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
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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
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Wednesday, May 07, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 238.
Labels: poetry
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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
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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
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