This column celebrates the vibrant literary culture and heritage of Dumaguete City, in anticipation of its bid to be designated as UNESCO City of Literature under the Creative Cities Network. It is produced by the Buglas Writers Guild, a network of literary artists from Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, and Siquijor. Each week, we will focus on the work of one local writer.
What is home? For poet Merlie M. Alunan, the answer is a difficult thing to come by, given the way her life has unfurled.
She currently resides in Tacloban City, but was born in Dingle, Iloilo on 14 December 1943, the eldest of seven children of Flavio Alunan and Amina Muyco. She finished grade school at Victorias City, Negros Occidental, and graduated high school at Ormoc, Leyte—and then obtained a bachelor’s degree in education, major in English, at the University of the Visayas in Cebu in 1964.
She would later spend a significant number of years being a resident of Dumaguete City, where she earned her master’s degree in creative writing at Silliman University in 1974.
She began teaching at Divine Word College in Tagbilaran City, Bohol, and then moved back to Dumaguete to teach at Silliman. Later, she would join the literature and creative writing faculty at the University of the Philippines, both in Cebu and in Tacloban, where she would eventually retire as professor emeritus in 2008.
In a sense, her life is a criss-cross of homes—spanninig the wide stretch of the entire Visayas—which is probably why, among her many books, the one tome that has become a significant summation and culmination of her life as a teacher, as a researcher, and as a writer, is Sa Atong Dila: Introduction to Visayan Literature [University of the Philippines Press, 2015], a thick compendium of literary works—both folk and modern—in all of the major Visayan languages, including Bisaya [often mislabeled as Cebuano], Waray, Hiligaynon, Kiniray-a, and Akeanon.
So, “home” to Alunan is indeed a myriad consideration, but she will always consider Dumaguete as a primary home besides Tacloban: this was where she found her literary voice under the tutelage of Edilberto K. Tiempo and Edith L. Tiempo, and where she finally started writing—and quite a late start at that.
While in Dumaguete in the early 1990s, she also co-edited Kabilin: 100 Years of Negros Oriental with Bobby Flores Villasis. It was a path-breaking coffeetable book celebrating the history, the life, and the culture of Negros Oriental in time for the Province’s centennial celebration.
In Dumaguete, her son Babbu Wenceslao, a popular local visual artist, has also taken root, where he owns and manages El Amigo along Silliman Avenue.
Merlie Alunan is primarily a poet, and her works—in English, in Bisaya, and in Waray—are collected in Hearthstone, Sacred Tree (1993), Amina Among the Angels (1997), Selected Poems (2004), Tales of the Spider Woman (2011), Pagdakop sa Bulalakaw ug Uban Pang mga Balak (2012), and Running with Ghosts and Other Poems (2017). She also recently translated the Binisaya balak of Canlaon poet Ester Tapia in Húbad: Ester Tapia (2021).
Among the anthologies she has edited include Fern Garden: Women Writing in the South (1999), Mga Siday han DYVL (2005), Our Memory of Water: Words After Haiyan (2016), Susumaton: Oral Narratives of Leyte (2016), and Tinalunay: Hinugpong nga Panurat nga Winaray (2017). She also edited The Dumaguete We Know (2011), a memorable anthology of creative nonfiction mining many writers’ memores of Dumaguete.
For her contributions to literature, Merlie M. Alunan has just been announced as one of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awardees in 2025.
But to go back to her grasping for the meaning of home in her poetry, we turn to a poem she wrote when she was leaving Tacloban with her family for a prolonged stay in Dumaguete, and found that the impending departure has torn her young daughter’s sense of home. This is Bringing the Dolls:
Two dolls in rags and tatters,
one missing an arm and a leg,
the other blind in one eye—
I grabbed them from her arms,
“No,” I said, “they cannot come.”
Each tight luggage
I had packed
only for the barest need:
No room for sentiment or memory
to clutter loose ends
my stern resolve.
I reasoned, even a child
must learn she can’t take
what must be left behind.
And so the boat turned seaward,
a smart wind blowing dry
the stealthy tears I could not wipe.
Then I saw—rags, tatters and all—
there among the neat trim packs,
the dolls I ruled to leave behind.
Her silence should have warned me
she knew her burdens
as I knew mine:
her clean white years unlived
and mine paid.
She battened on a truth
she knew I too must own:
When what’s at stake
is loyalty or love,
hers are the true rights.
Her own faiths she must keep, not I.
A tender, if heartbreaking, poem that explores the tension between survival and sentiment in the context of forced migration or displacement, we find in the poem the speaker—focused on necessity—denying her child her battered dolls, which symbolize the past and innocence.
Yet, the child quietly resists, smuggling the dolls aboard the boat bound for another home, asserting that in upheaval, love and memory must also be carried.
The poem contrasts adult pragmatism with a child’s uncompromising loyalty to what matters emotionally. And in the end, the child’s act becomes a quiet rebuke and reminder that love and belonging cannot be sacrificed, even when life demands painful choices.