To recognize and amplify the platform for non-traditionally featured book reviews, the following reviews of The Beginning of Leaving feature Bookstagram reviews from Instagram. Unlike the reviews published in literary journals and excerpted on this site with hyperlinks redirecting to the complete review, the Bookstagram reviews here have been reprinted in their entirety as they originally appeared in an Instagram post.
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Andrea Guerrero | Gladys Nadal Somera | Maria Bolaños | Via Justine De Fant
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FEATURED REVIEW FROM THE COVER ARTIST, POSTED ON UNDAS 2023: On this sacred night of Undas, when we honour our ancestors on the day of all souls, I thought it fitting to finally share this beautiful book, The Beginning of Leaving, written by my darling kasinsin @elsavalmidiano. She is the magic behind it all, a scribe for her ancestors who lends her voice to the places we long to heal but sometimes cannot reach on our own.
I am so grateful to be part of this incredible project. Designing the cover has been one of my greatest joys and proudest moments. My artwork, Nectar, is the drawing that appears on the cover, emerging from the photo of the Murujuga landscape that Elsa took nearly three decades ago.
Two years ago I made this drawing on October 13th, the birthday of my great Lolo Papang. His birthday is just a week shy of Elsa’s and I’m convinced he is one of the many ancestors who conspired to bring us into each other’s diasporic lives. We both know the wound of leaving our Inang Bayan of the Philippines, as many of our Kabayan do.
There are many reasons we have to leave, and with leaving comes great loss. But with loss there is also growth and searching—we leave not only to find better lives, but to find one another along the way. Holding this book in my hands is a ripening of these moments, evidence that we come full circle all over again.
— @braincrumbz, Andrea Guerrero, November 1, 2023
I share with you not just a book, but someone’s journey. My journey probably is similar but different. Whether we were born over there or we were American-born here like me, we still share a common ancestral trait. Elsa, this author, this sister-cousin of mine, like many others, is all I have to remember how brown and proud I am! PS Ayaten Ka Unay!!!!!! #Ilocano #FemaleWriters #FilipinoWriter
— @ihappybutt, Gladys Nadal Somera, July 26, 2023
Oh, this collection of essays, photographs, poems. A heartfelt offering to our once & future ancestors, decades in the making. I’ll let you buy a copy and read Elsa’s story directly from her, in the way only she can tell it.
But I can speak to the parts of the story that are mine—in that I see myself reflecting & intersecting in the details of my friends’ lives, like we’re living a collective, ancient epic that cycles & reincarnates poetically among our mga kasama.
Her story is my story, & it sees our matriarchs fleeing to the mountains. Catholic school with those graphic abortion videos. Exes who take more than they’re given. Elders who sniff-kiss to inhale you but also bury secrets deep. Losing homes to urban development. Being a wild child of the tree-climbing, amoy araw, knee-scraping generations. Trying to pivot an English degree into a job as a lawyer against better instincts. Seeking refuge in the desert.
TBOL reminds me what an urgent joy it is to be a member of this oral tradition of memory-keeping. Importantly, while our men figure large in these pages too, all instances of storytelling here are the handing of gifts between women, between sisters. All of this inheritance, all memory, passes along an umbilical core, mother to daughter, manang to manghod.
Before this book was ever distributed in print, it existed in the intimate form of one-on-one conversations. Every essay feels like another one of Elsa’s visits, sitting at a local boba place as I rage about my latest heartbreaks against the world, and Manang laughs in that way that says, “Oh sis, it gets worse, but also we get stronger.” Or walking a trail overlooking the Pacific, letting the morning brown us further; we swap childhood memories like we’re trading trickster myths.
Our tsismis, our stories, are sacred headstones carved in my heart, landmarks to help me find my way, planted now while the Earth of myself is soft in its dreaming.
— @mariabeewrites, Maria Bolaños, July 31, 2023
At the beginning of last year, Elsa gifted me an AR digital copy of TBOL in exchange for an honest review. I wanted to savor every moment I had with her words, these pages, this book.
True to my intentions, I finished reading TBOL at the tail end of 2022 while I was visiting my family in my Lola’s bahay in Pulupandan—the same house she didn’t leave to a single one of her children but rather gifted to her entire progeny after her passing. The same one I hadn’t visited since I was a teenager.
As a child, I would fly home to the Philippines every year, usually spending long, hot summers in Bacolod and Ubay. Over time, those annual visits became less frequent, and before I knew it, it had been over 5 years since I had last been home. It was 2022 and my 10-year-old cousins were getting ready to graduate college; my baby niece and nephew were half my size; my aunt had moved into a new place; and my Lola’s house now had actual Wifi, rendering a trip to SM to check our emails unnecessary.
So much had changed, yet in many ways everything was still the same: the ongoing chismis of the barrio, the goats that graze the grass at the patyo, the tindahan selling sachets of Sunsilk and sandwich bags of Coca-Cola, the four or five children riding through the barangays on one bike, and the ominous swaying of the sugarcane fields filled with all manner of aswang, kapre, duende, and multo.
It’s funny how serendipitous it was to be reading a book about leaving a home while returning to mine, and oddly enough, both experiences feel the same. It was like embracing echoes that felt like old friends and it was just what I needed to find my way back, before inevitably leaving again—this time, without really leaving at all.
A million “thank-you’s” to Elsa for sharing the treasure that is TBOL with the world. 💓
— @a_coldroom_poetry, Via Justine De Fant, August 29, 2023
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