Fiction: To the Town Hall

This is my final post for the “Three Days in Kulaman” series, and I reserved the least related for last. During my short stay in the central village, I received my copy of the eleventh issue of SanAg, the annual literary journal of the University of San Agustin, in Iloilo City. John Iremil Teodoro, the editor, published my story “To the Town Hall.” I’m glad to be in the same publication as Leoncio Deriada, touted as the father of West Visayan literature. Deriada was one of the panelists when I became a fellow at the Iligan National Writers Workshop, and his stories, along with Jose Dalisay’s, were my favorite long before I joined workshops.

Teodoro says in the introduction that my story is a retelling of the Maguindanao massacre. I did not say anything of that sort when I submitted the story to him. But he’s right. I had wanted to write about the massacre, but I didn’t want the reference to be obvious, so I moved the setting to Kulaman Plateau (though the name of the place is not mentioned in the story) and I made the characters purely Christians. I guess in the end I failed to hide what I had wanted to hide, for Teodoro easily saw where the story is based, but in the introduction he says nice things about my use of euphemism instead of exaggeration, which he says is the more common technique in retellings.