The essay after the margin

By Noel Galon de Leon

One of the most revealing discoveries in reading In Transit: Selected Works from Bangsamoro Literary Review 2021–2025 is that many of its essays refuse to behave like the essays most of us were taught to write. They do not begin with a thesis to be defended or an argument to be neatly proven. They move instead through memory, geography, food, family, history, religion, language, and silence. They circle around an idea rather than assault it. They understand that some truths cannot be reached through direct argument but only through accumulation, through returning to a memory from another angle, through allowing history and personal experience to converse with each other. This is perhaps the anthology’s most radical contribution. It quietly proposes another way of writing essays in the Philippines.

For decades, the Philippine essay has largely been imagined through metropolitan traditions. Whether academic or literary, many essays privilege clarity, coherence, and linearity. The writer is expected to organize experience into an orderly sequence and arrive at a satisfying conclusion. The Bangsamoro writers in In Transit complicate this expectation. They write as though identity itself is unfinished. Their essays proceed through fragments because Bangsamoro history itself has been fragmented by colonialism, displacement, war, migration, and misunderstanding. Their craft refuses the illusion that life can always be organized into tidy conclusions.

This is immediately visible in Nurmina S. Abdul’s “Writing Process.” On the surface, the essay appears to be about becoming a writer. Yet it quickly becomes something far more unsettling. Writing is inseparable from learning how to hold a pencil, from the memory of prayer, from the trauma of the Mamasapano massacre, from being misunderstood as a creative writing student, from confronting internalized prejudice toward one’s own people. Abdul does not romanticize writing as inspiration. She understands writing as emotional labor and ethical responsibility. Her declaration that “I have to feel, I have to remember, I have to retell” becomes more than a personal statement. It becomes a philosophy of essay writing. The essay exists because forgetting is dangerous.

This insistence on memory appears again in Nathara Mugong’s “Where the Sea Remembers, Tawi-Tawi and Its Longings.” Here, longing itself becomes a literary structure. The essay refuses the tourist gaze that has long reduced Tawi-Tawi either to paradise or to conflict. Instead, Mugong writes from inside homesickness. She constructs place not through landmarks but through inherited songs, family stories, music, ocean currents, historical wounds, and collective desire. The result is remarkable because the essay demonstrates that place is not merely geographic. It is emotional, historical, and cultural memory operating simultaneously. The essay does not explain Tawi-Tawi. It inhabits it.

Equally striking is Datu Shariff Pendatun’s “Partaking,” perhaps one of the anthology’s most intellectually ambitious essays. Pendatun understands that food writing is never simply about cuisine. Every ingredient becomes historical evidence. Every forgotten spice points toward interrupted trade routes, colonial encounters, and erased cultural memory. By tracing Maguindanaon food traditions, he reconstructs histories that conventional textbooks have neglected. The essay transforms culinary memory into historical criticism. This is a significant intervention in Philippine nonfiction. It suggests that recipes can function as archives and that taste itself can become historical methodology.

Meanwhile, Diandra Ditma A. Macarambon’s “Children’s Festival and My Dad’s Gifts” demonstrates how childhood memoir can expose religious prejudice more effectively than political rhetoric. The essay recalls a Muslim child who longed to believe in Santa Claus, not because of theology but because every child longs to belong. Rather than condemning misunderstanding through anger, Macarambon presents her father’s profound generosity. He secretly became Santa Claus so his children would experience the happiness shared by their Christian classmates. His statement, “A child shouldn’t be tainted by this world’s cynicism and discord,” quietly dismantles decades of sectarian suspicion. The essay reminds readers that compassion often survives where ideology fails.

Then comes Afdal B. Kunting’s “When You Hear Hoofbeats,” perhaps the anthology’s clearest demonstration of how personal essays can function as cultural history. Traffic in Zamboanga becomes an entry point into migration, multilingualism, family genealogy, Chinese ancestry, religious hybridity, disappearing neighborhoods, and childhood memory. Kunting never treats identity as singular. Instead, identity emerges through overlapping inheritances. Islam, Catholicism, Buddhism, Chinese ancestral rituals, and local traditions coexist within one family without anxiety. His essay quietly rejects the rigid categories through which outsiders frequently understand Bangsamoro identity.

Perhaps this is what distinguishes these essays from much contemporary Philippine creative nonfiction. They rarely position the self as the center of the narrative. The “I” continually opens itself toward community. Family histories become regional histories. Personal memories become political archives. Food becomes historiography. Language becomes evidence of migration. Childhood becomes religious dialogue. The self is never isolated. It is relational.

This challenges one of the dominant tendencies in contemporary memoir, particularly those influenced by Western creative nonfiction, where the essay often revolves around self-discovery as its ultimate destination. The Bangsamoro essays in In Transit seem less interested in discovering the self than in locating the self within generations, histories, and communities. Identity is never invented individually. It is inherited, questioned, negotiated, and shared. The essay therefore becomes an act of cultural restoration rather than personal confession.

The anthology also proposes a different ethics of nonfiction. Many essays refuse spectacle. Despite living through histories of armed conflict, displacement, discrimination, and political violence, these writers seldom exploit trauma for emotional effect. Conflict remains present, but it is never allowed to define Bangsamoro existence completely. Instead, readers encounter gardens, kitchens, beaches, festivals, grandparents, prayers, music, horses, spices, childhood games, and family rituals.

This is perhaps the anthology’s most provocative achievement. It refuses the literary marketplace’s expectation that Bangsamoro literature must continually explain violence. There is another lesson here for Philippine literature. Too often, writers from marginalized communities are expected to become ethnographers of themselves, endlessly translating their cultures for metropolitan readers. In Transit resists this demand. These essays are not written to satisfy curiosity. They are written because these lives deserve literature. They do not ask permission to exist. They simply exist on their own terms.

What finally emerges from In Transit is not simply an anthology of excellent essays. It is an alternative theory of the essay itself. The Bangsamoro essay, as these writers collectively demonstrate, is not merely reflective prose. It is an archive of belonging. It is cultural criticism disguised as memoir. It is history written through kitchens, shorelines, classrooms, festivals, prayers, and family conversations. It understands that the personal is never detached from geography, politics, or ancestry.

For Philippine creative writing, this anthology should not remain at the margins of literary discussion. It should be read as a challenge to the craft itself. If these essays teach us anything, it is that the future of the Philippine essay may no longer be found in the familiar centers of literary production. It may already be unfolding in the Bangsamoro, where writers have transformed memory into method, belonging into structure, and the essay into one of the most powerful forms of cultural survival.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.