TYBOX: Book Review: Teng Mangansakan’s Closing Party and Other Stories

MindaNews / 27 December – It’s been a notable year for filmmaker and writer Gutierrez ‘Teng’ Mangansakan II, his two books published in 2025 gained recognition in the literary community.

The anthology Panumtuman: Anthology of 21st Century Bangsamoro Literature is a finalist of the 43 National Book Awards, a collection of literary works of English and Moro language essays, poems and short stories from 34 writers.  His other book, Closing Party and Other Stories, is listed in the Rolling Stone Philippines’ 12 Notable Filipino Books in 2025.

This recognition solidifies Mangansakan as a multiskilled artist and a bearer of Bangsamoro culture and memory. He has been consistent throughout his works to engage the audience on the Bangsamoro questions of culture and identity amidst modernity. His award-winning documentaries House Under the Crescent Moon and Forbidden Memory bear pained history of the Moro people. His films mix Mindanao and Moro history with mysticism. While the three literary anthologies weaved the works of Moro writers into a singular thread of identity.
 

Now in his first collection of short stories, Closing Party and Other Stories, Teng continues that same path, with thirteen stories that make readers see through the eyes of Moro characters how they negotiate tradition, religion, gender, class and folklore.  

Women characters standout in this collection. The character Mainoma in Crescent Moon in Daylight finds awakening as a student activist in Manila, but returns to face the rites of genital mutilation for her daughter. In A Woman of Her Own, a woman artist confronts the tradition of slavery that binds her family. A Ripple in the Pond finds the character asserting her dignity when she discovers the infidelity of her younger fiancé. In All the Nights After, the question of a woman’s chastity before marriage is told from the perspective of the groom’s family.

Folklore also finds its place in this collection. The belief of lumay and potions in Lifting the Veil gathered four women with different needs in their relationships, but finds that solutions to the problems of the heart lies in one’s decisiveness. “It is not the bottle we need. Deciding is the real sorcery,” one woman says.

Mangansakan’s flair for magical realism comes to fore in Transfiguration of Milagros, where a Capiz-born native marries a Spanish haciendero’s son, only to awaken her curse. It ties up mysticism to resistance against Spanish colonization. 

Turning the Sky presents the family’s belief in magic against the weather hinders a tribe from understanding the cause of their community’s floods. While in Island Fever, a writer’s dreams of ghosts are pulling her to the ocean that bears memory of Palimbang.
 

Queer characters also come in heartfelt journeys. A transgender slowly breaks her plans to her family in Born from the Ashes. A queer couple contends with distance and closeness living in a different country.

Princes of Cotabato captures the impulsiveness of youth as children of influential clans turn a graduation into a clash of wounded pride.

Mangansakan said this book is a “homecoming of sorts” as he melds his many role as filmmaker and storyteller in crafting these stories. It is also a homecoming as he tells these stories through many eyes, as a filmmaker, a member of Moro aristocracy, as an LGBTQ advocate. It also opens up to the readers the complex lives of the Moro people, contending with the modern times that somehow marginalize the culture that once thrived in Mindanao in the past. The stories are told like short films, dialogues and conversations short but pointed, description of place and time detailed and moving.

This book is a revelation and reflection. Mangansakan intends this collection to stir conversation of the negotiations of Moro identity. Even in fiction, truths are revealed.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Tyrone A. Velez is a freelance journalist and writer.)