Legarda rekindles Solidaridad’s spirit through Ivatan poetry and cultural memory

In collaboration with Solidaridad Bookshop, Senator Loren Legarda brought new life to the storied halls of the bookshop on Padre Faura, Ermita, Manila, for the first session of the Solidaridad Literary Series, a program celebrating Philippine literature through conversation and community. The inaugural event, held on July 16, featured Ivatan poet Dorian Merina in a dialogue on “Laji: Poetry, Orality and the Ivatan Imagination”, a theme that wove together indigenous voice, historical memory, and belonging.

Legarda described the bookshop as a space shaped by conviction and sustained by the community that continues to gather within its walls.

“Manong Frankie, one of my dearest friends, started this bookshop as a stubborn act of faith in Filipino thought. He would spend his days here, always ready to argue about a line of poetry or press a book into your hands that he thought would change how you saw the country,” she said. “That is why I asked my son, Congressman Leandro Legarda Leviste, to keep this space alive rather than let it close. Solidaridad should remain a place where writers gather, where a young poet can wander freely, and where anyone curious enough to browse can simply lose themselves among the shelves.”

The afternoon of literary exchange was moderated by poet Kristian Cordero, who guided the discussion with Dorian Merina. Merina, of Ivatan and German-Irish heritage, recounted his years documenting laji, the sung poetry of the Ivatan people that carries stories of courtship, grief, and the rhythms of daily life. He also gave a brief talk on his poetry collection, yndio arxipelago, which reimagines the earliest encounters between Filipinos and European explorers from Indigenous perspectives.

“Much of what Dorian has gathered exists nowhere else, not in any library or archive, only in the memory of the Ivatan people themselves,” Legarda said, commending his work to preserve oral traditions.

With the recent claims over Batanes, Legarda said that “one of the clearest rebuttals to those claim is laji, recorded in the words of the Ivatan themselves, kept as our own record and no one else’s.”

The four-term senator drew from her long-standing cultural advocacy. Legarda authored the Cultural Mapping Law to help local governments document traditions before they disappear, championed Schools of Living Traditions where artisans pass on their craft, supported the Bantayog ng Wika for endangered languages, and established a national repository for cultural mapping. “Every one of these is a safeguard,” she said. “Proof, in our own words, that this culture is ours.”

The Solidaridad Literary Series opened as a return to dialogue, showing how culture endures when words are spoken, sung, and shared. (30)