Why Marga Ortigas' first novel is a parable
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Loading... - Amina Bakar
- 24 Jun 2022
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The ever overly inquisitive and tenacious Marga Ortigas (or so she’s told) has never been afraid to try out something new. Back when she was a few years old, her parents took her to a Japanese restaurant, and she was so fascinated by the chef using the misono grill, she put her tiny palm down on the grill.
“I spent the rest of the meal with my scalded hand in a bowl of ice,” she told Lifestyle. “But that didn’t put me off eating all this wonderful new food that was magically cooked by a shiny table.”
There was also an incident with an electric fan that was thankfully aborted by her father’s quick thinking.
Ortigas was still in college at Ateneo de Manila University when she became one of GMA 7’s three first newsbreak anchors. “I didn’t plan to become a journalist—but I followed the road that opened up, and took it one step at a time,” she said.
A full-time stint at GMA was followed by tours of duty with the Probe Team, CNN in London and Al Jazeera English. All this took her across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the United States and Brazil. “It also took me to Iraq in the early days after ‘Shock and Awe,’ as it dealt with the fallout of the second Gulf War.”
It was yet another pioneering move to go from the ubiquitous CNN in 2015 to join the nascent Al Jazeera English, which people had been initially wary of.
“Trying to set up a bureau in Manila, what I kept getting—even from those in supposedly the most informed sectors—was: ‘What? Why would you join al-Qaida?’ I had to do a lot of explaining in those early days. But the birth of Al Jazeera English was big news in the industry and much anticipated in Europe, where I was living at the time, plus I knew the Al Jazeera Arabic team in Baghdad from my time there. So, I had faith in the channel, and the people we were with when it started.”
As a journalist, Ortigas was proud to have been recognized by International Committee of the Red Cross for Humanitarian Reporting for her reportage on Mindanao.
“Honestly, for a journalist like me, doing the stories we did, it was such a great honor, totally unexpected, too, as I hadn’t even realized we had been put up for it. From our first days on air, we did a lot of stories around the conflict in Mindanao. The reports were in-depth, gave context, were nonsensationalist and consistent. We didn’t just go a few times and were done with it, but truly made an effort to tell the continuing story of the challenges faced by the people in the restive regions of the southern Philippines.”
But there was something else that Ortigas longed to do. “After almost 11 years with Al Jazeera English, where I was a senior correspondent, I put down the mic and the reporter’s notebook to take on a different writing enterprise.”
Ortigas, you see, had always wanted to write creatively “since I could pick up a pen; I would have been a creative writer from the get-go had I not stumbled into journalism,” and had always dreamt of writing a novel. So, as she always does, she did. Read More…
