Essay collections and a kid’s book that spurs imagination
IT’S Manila International Book Fair (MIBF) season, the perfect time to add titles to your shelves. Here’s a set of books that go together for family reading, with two essay collections for the grownups and an illustrated book for the young and young at heart.
The Holy Wife: Stories of Extraordinary Love
This slim volume is a memoir about a woman’s experiences of life, love, and loss that inspire her to conceive of God’s “feminine side.” Ting PantojaMañalac, the writer of these wry and selfreflective musings, lived and worked as an expat in many places around the world, including the
United States where she was a family crisis counselor. She recounts the path traced by her life from childhood to adulthood, and how, during times of uncertainty, change, and tragedy, she saw the hand of God guiding her and providing solace, wisdom, and lessons on love.
Each essay focuses on a particular incident in Ting’s life and the lesson learned from it. She first takes us through her adolescent years as a student at Catholic girls’ school St. Paul’s, her time in college, a stint as a chemistry teacher at the University of the Santo Tomas. At each point, trouble bubbles up, but the gentle hand of God gives her little miracles that help her survive each trial with grace and gratitude.
She gave up her teaching job to join her geologist husband abroad as an expat’s wife. Not one to stay idle at home, she decided to go for a master’s degree in human relations at the University of Oklahoma. No way, said the program head – your undergrad degree is in biochemistry! She jumped all the hurdles placed in her way, and eventually graduated with a 4.0 average. She knows who to credit for smoothing her way.
Deeper tragedies occur throughout the years, including the untimely death of one of her sons in the week of 9/11. The grief was an abyss she climbed out of only through the grace of God. “Did He actually pick me up?” she asks. “Did I feel His arms around me? I don’t know how to answer that, but in my mind, I heard His voice: ‘With every breath you take, you will feel my love course through your body.’ And it did.” The rest of the book details other incidents in her life, and they make for interesting reading, not only for the life lessons, but also because they show how the choices and decisions made by an individual shape and impact the trajectory of their life. Throughout it all, Ting’s faith in a gentle, nurturing deity helps her keep her courage up: “Divine consolation, it is apparently called, when God just comes to comfort you directly, no agents this time, just Himself with that…that big, big love. I call it extraordinary love…God may be a man, but He has the heart of a woman.”
Calling Out the Destruction: Meditations on Violence and Transcendence
After the success of his previously essay collections (check out my favorite, Radiant Void: Reportage published by Visprint in 2014), raconteur and pop culture critic Karl R. de Mesa returns with a new collection of pieces he’s written through the years on subjects ranging from fight sports to a profile of an actress in a pivotal sapphic role.
In his introduction to the book, poet and broadcaster Quintin Pastrana writes about De Mesa: “Always the fanboy but never the lackey, he navigates engagements with his subjects unapologetically.”
Right away, the first essay plunges us into an amazing story about “a beauty queen in exile.” Sounds like a puff piece? Nope, and far from it. It’s a story about Bahareh Z. Bahari, who competed in the Miss Intercontinental beauty pageant in 2018 representing Iran. She is also a women’s rights activist who had to remain in exile in the Philippines, where she was taking a dentistry course, rather than face certain rape and execution in her country.
De Mesa’s reportage skills also shine in another strong piece, this one on Fil-Italian model Ambra
Gutierrez. She testified in the #MeToo case against a disgraced movie mogul that led to the latter’s conviction for rape. “This young woman,” De Mesa writes, “sitting at a New York City Police Department sexual victims desk in 2015 and her j’accuse was what started Harvey Weinstein on the road to a prison sentence.”
There’s also a savory piece on actress Rhian Ramos, who at the time of writing was fresh off portraying a sapphic role on a soap. Juxtapose these essays about strong women with De Mesa’s impassioned discourses on fight culture that ask: “For centuries, unarmed combat practitioners have sought to answer the question: which martial style is the best?” De Mesa figures it’s not the art, it’s the fighter: “A fighter must learn everything from the striking, clinching, and grappling arts to truly be ‘the best.’”
This collection deserves more praise than I have space for here. “[There’s] a phenomenology about these profiles that infuses enough arms-length coverage,” writes Pastrana almost in awe, “while keeping the intimacy alive enough to widen a keyhole into lives behind the klieg or octagon lights.” Run, don’t walk, to your nearest book purveyor to buy a copy of this tome.
The Mountain That Grew
Multi-awarded author Alfred A. Yuson adds to his hefty catalog of over 35 literary titles this charming yet thought-provoking story for children, lavishly illustrated by Ilana Antonio and Marcel Antonio.
The setting is the island of Manao. On the island rises Mt. Lariq. It is nearly bald; “nearly all its trees had been cut down” to make boats for islanders who wanted to leave “to seek better fortune elsewhere.”
But then, Ka Liser, one of the islanders, notices that the mountain starts getting taller! New plants start to grow and cover the higher parts of Mt. Lariq. Word is sent to those who left, and they start coming back. Ka Liser leads them up and up, closer to the summit, where “lush valleys gave way to grass-carpeted meadows, where tiny brilliant flowers ringed crystal ponds that reflected the looming nearness of the sky.”
Other events start to unfold, until readers reach an ending that is simultaneously epiphanic and ambiguous. It will take a creative and expansive imagination to figure out a meaning, and this is where parents, reading this aloud to their children, can help them build critical thinking and interpretive skills.
The lyrical writing (Yuson is an acclaimed poet) and lush illustrations, rendered in earth and sea colors that reflect the Philippine archipelagic experience, create an atmosphere of dreaminess and fantasy that captivates. Raise rational and reflective children with books like this one.
The Holy Wife: Stories of Extraordinary Love By Ting Pantoja-Mañalac
2022, 80 pgs, pb, UST Publishing House
Calling Out the Destruction: Meditations on Violence and Transcendence
By Karl R. de Mesa
2022, 258 pgs, pb, Rebo Press
The Mountain That Grew
Written by Alfred A. Yuson, illustrated by Marcel Antonio and Ilana Antonio
2022, 32 pgs, pb, San Anselmo Press
About the author
Dr. Ortuoste teaches communication and creative writing. She is a member of the Manila Critics Circle, and organizer of the National Book Awards. For comments and feedback, you may reach the author on Facebook and Twitter: @DrJennyO.