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.