Toward a West Visayan reading library for children

By Noel Galon de Leon

I grew up without children’s books written in my own language. As a child, I encountered books, but very few of them allowed me to see Hiligaynon as a language of stories, imagination, and literature. The books that reached me were largely written in English or Filipino, languages that were treated as the natural languages of books, education, and reading. Hiligaynon belonged somewhere else. It was the language spoken at home, in the neighborhood, in the market, in conversations with relatives, and in ordinary moments of everyday life. It was the language of affection, jokes, scolding, storytelling, and community, but it was rarely the language I encountered between the covers of a children’s book. Looking back, I realize that this was not simply a personal absence. It was a reflection of a larger problem in our literary and educational system. We asked children to become readers while giving them relatively few opportunities to read themselves, their families, their communities, and their languages into the books placed before them.

This personal experience is one of the reasons why the idea of a West Visayan Reading Library for Children matters deeply to me. I do not see the project simply as an effort to establish another collection of children’s books. I see it as an opportunity to correct an absence that many children in Western Visayas may still experience today. The question is not merely whether children have access to books. The more important question is whether they have access to books that speak to them. A child may have a shelf full of beautifully produced books and still experience literary invisibility if none of those books acknowledge the language spoken at home, the landscape surrounding the child, the food on the family table, the stories told by grandparents, or the cultural realities of the community. Access without representation is incomplete. A library can be full and still feel empty to a child.

This is why curation matters. To curate is to make deliberate choices about what deserves to be placed before readers. It is not simply collecting whatever books happen to be available, donated, popular, inexpensive, or commercially successful. Curation is an intellectual and cultural responsibility. Every book placed on a library shelf participates in the formation of a child’s understanding of the world. The books we select tell children which languages matter, whose experiences are worth reading, what kinds of characters can become heroes, what communities deserve to be represented, and which stories are considered important enough to preserve. In this sense, curating a children’s collection always carries cultural implications. It is an act of cultural decision-making. When we choose to include a Hiligaynon picture book, a Kinaray-a folktale, or an Aklanon story, we are not merely adding another title to a shelf. We are making a statement that these languages and the communities that speak them belong in the literary lives of children.

The absence of books in regional languages is particularly troubling because Western Visayas is not culturally or linguistically empty. It has an extraordinarily rich literary and oral heritage. Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, and Aklanon carry generations of stories, expressions, beliefs, humor, songs, memories, and knowledge. Yet the availability of children’s books in these languages does not always correspond to the richness of the cultures they represent. This contradiction should force us to ask uncomfortable questions. How can we expect children to value their mother tongue if their own language is almost invisible in the books they are encouraged to read? How can we tell children that regional languages are important when the publishing industry continues to produce far more books in dominant languages? How can we claim that we are promoting reading if the first literary mirror available to many children does not reflect their linguistic reality?

For me, this is where the idea of an ideal book collection becomes important. An ideal collection does not mean a collection with the largest number of books. It does not mean filling shelves with bestsellers or accumulating books simply because they are available. An ideal collection is purposeful. It is carefully selected according to the developmental needs of children, the cultural realities of the community, the diversity of languages, the quality of the literature, and the different ways children experience the world. It should contain books that children want to read and books that challenge them to think. It should contain books that make them laugh, books that frighten them, books that make them curious, books that introduce difficult questions, and books that help them understand experiences different from their own. Most importantly for a West Visayan library, it should contain books in which children can recognize their own linguistic and cultural worlds.

A truly ideal collection for children in Western Visayas should therefore begin with Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, and Aklanon literature. These languages should not be treated as supplementary materials that occupy a small corner of the library. They should be part of the central intellectual and cultural identity of the collection. Hiligaynon children’s literature can provide young readers with stories that sound like the language they hear from parents and grandparents. Kinaray-a literature can provide children from Antique and other Kinaray-a-speaking communities with the opportunity to see their language transformed into literary text. Aklanon literature can create similar possibilities for children in Aklan. The presence of these languages is important not only because of language preservation but because reading in one’s own language can create a sense of recognition. The child can finally encounter a book and think, perhaps for the first time, “Amo man ini ang hambal namon.” That moment of recognition can be more powerful than any formal lesson about cultural pride.

The collection should include original picture books, early readers, poetry, folktales, comics, nonfiction, biographies, and contemporary stories written in these regional languages. It should also include translations. Translation is particularly important because it can demonstrate that regional languages are not confined to traditional stories or local subjects. A Hiligaynon translation of a story originally written in another Philippine language can place Hiligaynon within a broader literary conversation. A Kinaray-a translation of a contemporary children’s story can demonstrate that the language can accommodate modern themes. An Aklanon translation of an international picture book can allow children to encounter the world without requiring them to leave their linguistic home. Translation, in this context, becomes a form of linguistic empowerment because it expands what children can read in their own languages.

The collection must also preserve and reintroduce West Visayan oral traditions and folktales. Many children today may know more fictional characters from international popular culture than characters from the oral traditions of their own communities. This is not necessarily the fault of children. Children read what is made available to them. If a local story has never been adapted into a beautiful picture book, professionally illustrated, translated, distributed, and placed within a library, we cannot simply blame children for not knowing it. The responsibility belongs partly to writers, publishers, educators, cultural workers, librarians, institutions, and communities. A folktale becomes more likely to survive when it is given new literary forms that children can encounter. The task, however, is not to fossilize folklore. We should allow traditional stories to be retold, questioned, illustrated, translated, and reimagined while respecting their cultural contexts.

But I also believe that a West Visayan children’s collection must be careful not to romanticize the region. There is a danger in creating a collection that presents Western Visayas only through festivals, colorful costumes, local food, beautiful landscapes, and nostalgic memories. These things matter, but they are not the whole region. Children also live in cities, crowded neighborhoods, rural communities, fishing villages, schools, farms, and rapidly changing urban environments. They experience poverty, migration, separation from parents, digital technology, environmental problems, bullying, disability, changing family structures, and social inequality. They have questions about gender, identity, friendship, belonging, and the future. A contemporary regional children’s library should have the courage to include these realities. If regional literature only shows children the beautiful parts of their community, it becomes tourism literature rather than children’s literature.

This is why I would insist that the collection include books about local environments and ecological realities. Western Visayas is surrounded by water and shaped by islands, rivers, coastlines, farms, mountains, forests, and marine ecosystems. Children should encounter stories about the Iloilo River, the islands and waters around Guimaras, the landscapes of Antique, the coastal communities of Capiz, the cultural and environmental landscapes of Aklan, and the many ecosystems of Panay. These books can help children understand that place is not simply scenery. A river is connected to livelihood, memory, pollution, transportation, history, and community. A coastline is connected to food, climate, fishing, tourism, and survival. A mountain is connected to biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Children’s environmental literature should therefore move beyond simple messages about loving nature and help children understand the complicated relationships between people, communities, and the places they inhabit.

The collection should also include books about the histories and people of Western Visayas, but these should not be limited to the familiar names found in textbooks. Children deserve stories about writers, artists, teachers, farmers, fisherfolk, workers, community leaders, indigenous peoples, women, young people, and ordinary families whose lives have shaped the region. History should not be presented only as a sequence of heroes and dates. A child should be able to discover that history is also made by ordinary people. This approach can make regional history more intimate and meaningful. Instead of asking children merely to memorize the past, literature can encourage them to understand how people experienced it.

At the same time, the West Visayan Reading Library should not become inward-looking. A regional library should be a window as much as it is a mirror. If local books function as mirrors that allow children to recognize themselves, books from other Philippine regions and other countries function as windows that allow them to encounter experiences beyond their own. The collection should therefore include children’s literature in Cebuano, Waray, Ilokano, Bikol, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Maranao, Tausug, and other Philippine languages. This is important because Western Visayan children should understand that their regional identity exists within a larger multilingual Philippine nation. The Philippines should not be presented to them as a country with one language, one culture, and one narrative.

The same principle should guide the inclusion of international children’s literature. Children in Western Visayas deserve access to stories from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, the Pacific, and other parts of the world. They should encounter children who live in different climates, speak different languages, practice different traditions, and inhabit different social realities. But the purpose of international literature should not be to replace local literature. It should be to create dialogue with it. A Hiligaynon story can stand beside a Japanese picture book. A Kinaray-a folktale can be read alongside an African folktale. An Aklanon story can converse with a story from Indonesia. In this arrangement, the child does not have to choose between being local and being global. The child learns that being deeply rooted in one place can be the beginning of understanding many other places.

This is perhaps the most important principle behind the West Visayan Reading Library for Children. We should not build a library that teaches children to escape their culture before they can understand it. We should build a library that gives them enough confidence in their own language and identity to encounter the rest of the world without feeling that their own culture is inferior. My own childhood experience reminds me why this matters. When a child rarely encounters their own language in books, the absence can become normalized. The child may eventually believe that books are supposed to sound different from home. That serious literature belongs to English. That school knowledge belongs to Filipino or English. That Hiligaynon belongs to ordinary conversation. That regional languages are spoken but not necessarily written, published, illustrated, studied, or preserved in children’s literature. We need to challenge that assumption.

The library, then, can become a small but meaningful intervention against that hierarchy. It can tell children that Hiligaynon is not merely a language they inherited but a language in which they can imagine. Kinaray-a is not merely a language spoken by people in certain communities but a language capable of carrying complex stories and ideas. Aklanon is not merely a language associated with a particular province but a literary language deserving of space, publication, readership, and preservation. The presence of these languages on the shelves can challenge the old hierarchy in which some languages are considered naturally literary while others are treated as secondary.

In the end, curating the West Visayan Reading Library for Children is a personal project for me because it addresses something I did not have as a child. I grew up without enough books that spoke to me in Hiligaynon. I cannot change that childhood experience, but I can imagine a different experience for the children who will enter this library. I imagine a child opening a picture book and immediately recognizing the language. I imagine another child discovering a story from Antique written in Kinaray-a. I imagine a young reader from Aklan finding an Aklanon story and realizing that the language heard at home can also live on a library shelf. I imagine children moving from these books toward literature in other Philippine languages and eventually toward the literature of the world. That movement is important. It means that the library does not merely give children books. It gives them a point of departure.

The ideal West Visayan children’s collection, therefore, should not be measured simply by the number of books it contains. Its success should be measured by the number of children who finally see their languages represented, the number of stories that are rescued from obscurity, the number of conversations created across regional cultures, and the number of children who learn that their own community is worthy of literature. The collection should be rooted in Western Visayas but never trapped within it. It should begin with Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, and Aklanon, expand toward the many languages of the Philippines, and eventually open toward the literature of the world.

For a child like the one I once was, this kind of library could have meant something profound. It could have helped me articulate a question I did not know how to ask at the time: “Can a language I hear every day also belong inside a book?” The answer should be an unequivocal yes. And perhaps that is the real purpose of curating an ideal collection for the West Visayan Reading Library for Children. It is not simply about putting books on shelves. It is about making sure that when children open those books, they discover not only other worlds but also the value of the world from which they came.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.