Photo by Lyka Gonzalez
Nicola Sebastian is a Filipino writer, surfer, and National Geographic Explorer. She is interested in “islandness,” both as space and sensibility.
Her work has been published in Orion Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, ATMOS, VICE Asia, and Vogue Philippines. Nicola graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, New York, where she was the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal, and taught fiction writing to undergraduates. She lives in La Union, Philippines, where she co-founded Emerging Islands, a coastal arts-for-ecology residency and organisation. She is also working on an ecological memoir on disaster, discovery, and the Philippines.
The Woman Who Owned the Sea
Flash essay in Orion Magazine
I am standing on Yolanda Beach. The edge of the world. One edge, anyway. East of the Philippines, where the island of Samar meets the Pacific. Samar, a sound like the local word for “wound,” an island named after pain.
Pacifico, Magellan had said of the great ocean, and in describing it gave it a name. El Niño, South American fishermen had said as the ocean warmed, the infant Jesus blessing Magellan’s fleet with fine weather before the doldrums that suspended them between east and west, nearly killing them. His heart bursting with the thrill of arrival, Magellan didn’t know he would never return home.
The Land Is Home, the Sea Is Community
Essay on Philippine biocultural diversity in Orion Magazine (excerpt from a book collaboration, Homelands)
One afternoon, while walking across a limestone ridge covered in rainforest, a Filipino geoscientist named Narod Eco told me that the island we were on, Luzon, shelters hundreds if not thousands of endemic plants and animals. Nearly all of its fifty-six kinds of mammals are found nowhere else on Earth. The karst landscape had been completely deforested and scarred by large-scale quarrying before a civil engineer named Ben Dumaliang fell in love with the jagged rock formations that stood like the sentinels of a disappeared civilization.
The geoscientist went further: even the mountains of Luzon have their own species, so that if you were a giant and used the mountains like steppingstones, hopping from one peak to another, you’d discover that each forest’s ecosystem is unlike any of the others. “Sky islands,” he called them.
The same goes for the bodies of water between our islands. They shelter forests of their own: coral reefs as diverse and life-sustaining as any ecosystem above the ocean’s surface.
King Tide: Jay-R Esquivel Takes The Global Surfing Stage
Profile on Philippine surfing star Jay-R Esquivel and his surfing hometown, San Juan, La Union, in Vogue Philippines.
Even though it’s Jay-R’s first time in America, the scene he’s making at Huntington Beach looks more like a homecoming. It’s the first leg of the 2023 WSL World Longboard Tour. At 27 years old, Rogelio “Jay-R” Esquivel from Barangay Urbiztondo, San Juan, La Union, is the first Filipino surfer to qualify for the chance to become a world champion.
Naturally, Filipinos have taken over the California beach. The sea breeze carries the smell of pork barbecue across the water; people have set up tents and are handing heaping plates of food to anyone passing by, or a shot of rum, if you know who to ask. People in the crowd are sporting matching t-shirts printed with Jay-R’s last name and the number 15; borrowing from basketball, his fans have turned his birthday, July 15, into his unofficial jersey number. It looks like a reunion, and for many of these barkadas, it is. One guy has traveled from as far as Chicago, and some people are waving Philippine flags, the yellow, red, white, and blue shining bright against the northern hemisphere sky. After having been accosted with lumpia, one of the competition judges jokes that Jay-R has brought his whole village with him. Afterward, Jay-R posts on IG, thanking #barangayHB for making him feel at home in a foreign land.
The Malaya Lolas
Literary reportage and photography criticism in the Virginia Quarterly Review
I am looking at photographs from the several weeks Hannah spent with Isabelita in 2019, documenting the story of the Malaya Lolas, sometimes translated from Tagalog as the Free Grandmothers or Grandmothers of Freedom. We are in her apartment in Makati—the red light, rather than the business, district—which, over the years and across collaborations, has become a second home to me.
The Tagalog language refracts the word pagdadala, the act of burden bearing, in different ways; a variation in the way it is said is a variation in nuance. The word struck Filipino psychologist Edwin T. Decenteceo as “a model for viewing the life experiences of the Filipino.” Framed by his Pagdadala Model, “the Filipino is then revealed as committed to his or her tasks, responsibilities and relationships, taking these to their destinations, crawling on hands and knees if needed.”
Horizon I: An Origin Story
Excerpt of my memoir-in-progress in Suspect Journal
Look, there are beginnings and endings everywhere—think of them as raindrops setting off ripples on a still pond, changing at each meeting point. Or better yet, focus your attention on a single droplet of water suspended in the air, setting off its own private rainbows, spectrums radiating every which way, deepening into reds and brightening into blues all at once, depending on the angle of your gaze. In other words, even the water and the air have their own stories to tell. How, then, should we listen?
Homelands
A photography book on the Indigenous communities in the Philippines in collaboration with Jacob Maentz
A story about the land is a story of its people. Enfolded in the varied landscapes of the Philippine archipelago are communities that have remained rooted to place against great and unrelenting adversity: those whom we call “Indigenous.” From 2011 to 2020, Jacob Maentz paid visits to these communities to listen and learn from within, that is, from the people who have called these lands home since time immemorial.
What unfolds in Homelands is the photographic narrative of Jacob Maentz’s close and continuing collaboration with various Indigenous communities and groups who have been historically marginalized in the Philippines. In a symposium of 18 dialogues and essays edited and written by Nicola Sebastian, Homelands further reflects on Indigeneity as cultural identity, as rallying banner, and as multitudinous question. The text explores even as it introduces the diverse concerns of Indigenous communities: the importance of solidarity in the clash between self-interest and shared interests; the submerged history of political resistance; alternative education and Traditional Knowledge systems; food sovereignty; and the successes and challenges of reclaiming land recognition after centuries of colonization and modern development aggression.
Finally, Homelands stands in support of Indigenous peoples as the environmental frontliners of the world: holding the line against irreversible ecological devastation. With his lens and his presence, Maentz listens to and holds space for those who have never left, and those who continue to fight to live.