Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast

Guest-edited by Rina Garcia Chua, Esther Vincent Xueming,and Ann Ang.
Series Editor Craig Santos Perez.

Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting is a timely and exciting project guest edited by Rina Garcia Chua, Esther Vincent Xueming, and Ann Ang. Featuring nearly thirty authors and includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, this anthology is comprised mostly of anglophone texts, which reflects the aspirations of regional writers to speak across borders and to the globe at large. Several native languages appear in these pages as well. In this anthology, Southeast Asia refers to the constituent nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), namely, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as their associated diasporas. The writers and the peoples of the region live and remember more profoundly than we know. Their work here explores the ecological across a multiscalar spectrum, featuring both geological landscapes and visceral botanical or animal entanglements, inheriting histories and spiritualities that defy and disrupt modern epistemologies.

This anthology represents a chorus of offerings, first and foremost to the land and the sea; and secondly to you, our readers, as an invitation to attend to the urgencies and travails of our homes. These are the stories we share and the stories we carry in our pasiking (basket) as we follow movements towards our destinies. These are the stories that sing of hope—for ourselves and for our world; ones that we whisper silently to ourselves as we touch our lips to the familiar earth and wait for the incoming monsoon rain to fall gently on our backs, our fields, our rivers.

150 pp., winter 2023 (35:2)
978-0-824-89865-6
Project Muse