2023 has kept the Filipino reader mighty busy. We had to pencil in many a book event, like the National Book Development Board’s inaugural Philippine Book Festival and the annual Manila International Book Fair. Filipino titles continue to hit the shelves of our favorite mainstream and independent bookstores. More poets turn their Facebook accounts into storefronts as they self-publish their collections.
It seems a lot of us just cannot stop telling stories, and even more cannot stop seeking them out. I’m reminded of a quote from Kannika Claudine D. Peña’s novel “All the Lonely People,” where a character gets on a bus with leaky air conditioners and overworked tin can speakers (pretty much every bus ever): “Is this how this city allows its people to cope, by overpowering them with other forms of pain, as if by stacking them one on top of another, they can cancel each other out?” I’m hopeful it’s not naive to think books are our reprieve from this, to think it’s comforting to read about someone climbing the same “buwis-buhay” overpass you do everyday. To have your story reflected back to you, or to recognize the same emotions in a character with entirely different experiences in an entirely different world. To do the reading but feel like it’s you being understood.Catch up on some of this year’s literary offerings, all centering on our different truths, all made to both comfort and agitate.’ ‘3’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:afffbd7b-d566-4c75-b7b4-a97fa874eb6c
“All the Lonely People” by Kannika Claudine D. Peña
Author Kannika Peña seems to have lived a hundred lives before writing this book. It was a joy reading about such lived-in characters; ones we relate to by virtue of location, occupation, or simply feeling. Thank god for finding and being found by stories — you are never alone, ad infinitum.
Available at Milflores Publishing.
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“Sapagkat Marami nang Laman ang Katawan Ko” by Red Enid
Poet Red Enid is a storyteller. Their first book, a collection of poems from 2018 to 2023, puts front and center Enid’s remarkable command of language. Each piece is an evocative vignette, and every syllable is purposeful. Even the title itself is so meaty — “title pa lang, ulam na,” as they say.
“Sapagkat Marami nang Laman ang Katawan Ko” is strongest at its most diaristic. Enid, based in Baguio, devotes a sizable section to city life: melting in public transportation, clamoring for rest, and being unable to keep up with the rush but trudging on anyway in fear of being left behind. “Pinaiyak ka na naman ba ng siyudad?” asks one poem. Maybe I’m biased because I read them almost at the same time, but this is a great companion piece to Peña’s “All the Lonely People.” Though perhaps we’re all just tired, and we’re drawn to art that attempts to make sense of the exhaustion.
Available through Red Enid.
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“Compositions” by Carissa Pobre
“Formations,” Carissa Pobre’s first book self-published in 2021, was familiar — like most pandemic-born work, it grieved a future stolen by a public health crisis. It wandered through the interiority of both author and reader via 30 writing prompts Pobre came up with and subsequently answered. She returns with “Compositions,” a four-movement book project published almost a decade after it was completed. It sets out to explore the limits of poetic and essayistic languages in translating music; it lands on something more intriguing in the process. Pobre herself doubts the feasibility of her project, quoting German philosopher and theorist Walter Benjamin in the prologue: “Music needs no translation.” It is only through this act of letting go so early on, of course, that “Compositions” finds its voice. “When we write, we want to know. Of course we cannot ‘know,’” Pobre writes in the notes to the prologue. “In the event, we can write how we are trying to know.” While the book starts with music, it touches on writing, history, memory, and more, inasmuch as music begins as one thing then starts permeating all of life. Pobre’s words are equal parts abstract and arrestingly physical. You’ll have the most fun just holding her hand and letting her take you where she takes you.
Available at Everything’s Fine.
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“Inside Stories: Women’s Situation in Jails & Access to Justice” by the CHR Center for Gender Equality and Women’s Human Rights (published with Gantala Press)
On top of extrajudicial killings, the War on Drugs, beginning in the Duterte administration in 2016, led to an extraordinary surge in arrests. About 67% of inmates were detained due to drug-related charges; 13% were women. In 2017, Philippine prisons were reportedly holding 7x the ideal prison population.
The e-booklet “Inside Stories” contains information like this, taken from the Commission on Human Rights (CHR)’s report on women deprived of liberty in different detention facilities across the country. Most striking are the 28 short first-person narratives by the women themselves, sharing their daily lives and ways of coping during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their stories — mostly descriptive, usually about missing loved ones or noting the lack of provided necessities – reveal the inhumane tendency of a trigger-happy government to ‘solve’ problems by sweeping them under the rug and pretending they no longer exist.