Guest: KARLO ANTONIO GALAY DAVID | 𝐏𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐤𝐥𝐨𝐠

𝐏𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐤𝐥𝐨𝐠: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲'𝐬 𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Promising fellows, hardworking organizers, my fellow panelists, and to the people up there in Zamboanga del Sur, let me greet you in five different languages: ghempya sasalem, moppiyon sollom, mapiya mapita, maayong buntag, good morning to one and all.

Pakighinuklog – the title of the first keynote speech to the Pagadian Writers Workshop was conceived with several levels of nuance in mind. And I think explaining it today would make it a useful first point of learning for the workshop.

This coinage was part of the Mindanao Creative and Cultural Workers’ Group Inc.’s theme for the recently concluded National Arts Month celebrations.

The full theme was ‘mamugnaong pakighinuklog,’ and it informed a very mamugnaong lecture series, which you can all watch for free on MCCWG’s Facebook page.

That I am using the word pakighinuklog again here today is no case of lexical recycling due to a poverty of imagination or laziness.

I had deliberately pitched the word to the MCCWG to use as national arts month theme with the intention of using the same word again for you today.

It was an expression of my desire as recently appointed Executive Director of the MCCWG for the organization to start directing its attention towards your wonderful province and region. Zamboanga del Sur, like much of Mindanao, is rich in cultural possibilities but suffers from great neglect in development.

That needs to end.

It is also deliberate that the root of this word, ‘hinuklog,’ bears a striking similarity to the name of your province’s greatest piece of intangible cultural heritage – the Subanen ritual of the Buklog. To emphasize this, our NAM logo featured the Buklog’s central pole, the Dlugan.

By making this nod to the Buklog with a Bisaya word, we aimed to achieve several things.

For one, we sought to bring the significance of indigenous rituals such as the Buklog into the realm of intellectual discourse and reflection.

It was also a subtle way by which we highlighted the often ignored links between Mindanao’s ethnic groups.

Another reason why we chose the word is because we wanted to assert the legitimacy of Mindanao Settler languages.

We had a lively discussion on the use of the word.

‘Hinuklog’ in the Binisaya of Cebu has a meaning closer to ‘grieving’ or ‘regretting’.

But in the Binisaya of many Settler communities here in Mindanao, it has somewhat lost this negative connotation, veering instead closer to solemn, almost religious contemplation.

The title of Davao fictionist Melchor M. Morante’s recently published collection of short stories ‘Mga Lumadnong Sugilanon nga Mahinuklogon’ reflects this nuance.

MCCWG thus translated ‘pakighinuklog’ as ‘inter-reflections.’

And that is essentially what a writers workshop is: an occasion for writers to engage in reflection with one another.

Writing is a solitary art. The writers workshop – where one can hone craft, pick up new ideas, and meet like-minded people – is one way by which the writer overcomes that solitude.

A workshop can be a terribly fun experience, in which pampabrayt, laag, and even biga can take place, often simultaneously.

It is my hope that this is only the first of many more workshops that our fellows this year will attend.

And it is also my hope that this is only the first of many Pagadian Writers workshops, and the first of projects that you, future writers of Pagadian and Zamboanga del Sur, will be organizing for your wonderful province.

(I hope you will invite me in them so I can also take part in the pabrayt, laag, and biga.)

But on a serious note, I began the workshop by explaining the nuances of the word ‘pakighinuklog’ in order to impress upon our beginning writers the very important role that writers play in their communities.

It is through its own literature, after all, that a community – a town, a province, an island – sees and understands itself better.

Ultimately, it is not just the story or the poem or the play or the essay which the writer is writing, he is ultimately writing the destiny of the people who will be reading whatever he writes.

The writer initiates paghinuklog – like the Buklog in its collective expression of Subanen gratitude, the literary works we write are meant to bring people to feel the earth beneath their feet.

And the writer stimulates 𝑝𝑎𝑘𝑖𝑔hinuklog, reflecting on the experiences of other locales in order to better understand and improve our own realities.

It is by that process of reflection and inter-reflection that we make literature mamugnaon.

Let us engage in some pakighinuklog, and let me share the experience of my hometown of Kidapawan, North Cotabato, 277.40 kilometers from Pagadian.

The people of Kidapawan are largely ignorant to their own history – they do not know when their town was founded, they hardly remember any of its past mayors, they know miserably little about the experience of its indigenous Obo Monuvu people or its large Moro minority. They do not even know why their immigrant ancestors settled in Kidapawan.

It becomes dehumanizing when you realize this ignorance has meant that people – large numbers of people – can suffer and die horrible deaths with the community not even remembering.

Mindanao is a mass grave of dead memories, and the failure of its writers is partly to blame.

That is something I had hoped to start undo, at least for my hometown.

Since I was 16, I had written almost exclusively about Kidapawan. The vast majority of my fiction has been set in and about my hometown.

And almost everything I have written has been written with the people of my hometown in mind as readers, designed to educate them, and to stimulate them into reflection about their local realities.

One of the stories I had written to address this – 𝐿𝑎ℎ𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑎– was basically a litany of all the forgotten Moro atrocities that happened in Kidapawan during the turbulence of Marcos’s war with the Moros in the 1970s.

Cloaked as fiction, I described massacres and murders that actually happened in the town, and in many cases the names of victims see print for the very first time. But I also noted in it how the Settler neighbors played a big role both in saving lives, and in keeping alive the memories of those who had died.

The process of writing the story was also part of the process of my hometown remembering the things it had long forgotten.

I am grateful to fellow panelist Dr. Rebecca Añonuevo for making it possible for that process to reach Bangkok, where the story was published in 2019.

What had long been forgotten in Kidapawan is now remembered even in Thailand.

The community’s memory - this is the work of the writer, and it is wonderful in our eyes.

It is often the writer who documents culture. But more crucially, it is the writer who 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠 culture, who observes problems, who asserts improvements, who brings about change, who innovates.

Because the writer is also the community’s imagination.

How would I imagine my hometown of Kidapawan?

It is a town where dogs save villages from drought by discovering springs, or die as they save their masters from snakes.

It is a town with a boiling lake where the people of old believe a giant eel lives, giving happiness to whoever sees it.

It is where almost every house will have a tree in their backyard that, come August, will be ablaze with fruits that look like little red suns.

It is where every morning men go to groves, stand under trees, and, holding knives, reach out to the sky to make the tree bleed clouds, which slowly trickle down in a liquid spiral to a waiting coconut shell.

It is a town where they still call a place ‘Barracks’ long after the barracks had been relocated, or the school ‘Boys’ long after it ceased being an all-boys school. It is a town where the names linger almost as long as the gossip – of Japanese soldiers marrying local women, or of a councilor having an affair with his male staff member.

It is a town where Singkomas is a green fruit, where bread is made into barbecue, and where you can say I love you in twelve different tongues.

Ostranenie, the Russian Formalists call it. Defamiliarization. The art of showing things in a new, fresh, often strange light. Because the local is often taken for granted, the writer’s job is to shift perspectives, that the local gets to say ah, bitaw no, we are quirky like that.

The result of embracing the local is this, what I call a Literature of the Specific, language of a stylistic, particular freshness that anyone the world over would find new.

The local is a stylistic goldmine, full of unique conditions waiting to be articulated in equally unique language.

And no one is more arrested than the local, who is suddenly shown what wonders he has been made to take for granted, neglecting, allowing to deteriorate and be forgotten.

Doing this, of course, demands that you know your locale.

Do you know much about Pagadian, or Zamboanga del Sur?

Do you know how it was established, what led to its establishment, what its establishment meant for its many peoples, and what hardships and triumphs it had seen?

Do you know how the Subanen of Lakewood explain the position of frog’s genitals?

Do you know the names of those 12 people that the Ilaga massacred in Dumingag, or the Jesuit whose residence they strafed in Bayog in 1982?

Have you heard about that Mayor of Pagadian who shot himself in front of his parents' tomb on International Suicide Day? Or the one who died choking in Balbacua? Or the one who had an affair with his maid, a maid who, after he died, allegedly ran away with his will, throwing his clan into disarray?

Do you know what makes falling in love, going insane, or being murdered in Zamboanga del Sur unique?

Do you know your communities?

I will not be surprised if you do not, or if these questions never occurred to you, and it is not your fault.

We live in a colonial republic whose imagination is centered in Manila or in the West, where it is deeply embedded in culture to ignore the local and focus on the national or the so-called universal.

It is the job of the writer to resist that. To 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑎𝑑𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝑜𝑓 that.

It is the job of the writer to put his hometown or his home province in the imaginations of people, specially of his own people.

Because if the writer from Pagadian or Zamboanga del Sur does not write literature about and for Pagadian or Zamboanga del Sur, nobody will.

And it is a shame, because there are entire universes in your hometowns just waiting for you to discover.

Each locale is a rich reservoir of realities waiting to be reflected upon, the setting of innumerable unique experiences and insights, where, in the words Estefanio Argall Luceño, ‘life becomes a grassy hill, where trees, Before, defied the sky – only to lift their hands and bow to die.’

And it is very appropriate that tomorrow we will be commemorating that late great Pagadianon.

Although little known by the literati outside Pagadian, Estefanio Argall Luceño, poet, essayist, historian, showed what it was to be a writer. He dared to discourse his hometown, even telling Pagadian in 1992 that ‘it is too young to be a fully urbanized city, but too old to remain a component city of the province of Zamboanga del Sur.’

Do you agree with this?

As writers of Pagadian and of Zamboanga del Sur, it is incumbent upon you to have a response, to continue the discourse Luceño initiated, and to play your organic roles in your communities as he did.

To resist against 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒈𝒏𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, to process your people’s collective experiences into contemporary relevance, giving 𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒄s of the past a renewed reverence.

Makighinuklog kamo, engage your elders and one another, argue, disagree, debate. Do not trap yourselves in the 𝒄𝒐𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒆 of Cancel Culture in which you hide in your so-called ‘safe spaces’ and justify your 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒍 𝒎𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒐𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒚 by pretending to ‘refuse sharing platforms’ with people you disagree with.

You are, after all, the unsung legislators of Zamboanga del Sur. And the laws of your provinces’ soul will not be written by the timid without deliberation.

Let the Pagadian Writers Workshop serve to bring your imaginations home, dare you to come home. As it guides you into the many particulars of literary craft, let this workshop also serve to teach you that the culmination of literary form is impact.

Let it teach you that the point of writing is to be read, and to change people’s lives, if only a little, if sometimes against their will.

Because what is a writer for if he cannot change his community?

Daghang salamat ug maayong buntag kanatong tanan.

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Photo from https://arealnews.com/karlo-antonio-galay-david/

Karlo Antonio Galay David is a multi-awarded professional Mindanaon writer who teaches at Silliman University. He is the Executive Director of the Mindanao Creative & Cultural Workers Group, Inc. which helped organize the Pagadian Writers Workshop.

About the piece

This was the author's keynote speech to the first Pagadian Writers Workshop held on March 24-25, 2021.