The Staccato Rhythm of Roots

A sense of place in creative writing is not merely a backdrop; it is a pulse. It is the writer’s duty to inhabit a location before attempting to transcribe it—to walk its jagged streets until the soles of their feet recognize the terrain, to sit in the heavy silence of its noon, and to catch the specific lilt of its dialect. To write truthfully is to ask, “What is this place trying to tell me?” and then have the humility to let the land speak first. We must listen to its rhythm—the scars it bears, the quiet beauty it hides, and the cadence of its daily survival.

By surrendering to this local vibration, a writer resists the seductive trap of Orientalism. This is the colonial habit of observing a "provincial" or "othered" land from a safe, clinical distance—reducing a complex culture to a collection of exotic tropes that fit a pre-conceived imagination. To be an Orientalist is to be a tourist with a pen, flattening the depth of a people into "local color" for an outsider’s amusement. Genuine writing demands a radical empathy that refuses to simplify. It honors the people rooted in the soil, transforming a mere setting into a soul.

Orientalism is, at its core, a theft of narrative. It looks at the "small" or the "distant" through a telescope, focusing only on the strange or the picturesque while ignoring the mundane holiness of everyday life. It builds a wall between the observer and the observed, turning a living, breathing community into a static museum exhibit for the Western or urban gaze. To write against this is to engage in a quiet revolution; it is to insist that our hometowns are not curiosities to be dissected, but sanctuaries to be understood. When we write from the inside, we replace the "exotic" with the "intimate," proving that the truth of a place is found in its complexities, not its stereotypes.

For me, this dialogue between memory and meaning always returns to the staccato rhythm of Tacurong City. It is my “lugar lang”—my only place, my starting point. My understanding of the world was composed in the early morning echoes of tricycles and the liquid gold that spills over rice fields after a monsoon rain. I grew up in the hum of carinderias glowing at dusk, smelling of star anise and woodsmoke, where the steam from a bowl of soup carries the weight of a day’s labor.

In these streets, I learned a specific kind of patience—the slow, tectonic pace of days that do not rush for progress. I saw courage not in grand gestures, but in the quiet persistence of people who keep moving despite the gravity of life. This is the "staccato" of my heritage: the brief, sharp moments of joy and struggle that form a steady, unbreakable song.

Whenever I write, I find myself performing an act of return. Tacurong has become a permanent filter for my perception—a lens of simplicity and sincerity. Every scene I create, no matter how far removed, carries a trace of that warmth. Tacurong taught me that dreams do not have to be loud to be valid, and that even a small city, tucked away from the world's frantic gaze, holds infinite, sprawling stories.

Tacurong is the sanctuary of my earliest wonders and the site of my first heartbreaks. To write about it is to honor the roots that anchored me before I knew how to fly. It is a reminder that every story, no matter how small, deserves to be told with the dignity of someone who has heard its heartbeat and finally knows its name.