Reclaiming ‘Sub-Saharan Mindanao’: An Afro-Pinay writer’s counter-narrative of the South
GENERAL SANTOS CITY (MindaNews / June 8, 2026) — When political analyst Richard Heydarian described parts of Mindanao as having “Sub-Saharan levels of human development,” the phrase quickly entered public discourse.
To some, it was a blunt assessment of economic disparities. To writer and cultural producer Elaine Joy Edaya Degale, it revealed something deeper: how language can reduce entire regions into shorthand for deprivation.
“What struck me wasn’t the comparison, but how casually ‘Sub-Saharan’ was used as shorthand for inferiority,” Degale told MindaNews.
An Afro-Pinay writer, filmmaker, educator, and community organizer whose life moves between Sto. Niño, South Cotabato and New York City, Degale has spent much of her creative life interrogating the assumptions embedded in such descriptions.
Rather than rejecting the phrase outright, she has sought to reclaim it, treating “Sub-Saharan Mindanao” not as a label of deficiency but as an opening to examine how regions of the Global South are imagined, compared, and valued.
Reclaiming a language of deficit
For Degale, the problem lies not only in how Mindanao is portrayed but in the historical baggage carried by the comparison itself.
“I couldn’t ignore the historical weight of that term. Sub-Saharan Africa is not a metaphor for deprivation. It is a site of resistance, history, and cultural brilliance,” she said.
She argues that comparisons between regions of the Global South often function less as acts of understanding than as systems of ranking, reinforcing inherited colonial ideas about progress and development.
“This is how intellectual conditioning works. Even educated voices learn to equate the South with backwardness,” she added.
Rather than rejecting comparison altogether, Degale proposes a different framework—one that sees Mindanao and Sub-Saharan Africa not as parallel examples of failure but as places shaped by overlapping histories of colonialism, extraction, resilience, and cultural survival.
At the center of her work is a persistent question: who gets to define what a place is worth?
Between Sto. Niño and New York
Her perspective is rooted in a life shaped by two seemingly distant worlds. Growing up in Sto. Niño, she learned agriculture not as a policy issue but as daily practice.
Coming from a family involved in farming and horticulture, she recalls school lessons that included planting vegetables, composting soil, sewing, repairing household items, and crafting with local materials.
“In agriculture class, we learned how to plant vegetables, compost soil, make bamboo lamps, sew, and repair things with our own hands,” she recalled. “Home economics wasn’t an elective. It was an expectation.”
Practices often dismissed as signs of underdevelopment, she argues, embody forms of ecological knowledge, self-sufficiency, and collective care that are rarely acknowledged within dominant frameworks of development.
“But they are technologies of survival—ecological intelligence, self-sufficiency, collective care,” she explained.
If Sto. Niño taught her those lessons, New York offered a different kind of education. There, she found anonymity and the space to think and write.
“In New York, I can disappear into the crowd. I can think, draft, and write without interruption,” she said.
Mindanao, by contrast, remains a place of constant visibility and interconnectedness.
Writing memory through plants
Those experiences find expression in Degale’s literary work, much of which draws from the agricultural landscape of her childhood. Plants appear repeatedly throughout her fiction—not as decorative symbols but as living repositories of memory, resilience, and transformation.
Her works include Moonflower, Paraiso Verde, Dandelion, Golden Pothos, and Bonsai, while her forthcoming novel Sunflower: Black Baby explores themes of Afro-Pinay identity and visibility.
“In my childhood, plants were the first language I learned. They represent survival, memory, and renewal,” she explained.
Through botanical imagery, Degale explores questions of identity, displacement, and womanhood.
“A flower is beautiful, but when it is plucked at the wrong time, its life is shortened,” she said. “I’ve seen the same happen to women.”
Her literary and creative work has earned recognition across international platforms.
Her short story Paraiso Verde received 2nd runner-up honors for the African Diaspora Award and will appear in Mosaic: African Threads of Prose & Poetry.
Moonflower was named a Top 6 finalist for the Native Voices Award and is slated for publication in the Kinsman Quarterly Native Voices anthology, while Dandelion was also a Top 6 finalist and will appear in Iridescence: Second Dimension.\
Her work has likewise been featured in Black Butterfly: Voices of the African Diaspora. In film, she received Honorable Mention at the 2025 International Film Festival Manhattan for The Third Estate, and another Honorable Mention in 2024 for Dreamweaver, which also won Best Screenwriting at the Asian American Film Lab 72-Hour Shootout.
Yet for Degale, storytelling is not simply a creative pursuit. It is a way of preserving memory, challenging inherited narratives, and expanding what stories about Mindanao can look like.
Building stories beyond the page
Her commitment also extends beyond literature. Through Edaya’s Star Terrace Café, she has created a cultural space for workshops, readings, and youth-centered programs in South Cotabato.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she launched Operation Merienda to provide meals for frontline workers. What began as emergency relief later expanded into literacy initiatives, feeding programs, and educational support for rural and indigenous communities.
“At first we were delivering food to hospitals. Then it became about learning, access, and imagination,” she recalled.
Among the initiatives that emerged was a reading recovery program that supported hundreds of learners affected by pandemic-related disruptions. One moment, she said, continues to stay with her.
“When the children call me ‘Ma’am Elaine,’ it feels like a shift in history,” she said, contrasting that experience with memories of being called “negra” as a child, often as a term of ridicule.
“Now I am greeted with joy,” she added.
Taken together, Degale’s writing, educational work, and community initiatives form part of the same project: expanding how Mindanao is understood beyond narratives of scarcity and underdevelopment.
Many of the communities she works with, she noted, come from populations historically positioned at the margins of state attention.
“We are taught to see the South as extraction. But it is also where knowledge, language, and care are produced.”
For Degale, the phrase “Sub-Saharan Mindanao” remains contested terrain, a reminder of how language shapes public imagination. Yet it also presents an opportunity to challenge assumptions about development and whose histories are valued.
“Mindanao is not behind, it is following a different logic,” she explained. In that logic, agriculture is knowledge, storytelling is infrastructure, and care is political.
The work she is building through writing, film, education, and community space, is not a departure from Mindanao but a return to it as something larger than how it has often been defined.
Rather than measuring the South by what it lacks, Degale’s work offers another frame: one where the South is not absence, but abundance. (MindaNews / Guia A. Rebollido)
No comments:
Post a Comment