Category / Essay

by buglaswritersjournal

Caridad Aldecoa-Rodriguez’s History of Negros Oriental

Dumaguete historiographer Caridad Aldecoa-Rodriguez, who died in 2011, played a crucial role in making Negros Oriental one of the country’s most historically introspective localities. A product of the strong historiographic legacy of Silliman University, she stood out for her large body of history books on the province and its capital, making her one of the first “local” historians in a country where historiography, and history teaching, has largely centered on national history.

To wit, she wrote detailed histories of the province during the American Period, during the Japanese Occupation, and during the Third Republic. She also took a look at how the province participated during the Revolution against Spain, principally through the figure of Don Diego de la Viña, whose contributions to local history was mostly forgotten until Aldecoa-Rodriguez started writing about him and made him a central figure in the province’s late 19th century story—which made Negros Oriental one of the few provinces outside of Luzon to look into its role during this crucial period. This four-part collection of the history of Negros Oriental, from the Revolution to the Republic Period, is her magnum opus—a  project largely commissioned by the Negros Oriental Provincial Government under then Governor Emilio Macias II, and was sponsored by the Toyota Foundation.

Born in Dumaguete City in 22 March 1924, Aldecoa-Rodriguez pursued an academic career with a passion for history that led her to both the University of the Philippines and Silliman University, where she spent most of her teaching career. She served as a long-time faculty member and later became Chair of the History and Political Science Department at Silliman, where she mentored generations of scholars and public servants, including Earl Jude Cleope and Carlos Magtolis Jr. Her pedagogical approach was marked by a deep respect for archival research and oral history, which she taught with rigor and enthusiasm.

Her pathbreaking history of Negros Oriental—Negros Oriental and the Philippine Revolution (1983), Negros Oriental From American Rule to the Present: A History (1990, three volumes), and History of Dumaguete City (2001)—was a pioneering work in documenting the region’s transformation from Spanish colonial times to the modern era. Her essays and monographs—often published in regional journals and anthologies—remain key references for researchers and local historians. She was also instrumental in establishing local historical societies and organizing heritage preservation efforts in Dumaguete City and beyond.

In Handulantaw, fellow historian Carlos Magtolis Jr. remembers her love for her students and her teaching: “Her unfailing kindness and generosity made [her] a source of joy to all who were under her,” he wrote in his profile of her. “As a professor of history, she had displayed a remarkable mastery of the subject and skills in teaching it. She had a flair for the dramatic and possessed an imaginative mind, which made teaching and studying history easy and very interesting. Listening to her was like watching a movie, like a war picture or a romantic and dramatic movie. Gone With the Wind easily comes to mind. She would narrate and re-enact very interesting scenes from the Battle of Waterloo, or the American Civil War, or the Japanese occupation of Silliman campus, or her very own war experiences. All her stories, grippingly told, made her students enthusiastic for the day’s lessons. Every day, she would greet with a smiling face all those who entered the classroom quietly and politely—but she would stare angrily at the latecomers and follow them until they reached their respective seats.

“Superior service marked her work,” Prof. Magtolis continues. “She was a superb teacher, skilled in pedagogy—but above all, she was a teacher of students and not merely of history subjects. Her Christian witness was an integral part of her work and a vital force in her life. She joined Silliman University with a deep devotion to the ideals of the institution and with a rich background of teaching experience. During her years at Silliman, from 1947 to 1989, she was an indefatigable worker and took her work seriously, and became a model for many of us. In her work as historian, Rodriguez was an exemplary researcher and writer.”

Her name is also listed down in the 1974 Directory of Selected Manpower in the Philippines, and in Reference Asia’s Who’s Who of Men and Women of Achievement in 1989. For her achievements, she was named an Outstanding Sillimanian Awardee in 2001, Negros Oriental Centennial Endeavor Awardee in 1990, and Outstanding Dumagueteño Awardee in 1998. Dumagueteños have her to thank for modeling a deep and abiding dedication to the education of young people, for her excellent guidance and support, and for her impeccable record as local historian, history professor, administrator, author and writer of history books.

But beyond her academic contributions, she was also a committed civic leader, involved in cultural advocacy and historical preservation. Her legacy thus lives on in the scholars she inspired and the institutions she helped build. She exemplified the scholar as public intellectual, rooted in place yet mindful of the larger national and global context. Her life’s work continues to shape how the Visayan story is told—faithfully, passionately, and with unflinching regard for truth.

by buglaswritersjournal

Khail Campos Santia’s Pandesal Boy

The poet and video game designer Khail Campos Santia, who hails from Bukidnon but now calls Dumaguete home, plays with worlds.

He does that not in the careless way of a child stacking blocks only to topple them, but in the precise, deliberate alchemy of a creator who knows that every rule, every pixel, every string of code is also a sentence, a stanza, a line break. He moves between disciplines—game design, computer programming, chemistry and physics, art, writing—with the enviable quicksilver ease of someone who refuses to be bound by a single form. What results, I think, are works that exist in that rare space where digital play meets literary contemplation.

His games, at first glance, might seduce you with their whimsy. Pandesal Boy, a collaboration with graphic novelist Josel Nicolas, which became an official selection for Indie Prize Singapore, is a delightful platformer where nostalgia smells faintly of yeast and morning streets. Paper Worlds, developed with Eru Petrasanta and Dumaguete visual artist Xteve Abanto, which was chosen for the Tokyo Game Show, layers visual charm over the heft of environmental storytelling. And In the Time of Pandemia—crafted with Dumaguete animator Ramon del Prado, Linea Fernandez, Dumaguete composer Algernon van Peel, and others—is a fragile HTML5 artifact from a global moment, a kind of playable diary that remembers the stillness, fear, and strange camaraderie of those first months of lockdown.

The uninitiated might think of these as “just games.” But look closer.

Khail’s mechanical choices echo the economy of poetry: every jump, obstacle, or collectible is as intentional as an enjambment. He calls it, half-wry and half-earnest, “the austere beauty of game mechanics,” and it’s not hard to see why. Like a sonneteer bound by meter, the game designer lives within the constraints of code and rulesets, and Khail thrives in these limits, turning them into creative muscle.

Perhaps this is why his work has found recognition across the board: quadruple Newgrounds trophies from the global player community, a national GameOn award, and invitations to curated exhibitions in Tokyo, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. Even his venture into tabletop learning design—a board game that won the inaugural Benilde Prize for Design Excellence—feels like an extension of his poetic sensibility: the tactile click of a piece on a board, the careful pacing of a player’s choices, the hidden narrative unfolding in the quiet logic of turns.

The literary connection is no accident. Khail was a special poetry fellow at the 54th Silliman University National Writers Workshop, where the brutal generosity of panel critique shapes you in ways you can’t yet articulate. His poems and essays have appeared in Sands & Coral, MetroPost, and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. There is, in his writings, the same playfulness and precision you find in his games. And in his games, you can detect the same literary impulse: the desire to make meaning from structure, to embed stories in systems, to seduce the player into a narrative without once uttering a word.

In this way, Khail’s practice recalls that old Jorge Luis Borges idea—that literature is a labyrinth, and the reader, a player navigating its turns. Except here, in Khail’s games, the labyrinth actually responds. It is both text and machine. A line of poetry might be a trapdoor. A puzzle might be a metaphor. The reward for clearing a level might be not victory but recognition—of the self, of the world, of the delicate architecture that binds both.

For Khail, code and verse are not opposites. They are dialects in the same language of making. A game, after all, is just a story you enter with your hands. And a poem is a game you play in the mind, where the rules are rhythm and image, where victory might simply be the catch in your breath at the final line.

It is tempting to ask which came first—Khail the poet or Khail the game designer—but that’s the wrong question. They are the same maker, inhabiting two interfaces, feeding each other’s obsessions. In one world, he writes in loops and conditions, in assets and sprites; in the other, he writes in couplets and line breaks. Both worlds converge in the player, the reader—us—invited to inhabit the beautiful machinery of his mind.

by buglaswritersjournal

Kerima Polotan’s “Dumaguete, Mon Amour”

Anyone who knows the classics of Philippine literature would consider the works of Kerima Polotan—whose 14th death anniversary we commemorated last August 19—to be among the best our writers in English have ever wrought in that language.

Her short stories “The Virgin” and “The Sounds of Sunday” are oft-anthologized, and have become staples in any respectable curriculum on our national literature. In 1966, she collected eleven of her short stories—including several that won first prizes at the Palanca Awards—in Stories. Earlier in that decade, she already published her one and only novel, The Hand of the Enemy, which won the 1961 Stonehill Award. In 1972, she collected many of her celebrated essays, culled from years as staff writer of the Philippines Free Press, in Author’s Choice, which was republished in 1998. That year, she also published a biography of then First Lady Imelda Marcos, which cemented her ties to that ruling family [together with her husband, the writer Juan Tuvera, who served as Presidential Executive Assistant to President Ferdinand Marcos starting in 1979, playing a crucial role in the administration of executive orders and official government communications]. In 1977, she would put out another collection of her essays, Adventures in a Forgotten Country. A final essay collection, The True and the Plain, would come out in 2005. She also edited, in 1976, the four-volume anthology collecting the winners of the Don Palanca Memorial Awards.

She was born on 16 December 1925 in Jolo, Sulu, to an army colonel father and a home economics teacher mother. Her father’s various  military assignments all over archipelago made her a natural-born itinerant. One such place she formerly called home was Dumaguete—and it was here, beginning in 1963, that she began a love-hate relationship with the place, which produced some of her most scintillating, and very fiery, reportage, often published in the pages of Philippines Free Press.

One such blistering account is an article titled “Dumaguete, Mon Amour” from 1969—and you have to love the candor of her essay. Here’s an excerpt:

“Dumaguete City is described by its radio station as ‘the city of gentle people.’ The presence of Silliman University is its one claim to fame; visitors like the Luces and the Rockefellers drop in, and the university is constantly rolling out the red carpet for some foreigner who, given his hot bath and his coffee promptly, might just leave a donation. Few seashore towns can match its beaches, the gray-blue-green scene across Tañon Strait, and the cross above the Santander town church in Cebu that you can see when there is no mist.

“The city has all the virtues and the drawbacks of the small town, a warm and generous people, but at the same time, a parochial mind, a pharisaical touchiness, a country-cousin kind of conceit, insulated against the rest of the world by a smugness deeper and broader than the sea around it. What saves Manila from being swept under by its filth is the irreverence of its inhabitants, its people’s willingness to question the demigods, and to be disenchanted. Manila survives its seasonal circuses and grows hardier than ever because it is not so touchy it cannot meet the antics of clowns like Antonio Villegas with therapeutic laughter.

“But the small town can’t do this. It is not capable of this kind of healing humor. Dumaguete hardly ever laughs at itself—if it did this, it would never recover. It takes itself very, very seriously. At any one time, there are seminars, forums, and workshops going on about demography, food production, manuring, modern math, history—things like those—but the town itself manifests a squeamishness about taking a long hard look at its own backyard. Anything that doesn’t smell of the status quo is rejected posthaste; anyone who disturbs the status quo is suspect; and the stranger who doesn’t do what the well-mannered guest is supposed to do—pat the horses, walk through the park, socialize—is marked for the butcher’s block.

“There is, among many, this pathetic ache to belong socially, to be counted as one in the elegant circle, to say and do only what will not bring one social disgrace, to speak softly and walk gently around and about the rich and the powerful, lest they shake their coattails at you. It matters little if the rich are rapacious, and the powerful are conscienceless: if they run for congress and are elected, they are ‘vindicated’ enough.

Ouch. But I love this glorious, no-holds-barred read. It’s fundamental in our seeing Dumaguete City set in another light, far less fetching than we usually take her to be.

What made Polotan hate Dumaguete this much? The poet Edith Lopez Tiempo was one of her closest friends in literary circles, and one could surmise that several things, including the beguilement of the Tiempos, the local writing scene, and the nascent Dumaguete workshop which would become the first and longest-running creative writing workshop of its kind in Asia [which Polotan actually help run together with David Quemada, during the years that the Tiempo took up temporary residence in the United States], which led her and her large family [Polotan had ten children] to settle here. So what happened? Not much is known, but one could feel that in the next few unfolding years in the 1960s, she had grown slowly disappointed by the place—perhaps because of promises made to her that were broken. Who knows?

Not every writer has to love Dumaguete. But even that is part of its history as a City of Stories.

by buglaswritersjournal

Salvador Abcede’s Nita

In the pantheon of Negros Oriental’s history, certain names flare like sudden brushfires in the dark, and then burn themselves into permanence. One such name is Salvador Sureta Abcede, whose 112th birth anniversary we celebrated last September 6. His nickname was Badong, and he was born in the quiet town of Indan [now Vinzons], Camarines Norte—but he was destined to carve his legacy in the mountains of Negros, among the ragtag men and women who dared to resist Japanese occupation.

Abcede was soldier, patriot, police chief, and—often forgotten in the catalogues of Philippine letters—novelist. To remember him is to remember how history’s brutality demands both a rifle and a pen, and how the story of our nation, particularly in wartime, is not only etched in blood but also written in words.

He began like many young men of his generation, full of zeal for uniform and flag. He entered the Philippine Constabulary Academy in 1935 and graduated just as the country teetered toward independence, yet shadowed by another colonizer’s ambition. When World War II came, he was in Dumaguete, commanding ROTC cadets at Silliman University. There, on the cusp of the Japanese invasion, he made a decision that would shape not only his life but the fate of the island: he would not surrender. When General Wainwright capitulated to the Japanese forces in 1942, Abcede chose instead to disappear into the folds of Negrense mountains, gathering farmers, students, and disbanded soldiers to form a guerrilla unit.

It is difficult to imagine now, from the vantage of a peacetime Negros where sugar and politics dominate the headlines, what it must have meant to live in those hills, hunted and starving, yet steadfast in defiance. For Abcede, resistance was not abstract—it was a daily calibration of courage and desperation. And when liberation came, his name was already legend, the commander who had held Negros together under the banner of a ragged sun.

His career after the war reads like the trajectory of a model soldier in a new republic. He went to Fort Leavenworth in the United States for advanced military training, returned to command Filipino troops in Korea during the Battle of Hill Eerie, and later became Chief of Police in Manila in the 1950s. He was, in other words, a man who had embodied the shifting faces of Philippine nationhood: colonial subject, guerilla rebel, soldier of a new state, custodian of law and order.

He died on 19 August 1982, and today his remains rest in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

But if we remember Abcede only in terms of his campaigns and commands, we risk forgetting his most human endeavor: his turn to literature, his attempt to make sense of history not through strategy but through story. That endeavor is crystallized in his novel Nita—a work obscure in the annals of Philippine literature, and yet, for those who know it, a vital testament to the emotional cost of war.

Nita, published in 1985 by Express Commercial Printers Corporation, is not the military report of a commander; it is, instead, a narrative of intimacy written against the backdrop of conflict. Set in Negros during the Japanese occupation, the novel tells the story of a young woman—its titular character—who becomes entangled in the complicated web of love, loyalty, and survival in a land scarred by war. What makes the novel remarkable is how it refracts history through the lens of the personal. For while history tends to monumentalize battles and leaders, Abcede insists that the truer measure of war is in how it shatters ordinary lives, how it tests the boundaries of affection, how it remakes the texture of everyday longing.

There is an almost Tiempo-esque sensibility to Nita, which is perhaps unsurprising, given the novel’s affinity with Edilberto K. Tiempo’s Cry Slaughter!—another Negrense novel that dared to place love amid war. Both novels emerge from the same soil, both attempt to grapple with the peculiar violence that befell the island, and both are written by men whose lives were inextricably bound to those years of Japanese occupation. Yet Nita feels different because it bears the authority of someone who was not merely a witness, but an architect of that very history. Abcede was there, in the trenches and in the forests, and when he wrote, he wrote with the memory of gunfire still echoing in his ears.

What does it mean, then, that a soldier would write a love story? Perhaps it means that even in the most brutal of times, the human need to imagine tenderness persists. Or perhaps it means that the work of resistance is incomplete without also recording the quieter devastations—the disrupted courtships, the unspoken affections, the homes left empty by men who never returned. In this sense, Nita is not just a novel; it is Abcede’s attempt to humanize the statistics of war, to remind us that behind every casualty was someone’s beloved.

Today, Nita remains an under-read text, eclipsed by more widely anthologized works of Filipino wartime literature. Yet its significance lies in its rarity: there are not many novels about Negros during the Japanese occupation, and fewer still written by those who commanded its resistance. To engage with the novel is to bridge the gap between history and emotion, between the martial and the domestic. It is to see war not only through the glare of strategy, but through the eyes of a young woman navigating her own survival.

Salvador Abcede lived many lives—cadet, commander, general, chief. But in Nita, he allowed us to glimpse another facet: the man who understood that history must also be written in the language of longing. To read him today is to recover a voice that insists on the fullness of our wartime memory. His lone literary output insists that the stories of this island are not only about battles won and lost, but also about the fragile persistence of love amid ruins. And perhaps this is Abcede’s greatest gift to Philippine literature: that he reminds us the past is not just a ledger of victories and defeats, but also a novel waiting to be read.

by buglaswritersjournal

Rodrigo Feria’s “Testament in Mid-Passage”

More often than not, we tend to forget our founders—the people who paved the way for great things to become established. When we think of literature in Dumaguete, we usually think of the Tiempos, as we should, but one figure that should not be forgotten in the annals of local literary history is Rodrigo Feria, whose 47th death anniversary we commemorated last September 13.

He was born on the first of January in 1910, in Cabangan, Zambales, the only son of Antonio Feria, a farmer. He graduated high school in Zambales in 1918, and soon found his way, as a pensionado, to the United States in 1929, where he studied English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, and where he also took up his graduate studies. While in America, he became close friends with Carlos Bulosan, who became a mentor and pushed him to explore his literary leanings—and soon he was known in campus as an accomplished poet. While studying at USC, he met Dorothy Stephens, of Marcellus, Washington, whom he wanted to marry—but miscegenation laws [which forbid white people from marrying people of color] were quite strict in the U.S. at that time. According to their daughter Chuki Feria Miranda, “[In order for them] to marry, they had to cross state lines, from California to New Mexico, where [my father] passed for a native American with his dark skin.”

Another daughter, the late journalist Monica Feria, wrote of that marriage in an article, “Writes in Exile,” published in Kritika Kultura in 2014: “It was [Carlos] Bulosan who orchestrated their marriage in 1941—both a romantic and political event in those days of interracial marriage prohibitions—arranging for a car to whisk them across the border to New Mexico, getting lawyers to prepare their legal defense should they be stopped, alerting sympathetic Hollywood media, and hosting a small reception for the newlyweds at a favorite hangout of ‘Pinoys’—the term used to refer to Filipino migrants on the West Coast who braved backbreaking work and the harsh discrimination of those days.”

His poetry would eventually be anthologized in Bulosan’s Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets, published in 1942, and its contents included poets as Jose Garcia Villa [with 6 poems], R. Zulueta Da Costa [with 1 poem], Feria [with 4 poems], C.B. Rigor [with 1 poem], and Cecilio Baroga [with 5 poems], and, of course, Carlos Bulosan. Of his four poems included in this anthology, “Testament in Mid-Passage” remains the most popular, having also been anthologized in Brown River, White Ocean, edited by Luis Francia and published by Rutgers University Press in 1993.

Testament in Mid-Passage

Man has the right to raise a fist against fate 

On earth, air, and water 
Decisive wheels move. Swift 
Spindles intercross and weave 
Patterns we cannot overlook. 
This history of change 
Pushes us into horizons 
Of light that spills the darkness 
Back within the covers of eternity. 
Inordinate standards of dreams 
And words we thought meaningless 
Are flames that trail the crossways 
Of wonders new to us: dazzling our eyes. 
This is the seed of tomorrow, the golden 
Ideal for which men died in ignorance. 

This is home at last, O America. 
Let us fly together over 
Your naked breast. Let us give 
Back the fields to the farmers, 
Speech to the people; extol 
To their delinquent hearts the purple 
Blood that darkness destroyed. 
Let us give them new patterns. 

O America: 

New hopes behind mask-faces; 
New glitter to sunken eyes; 
Motion to new frontiers. 

Let us give them to each other's 
Safekeeping; the feeling of touch, 
The answer that glistens, 
The laughter that rings: once more 
The grandeur of praise and love.

It is a wartime poem that reflects the dislocation, anguish, and resilience of a Filipino voice caught in the turbulence of World War II. Written in spare, resonant free verse, the poem adopts an elegiac tone, like a farewell or last will, situating the speaker “in mid-passage”—a liminal state between life and death, homeland and exile, destruction and survival. The sea voyage motif serves as both literal reference to wartime journeys and symbolic marker of diaspora and dislocation, allowing Feria to connect individual trauma to a broader collective condition. The language is modernist in its economy, unsentimental yet charged with metaphor, which lends the poem both intensity and restraint. Its strength lies in this witnessing function: by distilling the uncertainty of passage, Feria offers a testament not only of personal endurance but also of a generation’s fractured journey through war. At the same time, the poem’s density of metaphor and lack of explicit historical markers may render it less accessible to readers without knowledge of its context, and its restrained tone risks muting the raw emotion of wartime experience. Yet it remains significant as one of the earliest examples of Philippine English-language poetry that brings together themes of diaspora, survival, and memory, published in Bulosan’s book to situate Philippine literature within a transpacific frame. Quiet but haunting, the poem stands as both an individual lyric of survival and a collective testament of a people suspended in history’s violent crossings.

After World War II, the couple eventually left for the Philippines, where Dorothy changed her name to Dolores. The offer to teach at Silliman University came in 1947, and off they moved to Dumaguete City, where all three of their daughters—Stephanie, Marcia, and Monica—would be born.  The Feria home in Silliman campus would soon become the gathering place for many local writers and students, something that took root organically.

The year 1948—when things normalized in Dumaguete after the devastations of the war—truly marks a period of rapid literary advance that would go on until 1961, a span of years that saw an influx of gifted writers into Negros Oriental, led by the Ferias, augmenting the efforts of Ricaredo Demetillo and the Tiempos, and that of Metta Jacobs Silliman and Abby Jacobs, the missionary teachers who were the mentors of this early generation of Silliman writers.

The founding of Sands & Coral, which Rodrigo Feria organized that year, soon caught the national literary imagination and signaled Silliman University’s growing importance in the contribution to the national literature, particularly in English, would be the main engine of the burgeoning literary culture in those years.

Founding editor Aida Rivera Ford remembers the organization of the magazine: “It was conceived over steaming cups of coffee in the living room of Rodrigo T. Feria, our adviser, and his American wife—the critic Dolores Stephens Feria. We had the terrifying job of turning out a purely literary magazine, with these aims: (1) to maintain a higher literary standard among our campus writers, (2) stimulate genuine creative thinking, and (3) develop a keener appreciation of the more serious creations of our students. We had no office; we plotted at street corners or at the North Pole where being seen drinking beer made one the talk-of-the-town; we worked at cafeteria tables or at the library; we even did some editing at a picnic. For our cover design, Reuben Canoy squiggled a skeletal figure reaching for the top of the sea, strewing sand over coral.”

In that first issue, which Rivera co-edited with Cesar Jalandoni Amigo, Claro Rafols Ceniza—who would later go on to become one of the country’s most brilliant philosophers—contributed “Of Poets and Philippine Poetry,” his response to William Van O’Connor’s comment about the “pretentiousness of Philippine literary journals,” and Ricaredo Demetillo would contribute his poem “There is a Part of Me Born on Some Battlefield.” Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo would each contribute criticism all the way from their studies in Iowa, and Dolores Feria would review Steven Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn. Aida Rivera herself would write a short story titled “Bridge Over the Morrow,” which is based on the war-time experience of a certain family in the town of Kabankalan, Negros Occidental—a story which she would later improve on and expand with “Ordeal in Hacienda Mercedes.”

By the second issue, which came out in March 1949, Rivera would become the sole editor of a thicker volume, knowing full well that it was a follow-up to the maiden issue which had caught much of the Philippine literary world by storm, eliciting praise from Manila critics. In this second issue, she would contribute “The Chieftest Mourner,” which would later on become one of her most anthologized pieces. A Muslim writer in campus, Lugum Uka, would contribute a hilarious Christmas story titled “A Deer for Jesus,” which is set in a Bilaan school in Mindanao. Among the other contributions included Reuben Canoy’s short story “Sons of Darkness” and poem “The Hypothesis: Birth”; literary criticism from Ricaredo Demetillo, Edilberto Tiempo, Edith Tiempo, and Dolores Feria, the latter writing an essay where she considered the damage done to the growth of literature wrought by the war, and surmised that producing first-rate critics would perhaps hasten the national literature’s flowering. There was also a poem by Rodrigo Feria titled “Madness We Bequeath Thee,” and an essay by Francisco Lopez, Edith’s brother, titled “A Very Proper Gentleman,” where he skewered the Filipino’s tendency for over-niceness.

Feria would eventually leave Silliman University in the late 1950s to work for the government under President Carlos Garcia, who was also an alumnus of Silliman. He worked for the public relations arms for Garcia’s Reparations Commission, the government agency tasked to administer and oversee the country’s receipt and use of Japanese war reparations after World War II.

After this stint, he began teaching at the University of the East, who eventually “asked” him to resign in the heady days of Martial Law, because Feria was identified as a member of a group of progressive teachers.  His wife, Dolores, meanwhile taught at the University of the Philippines, where she gained both fame and notoriety for her activism [and her eventual imprisonment during Martial Law], which she eventually wrote about in such books as Project Sea Hawk: The Barbed Wire Journal [1993], as well as The Long Stag Party [1991], where she wrote about literature and resistance, imperialism and gender, and the status of women writers in the Philippines, especially in the essay, “The Patriarchy and the Filipina as Writer.”

Feria died during that tumultuous decade, on 13 September 1978.

by buglaswritersjournal

Marjorie Evasco’s “Ritual for Leaving”

To speak of the celebrated Tagbilaran/Dumaguete poet Marjorie Evasco is to speak of a life devoted to poetry, to teaching, to the difficult but necessary labor of giving voice to what has long been silenced. Born in the quiet coastal town of Maribojoc, Bohol, Evasco—known to friends as Marj—grew up steeped in the cadences of both English and Binisaya. It is this dual inheritance that would shape her lifelong work of weaving language into both bridge and mirror.

Her journey began in the classrooms of Catholic schools and later at Divine Word College in Tagbilaran, where she earned her degree in English in 1973. She first worked in the Ministry of Public Information, writing features and eventually becoming editor, before leaving government for the more enduring vocation of literature. At Silliman University, where she earned her MA in creative writing in 1982, she found her footing among peers and mentors. Soon after, she began her long tenure at De La Salle University, rising to professor emeritus, where she trained generations of writers—including her annual stint as regular panelist for the Silliman University National Writers Workshop.

Her oeuvre is remarkable in both breadth and depth: Dreamweavers (1987), Ochre Tones (1999), Skin of Water (2009), and Fishes of Light/Peces de Luz: Tanrenga in Two Tongues (2013, with Venezuelan poet Alex Fleites)—all later included in her omnibus collection, It is Time to Come Home: New and Collected Poems (2023). Her work has traveled across languages and continents, finding place in anthologies from Manila to London, from Havana to Singapore. The awards have been many—the National Book Awards, the Palanca, the Free Press, the Balagtas Prize, the S.E.A. Write Award—but these are only emblems of a deeper truth: Evasco has always written with integrity, whether in the lyric hush of a farewell poem or in the luminous dialogues she curated in Six Women Poets.

She has been, for Philippine letters, both witness and weaver. Also a sometime poet of goodbyes, farewells, and departures—especially in poems like “Despedida,” “Elegy #1,” “Mama’s Death Anniversary,” and “Poet in Exile”—but also of returns or hints of return, such as in “September Fugue” and “Why I Keep Coming Back,” and most especially, “It is Time to Come Home,” the poem that gives her latest collection its title. In these poems, I find Evasco at her most devastating: tender, lyrical, and unsparing.

But my favorite of all is “Ritual for Leaving,” because it is also the most Dumaguete of all her poems—written on the occasion of two poet friends, Grace Monte de Ramos and Juaniyo Arcellana, bidding their farewell to [an unnamed] Dumaguete:

Ritual for Leaving

For Grace and Juaniyo

Go now, and go at noon 
When this city shall stand 
Intense in the light, 
Equal to your silent grief. 

There are many ways of taking leave: 
Even when we choose to be dumb 
Our bodies, hands, feet, senses, 
Motion their own speeches as we go numb 
Gathering things to pack from room to room 
Or weaving the streets and boulevard 
After the usual beer at sundown. 

It is easier to leave 
In the middle of day—
The view from the port, postcard-pretty, 
Accented by kitchen smoke 
And blooming acacia trees—
An ordinary scene on an October day 
Which will probably be the same 
When you come back: a strange assurance 
Of infinities or that something 
We call indestructible.

The poem renders departure as both ache and ordinariness. It opens with stark instruction—“Go now, and go at noon”—invoking light as witness to grief. It acknowledges the many, embodied languages of farewell: the numb hands, the weaving through streets, the rituals of beer and packing. Yet Evasco resists despair. By situating leave-taking against the backdrop of acacia trees, kitchen smoke, and postcard ports, she transforms the pain of separation into an almost consoling rhythm of continuity. The poem, finally, suggests that even in absence, the world endures, offering us the fragile assurance of return.

In the Filipino imagination, farewells are always freighted with distance. We are a people defined by departures—seafarers, migrant workers, lovers bound to leave, friends who slip away into exile. Evasco gives us a vocabulary for this grief that is tender rather than bitter, a language of leavetaking that honors the gift of having loved at all. Her metaphors—birds in flight, water slipping away, dreams that persist—are not decorative but elemental, the very grammar of our diasporic condition.

Perhaps this is why her farewell poems haunt me. They remind me that to live is to leave, over and over again. Every embrace is a prelude to parting. And yet, what remains after reading Evasco is not sorrow but light—the small flame of a candle left in the window, illuminating the memory of presence, the possibility of return. In her poetry, goodbye is not an ending but a tender promise that what has been shared will not vanish.

by buglaswritersjournal

Stefan Andre Solon’s Tears of the Forgotten

There is always a sense of awe and satisfaction when we come across a very young writer who finishes their first book, a sense of defiance that says: I have done the impossible. Especially if the first book is a novel. For Dumaguete writer Stefan André Solon, who is all of 28, that seeming impossibility takes the shape of Tears of the Forgotten, a bruising, fast-paced novel that fuses elements of investigative journalism, political corruption, and the lore of the engkanto into a thriller both Filipino and universal.

When I ask him what the novel is about, he is disarmingly honest: “On a personal level, this book is about proving to myself that I could finish something this ambitious. I had carried the idea for a long time, and writing it was as much about self-discipline as it was about storytelling. It taught me that an idea can manifest in the real world if you commit to it. I also wanted something to call my own, something I could hold in my hands and say, ‘Yes, I made this. I am an author.’”

That last line is something every budding writer in Dumaguete has whispered into the salty night, walking the Rizal Boulevard with stories like ghosts perched on their shoulders. Here, in this small seaside city that birthed Bobby Flores Villasis and Elsa Martinez Coscolluela and Lakambini Sitoy, that nurtured Edith Tiempo and Edilberto Tiempo and Rowena Torrevillas, that continues to midwife the dreams of young scribblers like Michael Aaron Gomez and Lyde Sison Villanueva and F. Jordan Carnice, one does not simply become a writer. One is made by the city itself, with its campus workshops and smoky cafés, its long afternoons under acacia trees, its gossip and myths.

Stefan joins that literary lineage with Tears of the Forgotten, a book where a young campus journalist, Del, finds himself investigating the trafficking of engkantos whose tears are bottled and sold as elixirs for the rich. It is a wild conceit, but also a metaphor sharp as a blade: the powerful draining the vulnerable to feed their endless appetites. In one of the novel’s most chilling moments, buyers discuss these bottled tears with the same casualness they would apply to fine wines or diamonds. [Disclosure: this novel was developed under my fiction workshop for the creative writing program at Silliman University.]

But what makes the book remarkable is how deeply it is rooted in place. Stefan admits: “I wanted to create a world inspired by my home. The province of Lugo and the city of Azucapuerte are modeled after Negros Oriental [and Dumaguete City], and I drew on my own experiences of living here. I wanted to capture the idiosyncrasies, the stories passed through the grapevine, and the legends handed down by our forebearers, and weave them into a universe that feels alive.”

These words reminded me of the long tradition of Dumaguete writers who turn the local into the mythic, who see in the ordinary surfaces of the city—vendors selling fruit outside Hibbard University, boys guarding motorcycles in the parking lot—the beating heart of an epic. It is not hard to see Kiki, the orange seller of Stefan’s novel, as an echo of every girl we’ve passed on the Boulevard at dawn, selling fish or peanuts, invisible until we choose to look.

For Stefan, the act of writing the novel itself was not easy: “It was daunting at first. I had carried this story idea in my head for a long time, but the act of putting pen to paper felt overwhelming. I had never written anything this long before. But every great journey starts with a first step, so I took it. I just started writing. My mindset was simple: write it first, you can always make it better later.”

There is a lesson here for every young writer in Dumaguete—or anywhere—who is paralyzed by the enormity of their own ideas. Just start. [Or join a workshop.] The novel will find its way if you let it breathe. In Stefan’s case, it was through workshops, revisions, and multiple rounds of editing. He says: “Looking back at my earliest notes and summaries compared to the finished novel was almost cathartic. It was incredible to see how the story had grown, how simple ideas evolved into complex characters and themes, and how the world of Lugo gradually revealed itself on the page.”

In the end, Tears of the Forgotten is more than just a finished manuscript; it is a manifesto of intent. Stefan says: “With this novel, I wanted to contribute to that legacy of human creativity, to add my thread to the fabric of stories that connect us all.”

That he does so from Dumaguete is no accident. The city has always been a haven for creatives, especially writers. It allows a young writer like Stefan to dream of turning the rot of local corruption into narrative, to transmute engkanto tears into a metaphor for systemic exploitation, and to do so under the gaze of acacia trees and the steady presence of the sea.

Stefan dreams big. “In the long run, my dream is to build the world of Lugo into something larger than a single novel, a franchise that could take shape not only in books but also in films, games, and other forms of storytelling.” Ambitious? Yes. But ambition is precisely what Dumaguete has always demanded of its writers. It demanded it of the Tiempes when they built the Silliman University National Writers Workshop out of nothing but conviction. It demanded it of the countless young authors who came after, from Cesar Ruiz Aquino to Marjorie Evasco to younger generations still finding their voice.

Now it demands it of Stefan Solon, who with Tears of the Forgotten has written not just a novel, but a declaration: that the stories of Negros, of Dumaguete, of the Philippines, belong not only to myth or to the margins, but to the center of literature itself. And if Dumaguete is indeed a city of writers, and a city of stories, then this book is proof that it continues to do what it has always done best: take the trembling words of the young and, with the patience of the sea, teach them how to roar.

by buglaswritersjournal

Marianne Villanueva’s Residents of the Deep

There is always something about Dumaguete that invites a doubling of perception: the city as paradise, and the city as an escape into disquiet. In Bacolod writer Marianne Villanueva’s “Dumaguete,” the first story out in her most recent collection Residents of the Deep [Unsolicited Press, 2025], we get the story of Carlos and his mother’s sojourn to the city unfolding in the measured cadences of memory, edged with the sharp pangs of abandonment. Here, Dumaguete is ostensibly the backdrop—but really, it is the theatre of a child’s initiation into loneliness, betrayal, and premature knowledge of adult duplicities.

Stowed away by his mother away from his father and into the languor of promenades and resorts [specifically Seven Seas Resort, a stand-in for South Seas Resort of yore, now The Henry Resort], Carlos senses all too clearly the cracks beneath the performance of holiday. The crocodile farm and zoo, the old acacias in Silliman University—all these are catalogued with the innocent wonder of a boy, yet underscored with the shadow of a mother slipping away. Villanueva renders the mother with a troubling glamour: her green-eyed sadness, her floaty dresses, her sudden absences into the hotel lobby. Carlos’s gaze is both adoring and accusatory, and through it the reader sees the larger fissures in a family—his father’s affairs, his mother’s evasions, his yaya’s whispered warnings of aswang and witches.

The brilliance of the story lies in its refusal to be about Dumaguete as tourist idyll. The city becomes instead an emotional landscape, haunted by the boy’s fear of being left behind, the boy’s fragile strategies of mimicry and pantomime to keep his mother’s attention. Even the menace of strangers—drunken men in sunglasses, a pistol tucked against khaki pants—becomes a metaphor for the encroaching adult world that Carlos must learn to navigate.

Villanueva’s “Dumaguete” is also less a travelogue than a reckoning. It is about the terrible knowledge a child inherits when he realizes that paradise is never innocent, that even mangoes, ripe and golden, cannot mask the sour taste of abandonment. In that psychological regard, it is very precise.

There is indeed a precision to Villanueva’s fiction, as if each sentence were a scalpel cutting into the intimate flesh of exile, memory, and longing. She was born and raised in Manila, with Bacolod roots, and was later transplanted to the United States when she became a Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University in San Francisco, and has since then been writing and publishing stories about the Philippines and Filipino-Americans since the mid-1980s. She is the author of the short story collections Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila [1991], Mayor of the Roses [2005], and The Lost Language [2009]. Her novella, Jenalyn, was a 2014 finalist for the United Kingdom’s Saboteur Award, and her individual stories have been finalists for the O. Henry Literature Prize, nominated for the Pushcart, and included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fiction of 2016. She has also edited an anthology of Filipino women’s writings, Going Home to a Landscape, which was selected as a Notable Book by the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

In many of these works, Villanueva inhabits that unsettled terrain we call diaspora, where home is both a point of origin and a persistent ache. Her stories are deceptively quiet, but they shimmer with suppressed ferocity. They are, in fact, about survival: how women navigate silence, how families are fractured by geography and history, how desire is always tinged with danger.

Villanueva’s voice, one might say, is one of displacement, but it is never rootless. Even when she writes about Manila or Bacolod or Dumaguete, or elsewhere in the United States, she is charting the internal geographies of her characters—children abandoned to their own devices, women marked by absence, men diminished by betrayal. In her prose, places refuse to remain mere backdrops; they bristle with unease, as though the very air carries the weight of memory. The Dumaguete in her story, for instance, is rendered not as the idyllic “City of Gentle People,” but as a stage for a boy’s terror of abandonment—and perhaps imagined from real life. “I visited Dumaguete with my son and niece when they were both about nine. So, that’s the basis of the story,” she told me.

In Residents of the Deep, Marianne Villanueva returns with a collection that summons both the physical vastness and metaphorical weight of seas and oceans. The title story, in particular, uses the ocean not merely as setting but as a crucible of moral reckoning: a ship captain finds a submerged city beneath fathoms of water, and in its discovery is forced to confront what duty, responsibility, and human ambition demand when one explores what is meant to be out of reach.

This fascination with what lies beneath—depths unseen, lives unimagined—is matched elsewhere in the collection. The ocean becomes a threshold: between what humans can know and what must remain mysterious, between surface identities and submerged truths. In stories like “Ice,” Villanueva explores liminal spaces—post-apocalyptic wastelands, small cities, familial relationships—yet it is the deep waters of the title story that most fully dramatize that boundary between surface and abyss. “[I love] stories about the sea. I love writing about oceans,” she also told me.

Through recurring imagery of water—its calm, its hidden currents, its capacity to obscure—Villanueva probes human resilience. The sea’s depths mirror inner depths: guilt, longing, moral ambiguity. The ocean in this book is both metaphor and character: sometimes hostile, sometimes beckoning, always inscrutable. In Residents of the Deep, Villanueva’s seas are not places for escape so much as confrontations with what we carry beneath our skins.

by buglaswritersjournal

Myrna Peña-Reyes’ “Ethnic at Checkout Counter” and “At Camp Lookout”

If you ask the poet Myrna Peña-Reyes what her favorite poem is—as I did only a few days ago—you will be surprised that it’s not “Breaking Through,” although that’s her most anthologized poem, the one she is most well-known by. I love that poem, too, and used to teach it when a course on Philippine Literature was still something to be had in college. But, to be honest, it’s also not my favorite of poem of hers.

The one I love the most is one of her most Dumaguete-centric poems, “At Camp Lookout.” But that is not her favorite poem either. It’s something titled “Ethnic at Checkout Counter”—and I completely understand why that is her choice. That poem is an incisive and ironic look, in the voice only Myrna Peña-Reyes can pen, at immigrant life she used to have when she was living in the United States. Come to think of it, my favorite of her poems and her favorite of her poems invariably talk about “home.”

She was born in Cagayan de Oro, a child of the southern landscape—lush, rivered, restless, and her early years were steeped in the pulse of provincial life. But it was in Dumaguete, where her father, the great biologist Alfredo Reyes, took up a teaching post at Silliman University, where Peña-Reyes’ sensibility as a poet truly formed. At Silliman, under the tutelage of the Tiempos, she found not only the discipline of craft but a community of writers who valued precision and quiet truth. Her poems from those years reveal an eye that lingers—on light, on silence, on the textures of ordinary days.

Later, with her husband, the American poet William Sweet, she settled in Oregon, where the distances from the Philippines grew longer, the seasons sharper. The immigrant years deepened her voice; her poems began to speak from the fault line between belonging and estrangement. In the grocery aisles, in the long grey of American rain, she traced the small negotiations of identity—Filipino, woman, writer—each one both burden and inheritance. We see this in her first book, The River Singing Stone.

When she returned to Dumaguete after many years abroad, it was not with nostalgia but with a kind of tempered clarity. Her later poems—in Almost Home and Memory’s Mercy—carry that tone: measured, unsentimental, but tender toward the landscapes that made her. Peña-Reyes’ life and work unfold across geographies, but always circle back to one enduring question—what, and where, is home?

Let’s explore this in her favorite poem:

Ethnic at Checkout Counter

The clerk chants the prices
as she punches the register keys.
Her smile is bemused.
I watch my fish heads
dive under chicken livers,
ox tails bounce against beef tongue,
pig’s feet squirm under tripe.
The line behind me stares silently.

Then when she announces the sum
and starts to bag
I take my time. I write a check.
They often think:
Another food stamp ethnic.

It is a small, searing poem of displacement—an immigrant’s moment of reckoning at the banal altar of the supermarket. In the measured precision of its imagery, the poem captures what it means to live in quiet translation: to inhabit a body, a culture, and a grocery cart that all announce otherness in a land that pretends to smile but still stares.

The poem opens in the mundane rhythm of transaction—“The clerk chants the prices / as she punches the register keys.” The verb “chants” immediately transforms the scene from mechanical to ritualistic, the checkout counter turned into a site of performance and judgment. Peña-Reyes’ speaker stands exposed under the fluorescent lights, her choice of groceries—“fish heads,” “ox tails,” “pig’s feet,” “tripe”—marking her unmistakably as alien. But the poet wields these images with both pride and unease: they are emblems of memory and inheritance, but here they are rendered almost grotesque under the gaze of an audience [presumably a white one]. The phrase “The line behind me stares silently” lands like a verdict.

The immigrant’s negotiation of identity here is not one of loud defiance but of subtle resistance. When the speaker says, “I take my time. I write a check,” it is a small assertion of dignity in a space that expects her shame. The slow gesture becomes a reclamation of agency, an insistence on visibility. Peña-Reyes’ final line—“They often think: / Another food stamp ethnic”—burns with weary irony. The voice is neither angry nor pleading; it is exhausted, aware of how stereotypes flatten complexity.

In a few taut lines, Peña-Reyes crystallizes the immigrant experience in America: the daily humiliations that pass as ordinary, the quiet strength it takes to remain seen, and the unspoken ache of carrying one’s culture through aisles that do not recognize its worth. Home, in the reality of that grocery store, feels so far away.

Her poem “At Camp Lookout,” on the other hand, is a poem of quiet distance, of standing high above the world and trying to make sense of what it means to belong to it:

At Camp Lookout

Fog haze, morning chill
chart our days:
linger under blankets,
breakfast at ten, then
ascend a weedy trail,
lift our faces to the sun,
the wind fancying our hair;
listen how the mountain sings:
bird calls, insects, wind
in the trees, billowing the grass,
the trickle of a hidden stream,
the sudden startle of wings!

Down in the sweltered plains
doll houses, offices, streets lost
in the toy towns with borders
blurred in the clustered trees;
bathtub boats streaking a silver sea,
curve of shoreline holding back
the deep; Siquijor, Sumilon, Cebu
breaking up its sparkle and sweep;
and at the airfield scarring the land
planes descending, taking off—
we’re here to escape them all.
How distant they all seem!

Late afternoon,
the monotone cricket song,
cicada wings shivering the air,
bats navigating the dusk.
Soon the firefly hour,
Night’s bright sentinels encamped in the sky.
Far below, the town lights blaze,
ship lights crawl their slow trails
across the blackened sea,
drop below the horizon,
fade, flicker, sink.

Drawn downward,
our thoughts turn home,
the lowlands closer than we think.

Here, “home” is both a physical landscape and a state of mind—something the poet must leave in order to see clearly, and something that calls her back even from the farthest vantage point. The poem becomes a meditation on the tension between escape and return, between the ache for solitude and the gravity of rootedness.

From the first lines, Peña-Reyes situates us in the rarefied air of retreat: “Fog haze, morning chill / chart our days.” The mountain is a refuge from the “sweltered plains,” where life unspools in the clutter of “doll houses, offices, streets lost / in the toy towns.” To be at Camp Lookout [in Valencia town] is to be removed—to exchange the noise of daily living for the elemental: “bird calls, insects, wind / in the trees.” The poet’s diction is stripped clean, rhythmic in its stillness. This is home reimagined as simplicity, as the purity of hearing the world breathe. Yet, beneath the serenity, there is the knowledge that this peace is only possible in absence—an absence from the very world that made her.

Home, then, is complicated. From the mountain, the towns below appear “blurred,” the sea “silver,” the islands “breaking up [their] sparkle and sweep.” The distance transforms them, miniaturizes them, but never quite erases their hold. Peña-Reyes’ gaze, however, is tender and never scornful. The poem acknowledges the beauty of detachment, but also the pull of connection. The mountain grants her perspective, but not release.

As night falls, the poem begins its slow return. The speaker listens to “cicada wings shivering the air,” then watches the “ship lights crawl their slow trails / across the blackened sea.” These images of navigation and movement [bats, ships, fireflies] are metaphors of longing. They mirror the speaker’s own drift between solitude and belonging. By the end, she concedes to the magnetic pull of home: “Drawn downward, / our thoughts turn home, / the lowlands closer than we think.”

This final image captures Peña-Reyes’s mature understanding of home—not as the idyllic space of escape, but as an ever-present gravity. No matter how high she climbs, or how far her thoughts wander, home is the pulse that calls her back. In the luminous quiet of Camp Lookout, she finds not distance from home, but a clearer way of seeing it.

In both poems, Peña-Reyes charts two dimensions of home [and exile]: the immigrant’s alienation in a foreign land and the exile of distance from home. The first unfolds in the fluorescent glare of a supermarket, where belonging is questioned with every stare; the second, in the serene remove of a mountain, where belonging is remembered from afar. One poem bristles with the quiet humiliation of being seen as other; the other softens into homesickness and return. Together they trace Peña-Reyes’s lifelong negotiation between displacement and the fragile comfort of finding home again.

by buglaswritersjournal

Justin Jose Bulado’s “We All Must Work, Fight, or Starve”

In the quiet steadiness of Dumaguete historiographer Justin Jose Bulado, we find the unlikely poet of the archives—the kind of scholar who listens for the murmurs beneath the dust. Born on 18 October 1989, in the city that would shape both his sensibility and his vocation, history for him, from the very beginning of his vocation, was never simply the catalog of dates and decrees. It began, as all obsessions must, with a story told by a grandfather—his, a boy in wartime Manila, remembering the Japanese occupation not through the lens of textbooks, but through the sharp scent of fear and the soft ache of hunger. These recollections became the seed of his own historical imagination.

Years later, while most of his generation were seduced by the immediacy of the digital and the disposable, Justin found his own cinema in the sepia. For example, watching HBO’s Band of Brothers did not romanticize war for him—but it made him curious about how ordinary people endure a catastrophe like a devastating war. He followed that curiosity to Silliman University, where he would complete his BA, MA, and PhD—all in history, the university’s corridors becoming both his archive and his crucible. By 2020, he had earned his doctorate in Social Science.

But if there is a word that best defines Justin’s work, it is “local.” In the age of global histories, Bulado’s gaze remains grounded in the soil of Negros Oriental. His scholarly work has revolved around the Japanese occupation of the province—its collaborators and resistors, its hunger and survival, its silences and its hauntings. He writes, as he teaches, from a conviction that the stories of small places illuminate the great movements of history. The world war, filtered through Dumaguete or Siquijor, becomes less abstract and more intimate: a neighbor’s betrayal, a family’s starvation, a child’s lost innocence.

This is what the best local historians do: they remind us that the grand narratives are composed of a thousand small tragedies. Yet Justin is also aware of the danger in this intimacy. “Some people,” he warns, “attempt to write local history by inventing stories or glorifying relatives without basis.” This, he insists, is mythmaking, not scholarship. History demands evidence, not nostalgia. The work of the historian, then, is not to embroider but to excavate—to find, beneath the gossip and legend, the fragile truth that time has tried to erase.

In this sense, his historical essays and journal articles are not mere academic exercises; they are acts of reclamation. His paper “We All Must Work, Fight, or Starve,” published in Philippine Studies in 2023, is emblematic of this. It reconstructs the wartime food crisis in Negros Oriental, showing how hunger became both a weapon and a wound. Another article, a forthcoming one on Japanese atrocities under Colonel Satoshi Oie, has taken him nearly a year of painstaking research to complete—a year spent listening to the ghosts of the past whispering through military reports and faded testimonies. For Justin, writing history is not about being first or being famous. It is, he says, “driven by curiosity and a desire to piece together narratives that have not yet been told.”

To write local history, he believes, is to swim against the current of forgetfulness. It is to labor over scarce sources, to make meaning out of fragments. The difficulty is real: archives are incomplete, memories are frail, and politics often distort the record. Yet this is where the historian’s artistry comes in. The challenge is not only to reconstruct but to interpret, to find the connective tissue between a forgotten town and the larger body of the nation. “Wars have no real victors, nobody wins in wars,” Justin regularly reminds his students. “At the end of the day, it is the civilians who suffer the most.” This moral clarity gives his scholarship both its edge and its empathy.

He amply demonstrates this hardship in his article, “’We All Must Work, Fight, or Starve’: The Food Supply Problem in Negros Oriental during the Japanese Occupation,” published in Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints in 2023:

Dumaguete’s supply of milk was largely obtained from Cebu, and when Cebu fell to the Japanese forces, the supply was cut off. Fortunately, Bais Sugar Central, the largest producer of sugar in Negros Oriental, helped the people of Dumaguete by providing “one hundred cases of their milk,” most of which were rationed to “sick or very small children.” Soon enough, the stocks of flour would run out, primarily due to hoarding. There was a time before the Japanese occupation when the people of Dumaguete did not have a steady supply of bread. Later, it was found out that around a hundred sacks of flour were kept in a certain storehouse in Dumaguete. It was a case of hoarding—perhaps the flour was going to be sold in the black market in the future for a higher price. Eventually, the owner of the storehouse begrudgingly decided to sell the flour, and it was good enough for a few weeks of bread for the townspeople.

It is easy to see why, in 2023, he was chosen as part of the Emerging Scholars Workshop of the Jenny Craig Institute of War and Democracy at the National World War II Museum in Louisiana. Among the North Americans, he was the lone Asian voice—a historian from Dumaguete bringing the war in Negros to an international table. It was not just a career highlight; it was a moment of historical symmetry: a scholar from a once-occupied nation reclaiming his place in the world’s remembrance of war.

What, then, does Bulado teach us about writing local history? That it is a moral act as much as an intellectual one. That to write about one’s town is to love it enough to tell its truth, however inconvenient. That documentation is resistance—against amnesia, against myth, against the lazy habit of thinking that the stories of small places do not matter. Local history, in his practice, becomes a form of justice.

He plans, in the long run, to turn his dissertation on wartime collaboration into a book, alongside a collected volume of essays. But his heart, he insists, remains in teaching—at Negros Oriental State University, where he has found his equilibrium between the classroom and the archive. He teaches not just historical method but historical ethics, the discipline of doubt, the humility of evidence. In a world drowning in misinformation, that may be the most radical lesson of all.

And so, perhaps this is how one should end a story about a historian: not with accolades, though he has many, but with the image of a man at his desk at dusk, the computer light falling on yellowed documents, the city outside quieting into night. In that silence, he listens—for the echoes of wartime Negros Oriental, for the footsteps of people history forgot, for the pulse of a local past refusing to die. Because in the end, history is not merely the study of what happened. It is the ongoing act of remembering—and in Justin Bulado’s hands, remembering becomes a form of devotion.