ARTS AND CULTURE Mothers talk to mountains, farmers read clouds, fishers warn of the sea in ‘Agam’

Originally published in Interaksyon

After a landslide triggered by Typhoon Pepeng wiped out his home and killed his entire family, a man was going to build a new house where his old one once stood.

Padmapani Perez drew on this story told to her by a Benguet local as she was writing her poem “Mothers Speak” for the book Agam, launched in a Quezon City restaurant Tuesday, June 24.

As with the 23 other writers contributing to the book showing the human face of climate change, she was given a photo taken by Jose Enrique Soriano as a prompt for her work. In her case, the photo was of a woman carrying a child whose eyes were closed. The sea was their background.

Baguio-based Perez had a child of her own. “That’s why I decided to write about the effects of climate from a mother’s point of view,” she told InterAksyon.com. In the poem, a mother speaks to a mountain, the same one who has seen her child grow, the same one who has taken her child away.

“I was recalling his story and his grief,” she said of the Benguet resident who went back to his old habits after tragedy struck. “No matter what climate change does to people, what else are they to do but what they know how to do?”

The Cebuano poem “Unsaon Pagbasa ang Panganod?” (How Do You Read the Clouds?) by Grace Monte de Ramos, tackles a similar theme.

“People have traditional knowledge. Even if they are uneducated, they know how to read the weather. If they spot a certain cloud or feel a certain temperature, they know what will happen next. But now things have changed. You can no longer predict when it will rain. That’s the problem,” de Ramos told InterAksyon.com.

Her prompt was a photo of a woman staring suspiciously at the camera, a tricycle painted with the words “Saint Isidore” behind her. The holy man is the patron of farmers, which is why the poem has a farmer as its persona.

The same poem is a prayer to the saint, interspersed with the farmer’s stories.

Another Cebuano poem in the book is “Krutsay” by Boholana Marjorie Evasco. The title comes from the word—and a song—people in Visayas and Mindanao use to call the wind.

It is about the man in the photo assigned to her, a fisherman, Evasco gathered, by looking at his muddy shorts. “I realized that he just came from work, from the sea.” She also found out that the man was a survivor of Tropical Storm Sendong. This dictated her choice of language.

The song “Krutsay” was the spine of the narrative poem, Evasco told InterAksyon.com. The four-part poem ended with the fisherman warning the people, because “He knows the sea.”

Other contributors drew from their own experiences. Ramon Sunico, who wrote “Diptych, Hindi Selfie,” was on his way to a funeral when Tropical Storm Ondoy struck. “The water was waist-deep outside our subdivision,” he told InterAksyon.com. “Our dog almost drowned.”

He was given two photos of the same woman in ankle-deep flood, one with what looked like a sari-sari store behind her, and the other with a house and palm trees as her background.

Meanwhile, Arnold Molina Azurin wrote the essay “Agayayos” with a photo of an old man wearing a salakot (native hat) and a dirty shirt, a boy peeking from behind him. Palm trees surrounded them.

“Agayayos,” said the Vigan-born writer, was Ilocano for “ever-flowing, as water down a river, or blood in the veins, or memories in a lifetime.”

He pictured himself on the highest promontory on the way to Vigan, with a view of the entire landscape, the sea, and the mountains leading to Abra. “Sometimes there are even monkeys in the trees,” he said of his vantage point.

“You can see the changes of croppings in the farms. Oh, they are planting melon there! And there, on the way to Abra with the hills, there are the cornfields. Per weather, per season, you can see the changing productivity and the changing generations too,” Azurin told InterAksyon.com. From there too, one could see the sea encroaching upon the poblacion because of black sand mining.

He imagined the elderly man and the boy as grandfather and grandchild, farming together. Just as the livelihood was handed down from one generation to another, so too were the tales of their ancestors. A falling star creating the mouth of a river, a pair of giants who were the first couple.

“I’m thankful to have been given the opportunity to write in a very comprehensive sense the memories of my own youth or my own people, whether you can validate them or not. The memories of the people about the landscape, how it was formed, I was able to revive them. Make them alive,” he said.

Along with the scientists, humanitarians, and disaster risk reduction and management workers, storytellers like these five were important players in the issue of climate change.

“We need to recreate discourse. We need to introduce narratives, storytelling, into such an important issue. It’s not enough to use big words or send a barrage of numbers to the people,” said Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities executive director and publisher Renato Redentor Constantino during the launch of Agam.

Added Senator Loren Legarda, who chairs the Senate Climate Change Committee, “I truly appreciate the fact that narratives, poetry, prose, images, photos, and eight languages in our great country are being utilized in this book. I think this is one of the most novel and innovative ways of bringing climate change to the national and international consciousness.”

The book is Constantino’s way of rallying Filipinos to participate, to act. “For us, involvement starts with information,” he said.

The photos “avoid the cliché of disaster.” Soriano was instructed precisely to not look for victims as he came up with the 26 images that are included in Agam.

This is how the book tackles uncertainty, as in “agam-agam.” It is not a negative thing, said Constantino, because it meant that “the bad guys haven’t won, and… we can still prevail.”

“Some are harrowing,” he said of the stories. “Some are haunting. Some are really moving. Some are playful. Some are like a paper cut when you’re reading them; you don’t know that you’re already wounded.”

‘Agam’: Showing the effects of climate change through storytelling

Originally published in GMA News

Melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, increasing temperatures, extended droughts, devastating super typhoons: the effects of climate change have been written about so much that many of the stories are starting to blur into each other.

“When we talk about climate change, listeners are forced to choose between wonky, constipated jargon or cliches of disasters, victims, and easy formulations of what the problem is. And that’s unfortunate because the problem is so complex and so big that it requires deeper engagement with the public,” said Renato Redentor “Red” Constantino, executive director of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, a non-profit group working on sustainable energy solutions.

“[We thought,] surely there are ways to engage the public to talk about the issue in a story-telling way, in a way that captures the magnitude of the problem, but also how personal it should be,” he told GMA News Online.

One of these ways is “Agam,” a collection of 26 narratives about climate change that do not classify as scientific pieces or sob stories.

The book is the brainchild of Constantino and Manila Bulletin’s Business Agenda section editor Regina Abuyuan. The two came up with the concept in 2011 after attending a photo exhibit pushing for the passage of the People’s Survival Fund Bill, which would create a fund that local governments could use to put climate mitigation practices in place to lessen the impact of natural disasters.

The exhibit featured portraits of people affected by climate change. But Constantino and Abuyuan thought that more could be done with the photos presented to them. “Why not present the issue in a different way?” said Abuyuan in an interview with GMA News Online.

Some of the photos from the exhibit made it into “Agam,” taken by photographer Jose Enrique Soriano. The written pieces collected in the book were based on the photos.

“The images are all portraits of Filipinos across the archipelago, and you will notice from the photos that all of them reflect ambiguity. There are no easy narratives there. The book could be about anyone,” Constantino said.

Different perspectives

The book’s contributors—24 writers from different backgrounds—were each assigned a photo that served as a prompt for the piece they were to write. They were free to write in any literary genre and use any language. The result is a collection of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poems in eight different languages: Sinama, Maguindanao, Bicolano, Cebuano, Tagalog, Ilocano, Waray (English translations were provided for all of these) and English.

Three writers used local literary forms. “One used a children’s rhyme in the Sinama language. One from Tacloban used the ‘panawagan’ form—it took the form of a radio call—and the other used a ‘krutsay,’ parang story-telling,” said Abuyuan.

“Some wrote about the people in the photo, some wrote about the hat that the person in the photo is wearing, some wrote about the river in the background. Gina [Abuyuan] wrote hers from the perspective of a dog looking at the person at the photo,” Constantino said.

The submissions could not be longer than 1,000 words. And while this is a book about climate change, the writers were forbidden to use the phrase “climate change,” as well as words that are often used when writing about the topic: “adaptation”, “mitigation”, “temperature”—”…all the words that the world of NGOs (which I belong to) and the scientific world often use, but which also often separates them from the public. And so you have a book about climate change without none of such words,” Constantino said.

“The message also is that we better start telling stories about this issue rather than talk about the technicalities only. They’re important, but if you don’t get engaged, it doesn’t really matter much,” he added.

Among those who participated in the project are poet and bookstore owner Padmapani L. Perez; Cultural Center of the Philippines Intertextual Division Director Hermie Beltran; Carlos Palanca awardee and distinguished anthropologist Arnold Molina Azurin; former PAGASA Director Leoncio Alhambra Amadore; 2003 Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and the Creative Communication Arts winner Sheila S. Coronel; and University of the Philippines-Diliman Chancellor Dr. Michael Tan.

“We tried to put into one book something that is unique, that crosses some of the conventional boundaries in publications, largely because the content of the book is about articulating stories, views, on an issue that has really not enjoyed the kind of depth it deserves,” said Constantino.

The complexity of climate change

“Agam” lays out its objective right away. “The introduction tells the readers, if you’re looking for the glib 10-things-you-can-do-for-the-climate, this is not the book for you,” said Constantino. “The book wants to reader to pause, to take a deep breath, to see how complex the issue is, and to tackle the issue in a deeper, more personal way. Because there is no single solution to this problem, and it won’t be solved overnight.”

Climate change will be with us for a while, Constantino added.

“It requires far more than just switching off your lights or switching to renewable technology because it questions the very trajectory of our development, the way they’ve organized our economy,” he said. “And so the response to climate change must be more enduring. This is not only about disasters. It’s about slow-onset impacts that are not necessarily confined to the definition.”

“Agam” will be launched on Tuesday, June 24 in Quezon City. The book will soon be available in major bookstores and in major online booksellers. There will also be a launch in Tacloban and three in the US: in California, New York, and Washington DC. At the DC event, the book launch will be accompanied by an exhibit.

The proceeds from the book will go to Re-Charge Tacloban, a project that funds the building of e-jeepneys and integrated solar sustainable transport facilities in the Yolanda-hit city.

Literary Climate Change Book “Agam” To Be Launched On June 24

Originally published in Orange Magazine TV

A “period-defining publication” will be released this June 24 (Tuesday) by the same pioneering group that launched the ejeepney revolution in 2007. Titled Agam, an early Tagalog word for foreboding and memory, the book brings together new work from Filipino writers across diverse disciplines, focused on the confrontation between climate change and cultures across the archipelago.

The book launch will be held at the Ilocano restaurant Victorino’s in Quezon City from 3:00 to 6:00 PM. It will be followed by similar events in the US in mid-July, in Berkeley and New York.

“Agam represents story-telling at its best. More than climate change, the book is about people, about what was, what might be, and what is. It is the story of all of us,” said Renato Redentor Constantino, publisher and executive director of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (iCSC).

Agam is composed of original creative narratives by 24 Filipino writers, minus the crutch of scientific and NGO jargon. Works were submitted in the languages of Tagalog, Waray, Maguindanao, Ilocano, Bisaya, Sinama and English, in response to images taken by the elusive photojournalist Jose Enrique Soriano.

Agam contributors include distinguished poets Merlinda Bobis, Ramon C. Sunico and Padmapani Perez, Dean of Columbia School of Journalism Shiela Coronel, UP Diliman Chancellor Dr. Michael Tan, and anthropologist Arnold Azurin.

According to Dr. Leoncio Amadore, considered the godfather of Philippine climate science and who provided the book’s foreword, “The work is nothing short of compelling, moving and provocative — a body of work the scientific community urgently needs.”

“I am glad that the literary community of the Philippines has taken notice,” wrote Albay Province Governor and Green Climate Fund chairperson Jose Ma. Sarte Salceda, in his review of the book’s manuscript. Citing stories of “tenacity and hope,” Salceda said he looks “forward to the time when climate change will be the overriding theme of songs and poems.”

All proceeds from the sale of Agam will go to the Re-Charge project, an integrated solar and sustainable transport services and training facility that is being set up in Tacloban City. ICSC is a pioneering climate policy group that approaches big problems sideways, by incubating ideas, innovating approaches and implementing solutions.