Tubi. Tubig. Water: building an archipelagic library

By Noel Galon de Leon

The first time I encountered the idea of the archipelago as something more than a geographical description was through poetry. I remember reading John Iremil Teodoro’s Arkipelago kang Kasingkasing: Mga Binalaybay (2009, Imprenta Igbaong–Invictus) and encountering the archipelago not simply as a collection of islands separated by water, but as a condition of being, a way of understanding identity, memory, distance, belonging, and connection. An archipelago is separation and connection at the same time. It is the island, but it is also the water that makes the island an island. For a long time, however, I think I understood the Philippines more from the perspective of land. We speak about provinces, cities, mountains, farms, roads, plazas, schools, and communities, and when we draw maps, we usually emphasize the outlines of islands. Yet between those islands is an immense body of water that is rarely given the same cultural attention as the land, even though the sea has shaped the movements, livelihoods, histories, languages, economies, conflicts, and imaginations of generations of Filipinos.

This thought returned to me recently while I was setting up TukiBása: The UP Visayas Language Program Reading Corner, which we are preparing to launch next week. After spending hours arranging books, cleaning shelves, organizing materials, and imagining how students, faculty, staff, and visitors might use the space, I received a message from Dean Fernandez, our Dean at the College of Arts and Sciences. He suggested that I include an Archipelagic and Ocean section in the reading corner. At first, I was intrigued because I had never really thought about the idea of a library section organized specifically around the Philippines as an archipelagic and maritime nation. I began doing some reading and research to understand what he might have in mind, and the more I learned, the more I realized that his suggestion was not simply about adding another category of books to a small reading corner. It was an invitation to reconsider how we understand the Philippines and how libraries themselves can participate in shaping that understanding.

An Archipelagic and Ocean library section can be understood as a thematic collection that presents the Philippines through its intimate relationship with islands, seas, oceans, rivers, coastlines, communities, languages, cultures, histories, livelihoods, biodiversity, and environmental realities. It should certainly include marine science, fisheries, oceanography, coastal management, biodiversity, and environmental studies, but I think it would be limiting to stop there. The sea should not be treated merely as a scientific object or as a physical space separating one island from another. It should also be understood as a cultural space where people work, travel, trade, migrate, remember, create, worship, struggle, and imagine. Such a collection therefore has the potential to bring together literature, anthropology, history, linguistics, political science, environmental studies, marine science, indigenous knowledge, children’s literature, visual culture, and community histories in one intellectual space.

The concept becomes particularly important when we remember that the Philippines is fundamentally an archipelagic and maritime country. Our geography is not simply a collection of landmasses surrounded by water. Water is one of the principal conditions through which Philippine society has developed. Fishing communities depend on it for food and livelihood. Traders and travelers historically crossed it to connect communities and exchange goods. Migrants have moved through maritime routes for generations. Coastal settlements developed because of their relationship with ports, rivers, bays, and seas. Indigenous and local communities have developed sophisticated knowledge about tides, currents, weather, marine resources, boats, and coastal ecosystems. Even our languages contain countless words and expressions that reveal how deeply water is embedded in everyday life. To understand the Philippines without understanding its relationship with water is therefore to understand only part of the country.

This is where I think our libraries have an important role to play. Libraries do not simply preserve information; they also communicate what a community considers important enough to collect, organize, preserve, and make accessible to future generations. When a library develops a dedicated Archipelagic and Ocean collection, it makes a statement that the sea belongs within our understanding of national culture and knowledge. It tells students that marine science is not disconnected from literature, that environmental problems are not separate from history, and that local languages are not detached from geography. A library can become the place where these seemingly separate fields meet, allowing readers to discover relationships that are often hidden when knowledge is divided strictly according to academic disciplines.

This perspective is especially meaningful at the University of the Philippines Visayas because UP Visayas already occupies a distinctive intellectual position within the Philippine university system. The university has deep expertise in fisheries, aquaculture, marine science, coastal environments, biodiversity, and other fields directly connected to the country’s marine resources and archipelagic geography. At the same time, UP Visayas is located within a region with extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, making it an ideal place to bring the sciences into conversation with language, literature, history, anthropology, and the arts. An Archipelagic and Ocean section at the UP Visayas Language Program Reading Corner could therefore become a small physical representation of the university’s larger intellectual identity, demonstrating that understanding the sea requires not only scientific knowledge but also an understanding of the people and cultures whose lives are intertwined with it.

I also find the idea particularly relevant because UP has already engaged with archipelagic and ocean studies as an interdisciplinary field. The university’s initiatives in this area recognize that the Philippines needs ways of thinking that are appropriate to its geographic, environmental, political, cultural, and economic realities as an archipelago. This means that an Archipelagic and Ocean collection does not have to be confined to marine biology or environmental science. It can explore maritime sovereignty, coastal governance, migration, trade, cultural exchange, indigenous knowledge, literature, language, climate change, food security, fisheries, and community resilience. A reading corner may be physically small, but the intellectual territory it represents can be enormous.

For Western Visayas, the importance of such a collection becomes even more immediate because water is not an abstract concept in our region. Iloilo, Guimaras, Antique, Aklan, and Capiz are deeply connected to coastal and marine environments, while the broader Visayan landscape has been shaped by the Visayan Sea, Iloilo Strait, Guimaras Strait, Panay Gulf, and numerous rivers, bays, islands, and coastal communities. Our economies, food traditions, transportation systems, tourism, fisheries, and cultural practices have developed in relation to these waters. Yet when we talk about Western Visayas, we often describe the region through provinces and political boundaries rather than through the bodies of water that connect them. An Archipelagic and Ocean collection can offer another way of seeing the region, one that recognizes that the sea is not simply a boundary between communities but also a historical and cultural connector.

This perspective can also change how we understand regional literature. Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, Capiznon, and other Philippine languages should not be treated as isolated linguistic territories that exist independently of geography and movement. Languages travel with people, and people travel across islands. Words, stories, songs, poems, beliefs, and oral traditions move along the same routes as traders, fishermen, migrants, travelers, and families. A multilingual Archipelagic and Ocean collection can therefore reveal relationships between language and landscape. It can encourage readers to ask how different communities describe water, waves, currents, storms, boats, fishing, islands, rivers, shores, and journeys, and what these words reveal about the ways communities have historically understood their environments.

This is why I believe language must be at the center of the collection rather than treated as an additional feature. If the purpose is to understand the Philippines as an archipelago, then the languages of the archipelago must be visible and audible on the shelves. A collection that contains only English-language scholarship about Philippine oceans would still be valuable, but it would remain incomplete. Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, Filipino, Cebuano, Waray, Bikol, Ilokano, Ivatan, Tausug, Sama, Maranao, Maguindanaon, and other Philippine languages should be represented whenever appropriate materials are available. Translations should also be collected because translation allows one linguistic community to encounter the knowledge, imagination, and experiences of another. In this sense, multilingual collecting becomes more than a language policy; it becomes a way of reconnecting the fragments of an archipelago.

The collection should also make space for regional literary histories and oral traditions because many forms of Philippine knowledge have survived through communities rather than through formal institutions. Books such as Corazon D. Villareal’s Siday: Mga Tulang Bayan ng Panay at Negros are important because they preserve folk poetry from Western Visayas and demonstrate how local languages carry cultural memory across generations. Alex C. Delos Santos’s works on Kinaray-a literature similarly provide an important entry point into the development and history of a regional literary tradition. The work of Alicia P. Magos on Panay oral literature, epics, ethnography, and indigenous traditions is equally significant because it demonstrates how literature, oral tradition, community knowledge, and cultural identity are inseparable. These materials should not be relegated to a small regional literature corner; within an archipelagic framework, they become essential evidence of how communities understand place and belonging.

The collection should also contain books that help readers understand the Philippines before and beyond colonial frameworks. William Henry Scott’s Barangay is important because it offers a detailed examination of sixteenth-century Philippine culture and society, including aspects of Visayan life, trade, technology, social organization, and literature. James Francis Warren’s The Sulu Zone is equally important because it presents the Sulu and surrounding maritime areas as an interconnected historical zone rather than simply as peripheral islands. Archaeological studies of the Butuan boats likewise demonstrate the importance of maritime transportation, trade, and technology in precolonial and early Philippine history. These works remind us that the sea was not merely an obstacle separating communities. It was also a highway, a marketplace, a cultural route, and a space through which people participated in wider networks across Southeast Asia.

This is where the collection can also become a decolonizing project. Much of the conventional narrative of Philippine history begins with colonial arrival and consequently risks making earlier Philippine societies appear isolated, fragmented, and disconnected. An archipelagic perspective complicates that narrative by showing that communities across the islands were already participating in systems of exchange and interaction. The movement of people and goods across maritime Southeast Asia challenges the idea that Philippine communities existed as isolated islands waiting to be connected by colonial powers. A library that deliberately collects books about maritime trade, traditional boats, migration, indigenous knowledge, oral traditions, and precolonial societies can therefore help students imagine Philippine history from perspectives that do not begin and end with colonial encounters.

The southern Philippines must also occupy an important place in this collection because the archipelago cannot be adequately understood through a Luzon and central Visayas perspective alone. The Sulu Archipelago, Sulu Sea, Celebes Sea, Mindanao, Palawan, and neighboring maritime regions have long been spaces of movement, exchange, political negotiation, cultural interaction, and conflict. Books on Tausug, Sama, Maranao, Maguindanaon, and other communities can help readers understand the Philippines as part of a wider maritime world. The Darangen epic of the Maranao people, for example, demonstrates how literature can preserve history, social values, mythology, political memory, and worldview. Including such works alongside studies of maritime history and ecology allows the library to present culture not as something detached from geography but as something produced through relationships between people and their environments.

At the same time, an Archipelagic and Ocean collection must confront the environmental crisis facing our seas. The Philippines possesses extraordinary marine biodiversity, including coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass ecosystems, fisheries, and other coastal resources, but these ecosystems face pressures from overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, coastal development, and other human activities. These problems cannot be understood only through scientific reports because environmental degradation is also a social and cultural issue. When a reef disappears, a community can lose food, income, traditions, and knowledge. When a coastline is transformed, people may lose access to places that have shaped their families for generations. When traditional ecological knowledge disappears without documentation, we lose not only information about the environment but also part of our cultural memory.

This is why the collection should include books about environmental justice and community resilience alongside scientific publications. Students should be able to read about coral reefs and then encounter the experiences of people who depend on those reefs. They should be able to study climate change and then read personal narratives about communities experiencing stronger storms, coastal erosion, flooding, displacement, or changing fisheries. They should encounter research about marine biodiversity alongside stories, photographs, poetry, and children’s books that make the ocean emotionally and culturally accessible. The purpose is not to replace scientific knowledge with literary or cultural perspectives but to allow different forms of knowledge to speak to one another, because the environmental problems confronting the Philippines are too complex to be understood from only one discipline.

For this reason, I would organize the collection into several interconnected areas rather than one general shelf. There could be sections on Philippine Archipelagic Studies, Oceans and Marine Science, Fisheries and Coastal Livelihoods, Maritime History and Trade, Traditional Boats and Navigation, Indigenous and Coastal Knowledge, Philippine Languages and Translation, Literature and Creative Writing, Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Climate Change and Environmental Justice, Maritime Law and the West Philippine Sea, and Local Histories and Oral Archives. There could also be a small section devoted to visual materials such as maps, photographs, illustrations, comics, and documentation of coastal communities. Such an arrangement would allow readers to enter the collection through different interests while still revealing the larger relationship among the materials.

I would particularly like to see children’s literature become a significant part of the collection because our understanding of the ocean must begin early. Children need books that present Philippine seas not merely as beautiful places for tourism but as living environments inhabited by communities and species that deserve protection. We need more picture books about fisherfolk, island children, mangroves, coral reefs, boats, storms, marine animals, coastal traditions, and indigenous ecological knowledge. We need stories in Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, Filipino, and other Philippine languages because children should be able to encounter environmental ideas in the languages through which they first understand home. A child who learns to see the sea as part of culture, livelihood, memory, and responsibility may grow into an adult who understands that protecting the ocean is also protecting communities.

There is also an opportunity to make the collection interactive and linguistic rather than simply bibliographic. I imagine a small display called “Words of Water” where readers can encounter words for water, sea, river, rain, waves, tides, shore, boat, fishing, storm, island, and other maritime concepts across Philippine languages. Such a display would immediately demonstrate the linguistic diversity of the country while also encouraging students to investigate how vocabulary reflects lived experience. Some communities may have highly specific terms for environmental phenomena because those phenomena are important to their livelihoods and survival. The words themselves can become starting points for research, translation, creative writing, oral history, and comparative cultural studies.

This kind of collection can offer enormous benefits to libraries throughout Western Visayas. Public libraries could use it for community education and environmental awareness. School libraries could connect it with science, social studies, literature, and language classes. University libraries could support interdisciplinary research on marine science, culture, history, and environmental studies. Museum and heritage libraries could connect maritime materials with artifacts and exhibitions. Local government libraries could use the collection to support discussions about fisheries, disaster preparedness, coastal development, and environmental management. Independent reading spaces can make the subject accessible to ordinary readers who may never encounter academic marine research but who have personal connections to rivers, beaches, fishing communities, islands, and coastal towns.

The model can eventually extend beyond Western Visayas and become a national library movement. Different regions could develop collections that reflect their own maritime realities while remaining connected to one another. Batanes could foreground Ivatan knowledge, island resilience, traditional architecture, fishing, and typhoons. Palawan could emphasize biodiversity, island communities, maritime boundaries, migration, and conservation. Eastern Samar could collect works on coastal life, typhoons, disaster resilience, and fishing. Tawi-Tawi could foreground Sama and Tausug cultures, maritime mobility, traditional boats, trade, and the Sulu Sea. Surigao could explore Pacific-facing communities, islands, fishing, mining, and environmental transformation. Each collection would be local, but together they would create a national network of maritime knowledge.

Such a network could also encourage publishers, writers, artists, researchers, librarians, teachers, and cultural institutions to produce and preserve more materials about Philippine maritime life. We need more children’s books about our seas, more poetry about islands and coastal communities, more oral histories of fisherfolk, more documentation of traditional boats and navigation, more translations of regional literature, more research on women’s work in coastal economies, more books about climate migration, more accessible studies of maritime law, and more community publications that allow people to document themselves. We cannot build meaningful collections if we continue producing knowledge only about communities rather than knowledge with and by communities. An Archipelagic and Ocean library project can therefore stimulate not only collecting but also publishing, research, translation, documentation, and community participation.

I think the most important question is what kind of consciousness we want our libraries to cultivate. A library collection is never completely neutral because every act of selection says something about what we consider worthy of attention and preservation. When we acquire a book written in a Philippine language, we affirm that language matters. When we preserve the oral history of a fishing community, we affirm that community memory matters. When we collect indigenous ecological knowledge, we recognize that knowledge does not have to originate inside a university to possess intellectual value. When we place a scientific study of coral reefs beside a poem about the sea, we create the possibility of a conversation between evidence and imagination, between ecological knowledge and cultural memory, and between the measurable world and the world that people experience emotionally.

This is why I now see the Archipelagic and Ocean section not simply as another shelf for TukiBása but as a possible philosophy for the reading corner itself. The reading corner can become a place where land and sea meet through books, where a student from Panay can encounter a story from Tawi-Tawi, where a reader of Hiligaynon can discover an Ivatan word, where a marine science student can read a poem about a fishing village, and where a literature student can discover the ecological realities behind the landscape described in a story. The collection can create encounters that classrooms sometimes cannot provide because libraries allow readers to wander across disciplines, languages, regions, and generations according to their own curiosity.

Perhaps this is what I was beginning to understand when I returned to the shelves after Dean Fernandez suggested the idea. He may have been asking me to add books about the ocean, but I now think the deeper invitation was to make the reading corner reflect the reality of the place where we are. We are in the Visayas, in a university deeply connected to marine science and coastal communities, within a country whose history has been shaped by water. The ocean is not somewhere outside the library. It is already part of our lives, our languages, our literature, our food, our economy, our histories, our environmental struggles, and our imagination. The question is whether our libraries will make that relationship visible.

I also keep returning to the word tubi. In Hiligaynon, water is tubig, and water can take many forms and meanings depending on where and how we encounter it. It can be river water, rainwater, seawater, drinking water, floodwater, spring water, sacred water, dangerous water, or life-giving water. Different Philippine languages give water different names and associations, but beneath these linguistic differences is a common human dependence. Perhaps that is why the title Tubi. Tubig. Water. feels appropriate to me. It begins with language, moves toward geography, opens into history and literature, and eventually arrives at ecology, politics, memory, and survival. A single element becomes a way of reading an entire country.

I would like to imagine that the Archipelagic and Ocean collection at TukiBása can eventually become more than a collection of books. It can become a meeting place for students, teachers, writers, scientists, artists, researchers, librarians, and communities who want to understand the Philippines from the perspective of its waters. It can encourage small research projects, reading lists, book talks, storytelling sessions, poetry readings, children’s activities, exhibitions, translation projects, oral history documentation, and conversations about environmental responsibility. It can also become a model that other libraries can adapt according to their own regions, languages, communities, and ecosystems. A small shelf may not change the country, but it can change the questions a reader asks, and sometimes a different question is where a different understanding begins.

The Philippines has always been connected by water, even when our political maps make the islands appear separate. Our challenge is to make our libraries reflect that reality and to recognize that there is no empty space between one island and another. There are routes, histories, languages, livelihoods, memories, communities, ancestors, stories, and living ecosystems within those waters. There are also conflicts, inequalities, environmental threats, and unresolved questions about who has access to resources and who bears the cost when those resources are damaged. To read the archipelago honestly means reading all of these realities together, not romanticizing the sea but neither reducing it to a problem to be solved. The ocean is part of who we are, and our relationship with it demands both critical thought and care.

As I return to the shelves of TukiBása, I am beginning to imagine that small Archipelagic and Ocean section differently. I no longer see it simply as a place for books about marine science, islands, or the environment. I see it as a small intellectual map of the Philippines, a place where different languages, disciplines, communities, histories, and imaginations can meet through the shared presence of water. Perhaps a student will pick up a book about a sea she has never crossed. Perhaps another reader will discover a language he has never heard. Perhaps a child will encounter a story that teaches her to see a mangrove not simply as a tree but as part of a living ecosystem. Perhaps a researcher will find an overlooked regional publication that opens a new field of inquiry. Perhaps a reader will simply sit quietly, read a poem about the sea, and recognize something familiar in it.

For a country made of islands, perhaps this is precisely what our libraries can help us recover. We need to stop thinking of the sea only as the blank space between places and begin reading it as a place of connection, memory, movement, culture, livelihood, conflict, imagination, and life. We need collections that allow one island to hear another and one language to encounter another. We need libraries that do not merely preserve books about the Philippines but help Filipinos understand the relationships that have always connected us. And perhaps somewhere in that small reading corner at UP Visayas, among books in Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, Filipino, English, and other Philippine languages, we can begin to cultivate a different way of seeing ourselves, not simply as people living on islands, but as people whose histories and futures have always been shaped by water.

Tubi. Tubig. Water. Three words that seem simple enough, yet behind them is an entire archipelago. Behind them are islands and shores, boats and journeys, fisherfolk and children, poems and epics, languages and memories, coral reefs and mangroves, storms and migrations, histories and futures. If our libraries can bring these stories together, then perhaps a shelf about the ocean can become something much more significant. It can become an invitation to read the Philippines differently, to understand that the spaces separating us can also be the spaces connecting us, and to recognize that caring for the water is ultimately an act of caring for the people, cultures, languages, and communities that have always called this archipelago home.

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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.