Mapping My Literary Journey

“The struggle to be a writer does not end,” said panelist Angelo “Sarge” Lacuesta in one of our sessions during the Silliman Writers’ Workshop in Dumaguete in May 2009. Now a recognized Filipino fictionist in English, Lacuesta was then citing on how a creative writer must invest time, effort and yes, as clichés go, resources—sure, their lifetime—to be able to master the literary craft, or so that whatever he or she has written could at least make sense.

 

The statement stuck the moment I heard it, there and then admonishing me and making itself a tall order for me. So I responded by asking back that if writing does not really not end, I could at least throw an equally valid question: So, therefore has it ever begun at all? I could start clarifying the statement by first asking the wherever, whenever, however—or the circumstances—involved in its inception. 

 

In other words, I would like to begin today by answering the question taken from that sweeping statement—particularly, when does the struggle to write even begin in the first place? Or more clearly—when does a literary life ever begin?  

 

When did my literary life begin? Just when did my “whole affair” with literature begin?

 

Darakulaon mata niya namumulaag, garong kakakanon ka. Sa basug mo nanuparan pasiring ka sa eskwelahan. Kuminutipas kang pauli na maski dai pa lamo retira. Tuminago ka sa likod kan platera nindo, nagrurulungsi ka. Nasabatan mo itong asbô sa libro ni Mrs. Páya.—“Anayo II” , Facebook Post Dec. 25, 2014.#AraaldawMaanayo

 

Imaginative and young as I was, already I chose to make my own reality; and invented my own tawong lipod which I probably thought could tell others about. 

 

In mapping my own literary journey, I take many, many steps back to retrace where I came from—and as I do, I look to the many experiences and not only the various opportunities but also the many different sensibilities who took part, were part or helped shape these events.

 

For this piece, I will try to answer this question, but also know that when I do, I will be raising more questions than answering them.

 

FROM BAGACAY TO BAGUMBAYAN

Born the youngest of six to two under-compensated public schoolteachers in the 1980s, when Salary Grade (SG 11) was probably not yet assigned to a Teacher I, I began school when my mother was already a widow, working hard to make ends meet for her six growing children. 

 

Was I the perfect candidate to win the most coveted Little Boy Blue award? Being labeled achiever and typecast as bright slash loner slash weird slash “siisay lamang an amigo kaiyan,” was I being groomed to befriend books for life, as it were?

 

What else could this little fellow do? How else was an 11-year-old boy supposed to respond after being chosen by Grade 4-Yakal adviser Ella Mariscal to memorize and deliver a “A Child of Woe” declamation piece to represent our humble school in the bigger Tinambac schools?

 

What else could he do—being rehearsed even during regular classes and weekends—to internalize a clichéd character of a child beggar asking for alms in the busy city streets only to be run over by a car and become an amputee for the rest of his life? 

 

And what could be more heartrending than this piece ? Can you think of something else that will better teach the bitter truth about poverty to such young, emotionally vulnerable—too impressionable—sensibility?

 

Laughable. Yes, Virginia, you might even say that of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” monologue as it might just pale in comparison to my declamation piece—if we talk in terms of literally making “audience impact”. 

 

While “Hamlet” actors must make sense by vacillating between “To be or not to be” only because the audience know the lines by heart, I simply made my audience cry when I did cry.

 

I mean who wouldn’t be affected by a boy onstage, crying hard about his misfortune in tattered outfits? Almost every sentence in that overwrought declamation—piece of “tragic” proportions—required me to act out grief—which I did so accordingly generously, much to the satisfaction not just of my coach when I qualified for the District Meet, but also of the school district supervisor who was already counting their high marks in performance evaluations.

 

At a young age, this boy was already being taught the gravitas—correct diction and serious emotions delivered to the audience—in tattered and dungis and dugyot outfit—eventually winning the hearts of many a judge, bringing me to represent Tinambac district in San Miguel Bay Meet in 1987. Nom! Saen ka pa?

 

But more than anything, the “Woe” monologue could have had more impact only because I was speaking my own character. I come to think now: was it really acting—or was it simply acting out what I really was? 

 

Because my mother was struggling so hard for her children, so probably my teacher thought that her youngest son could best interpret the piece to evoke the sentiment being exaggerated and—in the words of Rosario Cruz-Lucero—overdone or “over-killed” in that weepy declamation piece. 

 

Interestingly, I have yet to know the name of whoever wrote that “woeful” attack on poverty. At the time, my coach considered it a cousin to the more popular “Vengeance Is Not Ours,” which was a staple piece and made rounds in the DECS (Department of Education, Culture and Sports) community.

 

As an essay writing contestant, too, I—sadly—was asked to memorize words from a previously written piece and just rewrite them using pencil (so I could easily erase any errors) during contests proper in Tinambac district or San Miguel Bay. I wonder why they called it essay-writing contest then—when I was just asked to rewrite a piece I memorized. It should have been called Essay Rewriting Contest.

 

Looking back to all these, I should say I had the good fortune of not only being given these opportunities but also having enjoyed them. To me, these early “literary” involvements, these engagements couldn’t just be ignored; for they served as cornerstones and milestones which directed me and cleared the ways for me to consequently pursue the road to literature. 

 

To me, these and other such exposures were simply the asbo which I saw on Mrs. Paya’s book and from which I couldn’t just be torn away.

 

            When I entered Ateneo de Naga in the late 1980s, fortunately through a scholarship, I was overwhelmed by the Ateneo’s English PowerHouse Department. By this I mean the privilege of being taught by this batch of teachers—whom I now call renaissance men and women inspired and nurtured by Fr. Raul Bonoan’s repackaging of Ateneo’s human resource which historically dramatically helped salvaged saved rescued the said institution from its near-closure. 

 

While my early (freshman) membership in the schoolpaper Blue and Gold afforded me opportunities to train and, if you may, intimate with the English language, fellow Knight of the Altar member Xavier Olin’s proactive editorship sparked in me the love of publication itself, especially when I was being tasked to write and make significant contributions for the paper.

 

Well, I loved Alejandro Roces’s “My Brother’s Peculiar Chicken” under Mrs. Bernadette Eduardo-Dayan. But who am I to forget Jesuit scholastic Rene Repole’s incisive phonetics classes? More than anything, they inspired me, too, not only to enunciate the keywords but really project the nostalgia in Horacio de la Costa’s classic essay oratorical piece “Jewels of the Pauper”.

 

Meanwhile, in my junior year with Mrs. Eden Maguigad, we did not only see real, familiar characters, who were not far different from ourselves—as the boy protagonist in N.V. M. Gonzalez’s “Bread of Salt” or the other one in James Joyce’s “Araby”; we also role-played Alberto Florentino’s The World Is An Apple” and metaphorically took a bite at poverty to its core.

 

Not to be left out are my Filipino subject teachers Delia Villanueva with whom we read and understood European culture from a Filipino author writing in antequarian Tagalog, namely: Francisco Balagtas “Florante at Laura” 

 

There is also Delia Volante under whom we dissected Inang Bayan’s literal and figurative maladies in Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.

 

Then, to have one Gregorio Abonal for an English or even Practical Arts teacher was legendary at the time in our campus. In his English and journalism classes, we did not only see ourselves as Stripes looking for our own Yellows after reading Trina Paulus’s “Hope for the Flowers”; we also relished and probably held our tears after reading Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon”. 

 

Who was I to hold back my tears seeing how Charlie’s mental deterioration is reflected in her notes to Ms. Kinian, making the story probably the least clinical but the most poignant doctor-patient meeting ever written? The teacher’s love of the letters, such appreciation of the language culminated in our production of Roman scrolls based on William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. For me who was still growing up doing so much already with these opportunities, it’s simply difficult to just forget them. 

 

After all, someone said that whatever an individual did best and/or loved doing when he was 15, he would be probably be do(p)ing all his life. This has proven true to me. From the day I found copies of my uncle’s 1980s newspapers Balalong and Bikol Banner as a kid playing with my cousins in the second story of their house, I have always loved journalism. And when I became editor of the Blue and Gold in my senior year, producing an issue with the gang was the pinnacle of everything I probably did in high school.

 

What could be a more fitting practicum for all the years of training in the languages for the last three years but a stint at the school paper which allowed me to offer back my contribution to the community who taught me the love of the language but more importantly, the flavourful life lived with literature?

 

Indeed, newspapers overwhelm me ceaselessly—while some are produced to make profits, I relish how thousands of sensibilities are gathered in one page or publication by a more organized mind—which puts everything into place, so as to create a sensible whole, one that makes any reader more knowledgeable and wiser than he was before.

 

Besides the required weekly journal submission, which asked us to write observations, experiences and insights—now status updates or blog entries, as in a diary—Abonal’s English classes did more—how can I forget a class when it mixed your taste for New Wave music to building up your speech skills? What happens to you if you were allowed to act out the lyrics of Depeche Mode’s “People Are People” as in a speech, or dramatize a scene based from a gospel song, Basil Valdez’s “Lift Up Your Hands”? 

 

And what could be more flattering than being asked to reflect one Sunday and write a homily-like essay on the concept of the Holy Spirit but stand and deliver it in front of our all-teenage-boys “congregation”?  During these times, your classmates, including those who bullied you in one way or another, will be made to listen to you for one moment in their lives.

 

In all these, I did not remain a performer of other people’ art; I also did create my own work of art myself, just like what Dame Edith Tiempo said in that one summer of 2009—“the moment you look at a flower, you already own that flower.”

 

You wouldn’t just be able to forget it even as it prefigures what you predict yourself to be –standing in the pulpit persuading people to believe in what you have to day.  I mean nothing else was more empowering to me than that. The English classes, projects and exercises were my life, my lifeblood, if you may—because virtually, all these could answer the present-day coffee ad question: “Para kanino ka gumigising?” Yes, indeed, I could not wait for the classes to resume or projects to be unveiled, or activities to unfold. All these excited me.

 

FROM CAPILIHAN TO KATIPUNAN

The strong influence of Abonal and later, the De los Trinos (who made homes in Capilihan Street in Bgy. Calauag and where I personally submitted class projects or retrieved them) would sustain me enough until I attended Rudy Alano’s classes as a full-time Literature major in Ateneo de Naga college.

 

While college English was a requirement across the courses, this was also the time when I could chose what to learn—even as I could choose my courses and schedules and electives to suit my tastes.  

 

Inspired from my previous English teachers in high school, I continued journaling under Joy Bonafe-Capiral, who read my juvenilia, or my hormones-induced incantations and intimations on girl crushes from Nabua and Iriga. Most of these written works impressed them and eventually made my rom-com life possible. 

 

Along side, even in college, I still benefited from the literary fellowships I began with my high school teachers. Grace Dorotea Nobleza-Rubio lent me not only her Scribner’s first-edition Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea), a worn copy which I carried me through college but also—Conrado de Quiros’s Flowers from the Rubble, from which I witnessed the profound simplicity and the simple profundity of the essay.

 

Not to be left out is my younger Pillars associate and layout artist’s Karl Llorin’s predilection for Jessica Zafra when she rose to the literary firmament with her Twisted essays. On days at the college paper Pillars which I edited in my senior year, I led to publish proofs of how we, too, caught the Zafra fever in campus through versions of our own Twisted universes.

 

If there was a clincher of our sad, literary lives in Ateneo, it would be our Rudy Alano experience. The Bikolista sensibility in Alano afforded our batch the chance to interpret his Bikol adaptations of two Western classic plays—Shakespeare’s “An Pagkamoot ninda Romeo & Juliet” which the English and Literature majors staged in 1994 and Edmond Rostand’s classic Cyrano de Bergerac, now “Cyrano de Queborac” (after the Bagumbayan sitio) also showcased by the same group the following year. 

 

The Alano interlude will not be complete without the mention of the publication of “Bilog at Iba Pang Mga Tula, a Knight literary folio I edited which was a response to Miriam College’s seminal “Libog at Iba pang Mga Tula”. The latter similarly drew huge criticism at the Time when Jane Campion’s The Piano, an independent film displaying male and female nudity was censored and cut by the prudish Movies and Television Regulation and Classification Board (MTRCB) led by one Henrietta Mendez. 

 

More than anything, it was a privilege for me to be taught by what I call the DE LOS TRINO TRIO, namely: the husband-wife tandem of Vernon and Maria Liwayway, or the most indispensable Maa’m Y; and their younger brother Joeby in the Social Sciences department.

 

Vernon de los Trino’s speech class allowed me to mark American minor poet Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe” a weighty and heartfelt oral interpretation seeing Jean-Francois Millet’s realist classic “The Man with the Hoe”.

 

Liwayway de los Trino’s narration and expository writing techniques and Jose de Los Trino’s weekly Rizal essays afforded me the gravitas, to take seriously the essay form—how the essay form can glorify an idea and elaborate it using details freely and sometimes unabashedly. 

 

More writing opportunities became my points of directions, including Lourdes Huelgas’s Essay class which required me to react to an essay in the form of another essay; Danilo Gerona’s Philippine history class, which trained me to stick to facts and interpret history using concise language and of course, Ranilo Hermida’s weekly Philo essays which asked me to illustrate the ideas advanced by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine or Aquinas using my own experiences as examples. 

 

Moreover, my affiliation with my fellow Literature majors surely came with even firsthand literary awakenings. F. Sionil Jose’s green Tree novel was lent to me by my classmate-cum-almost-confidante Jennifer Jacinto while John Steinbeck’s The Pearl by Corazon Uvero at one time made rounds among us Literature majors. These two slim volumes on nostalgia and realism taught me that novels and novellas are enough to give us a perspective with which we can view reality meaningfully.

 

All these served as training ground to appreciate the essay and extend it in my personal letters to family members or even experimental pieces which found space in the Bikol Daily, a new paper I worked in 1996 right after college graduation.

 

FROM DERRIDA TO DERIADA

After graduating from Ateneo de Naga, I chose to pursue graduate studies in literature at the bigger Ateneo in Loyola Heights, a sprawling Jesuit commune in Katipunan, Quezon City. There, my Literature professors, Dr. Edna Manlapaz, Jonathan Chua, Danton Remoto and D.M. Reyes are my “shimmering” lights at this time, guiding me to steer clear of traps in literary studies where I may have otherwise fallen but at times mentoring me and inspiring me to read works of literature seriously. These teachers taught me to treat literature as a doctor does a patient with a scalpel—clinical and exacting, but most importantly, aware of the diagnosis from which I will benefit.

 

The poetry electives I enrolled in—Rofel Brion in 1999 and B.J. Patiño and Alfred Yuson in 2003—helped produce subsequent poems written in English in Bikol not only because the weekly meetings cum workshops required output but also because I was being taught that to write about the self is not the only way to write. In these expisures, I was taught about being a creative writer. In particular, Krip Yuson urged his students to depart from the “I” persona in writing our weekly poem submissions. He asked us to produce poems which are of consequence not just to ourselves but to the general reader.

 

In recent years, I enjoyed literary fellowships from schools and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. These experiences I cherish deep in my heart because while they probably made me see my inadequacies, they have also not really dissuaded me from writing.

 

Joining Iyas fellows in 2007 chase ghosts in the Administrative Building of the DLSU Bacolod, I had the privilege of achieving enlightenment through poet par excellence Marjorie Evasco. More than anything, Evasco told Rodrigo de la Peña and myself, fellow Iyas poet, to “attend to your art,” admonishing us to clearly “pay attention to the things I have chosen to invest time in,” another tall order which I have not taken seriously.

 

Then, attending Iligan Workshop in 2008, the words of Waray poet Victor Sugbo sounded more than flattery when he said that learned a poetic style from my poem submission “Anayo”, which also received a Special Prize for Poetry. It was more than a fortune to be mentored and guided by the likes of Rosario Cruz-Lucero, who zeroed in on the folk elements she found alluring in the same poem “Anayo”. The praises for the poem came with admonitions on how it pales or fails even as, they said, it could achieve more.

 

That summer some ten years ago, I had the good fortune of studying poetry and fiction with some of the most illustrious names in Philippine literature in English, including poets Gemino Abad and Alfred Yuson and the Visayan sensibility Rosario Cruz-Lucero.

 

Among others, our batch was one of the last to listen to Dame Edith Tiempo, the mother of a big number of contemporary literati writing today. Though already frail at the time, Ma’am Edith still generously accommodated us in her legendary home in and profusely admonished us on the indispensable symbiosis of form and content. The home of the Tiempos is legendary because it is where writers are born; or made. A bug number of prominent writers are alumni of the Silliman Writers Workshop, including not only our homegrown talents Rudy Alano and his wife Selena, Maryanne Moll or Jason Chancoco, but also, believe it or not—Leoncio Deriada and the New York-based Magarao poet Luis Cabalquinto.

 

I give credit to every bit of learning I had during when I at the Ateneo, absorbing copiously seriously whatever a member of then powerhouse English and Filipino departments would cook up for their students. 

 

FROM ATENEO TO ANAYO

Beginning with verses in my journals, I relished words through my experimentations—amateur, juvenilia, and so on. But later on, my lessons in literature afforded me models to emulate, words, to borrow, phrases to elaborate, and ideas to expound.

 

All of which found expression in my random notes and jottings, which later became poems that I submitted to magazines; and essays which I gave to friends and confidantes. 

 

I love the essay. In my current outputs of saysay, which fuses Bikol and Hiligaynon and even Bikol and English at times, I would like to embed personal writing with something else which I create. I am working hard to make the usual informal essay become a creative non-fiction; with the plethora of personal experiences which I have now penned as drafts, I believe they also can become materials for a poem or even a short story. 

 

I began writing rawitdawit or Bikol poetry in 1995 which were also published in the Knight literary folio. This formed part of our Vernacular literature exposure through the same Rudy Alano, who promoted Bikol along with Dr. Lilia Realubit of the pioneer Kabulig writers group in 1992.

 

Whatever words come out of my mouth today, whatever sensibility I have I owe to the men and women with whom I encountered the beauty of language and its evocations of truth, universal and temporal. Or to put it more awkwardly, “I am legion”—infamously said by Lucifer when asked who he was by an exorcist priest.

 

As American poetry father Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes,” through my works, I invoke the many sensibilities which have affected me, and indicate the plurality of the voices I myself engendered in my poems and essays. This was echoed by the seminal Tagalog modernist Alejandro Abadilla when he famously wrote, too, “Ako ang daigdig”, prefiguring for the next generation of poets the primacy of the individual. 

 

My own private pursuits of literature were equally beneficial to me as reader. The fact that I chose to read them indicates to me how I wanted to see and feel and experience literature and do something to me. All these literary involvements and pursuits only become meaningful not really because I will write about them—but they will all be ingrained in my memory. 

 

Whether I did them during one cozy summer vacation (when I read Sidney Sheldon’s Master of the Game because everyone else in our household was reading it) or assigned myself a Holy Week reading to observe the Lenten season (I devoured Og Mandino’s The Christ Commission from page to page, seeing Christ come alive in the yellowed pages lent to my brother by his classmate)—I chose to be affected by literature that’s why I read them. I wanted to enjoy and be entertained and so I did, and so I was. 

 

The otherwise public experiences—I played a gay character in Alano’s “Romeo & Juliet” and Clarissa Guadalupe’s “Tao, Tao Saan Patungo ang Basura Mo?” embedded in me their serious message, which I would remember long as I live.

 

Then there was a time when I was being published. I began to enjoy publication from individuals and institutions. Foremost, these were the fruits of my partnership with my benevolent teacher in college, Paz Verdades M. Santos, who has in countless ways encouraged me to pursue literature like a mother would sing to her son to pursue his own path—herself a Gawad Paz Marquez Benitez awardee for promoting Bikol literature. 

 

Madam Doods had seen me as a promising writer in college, checking my journals and urging me to write further and be published. She sent me people to send works to.

 

First published by the Canada-based Bikolista Gode Calleja from Albay, my epistolary poem “Surat sa Pinsan na Taga-Libmanan pagkatapos kan Bagyo” was picked up by Ma’am Doods Santos to represent one of the many voices and/or flavors in the watershed anthology “Mahamis, Maharang na Manlain lain na Literaturang Bikolnon or Sweeets and Spices. This feast in Bikol literature also first saw an e-publication or digital platform. 

 

While I have yet to know how personal writing like that qualifies easily as creative writing. The poem’s shines even as it reflects a marital drift or crumbling marriage 

 

The “Leoncio Deriada” of Home Life’s “Poetry Workshop with Tito Leo” is admittedly my literary father who gave birth to my earliest attempts at English poetry—worthy or publishable or otherwise. Still in college I sent Sir Leo my English poems, some of which he found publication-worthy. 

 

My contributions to this magazine would soon find print in St. Paul Publications’ In Time Passing, There are Things, Deriada’s edited collection of works by 100 poets published in the long-running poetry column. 

 

Considered the father of contemporary Western Visayan literature, Deriada’s landmark anthologies including Patubas have been instrumental in the birthing of poetic and literary sensibilities who have since sprung from anonymity to prominence in the national literary scene.

 

My early works also saw print in Carlos Arejola’ short-lived Makata literary journal while has was still based in Laguna. 

 

In 2004, my rawitdawit was first published online by Muse Apprentice Guild, and later published by E manial poetry. In Sa KAbila ng Ritmo

 

Oragon Republic.com and its subsequent folio, Salugsog sa Sulog also featured my rawitdawit titled “Ki Agom,” admittedly inspired by of T.S. Eliot’s dedicatory “To my Wife”, which I wrote as my own incantation to my wife in 2005/.

Published in 2012 by Salabay Press and Abkat group bannered by enterprising young poets led by Eduardo Uy, the Anayo chapbook reflects my poetic sensibility. 

 

Anayo is a tapestry that weaves together some 30 Bikol poems or rawitdawit representing a variety of voices or personas with their own sense of enchantment or acquired a kind of malady, a motley crew of disenfranchisement.

 

The whole irony of this publication is that I don’t even have a copy of it at the moment. The limited number of publications and its being out of print is pushing me for its republication of a bigger, more expanded version, to include newer pieces to date. I plan to reissue an Anayo Redux in 2020 from publisher who would even dare read its contribution to the conversation, as it were.

 

FROM ANAYO TO DAYUYU

Soon after graduation, I suffered from this dilemma of how to relate to my truer Bikol self, particularly after obtaining or seeming to have assumed an English-clad sensibility. Such vacillation or being torn between seeming to know something in English but knowing Bikol better by heart surfaced or was given full description in a Bikol essay I penned more than 20 years later, thus:

 

BAGAQAY, TINAMBAQ, QAMARINES SUR—Ano daw an matabô sa sarong English major, idtong nag-adal dangan naqapagtapos nin Bachelor of Arts uqon A.B. English sa Naga? Qun pagbuwelta niya sa sadiring banwa, dai niya na aram qun siisay an pwedeng maistorya. 

 

Sain niya na daw maipamugtaq an sadiri sa dating estada? Diin siya maqahanap nin tawong maqaistorya nga arog man niya? Dawa muya qaining mag-istar sa poblacion na dinaqulaan niya, mapilitan siyang magtiner na sana sa mas daqulang banwa.

 

Siya iyo idtong dai naqamove-on pagqabasa qan si “Araby” ni James Joyce sa qlase qadto ni Mrs. Habla: Grabe an hugop-hugop qan solteritong bida na igwang mabaqal para sa iya nga hinahangaan na daragita. Haloy niyang linangqaba dangan ginibong qalis na garong sa Santa Misa. Alagad, lintian. 

 

Pag-abot niya sa baligyaan, mayong lábot si tindera ta uto man duman naqiquhulnaqan sa gusto qaining qapareha. Nawaran lugod nin gana si idtong bida, sarong nagdadaqula pa sana. Pagqanuod pa sana nganing mamoot, sinampaling na tulos nin pagqaanggot. Mababasol mo daw siya qun magdaqula siyang angót? 

 

Siring qaining bida sa istorya, grabe an hugop-hugop niyang igwang maihiras sa iba an nanudan niya, may maqaututang-dila, maqaistorya, alagad mayo nin madangog maqaqaintindi saiya.

 

Sabihon pa saiya qan tugang niyang matua, “nag-E-english qa, Noy, digdi sa harong ta? Spoqening dollars qa na!” Dangan sa ila nga harong mangirisi sinda. Dai niya mabal-an qun maingít sainda o maoogma. 

 

Sa siring na qeha, siya idtong persona sa “Coming Home” ni Leoncio Deriada. Pagqauli qaining bida ta hali sa siyudad pag-esquwela, dai niya na baga maqaulay su mga magurang niya. Qawasa nag-iba na daa siya. Si dating mga amigo niya, dai niya na maqaistorya, diyata naqapag-adal na sa daqbanwa, halangqaw na daa an pinag-adalan niya. Garo palan “Laida Magtalas, Version Two Point O” ang peg qan satong bida. An saiyang inadalan nagi pa lugod na qaulangan. Daindáta.

 

Mayo siyang qinalain qi Pedro, a.k.a. Peter na iyo an bida sa “Letter to Pedro, U.S. Citizen, Also Called Pete” qan Cebuanong si Rene Estella Amper, na paboritong pang-midterm sa Intro to Philippine Lit qaidto sa Ateneo de Naga: Pagqahali sa abroad, nag-i-English na; an dating pangaran niyang Pedro, ngonyan “Pete” na.

 

Garo man sana idtong sabi qan iba sa mga Biqol na mga inistorya: nasa riles pa sana ngani daa, sa Pamplona, nag-Tatagalog na. Suba-suba qa ka’yan. An pagqálain sana qan bida ta sa ining mga istorya: dai siya naqapa-Ameriqa ta nganing mag-iba an dila niya. Imbis na mag-upod sa esqursyon qan mga dating qaesqwela, dai na sana daa qawasa taposon pa niya an napunan na poetry collection ni Anna Akhmatova. Ha?

 

Sarong aldaw naman, pagduruman qan mga tugang niya sa handaan qan mga pinsan ninda, mapawalat na sana daa ini sa harong ta ito palan, nagumon na sa Crossword Puzzle, gamit an bagong thesaurus na tinauhan pasalubong saiya qan tiyuon na nasa Toronto na.

 

Kaya maghapon, solo-solo ngonyan sa harong. Maqiqilaghanan siya qan iqos na nag-unas qan dai naluqduan na sira sa saindang qusina. Out of the blue, siniqa niya ini, binadag ini nin plato alagad dai tatamaaan, dangan masabi: “What the f… Get out! Out! Out! You’re not welcome here!!! Haaayop na ini!”

 

Si malutongon na muda niya sa mother tongue, na garo iyo man sana an iqinabuhay qaini, yaon na sana sa puro qan dila niya. Secondary language niya na sana palan an wika ng kanyang Inang Bayan. 

 

Nasa puro na sana ini; alagad dai niya malingaw-lingawan. Dai niya nang gayo mataratandaan alagad iyo an nahambal niya sa qaanggotan. Nasa puro sana qan dila niya. Pero dai niya maiquruquspa sa hugasan. 

 

In mapping my literary journey, I give tribute to all the men and women who kindly generously ushered me into the world of language and literature—the stories and their lessons—the myths and their meanings, and the sense and their sensibilities. 

 

In every poem I turn in, or work so hard finishing, in every closure I render to every poem, in all stories I helped unravel and even insights rendered in an essay, I invoke those who also devoted to seeking joy or enjoyment from them, or equally found truths and uncovered realities about being human.

 

In writing, I have been guided by some tenets which make sense to me everywhere I go, or wherever I find myself writing, or aching to write. 

 

Úsip ni Carl Sandburg, saróng Amerikánong saindá man saná pamóso, tolóng bágay daá an kaipúhan tangáning mahimô kan parasurát an saiyang obra-maestra, ukón dakulang-gibo: Énot an toil, ukón trabáho. Panduwá, solitude, ukón pagsoló-sólo. Dángan, prayer, ukón pangamúyo.

 

Toil. Kaipuhan mong magparasúrat saná tangáning ika makánood magsúrat. Iyo ni an imo nga trabaho. Magsúrat ka sa adlaw; magbása ka sa banggi; káyod-kabáyo, garí. Pwede mo man idungán: magsurat sagkod magbása barabanggi. O uruáldaw. Segun saimo, dipindi. Bastá mayo nin palusot sa trabáho nin pagsurat, hadí? Iní an importanti. Magparabása saná daá kita, ta ngáni man igwa kitang maipabasa, iyo pa an sábi.

 

Solitude. Dapat daá saímo pirming solo-solo? Dai man siguro. Tibáad gusto sanáng sabihon, igwá ka nin espásyo. O kutâ na, silencio. Ngáni na tibáad sa rárom kan bangging ini, magriliwánag na an ribo-ribong bitúon sa itaas kan saìmong harong, sa lindong kan langit na saìmong imahinásyon.

 

Prayer. Bako man gayod itong maaráng ka saná sa altar kawasâ naanáyo. Bakô man gayód dapat parasimba ka o relihiyóso. Ukón paralinig sa patio, o nagdakulang akolito. Dai man káso kun luminuwás ka sa semináryo o sa beateryo.

 

Kundi lang gayod, sa boót mo, bal-án mong bakô kang perpekto; kayâ ka nagpapang-amígo o nangangayo-ngáyo, bako man kaipuhan sa anito ukon sa rebulto. Bakô man dapat an ngaran mo sagrado, ukon apelyido Divino, kun saen-saen nagmimilagro; nagpaparasámba sa macho, o sa kalalawgon ni Piólo.

 

“Dayuyu”—it’s always the poet needs the pain. The poet vacillates because he has been trained in English but is also being admonished to produce in Bikol which was never taught to him in the first place. Nagdadayuyu kawasa naskukllgan an sarong sensibilidad. Naaapi an saro sa saiyang doble kara.

 

Just like the Bikol language (and of course Filipino) still being marginalized in academic institutions or being considered irrelevant in the age of K to 12, call centers and skilled workers, the writer is writhing in pain crying because he doesn’t know where to begin. He is taught one thing but also needs to advocate for another. 

 

Quo Vadis? Where Am I Going?

Ever since I could remember I have been writing—I had written so many things in the past, presently I am writing—I’ve done it not because I want to tell [you] something which I remember or already know. As far as I am concerned, I will continue to write—as long as I live—because I can hardly wait what it wants to tell me.