This month is National Literature Month, and in two weeks time, we are going to celebrate it by staging the first ever Dumaguete Literary Festival. So let me celebrate in this space Dumaguete and the literature it has engendered.
Time and again, there’s always someone who’d ask me why I’ve chosen to stay and live in Dumaguete, my hometown. I understand why—I, too, believe in the principle of leaving “safe harbors,” to wrestle with the unknown in order to find our place in the world. But what if that place in the world just happens to be the place you were born in? Thus, my usual answer to this query is: “My purpose is here.” That word “purpose” is so loaded it stops most from further interrogating me. But there’s also always someone who’d tell me that with what I could do—and the promise that I apparently possessed—I could have reached farther shores with whatever dreams I’d have chosen to embark on. Why not Manila? Why not the world? Indeed, why not?
A long time ago, a national magazine [I believe it was the now defunct Sunday Inquirer] actually asked the same question to the literary power couple Edilberto and Edith Tiempo. Their answer was simple: “The Dumaguete shoreline.”
On good days, when I walk by the famed Rizal Boulevard, I get what the Tiempos meant. There is something about this specific view of the world, from the window of this stretch of Dumaguete, that tugs at the heart, and convinces you that this is ample reason for staying. The blueness of sky, the emerald clarity of our share of the Bohol Sea, the slight feel of the salt on your skin, the invitation to an unhurried life. I love all of these, and they easily convince me that choosing to live in Dumaguete can be the dream. But that is not all.
I’m starting with a Tiempo story because my own answer is a bit different—but also, like the prowess of these two giants, very literary. So why do I stay here in Negros Oriental? There are many reasons—but foremost among them is the privilege of being at home, literally, in the place conjured in the literary dreams of many writers I love and respect. It’s enough of a reason to stay.
People often forget that the literary is in the heart of being Dumaguetnon, or of being Oriental Negrense. We who live here reside in a place that’s practically the heart of Philippine literature—or at least one of its vital organs—and not just because this is home [both real and chosen] for many Filipino writers. It is also because its landscape has been thoroughly etched in so many poems, so many short stories, so many essays, so many novels, and so many plays—and not just by our homegrown writers: Dumaguete lives in the pages penned from so many writers from other places, all inspired by what they see as its bucolic air and its gentle people [and often its mystery), seduced by the “literary” spirit of the place, with many of them coming here to incubate in that particular atmosphere.
I remember the American writer Tim Tomlinson going for a diving vacation in Apo Island off Dauin without prior knowledge of Dumaguete. “When I passed through the place,” he later told me, “something struck me about it as being a haven for writers for some reason.” Once he got back to Manila, he asked a poet friend, “What do you know about Dumaguete?” And that’s when he got to know a bit of Oriental Negrense literary history—that it is home to the oldest creative writing workshop in Asia, that it is home to two National Artists [Edith Tiempo for literature and Eddie Romero for cinema], and that it is home [and incubator] to so many contemporary writers who fill the pages of our anthologies and the shelves of our bookstores. We will probably be, perpetually, a small, inconsequential Central Visayan city for many—but culturally, Dumaguete is a giant, and literature our biggest boast. [Tim has been back several times since then, to take part of our literary goings-on].
I can start with Oriental Negrense writers in general—from all the towns and cities that make up the province, and will forever be bound to Dumaguete in the metonymic sense. Grace Monte de Ramos is a poet from Siaton. Michael Aaron Gomez is a fictionist and playwright from Dauin. Eva Rose Washburn-Repollo is a children’s writer and documentarian from Tanjay. Dara Tumaca-Ramos is a fictionist from Bayawan. Ester Tapia is a mambabalak from Canlaon City. Simon Nino Anton Baena is a poet from Bais. Rolin Miguel Cadallo Obina is a playwright also from Bais. The late Bobby Flores Villasis was a poet, fictionist, and dramatist from Bayawan [his short story collection, Suite Bergamasque, is a fascinating probe on the wealthy denizens of the Rizal Boulevard sugar mansions, and many of his plays tackle the highs and lows of our landed classes from Bayawan to Bais]. The late Ernesto Superal Yee was a poet and fictionist from Tanjay [his novel Out of Doors is a scintillating gay love story with the backdrop of his city’s sugar country].
Then there are the Dumaguete-born writers themselves, like the Eddie Romero [see Ganito Kami Noon Paano Kayo Ngayon and The Passionate Strangers], Lakambini Sitoy [read Mens Rea and Other Stories and Jungle Planet], Cesar Jalandoni Amigo [see Sa Dulo ng Kris], David C. Martinez [read A Country of Our Own], Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas [read Upon the Willows and Other Stories and The Sea Gypsies Stay], Elsa Martinez Coscolluela [read In My Father’s House], Georgette Gonzales [who writes under the pen name Edith Joaquin for popular romances], Christine Godinez-Ortega [read Lanterns in the Sun and Other Poems], Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez [read Julia and the Music of Light], Jean Claire Dy [see A House in Pieces], the late Artemio Tadena [read This Craft, As With a Woman Loved: Selected Poems], and Dulce Maria V. Deriada [read Places, Faces, Phases]—all of whom go beyond rhapsodizing their hometown, like true natives should, and reflect on some painful truths and social commentary in their works—for example, the Dumaguete in Sitoy’s novel Sweet Haven [hidden under the moniker Donostia] goes deep into local social and moral hypocrisy, and the Dumaguete in Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s famous play chronicles the sundering of family at the height of the Japanese Occupation during World War II, and makes us ask uncomfortable questions about what makes heroes and what makes traitors. In their wake, we have younger writers such as the gifted poet Lyde Gerard Villanueva, the award-winning food writer Renz Torres, the irrepressible dramatist Junsly Kitay, and their cohorts such as Frankie Flores, Justine Megan Yu, Tara De Leon, Zakiyah Sidri, Gelend Talahuron, Junelie Velonta, Andre Aninon, Shay Natasha Du, Benjie Kitay, Simon Alvarez, Dwight Yap, and Pia Villareal.
There are also our prominent Dumaguete historiographers who are instrumental in creating the story of our past, such as Earl Jude Paul Cleope [read Bandit Zone: A History of the Free Areas of Negros Island During the Japanese Occupation], Caridad Aldecoa Rodriguez (read Negros Oriental: A History), and T. Valentino Sitoy (read A History of Christianity in the Philippines: The Initial Encounter), as well as cultural researchers whose outputs are foundational in Philippine cultural studies, such as Elena Maquiso (read Ulahingan and Mga Sugilanon sa Negros) and Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham (read The Folk Songs of the Visayas).
The above does not even include the immigrants to Dumaguete who have been so thoroughly dagit-ized* you cannot separate Dumaguete from their work and their identity—a list that includes Edith Tiempo from Nueva Vizcaya; Edilberto Tiempo from Southern Leyte; Claro Ceniza from Cebu; César Ruìz Aquino from Zamboanga; Myrna Peña-Reyes, Lemuel Torrevillas, Lorna Makil, and Domini Torrevillas from Misamis Oriental; Rebecca de la Torre and Beryl Andrea Delicana from Agusan del Norte; Earnest Hope Tinambacan and Ben S. Malayang III from Misamis Occidental; Merlie Alunan from Leyte; Dessa Quesada-Palm from Manila; Leonilda Bayran Magdamo from Laguna; and Albert Faurot from Missouri, USA.
To their ranks we can include a seemingly endless list of writers not from Negros Oriental who have nevertheless called Dumaguete their residence in their formative years as writers, or as their haven in their continued pursuit of the writing life: the National Artist Resil Mojares, Kerima Polotan, Reuben Canoy, Alfred Yuson, Susan S. Lara, Timothy R. Montes, Anthony Tan, Lina Sagaral Reyes, Erlinda Alburo, Jaime An Lim, Aida Rivera Ford, Marjorie Evasco, Rosario Cruz Lucero, Ricaredo Demetillo, David Quemada, Antonio Enriquez, Carlos Ojeda Aureus, K.M. Levis, Ted Regencia, Theodore Boborol, Dinah Roma, Renato E. Madrid, Dolores M. Feria, Francis C. Macansantos, Leoncio Deriada, Graciano H. Arinday, Fanny HB Llego, Jane Timbancaya-Urbanek, F. Jordan Carnice, Arkay Timonera, Joji Benitez, Lendz Barinque, Nino De Veyra, Alicia Tan-Gonzales, Luna Griño-Inocian, Victor Padilla, Lorenzo Fajardo Dilag, Edgar Libre-Griño, Linda Faigao-Hall, Niccolo Rocamora Vitug, Ed Ortega, Laurie Raymundo, Priscilla Supnet-Macansantos, Mitos Suson, Angela Gabrielle Fabunan, among many others.
Then there are the fellows of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, numbering in the hundreds and who, since 1962, have also called Dumaguete their home for at least one summer, and perhaps also for a lifetime. In their works you will find the most rhapsodic pieces about the place—which is understandable. A lot of these poems [and they’re mostly poems] are nostalgic bits, using Dumaguete as metaphor for their coming of age insights, their existential struggles, or their reckoning with their chosen vocation.
[So many names!]
I once hosted a “litera-tour” of Dumaguete for the City Tourism Office sometime in 2017—and I loved the energy of literature brought to life in the actual geography. There’s a kind of voodoo in that conjunction, and taking a captured audience on a storytelling tour. That’s the seaside bench in Villasis’ short story “Menandro’s Boulevard.” That’s the Redemptorist Church in Alunan’s poem “The Bells Count in Our Blood.” That’s Escaño in Justine Yu’s “Sweet Baby.” That’s Jo’s Chicken Inato in my own story “A Tragedy of Chickens.” That’s the old Tiempo house in Amigo Subdivision, which used to be a beehive of literary comings and goings. It was a successful tour, and it got me to thinking: an anthology of writings about Dumaguete should really be compiled.
I am currently compiling an anthology of these writings, and this project is a wish fulfillment.
This upcoming book, which I’ve titled The Gentlest City Imagined, comes about after years of dreaming of its existence. It answers the question: Dumaguete calls itself a City of Literature—so why are there no anthologies responding to that claim? There has been no answer to that query as far as I know, although one can make the claim that the Sand & Coral, the literary journal of Silliman University [and to some extent, its plucky but short-lived replacement Dark Blue Southern Seas], somehow filled that void since its establishment in 1948. But then again, not a single issue of the journal ever set out to map out Dumaguete in the literary imagination. This book, for better or worse, is indeed a first. And a necessary one.
The urge to do a literary rendering of one’s own place has been the ultimate project for many writers. There are easy examples to highlight. Alice Munro’s Ontario, Canada. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo. John Updike’s Olinger, Pennsylvania. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Edith Wharton’s New York. When we think of these writers and many more like them, what immediately comes to us is a sense of a specific world that they conjure in their works. With story after story, and poem after poem, they essentially give us the bricks and the seeds and the atmosphere to make up this specific sense of place, which becomes an embracing stage upon which their diverse characters play out their conflict and their drama. Timothy Montes once wrote that a “sense of place” is linked to, but is not necessarily the same as, “setting,” which itself is an often “overlooked as an active element” in literary creations, always secondary to plot and character, and often scaled down to a “cosmetic role.” But he also noticed that many writers return again and again to a particular setting that in the end what they have created is a believable world whose “air” blends so well with the characters and their stories that we begin to feel they could only have existed in the very place they occupy. He goes on: “I think most writers, especially those writing short stories, operate from this single-minded creation of a sense of place. They take great pains to make each story complete or self-enclosed, but the sense of place can only be formed by an accretion of stories, the building of worlds that will be more subtle than the alien worlds of science fiction, and sooner or later they will see that the sense of place will loom larger than the individual stories that make them. The impulse may be conscious or unconscious, and one has to drink deep from the well of memory to be able to tap into it.“
Needless to say, Dumaguete is my mythical place of roots. In Dumaguete lay the secrets of my blood, my history. Also here is the setting of my mother’s bedside stories, of those moments when I was a young child and she’d tuck me to bed and gamely recall a life when she was a young woman and World War II was brewing, or much later when she had returned to Bayawan town as a married woman in the sugar boom of the late 1960s and became, for a while, one of its fairer society hostesses. Those were the heady days, when sugar cane oiled the pockets of young hacenderos on the make, and everybody was rich… Dumaguete means memory—and this word alone means so much in the ways it must mean: as a threshold of recollections both happy and tragic.
And it turns out, this Dumaguete of the literary imagination is not my sole project. It is a project shared by many writers—and this book is an attempt to consolidate all of that.
In the final analysis, however, the sense of place we have all tried to cultivate in our fiction and poetry and drama eventually comes sidled with a higher agenda—to help create a sense of nation, a sense of the Philippines. Montes, again, says it better: “For me, the Ilocanos are fixed in a small town called Nagrebcan in La Union because of the stories of Manuel Arguilla, [the island of] Mindoro in the works of N.V.M. Gonzalez, [the province of] Tarlac in the Camiling stories of Gregorio Brillantes, and the old Manila in the works of Nick Joaquin. I never believed in a monolithic National Literature because my impression of Philippine literature was that of the variety of particular worlds created by writers I admired, worlds that felt as concrete as the jutting stones in the unpaved streets of my town as well as the smoothness of the streets of the poblacion [downtown] under my chinelas [flipflops]. So the Philippines would be an act of the imagination as different writers so rooted in their regional origins would reveal to me…”
He continues: “I believe that we are forming our literature in the story-telling projects that our writers have made of their particular towns, their particular cities. We are not creating a Nation from an abstract perspective; we are building it town by town, city by city, house by house, character by character. The imagined community is not only formed by a daily newspaper with a national headline informing us what happened in the national center; it is also brought forth by ordinary sights, smells and sounds that a ten-year-old boy in a small, obscure town in Samar would try to convey through stories.”
With that goal in mind, I set out to collect short stories, and poems, and plays from writers I knew—both from Dumaguete or Negros Oriental and from elsewhere—dangling this line of invitation: “Do you have any literary pieces set in or inspired by Dumaguete or Negros Oriental?” What they submitted for consideration defined for me how the writers themselves grappled with the question of “a sense of place”: in many pieces, they do make literal mention of Dumaguete [or other places in Negros Oriental], but in some others, Dumaguete remains unmentioned—but still the writers insist they are “Dumaguete pieces,” because the place is their inspiration in the writing [in other words, Dumaguete as prompt], or because the place is evoked somehow in their execution of the piece, no matter how oblique. I have decided to be generous in making a space for this kind of pieces—but I also took note to map them all, with the help of the writers, whether in the general sense of geography or in the specific. [Hence, the reader can find geographic indications on top of each piece.] The purpose is to provide a literary map of Dumaguete and Negros Oriental, reminiscent of that 2017 “litera-tour” I once hosted, for readers to actually seek out these spaces and consider the literature written of them.
[Sometimes, the Dumaguete they’ve imagined is not exactly the “Dumaguete we know.” Sometimes, it is a fantastical Dumaguete—as in the short story by Dean Francis Alfar, or even the musical play by Junsly Kitay. And sometimes it is Dumaguete at the dawn of the Spanish colonial period—as in the short story of David C. Martinez. In his sister Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s play, we also get a Dumaguete in the midst of World War II.]
I have also decided to omit creative nonfiction/essays from consideration. Merlie Alunan’s The Dumaguete We Know, published by Anvil in 2012, has done a very thorough job in collecting this genre of Dumaguete writings—and I did not want to replicate that project. Instead, I wanted this book to be a repository for fiction and poetry and drama, which makes this a veritable companion volume to that earlier book, which also included many of the writers already mentioned in this introduction.
What I did not expect was that, even with the exclusion of essays, this book would become a thick compilation—which surprised, and also somehow delighted me. It just goes on to prove that there is indeed a wealth of literature out there that puts Dumaguete into the center of their imagined rendering of worlds. And to think I have already set some limitations, including that there will be no excerpts from novels, and that each author should only be represented by one genre [hence, the drama of Elsa Coscolluela but none of her poems or fiction; the poetry of Ernesto Superal Yee, but none of his fiction; the fiction of Bobby Villasis but none of his plays or poems; the fiction of Edith Tiempo, but none of her more celebrated poems, etc.]
I made the conscious choice to begin this book with some historical recollections, culled from the public domain, which give us an idea of how Dumaguete [and Negros Oriental] was constructed in the literary imagination right from the beginning. There is, alas, an almost total absence of writings by or about Oriental Negrenses from the pre-colonial period straight on to the end of the Spanish colonial period, save for a brief history of Dumaguete written by the last of its Spanish colonial parish priest, Fr. Mariano Bernad [which is, however, not reproduced here, for lack of an adequate translation]. So these recollections—from Jose Rizal, from Dean C. Worcester, from Edna Moses, and from Florence Kimball Russel—are really our first full glimpses of Dumaguete rendered in diary entries and memoirs, and by outsiders. If this book is about the “imagined Dumaguete” in terms of literature, these pieces are a great way to begin in examining that “construction of place.” I know for sure that their depictions of Dumaguete—both gentle and brutal, civilized and savage—will be an eye-opener, especially for Dumaguetnons themselves.
The rest of the book is a treasure trove of writings by Filipino writers, both native to Negros Oriental and not, with Dumaguete or the province at the center. I would like to acknowledge National Artist for Literature Gémino H. Abad, Cesar Aljama, Merlie M. Alunan, Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena, Jose Wendell Capili, F. Jordan Carnice, Fidelito Cortes, Ricardo M. de Ungria, the family of Ricaredo Demetillo, Jacob Walse Dominguez, Elson T. Elizaga, the family of A. Beaunoni Espina, Marjorie Evasco, Angela Gabrielle Fabunan, the family of Diana T. Gamalinda, J. Neil C. Garcia, Jeneen Garcia, Christine F. Godinez Ortega, Nerisa del Carmen Guevara, Ramil Digal Gulle, Mike Ortega Ligalig, the family of Francis C. Macansantos, Mohammad Malik, R. Torres Pandan Jr., Allan Justo Pastrana, Myrna Peña-Reyes, Danton Remoto, DM Reyes, Khail Campos Santia, the family of Artemio Tadena, Anthony Tan, Ester Tapia, Lyde Sison Villanueva, Niccolo Rocamora Vitug, the family of Ernesto Superal Yee, and Alfred Yuson for letting me include their poems.
To Dean Francis Alfar, Jaime An Lim, César Ruìz Aquino, the family of Leoncio Deriada, Susan S. Lara, the family of David C. Martinez, the family of Jose V. Montebon Jr., Timothy R. Montes, Lakambini Sitoy, the family of Edilberto K. Tiempo and Edith Tiempo, Lemuel Torrevillas, Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, Dara Tumaca-Ramos, Marianne Villanueva, the family of Bobby Flores Villasis, Therese Yaptengco, and Justine Megan Yu for letting me include their short stories.
And to Elsa Martinez Coscolluela, Michael Aaron Gomez, and Junsly Kitay and the Belltower Project for letting me include their plays.
This book is in celebration of the 75th Charter of Dumaguete City—its Diamond Jubilee Year—and thus I give my ever grateful thanks to Dumaguete City Mayor Felipe Antonio Remollo and to Dumaguete City Tourism Officer Katherine Aguilar for allowing this important volume on Dumaguete’s literary culture to come to being. It comes out in May.
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Author’s email: [email protected]
