Cuentos de Juana by Adelina Gurrea: Hispanic-Filipino Gothic
Elizabeth Medina
Dedicated to Edwin Lozada and his poem, “Lady in
White”.
Hispanic-Filipino literature is an open skylight on an already mythic Filipino
past. Legends and myths emerge only after
a long time has passed and the events and characters that left a mark on the
people’s spirit have become forever impressed upon collective memory, naturally,
with the distortions of the original referents (i.e., changes of people and
place names, temporal context, etc.).
For us Filipinos, however, our second colonization, which imposed a new
language and accelerated technical modernization, left gaps in the Filipino
collective memory that are difficult to bridge for those of us who feel the
lack of cultural rootedness, that perhaps only literary study and imagination
can resolve. For what else is literature
but the possibility of listening to the voices of the past?
Is there today actually such a thing as a collective Filipino
memory? It is a difficult question that
I can only throw into the air. Maybe
Filipinos have one and it is I who, having lived most of my life in exile, have
no connection to it. However, I, too, am
the product of a long collective process that I carry in my ancient genetic memory. So when I say that I detect the existence of
a gap in our national literature, it is possible that, indeed, there is, in
fact, such a one. A gap that, however,
is populated by islands, and one of them is Adelina Gurrea Monasterio: poet,
essayist, Hispanic-Filipina writer born in 1896, the year of Rizal's
execution. The father of Hispanic-Filipino
letters died and a baby girl was born whose future work, though brief, would
bequeath us a literary creation that, in my opinion, is the bridge between the
literature of the Spanish colony and that of the neo-colony, extending into the
present. For me, reading Doña Adelina is
to time travel to the world of her Negrense
childhood that, for us the Filipinos of the 21st century, is already a mythical
place.
In Cuentos de Juana a woman’s voice
describes deep and subtle emotions with rare discernment. She presents two sensibilities, side by side,
in two narrative voices: one is the voice of Juana, her native yaya, and the other, that of the girl
who lived astride two worlds: the world of her parents in the old Spanish
colony, and the world of the new colony, where she was born but that did not
take possession of her essence, which was Hispanic-Filipino. She is both Spanish and native Filipino and
inhabits and transits through these worlds in perfect, normal harmony. Through her yaya’s stories, Adelina received
the seeds of her future literary creation and in maturity created fiction that
lifts a veil and gives us glimpses of that vanished world, scarcely able to weave
its spell over modern Filipino readers and writers because English translation bleeds
it of the magic. The marvelous, the
tragic, the ill-fated and heartbreaking are proper to that pre-hecatomb Filipino
world, whose powers of enchantment are encoded in Spanish, and the English
keyboard cannot summon its incantations: the magic has faded away in the vacuum
of the soul. What is that vacuum about? A
death, a wiping of the slate clean that has left us with a vague, ambivalent
longing for something that once was our great treasure, that our forebears
tried to hold on to, but that slipped through their fingers. Like a new and great love cut short by a
bizarre, untimely accident; like Luisa’s unexplained death far away in Spain, that
leaves the orphaned heart of Fermín, the ill-fated young landowner in the
collection’s final story, consumed by despair.
In "El lunuk del remanso verde” (The Lunuk of the Deep Green Pool),
whose leitmotif is a supernatural curse that plagues two generations of a
family, I do not see the central theme as being the story of tragic love
between Luisa, from the Spanish upper class, and Fermin, the Filipino mestizo
heir to two haciendas in Negros province.
Rather, my reading is of a story in gothic key of ill-fated love between
Fermín and Cadio, the native Filipino who is the foreman of his hacienda and was
a father figure to Fermín as a boy, after he lost his father. The love between the two protagonists will
end tragically because the former cannot acknowledge, accept and honor their
bond, while the latter’s deep commitment will end in death and the oblivion of
madness. The third character is the
spectral tamao, a goblin whose home
is the huge, ancient tree called the lunuk,
and who fulfills the function of the Fates, or fatal destiny.
Though brief, Gurrea's body of work is one of the most important achievements of the golden age of Philippine literature, in terms of aesthetics, style and spiritual content.
A witness between worlds
Adelina Gurrea was a privileged witness to the twilight of the Spanish
colony and the creation of a U.S.-branded Philippines. She was born in 1896, on the eve of what
Spain would call The Disaster, into a creole-mestizo family who owned and ran a
sugar plantation. Her childhood home was
Negros Occidental, a Visayan province far from Manila (the past lives on in
faraway places) and her narratives are suffused with the two faces of Filipino
interiority ─that of the creole and Spanish mestizo on the one hand, and of the
native on the other. The two were the
paradigmatic actors of the Spanish-Filipino colony who coexisted and interacted
for over three centuries within the rural space, and for this reason I consider Cuentos de Juana and, most especially, “El
lunuk del remanso verde” a literary time capsule of messages from a vanished,
exotic past for modern Filipinos, who can only read imperfectly-rendered
English translations, with the resultant loss of the original’s soul.
Nonetheless, Gurrea wrote with prescience: "Droplets of water falling for centuries form lagoons that can never run dry”; her words are droplets from the eternal springs of universal literature. Our Hispanic-Filipino literature has been and always will be the nourishing spring of our essentially Hispanic-Filipino spirit, and of the future rediscovery and rebirth of Filipino letters in Spanish.
Estampas
y cuentos de la Filipinas hispánica
My first reading of this great Hispanic-Filipina autor occurred in July 2001 in Madrid, when I acquired a copy of Estampas y cuentos de la Filipinas hispánica (Prints and Tales of Hispanic Philippines), an anthology of prose works by Hispanic-Filipino and Spanish authors, a research project by Professor Manuel García Castellón of the University of New Orleans. García Castellon’s prologue is an excellent summary of the Filipino colonial process, written with discernment, deep historico-cultural analysis in refined style. Two of Gurrea’s stories close the book: the second half of “El lunuk del remanso verde” and the complete story, “La doncella que vivió tres vidas” (The Maiden Who Lived Three Lives). The plots of both revolve around the “tamao”, a supernatural entity with sinister powers, whose dwelling is the lunuk, a huge, centuries-old tree.
My mother, Felisa Cañete Abad, was born in Barili, Cebu. I spent my summers between the ages of five and eight in Mandaue, Cebu (1959-1963), in the ancestral home of Andrea Seno, my adoptive maternal grandmother. Lola Andrea once told me, with her habitual parsimony, of her fear of the supernatural, that the devil appeared in the guise of a huge dog or pig and wandered about very late at night.
Lola Andrea never told any stories about the tamao. As a child I climbed tamarind trees but there was no lunuk behind the old house, nor did I ever learn that both were dwellings of engkantados. And so I found Gurrea’s mythic, negrense world strange, alien, almost from another planet; but the stories had an effect and spooked me from the start, and I now consider them horror fiction.
Twenty-one years passed between my first reading of the two stories in Estampas. When I was finally able to read Cuentos de Juana from cover to cover in 2021 I felt overwhelmed by Gurrea’s prose, its originality and beauty of expression, emotional and psychological depth, the accuracy of its symbols and the depth of her revelations of her Spanish and native characters’ inner worlds.
This analysis is centered on "El lunuk del remanso verde", which I consider the richest and most complex of the stories, though I mention two passages from "El Tic-Tic", likewise very revealing of the native interiority.
Only the
second half of "El lunuk" was presented in the anthology, and when I
read the complete story years later I was able to appreciate its masterful
narrative progression, from the initial atmosphere of colonial peace and
prosperity overshadowed by an eerie legend, to the stormy end of the young
planter's death that fulfills the first line’s grim presage: "The Arruezo
family died out because of the lunuk...".
Hispanic-Filipino gothic
Cuentos de Juana, in form and style Spanish, is Filipino in everything else: a panegyric to the natural beauty of rural provincial landscapes and the expression of Gurrea’s deep love for the Filipino people, for her Filipino self. The elements found in all of her stories, aside from the main thread that is the voice of Juana, Adelina’s childhood nanny and longtime servant of her family, whose voice merges with that of the writer’s, are as follows: (1) the presence of nature, whose transformations powerfully affect and at the same time externalize the characters’ emotional states; (2) the supernatural as an intrinsic part of nature, expressed as a dark, unknown presence that can without warning become a threat to humans; (3) the personification of the supernatural entity as an object of the natives’ fear, a latent threat and danger, but that if profaned acts in the rural dweller’s mind as artifice of chaos, death, fatal destiny; and (4) the vulnerability of reason, the precariousness of “progress”, the power of fate over human life, no matter how civilized men may be, and able to mold the material world to their designs.
When I trained an interpretative look at Gurrea’s fiction to define and describe the characteristics of the literary world that one enters in Cuentos de Juana, I discovered texts that fitted into the fiction category of gothic literature.
Gothic literature is a subgenre of romantic literature that emerged in 17th century England. The term “gothic” fictional narrative made its debut in the title of Horace Walpole's short story published in 1765, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. “Gothic” meant: a story from ancient times, rediscovered in the present.
The ambiguous frontier between reality and fiction and the epochal overlap in Cuentos de Juana
Adelina
Gurrea’s stories are curiously ambiguous because they are not products of pure
imagination, nor can we be absolutely sure in which era — the Spanish or the
North American period — the author weaves her tales. First, they are based on
the supernatural folklore of the native Filipino peasantry, which, more than
mere folklore, transmit worlds experienced by country folk as a parallel
reality. Second, there is a palpable
blend of two epochs, especially in "El lunuk...", that in effect overlapped
in the author’s life as a palimpsest of worlds: the Spanish colonial past on
the one hand, and the overwriting of Americanized[1]
modernity, which was quickly advancing in the neo-colony during Gurrea's
childhood and early adulthood, especially in the large cities.
Gurrea’s parents sent her to high school in Manila as an intern in the convent school for girls, St. Scholastica’s College, when the curriculum was already taught in English. Thus, her life was shaped by a dual melting pot: her childhood was lived in the distant province of Negros Occidental, immersed in the Hispanic-Filipino world, the symbiosis between atavistic native and plurisecular Spanish culture, over which North American as yet was only making the slightest of indentations, and she spent her adolescence mainly in Manila, where she received American transculturation and became fluent in English. This duality of mentalities is reflected in her fiction and her poetry; nevertheless, her soul, her identity were — as she always and unambiguously affirmed, after the family’s repatriation to Spain in 1921 at the age of 25 — ineffably, indelibly Filipino.
Two storytelling voices
There are two narrators in Cuentos de Juana: Adelina and Juana, her native yaya, a character who emerges as a storyteller in the ancient traditions of Asian storytellers, such as those of Cambodia and India. In the introduction to the first edition of Cuentos, Gurrea recounts that Juana had worked for her family from a very young age, before the author was born. It is worth including the description of Juana's spontaneous character and the origin of the droll English nickname she received, from a historical disaster:
Juana was a
native maid whom I had known in my home since I first began to have an
awareness of the things of this world.
She had previously served in my paternal grandmother's house. Since Juana
was not yet an old woman when I first met her, we must infer that she had
always served the family. Her nickname was “Baltimore”. It was the name of one
of the American battleships that performed a parody of a naval battle against
the rust-eaten, battered Spanish squadron in the Bay of Cavite.[2]
The explanation of how Juana came to be nicknamed “Baltimore” and the description of what the French would call her “moral portrait” is another delight:
Juana had the sass of a flamenco dancer and was
quite plump, so her corpulence was likened to that of the American battleship.
When I became aware of Juana's personality, she was no longer so full-bodied; her
complexion was very dark, her nose markedly flat, her eyes small and her mouth
large, the withered lips revealing no pearly enamel. She was born with white
teeth, but the habit of chewing buyo deposited a red patina over the
ivory, and it had become stained as though with dark blood. For a Western man
recently arrived from Europe or America, such a mouth would have looked
repulsive, but we who were born on the islands and those who had lived in the
country for many years had grown so used to buyo and its unpleasant coloring,
that as a child I never shied away from a kiss from those lips or from her
tenderness. Neither did others, who weren’t
children, shun that mouth, because, ugly as she was, Juana possessed a special allure
for men, whether Malay or European.[3]
I have wondered if Juana told her stories in Spanish or Bisaya and concluded that she mixed the two languages. According to Gurrea she was fluent in both, but resorted to Bisaya when she found herself in a fix:
She turned out less ignorant than the rest of
the women on the ranch because of her interactions with Spaniards in my
grandmother's and my parents' houses. She spoke Spanish but forgot it as soon
as she was reproached for some bad action or failure in the performance of her
duties.[4]
The above draws the picture of Juana, a real personage who told stories to little Adelina and her siblings in the Gurrea Monasterio paternal home, amid the landscapes and places of the Carlota Hacienda along the Calatcat River and the proximities of Canlaón Volcano, in the province of Negros Occidental, and how, years later, Juana’s storytelling voice would become the writer Gurrea’s muse, as, steeped in nostalgia, she evoked the lost Eden of her childhood. The lyrical descriptions in the stories surely do not come from Juana but from Adelina the poet’s pen. However, the reader soon loses the notion of whose voice he/she is hearing: is it Juana’s, or the writer’s? And are they reading true stories or fiction? Where is the dividing line? The author never clarifies, which leads to the supposition that there is no such border. It is in fact characteristic of the Filipino creative genius that the dividing line between “real” and “imaginary” is extremely fluid.
In Filipinas, the asuang or vampire was not born from fiction but from the inhabitants of the countryside and the jungle. Quite the opposite: the (psychic, if not material) reality of the asuang, the cafre, the ticbalang — and, in Negros, the tamao, the bagat, the tic-tic — spawned oral traditions, and with the advent of modern print media, our folklore fiction.
The haunting atmosphere woven in Cuentos de Juana then led me to hypothesize that it could be called "Hispanic-Filipino gothic"; and after doing a bit of research, I discovered that my hunch was not far afield.
The Characteristics of Gothic
What are the characteristics of gothic
literature? Looking back on some
literary classics that are familiar to Filipino readers and film buffs of
today, such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Edgar Allan Poe's short stories
and poems, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, and
cross-referencing "El tamao" (28 pages), "El Tic-Tic"
(56 pages), "El Bagat" (24 pages) and "El lunuk en el remanso
verde" (62 pages), the following common elements[5] leap
out:
- Dark, picturesque landscapes
- Omens and curses
- An atmosphere of mystery and dread
- A terrifying and menacing villain
- Supernatural and paranormal activity
- Romance
- Emotional
distress
- Nightmares
Edgar Allan Poe (b. 1809, d. 1849) was the pioneer of the gothic narrative that linked the supernatural to "psychological trauma, the evils of man and mental illness",[6] elements that likewise are found in Emilia Pardo Bazán's Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886)[7], and Rizal's Noli me tángere (1887). Pardo Bazán's novel is inscribed in the naturalistic current; however, I see parallels between it and Adelina Gurrea's stories in the revelations of the characters’ psychology and intimate world, the settings in rural wooded landscapes, the melancholy decadence of the ruined rural petty nobility, clinging to their glorious past in once-stately mansions grown dilapidated and shrouded in gloom, and in the dark intimations of how the characters’ plans and projections inexorably end in misfortune through the action of fatality. In fact, I found a reference describing elements of the gothic novel in Los pazos de Ulloa.[8]
The plot
One of the themes developed in "El lunuk del remanso verde" is the romance between the Spanish Filipino mestizo Fermín and Luisa, the governor general’s daughter, who belongs to the Spanish aristocracy. Before Fermín can even dream of marrying her, he must become wealthy. By obsessively undertaking this enterprise, he falls into the same error and fatality as his father and, subsequently, his stepfather, before him. And just as the loyal, self-sacrificing overseer Cadio failed to protect Fermín’s father from the tamao’s vengeance, he will likewise fail to save the life of Fermín, whom he loves like a son.
The love story between the Spanish girl and the Filipino mestizo is framed in two past tragedies: first, Fermín’s father, and, later, his stepfather, succumbed to the vindictive tamao because they paid no heed to Cadio’s warnings, to Fermin's father not to order the giant lunuk’s branches to be cut down, and to don Alberto, not to have the tree’s entangled roots cut back, in the dark green pool by the river bank, atop which the tree stood.
Even more than the masterful unfolding of a supernatural tragedy and human arrogance what impresses is the psychological sensitivity with which the author reveals two realities, two worlds: the relationship between the Spanish mestizo master and his native subordinate, and the logic of the dominance hierarchy amongst the Spanish themselves. The barely two decades that the Americans maintained a minimal physical presence on the islands did not lead to the same bonds of custom, interdependence and affinity/friction that took root between Filipino natives/mestizos, Spanish creoles and Spanish peninsulars over three centuries of coexistence.
A passage in “El lunuk” describes how many Spaniards arrived in the islands “with no other baggage than physical strength and the drive of their tenacious will.”[9] They were helped by the whiteness of skin that erased “the inferiorities of birth”. Their social betters were obliged to welcome and treat them in a manner that would prop up the colonizer’s dominion in the face of the natives’ overwhelming numerical superiority. However, despite the appearances of equality between peninsular and insular Spaniards,[10] creoles and mestizos, a marriage engagement between a peninsular lady of noble lineage and a Spanish mestizo, even if he stood to inherit property and belonged to the privileged social circles, could not be looked upon by the Manila elite with complete approval. Worse still, Madrid’s high society was not going to forgive Luisa her choice, unless he was a Croesus.
Fermín realizes that in the eyes of the social hierarchy “of castes, ancestries and parentage", the only way he can be accepted by the cream of Spanish society is through amassing a large-enough fortune. When Luisa’s father the governor general is relieved of his mandate, Luisa must return with her family to Spain, but promises Fermin that she will wait three years.
In the
contrast between Luisa’s world — an archaic social order, flash-frozen in the glorious past, and Fermín's — young and unburdened by that past — I believe one
may glimpse a cultural and philosophical dilemma that weighed on the
Spanish-Filipino youth after the establishment of the new U.S. colonial regime.
Gurrea set her story in the Spanish colonial era but wrote it in Spain, when
the American regime ruled the Philippines.
As mentioned earlier, I speculate that this part of the narrative hints
at an overlap of two historical moments, as the author projected her own ambivalence
into Fermin’s vital inflexion point.
In the
coming half-century after 1901, the black legend of the Spanish colonial period
as the reign of obscurantism, backwardness, impermeability to the future, would
become a cliché, in propagandistic contrast with U.S. rule of “independence and
democracy” and openness to progress.
Perhaps in the early 20th century the choice between two cultural
models — the old, traditional culture,
weighed down by social barriers and limits, and the new one full of bright
promises of freedom, modernity and material wealth —
weighed over Adelina Gurrea’s generation of Hispanic-Filipino youth. She herself submitted with mixed feelings to her
family’s decision to leave the Philippines and return to Spain.[11] Years later, already a recognized cultural
figure, she visited Manila on two occasions as an illustrious daughter, and was
an advocate for the recognition of the importance of the Hispanic-Filipino
heritage and language. She never
renounced her love and saudade[12]
for her native land and never overcame her nostalgia for her native soil.[13]
Gurrea described the self-questioning that the young mestizo had to resolve:
[...] his mentality could not take the measure of and value genealogy,
the brilliance of the old, the archaic, the long-established, the traditional
in terms of birth, family and name. [...] But he [...] belonged to a country
that was still a child [...] with the natural eagerness to leap into movement
and self-expression, [...] intently scanning countless paths blending into the infinite
horizon [...] a country with an entire life ahead".
Fermin opts for merging two worlds: he would earn Luisa’s family’s consent to their marriage, would attain the wealth required, and trusted that, once at his side and had children, Luisa would happily adjust to her new life and they would be free of the conditionings of social class. First, however, he had to sacrifice his peaceful, easy way of living for the sake of transforming the land into a wealth-producing machine. He also renounced social life: "…he was no longer an eligible bachelor [...] but was becoming an ordinary hard-working and reclusive provincial".
When Fermín was an adolescent he had learned from Cadio to fear and respect the lunuk and keep away from the tree, the pool and the tamao. His mother, out of respect for her late husband’s wish that their son should have a profession, sent Fermín to study in Manila. At first the boy is terribly homesick, but over time the years of study and social life in Manila he grows accustomed to the amusements and lifestyle of the city and is weaned aways from his attachment to the province. He returns to the hacienda transformed into a gentleman and master, no longer the old affectionate and unspoiled Nonoy. With Cadio he acts like a boss with his foreman, someone he values, but who, in the end, is his employee and subordinate. Cadio realizes that now he must not merely protect his Nonoy from the tamao, but also from the bewitchment of his love for a woman who Cadio believes is dangerous.
Fermín orders Cadio to find tenant farmers who can clear and plant the remaining fields of the small hacienda in a forested area. When Cadio explains that his father had decided against it because many of the men contracted malaria and died, Fermín insists that the fertile lands must be planted with sugarcane because the yield will be extremely profitable. He promises to obtain plenty of quinine to prevent and cure any sickness, insisting on Cadio finding men, even if he has to offer them a higher wage per day.
It so happens that one day, as the master and his foreman are returning from the day’s labors in the fields, a sudden noise in the canebrake spooks Fermín’s horse, it breaks into a mad gallop and throws him right under the lunuk. Fermín notices half a field that is lying fallow just there, because the tree’s long branches and thick foliage shroud the field in shadow such that the sugarcane would not get the needed sunlight. What happened before, happens again. This time, Arruezo Junior orders the tree’s branches pruned and that the land be planted. Cadio refuses to obey; instead, he breaks down and confesses all he has suffered from Fermín’s estrangement and swears he will never let the tamao take revenge once again and do his master harm.
Cadio’s
outburst moves Fermín and he desists. However, Luisa, jealous of Cadio’s
influence over her fiancé, chides him a letter that it is unworthy of his
European culture to heed the superstitions of a colored man (“la superstición
de un hombre de color”). She urges him
to have the tree felled or, minimally, pruned. Fermin reads her letter to Cadio when they are
both under the shade of the lunuk. They
hear the rustling of the lunuk’s branches; Fermín is surprised that a wind has
suddenly risen out of nowhere. With a
somber expression Cadio corrects him; it was not the wind, he says, pointing
out the deathly stillness that surrounds them.
Months of good weather and plentiful harvests follow and Fermín is confident that his plans are assured of success. He does not heed Cadio's warning that an unusually dry season can be followed by heavy rains that would reduce the harvest, and Fermín should therefore invest in drainage canals. But Fermin decides against it because of its high cost and because he trusts that the good weather conditions will hold. Suddenly, on the eve of Fermín's departure for Spain, the harvests having been sold and the loan payments secured, the news arrives of Luisa’s sudden death from an unknown cause.
With the
same all-encompassing passion with which he pursued the attainment of his
dream, its abrupt end hurls Fermín into a black pit of despair; he loses all will
to live. Fermín vegetates in depression while Cadio is left to struggle alone
with the administration of the farms, the work in the fields and, soon, a
plague of locusts. One day, it starts to rain. At first Cadio is optimistic:
the rain will put an end to the plague; but soon it becomes a hurricane. Cadio finally convinces Fermín to come out of
his state of listless apathy: only the master has the authority to force the tenants
to vacate their houses along the banks of the Calatcat River, which is on the
verge of overflowing. The scene of the demolition with axes is dramatic, of the
human struggle with Nature’s violence, and the wrenching metaphor of the
destruction of Fermín’s dream — an inhuman power has robbed him of a future of happiness.
Mingled with the howling of the storm were sounds of human shrieks and wails, the crying children, the old hurling curses, as the heavy, rhythmic axe blows kept time with the swiftly passing minutes and the river torrent rose higher and higher, threatening to burst its banks.[14]
However, the
storm will be a mere prelude to Fermin’s unhinged retaliation against fate that
ends in a climax of tragedies. That night he would overhear Cadio’s words,
spoken in confidence to the other foremen, who, like him, had to spend that
night in the big house as a precautionary measure:
That lunuk’s
tamao is one of the most powerful I have ever known: it can even kill from
afar. The first master was killed while he was in Spain, and now it has struck
down señorito Fermin’s fiancée in revenge, just because she wrote the master
and told him to cut down the lunuk.[15]
The following afternoon Fermín rides out, ostensibly to survey conditions in the flooded fields. But Cadio’s words – Cadio, who, Fermín knows full well, loves him more than anyone else – leash a hurricane that will drive Fermín to a final act of revenge against the destroyer of his future. And so, by trying to protect Fermín from all danger and evil, Cadio becomes the artifice of his final destruction by convincing him that the tamao is the cause of his misfortune. Fermín is beside himself, his reason blinded by fury. Riding to the lunuk, he clambers up the tree and chops down the largest branch, which falls across the trail below. That evening, as he gallops back in the middle of a downpour, one of the typhoon’s last rains, his horse stumbles over the branch. Fermín falls off his saddle, hits his head and rolls, unconscious, down the slope and into the dark, turbulent pool below the lunuk.
Cadio arrives too late; ignoring the danger, he dives again and again into the roiling water until he recovers Fermín’s lifeless body, after slashing it free with a knife from the lunuk’s tangled roots.
The story ends with the land auctioned off to repay the loans. Fermin’s mother is reduced to living on the new owner’s charity. Cadio is now a cheerful madman, unquestioning that he will be reunited with his beloved Nonoy.
Elements of Gothic Narrative in Cuentos de Juana
1. Gloomy and picturesque
landscapes
·
The description of the lunuk tree and the
pool. Note the dark atmosphere painted
by references to the grim memories imprinted on the water: traces of souls who
suffered, who were tortured, who drowned; voices silenced for centuries, concealed
tombs:
The sloping
bank was split in two by the growth of a gigantic lunuk. Part of its trunk grew
downwards, its subterranean roots sipping the cool water while its crown stretched
upwards seeking sun and open space. ... and after bending over the edge of the
bank, still it raised its head sixteen meters above the fields. The leafy crown, expansive and lush, formed a
canopy nearly twenty meters in circumference.
...And down
below was the largest, deepest pool that there was in the river, where they never
swam because of the water’s gloomy green color and murky depths that reflected nothing
above the surface.
Dead,
ecstatic, the waters of the large pool gazed out like the blind, unseeing of
the light but filled with inner visions of gruesomely contorted faces, of
unending torment, of voices that remained silent for centuries, of hidden
graves trodden underfoot, of ghostly weeping and wailing from the unquiet dead….
It was the frigid, dreary, twilight
realm of the tamao.[16]
·
Man’s struggle with Nature’s destructive
force.
“Chop all the houses down—you’ll see them get out.”
“I can’t do that, Fermín.”
“Well then, I will.
Hand me an axe.”
He slipped it inside his belt and went down to the
street. The rain was pounding with gale
force and the wind gusts lashed the ground, trees and houses. The very earth was raked over, gashed by the
unseen claws of the elements. The liquid
curtain blinded the master and his foreman, but they pressed on unflinching, as
though the power of their inner turmoil surpassed even Nature’s untrammeled
wildness, and they continued unswerving on the road and crossed the bridge, that
trembled and shook from the force of the current.[17]
·
Description of the gardens of Malacañang,
the Governor General’s mansion, on the night of a formal ball. The Pasig River flows by in silence while the
people in the native huts along the opposite bank look on admiringly. Gurrea plays with language, infusing it with
the visual plasticity so characteristic of English. Note the original, unique
imagery used by Gurrea to transform the marble benches into “white dashes” that dot the jet blackness of the
lawn, and how she personifies the nipa huts across the river. Instead of saying that their occupants
observed the party, she converts the houses into onlookers, their windows into
eyes and the palm leaf awnings above the windows into “straw eyelids”.
The garden benches
dotted the lawn with white dashes, marking the boundary between the mansion’s park
and the banks of the Pasig. Luisa and Fermín sat together beside two hibiscus
bushes, their feet perfumed by camias flowers. Other aromas filled the air from
the ornamental plants of the gardens — sampaguitas, gardenias, kamuning — all of
the fragrant snowiness of the tropics. Below, the waters dark and still,
already dreaming of the sea or enamored of the river bank’s stillness. And ahead
— nothing — only the mystery of the night and the echoes of violins encrusting
sensuous somnolences on the woodland. Or drawing ecstatic sighs of admiration from
the naïve, primitive soul of the native houses, peering out of straw eyelids at
the marvels across the river. Above, the stars: so many, so many, that more
than a star-studded sky it seemed a canvas sprinkled with golden sand.[18]
2. Omens and
Curses
·
An atmosphere of mystery and fear
And in the
spookiest hours of moonless nights, on ghostly religious feast days such as All
Souls, during conversations about crimes or mysterious happenings, in the
mournful aftermath of seismic or climate catastrophies — typhoons, floods,
earthquakes — Cadio took advantage of the psychological phenomenon of fear and
talked to the boy about the tamao in the lunuk tree, sowing in his mind an
exaggerated terror of the place and the goblin.[19]
·
A fearsome and menacing enemy
And he often
spoke to him about the lunuk, that it was the mysterious lair of the
treacherous, vengeful tamao, who was, besides, hostile to his father, to his family,
to the blood in his veins.[20]
·
Other-worldly, paranormal phenomena
“And how did
the tamao find out about this order?” asked another foreman.
“Ah, because
he is asuang,”
replied Cadio, “and because Master Fermin read me the part of the letter that about
the order right when when we were passing under the tree. And then the tamao,
in the middle of complete calm, shook the branches violently, as if the wind
was shaking them.[21]
·
Romance
I’m done
begging. Fermín, I was there when you
were born, I’ve raised you. More than a
servant, I’ve been a father to you. I’ve
suffered when you strayed away from my care, when you were cold and withdrew
from my guidance, my vigilance, my affection, and treated me like just an
employee. I suffered through all those things
and still served you in silence. But I’m done now, I will neither put up with
nor indulge your foolhardiness. I must put a stop to this. That lunuk is not
going to be cut down, you will have to kill me first, so that I can save you! And if in spite of the pain your abandonment
has caused me, everything I’ve done to assure your prosperity, all my efforts
for the sake of seeing you grow up into an exemplary man — if you still won’t
listen and pay heed to my plea, you’ll just have to get rid of me so you can
have it your way and cut down that tree.[22]
By this time
Cadio was equally in tears. Fermín sensed
it from the choking tremor in his voice — it had gotten dark and he could
barely see, standing under the tree’s branches. The foreman’s vehemence had frightened
him but he was equally moved by the open display of affection, his utter
selflessness, that he rebelled only because he wanted his safety. Fermín tightened his hold on his horse’s reins,
got on the saddle and set off at a gallop.[23]
·
Anguish
When he
finally emerged from the water laden with his trophy of death, the two banks of
the river were already lit up by the oil torches of the natives who lived in
the hamlet, and the reflection of the tongues of fire dan on the danced on the
dreadful, tragic, shuddering waters of the gloomy, funereal pool.[24]
·
Nightmarish states
Superstitious fear clutched at the loyal
foreman’s throat, the native in whose soul atavism had laid centuries of terror
and ghostly beliefs. He could feel terror choking, drowning him with
overwhelming force. A single, weird
flash of lightning suddenly lit up the backwater and the sight of it reminded
him that in those depths, Fermín might still be alive.[25]
Native
Interiority in Cuentos de Juana
Gothic literature is a highly subjective narrative: its seductive force that submerges the reader in a plot woven with elements of great suggestive power, is fed by the central characters’ emotional inner life and imagination. The reader deeply empathizes with the characters and vicariously shares in their existential trials, discoveries and final transformation. Familiar to us are Goethe’s Werther, Jane Eyre, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Nucha and Julian in Los Pazos de Ulloa. The central characters of Cuentos de Juana are almost all Filipinos, whether natives or mestizos; Spaniards are absent or play secondary roles, which creates a strong sense of identification in us, as Filipino readers.
The
following passages, from “El lunuk” and “El Tic-Tic”, are illustrative of the
author’s genius for sounding the native Filipino character and psyche.
·
Reference to mutism and lack of expression,
the impassiveness of the native that was at times extremely disconcerting and
annoying for the Spaniards, who interpreted it as slowness, lack of
intelligence. This is not the place for
an analysis of the native character; suffice it to say that Gurrea had an
impressive ability to reveal native Filipino sensitivity and affect:
The people from Caiñamán weren’t coming. None of the groups made any comment on why.
The natives’ Oriental character wraps them in a fatalistic reticence; they are
little inclined to wonder about things or express opinions about events of
little real significance.[26]
The mother
and the son said nothing…that silence, so typical of the race, that seems
empty, yet is a fullness beyond words.[27]
·
Loyalty, selflessness, capacity for sacrifice
—The master
knows how loyal I’ve always been to him:
I’ve never disobeyed an order, never robbed, never shirked work that
could multiply my master’s wealth.
Neither have I denied my master anything: I searched out the most
attractive women of the village, found the best possible solutions for any
difficulty, I defended your life with my body, and my scars are proof of the
times I put myself between you and the bolo of an enemy who tried to kill
you... [28].
·
Vulnerability and inner strength
And against
everything, there was only Cadio — the simple farmhand of the tropical plains,
the colored man with no resources, with no support from his racial betters, no
culture, no Western trappings; the man-child of a young country, unequipped
with spiritual devices, familial counsel, folk wisdom, ancestral wiles. He alone: naked and
guileless in the sunlight, against them all.[29]
Having
presented the defining elements of gothic literature and their presence and
development in Cuentos de Juana, in
an essentially Filipino yet universally human way, the assertion is
substantiated that this work of fiction by Adelina Gurrea indeed qualifies as
Hispanic-Filipino gothic.
And the key to the narrative power of Cuentos de Juana is the language that opens a window to the native soul to reveal its innocence and purity, its woundedness even in wickedness. Juana’s rich interiority — her sparkling humor, cunning and creativity of the aya Juana — are just the tip of the iceberg. Gurrea’s exquisite language and sensibility are displayed in A lo largo del camino, the collection of her poems. I hope that Juana knew that the little girl she held tenderly in her lap became a celebrated writer and poet, and that she, la Baltimore, was her muse.
Conclusion
Gurrea's literary work is situated in the
transition between the Spanish and American colonial periods, from the 1900s to the
years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War II. The first two decades of the 20th
century are considered the golden age of Filipino letters, of writers,
journalists and poets who wrote in Spanish.
It was a literature that brought to the fore the conflicts and
vicissitudes of the lives of a generation that used the press, the arts and
literature, in Spanish, Tagalog and the other Philippine languages, to assert
the Filipinos’ will to freedom and celebrate their culture.
If Gurrea shared the sentiments and
political orientation of the Filipino campaigners for independence under the
U.S. regime, she gave no overt sign of it in her writings. In Spain she devoted herself to cultural
activities and took time from her many duties to write about her memories of her
beloved homeland, and in two subsequent visits to the Philippines she stressed
the cultural and spiritual importance of Spanish as the language of our
Hispanic-Filipino legacy.
As a Hispanic-Filipino writer, her prose
and poetry are part of the Filipino literary heritage. However, after Spain lost the archipelago and
with the accelerated abandonment of Spanish, despite being deservedly recognized
in Spain for the cultural value of her work and her admission as a full member
of the Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española, Gurrea may have foreseen that
her writings would become inaccessible to the Filipino youth .... until the
advent of new generations who would want to rediscover the treasures of the
past, future generations that would once again read and write in Spanish. I
want to believe that Doña Adelina left messages to the future in her essays and
speeches, because in the lectures she delivered to her Filipino audiences, she
clearly and strongly conveyed the importance of validating and defending our
heritage.
And speaking of a hypothetical future
return of Spanish to the Filipinos, let's talk about “The Boom”.
Hispanic-Filipino literature as a precursor
of the Latin American Boom
This article was born as an attempt to
write in the key of literary criticism, and has led me to reflect on
Spanish-Philippine literature within its larger framework: the literary universe of the former Spanish
colonies.
Ours is a literature that had a difficult
birth and development in the three centuries of the colony, and that came to
bloom with the fervor, first reformist and then revolutionary, of the late
nineteenth century. It flourished with
astonishing vitality in the early days of the American regime, which tolerated
a freedom of the press never allowed under Spain. However, the foundations were laid for
universal education in English, which led to the progressive abandonment of
Spanish in the following decades. The
proud triumph of English was inevitable: the English-educated Filipino would
inevitably become enamored of English literature, and the Filipinos who
continued to be mired in hardship and social limitations would bet on
emigration to the great magnet of the North, the land of hope for all the
world's migrants. In the course of decades, the illiterate and poor Filipinos were
followed by new batches of young Filipinos with higher education and
professional training.
Filipino literature in Spanish, upon the language
change to English, went into a century-long hibernation — metaphorically speaking, because even during the
decades of greatest indifference there have been cultural heroes and heroines
who have kept the flame alive on Philippine soil, notably Don Guillermo Gomez
Rivera. But in this new era of the
Internet and the globalization of communications and transportation, a new
world of creation has opened up for us, islands and a continent rich in humus
for the new seeds in need of nourishment, their roots and deep, solidary
traditions never truncated. It is the
great wealth and treasure of Spanish, Caribbean and Latin American literature
that can inspire us, the new Filipino writers, if we wish to recover the legacy
of our founding language, our foundational culture. To respond to this enormous and precious
challenge, we must arm ourselves with the Rizalian sensibility of justice and
authentically Filipino education, and with the Gurrean inspiration of a
mother's unconditional love for our own people, for ourselves, without
exclusivist distinctions or divisiveness between mestizos, creoles and natives.
In terms of the time that must pass before an
authentic national literature can emerge, it is worth reflecting on how the
Latin American Boom of the 20th century — that cross-continental
and overseas marvel from Mexico to Chile, including Puerto Rico, Cuba and the
Dominican Republic — produced an
avalanche of literary works that captivated readers of the entire the planet,
thanks to their translations, and that the Boom emerged 400 years after the
Conquest. Our own foundational literary
tradition bore its first fruits from the mid-19th century on, the same era of
the first seeds of the Boom,[30]
until reaching the zenith of its flowering in the first two decades of the 20th
century — approximately 350 years after the founding
of Manila.
As a Spanish colony, the development of Hispanic-Filipino
culture necessarily followed a parallel path to that of the other colonies,
except that, unlike Mexico, Central America and, in general, all of Latin
America, Spanish culture and hegemony was not established in the Philippines over
razed millenary physical foundations of prior civilizations (Aztec, Mayan,
Inca). In this sense, our initial moment of process as a Spanish colony, was
analogous to those of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic: the destruction of incipient indigenous
cultures, the disappearance of the native way of life with evangelization. But
in the Philippines, as in Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, the
indigenous numerical superiority could not be eradicated, not in the plains, the
mountains, or in the bodies. The
mountain-dwelling ethnic groups of Luzon have survived, even if just mere
traces remain. But
they remain.
The development of a high literary culture takes
a long time because it is birthed by social and historical evolution. The roots of our literature are still alive in
the dark backwater of our Hispanic-Filipino past, which is still a source of
inspiration, whether conscious or subconscious, of our literature in English.
Therefore, I predict that there will be a
future literary flowering of Filipino writers and poets in Spanish as we return
to speaking, writing, thinking, loving and reminiscing in Spanish. How difficult will it be, if even Japanese
writers are capable of writing in languages other than Japanese, when, for us,
Spanish is truly our language, it is in our DNA, in our blood and bones. It
will be essential to go back to our Hispanic-Filipino writers and poets and, in
parallel, to broaden our linguistic and artistic horizons, immersing ourselves
in the arts, cultures, stories and legends of the great cultural creators of
the Caribbean, Mexico, Latin America and, of course, Spain. Not in translation, but in the original Spanish.
Our honored poet, journalist, playwright
and novelist in Castilian Spanish, Don Guillermo Gomez Rivera, is our direct
and living link to the Hispanic-Filipino literary golden age. But we who were
born from the 1950’s on are necessarily hybrid creators in a country whose
sources of Hispanic-Filipino inspiration continue there, latent in our native
soil. And we are in need, I firmly
believe, of the renewing breath, the proximity and encounter with our family
beyond the Pacific to recover our forgotten language. This is because the
Caribbean and Hispanic America mirror us.
The Castilian language that Hispanic America and the Caribbean made their
own is the same tongue that will always link us to the powerful memory, deep
love and noble sensitivity that were taken from us by the vicissitudes of a
destiny that reduced us to machine-like struggle for chimerical material well-being,
impelled us to create in a new language, a different sensitivity, that could
never replace Spanish, so interbred and interwoven with our native languages,
so expressive of the spiritual depths of our filipinidad.
We will all one day live in peace with our
animas and demiurges, and whether with the tamao of Negros, the ticbalang of
Luzon, the trauco of Chile, or La Llorona of Mexico, we will share our myths,
and the terror they may arouse in us will be the fear that comes from the
living energy that creates, and heals.
Santiago,
Chile
January
30, 2022
More photos of AG:
[1] “American” meaning the U.S.
[2] Cuentos de
Juana, Madrid, Imprenta de Prensa Española, 1943, p. 7, free translation
by E. Medina. Juana era una criada nativa que conocí en mi hogar desde que
comencé a darme cuenta de las cosas de este mundo. Antes había estado sirviendo en casa de mi
abuela paterna. Como cuando yo conocí a Juana esta aún no era vieja, debemos
deducir que estuvo sirviendo siempre en la familia. Tenía el remoquete
Baltimore. Nació tal remoquete del nombre de uno de los acorazados
norteamericanos que hicieron la parodia de batirse contra la carcomida y
resquebrajada escuadra española en la bahía de Cavite.
[3] Ibid., pp. 7-8.
[4] Ibid., p. 8. Resultaba menos
ignorante que el resto de las mujeres del rancho, por su trato con los
españoles en casa de mi abuela y en la de mis padres. Hablaba el castellano,
pero se olvidaba de él tan pronto como se la reprochaba alguna mala acción o
falta en el cumplimiento de su deber.
[5] See:
https://biobibliografias.com/literatura-gotica/
[6] Ibid.
[7][7] “The Manor Houses of Ulloa.”
[8] Clark Colahan & Alfred Rodríguez, “Lo ‘Gótico’ como fórmula
creativa de Los Pazos de Ulloa”, Modern Philology, 1986, vol. 83,
núm. 4, pp. 398-404.
[9] Cuentos de
Juana, op. cit., p. 14.
[10] Peninsular: Spaniards born in Spain. Insular:
Spaniards born in the archipelago, or creoles.
[11] Her Spanish mother was in ill health and wished to return to her country
and Adelina felt duty-bound to accompany
her.
[12] Nostalgia.
[13] In her
later years Gurrea did reside again, briefly, in Negros, then returned to
Spain.
[14] Ibid., p. 240. Mezclados con
el aullido de la tempestad, remataba el cuadro dramático de aquellos momentos
los gritos y los ayes humanos, el llanto de los chiquillos, las maldiciones de
los viejos, mientras el golpe seco del hacha marcaba el ritmo en el reloj de un
tiempo que pasaba raudo a medida que el río crecía, amenazando desbordar su
cauce.
[15] Ibid., p. 241.
[16] Ibid., p. 189-191.
[17] Ibid., p. 239.
—Derribadlas todas; ya verás cómo las dejan.
—Yo no puedo hacer eso, Fermín.
—Pues yo lo haré; dame un hacha.
Se la sujetó en el cinturón y bajó a la calle. El agua caía
huracanada y el viento zarandeaba la superficie de la tierra, dando dentelladas
al arbolado, a los edificios, al propio suelo, que quedaba arañado y removido
por las uñas invisibles de los elementos.
La cortina líquida cegaba los ojos del amo y del cabo. Pero impasibles,
cual si la grandiosidad de su drama interior superase a la de la Naturaleza en
desenfreno, continuaron firmes su camino, cruzando el puente, que temblaba
sacudido por la fuerza de la corriente.
[18] Ibid., p. 214. Los bancos moteaban el césped con
guiones blancos, marcando el límite entre el parque y la orilla del Pásig.
Luisa y Fermín se sentaron juntos a dos arbustos de gumamelas dobles, los pies
perfumados por las matas de camias. Había otros aromas en los macizos, las
sampaguitas, las gardenias, los kamuning, todo el blanco oloroso del trópico.
Las aguas, abajo, estaban oscuras y quietas, soñando ya con el mar o enamoradas
de la quietud de las orillas. Y enfrente, nada: el misterio de la noche y el
eco de los violines incrustando somnolencias sensuales en la floresta. O
efluvios de admiración en el alma ingenua y primitiva de las chozas indígenas,
que miraban con sus ventanas de párpados pajizos las maravillas del otro lado.
Arriba, las estrellas: tantas, tantas, que más que un cielo tachonado, parecía
un lienzo espolvoreado con arenas de oro.
[19] Ibid., p. 203. Y en las horas más medrosas de las noches oscuras, en las fechas
fantasmales religiosas, como el día de las Ánimas, durante los comentarios en
torno a crímenes o sucesos misteriosos, en los epílogos luctuosos que sucedían
a grandes catástrofes sísmicas o meteorológicas, tifones, riadas, terremotos,
Cadio aprovechaba el fenómeno psicológico del miedo para hablar al muchacho del
tamao del lunuk e inculcar en él un terror desmesurado hacia el lugar y el
duende.
[20] Ibid., p. 202. Y
con frecuencia le hablaba del lunuk, misteriosa guarida del tamao pérfido y
vengativo, que guardaba, además, agravios contra su padre, contra su familia,
contra la sangre que corría por sus venas.
[21] Ibid., p. 241. —¿Y cómo se enteró el tamao de esa orden? —preguntó otro capataz.
—¡Ah!,
porque es asuang —replicó Cadio—, y además, porque el señorito Fermín me leyó
el párrafo de la carta que se refería a tal mandato en el preciso momento en
que pasábamos por debajo del árbol. Y entonces el tamao, en medio de una calma
absoluta, agitó violentamente el ramaje, cual si le sacudiese el viento.
[22] Ibid., p. 228-229. Ahora
no voy a rogar. Yo, Fermín, te he visto
nacer, te he criado; he sido, más que un servidor, un padre para ti; he sufrido
cuando te desviaste de mi afecto, cuando te alejaste fríamente de mi custodia,
de mis desvelos, de mi cariño, tratándome como a un simple empleado; lo sufrí
todo y continué sirviéndote en silencio. Pero ahora no voy a soportar ni a
consentir que busques tu perdición. He de intervenir en esto. El lunuk no se
corta, porque lo defenderé yo con mi propia vida para que ella salve la tuya; y
si en nombre de lo que he sufrido con tu desvío y lo que he luchado por tu
prosperidad y lo que me he sacrificado por hacerte un hombre modelo no escuchas
y atiendes mi ruego, tendrás que quitarme de en medio para satisfacer el
capricho de cortar ese árbol.
[23] Ibid. Cadio estaba llorando esta vez también. Fermín presintió sus lágrimas en lo ahogado de la voz, pues había oscurecido y apenas se veía bajo el ramaje del árbol. Asustado por la energía del cabo y emocionado ante aquel cariño, toda abnegación, que se rebelaba sólo para salvarle, Fermín tiró de las riendas de su caballo, montó y partió al galope.
[24] Ibid., p. 249. Cuando, finalmente, salió de las aguas cargado con su trofeo de
muerte, las dos riberas del río se hallaban iluminadas con antorchas de
petróleo, empuñadas por los indios del caserío, y el reflejo de las llamas caía
sobre la poza siniestra en un rielar pavoroso y trágico, tenebroso y fúnebre.
[25] Ibid., p. 248. La superstición se agarraba a la garganta del cabo fiel, del indígena en cuya alma sedimentó el atavismo terrores seculares, convicciones fantasmales, y el hombre sentía cómo el terror le iba ahogando, ahogando, con una fuerza superior a la suya. Un relámpago único y extraño iluminó entonces el remanso y su visión le recordó que allí, en su fondo, podía estar Fermín con vida todavía.
[26] Ibid., p. 57. Los de Caiñamán
no venían. Ningún grupo comentaba el motivo. El carácter oriental de los
nativos les baña en una pusilanimidad fatalista que les aleja de las extrañezas
y de las alusiones ante hechos que no revistan demasiada gravedad.
[27] Ibid., p. 214. Callaron la madre y el hijo. Ese silencio tan característico de la
raza, que parece vacío y es una plenitud inexpresable.
[28] Op. cit., p. 196. —El amo sabe con qué fidelidad le he servido siempre: nunca
desobedecí, nunca robé, nunca esquivé el trabajo con que aumentar la riqueza
del señor; tampoco negué nada a mi amo, le busqué las mujeres más atractivas
del poblado, salvé como mejor pude los momentos difíciles, defendí su vida con
mi propio pecho, y de ello hablan las heridas que recibí por interponerme entre
él y el bolo[28]
de un enemigo que quería matarle…
[29] Ibid., p. 222. Y contra todo, solo Cadio, el labrador llano de la planicie
tropical, el hombre de color, sin recursos, sin apoyos raciales, sin cultura,
sin occidentalismo; el hombre niño del país joven, desprovisto de repliegues
espirituales, de prevenciones hereditarias, de sabidurías populares, de
picarescas atávicas. El solo, desnudo e
ingenuo a la luz del día, contra todos.
[30] Argentina's first prose work, "El matadero” (The Slaughteryard),
written by poet and essayist Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851), was the precursor
of the Spanish-American short story. It
was written in exile and published posthumously in 1871, and is one of the most
studied texts in Latin American literature.
The Filipino secular priest, padre José Burgos (1837-1872) wrote a
historical novel, La loba negra, that
was impossible to print in his lifetime. It was finally published in 1958, eighty-six
years after Burgos’ execution on the false charge of sedition. The Latin
American Boom as a literary phenomenon spanned the 1960’s and 1970’s, but an
early precursor was Hombres de Maíz (Men
of Maize) published in 1949, by Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias
(1899-1974), awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967. The title came from the Popol Vuh, the sacred
book of the Mayas and was inspired by the indigenous Mayaquiché cosmogony that
the human body was created out of corn. Most
interesting is that Asturias’ nanny, Lola Reyes, was a young indigenous girl
who told him the stories, myths and legends of her culture, and greatly
influenced the future writer.
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