FERLIE Joy M. Lanaria is with DepEd Passi City. She teaches 21stCentury Literature from the Philippines and the World for senior high at Passi National High School.
I didn’t know Ferlie from Eve before she won the 2019 Peter’s Prize for Excellence in Writing Love Poems. But after our first meeting, we became fast friends.
Well, she insists she’s a diehard fan. But I can believe her sincerity. That she had been won over by my Donato story long before we met, I didn’t know…until now.
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Giving and the Humanity Inquiry in a PSN Masterpiece
by Ferlie Joy M. Lanaria
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Time is the ultimate judge of literature. History tells us that only the best literary pieces have endured and survived the test of the rolling years because people have the harsh tendency to easily forget the average, the ordinary, and the mediocre. Those literatures that survive the test of time are what we call the classics.
The Peter Solis Nery — with that special determiner, that definite article ‘the’ to describe his unique pre-eminence, as we do with the Queen, or the Pope — has proven once again that he is indeed the unsinkable Champion of Hiligaynon Literature, and the incontestable Prince of Ngoyngoy, by bringing to life the heart-wrenching and tear-jerking story of Donato, the hunchback.
His emotionally and spiritually empowering literary masterpiece is a modern classic that was even declared as the First Prize winner at the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature 2011, Hiligaynon Short Story category.
Of course, I am a PSN fanatic. When your life is genuinely touched by a piece of literature, it is hard not to be loyal to its author. I have not just read, but I had lived with “Donato the Hunchback” thrice. It is like falling in love to the same story three times.
The first time was when I was newly hired as a teacher of DepEd. The story was a helpful and handy reading selection for the study of regional literature then. The second was when it was discussed in the masteral class that I was attending. At that time, my admiration was doubled because the story was actually being seriously analyzed in postgraduate studies. And the third time was fairly recently to study it more so I could write this essay.
I have experienced the story in three different circumstances. But all in all, the general impact and effect on me is still the same — just plain awe and admiration for the journey that the story takes us on.
The PSN is definitely the master of artistic wordplay, and the wizard in evoking and awakening emotions that I have started to suppress in order to be strong as I face the big, wide world. Through clever plotting and wordplay, the master writer took me along a rollercoaster ride of feelings and emotions.
Once I started reading, I was left with no choice but to succumb to the riveting and beautifully tragic life story of Donato. The perfect blend and masterful control of literary elements, devices, and techniques showed that Nery did not only hang the pistol on the wall. He fired it with optimum creativity, and perfectly aimed at his readers’ deep sense of humanity.
The universal theme of the story — familial love — teaches me valuable lessons about acceptance and forgiveness. It reminds me to cease from merely existing, and to live with a purpose; to live a life that matters, and to live a life that influences others in a significant, and charitable, way.
From the very beginning, the hunchback was regarded as “an extra” like a movie extra or a bit player, an insignificant other. He experienced the cruel and callous bullying of his close associates Bimbim and Macmac as well as the painful rejections of his mother and twin brother.
However, just like Jesus Christ, who died on the cross, and who had great love even for the thief who mocked Him, Donato was firm in living up to the meaning of his name — God-given. Thus, he gave much in return. He sacrificed and offered his kidney to his ungrateful and sarcastic twin brother, thus giving the arrogant Jed the gift of chance to renew his faith and existence, and to reconcile with the Creator.
In this era of fast-paced living and endless possibilities, Nery’s exquisite work of literature is like a pause, a respite, in an unending series of distraught continuity. It is a breath of fresh air, a glimpse of sunshine. Nery’s story has the power to make readers ponder on the measure of their faith, and the strength of their relationship with the Lord.
It is impossible not to see one’s self in Donato, who, despite his physical deformities, and in spite of the imperfections of his family, has remained steadfast in his choice to be just like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s fresh Rhodora, which beautified the damp nook in the woods. Donato chose to be his own kind of beautiful. And it is a kind of beauty that is invisible, intangible, but essential because it is something that the soul craves, something that one can bring to the afterlife.
Maybe, we are given; therefore, we give back in return. But when millions died because of the horrible pandemic, God gave us the chance to live. We live, that’s why we give; or maybe, we give, that’s why we live./PN
