Inang Bayan (Motherland)
Part II
By
Bryant Lim, Tabah Syed, Diana
Tran, Angeline Jeng, and
Samantha Santiago
Necessary Fiction
• Author Caroline Hau explains the Rizal Bill and its
significance
▫ Relationship between literature and nationalism
▫ the state had a role in enforcing how to read Rizal’s
literature
• Paradoxes of literature
▫ “literary works both embodied culture and helped create
that culture”
▫ Since few Filipinos read literature, it has no place in every
day life
 Yet plays a significant role in developing the nation
• “made the act of reading literature an act of
(re)discovering the nation’s origins in ideals embodied
by the life and works of the nation’s heroes.”
Context
• Language and interpretation
▫ Issue of Rizal being read in different ways
 Church view
 Nationalistic view
• Literature has ability to enlighten and obstruct
views of history
Nationalistic Literature
• Truth and action
▫ Together they materialize the relationship
between literature and history
▫ Relationship meant that effective action could
only take place with knowledge of the past,
present, and future
• Transformation of consciousness
▫ Underlying work of the state and foreign
dominators
• Relates to previous idea of the reinstitution of
hierarchy
“Excess”
• The excess refers to elements that “inform, but
also exceed, nationalist attempts to grasp,
intellectually and politically, the complex
realities at work in Philippine society”
• Internal weakness because of excess
▫ Philippine literature is haunted in the present
because of their past
▫ Exclusion of “excess” in the name of the nation
Question
• How can social change, freedom, and identity
exist without a definition of “culture”?
ANGELA MANALANG GLORIA
• Angela Manalang Gloria was a
Filipino poet in the mid 1900s.
Over her career as a writer, she
wrote 113 published poems, was
chosen as editor of the Collegian
by Celedonio Gloria, to whom
she would marry, and became a
founding member of the U.P.
Writers Club.
• Her poems often centered
around love and feminism.
• However, Manalang Gloria was often criticized
for her writing.
▫ One man, Jose Garcia Villa often criticized her
calling her a “third-rate amateur poet” at her best.
▫ An Australian writer by the name of Tom Inglis
Moore stated that her poems were weak; they
were formless and vague with an inaccurate use of
grammar and idioms.
 They were truly “Filipino literature”; Sentimental
and Formless
 Possible vs. Real
Sketches (1926)
Fades the Dusk?
I see it
In clouds of frankincense,
Grey and greyer still,
Wafted
From Golden censers on floral chains,
Nightwards…
Stays the Night?
Leave it so—
A lyre of ebony
Draped in spangled gossamer,
Sepulchered in a subterranean tomb,
And untouched
Forever…
• Her earlier poems were very disorganized
• There was no proper format
• And they all seemed have very dark imagery
• After hearing a lot of criticism, Manalang Gloria
would go about her years questioning this,
questioning the solution to the formlessness of
her poems.
• She would find answers from the influence of
other female poets like Sara Teasdale where she
would then learn metric styles
• Manalang Gloria also shifted from writing about
possibilities to writing about real life; defining
the self by shifting from imagined life to actual
life, a life with pain.
• She had a great number of supporters
▫ Gemino Abad, in 1982, said she was the best
Filipino poet next to Jose Garcia Villa
• Today, her poems attracted two groups of
readers
▫ The first group are typically young women who are
reading the poems for the first time and relating to
the feministic genre in such a patriarchal world
▫ The second group are people who reread the
poems to “create new meanings” behind the
poems.
• Why were her earlier works so criticized and
what was the shift that made them gain more
respect?
• Her experience of the real world had disabused
her romantic illusions.
• Got tuberculosis in 1930, relapse in 1935
• The Lie- crisis of faith
• Recovered from tuberculosis in 1937.
▫ The Debt shows gratitude
• Paradox- scholastic star vs. housewife
▫ Wisdom is a motif in later poems
▫ Wisdom is recognition of the gap between life-asit-was-once-imagined-to-be and life-as-it-wasactually-experienced
• Year 1940: Published Poems in sequence of her life:
longing romantic love  courtship and marriage 
death of a friend  illness and recover  maturity
and wisdom
• First collection of poetry written in English by a
Filipino woman.
• made up largely of highly lyrical poems exploring a
woman’s private world of personal relationships and
passion
• Didn’t win the Commonwealth award
▫ Judges based their objections on poems dealing with
female sexuality.
▫ Judge based on “social relevance”
▫ “Red-blooded literature”
Revolt from Hymen
O to be free at last, to sleep at last
As infants sleep within the womb of rest!
To stir and stirring find no blackness vast
With passion weighted down upon the breast,
To turn the face this way and that and feel
No kisses festering on it like sores,
To be alone at last, broken the seal
That marks the flesh no better than a whore’s!
• Gemino comments, compared to da Costa’s
poems, her work is “…even more distinctly
Filipino.”
• 1950:published student edition of Poems but
was forced to delete several poems
▫ Ex: had to change “whores” to “golden bores” in
Revolt from Hymen
Critiques of Poems
• 1940: Cornelio Faigao: refused to privilege Coasta’s
poetry over Manalang’s.
▫ Described Manalang’s poem as fragile and passive.
• 1950: emerge of “modern poets.” her poems were
virtually ignored.
• Neglect has been compounded by prejudice.
Contrary to popular impression of her work, only
half of Gloria’s poems are on love. Others being on
such diverse themes as illness and death, poetry and
criticism, faith and unbelief, and sexuality and war.
• 1982: Gemini Abad comments,
“…Especially when she probes her passion and
pride, the delicacy of her feeling, being so finely
worded, gains a kind of strength and grace which
removes the dross of the merely sentimental or
inauthentic.”
• 1989: Edna Zapanta Manlapaz and Stella
Paganghan comment,
“Manalang has much to say from within the ‘wild
zone’ of women’s experience, her voice is ‘muted’
by the male culture dominant in Filipino
society.”
Question
What makes Manalang’s work “even more
distinctively Filipino?”
Salvador Ponce Lopez
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(1911-1993)
Born in Ilocos Norte
Studied at the University of the Philippines (UP)
o Drama Critic for the Philippine Collegian
o Member of Upsilon Sigma Phi
o 1931, Bachelor of Arts degree in English
o 1933, Master of Arts degree in Philosophy
1933-1936, Professor at University of Manila
1940, “Literature and Society”
o Commonwealth Literary Awards
o Against “art for art’s sake”
Appointed Secretary of Foreign Affairs
o Ambassador to the UN for 6 years
o Ambassador to France for 7 years
1969-1965, President of UP
o 1970, “First Quarter Storm”
o 1971, “Diliman Commune”
Rafael Zulueta da Costa
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Born in Manilla in 1915
Studied at De La Salle College
Specialized in business administration
Executive at San Miguel Brewery
First Collection of Poems was First Leaves
Famous for Like the Molave
o Published in 1940 by Carmelo and Bauermann
o Won the 1940 Commonwealth Literary Contest
(beats Jose Garcia Villa’s entry)
o Do actions speak louder than words? Are
protests or writings more effective in bringing
about change?
Like the Molave
• Author: Rafael Zulueta da Costas
• Time: 1940
• Winner of Commonwealth Literary Award for
Poetry
• Cries for Jose Rizal
• Molave: Hard and durable indigenous tree
▫ Mentioned in Quezon’s speech(prior to poem)
▫ Referenced in Arguilla’s “A Son is Born” for its
properties of strength and durability
▫ “Like the molave, firm, resilient, staunch,”
“Would you have me sugarcoat you?”
• Focuses critically on the younger generations
• Details the youth of the land
▫ “…are a bitter pill to swallow.”
• Highlights the complacency of the youth
▫ “We are secure under the Stars-and-Stripes.”
▫ “I speak English…can lisp a little Tagalog.”
▫ “We Manilans are really cosmopolitan.”
• Still calls for independence
Incite Inang Bayan, Denounce the Others
• “…Arise, not out of the ashes of the past, but out
of the standing materials of the present.”
• Counters American’s perceptions and claims
▫ In contrast to an anthem, Filipino “songs are
legion but all songs are one.”
▫ In response to claims of being suckered:
“…You are not a sucker. Philippines, you are
the molave child…”
• Philippines – (Spain + America) = MOLAVE
• “Gods walk on brown legs.”
Different Authors, Same Story?
• Jose Rizal recognized as Philippine hero
• R. Zulueta da Costas recognized for poetry
• Various female authors go unnoticed
▫ Victoria Laktaw, “Our Plea”
▫ Angela Manalang-Gloria, “Revolt from Hymen”
• Are the narratives of these poems same? What
about their implications?