When history comes to life again through a fiction novel

MANILA, Philippines – In the late 1990s, when the National Museum of Anthropology was still called the Museum of the Filipino People, a younger Darwin de Jesus Mariano first saw the Laguna Copperplate. It sits on a podium inside a glass case, fairly simple: a thin, hammered sheet of copper engraved with words from an ancient script.

Translated, it bears a thousand-year-old legal text recording the acquittal of a debt in gold for a man named Namwaran and his relatives.

More than two decades later, Mariano — now a Filipino author, corporate leader, tech entrepreneur, and lawyer — returned to the same museum with those names no longer confined to an inscription. He debuted his historical fantasy novel, Namwaran and the Golden Tara, on September 13, a day after its official launch at the Manila International Book Fair.

The novel is mainly inspired by the Laguna Copperplate and the Golden Tara of Agusan, following the story of three siblings: Namwaran, Angkatan, and Bukah, whose lives change after their mother disappears and the golden statue is stolen.

Mariano wove real artifacts and documented periods of Southeast Asian history into his imagination to revive the people on the copperplate.

“It all started with the scribbles on my notebook from my museum visits that fueled my fascination for ancestral history. I wondered — what if these people were on a journey and along the way, they discover the other artifacts in the Philippines and Southeast Asia?” said Mariano, explaining how he came up with the idea that bore his first novel.

Bringing adventure to history

Imagining these people living their lives in the past wasn’t the hard part in creating the novel. For Mariano, this was the base. It was the historical backdrop that tied it all together. The real challenge was to build an adventure out of fragments of the past.

He took the three names of relatives in the Laguna Copperplate and turned them into siblings and gave them the magic of eternal life, which they use to search for their missing mother across different eras in the novel.

“There was no mother mentioned in the artifact, so I had the freedom to create that character,” he said during the book launch.

But beneath the fiction and magic were real incidents, such as the civil wars and major eras mentioned. Specifically, Mariano lets the siblings journey through the rise and decline of regional powers such as Srivijaya and Majapahit, as well as conflicts surrounding Manila centuries later. The book also carries real historical figures from these time periods.

“I first heard about these Southeast Asian empires from an early mentor, the late senator Raul Roco. Combined with my museum notes, these learnings made me realize that the people, places, and things in our history can make for a great story,” he explained.

On the same note, Mariano said that he wants to share his appreciation for history with other Filipinos.

But Mariano had a question that followed him through years of museum visits and research: how can he make people curious about a history that can feel impossibly distant?

His answer is to create a world that is more understandable and relatable, something more familiar and easier to consume: an ancestral fantasy novel.

“We don’t have a lot of ancestral fantasy books and it’s not a common genre. Novels like this inspire curiosity and in turn, you’d want to learn more. Hopefully, this book’s readers will be interested in revisiting our history and culture,” he said.

When ‘them’ becomes ‘us’

Apart from reading historical textbooks and novels, another way to revisit the past is by going to museums. Mariano chose to hold the book launch at the National Museum of Anthropology, not just to match the theme of his novel, but also to invite the attendees to a guided tour.

The tour, guided by museum staff, featured five artifacts: the Kulaman limestone burial jars, the Maradika Qur’an, the Manunggul Jar, the Banton Burial Cloth, and finally, the Laguna Copperplate itself.

At the last stop, Mariano took over from the guide to give a short speech to explain the story of the copperplate.

“Imagine what would have been required for this document to exist in 900 AD,” he pointed out. “The society behind it would have needed systems for writing and keeping time, as well as laws, governance, and a means of recognizing when an obligation had already been settled.”

He explained that because of the contents of the copperplate, historians were able to say that this artifact is evidence of an organized society having regional connections.

However, museum pieces like this don’t fully describe the lives of those who once held them.

For National Museum of the Philippines director-general Jeremy Barns, this way of looking at the past can also change the distance Filipinos place between themselves and their ancestors.

“When we speak about our precolonial ancestors, we tend to speak about ‘them,’ when we are really talking about ‘us’,” he said in his opening remarks.

Ultimately, Mariano’s idea to fictionalize the lives of these historical characters aimed to address this issue. He created a world where these people can exist again and gave them concerns that readers could recognize: family, loss, survival, and the search for someone they love.

“We realize that they are regular people like us. They experience love, hope, fear, and sadness. In reality, they are not very different from who we are today,” he said, referring to the main characters of his novel.

During his discussion at the launch, he pointed out that there may be differences in language, place, and identity across communities, but there were also things people had in common.

For Mariano, a huge part of being interested in our history comes from the sense of connection that we have with the past. He noted that most Filipinos learn about history in school, but books, museums, and personal research made him more inclined to learn about our own culture.

He also admitted that his decade-long research and writing brought him new learnings, and that he hopes he can share these with the readers of Namwaran and the Golden Tara.

It is this sense of connection that Mariano hopes readers take with them after the adventure ends.

Telling our own stories

While Mariano’s novel aims to reconnect people with Philippine and Southeast Asian history, he admits it’s only one way to preserve our past.

The launch also came at a time when the Laguna Copperplate is being considered for inclusion in the UNESCO Memory of the World Committee for Asia and the Pacific Regional Register, a program concerned with safeguarding and widening access to documentary heritage.

During the event, UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines secretary-general Ivan Anthony Henares similarly described heritage as something that lives not only in artifacts, but also in documents, manuscripts, films, and other records.

In his remarks, he said Namwaran brings a part of the shared past “back to life, retold and made accessible to the new generation.”

For Mariano, accessibility does not have to come only from academics or cultural institutions either.

“You can be an ordinary Filipino and still be interested and spreading the word about history,” he said during the discussion.

Mariano believes Filipinos should take part in telling these stories themselves, “before other people start writing down what we should’ve been writing on our own.”

Standing once more before the artifact that had sparked his curiosity decades earlier, he left guests with another question.

“What kind of debt do we owe people like Namwaran and this family?” Mariano asked. “…the people who came before us, who lived in these islands that we now call the Philippines, that we don’t remember.”

For Mariano, remembering does not necessarily mean knowing everything about them. Much of their lives may never be recovered from the fragments that remain.

But perhaps a museum visit, a story, or an adventure can make someone curious enough to begin looking. – Rappler.com