I'm home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I've already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough.
Miguel SyjucoWe referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.
Miguel SyjucoAngst is not the human condition, itโs the purgatory between what we have and what we want but canโt get.
Miguel SyjucoLiterature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.
Miguel SyjucoYou canโt bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. Iโm hardly speaking in metaphor. Itโs the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?
Miguel Syjuco