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Literary Reading Through Biographical Context: Subject Objectives
Literary Reading Through Biographical Context: Subject Objectives
Subject Objectives
Start-up Activity
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World 1|Page
S.Y 2020-2021
Supplementary Ideas
In your previous English and Filipino classes, perhaps you have been
asked by your teachers to read about the author before reading his or
her work. Some teachers ask you to read about the life of Francisco
Baltazar before discussing Florante at Laura. This is because the
author’s life may affect his or her writing.
Biographical Context places a particular literary work within the context
of the author’s life. Consider the circumstances under which the literary
work was written. While exploring biographical context, useful sources
include biographies of the author, autobiographies or memoirs by the
author or by people who knew him or her, and critical works that give
close attention to the author’s life.
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World 3|Page
S.Y 2020-2021
Self-Reflection
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your
answer
FORM
Read each statement and check ( ) the box that reflects your work
today.
Name: Date:
Section:
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Agree Disagree
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World 4|Page
S.Y 2020-2021
Self-Assessment
Directions: Read the author’s life and the story, Under my Invisible
Umbrella. Answer the questions afterwards. (50pts.)
Laurel Fantauzzo is a writer and teacher. Much of her work finds her
studying appetite, identity, the signals for real love, and the search for
home. She is largely a nonfiction writer and an essayist, but she also
writes young adult fiction. Laurel Fantauzzo was born in Southern
California to a Filipina mother and an Italian-American father.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Manila Review, and
Esquire Philippines to name a few. She earned a 2011 Fulbright research
scholarship, a 2012 Iowa Arts Fellowship, and a 2013 Don Carlos
Palanca Memorial Award for Literature. Her unpublished non-fiction
manuscript, The First Impulse: Notes on Love, Film, and Death in the
Philippines, is an investigation into the unsolved deaths of two young
film critics, and she is currently at work on a memoir.
“Did you notice that he held the umbrella only for you?” she murmured.
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World 5|Page
S.Y 2020-2021
Then—as people of the Philippines are inclined to do, when a situation
seems too absurd in its wrongness to repair—she laughed.
The man was not holding the umbrella above me. He was holding the
umbrella above my whiteness. He was holding it like a flag for everything
he assumed my whiteness represented: my wealth, my station in life—
higher than his—and my deserving extra service.
Before moving to the Philippines, I had no idea how closely my class would
be identified with my face. In America, my face had been merely diverting,
a prompt for racial guessing-games that always made me shudder.
“Mexican! Polish! Sephardic!” “You kinda look Spanish and Oriental at the
same time. What is that?” Or my face had been an inspiration for the
saying of strange, murky compliments that made me shudder more. “I
wish I had your nice, smooth, Asian skin.” “You’re so lucky your nose isn’t
too—well, you know.”
Thanks to my face, and the strength of the dollars I had, I was top one-
percenting for the first time in my life. I lived, overtly, the troubling
inventory Peggy McIntosh outlines in “White Privilege: Unpacking The
Invisible Knapsack:”
Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color
not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
Last August, I spent only forty pesos at an upscale cafe in Greenbelt mall
to wait out a cloudburst. I used the café’s Wi-Fi for hours, while servers
impatiently thrust menus at more-melanined customers who had dared sit
for too long.
In a live, crowded theater, I crossed a restricted area to use the much less
crowded staff restroom. Four guards said nothing.
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World 6|Page
S.Y 2020-2021
As I slowly learned my motherland’s arithmetic of identity—repeated in
countries once brutalized by white rulers around the world—I realized
what members of the service sector assumed of me: English speaker +
pale face + black hair = A foreigner. Or a mestiza. She looks like the
rulers—Spanish, or American. She and her family must have some
authority—perhaps political authority. She merits extra courtesy.
My favorite karinderya serves scrambled eggs and rice for twenty pesos.
My presence amuses and annoys the guards and drivers who were never
granted scholarships to study me in my birth country. As my Tagalog
improved, I began to understand their objections. Didn’t I have a more
sosyal place to eat as a foreigner? What was I playing at, treading into
their space?
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Or the server who looks at me in terror when we realize she brought the
wrong order. Who will stop her boss from automatically deducting the two
hundred pesos from her own small paycheck? Who can she look to,
besides me, and the narrative of wealth my pale face projects, to
momentarily assist her with a generous tip?
In the end I call the overcharges my “dayuhan tax.” My foreigner tariff. The
extra cost I owe for the postcolonial privileges of my face. As long as the
population remains economically stranded, I suspect my American
whiteness continues to be a kind of cheating in the modern Philippines.
Besides the dauyhan tax I joke about, there are other subtler, more
personal taxes intrinsic to my pallid appearance. No one in the Philippines
will ever immediately believe I am Filipina, no matter how strongly and
how affectionately I choose the country. My Tagalog will take years to
reach everyday, pun-level proficiency. My mother chose not to teach me
and my two younger brothers Tagalog, for fear that our Italian American
father would feel excluded. My brothers feel no connection at all to her
home country. I alone return regularly.
On some days I don’t know what to do with all this, when I leave the room
I rent in Quezon City. On some weekends I grow so tired and confused, I
don’t leave. I stay in and watch the subtitles on the local music video
channel, Myx, to try and gain a little more Tagalog. I harbor dreams of
using my white mestiza privilege to become a VJ, until I hear how fast and
natural the VJs’ Tagalog is.
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World 8|Page
S.Y 2020-2021
I turn the television off.
One night, a new friend invites me to a party in Forbes Park. I know the
neighborhood’s name as code, the way I know certain last names as code:
upper-est class, highest security, a servant for each family member, etc.
Inside the house, a fog machine distorts the regal dark. A DJ’s bass line
shakes my skeleton. A man dressed like a pirate urges us to drink. Small,
oval-shaped rainbows glow intensely at a slick, temporary bar. Servers
call me “Ma’am!” and gesture toward the rainbows. I realize they’re
drinks. I pick one up. It illuminates my hand. My rainbow shot is very,
very sweet.
“What?” a Filipina friend mocks me later, when I describe the bull and the
bass line and the sweet rainbow and the Malibu-celebrity-style house and
the free burger that was really very delicious. “Were you just judging it the
whole time?”
I flinch. But I fail to explain to her that the same thought occurred to me at
the party, too.
Why, I argued to myself, should I judge this? Why should I worry about
my complicity in racial hierarchies and class hierarchies and family
entrenchments that were constructed long before I ever arrived in my
motherland? Why not imagine, for just one night, that I am part of a
powerful family? Why not just laugh?
When I finally exit the gate, I am surprised to find another, more muted
party—party in the most utilitarian sense of the word.
These are the drivers and bodyguards, waiting for the members of the
Philippine elite inside. They smoke and murmur to each other and check
their cell phones. Their own families are waiting for them at homes far
from Forbes Park.
How do I make space in myself for everyone on both sides of the gate?
Protected and unprotected? I don’t know.
Once, when the wind blew the trees horizontal in the business district of
Ortigas, I paused in the lobby of an office tower, drenched. More and more
passersby, each of their umbrellas brutalized and useless, joined me. The
guards let us all stay. Most of us were waiting to walk to the MRT train.
Over the next hour, we watched power lines whip and taxis forge defiantly
forward and rain slash into the streets’ now-surging floodwaters. We were
all, for a brief moment, equally halted, equally soaked.
He smiled, offering to go out into the rain for me. I smiled back, and told
him no.
http://themanilareview.com/issues/view/under-my-invisible-umbrella
Ang, J.G. (2016) Literatura: 21st Century Philippine and World Literature.
Mindshapers Co. Inc, Intramuros Manila
https://www.slideshare.net/danigrose/contexts-of-literary-works
https://salempress.com/Literary-Context-English-Literature
http://mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/305context.html
https://www.vcestudyguides.com/blog/the-importance-of-context-in-literature