Huron: Essays on wilderness and dwelling

• Main Author: Ortego, Ma. Carmie Flor I.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2021
• Subjects: Essays; English essays; Creative Writing
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_lit/1; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=etdm_lit
• Institution: De La Salle University

“Huron” in Waray can mean two things: a rustic, rural area, even a wilderness (hurón) or to dwell, as in “Didi kami mahúron” (We will dwell here, we will stay here). This collection of five personal essays in both Waray and English about my hometown of Talalora, Samar takes as its basis the assertions of Julia Martin in her 2015 essay “Minute Particulars and Global Flows: Place and Interconnectedness in a Creative Nonfiction Class” that a place is process, not object, and because of that, proximity to the physical space of the dwelling does not in any way matter, as Martin Heidegger contends in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (2001). It attempts to answer the question of when the notion of “home” took root and became such a concept, amid all the voluntary and involuntary movement to and away from it. This collection draws its main inspiration from Edward Soja’s notion of Thirdspace which builds on Henri Lefebvre’s work on the perceived, conceived, and lived spaces and emphasizes lived space as the space of representation. This Thirdspace then becomes an ethics of place for these personal and shared memories of my generation, a generation that is increasingly inhabiting neither wholly local nor exiled spaces, more than seven decades since the founding of our town. Translation practice was guided by avoiding Antoine Berman’s notion of deforming tendencies in “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign” (2012). Nevertheless, where they have been resorted to is an embrace of the Thirdspace that informs my writing in that although this project was initially about reclaiming my Waray mother tongue, it has grown to be an acknowledgment of the bilingual experience I also share with others of my generation, and that both Waray and English, in their own linguistic formulations, can be used to write of the personal. Keywords: personal essay, Waray, Talalora, wilderness, dwelling, place, thirdspace, bilingual