DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

TH
ST
20 AND 21 CENTURY
LITERATURE
Ma. Julie Anne C. Gajes
BONFAL NATIONAL HIGH
SCHOOL

 What

makes the 20th and

21st century literature
different from one
another?

20th century literature deals with LOVE,

LOSS and LIFE at a general point of
view while 21st century literature is
more specific and the topics are more
intense such as the extremities of real
life. (e.g. Pasilyo 8)

THEME

20th century literature follows the

traditional plot (beginning-middleend) while 21st century literature is
more fragmented

STRUCTURE

20th century literature is traditional

in a way that what you see is what
you get while 21st century
literature is experimental it
would usually take on an informal
form

STYLE

Most 20th century literature

topics deals with man vs.
foreigner while 21st century
literature topics deals with man
vs. himself

TOPICS

PATRICIA
EVANGELISTA

a Manila-based journalist and

documentary filmmaker. She
is a multimedia reporter for
online news agency Rappler
and is a writer-at-large for
Esquire Magazine.

Evangelista finished high

school at St. Theresa's
College, Quezon City. She
graduated Cum Laude with a
degree of BA Speech
Communication University of
the Philippines Diliman in
2006. She is an alumna of
the UP Debate Society
(UPDEBSOC).

 The

Baby in the Backpack

What can you infer from the title?

Why is the baby in the backpack?

The backpack sat on the curbside. The surface was flaking, the
purple print scratched.
We found it in the afternoon, beside three corpses in body bags. The
men working along the highway said that the bodies had just been
recovered. They said there was a baby in the backpack.
It was cold that day. The air smelled of dead. I remember crouching
beside the bag and hunting for the zipper, remember thinking I had
to verify the story, remember feeling uneasy. It was a morbid act,
like opening a strangers closed coffin. Maybe it was a convenient
excuse, an odd conservatism in a city where the dead had been
shoved into plastic garbage bags. I didnt open the bag, ran my
hands over it instead, tracing the lumps of head and hands and
folded knees.
It was 15 days since the storm, and there was a corpse inside the
backpack.

 Do

you remember
Typhoon Yolanda?

I write this late at night, in Manila, almost three months after typhoon Haiyan. It
is difficult to write. I meant to write something else, have been trying to write
something else for a week, an analysis of post-disaster vulnerabilities and
government mishandling. I did the interviews, read the documents, watched the
congressional hearings and the resulting glad-handing and politicking that came
with it: the secretary of the interior smiling, the mayor of the broken city smiling
back, the men and women in the background smiling along, all of them grinning
as if they were not witness to weeks of calling each other liars and frauds.

Instead Im writing about how it was, on the ground, the apocalypse that all of us
found when we landed on the Tacloban tarmac. I seem to be unable to write
about anything else. Ive been a columnist for ten years, a reporter for the last
five. My beat is disaster and human rights and the stories that fall in between
the dead, the lost, the rebels and the survivors. Nothing Ive seen prepared me
for what I saw after Haiyan.

I dont claim to be a veteran. What Ive seen is nothing to what many others have
seen, and my version of reportage is very often limited to individual human
experience instead of the larger implications. I fixate on images, sentences,
narrative arcs, the smoke in the sky, the blood on the doorknob, the bottle of
White Flower carried by the defendant, the color and pattern of the tiles on the
floor of Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 221 instead of the decision
handed down by the trial court judge. For me, Haiyan was the rainbow blanket
around the dead boy. It was the father who covered his drowned daughters
corpse with a tin roof to protect her from the rain. It was the man who walked
daily to his girlfriends grave, the plastic panda floating in the water, the baby in
the purple backpack.

There were many other stories. Government ineptitude. Political infighting. The
scale of displacement and the terrible conditions forced on the survivors. I admit I
went looking for the dead, an easy thing in Haiyan country. My reasoning is the
same as it's always been in a situation where morals are suspended and the
narrative makes no sense, it is necessary to hold whatever truth is left: that the
dead shouldn't be dead.

Maybe there is some ego involved here, the awareness

that the sights and smells and sounds that will force the
average person to turn away is something that can be
handled without flinching, safe under the cloak of public
interest. It is necessary to pretend those of us who report
are tougher than everyone else. It is necessary, very
often, to pretend this is a job, a commitment, a challenge
met that separates us from the government clerk or the
lawyer or even the reporters who cover the seemingly
safer beats. We understand, for example, that it is
possible to step away, to retreat to some safe mental
corner while noting down the observation that the body
in the water is probably female, that what may or may
not be breasts are still under the faded yellow shirt, in
spite of the fact the face above the shirt has been
stripped of skin and flesh.

It is of course presumptuous for me to use the word we

instead of I, but I is a pronoun that I have used under
protest in the last few years. I is personal, it redirects
the spotlight, it is arrogant and indulgent and emphasizes
the primacy of personal opinion instead of the real story. I
dont pretend to speak for all journalists, or even for some
journalists. Im not certain I even speak for myself, as the
safe mental corner that I used to have is no longer
particularly safe. Fourteen million people were affected, at
least 6,000 died. What I felt and continue to feel is not the
story I mean to tell, as there are many things more
deserving of public space than the confusion of a 28-yearold journalist, especially one who demanded for this
coverage and found out that the magic cape has holes.

Everyday I asked the questions. Framed the

interviews. Rolled the video. Held up a hand to
stop a weeping man midsentence because of the
roar of the C130 swooping overhead. Nodded, in
understanding, as if it was possible to understand
how it feels to watch wife and children drown
while hanging on to a slab of concrete. I asked
survivors about the height of the waters and the
loss of daughters, and although many of them
were desperate to tell their stories, it was
impossible not to feel exploitative, that we were,
or I was, using their grief to add to the grand
drama that was the aftermath of typhoon Haiyan.

I dont pretend I made any sort of difference. The stories I

told were stories people might or might not read or watch
or share, in the language of the Internet but they were
only stories, and at the end of the day I knew I was
leaving, knew that in a week or two weeks I would be in
Manila at my desk and the weeping father would still be
there, in the dark, dreaming of his lost babies. I suspect I
went looking for the worst to validate my being on the
ground. It would be romantic to say I was bearing witness
for the victims. The truth was that I went from shock to
further shock, and I was afraid, always, that I wasnt
doing anyones story justice. Covering Haiyan was like
walking into a Salvador Dali painting and discovering the
paint was still damp.

I asked for a week longer, after a week I stayed one more,

and then was allowed one more. I like to think I stayed as
long as I could, but thats only one way of telling the story.
The longer I stayed, the less guilty I felt. I admit I didnt
finish out that last week, because on the 16th day I found
myself on the coast shooting a womans corpse hanging
from a tree. It took a long time to see the body. I was
standing less than five feet across, I could smell it, I was
told it was there, but her head was pushed back and her
arms were the color of dead wood and my brain refused to
acknowledge that what I was staring at used to be a
person. When the image suddenly made sense in my head,
I took the photo, then turned to vomit into the bushes.

There were many more bodies before and after that, mass graves
with hundreds of tangled dead, but none of them had me heaving
with my hands on my knees. Maybe it was the fact she hung meters
away from the shanty of a man who refused to leave for an
evacuation center because he was waiting for his missing wife to
come home I want to be here when she comes, he said. His
name is William Cabuquing, and he was one of the survivors who
packed the bodies of his neighbors into bags 14 days after he
staggered home bleeding after being swept across the bay. He did
not know who the woman on the tree was.
That night I was on the phone with my editor. Are you all right, she
asked. It was a question that at that point seemed terribly
important, and I stuttered and mumbled and was largely inarticulate
until I managed to say, after a series of evasions, that yes, I wanted
to go home.

The truth is that there is no going home. It is

difficult to write about it, and more difficult to
write about anything else. I am aware there are
many journalists who can move past stories like
this, that my job demands I move past it myself. I
also know there are others like me who have been
smoking too much and sleeping too long, who
have come home to wake in the night, unable to
move on to other stories and other
responsibilities, aware, one way or another, that
whatever story comes along, Haiyan is out there,
and the promises we made are still no more than
promises.

I like to think of journalism as an attempt to make the public

imagine. We cannot protest against what we cannot see, we cannot
move when we cannot be made to feel. Six thousand is a large
number, larger than Ketsanas 464, Bophas 1,067 or Washis
1,453, but it is difficult, as with any statistic, to remember that
each one of the thousands in each of the storms shouldnt have
died, could have been saved, deserved, if nothing else, to be
buried with some attempt at dignity instead of being left to rot in a
muddy field covered with campaign posters. We are meant to
understand that, to imagine that, to stand in the shoes of the man
scrabbling in the muck for his fiance. To forget what happened
makes us all guilty, makes us accomplices to what brought them
here, allows the same tragedy to happen again and again, as it has
happened, again and again.

I dont know what I intended to say. Maybe that I cant

forget, or that Im afraid I will. Many of us who were on
the ground are afraid to say what it was like, because
were supposed to be tough as nails. Were supposed to
be brave. Were meant to serve the story. Were
supposed to walk away from the mass grave and report
the number and the state of decomposition. We can
stand in the hellhole that was Zamboanga City in
September and say yes, we can take more. Were afraid
if we say we cant, we wont be sent to the next story,
will be told we dont have the balls, dont have what it
takes, cant deliver, wont survive. I say we because
its harder to say I, and maybe that was what I meant
to say.

How do you find the essay? Can you imagine being

in Haiyan country yourself? What can you say
about the experiences the author has written down
in the essay? How do these make you feel?
What is one personal story that you have that can
help you relate more to the essay on hand? How is
the deadly Typhoon Haiyan portrayed in the text?
Is this essay entertaining resisting or challenging
the events or beliefs of the Filipino culture? What
does it say about journalism and writing?