Memory work

Abstract

In this piece of memory work, Delia Aguilar reflects on the meaning of coming home from exile. Aguilar opens with a story of a trip where the author and E. San Juan, Jr. regarded the ruins of Escolta, Manila’s former fashionable district. Using this story, Aguilar meditates on the ethics of memory and the politics of witnessing history. This is the history of her partnership with San Juan in which their embrace of radical politics has become their way of coming alive to a world marked by “the banality and dreariness of the quotidian.” For Aguilar, to speak about this history is not only to witness, but also to come home.