Land of the Mourning

Mandy’s search for answers to the sad plight of his people and country as a backdrop, he weaves a story full of personal challenges and struggles to overcome abject poverty, illnesses, a disastrous first-love, a conflicted feeling toward his deceased father and older sibling, and realizes his quest for a college education as a ticket out of the slums. Determined to read his unpublished memoir to his elderly and sick mother, Mandy visits her in Manila and rediscovers a lifelong bond between them and a rare opportunity to get clarity of vague memories and questions he has kept to himself. During the visit he took the journey to his ancestral village, which for years he has avoided, afraid to find the place of childhood memories gone forever. The memoir dwells on teenage love, a coming of age under difficult social and economic conditions of slum life. Although childhood love is a common theme, the naiveté and innocence of the main characters give the story a different ring. The story is framed by a series of love letters exchanges between the two youths spanning the year of their forbidden love. Set in Manila in the 60’s, the writer’s struggles to find himself, his coming to grips with an ill-fated young love, overcoming poverty along with millions of other poor Filipinos, understanding his people’s modern-day diaspora, and his country’s unending political instability, are themes that underlie the plot. Evolutionary psychological perspective has been employed in this work as a framework to explain or underscore some of the human tendencies and flaws of the characters. It is a perspective also used to describe the plight of the Philippines as a troubled nation by revisiting its colonial past and the long-term effects of colonialism on the Filipino consciousness. The benefits of Western ideas and religious beliefs introduced to or imposed upon the Filipinos as colonial subjects are weighed against the devastating imprints of colonialism with far-reaching consequences on the psyche of generations of Filipinos. Perhaps a parallel can be drawn with other nations whose past is similar and likewise suffering from constant socio-political upheavals.