First, prepare a cup of tablea tsokolate. Kapeng barako will do, but because cacao seeds arrived in the Philippines earlier than coffee through the Galleon Trade, I’ll opt for the former to pair with this book. When the chocolate brew is ready, steep yourself in the richness of both history and drink.
Every essay in this collection discloses an aspect of Philippine history that this reader was oblivious to: Mindanao was once christened “Caesarea,” Spanish maps reveal that “ships could sail in straight from the West Philippine Sea, into Balayan Bay and up a causeway straight into Taal Lake.”
But this book does not contain mere trivia: The essays also confront Manila’s dark chapters. Swastika Manila tells of how the claws of Nazism managed to reach the Philippines, and in Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves, it is exposed how Manila unfortunately became the center of the Transpacific slave trade.
Also, a Broadway show that premiered in 1902 called The Sultan of Sulu?! Written by anti-imperialist, George Ade, whose work has been praised by Mark Twain; at first glance, an unflattering and fictional depiction of a sultan of Sulu, but fundamentally a satire on America’s colonial designs in the region. It went on to have a sold-out run of 192 shows.
And while I’ve been aware of how Filipinos dominate the world of music gigs in cruise ships and clubs nowadays, thanks to Mangubat’s exploration into colonial archives there is a record showing that this is not a recent phenomenon. Over a hundred years ago, a group of talented Filipinos earned a reputation for being “foreign piano devils” when a Spanish bandmaster brought nineteen musicians to the port city of Shanghai in 1881!
The aforementioned are just the tip of the iceberg, however. It’s a book every Filipino should have on their shelf. These long-forgotten stories from Philippine colonial times have a way of making the past come alive beyond the usual facts and dates we’ve been required to memorize in our school years. Mangubat does not merely reiterate the details he uncovers through research but strings the tales captivatingly and transmits his enthusiasm for history to the reader.
As I relish in how readable these essays are, I am reminded of a historian’s line from I, Claudius: “For every word I wrote I must have read many hundreds.” Our generation is fortunate to have a Lio Mangubat in our midst who does the hard work for us and renders history a vital and accessible thing.
This reader is eager for a second cup and a second volume!
Malika Moustadraf is Morocco’s answer to Egypt’s Nawal el Saadawi whose depictions of how women are viewed and treated are unflinching. But Malika has a distinct style that draws the reader right into a scene, into the midst and into the cracks of such a society, sometimes forcing us to look through the eyes of the scoundrels themselves. I daresay she is the more masterful fiction writer. Fiction, as we know, is just a tool to reveal the rawest of truths. Read full entry here.
A Woman is a School, Celine Semaan
Even though this one did not exceed my expectations, it has its merits. I love how she writes of art as “the ultimate act of giving.” It may be enlightening to someone younger who is reading about the effects of colonialism for the first time, but readers may find more substantial memoirs and more informative books on Lebanon and Lebanese culture, and better books that encourage attentiveness to social justice.
The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams
An exceedingly apt book for Women’s Month that would also make a splendid companion read to Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman. It is this one that left my heart with a tender aching.
“Never forget that… Words are our tools of resurrection.”
The Book of Disappearance, Ibtisam Azem
In another Palestinian masterpiece, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, the entire book is a bullet in motion that hits you with a staggering force on the very last page. There is an abrupt and brutal finality. There is no closure in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. It ends without a concluding cadence and leaves the reader suspended in an unsettling limbo. But that does not imply that this book pales in comparison. Perhaps we are given a nanoscopic glimpse of what it feels like to be Palestinian. Read full entry here.
We Do Not Part, Han Kang
“Extermination was the goal. Exterminate what? The reds.” But Jeju’s inhabitants were not all reds, and yet it was easier for the military to operate by decimating the population. For nearly fifty years after the massacre, it was a crime punishable by law for a South Korean to mention the event. A huge percentage of the thousands that perished were innocent.
“Collateral damage.” That’s what they call it. Now where have I heard that term recently? Read full entry here.
Cold Nights of Childhood, Tezer Ozlu
Bursts of beauty in the prose amidst a stream of surreal disclosures from a woman grappling with mental illness and electroshock therapy. But it is ultimately a sad and disturbing portrayal of a particular societal context and its effect on the psyche, framed affectionately by Aysegul Savas’ introduction and Maureen Freely’s translator’s note. Read full entry here.
Light: Monet at Giverny, Eva Figes
An impressionist painting in book form with the most elegant feminism I have ever read.
“I’m sitting at the restaurant reading. Some books take me to worlds far greater and more tender than real life.” This line was lifted from Tezer Ozlu. She could have been referring to this book. Amidst the cacophony of social media and political rants, my mind is thankful to have been transported and softened by such a beautiful, beautiful book!
Three Filipino Women, F. Sionil Jose
This reader’s Women’s Month has usually been reserved for reading women authors, but an exception had to be made for this. Curious as to how a man would paint a portrait of the Filipino woman, I soon realized that this is more portrait of Philippine politics than it is of the Filipino woman. It is a dismal but virtuosic depiction. Three women: A politician, a prostitute, and a student activist. Maybe parable, maybe allegory, maybe both. Beyond death, F. Sionil Jose reminds me, once again, that he was the closest thing the Filipinos had to a Nobel laureate in literature.
In the heat of the 2022 election season, I read two of literature’s Roman Empire trinity: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and John Williams’ Augustus. It was, perhaps, a subconscious response to how my nation’s “history” was being crafted to suit narratives while facts were being doubted and ridiculed.
The novels led me to plead that if we dare to question history, we need also the courage to question our motives and ask ourselves what kind of people our convictions empower. That we have the son of the dictator as president is proof that my plea was futile.
As political temperatures rise once again, simply because the very same people who refused to listen to history are stewing in the consequence of their choices, I found myself drawn to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.
Writers are discouraged to begin any piece of writing with “I”. It’s clever how this book pretends to break that rule with its title and then proceeds to construct the story, not of one man, but of an empire. While I prefer the elegant prose of Hadrian and favor the compassion with which Augustus treats its subjects, especially the women, Claudius completes the trinity with its wit and brilliant insight into the inner workings of politics, power, and the process of writing history.
“…there are two ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth… and perhaps they are not irreconcilable.”
I, Claudius renders many books inconsequential and makes a reader wonder why they beat around the bush before undertaking it. The OG Game of Thrones but better, if Robert Graves will allow me such language.
Reading about corrupt rulers draining the treasury, entertaining the masses with shallow amusements and feeding them with false narratives, and all the political maneuvering and violence tells me that we have not come very far. The only difference is that, at a time when the Roman Empire transitioned from representative democracy to centralized imperial authority, the people were not to blame for electing crooks.
“I’m sitting in the restaurant reading. Some books take me to worlds far greater and more tender than real life.”
Amidst a stream of surreal disclosures from a woman grappling with mental illness and electroshock therapy, bursts of beauty in the prose.
“I want to wander down these streets and avenues, drinking everything I see, making new discoveries, watching these people who remain strangers to me, all around me, this unquenchable life that I so long to take into my heart. Could it be that there are others who find whole worlds in a single moment, who marvel in the miracle of existence, whose thoughts can purge into the depths of unfettered time and rapture? I don’t know. A single moment can hold an eternity.”
But it is ultimately a sad and disturbing portrait of a particular societal context and its effect on the psyche, framed affectionately by Aysegul Savas’ introduction and Maureen Freely’s translator’s note.
Reading this brought to mind Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, and reading this reminded me that sometimes the point of literature is not to read only about women’s lives that appeal to the reader, but to have one’s eyes opened to different kinds of suffering if only to achieve a better understanding of the world we live in.
It’s a book I can only recommend to a select few, but I know the Turkish section of my shelf is richer for compassionately clasping it to its bosom.
“What if all Palestinians vanished from their homeland overnight?”
This is the line that greets the reader on its French flap. Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, one would think that the question, and the novel, are a response to the Gaza War. Although uncannily timely, it was written in 2014.
In this story, all Palestinians disappear. There is fear, relief, and even joy. “This problem disappeared on its own. It is a divine miracle,” remarked one Israeli. Ariel, a journalist and liberal Zionist, tries to figure out what really happened and looks for traces by reading his missing friend Alaa’s letters to a dead grandmother.
The book is semi-epistolary as it alternates between Ariel’s articles and Alaa’s letters. In a clever contrast, Ariel’s articles look toward the uncertain future, while Alaa’s letters look into the past. “Perhaps I am writing out of fear. Against forgetfulness. I write to remember and to remind, so memories are not erased. Memory is my last lifeline.”
The articles and the poignant letters reveal the disparity of their personal histories: One looks at the same city as the Jaffa his people had lost; while one looks at it as Tel Aviv, with its Bauhaus architecture, the dream that came true.
In another Palestinian masterpiece, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, the entire book is a bullet in motion that hits you with a staggering force on the very last page. There is an abrupt and brutal finality.
There is no closure in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. It ends without a concluding cadence and leaves the reader suspended in an unsettling limbo. But that does not imply that this book pales in comparison. Perhaps we are given a nanoscopic glimpse of what it feels like to be Palestinian.
There has been a significant increase of Maghrebi literature in my reading repertoire, and the recent discovery of Malika Moustadraf is yet another strong force that pulls my literary compass in that direction.
She is Morocco’s answer to Egypt’s Nawal el Saadawi whose depictions of how women are viewed and treated are unflinching. But Malika has a distinct style that draws the reader right into a scene, into the midst and into the cracks of such a society, sometimes forcing us to look through the eyes of the scoundrels themselves. I daresay she is the more masterful fiction writer.
But fiction, as we know, is just a tool to reveal the rawest of truths, and Malika has succeeded in this. The tragedy is that she will no longer be writing. The few works that she leaves in her wake are glimpses of the undeniable literary powerhouse she would have become had she not passed away from a chronic illness at the age of thirty-seven in 2006.
One thing I’ve noticed in Maghrebi authors is the sensitivity and the softness of the men and the forcefulness of the women. Their literature can teach us many things, but among these is the truth that softness can be extremely masculine, and forcefulness immensely feminine.
This book was, indeed, a fitting way to start this reading month. Wishing you a rewarding Women’s Month!
“Only love and art can do this: only inside a book or in front of a painting can one truly be let into another’s perspective. It has always struck me as a paradox how in the solitary arts there is something intimately communal.”
An understated book that is a meditation and an education in art and life.
“I hope that when there is laughter, it’s laughter made wise by having known real grief — and when there is grief, it is made wise by having known real joy,” Kaveh Akbar writes in Martyr! Whether writing about art, architecture, Libya, or politics, Hisham Matar’s books are often so heartfelt — wholly made wise by having known sorrow and loss.
Fires, Marguerite Yourcenar
…because maybe, subconsciously, this month’s reading theme is about finding solace in the works of authors whose masterpieces have already left an impression on me, that I immediately dove into Yourcenar’s Fires without hesitation, having been incredibly moved by Memoirs of Hadrian in 2022.
She does admit, and warn, in the Preface that this book is, “the product of a love crisis” and that writing this was, in a way, “exorcising a very concrete love”; and yet it still surprised me that the elegance I encountered in Hadrian was replaced in Fires by a certain violence and ferociousness in the prose.
Antigone, Sappho, Clymenestra, and Achilles are just some of the main characters of the nine lyrical prose pieces, or stories, that Yourcenar amalgamates with her own experiences. I was left wondering if I understood the allusions correctly, or whether I understood anything at all.
One thing is certain, Fires is a masterclass on opening lines:
Phaedra’s piece begins with, “I hope this book will never be read.”
The Patroclus opening, “A heart is perhaps something unsavory. It’s on the order of anatomy tables and butcher’s stalls. I prefer your body.”
Lena’s? “Loving eyes closed is to love blindly. Loving eyes open is perhaps to love madly.”
“Love is a penalty. We are punished for not having been able to stay alone.” Clymenestra’s.
Face Shield Nation, Gideon Lasco
Articles that I looked forward to during the pandemic compiled in a book. Lasco was the voice of calm and reason at a time of confusion; evoking through his column the architectural definition of a column as a sturdy pillar of support. An essential time capsule of an era that we cannot afford to forget if we intend to learn from it. Read full entry here.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a re-reading)
Growing up is realizing that Gabo is the real Melquiades who brought us magnets, magnifying lenses, astronomical observations, and mercurial storytelling. It was he who made imagination and literary possibilities flourish in the fertile and pristine Macondos of our minds, and who never really died. Read full entry here.
Nothing but the Night, John Williams
Maybe the first disappointment that assails the reader is the realization that, despite the slenderness of this volume, there is a heaviness in each page that restrains forward motion.
“Boring,” the lazy might judge hastily somewhere within the first three chapters. But one should not be too quick to criticize even though I myself could only read a couple of pages per sitting. For if one looks closer, and feels deeper, isn’t this genius, how John Williams conveys exactly what depression feels like?
“…there came to him that peculiar loneliness which is felt only in the monstrous impersonality of a multitude…”“What was the senseless circumstance which led him on and on, deeper and deeper into what seemed to him a maze labyrinth, devoid of pattern or meaning? …some unnameable power pushed him from one place to another, down paths he had no wish to travel, through doors he did not know and had no wish to know. All was dark and nameless and he walked in darkness.”
But then the reader is momentarily allowed to come up for air. I’m referring to the fourth chapter that is briefly set alight with a Proustian beauty! “That is the very best time of life, he thought: lost time.” And then John Williams proceeds to craft this fleeting tribute to the master searcher of lost time before he relinquishes the ethereal chapter to the fading light.
As the novel finally builds suspense, it spirals into a nihilistic darkness that ends with a violent and repulsive slap in the face.
Written in Burma when he was only twenty-two while recovering from injuries brought about by a plane crash over the Himalayas during WWII, he wrote this first novel at a particularly dark time when there was nothing else but the night.
The John Williams here is not the John Williams that gave us Stoner and Augustus. The John Williams here is the John Williams that would eventually give us Stoner and Augustus.
The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk
This reader has been through Pamuk’s longest novels and still felt the density of the mystery and prose in this book’s mere four hundred pages.
It explores the writing process and the precariousness of identity. It is also about how much the books we read, the stories we hear, the movies we watch, the everyday objects in our lives, and our city’s history shape the multiplicities of our being.
I enjoyed that twist at the end and relished the familiarity of Istanbul as a breathing character in a Pamuk novel. But maybe, just maybe, The Black Book is not for the Pamuk newbie, and not for those who are in a hurry.
The Golden Road, Willliam Dalrymple
It is not only the Silk Roads that are rising again, as Peter Frankopan proclaims in a forceful last line that gave me goosebumps. Rising, too, are buried or forgotten histories that have now resurfaced to challenge centuries of unquestioned narratives.
Frankopan’s The Silk Roads was an eye-opener, but The Golden Road takes this non-Eurocentric view of ancient and early medieval history to an intriguing direction by revealing India as a catalyst that transformed the world. Read full review here.
It is not only the Silk Roads that are rising again, as Peter Frankopan proclaims in a forceful last line that gave me goosebumps. Rising, too, are buried or forgotten histories that have now resurfaced to challenge centuries of unquestioned narratives.
Frankopan’s The Silk Roads was an eye-opener, but The Golden Road takes this non-Eurocentric view of ancient and early medieval history to an intriguing direction by revealing India as a catalyst that transformed the world.
The evidence lies in the art discovered in Afghanistan’s mountains and caves; in the archaeological treasures of an ancient Egyptian seaport; in Baghdad where the knowledge of ancient India converged with that of ancient Greece and Abbasid viziers were Sanskrit-literate; in Spain where Sa’id Al-Andalus championed Indian contribution to mathematics and astronomy; in Pisa where Fibonacci popularized what we call “Arabic numerals” but which are actually Indian; in Roman texts, some written by Pliny; in the jungles of India, or in its museums that appear to hold more Roman coins than any other country outside the Roman Empire; in China’s overlooked history where once upon a time it looked to India for enlightenment; in Sri Lanka and Central Java where Indian Buddhist literature achieved peak expression in architecture; in Cambodia’s Angkor Wat which Dalrymple refers to as the most spectacular of all Indic temples, and where one can find the oldest inscription that represents the number zero; in Brahmagupta’s 7th century writings that made him the first mathematician to record his exploration of the properties of zero, defining it as a number akin to the other nine rather than a void; in the numbers that dictate our most advanced technology to those we use in simple day-to-day calculations, “arguably the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language…”
[…and also in, if I may add, the Philippines where currently displayed in the Ayala Museum as part of the Gold of Our Ancestors exhibit is an intricately crafted, four-kilo gold sash from 10th to 13th century Mindanao that massively echoes the sacred thread, or upavita, in Hindu culture. (Dear William Dalrymple, or your cute son, Sam, please come to the Philippines to look into this? Haha)]
To engage in this book is also to question why India’s extraordinary role in world history has been subdued. The pulsating arteries of India’s influence that crossed continents and oceans, “spread not by the sword but by the sheer power of ideas,” has been brushed aside. It has never even been given a name. William Dalrymple calls it The Golden Road.
Although I prefer the William Dalrymple who does not make the “I” completely disappear in his travelogues, thereby giving his text a more endearing and personal touch, I like how this history book is not tediously academic and does not promise to be all-encompassing. Its readability serves as an introduction for those who would like to have a general idea of these trade, cultural, and intellectual routes that seem to have a life of their own apart from — although intersecting at times — the often romanticized Silk Roads.
The prolific stream of fascinating history from Dalrymple’s writings makes this reader feel fortunate to be alive in this age of rediscovery and information. The generosity of his work is encapsulated in my favorite line from this book: “The possession of knowledge is not weakened when shared with others but made more fruitful and more enduring.”
Many years later, as she faced the esplanade, Miracle Romano was to remember that distant afternoon when her bestfriend took her to discover Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Rather than a rereading, this felt more like a revisit of our teenage years. Nostalgia accompanied me on every page. These characters who ushered us into adulthood were so real to us then. They lived in our conversations and in our heads, they colored our loves and we went through growing pains with them. Yellow flowers raining down from narra trees of Cebu’s Osmeña Boulevard would often transport us to the day of Jose Arcadia Buendia’s death. Magic realism was delivered to us by a master; it was new to us and it was… magic!
(Who was crazy enough to think they could make a successful screen adaptation?)
But how could we have dismissed how unhinged the characters actually are? How did I, a young girl, go through the depictions of sexual violence unfazed; or was I too innocent to know what that’s actually like in real life? How could we not have known that the banana company strike which led to the massacre that Jose Arcadio Segundo witnessed and which drove him to madness was a real event in Colombia; and that the banana company was relatable for Filipinos in the way first-world corporations exercise control over developing nations? And was it from GGM where GRRM drew inspiration for the aunt-nephew bonds?
But Gabo is the real Melquiades. He brought us magnets, magnifying lenses, astronomical observations, and mercurial storytelling. It was he who made imagination and literary possibilities flourish in the fertile and pristine Macondos of our minds, and who never really died.
Read Gabo when you’re young and you don’t know better. But also read Gabo when you’re older, to realize that what was Sanskrit in our innocence was ultimately a revelation about politics, time, memory, and history — “a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” — because one day you can only wish you could read Gabo again for the first time as a juvenile and simply resign to the fact that the book you are reading is a literary masterpiece.
The Book-Butterfly 