For decades, Filipinos were taught that the country was ‘discovered’ by Ferdinand Magellan. The Portuguese explorer led the 1519-1522 Spanish expedition to the East Indies, credited as the first circumnavigation of Earth. Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle of Magellan’s voyage became one of the earliest documents recording the culture of 16th-century Philippines.
Philippine history has it that Magellan sailed northward after mistakenly identifying the location of the Moluccas. The expedition reached an archipelago of volcanic islands, where they were allegedly robbed, hence the explorer giving it the name Islas de los Ladrones (Isle of Thieves). Ten days later, they reached Samar, which they named Islas de San Lazaro after seeing it on Lazarus Saturday. They eventually sailed northwest between Leyte and Bohol and entered the harbor of Cebu, which Pigafetta called Zubu or Zzubu.
Pigafetta’s chronicles described the island that he and Magellan landed on (with translation by James Alexander Robertson):
‘It is a large island, and has a good port with two entrances – one to the west and the other to the east northeast. It lies in x degrees of latitude toward the Arctic Pole, and in a longitude of one hundred and sixty-four degrees from the line of demarcation. Its name is Zubu. We heard of Malucho there before the death of the captain-general. Those people play a violin with copper strings.
In the midst of that archipelago, at a distance of eighteen leguas from that island of Zzubu, at the head of the other island called Bohol, we burned the ship ‘Conceptione,’ for too few men of us were left [to work it]. We stowed the best of its contents in the other two ships, and then laid our course toward the south southwest, coasting along the island called Panilongon, where black men like those in Etiopia live. Then we came to a large island [Mindanao], whose king in order to make peace with us, drew blood from his left hand marking his body, face, and the tip of his tongue with it as a token of the closest friendship, and we did the same.’
Magellan’s voyage, as well as Pigafetta’s chronicles, happened during the Age of Discovery, when Europeans went on expeditions to explore, conquer, and colonise other continents. The explorers were on a mission to find natural resources that their homeland could exploit, which had devastating consequences for indigenous peoples and their ecosystems.
At the time, travelogues about colonised islands – such as the Philippines – came from the point-of-view of the Western male colonisers. New territories were called ‘discoveries,’ not acknowledging the fact that the islands were already lived on. These travel writings, in effect, lacked the context of indigenous languages, thus misspelling words; ignored indigenous traditions, regarding them as savage and uncivilised practices; and romanticised the bounty of natural resources, which were later exploited.
This narrative of ‘newly discovered’ lands persisted at the height of colonial empires, when imperial propaganda, educational systems, and even popular literature were used to assert dominance over colonies. But after World War II, decolonisation and post-colonial perspectives sought to critique identities, including travel writing from post-colonial travel writers like Pico Iyer and Frank Delaney, amid an era of globalism and multi-culturalism.
As Iyer put it in a 1997 interview (Stammwitz), ‘The difference, perhaps, is that, in the old days, a travel writer from England, say, would survey India with a very firm sense of who he was and how far he’d come: he was a European inspecting a strange foreign culture. These days, when someone like me goes to India, I am perhaps better able to try to take it on its own terms, to travel light, and to bring to it assumptions that aren’t necessarily – or limitingly – British or American or Indian.’ Iyer was born in Oxford, England, to Indian parents in 1957, and moved between England and California growing up.
Post-colonial writing dismantled the Eurocentric framework that once defined the genre of travel literature. The shift in Eurocentric biases allowed the silenced voices from formerly colonised communities to reclaim their narratives. These include women writers from the Global South, particularly from the Philippines. This effectively gives a more inclusive perspective on the islands outside that of Western colonial male.
In Lenka Filipova’s Travel Writing and Ecofeminism, she investigates the colonial history of the genre and, ultimately, concluded how an ecofeminist re-drawing of the map – stemming from the practices of colonial cartography as inherently gendered (as in the chronicles of Pigafetta) – become more ‘comprehensive, albeit contingent and provisional, acts of ‘worlding’.’ This means bringing forth the ‘cruxes of gender, class, race, economic capacity, and so on’ in reading accounts of travel through the ecofeminist lens (Filipova 508). In addition, we can also look at travel poetry as a form of travel writing. A chapter in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing pointed out the inseparability of travel and poetry: ‘On a basic level, a travel poem, as with any prose travelogue, narrates a journey, or the means of travel, to some kind of distinctive natural or cultural space.’ Author Christopher M Keirstead added: ‘Poets can manipulate the rhythm, metre, and structure of lines in ways that mirror the flows and disruptions of travel itself.’
In this essay, I will discuss travel writing about the Philippines – in the form of travel poetry – by three Filipina writers: ‘Hill Station’ by Luisa A Igloria, ‘It Is Time to Come Home’ by Marjorie Evasco, and ‘Bantayan Notebook’ by Merlie M Alunan.
All three women hail from places outside Metro Manila, with their respective hometowns having gone through changes brought about by colonisation. Igloria has roots in Baguio, a province in northern Philippines; Evasco is from Bohol in Central Visayas; and Alunan is from Iloilo, a part of Panay Island in Western Visayas. These places are also key tourist destinations, which have gone through so-called development with the goal of commercialisation.
And amid all these changes, it is worth exploring how their poems are each influenced by their sense of home, journeying to other places (whether in their formative years, adulthood, or retirement), and then coming back. This also means exploring thoughts of home vis-a-vis that which is foreign, new, and unique; and, ultimately, the self-identity attached to a sense of place.
The triangulation of leaving-journeying-returning allows for a ‘poetry of place’ that ‘values locales, which sees and lets the reader experience what makes a place unique among places,’ as defined by Windfall Press. And for the three poets, their travel poems give the readers a sense of looking beyond a tropical country often romanticised for either its white-sand beaches or verdant hills.
