a song for her.

What’s the use of dreaming?

She always tell me,

As I play my guitar,

Alone with my hotdog pillow

In my room.

“Strumming that thing will get you nowhere”

She always tell me,

But I pay no attention to her,

The sound of the strings overpowered her voice

“I wish you’d clean your room

Or wash the dishes sometimes”

She said,          l o u d l y.

I hate all she wants for me.

I don’t even care

if

She would hear

The song

I wrote

For her.

Discussion:

            I’m so stressed of thinking of what to write in this part and I can’t anymore of someone to concretize my idea of super-ego. This is how I understand “psychoanalysis.”

            Well, the speaker is firm in his passion (to play and write songs). S/He is dominated by his/her of pleasure, through which, s/he is pressed for immediate gratification of hi/her desires.

She always wanted us to sit at the right side, because for her (and so with other people) it is safer there. Which I believed because I was always her follower. But not when I stepped into college. There were so many instances in my life that has led me to question her ideologies.

Last September, me and my girlfriend rode a jeepney together. It was almost ten (10 pm). The jeepney we were riding unloaded a passenger in an unlighted street in Boulevard. The place was dim, and there were no other people there but just a few tricycle drivers. After a passenger got off, our jeepney started to move again, but still quite slowly – maybe the driver was trying not to miss some of the potential passengers lining up the sidewalks.

Suddenly, something splashed through the window from the outside and it managed to break the silence inside the jeepney. When we looked outside, there were a bunch of kids of about 7 to 9 years old, were scampering towards varying directions, looking like a disturbed flock of birds. The driver quickly stepped on the gas and left the place. A middle aged woman was wet on her nape and back. She was disgusted. There was a cellophane beside her. She smelled the liquid that wet her neck, and came into a conclusion that it was urine that was thrown at her by the rowdy boys. There suffused a pungent smell all over the jeepney! Passengers exchanged comments about those kids, but all were terrified. The middle aged woman was infuriated that left her almost in tears.

The thing was, she sat on the right side of the jeepney.

We all know that the right side is also the sidewalk. Nobody can tell what people in the street can do to passengers sitting helplessly inside the jeepney.

Now, everytime I ride a jeepney I disobey my mom, and sit at the left side, for (I believe) it is much safer there.

Discussion:

            Unlike any other theories like formalism, reader-response criticism approaches literature in a different manner in that it places much emphasis on the readers in giving a literary work meaning and experience. This lies in the belief that a work does not have a life of its own, but it is through a reader’s interpretation of the text that its “real existence” is imparted. In the case of the memoir about the jeepney above, the piece takes its root on the “jeepney”. For us Filipinos, the jeepney is more than just a public utility vehicle, but rather, it has come to signify the Filipino way of life. This incident, as cited in the essay above, strikes most of its readers (who are, themselves, riding the jeepney on an everyday basis). And it manifests the idea that literature exists only when it is read, and the reader is the one that gives meaning and value into the text. And the same also goes with the idea that the value of a particular text (like this one) is not fixed, but varies from reader to reader.

It is raining hard outside, so hard that Pepe could not hear his shallow pulsating breathing. He is sitting at the right end of the couch while his dog is sleeping on the other end.

A bicycle exhibition showcase is running on the muted T.V. He is holding the remote.

A few weeks ago, Pepe and his friends made a bicycle ramp from wooden scraps and ply board.

They placed it at the vacant lot in front of Pepe’s house. They also cleared the ground, cut the grasses and made a little bicycle circuit. Every afternoon, they went there to practice their bike stunts until late night.

Now, Pepe looks outside his window, watching how the hard rain slowly destroys their ramp and their little bike circuit. He has been sitting there for days now.

That was the ramp they made for their first annual highest bike jump contest. Pepe won. And broke both legs.

Discussion:

            In this story, the theory of post-colonialism is shown in a subtle, but resounding, manner. Pepe’s characters is very much distinguished with the American culture’s extreme games exhibition. The idea of doing extreme sports and extreme games like bike stunts, skateboarding, and many others is something that we have acquired from our former colonisers. Although it has been several decades since they last invaded our country, they have left so much influence on our daily lives (the same could also be said with our Spanish colonisers). Their culture has influenced ours in as many ways as you can possibly think of like our speech, the way we dress, in architecture, music, among other things. And with television and internet nowadays, it is very easy for most of us to have access to American pop culture, and it has thus infiltrated our own way of living and perceptions.

            In most post-colonial works, it deals with the colonised people(s) as the subject-matter. Furthermore, it also articulates how the colonised reclaim or “[maintain] strong connections with the coloniser”. In a way, there is also this binary opposition existing between the coloniser and the colonised. One is always considered as superior, while the other is (apparently) the inferior. And with that being said, most of us would consider America as the center of culture and we always try to emulate that. It has created so much influence in that, in a few aspects, the American culture and ours seem to be quite similar.

When I was small,

we joined a field trip together.

`

We passed through the

shadows of tall trees,

then she sat on the

grass, stretched and yawned.

`

She combed my hair

while saying do’s and don’t

on my face.

Her hair was short

and beads of sweat formed in her forehead

because she ran

after me.

`

I saw myself

in her dark brown eyes when she

knelt in front of me.

`

She wiped my dirty knees

with wet towel;

her hands were warm

as she pat powder on my face, back and chest.

`

She gave me my snack

and asked me to

behave while eating.

`

Then I ran away from

her again,and shared my food

with my playmates.

`

Now,now that she thinks

I’m all grown up,

All she does is

enter my room without

permission

and leave me a kiss in the middle of my dream.

`

And me,

dreaming

how she stroke my hair

while saying do’s and dont’s

on my face.

Discussion:

            Structuralism makes both the reading the particular texts and the reading of particular cultures behind the text: through semiotics, structuralism leads us to see everything as ‘textual’ that is, composed of signs, governed by conventions of meaning, ordered according to a pattern of relationships.

            Structuralism approach our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by, binary oppositions. These binary oppositions were used to describe fields of cultural thought.

            In the poem, the binary opposition there is the comforter (she) and the speaker. Clearly, the speaker has a close connection to where s/he addresses the poem. In my intention of writing it, “she” is actually the mother of the speaker. In Filipino society (and to some/many other societies), women as mothers are depicted in a particular pedestal such as giver of life, loving, caring and empathic. The mother and child relationship in the poem is the binary opposition in it. The mother is presented as “master” of the speaker’s (kid’s) life. It is like a master and follower relationship.

            In Structuralism, meaning is not the identification of the sign with object in real world, but it is generated by difference among signs in signifying system. It forms the basis of semiotics, the study of signs, where sign is a union of signifier and signified.

            In the poem, the pronoun “she” who is obviously a mother (for me) is a sign in a real world, signifying its being a woman through “motherhood” by showing motherly attributes to her child.  

From inside, I looked

at the world through my window.

T’was not a good sight.

I wiped and cleaned the window,

world was beautiful again.

Discussion:

            The poem briefly, but concisely, manifests some of the ideas that Marxism espouses: such as that it is based on the belief that people’s consciousness of the condition they live in consequently affect their actual living condition, also that there is this understanding of the class in terms of relations of production. In our study of Marxism, we learn about the concept of ‘alienation’ which refers to the aspect of ‘human nature’, and is also cited by Marx as a “systematic result of capitalism”. Alienation also refers to the the particular situation that a person goes through that has led him/her to believe and feel alienated.

            On the other hand, Marxism also deals with the consciousness of an individual – both of itself and the social world within s/he exists. For some of us, we act based on this awareness and what we have come to accept as our “reality”. And here is where “ideology” comes in and the concept of a false consciousness.

            Going back to the poem, the persona has come into some sort of realization and awareness with regards to their actual living condition (I looked / at the world through my window). It seemed like the persona was doomed from the very beginning. However, the character has adapted a more positive attitude that will help her/him look at their situation differently (I wiped and cleaned the window, / world was beautiful again.).

I scribbled down in my notes, read some of the lines I wrote before and tried to make sense out of it. The idea of choosing to write Pepe’s unfortunate experience came after I thought about Lemony Snicket’s “Series of Unfortunate Events.” I just wanted to create a character who’s fate is slightly similar to Boudelaire orphans.

Honestly, I am really weak in sustaining and developing characters, so I felt comfortable in writing flash fiction. My story is in a narrative form, I choose to write in a narrator’s point of view to give a clearer picture of the brief single scene I have without compromising my character’s epiphanic moment.

My CW teacher told us in class that – “unlike memoirs, flash fiction is not necessarily our story.” Thats why I really had a hard time formulating my fiction, so what I did was, I put myself in my main character’s shoes and feel for him. That is also why my main character is obviously slightly similar to me.

My main character (Pepe) is just an average teenage kid, who wants to explore the world in a not so ordinary way. He doesn’t care in what other people would say, and not afraid to face the consequences of his wrong decisions. At the end of the story, I revealed the reason of his agony. I tried to make a bang in ending my fiction, and until now I don’t know now if my style was effective.