English Department

Editorial Board

Ma Elena Paulma, PhD
CNF and Fiction Editor

Ferdinand Cantular
Poetry Editor

Roger Garcia
Criticism Editor

Ann Catherine Acenas
Managing Editor

Arlene Yandug
Editor in Chief

Contributors

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» Sari sari

Here it is

Carayan is inevitable. Its coming forth cannot be helped.

This journal may have started as a compliance for the English Department’s profiling and upgrading, but really it has wellsprings as deep as any river’s beginnings.  The works featured in our first issue come from voices fresh and yet wise and old as our forests.  Voices that perhaps have strayed somewhere far too long as tiny tributaries, but are now coming forth, one thousand-current-strong, open, connecting to the world wide web.

True to its character, this journal, is a freeflow.  This means, it is academic but tries to maintain a look and sound that moves away from anything austere, rigid, and final.  We accept works in English, Bisaya, Tagalog, and perhaps soon, in any local language. This is an inclusivity and fluidity we try to uphold as a response to our regional location and needs. This we celebrate from the creative to the literary study page through the image of water flow.

Water moves, it slides around obstacles, corrodes the most primal of stones.  The literary pieces, coming from authors of different social, cultural, and academic circumstances, variously show this flow as a physical or geographical movement:

the grueling journey to the edge of the world;
a disconcerting taxi ride in a far country;
a lovely morning walk occasioned by a flat tire;
paper boats faithfully sending love to the other side of the river;
the hectic but insightful studies abroad;
the brave gesture of living in a foreign country, speaking (or unspeaking) the foreign
language of the beloved.

As suggested by the modifiers above, this flow is more often internal.  It happens actively inside us while we cope with the vicissitudes of daily life in our homeland and beyond. This flow then can also be the many movements of the mind, how the painful, sweet and bittersweet memories reconstruct our past.

In this maiden issue, the water speaks as the ultimate memoirist, retelling us its story which is our story, its intricate origin and destination also ours.

Carayan is the language that allows us to embrace the past and the present, the old and the new, what is ours and the not-so-ours.  While Carayan “calibrates” the past, it celebrates the present.  It promotes not only who we are as individuals but also who we are as a people. Water flows, reaching outward; it hugs our differences and slips through imagined and real borders that separate us.

Water purifies, water includes everything even fire, water stands still, water is progression. Water is life, water is death.  Water is the

beginning.   In the beginning is water.

And so we say

let there be carayan.

And here, here it is.

editorial , Carayan Vol 1. No.1 Dec 2015