His stories have been gathered in Peripheral Vision (1992). Gamalinda’s poems are collected in Fire Poem/Rain Poem (1976) and Lyrics From a Dead Language (1991). He currently works with the Center for Investigative Journalism. He participated in the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Programme for the 21st century. he got a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy. In 1990, he went to Great Britain to represent the Philippines in the Cambridge International Writers’ Conference and to attend the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat in Scotland, 1991.

He was a local fellow for poetry of the UP ICW in 1983. He took undergraduate courses at the UST for three years and the UP for a semester. Gamalinda is a poet, a fictionist and an essayist. It's what real life might look like if both heaven and hell were crammed into it, and all its creatures were let loose.Įric T. By the end of their project-and this breathtaking novel-the reader emerges from a world that is at once familiar and unbelievable. This landscape includes mythological sultans, mercenaries, the Beatles, messianic Amerasian rock stars, faith healers, spies, torturers, sycophants, social climbers, sugar barons, millenarian vigilantes, generals and communists-the dizzying farrago of lovers and sinners who populate the country's incredible story. Working from an office called Agency for the Scientific Investigation of the Absurd, they embark on a journey that will take them across a surreal panorama of Philippine politics and history, and in the process question all their morals and beliefs. Their mission: to make it appear that Marcos was destined to rule the country in perpetuity. Two friends are hired by Marcos to rewrite Philippine history. Because of this we have no memory of ourselves: we remember only the last deluge, the last seismic upheaval. This is a land both fact and fiction, where generations leave no trace of themselves and everything is constantly wiped out by clockwork destruction: typhoon, tsunami, earthquake, drought.

A memory of empire