Friday, December 4, 2020

Directive by Robert Frost

The Lenten Season makes one think of one's humanity- sense of belongingness, and journey of finding the true meaning of life. This leads to Robert Frost's Directive, a poem which seems to tell of the traveler's (speaker) journey his quest for truth, his quest for acceptance, his quest for reality. The poem shows us that the speaker went again home oily to find a different home, quite far from how he had imagined it growing up in the area, this tells us, indeed our homes also evolve and the ideal home can only be kept in our hearts, 
As one reads the poem, one would realize that indeed finding your way isn't a neat road /The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you/Who only has at heart your getting lost,/May seem as if it should have been a quarry—/Great monolithic knees the former town/Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered./ The road is filled with different challenges, dangers, not just from the outside but also from the inside. Although it is like this, the speaker is rather positive in saying /Here are your waters and your watering place./Drink and be whole again beyond confusion./ like our spiritual journey, once we have taken the water of life, we are made whole again amidst confusions, amidst fear.
The Directive isn't actually a directive, perse, it is a presentation of what could happen and what could not happen if we find the strength to take the map and embark on our personal journeys.
Directive 

by Robert Frost 
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.


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Friday, November 13, 2020

La Naval de Manila by Nick Joaquin

 Nick Joaquin's La Naval de Manila brings us to the grandeur and power of the old Manila. As the essay shows us what is in store in that old city, it also shows us the valor, courage, and strength of both the women and the men of the old. It shows us hos Christianity has been strengthened by the image of La Naval de Manila.

As you read the essay, you would discover that indeed, we are each  apart of this pilgrimage and as the world grows older and humanity is again being challenged, we know, though little, we have a task to do and  a duty to fulfill. 

   LA NAVAL DE MANILA

Nick Joaquín

 

 

HISTORICAL NOTE: The battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement between the combined fleets of Venice, Spain, and the Papal States, commanded by Don John of Austria, natural brother of the King of Spain, and a powerful Turkish armada under Ali Pasha. After a desperate and sanguinary engagement, the Christian fleet routed the Turks. Some 8,009 Christians were killed, but 20,000 Turks were killed, wounded, or taken as prisoners. The Christian victory broke the Turkish naval power in the Mediterranean and ended the last Crusade. Locale of the conflict was near the Cursolari Islands at the western entrance to the Gulf of Patras, Greece.

 

source: https://images.app.goo.gl/TUfXEopvNfDMuEYC9


1. THE HISTORY

 

When on the first Sunday of October, 1571, Cross and Crescent grappled at Lepanto, the Cross won a signal victory. Gilbert Chesterton has, in a famous ballad, celebrated the victory for what it is: the farewell gesture of Christian Chivalry. Wherefore, the break in his voice. Lepanto was the last act of the medieval drama, and Chesterton, being a Christian, lets the curtain fall, not upon the vivas and banners of Success, but rather upon the silence, the stark waste of a Castilian plain, upon the figures of the Sorrowful Buffoon, the Crusading Skeleton, the Knight Ridiculous.

 

His cast, though, is incomplete: Selim the Sot, Don John of Austria, Felipe II, St. Pius V, Cervantes—there is a grave omission, an omission the latter Chesterton would surely not have made. For it is well known how firmly the Christian soldiery at Lepanto believed that the Queen of Heaven herself had participated in the battle, that she had appeared in the midst of the fighting with a rosary in hand and a sword in the other, exhorting her champions and confounding her foes.

 

Certainly, St. Pius V, then pope, and father of this crusade, had ordered that on the day of the battle the rosary be publicly offered throughout Christendom in spiritual support of the Christian navies; himself though aged and ailing, presiding on foot the rogative procession in Rome. Being a Dominican, he was naturally to invoke most fervently the aid of the great Patroness of his order and to place his confidence in her rosary, those holy beads the continuous recitation of which he and the entire body of the faithful were to lift to her all that day —now meditating on the various mysteries of her life (the happy, the tragic, the victorious), now chanting the graceful invocations of her litany— while out upon the embattled Mediterranean the “last knight of Europe” chopped down the arrogance of the Sot.

 

The Church was quick to acknowledge the role of Mary at Lepanto; October 7, the date of the victory, has ever since been her feast as Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, a feast and an advocation of hers around which maritime traditions consequently clustered: the Virgin of the Beads is popularly a Virgin of Sea Battles, a Virgin of Naval Victories. Some eighty years after

Lepanto, she was again to justify those titles, to manifest her power in the faraway Orient of the conquistadores, to wield her mighty beads in favor of a handful of islands: the small necklacelike archipelago that had been named after the brother of the Lepanto hero.

 

Among those islands Spanish Chivalry was being granted a long and active indian- summer. Indeed, if the Manco of Lepanto had come over instead of moping behind in Andalusia, this sufficiently tearful world would have been spared his Quijote: all dressed up and no place to go. For in the Philippines the breed of hidalgos still had its Moors to face, its turreted towns to defend, its unknown lands to conquer. If Lepanto was its last act, our colonial history may be termed an oriental epilogue to the miracle play of the West.

 

Besides Moors, there were also the heretics — those Dutch and English buccaneers who had long harassed the Manila galleons. It was the Age of Pirates. The notorious Drake had dared set sail on Philippine waters and Thomas Cavendish once all but captured Iloílo. As crusader and visionary had founded the Spanish empire under the banner of the Cross, so now, pirate and buccaneer were unconsciously founding the empires of the future—under the banner of the Skull and Bones.

 

One such marauding expedition, a Dutch fleet of five, threatened Manila on March 15, 1646, when there happened to be but two galleons ready to defend her: the said galleons sallying forth undaunted nevertheless, trusting to win (as the chronicles say) “more by spiritual weapons than by weapons of war”; and while riding to face the enemy, “the members of the said armada did with much devotion recite the Holy Rosary, on their knees and in two choirs, all trusting that by such means they might be found worthy to succeed against the foe.”

 

The two forces met in the bay of Bolinao, the battle beginning at two in the afternoon and ending at six in the evening, with the Dutch fleeing in panic, “their lights covered and much damage done to their ships, but of our side not a man was lost.”

 

On July 29 of the same year this armada of two was again to sally forth in defense of the City, enemy having in returned; this time on seven large vessels “which carried such powerful artillery and some eight hundred men, not including the sailors — and this battle (fought between Bantón and Marinduque) was one of the fiercest and bloodiest in our day, lasting from seven in the evening till four at dawn — at which time, seeing how grievously maltreated their ships were and one on fire, they did retreat and seek shelter, and would not give battle though we called them to it.”

 

Two days later the enemy reappeared with six ships, and hostilities were resumed off the coast of Mindoro, this conflict enduring from noon to the Angelus, when the Dutch fled a third time, one ship lost and another crippled — “and our armada did acclaim that victory as miraculous and did attribute it to Our Lady saying that she herself had fought and not men; and many did testify how, during the battle, voices moved in the air crying: Viva the Faith of Christ and the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary!” Before the initial battle, moreover, the commanding- general, seeing the great disparity between forces, “did make a vow to the Virgin of the Rosary, promising her a feast of thanksgiving should the victory fall side, and with every man in the armada to come on bare feet and offer thanks at her shrine in Manila; which vow and promise, when laid before the soldiery, they did accept and ratify.”

This vow, still unfulfilled, was to be renewed at the express order of the governor-general of the Philippines, for hardly had the two triumphant galleons reached Cavite when news came of a fresh Dutch fleet approaching Mariveles. Though much battered and in need of repairs, the armada of two had once again to go and grapple with a superior force, this fourth encounter taking place between the islands of Luban and Ampil, and raging steadily for ten hours, “until seeing themselves hard-pressed, the enemy did escape and take flight, our ships pursuing and giving fire still, though one, our Capitana, had been hit in the side and was much feared for and yet did not sink.”

 

About a week later three of the Dutch ships, repaired and re-equipped, returned to the scene and found the disabled Capitana alone, her sister ship having sailed ahead, “and they did surround and fiercely set on her and did fire so close that there was long a danger of their boarding the ship; but our men, calling on God and Our Lady, did rise to the contest in such manner that they wrought a woeful destruction among the enemy, and did totally destroy one ship and scatter the others, which, fleeing, were discovered and severely punished by the Galera, a ship dispatched to our assistance — and though our Capitana had been engaged on such close quarters that for hours it seemed to rain bullets, nevertheless we had but four men dead.”

 

Only fifteen men, in fact, had been lost by the defenders in all five battles. And these victories were decisive: the Dutch were to trouble the islands no more, were never again to overcast with Calvin’s shadow the tiny Rome growing up by the Pásig. This last attempt of theirs to besiege it had but furnished that “noble and ever loyal city” with one more festival, its most traditional one. For the armada heroes were not to be content with the simple fulfillment of their vow. True to that age-old courtesy towards heaven, with which the hidalgo has ever insisted that any victory of his arms is not so much a victory of his courage as of his faith, they were urgently to demand from the cathedral-chapter of Manila an official recognition and declaration of those five victories as miracles wrought by the Mother of God.

 

The ecclesiastics were, however, not to be hurried: the witnesses must first be heard, the evidence examined; only after six years did they pronounce a decision, declaring “that the five victories achieved by Catholic arms over the enemy Dutch in the year 1646 were and must be considered as miracles, vouchsafed by the divine Majesty of God through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady, and the devotion to her Holy Rosary; wherefore it is authorized that, as miracles, the said victories be commemorated, preached, and celebrated.”

 

And commemorated, preached, and celebrated they have ever since been among us, in a feast which is purely ours, yet spaciously historical too, kept always on the second Sunday of October, and popularly known as the “Naval de Manila.”

 

2. THE IMAGE


source: https://images.app.goo.gl/KpHXCydHJnj1o8jcA



 

The institution of this feast was, of course, to enhance the fame of that marvelous Virgin of the Rosary enshrined at Sto.  Domingo church; was indeed to focus on her the Marian devotion of the City. But even before all this, votive gifts that covered her chapel from floor to ceiling and the ever increasing splendors of her cult, shrine, and wardrobe could testify to the effectiveness of her thaumaturgic powers, to the volume of her clients, and to the faith and gratitude she inspired. It needed but these naval successes of 1646 for the devout to see in her truly the great Lady of Lepanto, giver of sea victories.

 

And yet, of all the famous Virgins of the Philippines, this one alone has not been seafaring, has never guided a galleon safe into Acapulco, or come sailing from some old shrine in Spain to occupy a new one in the Islands. A “native Virgin,” she was sculptured in Manila in 1612, the joint masterpiece of a Chinese catechumen and an officer of the Spanish garrison, the work being commissioned by Don Luis Pérez Dasmariñas, then governor-general, by whom the image was presented to the Manila Dominicans for their newly erected church and priory at the mouth of the Pásig.

 

Life-size, of combined wood and ivory, the image is arrayed as a royal lady at the court of the Felipes — just such a figure, in fact, as John of Austria and his men would have imagined heaven’s Queen. In the pronounced majesty of her aspect and bearing, she exemplifies the transition from the simple gothic Virgins, where it is Mary’s motherliness that is most stressed, as the emphasis, in these more elaborate images of the seventeenth century (the Spanish “golden age,” and the period of the great monarchies), has shifted to her dignity and power, the properties of queenship; while a still later phase of devotion (for the firmer the creed, the more flexible and progressive the devotion) would seek out what is most maidenly, most virginal, most girlish in her, turning piously from Maria Theotokos to Mary the person, and progressing from the Murillo madonnas, through the cult of the Immaculate Conception, to such purely modern concepts of her as the Lourdes apparition and the Virgin of the Medal.

 

In our Santo Rosario (as she is popularly called), though very much of the “golden age,” there are both gothic and modern elements. The posture is a stiff and conventional as any feudal Virgin’s: the Child on one arm, the other outstretched; but the face is individualized, is warmly human, and was surely chiseled by the Chinese catechumen. The features strike one as oriental (now, especially, when time has mellowed the ivory to a delicate brown), the cheekbones set high, the eyes small and slanting. Around her famous jewels (tributes of three grateful centuries), three hovers as brilliant a cluster of legend, each rare stone having a romance behind it — the great one, especially, blazing on her forehead (a “carbuncle,” the old people called it,  and which they will further tell you, a monstrous snake that once haunted the Manila walls had carried about in its mouth, but would greedily lay aside for a bowl of milk; its greed serving at last to trap and kill the monster, its treasure being despoiled to adorn, quite appropriately, the image of her whose feet had crushed the serpent’s head). Her annual novena has become almost as legendary for its splendor, and the earliest memories of many a Manilan of devout family are of October evenings at these rites — of the blaze of chandeliers within the gothic and crowded vastness of Sto. Domingo, with a black sky looming and a windy rain whipping through the windows; the dramatic quality of the music, the prayers, the sermons; the sound and smell of corn popping and chestnuts crackling on coals outside on the patio and the acute loveliness of the Despedida, that haunting song with which the ceremonies have always closed and which, once heard, is not to be forgotten, ever evoking afterwards the atmosphere peculiar to these evenings; their indefinable excitement and vague joyousness.

 

Indeed the twin feasts of the Naval de Lepanto and the Naval de Manila on the first and second Sundays of October have imparted to that month so intimate and traditional a flavor of festivity that it has become the month most truly special to Manila, the month when in full typhoon season, the City broke out into the biggest celebrations: these of the Naval; besides the fiestas of San Miguel, Sta. Cruz, and Binondo; the month that started the display of hams and cheeses among its grocers and of turrones among its sweetshops, when her markets overflowed  with apples, grapes, oranges, pomelos, and her sidewalks with chestnuts and lanzons; the month when back in our childhood, the very air turned festive and the Circus came to town and the season opened at the old Opera House.

 

3. THE DEFINITION

 

The story of the Naval having identified itself with Manila, it can yield a full pertinence only to the Manilan with a pious eye for the past; but equivalent traditions are embodied for, say, the Visayan in Cebú’s historic image of the Holy Child, or of the Bicolano in Naga’s famed Virgin of Peñafrancia. There is indeed no Philippine town or village, however humble, that does not feel peculiarly itself, as belonging to that spot of ground and no other, because of some patronal cult traditional to the locality, some holy image there venerated and investing the site with legend and association. When we talk today of the need for some symbol to fuse us into a great people, we seem to forget that all over the country there lies this wealth of a “usable past,” of symbols that have grown through and through the soil of the land and the marrow of its people.

             

The angels keep their ancient places,

Turn but a stone and start a wing; ’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangéd faces

That miss the many-coloured thing.

 

But the past can become “usable” only if we be willing to enter into its spirit and to carry there a reasonably hospitable mind. As long as we regard it with hatred, contempt, and indignation, so long will it remain hateful and closed to us. Like a mirror (to borrow Aldous Huxley’s image of the Future), it will meet us with spears if we advance towards it with spears. And as long as we remain estranged from it, so long will we remain a garish and uncouth and upstart people, without graces because without background. Henry James has noted what an infinite amount of history it takes to form even a little tradition, and what an infinite amount of tradition to form even a little taste. Merely from his viewpoint, the esthetic one, it should be instantly apparent how little we can afford to spare a single one of our four hundred years of conscious history. Towards our Spanish past, especially, it is time we became more friendly; bitterness but inhibits us; those years cry for a fresher appraisal.

 

To accuse the Spanish, over and over again, of having brought us all sorts of things, mostly evil, among which we can usually remember nothing very valuable “except, perhaps,” religion and national unity, is equivalent to saying of a not very model mother that she has given her child nothing except life. For in the profoundest possible sense, Spain did give birth to us — as a nation, as an historical people. This geographical unit of numberless islands called the Philippines — this mystical unit of numberless tongues, bloods and cultures called a Filipino — was begotten of Spain, is a Spanish creation. There is as great a gulf between the pre-Spanish drift of totem-and-taboo tribes and our present existence as one people as there is between protoplasm and a human creature. The content of our national destiny is ours to create, but the basic form, the temper, the physiognomy, Spain has created for us. If she had managed, for instance, to conquer Borneo along with these islands, we would have had four stars in our flag and (possibly) that swaggering self-confidence a big territory is apt to foster. Or Spain might have succeeded in holding only the island of Luzón, in which case we would have found ourselves a group of very minor islanders to whom the Visayans would be, not brother-“Filipinos,” but peoples as strange and remote as the Borneans now seem to be.

 

For three and a half centuries we lay within the womb of Spain; the Revolution was our violent birth; and in the bitterness with which we have ever since regarded the great and tragic nation to whom we owe so much, Freudians may read a parallel to that obscure enmity that haunts the relations of even the most loving son with his father—an enmity that perhaps voices the resentment of matter that has been wrenched out of its sleep and burdened with consciousness. It is just such a resentment—most vividly expressed in the poetry of Houseman (“Oh, why did I awake? When shall I sleep again?”) —that underlies much of our present vengefulness towards the Spanish. It should also help to explain the sluggishness of which we have been accused, and which, along with the equally famous “fatalism” of ours (so blankly accepted as native to us, being oriental, with no attempt to explain its presence or locate its source) may be no more than our blood’s memories of the communal tribe-house, where custom and taboo lay heavy upon life, pre-determining all event, all action, all speech even (we still dimly recall the taboo on uttering the chief’s or parent’s name); within whose rigid circle— everything being pre-ordained, pre-established—men moved as in a trance, without having to exercise their wills, and, therefore, without creating history. The dreaminess thick in our nature, our incapacity for decisive thought or action (as in the see-saw character of our politics) may, if analyzed, be found to derive from our failure so far to break loose completely from primeval carry-overs, from those submerged longings for the tight, fixed web of the tribal obedience—the mechanicality, the drift, the “even tenor” of passive vegetation as against the pain and effort of responsible and personal existence.

 

The prime work of Christianity for us (as for all the peoples of its information) has been this awakening of the self, this release and expansion of the consciousness, a work undoubtedly still in progress, we being not yet fully awake nor perfectly conscious; immature Christians at best; Catholics but not catholic; enclosed within the Faith as within a sect; having still to realize that to open oneself to this, “one of the great, conjoint, and—so to term it—necessary products of the human mind… rich in the world’s experience,” is to let in “a great, tide of that experience and (to make), as it were, with a single step, a great experience of one’s own, and with great consequent increase to one’s sense of color, variety, and relief, in the spectacle of men and things.”

 

That passage from Pater will ring with special accuracy to the Manilan who has grown up on the story of his city’s principal feast, and who, year after year, from earliest childhood, has participated, with pious “attentiveness,” in its popular celebration—in the culminating pageant especially: that of the procession (Manila’s “procesión de las procesiónes”), where in her triumphant march through the streets of her city, the miraculous image has for glittering escort the flower-and-fruit of the Dominican sanctoral: St. Vincent Ferrer, who could move the very stones to penance, and St. Rose of Lima, first bloom of American faith; Aquinas, who took all knowledge for his province, and the ecstatic Catherine of Siena, “that intellect of a man’s ablaze within the quintessence of womanhood”; the founding father, St. Dominic, terror of the troubadours; and, of course, St. Pius V of Lepanto, and St. Joseph.

 

Our Manilan will realize that such practices, such pieties, have developed in him—long before the possibility of books—a “sense of infinity,” of being “at home in history”; so that no page of Aquinas, however profound, no ecstasy of St. Catherine’s, however mystical, but strikes him now as intimately clear and long familiar, for a feeling that he has known those people all his life and has often seen them strolling along the streets of his city. The Battle of Lepanto will always smell to him of rain and popcorn and roasting chestnuts; upon mention of the Elizabeth pirates he hears the high tremolo of a boy’s voice keening the Despedida. And, conversely, the most local, the most native objects will, like windows in a tower, open out for him upon immense vistas, upon the whole crowded spectacle, in fact, of “men and things.”

 

Many an October evening, while watching this procession of the Naval, and having divined, by a general excitement, the approach of the Image, he has heard the cries and trumpets of the passing concourse dissolve into the cries and trumpets of battle — that battle being, confusedly, now the medieval one against the Albigensians (when Our Lady, through St. Dominic, instituted the Rosary), now the Lepanto debacle, now the Philippine skirmishes with the Dutch; and he has understood afresh how these various wars were really one, that, in this particular advocation of hers, Our Lady has been concerned with the same conflict: the supreme and eternal one between pagan fate and Christian freedom; that, whether it be the Albigensian cult of suicide, the kismet of Islam or the predestination of Calvin, her beads have ever been wielded against the same foe; despair — and in defense of the same article: spiritual unction. And the trumpets of battle dissolving again into the trumpets of the procession, he has then seen her blaze into vision against the skies of his city, borne upon cloud on cloud of incense and music, her face on fire with jewels and mysterious with the veneration of centuries, with gleaming rainbows forming and falling all about her and silken doves bobbing whitely among her flowers of gold and silver—Oh, beautiful and radiant as an apparition! —the Presence at Lepanto, Lady and Queen and Mother of Manila, the Virgin of the Fifteen Mysteries.

 

 

October 1943


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Tuesday, November 10, 2020

The Mango Tree by Outhine Bounyavong

 

Othine Bounyavong's collections of Folktales show us the universal desire of the people to create a better world. It shows us that the desire for unity, justice, and acceptance is so universal that it reflects the aspirations of the different tales around the world. 

The Mango tree for instance, shows us how greed kills not to mention ignorance. The Earth gifts us with natural wonder and thus we have no power to abuse it not take it as our own. 


The Mango Tree

 

Once upon a time a fine mango tree grew in the jungle near the village. Every year when the fruit was ripe the village children ran into the jungle and picked the fruit. One day, however, when the children went to the tree, they found a fence all around it. At the side of the fence there were two huge, fierce dogs. A stranger came out of the jungle. "Go away!" he shouted loudly. "This is my tree now." "No, it is not," the children cried. "You don't own the jungle. The tree is everybody's tree. Anyone can have the fruit."

The children were telling the truth but the stranger did not listen to them. He made his dogs chase the children back to the village. The children went to the village headman and told him what had happened. The village headman was very wise and, after some thought, he worked out a clever trick to play on the nasty stranger. The next day one of the girls of the village went to the tree again. She threw two pieces of meat to the dogs and climbed over the fence. Then she took a mango from the tree and began to eat it. Again, the stranger ran out of the jungle and he shouted at her: "Stop! You cannot take my mangoes. Go away." The girl took another bite from the mango. Suddenly she screamed out loud and fell to the ground. At that moment, the headman came by and asked: "What have you done to that girl?" "Nothing!" the man answered. "She took one of my mangoes and fell to the ground."

"The headman looked sadly at the little girl."She has mango sickness," he said. "Once every ten years, this mango tree has poisonous fruit. This must be the tenth year for this tree. You must not eat the mangoes on it this year." Then he picked up the girl and carried her back to the village. The next morning, the village headman took the children into the jungle to the mango tree. The stranger had gone, and he had taken his fence and his huge dogs with him. Once again, the children picked up the fruit, and carried them back to the village, laughing and singing because the tree was everybody's tree once more.

The Magic White Swan

The farmer went fishing one day.  He had a long fishing net.  Like other farmers, he wore a piece of cloth around his head.  He cast his net, but he got nothing.  He did it again and again, but he got nothing.  There was not a single fish.  He cast his net once, twice, thrice, but he got nothing.  He cast his net for the last time and pulled up the net.  He pulled and he pulled. "Oh, it is so heavy."

Then, he found a white pebble in his net.  It was the most beautiful pebble that he had ever seen.  So, he took the pebble home and placed it on the altar above his head.  After dinner, he went to sleep.  The next day, the white pebble had turned into a white swan.  The swan approached the farmer and said, "I will take you to a place, a beautiful place, full of flowers.  You can take whatever you like."

So the swan began flapping its wings and flew off to the garden with the farmer sitting on its back.

Once there the farmer enjoyed the garden. He picked one flower and felt that it was heavy.  He picked the second one and it got heavier.  He picked the third one and it was even heavier. 

"Oh, I don't think I should pick any more flowers.  It will be too heavy for the swan to fly and take me home."

So, the swan took the farmer back home and disappeared.  The flowers were turned into gold!  So, the farmer became a rich man.

The news of his wealth reached the ears of his friend, who came to ask the farmer right away about how he had acquired his wealth.  The farmer told his friend everything.

The next day, his friend went to fish in the river with his long net.  

He cast his net, but he got nothing.   He cast his net once, twice, thrice, but he got nothing.  He cast his net for the last time and pulled up the net.   Then, he found a white pebble in his net.  He took the pebble home and placed it in his room.

The pebble became the beautiful white swan who said to the second farmer:

"I will take you somewhere today, to a flower garden."

So, the man jumped on the swan's back and the swan took off to the flower garden.   Once there the man picked the flowers, one, two, three. 

"Oh, I have to pick a lot since I have come here already,"  he said.

So he picked two arms' full of flowers and went to the swan.

"Take me home now.  I will put these away and I will come back for more."

So he jumped on the swan's back.  It was so heavy.  The swan almost could not fly.  He flew, swaying left and right with weight.  But he was able to take the man to his house with difficulty.

The man jumped off the swan's back and said, "Now, wait here.  Don't go away.   I will go back to the garden to pick more flowers." 

Then he took the flowers into his room.  When he came back, the swan disappeared.   He returned to his room, but he found . . .

only ordinary flowers, no gold.  And that's the story.

1)     What a Beauty

What a Beauty was first published in 1978. It describes the relationship of Lao women to the revolution. In this type of story, a Lao woman oppressed by the corrupt capitalist society of pre-revolutionary Laos ultimately finds respect and romance from the revolutionary cadres. The story’s heroine, a young woman named Phaengkham, is unpopular because she is poor. During the Lao lamuong dance described in the story’s opening scene, she cannot find a dance partner because her clothes are not fashionable and she does not know how to dance in western style. Eventually, however, one man shows an interest in her and explains to her privately that he understands the true value of poor people, farmers, peasants, and laborers. Only after the revolution does Phaengkham learn that her admirer is a member of the Lao People’s Army. As for the wealthier women who had been her competition on the pre-revolutionary dance floor, after the communist victory they all have either fled the country or been sent away "to one of those Women’s Islands to be re-educated."

 

These are some of the stories written by Outhine Bounyavong, There are other stories, folktales, essays written by other Lao writers deposited in literature-rich Laos waiting to be translated and for the world to read.

 From: Mother’s Beloved: Stories from Laos


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Monday, October 12, 2020

Dyer Nanay

 Dyer Nanay

by John Hingco 

Dyer Nanay by John Hingco shows the desire of every woman to help their family. This particular Kinaray-a poem though has described the heartbreaking status of some women in postcolonial countries. Due to poverty and ignorance , due to lack of education, women are forced to sell their body, as the reports on human trafficking tells us, often this women are promised better life for their family and themselves only to find themselves enslaved in foreign places with no one to turn to. 

A more profound discussion can be seen in the link below. 



https://youtu.be/F7gqq6Xi2bY

Dyer Nanay

by John Hingco

 

Dyer Nanay, kumusta ron tinyo

nahidlaw ron takon

kaninyo nga tanan.

 

"Nay,

luyag ko run kuntani nga magpauli

indi ron takon

kantus kangakon

obra rigya sa Japan.

Kuon kagrekruitment edyensi

kultural danser kuno

ang obra namo rigya.

Mura dia

nagapa por kilo

tamon rigya

hamak ro ra, "NAy?

Tatki-isa

mayad timo ra?

 

"Nay,

kun-an mo gali si Neneng

nga indi ron mag-ambisyon

nga magdanser rigya sa Japan,

nga daaan wara pa ran eksperyens

neber bin tats, neber bin kist

 

'Nay,

kun-an mo dulang tana

nga magtanum kamote

kag alugbati

kag magsagud kang idik.

 

"Nay, "nay,

indi ron takon kaagwanta

indi ron takon kaagwanta

 

Lab, Inday


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Sunday, October 11, 2020

Guardia de Honor by Nick Joaquin

Guardia de Honor

by Nick Joaquin 

Natalia Godoy is a young woman of 18 who is excited to join the Feast of the Virgin of Manila as one of the guardias for the first time. The feast is celebrated every October, where a breath the North stirs Manila, blowing summer dust and doves from the tile roofs, freshening the moss of old walls, as the city festoons itself with arches and paper lanterns for its great votive feast. This feast, in honor of Our Lady of La Naval de Manila is held every 2nd week of October. Historically, the Virgin is believed to have guarded Manila against different battles. As it is, the eyes that, long ago, had gazed up anxiously, invoking the virgin, had feared a grimmer rain--- of fire and metal; for pirate crat crowded the horizon. Our Lady of La Naval de Manila was declared a “National Cultural Treasure” in RA 10066 or the NCCA Heritage Act of 2009.

But for Natalia, the feast had become emeralds from her father. She would wear the emeralds to the procession. The jewels are a set – a ring, a necklace a brooch, a comb to crown the veil with, and pendulous earring shaped like chandeliers. She was all set and was awaiting her ride to the rendezvous of the procession when her father Don had approached her for a conversation regarding her two suitors; Esteban and Mario. In this conversation, she had discussed with her father that she has already chosen the man that he loves, but that she would be riding with the man she has not chosen. Her father found this arrangement curious commenting “How you girls love to kill with kindness!” This was the time as well when the good Don had finally realized that his little girl is finally a young lady whose heart was captured by a young man. She had asked for his blessings which he had given. In this brief exchange of thoughts and feelings as well between the father and daughter that the good Don learned that, Elisa, Natalia’s aunt, is in love with Andong Ferrero. When her father was to go downstairs, she requested him to tell Mario that she would be riding with Esteban, a gesture which during their time is considered to be the woman’s way of telling the suitors who was chosen, only in this case this practice is not observed. When her father has left, Aunt Elisa had come to see Natalia asking her to hurry as they would be late. Along the conversation of these two women who are in love, Natalia had thought of just riding with the man she loves after seeing a vision of violence and death  thus she asked her aunt to see Mario and tell him that would be riding with him. Unfortunately, Elisa did not see Mario who came to confront Natalia of her choice insisting that it was him whom Natalia loves. Irritated by his gesture and unwillingness to listen, she challenged him saying he has no right to dictate nor question her choices. For a moment’s whim, she decided to right with Esteban instead forgetting the omen that has forewarned her of the turn of events. This angered Mario badly leading his to race them, and for the first time Esteban took control of the horses’ reign and raced with Mario as if racing to the heart of the woman they both loved.  This race had led to the death of Elena and Esteban. In this accident caused by jealousy and passion, as well as childish whims, Natalia lost her jewels save a piece of the emerald chandelier earring, which from then on is worn with grace and pride by the generations of guardia de honor after her. In the end, when all has settled down, Natalia ended marrying Andong while Mario, aggrieved at the same time guilty of the wrong judgement he had committed that day had decided to serve the God by becoming a man of God.

Andong and Natalia had good and happy life together, grateful that Elena has been a way of them finding each other.

 

These events unfolded in the present time as Josie looks into the mirror in her childhood room. She had seen what had happened and what was supposed to happen to Natalia and Mario, the ony event he did not see was the death of Elena and Esteban.  Read the rest of the short story to see how this tale reflects and warns us against impulsive decisions.










Source: Joaquin, N. (2017). The woman who had two navels and tales od the tropical gothic. New York: Penguin Books.

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Thursday, October 8, 2020

God Said, I Made A Man

Morrissette's song goes, "If God has a name, what would it be? Would you call it to his face?" if it were you, will you? The poem by Jose Garcia Villa will show us that even before the legendary singer had asked her question, man has always been into measuring an entity bigger than himself....

 

God Said, I Made A Man

by Jose Garcia Villa

 

God said, "I made a man
Out of clay—
But so bright he, he spun
Himself to brightest Day

Till he was all shining gold,
And oh,
He was lovely to behold!
But in his hands held he a bow

 Aimed at me who created

Him. And I said,
‘Wouldst murder me
Who am thy Fountainhead! '

Then spoke he the man of gold:
‘I will not
Murder thee! I do but
Measure thee. Hold

Thy peace.' And this I did.
But I was curious
Of this so regal head.
‘Give thy name! '—‘Sir! Genius.'"

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Ang Masel ni Aling Maria

 Today we feature the poem Ang Masel ni Aling Maria, written by  German V. Gervacio. A three-time winner of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and a four-time winner of the Homelife Magazine National Poetry Competition,  he authored Hari Manawari, Si Tanya, ang Uwak na Gustong Pumuti, and 101 Bugtong na Hindi Alam ng Titser Mo. His works have been included in various anthologies and journals like CCP’s Ani 22 and UP Likhaan Anthologies. 

Ang Masel ni Aling Maria is a story of parenthood, motherhood in particular. Although there is already gender equality, the poem shows us still of the tasks a woman has to bear in order to support her family. Though we say, it is  a choice in the end, we would know it is the basic instinct of Maria to ascertain her children have food in the table as well as are sent to school. 

Let us read the poem and discover how our mothers, even fathers, are reflected and appreciated in the smallest gesture we oftentimes neglect- Acknowledgement of their efforts. 

Ang Masel ni Aling Maria

ni German V. Gervacio 


alas-tres ng madaling araw

habang ang bana'y naghihilik pa

babangon siya para makipag-agawan

sa mga ibabagsak na banyera ng isda

doon sa may talipapa

siya na rin ang bubuhat

papunta sa kanyang pwesto

dalawanpung taon siyang ganito!

tingnan mo tuloy ang kanyang braso

mahihiya si Popeye

maski na si Rambo

 

pero sa masel niya masasalamin

walong anak na iginagapang.

                isang kumakarera

               dalawa sa hayskul

               tatlo sa elementarya

               ang isa'y di pa nag-aaral

ang bunso'y pasususuhin pa

 

pagkagat ng dilim

 

saka pa lang huhupa ang masel niya

ang ulo niya'y nakasubsob sa unan

patalikod sa banang mapintog ang tiyan.


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A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino by Nick Joaquin

  A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino -Nick Joaquin (An Elegy in Three Scenes)   How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence ...