#PILF2019: Memory, ghosting, kilig in PHL literature
Have you ever experienced being “ghosted”? As in when someone leaves in on limbo after a seemingly great romantic connection.
Ghosting, hugot, and kilig are but a few things that were tackled the 10th Philippine International Literary Festival (PILF) which took place over the weekend in QC.
This is the 10th year of PILF, an annual gathering of content creators — authors, illustrators, publishers — to provide a venue for artistic and intellectual discourse about the most pressing matters affecting Philippine literature and book publishing.

Organized by the National Book Development Board (NBDB), the two-day fest had a theme of “Gunitâ: a pursuit of memory,” making a mark in the age of forgetting by remembering our roots and fostering new voices.
Literary connoisseurs Dr. Jaya Jacobo, Dr. Luna Sicat-Cleto, and Niles Jordan D. Breis tackled “ghosting" as an aspect of contemporary literary trope on relationships within love, work, family, and communities.
Ghosting is a killer of kilig, another compelling subject for #romanceclass, a reader/author community which discusses consent and relationships mostly for females and the LGBTQ. In one session, founder Mina V. Esguerra shared how the community has helped over 80 Filipino authors publish over 100 books in the romance genre.
Meanwhile, Titik Poetry founder John Verlin S. Santos delved on the three areas of the spoken word (writing, communication, and interpretation) in his spoken word poetry workshop Kung Paano ang Bumaon.
A Site of Memory
NBDB Chairman Flor Marie “Neni” Sta. Romana-Cruz pointed out that, despite economic deficits and the festival being Manila-centric, the literary discourse is thriving throughout the region.

Sta. Romana-Cruz commended the literary groups and institutions in the regions, which have mounted their own literary festivals across the country: the Cebu Literary Festival, PUP Literary Festival, and National Book Store’s Philippine Readers and Writers Festival.
For the NBDB chair, gunitâ or “memory” is a timely and apt theme this year.
“Literature has always served as a site of memory,” she explained, citing French historian Pierre Nora’s lieu de mémoire, “a monument of an object vested with historical memory, acting as an expression of our shared past.”
But literature should not just be a source of kilig or hugot, or a mere artifact of nostalgia.
“[Literature] is an active record of our witnessing, our victories, our failures, and our traumas. More than that, literature has served and should continue to serve as a call to arms, a reminder that we should not remain passive in the face of persecution. Literature, as a site of memory, is a starting point for investigating our history and a starting point for the pursuit for justice.”
The Imperceptible Indio
In his keynote address, National Artist for Literature Dr. Resil B. Mojares related a story, which he wrote in his essay “The Book That Did Not Exist.”
The story started with a rumor about the Augustinian botanist Fray Manuel Blanco who “was tasked by his superiors to write a definitive treaties on the nature and character of the indio, the Philippine native.”
Upon his request, the manuscript he wrote, El Indio, thick volume and bound in vellum, was opened after his death. His colleagues were struck to find nothing, but blank pages.
Whether the book was used by the friars or the reformists, it was, as Dr. Mojares pointed out, “part of a racist discourse on the congenital capacity of the indio, a being without history, an emptiness; reducing the native to a category of something less than human.”
Using the tale as a trope, he claimed that “an originary text in Philippine literature is a book that does not exist.”
“For a people with over 400 years of history, how many titles can we offer for a readable collection? If we are to map a geography of the national literary imagination, how much of this country still largely remains terra incognita?” Dr. Mojares said, asking how visible Catanduanes, Marinduque, Samar, Basilan, Surigao, Tawi-Tawi and other places are in our literature.
In the Time of Forgetting

Philippines Graphic magazine editor-in-chief Joel Pablo Salud retold the story of his Batangueno grandfather who once confronted the forest spirit he thought was responsible for the plague on his livestock. Dr. Miguel Syjuco, writer of the acclaimed novel Ilustrado, evoked his memories of the late Clinton Palanca.
For Salud, the realm of literature is “the place where language shapes stories which insist on their right to become memory: first as the author’s memory, then as literary memory, and thereafter, national memory.”
Agaw-dilim, Agaw-liwanag author Lualhati Abreu said that historical revisionism is not something new. As an example of a surge in autobiographical literature, she said that her novel was written to rectify some observations of Roberto Garcia in his book Suffer Thy Comrades.
Abreu nodded when an audience member, a product of the public school system, related that there are time jumps on the discussion of Philippine history in Aralin Panlipunan textbooks.
“Hindi lang naman ‘yung mga nag-aaral sa mga unibersidad natin ang nag-aaral ng kasaysayan. Ang lahat ng mga naoorganisa ng kilusang masa ay nag-aaral ng kasaysayan,” she pointed out.

“Nakadalaw na ba kayo sa mga lumad, ‘yung mga nag-aral sa UP (Diliman)? Mabibigla kayo. Kekuwentuhan nila kayo ng CAHRIL,” she said, referring to the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law. “Kasi itinuturo iyon sa AP sa mga eskuwelahang lumad tapos alam nila ‘yung kasaysayan ng Pilipinas.”
Stakeholders conducted sessions on promoting gender sensitivity through literary works and publishing accessible books for persons with print disability. There are also sessions on book design, vlogging, translating literary works to different media, and tabletop roleplaying games.
The festival flew in writers from as far as Mindanao. Sigwa: Climate Fiction Anthology from the Philippines contributor John Bengan and co-editor Kristine Ong Muslim talked about the book’s creation and climate change. Another Sigwa contributor and author of fiction collection Seekers of Spirits, Jude Ortega, delved into personal essays, while award-winning children’s story writer MJ Tumamac talked about translation. — LA, GMA News