BIOGRAPHY

Angela Manalang-Gloria

(1907 - 1995 )

Angela Manalang Gloria’s Poems (1940) is the first and only pre-war anthology of poetry in English by a Filipino woman. A collection of lyrical pieces exploring a woman’s private passions, it was predictably ignored at the 1940 Commonwealth Literary Contests, which prized social significance and moral values. Although re-issued as a student anthology in 1950, Poems failed to merit the attention of the dominant literary critics of the time, who subscribed to the school of New Criticism. Manalang Gloria’s poetry, however, has undergone revaluation in recent years. The publication of a complete collection of her poems and a literary biography has made her work available to a wider audience. Re-reading her work free from the constraints of her time, feminist critics such as Edna Zapanta Manlapaz and poet Gemino Abad have found the poems of Manalang Gloria a revelation, prompting them to assert that she emerges—imperiously—as the matriarch of Filipino poets writing in English. Among ALIWW’s collection of Manalang Gloria’s personal papers and photographs are two notebooks, Bureau of Education issues which the poet had appropriated from her young son in grade school. These contain early penciled drafts of some of Manalang Gloria’s poems and various notes, some of which have faded beyond legibility. Of particular interest is an early draft of “Revolt from Hymen,” the controversial piece which reportedly made the all-male judges at the Commonwealth Literary Contests “see red.” The draft seethes with anger at the experience of marital rape, and becomes a compelling read against the final version of the poem, where the poet successfully transmutes the raw display of rage into controlled but masterful spite.

I. SOLEDAD

               Soledad is a name in Spanish which means “solitude”. From what I have understood, the poem talks about Soledad who has an affair with a guy and she is being talked (or thought) about by her neighbors. I think that during the 1940s (a still very conservative time) people looked down on people who had affairs, thus the neighbors talking about her, calling it (the affair) “a sacrilege”.  Manalang-Gloria compares the affair to a fire that ravages everything that is in its path.  The nosy neighbors (in my humble opinion) cannot even begin to imagine why Soledad “shattered every mullioned pane/ To let a firebrand in”.  The fire that I talked about before could also be taken to symbolize the all-consuming desire that devoured Soledad.  Because of her affair and because she “loved too well” the “town condemned her”. They condemned her maybe because they didn’t (try to) understand her or they thought that she was of a lower class than all of them because she had an affair during a time when anything that is not prim, not proper, not subscribing fully to the church’s ideas are looked down upon by snobbish matrons.  Because of this affair, Soledad is scorned by the town and maybe, just maybe she is left alone to her own devices, alienated, alone in a town full of people who scorn her.

II. REVOLT FROM HYMEN

               Well, I learned from one of my classes before that a hymen is a “sacred thing” because it is the thing that determines if a girl was still a virgin or not. Apparently, it kind of “broke” when the vag. is breached for the first time. But for now, enough of this hymen thing per se because I still have to discuss her poem Revolt from Hymen.

               According to Vina Carla Gonzaga, during the 1940s Manalang-Gloria’s poem was deemed “immoral” because of the word “whore’s”. The censors wanted her to change the word to “bore” for it to be published in Philippine textbooks.  It’s a good thing that she didn’t yield to the censors because if she did, then the poem wouldn’t be the same. Duh.
 

               I think that the poem talks about a woman’s being free from something. This something could be one of the following: a.) the woman is free from her Self;  b.) the woman is free from the very restricting society (in general)  that ties her down;  or cso I apologize to the offended party/ies). ) she is free from the male-dominated society that she is living in.  The only thing that I am certain about is that this poem talks of a freedom of some sort from something.  And this “revolt” is a celebration of that freedom. The hymen could symbolize a woman but I don’t want to raise stereotypes (and I don’t want the feminists to stone me to death because of this,