about liham

child of the sun revolting, bars 59 - 62

Bienvenido Santos (1982) once wrote: “All exiles want to go home. Although many of them never return, in their imagination they make their journey a thousand times.” In another timeline, André Aciman (1999) framed this sentiment as “permanent transience” – transiting through multiple places in one’s mind to find home, because there isn’t, and wasn’t, any.

Many diss on social media for its phony, alienating, commodified, curated realities. Isn’t anyone tired yet from those desperate calls for the public square’s attention? Isn’t anyone else left untarnished from its addictive pleasures? And yet, for people who are uprooted from a homeland’s overly familiar warmth, social media provides the only means to see a plethora of parallel worlds running at the same time. It is a window that’s hard to miss, one that offers glimpses into multiple “homes.” Or sometimes the ambiguities of such homes.

Seeing double can be a blessing. Or a curse.

Like many others, I could not turn a blind eye on one reality. The Philippines anticipated an unprecedented national election during the summer heat of May 2022. As the son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. enjoyed alliances among powerful names and cronies, befitting a presidential candidate. Historical revisionist campaigns ran for a decade or so to clean the sullied name of his father – the architect of the Martial Law years (1972-1986) who was eventually exiled to Hawaii. Meanwhile, outgoing Vice President Leni Robredo rose as a figure of resistance amidst the impunity of Rodrigo Duterte’s incumbent government. A grassroots-led “Pink Movement” bolstered her presidential candidacy, carving a massive following that radicalized volunteerism.

Bongbong Marcos won the presidency with 59% of the popular vote. Sara Duterte, Davao City mayor and Rodrigo’s daughter, won the vice presidency. It would appear that collective amnesia took root. Many forgot the dictatorship that once brought mass tortures, executions, and disappearances of thousands of civilians. Many ignored its corruption that plunged the country into a severe economic recession and overwhelming debt, naming the country as “the sick man of Asia” that took decades to recover from. Why didn’t it matter that thousands of lives claimed from extrajudicial killings under the Duterte drug war is a deal-breaker for maintaining a sound collective moral conscience?

I looked out the window and saw another reality: greenery flourished in this cozy park across the house I’m at. Fresh from my MacDowell artist residency at New Hampshire, United States, I visited Vancouver in May 2025 on a mission to compile Filipino Canadian stories. While colonial machinations once brought the first Filipino manongs (“uncles”) here in Turtle Island (so-called North America), ensuing diasporas also confronted systemic barriers for generations. Oscar Campomanes blamed this “spectre of invisibility” (1992) on American historical erasures, past and present. Filipinx invisibilities pervaded within diasporan struggles in the Global North: anti-Asian racism, discrimination, underrepresentation, migrant de-professionalization. Fueled by the Philippine’s labour export policy and ongoing “brain drain,” narratives of economic migrancy continuously shaped Filipinx lives both home and abroad – especially those entangled with the homeland’s socio-economic conditions.

One could argue that this invisibility is gradually peeling off nowadays. Philippine culture is now hitting the mainstream. In Toronto, I can buy halo-halo (shaved iced dessert) from a Vietnamese-owned milk tea shop a mere ten-minute walk away from my house. Representations materialize now in cartoons, TV shows, film, sports, food, literature. Philippine gong cultures are emerging in music scenes. Vancouver designates April 27^th as Lapu Lapu Day, honouring the increasing presence of Filipinx folks in the city and the legacy of colonial resistance under the chieftain who fought the first Spanish fleets. Canada celebrates Filipino Heritage Month every June – the result of nationwide grassroots mobilization by Paulina Corpuz and many others. These things, among many others, now redefine “Filipino” as no longer confined to centralized vanguards, relations, and brokerages explicit to the homeland’s nation-building. Diasporans turn out to be instrumental as well in reframing this construct.

This reclamation is not without cost. Tragedy struck the Vancouver community during Lapu Lapu Day Festival 2025 celebrations at the John Oliver Secondary School. Kai-Ji Adam Lo, 30, rammed his vehicle at high speed into crowds at the conclusion of a festive street block party on 26 April 2025, killing 11 people (including a five-year-old child) of various backgrounds and injuring at least 32 others. An outpouring of sympathies and statements of support within Canada, the Philippines, and across the world reached these grieving communities, following what is by far considered the deadliest mass attack ever in Vancouver. 

I arrived in the city ten days after the tragedy. Is it fate that I booked a short-term stay near Ground Zero without full awareness of it? I couldn’t avoid seeing the memorials at East 41st Avenue and Fraser Street whenever I left the house. I saw random passersby pay respects to the once living, all snuffed out in a blink of an eye. My Vancouverite friends had their own story or connection with the tragedy in some way. How do communities move forward with such loss, trauma, and survivor guilt?

hell do our soles adore, bars 80 - 84

Like private correspondences written in secret, Liham (LEE-hum; “Letter”) recounts one’s hopes and struggles. It’s a four-part song cycle for low voice (mezzo-soprano or high baritone) and piano that stands as a memoir and love letter to the Filipinx spirit. Conceived in 2021 by Renee Fajardo at the Banff Centre's “Opera in the 21st Century” program, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss (ed. André Aciman, 1999) frames the work as if one writes letters to an audience. Fajardo commissioned Liham with support from the Ontario Arts Council. After mounting its 2024 world premiere at New York’s MISE-EN Festival, we now present it here on a digital platform with further support from Sound The Alarm: Music/Theatre and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Revan Badingham III wrote the poetry for all art songs, whose titles unabashedly toy with the first lines of the Philippine National Anthem’s English (colonial) version: land of the mourning || child of the sun revolting || with fevered dreaming || hell do our soles adore. The libretto follows classical poetry forms and yet articulates stories of liberation: the desire for freedom, the impunity of the nation-state, the precarity of migrancy, and a clamour for social change. They reveal the strength of seven thousand islands, the wails of sirens, the icy roads of glacial paradise, and the bloody swarm of death. Characters throw their fists up, plead for sanctuary, take what’s given without complaint, and see flowers heal ravaged lands. A Tagalog tanaga verse introduces each art song’s mise-en-scène, like elders sharing wisdom over a bonfire. Two songs narrate the diasporic struggle, while the other two speak of homeland struggle.

Liham attempts to sound post-classical. Mirroring the quotation methods of Charles Ives and Luciano Berio, piano landscapes juxtapose post-romantic expression with Filipino kundiman art song. Listeners would detect hints of Nicanor Abelardo (Kundiman ng Luha, Mutya ng Pasig, Bituing Marikit), Francisco Santiago (Madaling Araw, Anak Dalita, Pakiusap), and Constancio de Guzman (Bayan Ko) in unexpected places. Some sections require mimicking pop ballads, notated like chord sheets where the pianist could improvise. A descending “lamento” motif provides scaffolding to hold all songs together, articulating a sober lament amid defiance and fiery optimism.

Akin to the European art song, the kundiman is a love song with Filipino poetry set to music. Professions of love mask anti-colonial declarations of devotion for Inang Bayan (Motherland). Its popularization in early 20^th century sarswela (indigenized Spanish zarzuela theatre) and the later protest song movement of the 1970s cemented its legacy as a nationalist expression through symbolism. Now through the lens of permanent transience, Liham straddles past and present worlds across oceans – its fleeting kundiman evocations invite a greater impulse to strip off excesses and excavate foundations long buried underneath.

And yet I find the rather conventional frame of Liham ironic. A composer writes music bent on post-romanticism and musical quotation in spite of newer experimental practices. A poet chooses the Shakespearean sonnet, villanelle, rondeau redoublé, and Petrarchan sonnet due to their formal restraints. However, should postcolonial affects always speak out in intelligible forms? Badingham complicates it more: Are all rebellions (i.e. Dadaism) from traditional forms necessarily anti-colonial? Does liberation from “form” emancipate or merely impose neo-colonial policing instead on those already under colonially-entrenched systems? We find that old forms also create “Frankenstein monsters” – not of a devouring nature but of an anachronistic one. They break colonial space-time linearity, catapulting our existences into simultaneous pasts, presents, and futures as an act of liberation. Filipinos have an adage for it: “Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.”

with fevered dreaming, bars 78 - 81

As a final note, I also invite you to “listen nearby.” In the film Reassemblage (1982), Trinh Minh-Ha conceives the act of “speaking nearby:” a speaking that doesn’t objectify truths to make them palatable for audiences. Trinh narrates: “I do not intend to speak about // Just speak near by [sic].” Filipinx legibility requires proximity to inner lives, not on exported concoctions meant for mass consumption. To do this, we must “sit and listen nearby.” 

Four stories of Filipino Canadians accompany the song cycle, all written like love letters addressed to you. Some of them convey an optimistic outlook, some provoke further interrogations, others challenge stereotypes and assumptions, and others provide windows of homeland and diasporic realities. Relations to their respective art songs are elusive and yet grounded to landscapes where they reside. Not one song speaks about a particular story and vice versa – they can only speak as themselves. But together, they all resonate as they “speak nearby” in unison.

Here, we read letters from two Filipinx business owners – Bennet Miemban-Ganata (of Plato Filipino Restaurant, Vancouver, BC) and Nigel Elivera (of Pro-Tech Auto Repair, Burnaby, BC). Their businesses also served as filming locations of the art songs. We also read a letter from Toronto-based multi-award winning actor, playwright, and singer/songwriter Carolyn Fe, who grew up in the suburbs of Montreal, QC. Vancouver-based visual artist Bert Monterona offers the last letter, summing up a collective voice that aims not to fully represent the Filipinx Canadian diaspora but to begin scratching its multi-layered, complex surfaces. I implore you to read their letters and dive into their worlds as you listen to the song cycle and explore the digital universe of Liham.

A desire for clarity is the antidote to seeing double. Whoever or wherever you are in the globe – join us in this celebration and search for clarity in Liham.Listen as if you’re sitting right beside these songs and stories. The lack of legibility among Filipinx histories already inhibits solidarities. But most importantly, listen with the reminder that settlers among occupied indigenous lands also owe it all to their original owners, not to colonial nation-states. Filipinx lives in so-called North America also intertwine with indigenous lives – both Philippine and indigenous colonial histories mirror each other’s legacies of erasure and violence. This should usher a reflection on the conditions that diasporas find themselves on colonially occupied or unceded territories. It’s in sitting near these nuanced positions where emancipation becomes a shared narrative among all of us sojourners in life.

Juro Kim Feliz

[originally written on 14 June 2024 for the MISE-EN Festival, updated on 08 June 2025]