Filipino Sexuality and Repression in Kerima Polotan’s The Virgin and Aida Rivera-Ford’s Love in the Cornhusks

Abstract

In his essay, “The Father and the Maid,” N.V.M. Gonzalez extols Aida Rivera-Ford’s “Love in the Cornhusks” (together with Manuel Arguilla’s “How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife”) as a literary work that “provides the occasion for describing how much lived life in Filipino terms a story may achieve” (1; emphasis mine). Such praise can be extended to Kerima Polotan’s “The Virgin” as well, which offers a seemingly straightforward but rich dive into the “lived life” of Filipinos. Miss Mijares, Polotan’s protagonist, resembles Rivera-Ford’s Constantina Tirol in many ways. Both women, with Nature and Society as their backdrop, as Gonzalez says (12), reflect on, and then react to, their new realizations, situated within their respective geographical and cultural environs, the rural areas where Christians and Bagobos interact, perhaps, or the urbanized city with its employer-employee strata. Hence, the consequent thoughts and behaviors we may observe from these two protagonists provide fertile ground for literary analysis concerning lived Filipino reality. “Lived life,” which itself seems like an unnecessary pleonasm, is nevertheless an apt description for these short stories, an active life that is complex and breathing, one that develops and unfolds. How can one find, and eventually describe and dissect, the “life that lives” in the brief narratives of Constantina Tirol and Miss Mijares?