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Carissa Pobre

Carissa Pobre

Carissa Pobre is a writer, strategist, and educator from the Philippines.

📍 Metro Manila

Letters to the Writer: On Becoming Descendant

There’s a caricature of the Filipino literary scene over the last century: the dominance of academia, the culture of patronage politics, the epicenter for elitism, the binary of aesthetics versus politics . . . I ‘grew up’ in this contemporary literary culture.

agritriptych

I’d like to situate the conventional mistrust of fake women: food and love. Growing up as a girl, I was often willing to starve in both contexts.

Notes on Pagkamulat: Routes and Roots of Radicalism

The radical points to a desire close to Marxist and revolutionary thinking, but more rooted and filial as a Filipino through the posing of a question: Paano ka namulat?

The Necessity of Creative Inquiry in Troubled Times

When we are compelled to change our conditions, as we are called upon to do now, creativity wagers on what is possible.

Solidarity as an Alternative Story of Power

Collective solidarity gives rise to alternative modes and stories of power—in which it is shared, distributed, and kept alive in an interplay of diverse actors.

limits to growth

Among the three of us, we always lived in the north part of the city. By that time, no one will want to live here anymore. But I wasn’t sure.

on conversation

I am always suspected of a sickness, she says. All I want is to trust a man with plain, unshaken faith. I couldn’t speak for days once.

Reading as a Relational Practice

We are readers and listeners of each other, relational, constantly unfolding, re-infolding and taking shape.

Writing in an Emergency

During crisis, many things become uncertain. In those early days of the Covid-19 pandemic especially, she said, “Everything became immaterial.”