[Readings in Philippine Literature: Short Story # 2] Servant Girl by Estrella Alfon, a great Cebuano short story writer

Today, Mel U of The Reading Life and I feature the works of Estrella Alfon, a Cebuano pre-war short story writer. This is our second endeavor to showcase Filipino writers and their works. Our first feature was on the works of Paz Marquez-Benitez. This is supposedly a once-a-month initiative but we found that there are so many writers and stories that we could make a post on, so this might turn out more regularly than just monthly.

Estrella Alfon (1917-1983) is a Cebuano, like me. She was born in Cebu, one of the beautiful provinces in the archipelagic Philippines. She was a fictionist, playwright, and journalist. From what I gather about her, she is a realist writer because she wrote about life as she saw or experience it; hence, she was not a strong conformist of technique and style. This characteristic is quite obvious in her two stories, The Servant Girl and Panamilit sa Kabatan-onan (Farewell to Youth), although The Servant Girl has been praised as one of her stories with admirable story structure.

Alfon was born during the period in Cebu when periodicals play a significant role in the promotion of fiction in the prewar period, specifically in the 1920s and 1930s. At this time, there were Cebuanos who produced several works in Spanish and English, but majority of the literature produced were works in Cebuano. Renowned historian Resil Mojares observed that, “Cebuano writing also had the special value of being more directly expressive of the groundlevel realities of Visayan culture.” For new readers, Visayan refers to the islands in the Visayas region, the midsection of the country. The north is Luzon and the south in Mindanao. Cebu is in the Visayas.

On a personal note, I agree with Mojares. Oftentimes, the best way to illustrate the life of a certain culture is to use the language unique to that culture. In our case, we have Cebuano as a dialect. It is a sad case that many of the young people I know are more inclined to read, write, and speak in American English rather than reading, writing, and speaking in Cebuano. Even some children as young as six years old who are now starting school are having serious difficulties speaking their own language in conversing with other children who knows more Cebuano than English, because they have been heavily taught and programmed to speak English at home and in school.

Alfon’s clear no-nonsense depiction of Visayan life is admirable. She is one of those fine writers who contributed to the maturity that Cebuano fiction already achieved when the Pacific War broke out in 1941. Along with the others, she showed “the richness of Cebuano language as medium for artistic prose”.

One of Alfon’s memorable works is The Servant Girl (1937), which can be read online. Her other work that I would like to briefly mention about is written in Cebuano, entitled “Panamilit sa Kabatan-onan” (which means “Farewell to Youth”). However, the latter can only be found in printed books, such as Sugilanong Sugbuanon: Cebuano Fiction Until 1940 by Erlinda K. Alburo, et. al. I tried to search for it online but I couldn’t find a link that I could share with you.

Servant Girl is written in English. It centers on Rosa, a household help working for an abusive woman. During her service, she meets two men--Sancho who has a suspicious way of following her whenever she comes out of the house and the cochero (horse-drawn carriage driver) who conquers her daydreams and wishes for love. In the first part of the story, Rosa is always being assisted by Sancho, giving us the impression that he is a gentleman with modest means. When a minor accident takes place, Rosa meets the cochero who takes the time to ease her physical pain and drives her home. Since then, Rosa dreams of him, chiding herself for not getting the cochero’s real name. In her mind (and daydreams), she calls him Angel, for the way she saved her. 

She dreams about the gentleness of his fingers. She smiled remembering the way he had laid out the clothes on stones to bleach. She knew that meant he must do his own washing. And she ached in tenderness over him and his need for a woman like her to do such things for him.

How like Rosa to daydream herself and her importance in the cochero’s life! But, ah, that is how many women daydream themselves--their purpose in the man’s life. For Rosa, life goes on. She moves and does things, but this time, with a sense of inspiration and glow. One night, she was asked by her mistress to buy wine. But after an unfortunate encounter with Sancho (some things are not what they seem), she comes home with a torn dress and a broken wine bottle. Later that night, Rosa thinks she has enough of her mistress’ abuses and decides to run away. While walking, she would crane her neck, as if on the lookout, for the cochero. She finally meets him again. But the man is not really thinking of her as hard or as gaily as she was of him. In the end, the cochero drove her back home. And in this part, he revealed his name: Pedro.

Because of the way Alfon presented this story, and the fact that this is a story that is still very relevant today, I consider this a heart-wrenching story. The Servant Girl is like a microcosm of current events, of many house maids still facing abuse by their employers. I pity Rosa because it seems she has nowhere to go when she decides to run away; she relies on someone to help her. The irony there is, the very person she considers her “angel” has driven her back to her mistress’ home, a hell of a house. And so, Rosa “went into the house without hesitation, forgetting all her vows about never stepping into it again...” She, it seems, has finally accepted the things as they are because she could not do anything about it.

Another story by Alfon, “Panamilit sa Kabatan-onan (1938)” (Farewell to Youth), tells the story of two friends from the perspective of the older friend. The younger friend, Patria, is a young, active, dynamic woman. After some time, the older friend is advised by her mother to stay away from Patria because of the latter’s flirtatious ways. But the older friend could not and when she confronted Patria about it, she received the biggest shock--that Patria, at a very young age, is pregnant.

I’ve read both the original in Cebuano and the translation by writer-history Erlinda K. Alburo in English. I like the Cebuano version better, because it is my primary language. The English translation is much shorter. I wonder how the conservatives reacted to this story upon its publication. Pre-marital sex is discreetly embedded in the story, a social issue that the Roman Catholic Church is strongly against. And many of the people in the Visayas are Roman Catholics, as evidenced in the churches being filled up almost every hour of every Sunday. This is a social issue that is still happening today--many young women are prematurely saying goodbye to their youths in order to become mothers.

So, to Alfon, thank you for producing these culturally rich and socially relevant stories.

Please head over to Mel U’s blog, The Reading Life, to check out more about Estrella Alfon and her works. Mel makes insightful posts on his area of interests: classics, post-colonial literature, Japanese fiction, short stories, and literary fiction. He is inviting us to his initiative: Irish Short Story Week-Year Two on March 12 to 22, 2012.

We hope to hear from you. Share with us your experience with Philippine short stories. Mel and I would be very happy if you could join us in this initiative, and we could exchange links. There are so many rich stories on Philippine literature we could feature, so we invite you to join us.


Our next feature would be on the works of Loreto Paras-Sulit.

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- Nancy -