Wednesday, July 09, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 247.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, July 07, 2025
2:34 PM |
Paul Palmore Returns!
CATCH THIS ONE OF A KIND THEATRE EVENT ON WEDNESDAY! In his first work as a come-backing theatre artist, Paul Palmore directs and presents a collaborative work with Dessa Quesada-Palm, Alex Cerra, Mayumi Maghuyop, Iniaki Montenegro, and Fionabelle Marie Cabe doing excerpts from James McLure's Laundry Room and Bourbon and Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box, the JULY 9, Wednesday at 7 PM at the Woodward Little Theatre, Silliman University, Dumaguete City! FREE ADMISSION [but donations will be appreciated].
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, silliman, theatre
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, July 02, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 246.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, June 30, 2025
8:44 PM |
All About Tenderness
I mean to share this earlier in June for Pride Month, but life ... got in the way. Better late than never! But I was moved by Mark Fermill's [ IG: @markfermill ] recommendation for Talk Bookish to Me PH [ IG: @talkbookishtomeph ] of my book DON'T TELL ANYONE: LITERATE SMUT [from Anvil Publishing: IG: @anvilpublishing ]. There's some sex in it, yes, but the book is really a distillation of what I know about heartbreak, about loving, and about longing, done in the most tender way I can write about all these. That he highlighted two of my favorite stories from my own end of the book is also a kind of affirmation for me. I cried when I wrote “Compartments.” I was exorcising all my heartbreaks when I wrote “The Boys From Rizal Street.”
You can order the book from Lazada at this link.Labels: books, love, Pride, queer
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, June 29, 2025
9:18 AM |
A Life of Culture
This is an expanded version of my acknowledgment speech at the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards, given last June 28 at Brooke’s Place in Batinguel, Dumaguete.
To be invited to speak on behalf of the honorees in the Artists and Entertainers category of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards feels like standing at the threshold of history and memory. And it feels both so fitting and intimidating, perhaps simply because I know these people throughout my whole career as a cultural worker and have championed many of their works. These are people I have worked with, admired, written about, or simply held in reverence.
The theatre artist Evelyn Rose Aldecoa, who directed me in three unforgettable plays, taught me the rhythms of performance and community.
The poet Merlie Alunan is one of my literary mentors, and continues to guide me in collecting the folk literature of our province, helping us hold onto the fragile strands of our cultural memory.
When I found the films of screenwriter and film director Cesar Jalandoni Amigo, who died in 1987, I tried to give them light again in articles I have written about him and in screenings I try to do of his films, knowing that every frame of his cinema was a testament to his quiet genius.
The visual artist Hersley-Ven Casero is my most frequent collaborator. He has done the illustrations of most of my books, and I actually curated his first solo exhibit more than a decade ago. I am always drawn to the artistry he creates with his lens, which has chronicled the beauty and everyday wonders of our city, and I see as an artist who sees the world in textures we often miss.
I spent some time with the filmmaker Eddie Romero before he died in 2013. His stories for me moved beyond the screen into the national consciousness, and one of the highlights of my cultural work last year was curating the exhibit dedicated to his life and works at the National Museum of the Philippines in Dumaguete.
Edith Lopez Tiempo—Mom Edith—whose wisdom and grace launched countless literary careers, including my own, is the light we continue to follow.
I do not know Boboy Garovillo personally—but I feel like I do, given that almost all of us here have grown up with the songs of APO Hiking Society, their music inscribed in our hearts and has become our very definition of the best of OPM. That I have been chosen to be in their ranks humbles me, because I am first and foremost a rabid admirer of their creative life and a champion of their works.
You will notice that among all the categories in the current iteration of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards, our category has the biggest number of honorees. This underlines what for me is the biggest and often unacknowledged truth about Dumaguete: that it is in fact a city of the arts and culture—and every means should be done by our LGU to highlight that truth, through education, through tourism, through policy. In the first iteration of this award, in 1998, only one artist was actually honored: Canuto Villariza, a musician and songwriter who brought us “Dumaguete [Do You Hear Me Calling?” Today, more than 25 years later, Dumaguete has honored eight individuals—and among us we have two National Artists in fact! We need to embrace this, and nurture a city that is friendly to its artists.
I do hope that the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards will become an annual honor, because we have so many artists and cultural workers who deserve this distinction. Francisco Sevilla Banogon, Rene Armogenia, and Dean Sinco for architecture and interior design. Cornelito Aro, Kitty Taniguchi, Jose Laspiñas, Paul Pfeiffer, Maria Taniguchi, and Muffet Dolar Villegas for visual arts. Luis Sinco for photography. Artemio Tadena, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Myrna Peña-Reyes, Edilberto Tiempo, Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, Bobby Flores Villasis, Elsa Martinez Coscolluela, Lakambini Sitoy, and Eva Rose Washburn-Repollo for literature. Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham, Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez Emmanuel B. Gregorio, Jay Cyrus Villanueva, and Enchi for music. Junix Inocian and Andy Bais for theatre. Lucy Jumawan-Sauer for dance. Dennis Trillo and Glydel Mercado for film. Tingting Delfin, Isabel “Boom” Roxas, Jeanne Ong, Digna Coo, Fred Quimat, Amir Sali, Alexis Monsanto, and Rajo Laurel for fashion design. And these are only just a few that I can remember.
We speak often of progress in terms of roads and buildings and markets. But true progress lies also in the art we create, in the songs we write, in the stories we tell each other when the lights go down and we gather in darkened theaters to remember that we are human. It is in these moments that we learn empathy, find courage, discover ourselves anew. The arts are not a luxury but a lifeline. They keep the soul of a community alive.
I hope this awards tradition continues, and that every year we pause to remember the artists and cultural workers who labor often in silence, sometimes in obscurity, to bring beauty into our lives. Their work is the work of spirit, of heart, of community.
Some might ask: why honor the arts when the world is beset with crisis? Why spend time celebrating when we are surrounded by hardship? The answer is simple. Art is our response to darkness, our stubborn refusal to give in to despair. It reminds us of the beauty still possible. It gives voice to the voiceless, gives shape to the dreams we hold close at night, lets us imagine a better world. And we gather here tonight not just to give medals but to affirm our collective belief that culture matters, that artists matter, that our stories matter.
On behalf of my fellow honorees, thank you for this recognition. We dedicate it back to the community that made us, to Dumaguete whose gentle spirit continues to nurture our own. May we all continue to live a life of culture, because in the end, it is the only life truly worth living.
Archiving a digital copy of the Pasidungog 2025: The 2nd Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards programme:
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 245.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, June 22, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Weight of the World
The dictionary definition of malaise is that it is “a general feeling of discomfort, illness, or uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify.” From the brain fog I am in, I consider that very carefully, and think through the murk: yes, that’s exactly it—that’s the fugue I’ve been flailing in since I arrived back from Singapore a few weeks ago. I wanted my return from that trip to mark some kind of refreshed start, a clean reboot of the self. But instead, a few days into my arrival in Dumaguete, I got sick. Flattened by something suspiciously COVID-like, probably the new strain that everyone’s whispering about again but refusing to name out loud, as though we’re too exhausted to even fear properly.
That unexpected illness floored me. The days in early June were a blur of fevered dreams, sore muscles, and the desperate awareness of breath, and suddenly the world receded into muffled silence. I recovered eventually, or at least the body did what bodies are designed to do—it carried on. But something else stayed. Something stubborn, low-humming, and disorienting. Something I have come to recognize as “malaise.”
Not the dramatic kind. No weeping on the floor, no screaming into the abyss. Just this quiet slippage of self into a fog where nothing feels anchored. It’s as if I’ve misplaced the coherence of my life, and I don’t know where to look for it. I try to read a book, and the words swim away. I sit down to write, and the blank page stares back at me, unimpressed. The days blend together. I avoid calls. I forget to reply to messages. I move through the house like a ghost haunting his own life.
At first I told myself it was just physical fatigue, the tail end of an illness’ wreckage. But as the weeks rolled on, and my body grew strong enough to lift grocery bags and climb stairs again [I even managed to do my part as a resident panelist of the 63rd Silliman University National Writers Workshop for one complete week], the fog still didn’t lift. That’s when I realized it wasn’t just my body that had been infected. My spirit, too, had caught something—something darker and harder to shake. A kind of existential weariness. A deep, gnawing ennui. I know ennui well.
And when I interrogate the shape of that ennui, I see it plain as day: it’s really the world, and all the dirt we are caked in. It’s the politics that seep into every crevice of our lives, choking beauty, distorting truth. It’s the endless cycles of betrayal in the headlines, the impunity, the hypocrisy, the spinning of narratives so brazen that gaslighting feels like air. And it’s the art we try to make in the midst of all this—art that cannot help but be affected by the political, even when all we want is to simply tell a story, to nurture culture, to capture a feeling, to make something true.
But I won’t kid myself. The act of making art is no longer a neutral act. In this time, in this country, in this fraught global moment, to make art—especially art that speaks—is to wade into a battlefield. Everything is coded. Everything can be weaponized. Silence can be complicity. Expression can be read as sedition. A simple poem can be torn apart for what it did not say, or for what it dared to.
And yet all I want—if I am being honest—is to live a fruitful life of culture. To write what I must write. To teach what I love. To read a good book. To mount a play. To celebrate a painting. To attend a concert and feel joy bloom in my chest. To do these things without the constant noise of politics and the havoc it brings. But how do you do that in a world where even breathing feels like a stance?
The simple answer is: you can’t. Not entirely.
But maybe the better answer is: you do it anyway.
You write the story, even if the world is burning. You stage the play, even if the theatre is falling apart. You curate the exhibit, even if funding is scarce and freedom scarcer. You teach the class, even when students are too distracted by the collapse of everything to listen. You do it knowing that it “matters.” Knowing that every act of culture is also an act of resistance—not necessarily against a regime or an ideology, but against despair.
Because that’s the real enemy, isn’t it? Not just the politicians, or the trolls, or the systems of oppression we all navigate. The real enemy is the part of us that wants to give up. That whispers, “What’s the point?” That tells us the fog will never lift. But there is a point. There is always a point.
I used to believe we make art to make sense of the senseless. I used to believe we make art to stay alive, to find meaning, to dream another world into being. I used to believe we make art to remind ourselves—and others—that we are still here. That we feel. That we refuse to go numb. I badly need to believe in all of this again.
So this is what I tell myself on these doldrum days when the malaise continues and wraps itself around my chest like a wet shroud: write something. Anything. Like this "essay" you can barely write. Let the cultural work you do be the quiet rebellion it has always been.
But I am still tired. The fog still lingers. In these small acts of a little bit of writing, I hope I can find a way through. Maybe, for now, hoping and a bit of writing is enough.
Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 244
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 243.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 04, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 242.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 241.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
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