island conversations
podcast series
Welcome to SICRI’s “island conversations” podcast series.
The aim of these podcasts is to highlight the work of island studies scholars and practitioners who make a significant contribution to islands’ research, arts, and culture landscape.
The podcasts are accompanied by a curated transcript that is edited to read as an independent piece.
"Island Notes" composition in Cretan Flat Mandolin by Christophoro Gorantokaki @"Melody Box"
Welcome to SICRI’s Island Conversations podcast series. This is Dr. Evangelia Papoutsaki, the host of this podcast and SICRI’s co-convener.
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In this episode, we have invited Assistant Professor Antonino Salvador de Veyra, who currently serves as Director of the Leyte Samar Heritage Centre of the University of the Philippines at Tacloban College, which is also hosting the 2026 SICRI International Small Island Cultures Conference. Nino also teaches literature and creative writing courses in the Division of Humanities, and his research and creative works focus on ecocriticism and ecoliterature, particularly in relation to the Eastern Visayas Islands of the Philippines.
Nino, welcome.
Thank you. It's nice to be here.
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Nino, it's a pleasure to have you with us — and a particular pleasure because you will be hosting us. This is an opportunity to get to know you and, by extension, the work that you do in the Leyte Islands.
I'd like us to begin on a personal note. You grew up in the Philippines in an archipelagic context shaped by multiple island cultures and languages.
Antonino Salvador de Veyra
Could you tell us a little about your island background, where you grew up, the cultural environment that shaped you, and any early memories that still stay with you?
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Perhaps it's best to start by locating the islands within the wider world. If you go to Google Earth and zoom into the Philippines, the Leyte and Samar Islands are in the middle part of the whole archipelago, on the eastern side facing the Pacific. I grew up on the island of Leyte, particularly in Tacloban City, the capital city of Leyte, and the neighbouring town of Palo. Throughout my years in the islands, I've been going around both Leyte and Samar.​
Samar actually comprises three provinces — Eastern Samar, Northern Samar, and Western Samar — while Leyte has two provinces: Leyte and Southern Leyte. There is also another island province, Biliran, on the northern tip of Leyte. When we hold the conference in June, perhaps we can arrange a visit to Biliran. It's a beautiful, small island — smaller than Leyte.
So, I grew up in Leyte, in Palo where my family resides and in Tacloban where I went to school — daytime I was a Taclobanon, nighttime I was a Paloeño. But when I reached my twenties, I wanted to go out into the world. Living on an island can sometimes feel claustrophobic; you know all the people, and you want a change of scenery.
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For more than twenty years I lived outside of Leyte. First, I moved to Negros Oriental, which is about two islands away, and then to Mindanao in the south of the Philippines — specifically Davao, where the infamous Duterte comes from. I worked there for around twenty years at UP Mindanao. Then in 2022, I moved back to Leyte, primarily because my father was growing old and had been widowed, so someone needed to be with him. I transferred from UP Mindanao to UP Tacloban.​
That move changed how I look at the island. When I was twenty, I saw it one way. Now, having seen more of the world, I look at it through more mature eyes.
Map of the Philippines - the Leyte, Samar and Biliran Islands
(photo source: https://www.leytesamardailynews.com/push-to-create-samar-island-region-gains-renewed-momentum/)
Do you have any memories from growing up? I assume there is a distinctive language or dialect in Leyte?
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Yes, we speak what we call Waray. There are variations of Waray — the variety spoken in Tacloban, Palo, and nearby towns differs somewhat from that spoken in Samar, but not so much that we can't understand each other. On the western side of Leyte, facing Cebu Island, people speak Cebuano, which is a different language. When I moved to Negros Oriental — where they also speak Cebuano — I had to learn it through daily communication. So now I speak both Cebuano and Waray, which has enriched how I see the world.
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That's interesting, and it leads us to the next question. The Philippines is often spoken of as a single nation, yet it is made up of thousands of islands with distinct histories and linguistic traditions. From your perspective, how does this archipelagic condition shape identity, both nationally and locally?
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I'll need to offer a little history. Interestingly, Leyte and Samar were the first islands to be named the Philippines, or Filipinas — named, I believe, by Ruy López de Villalobos. When Magellan was circumnavigating the world in search of a route to Malacca, he first set foot on Homonhon Island in Samar, then went to the southern part of Leyte, to Limasawa , where the first mass on Philippine soil was held. This opened the entire trade route for the Spanish Empire. Years later, another set of navigators came to what is now the Philippines and claimed the islands — first Leyte and Samar — as Filipinas. In that sense, we are the origin of the nation.
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But of course, the centre of the nation is no longer in the Visayas. It is in Luzon, in Manila, where policies are shaped and where a different language — Tagalog — is spoken. Tagalog is an Austronesian cousin of Waray, but still, the dynamics of centre and periphery apply. Even when some of our national leaders trace their roots to these islands — our current president Ferdinand Marcos, for example, whose mother comes from Leyte — their policies don't necessarily reflect that connection. She built the family mausoleum just across from our house in Tolosa, a coastal town where I spent my summers. The backyard of my maternal grandmother's house in Tolosa faced the sea.
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Those who lead the nation may feel nostalgic about the islands, yet when they make policy, they are often thinking about other things. So, we in the islands navigate and negotiate around national agendas, finding our way through.
That dynamic of centres and peripheries is common to many archipelagic nations, and communities are constantly negotiating with the centre. It's interesting that you grew up speaking your island language. Did you learn Tagalog at school, or did it come later?
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It was a required subject from grade school through high school, and it's also the language of national media. We don't officially call it Tagalog — there's a national language called Filipino, which is essentially Tagalog with a different name. The idea was that Filipino should be a blend of all the languages, but in practice it has remained predominantly Tagalog. We hated that subject in grade school. We couldn't understand why we had to learn it. In the end, I didn't really learn the language in the classroom — I learned it through comics, television, and popular culture. And of course, we had cousins in Manila, so when we visited for holidays, you didn't want to seem lost, so you picked it up.
You mentioned that you went away — as many islanders do — and then returned. You spoke about seeing your island with different eyes. Looking back at that moment, what did you feel made Leyte distinctively different from the other places you had lived?
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That's a tough question. I've lived on different islands for most of my life, but the experience of islandness felt sharpest in the smaller ones. When I was in Negros Oriental, I would go on weekend trips with friends to Siquijor, a smaller island just across the water — famous for its mythology around sorcery and healing. That was a very different experience from being on the bigger islands like Negros Oriental, Leyte, or Samar.
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When I was growing up, my family would sometimes take us to Biliran, and there's a small group of islands just off Biliran called Maripipi. One island there is so small you could walk around it in half a day. People know each other, and there is a different vibe entirely.
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In my mother’s hometown, Tolosa, for example, people know what you're going to have for lunch before you've even been to the market. They know what's being sold, they know your household's circumstances, and they can predict what you'll cook. That kind of intimacy was something I missed. But before I left, it was also precisely that closeness that made me feel claustrophobic and pushed me to want adventure. When I came back with more mature eyes, I could finally balance both feelings — appreciate the richness of the islands and the culture, and understand what I hadn't been able to see when I was young.
Appreciation and acceptance. You are now the Director of the Leyte Samar Heritage Centre. Could you tell us about the Centre's vision and how it supports both tangible and intangible heritage in the region?
The Leyte Samar Heritage Centre was established in 1995 as the Research and Extension Unit of UP Tacloban College. The founding director, Professor Joyce Dorado Alegre, envisioned it as a repository and research hub for the islands' culture and heritage. Over the years it has made progress, though budgetary constraints have meant it hasn't fully realised its potential.
When I moved here in 2022, I became director partly because it was the easiest way to secure my transfer from UP Mindanao — my home unit was reluctant to let me go, but when the directorship became open, I applied and was selected. Once I took the role, I realised how much there was to do.​
Leyte-Samar Heritage Center (LSHC), University of the Philippines
One of our current projects is the Waray Language Programme, which takes a more scholarly approach to studying our language, knowing that culture is embedded in it — we understand our culture because we understand the language. Waray is not yet a vulnerable language, but there are signs of erosion. The influence of media, of Tagalog and Filipino, is slowly shrinking the Waray lexicon. One of our goals is not just to preserve the language but to make it more dynamic — to encourage more people to speak, write, and engage in Waray.​​
If you look behind me, you can see paintings. These were commissioned by the founding director — they depict endemic birds of Leyte and Samar, including a Philippine eagle and a cockatoo. When I arrived, I did an inventory of the Centre's assets and found many of these paintings in storage. I had them cleaned and set up an exhibition.
But I wanted to make it livelier, so we sourced recordings of the birds' calls and made it interactive — visitors could scan a QR code to hear each call. If many people accessed the recordings at once, you would hear a cacophony of bird calls, as if standing in a forest.​
Antonino Antonino Salvador de Veyra with the background paintings
(the cockatoo to the left and the eagle to the right) during the podcast interview
We also arranged the paintings in concentric circles: the outer ring featured birds found in urban and lowland areas, while the innermost ring displayed birds found only in forests and mountains. Interestingly, some of these birds appear in local poetry. The exhibit title was drawn from a famous Waray poem — and folk song — whose imagery includes hornbills and sparrows in flight.
So, the Leyte Samar Heritage Centre tries to go deep into both natural and cultural heritage, and hopefully we're doing a reasonable job of it.
This is fascinating. You are saying that heritage for the Leyte Samar Islands encompasses not only the human and cultural dimension but also the natural world. And this connects to your own scholarly work in ecocriticism and ecoliterature. I could see the passion as you described those birds, the sounds, the poetry, and how that poetry is woven into the culture.
What drew you to ecopoetry in particular, and how did that path lead to your current work in the Eastern Visayas?
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That's quite a story. In November 2013, I was working at UP Mindanao when a group of writers in Leyte invited me to sit on a panel for a creative writing workshop. We went to Biliran, where one of the universities hosted the event. It was supposed to be a three-day workshop followed by a tour on the fourth day. But we ended up finishing in two days, because Typhoon Yolanda — Typhoon Haiyan — was forecast to hit on Friday, November 8th. We left Biliran and crossed back to Leyte on the afternoon of November 7th. Early morning of the next day, November 8th, Typhoon Yolanda struck.
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When the typhoon hit Tacloban, all communication lines went down. Friends and fellow writers across the Philippines knew we had been in Biliran, and feared the worst — some thought Philippine writing in Eastern Visayas had been wiped out. I couldn't even confirm the safety of my fellow writers who joined the Biliran workshop, some of whom lived in villages right beside the sea. I feared what the storm surge had done to them.​
Palo Municipal Hall Building (photo source: Antonino Salvador de Veyra)
Palo Municipal Hall Building after Typhoon Yolanda (photo source: Antonino Salvador de Veyra)
In some ways, that experience marked a rethinking of what it means to live on an island. When you're on your own island, you can take things for granted. A new island feels exotic — tropical paradise and all that. But your home island is just... home.
After Yolanda, when the wind subsided and we could go outside, I found our neighbourhood flattened. Only a few structures were still standing. But in the week of recovery that followed, something remarkable happened: we went back to the kind of community I had experienced as a child — where neighbours were truly neighbours, where everyone shared what they had, where people looked out for each other.
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That brought me to a reckoning. I was a poet living in something of an ivory tower, looking at the world in a particular way. And then reality came knocking. I realised I needed to reconfigure how I looked at things. Whatever crisis has come since, I remind myself: I survived Yolanda. I can survive anything.
So, your ecopoetry is a direct response to your lived experience of a devastating natural event that affected the whole island. In your 2021 article 'Ugmad: Storm Surges, Super Typhoons, and the Ecopoetry of Post-Haiyan Leyte Samar,' you reflect on poetry written after Typhoon Haiyan. How do you see poetry helping communities process environmental trauma? And what does Ugmad convey that English or Tagalog cannot?
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One thing to be clear about from the outset: poetry will not save the world. Don't expect too much from the poet. But the poet will always offer new ways of seeing, and hopefully those ways of seeing will matter — gradually, through accumulation, changing how a reader thinks.
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After Typhoon Haiyan, I found that I couldn't write about it. I could talk about it to friends, describe what had happened, but I could not put it into writing. I asked fellow writers from Leyte and Samar about their experience, and some had written prolifically in the immediate aftermath. But others, like me, couldn't.
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One of our former teachers — now a close friend — observed that in Waray writing, nature has often served as metaphor, as backdrop. I found myself wondering whether that was true. And that question was the seed of Ugmad. The anthologies of creative works focusing on Yolanda came out in 2017, four years after the super typhoon. I looked at the poems produced over the years, trying to understand whether Waray writers had truly taken nature for granted, treating it merely as scenery.
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What I found was more nuanced. The trauma of Yolanda was real, but it was also revelatory. In Waray, ugmad carries the sense of a wound or trauma that also opens something — that pushes you to see differently. That discovery led me into ecocriticism, ecoliterature, and ecopoetry as my primary intellectual preoccupation.
​​Nino, may I ask you to read a passage — from your poetry or from the collection?
I'll read someone else's work rather than my own — I usually prefer to let others read my poems. This is by a good friend, Michael Villas. He was one of the writers with us in Biliran, and he made it back to Tacloban before the typhoon struck. He lives in a housing unit beside Red Beach — one of the sites of the liberation of the Philippines, near the MacArthur Memorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2niMpvSJscY). When the storm surge came, the waters submerged his house. He wrote this poem, 'Landfall':
"Not the beheading of trees, nor the wind raising its voice makes us scamper, mouselike, for cover, but glass shattering in the other room.
Papa, Carlos, and I hold the roof together against the gusts, erasing house, street, neighbourhood.
Over us hovers a wasteland of white as we strive to keep the roof above us.
The sea breaks in, uninvited, through the doors, the lock gate, the walls and ceiling gave in, the tides take over, a world submerged.
For three long hours, we were not Block 13, Block 25, Baras, Palo, Leyte.
We were the Pacific."
Thank you. Very powerful imagery. In your work, you discuss a decentring of the human subject in post-Haiyan poetry. Could you expand on that idea? How might island writers be reimagining the human–nonhuman relationship in the context of the climate crisis?
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I am currently working on a longer study called 'The Nature of Nature in Eastern Visayas Literature,' in which I try to understand how Waray people actually relate to nature — whether we follow Western frameworks for thinking about the human and more-than-human, or whether we have an indigenous way of understanding the world around us.
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What I am finding is that nature has always been embedded in people's lives here — in the language, in how we describe things, in how we orient ourselves in the world. I asked myself whether this was comparable to how Wordsworth, for example, writes about nature in the Anglo-American tradition. And I realised it isn't, quite. The Western concept of humans as stewards of the earth is not really what I find in Waray culture. Instead, there is a recognition that we are part of a larger world — that we have never placed ourselves at the centre of it.
I am trying to surface this in the folk tales, folk songs, and folk poetry of the Waray people — to show that this is how people have always lived, not just in literature but in everyday life: in the food they prepare, in how they wash clothes, in how they travel from one place to another. Nature is not separate from us.
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When I use the term 'decentring,' I am borrowing from Western ecocriticism, where it implies breaking away from a long-standing assumption of human centrality. But in Waray culture, there was never that assumption to begin with. The decentring, in that Western sense, is not really what is happening here — it's more of a recognition that we have always understood ourselves as part of, not apart from, the world. I use that vocabulary because I am writing in English and it is the available framework, but the underlying reality is different.
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Your work brings to mind David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous and the concept of the more-than-human world, where he draws on many indigenous cultures' ways of engaging beyond the human-centred frame. It seems that storytelling functions in a particular way in the aftermath of catastrophe in island communities.
A few years have passed since the disaster. How do people on the island engage with that memory? Do they keep telling the story — given that so many lives were lost, so many homes destroyed?
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One thing that struck me was how, when people from the island who haven't seen each other for a long time finally meet, the conversation opener is almost always: 'So, where were you before Yolanda?' And then: 'What happened after?' I have a shorthand for this — B.Y. and A.Y. or Before Yolanda and After Yolanda. The ecocritic E. Ann Kaplan calls it a border event: a catastrophe around which you measure your life.
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Another ecocritic, Frederick Buell, has observed that people in the Global South are always dwelling in crisis and have always found ways to manage. The Western world tends to celebrate this as 'resilience.' But we islanders know that resilience is not something that emerges dramatically in response to a single crisis — it is an everyday practice. We see that across almost all indigenous cultures.
Because living with adversity is so ordinary, there is also a tendency — noted by Buell — to try to forget the bad things and move on, then remember again when the anniversary of Yolanda comes around. In Tacloban, for example, the coastal area badly hit by the storm surge was declared a no-build zone. And yet, if you go there now, you will see stronger concrete structures right beside the sea — hotels and restaurants facing the very body of water that surged during Yolanda. The 'no-build zone' has effectively become a 'build stronger zone.'
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But in terms of storytelling — whenever people share what happened during Yolanda, the stories flow naturally. The Waray people are a storytelling people. Ask someone what happened here and they will give you a whole set of stories. Storytelling is part of how we cope with what life and nature give us.
Dulok
Nino Soria de Veyra
1.
Harayo pa nababati-an na nam’
An nagkikinurahab nga babayi.
Sige gihap an iya guli-at paglabay
Nagdidinalagan, hapit nadadanas
An iya upod nga bata, gindudu-as,
Nagbuburusag na an im-im.
“Tsunami! Tsunami!”
Natarantar an iba ha am’ pila
Natap-unan hin kakulba
Dagmit nga nag-inuulian.
May-ada nagpaki-ana
Kay diri karuyag bumul-iw
Han halaba nga linya
Ha pipira la nga tindahan
Nga nag-abre kahuman han Yolanda,
“Tinuod ba ito nga may tsunami?”
“Diri gad ada kay waray man luminog,”
Baton han usa nga naghuhulat han iya turno.
Damo an sumagbang hin istorya
Kabahin han balud nga dara ni Yolanda,
Tulo o upat ka dagko nga balud—
“Labaw pa han atop an kahitaas”
“Nag-iiritum pa gud,” siring han usa pa—
Sagunson kuno an paghaguros
Ginlunod ngan gin-anod an kababalayan.
Damo daw an nawad-an hin pamilya
Ha Baras, ha San Joaquin, ha Salvacion.
Tungod ada han amon uru-istorya nahadlok
Pati tag-iya han tindahan. Balik na la kuno buwas.
Panhihipuson anay nira mga nagkahuhulos nga tinda.
Pag-uli ko ha balay, an ak’ pamilya nanbakwit na
Ha am’ sapit nga balay may ikaduha nga andana.
Gunmuli-at pakakita nira ha ak’: “Ada na an tsunami!”
Kamalalaksi kumarida inin at’ pagkalilisang.
Storm Surge
Nino Soria de Veyra
(English translation: Merlie M. Alunan)
1.
From afar we could hear
the woman crying out loud,
yelling as she passed by,
running, almost dragging
the child who was with her,
pale-cheeked, her lips white.
“Tsunami! Tsunami!”
Panic seized our line,
infected by her terror
People wanted to rush home.
A few asked around,
unwilling to leave
the long queue
in the few stores
that opened after Yolanda.
“Is there indeed a tsunami?”
“There can’t be, there’s no earthquake,”
Said one waiting for her turn.
A rumor of stories spread
about the great wave brought by Yolanda,
three or four huge waves
“Taller than the rooftop,”
“It was all black with dirt,” said the others,
“They battered us one after the other”
It drowned all the houses,
Many lost their families
in Baras, San Joaquin, Salvacion,
The exchange of stories scared
the store owner. Come back tomorrow, she said,
She had to put away her soaked merchandise.
When I got home, my family had evacuated
to a neighbor’s house which has two stories.
They screamed when they saw me, “The tsunami’s here!”
How fast our terror runs.
2.
According to Voltaire Oyzon in his Facebook account, “Dulok” is the word for those huge waves
brought in by a storm. He read this in the Diccionario Bisaya-Español by Antonio Sanchez de la Rosa, published in 1914. That’s just a few years after the storm that Padre Jose Algue, S.J. talks about in his writings, El Baguio de Samar y Leyte, 12-13, 1897. This storm also carried with it ola de huracan, or waves brought forth by the wind which demolished everything in its path, from Guiuan to Tanauan, Palo and Tacloban.
De la Rosa further said, En la parte Este de Samar se manifiesta el doloc, cuando el temporal ó baguio pasa no muy lejos de la costa, en tal caso el oleaje no revientaen medio del mar, sino que viene serpenteando hasta estallar con furia en la playa, pero sí revienta en medio del mar.
Or as Voltaire says, “In Eastern Samar the doloc manifests when the typhoon passes not far from the coast, in which case the wave does not burst at sea, but comes snaking to explode with fury at the beach.”
Does anyone still remember this word? Because tsunami or storm surge is the term most used by those I talked with. That’s aside from my friend, the information officer of Project Noah. He said it was difficult to explain the difference between a storm surge and a tsunami, the Nihongo term for seismic sea wave or tidal wave. They tried using the term tsu-balod in their seminar, but the participants found it funny. So they stopped using it.
Sometimes when we are partaking of bahal, he insists it is most important for people to understand the difference between tsunami and storm surge. If there is dulok, there’s still time to evacuate.
No need for terror to outrun us.
Looking at the present moment, what do you see as the main cultural and environmental challenges facing Leyte and the neighbouring islands? And where do you see signs — I won't say resilience, but rather creative renewal?
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After Typhoon Haiyan, many people became more aware of what needed to change. Small groups formed — some focused-on mangrove rehabilitation, others more active in the environmental justice movement. But national policy has not reshaped the islands in response to Yolanda. If anything, it has become more extractive. Take Homonhon Island — the first island where Magellan set foot. Part of it has now been stripped bare by nickel mining, permitted because government officials have signed off on it or have commercial interests in it.
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But I am seeing more activism in opposition now than I ever did growing up. When I was young, the islands of Leyte, Samar, and Biliran were dominated by powerful political dynasties — the Romualdez family and others. You could not speak up without being targeted. Now people are more aware, more engaged, and more willing to seek environmental justice.
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And there are small but meaningful signs of creative renewal. A group of food researchers working on culinary heritage has started a movement that local government has embraced. It has helped farmers who grow traditional vegetables find a market. There is a dish called lawot-lawot, a medley of vegetables cooked in coconut cream — vegetables that many people would simply consider weeds. When I was growing up, you made it because the ingredients were just there in the garden and you had coconuts. Now, every market day in my town, a group of farmers sells these vegetables tied up in bouquets. People buy them, along with ready-prepared coconut cream. The municipal government has promoted it as a flagship heritage food project.
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I see this as a sign that if we value what grows in our natural habitats, we will also protect those habitats. You can't have the vegetables if you turn the land into a shopping mall. Little by little, I hope we are making changes.
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That is a wonderful example of creative renewal — and it doesn't have to come from arts or culture alone. It is a way of life being creatively renewed. Being a vegetarian, I must say: when I come to the conference in June, I very much hope to taste that dish.
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I was actually thinking of inviting a local chef who works on culinary heritage to give a demonstration during the conference — showing all these indigenous approaches to cooking and explaining the why behind them. A few days ago, we held our annual student festival here at UP Tacloban. We call it Tagay, Sankay — which roughly translates as 'have a toast, friend.' All students were required to bring heritage food from their home towns, and we set up a small bazaar where they sold local delicacies to one another. We also had food scholars speak about what they were tasting. One of the topics was tuba — coconut wine — and there were names for each stage of the production process. I had a field day just taking notes.
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There is clearly a tremendous richness in these islands that deserves to be renewed and shared, especially with younger people. What a wonderful conversation. I feel we could keep talking about these fascinating topics for much longer. I very much look forward to visiting in June and experiencing your culture firsthand. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today, and we look forward to being hosted by you.
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It is my pleasure and my honour. Thank you very much.
References
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Antonino de Veyra 2021 Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism Volume 1 Issue 1
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Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment-Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASLE-ASEAN)
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Ugmad: Storm Surges, Super Typhoons, and the Ecopoetry of Post-Haiyan Leyte and Samar, Philippines
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