5. The scholar Caroline S. Hau once said that Philippine history is closely intertwined
with Philippine literature, with the latter constantly intervening through imaginative
articulations of the nation's predicaments.
In her book Necessary Fictions (2000), a study of Filipino novels from Jose Rizal to
Mano de Verdades Posadas, she elaborated on this conjecture by noting "some of the
central concerns and motifs of the so-called Philippine literary tradition."
"Among them," she wrote, are "the commingling of literature, history, and
nationalism; the need for transforming consciousness and society; and the truthful,
realistic depiction of Philippine society." Being thrice-colonized,
Filipino culture is clearly afflicted by what Resil B. Mojares (2002) described
as a "haunting that comes from feelings of displacement, dispossession,
decenteredness, (and) disembodiment."
6. In revaluing the works of the late National Artist for Literature N. V. M. Gonzales,
Mojares basically brought to light the problem of the loss of a "national soul," a direct
consequence of our long history of subjugation. This soul-loss in turn became a persistent
subject in many of our literatures, since, as Mojares placed it, "colonialism is the trauma of
Philippine literature," and this "trauma is defined not just by the specific, manifold character
it took and the site in which it was played out."
For Mojares, the loss of the national soul, and by extension, national identity, has
haunted the Filipino writer, and yet this "haunting" may also help bring about the recovery
of this lost identity.
"While it is a soul a writer seeks," Mojares wrote, "it is in the haunting of its absence
that he does his best work. This point about the haunting hammers down Hau's position
about the intimate relation of literature and history. According to Hau, "Literature can
teach its readers much about Filipino society even as it is also a social artifact shaped by
the society it seeks to represent."
7. Markers
It features people faced
with conflicts, and their
struggles to overcome
these conflicts.
Novel Realism
In fiction is often
described as an authentic
rendition of reality.
Verisimilitude
or the quality of feeling
real, is the most important
quality of realism
It is pessimistic literary
viewpoint that sees social,
hereditary, and historical
conditions are inescapable
and thus shaping the
human struggle
Naturalism Social Realism
It is a literary viewpoint
that criticizes oppressive
social structures.
Heteroglossia
It is a term that describe
the diverseness of the
novel’s language
8. What is the Novel?
02
“Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to
make a New year's prayer, not a resolution.”
9. ➢ For the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), the novel is the modern
world's reinvention of a classical genre-the epic. The classical epic, as we know it,
narrates stories of heroic deeds and adventures, much like the novel.
➢ However, the novel has fundamentally swerved away from the heroic focus of an
absolute past, as well as from aspects of divine intervention (as in the Iliad and the
Odyssey), to dramatize "contemporary reality," to quote Bakhtin.
➢ What also characterizes the novel, despite maintaining the figures of the hero, is
that it transformed classical heroic odysseys of journeys into stories of individuals
journeying into discovery or self-actualization in the modern world.
➢ The novel, according to Bakhtin, is a "discourse of a contemporary, about a
contemporary addressed to contemporaries."
10. ➢ This is one of the things that makes the novel new, or "nouvel" as in its Old French
etymology. Instead of heroes with extraordinary powers, the novel features people faced
with conflicts.
➢ For Bakhtin, one thing that constitutes an epic is its "national tradition," where a "national
heroic past" existed, "a world of 'beginnings and peak times' in the national history."
➢ The novel, as mentioned earlier has been used to "narrate" the nation, to call it forth, to
name its woes, the way Rizal did through his Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.
While the classical or indige nous epic extols the glory of a culture in the figure of the
hero, the novel exposes the afflictions of a nation, recapitulating its lost values, calling for
the re-imagination of its existence. Thus, the novel and the epic, though differing in form,
are still the same explored species, responding to the situation of their respective times.
11. Trackback: Encountering Bangsamoro
"Bangsamoro" has been a very contentious term as it signifies many things for
people from Mindanao and for people from outside it. On a more denotative level, it is
what it means, quite simply: the nation, bangsa, or bansa of the Moro people. But the
vastness of Mindanao compels for a more nuanced appre ciation of the term
Bangsamoro, which also refers to the area under the administration of the Autono mous
Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), an economic and political entity provided by the
Philippine government in 1989 through RA 6734 for the Mindanao provinces with
significant Islamic populations and cultures.
In terms of current legislation, an attempt to further strengthen this regional entity
is carried out through the Bangamoro Organic Law, a similar legislative move to replace
ARMM and establish a new autonomous political entity known as the Bangsamoro
Autonomous Region, which is thought by some parties as one that will finally solve strife
in Mindanao. Aside from its governmental and geographic denotation, it may also
embody the long struggle of Muslim Mindanao for inclusive growth and cultural
recognition. Being the big island that it is, Mindanao-and its significant Muslim
population-has been marginalized for long. The problem of peace is but merely a
symptom of this struggle which is yet to be solved by the government.
12. Trackback: Encountering Bangsamoro
Individually, do the following:
➢ Collect current information about the struggles for peace in Mindanao
from newspapers, magazines websites, and periodicals. Note specific
developments and how the government is responding to provide
lasting peace in Mindanao.
➢ Share information with your classmates and come up with a
Mindanao situationer.
➢ Present this situationer in class.
14. ➢ Born and raised at Zamboanga city , and educated
at Jesuit School.
➢ Author of several books of short stories and novels.
two-time winner of the Palanca Grand Prize
➢ Won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Grand Prize
for Literature for his third novel, “Subanons” and
first won the grand prize in 1982 for his first novel,
“Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh”.
➢ He is born at Zamboanga city which is the setting
of his short stories and novel.
Antonio R. Enriquez
15. ➢ It pertains to the nature of the genre being discussed.
1. Biographical context - points to the relation between the writer’s life
and work.
2. Linguistic context - relates to the languages present in the novel as the
author orchestrates a particular artistic effect.
3. Socio-cultural context – suggests the intimate relationship between the
work and what surrounds it (social conditions, culture, worldview and
history.
Literary Context
16. Pikit was the oldest town in Cotobato, they said. And the townsfolk said too that
hundreds of years ago, a Spanish ship had dropped anchor in the Pulanggi River, and while
the awed Moros watched, Spanish soldiers in iron clothes (mailcoat) came down her
gangplank and discovered the town behind the cogon grass and under the great balete trees.
The Spanish soldiers’ faces were white as paper, with straight high noses and glistening,
unstained teeth which bore no reddish stain from the juice of mama (betel nut chew). The
Spaniards apparently had not stayed long in Pikit, for Alberto had not seen a mestizo or
mestizo in town since his arrival some three months ago. This was not all like his
hometown,Zamboanga, where the Spanish conquistadores (and licentious friars) had sown
so many seeds that mestizos bloomed vividly like bougainvillaea flowers, and the old spoke
fluent Castellano and the streets were named after saints or places in Spain.
17. Not so long ago the commercial bus never stopped in Pikit; not even long enough for
its cloud of dust to settle back on the highway. Instead, it disgorged its passengers at the
nearest small village, and they had to walk about two kilometers to the town proper carrying
their baggage on their backs. Those who refused to get off, or asked for a fare refund, were
kicked off the bus by the conductors, divested of their luggage or cargo, and were forced to
walk barefoot to the nearest barrio where they brought slippers or rubber shoes.
If a bus stopped in Pikit, they said the Moros there deflated the tires with their wooden
clubs, smashed the lights and windshields to smithereens. Then market goers and store
owners stripped off its wooden parts and burned them for fuel; the townsfolk dismantled the
chassis and engine and sold the metal by the kilo in Cotobato City over a hundred kilometers
away. Only the skeleton of the bus was left on the road to rust and corrode under the sun
and rain, and for the naked children to play all sorts of games on. But what the children loved
to play most was being grown-ups, replaying the parts the townsfolk had in dismantling the
bus.
18. Up along the road and just before the market-place, an abandoned truck-chassis, or
what was left of it, was covered with vines and climbers whose tentacles wound round and
intertwined with its steel and iron frame. They grew thick and luxuriously green, and here
and there flowers bloomed as though on abandoned and forgotten grave. The Flowers were
orange, yellow, and red, and early in the morning their tiny petals glistened under beads of
dew and were wonderful to look at. Long before the Cerdeza Surveying Company men
came, they said the bus had been hastily abandoned on the highway when a datu from
Matalam ordered the Christians down and raked the side of the bus with bullets. The
automatic carbine went tat-tat-tat-tat and made holes on the side of the bus as big as
thumbs. A four-year-old child abandoned by the mother died there on the bus, his head
blown-off and his scalp plastered on the wooden backrest of his chair.
At six o’clock every evening, the sari -sari stores and carinderias along the road were
closed and barred with wooden boards. No one walked there after this hour, and the
policeman on beat changed his uniform into civilianclothes and drank with his buddies in
one of the tuba stores far from the town proper. And then the rats and tomcatsemerged from
their hiding, and the dogs scavenged the garbage dumps for crumbs. Only Datu Mantel, they
said, walked the main his, his 45-calibre handgun hanging low form his hip.
19. One night a drunkard lost his way home, and on the main street Datu Mantel shot him neatly
between his eyes. Like the bodies of other murdered men, the drunkard's corpse was not found the next
day, and the chief of police did not send policeman after the datu. Because one evening, a week before the
murder, while two of them were drinking in abar, Datu Mantel slapped him across the face and challenged
him to draw his gun. The chief of police knew that with one hand Datu Mantel could draw and at the same
time cock his 45-calibre handgun while it was still in its holster, as though it were a toy gun. Said Datu
Mantel to chief of the police, “Now I am the chief of the police.” That was how, they said, Datu Mantel
became unofficially the chief of police of Pikit without an appointment from the governor. And the next
day, the townsfolk saw him wearing the khaki uniform of the police chief, although he never wore a badge.
There was no place to go in Pikit after nightfall, and the one movie house opened in the morning
and closed in the afternoon. It showed double-program war features. In one film, Fernando Poe Jr., the
Golden Boy of action pictures, with automatic machine gun, mowed hundreds of Moros on a slope. Upon
seeing this massacre on the picture screen, Datu Mantel Stood up from his wooden bench, drew his 45-
calibre gun, and promptly perforated the picture seen. “There!” he said to one in particular, “you are now
dead!” Everyone scampered for safety and the movie house owner stopped showing films again in Pikit;
thereafter they said, he showed only American war movies. When the fans of Fernando Poe Jr. demanded
to see their movie idol, the owner of the movie house said they all knew he was shot dead by Datu
Manteland now lay buried in the hills of Pulanggi.
20. Navigate
1. The excerpt immediately provides some bits of the town’s colonial history, as the
townsfolk know it. What were those details and how did the Pikit natives perceive
the foreign invaders?
2. The excerpt also provides an impression of Zamboanga, where Alberto came from.
A comparison was suggested between Pikit and Zamboanga. Compare the two
towns based on Alberto’s impressions.
3. How were the Moro inhabitants: “Not so long ago the commercial bus never
stopped in Pikit. Instead, it disgorge its passengers at the nearest small village, and
they had to walk about two kilometers to the town proper carrying their baggage on
their backs?
4. By the way inference, why was violence the constant element in the way the Moro
responded to “external”?
5. If allowed to make some conjectures, how do you think this dynamic has affected
Pikit? Speculate the condition of the following in the aspects of Pikit life considering
the circumstances of the excerpt: Governance, Economy, Culture, Environment,
Peace and Order?
22. Mindanao has long been considered an "Other" by the various centers of Philippine culture. The
"Other" is a concept found in Edward Said landman book Orientalism (1979), which discusses now
particular perspectives or "centers are privileged to assign marginal positions to other perspectives
Mindanao has been an "Other historically and this otherness does not necessarily serve its diverse
cultures wat Mindanao has been associated with images of exoticness, hostility, and strife its
indigenous culture is often recalled in popular culture to conjure the native, usually out of contain
Mindanao had also been seen as hostile territory because of the consistent narrative of resistance to its
beliefs and cultural values. Though efforts have been exerted by the state, much work still to be done to
avert future strife in the region Mindanao is being imagined and reimagined constantly because its
narrative changes. One may read Children of the Ever-changing Moor: Essays by Young Moro writers
edited by Guterraz Mangansakan Il to see the new narrations of Mindanao.
Survey articles, documentaries and videos, and find out how Mindanao is constantly imagined in
the public sphere. Answer the following questions in your survey.
1. What aspects of Mindanao are usually considered positive and negative? Make a list
2. In your survey, how does the country generally perceive Mindanao? How about the world?
3. Given the choice, who or what do you think best represents Mindanao today?
4. Research on the "Lumads"Why were the Lumads in the news not long ago?
