Category: Nonfiction

Gender In Literature

Nonfiction by | June 28, 2009

The story of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” expresses how women are defined as “the other” and men as the powerful sex.

Attics do not house humans. They are wasted space. Women are considered half monsters — and they are wasted. A woman inhabits the attic; literally and metaphorically, she becomes a madwoman, both as a writer and a character.

The fact is, Nathaniel Hawthorne is male; and men don’t glorify women.

Nathaniel Hawthorne did not directly say that Georgina is a monster. Only by the way she is presented in the story will it then become clear that literature had always been confined to male writers and male characters. Georgina’s birthmark embodies the unforgivable flaws of the female body and her position as a woman. She is not any different from Dr. Frankenstein’s monster; and the only way to kill the female monster is to destroy male literature.

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I Owe Y’All Two Pages

Nonfiction by | June 21, 2009

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning: should I wear my hood in class on the fifth of January or should I wear my hood in class on the fifth of January? It’s a tricky question, given that we live in a democratic society. By democracy, I mean being surrounded by people who are as free as you are they’d sing Itaktak Mo over and over until you’d feel odd enough you’d be moved to remove your hood. Scandal has two sides after all: baring your head below, and covering your head above.

I do not wish to move the world. Not that I won’t dare, but how could I disturb the universe given the size of my breasts and my booty? A few years back, a fiction teacher said I was a promising writer. By that I think he meant I have the great talent for putting off one article after another for the next day. My reason is a humble one: I write because I want to play god; so then I could pare my fingernails.

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Ang Kaisa-isa Kong Sandal

Nonfiction by | June 21, 2009

Kahirapan ay di hadlang sa ating buhay dahil lahat ng panahon ay nasa ilalim tayo. May pagkakataon namang nasa ibabaw.

Sa Cebu, naaalala ko pa nang ako’y nasa haiskul. Nang dahil sa mahirap lang kami, hindi ako nakapag-aral ng tuloy-tuloy. Kusa akong huminto dahil naawa ako sa aking mga magulang. Pito kaming magkakapatid at isang manggagawa lamang ang aking ama. Naghanap ako ng trabaho. Nag-aplay at napasok sa isang Printing Press bilang cutter ng
mga cellophane. Ipinagpatuloy ko ang aking pag-aaral sa gabi. Maghapong tumayo ako sa limang taon sa pagtatrabaho para lang matustusan ang aking pag-aaral. Sa awa ng Diyos, nakatapos ako ng haiskul sa University of the Visayas noong 1979.

Ibig kong ipatuloy ang aking pag-aaral sa kolehiyo ngunit parang madilim at mailap pa rin sa akin ang pagkakataon. Ngunit para sa akin hindi natutulog ang Diyos.

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Confessions of a 58-year-old Trekkie

Nonfiction by | May 31, 2009

Space – the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.

These words invaded my awareness more than forty years ago when the first edition of Star Trek came out on television. As a precocious teenager, I became instantly tantalized by the Gene Roddenberry creation, a penchant shared by my sister Thelma. At least once a week, we had a rendezvous at around 7:00 PM with the crew of the Enterprise in our 10-inch black-and-white TV set. As far as I remember, we never missed an episode, and should a storm occur at that moment with a blackout, we cursed the heavens for causing us to miss our date with Star Trek-TOS (The Original Series)!

The sci-fi series became a bonding link between my sister and I. There were other sci-fis that came out on TV later (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon) but our interest was never drawn to them as much as with Star Trek. From the moment we met James Tiberius Kirk and the pointy-eared Vulcan Spock, we knew we were bitten by a bug from which we never recovered.

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Á Bientô, Great Man

Nonfiction by | May 24, 2009

It is not everyday that one gets the chance to grieve the loss of a great man. Great men come in too little a supply, and often, they leave without so much as a warning to lessen, if not completely halt, any pain that naturally comes from goodbyes. Yes, it is a pain to part, and even more painful to part with great men. Hence the natural order of things where great men are few, and to part with them an even rarer circumstance. My family, however, grieves the loss of a great man once or twice a year. And once again, the time has come for us to swallow the bitter pill that is goodbye.

A great man is one who loses himself in the service of others, including those he loves the most. A great man takes time to make up for lost time, despite knowing the futility of such an act. A great man braves the seven seas and the cruelty of the world, sometimes even literally, for someone other than himself. A great man is my dad.

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My So-Called Glamorous Life As A Freelance Writer

Nonfiction by | May 17, 2009

Everyone assumes that writing is such a romantic occupation. I most certainly did—I wished with all fervent hope that I would eventually walk the path that Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad and Mary Shelley took when they made it through the annals of literary history.

In my youth, I had imagined writers cloistered away in their lavish Victorian-inspired home, dark with velvety crimson curtains and thick tapestries. Quill in hand, parchment under their elbows, these writers would look out into the vast open countryside seeing not the green landscape, but characters—fictional characters, characters of their own creation—speaking, weeping, and eventually floating back to the paper, becoming wisps of breath fashioned into the writers’ great languid scripts where both characters and writers would eventually be immortalized in written text.

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Kite

Nonfiction by | May 2, 2009

It was during the summer of 2001. I and my playmates were under the heat of the glaring sun busy making our “tabanog”. Arjan, who was four years younger than me was holding a blue plastic bag. Like any inquisitive kid, he kept on asking me, “Ate Banban unsaon paghimo ug tabanog?1” he didn’t stop pulling my skirt until I replied his childish query.

“It takes patience to make a kite Arjan. So just sit there, relax and wait for me to finish the kite I’m still making, okay?”, I carefully explained to him.

So he sat at the corner and waited for me. When I finally finished my hand made kite, I asked the little boy to structure his blue plastic bag. He was very excited that time. He drew a curve on his lips when I narrated him my first instruction, “Okay Arjan first you have to fold the bag in half and it should be flat and even.”

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From a Davao Diary

Nonfiction by | April 19, 2009

davaodiary
Move.

There I was, one pleasant morning, on a long sweaty walk that started at the Davao City Hall and led to the unimposing Gaisano South Ilustre mall downtown: moving, maybe lost, but moving. Even though according to the locals I actually came close to the Chinatown of the largest city in the world, it was a stretch that struck me as more Western than Oriental: diners and billboards, no teahouses, and no lanterns.

No matter. Why exchange sixty minutes of sun and solitude for anything else? The weather was agreeable, and I was enjoying being a traveler, as opposed to being “just a domestic tourist.” Only briefly did I stop: upon a minor assault of hunger I had breakfast at a McDonald’s at one corner of an intersection. I forgot for one reason or another to take mental note of the streets’ names, a habit I had acquired in Manila. It was something else which I let guide me: the kites being flown above –looking like seven sperm cells in the clear blue sky– or something simpler perhaps, and vaguer, such as an impulsive fearlessness of the unknown. Whatever it is, if the guide disappointed, I still would’ve moved, just moved, in what R.L. Stevenson had once called “the great affair.”

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