Departures Essays (The Philippine Writers Series 2021)

In this collection of essays, the author reflects on her life and times, including those of family members, whose lives were marked by departures from home, hometown, and homeland. Woven into the fabric of individual lives are events and “upheavals” in history—the peasant unrest in the early twentieth century, the war in the 1940s, martial rule, the 1990 Luzon earthquake, and the 2020 pandemic—leading to departure and separation. Macansantos writes with candor and melancholy, though not without hopefulness, because memory bears many gifts, including understanding and insight, and possibly, healing.

This isn’t just the story of a father or a mother, or of the author herself—it’s the enlarging biography of a community, a region, a corner of Philippine society that those of us more familiar with Eastwood and Greenhills know and care little about. From Macansantos, we can trace a line straight back to Bulosan, and even earlier to those first Ilocano expatriates whose stories will forever lie unspoken, because they did not have articulate grandchildren to record and relate them. These narratives are laden with violence—sons get killed in foreign wars, an uncle vanishes in the wild, a younger brother dies in infancy, the father is imprisoned and then the daughter herself—but the author deals with pain with a stoic evenness, even tenderness, rather than the hysteria that a younger or less collected writer might have employed.
—Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.