Author: Jose Duke S. Bagulaya
To write in Waray is a long and lonely struggle. The readership is miniscule, and publication is a long shot. One writes with a fear that all the poems will come to naught for lack of support from the general public and the institutions of government. One writes with a feeling that writing in the mother tongue is an act of futility, if not vanity. One writes not just against the marginality of the language but against the marginality of writing itself.
Set against this backdrop, Linara nga mga Pulong (Woven Words), a collection of about a hundred poems in Waray and their translations into English, signifies a defiance of historical and geopolitical marginalization of regional languages in the Philippines. It affirms the vitality of a people’s literary sensibility and poetic tradition, which, in not a few ways, deviate from the modernist visions of the hegemonic strands of Philippine literature.
C.2017 / UPP