Just Some Write-Ups

  Hinashasan Workshop Panelists, Fellows, Lecturers, Moderators, and Other Attendees, a pleasant morning to you all! One of the most insightful write-ups I read about the pandemic came out in the first half of last year, as countries the world over slipped, like rapidly falling dominos, into lockdowns and various other restrictions. Besides calling out the Indian government for the inhumane way it enforced its pandemic protocols, Arundhati Roy’s “The Pandemic as a Portal” articulates a unique perspective on the crisis, one that’s particularly nuanced in the face of toxically positive rhetoric like “The planet is healing” or overtly negative opinions that interpreted COVID-19 as some sort of divine punishment. In Roy’s willfully optimistic view, the pandemic, besides being an obviously devastating event for many, is also a “gateway,” a chance for humanity to collectively gain insights that we can carry toward a potentially better, post-COVID world. The Book Prize–winning author e...

Maayong hapon kanatong tanan! A few days ago, when I first shared on my Facebook profile the poster for this event, another friend of mine on the platform, as well as a Carolinian contemporary, shared the same post on his profile with a caption beginning with the sentence: “Huge part of our history is in the archives in Spain.” A well-known fact among us within the academe, lesser known and likely even taken for granted by those outside it. If you tuned in to last month’s installment of this lecture series, you will probably recall how a good number of questions during the open forum revolved around the ethics of this whole “former colonizers still controlling much of the archives” arrangement and how, despite a recent cultural shift [1] marked by a growing awareness among young people of just how much “unlearning” and “decolonizing” there is to do, some issues still remain somewhat “dense”—to use the word of our previous speaker, Dr. Cristina Juan. While these universities and ...

This paper was originally presented at Mopalawod, Mopalawom: The Sea and Its Transformations in Cebuano Literature, a conference held via Zoom on October 5, 2020.  * * * I. Once-Isolated Worlds   Back in 2018, in the course of doing research for a story I had already begun writing, I interviewed a priest who told me of his idyllic childhood growing up in the fertile valleys of Tuburan, a town he frequently described as “quiet” and “sleepy,” often overshadowed by its more developed, better-known neighboring municipalities with less stony shorelines. The descriptions he provided played out like vignettes right out of a postcolonial novel: long summer treks to the beach with relatives and friends across hilly terrain, false priests roaming the countryside and performing pseudo-Catholic rituals in the presence of unsuspecting locals, clashes between communist rebels and the military, to name a few. Of particular interest—to my city-born and -bred imagination, so used to travelin...

Somewhat ashamed to admit this in writing, but the first time I met Dr. Resil Mojares, I didn’t know who he was, let alone his stature in the local community of letters—a community which, as a naive nineteen-year-old attending his first writers workshop, I was unwittingly about to be inducted into. This was back in 2010, at the 26th Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers Workshop, where I was first introduced to other luminaries of Visayan literature, as well as other young literary practitioners better read and with already more poems and stories to their name. Though a linguistics and literature major, I was still just a couple of years past a high school education that had weaned me on Homer, Shakespeare, Harper Lee, and other esteemed works of the Western canon, so I was a long way off from even beginning the process of what many a literary website refer to as “decolonizing one’s reading list.” Flashback to a couple of months from this writing, when I received that first emai...