I first read this novel as an M.A. thesis called “Kamatayan sa Piling ng mga Lilang Nimpeya” back in 2001. Yapan changed the novel’s title in its eventual publication for it to reflect, perhaps, the various senses in “mata” that the narrative attempts to deal with. The most obvious of course is “mata” as sense of sight.
In Filipino, we use our eyes to have paningin and pagtingin, which may connote opinion and affection, respectively. In the novel, we get to know the stories from Esteban’s point of view, an albularyo who supposedly saw all that could be seen in the events that he recounted, even those that only his sixth sense could witness. Of course, he did not have only his “views” of the things that happened in Sagrada; he also certainly had emotional stakes in them for they involved Selya, the one he used to love but could not help in the moment (perhaps one of the most central “sandali” in the story) she needed him most. If Esteban’s view of things seemed very intimate, there were also distant pananaw and pagtanaw, like the opinions of the unnamed people of Sagrada when they learned of Estela’s suicide in the beginning of the novel.
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Mata could also mean “the center” or “from where things come,” as in the “eye of the storm,” and this certainly does not overread for Sagrada is in Bicol, one of the regions most visited by typhoons in the Philippines—and the chapter “Mga Bahay sa Gitna ng Bagyo” dealt with the very naturalist relationship of the space’s climate and weather to the internal and external conflicts that the characters had to deal with.
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Mata, when used as a verb in Filipino, could additionally mean two things. One is “to make obvious, to reveal.” We say this to people in frustration of their inability to see commonsensically. This is probably Esteban’s reason why he had to write the stories he already narrated before: the textuality of the story corners it, makes it subject to the storyteller’s gaze, unlike the fluidity and context dependence of oral narration, that is more likely the reason why deaths ensued after Nene, and later, her son, Boboy, “heard” the stories of their epic heroes. They misheard or missed entirely the metaphors that function as both representation and revelation at the same time, like the unbridled presences of snakes and Oryol throughout their family history and the local history of Bicol. Mata could also mean “to devalue” someone or something (as in “matahin,” “ipamata”): and so this is also certainly a story of reviewing the marginalized, those outside the center. For example, the woman, the native and the uneducated that Agatha somehow represents.
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In the end, mata, when pronounced as máta, is also death, the inescapable death that was expressed more overtly in this novel’s first working title. The novel began with Estela’s death, and it was maybe a death that had to happen—not just for her, but—for the child in her womb to end the curse of Nuevas growing up fatherless, like Boboy and Nene did.
Filed under: Filipino Novels Tagged: Alvin B. Yapan
