The Savage Mind of Bicol: 'We Had The Country in That Bookshop'
Kristian Cordero has built and rebuilt his bookshop. Can he do it again?
(SPOT.ph) The early weeks of October brimmed with hope and promise for Kristian Sendon Cordero. The award winning poet, fictionist, translator, and filmmaker had barely recovered from the high brought about by the success of the Third Bikol Book Festival when it was time for him to fly to Germany, for the much anticipated Frankfurt Buchemesse, or the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest and most important trade fair dedicated to books.
Cordero, currently the director of Ateneo de Naga University Press, is also the founder and force behind the Naga-based independent bookshop Savage Mind, a kind of cultural hub that has earned the respect and admiration of noted figures in Philippine letters and visual arts. The Bikolano had to be at the Frankfurt book fair to observe, network, and witness the handover of this year’s Guest of Honor Italy to the Philippines—who will be star of the show in 2025. It was a sign of good things to come for Philippine authors and Philippine books.
The 40-something Cordero was in high spirits in Frankfurt until news from home started appearing in his phone. Typhoon Kristine, also known as Severe Tropical Storm Trami, had struck Naga, unleashing an unexpected amount of rainfall that left a great part of the city and the rest of Bicol region submerged.
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‘We have the whole country in that bookshop’
Cordero’s Savage Mind was not spared and almost everything that the bookshop proprietor has collected and curated since he put it up in 2018, including items consigned to the store, were damaged, many of them unsavable. Cordero helplessly watched the water ravage his shop from Frankfurt through a CCTV app on his mobile phone.
“You know, we have the whole country in that bookshop,” says the Bicolano, the heartbreak still fresh in his voice, his words raw with emotion and confusion, as he tries to make sense of everything that happened. “We brought the Philippines in that bookshop para lang yung Bicolano will get the sense of dynamism in Philippine publishing,” he adds. Commercial, university, alternative and independent presses from all over the country consigned their titles to Savage Mind. “It was a little Frankfurt for the Philippines.”
It’s not like they didn’t prepare. Cordero’s parents, who manned the shop while he was away, knew to place the books in elevated areas and in the adjacent art gallery, Kamarin, where they would be safe. With the warning set at Signal No. 1, they knew the drill. “My parents prepared for it kasi nga we had a previous experience already,” says the bookshop owner, referring to Typhoon Enteng which hit them just a few weeks earlier.
“I was monitoring the typhoon through my phone and nung napansin ko na tumataas na yung tubig, dun na ako kinabahan,” Cordero recalls. Because they needed to go home to Iriga, which was 40 kilometers away from Naga, Cordero’s folks needed to leave the bookshop. “When I realized that the water was rising, I didn’t tell my parents to go back na because we were confident it was only Signal No. 1. Kung bahain man yung bookshop, everything was ready, including our cats,” he tells SPOT.ph.
But the rainfall in Bicol that day was of an intensity no one expected. At one point, in the area where Savage Mind was located, the water was 15 feet high.
Cordero’s parents attempted to return to the store but got stranded when a bridge in Iriga collapsed. Only when his CCTV updates got cut did Cordero start reaching out to friends and neighbors in the Philippines through social media, for someone to at least save his three cats--Innova, Kaiju, and Laya. “They are mainstays of the bookshop. May sarili yang mga fans," he says. "In my heart, I was telling myself na pag hindi nag-survive (yung mga cats), that will be my ultimate reason not to operate [Savage Mind] anymore."
Among those he lost
The cats, with the help of friends and PAWS volunteers, survived but many of the books, important documents and artworks did not.
Among those damaged was the Luis Cabalquinto section which features works collected by the esteemed Bicolano poet in the past 30 years. There was also Cordero’s personal library which housed, among others, rare first editions, a copy of the first Filipino poetry book from 1908, and letters of Antonio Luna.
The Kamarin art space wasn’t spared as well, with several of its permanent collections of artworks—by artist Venancio Igarta and by Bicol artists Fr. Ninilon Bancaso, Frank Penones, Cocoi Base and Aldrin Camacho—damaged by the flood. The paintings and carvings purchased from indigenous artists from Buhi were also affected, says Cordero. “I’m readying myself for everything,” he tells Spot.ph while at the Frankfurt airport awaiting his flight.
Cordero was back in the Philippines on October 29 and has yet to fully grasp and assess all that was lost. “Si Mama was just in tears because she realized the value of the things we put there," the Savage Mind founder shares. "Hindi naman sila investor diyan pero alam nila ang amount of energy and money I put into this shop. Hindi kami mayamang pamilya. OFWs sila and just that idea of putting a space like this enlarges their sense of being Filipino and a part of a community.”
The making of Savage Mind
Cordero put up Savage Mind in 2018 after his writing residencies in Iowa, Michigan, and Alaska. “I was moving around the US and I was inspired by how community bookshops gathered people from all walks of life. When I came home, I had this great feeling of putting one in Naga,” he shares.
In just six years, he's managed to make Savage Mind a dynamic and important literary, cultural, and creative hub for the region. Beyond the eclectic mix of titles, it carries the most extensive collection of books on Bicol and those written by Bicolano authors like Cabalquinto, the screenwriter and National Artist Ricky Lee, and noted poet Marne Kilates. It also has a considerable collection of books translated in different Philippine dialects, from Waray and Hiligayanon to Cebuano and Ilocano.
Just as vibrant was Kamarin, which provided a generous space for the works of the region’s visual artists. The art gallery-cum-café has hosted numerous activities, from lectures, workshops, to reading sessions that catered not just to a small group of creatives but to Bicolanos from all walks of life, giving the greater public access to a space in which they can lose themselves in books, movies, and art.
Cordero’s countless initiatives to highlight and preserve the rich literary and artistic culture of Bicol through his shop is such that historian Ambeth Ocampo, after visiting Savage Mind during the Third Bikol Book Festival, would write on his Facebook wall: “I live my frustrated dream [to own a bookstore] through the experience of Savage Mind's owner and curator. When I grow up, I want to be Kristian Cordero!”
Rizal, Wilhelmsfeld, the ‘Great Flood’
From the onset, Cordero knew putting up a bookshop in a low-lying city located in a region vulnerable to natural disasters was a gamble. “Ine-expect ko naman na we are a typhoon-prone region, may earthquakes. Ni-romanticize ko din naman yan,” says the Bicolano. The disasters came in predictable and unexpected ways, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the catastrophic typhoons Usman, Rolly, Ulyses, and Enteng. Interestingly, says Cordero, something beautiful and innovative almost always comes out of these ugly events.
“The bookshop took flight when the pandemic happened. It became an opportunity for growth and innovation,” he says, citing an example. From the pandemic sprung projects such as Himati, a Bicol poetry reading series featuring celebrities like Piolo Pascual and Jaime Fabregas; the Bahay Kubo Picture Book in partnership with archeologist Stephen Acabado; and the Takatak Short Story Writing Contest in Bikol Languages that attracted 10,000 entries. When the town of Buhi was badly hit by typhoon Usman in 2018, Savage Mind initiated a partnership with indigenous artists there, buying their artworks to sell at the shop.
Just this September, typhoon Enteng struck and Cordero had two days left to clean the entire shop in time for the Third Bikol Book Festival which Savage Mind hosted. Naga sprung to life with events graced by artists, writers, press owners, publishers, diplomats, and literary enthusiasts. Special guests included Dante Ang II, Ambeth Ocampo, National Book Development Board’s Neni Sta. Romana Cruz, and former Vice President Leni Robredo.
“Nakakatuwa rin at dinudugtong tayo ng mga karanasan ng bagyo. Something new is created from a destructive force,” Cordero muses. However, the level of destruction brought by Typhoon Kristine was the most severe to date not just for Savage Mind but the rest of the region. “Ngayon lang talaga na medyo mahina kami dahil inubos [ng bagyo]. Kami na yung nasa posisyon ng walang wala,” he laments.
Cordero has yet to come to terms with so many things, among them the timing of events. “I’m just struck at the coincidence that I’m here [in Germany],” he tells Spot over Zoom, sounding frustrated.
When Kristine struck Naga on October 25, Cordero still had three days left in Germany with fellow Filipino delegates. He had an itinerary that included a visit to Jose Rizal’s statue in Wilhelmsfeld. Cordero narrates how he couldn’t contain his tears and draw parallelisms as he watched a reenactment of Rizal’s brief stay in the small German town while finishing his Noli Me Tangere amidst the cold and loneliness.
“I felt that ang dami niyang sinakripisyo para sa kanyang panulat. It gives you a very strange feeling of why the universe is giving you this kind of event [where you lose all that you have built] when a Filipino writer has also had to struggle about that same feeling of being far away from home.”
The answers may not be within Cordero’s grasp just yet but he is slowly coming to terms with the fragility of material things. “[The tragedy] is giving me this acute sense of fragility-- that everything we hold dear [like books] is fragile that’s why they are beautiful,” he says.
But what looks broken outside may still be held whole by the many people whose lives the bookshop has touched. If the outpouring of support –financial and otherwise—is an indication of Savage Mind’s impact on the community it serves, then it may be just a matter of time before the bookshop may be pieced together again. Currently, the Savage Mind team has put up a Solidarity Relief Fund as a first step towards rebuilding or considering a new direction for the space.
“The Great Flood is a portal that we need to deeply think about [to know] how we can proceed from here. It’s a portal that we have to go through,” Cordero says, thinking of that biblical story, reflecting aloud, as if knowing that only through terrible storms and great loss can one really start again, as if knowing somehow that a sense of community and irrepressible creativity will bring new life back to Savage Mind bookshop—just as they have done many times in the past.
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