EVANESCENCE
Letter from the Board of Judges
by Canarias, Carillo, Edding, Gerodiaz, Templado
The Carlos Palanca Memorial Literary Awards fervently known as the Palanca Awards is an annual prestigious literary contest open to all Filipino citizens in all age brackets. The essay, amongst others, is one of the categories subject to criteria in the Palanca awards, which is the respective category of the first placer essay of Atom Araullo, “Letter from Tawi-Tawi.” The essay talks about the lives of the people from the small, isolated community of Bongao, Tawi-Tawi—from Sidang, a teacher who diligently teaches children one floating house at a time, Sali who learned to speak Filipino and some English just by listening to news, and to Marsila, a little girl who aspires for education not just for herself but also for her parents.
Winning a Palanca Award is not an easy feat. Thus, this deliberation details why Atom Araullo’s essay, “Letter from Tawi-Tawi” deserves its achievement using Lee Gutkind’s “five R’s.” According to Lee Gutkind, there are five important Rs to make a good and notable Creative Non-Fiction, which are Real-life aspect, Reflection, Reportage or Research, Reading, and (W)riting. These five are the major ingredients to make a Creative Non-Fiction work stand out and be worthy of being read by people. Although these are just writing principles that Gutkind follows and believes to complete the writing process and the text itself, having these applied in a writer’s text could alleviate it and steal people’s attention– it could even help a writer win an award.
More often than not, writers write more about themselves and their experiences because it is the most familiar to them. Writing about others and their lived life could be difficult especially when the writers haven’t gone through it yet. But Atom Araullo isn’t one to be limited by his existing knowledge, instead, he dares to push boundaries and go beyond expectations. Atom Araullo, to further his understanding of his subject, immersed himself and went to the community to see their plights and capture the candid moments that would be an important part of his paper. One of the most remarkable parts of the paper is when Marsila innocently asks her teacher what an Elephant is, reflecting the child’s curiosity and wanting to know more. This real-life aspect wouldn’t be captured just by reading books or research related to the subject, thus this little conversation can become a detrimental piece in making the story, as it evokes feelings and emotions that were captured through that short scenario.
Moreover, even though Araullo didn’t practically go through the same hardship as the people in Tawi-Tawi, his eagerness to see and hear their everyday events reflects how detailed and creative, but careful his writing was. As Gutkind said, the immersion is, “an attempt to experience, and to re-create from experience, real life.” Which to say, to feel at least a little of what the subject is currently feeling. Riding the boat and following the volunteer teacher to the places she teaches, is an act of immersing and thus understanding. Atom, through his diligent work in learning more about his subject, was able to make an appealing essay that captured not just the struggles but their ambitions for a better life.
In Lee Gutkind's "Private and Public: The Range and Scope of Creative Nonfiction," reflection, the second R in creative nonfiction, allows the writers to include their feelings and responses about the subject. However, Gutkind also emphasized, "...essays cannot just be personal opinion: writers have to reach out to readers in several different and compelling ways."
Appealing to the readers with the writer's reflection was properly presented by Atom Araullo in his essay, "Letter from Tawi-Tawi." Aside from reaching out to the readers through the experiences of Teacher Sidang, Marsila, Sali, and the other unnamed children that he came across during his visit, he was also able to deliver his reflection incorporated with facts regarding the situation in Tawi-Tawi.
The essay was not egocentric, as it did not focus on the writer's experiences and sympathy for the situation in Tawi-Tawi. Despite being in an extremely oppressed community, Araullo was able to write an essay that focused not on what he felt about Tawi-Tawi, but on the experiences of the people that need to be reflected on. "Letter from Tawi-Tawi" is an informative and moving story that deserves its recognition.
The essay skillfully conveys realistic information about Tawi-Tawi, a significant frontier in the Philippines, vividly and dramatically. Striving for a deeper truth achievable through verifiable facts, it embraces the fundamentals of reportage, seamlessly blending poetic and journalistic elements. It assembles and presents information, offering readers insights into the conditions in Tawi-Tawi and the lives of its inhabitants and highlights various individuals from the local community, providing glimpses into their lives, traditions, and challenges—such as a teacher with a floating school, a self-taught Tagalog-speaking fisherman, and an 8-year-old dreamer from the community.
The focal point is on real people and their stories, creating a balanced narrative. The author skillfully interweaves detailed descriptions of both the place and the community's situation, expressing personal sentiments and emphasizing the need for action to improve life in Tawi-Tawi, especially in choosing national leaders. Additionally, what enhances the essay's persuasiveness is the integration of factual details within creative depictions. Readers gain insights into the geographical history of Tawi-Tawi and its contribution to the enduring challenges faced by its people. Araullo incorporates concrete studies, including real percentages and data, enhancing the essay's credibility. As a result, the synthesis of real-life situations, narrated through storytelling techniques and stylistic conventions, combined with thorough research, adds balance to the overall work.
What Guntkind led to the fourth R which is Reading is assessing the competition by “finding a new angle” out of the already written subject, and “knowing all the contrasting points of view to reflect on to evaluate a person, subject, or place. It adheres to what Arraulo did in his essay as he presented us the story of Sidang, a teacher with a floating school, Mansul, a fisherman who taught himself Tagalog, and Marsila, an 8-year-old dreamer from a small community in Tawi-Tawi. He was able to demonstrate a profound understanding of the region's complexities through these points of view. In Gutkind words, “almost all writers have read the best writers in the field and are able to converse in great detail about their stylistic approaches and the intellectual content of their work..”
No doubt, Atom Araullo is a great journalist whose work spans various mediums, including television documentaries, news reporting, and investigative journalism which would require him much reading. In the essay for example, he deviated away from the conventional writing of journalistic essay as he wrote a creative nonfiction framed with history, as it follows the point of view of Sidang, revealing the characters she met while shifting to the history from time to time. Araullo's narrative prowess is evident, seamlessly weaving together personal anecdotes, historical context, and expert analysis to offer viewers a rich and multifaceted portrait of the place. Indeed, his drifting away from the conventional form of the essay was evident that he had read others before as he was “able to converse in great detail about his stylistic approaches and the intellectual content of his work.” Lastly, with his nuanced storytelling and empathetic lens, he invites audiences to not only witness the beauty and challenges of life in this remote province but also to contemplate broader themes of resilience, identity, and the human experience.
To Gutkind, (w)riting “is the most artistic and romantic aspect of the whole [creative nonfiction] experience.” And this statement reflects itself in Atom Araullo’s writing for Letter from Tawi-Tawi. An ordinary essay (a journalistic essay, perhaps) would limit itself to immediate facts and compelling truths but Araullo’s essay differentiates itself through what Gutkind considers to be the building blocks of creative nonfiction—scene, dialogue, and intimate detail. Writing is a task, that is with certainty. But writing creative nonfiction should not just be about relaying information, it is about immersing ourselves into the moving scenes as if we were witnessing what the writer and their subject had experienced. For example, the essay depicted a scene of Sidang and others embarking on lantas, the main transportation in Tawi-Tawi. People bunched together due to limited space, the writer relaying a short history behind the boats, the passengers’ creative antics to their sitting positions for the next four hours. In a non-creative essay, these scenes would have been absent in favor of generic and informational statements but these scenes help establish the place and scene of Tawi-Tawi, as well as its growing economy while also bringing the readers along the boat ride.
Dialogue is also present in the essay. Dialogue, in many ways, adds a sense of intimacy to the writing. Not only that, it allows people in the essay to be people. More often than not, people in essays tend to be treated as just subjects. In a sense, it adds personality to the names we read. Sidang, her students, Marsila, and Sali, for example, all have dialogues and these do, in fact, tell us readers something about their personalities beyond the written word. One instance, for example, is when Sidang and Araullo finally arrive in Sidang’s village and the village chief is there to greet them. Araullo saw a “roaring speedboat [disappear] behind the curve of the island” and turned to question the village chief. If Araullo had not decided to add the chief’s reply as a dialogue and instead written it into the essay, the readers would assume that it was Araullo’s own words and he would have received backlash for assuming such atrocities indeed happen. But what the village chief’s dialogue tells us is how these “crimes” are so endemic to the farthest province in the Philippines that it has become a normal occurrence to the people of Bongao.
Lastly, Araullo captures several intimate details in his essay: Marsila’s eagerness to learn for both herself and her parents, Sidang’s quiet arrangement of her teaching materials at the crack of dawn, Sali’s prized transistor, and his love for listening to the news. But there is a particular part in the essay that we deemed such an intimate scene and that was during the first classes Sidang had taught, with Geralyn and two other girls:
“There was an eagerness in the girls’ eyes as they recited the letters of the alphabet as if they were unlocking the secrets of the universe with every syllable uttered in rote”
The essay highlights the importance of education, especially on an isolated island such as Bongao, far and out of reach from the rest of the Philippines, and how poverty has limited education to those who have money. It shows just how much the children hold onto that dream of education. The realization of education’s power in shifting current events is indeed evident and the likes of Sali and Marsila know that. The overall sequence of the essay helps relay the different degrees to which education holds, from Sidang’s door-to-door teaching for children who cannot afford the additional costs to travel to the school, to the frightening corruption behind the elections and the abuse of power towards the illiteracy of most of the voters who themselves do not have access to basic identification such as the birth certificate, even abusing the democracy by making them vote four to five times more.
In conclusion, Atom Araullo's essay, “Letter from Tawi-Tawi,” is a remarkable piece of creative nonfiction that exemplifies excellence in storytelling and journalism, deserving of its recognition in the Palanca Awards. Araullo masterfully employs Lee Gutkind's five Rs—Real-life aspect, Reflection, Reportage or Research, Reading, and (W)riting—to craft a compelling narrative that immerses readers into the lives of the people of Bongao, Tawi-Tawi. In essence, “Letter from Tawi-Tawi” is more than just an essay—it's a powerful testament to the transformative potential of storytelling. Through his thoughtful and empathetic approach, Atom Araullo brings to light the often overlooked realities of life in Tawi-Tawi, leaving a lasting impact on readers and deserving of the prestigious recognition bestowed upon it by the Palanca Awards.
Judges
Carillo, Karen Joy
Canarias, Reggie Faye
Edding, Fatima Herizza
Gerodiaz, Allaiza
Templado, Diane Pearl