Paragon Place, 17 Commonwealth Ave, Quezon City, 1126 Metro Manila

Tel. No.: 253-0452

STUDENT’S EDUCATIONAL PACKET

21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World
Grade12
1st Quarter - Week Eight & Nine
Emerging Trends in Philippines the Literary Essay

OBJECTIVES: This lesson notes the differences between the 21st century essay and earlier forms of the
same genre.
1. Compare and contrast the various 21st century literary genres from those of earlier periods,
citing their elements, structures and traditions.
2. Contrast the said elements and conventions with Philippine essays from earlier periods.

INTRODUCTION: Trackback
Home means an enjoyable, happy place where you can live, laugh and learn. It’s somewhere where
you are loved, respected, and cared for. When you look at it from the outside, home is just a house. A
building. Maybe a yard. But on the inside, it’s a lot more than wood and bricks. The saying “Home is where
the heart is” says it all.
Home is also where your memories lie. Home is where I got my head stuck under the couch. Home is
where I fell in the goldfish pond. I remember sleeping in the playhouse, falling down the stairs and climbing
up the apple tree. Without memories, most people wouldn’t be the people that they are today.

Task 1: HOME TREE

Directions: Create a “home tree,” writing down the addresses or pasting pictures of each home onto a
manila paper or any reusable writing materials (used calendar, connected used bond paper, magazine and
others…) sizing 36″ x 48″ or “18 x 24”. Arranged as is a family tree up to third degree of your both parents,
label each person in your family tree. Below of your family tree answer the following questions:
1. Why do you call the place you live in now “home”?
2. How many “homes” do you really have? Do you have more than one?
3. What define “home” to you?

Read the essay:

FIVE BROTHERS, ONE MOTHER from ‘Many Mansions’ by Exie Abola

DISCUSSION: The Essay Analysis

Five Brothers, One Mother by: Exie Abola No matter what place you call home, the very word strikes
a chord deep inside each of us. Home means sanctuary, for every person, some places hold great
importance. At some point in our lives,we experience a culture as an outsider by moving from one culture
to another. Like so, the writer exhibited this kind of experience of struggling towards shifting of houses and
necessitates a vital conflict in the essay. At the outset, he describes his house in Marikina as fragmentary
with no electricity, unembellished windows and has a profusion of mosquitoes. Having the sense of
obligatory to move in, the writer asserted, an ultimatum hanging over their head; showing the engagement
of Man vs. Nature
Every one of us calls someone or somewhere our “home”. Our home keeps us warm and makes us
feel safe. Because of this, the story strikes a chord in every one’s heart. The story was about the personal
experiences of the author, and the place he chose to call “home”.
 In this story, the writer exhibited the experience of being an outsider by moving from one culture to
another and the challenges of it in the essay. In seeking true home outside of this present situation, people
tend to deny that such present moment is indeed the true home. In recognizing ourselves as the home we
have always sought, the writer teaches people to delight in every second. In addition, the writer eloquently
described their home in Marikina and the parts of the house as something more.

Concepts the story tackles:

Home
Family
Houses are not homes and the houses we used to live in stays inside of us.
Main perspectives in the story
Father / Mother / Brother / Author
Father
The author’s father lived in needed to be sold. He mentioned that there is an invisible rope that causes
emotional connection between the family and the house.

Mother
The mother of the author fears and has become anxious about her children growing up. It was described
as an exodus when they start leaving. The mother tries to maintain the home through her cooking which
she believes holds everyone together.

Brother
The brother of the author already the country to live in a foreign land, which is the US. Despite this, the
family still leaves a place for the oldest brother, in hopes he would return.

Author
Lastly the author has felt that houses are not permanent, mainly due to his experiences of moving from
house to house. He also mentions that the house is supposed to be a fixed point, where one could find
peace and comfort. But the author mentions that houses are an “uncertainty of life” and that our fixed points
changes.

Markers:
Description – is an account of a person, object, or event, that enables the reader to get a clear
picture of what is being described.
Narration – is the act of telling a story.
Anecdotes – are short stories based on true accounts.
Characteristics – are the mental, and moral qualities that makes someone distinctive.
Dialogue – are conversations found in written works such as books, plays, or time.
Insight – is the capacity to gain a deep understanding about something.

The Author: Alexis “Exie” Abola

- Award winning fictionist and essayist
- A product of Ateneo de Manila University
- M.A. English Creative Writing -University of the Philippines Diliman
Areas of Specialization: Creative Writing (Fiction & Nonfiction) Philippine Fiction in English-
Shakespeare
Achievements:
❖ A recipient of Don Carlos Palanca Awards in Creative writing
❖ He has won an award for fictions and journalism
LET’S PRACTICE
Task 2: Think – pair – share
Directions: Think – pair – share on the description of the kind of house that you have.
b) Share about four things that you love about your home.
c) What does the advent of social media like facebook and tweeter mean to our concept of being ‘at home’?
d) OFW’s are often separated from family members geographically, how can this affect how we view
‘home’?
e) How does Abola’s essay dramatize the saying “home is where the heart is

Task 3: Directions: Students will post a blog or on their FB wall an answer to:
a) What defines home to you?
b) If you need to leave where you were staying now, what would you do to make yourself at home?
c) How do you see your home thirty years from now?
EVALUATION: Constellate
Directions: Revisit the idea of the home and how the selected essay tackled it via a combination of reflection
and storytelling.
Ask yourself this question and present your answer in the form of a short 5-minute audio-visual
presentation: What will home mean fifty years from now? Present this in class, allowing for an open forum
at the end of your presentation. All members of the group must clearly show a contribution to the final effort
presented by the group.

SYNTHESIZE
Directions: Describe how Exie Abola used the following in the excerpt from “Many Mansions”:

Dialogue
Characters
Description
Anecdotes
Narration

ASSIGNMENT

Directions: Read the essay of “MAGDALENA JALANDONI” by Winton Lou G. Ynion from Iloilo, for
the next lesson.

MAGDALENA JALANDONI
Winton Lou G. Ynion
Iloilo

MAGDALENA JALANDONI WAS FIVE YEARS OLD IN

1896 when her first love was sentenced to death by firing squad by the Spanish authorities. The
man, who was known as José Rizal, was an ophthalmologist who, in his times of passion, wrote
reformist novels that provided an indelible momentum for the Philippine Revolution in 1898.
His life had been accentuated by women of different languages. He left Leonor Rivera, his
childhood love, when his family sent him to Europe for further medical studies, only to fall in love
with a German dame in the person of Josephine Bracken. When he visited Japan in 1888, he
wrote a woman named O-Sei-San about the equation of her beauty and that of the blooming
sakura. There were other women; some of them were kept in secrecy along with José’s indecent
encounters while sojourning withother ilustrados who established relationships with women of
European lineage. His looks were ordinary; Filipinos, in fact, felt deceived when he once came
home and packaged himself as a doktor Aleman. But he was gentle and, perhaps, romantic that
Magdalena, heiress to the incredible fortune of Francisca Gonzaga and Gregorio Jalandoni, fell in
love with him.
Magdalena’s father died when she was two. Her brother Luis was only three-months old and her
mother was only twenty-three. After Gregorio’s death, the Gonzagas supported the Jalandonis,
sending Magdalena to Colegio de San Jose. At night, she would hear stories from her mother. At
one instance, she asked if the happenings and situations
in the narrative were true. Having told that the storyteller imagined the story, Magdalena resolved
to make one. And the household was amazed that she narrated a story that she originally owns.
At ten, she wrote her first corrido, Padre Juan kag Beata Maria (Father Juan and Mother Maria).
At 13, she has four of the same genres, manuscripts of these were submitted by her mother to La
Editorial in Iloilo City, which published
them in 6”x8” softcover newsprint edition.

When Magdalena was sixteen, almost ten years after her first love’s death, she wrote her first
novel, Mga Tunoc sang Isa ca Bulac (Thorns of a Flower). It was becoming evident then that she
would be a wellknown writer like her José. But writing was a male-dominated sphere, so
Magdalena was prohibited by her mother from producing more literatures.
She would write at night and keep her notebooks under her clothes in her trunk. When she was
18, her mother wanted her to get married. The bothered Francisca had chosen a prospective
husband for her daughter. Magdalena, out of obedience, agreed to marry the man of honorary
stature; but she had one unjust precondition, that he should write a novel
within the year. So, Magdalena remained single, and wrote 37 novels, 5 autobiographies, 8
narrative poems, 6 corridos, 10 plays, 213 lyric poems, 132 short stories, 9 essays, and 10
melodramas. Not almost over José, she transformed into painting all that was imagined by him in
his novels. Along with her dioramas of Filipino life, society, culture and history are striking
canvasses of scenes from Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.
From her room, Magdalena could view the quarters of the Spanish priests ruling the Archdiocese
of Jaro. So religious that she ornamented her inherited house with wood statues that she
personally carved. In present Iloilo, the house, located at No. 84 Commission Civil Street in Jaro,
no longer bears the sophistication of Magdalena’s isolated world. Perhaps, even the local
government lacked the funds to preserve the
grandeur of the history of Jaro. The Jalandoni house was among the balay na bato styled after
European architecture, and was among the mansions that decorated the vicinity of the bell tower
and the Cathedral of St. Elizabeth of Hungary where the statue Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria
can be found. On the streets of Jaro, formerly known as Salog, rumbled the carruajes driven by
cocheros.

The feast of the Señora or the Lady of Candle has been celebrated ostentatiously with a reina, a
festival queen chosen from among the daughters of the richest and the famous of Ilonggo families.
She is often considered as binukot (literally means “isolated”) or family treasure for her affiliation
with powerful, usually through marriage, could bring more affluence. Contemporary Ilonggos
continue to observe the spirituality and essence of the Virgin who is believed to have been
discovered by a fisherman in the banks of Iloilo River. It was only a foot high then but was
dreadfully heavy until folks decided to bring it to Jaro. Since then, she had the habit of disappearing
in the early mornings. Stories say that a beautiful lady with long hair had been seen bathing her
child at the artesian well at
the plaza.
The Candelaria, as colloquially known, called for an extravagant procession of Jaro’s material
assets, a practice that Ilonggos were not able to protract along the onset of inequities in a colonial
society. Unwritten, it must be celebrated every 2nd of February to commemorate the presentation
of Jesus at the Temple and the purification of the Blessed
Virgin. Once, perhaps was just imagined, when the wealthy families were
broke and cancelled the feast, Great Flood came. The lineage, wealth, and opulent lifestyle, and
prominence of affluent personages of Jaro largely contributed to the glory of Iloilo as the “Queen
City of the South.” In its streets figure the gem-bathe mansions of the Lopezes, Montinolas,
Ledesmas, and, of course, the Jalandonis. But the heirs could only
imitate the arrogance of colonial models that Jaro lost from the track of
development and progress.
When she was 75, Magdalena wrote about this leitmotif of losses and finds in Juanita Cruz, her
most mature novel according to scholar Lucila
Hosillos. Conscious of the depreciating affluence of Jaro, she wrote about Juanita who is a binukot
of her family, a treasure kept by her father to the highest bidder who offers the greatest wealth
and power. But she fell in love with a poor choirmaster Elias. Disinherited, she disguised as Celia
de Asis, went to Manila, found a surrogate family, and became heiress of her foster parents.
Juanita was reunited with Elias in the end only to discover
that he is involved in the revolutionary movement against Spain. He was killed in a victorious battle
and now, Juanita, or the old woman who tells the story, or Magdalena, confronts Elias’s monument
at the plaza.
On the 70th anniversary of her first love’s death, Magdalena wrote about an undying love –
whether filial, agape, nor eros, it was a passion toward a country finding golden meanings out of
its centuries of feasts. From her glass windows, Magdalena might have had internalized, more
than ever, her life role of a binukot, isolated and untouched.
In 1978, 80 years after the realization of José’s dream, Magdalena died at the age of 87. She
remains the reina of Hiligaynon literature. No one knows if she once had dreamt of herself as a
reina for the feast of Candelaria, or if she ever imagined of Jose Rizal escorting her down the
plaza.