ANGELA MARIA “BLYTHE” TABIOS Reviews
KalapatingLeon by Eileen R. Tabios, Translated by Danton Remoto
(University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2024)
In the Wake of Dark, Here You Are:
Reflections on KalapatingLeon by Eileen R. Tabios,
Translated by Danton Remoto
(Editor's Note: The review is available in Filipino HERE.
Also, the author boldfaced certain words,
a format we left untouched to respect
the author's choices for emphases.)
I tried reading KalapatingLeon everywhere—on buses, trains, sidewalks, cafés, anywhere I could steal a few minutes and pretend to be the kind of person who reads in public. But the more I tried, the more I realized this was no ordinary book. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a reader. Very much of one, considering that I’m majoring in Creative Writing. But KalapatingLeon? It’s just not the kind you open on a whim or browse between errands. It’s the kind that demands your full attention—your silence, your patience, your willingness to be undone. It’s not meant for background noise. It wants the world to pause.
My first attempt was on the bus. I had a long ride ahead of me, the kind of trip perfect for getting lost in words. Or so I thought. But as the road groaned beneath the tires and the seats trembled in rhythm, I couldn’t get past a few lines. The book resisted me, as if it were saying, not here, not like this. I tried again in a jeepney, wedged between strangers and the scent of gasoline. I barely lasted two sentences before the noise of tambutso and the blur of traffic blurred the prose itself.
Once, I even tried walking with it—Belle from Beauty and the Beast, reborn in Makati’s pedestrian lane, clutching a paperback instead of a baguette. It was romantic in theory, cinematic even. In practice? A disaster. I nearly tripped over a pothole in the name of literature! Then came the train. Book in my left hand, highlighter in my right, Shanne Dandan’s “Himig ng Pag-Ibig” humming in my ears. Finally, it fit: the soft hum of the engine, the drizzle on the window, the gray sky reflected on the page. For a moment, everything clicked—the rhythm of the song, the weight of the words, the ache of being still in motion.
And then I caught my reflection in the window. There I was: the performative reader. The pretentious commuter with a paperback and a playlist, feigning depth, romanticizing exhaustion. I laughed quietly at myself. Because KalapatingLeon isn’t a prop, and it doesn’t tolerate pretense. It’s not something you read for show; it’s something that reads you back. It watches you fumble for meaning, dismantles your practiced intellect, and leaves you there—bare, unguarded, mid-transit, holding a book that refuses to be tamed by convenience. It’s a book that chooses where it wants to be read, and if you’re not ready, it closes itself on you.
If anything, I tried to make this book my travel companion. But in the end, the lesson was clear: KalapatingLeon is not a novel for killing time. It’s not the kind of book you read while waiting for your food at a karinderya or standing in line at the LRT. It refuses to be background noise to the chaos of the city—it demands your full attention, your complete reflection, the entirety of your inner stillness.
Such is Dovelion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times by Eileen R. Tabios, first published in 2021 by AC Books in the U.S. Its Filipino counterpart, KalapatingLeon: Isang Kuwento ng mga Diwata Para sa Ating Panahon, comes to us through the masterful translation of Danton Remoto, published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.
And Remoto’s translation is not just a linguistic bridge—it’s a reincarnation. What began as an English fairy tale of revolt and rebirth takes flight in Filipino, shedding one skin and growing another. KalapatingLeon is not just a book you bring along for the ride. It’ s the ride itself—the disquieting journey inward that no amount of background noise can drown out.
This novel isn’t your typical “once upon a time” bedtime story. It’s the kind of once upon a time that startles you awake, drags you out of your comfort zone, and leaves you with a question that refuses to fade: Who are you—and how do you keep going beneath the weight of what came before?
At its very heart, the novel reveals that freedom—whether personal or national—begins with reclaiming the identities that were erased, and with the courage to resist dictatorship and colonialism. It uses the language of the fairy tale, beginning each small section with the familiar “Once upon a time,” only to subvert it—to tell of memory, trauma, politics, and revolution. The prose reads like remembrance itself—torn, rebuilt, layered—both fragmented and whole, tender yet cutting. The narrative glimmers as fiction, yes, but it strikes the reader as history: shimmering like myth, yet anchored in the blood and silence of the real.
The story revolves around Elena Theeland, a poet and orphaned woman who gradually uncovers the mystery of her own origins. Along her journey, she meets Ernst Blazer, a painter of intricate temperament and shadowed history. The two form an unconventional yet magnetic bond, standing together against the corruption and dictatorship of a nation called Pacifica—which, in a stunning reveal, is later known by its true name: KalapatingLeon.
In the end, Elena discovers that she belongs to the Itonguk tribe, an indigenous community long believed to have vanished. From that revelation begins her reclamation of identity—an act of both return and rebirth, as she emerges a leader in the struggle for freedom.
See, in KalapatingLeon, the woman is not merely a character—she is the very map of memory and history. Gender here is not decoration; it is the body itself, broken by trauma yet rising again to bear witness. Sexuality, too, is rendered as a wound revisited again and again—painful, yes, but also the source of liberation, of self-assertion. And identity? It is never handed down; it must be sought, walked toward, wrestled from the ruins of dictatorship, colonialism, and personal memory. Though wrapped in the skin of a fairy tale, KalapatingLeon mirrors how literature becomes a vessel for self-discovery amid the chaos of history—a fable that dreams, bleeds, and remembers in the same breath.
In this analysis, I will trace how KalapatingLeon weaves together three central themes: first, gender as the body—a contested terrain of possession, memory, and control; second, sexuality as a space of both wounding and liberation; and third, identity as a continuous process of reclaiming, rebuilding, and reinventing the self.
To begin with, KalapatingLeon reveals that storytelling is never mere ornament or entertainment—it is weapon, remedy, and resurrection. It is the fiercest form of salvation, rescuing both history and humanity through the act of remembrance.
In all honesty, KalapatingLeon is a novel that defies confinement. It is not merely political, not purely romantic or erotic, and certainly not just a personal narrative. It is, rather, a kaleidoscope—each turn revealing a new light, each mirror reflecting fractured faces of history, trauma, and identity. Through this fluidity, Eileen Tabios dismantles the boundaries of genre itself, showing that the experience of womanhood—especially under oppression—can never be contained within a single narrative form. It shifts, splinters, and reforms, just as women have always done in the face of silence.
“Minulto ako nito. Minulto sila. Mahaba ang alingawngaw ng tortyur.” (p.15)
At the heart of the novel lies a truth that thrums quietly but persistently through every page: memory is never innocent.To remember is to rebel. It is an act both perilous and profound—a reaching back into the wounds of the past, knowing full well that remembrance cuts as much as it heals. In KalapatingLeon, memory refuses to be a passive archive. It breathes, bleeds, and insists on being felt. The horrors of dictatorship are not just recorded in historical documents or whispered in secondhand testimonies—they are carved into the flesh of Tabios’s characters, tattooed into their trembling bodies, their unspoken grief, their persistent ache to survive.
At first, I found myself confused, even frustrated: why does Elena’ s story seem to circle endlessly, never quite moving forward? When will she meet Ernst again? What keeps their union perpetually suspended, like a breath held too long? Must the narrative remain still, caught in the limbo of memory and mourning? And then the realization dawned: this stasis is the point. The act of remembering is not about progression but reconstruction. Each pause, each silence, each reflection is a form of rebirth—a slow, deliberate rebuilding of self from the ruins of trauma.
In remembering, Elena does not simply look back—she reclaims. Every recollection is an
act of rebellion against erasure, every reconstruction a refusal to vanish. Through her, the voices of the silenced return, spectral yet solid, speaking through gaps, through whispers, through poetry. In the chaos of fragmented storytelling, there is method; in the broken rhythm, there is heartbeat. This is where revolution resides—not in the clamor of the streets, but in the intimate, trembling act of narrating one’s pain. To write, to speak, to remember—these become the first steps toward healing, the quiet march toward freedom.
And nowhere is this struggle more palpable than in Tabios’s representation of the female body. The body, in KalapatingLeon, is not a metaphor. It is the battlefield itself—both scarred and sanctified. It bears the memory of oppression but also the promise of revolt. It is where violence is enacted, yes, but it is also where resistance begins. The female form is watched, touched, censored, disciplined—yet it persists. It learns to reclaim the gaze, to wield desire as defiance.
Desire, in this world, is not indulgence; it is insistence. It is a declaration that pleasure and agency belong to women, even after centuries of being told otherwise. To want is to live. To ache is to affirm existence. Even pain, when acknowledged, becomes a proof of life—an embodied testimony that though fractured, one continues.
In KalapatingLeon, every bruise becomes scripture, every scar a chapter. The body is no longer the site of defeat, but of resurrection. And in this resurrection, Tabios offers not comfort, but clarity: that to inhabit one’s body, one’s history, and one’s memory—all at once—is the most radical act of survival there is.
“Ika-18 ng Hunyo. Noong unang panahon, pumayag akong mahulog sa mga kamay ng isang dayo. Ipinakikita rito ang naaabot ng malupit na diktador—kung paanong ang isang diktaturya’y puwede pang magpatuloy kahit matagal na itong natapos sa pamamagitan ng mahigpit na pagkuyom ng pagkatapos.” (p. 6)
When it comes to identity, there are no clean lines, no neat categories. The characters of KalapatingLeon exist in the in-between—a woman, yet one who fractures the patriarchal image; a creature of diaspora, yet endlessly pulled back by her roots; an individual, yet burdened by the weight of collective history.
It is in this ambiguity that the novel’s beauty lies. Tabios reveals that the self is never a fixed portrait but a process—a constant becoming. Identity here is fluid, shifting, alive. It transforms as one remembers, as one resists, as one learns to reconcile the fragments of who they are. The novel reminds us that to live is to remain unfinished, and that the truest form of wholeness is the willingness to be in motion—to keep rediscovering oneself amid the fractures of memory and belonging.
“Hinati nila ang mga tao at, dahil dito, nag-imbento sila ng bagong pangalan na idaragdag sa ‘Mga Kalapati’ at ‘Mga Leon.’ Isang pangalan na tatawagin ng magkabilang panig sa isa’t isa.” (p.132)
At first glance, KalapatingLeon may appear to be merely a creative interweaving of memory, diaspora, and formal experimentation—a cerebral novel meant to be admired for its linguistic play. But once read through a feminist lens, the book reveals itself as something far more insurgent. It does not simply sing about women; it confronts the entire machinery that has historically muted, softened, and simplified the feminine voice. This is not a story that includes women—it is one that interrogates patriarchy and colonial power, cracking open the very frameworks that have long dictated what a woman can be, what she can say, and how her stories should end. Tabios does not simply write the feminine; she fights the patriarchy embedded within language, culture, and history itself.
Even its title—KalapatingLeon—is a manifesto disguised as metaphor. The dove has always been the emblem of femininity: soft, nurturing, delicate, the keeper of peace and purity. The lion, in contrast, roars with the masculine archetype—strength, dominance, sovereignty. By fusing these two into one body, Eileen Tabios performs a quiet revolution. She dismantles the binary. She allows the woman to exist as both gentle and formidable, both healer and destroyer. This is not a contradiction—it is wholeness. The title itself becomes a feminist act of reclamation, a declaration that a woman’s essence is not bound by how softly or how fiercely she moves through the world.
This is where Tabios’s writing becomes truly radical! Tabios does not rely on the safety of realism, nor on the predictable arc of the political novel. Instead, she chooses myth—that ancient, ungovernable terrain where gods and mortals, past and present, memory and imagination coexist. In her hands, myth is not escapism but exposure. She uses its language to reframe the truths that realism too often sanitizes. Through myth, she captures the magnitude of generational pain—the kind that cannot be contained in mere reportage.
The dove and the lion are more than symbols—they are mirrors of survival. They embody the paradoxes of the feminine spirit: peace and ferocity, submission and rebellion, tenderness and vengeance. In the world of KalapatingLeon, these dualities are not opposites to be reconciled but energies to be embraced. The novel insists that one can grieve and rage, nurture and destroy, love and liberate—simultaneously.
In merging myth with memory, Tabios redefines how we understand history. She suggests that the “real” is not always the most truthful, that the poetic might sometimes offer a more faithful mirror of the human condition. Her storytelling refuses the linear and the literal. Instead, it moves in spirals, like memory itself—returning, revising, reawakening.
Through this alchemy of myth and recollection, KalapatingLeon becomes not just a feminist retelling but a feminist rewriting—a reclamation of how history is told, who gets to tell it, and what counts as truth. Tabios reminds us that sometimes, it takes the rhythm of poetry to confront tyranny, and the courage of imagination to expose what realism cannot name.
In the end, KalapatingLeon does what all great feminist works aspire to do—it unsettles. It tears down the divide between softness and strength, between art and activism. It tells women: you can be the dove and the lion. You can be peace, and still be power.
On a technical level, Tabios’ narrative stands as a radically feminist act of defiance: she does not fear rupture; she embraces it. Her prose shatters the traditional mold of storytelling, rejecting the neat linearity and rigid logic that have long characterized the patriarchal and Western canon. The fragmented structure—the seamless fusion of poetry, diary entries, and essayistic reflections—becomes an embodiment of rebellion. It mimics the female body itself: nonlinear, unpredictable, full of contradictions yet pulsing with an undeniable vitality. In refusing order, she asserts freedom; in breaking the rules, she builds a new language of resistance.
Tabios’ writing thus becomes more than just narrative—it becomes performance, a unity of rupture and reclamation. Every fragment, every pause, every refusal to conform is a feminist gesture that speaks against the silencing of women’s multiplicity. Her form mirrors her politics: to be fragmented is not to be broken, but to be expansive. Through this radical hybridity, KalapatingLeon transforms chaos into coherence and the disjointed into something deeply human.
Yet, KalapatingLeon does not detach itself from emotion—it insists upon it. The novel recognizes that revolution without tenderness is hollow. Here, passion exists not as a soft escape but as a dangerous, scorching force—one that wounds as much as it empowers. Passion becomes a paradox: a shackle that can both imprison and awaken. But it is also the pulse that drives the self forward, the fire that refuses to be extinguished even in the face of despair. In this sense, the novel reminds us that in every act of rebellion, there lies an act of tenderness—and that sometimes, intimacy is the fiercest form of defiance.
“Gusto nilang wasakin ko sila. Pero, minsan, ako ang nawasak.” (p.17)
This novel thrums with erotic energy—but not the kind that seeks to seduce or to please. Rather, it is an eroticism that unsettles, exposes, and remembers. Tabios wields the erotic not as decoration but as revelation, peeling back the skin of history to show that the body itself is where oppression and power collide. Through Elena Theeland, Tabios transforms desire into testimony. Every gesture, every pulse of longing, becomes a trace of how colonialism and dictatorship have penetrated not only the body politic but the intimate body of the woman herself.
Elena’s body carries the ghosts of empire and patriarchy. Her every act of submission and dominance becomes in Tabios’ prose a form of historical reenactment. When she yields, it is not mere surrender; it is the body’s remembering of how it has been conquered before. When she takes control, it is not just assertion; it is reclamation—a rewriting of what has been stolen from her. The erotic here becomes archive, confession, and weapon: an archive because the body stores trauma in the form of desire, a confession because every touch admits pain, and a weapon because to name and feel that pain is to wrestle it from silence.
Tabios turns the female body into a text that refuses to be censored. The skin becomes paper, the scar becomes punctuation, and the act of pleasure becomes language. Through Elena’s body, the unspeakable becomes speakable. Her sweat and blood are metaphors for a history that women have long carried in secret, one that finds no place in official archives or state-sanctioned narratives.
The eroticism of KalapatingLeon is radically political. It dismantles the gaze that has long objectified women, replacing spectacle with agency, and shame with self-knowledge. It insists that pleasure and pain are not opposites but intertwined forms of truth-telling. To desire, in Tabios’ universe, is to remember; to remember is to resist. And in this alchemy of flesh and memory, Tabios reminds us that liberation often begins not in the mind, but in the body that refuses to forget. The erotic is no longer a private indulgence; it becomes a societal discourse, a corporeal way of remembering what history tried to erase. Tabios, in this sense, wields sensuality as power.
“Inisip niya, Ano ang mangyayari sa akin, Ernst, ngayong pinili ko nang makilala ka? At diyan ko na sinabi ang talaga namang halata: Sa ngayon, magkikita lamang tayo. Magkunwari tayong may espasyo tayo para magdesisyong huwag magkita.” (p.42)
In Elena’s relationship with Ernst—a nonbinary lover—the novel further challenges the boundaries of gender and the traditional notion of romance itself. This is not merely a story of two people in love; it is the convergence of two histories once divided by power and pain, now learning forgiveness, empathy, and the delicate art of mending what was once broken. Through this union, queer relations becomes a revolutionary space—a living experiment in how a new world might exist, one where gender knows no walls.
Their BDSM relationship is one of KalapatingLeon’s sharpest and most astonishing dimensions, precisely because Tabios transforms erotic tension into a layered metaphor for power, history, and the reclamation of the body. At first glance, it seems like a narrative of domination and submission, but beneath the surface lies a mirror reflecting the wounds left by dictatorship, colonialism, and gendered violence. Every act of restraint and release becomes a choreography of trauma—each knot tied, each command whispered, an echo of how authority once sought to control, silence, and possess.
Yet, Tabios refuses to let the story remain in the realm of pain. Through Elena and Ernst, she turns what is often seen as transgression into transcendence. The exchange of power between them is not about ownership but about trust, about the radical vulnerability of letting oneself be seen, touched, and known beyond binaries. It becomes a rewriting of the master-slave dynamic imposed by empire and patriarchy—one that transforms submission into agency, and domination into dialogue.
In this way, their intimacy becomes a site of resistance. The bedroom turns into a battleground where history is rewritten through tenderness and consent. Each encounter is both an unlearning and a rebirth, suggesting that healing, like desire, can only happen when one dares to face both power and pleasure without fear. Through Elena and Ernst, Tabios teaches us that to experience raw intimacy—truly vulnerable—is to dismantle every boundary the world has drawn around the body, and to emerge, finally, free.
“O minsa’y hinahawakan ko sila para masiguradong nariyan nga talaga sila, nakatayo malapit sa akin at nakikipagpalitan ng hininga.” (p.8)
As such, for Elena and Ernst, the act of submission is not weakness—it is a ritual of reclamation. Elena’s surrender is never an act of defeat, but a test—a deliberate exploration of how far she can relinquish control and, in doing so, discover a rare and intimate form of freedom. In a society that has long dictated what a woman should be—obedient, modest, contained—her desire becomes revolutionary. She does not repress it, nor does she apologize for it; she embraces it, explores it, and transforms it into the language of the body, articulating what the tongue has long been forbidden to say.
Through this embodied defiance, Elena transforms submission into authorship. What was once read as passivity becomes an assertion of will, a conscious showcase of vulnerability that redefines power itself. Her body, once colonized by patriarchal and political systems, now speaks a new grammar—one where pleasure and agency coexist, where consent becomes a form of sovereignty.
Tabios, in rendering these moments with lyrical precision, does not romanticize pain but reveals its generative potential. Each act of yielding is simultaneously an act of authorship, a rewriting of how the female body has been read and misread through time. Submission, then, becomes a reclamation of narrative—a rebellion told not through words but through breath, pulse, and the deliberate choice to feel.
And Ernst, being nonbinary, embodies possibility itself—a kind of vulnerability that refuses to be confined by gender or morality. Within their relationship—woven with trust, fear, and desire—Tabios tears apart the illusion of what we call “normal” intimacy. She redefines closeness not as a hierarchy of gender or power, but as a covenant of mutual surrender. In this space of shared vulnerability, intimacy becomes neither masculine nor feminine, but profoundly human—a tender rebellion against the binaries that seek to divide it.
Viewed this way, the BDSM in the novel transcends the physical; it becomes a searing metaphor for the nation’s history. Like Elena’s body, Pacifica has long been possessed, colonized, and silenced—its autonomy violated by those who claimed to love or protect it. Yet, in confronting pain and desire head-on, reclamation becomes possible. Healing does not come from denial, but from embodiment—from acknowledging the scars, naming the ache, and allowing the body to remember.
Elena, then, is not merely a woman beneath the power of her lover; she is the embodiment of a nation rising from subjugation. Through her, history is rewritten in the language of the flesh. Tabios turns eroticism into historiography, the body into a living archive. What was once shame becomes scripture; what was once silence becomes speech. In this act of rewriting—from within and beneath—the female body becomes both battlefield and birthplace, a site where power is undone and remade through the sheer audacity to feel.
“Noong unang panahon, lumapit ka sa isang abuhing gusali kung saan ako naghihintay sa iyo. Habambuhay na akong naghihintay, Elena, naisip ko habang pinanonood kita mula sa bintana sa ikatlong palapag. Naghintay na nga ako sa Kapwa-oras kung saan walang konsepto ng paghihintay.” (p.93)
Elena is perpetually in between—never fully whole, yet always striving toward wholeness. She exists in a state of becoming, her identity in constant motion. I am reminded here of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold, making the fractures not flaws but the very source of beauty. For Elena, identity works the same way—it is not static, but fluid, forged in the intersection of personal wounds and national history, of womanhood and being that transcends the rigid confines of gender.
Through Tabios’s use of kapwa-time—a mythical lens where the past, present, and future converge—she suggests that identity is never a finished product but an ongoing process. The self is not something one discovers, but something one continually creates, uncreates, and recreates. Time, in this novel, does not move forward in a straight line; it folds, loops, and intertwines—mirroring the cyclical nature of memory, trauma, and healing.
Even the novel’s very form becomes a site of resistance. Each section begins with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time,” an invitation to a fairy tale—but this is no story of castles or princesses. Instead, it is a tale of dictatorship, colonialism, and blood. Tabios transforms the language of fables into a weapon against forgetting. Her hybrid style—melding poetry, myth, legend, history, critique, and imagination—defies genre as an act of rebellion. The novel does not merely tell stories; it dismantles and rebuilds them, challenging the reader to confront how narratives shape truth and power.
In merging these forms, Tabios crafts an alternative historiography—a myth of truth, where creation itself becomes an act of liberation. Every fragment, every rupture, every shimmer of gold within the cracks of her prose asserts that to tell a story is to resist erasure, and to imagine is to survive.
“Hindi maaaring magkaroon ng sining nang walang konteksto. Pero ang kadalasang gumgawa ng sining ay ang pagkakaputol-putol ng mga nabuong (mga) konteksto. Mahal na Elena, inisip ni Ernst, puputulin ba natin ang konteksto na gusting isiil sa atin ng isang diktdor?” (p.61)
In the end, the relationship between Elena and Ernst becomes an experiment in healing—not noble, not comfortable, but profoundly true. Between grief and desire, control and surrender, Tabios reveals the quiet courage of confronting one’s own wounds. The body, though marked and scarred, is never merely a victim—it is memory incarnate, an instrument of reclamation, and a witness to its own becoming. Beneath the layers of myth and narrative lies a truth so moving: that to touch one’ s pain is to begin the act of resistance. Perhaps this is the most enduring gift of KalapatingLeon: its steadfast belief that literature is not a passive art but a space of action. Within language, we find the power to heal; within writing, we rebuild the self; and in the very act of creation, we raise the quiet but unyielding banner of resistance—softly, personally, even invisibly. In Tabios’s world, healing is never detached from struggle. To write is to fight, to remember is to reclaim, and to feel is to live defiantly. Through KalapatingLeon, she reminds us that every act of storytelling—no matter how private—ripples outward into history. It is in the fragile, luminous space between suffering and imagination that the true revolution resides.
Now, if Elena is the heart of the novel, then Ernst is its mirror—not merely reflecting her passion, but also the transformation she yearns for within herself and her country. It would be easy, almost convenient, to reduce the story into a conventional tale of intimacy: woman, man, desire. But Tabios resists that simplicity. Instead, she places a trans nonbinary character at the center of the narrative—a deliberate act of defiance, both political and poetic, that dismantles the expected architecture of passion and identity.
Ernst’s transness becomes an embodiment of freedom—an escape from the social and colonial dictates of what it means to be human, to inhabit a body, to exist within boundaries not of one’s own making. Just as colonial powers once carved borders into the flesh of nations, gender too has been bordered, divided into “male” and “female,” leaving no room for the fluid, the in-between. Yet Ernst inhabits that space. They are the living proof of a middle ground—a borderland that is neither exile nor erasure, but a territory of becoming.
In this light, Elena and Ernst’s relationship transforms into something far greater than romance; it becomes an act of reclamation. Their intimacy is not a rebellion of mere desire, but a leap beyond binaries—toward a passion that acknowledges multiplicity: messy, uncontained, and gloriously human. Through them, Tabios imagines a world where intimacy is not dictated by form but liberated by truth.
Furthermore, Ernst’s trans identity becomes not only a reflection but also a structural principle of the novel itself—fluid, nonlinear, and perpetually in the act of becoming. The repetition of “Once upon a time” at the start of every section is not a mere stylistic choice but a declaration of constant rebirth: a refusal of fixed beginnings and endings. Just as Ernst’s body cannot be contained by rigid categories, the text itself resists enclosure. It shifts forms like a living organism—at once novel, poem, myth, memory, and historical record. In this sense, KalapatingLeon does not simply tell a story; it embodies trans-formation. Its transgressive structure mirrors the trans body: both stand as testaments to survival, fluidity, and the right to self-definition in a world obsessed with order and certainty.
To read the novel, then, is to enter an act of trans creation—an aesthetic and political movement that dissolves boundaries between genres, between truth and fiction, between past and present. Tabios’s narrative architecture is itself an act of resistance: it dismantles the linearity of colonial and patriarchal history, replacing it with a rhythm closer to memory and dream—cyclical, nonlinear, embodied. Each “Once upon a time” becomes a gesture of reclamation, a way of saying that history is never finished, that identity is never final, that both can be rewritten endlessly.
From this perspective, the novel performs a double rebellion. It is feminist because it deconstructs the patriarchal tradition that confines women to silence or victimhood, granting instead to Elena a language of her own body. And it is trans because it insists on movement, on liminality, on the sacred space of the in-between—challenging not just the binary of gender but the very binaries upon which society and storytelling are built: colonizer/colonized, self/other, body/spirit, fact/fiction.
Ultimately, the relationship between Elena and Ernst transcends the bounds of passion and intimacy. It becomes an act of radical reimagination—a revolution enacted through the flesh. Their union is not an escape from history but a rewriting of it: two bodies defying the scripts imposed upon them, two souls inventing new grammars of desire and existence. In KalapatingLeon, love—queer, transgressive, uncontainable—is not a retreat from politics but its purest form: a reclamation of the right to live, to feel, and to transform.
As readers, we are provoked by this relationship: how does one seek a transcendent connection—be intimate—when gender refuses to conform to the traditional template? It’s within this question that the novel’s brilliance emerges—it compels us to abandon the comfort of binaries and embrace the idea that passion, like gender itself, is fluid, intricate, and impossible to define by a single form. Tenderness here is not a fixed state but a spectrum of becoming.
The tone and pacing crafted by Tabios and Remoto are nothing short of masterful—a perfect duet of precision and tenderness, sharp yet deeply felt, intellectual yet laced with wit and quiet sensuality. Their prose knows when to strike and when to soften, when to tease and when to wound. There are moments when you have to stop, take a breath, and marvel: “Can a novel about dictatorship and trauma really be this playful, this daringly experimental?” And yet it is—this is a book unafraid of contradictions, where gravity and humor, memory and myth, coexist in restless harmony.
This is not your typical “historical novel” that marches neatly through dates and regimes. Rather, it unfurls like a patchwork quilt—stitched from fragments of documents, recollections, dreams, and poems, all held together by the trembling voice of a woman still trying to locate herself amid history, patriarchy, and displacement. Each fragment breathes, each silence vibrates. The novel’s rhythm oscillates between logic and lyricism, intellect and intimacy, chaos and structure—a delicate equilibrium so rare that it feels almost alchemical.
The brilliance of Danton Remoto’s translation lies in his sensitivity to the nuances of gender and selfhood. By using the Filipino language, he manages to amplify the very core of the novel’s themes: fluidity, ambiguity, and transformation. The Filipino language, unlike English, does not force its speakers into rigid gender categories. We do not have pronouns that separate “he” from “she.” Instead, we have siya, kaniya, sila, atin, and akin—words that emphasize personhood over gender, community over division. Our pronouns are anchored not on gender but on number and relational context. Thus, to us, it feels organic, almost effortless, that a single word may refer to either a man or a woman, or to someone beyond the binary altogether. This linguistic neutrality is not an absence but a form of quiet inclusivity that has always existed in our cultural consciousness.
In a time when global discourses struggle to reimagine language as gender-inclusive, Filipino has long stood as a living testament to the possibility of such fluidity. It does not erase gender—it simply refuses to make it the central axis of identity. This is why many Filipinos continue to reject the term “Filipinx.” For them, Filipino already holds within it a wholeness that transcends binaries. It is a word born from history yet unafraid of transformation—just as KalapatingLeonitself is a novel born from pain, migration, and the search for freedom.
Through Remoto’s translation, the novel achieves something extraordinary: it situates the narrative in a linguistic space where the body and the word are equally liberated. His Filipino rendition does not merely echo Tabios’ text—it converses with it, adds layers to it, and, in doing so, transforms it. In Filipino, the metaphors breathe differently; the rhythm slows down, allowing silences and repetitions to resonate like prayer or protest. The intimacy of the language makes the novel feel less foreign, less distanced—it becomes something that belongs to us, something that speaks our collective heartbeat.
Remoto’s translation reveals how language is itself an act of resistance. In a world that constantly seeks to categorize, Filipino stands as a reminder that identity can be fluid, that meaning can be plural, and that literature—when written or translated in our tongue—can be both political and intimate at once. KalapatingLeon, in Filipino, becomes more than a text; it becomes a mirror where the nation can see itself—fractured yet beautiful, wounded yet whole, continually rewriting itself through the power of words.
What truly caught my attention was how Remoto chose to use plural pronouns—sila and nila—to refer to Ernst, instead of the usual siya or niya. At first, I was puzzled. I even asked a few queer friends if this could be read as a translation of “they/them,” or if there might be another reason behind it. But as I thought more deeply about it, I realized that Remoto’s choice carried a profound and deliberate intention. The use of the plural form is not merely a grammatical or stylistic gesture to reflect Ernst’s nonbinary identity—it is also a symbolic act, one that transforms language into a vessel of history and collective memory.
On a deeper level, sila does not only refer to Ernst as an individual but also as a constellation of many: the silenced, the forgotten, the nameless voices of the nation’s past that continue to echo through the present. In this reading, Ernst ceases to be a single person and instead becomes a gathering of ghosts—a living archive of those who were erased, exiled, or ignored. Through this pronoun, Remoto expands the boundaries of identity, reminding us that the self is never solitary. Every “I” is made up of countless “we’s.”
The genius of this linguistic move lies in how it reimagines the grammar of being. In Filipino, plurality does not merely imply number—it suggests community, coexistence, multiplicity. By calling Ernst sila, Remoto not only affirms their nonbinary existence but also situates them within the vast chorus of history. It is as if the act of naming becomes an act of remembrance: to speak sila is to acknowledge that identity, like memory, is shared and never finished.
Thus, the pronoun itself becomes an instrument of liberation—a quiet rebellion within the structure of language. It resists the rigid binaries of gender and grammar, instead embracing the fluidity that has always been inherent in Filipino thought. In Remoto’s translation, sila becomes more than a word; it becomes a philosophy, a mirror of the collective soul. It tells us that to exist is to carry others within us—that every self, like the nation, is a mosaic of many lives, many wounds, and many dreams stitched together by the living pulse of memory.
It is also important to remember that in this novel, writing itself becomes an act of reclamation—a way of asserting one’s existence. The very act of narration transforms into a form of uprising. Hence, when we read Elena, she is not merely a character on the page; she embodies all women who have been silenced, violated, and forgotten—women who now write themselves back into being. Through the power of language, she refuses erasure; her voice becomes both wound and weapon, both testimony and resurrection.
In truth, the novel’s form mirrors this struggle for selfhood. It is fragmented, nonlinear, at times chaotic—and yet, isn’t that precisely how identity works? The self, like gender, does not unfold in a straight line; it meanders, spirals, and contradicts itself, moving through confusion toward clarity, through fracture toward wholeness. Identity is not a fixed point but a labyrinth—a space of wandering, rediscovery, and transformation.
Through this style, Tabios reveals a powerful insight: that literary form can mirror the living, evolving process of becoming. To be fragmented is not to be false; to be disordered is not to be meaningless. Wholeness, after all, is not the absence of cracks but the courage to inhabit them. Every gap, every rupture, every uneven rhythm in the novel carries the pulse of humanity—messy, luminous, and endlessly resilient.
In KalapatingLeon, imperfection itself becomes a kind of beauty, and fragmentation becomes truth. Tabios reminds us that stories—like people—do not need to be neat to be real. They only need to be alive, breathing through every broken sentence and unfinished thought, insisting on presence in a world that has long tried to silence them.
KalapatingLeon is more than a novel—it is a feminist literary manifesto, an audacious reclaiming of voice, language, and body. In its world, these elements no longer stand apart; they merge, overlap, and pulse together. Each paragraph becomes an act of resistance, each image a declaration of becoming. The text invites us to rewrite ourselves—not as passive doves, but as lions unafraid to roar against the systems that once silenced us.
The beauty of KalapatingLeon lies in how it transforms literature into liberation. Its sentences are not merely written; they perform identity, unfolding in the fluid rhythm of transformation—feminist, queer, and decolonial. Reading it feels like watching a body relearn how to move after being bound for too long: tentative at first, then bold, then unstoppable.
Returning to the metaphor of music, KalapatingLeon resonates deeply with Shanne Dandan’s rendition of “Himig ng Pag-Ibig” (Melody of Passion)—a song that embodies the ache of rebirth, the beauty of resilience. The melody mirrors the novel’s tone: soft yet searing, melancholic yet quietly defiant. Just as the song reminds us that even wounded passion can still bloom, the novel asserts that broken histories, fractured identities, and silenced voices can still sing.
In the song, the line “sa pagsapit ng dilim” (“as darkness falls”) becomes more than a poetic image—it encapsulates an era of fear, censorship, and silence that mirrors the dictatorship’s shadow over the nation and over Elena herself. The darkness is historical and personal at once: it seeps into the skin, memory, and language of those who have lived through trauma. Yet, within this shadow, there is an undercurrent of endurance. The lyric “Ako’y naghihintay pa rin sa iyong maagang pagdating” (“I am still waiting for your early return”) transforms from a lover’s yearning into a political and spiritual waiting—for dawn, for renewal, for the long-delayed promise of freedom.
The refrain “Tulad ng ibong malaya ang pag-ibig natin” (“Our love is like a free bird”) evokes not only romantic love but also the radical act of living against constraint. Elena and Ernst’s intimacy—fluid, transgressive, and defiant—embodies this metaphor. Their connection becomes a rebellion against the binaries imposed by society, much like the free bird that resists the cage.
Meanwhile, “Tibok ng puso’y kay sarap damhin” (“How sweet it is to feel the beating of the heart”) resonates as the rhythm of rebirth. After years of silence and pain, the body—so often a site of repression, gendered violence, and historical burden—becomes capable once more of feeling pleasure, tenderness, and life. Tabios’ novel, much like the song, stages this quiet yet radical reclamation: the heart’s return to its own music after trauma.
Remoto’s translation captures this mood precisely: tender yet unflinching, subdued yet sharp. His Filipino is deliberate, fluid, and intimate—language that seeps rather than shouts. The result is a reading experience both haunting and alive, like rain tapping against memory. The prose moves in fragments, in sighs, in sudden bursts of light—inviting reflection rather than resolution. KalapatingLeon leaves you in that fragile space between grief and grace, where the personal becomes political, and every act of writing is an act of return. It is not merely a story—it is a reminder that to speak, to translate, to love, is already an act of defiance.
KalapatingLeon stands as a testament to the power of love—not as sentimental romance, but as a force of defiance and survival. Love here is multifaceted: self-love as healing, familial love as continuity, queer love as revolution, national love as awakening. Like light breaking through the longest night, it does not promise perfection or peace, but presence—a flicker that reminds us that even in darkness, there is still the possibility of clarity, connection, and becoming.
Eileen Tabios’ style and tone are deliberately audacious. She refuses to conform to narrative comfort or linear coherence. Instead, she employs fragmented storytelling, disorienting sequences, hybrid forms, and arresting imagery to remind us that history and identity are never neat or orderly—they are ruptured, recursive, alive. Her technique resembles that of a collage—piecing together personal memory, national trauma, and the mythology of the body. Through this form, the intersections of gender, sexuality, and identity are rendered palpable and intimate: womanhood is not merely a role but a vessel of collective memory; sexuality is not simply pleasure but a wound that demands tending; and identity is not a static label but an act of unconquering—a struggle to be seen, to be named, to be whole.
Danton Remoto’s hand in KalapatingLeon is not merely that of a translator—it is that of a cultural architect. His translation transforms the novel into something distinctly Filipino, both in texture and in soul. Remoto’s prose is crisp yet musical, balancing clarity with cadence, intellect with intimacy. He understands the rhythm of silence, the weight of pauses, and the emotional charge of restraint. Through his translation, KalapatingLeon no longer reads as a borrowed text from another tongue; it becomes a living document of Filipino sensibility—fluid, passionate, and unafraid of contradiction.
What makes Remoto’s contribution remarkable is his ability to navigate the novel’s layered terrain of eroticism, trauma, and identity without losing the subtlety of Tabios’s vision. His Filipino is elegant yet accessible, poetic yet grounded. Each choice—especially his deliberate use of gender-neutral pronouns and collective forms like sila and nila—turns linguistic nuance into political gesture. He does not simply translate the text; he deepens its resonance, ensuring that the language itself mirrors the novel’s transgressive heart.
In Remoto’s hands, KalapatingLeon becomes a dialogue between tongues, histories, and selves. His translation style echoes the novel’s fragmented, hybrid form—seamlessly blending lyricism with philosophical sharpness, intimacy with distance. By doing so, he not only preserves the emotional truth of Tabios’s work but reclaims it for the Filipino literary imagination. The result is a text that feels at once universal and profoundly local: a love letter to language as much as it is an act of rebellion against forgetting.
Reading KalapatingLeon feels like conversing with a novel that wears many faces—at once a teacher, a confidant, a poet, and a prophet. It speaks in shifting tones: at times tender, at times incisive; sometimes whispering in metaphor, striking with the weight of truth. Every line feels deliberate, quotable even, but none of it is ornamental. Beneath its lyricism lies a single, urgent plea—to be read with full attention, to be taken with the gravity it deserves.
It rewards that devotion. For when you reach its end, you do not simply emerge carrying Elena’s story—you carry with you a sharpened awareness of how history wounds and heals, how gender both confines and liberates, and how literature becomes the vessel through which we reclaim ourselves. KalapatingLeon reminds us that for women, and for all who write from the margins, the act of writing is more than self-expression—it is an act of survival, of remembrance, and of quiet revolution.
In the end, I can say that KalapatingLeon is a book that unsettles before it soothes, a work that challenges the mind even as it stirs the heart. It is a reckoning with memory, identity, and desire, and above all, a reminder that writing—especially women’s writing—is never merely the act of creating stories. It is a deliberate, radical reclamation of history, of the body, of voice. It insists that the personal, the political, and the poetic are inseparable; that to write is, in itself, an act of activism. KalapatingLeon does more than tell a story—it redefines what storytelling can be. It asks: what if passion were political? What if the most revolutionary act we could perform is to be passionately alive—wildly, imperfectly, beyond definition?
This is not a “commute-friendly” novel. It is not the sort of book you can skim while your mind drifts elsewhere. It demands your full attention, even your surrender—and that is precisely where its power lies. It is not designed to pass the time; it is designed to stop it. The novel pulls you from the noise of the world and hurls you into the depths of your own interiority. Each page is a shard of broken glass—sharp, dangerous, necessary—piecing together the fractured image of history, chaos, and reconciliation. In gathering these fragments, you are no longer a passive reader; you become a co-conspirator, extracting meaning from the debris of the past.
I will say it again: KalapatingLeon is not a light companion for the road. But if you seek a book that can sweep away the dust of the past, challenge your assumptions, and lead you back to yourself with every page, this is it—a guide, a mirror, a provocation, all at once.
*****
Angela Maria Tabios, also known as Blythe, is a senior Creative Writing major at the University of Santo Tomas in España, Manila, Philippines. As an essayist and playwright, she writes across multiple forms, including short stories, poems, essays, plays, and film scripts, with a particular focus on feminist writing and the intersectionality of gender, memory, trauma, and sexuality. Her work has garnered recognition for its depth and insight, including 3rd Place for One-Act Play, Choke, at the 40th Gawad Ustetika (2025), and publication in Dapitan 2023: Panopticon by the UST Flame, where her speculative fiction short story, The Song of the Tides, was featured.
A passionate spoken word and performance artist, Blythe has performed at various UST events since 2023, bringing her feminist and socially conscious narratives to life. She recently authored her essay “In the Wake of Dark, Here You Are: Reflections on KalapatingLeon by Eileen R. Tabios, Translated by Danton Remoto,” and its Filipino counterpart, “Sa Pagsapit ng Dilim, Ako’y Naghihintay Pa Rin: Isang Masusing Pagbabasa ng KalapatingLeon ni Eileen R. Tabios, Na Isinalin sa Filipino ni Danton Remoto." Written for her Gender and Writing class, these in-depth analyses examine the novel’s engagement with gender, tracing how its narratives and literary strategies intersect with memory, trauma, and sexuality. Blythe’s engagement with the concept of translation and the intricate dynamics of language prompted her to compose her analysis in both English and Filipino, thereby illuminating the subtle nuances and interpretive possibilities that emerge across linguistic contexts.
Currently, Blythe is developing her senior thesis, a medical thriller limited series, blending suspense with critical explorations of human and societal dynamics. Her work consistently bridges literary craft and performative storytelling, championing nuanced perspectives on gender, power, and identity.
