Nínay
Encyclopedia
Nínay is the first novel authored by a native Filipino
. Originally written in the Spanish language
by Pedro Alejandro Paterno, when he was twenty-three years old, and while living in Spain
in 1885, the novel was later translated into the English language
in 1907, and in the Tagalog language
in 1908. According to Dominador D. Buhain in his book A History of Publishing in the Philippines, being the first Filipino novel, Ninay marked the beginning of the awakening of national consciousness
among the Filipino intelligentsia. Being a "largely cultural" novel, the narrative provides a "folkloristic tour" of the distinctive culture of the Filipinos. Composed of 262 pages, the 1908 Tagalog version of the novel was published by the Limbagan Nang La Republika Kiotan Bilang 30 during the American period in Philippine history.
. Her heartbreak was due to her separation from her lover Carlos Mabagsic. Ninay's misfortune became harder to bear because of the loss of her parents. A pasiam, the novena
for the dead, was being said and offered for the lifeless Ninay. Framed with this melancholic atmosphere of nine-day prayer for the departed, the novel opens up a succession of narratives that present "variations of unrequited love". The first condemned relationship was between Ninay and her lover Carlos Mabagsic. When Ninay was still alive, Mabagsic was falsely accused of being the leader of a rebellion. Mabagsic's accuser was Federico Silveyro, an entrepreneur from Portugal. Mabagsic went abroad. Upon his return, Mabagsic found out that Ninay confined herself in a convent. Mabagsic became a victim of cholera and died. Ninay also died of cholera. The other victims of the wickedness of the Portuguese Federico Silveyro were the couple named Loleng and Berto. Silveyro was the cause of Loleng's death. Berto avenged Loleng's death by killing Silveyro.
's recommendation that his "expatriate fellows work together to produce" a compilation that would represent the Philippines to a larger audience outside the country. Apart from Mojares's description of Ninay as a tool to present Philippine society and culture to non-Filipino readers, Eugenio Matibag explained in his The Spirit of Ninay that Ninay is a politically tinged piece of literature because it informs the public that Spain made the Philippines the "obverse of what European civilization stood for", meaning the civilization of Europe, particularly Spain, is supposed to have been the promoter and implementor of equality of all peoples.
at Georgetown University
in Washington, D.C.
of the United States
, Ninay is the first or inaugural Asian
novel written in the Spanish language
. Being such, Lifshey further described Ninay as a landmark
text, an artifact that was deterritorialized and is fundamentally transnational
because the novel is both Asian
and European
. Apart from being a window to the national customs of the Philippines, Ninay is a historia crítica or "critical history", a mode of writing based on historical documentation or historiography
wherein Paterno attempted to confirm the Filipinos' claim and assertion of having a civilized status and civilization that existed prior to the arrival of the Spanish explorers in the Philippine archipelago, and to defend the Filipinos' fundamental resemblance to other peoples and the universality of the Philippine culture and customs.
Although published in Madrid Spain while the Philippines was still a Spanish colony, Ninay was conceived and written by an author who considered himself as a true Filipino. Ninay, the book, had been labeled as the first Filipino novel because it fell under the literary classification of the novel, meaning Ninay portrayed the contemporary life of human beings, in this case the Filipinos and their customs during the 1880s. However, although Ninay was a realistic and "fully developed novel", it has its imperfections. These flaws include having an artificial formal structure, having an inadequate melodramatic plot structure, a narrative lacking literary merit, being an undistinguished and loosely conceived story, and that it was created in order to entertain readers. In addition, tt was a novel that deviated from the native narrative tradition of the Philippines. Despite of the negative literary criticisms, Ninay is still an important novel because it was both an effort and a gap-filler in the literary history of the Philippines. The novel concentrated on the cultural aspect and characteristics of the Filipino people. Although described as a novel without valuable literary qualities, Ninay was an "exaltation of the pre-hispanic traces of civilization in the Philippines" and a work that prompted the production of other novels that highlighted the characteristics of Filipino identity.
s (half-breeds) with a hybrid culture. This is la filipinidad or "the Filipinoness" that Paterno showed in the novel.
Ninay, the character, appeared as a specter at the latter part of the novel. The apparition of Ninay represented the "ghostly image" or the spirit of the seemingly absent yet present Filipino image or national identity. The national identity of the Filipinos, according to Matibag, is personified in the traces of Ninay's presence but "contextualized" by the memory of Ninay.
scripts of the baybayin
, a linguistic rendering that was accompanied by the Spanish translation saying A mi querido padre, which means "To my beloved father" in English. Upon the arrival of the Americans as the replacement colonial ruler in the Philippines, Paterno dedicated the English version of Ninay to Helen "Nellie" Taft, the wife of then US President William Howard Taft
. The actual phrase used to dedicate the novel to Helen Taft was To Mrs. William H. Taft, and it was placed on the page that was facing another page containing the photograph of the American first lady.
and abaca
fibers. Together with Guia Gomez, Tesoro created "Ninay, The First Filipino Doll". Tesoro and Guia did not merely produce one representative doll of the character Ninay. Their so-called Ninay doll collection portrayed Ninay as a baby, as an adult, and as a grandmother. Through Ninay the doll, Tesoro and Guia portrayed the cultural and social life of Filipinos during the 19th century – the Spanish era – in Philippine history, as depicted in Ninay the novel. The "first edition" of the Ninay doll collection was composed 160 individual dolls that were 20 to 22 inches tall for Ninay as an adult and 8 to 12 inches tall for Ninay as a child.
Filipino people
The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines ....
. Originally written in the Spanish language
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
by Pedro Alejandro Paterno, when he was twenty-three years old, and while living in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
in 1885, the novel was later translated into the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
in 1907, and in the Tagalog language
Tagalog language
Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a third of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by most of the rest. It is the first language of the Philippine region IV and of Metro Manila...
in 1908. According to Dominador D. Buhain in his book A History of Publishing in the Philippines, being the first Filipino novel, Ninay marked the beginning of the awakening of national consciousness
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
among the Filipino intelligentsia. Being a "largely cultural" novel, the narrative provides a "folkloristic tour" of the distinctive culture of the Filipinos. Composed of 262 pages, the 1908 Tagalog version of the novel was published by the Limbagan Nang La Republika Kiotan Bilang 30 during the American period in Philippine history.
Plot
The novel explores the life and love story of the female protagonist named Ninay, a heartbroken young woman who died of choleraCholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
. Her heartbreak was due to her separation from her lover Carlos Mabagsic. Ninay's misfortune became harder to bear because of the loss of her parents. A pasiam, the novena
Novena
In the Catholic Church, a novena is a devotion consisting of a prayer repeated on nine successive days, asking to obtain special graces. The prayers may come from prayer books, or consist of the recitation of the Rosary , or of short prayers through the day...
for the dead, was being said and offered for the lifeless Ninay. Framed with this melancholic atmosphere of nine-day prayer for the departed, the novel opens up a succession of narratives that present "variations of unrequited love". The first condemned relationship was between Ninay and her lover Carlos Mabagsic. When Ninay was still alive, Mabagsic was falsely accused of being the leader of a rebellion. Mabagsic's accuser was Federico Silveyro, an entrepreneur from Portugal. Mabagsic went abroad. Upon his return, Mabagsic found out that Ninay confined herself in a convent. Mabagsic became a victim of cholera and died. Ninay also died of cholera. The other victims of the wickedness of the Portuguese Federico Silveyro were the couple named Loleng and Berto. Silveyro was the cause of Loleng's death. Berto avenged Loleng's death by killing Silveyro.
Reviews
Ninay had been reviewed by literary critics such as Claude Schumacher, Bienvenido Lumbera, Cynthia Nograles Lumbera, and Resil Mojares. According to Schumacher (1997), Paterno's Ninay is a novel that is "mediocre worth" because of being "little more than a framework" or an outline interleaved with "scenes and customs" of life the Philippines. On the contrary, Lumbera and Lumbera described Ninay as a novel with Philippine placenames and Filipino characters but "foreign", in the sense that the "locales and […] characters" were "overly romanticized". Mojares, on the other hand, reiterated that the novel is "distinctively Filipino" and it is a work that Paterno created as a form of reply to Philippine national hero Jose RizalJosé Rizal
José Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda , was a Filipino polymath, patriot and the most prominent advocate for reform in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era. He is regarded as the foremost Filipino patriot and is listed as one of the national heroes of the Philippines by...
's recommendation that his "expatriate fellows work together to produce" a compilation that would represent the Philippines to a larger audience outside the country. Apart from Mojares's description of Ninay as a tool to present Philippine society and culture to non-Filipino readers, Eugenio Matibag explained in his The Spirit of Ninay that Ninay is a politically tinged piece of literature because it informs the public that Spain made the Philippines the "obverse of what European civilization stood for", meaning the civilization of Europe, particularly Spain, is supposed to have been the promoter and implementor of equality of all peoples.
Analysis
According to Adam Lifshey, an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and PortuguesePortuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
at Georgetown University
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...
in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, Ninay is the first or inaugural Asian
Asian people
Asian people or Asiatic people is a term with multiple meanings that refers to people who descend from a portion of Asia's population.- Central Asia :...
novel written in the Spanish language
Spanish in the Philippines
Spanish was imposed as an official language of the Philippines from the beginning of Spanish rule since the times of Miguel López de Legazpi in the late 16th century, through American rule and independence, until the change of Constitution in 1973...
. Being such, Lifshey further described Ninay as a landmark
Landmark
This is a list of landmarks around the world.Landmarks may be split into two categories - natural phenomena and man-made features, like buildings, bridges, statues, public squares and so forth...
text, an artifact that was deterritorialized and is fundamentally transnational
International
----International mostly means something that involves more than one country. The term international as a word means involvement of, interaction between or encompassing more than one nation, or generally beyond national boundaries...
because the novel is both Asian
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
and European
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. Apart from being a window to the national customs of the Philippines, Ninay is a historia crítica or "critical history", a mode of writing based on historical documentation or historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
wherein Paterno attempted to confirm the Filipinos' claim and assertion of having a civilized status and civilization that existed prior to the arrival of the Spanish explorers in the Philippine archipelago, and to defend the Filipinos' fundamental resemblance to other peoples and the universality of the Philippine culture and customs.
Although published in Madrid Spain while the Philippines was still a Spanish colony, Ninay was conceived and written by an author who considered himself as a true Filipino. Ninay, the book, had been labeled as the first Filipino novel because it fell under the literary classification of the novel, meaning Ninay portrayed the contemporary life of human beings, in this case the Filipinos and their customs during the 1880s. However, although Ninay was a realistic and "fully developed novel", it has its imperfections. These flaws include having an artificial formal structure, having an inadequate melodramatic plot structure, a narrative lacking literary merit, being an undistinguished and loosely conceived story, and that it was created in order to entertain readers. In addition, tt was a novel that deviated from the native narrative tradition of the Philippines. Despite of the negative literary criticisms, Ninay is still an important novel because it was both an effort and a gap-filler in the literary history of the Philippines. The novel concentrated on the cultural aspect and characteristics of the Filipino people. Although described as a novel without valuable literary qualities, Ninay was an "exaltation of the pre-hispanic traces of civilization in the Philippines" and a work that prompted the production of other novels that highlighted the characteristics of Filipino identity.
Characters
The characters in Ninay is a mixture of native Filipinos (known then as indios) and peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain), thus - in a way - a community of mestizoMestizo
Mestizo is a term traditionally used in Latin America, Philippines and Spain for people of mixed European and Native American heritage or descent...
s (half-breeds) with a hybrid culture. This is la filipinidad or "the Filipinoness" that Paterno showed in the novel.
Ninay, the character, appeared as a specter at the latter part of the novel. The apparition of Ninay represented the "ghostly image" or the spirit of the seemingly absent yet present Filipino image or national identity. The national identity of the Filipinos, according to Matibag, is personified in the traces of Ninay's presence but "contextualized" by the memory of Ninay.
Dedication
The original Spanish version of the novel was dedicated by Paterno to his father, a dedication that was written using the pre-MagellanicFerdinand Magellan
Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer. He was born in Sabrosa, in northern Portugal, and served King Charles I of Spain in search of a westward route to the "Spice Islands" ....
scripts of the baybayin
Baybayin
Baybayin , is a pre-Spanish Philippine writing system. It is a member of the Brahmic family and is recorded as being in use in the 16th century...
, a linguistic rendering that was accompanied by the Spanish translation saying A mi querido padre, which means "To my beloved father" in English. Upon the arrival of the Americans as the replacement colonial ruler in the Philippines, Paterno dedicated the English version of Ninay to Helen "Nellie" Taft, the wife of then US President William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft was the 27th President of the United States and later the tenth Chief Justice of the United States...
. The actual phrase used to dedicate the novel to Helen Taft was To Mrs. William H. Taft, and it was placed on the page that was facing another page containing the photograph of the American first lady.
Ninay in doll making
Ninay, the character, was adapted and transformed into a doll of the same name by Patis Tesoro, a well known Filipino fashion designer who utilizes indigenous materials such as cloths made from pineapplePineapple
Pineapple is the common name for a tropical plant and its edible fruit, which is actually a multiple fruit consisting of coalesced berries. It was given the name pineapple due to its resemblance to a pine cone. The pineapple is by far the most economically important plant in the Bromeliaceae...
and abaca
Abacá
Abacá, Musa textilis is a species of banana native to the Philippines, grown as a commercial crop in the Philippines, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. The plant is of great economic importance, being harvested for its fibre, once generally called Manila hemp, extracted from the trunk or pseudostem. On...
fibers. Together with Guia Gomez, Tesoro created "Ninay, The First Filipino Doll". Tesoro and Guia did not merely produce one representative doll of the character Ninay. Their so-called Ninay doll collection portrayed Ninay as a baby, as an adult, and as a grandmother. Through Ninay the doll, Tesoro and Guia portrayed the cultural and social life of Filipinos during the 19th century – the Spanish era – in Philippine history, as depicted in Ninay the novel. The "first edition" of the Ninay doll collection was composed 160 individual dolls that were 20 to 22 inches tall for Ninay as an adult and 8 to 12 inches tall for Ninay as a child.