Editor’s Letter: WALANG MAGMU-MOVE ON.
“Okay, we’re ready.”
Cover art by Ira Nicolas (Manila, Philippines)
By Jancy Eugenio Nicolas (Tondo, Manila)
February 26, 2023
I wanted to begin this piece with an apology. To speak on behalf of Hiraya Media and apologize for our prolonged silence after last year’s national elections.
As an organization that aims to provide relevant digital content for the Filipino youth and by the Filipino youth, we feel like it’s our humble duty to continue fighting for a better society through our storytelling platforms.
We live by the motto: Challenging the narrative. Yet, how do you even challenge a narrative that challenges you back? If narratives help make sense of the senseless, how do we even start telling stories that we, ourselves, couldn’t make sense of anymore?
As a start-up organization born out of our idealism, hope, and quiet courage to continue believing in our nation, it is quite embarrassing to admit that even as creators of this platform named after such an enchanting Filipino word, Hiraya feels elusive and could sometimes feel like nothing more than a motherhood statement during these trying times.
We were lost, angry, and weary all at the same time.
“In a world where everyone wants to say something, it takes power to step back, sit in silence, and finally learn to listen.”
But here’s something I know for sure about storytelling and life at large. It may not feel like it, but being lost could be the most powerful place one could be in. Lost is a stage of possibilities. Lost is where we detach from our conditioning and where we grow even more mystified by and comfortable with life’s unreasonable reasons. Lost is a trial and error, thus, a place where failure is surprisingly gentle and harmless. It is where the Universe takes everything from us in order to show us that what remains is what truly matters — a stage where humility brings us closer and closer to the truth.
Lost, is actually, the most ideal space to challenge narratives.
So, no. I am not apologizing, after all. We’re sorry but we are not sorry. At least, not anymore. In fact, instead of being guilty about it, I am proud of our silence.
In a world where everyone wants to say something, it takes power to step back, sit in silence, and finally learn to listen. Amid the noise of millions of tweets, hundreds of podcasts, information overload, and our generation’s addiction to attention, we succumbed to stillness. And while we have no intention of stopping our mission, we finally accepted the lesson here: To tell stories isn’t to shout them to the world that it just adds up to the noise. A storyteller should also have the wisdom to know when to pause the telling and embrace the sacred lulls and gaps where relevant narratives ultimately come from.
When we temporarily ceased with our creation, we received the gift of contemplation.
And so here we are, welcoming you to our first narrative for 2023 – THE PAST NARRATIVE.
Instead of just looking into the future, desperately seeking that far-fetched Hiraya at the end of the tunnel, our silence has reminded us that what we need right now is a serious and consistent reflection of our past.
We refuse to pretend that everything’s back to normal again just because we have returned to a world where hugging and removing a mask don’t feel like a crime anymore. We refuse to think that moving on — which often feels like a good thing and is commonly associated with forgetting — is a prerequisite to moving forward. We refuse the temptations of apathy and privilege that are just as dangerous as the very return of a corrupt dynasty to the highest seat of the land. We refuse the false narratives of healing and a ridiculously twisted meaning of unity as a cure for symptoms instead of doing a surgery of the past to save our dying nation by taking its tumor out.
The word remember is conventionally defined as recalling a memory or an information. But I once read somewhere that remembering means “to put together” making the word “dismember” its antonym which means “to remove the limbs of” or “to cut or otherwise divide something into pieces”. I also searched online and saw this definition:
re-member(verb)
to reconstitute or reassemble that which has been dismembered.
“Problems occur when we go through life as our dismembered selves. We stop putting pieces back together and so we fail to truly move forward.”
Perhaps, in its very essence, remembering is being WHOLE AGAIN. Remembering is ultimately a path to INTEGRITY. And to replay a sentimental memory or recall useful information is just a tiny aspect of remembering. Even if we use the more popular meaning of this word, it is still very much an expression of being whole. Because something that was once forgotten could be that missing piece that completes a puzzle. Remembering isn’t just about walking down memory lane. We remember in order for us to connect the dots backward and see the image it forms for the whole picture to make sense.
That is why it should not come as a surprise how dismembered we all are as a people — both in our personal lives and as a collective. Problems occur when we go through life as our dismembered selves. We stop putting pieces back together and so we fail to truly move forward. Like a broken machine, we are forced to function despite our missing parts. Instead, we romanticize our resilience rather than building ourselves back first.
Now, we come out of our silence, but we keep the wisdom of stillness with us in this journey ahead. We’re still lost but aren’t we all? But if we become lost together… maybe, that’s our true Hiraya. Perhaps, Hiraya is not at the end of a long dark tunnel waiting for us. It is exactly where we all are right now, sitting with us in darkness to be the light we could hold on to.
Okay, we’re ready.
We invite you to REMEMBER with us.
