The recently concluded 3rd Mindanao Book Festival, organized by MindaNews and Ateneo de Davao University, showed how prolific our Mindanawon authors have become in telling the story of Mindanao.
Professor Mansoor Limba, one of the most prolific authors in the region, captured the essence of this creative struggle beautifully in a recent social media post. To be an author, he writes, is to engage in a form of “beautiful madness.”
As Professor Limba puts it:
“You write when exhausted. You edit when uncertain. You publish despite knowing that books from the margins rarely enjoy the privileges of those from the center. And yet you continue.”
Expressing his gratitude to the organizers for the invitation to join the Forum on Independent Publishing, he noted that the event transcended a standard panel discussion. Instead, it became a moment of raw, honest storytelling—a rare window to share the intimate, ongoing journey of independent creators.
It is a journey that began amid the deep uncertainties of the pandemic, fueled by a stubborn dream to build a publishing platform dedicated entirely to Mindanawon writers and translators. It is defined by the quiet, daily struggle to sustain literature deeply rooted in memory, faith, history, identity, and resistance.
There is no grand corporate machinery behind operations like Professor Limba’s ElziStyle Bookshop. There is only conviction. Only persistence. Only the unwavering belief that the stories of Mindanao deserve to be printed, read, remembered, and carried far beyond the shores of the island itself.
Dr. Patricio “Jojo” Abinales, a prominent Filipino political historian, author, and professor (ret.) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa presented his insights on this framework during his lecture titled “Mindanao as Historical Center.” Professor Abinales uses the framework of the Nusantara to reframe how we look at the Philippines, challenging the traditional “Manila-centric” narrative of history.
For generations, mainstream Philippine history has been written with a heavy imperial accent. Our textbooks tell a story that begins and ends in Manila, treating the capital as the sole cradle of power, commerce, and civilization. Through this hyper-centralized lens, Mindanao is routinely pushed to the margins—reduced to a quiet afterthought, a passive periphery, or worse, a perpetually troubled frontier.
But if you zoom out and look at the fluid, borderless canvas of maritime Southeast Asian history, that entire narrative crumbles.
As Prof. Abinales points out, long before Spanish sails ever loomed over Luzon, Mindanao wasn’t a remote edge; it was a booming center. To understand how, he invokes the concept of the Nusantara—the classic Indonesian-Malay term for the vibrant archipelago of maritime Southeast Asia.
By anchoring Mindanao within the Nusantara world, Abinales reminds us that the south was never isolated. It was a vital, pulsing hub in a massive web of seafaring trade. Centuries before Western colonizers arrived to draw arbitrary national borders, the Sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao were already sophisticated maritime states, holding their own in direct diplomatic and economic trade with China, the Malay Peninsula, the Indonesian islands, and far beyond.
This global exposure didn’t disappear with colonial rule; it evolved. By the early 20th century, regions like Davao and Sulu were wired directly into the global economy. This is precisely what historian Dr. Patricia Irene Dacudao uncovers in her book, Abaca Frontier: The Socioeconomic and Cultural Transformation of Davao, 1898–1941. She maps out how Davao’s massive hemp industry tied the local landscape and its diverse communities straight to major global markets in Japan, the United States, and Europe.
When we look through the lens of the Nusantara, we stop viewing the southern Philippines as a disconnected borderland. We see it for what it has always been: a vibrant geopolitical crossroads. Shifting our perspective from a rigid, land-bound national history to a fluid, maritime regional history allows Mindanao to finally reclaim its rightful place as a historical center.
The Mindanao Book Festival, now in its third year, is proof that the ground is shifting. But we need more. We need a steady, relentless wave of new writing to fully unravel, document, and celebrate these hidden layers of our past.
Because rewriting our story from the ground up—and finally seeing ourselves clearly—is all that matters.
