(This article is one of the sub-titles in my essay “On Contemporary Writing in Waray: Its Style, Content and Locale.” I’d appreciate the relevant comments, reactions or responses from the Sinirangan commentators, especially the substance of my write-up.)
The academe is a new staunch ally of the written literature in Waray. Abandoned by the local patrons and the printed media of the literary crafts, the contemporary Waray writings had for the most part changed its residency from the community to the school colleges and universities. This renewed project to write employing the Waray language has been a progeny from the recent move of the Philippine writers in English to write poetry and short story in their indigenous mother tongue.
In the early decade of the 1990s, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) legislated a policy requiring the study of Philippine literature from the region, not excluding the Eastern Visayas, as a distinct subject in the universities and colleges. From this period on, this meritorious measure has engendered a new breed of audiences and writers for literature in Waray. Although this policy is merely a token act by the government through CHED, as one local literary historian commented, it nonetheless allowed speakers and audiences in Waray — largely sited in the academic territory — to scrutinize, deepen and study the volumes of their own literature.
Albeit the CHED’s policy has augment to reinvigorate the literary contour in Eastern Visayas within the academe, the Waray writers and academicians greatly opted in devising their ethnic mother tongue for three main reasons: Restoring the vibrancy of the literary landscape in Samar and Leyte, expressing their unique experiences, feelings and thoughts, and reclaiming the relevance of the Waray language in their society and people. This last produced a young Waray generation that shattered the myths of Waray as a mere dialect and its inferiority over other languages.
And in the mid-1990s, the second illustrious anthology of Waray literature — the first one was edited by Gregorio Luangco – was published by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts and edited by UPVTC professor, Dr. Victorio N. Sugbo. Although this publication was not widely circulated in the East Visayan zone, it has however added the bulwark in preserving and safeguarding the rich literature in Waray. Besides contributing for Elmer A Ordoñez’ Many Voices: Towards a National Literature, Sugbo also became the area editor for the Eastern Visayas literature in Bienvenido Lumbera’s Filipinos Writing. These significant steps further expanded its audience and regained its lost ground, both local and national in scope.
On February of 2004, the first Creative Writing Workshop (CWW) in Region 8 was held at the Tiburcio Tancinco Memorial Institute of Science and Technology (TTMIST) in Calbayog City, Samar. This is annually conducted — which in later years came to be known as the Lamiraw CWW – with its primary panels coming from the university academe. Moreover, the UPVTC holds its creative writing workshop yearly. These workshops radicalize the art of open critique to a definite literary craft, and leading forward to the production of literary works that are subtle, compact, metaphorical and sometimes experimental. Most memorable to these contemporaneous works are written by Voltaire Oyzon, Janis Clair Salvacion for Waray poetry and Doms Pagliawan for Waray fiction. These contemporary writers in Waray tackle the universal themes in their artistic creation such as laughter, wounds that never heal, the pain of one’s departure, the inevitability of death and other dilemmas within relationships.
Apart from the creative writing workshop, the academe engages in other literary venues utilizing Waray such as school play presentation, poetry competition, and public poetry reading session among others. Within the purview of the academe, written poetry and fiction in Waray are heavily touched in almost all of its literary undertaking. As a whole, it has generated, and strives to generate, a unique mode of literary style and quality that breaks away from the traditional type.
Fhen Macabasag is [a] Waray.
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