Fragments of a Shattered Sun An Oral History of the Mindanao War of Independence (2028-2031)
Fragments of a Shattered Sun is an oral history novel chronicling the fictional Mindanao War of Independence (2028-2031), told through interviews, recovered letters, declassified documents, and testimonies collected by a historian in 2041.
For decades, Manila treated Mindanao as a colony within its own nation—extracting nickel, gold, and timber while returning only soldiers and broken promises. When a leaked government bill threatens to privatize Lake Lanao itself, selling the sacred waters to presidential cronies, three unlikely leaders stand together: a Maranao professor, a Christian bishop, and a Lumad chieftain whose father was killed by Moro fighters decades earlier. Their declaration of independence ignites a war that will draw in great powers, shatter families, and force impossible choices on everyone it touches.
The novel unfolds through a mosaic of voices on all sides of the conflict: a schoolteacher who becomes a guerrilla commander; a young soldier from Luzon questioning why he's fighting people who look like his cousins; a trauma surgeon who abandons her Manila career to operate by flashlight in jungle caves; fishermen turned smugglers; overseas workers who leave jobs in the Gulf to take up rifles; diplomats maneuvering in Bangkok and Riyadh; a palace secretary who witnesses power unraveling from the inside.
As the war escalates, foreign powers pursue their own interests on Mindanaoan soil. American advisors, Chinese operatives, Malaysian intelligence officers, and Filipino diaspora networks from Dubai to San Diego are drawn into a conflict that refuses simple narratives of good and evil.
Fragments of a Shattered Sun explores how ordinary people are transformed by extraordinary circumstances—and what it costs to build a nation from blood and hope. It is a story of exploitation and resistance, of unity forged across generations of distrust, and of the question that haunts everyone who survives: was it worth it?