Reprinted with permission. This article first appeared in https://salingpusa.com/– Calgary’s Literary Magazine
As the keel meets the water: a contributor’s journey into Magdaragat
By Renato Gandia
When the acceptance email arrived, I was
already standing at the edge of a different
shore, imagining the day I would leave the
familiar tides of corporate communications for
the uncharted waters of literary writing. It was
the voyage I had long postponed but never
stopped dreaming of. My contribution, Tubigan,
tumbang preso, taguan, and other preludes to
a trauma, would set sail in Magdaragat: An
Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing,
alongside forty-two other voices gathered by
Teodoro Alcuitas, C. E. Gatchalian, and Patria
Rivera. It was my first time sharing literary
space with so many Filipino-Canadian writers.
The yes from the editors felt larger than an
acceptance—it felt like the moment a keel first
meets the water.
Magdaragat takes its name from the Filipino
word for “seafarer” or “mariner,” an image that
moves like a current through the book. The title
recalls the journeys that have carried us from
our small rivers to vast oceans, across time
zones and climates, into communities both
welcoming and wary. In these pages, each
piece becomes a vessel—some cutting
through calm waters, others weathering storms
—but all moving toward the same horizon: to
be seen, to be heard, to take our place in the
wide sea of Canadian literature.
For Teodoro “Ted” Alcuitas, the anthology
marks both a personal and community
milestone.
“To me personally, it is a dream come true in
that I have always thought of writing my story,
albeit not in an anthology,” he said in several
interviews.
At 85, Alcuitas—a self-described “accidental
journalist”—has spent nearly half a century
telling the stories of Filipinos in Canada.
“I believe this is a breakthrough for our
community that will hopefully spur other writers
to share their stories… I am convinced that it is
our own responsibility to write and document
our struggles, histories, and not rely on others.”
The title Magdaragat, he explained, “alludes to
our experience of being ‘voyageurs of the
sea’—being travellers from our small rivers to
the vast oceans of other lands… not by ship in
all cases but mostly transported by modern
means of transportation.”
In many ways, Alcuitas is a magdaragat himself.
He recalled travelling by ship from Cebu to
Mindanao, and eventually emigrating to
Saskatoon in 1968 with his wife and eight-
month-old baby, later moving to Winnipeg
where he started the community newspaper
Silangan.
“Like the ocean, my life seems to be in
constant flux.”
As Patria Rivera told me when the book was
launched in Toronto in 2024, the release of this
tome is a cause for celebration.
“I think it means a lot for us as a people who
have not been read, seen, or heard, to be out
there with the rest of the Canadian literary
community, to share our work as poets, short
story writers, novelists, essayists, or
playwrights.”
For Rivera, contributing her own family’s
migration story was “like a personal revelation,”
allowing her to reflect on both pre- and post-
immigrant years. She noted the shared joy of
the contributors. “They’re able to share with
our kababayan as well as with the rest of the
world, that Filipinos too have a love for food, a
love for fun, as well as a love for work.”
Her hope is simple but far-reaching. “That more
people will become aware that there’s a
community here for almost a million… It will be a
delight if people will know more about what we
think, what we feel, how we think about the
world by sharing them through our story.”
C.E. Gatchalian spoke about the difficulty of
narrowing over a hundred submissions to
around fifty:
“One of the great joys of that process—of
course we knew some of the writers—was to
find out the richness and the level of Filipino-
Canadian literary talent was. We’ve got brilliant
submissions… and some were from writers none
of us had heard of. As an editor that’s always a
great discovery to make.”
For Gatchalian, the anthology is also a beacon
for the next generation.
“If there had been an anthology like this when I
was growing up, as a young, aspiring writer, I
think it would have made my journey towards
being a writer a little bit easier… knowing that
there are other Filipino writers writing things
about being Filipino. I didn’t have that growing
up.”
As a contributor, I read Magdaragat differently
than I would any other anthology. I was not only
meeting the work but also meeting my
neighbours in print—writers whose lives and
imaginations are bound to the same currents of
migration, history, and survival. My Tubigan…
looks back on childhood games in the
Philippines as preludes to an unspoken trauma.
On its own, it is one story. In this book, it
becomes part of a larger map of how play,
memory, and violence coexist in the diasporic
imagination.
One of the anthology’s fiercest voices is Kaia M.
Arrow in Dreams of Pinoy Joy: Decolonial Rage
and Disabled Resistance in the Diaspora.
Arrow’s piece blends declarative prose and
italicized refrains, part manifesto, part prayer.
Speaking as a sick and disabled Pinay, Arrow
lays bare the cost of existing under white
“tolerance”—a tolerance that evaporates when it
becomes inconvenient. “My body is an act of
defiance / That I’m an un/willing accomplice to,”
they write, refusing to smooth over discomfort
for the reader. The poem expands the
anthology’s scope by making disability justice
inseparable from anti-colonial struggle. The final
lines—Will this Land embrace me / Or spit me
back, unknown daughter / I’m afraid to find out
—crystallize the paradox of longing for a
homeland that may no longer feel like home.
Hari Alluri’s Body Is Not a Thing to Escape takes
another route into the same waters. Here,
memory is braided through ghost story, family
history, and wartime trauma. Lolo’s ghost
appears during a shared cigarette, then the
narrative flows back to his Death March from
Bataan. Alluri collapses timelines so that the
living and the dead, the past and the present,
share the same breath. The poem refuses to
treat the racialized body as something to be
shed; instead, it is a vessel for love, grief, and
survival. “Those islands whose roots are
centipedes of flame” is an image that carries the
full weight of colonial violence. By ending with
Lolo walking “on any day but that” of the March,
Alluri performs an act of quiet resurrection—
restoring what history tried to erase.
From the first pages, the anthology shows its
range in form and sensibility. Deann Louise
Nardo’s “Where Do You Come From” unfolds as
a prose-poem catalogue of memory, moving
from “the arthritic crackle of my grandmother’s
hands” to “the eerie creaking of Maplewood
floors.” It holds the Philippines and Canada in
the same frame, letting sensory detail bridge
oceans. Nathalie de los Santos’s Over the
Rainbow spans generations and continents,
from Bohol to New Brunswick, charting the
dissonance of being “not Filipino enough” and
“not Canadian just by looking at me.” These
pieces sit comfortably alongside more
experimental work, hybrid forms, and pieces
that switch between English and Philippine
languages without apology or footnote—
affirming that translation, when it happens, is a
gift, not an obligation.
Reading the anthology front to back, patterns
emerge. Belonging is not treated as a
destination but as a series of crossings—
sometimes voluntary, often forced. Nostalgia is
complicated, tinged with both love and
suspicion. The homeland is not romanticized; it
is a place still marked by colonial capitalism,
political corruption, and inequality. Canada is
neither pure refuge nor simple antagonist; it is a
place where microaggressions and systemic
exclusions shape daily life even as communities
take root. Language itself becomes a site of
negotiation—the editors note the cultural weight
of hiya, often mistranslated as “shame” but more
accurately a sensitivity to context and propriety;
the discomfort with terms like “Filipinx,” seen by
some as a Western imposition; the colonial
residue in “Philippine,” a name not of our
choosing.
The editorial vision is clear: to assemble not a
definitive statement but a foundational one. This
is, as far as I know, the first anthology to
explicitly centre Filipino-Canadian writing across
genres. In a literary landscape that often
collapses Asian diasporas into a single category,
Magdaragat insists on the specificity of our
histories—the labour export policies that have
shaped migration patterns, the colonial
entanglements that predate our families’
departures, the climate and geography that
make settling in “Winterpeg” or the Prairies its
own test of endurance.
The book is also an act of record-keeping. The
inclusion of writers at different stages—from
emerging voices to established authors—means
that it functions as both archive and launch pad.
For emerging Filipino-Canadian writers, it says:
here is proof that we are here, we have been
here, and our stories matter. For readers outside
the community, it offers a textured, sometimes
uncomfortable portrait that resists the tidy
narratives often sought from migrant
communities.
Of course, no anthology can contain every
strand. One could wish for more pieces in
French to reflect Filipino communities in Quebec,
or more intersections with Indigenous narratives
given our shared but distinct relationships to
colonialism. But these are less gaps than
invitations—spaces for future work to fill.
By the time I reached the last page, I was
thinking less about my own contribution and
more about the collective one. Magdaragat is a
fleet, not a single ship. Each piece navigates its
own route, but together they form a crossing
that feels historic. The sea between here and
the Philippines is still there, but in these pages,
it is alive with voices—questioning, mourning,
resisting, celebrating.
For me, being part of Magdaragat has meant
seeing my work in a lineage I had not yet
claimed. I’m no longer only writing into the void;
I’m writing into a body of work that speaks
back, that answers, that argues. For me, that’s
the gift of this anthology—not just to the
contributors, but to the literature of this
country.
(Magdaragat is published by Cormorant Books and available at most reputable bookstores)