet while you read.”

From Tara de Leon: “I sadly suffer from what is referred to as ‘brain rot.’ It has made reading books difficult but it hasn’t curbed the desire to hoard. When I’m surrounded by people who enjoy what they’re doing, I get caught in the current of their excitement. I joined the Silent Book Club 6200 in the hope that by osmosis, I can rekindle my love for reading—and also tackle my mounting to-read tower!”

From Leah Navarro: “As someone who used to read a lot but now has difficulty doing so, I have hoped joining the Silent Book Club will spark my desire to consume books again. Which, apparently, after many sessions, has immensely helped me read the books I just put on the shelf after buying them. It’s like rekindling an old flame—and for me, having a community that read together for an hour is quite inspiring. I look forward to each month, to seeing new [and old] faces, to talk about their progress on the books that they have chosen to read.”

From Dominique Roleda: “I mainly joined because I needed an excuse to read. I had been in such a huge reading slump for the past two years, where I’d start a new book, then forget about it and then start another. I just could not finish reading a book! And then I’d make excuses that it was because I was busy, and I had other things to do. When I heard that there was a book club though, I figured that I’d give it a shot. Silent Book Club gave me an excuse to actually go out and read, so that was hitting two birds with one stone. I didn’t really think that it would be for me, because I didn’t think reading in silence would be very engaging, but just being around people reading and mirroring them did help me get out of my reading slump. It also feels comforting to silently be a part of a community, even though there isn’t much talking involved, just a shared love of books. I feel like whenever I was part of online book clubs before where there were discussions, it just pressured me into putting up a persona so that I didn’t seem dumb, and I was rushing to read so I had something to talk about—but missing the enjoyment of the book actually sucked, and that got tiring real quickly. Just silently existing in a room to read with other people [who also love reading books as much as I do] is comforting in its own way. And I’d also get some good recommendations for my next read just by looking around! And if I really want to start a conversation, asking about books at the Silent Book Club is pretty much a free ice-breaker.”

I do hope Silent Book Club becomes a firm fixture in Dumaguete’s literary landscape, much like the workshops and readings that have come before it. I love its simplicity. I love that it requires no grand gestures and no elaborate discussions—just a group of people reading together, in silence, finding comfort in the shared stillness of books.


Silent Book Club 6200 [ Instagram: @silentbookclub.6200 ] meets once a month, usually on a Wednesday night, at Libraria Books at 58 EJ Blanco Drive. The event is free and open to the public.

Labels: books, city of literature, dumaguete, literature, silent book club

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Friday, October 11, 2024

6:27 PM | Han Kang, Nobel Prize Laureate

The New York Times on Han Kang’s win. This is a very good analysis of why we needed this first Asian female writer [and first South Korean] to be our Nobel Prize laureate this year. It’s a perfect stand against entrenched patriarchy [and in South Korea, a fitting rebuke against poet Ko Un, long considered the probable Korean to win the prize but who is now facing a backlash for allegations of sexual harassment].

Labels: asian literature, literature, Nobel Prize, writers

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Friday, March 22, 2024

1:42 PM | Almost There!

This is ready to go to my copyeditor! It is a phone book.

Labels: dumaguete, history, literature, negros, philippine literature, writers, writing

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Thursday, March 16, 2023

7:00 AM | The Darkness We Don’t Talk About

In 2008, a sort of funny thing happened. It was the second year of the Man Asian Literary Prize, the now defunct literature award given to the best novel in the English language [or in translation] by an author in Asia—and four Filipino authors were longlisted for the award: yours truly, Lakambini Sitoy, Alfred Yuson, and Miguel Syjuco, with the latter ending up winning the prize [and the Palanca Award for the novel at that time].

It was an amazing harvest of Philippine literature, and being thrust personally in the middle of that was surreal. [It tickled me to see my name in print on the New York Times book section, for example.] Part of it was the allure of the prize being given by the same body that was sponsoring the Booker Prize, and thus the Man Asian Literary Prize was being seen in many quarters as the “Asian Booker.” Another part of the allure was also the fact that we were the sophomore follow-up to a stellar first crop: in 2007, the Chinese writer Jiang Rong won the inaugural prize with his novel Wolf Totel, with the short list consisting of Soledad's Sister by Jose Dalisay Jr. [another Filipino writer], Families at Home by India’s Reeti Gadekar, Smile As They Bow by Myanmar’s Nu Nu Yi, and Habit of a Foreign Sky by Hong Kong’s Xu Xi. [The longlist was even more formidable, and included Mo Yan, the future Nobel Prize winner for literature.]

But what struck me the most about the 2008 longlist was the fact that two Dumaguete writers made it in: there’s of course me, with the other one being Lakambini Sitoy. And ours were two novels whose premises are anchored on the dark soul of Dumaguete [and Negros Oriental as a whole].

My [still unpublished] novel is titled Sugar Land, and its drama springs from the infamous serial killings of young women by a landed Spanish mestizo that had rattled Dumaguete in the 1970s to the 1980s, ending in a tragic shoot-out near St. Paul’s in the early 1990s. Bing’s novel is Sweet Haven, where she renames Dumaguete as “Donostia” [and Silliman as “Sweet Haven University”], and follows the fall-out of a sex scandal, tailored after the infamous “Dumaguete sex scandal” in the mid-2000s, where several coeds were secretly filmed while engaging in sex, with the footage eventually leaked to pirates and jumpstarted the trend of amateur porn videos being titled after specific places [“Bacolod Sex Scandal,” etc.].

I joked then to Bing: “It’s funny how we are putting Dumaguete in a very negative light in our novels, with real life sex scandals and serial killers.”

But I know it was not easy for both of us to proceed with these projects, and we took pains fictionalizing the general information, although our details were culled from what reportage we could research from. She renamed the city to something else, and when we launched the novel at Silliman sometime in 2013, she understandably took pains to obfuscate the similarities. But anyone who knows Dumaguete/Silliman can read between the lines in her descriptions of Sweet Haven University, and her rightful condemnation of the misplaced moral lynching that can sometimes erupt in its hallowed halls. [In her novel, a young coed’s reputation has been tarnished because of the video, with her name gleefully dragged through the mud by the moralistic people of the town—but she has a secret she’s keeping: the man who raped and filmed her is the privileged son of a high-ranking university administrator.] In my novel, I did not hesitate from using the name “Dumaguete,” but I had to create another name for the alleged serial killer—simply because I knew his family [and I liked them!], and I did not feel it was right of me to have their name besmirched once more, even after so many years after their predecessor’s horrifying demise.

In a way, Bing and I were trading our tales using the subterfuges of secrets that Dumaguete traffics in. The truth is, you will never find concrete accounts of the serial killing or the video sex scandal on the Internet anymore, and the newspaper accounts are sketchy [if you can actually gain access to them]. But trust me, these accounts are alive in the private recollections and conversations among Dumaguetnons, gossiping as we do while in a party, while doing household chores, while drinking among friends. Nobody writes of these dark stuff in community newspapers. Nobody posts about these things on social media. But among ourselves, we talk.

People gossip. People have theories. People have emotional investments in the oral unraveling of these local misfortunes. But these discourses will never see print—except perhaps in the private chatgroups of Dumaguete Facebook. And if you notice, I have never referred to a specific name at all in this article so far. This is the Dumaguete way.

Which explains why nobody in Dumaguete [and Negros Oriental] really puts out comments about the recent Pamplona massacre out there, especially on social media. Someone, obviously a langyaw [a stranger or newbie], had wondered about the silence. No one talks and no one names names! Which is strange because everyone certainly knows the name of the alleged perpetrators. It’s just probably very anti-Dumaguete to name names, and perhaps we are right to do so, mostly for fear of our lives. I wish I could list down past instances of this happening—but all of Dumaguete knows why I can’t.

Everyone here knows never to utter names, and if we really had to, we borrow a device from the Harry Potter books, and call the specter as He/They Who Must Not Be Named. Which is why it astonishes me no end to hear non-Oriental Negrenses uttering the name so clearly and blatantly in their social media posts and in their interviews. You really have to be from somewhere else to truly be able to do that. A few days ago, I was asked to facilitate the sourcing of potential interviewees for a podcast about the recent violence in Negros Oriental by a major media outlet. The producers seemed to be aware of the communal bind we were in regarding talking openly about these matters, and they hastily assured me: “We won’t be specific, we will speak only generally about the violence in the community.” And then also this: “If we can’t find locals to interview, perhaps you know of people who are willing to talk who are in the U.S.?” That buffer of generality and geographic distance is perfectly indicative of the paralyzing conundrum locals have about the occasional violence that erupt in our midst.

What does this say about the Dumaguetnon? Is this cowardice, or is this just a mechanism for survival? My friend, the theater artist Lu Decenteceo, tries to give an explanation: “We are as human as you get them. Our persons run the whole range even if we have been raised to admire the good and gentle. So we try to live the life we would like ourselves to be. The dark side, we recognize, but we would rather keep them in the shadows as they are not how we would like ourselves to be. [We in Dumaguete] are a genteel breed. Politeness and courtesy reigns — on the surface [at least]. And it is impolite and uncivil(ized) to be otherwise. As a society that is [was?] not so mobile, [we have] generations [who had to learn] to live with each other [because] we are [were] a small [closed] community. Or at least, even if we have our langyaw, we still have a core members of the community who see and have to deal with each other. We have to have a modus vivendi.”

It begs another question: are we really a city of gentle people, given this recent descent into hell?

I found a photo on Twitter many days ago. It shows an ordinary shot of Hibbard Avenue traversing Silliman campus, but what struck me was a painted sign attached to the base of a streetlamp that says: “None of you are gentle.” I don’t know who took it, or who made this sign, but it made me pause. I’ve written about this before: the title we have given Dumaguete, that it is a “city of gentle people,” is something we inherited from the creative ploys of a popular local radio personality in the 1960s/1970s [Philidore Quingco of DYSR/DYRM] who brandished it so frequently we just adopted it through osmosis, until it finally became a kind of a brand. Some people then actually thought it was corny, but it stuck. I think of it more as bullshit marketing tag, the way most cities in the Philippines have something going on: Cebu as the “Queen City of the South,” Bacolod as the “City of Smiles,” Cagayan de Oro as the “City of Golden Friendship,” etc. They mean nothing, to be honest, just a tag to pat ourselves by.

So, are we no longer the city of “gentle” people, given recent circumstances?

But then again … were we ever “gentle”? 

Nostalgia is nice [“Ahhh, mas tsada katong sa unang panahon...”] but it is unreliable and warps memories, and if you can only go back in time to the very past you think is great, you’ll encounter people who will bemoan the same kind of problems we hate today. What comes to mind easily is the 1951 murder of Magallon town politician Moises Padilla, who dared run for town mayor against the wishes of then Negros Occidental Governor Rafael Lacson—and for that disobedience, the governor had cohorts of his private army kidnap and torture Padilla, and then had his body dragged around through several towns as an explicit warning to the locals about the dangers of earning the ire of an all-powerful politician. President Ramon Magsaysay, angered by the murder, personally saw to it that justice would be served—and Lacson ended up incarcerated. [But because he was rich and influential, Lacson was quietly released under the presidency of Diosdado Macapagal some years later, and returned to live out the rest of his days in his hometown in peace.] The lesson to be gained is this: the past has never been innocent. [And the powerful will try to bend justice their way, whenever they can.]

This is not a Negros problem. The same kind of injustice and crime and killings that have been happening here in our island also occur everywhere else. [Think of Calauan, Laguna Mayor Antonio Sanchez and his rape/killings of two UP Los Baños students in 1993. Think of the Ampatuan massacre in Maguindanao in 2009. But what is it with murderous politicians, no?] We just feel ours more strongly now because they are within intimate reach.

I’d still like to believe Dumaguetnons and Oriental Negrenses are good people on the whole, gentle even. I know many of these folks. But evil does exist. Even among us.

And until we allow ourselves to articulate that evil, we will forever be victims of it, because it is a cancer that will not stop spreading until we name it. Any takers?

Maybe I’ll write a novel about it. [But most likely not, hahaha.]



P.S.

Since I just wrote about it, if you’re wondering where you can get a copy of Lakambini Sitoy’s Sweet Haven in Dumaguete, Tara De Leon just sent me this photo. It’s available at Caballes Bookstore! [And apparently also, Ichi Batacan’s Smaller and Smaller Circles.] Get them!

Labels: crime, dumaguete, history, literature, negros, philippine literature, politics, sex, true crime

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Tuesday, November 15, 2022

1:20 PM | Thank You, Dumaguete City

So, this just happened. The Dumaguete City Council passed a resolution today commending me for my contributions to local literature and cultural work, and for winning my sixth Palanca Award. Brought my family along to witness it, but I didn’t expect the proceedings to be emotional — and I didn’t expect all the Councilors and Vice Mayor Maisa Sagarbarria to say something in tribute to my work. In my speech I dedicated the award to all the Dumaguete writers that came before me — the Tiempos, Bobby Villasis, Myrna Peña-Reyes, and many others — and reminded the City Council that there still remains that dream to proclaim Dumaguete as a UNESCO City of Literature. Thank you to Renz Macion for authoring the resolution, and thank you to the Dumaguete City Council for this honor. And thank you to my city for always being an inspiration, and a cradle to artistic endeavors.

Labels: art and culture, awards, dumaguete, life, literature

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Friday, August 05, 2022

5:58 AM | An Arts Academy for the Nation’s Teachers

One of the most dynamic, and humbling, things I do in my vocation as both writer and cultural worker has been moderating writing workshops for teachers. I cannot recall when this exactly began for me, but it has been a while. And my general takeaway has always been that of supreme fulfilment, a matter of giving back, so to speak.

In one of the most recent workshops I’ve given, I was asked by a participant how I knew I was a writer. My answer was immediately forthcoming: I had no idea I could write well until my teachers told me I could, paving the way to a career devoted mostly to creative writing.

In grade school, I remember enjoying doing the themed compositions my teacher, Ms. Bennie Vic Concepcion, made us do on an annual rotation—and missives devoted to “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” or “My Best Friend” became ripe ground to explore, in a creative manner, my childhood rumination on those themes. Ms. Concepcion, who was my English teacher from Grade III to Grade IV, also equipped me with the fundamentals of the English language, making my facility in it adept enough to be able to tell stories well. I was later appointed to become editor-in-chief of the school organ, The Western Star, although I had no idea I could do journalism as well. The same thing happened in high school, with teachers like Ms. Tessie Sedigo, Ms. Gina Fontejon, and Prof. Alejandra Bañas validating my writing, that I could also be tasked with editing the school paper. In college, Prof. Ceres Pioquinto took me under her wings, and under her I learned the nuances of literary criticism. When I was a freshman, Prof. Timothy Montes approached me after his BC 11 class one day, and essentially “ordered” me to apply for The Weekly Sillimanian [which I did, and years later, I would become its editor-in-chief]. It was also Tim who “ordered” me to apply for the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in 2020, where I rubbed elbows for the first time with many of the luminaries in Philippine literary circles. That essentially began my writing career.

My teachers were the ones who recognized something in me I did not even see in myself. They inspired me, they goaded me, they made me believe in a talent I never even knew I had. Thus, in giving these writing workshops for teachers, I am only coming full circle. These workshops have been a privilege and a pleasure.

The Arts Academy of the Cultural Center of the Philippines has been an annual tour-of-duty for me—vacated only by the pandemic in recent years. In past editions of this academic outreach by the CCP, I’ve taught regular writing workshops in poetry and fiction, but when I was invited to teach again in 2022, I decided that I wanted to pursue something I’ve been an advocate of in recent years: writing in Binisaya—in other words, mamugnaong katitikan sa Binisaya.

I felt it was necessary. I felt I could make a difference if I use Binisaya as the lens with which to do a workshop in creative writing, and succeed not only introducing obscure texts to a new audience of teachers [who might go on to teach these very works to their classes] but also in rekindling in them the often-ignored truth that when you write in your own mother tongue, you will discover a different kind of depth you can never really fathom when you use a borrowed language.

And frankly speaking, it also helps jumpstart a curiosity in learning the grammar and orthography of the native tongue—something we don’t learn at all in school. I always find it heartening when people who have been speaking Binasaya most of their lives eventually find out that there is actually a difference between “og” and “ug,” between “putli” and “ulay,” or between “ni” and “kang”; that you are actually using a Tagalog-corrupted lexicon when you say “nilugaw” [correct usage: “linugaw”] or “nilabhan” [correct usage: “linabhan”], “niluto” [correct usage: “linuto”], or “nilung-ag” [correct usage: “linung-ag”]; or you’re basically entertaining bad grammar when you say “taga-i” [correct usage: “hatagi”], or “tuho-i” [correct usage: “tuohi”], or “palikero” [correct usage: “palakero”], or “dalunggan” [correct usage: “dulunggan”]. What accounts for the mistakes we regularly make of our own language is the fact that for most of us, it has remained largely oral—thus, when we mishear something, we automatically use the spelling of that misheard word—and we are not used to reading the words or the “pulong” on the page. It’s about time we take seriously our own language, which also means using it correctly as much as possible.

While creative writing in both English and Tagalog continue to flourish—and helped by the fact that these are taught in schools and published widely—regional language literature always seem to be neglected in the larger scheme of things. Our writings in Binisaya, Bikolano, Waray, Hiligayon, Kiniray-a, Akeanon, Ilocano, Chavacano, and others are certainly not dead—of late, they have actually seen a resurgence [if limited] in popularity and in scholarship. But the fact remains that in terms of development it has lagged behind English and Tagalog. I’ve written in English most of my life, and I’ll probably continue doing so, since this is the language that I am most comfortable with—but I’ve become cognizant of this sense of responsibility of becoming an advocate of the literature of my own language because, to borrow the wisdom of two my mentors, this specific kind of literature is a valid building block in our continuing effort to build, and understand, the nation, which we should do city by city, province by province, language by language [something I learned from Tim Montes]; and learning the language as part of the culture of the place where we’re from helps us distance away from using outside models [e.g., Manila culture, Western culture] to understand ourselves [something I learned from Rosario Cruz Lucero].

In the past five days, I’ve been immersed in learning the nuances of Binisaya, and in crafting the balak, the siday, the binalaybay—all contemporary forms of poetry in Binisaya, Waray, and Hiligaynon—with an assortment of teachers from all over the Philippines, counting among them Bernardino P. Magno Jr. [Digos City], Beverly L. Deque [Bais City], Edwin Garcia [Baybay, Leyte], Eloisa Jane Ramos [Las Piñas City], Guia May D. Flordemarlin [Tagum City], Jeepee Magallanes [Bonifacio CIty, Misamis Occidental], Joseph O. Montajes [Baybay City, Leyte], Katybeth P. Sumalinab [Caraga, Davao Oriental], Kezia Keren L. Cagalawan [Tudela, Misamis Occidental], Leizel C. Quiatchon [Bacolod City], Marliel P. Castillejos [Pasig City], Maryjean T. Susaya [Jaro, Leyte], May D. Castino [Catbalogan City, Samar], Narciso Ogaya Jr. [Pasig City], Niña Rose D. Inoferio [Dumaguete City], Ninfa Jael Hopilos [Iloilo City], Patricia Villanueva [Iligan City], Rene Puson [Baybay City, Leyte], Rey D. Calo [Valencia City, Bukidnon], Rolinda Judith Carlobos [Butuan City], Roma Medina [Masbate City], Shelamar C. Garrucha [Bais City], and Tess Sedigo-Bernal [Siquijor], who was actually my freshman English teacher in Silliman High School way back in the early 1990s.

They are only a part of a bigger contingent of teachers [about 180 of them] who have been in Dumaguete the past few days, and here to sharpen more their classroom know-how in the teaching of Theatre Arts [under Dessa Quesada-Palm], dance and dance production [under Ronnie Mirabuena, Cheenee Limuaco, Angelo Sayson, and Aiken Quipot], film [under Elvert Bañares], band conducting and music production [under Joseph Albert Basa and Juni Jay Tinambacan], and visual arts [under W Don Flores and AK Ocol]. I’m sure I’m not the only one among the mentors who are gratified in the heartening response of our participants—I love my workshoppers’ hunger to learn, and I love their capacity for absorption and reflection, for their humor even in challenging activities, and for their willingness to also teach me in things that I lack.

A confession: I teach because I want to know. This springs from the adage: “If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.” Hopefully, in doing a creative writing workshop in Binisaya, I am on the way to that last of lofty goals.

Labels: cultural center of the philippines, literature, philippine literature, silliman, teaching, workshops

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Tuesday, August 02, 2022

7:00 PM | Teaching Binisaya Literature for the CCP Arts Academy

From Day 2 of the CCP Arts Academy, where I'm teaching a workshop on Binisaya literature, using regional language as the lens to teach creative writing. [I think it's needed.]





My workshop is being held at the Silliman Library, and I have about 30 participants — all teachers from all over the Philippines, from Davao to Iligan, from Bacolod to Baybay, Leyte, from the NCR to Masbate, from Bais to Iloilo. This is most interesting, and I'm also learning along the way.





Yesterday, I lectured on a sense of place in literature, and today we touched on Binisaya orthography and the various literary forms [from traditional to contemporary] in Katitikang Binisaya. This afternoon, we began our writing workshop, where I asked them to write a balak/siday/binalaybay. We also did an exercise on crafting the sambingay [metaphor]. Can't wait for Friday, where we will see the fruition of all these efforts.



With some of the resource speakers for the workshops on the various arts ranging from theatre to dance, visual arts to film, music to literature.

[Photos by Renz Torres]

Labels: art and culture, cultural center of the philippines, literature, philippine literature, teaching, workshops, writing

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Saturday, May 29, 2021

5:51 PM | A Literary Reason for Staying

Someone recently asked what is my reason for staying in Dumaguete. A long time ago, the same question was asked the literary power couple Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, and their answer was simple: “The Dumaguete shoreline.”

On good days, when I walk by the famed Rizal Boulevard, I get what they meant. There is something about this specific view that tugs at the heart, and convinces you this is ample reason for staying. But I’m starting with a Tiempo story because my own answer is different—but literary.

People forget that the literary is in the heart of being Dumaguetnon, or of being Oriental Negrense. We who live here live in a place that’s practically the heart of Philippine literature—or at least one of its vital organs—and not just because this is home for many of our beloved writers, but also because its landscape has been thoroughly etched in so many poems, so many short stories, so many essays, so many novels, and so many plays. And not just by our homegrown writers; Dumaguete lives in the pages penned from so many writers from other places, all inspired by what they see as its bucolic air and its gentle people (and often its mystery), seduced by the “literary” spirit of the place, with many of them coming here to incubate in that particular atmosphere.

I remember the American writer Tim Tomlinson going for a diving vacation in Apo Island without prior knowledge of Dumaguete. “When I passed through the place,” he told me, “something struck me about it as a haven for writers for some reason.” Once he got back to Manila, he asked a poet friend, “What do you know about Dumaguete?” And that’s when he got to know a bit of Oriental Negrense literary history—that it is home to the oldest creative writing workshop in Asia, that it is home to two National Artists (Edith Tiempo and Eddie Romero), that it is home (and incubator) to so many contemporary writers who fill the pages of our anthologies and the shelves of our bookstores.

Grace Monte de Ramos is a poet from Siaton. Simon Nino Anton Baena is a poet from Bais. Rolin Miguel Cadallo Obina is a playwright also from Bais. Bobby Flores Villasis is a poet, fictionist, and dramatist from Bayawan. (His short story collection, Suite Bergamasque, is a sinful take on the denizens of the Rizal Boulevard sugar mansions, and many of his plays tackle the highs and lows of our landed class.) Ernesto Superal Yee is a poet and fictionist from Tanjay. (His novel Out of Doors is a scintillating love story with the backdrop of his city’s sugar country.)

Then there are the Dumaguete writers, like César Ruìz Aquino (read Chronicles of Suspicion), David C. Martinez (read A Country of Our Own), Artemio Tadena (read This Craft, As With a Woman Loved: Selected Poems), Jose V. Montebon Jr. (read Cupful of Anger, Bottle Full of Smoke), Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas (read Upon the Willows and Other Stories), Myrna Peña-Reyes (read Memory’s Mercy), and Edilberto Tiempo (read More Than Conquerors)—each of those books containing either glimpses or full vistas of life in Negros Oriental, for better or for worse (at least for drama’s sake).

A lot of them do reflect on some painful truths and social commentary—for example, the Dumaguete in Lakambini Sitoy’s novel Sweet Haven (hidden under the moniker Donostia) goes deep into social hypocrisy, and the Dumaguete in Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s play In My Father’s House chronicles the sundering of family at the height of the Japanese Occupation during World War II. In Edith Tiempo’s story, “The Black Monkey,” a crippled woman battles her fears in the hills of Valencia also during the war.

Merlie Alunan has anthologized literary memories in The Dumaguete We Know, and together with Villasis edited the seminal Kabilin, the coffee-table book commemorating the provincial centenary in 1991. Dumaguete figures prominently in the fiction of Aida Rivera Ford (read “There’s a War Out There!”), Jaime An Lim (read “The Axolotl Colony”) and Antonio R. Enriquez (read “Butong”), the poetry of Anthony Tan (read “To a Tree Near a Boulevard”) and Ricaredo Demetillo (read “Banyan Tree”), and the plays of Lemuel Torrevillas (read “Looking for Edison or What’s the Name of the Guy Who Invented Something”), all of whom lived in the city in the formative years of their writing lives.

When you tackle the works of writers not from the province, you’ll be surprised to find Negros Oriental at the heart of some of their works: discover Bacong’s Leon Kilat in Krip Yuson’s novel The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café; climb the foothills of Valencia in Gemino Abad’s poem “Casaroro Falls”; chart the heartbreaks of the Rizal Boulevard in the poems of Cesar Aljama (“Dumaguete Nights”), Ricardo M. De Ungria (“Dumaguete Blues”), Nerisa Del Carmen Guevara (“Boulevard Tree”), Jose Wendell Capili (“Hugging the Shore”), Jeneen Garcia (“On a Night Boat From Dumaguete”), and Diana T. Gamalinda (“Dumaguete”); dive into the dark (and sometimes fantastic or erotic) side of Dumaguete in the stories of Marianne Villanueva (“Dumaguete”), Leoncio Deriada (“Tartanilya”), Rosario Cruz Lucero (“Conundrums”), Dean Francis Alfar (“Six From Downtown”), and Susan S. Lara (“The Other Regina”); court nostalgia in the essays of Marjorie Evasco (“Tertullias at San Jose and a Family Album”), Francis Macansantos (“Two Masters”), and Timothy Montes (“Silliman in the Eighties: Of That Time, Second Person”).

There are our prominent historiographers who helped create the story of our past, such as Earl Jude Paul Cleope (read Bandit Zone: A History of the Free Areas of Negros Island During the Japanese Occupation), Caridad Aldecoa Rodriguez (read Negros Oriental: A History), and T. Valentino Sitoy (read A History of Christianity in the Philippines: The Initial Encounter), as well as cultural researchers whose outputs are foundational in Philippine cultural studies, such as Elena Maquiso (read Ulahingan and Mga Sugilanon sa Negros) and Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham (read The Folk Songs of the Visayas).

I once hosted a “litera-tour” of Dumaguete sometime in 2017—and I loved the energy of literature brought to life in the actual geography. There’s a kind of voodoo in that conjunction. That’s the seaside bench in Villasis’ short story “Menandro’s Boulevard.” That’s the Redemptorist Church in Alunan’s poem “The Bells Count in Our Blood.” That’s Escaño in Justine Yu’s “Sweet Baby.” That’s Jo’s Chicken Inato in my own story “A Tragedy of Chickens.”

An anthology should really be compiled, if you ask me.

So why do I stay in Negros Oriental? There are many reasons—but foremost among them is the privilege of being at home, literally, in the place conjured in the literary dreams of many writers I love and respect. It’s enough of a reason to stay.

Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, life, literature, negros, philippine history, philippine literature

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020

4:07 AM | Terrence McNally and the Artistic Struggle

I've always wondered, morbidly, which among the major [or minor] celebrities that I know would succumb to COVID-19. It turned out to be a writer and theatre artist, the Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally [1938-2020]. I first discovered his work [like most people, I think] via the film version of Love! Valour! Compassion!, which centered around a group of New York friends, all gay, as they occasionally spend weekends together in the country -- which allowed for deep excavations of friendship, fidelity, AIDS, and dancing Swan Lake. I loved that film [and play]. It was one of those titles that my brother Rey sent me all the way from the U.S. in the late 1990s that proved foundational in my then growing education in queer cinema. The play was funny and sad in equal measure, and allowed me to distinguish all the kinds of queerness that it offered. [Also, that kitchen scene at midnight looking for milk will always leave me breathless.] I also loved Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Master Class, which we staged at the Luce starring the great Cherie Gil as Maria Callas. And although he will always be notorious for writing Corpus Christi -- which I won't even bother to talk about -- he will always be for me as the playwright who grappled with artistic obsolescence [choreography in Love! Valour! Compassion! and opera singing in Master Class] but gave the struggle wit, beauty, and humanity. Thank you, Mr. McNally. And here's wishing COVID-19 will stop its ravaging before it takes more of the people we admire and love

Labels: literature, obituary, people, theatre

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Monday, September 30, 2019

6:17 PM | Call for Manuscripts to the 59th Silliman University National Writers Workshop

The Silliman University National Writers Workshop is now accepting applications for the 59th Silliman University National Writers Workshop to be held from 27 April to 8 May 2020 at the Silliman University Rose Lamb Sobrepeña Writers Village and the Silliman University campus.

This Writers Workshop is offering ten fellowships to promising writers in the Philippines who want to have a chance to hone their craft and refine their style. Fellows will be provided housing, a modest stipend, and a subsidy to partially defray costs of their transportation.

To be considered, applicants should submit manuscripts on or before 6 December 2019. (Extension to the deadline will not be made.) All manuscripts should comply with the instructions stated below. (Failure to do so will automatically eliminate their entries).

Applicants for Fiction and Creative Nonfiction fellowships should submit three to four (3-4) entries. Applicants for Poetry fellowships should submit a suite of seven to ten (7-10) poems. Applicants for Drama fellowships should submit at least one (1) One-Act Play. Each fiction, creative nonfiction, or drama manuscript should not be more than 20 pages, double-spaced. We encourage you to stay well below the 20 pages. Aside from manuscripts in Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Drama that should be written in English, the Workshop will also be accepting manuscripts for Balak (poetry in Binisaya) and Sugilanon [short story in Binisaya]. Applicants should submit a suite of seven to ten (7-10) balak entries with their English translations, or three to four (3-4) sugilanon entries with their English translations.

Manuscripts should be submitted in five (5) hard copies. They should be computerized in MS Word, double-spaced, on 8.5 x 11 inches bond paper, with approximately one-inch margin on all sides. Please indicate the category (FICTION, CREATIVE NONFICTION, POETRY, ONE-ACT DRAMA, BALAK, or SUGILANON) immediately under the title. The page number must be typed consecutively (e.g., 1 of 30, 2 of 30, and so on) at the center of the bottom margin of each page. The font should be Book Antiqua or Palatino, and the font size should be 12.

The applicant’s real name and address must appear only in the official application form and the certification of originality of works, and must not appear on the manuscripts. Manuscripts should be accompanied by the official application form, a notarized certification of originality of works, and at least one letter of recommendation from a literature professor or an established writer. All requirements must be complete at the time of submission.

Send all applications or requests for information to the Department of English and Literature, attention Dr. Warlito Caturay Jr., Workshop Coordinator, 1/F Katipunan Hall, Silliman University, 6200 Dumaguete City. For inquiries, email us at nww@su.edu.ph or call 035-422-6002 loc. 350.


DOWNLOADABLE FILES:

Application Form
Certification of Originality
Recommendation Form

Labels: city of literature, dumaguete writers workshop, literature, silliman, workshops, writers, writing

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Monday, October 30, 2017

9:09 PM | Coming to Terms with Disorder

The Center Will Not Hold (2017), Griffin Dunne's fascinating new documentary on the writer Joan Didion, begins with her voice-over, reading from the preface of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968): "I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder." I felt this kind of paralysis early this year -- but I think most writers do. I'm glad for this film; it is a fascinating portrait of an important literary voice. Who has read "Goodbye to All That" [read here] and not been astounded by that sheer command of language?

Labels: books, documentaries, essay, film, literature, writers, writing

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Wednesday, October 04, 2017

10:11 AM | A Review of 'Don't Tell Anyone' by Anette Fabre of Anette the Wicked

Right off the bat, this book is amazing, I have never read anything like this obviously because this is the first LGBT literature I have read. Really, this is amazing.

I have no qualms reading smut because duh, fangirl since 2009. I have long been exposed to smut. Literary smut that is. You know, stories that depict sex as something beautiful almost. Sex is where two people come together, either to fall in love or not. Both authors have tackled writing LGBT sex as beautiful as heterosexual sex.

I have been reading gay smut stories since I have been exposed to the world of fan fiction. If I'm not reading books, I'm reading fan fiction. But, gay fan fiction is different from literature. Literature is more raw. It digs through your heart and mind. After that, it fills you up with so much emotion that you kind of overflow. This book is no nonsense, straight up gay and lesbian erotica.

This book should be handled with caution yet with an open mind. I mean, come on. the LGBT community have sex just like heterosexuals, albeit it looks different. But yes, they can have sex. They can achieve climax as well. Damn right, they are the sexiest people I have ever come across with. Not only do they have sexy bodies to begin with, but their minds are sexy as hell. This book is literally in your face. Like, really you will devour this in one sitting. Or maybe sitting on top of someone, I don't know. Hah. Innuendo right there.

Reading this book didn't change my sexual orientation as a heterosexual. Reading this book made me understand the struggles and hardships of the LGBT community when they fall in and out of love. They suffer so much just like we do. Reading this book makes me want to study about gender and all the difference that there is about it. Just so I could understand that there's more to it than just being called a man or a woman.

This is just a beautiful piece of literature that I hope some day a lot of people would get to read more LGBT Lit. I hope this isn't the last from either of these authors. I hope more people follow suit as well. This book is funny, sexy, witty, sad, and just downright amazing. Just buy it now.


From Anette Fabre of Anette the Wicked

Labels: books, literature, philippine literature, queer, review

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Friday, September 22, 2017

11:38 AM | Art to Disturb, Art to Move

There are three things that have slowly become apparent as we live out the current days with their quotidian tremors that often signal—at least to those people who are sensitive to them—an unending arrival of apocalypse:

First, that Jean-Paul Sartre and Darren Aronofsky are right: hell is other people.

Second, that Hannah Arendt is right: the great cover of evil is banality.

And third, that Umberto Eco is right: a very good way to fight evil in the world is to persist in writing about it.

Evil is a curious thing. We tend to think of it as a dreadful embodiment of metaphysical darkness—a demonic possession, for example, or the bloody body count of serial killers, or the social havoc that is unleashed in the wake of psychopaths. In these instances, often graphically illustrated by the purveyors of our popular culture through movies and books, evil as a thing is banished to the realm of fantasy. It has become a malevolence that lurks mostly in the fringes of our imagination. We can be screening The Exorcist on our laptop screens, for example, cowering from its perfectly modulated jump scares—but we can just as easily turn the whole thing off, and then proceed to draw the curtains of our closed-off rooms, and suddenly the daylight of the “real” comes crashing in, saving us from a further sense of dread. Real evil, alas, is not so easily pigeonholed, and doesn’t usually come with bells and whistles.

What is often missing in the simplistic consideration of evil is the real thing that lurks in the human heart which, once in a while, jumps into abominable turns of history that allowed Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Marcos, and many of others of their ilk to happen.

Hitler impassioned many Germans—who were understandably feeling defeated by the ruinous end of the First World War—and he did so with his dreams of National Socialism. He triggered with it another great war, as well as the systematic elimination of “undesirable people” through a program we now call the Holocaust. (For Hitler, it was just called the “Final Solution.”)

Stalin built on the communist ideals of Lenin before him—but soon realized that a “revolution” ceased to be a revolution when it had no enemies to fight, and so he unleashed a never-ending search for “counter-revolutionaries” that ended up as several cycles of murderous purges in Russia, sparing no one.

Pol Pot dreamed of a return to a pure peasant society for Cambodia, and unleashed a program he called “Year Zero,” which soon systematically brutalized his people through years of making them toil in the so-called “killing fields.”

Mao dreamed of an empowered China and ushered in a plan he called “The Great Leap Forward,” a catastrophic program that led to 18 to 46 million dead Chinese—perhaps the greatest genocide in history.

Marcos dreamed of a “New Society,” and armed it to the teeth with martial rule.

What is often amazing to consider in these experiments in terror is that they were often carried out at the behest and in the name of those that these dictators ruled. “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country,” Pol Pot once said. All the others felt the same way, too. In many cases, these despots often unleashed their worst tendencies with the approval of many. Hitler was beloved in Germany, and his policies—obviously wrong and evil in retrospect—resonated with the German masses. In their eyes, Nazism was a chance for Germany to become great again, and Hitler could do no wrong. Today, we ask a question that cannot be truly answered: how could so many be deceived? How could so many give tacit permission for atrocities to happen? And the answer may be this: human nature. Jean Renoir perfectly sums it up with this line in his film The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Which makes Sartre right. Hell is other people—especially those people who have learned not to see anymore the moral imperatives of decent living.

I made this observation not too long ago: “When the bodies started piling up a few days ago in what appeared to be a growing rage for vigilantism, emboldened by a strongman’s battle cry for a war on drugs, the manner of the deaths and the manner of the disposal horrified me—as they should any right-minded human being. The anonymity of the hits. The crude fact of packaging tape sometimes covering the corpses, mummifying them in despairing positions. The cardboard signs that declare the dead a criminal—‘Pusher, ‘wag tularan,’ ‘Snatcher, ‘wag tularan,’ etc.—justifying the murder. Inside, I scream: ‘What happened to due process?’ These days those two words—bedrocks of a functioning democracy—are being laughed at. And I could not understand how people could shrug off the sinister implications.

“There has been a quiet acceptance by almost everyone of these things happening. And also waves of violent mocking by a mob if you issue dissent.

“It is not an entirely new thing. A sense of history would attest that these things have happened before, in exactly the same manner, give or take a culturally specific difference. I am going to use right now the most frightful of historical correlations. Because now I totally get what life was like for ordinary Germans in Nazi Germany, especially in the contentious pre-war decade. You see, seeing and reading about the horrors of World War II—in particular, the unbelievable death machine of the Holocaust—I used to ask myself: How come nobody did anything? Why were ordinary Germans so quiet, so passively (or aggressively) supportive of the programs of Hitler’s regime? Couldn’t a civilized people recognize a evil in their midst?”

That acceptance, that silence make evil the most ordinary thing in the world. All these murders have become so ordinary, we are not even moved by every new reportage anymore. We have learned to shrug away all these things, and we have even learned to make excuses for them. “Para sa bayan ‘to,” some of us have learned to say, without the slightest hint of irony—and thus Arendt is right: evil can become so banal.

Our ultimate hope lies in a suggestion Eco once proposed, especially for those facing a moral crisis in a society that is slowly embracing evil as a necessity: “To survive, we must tell stories.”

That was the imperative I went when I decided to put The Kill List Chronicles in June 2016, ostensibly to collect and archive the many literary works that started appearing, all of them protesting the new culture of impunity in the Philippines. In my introductory essay to that archive, I wrote: “Many Filipino writers…have slowly come out of the shadows of overwhelming public approval of the ongoing purge, to register dissent, to call for a process of justice that also respects human life and dignity, to strive for a country that recognizes that indeed crime must pay but this must be done in the only way that makes our democracy a functioning one. Anything else is a form of fascism.

“The rise of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency, and his unorthodox methods of dealing with some of the country’s problems has currently inspired — if that is the right word at all — a few of our writers to take to the literary to express their grief and their horror, all in all registering a dissent that is still forming, that has yet to be studied. Some of the works take their cue from the bloody reports from television news and broadsheets. Some from the unexpected deaths — the new ‘collateral damage’ — of friends and people they know….

“This…is an attempt to archive the new literature of protest that is now beginning to be written. Only the future can tell how this literature, as a prospective tool for change, can impact what is going on at present. Protest literature are almost always considered only in the aftermath; perhaps this project can change that, and can demonstrate, once and for all, the power of literature as a social tool.”

One of the many writers who responded to that call was Carljoe Javier, who started to churn out little stories to document, in fiction, various scenarios, which would have been paranoid fantasies only a few months ago, but now have become painfully realistic.



Those stories together have become the first short story collection about the EJKs, a folio titled Cardboard Justice.

He started out with a poem titled “Cardboard Villanelle,” which rendered to playful lyricism the realization of growing horror at the status quo. Not satisfied with that, he turned to the essay—and produced “#PosiblengAdik,” a short rumination about the vicious randomness of the killings, where he makes this plea: that drug addicts and drug users—which are not the same things—must be seen as human who are capable of rehabilitation. He uses his own life as evidence of that, and writes: “We want to protect ourselves, protect our families. But every single time I see one of these people who are dead, I think, that could’ve been me. If I made different decisions in my life, I could have turned out that way. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to go to school, I can imagine being driven to do whatever it takes.”

That sentiment becomes the very theme that animates the short stories that quickly followed, each one suddenly pieces of a whole that gave us a sad geography of injustice.

“At the Door” shows us a young musician answering the frenetic knocks of raiding policemen, bent on arresting—or even killing—him, even though he has cleaned up his act for some time now. That doesn’t matter to the raiders. His name is on “the list,” and that was enough for police to harass him. That same dynamics—the fear of “the list”—puts the two characters of “On the List” in an existential crisis. Should they answer the summons or not? All the alternatives prove ultimately deadly.

“Past Buendia” follows a man on an innocent leisurely stroll in an old neighborhood—and gets mistaken for a pusher, and nearly dies because of that mistake.

“In the Street” underlines the innocence that has become compromised in the new culture of impunity: a group of young girls—a barkada—decide to have a food trip in Maginhawa Street in Quezon City, and they become witness to an actual extrajudicial killing. Their confrontation with the killer in the end marks the very end of their innocence—and signal a world that has gone absolutely upside-down. That blooms to paranoia, eventually—which becomes the focus of “At the Hood,” where a group of friends—formerly a rock band—consider attending the funeral of one of their members. But attendance at what cost? One of them demures—“It’s like those movies where people go to a funeral of a mob boss, and so there are cops all over taking picture of everyone go goes to the funeral. Then they use those photos to track down the people who went”—painting once and for all the compromises of a new age of paranoia.

“In an Uber” takes that paranoia and makes it the center point of conflict in what should be a normal social interaction between strangers: an Uber driver and his passenger. One approves of the killings, the other does not. Tension mounts.

And in “Nagda-drama Lang,” Javier chooses to occupy the consciousness of the bereaved—a woman cradling the dead body of her lover gunned down on the streets. It is inspired by a real life incident that became an iconic piece of photojournalism—a measure of grief that President Duterte later dismissed as “nagda-drama lang.” Which finally underlines the unemotional inhumanity behind all of these.

Why does Javier continue to write stories like this? They couldn’t possibly be a hoot to write; these sad stories only immerse us—the writer and the reader—in a flood of despair that seems, for the moment, unstoppable.

I think the answer is this: our anger has to be sustained, although that itself is an undertaking fraught with difficulty. How does one sustain anger? It is often easier to give up, and then to spout out such lines of “wisdom” like: “People deserve the politicians they vote for.” It is so much easier to surrender to the prevailing darkness—much like the Germans did at the height of Nazism, or Filipinos in the first five years of Martial Law. Protest and the literature that advocates it are not something that is embraced or favored by many people especially in the immediate aftermath of disastrous things. We are often told to “shut up”—and just embrace the status quo.

Nonetheless, we write.

In his recent visit to the Philippines, the Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa made it perfectly clear that reading and writing are subversive acts: “Dictators [and] dictatorships are right in being suspicious of this kind of activity, because I think this activity develops in societies a critical spirit about the world as it is,” he said.

And its effects are not in the immediately apparent; it is in the cumulative.

So Carljoe Javier and others like him write on, because we must survive. Because we must document and dramatize the unspeakable. Because the future demands it. Because when good finally triumphs over evil—as it always does—it needs to see where its seeds began, and it might as well begin in the stories we chose to tell today.


What dark place Carljoe Javier had wrought Cardboard Justice from is something I am familiar with. I was invited to write for Rogue Magazine late last year: it was for a personal evaluation of the year that was—2016—and what had been, by and large, a tumultuous and ugly time. The spate of EJKs had exploded and divided the country, among other issues, exposing the unbelievable horror that people were actually capable for cheering for more blood.

I remembered F. Sionil Jose’s old reminder: “Art does not develop in a vacuum. The artist’s first responsibility is not just to his art, but to his society as well.” So in that Rogue article, I had posed the following sentiment, taking note of my responsibilities as a creative writer: “But when was being silent being part of the solution, ever, in history? And am in the wrong for calling for justice and for asking for equality? Should we stay quiet because the world has gone mad? Must the mob win? I ask myself: what is the role of the writer in times of crisis? Should I be spineless? When you live in horror, shouldn’t you fight the bogeyman?”

I haven’t been silent—and I have used what art I know to chronicle the nuances of these disturbing times. As I have previously mentioned, I put up a literary blog last year—I called it the Kill List Chronicles—which has become an attempt to archive the new literature of protest that is now beginning to be written. I wrote about it: “Only the future can tell how this literature, as a prospective tool for change, can impact what is going on at present. Protest literature is almost always considered only in the aftermath; perhaps this project can change that, and can demonstrate, once and for all, the power of literature as a social tool.”

Since then I have received, and archived, hundreds of poems, essays, short stories, and one-act plays that have tried to provide insight, or have struggled to define these bloody times—mostly from amateur writers, but also a significant number from some of the brightest names in Philippine literature, including Krip Yuson, Marne Kilates, Carljoe Javier, Luisa Igloria, Dean Francis Alfar, Daryll Delgado, Miguel Syjuco, Floy Quintos, and so many others.

I’ve written two horror stories for the effort, both articulating the horror of EJKs in a fantastical realm that finally didn’t seem so farfetch. And as we have seen, it has also led Carljoe to come out with what is perhaps the first short story collection about the EJKs, Cardboard Justice, and Miyako Izabel to come out with its poetry equivalent. When I judged the Palanca for the short story in English, two entries immediately stood out as gripping responses to the times—John Bengan’s “Disguise,” which won first prize, and Katrina Guiang Gomez’s “Misericordia,” which won second.

Let’s do a quick sampling of artistic responses to the national malaise. Nerisa del Carmen Guevara has done a performance piece titled “Elegy 5: Wake.” Jam Pascual has done spoken word poetry titled “Bloody Sunday.” Gary Granada has come up with a song titled “Pordbida!” Adolfo Alix Jr. has done a feature-length film titled Madilim Ang Gabi, and Bor Ocampo a short film titled, of course, “EJK.” Liza Magtoto has written a musical titled A Game of Trolls for PETA.

I am fascinated, however, with what visual artists have come up with to make sense of the madness—and we don’t have a lack of such artists coming up with works both subtle and visceral all over the country.

In Dumaguete, there’s Einstein Schwartz Gaspar Maulad whose miniature and morbid piece titled “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” does not mince intentions with its slap of the painfully ironic. It caused a bit of a stir when it was unveiled, together with the works of other Silliman Fine Arts students, last August. Here, what you basically get is a contraption that’s laid out as a kind of elongated balikbayan box, or perhaps a gift, accompanied by a label that recalls immediately the official tagline of Philippine tourism. Upon opening the box, you get a surprise: the shape of a dead body wrapped up in masking tape, bloody drips everywhere, bearing a sign that reads, “Drug pusher ako, wa’g tularan,” recalling instantly the EJKs we have come to breathe as the new reality of this carnage republic.



It’s not a subtle piece, nor is it meant to be. This is what accounts for its greatness: the forcefulness of its message that straddles the border of irony and sincerity—which is perhaps the best response to the murderous chaos this postmodern world has come to be.

And then there’s Nicky de la Peña whose Predicaments exhibit only last February continues to haunt me. I cannot stop thinking of the works in that exhibit, how appropriate they are material-wise, how uncannily conceived to be both a reflection of the headlines and as a shock to our complacencies. How simple they are in the final analysis, but also how fraught with undeniable power.











Each work—a painting? a sketch?—is set on cardboard pieces of several varieties. There’s a pizza box, for example. (“The choice of materials is vital [because …] carton boxes [have been] used for the well-known ‘adik ako, huwag tularan’ signs [we have seen],” Mr. de la Peña explains.) And on each haphazard piece, upon the uneven brown surface of the unlikely canvas, we see bodies drawn in various states of black-and-white deadness—the faces all unseen, all becoming inconvenient ghosts most people today are removed from and do not think as an affront to the freedom they are enjoying.

The works ask you: do these anonymous bodies deserve their fate? Why?

Mr. de la Peña writes in his artistic statement of his inspiration and his process: “The issue of textrajudicial killings in the Philippines has attracted international concerns. Some countries strongly criticize the current administration while some have [given] solid support, especially from the East and South-east Asian region. Opinions [are] divided into right or wrong, between justifiable actions and pure immorality. This division of perspectives is the issue [that] my works depict.”













But to add to the hauntedness of his pieces, he used his own body as the subject of the reenactments of the various crime scene. According to him, it raises questions about what is right or wrong, or framed up or guilty, or what exactly accounts for just another collateral casualty. He continues: “Those people who don’t know me are more likely to justify the death, for they have no background of [who I am]. [My family and friends who do know me, however, will seek query.] These questions are important to me because people nowadays are quick to place judgment with inadequate comprehension of the situation, [often] turning a blind eye to justify their own opinion. With the current crisis involving the Philippine National Police…, these questions need to sink into the [minds] of every Filipino now more than ever.”

His art, like most protest art now being produced in the Age of Duterte, provokes us with this question: to what extent can you dehumanize someone to accept their murders as something completely deserved?

Can the news headlines remain impersonal to us? Can we remain unmoved?

It reminds of this passage from Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, where a society so much like ours slowly finds itself descending into misogynist dystopia:

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

The art we do now in the name of protest is to negate those “blank white spaces at the edges of print,” and “the gaps between the stories.”

They are meant to disturb, to make people think. They are finally meant to move.

Labels: art and culture, artists, EJKs, issues, literature, painting, philippine cinema, philippine culture, philippine history, philippine literature, protest art, writers, writing

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