Just Some Write-Ups

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...

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...