Posts

[Fiction] The Parable of the Sower and the Executive

Image
This work of fiction was originally anthologized in Hulagway: Empire & Emporia, published and launched jointly by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Ateneo de Zamboanga – Mindanao Institute on March 9, 2024, with printed copies subsequently distributed the following month. * * * 1 There is this story that is a favorite among priests, preachers, and gurus of these islands. It tells of a young man who ventures into the desert alone. 2 His reasons are not given, but the solo journey into a desolate place signals to the listeners that this is a man intent on discovering something about himself that can only be unearthed after a long and arduous trek. 3 As he walks across the barren landscape, the young man encounters an older man tossing seeds into the dry earth. 4 His curiosity is aroused, and his longing for a conversation after several days on his own compels him to approach the old man and ask him what exactly he is up to.   5 “I am planting seeds,”...
Post a Comment
Read more

Contextualizing the Cebu Art Book Fair in the Era of Globalization

Image
This article was originally published in the Cebu Almanac 2019–2023: Pandemic Crisis and Recovery, launched by the University of San Carlos Publishing House on April 29, 2024. An Apparent Scarcity   A little over a month after Supertyphoon Odette cleaved through the Visayas and parts of Mindanao, Cebu-born poet Lawrence Ypil posted on his Facebook timeline a link to an online literary folio that received a respectable amount of attention. Titled Odette in the Dark, the folio was envisioned as a “space” where Cebuanos could share their experiences of that night of the storm, and the long days, weeks, and months that followed. In his January 21 post, Ypil (2022) wrote, “We wanted to know how people fared in the storm’s aftermath. What they did in the dark in the light of candles. How many hours it took to get fuel, how many days it took before they drank iced water.”   Odette in the Dark was an admirable endeavor because its namesake storm was a collective experience tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Comparative Reading of the Postcolonial Pícaro in F. Sionil Jose’s Mass and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Image
This paper was originally submitted as a final requirement for the author’s compliance in the course LIT 607: Seminar in Comparative Literature (2017).   * * *   I. Appropriating and Adapting Genres of the West   Perhaps one of the more benign unintended consequences to have emerged from the era of colonization is the appropriation of Western literary forms by writers from formerly colonized regions of the world. This allows them to inject their own native sentiments and leads to new, unexpected ways of rendering these forms. Case in point is the novel. Its “closeness to life in the raw and society in the making” (Maiorino xii) made it the perfect mode to capture folkloric, precolonial ways of looking at the world—views that were gradually eroding as a result of Western hegemony, influence, and education—and reconcile it with a new, postcolonial identity. The epic—a more traditional way of telling a people’s history and a form present among numerous cultures—was...
Post a Comment
Read more