1. Last July 20, Aneka and I met at Cello's in Katipunan so that she could give me a copy of her newly-released young adult novel-in-verse, Displaced, co-published by Adarna House and Filipinas Heritage Library. The 152-page book contains illustrations by Mitzi Villavecer, who also did the cover design.

I'm glad that I saw how the novel evolved from the manuscript we critiqued in the 6th Barlaya Writing for Young Adults Workshop in 2007, when I sat in the panel with Heidi Abad, Astrid Tobias and Zarah Gagatiga, up to its pre-printing form in more than a year of intermittent conversations over coffee that Aneka and I had discussing her revisions of the novel, the state of Philippine YA literature, and the condition of artistic production in general.

2. Displaced is the story of Gabriella--Elay to her family & Gabby to her friends--and the events that happened during her last year in high school. Her experience of displacement is triggered by the return of her mom from working abroad for four years, on the one hand, and the introduction of Justin in her life, which challenged her long-term friendship with Trixie, on the other. All these amidst the challenges of academics, especially her difficulties with Physics. Gabriella tried to make sense of learning and life with her interest in music; chapter titles are consequently based on physics concepts and/or musical terms and titles of U2 songs.

3. The novel, while concerning itself with issues of the young (crush, friendship, school life), primarily deals with a larger issue of how family relationships are disrupted by the continued movement of Filipino workers outside the Philippines. The novel is touching without necessarily falling into the trap of the romantic. It does not involve death, premarital sex, addiction, sickness, or any other issues that are by themselves disturbing. Displaced deals with an ordinary life that has currency, the kind that many young girls of Gabriella's age living in the city experience at present, and the novel's charm rests in its simplicity of concerns and rendering, coupled with the complexity of truths it tries to confront.

1. Unang Ulan ng Mayo is Sicat’s sequel to her earlier novel, Paghuhunos. Here we see that after the death of her husband Carlos, Gloria tried to organize his journals; but when people outlive their beloved, his presence paradoxically overwhelms them in his very absence. As soon as Gloria realized this, she admitted to herself that she wanted to write her own stories, and thus her journey as a writer began.

This is not another novel about writing a novel, however. It is a woman’s journey into understanding, and getting into, the psyche of a writer (hence in hindsight forgiving her husband’s seeming shortcomings as her partner and father to their children), and initiation into the much complex reality of current Philippine literary scene: publications, critical and popular receptions, awards, and the prestige and honor that come with them, and how they potentially sustain, on the one hand, and cripple, on the other hand, one’s writing interests.

2. The first chapter of the novel, “Alimuom,” is also the title of Sicat’s first short story collection, published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press (incidentally available through GoogleBooks) and introduced by Edgardo M. Reyes, who is most likely the Edgar in the novel from whom Gloria would seek literary counsel, besides her eldest daughter. This certainly sets ground for one of the major interests in the novel—to depict Gloria’s creative process: her thoughts on, and the incidents that led to, the writing of particular stories that certainly echo what Sicat actually wrote and included in her collection. Perhaps incidentally, but Sicat elevates the nature of intertextuality in Filipino fiction and also its reference to reality: despite the difference in names (Gloria, not Ellen), no Filipino contemporary fiction in recent history dared to refer to her own earlier novel in a second novel.

3. Gloria would outline her stories in verse, even if she would not consider herself a poet, because she associates poetry with memorability, and she sees storytelling as an act of remembrance. This is therefore also a novel-testament to her own poetics. She would reiterate the need to use the vernacular in local literature, perhaps initially as defense to her own admission as colonial, and so she would talk with the common people, and would hear them speak, and would try to capture the tone and rhythm of their language and the sentiments and humor they contain. They are afterall her intended readers; she knew from the start that she would speak to them if she were to write at all.

4. Sicat’s expertise in comic dialogue manifests in several occasions, and it is definitely her most formidable tool in sustaining the reader’s interest with her stories. She knows how to laugh at herself, laugh with her characters, and make her readers at least smile once in a while. Even if many parts would sound like an apologia for her not being a "real writer," the whole novel is an assurance that we are in good hands, and that after all, Ellen might not be Gloria, or at least not fully, with the latter’s often shifts from false humilities to arrogance to indifference to sheer fear. But are we not all made of these stuff that make us truly human: so complex that we are unpredictable, as the first summer rain is, even to ourselves?

1. Page 21: This unlikeliest of fictions. To think of another life. A dog's. Dreaming of heavens. A beyond: Timbuktu.

2. In one of Willy's schizophrenic moments, while talking to Mr. Bones, Henry James and James Joyce are thrown in together with other "American know-how" that "keeps coming at you, and every minute there's new junk to push out the old junk."

3. Again, Willy: "I was reading a book. The Magic Mountain it was, written by Thomas Mann... I never finished the damned thing, by the way, it was so boring, but said Herr Mann was a muckety-muck, a hotshot in the Writers Hall of Fame, and I figured I should take a look."

4. And so that's what it meant to be human, Mr. Bones must have thought. To aspire for a certain literacy. To have a culture, and then to laugh at it, to think it unnecessary--waste even--in order to live life, a life, after all.

1. In U Z. Eliserio’s debut novel (or nobeleta, a novellete, as he preferred to call it) we find the narrative voice of a writer (who couldn’t find time to write) who’s also a teacher (who incidentally got his student-girlfriend pregnant). The postmodern play begins with the power of the name to produce uncertainties: is U the author the same as U the narrator? The play goes on when the last name Eliserio was given to the Lord Chancellor (Chancing Lord) of UPLB, the campus where U the narrator teaches, and U the author formerly taught. Because of the setting, the novel inevitably becomes an inquiry to the culture of the academe as symptomatic of the entire educational system in the country (with constant brownouts, the rise of the call centers, et. al.), and the culture of fraternity as metonymic to the societal violence.

2. The novel inevitably has metaconsciousness: it is aware of itself as a novel. And of other novels: The title clearly alludes to the classic Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag by Edgardo M. Reyes; We'd find U always carrying a book, or reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy; U also specializes on the novels of Jose Zembrano, an Aklanon.

It so happened that Chancing Lord Eliserio was also a novelist in English, and supposedly wrote one about a sculptor. However, U later on decided that amidst the unreasonable dismissal of faculty who were not in agreement with the chair’s policy, “the departmental politics was more important” than the novel, even if there were times when reality was seen as story material, and a source of humor, like when they were given a pamphlet about the Key to Paradise immediately after they had their dormitory key duplicated—a detail used by U’s friend JB (who also happened to be an obsession to the former’s) in a story that eventually won the Palanca!

3. Even if there were mentions of issues in reality (9/11, Mike Arroyo, Hacienda Luisita) as “characters’ topics for conversation,” kuko was clearly not suso. And so another concern of the novel was the issues on sexuality: “Titi ng Ama” was an expression/curse that U got from his own mother; U’d always pass by Pekpek Tower because it was just in front of the Old Hum; and how would he face the tension between the possibility of being a father and the consideration of an abortion? A chapter that graphically describes a sexual act (while talking and thinking about death: clearly, a play with eros & thanatos) would end in U farting to his own girlfriend’s face.

4. Because of a death threat that U got on his birthday, and because of the killings of Long Sleeves and Sando (two fratmen), the novel teases us into the genre of detective fiction, but it would not satisfy us with the expectations of the form; this was perhaps the homage to Auster's. The setting was also the time when sex video scandals proliferated—and so the camera at the ceiling of U’s room might be the only thing that could solve the crimes, but in turn would also reveal his sexual exploits.

Why did U leave the dorm and walked past the alley in the end of the novel—even if no one was literally running after him, unlike Edgardo M. Reyes’s Julio Madiaga in the end of his novel? Clearly he found something in the video, but the readers are not given access to that revelation. This was probably the novel’s final argument on what separates the novel’s reality to our reality: the readers can’t know everything a character had access to. Titi ng Ama.

1. This Earth of Mankind is the first book in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Buru Quartet, supposedly composed initially as a spoken narrative--and was written only two years later in 1975-- while Toer was imprisoned in the Buru Island Prison Camp. As far as memory serves, this was the first novel by a Southeast Asian, other than a Filipino, I read.

Even if was mostly a chronological narration of events that happened in the lives of some natives and Indos towards the end of the nineteenth century in the Dutch East Indies, there was an attempt to complicate its internal narrativity and textuality. The novel, as revealed by the narrator early on, supposedly began as short notes that were thirteen years later read and studied over again, merged “together with dreams, imagining. Naturally they became different from the original.” It was also recognized, nonetheless, that this fetish to make notes was probably caused by the narrator’s “European training.” In the latter part of the novel, Europe’s dependence on paper, on what’s been documented and set on record, is argued to be almost proportional to its disregard to the human person, to relationships built on emotion and faith.

2. The novel is a story of Minke—not his “real name,” but the name he’s been called by other people. Later we would realize that the moniker could have come from “monkey”—a recurring image to which the natives were compared, something not unlike the allusion the Spaniards made to the natives in the Philippines during their colonization, as revealed in Fray Miguel Lucio y Bustamante’s Si Tandang Basio Macunat. In This Earth, name is a central issue. The natives, like Minke was, did not have surnames, and in the then modernized and educated milieu in which he was a part of, the fact could cause one’s shame—or pride, depending on one’s attitude toward the Dutch colonial policies. Born on the same day (August 31, 1880) as Netherland’s Queen Wilhelmina, Minke was situated in a conflicting position: he was the only pure native studying in the most prestigious Dutch High School (H.B.S.) in Surabaya. Would he be the perfect colonial subject—or rebel?

3. Minke turned out to be a good writer (writing stories and essays as Max Tollenaar for the Surabaya Daily News) and the perfect lover to Annelies, daughter of a nyai or a Dutch’s concubine, and, true to the tradition of the beloved in most classics, simply the most beautiful woman that this earth of mankind could possibly conceive.

4. Chapter 10 is a fascinating brief account of being an Asian prostitute in the late nineteenth century, as recounted by Maiko, a Japanese working in the brothel owned by Babah Ah Tjong. Except for Annelies who was always lovesick with Minke until she found a strong resolve in an almost melodramatic ending, Toer presented a cast of strong women: Nyai Ontosoroh, Minke’s Mother, and Miss Magda Peters—all in their respective ways had guided Minke to the ways of tradition and civilization.

5. Miss Magda Peters was fascinated with the amount of reading that a nyai like Ontosoroh’s had. Faithful to the thrust of the written word, this is another novel that encourages reading. There was even a period when Minke would make a reading list for Annelies that she had to consume for a certain amount of time. Aside from the Western canon (like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend), it also mentioned several Malayan titles like G. Francis’s Nyai Dasima and the legends of Babad Tanah Jawi.

6. When Minke told his father that he did not want to be a bupati like the latter was, and said that, “My world was not rank and position, wages and embezzlement. My world was this earth of mankind and its problems,” I felt that it was a little naïve for him to not recognize that politics plays a major role in the problems of this world. Of course he would acknowledge it a little too late in the end when even his wife Annelies would be taken away from him by the European law that clearly contradicted their Islamic tradition. But it was a rite-of-passage novel, and no such story would prove successful unless the main character proved to have some shortcomings, a little shortsightedness, for where would his potential towards growth be if not for these lack and failures of vision?

1. Shortlisted to the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, Jose Dalisay’s second novel Soledad’s Sister somewhat paved the way for contemporary Filipino novelists based in the Philippines to gain international recognition. Only a year later, Filipinos would dominate the prize’s longlist, and Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino now living in Canada, would win the award for his novel Ilustrado.

2. Unlike Dalisay's first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place, that obviously had a number of autobiographical inspirations, Soledad’s Sister is a novel that pushed him to imagine more of other people’s lives and sentiments. Although this is primarily a story of the encounter between Aurora V. Cabahug, a bar singer in Paez whose sister Soledad died of drowning in Saudi, and Walter G. Zamora, a police officer from Marikina that was assigned to the same remote town of Paez after a failed case on the kidnapping of Charlie Uyboco and an affair with masseuse Noemi that ultimately sacrificed his marriage with Bessie, we also get a glimpse of the stories of the other people that were somehow involved in theirs, no matter how tangentially: Filemon Catabay, the OFW beheaded in Saudi; Ms. Principe, the Paez chief of police’s secretary who had some affection towards Walter; Choi the Korean engineer who would table Rory in between her sets; Mercedes Laquindanum, more known as Mama Merry, the one who manages the Flame Tree after the demise of her husband Filomelo, the name of the bar being her “last concession to poetry and metaphor”; Nick Panganiban, the old piano player who taught Rory some classic songs; Nathan, Soledad’s son to the teenager Edison, a Hong Kong national and only son of the Lau family she formerly served; Paez Vice Mayor Tennyson Yip, who had some fling with Rory, and, later, with a bar newbie, Francine; Jose Maria Pulumbarit, or Jomar, aka “Boy Alambre,” who carnapped the van driven by Walter that contained Soledad’s casket; Meenakshi, the maid from India, who escaped with Soledad in the night of their disappearance; and a lot lot of other names and faces that made this a novel that recognizes that there were no uninteresting characters, only a limited space to have their own stories fully fleshed out.

On the side, the novel made references to pop and contemporary culture that somehow affect the ordinary Filipino’s psyche: Brother Mike, People’s Tonight, Megamall, National Geographic, Readers Digest, Ruffa Gutierrez, Joey Marquez & Alma Moreno, Schwarzenegger, Ricky Martin, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the divas Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Donna Summer, Olivia Newton-John, Sharon Cuneta, Ivy Violan, Vernie Varga, and Regine Velasquez, and several pop songs that remain to dominate our airwaves: “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Love Is Stronger Far Than We,” "I'm a Fool to Want You," "Am I Blue."

3. In the end, we would realize that both Rory and Walter had deep desires to be remembered, even by people they don’t know personally, to not just be lost in obscurity in their ostensibly mundane lives: Rory, by trying to be a successful singer, and not just be one of the Regines in this country that so loves to sing both in its lowest and highest points; and Walter, by dreaming of eventually writing that master’s thesis on “criminal propensities in the Philippine countryside,” that hopefully would be of some use to someone. They hoped to accomplish their dreams without having to leave their country behind, despite the allure of working abroad (in the case of Rory), or following his estranged family in England (in the case of Walter), so unlike the thousands of other Filipinos who would gamble on where their fate and dreams would lead them, even if it were to their own deaths, outside the Philippines.

1. With all the lack of rootedness in the Filipino precolonial psyche that proliferates in Philippine local primetime viewing, thanks mostly to the fantaserye hype that’s been going on for several years now, it is about time that Filipino novels revisit our epics in order to reawaken our true imaginative gifts as a people. I had never read a novel in Filipino that deals entirely with the epic world, until T. S. Sungkit, Jr.’s Batbat hi Udan came out early this 2009. A true Higaonon by blood and sentiment, Sungkit wrote an interesting adventure set in a land where places were still called by their olden names, like Kagayhaan for Cagayan de Oro City, Yandang for Bugcaon and Kimambong for Malaybalay City.

2. Naturally, this is a story that involves a central hero, named Udan, who had to undergo his own rights of passage: go through some adventures (which in the epic translates to wars and battles) to save his tribe, fall in love with the most beautiful woman conceivable in their world (here named as Ananaw, but more known as the Hapoy ha Tagkalegdeg, Bolak ha Mahumot, which means “naglalagablab na apoy, mabangong bulaklak”), lose almost all his beloved (his father Datu Maghusay, and later, even Ananaw) in the course of pangayaw, meet his fiercest enemies (from Kalibato to the Tium). In the end, of course, he’d be able to overcome all the challenges, as a true epic hero, and that would signify the beginning of a new era for his ethnic group.

3. Two l’s are at the top of an epic’s concerns: land and lineage. To introduce onself is to invoke one’s roots: Mansugkil, when he introduced himself to Datu Maghusay, would tell the latter that he was the son of Mambulawan, who was the son of Manlagunha, who was in turn Mambinunsad’s son. During battles, Udan would summon the spirits of his ancestors, Buuy Manlunggo and Apu Maliga, to give him strength. But everyone from their land, from their banuwa, is considered a brother. That was why Udan was saddened upon learning that Mansugkil’s troop was salvaged by Kalibato acting as Datu Masagila: “Sapagkat ang mga kasama niya’y kanyang mga kapatid. Sapagkat ang lahat sa Lantapan ay kanyang kapatid. Sapagkat iisang dugo lamang ang nananalaytay sa kanilang mga ugat.”

4. Of all the places mentioned in the story’s geographic map, Lidasan was the most mysterious and dangerous of all, “a crossroad of secret passageways.” In that land once headed by Datu Mansugyang before he was defeated by Datu Maghusay and Datu Manlidasan lived the aligasis, mantianaks, bakesans, busaws, kabug and other creatures that could cause ordinary humans unimaginable harm. Lidasan was now headed by Datu Binigsulan, the chief of the aligasis and father of Kalibato and Ananaw, and assisted by Datu Mangiyab-kiyab, chief of the mantianaks, and Datu Magahiyup, chief of the tagbayang ahas. After a series of deception and cunning and deaths, Lidasan would eventually fall under Udan’s command when he defeated even the Tium hi Gaun, the tagbaya of his own great ancestor. Further revelations on real blood relations were untied in the end.

In Batbat hi Udan, we get a classic narrative rendering of an epic, only in prose and written form. For instance, details are being repeated several times, often successively, only in different ways, clearly a mnemonic device in the epic. In the end, this is a story of beginnings, for, as the real Datu Masagila told Udan, there are stories only because they have roots.