The Filipino Comedy and Tragedy as Post Colonial Subversions:

A Post Colonial Analysis of Severino Montano's "Sabina" and Marcelino Agana Jr.'s “New Yorker in
Tondo”

The history of the Philippines includes a long history of colonization and migration. This is a
history so firmly embedded in the country that a pre-colonial past is difficult to trace, and a national
identity difficult to define. The colonial nature of the Philippines has made a great impact on the country’s
socio-economic and political systems. This subjection to western colonialism has been the cause of
struggle in resolving a national consciousness (Buendia).

During the 333-year Spanish colonization in the Philippines, the conquistadores have left
influences on religion, government, and economy of the islands. According to The Philippine Islands
(1973) by Blair and Robertson, Spain has left its permanent mark in the Philippines starting from calling
the islands “Felipinas”, in the name of Spain’s King Phillip II (21).

After the Americans has been sold and granted the rights to the Philippines by the Spaniards to
cover their defeat in 1898, the Americans established their authority over the islands. The imperial
country brought the system of schools, hospitals, laws, and court to the country and the rule “seemed to
intensify the Filipino sense of dependence [to them]” (Fallows). The influence of the school system gave
way for the Americans to teach the English language to the Filipinos, a language that eventually became
one of the country’s official languages. This dependence to the Americans is still seen after the
Philippines has acquired their independence in 1946. The teaching of the English language through the
public school system lead the Philippines to learn the language and culture of the Americans, thus making
it easier for the Americanization of the Filipino consciousness (Buendia).

Because of this imperialist influence, among other economic factors, the phenomenon of the
Filipino diaspora is continuously rising. In Learning from the Filipino Diaspora (2016) by E. San Juan Jr.,
“three thousand four hundred Filipinos leave daily for work abroad, over a million a year, to join the
nearly ten million Filipinos (out of 90 million) already out of the Philippines, scattered around the
world” (1). He explained that because of the US tutelage, the working class and the indigenous
communities suffered through polarization of land ownership and that two thirds of the rural population
were landless (115). Overseas Filipino Workers, who are presently recognized as "modern-day heroes”
reside as service workers mostly in first world countries such as the United States, Australia, and Europe
(6).

The colonialism and migration that transpired for centuries in the Philippines have lead its people
to develop a mentality similar to those of the colonizers. The Spanish and American, alongside their
imposition of authority to the Filipino people, have also imposed the racial inferiority of the Filipino
people. They have deemed their culture and race superior to the indios (Buendia) and it resulted to the
colonial thinking that the West is better in terms of culture, language, and race.

The power dynamics of the colonizers and the colonized is apparent in Philippine literature,
particularly the 1950s post-war literature of the Philippines. In Louise Anne Porciuncula’s study about
Languages in Contact Across Generations (2014), she deemed plays, because of the inclusion of
dialogues, “portray the values and practices of a specific group of people at a particular point in time” (5).
During the 1950s, literature in the Philippines conveyed the theme of the quest for the Filipino identity.
Illa Sarvia’s Post War Philippine Fiction in English (1997) remarked that
“Writers were concerned with the idea of the Filipino as a pilgrim in search of his identity, and contemporary
fiction emphasized the courageous deeds, sacrifices and suffering that made up the people's lives. However,
here are a variety of themes in Philippine fiction in English: these explore religious faith, legends,
 superstitions, and fantasy; social problems, poverty and class conflict; political manoeuvrings, nationalism
and foreign domination; and adultery, morality and sex” (29).

Severino Montano and Marcelino Agana Jr., both post-war Filipino writers, wrote the one-act
plays Sabina in 1953 and New Yorker in Tondo in 1958, respectively. The plays are one-act plays,
continuous scenes without transitions or separate acts. This form gives the conflict in a straightforward
manner, an act of urgency to let the audience know immediately what the main problem in colonization
is– the Filipino identity.

The tragedy Sabina chronicles the life of Sabina, a Filipina native of Kawakan, a coast in Luzon,
who is enamoured with the visiting American Mr. George, and who believes that Mr. George will marry
her and she fights for her and Mr. George’s love despite the hostility of her whole family except her
grandfather towards Mr. George. At the end, she was revealed to be with child fathered by Mr. George
and the simultaneous confession of Mr. George that he is already married in America shattered Sabina’s
illusion that made her kill herself through a self-inflicting gunshot.

The genre of the tragedy, as utilized in the play, shows the truth about the trauma urged to the
Filipino people by the Americans. Conferring and telling Sabina’s story as a tragedy is acknowledging
that the post-colonial experience is a suffering of the nation. The Filipino identity, as shown in the tragic
drama, is fragmenting and divisive. There is the existence of fondness for the foreign and also the
rejection of this idea.

Sabina has believed that the American Mr. George can give her a better life. She has revolved her
world around him and that entails that her belief and faith to him has intensified to the level of it being
normal to her. She dismisses contentions that the American is deceiving her, putting faith into the colonial
ideals that are still too abstract and too far-reaching. The moment that she committed suicide at the end of
the play persists to the dangers of a colonial mindset to a person. She believed this American dream with
absolute validity and that thinking has lead to toxicity. The conflict of this tragedy lies in Sabina’s pursuit
to marry Mr. George amidst the disagreements and warnings of her traditional family. This conflict lies
deeper on the abstraction of the dream to be “American”. This conflict creates tension among Sabina and
her whole family, who insists that Mr. George is deceitful due to the fact that they see Mr. George as a
threat to their values. Antero expressed this anger, saying, “All right, but you know nothing about him
whatsoever. Its only three months you’ve known him!” (Montano), while Rustica, the old woman praying
from the beginning, eludes that:
OLD WOMAN: Wiser? Once there was a strange sailor who came roaming round this village; a clean
chap he looked like. But soon one of the young girls bore him a child. The sailor left, and the poor girl
died of sadness!
OLD MAN: Mr. George is not a sailor, Rustica!
OLD WOMAN: He is a man, nonetheless, Mamerto! (Montano)

They blame the death of Sabina's mother to Mr. George, with Cleta saying that “Aunt Maria
herself left heavy the day Sabina was fool enough to go out with Mr. George!” (Montano)

The genre of the tragedy is also supported in the overall tone of the play. The play opened with a
silent and still April night inside a home that does not entertain even the dim light of the moon.
The prayers are said in an emotional litany like monotone, and more or less chanted. The cry of a
turtle is heard faintly coming from the sea. It is about ten o’clock at night; but for prayers and the
voice of the turtle, the late April evening is still. (Montano)

This brings forth an atmosphere of a gloom moreover when it was revealed that the unintended
cause of Maria’s death is the relationship of Sabina and Mr. George. The identity of Sabina's home is
represented by their worldview that the foreign is antagonistic and damaging to their way of life to the
point of death.
 The tragic heroine, Sabina, explicitly expresses her fondness towards the foreigner, in hopes of
being married to him. She herself wishes to be domesticated by Mr. George:
SABINA: I kept thinking about you and I will be married some day. And I’ll bring a child into that
house and many more if I am able.
MR.GEORGE: Sweetheart.
SABINA: There’s just one thing I want to show you. (She shows him a baby’s lace bonnet.) For
the gift itself I’ll bring you into that house. (Montano)

The colonial here is disguised in the form of Mr George’s promises of marriage and a home. This
remains an illusion to everyone except Sabina who sees it coming true when she got pregnant with Mr.
George’s child. The heroine’s tragic flaw is her naivety about everything that Mr. George is drastically
bringing into her life.

Sabina, as an ordinary native of a colonized country, challenges the idea of a typical tragic hero as
she herself is not of noble birth. The one who is of noble birth is actually Mr. George, the one she views
as her superior, and Mr. George is considered the antagonist of the play. Sabina is not utterly responsible
for her naivety as this colonial mindset is a result of history, but eventually she met her downfall at the
same time as her realization that everything Mr. George represented is an illusion. She tries to challenge
customs drastically by putting her faith into an external force and suffered through this blind faith. Lois
Tyson’s book Critical Theory Today (2006) talks about the Post-colonialism theory as “particulary
effective at helping us see the domains of our experience– the psychological, ideological, intellectual, and
aesthetics– in ways that show us just how inseperable these categories are in our lived experience of
ourselves and the world (417). In Sabina, these categories are shown throughout the elements of the play.
It is set in Kawakan, a province in the coast of Luzon and the life of the people there as shown in the play
is very communal. They engage into superstitions (the prayers, the lamp, the curtains) and they try to
maintain a reputation that is well-respected in the neighborhood, avoiding further gossips by preventing
Sabina to light the lamp and open the curtains which signify the return of Mr. George. Sabina is
discerned to be a weak character by her family, with them repeatedly pointing out how gullible and
deceived she is by the life she is picturing with Mr. George. The psychological state of Sabina throughout
the play is in a state of daze that she cannot listen to reason, and that she considers Mr. George not only as
her beloved but someone who will take her to the American life. Sabina, at first, apparently internalizes
the American colonial values influenced by Mr. George. She does not join the family in their
lamentations, only appearing when it has already been done, and tries to dishonor the mourning by
brushing off the sorrow of the mourners and enlivens the atmosphere in the house with the lamp given by
Mr. George. This lamp is the only object in the house that belonged to the American and she gladly holds
on to it. She also refuses to wear black, the color of mourning, and insists on the joyful ambience of the
home, her own celebration that Mr. George is arriving and at that moment, nothing else but that matters.
She is in an unstable sense of the self, which for Tyson is called “double consciousness” (421). This
double consciousness is “a way of perceiving the world that is divided between two antagonistic cultures:
that of the colonizer and that of the indigenous community” (421). Sabina tends to rejects her indigenous
culture, although she does not wholly do so. She is in between these two cultures. She wants her family to
believe Mr. George as she believed in the illusion she created. At the same time, she desires and tends to
entirely accept the colonizer’s culture but the drastic changes and delusions it brings are too much for her,
causing her an unstable state of mind. After all, Mr. George is an unexpected visitor to their lives. Her
family and she herself did not expect her affair with the American. This culture shock waved upon her
made her rethink about where her “home” really is. This unhomeliness is a product of the double
consciousness, Tyson adds: “. Being “unhomed” is not the same as being homeless. To be unhomed is to
feel not at home even in your own home because you are not at home in yourself: your cultural identity
crisis has made you a psychological refugee, so to speak (421). Sabina, as the colonial subject, sees her
indigenous culture inferior to that of Mr. George. So when everyone but her grandfather is against the
colonial idea, she shuts them down completely too thus she was disowned. When Mr. George arrives, she
quickly brushes off Antero’s extreme contentions and ready herself for her lover’s arrival. The abrupt
arrival of Mr. George calls for the abrupt necessity of indigenous people’s adjustment to their way of life
when the Americans came, and Antero just saw it as exhausting, letting Sabina be.
 When Sabina learned of Mr. George’s first marriage, it suddenly shattered all her illusions about
him. That the love she perceives is a false promise. Her innocence unexpectedly turned into realizations
that the life she wanted for them is impossible. She was surprised by this and cannot handle the dire ideas
of the Americans. Her fate was presided over by that fantasy and when she finally learned that, she took a
gun to gain back authority over her fate and killed herself rather than staying with Mr. George and his
flawed ideas or rather than embracing the anger that her family has got towards her. At the end, she
considers herself not a property of these two contrasting cultures.

On the other hand, New Yorker in Tondo, presents the life of Francesca “Kikay”, a native of
Binondo, Manila. The play delineates her life as a Balikbayan from New York, having just come back to
her hometown. Her friends pay her a visit and the reunion involves her confrontation with her ex-fiance
Tony, the announcement of Tony’s engagement to their friend Nena, as well as their friend Totoy’s
disclosure of her feelings for Nena. It also includes Tony, Nena, and Totoy’s, as well as Kikay’s mother
Aling Atang’s insights about the “new” Kikay. They seem to contrast her so much with the “old” Kikay,
who used to sell ricecakes in the streets. Kikay, after coming back, seems to have embodied the New
Yorker way of life in terms of physical appearance, behaviors, food, language, and culture.

This can be seen first in the language that the play uses. The drama, written in English, a colonial
language, had made its way to somehow Filipinized the execution of English. It has included untranslated
usages of Filipino lexicon to the English piece of Agana. Some of these are the inclusion of the Filipino
delicacy “puto”, the endearment“kumare”, the expression “naku”, “uy”, the Filipino game
“panguingue”, the place barong-barong, and some Filipino dialogues “naku, lumabas din ang pagka
Tondo mo!”, and “mayroon ba tayo diyan?” and the inclusion of these Filipino concepts to an English
text not only Filipinize the English language but also honors the Filipino culture. Porciuncula stated that
this occurence is a product of contact literature, “their linguistic repertoires enabled them to use terms that
added a “local flavor” to the text, a sense of authenticity or realism that signifies the periods during which
they produced their plays. To a certain degree, the language of the plays can also be perceived to be the
“beginnings” of early stages of nativization” (333). This decision to leave the Filipino concepts
untranslated insinuates that although an originally colonial language is used, the Filipino did not have to
reconcile to Americanize local concepts. This device is also used in relation to Kikays identity. She
refuses to be called Kikay, the Filipino counterpart of her name Francesca. The artificiality of her
character lies on her trying so hard to become what she is not. She tries to refer to European concepts as
well in order to appear sophisticated.
She says that in New York, every body calls her Fran-CES-ca.That is how all those Americans in New
York pronounce her name. And all she wants everybody here to pronounce it in the same way. She
says it sounds so “chi-chi”, so Italian. Do you know that many people in New York thought she was
an Italian...an Italian from California? So be sure and remember; do not call her Kikay, she hates that
name ... call her Fran-CES-ca. (Agana)

The genre of the comedy in New Yorker in Tondo sets forth a tone of mockery in someone who
embodies a colonial mindset merely because she thinks it a superior culture than the one she used to have.
Tyson said that this assumption is an acknowledgement that Western ideals and experiences “were
universal, that is, the standard for all humankind” (*) Henri Bergson in George W. Brandt’s anthology of
Modern Theories in Drama delineated one characteristic of the genre. He said that “comedy often places
before us a character who sets the snare in which he will be caught himself” (32). Kikay is a manifestation
of this character. She is the protagonist of the story but she has an antagonistic personality. She wants to
be a "New Yorker” in body and in spirit so she dismisses anything that can be classified Filipino. Kikay’s
colonial mentality becomes the central humor of the play, and it implies that that mentality is a scornful
treatment to the Filipino culture.
 Kikay’s personality is mocked by her friends because it does not seem natural to them. We see a
turning point in the story in the scene when Tony confronts her about their previous engagement. At first
she was dismissive of the idea because it was not the New York way.

KIKAY: That’s the New York way, Tony. Forget. Nothing must ever be so serious, nothing
must drag on too long. Tonight, give all your heart. Tomorrow forget. And when you meet
again, smile, shake hands...just good sports. TONY: What are you talking about?
KIKAY: Tony, I was only a child at that time.
TONY: When?
KIKAY: When you and I got engaged. I’ve changed so much since then, Tony. (Agana)

Kikay, as a subject of migration, has inherited the culture of the colonizer. Tyson added in his
book that this inheritance is “a negative self-image and alienation from their own indigenous
cultures.” (*) This alienation is seen through her own othering of the Filipino culture, acquiring an
ethnocentric view that life in New York is more advanced, way better. But eventually, when she learns
that Nena is engaged to Tony, she apologizes for her actions and sees that her home really is in Tondo.
She acknowledges her Filipino roots again, making the story a happy ending. She got rid of believing in
her eurocentric culture, and claimed her culture once more.

Kikay and Sabina’s decolonization of their selves is in the form of realization that the American
culture is not their true culture. The were kept at a disadvantage because this culture brings
uncomfortableness to them because it is an artificial identity that they have.
Works cited:

Agana, Marcelino, Jr. "New Yorker in Tondo." Blogspot. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2019.

Blair, Emma Helen. The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 : Explorations by Early Navigators, Descriptions
of the Islands and Their Peoples, Their History and Records of the Catholic Missions, as Related
in Contemporaneous Books and Manuscripts, Showing the Political, Economic, Commercial and
Religious Conditions of Those Islands from Their Earliest Relations with European Nations to the
Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. James Alexander Robertson. Vol. I. Cleveland, Ohio::
A.H. Clark., 1903-09. Print.

Buendia, Rizal G. "Colonialism and Elitism in Philippine Political Development: Assessing the Roots of
Underdevelopment." Philippine Journal of PublicAdministration XXXVII.No.2 (April 1993):
Web. 3 Apr. 2019.

Fallows, James. "From 1987: 'A Damaged Culture' in the Philippines." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media
Company, 26 Jan. 2017. Web. 3 Apr. 2019.

Montano, Severino. "Sabina." Academia. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2019.

Porciuncula, Louise Anne. Languages in Contact Across Generations. Diss. U of the Philippines Diliman,
December 2014. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Academia. Web.

San Juan, E. Learning from the Filipino Diaspora. España, Manila: U of Sto. Tomas House, 2006. Print.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Sarvia, Illa. “Post War Philippine Fiction in English.” The British Library Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 1997,
pp. 28–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42554440. Web.