The Past Inside Us: Genevieve L. Asenjo and the Making of Lumbay ng Dila

Memory, Place, and the Languages We Inherit

Words by Mye Mulingtapang

Editor's note: Quotations in this article are drawn from an interview conducted by In The Mix

Magazine with Genevieve L. Asenjo in June 2026.

What happens when a novel refuses to remain in one category?

Is it a family saga, a political archive, a regional history, a meditation on language, or a story

about belonging?

Perhaps that is precisely the point of Lumbay ng Dila.

Nearly two decades after its publication, Lumbay ng Dila continues to resist simple definitions. It moves between personal memory and family history, folklore and political upheaval, migration and dreams, carrying multiple languages at once. In doing so, it has become one of the most significant works to emerge from contemporary Philippine literature.

Now, as Lumbay ng Dila prepares to reach international readers through its English translation, The Melancholy of the Tongue, the conversation surrounding the novel expands beyond literature itself. It becomes an opportunity to revisit questions that continue to shape the Philippines: How do we remember? Who gets to tell history? And what happens to a people when their stories travel across languages?

One thing becomes clear: Lumbay ng Dila was never meant to remain in a single category.

The boundaries separating the personal from the political, memory from history, and geography from identity were never meant to be rigid.

When History Enters the Family

Asenjo traces the origins of Lumbay ng Dila to a political history that haunted her adolescence

in Antique during the 1990s.

"I was educated in the 'the personal is political' school of thought," Asenjo recalls.She points specifically to "the political rivalry surrounding two prominent surnames, the assassination of our local hero, Evelio P. Javier, and the later release from prison of the accused, Arturo Pacificador, Sr, which prompted the opening chapter."

Rather than reconstructing those events, however, she chose to personalize them.

"I personalized this history by imagining Sadyah as the accused's granddaughter. And the

historical facts and references end there; everything else is fiction," Asenjo explains. What interested her was not preserving historical records but tracing what history leaves behind inside families.

"The central question, the emotional truth, was: how does the past manifest in and through

family stories, loyalties, silences, wounds? I wanted the political to be personal; to be intimate."

That approach explains why the novel feels simultaneously expansive and deeply human.

History does not arrive as an abstract force but through relationships, memories, and inherited

absences.

Beyond Realism

Writing is a curious process, if you think about it. Through language, a connection is created

between strangers who, by convention, pretend a fictional story is real. That connection—when it occurs—is both delicate and intense.

It reaches where other educational tools fail; it stimulates the mind, evokes feelings, and

changes the reader in subtle and unpredictable ways.Readers have long noted how the novel

blends myth, folklore, political history, contemporary life, and dreamlike sequences without

privileging one mode over another. For Asenjo, these worlds naturally coexist.

"They coexist in my mind, and there are certain emotional, psychological, and collective truths

best explored or dramatized through myths and dreams, or the non-realist techniques such as

surrealism," she notes.

Dreams are not decorative in Lumbay ng Dila; they are another way of arriving at truth. They

allow her to access forms of truth that realism alone may not fully contain.

Perhaps genre is also a matter of affinity. Writers often gravitate toward the kinds of stories they themselves enjoy reading, allowing familiarity to shape their creative instincts. Stephen King once wrote that he was more interested in "ordinary people in extraordinary situations" because he wanted to provoke "an emotional, even visceral, reaction" in his readers.

The observation is useful not as a comparison but as a reminder that literary categories are

rarely fixed. A novel can be intellectual without becoming inaccessible, political withoutbecoming didactic, and emotionally resonant without sacrificing complexity. Lumbay ng Dila occupies precisely this space. It moves between realism, dreams, myth, and historical memory, asking readers not to choose one mode over another but to inhabit all of them at once. Cinema also shaped her creative practice during those years.

"I am also heavily influenced by film, and during that time I spent many afternoons and evenings at screenings organized by the Instituto Cervantes in Manila, where I also studied Spanish, "Asenjo recalls.

That influence is visible throughout the novel. Chronology bends, memory behaves emotionally rather than historically, and scenes unfold with a fluidity that resembles cinema more than linear narration.

Fiction as Scholarship

Asenjo refuses the distinction between scholarship and creative writing.

"Creative writing is scholarship, " she states simply.

For her, ethnographic and archival research are foundational tools that allow fiction to move

beyond self-expression and produce knowledge.

"Research — ethnographic, archival — these are basic and fundamental, so fiction moves

beyond self-expression and produces knowledge and insight."

That commitment is evident in the novel's engagement with the Martial Law period, the enduringland struggles involving the National People's Army, and the perspectives of Panay Island and her own post-Martial Law generation.

At the same time, she sees the novel itself as a linguistic performance.

"It performs language on the page: the novel is an application or embodiment of the multilingualPhilippines in its Tagalog-based Filipino, or in its being Visayan-Filipino."

Research and imagination are not opposing forces in her practice; one gives the other its shape.

"Research grounds the imagination. Imagination opens up possibilities and alternatives. We are,therefore, enriched by fiction," Asenjo adds.

The Geography of Belonging

Sadyah begins by searching for her mother and grandfather, but the journey gradually becomes a search for herself.Yet Asenjo resists reducing the novel to a single narrative.

"It is all of them at once. It is all of the above. They coexist, overlap, entangled."

Like Sadyah, the novel inhabits multiple worlds.

"The novel itself happens in different places: Antique, Iloilo, Manila, Bicol, and Bangkok."

Truth, too, resists singularity.

"I don't think truth is ever fully recoverable. We approach it through fragments, memories,

testimonies, silences, and competing stories.

"Then she poses a question that sits at the center of the novel. "Whose truth?"

For Asenjo, fiction is not tasked with producing definitive answers.

"The task of fiction is to make sense, illuminate ways in which truth can be lived, and perhaps,

hopefully, make us better, which for me means a degree of life with dignity for many, not only for the few," she reflects.

In this context, literature becomes a bridge between past and present, a fabric of words that

connects people across time. Words, stories, and myths create invisible threads that bind

individuals, communities, and cultures together. Storytelling is more than a cultural practice; it is an act of empathy, connection, and social cohesion. Through stories, we understand the

present, remember the past, and imagine the future.

Every narrative, from ancient myths and folktales to contemporary novels, helps weave

relationships that extend beyond geography and generations. In this sense, storytelling

becomes a form of collective inheritance. It builds lasting bonds, strengthens a sense of

community, and transforms literature into a shared heritage that continually reshapes how

people understand themselves and one another.

Lumbay ng Dila participates in this tradition. Its stories move between family histories, political

histories, and personal memories, reminding readers that belonging is never an individual

experience but something created through the stories we inherit, retell, and pass on.

Writing Place as a Living Presence in Lumbay ng Dila

Barasanan and Antique occupy a special place in Lumbay ng Dila. They are not passive

settings but active participants in the story.

"My place or hometown has always been my muse, " Asenjo reflects.She goes on to describe Barasanan and Antique as the "centers of gravity."

"They are not only backdrops or settings but also characters, even protagonists such as Sadyah."

Place is not something we leave behind. It is something we carry.

"Geography builds our vocabulary, shapes how we think and dream, and how we relate with

others and the world."

Perhaps no sentence encapsulates her literary philosophy more clearly than this:

"I am my places; they are inside me: their terrains, their soils and waters, their smells and

sounds; their ruins and so-called 'development.”

The statement challenges the idea that migration erases origin. Instead, place becomes

something we permanently carry within us.

How Lumbay ng Dila Writes the Philippines Through Language

Few contemporary Philippine novels have centered Kinaray-a language and culture as

intentionally as Lumbay ng Dila.

For Asenjo, language is not merely a tool for storytelling.

"Kinaray-a and Filipino, or let me say my Visayan-Filipino, is not simply the medium through

which I tell a story; it is one of the ways I experience reality, memory, intimacy, and loss."

She also describes her literary practice as emerging from political consciousness.

"I am educated, or let's say politicized, that as a Filipino writer coming from the region, we

should preserve and promote our language through writing in it."

If the novel advances any form of advocacy, she argues, "it does so by existing."

Its very existence becomes an intervention, insisting that Philippine literature can emerge from

many linguistic centers rather than one.

Asenjo also reflects on coming of age as a writer in the years following EDSA, when efforts to

institutionalize bilingual language policies and broaden notions of a national literature were

taking root.

"I am very much a product of my generation and of the social-cultural movements that made

such possibilities imaginable.

"While she acknowledges being underestimated and typecast as a "regional writer,

" exclusion is not the feeling she remembers most.

"My primary feeling was not exclusion but exhilaration: imagine, I could write in Kinaray-a and

Hiligaynon, get published, win awards, and even get promoted at work!" she says with evident

delight.

She then offers perhaps the simplest explanation for her literary journey.

"To be able to write in the languages I love and earn a living, I simply did what I knew best: write, and write, and write."

Ultimately, one idea surfaces repeatedly throughout Asenjo's responses: Lumbay ng Dila was

never solely about language. It was always about inheritance—the histories we carry, the places

that remain inside us, the wounds that outlive generations, and the languages that continue to

hold them together long after we have left home.

To be continued in Part II: Translation, Identity, and Bringing Philippine Literature to the World.