I left for Catanduanes last July 18, 2024, to participate in the seventh Pagsurat Bikol Writing Workshop. Much of that day was novelty turned remembrance – first time in a ship, first travel to Catanduanes, first workshop out of campus. Tabaco to Catanduanes was three and a half hours, enough to nap, talk with France, a fellow whom I traveled with, and marvel at Mayon and islands stretching out before me. Iriga, my hometown, was fifty or so kilometers away, yet Tabaco, Albay’s port city, was foreign, Catanduanes another planet. To have found Bikolanos who so offered themselves in one with the sea was such a novel experience. Iriga was locked in land, and hasf known only the protection of our guardian, Mt. Asog. I was introduced, for example, to the pagroronda when I was in Catanduanes, where dove-keepers free the birds by the shore in hopes of them finding another to return with to their owners. I too learned that some locals, when the moon is high and the tide is low, would collect shellfish by the rocks until the sea rises again.
This I have acknowledged long ago but only saw with my own two eyes until the workshop–even with Bikolanos identifying under the same regional identities, they are subject to the uniqueness of their experiences with the land, sea (or absence thereof), and the people that came and went. The same differences apply even to smaller geopolitical units. Iriga is fluent with the poetry of burabod and salog, the springs and the rivers, while Bato and Buhi are fluent with their ranow’s, their lakes. The two latter municipalities including Balatan, Bula, Baao, and Nabua, and the lone charter city, Iriga, make up the fifth congressional district of Camarines Sur, under one spoken tongue, Rinconada, the district’s eponymous moniker.
Rinconada is spoken mainly around the area but those areas in Pili, Polangui, and Partido district near the borders also speak the same language, with around 250, 000 speakers based on a dated 2000 census. While the 2021 census records an almost 500,000 population of the Rinconada district, the current estimated speakers are still quite difficult to approximate. Not only is the language spoken beyond the borders of the district but there is, as is the slow death of any language, lesser and lesser appreciation of the language. Younger people, I observed, find less need to maintain, much less speak the language, when learning English, Filipino, or even Bikol-Sentral as the regional language would make more practical sense. Maybe it’s the difficulty of the language, maybe it really is nearing its eventual doom, maybe it’s the overly saturated communities online that demand less specificities, identity, language and all. Maybe it’s the incessant need to leave for Metro Manila and the shunning of one’s roots – it is unsophisticated after all, as I have learned, to bring all the mountainly fashions and languages I grew up with to Manila.
Unpacking all these was quite the realization. I left for Manila last 2018 to study creative writing only to have the rose-colored filter I had going in shattered. Growing up in a quaint mountain barangay in Iriga, much of my reality centered around helping my Lola with her bananas, chatting up neighbors extemporaneously, and speaking Rinconada at home, around the neighborhood, and in school. Part of surviving college for many from out of Greater Manila is unlearning their lived realities and assimilating with the urban culture. There are no bananas for harvesting, all were sold exorbitantly in supermarkets. My neighbors in the apartment I lived in were as strange as any square unit of plantable soil. Most of all, there is no place for a language so insignificant in the face of a hallway littered with students whose factory setting is to converse in English. With assimilation, there is estrangement from one’s home, until eventually, there is nowhereness.
Resistance to estrangement was difficult, but returning home after graduation and reconfiguring back to what I went to Manila for renewed my sense of being from Rinconada. I met writers and academics from Bikol who are just as passionate in hoping to keep the Rinconada tongue alive in print and spirit. All of them were teachers and professors–what I have also been since January last year–because they do and can. It was also as a teacher when I received word of being a fellow at Pagsurat Bikol VII (PB VII).
Among issues on craft, the workshop touched on numerous issues within and outside of literature that I am very passionate about. To be perfectly frank, surprise was the initial reaction upon receiving the email inviting me as a fellow for PB VII. The workshop during its call for submission mentioned how they would prioritize writers from marginalized sectors that I, someone who was very fortunate enough to formally learn craft at a university in Manila, am not a part of. If anything, I am the opposite of it. A privilege that I still contend with but disprove through what I write and which writing circles I’d rather be with. But what I will not be guilty about and will be forever in gratitude for is how PB VII acknowledges that the economic centers of Bicol Region subsume through establishments and institutions, homogenize and hegemonize even through language, art, and literature, and that Rinconada, a language sandwiched by two of those powers, Legazpi and Naga, should be given space in an effort to subvert with compassion without spite these imbalances. I felt that PB VII was able to shed light to those issues and carve out a space for our humble mother tongue through my acceptance.
Just as how English have long dominated the universal tongue, Filipino the country, languages spoken and published within Naga and Legazpi have long been insisted to also be the regional tongue, ignoring the fact that Bikol is neither a monolith or a standard but a tapestry of interwoven identities. To find differences is an opportunity to empathize, not to justify otherness. For a region so hellbent in proving its oneness, it has never been a good look to find the language of the peripheries stagnant if not for the struggles and the endurance of the writers in those margins. This was why when I was asked for a translation of the poem, I handed it out in English – a writer in Rinconada wielding the universal language in his hand is to refuse to acknowledge the centeredness of the local center and is to threaten the imagined homogeneity of Bikol literature by weaponizing the very language that threatens it too. I find that the choice to write in English can be subversive, especially when building a local literary tradition that not only represents the same – different identities of that tapestry, but to relieve tensions of languages, importance, and centeredness. Hence, too, this essay I’m writing in English. Jose Jason Chancoco said it best – the Bikol literary tradition is an amalgam of the colonially-assimilated, national, and local cultures, and that it is not the language that gives it a Bikolnon character but the poetics and the sensibility that the work lives in.
To write in Rinconada is to also write with two goals in mind. First is to articulate into writing, in a language that doesn’t alienate such experiences, the lives of the everyday Rinconada. It is most marvelous to write in one’s mother tongue about pagtuba (banana harvesting), Mt. Asog, the endless spring of wells, Waras and Barit River, Lake Bato and Lake Buhi, the joke that one would know when they’re in Baao with the chicken poop smell, the Inorogan Chapel, or anything else under the Rinconada sun. Secondly, and what I hope the rawit (poem), I submitted for the workshop could do, is to localize concepts, ideas, and experiences that may be seen generally as a sentiment fit only for a national readership. The rawit Ki Nelia, Clarita (For Nelia, Clarita), is a poem that introduces a new image for serving the people, a banana tree, and deconstructs classical symbols of struggle and revolt. With Rinconada’s history of resistance especially during the Japanese occupation when they joined and took up arms to drive Japanese military convoys off to Naga, the poem appeals to the revolutionary spirit of Rinconada, in a language it speaks, and with an image familiar, if not dear as it is to me, to the lived realities of the Rinconada people. These goals, I find, are essential in writing Rinconada in Rinconada – writing, after all, is not just an exercise of expression as it is a process of cultural production.
Then again, Rinconada has a very long way to go, but the machinery is at work, chugging on. Just June of last year, Camarines Sur Polytechnic College, through the Center for Rinconada Culture and the Arts, has been accredited as a proponent of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and is now authorized to initiate programs that support the NCCA’s mission to maintain, deepen, and promote Philippine culture and the arts. Being a proponent, the institution may also apply for competitive grants. The CSPC-CRCA has been leading the resuscitation of appreciation for the Rinconada culture and arts and, since even before the pandemic, organizing projects and events that highlight Rinconada’s bounty of imagination.
I have been very blessed to have met and still be occasionally in touch with one of the writers here in Rinconada, Mia Tijam, who was introduced to me through my fiction professor, Christine Lao. Just February of last year, our recent victory for contemporary Rinconada literature, Ma’am Mia’s fiction collection in English, one that I still hold dear to my writerly Irigueño heart, Flowers for Thursday, has returned to the bookshelves for its second edition accompanied by Rinconada translations by Sir Elbert Baeta and Sir Kristian “Scoobs” Escobido. The National Book Awards Finalist collection has been made more accessible to the Rinconada sensibility, in a language and with the same stories home to the Rinconada imagination.
I trust that in the very near future, Rinconada will find their language more than it being spoken. A problem that all of the writers in Rinconada acknowledge is that there is still the need to transcend the orality of the language. That writing in Rinconada is not mere novelty. That there is potency in it being solemnly read through stories like Mia Tijam’s, poetry like Sir Frank Peñones Jr.’s and Sir Kristian Cordero’s, and essays and historiography like Dr. Danilo Gerona’s. That there is a necessity for translation like Sir Elbert, Sir Scoobs’, and Sir Vic Nierva’s. That there is worth in the pursuit for literary understanding through education but more importantly through communal engagement and immersion. And that those aspiring writers and literature students who dared venture Metro Manila for college like I did find that we are all indebted to our mother tongues and mother towns, and that as much craft and theory we have learned in class, they are all in vain without returning the favor back to our home provinces. Leaving Iriga back in 2018, I carried three luggageful of personal items and everytime I return, it feels like I’m carrying hundreds more.
A weight that I may have carried with me upon attending PB VII. Currently, I am a teacher at Ateneo de Manila Senior High School, trying my best to return home as a person I hope I’d be to fully serve Iriga and Rinconada to the best of my capacity. I’m a long way there, treading slowly. PB VII, realizations months since, was a reminder for that need to return home in the future. The workshop’s theme is Pagbaltas, Pag-iba, Pagdakit and for the amount of time we have, we were given all the opportunities to travel, join, and cross over respectively in their most literal to poetic sense. We circumnavigated the island in awe of endless rolls of hills and seas, joined and celebrated with community writing workshops, and crossed over from Luzon mainland in a ritualistic act of visitation and immersion with fellow Bikolanos in the island. In Rinconada, pagrakot is to move or travel to another home, and finding the welcome that Catanduanes and PB VII extended felt like the rakot that it was–comforting, loving, and community-building.
Remembering PB VII through my fellows’ holiday greetings, I hope that all these concerns on craft, language, and discourse will find its way into the consciousness of the Bikolanos. May more writing workshops be born to help budding writers and graft new literary traditions worth welcoming. May, in the future installments of Pagsurat Bikol, there be the same or even more diversity I felt with my fellows from marginalized sectors, with different languages, and from all over the Bicol Region. May writers understand the need for small and independent presses in our communities or empower writers to collectivize just as how me and my college friends did with our small literary kolek, sininggang. Most importantly, may PB VII serve as a reminder for the need to actively participate in the maintenance and development of Bikol literature.
Mabalos ag anggan sa sunod tang barayadan!
The header features a vintage photo of Mt. Asog with Iriga City in the foreground (credit: History of Iriga City from the Iriga.gov website). The photos in this article were provided by the author and Pagsurat Bikol VII.
About the author
KENT DE LIMA, a native of Iriga City but is currently teaching English and Creative Writing at Ateneo de Manila Senior High School in Quezon City, is a graduate of the University of the Philippines’ Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing Program. He attended Pagsurat Bikol VII as a fellow for poetry and writes both in English and Rinconada, the latter of the language he holds great passion for.