Author: Frances Lucero

An Earnest Parable ( A Che bello! Review)

On By Frances LuceroIn Earnest ParableLeave a comment

My cup of tea! Finally! I initially thought this was going to be the same story as the other stories in the textbook, the usual literary selections that happen to be in the book even though they don’t really make sense. I am genuinely happy that this story is a different case! This is a parable that I appreciate so much. Very much!

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Merlinda Bobis, an Australian-Filipino writer

Award-winning writer Merlinda Bobis grew up in Albay, the Philippines at the foot of an active volcano, which figures prominently in her writing and performance. As a child, her main interest was painting, but at age ten she began writing poetry because ‘painting with words’ was cheaper. She has published novels, short stories, dramas, and poems. Her plays have been produced/performed on stage and radio in Australia, the Philippines, Spain, USA, Canada, Singapore, France, China, Thailand, and the Slovak Republic. She has performed some of her works as theatre, dance, and music.

(Source: http://www.merlindabobis.com.au/biography.htm)

I admire Merlinda Bobis for creating beautiful imagery in her prose. She’s able to create stories that make you feel like you’re in the story itself. She pulls you in with her paragraphs that’s easy to imagine and feel. When her story describes food, you can feel your taste buds tingle in delight. When her story describes places, you can feel that you have visited that spot before and so on.

I feel the need to say that she may have written this story in order to give a lesson and showcase how multiculturism has changed society over the years. We were all divided before globalization has started. It takes months for a message in this country to reach the other one. People were sheltered to only know a certain culture which is their own and now we can appreciate everyone’s culture by taking the time and effort to get to know this specific culture from another country.

The theme of this book, multiculturism, isn’t far from what Philippine literature can offer. Most of the modern Philippine literature published today has influences from world literature but it mainly focuses on our own culture, unlike this story, it promotes several cultures.

To keep the story short, this is a story of 5 different people who came from different countries. They shared a dish to one another in order to give someone a taste of what their culture is like. (No, really! That’s the summary!)

It’s a wholesome story that I ever read about sharing one’s culture. It’s a bite-sized story you can easily read without having to sit through an hour trying to figure out what’s the meaning of a certain object that wasn’t meant to have meaning at all.

The best literary approach for this story is Sociological Criticism. It examines literature in the cultural, economic and political context in which it is written or received. It explores the relationship of an artist and the society. Sometimes it examines the artist’s society to better understand the author’s literary works; other times, it may examine the representation of such societal elements within the literature itself.

(Source: http://home.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/spring97/litcrit.html)

I like this story for its admirable writing style. It’s a beautiful representation of how ‘show and tell’ works. I can’t help but look back at how it was written from time to time. Her writing style is delicate and imaginative. The way she describes the ‘taste of the food’ makes me ‘feel hungry’ to know about other cultures and how these people experience them. I also like how this story wasn’t ‘in-your-face-philosophical” type of narrative. Some stories just tend to go overboard in showing symbolism and moral lessons that just tend to be overwhelming.

However, some of the descriptions didn’t sit right with me. Some descriptions just seem off and tend to give another picture instead of the actual intention. The first opening lines were a bit difficult to understand but after rereading again, I came to terms with it.

I would recommend this book to… everybody! 

This story won’t make someone bored and it’s entertaining to read. This story is perfect for both light and heavy readers who want to view different cultures in a new perspective and a respectable way.

Overall, I give this story 9 out of 10 cookies. Beautiful! Just beautiful!

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Green Sanctuary (A dibibidis review)

On By Frances LuceroIn Green SanctuaryLeave a comment

It took me a while to actually like this book since the intro didn’t entice me to continue reading it. I try not to be biased and continued on with the story and for a while it made me realize how the Moros were interpreted wrong by the Filipinos over the years.

Antonio Reyes Enrique is the author of several books of short stories and novels. He was born in Barangay Labuan, Zamboanga city in 1936. He was educated at a local Jesuit school in Zamboanga. His parents wanted him to study medicine and sent him to a university in Manila, but after several years, he returned to Zamboanga City without a college degree. Enriquez later did various jobs like writing a news and other features for various newspapers and magazines. He also joined a surveying company in Cotabato where his experience provided him settings and characters for his novel Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh. Antonio Enriquez won a writing fellowship award which brought him to Siliman University where he graduated with a liberal degree in creative writing.

(taken from https://joeyzamora.wordpress.com/2016/11/13/antonio-reyes-enriquez-a-filipinoconmporary-artist-from-mindanao/) 

Throughout the excerpt, I can tell that Antonio wanted to showcase the culture of the Moros through the protagonist, Alberto Gonzales. Antonio knew he had to write down a story where it shows Mindanao on its own right and himself.

This novel represents the culture of the Moros and Mindanao considering these people were different from how Luzon and Visayas had shown their individual cultures but how did their culture differ from ours today? Well, all of us used to have the same culture until the Spaniards showed up and colonized the Philippines. The Spaniards tore the Philippines apart and let datus from each barangay face off one another thinking that the other datu had malicious intent. It wasn’t too long before our cultures slowly drift apart until it became what it is today.

Moro culture is very Malay-influenced. The Bangsamoro share similarities with the Malay people of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore and southern Thailand, while being distinct from them. The Bangsamoro cultures represent the only living examples of the larger historic lowland cultures of the northern and central Philippines who were once also culturally, and in some cases religiously, similar to modern Bangsamoro ethnicities, prior to the gradual Spanish colonization of the archipelago between the 16th-18th centuries. The precolonial Tagalogs, Kapampangan or Visayan, are seen as being culturally similar to the Moro, although in the case of the Visayan people, they were more Hindu-Buddhist influenced instead (see Rajahnate of Cebu)

The best literary approach I have to give for this book is the historical approach considering the book has so many influences of Moro history that the book allows us to visualize what’s happening in Mindanao and how it greatly affected the innocent and the people who are far away from Mindanao.

The only thing I liked about this book is the way it narrates what’s happening in the story. It was gut-wrenching when it came to the parts where people killed one another. It was heartbreaking when someone loses another. The Protagonist was relatable even though I never experienced what he went through.

However, I didn’t like this book because it doesn’t have so much to offer. It didn’t feel like a novel. I thought I was reading a short story or novelette. Some descriptions didn’t sit right with me and when it came to the middle of the novel I wanted to drop it on the spot. There was nothing in the novel that wants me to keep on reading it.

I would recommend this book to people who need to know about Moros and what’s happening in Mindanao, even though this book was published in 2003, everything that happened in this book is repeating in today’s time. There are ignorant people thinking that “Moros are this, Moros are that” when it’s the total opposite. We should be aware of what’s happening in other places in our country too. They may be different from how we act but we are all Filipinos.

I would rate this book 7.8 cookies, this isn’t the best Filipino literature I have read but this book still needs credit for showing the war that’s happening in Mindanao. I wish I could have given a higher rating but this book was never my cup of tea, to begin with, it took me some time to appreciate this book in all of its forms. This book was interesting but when I got to the novel itself I had lost interest.