To open Aleah Sulaiman Bantas’s Tademtademan is to consent to a haunting. This is a text made from fractures, a landscape where geography does not cradle the body but hunts it. Thirty kilometers to Kuyapon. Thirty more to Kidapawan. The infinite, aching span between a grandmother’s hand and the braid she once held. Here, distance is confronted as a living predator, one that leaves “lesions of remembering” as the only true coordinates on the map of the self.
The zine demands we face a question: does memory fill the empty spaces grief creates, or does it only measure how wide the fracture has become?
We begin this measurement not with a map, but with the geology of a friendship. In Human Geography, the poet traces the “shadow of wounds” on a friend named Norhanie. Bantas writes:
How in geology, these lesions of remembering flow from one winding path to another, meander through each instance. My memory of you, a sprig of landscape reappearing.
This is memory as a fault line. The poet is trying to map the shifting tectonic plates of a relationship defined by separation. By invoking “geology,” she suggests a grief that is ancient, slow-moving, and inevitable, yet the “lesions” feel frantic and fresh. She notes the specific, tactile details “hands brown from the sap of sweet potato” as if these small stains are the only proof that the two landmasses of their bodies were once connected. “They didn’t teach us how the absence of another redraws a hurt,” she observes. It is a devastating line that suggests grief is a cartographic act; every loss redraws the borders of the world, making the map unfamiliar to the one living in it.
But maps rely on clarity, and in Papanok a Beledtu, the atmosphere itself begins to conspire against precision. The prose piece describes a walk home from high school, covering three kilometers of cornfields and golden light. It feels idyllic until the light becomes too much, and the exactitude of the memory begins to rot.
I blinked against the light, and the world blurred a little more than it should have. The edges of things slowly softening. I would never know the color of my friends’ irises…
This is the quiet horror of the zine: the realization that the “distance” acts like an acid. It dissolves the specificity of the people we love. The “warming orange” of the sky eats the details of the friend’s face until they are just a silhouette, a “yema wrapper draped in the atmosphere.” Bantas captures the terrifying moment where the person becomes a blur, where the “edges of things” soften into a generic nostalgia that wipes out the sharp, singular reality of the past. It suggests a subconscious choice: perhaps we let the edges soften because the sharp reality is too painful to hold.
It is here, in this softening debris, that the text evokes that old cartographic fable of an Empire so obsessed with precision that it struck a map the exact size of the land itself. But such exactitude is unsustainable; the map was eventually abandoned to the sun and rain, disintegrating until only tattered ruins remained in the western deserts. Bantas inhabits these ruins. She understands that a map which coincides point-for-point with the past is impossible.
This disintegration is not just poetic, but structural. As scholars Escano and Sumaylo posit in their study of urban space, decay is essentially evidence of memory loss. When a center, be it a city street or a human heart, falls into disrepair, it is because the collective memory has failed to maintain it. In their analysis of memory after the bombing of San Pedro Street in Davao City, they argue that this physical decline creates “forgotten realities” that inevitably lead to “forgotten cultural identities.” The rotting infrastructure is not just a failure of maintenance but a failure of retrieval; the city forgets itself, brick by brick. Bantas applies this logic to the architecture of the self. In To Be Named After a Ruin, the “leaking ceiling” and the “peeling paint” of the boarding house are not just signs of poverty; they are structural failures of the memory itself. The physical decay of the room mirrors the “lack of adaptation” in the heart, or the inability of the “old spatial structures” of childhood to hold up against the “new modes” of adult grief.
This creates a vertigo for the survivor who holds the artifact but has lost the instructions. As I watch Bantas trace the softening edges of her world, I am thrown back into the stark, silent void of my own. The fluency of my history evaporated with my grandmother. What remains is a Chinese ancestry that feels like a terrifying blank canvas, composed of white things I do not know how to color. It is there in the steam rising from a bowl of plain white rice, individual grains clinging together in a mute, starchy solidarity, a daily ritual that fills the stomach but leaves the memory hungry for a recipe I never wrote down. It is there in the pale, sticky skin of tikoy hardening on a plate, a circle of New Year’s sweetness that offers texture but no translation.
In the examination of decay, the said study also suggests that observers often try to reclaim a dying space by pinning their own stories onto it, physically piercing the image to overlay their personal meanings. I realize now that I am doing the same violence here. I am pinning my white rice, my tikoy, and my silence onto Bantas’s woven ikam. I am the “looker” engaging in a meaning-making process that blurs the line between the art and the audience, perhaps damaging the original photograph in my attempt to understand it. I am trying to reverse the urban decay of my own history by squatting in hers.
Faced with this whiteness, and the disintegration of the map, Bantas offers a brutal solution in To Hold Blooming: we must practice taxidermy on our own dead.
facing the sun blooming into a kind of taxidermy. What I mean is to live, without the knowledge of animal skin
To withstand the vicissitudes of forgetting, we stuff the skin of the memory so it retains the shape of life even after the pulse has stopped. We construct “soundmarks,” as Escano and Sumaylo call it, auditory landmarks that define our territory when the visual fails. In Reenactment, the “leaking faucet” becomes the soundmark of the kitchen, a sonic signal that mediates between the listener and the emptiness of the house.
Her kidney failing how to unhear the water draining slow.
The leaking faucet becomes a metronome for death. Bantas writes, “I’m in the kitchen sink again,” a line of pure entrapment. She is stuck in the loop of the trauma, reenacting the sound of the spoon scraping enamel. This is the “aural chaos” of the memory, where the specific pitch of a spoon or a drip defines the entire emotional landscape. The salt she tastes in this memory is not just seasoning; it is the residue of the body failing to filter its own grief.
This inevitability of dissolution forces the poet into her most haunting admission. If the taxidermy fails, if the taxidermy is a lie, then what is left? In Saladeng (Deer), Bantas confronts the phantom in the machine of her own memory. She admits, “memory betrayed me there.” Her mind has replaced the violence of a hunt through men with guns and the slaughter of the lanitan, with the comprehensible image of a “brown one,” a graceful creature. This is the logical endpoint of the taxidermy: the invention of a ghost. The child had to invent the deer because the raw, bloody memory of the hunt was too heavy to carry. It is a mercy, but a heartbreaking one. We build these beautiful, soft fictions so we don’t have to look at the blood.
Yet, amidst this cycle of leaking and blurring, Bantas finds a way to inhabit the wreckage without being consumed by it. In Songs From The Rubble, she reclaims the narrative of the broken.
We are not our violence. We are the flick of a cigarette ember, then fall the ash.
It is an image of ephemerality, but also of burning. The ash falls, yes, but for a moment, there was heat. There was light. This poem acts as a counterweight to the failing kidneys and the blurring irises; it suggests that while we may be rubble, we are also the “bread warm in your belly.” We are the “keffiyeh passed down through a lineage of distance.” Even the objects become displaced ghosts of this survival: in Japanese Surplus, the poet finds “fish swimming in the blue of the sea” within a discarded plate, a heartbreaking act of transposition. She finds the ocean in the debris of another economy, proving that even in a “surplus” life, even in a city center defined by decay, there is room for the sacred.
There is, however, a necessary admission to be made here. In mapping this geography, I am forced to confront the limits of my own cartography. To write about Tademtademan in English, to intellectualize its grief through the lens of Borges or urban sociology, is to impose a foreign grid upon a lived reality. There are frequencies in this zine, in the tadem itself, that my own lexicon is simply not vast enough to contain. I am the looker pinning notes on a wall I did not build. I am standing outside the window of her grief, describing the glass, while she is inside, bleeding.
Tademtademan solves its own equation: the weight of memory is equal to the sum of its debris. It is measured in “half-empty cans of family brand sardines,” in “dead pamogon birds,” and in the “shrapnel of torn bodies,” a heavy, rusted anchor against a geography that hunts us. Bantas has no interest in taping together the Map of the Empire unlike Borges, because she knows that map is dead. Instead, she sits in the tattered ruins, amidst the ghosts and the leaks and the ash, and she sings. She proves that even in the “rubble of exiles,” in the lesions of the geography, there is a pulse.
This zine is not a recovery of the past, but it is a eulogy for the things we had to forget in order to survive. It is a testament that while we may be broken, whether by the distance to Kidapawan or the silence of a grandmother who speaks no more, we are still here. We are holding our yellow flowers, our white rice, our half-empty cans, waiting for the blur to resolve back into a face.
References
Escano, Ma. T., & Sumaylo, D. J. (2017). Meaning-Making Exercise Using Images and Soundscape: The Case of San Pedro Street, Davao City, Philippines. SAGE Open, 7(4), 215824401773635. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017736355
This review is part of Mindanews’ literary feature on SOX Zine Fest 2025, focusing on select zines highlighted from the event on November 29, 2025, at Notre Dame of Marbel University, Koronadal City, South Cotabato.
