LAST FEBRUARY 19, 2026, Linda Ty-Casper's noted protest Martial Law novella, A SMALL PARTY IN A GARDEN: REVISED AND CRITICAL EDITION, was launched by the Ateneo de Manila's Literary and Cultural Studies Program (LCSP), courtesy of Dr. Charlie Samuya Veric.
The book launch took place after a Conversation by publisher Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and Dr. Charlie Samuya Veric. Held at the Lobby of de la Costa Hall, the launch began with remarks from Ms Manguerra Brainard, as well as a messagere sent by Linda Ty-Casper.
Set in the Philippines during Marcos Dictatorship, A Small Party in a Garden tells the story of a privileged woman who is the right-hand woman of Imelda Marcos, and who, through the events transpiring from the titular party in a garden learns first hand what brutality meant under Martial Law.
This was followed by four student reactors, who each gave their thoughts on Linda Ty-Casper and her protest novella. These student reactors were, Ms Francesca Abalos, AB Literature in English from Ateneo de Manila; Ms Alyssa Marie Lopez, undergraduate intern from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines; and Ms Sofia Ysabel Bernardo and Mr Stephen Seth Zagala, both MA students in Literary and Cultural Studies from Ateneo de Manila.
The event concluded with closing remarks by Dr Jonathan Chua, former Dean of the School of Humanities.
Following are three responses by the Ateneo scholars. For further related readings, there are links to the Introduction of the book by Dr. Charlie Samuya Veric and an article about Linda Ty-Casper by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard.
A Response to Linda Ty-Casper
by Francessca S. Abalos
WHEN I WAS ASKED to talk about who Linda Ty-Casper is to me, I first thought of Manila City’s Victims of Martial Law Memorial Wall in the Mehan Garden. It is a small black marble monument, featuring the names of Manileños killed, tortured, and vanished during Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s dictatorship.The monument is always messy when I go, covered in leaves and dust and water stains. None of these details make the Memorial Wall any less impactful—several hundred martyred and disappeared makes an impression, even if their names never truly stick in my memory.You see, the scale of devastation is how I was taught to remember Martial Law: Figures on how our national debt and poverty ballooned and, of course, the statistics of its human toll. A fixation on macroscopic commemoration, which I find often removes the personhood behind names on a wall.
This is not the intention of the Memorial Wall, after all, its epigraph ends with this: “It is erected in the hope of inspiring people, especially the youth, to lead worthy lives, pursuing always the public good over self-interest, emboldened in their quest by the example of those who championed truth, liberty, and justice in one of the Republic’s darkest hours.” When we look at its marble inscriptions, we are meant to recognize the lives these Manileños led and, more pointedly, the lives they could have led if the Marcos dictatorship had not siphoned them away. But I think we do not really understand any of this when all we see is a name without a story.
Something will always be forgotten.
Such amnesia is why Linda Ty-Casper writes. In an interview with Exploding Galaxies late last year, she explained: I write [. . .] so that we won’t forget who we are or what we went through. And [so] we’ll know what to be when the time comes to make the choices [that matter].” Therein lies the power of her writing—how it reminds us of the humanity our history loses over time. Historical fiction like Ty-Casper writes are not factual restorations of history, but they bring us closer to the truth anyway.
So, today, my reaction is not really a celebration of Linda Ty-Casper as an exceptional Filipina author who won the Southeast Asia Write Award for her oeuvre. It is a touch more personal than that. My response to Ty-Casper is to honor her as a writer who—even if she has not written those exact stories—helps us remember that the names engraved on the Memorial Wall’s dusty, unkempt marble belonged to people whose lives had meaning.
***
Sofia Ysabel Bernardo
A Response to Linda Ty-Casper
by Sofia Ysabel Bernardo
LINDA TY-CASPER IS a wonderfully prolific writer and thinker. Through her work, I’ve been moved to ask: how does an active reconstruction of the past allow us to consider, first, our current circumstances, and second, the position from which we speak of said circumstances with our own unique voice?
I’m very grateful for authors like Linda, who dare to dive into the depths of history and lead us into a dynamic and expansive space where our sense of The Moment is not static— it is in constant process. Something we must remember about history is that more than ever, especially given our current historical moment with all its exigencies and the painful rewritings of the history we have known to be true, we must lean into the plasticity of history as much as possible, with a pursuit towards a unique cultivation of the understanding that it is our responsibility to be critical in our engagement with the reality that the historical is wholly malleable.
What is so wonderful about what authors like Linda Ty-Casper have achieved is that they allow us to inquire into and understand history as active plot, rather than lapsed moment. A distinct kind of formation accompanies the creative act of writing and rewriting, most especially in the moment of suspension that occurs during the attempt to string together the precise words capable of embodying a moment in historical time. Resil Mojares once said, “memory is a precious thing, and more so for being fragile.” In the act of creative navigation, the text is alive and capable of imagining alternative historical moments, details, and truths. Calling back to something Cecilia mentioned earlier which has very evidently taken shape in Linda’s body of work: stories constitute a form of strength, but they also constitute a form of healing. The greatness is in the story.
On a larger scale, then, in the face of various imposed truths which we are fed, which those in power gorge on in order to unjustly retain their place, an even heavier weight and responsibility accompanies the work we each must do in the course of our own historicizing. This work we must all constantly engage in to comprehend our current circumstances to ‘fill in the blanks,’ is not only a process but a living practice— a constant imaginative enquiry that allows us to develop our constantly shifting understanding of the current historical moment in a shrewd, critical, and nuanced manner.
***
Alyssa Marie C. Lopez
A Response to Linda Ty-Casper
by Alyssa Marie C. Lopez
HI, I'M ALYSSA. I am a BA English Language Studies student at PUP, and I am here at Ateneo as an undergraduate intern. I believe my background in academic achievements is the reason why I was brought here and why this place is meaningful to me.
Prior to the separation of PUP, the separation of English Language Studies and Literary and Cultural Studies in PUP, these two subjects used to be under one program, AB English. Language and literature were not considered competing subjects. They were read in pairs, like theory with text, pairs, text, and structure with story. I continue to go back to that history even though that may have been by the time of my time. It is as though I am entering into a conversation that had not been completed and now I am joining it halfway.
We are strictly trained to interrogate language in ELS. One of the principles that have influenced me is as follows: language is never neutral. English is not only a tool of communication. It has colonial memory, a hierarchy of classes, and institutional power. The manner in which something is put forward, such as who is named, who is not named, what is stressed, and what gets softened, already ciphers power. Even grammar has politics.
Thus, we learned language in the way it functions in our daily lives: conversations, media texts, public statements, and institutional communication. We have looked at the construction of identities, the production of legitimacy, and the stabilization of authority in narratives. I value that deeply. It sharpened my listening. It helped me to be more alert about undertones. To what is being said, and more to the point, to what is being avoided.
Yet somewhere during things, I came to experience an efficient discomfort.
We were still saying that language was political, although we were not always seated with the very literature that had been made by our own political history. We were taught motions, structures, and preludes to books. However, we were not always able to do so to space out writers in their works and to put them completely in the context of the Philippine sociopolitical realities.
And as I started thinking more seriously about martial law with Ferdinand Marcos, the lack was more burdensome. Since the martial law was not preserved by mere violence. Language helped to stabilize it.
The idea of authoritarianism was packaged as discipline. Censorship was defended as a defense. Fear was renamed as order. The regime suppressed dissent using controlled media, speeches that were carefully timed and euphemisms that were well calculated, and it even rearranged what might be deemed as “truth.” It was bodies that were controlled, but it was also narratives.
In ELS, we would refer to that as discourse production, power framed as normal through repetition. But the literature of that time tells us that there is also something still of equal significance: resistance is driven by language.
Im situations where open criticism was too risky, authors resorted to allegory, metaphor, and fragmentation. Fiction bore what journalism could not. Poetry was grief that could not be spoken publicly. Literature was inverted into a counter-archive in a place where memory survived despite being repressed. If the state had its official story, there was a parallel memory that literature bore.
And then there came the realization to me: in as far as I really believe that language is political, then I cannot stop at the analysis of the institutional discourse. I also need to consult the imaginative texts that put lived experience to the test. I must read the works that denied suppression.
It is because even now we see an effort to soften or revise that history. We observe the accountability being obscured by judiciously selected words. And, unless we are vigilant, unless we are critically literate, we are likely to confuse reframing with truth.
This is why I need to be here, to immerse myself more in local literature. Not as an addition to my training, but its continuation. I do not wish to simply trace the functioning of language in systems. I would like to know how it will stand on its own. How it resists containment. The way it does not forget what the institutions are trying to forget. I would like to observe how language is made a dwelling place of memory.
In a sense, this space is a reversion to that previous AB English vision, in which the study of language and literature is not a separate discipline but a practice that enlightens one another. Where narrative testimony intersects discourse theory. Where criticism and imagination come together.
I did not come to dispose of what ELS gave me. I am here to deepen it. To introduce that analytical rigor into Philippine writing influenced by martial law and its aftermath. Not to ask how power speaks, but how communities respond, inventively, tenaciously.
Since language can be used to discipline memory, literature can use language to protect it. And I believe that, more than ever, when the narratives are competing, and there is a weak historical consciousness, careful reading is not merely a scholarly activity. It is intellectual duty. And better still, it is ethical work.
***
Charlie Samuya Veric's Introduction to A SMALL PARTY IN A GARDEN: REVISED AND CRITICAL EDITION - "Gardens and Mountains of Philippine Literature" - https://www.esquiremag.ph/culture/books-and-art/gardens-and-mountains-of-philippine-literature-a7837-20260108-dyn
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's "Was Linda Ty-Casper Really a 'Saling-Pusa?'" -
https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/was-linda-ty-casper-really-a-saling-pusa
Photos taken at the Ateneo for the Conversation
and Book Launch of Linda Ty-Casper's novella
Charlie S. Veric and Cecilia Brainard
READ ALSO:
Cecilia Brainard Fiction: The One-Night Stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Cecilia Brainard Fiction: After the Ascension
Cecilia Brainard's The Journey
Celebrating Translations of Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's Fiction
Tags: #booksphilippines #martiallawphilippines #marcosdictatorship #Filipinonovels #Ateneodemanila #ateneouniversity
No comments:
Post a Comment