Thursday, May 22, 2025
Slept for 16 hours after arriving home. That has got to be a record.
Labels: life, sleep
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 240.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, May 18, 2025
9:00 AM |
Voting Through the Fog
I almost didn’t vote last Monday.
In past elections, I was always the early bird. I liked the quiet buzz of my polling station in the early morning, and the feeling of being ahead of the day. I liked ticking off that civic duty before the sun was too high and the heat became too punishing. I liked having breakfast after, a rasher of bacon in one hand while the other would go for an Instagram post—my forefinger proudly dyed in indelible ink, as if to say: Look, I did my part. I care about this country.
But this time was different.
I stayed in bed longer than usual, the sunlight already spilling through the curtains when I opened my eyes. My alarm buzzed with election reminders—both automated and internal. Vote! my calendar said. But I didn’t feel like voting.
Maybe it was the slow accumulation of disappointments in our political life—a fatigue that makes the ritual of election day feel like theatre. A part of me said: What good will it do? Another part whispered: What time do the precincts close again? My indecision was unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but not surprising.
In the days leading up to the election, I had barely paid attention to the Senate race, for example. I had vague inclinations toward Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan—but I hadn’t done my usual deep dive, hadn’t cross-referenced with utmost diligence everyone’s platforms, hadn’t weighed track records. That lack of preparation unsettled me only somewhat. It felt like I was no longer engaged, like I had become one of them: the indifferent, the disengaged.
By noontime, something shifted.
I remembered an essay I had written weeks earlier—a piece lamenting the low voter turnout in the U.S. presidential elections and how progressive voices, by choosing to sit out, inadvertently allowed the current terrors of Trump 2.0. I had been somewhat scathing in that essay, angry at the apathy that tipped the scales toward authoritarianism. How could I write those words and then not vote in my own country?
Hypocrisy has a bitter taste. I couldn’t stomach it. So I got up, dressed up, and walked to my precinct at Amador Dagudag Elementary School in Lo-oc. It was a smooth process, surprisingly so. No long lines. No chaos. Just a few minutes, and then I was done. My finger inked once again — a ghost of the pride I used to feel. And yet, later that day, a heaviness lingered.
I scrolled through social media, I chatted with some friends, and what I saw and heard was disheartening. So many people I knew—people who had once raged and rallied, who had posted black tiles and protest slogans—were nowhere near a ballot box this year. Some were on the beach, some in another province, some unapologetically absent from the civic process they once championed. I had to ask myself: Have we lost faith in our democracy?
It’s hard not to think so. So many of us are tired. We’ve watched the same families recycle power like heirlooms. We’ve seen entertainers and athletes coast into public office on the wings of name recall, while competent but obscure candidates are drowned out. We’ve seen votes bought in brown envelopes, corruption normalized, accountability reduced to punchlines. It’s no wonder people are checking out.
But then, when the results started trickling in, there were some surprises. The biggest of them all, in the final analysis, is the impact of the youth vote. It was the glimmer of something new, maybe even something hopeful. Generation Z, along with younger Millennials, were apparently the surprise force this election cycle. Many of them, perhaps disillusioned by the outcomes of the last one , were now of age—and angry enough to act beyond their social media posts. And they did not follow the usual script at all.
They rejected the usual suspects. They shunned celebrity. They looked past the surface gloss and chose, instead, to scrutinize. They weren’t afraid to bring down dynasties. They used TikTok and Twitter not just for trends but for truth-telling. They mobilized in a way even the polling firms did not see coming. So maybe there’s something to be said about how youth—unjaded, unburdened by too many betrayals — can afford to believe again, unlike me. Or maybe they just know somehow that if they didn’t act now, they would inherit the mess we’re leaving behind. Either way, they voted. In numbers that mattered.
I don’t exactly know if the same new trends hold true for Dumaguete or Negros Oriental. The pockets of hope in our archipelago are uneven. Some places pulse with civic engagement; others slump in political inertia. But I do want to believe that something is stirring beneath the surface—something we can nurture, if we still have the will.
I must once again remind myself that if we lose faith completely, if we all decide the election is not worth the trouble, then we do give the game away. Voting in a democracy, for all its flaws, still remains one of the few levers of power left to the ordinary citizen. Yes, it is imperfect. Yes, it often feels futile. But I needed to know again that to abandon this ideal altogether is to surrender to cynicism. And the thing about cynicism is that it pretends to be wisdom. It says: I’ve seen too much to care. It feels mature. But in reality, it’s just a mask for despair.
I almost didn’t vote last Monday. But I did.
Not because I was hopeful. Not because I was excited. But because I knew that giving in to apathy—even for a day—was giving in to the very forces that benefit from our silence. I voted because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. Because I still believe in accountability, even if it’s just the quiet, almost invisible kind. The kind that doesn’t go viral, the kind that doesn’t make you feel good immediately, but slowly adds up in the ledger of your conscience.
Maybe that’s what voting is now: not as an act of grand optimism, but perhaps of stubborn belief. A belief that the future is still being written, and that we—flawed, tired, angry as we may be—still have a hand in the ink.
Labels: elections, life, politics
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Happy anniversary, my love!
Labels: life, love
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 239.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, May 12, 2025
10:33 PM |
A Fragile Vote
I almost didn’t vote today. In the past, I would wake up at the crack of dawn to be an early bird at the polls. Today it took most of the morning to make me decide to go, and mostly because I had written an essay a few weeks ago about my disappointment that a significant percentage of the American electorate did not vote last November, especially those leaning liberal, which paved the way for Trump 2.0. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. So I voted. I was in and out of my precinct in minutes, which was miraculous.
But later I observed that many people I know who were so passionate about getting the vote out in the last election were not voting either. Have we lost our faith in our democracy?
Labels: democracy, elections, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 07, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 238.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, May 05, 2025
9:00 AM |
Incendiary Memories and Diasporic Reckonings
Who says that the body of work of Sillimanian writers are devoid of social issues and is centered only on fruitless formalistic pursuits? Consider the latest two plays in the ongoing Teatro Sillimaniana Festival—Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s Original Grace, and Linda Faigao-Hall’s Lay of the Land. Both plays emerge from different geographies and aesthetic registers, but they converge on the urgent politics of memory, abuse, and displacement that shaped the Filipino experience in the late 1980s.
In revisiting these works in 2025, we encounter not merely theatrical relics of their time but searing reflections that speak with renewed urgency to contemporary audiences. Set in the wake of the Marcos dictatorship and during the volatile aftermath of the People Power Revolution, both plays interrogate personal and political trauma, the price of silence, and the possibilities of healing.
Coscolluela’s Original Grace, directed by Eazel Sevilleno, stages its battle for truth and justice within the cloistered confines of a convent, juxtaposing legal struggle with spiritual sanctuary. Beatriz Vera [Jade Mary J. Cornelia], a corporate lawyer haunted by a troubled past, is pulled into the case of Carmela Santos [Precious Aranas], a teenage rape survivor whose abuser, Leon Garay, is shielded by layers of patriarchal and familial complicity. The play’s domestic horror is disturbingly familiar: Carmela’s mother Dolores [a very moving CJ Cañete] left for work abroad, a tragic echo of the “OFW economy” that escalated during the Marcos years and exploded in the post-EDSA years as the state normalized the export of labor. The play’s setting—a convent—might at first appear to be a retreat from political terrain, but it instead serves as a charged crucible where class, power, religion, and justice collide. Beatriz’s professional façade begins to crumble as Carmela’s story dredges up her own repressed trauma.
In 1988, when the play first emerged, such portrayals of incest, rape, and female complicity were incendiary; women’s rights were still marginalized in public discourse, and speaking openly about abuse was a radical act. Original Grace dared to expose the fissures beneath the idealized image of the Filipino family—especially the fractured families left in the wake of diaspora and dictatorship. In 2025, its relevance endures: child sexual abuse remains a crisis, and the question of how the law and social institutions fail survivors is still pressing. What deepens the play’s significance today is the recognition of how trauma is inherited and how women—across generations—internalize both pain and guilt.
Coscolluela’s choice to embed the legal battle within the nuns’ convent isn’t merely symbolic; it underscores the complicity of religious institutions in both silence and healing. Characters like Mother Alma and Sister Mary and Sister Lily are not caricatures of piety but fully human agents wrestling with their own ethical limitations. There is no easy redemption here. The staging and performances, particularly by Jade Mary Cornelia as Beatriz and Precious Aranas as Carmela, highlight the emotional tectonics of trauma without collapsing into melodrama. What Original Grace offers is not grace as divine absolution, but grace as the painstaking process of facing the past, speaking truth, and reclaiming one’s agency.
In contrast, Lay of the Land, directed by Tess Gal, unfolds not in the Philippine homeland but in the fragmented diaspora of New York’s East Village—a milieu where identity is as much a matter of survival as it is of longing. Perlas [Liezyl Livestre], newly arrived from the Philippines, steps into a shared tenement space infused with both bohemian American decay and the unresolved specters of martial law. Set during the February 1986 People Power Revolution, the play juxtaposes the euphoria of collective political upheaval with the isolation of the immigrant experience. Perlas’s arrival coincides with the nation’s supposed rebirth, yet her personal displacement reveals how liberation at home can coincide with alienation abroad.
Faigao-Hall’s writing navigates this tension with sensitivity and complexity. Her ensemble cast of characters are not mere emblems of multiculturalism, but embodied critiques of power, history, and belonging. Joaquin [Christian Evangelista], a fellow Filipino immigrant and Perlas’ brother, becomes both foil and mirror to Perlas. He has adapted, assimilated, perhaps at the cost of remembering. Helene, Artie, Gustaf, and Kelly represent various facets of American life—idealism, cynicism, exploitation, and artifice—all of which Perlas must contend with in her search for meaning and footing.
Where Original Grace is intensely internal, Lay of the Land is spatial and relational. The physical space of the tenement becomes a metaphor for a dislocated homeland—shared, shifting, contested. The gallery housed within it reflects the tension between representation and erasure: what gets exhibited, what stories are told, and who gets to speak? The play’s engagement with art and memory echoes Faigao-Hall’s broader dramaturgical commitment to rendering myth and magic real. She subtly weaves Filipino folklore and history into the urban grime of Alphabet City, not through overt fantasy but through atmosphere, rhythm, and metaphor.
The decision to set the play during the climax of the Marcos regime’s fall is bold. In 1986, the revolution promised a rupture from tyranny and the reinstallation of democracy. But in Lay of the Land, that rupture is not clean. The overseas Filipino watches from afar, disconnected from the spectacle of history, burdened with familial expectations and survival in a foreign land. For Perlas and many others like her, People Power did not end suffering—it simply shifted its geography. In 2025, with the political resurrection of the Marcoses and the global backlash against democracy, the play now reads like both prophecy and elegy. The “land” in question is not merely the literal Philippines but the moral and political ground we all must navigate.
Both plays, then, do not merely recall the volatile politics of the late 1980s—they reanimate them. Original Grace dramatizes the internal war for justice and healing within a society riddled with patriarchal silence and institutional complicity. Lay of the Land maps the psychic toll of exile, exploring what it means to hold onto identity, memory, and hope when the homeland itself is shifting under your feet. Each play in its own way reflects a fracture in the Filipino soul—between silence and voice, home and exile, past and present.
In 2025, their meanings resonate anew. The Philippines continues to grapple with historical revisionism, with the return of autocratic figures, and with enduring gender-based violence and diaspora trauma. The brave testimony of Carmela in Original Grace reminds us of the urgent need to listen to survivors and challenge structures of abuse. The lost and searching gaze of Perlas in Lay of the Land calls us to rethink what it means to belong in an increasingly fragmented world.
Together, these plays demand not just witness but reckoning. They do not offer easy catharsis but instead insist on confronting the wounds we have inherited and the histories we choose to forget. In staging them now, we are not merely looking back—we are being asked to choose what kind of future we want to write.
Teatro Sillimaniana Festival is ongoing. Michael Aaron Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago
will premiere on May 3, Saturday, directed by Bret Ybañez. Lastly, Beryl Delicana’s Mango Tree
will premiere on May 7, Wednesday, directed by Jorelyn Garcia.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, silliman, theatre
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, May 04, 2025
9:00 AM |
All Our Dearly Departed
Sometimes I find that I begin my days with a strange ritual: stretching my bones in bed and reaching out for something on my bedside—to open my phone, and steel myself for obituary notices. These are often not for anyone I would know personally—no aunt or cousin or friend or a literary acquaintance from a writing workshop—but almost always for people who have shaped the contours of my interior world. David Lynch. Joan Plowright. Gene Hackman. Marianne Faithfull. Pilita Corrales. Nora Aunor. Ricky Davao. Mario Vargas Llosa. Pope Francis. These in 2025 alone. One after the other, falling like the slow cadence of autumn leaves.
I would sit with my morning coffee, a little too bitter, watching their names trend on X (formerly Twitter, a name I still resent), the posts framed in eulogies and digital candles. It makes me feel absurd, really, how I grieve for them as though their deaths have punched a hole in the fragile structure of my day. I never met David Lynch, but didn’t Mulholland Drive teach me how to love disorientation? Didn’t Pope Francis, in a gesture of quiet inclusion, once make me believe that even the Vatican was capable of grace?
Why do we mourn these people?
Is it because they touched our lives?
Is it because of their legacy?
These are questions we ask ourselves now, in a time when the algorithm delivers loss with astonishing efficiency. Death scrolls down with the speed of a thumb.
There is a peculiar intimacy in mourning a celebrity, a person whom you know without knowing, whose voice has accompanied you in headphones, whose face has aged with you on your screen, whose songs or performances or books have wormed their way into your memories. And perhaps it is this—this unspoken companionship across time and space—that makes the loss sting.
When Nora Aunor passed, I remembered the first time I watched Himala. I was too young to understand its politics, but even then, there was something about her voice—raw, vulnerable, aching—that unsettled me. And I understood, in my own young way, that this woman was more than an actress. She was a mirror to our Filipino griefs, our impossible hopes. When she cried “Walang himala!” in that final scene, it was as though a nation collectively exhaled, admitting something it had long been afraid to say.
And then there’s Mario Vargas Llosa. His novels are often dense, winding labyrinths of time and memory, but The Feast of the Goat once gave me nightmares—visions of tyrants and complicity, of how literature unearths the things we bury too deep. He reminded me that fiction is not just escape, but confrontation.
We mourn, perhaps, because we feel orphaned.
Orphaned not in the literal sense, but orphaned in the mythic sense—that these figures once stood as pillars in the temple of our becoming. They made it okay to be strange, to be passionate, to question. Pilita Corrales and her elegance, a time capsule of a glamorous Philippines that could sing in perfect vibrato. Ricky Davao, whose steady presence in teleseryes gave us a template for decency in a world increasingly cynical.
Even Pope Francis, whose reforms sometimes felt like gentle ripples in the ancient river of the Church, gave us pause to hope. I remember a friend, an old seminarian who left the vocation because he loved another man, telling me once: “At least this Pope won’t call me an abomination.” That meant something. That still means something.
These recent deaths also remind us of our own time passing. They confront us with our own mortality in the most inconvenient of ways. We are no longer young. If Gene Hackman is gone, then surely, so is the 1990s, and maybe so is that version of me who once wore too much plaid and rented VHS tapes from the video store near the tianggue, along Maria Christina Street.
We mourn them because, in mourning them, we also mourn the people we once were when they mattered to us most.
That’s the secret of legacy, isn’t it? It’s not so much what you leave behind, but the echo of how you made others feel. The indelible marks you etch on the private walls of someone else’s interior life. That is legacy. And that is why we cry.
Sometimes I imagine the afterlife not as some pearly-gated, cherubic affair, but as a waiting room with books and movies and music playing in the background. And I imagine entering it like a literary conference, or a Cinemalaya gala night, and spotting Joan Plowright reading Virginia Woolf in one corner, Marianne Faithfull humming to herself, Nora adjusting her shawl waiting for the lights to dim.
And I would sit with them, perhaps timidly, and say, “You don’t know me, but you knew me.”
And that would be enough.
Labels: death, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 237.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, April 28, 2025
9:00 AM |
A Love Letter from the Rainbow
What a way to open the first ever Teatro Sillimaniana Festival! In a showcase of award-winning plays by Silliman playwrights, as helmed by the senior directing class of the Speech and Theater Department of Silliman University’s College of Performing and Visual Arts, Francis Esguerra’s production of Jireh Catacutan’s Una’t Huling Gabi Sa Ramona Disco proved a scintillating beginning—equal parts laugh-out-loud comedy and dramatic exploration about identity and acceptance.
The play primarily follows the journey of Dino [Nico Angelo de Guzman Privado] in finding his birth father. One fateful night, Dino finds himself in an intimate encounter with Andy [Sydney L. Tan], and they soon discover that their lives are somehow intertwined. Dino soon reveals his search for his father, which leads him to an old gay bar in Pasay called Ramona Disco, ran by Nanay Che [Jecho Adrian G. Ponce] and Tita Princess [AJ Delostrico]—and where Dino finally learns the truth, and reconciles his search for identity entwined in the lives of the queer folk behind Ramona Disco.
As directed by Esguerra, the play becomes a powerful act of reclamation, reflection, and representation. This production, at its core, is a searing yet tender exploration of queer identity, familial estrangement, and the possibility of finding oneself in the most unexpected places. The play becomes a vivid tapestry of memory, longing, humor, and hope—all possible because of Esguerra’s commanding direction, and the deeply nuanced performances from its cast.
Like how he demonstrated it with his production of Elsa Coscolluela’s Blood Spoor only a few months ago, Esguerra shows us how his directorial hand is both assured and compassionate, weaving together the play’s deeply personal narrative with theatrical precision and soul. What makes his work truly remarkable is how he interprets Catacutan’s text not merely as a script to be staged, but as a lived truth to be felt. In his director’s notes, Esguerra shares how his journey from performer to director prepared him for the daunting task of bringing such an emotionally layered piece to life: “Now, I am given another opportunity to be the head of a production team… It is another chance to put into practice the theories I have studied, and the practical lessons I have experienced.”
This experience shines in the seamless transitions between the play’s heartfelt monologues, uproarious moments of humor, and poignant silences. Esguerra guides the production with a respect for both form and feeling. He allows the narrative’s emotional beats to breathe, while shaping its structure with clarity and elegance. More importantly, Esguerra ensures that the play’s central themes of self-discovery and radical acceptance resonate with power: “Accepting people as they are can also lead us to accept ourselves and eventually revel at who we really are.” Under his direction, the space of Ramona Disco transforms into more than just a setting—it becomes a sanctuary for broken dreams, awkward truths, and found family. It becomes sacred.
In the role of Dino, Privado delivers a performance that is heartbreakingly authentic. As a masculine-presenting queer man grappling with internalized homophobia, Dino’s journey is rife with contradiction, and his aching confusion of someone desperately searching for his origins while fearing what he might find feels true. Privado portrays these layers with meticulous care—his silences are heavy with things unsaid, his bursts of vulnerability arrive like revelations. [His coño English also makes him endearing.] Privado’s performance peaks in the emotionally grueling Act III, an act steeped in spiritual crisis, where he channels a rawness that becomes almost painful to watch—and yet impossible to look away.
Tan’s portrayal of Andy/Andrea is nothing short of magnetic. With a character that shifts between comic confidence and quiet despair, Tan dances between these emotional states with finesse. Andy is bold, flirty, and fiercely proud—but beneath the surface lies someone who is still navigating the oppressive terrain of “Masc4Masc” culture. “He still sees the need to act masculine to be accepted,” Catacutan revealed—and Tan captures this duality with uncanny skill. What makes Tan’s performance stand out is the generosity he brings to the role. He gives space to every emotion—whether it’s the flirtatious banter with Dino, the devastating recount of childhood trauma, or the climactic spiritual reckoning. Tan’s Andy is never a caricature; he is fully human—beautifully flawed, richly layered, and utterly unforgettable.
As Nanay Che, Ponce offers one of the most soul-nourishing performances of the evening. In the tradition of queer storytelling, the “found mother” is a revered archetype—and Ponce embraces this role with grace and gravitas. Nanay Che isn’t just a character; she is the embodiment of acceptance, strength, and quiet resilience. With every scene she’s in, Ponce’s presence commands attention—both with volume and pratfalls, and also with depth. His delivery is sometimes gentle and sometimes boisterous, but always firm, playful but always wise. Ponce embodies the maternal force that many queer youth long for, offering Andy [and later Dino] the safety and affirmation they have been denied elsewhere. Ponce’s performance is a living tribute to the Golden Gays that inspired the play—a celebration of aging queens who never stopped nurturing.
If Nanay Che is the soul of Ramona Disco, then Tita Princess—brought to life by the vibrant AJ Delostrico—is its beating heart. Delostrico delivers a performance that is both intimate and larger-than-life. She is flamboyant and fabulous, but never one-note. Underneath the loud laughter and theatrical flourishes is a trans woman who has endured, and who continues to give despite everything she has lost. Her chemistry with the entire cast is electric, and her scenes with Ponce’s Nanay Che are particularly moving—two queens holding a kingdom together with eyeliner, sass, and unconditional love.
Una’t Huling Gabi sa Ramona Disco is a play that does more than tell a story—it invites its audience to remember, to grieve, to laugh, and to heal. Catacutan wrote it “to speak about the things [he] found odd or problematic in gay culture,” but he also wrote it as a love letter—to queer youth, to found families, to those who are still searching. And under Esguerra’s visionary direction, that love letter is delivered with both fire and finesse. The cast responded with performances that will be remembered for their honesty, vulnerability, and sheer theatrical brilliance.
I like that we are, at curtain fall, left not just with the story of Dino and Andy, but with a renewed sense of empathy and understanding. The play reminds us, as Esguerra so eloquently put it, that “their story is also our story of discovery, acceptance, love and celebration of the life that we are gifted with.” What a beautiful gift this production truly is.
INTERVIEW WITH JIREH CATACUTAN:
How did you come up with the story?
After writing my first one-act play, Pasilong sa Payag, for my Playwriting Workshop class at Silliman, I took in all the criticisms and thought that if I ever have to write another play, it had to be something that was really close to my heart. The play was also the last creative work I wrote before graduating from Silliman, so I wanted it to be special. I was thinking about what I wanted to see. What little queer boy Jireh wanted to see on stage.
For four years, I sort of felt like the token gay kid in class so I decided to lean into it. I am a writer who has the power to tell the experiences of queer men. And in 2023, the story about the Golden Gays was featured in the New York Times and gained traction, I would admit that I wasn’t really aware of their existence, but it inspired me to write about the Filipino queer experience through characters that come from and represent different generations.
What was your intention in writing this play?
In a way, the play was also an avenue for me to speak about the things I found odd, or for the lack of better term, “problematic” in gay culture. Say for example, with Dino, he represents the “masc” presenting queer men who struggles with internalized homophobia. I have encountered gay men who tend to avoid the flamboyant type of gays because they see femininity as “nakakahiya” or a sign of weakness. This is then countered by the character of Andy/Andrea that is open about his sexuality but also struggles with the “Masc4Masc culture” where he still sees the need to act masculine to be accepted or to hook up with other queer men. I also wanted to highlight other themes such as the domestic abuse young gay men go through, spirituality, and even the idea that gay men have to give away something [in this case, Gatorade and monay] just to feel loved.
I also wanted to express the idea of found family through the characters of Nanay Che and Princess who have taken the role of nurturing mothers to young gay kids who are seeking a home where they could freely be themselves.
Growing up, I always saw gay characters portrayed as comedic relief. Pushed aside to be the funny best friend or the person who dies of sickness at the end of the movie. With that in mind, I felt it was time to bring these characters to the forefront and take control of their own narrative.
What was it like to write the play?
It was crazy but at the same time, it was the most fun I had. I think all the scenes just fell into place because it was a story I was determined to tell. When I was a senior, I commuted back and forth so when I’m on the bus, a joke would pop into my head and I would immediately write them down on my phone.
In the first two drafts, the third act didn’t exist at all. [The play has four acts.] Its addition was needed since the last act felt too abrupt—Dino was being forgiven too quickly. Writing the third act was the hardest for me. I vividly remember writing at one in the morning, sobbing as I typed about the spiritual turmoil that bothered Dino and Andy. I think it was because I went through it when I was younger. There was a time where I prayed so hard to the point of crying, begging Him to make me straight. I guess Act 3 was just the part where I sort of inserted my own struggles as a queer man too.
But overall, Una’t Huling Gabi sa Ramona Disco was the story I had the most fun writing. And when it was finally staged, I was just glad that people laughed at the jokes I wrote on the bus. And as the lights dimmed after every act, hearing the audience sniffle and blow their noses meant that they were able to empathize with the characters I’ve written. Hearing the audience laugh and cry was the ultimate pay off, and I just hope that they left the little theatre inspired by the bravery and resilience of Dino, Andy, Tita Princess, and Nanay Che.
Teatro Sillimaniana Festival is ongoing. Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s Original Grace will premiere on April 26, Saturday, directed by Eazel Sevilleno. Linda Faigao-Hall’s Lay of the Land will premiere on April 30, Wednesday, directed by Tess Gal. Michael Aaron Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago will premiere on May 3, Saturday, directed by Bret Ybañez. Lastly, Beryl Delicana’s Mango Tree will premiere on May 7, Wednesday, directed by Jorelyn Garcia.
Labels: art and culture, city of literature, dumaguete, silliman, theatre
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, April 27, 2025
9:00 AM |
A Spectacle of Unraveling
It’s kind of frightening to see how fast America—supposedly the most powerful nation in the world—is unraveling these days. It’s also kind of frightening that Americans themselves allowed this to happen, that they voted for all these to happen. [My friend, the poet Bino Realuyo who is based in New York quickly tells me in a rejoinder: “Well, 31% voted for [Trump]. But 36% didn’t vote at all . Question is—how far will the 2/3 tolerate this stupidity?”]
I remember once watching a Fourth of July parade on cable television, the kind with high school marching bands and brass instruments blaring Sousa, confetti cannons flaring red, white, and blue. The commentator was breathless with patriotic pride. “This is America,” he said, as though the idea was enough to inspire the gods into applause. I was perhaps thirteen, and I believed him. In my young head, like many Filipinos, America was always the center of everything—of hope, of culture, of democracy, of dreams. I remember Jessica Zafra once quipping: “The greatest Filipino dream is to be an American.”
Fast forward a few decades, and that glittering image has rusted at the seams. Something is decaying in the state of America, and the rot is loud, unruly, and voted in.
I say this with the reluctant love of a former believer. Like many in the Global South, I grew up with a default reverence for all things American. The accents in the movies, the sitcoms, the endless brands, the smiling Disney promise of happily ever afters—they crept into our consciousness as omnipotent truths. America was the future, and the rest of us were catching up.
But the future got here, and it’s a mess.
The images we now get are of insurrections and incoherent speeches, of politicians with no grasp of science or decency, of book bans and culture wars, of schools riddled with bullets, of billionaires playing space cowboy while millions can’t afford insulin. All of it unfolding in real-time, the way a house burns while the owners argue whether fire is even real.
It’s a strange kind of horror, one that feels cinematic and absurd. Like The Purge franchise, but real. And yet, what’s truly terrifying isn’t just the collapse—it’s the consent. They voted for this. Again and again. With red hats and furious Facebook posts and voter suppression laws polished to look like patriotism. America, for all its claims to moral supremacy, seems to have walked willingly into its own undoing.
And I wonder: what do you do when the empire forgets its own mythology? When it willingly dismantles the very tenets it once exported with missionary zeal?
We have always been told democracy was sacred. That the press was free. That justice was blind. That the arc of the moral universe bent toward something good. And yet here we are, with courts stacked like rigged decks, with news dismissed as fake if it dares speak truth, with minorities demonized, with women fighting for rights their grandmothers had already won. There’s a recklessness to it all. An arrogance, too.
Because America is used to being the hero in its own story. It doesn’t know how to be the villain. So when the cracks appeared, it doubled down on denial. The climate? A hoax. Racism? A relic. Income inequality? Bootstraps. Mass shootings? Thoughts and prayers. Rinse and repeat.
It’s a madness dressed up in freedom.
And what does that mean for the rest of us, those watching from across oceans? We used to model our democracies after America’s. Our leaders have studied in their universities, we spoke their language, we echoed their dreams. And now? Now we scroll through headlines and see echoes of our own fragilities mirrored back at us.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: America’s unraveling is a mirror of what happens when a nation stops listening to itself. When grievance overtakes governance. When nostalgia becomes a weapon. When truth becomes negotiable. It’s not just an American story. It’s a cautionary tale.
And I find myself thinking of empire—not as something distant in time, but as something always on the edge of implosion. Rome had its bread and circuses. America has Fox News and TikTok. Both distract while the government burns.
Still, I don’t say this with schadenfreude. There’s no joy in watching a giant stumble. Especially one whose footprint stretches so far across the world that its missteps send aftershocks everywhere. The fall of America—if that’s indeed what this is—won’t be clean. It won’t be cinematic. It’ll be slow, spiteful, noisy, and lived. And it will affect us all.
And yet, part of me still hopes.
Because some myths die hard. And because somewhere in the noise, there are still people marching, resisting, organizing, dreaming. There are still artists making sense of the chaos, writers speaking truth, teachers holding the line, kids growing up not buying the lie. Maybe that’s what resilience looks like: not a return to old glories, but a stubborn insistence on not going quietly.
Still, it’s frightening.
Not just the speed of the fall, but the willful blindness that preceded it. The fact that this didn’t happen overnight. That it was courted, invited, elected.
That’s the part that haunts me.
Because if the mighty can vote for their own collapse, what’s stopping the rest of us?
Labels: america, issues, politics
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, April 25, 2025
9:00 PM |
Finding Melanio
Every time I see an anthology of regional writing, especially in Binisaya, the portion allocated to Central Visayas, particularly from Negros Oriental, is always zero. Like, wala jud. And I’m always like, “Madahaaaan...” Makasapot baya usahay. This is why I’m currently compiling works in Binisaya from the province, especially from decades past, and some discoveries have been amazing.
Like finding out about a mambabalak from Pamplona named Melanio E. Relatado, who used to write balak in the 1960s. My sister-in-law, Daisy, is a Relatado. So I casually asked her if she knew him. “He’s my father,” she told me. Like, what? Like, how did I not know this? Then again, many others don’t. Melanio Relatado used to contribute to Bisaya Magazine and the Philippines Free Press, but the poem below, titled “Larawan, Pahawa!” and published on 6 November 1968, is the only thing I have of him:
Naghigda ka niining timawa
Matag mingawng gutling sa paginusara:
Yam-id ang pahiyom ‘mong makabibihag
Naghimaraot ‘nng masulub-ong kalag;
Maidlot ug ‘tuling mga bangkaw
Lagbas ‘ning dughan, ang ‘lulot ‘mong panan-aw;
Lanog sa biaybiay ‘ning sa paglaom ilo na
Ang mahunihong tagingting sa imong katawa.
Busa lagi ‘tawon, Larawan, pahawa na
Uban sa kalipayng imong gipangita:
Pasagding sa kasakit ako mag-antos
Kay ‘na maoy angay ‘ning alaot ug kabos;
Hinaot ‘ta nga kalipay sa gugma imong mapupo
Samtang sa asgad mga luha ako magpatulo.
I’m also looking for other writers as well: Prospero V. Cañete of Bais, Felix B. Samson of Tanjay, Agustin N. Manalop of Bais, Sotero O. Nocos of Guihulngan, Linalang Timawa of Dumaguete, Leonardo A. Visorro Jr. of Dumaguete, and Norberta T. Elnar. Does anybody know these people? They used to contribute to Bisaya Magazine from the 1950s to the 1970s.Labels: balak, bisaya, dumaguete, negros, philippine literature, regional literature, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 236.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, April 20, 2025
9:00 AM |
A Note on Resurrection
What defines my life—and perhaps everyone else’s, in a frenetic world—is busy chaos. But finally, I have found some time for myself, after endless skirmishing with a flirt of schedule, to fit in a moment like this: it is a perfect sunny Wednesday morning in the middle of Semana Santa, with hardly any traffic snarling outside. It is unusually quiet for a Dumaguete day, the silence broken only by the occasional whirr of tricycles, and the soft music that blares from my Spotify.
I am on an 80s mode. First, there was El Debarge (remember them?) singing “Who’s Holding Donna Now,” and now I have Madonna singing like her old self. All those classics from my growing-up years, from “Like a Virgin” straight to “This Used to Be My Playground.” And somehow I begin to feel so much at ease in my skin. I have not even taken a shower yet, glorifying in the snugness of last night’s clothes, and going about the room thinking of everything and nothing, a cup of brewed coffee in hand.
Deep inside, I wish life was always like this—something suspended in uncomprehended, quiet joy, with the soundtrack of your life swirling around you, an orchestra of utter contentment.
It is very much a breath of fresh air.
Maybe it is the prospect of not having to go to a classroom tomorrow to teach. Can you imagine that? Tomorrow’s a Thursday without its prerequisite pressures: there is none of the rituals of having to wake up early, like an automaton, and be the paragon of collegiate springboard of pre-packaged knowledge. I like teaching, but the damn thing can take its toll on one’s nerves.
Maybe it is the kiss of a beginning summer, although I abhor the fact that they have changed the school calendar and I still find myself teaching during a sweltering summer day. I’ve always believed that Dumaguete is always more beautiful in the summer, which is the only time I really love the sun. The humidity is just so, and for the most part, what envelops is a dry heat. That, coupled with the blue of Tañon Strait and the sky, and that general sweet lethargy in the air … what’s not to love?
But maybe it is also the fact I feel that everything around me is clean. Spic-and-span. Smelling softly of rose, citrus, and Lysol. I went to sleep in the early morning today, around five o’clock, after I finished cleaning the whole afternoon, from top to bottom. I had to. The pad had been showing signs of housekeeping neglect of late, due for the most part to the realities of April for a college instructor. There had been an abundance of dust, even those little pests we call agay-ay. After a while, my body and my senses begged for something, anything, to happen.
Last night, the trigger was washing dishes. Which led me to clean the counter top, which led me to the windows, then the chairs, then the floor, the whole enchilada. It takes me about six hours to finish everything. It is not because I am a slow-poke when it comes to cleaning. (Cleaning is my genes; Ma is a virtual obsessive-compulsive when it comes to that, it had to rub off on me.) I like taking my time, mindful of the fact that I do not just consider cleaning house a chore; it is necessarily a kind of therapy, even a meditation. Sometimes I see the world so much better with a mop on one hand, a broom in the other. Can you imagine that? While you’re struggling with the stain on your countertop, you think of this dilemma and that vexation, and you think of the various solutions as well. (Sometimes, the action of scrubbing jogs your brain to come up with creative solutions.) The stain also becomes the metaphor for the problem in your head and in your life, and your rubbing with damp cloth and alcohol becomes the symbolic remedy you know is forthcoming.
I love cleaning the house. At night. It is not at all unusual that my cleaning habits take me to nighttime, almost always around midnight. There is something comfortable about cleaning the house when the rest of the world is asleep. The action of sweeping, dusting, and scrubbing the floors under the shadow of night takes on, for me, a symbolic meaning. It reminds me of a favorite tigmu—or bugtong for Tagalogs and “riddle” for the rest of the English-speaking world:
After a sleepless night covered with a blanket,
It rears up laughing.
This is an ancient Philippine gnomic verse, whose answer is “flower,” although many of my former students in Philippine Literature class would also venture the “butterfly,” even “a chick coming out of its egg shell.” All true, of course, but I like the idea of a flower better. Granted, one can readily see the literal meaning of that riddle: that under the cover of night, a flower blooms.
But it is its metaphorical and metaphysical levels of that tigmu which fascinate me. Why? Because the small verse paints perfectly the underlying process of nature, and to a considerable extent, the process of much of our lives.
Consider the flower. In the evening, it is an inconsequential bud, all closed up, its final beauty lost to us in its being hidden. During the night, botany tells us that the flower virtually “sleeps”—but such sleep is one that is actually full of silent processes, all of its biology working to produce the bloom by early morning’s light.
Or consider the butterfly: it starts out as an ugly, wriggly caterpillar, which must soon go to “sleep” encased in a cocoon, and triggers a process that would soon produce one of Nature’s greatest metamorphoses.
The riddle thus tells us that everything evolves (or revolves) under a process of dark quiet; that when the proper time comes, we can then burst out into the world, laughing.
Isn’t that such a hopeful thought? And so appropriate for Easter, too!
But how is this even related to house-cleaning?
I like the process of preparing for another day, and another week, sweeping everything clean. Clutter and dust diffuse the possibility for change, or for welcoming the new.
When this column comes out, it will be a Sunday, on a note of Resurrection.
It is so much easier to face that, all clean, all ready.
But, of course, I will take whatever it is that makes me smile today: genuine, unforced smiling—something that keeps from within—is something rare, and it is very much welcome. Then again, I have always liked the symbolic significance of holidays and red-letter days—Christmas, New Year’s, Valentines, or Easter in particular, or even The First Day of School. They give a kind of emotional deadline to finishing things. And I have so many things to finish: for the first time in so many weeks, these responsibilities have now acquired a patina of possibility.
Labels: life, philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 235.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 09, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 234.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 02, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 233.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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