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.