Eric Gamalinda
Eric T. Gamalinda is a poet, a fictionist and an essayist. He took undergraduate courses at the UST for three years and the UP for a semester. He was a local fellow for poetry of the UP ICW in 1983. In 1990, he went to Great Britain to represent the Philippines in the Cambridge International Writers’ Conference and to attend the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat in Scotland, 1991. he got a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy. He participated in the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Programme for the 21st century. He currently works with the Center for Investigative Journalism.
Gamalinda’s poems are collected in Fire Poem/Rain Poem (1976) and Lyrics From a Dead Language (1991). His stories have been gathered in Peripheral Vision (1992). His first novel, Planet Waves (1989), was set during the turbulent Martial Law era. A second novel, Confessions of a Volcano (1990), was written after a visit to Japan, and explores the differences between Filipino and Japanese consciousness. A third novel, The Empire of Memory (1992), is set against the momentous events before, during, and after the EDSA revolt.
Two of Gamalinda’s poetry collections won prizes in the Palanca. Ara Vos Prec won in 1985, while Patria y Muerte won in 1988. He also won Palanca awards for: Anatomy of a Passionate Derangement, a one-act play in 1980, "Mourning and Weeping in this Valley of Tears," a short story in 1988, and "The Unbearable Lightness of EDSA," an essay in 1990. His novel, Planet Waves received the National Book Award for fiction from the Manila Critics Circle in 1989.
(Source here.)
“Let me be the first to say that I know the name for everything and if I don’t I’ll make them up: dukkha, naufragio, talinhaga. Just like the young whose hearts give no shame, I love the excesses of beauty, there is never enough sunlight in the world I will live in, never enough room for love.I fear none of us will last long enough to prove what I’ve always suspected, that the sky is a membrane in an angel’s skull, trees talk to each other at night, ice is water in a state of silence, the embryo listens to everything we say.I am afraid for the child skipping rope on the corner of my street, the girl on the train with flowers in her hair, the man whose memory is entirely in Spanish. I am more afraid of losing consciousness when I go to sleep, or that in my sleep I will grow old and forget how desire once drove me mad with wakefulness.Just like the perfect seasons they will die and I will die and you will die also; no one knows who will go first, and this is the source of all my grief.”
“Then she decided she was ready to die.But before she did, she asked the poets to record these momentsin song, and the architects to carve the song in marble,and the marble to be extracted from the most secret veinsof the earth and placed where no man could see it,because that is the nature of love, because one walks alonethrough the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleepwith their eyes open, because the angels tremblefrom so much beauty, because memory moves in orbitsof absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain,and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.”
“Because you brand our tongueswith silence. Because you watch usin fear, even while we sing.”
“The monsoon came, six monthsof infinite rain. The towns I once knewwere wiped clean,and everyone said it was Godrevising his poem.”
“I love the excesses of beauty,there is never enough sunlightin the world I will live in,never enough room for love.”
“I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually killing me”