An Analysis of a 21st Century Philippine Literature entitled
The Safe House by Sandra Nicole Roldan
My countrymen, as of the twenty-third of this month, I signed proclamation #1081 placing the entire Philippines under Martial Law. - Ferdinand Marcos
BACKGROUND
Sandra Nicole Roldan
Sandra Nicole Roldan is a Ph.D. Media and Communication candidate at RMIT University through its offshore PRS Asia program. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman where she teaches creative writing and literature. The name of her husband is Paul S. De Guzman. Her father was a political prisoner that was criticized by the government of the Philippines.
She was awarded a 2016 fellowship at Seoul Art Space, a 2007 Philippines Free Press award for the essay, and a 2006 LTI Korea writing residency. Sandra Nicole Roldan also writes “At The School Gate” and was originally published in the year 2018. Sandra Nicole Roldan, who wrote the Safe House, is a teacher of literature and creative writing at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. She earned her degree in Creative Writing at the same school. Apart from winning the Philippine Free Press literary award for essays, she is also recognized by both local and international writing fellowships. He lives in Quezon City, National Capital Region.
Textual information:
"The safe house" was published on July 3, 2017
Sociocultural information:
Martial law means that the military has replaced the standing government. As such, the highest-ranking military official becomes the head of state, and the country’s constitution along with individual rights and freedoms, are suspended. A political prisoner is someone who is imprisoned because his or her conduct or opinions are in opposition to the government. Ferdinand Marcos was elected President of the Philippines in 1965 and was reelected in 1969. On September 21, 1972, Marcos imposed martial law and he stayed in power until 1986, after the historic four-day “ People Power ” revolution at EDSA. When the martial law was declared in 1972, Marcos claimed that he had done so in response to the "communist threat" posed by the newly founded Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and the sectarian "rebellion" of the Mindanao Independence Movement (MIM) The story took place during the period of President Ferdinand Marcos told from the point of view of a 5-year-old. Her father was a political prisoner who received official criticism.
COPY OF THE LITERARY TEXT
The Safe House
From the street, it is just one box among many. Beneath terracotta roof tiles baking uniformly in the sweltering noon, the building’s grey concrete face stares out impassively in straight lines and angles. Its walls are high and wide, as good walls should be. A four-storey building, with four units to a floor. At dusk, the square glass windows glitter like the compound eyes of insects, revealing little of what happens inside. There is not much else to see.
And so this house seems in every way identical to all the other houses in all the thirty-odd other buildings nestled within the gates of this complex. It is the First Lady’s pride and joy, a housing project designed for a genteel middle-class living. There is a clubhouse, a swimming pool, and a tennis court. A few residents drive luxury cars. People walk purebred dogs in the morning. Trees shade the narrow paths and the flowering hedges that border each building give the neighborhood a hushed, cozy feel. It is easy to get lost there.
But those who need to come here know what to look for—the swinging gate, the twisting butterfly tree, the cyclone-wire fence. A curtained window glows with the yellow light of a lamp perpetually left on. Visitors count the steps on each flight of stairs. They do not stumble in the dark. They know which door will be opened to them, day or night. They will be fed, sometimes given money. Wounds will be treated, bandages changed. They carry nothing—no books, no bags, or papers. What they do bring is locked inside their heads, the safest of places. They arrive one at a time, or in couples, over a span of several hours. They are careful not to attract attention. They
listen for the reassuring yelps of squabbling children before they raise their hands to knock.
It is 1982. The girl who lives here does not care too much for the people who visit. She is five. Two uncles and an aunt dropped by the other day. Three aunts and two uncles slept over the night before. It is impossible to remember all of them. There are too many names, too many faces. And they all look the same—too tall, too old, too serious, too many. They surround the small dining table, the yellow lamp above throwing and tilting shadows against freshly painted cream walls.
They crowd the already cramped living room with their books and papers, hissing at her to keep quiet, they are Talking About Important Things. So she keeps quiet. The flock of new relatives recedes into the background as she fights with her brother over who gets to sit closer to the television. It is tuned in to Sesame Street on Channel 9. The small black and white screen makes Ernie and Bert shiver and glow like ghosts. Most of these visitors she will never see again. If she does, she will probably not remember them.
She wakes up one night. Through the thin walls, she hears the visitors arguing. She can easily pick out an uncle’s voice, rumbling through the dark like thunder. He is one of her newer relatives, having arrived only that morning. All grownups are tall, but this new uncle is a giant who towers over everyone else. His big feet look pale in their rubber slippers, a band-aid where each toenail should have been. He never takes off his dark glasses, not even at night. She wonders if he can see in the dark. Maybe he has laser vision like Superman. Or maybe like a pirate, he has only one eye. She presses her ear against the wall. If she does her eyes and listens carefully, she can make out the words: sundalo, kasama, talahib. The last word she hears clearly is katawan. The visitors are now quiet but still, she cannot sleep. From the living room, there are sounds like small animals crying.
She comes home from school the next day to see the visitors crowd-ed around the television. She wants to change the channel, catch the late afternoon cartoons, but they wave her away. The grownups are all quiet. Something is different. Something is about to explode. So she stays away, peering up at them from under the dining table. On the TV screen is the President, his face glowing blue and wrinkly like an old monkey’s. His voice wavers in the afternoon air, sharp and high like the sound of something breaking. The room erupts in a volley of curses: Humanda ka na, Makoy! Mamatay ka! Pinapatay mo asawa ko! Mamatay ka! P%t@ng*n@ ka! Humanda ka, papatayin din kita! The girl watches quietly from under the table. She is trying very hard not to blink.
It is 1983. They come more often now. They begin to treat the apartment like their own house. They hold meetings under the guise of children’s parties. Every week, someone’s son or daughter has a birthday. The girl and her brother often make a game of sitting on the limp balloons
always floating an inch from the floor. The small explosions like guns going off. She wonders why her mother serves the visitors dusty beer bottles that are never opened.
She is surprised to see the grownups playing make-believe out on the balcony. Her new uncles pretend to drink from the unopened bottles and begin a Laughing Game. Whoever laughs loudest wins. She thinks her mother plays the game badly because instead of joining in, she always finds her mother crying quietly in the kitchen. Sometimes the girl sits beside her mother on the floor, listening to words she doesn’t really understand: underground, revolution, taxes, bills. She plays with her mother’s hair while the men on the balcony continue their game. When she falls asleep, they are still laughing.
The mother leaves the house soon after. She will never return. The two children now spend most afternoons playing with their neighbors. After an hour of hide-and-seek, the girl comes home one day to find the small apartment even smaller. Something heavy hangs in the air like smoke. Dolls and crayons and storybooks fight for space with plans and papers piled on the tables. Once, she finds a drawing of a triangle and recognizes a word: class. She thinks of typhoons and floods and no classes.
The visitors keep reading from a small red book, which they hide under their clothes when she approaches. She tries to see why they like it so much. Maybe it also has good pictures like the books her father brought home from China. Her favorite shows zoo animals working together to build a new bridge after the river had swallowed the old one. She sneaks a look over their shoulders and sees a picture of a fat Chinese man wearing a cap. Spiky shapes run up and down the page. She walks away disappointed. She sits on the balcony and reads another picture book from China. It is about a girl who cuts her hair to help save her village. The tide is Mine Warfare.
It is 1984. The father is arrested right outside their house. It happens one August afternoon, with all the neighbors watching. They look at the uniformed men with cropped hair and shiny boots. Guns bulging under their clothes. Everyone is quiet, afraid to make a sound. The handcuffs shine like silver in the sun. When the soldiers drive away, the murmuring begins. Words like
insects escaping from cupped hands. It grows louder and fills the sky. It is like this whenever disaster happens. When fire devours a house two streets away, people in the compound come out to stand on their balconies. Everyone points at the pillar of smoke rising from the horizon.
This is the year she and her brother come to live with their grandparents, having no parents to care for them at home. The grandparents tell them a story of lovebirds: Soldiers troop into their house one summer day in 1974. Yes, balasang ko, this very same house. Muddy boots on the bridge, guns poking through water lilies on the fishpond. They are looking for guns and papers, ready to destroy the house. Before the colonel can give his order, they see The Aviary. A small sunlit room with a hundred love birds twittering inside. A rainbow of colors. Eyes like tiny glass beads. One soldier opens the aviary door, releases a flurry of wings and feathers. Where are they now? The grandparents say the birds are gone, eaten by a wayward cat. But as you can see, the soldiers are still here. The two children watch them at their father’s court trials. A soldier waves a gun, says it is their father’s. He stutters while explaining why the gun has his own name on it.
They visit her father at his new house in Camp Crame. It is a long walk from the gate, past wide green lawns. In the hot sun, everything looks green. There are soldiers everywhere. Papa lives in that long low building under the armpit of the big gymnasium. Because the girl can write her name, the guards make her sign the big notebooks. She writes her name so many times, the S gets tired and curls on its side to sleep. She enters a maze the size of a basketball court, with tall barriers making her turn left, right, left, right. Barbed wire forms a dense jungle around the detention center. She meets other children there.
On weekends, the girl sleeps in her father’s cell. There is a double-deck bed and a chair. A noisy electric fan stirs the muggy air. There, she often gets nightmares about losing her home: She would be walking down the paths, under the trees of their compound, past the row of stores, the same grey buildings. She turns a corner and finds a swamp or a rice paddy where her real house should be.
One night, she dreams of war. She comes home from school to find a blood-orange sky where the bedroom and living room should be. The creamy walls are gone. Broken plywood and
planks swing crazily in what used to be the dining room. Nothing in the kitchen but a sea-green refrigerator, paint, and rust flaking off in patches as large as thumbnails. To make her home livable again, she paints it blue and pink, and yellow. She knows she has to work fast. Before night falls, she has painted a sun, a moon, and a star on the red floor. So she would have light. Each painted shape is as big as a bed. In the dark, she curls herself over the crescent moon on the floor and waits for morning. There is no one else in the dream.
Years later, when times are different, she will think of those visitors and wonder about them. By then, she will know they aren’t relatives and were given names not their own. Although faces never really change, in a child’s fluid memory, they can take any shape. She believes that people stay alive so long as another chooses to remember them. But she cannot help those visitors even in that small way. She grows accustomed to the smiles of middle-aged strangers on the street, who talk about how it was when she was this high. She learns not to mind the enforced closeness, sometimes even smiles back. But she doesn’t really know them. Though she understands the fire behind their words, she remains a stranger to their world. She has never read the little red book.
Late one night, she will hear someone knocking on the door. It is a different door now, made from solid varnished mahogany blocks. The old chocolate brown plyboard that kept them safe all those years ago has long since yielded to warp and weather. She will look through the peephole and see a face last seen fifteen years before. It is older, ravaged, but somehow the same. She will be surprised to even remember the name that goes with it. By then, the girl would know about danger, and will not know whom to trust. No house, not even this one, is safe enough.
The door will open a crack. He will ask about her father, she will say he no longer lives there. As expected, he will look surprised and disappointed. She may even read a flash of fear before his face wrinkles into a smile. He will apologize, step back. Before he disappears into the shadowy corridor, she will notice his worn rubber slippers, the mud-caked between his toes. His heavy bag. She knows he has nowhere else to go. Still, she will shut the door and push the bolt firmly into place.
ANALYSIS
Literary Genre
The 21st Literary Genre is a new literary genre composed of works written, created, and published by authors in the twenty-first century between 2001 and the present. Its objective was to categorize novel forms of literature.
The literary genre of this story is a 21st-century literature genre because it uses new codes to add flavor to the literature for us to feel the emotion of the character. And the narrator exposes herself as both a character and the narrator.
Process Questions / Analysis Guides
1. What is the dictionary meaning of “safe house”?
The dictionary meaning of ‘safe house’ is a dwelling or building whose conventional appearance makes it a safe or inconspicuous place for hiding, taking refuge, or carrying on clandestine activities.
2. What is the double meaning of the title The Safe House? Why do you think this was used for the title?
The double meaning of the title Safe House is first, the actual place where a person resides and finds conference, the person may have an emotional attachment to it for it to be considered his or her safe house. Another meaning of an actual safe house is where you keep your valuable things to keep it away from being misplaced or taken away by another being.
3. Why did the narrator feel unsafe?
The narrator feels unsafe because the people, or their visitors, which the narrator calls her aunts and uncles, come more often in their house. The house serves two purposes: protection from their own enemies and a safe place for planning a rebellion. It would be suicidal, during the setting of the text, if they would form a rebellion outside the protection zone of the government.
4. What makes you feel unsafe? Can you relate to the narrator? Why or why not?
What makes me feel unsafe is not being with my family. Knowing that I’m not near them makes me feel in danger when I’m alone and unprotected. No, I can’t really say that I can relate to the narrator, because I didn't experience what they suffered and go through. They must've suffered so much in that time, so I can’t really relate to them.
5. Why did the man in the story have band-aids instead of nails? What does this imply about the visitors in the house? Do you sympathize more the visitor’s or the narrator? Why do you feel this way?
Because the man was tortured by the police. They did a lot of things just to get information from the man by means of anything. He had band-aids instead of nails because, in the time of martial law, removing nails was a form of torture. The visitors were hiding from the police, not only because they didn't want to get arrested, but because they were also afraid of getting tortured. And in the worst-case scenario, they might have been killed even if the victim gave them what they wanted.
6. Do you sympathize more the visitor’s or the narrator? Why do you feel this way?
Yes, because they know the whole story. They know what happens next in the story.
7. Why did the mother leave? Do you understand this decision? Would you have left as well? Why or why not?
The mother left because of the fact that she did not want to be affiliated with the rebellion. I understand the mother’s decision, because of the problems the mother left to escape the problem and into the chaotic house. No, I will not leave home because I will have a family left, even if it is a bit chaotic I will find a way to fix and solve the problems facing our family.
8. How does the narrator's view of martial law differ from her father's view? Why does she have a different point of view?
The narrator’s view of martial law differs from her father’s view, because the little girl’s view is from the perspective of a child that would be different from her father who experiences the cruelty of the Marcos regime.
9. What effect does reading this story have on you? How does it affect the way you look at martial law? What did you feel about it before you read the story and after you read the story?
Well, it affects my perspective on martial law especially to the people who are against it, just like the father, he is willing to sacrifice himself just for the freedom of our country. At first, I thought it's literally a safe place where you are safe and protected. But after I read the story, I felt sad for the girl, because her home is not a safe place anymore.
10. Why was it necessary for the narrator to tell us that she locks the door against the visitors nowadays? What does this symbolize? Do you agree with the narrator? Why or why not?
It is possible that the narrator senses danger lurking around. It can be her gut feeling telling her that she needs to be vigilant and to never be too trusting. Locking the door doesn’t just signify safety but it also marks boundaries on your territory or your property. She may be feeling something negative about the visitor.
C. Contextual Analysis
Sociocultural context can be used to interpret the text "The Safe House" because it is all about the culture and the events that happened in the time of Martial Law. It is also said that the social status of the people who experienced that kind of event in the term of President Marcos. There are so many events like the boys who have a meeting just to talk about how they can survive from the Martial Law. They go to their so-called "Safe House" just to protect each other even though they are not relatives. And for us, the context that the story gave to us is enough reason for us to know that it is a Sociocultural Context.
Biographical Context can be used to interpret the text "The Safe House" because, according to the author's background information, Sandra Nicole Roldan's father is a political prisoner who has been criticized by the government. The "Safe House," as we can see, is all about how the government manages its citizens. And there's a part of it where the girl's father becomes a prisoner.
SUMMARY
Mrs. Sandra Nicole Roldan is a Ph.D. candidate in Media and Communication and the author of "The Safe House." She works at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, as a literature and creative writing teacher. Paul S. De Guzman is her husband's name. She has written numerous works over her career as an author, which have all been successful. "Safe House" and "At the School Gate" are two of her successful works. His father was a political prisoner who was criticized by the Philippine government, and she can relate to her own work, "The Safe House," because of this.
The safe house is all about Martial Law. It happened in the term of late President Ferdinand Marcos. It is from the perspective of a young girl who doesn't know anything. She is an innocent girl who thinks that the people around her are her family. But at a very young age, she heard unfamiliar words for her. The sacrifice of all the people who want to fight against the Martial Law. But in the end, the girl didn't know if that house could be a safe house for her because she already knew that the people around her are not her family. She didn't know who could be trusted or not. The literary genre of this story is a 21st-century literature genre because it uses new codes to add flavor to the literature for us to feel the emotion of the character. There are so many meanings of the "Safe House". In every dictionary on the internet, there is a word safe house. But in our literary text, this safe house is a place where all the people group themselves to protect them in martial law. Although this safe house isn't like a safe house that we know because also the narrator feels unsafe in that house. All the people there protect themselves by putting on band-aids instead of nails. But the father of the narrator experiences the cruelty of the Marcos regime. This literature has two contexts. Biographical context because the father of the author is like the father of the girl in the story. They are both prisoners and are criticized by the government. Sociocultural Context because the events that happened in Martial Law are the same as the "Safe House" is all about. The culture, society of the people at that time is clearly for us to interpret that this is the time of Martial Law.
REFERENCES
Book/s
Roldan, S. (2009). The Safe House. Philippine Free Press.
Online Source
Ortilano, L. M. (2017). The safe house – by Sandra Nicole Roldan. Retrieved from https://lukemichaelortilano.wordpress.com/
Elcomblus Contributor. (2020). The safe house by Sandra Nicole Roldan. Retrieved from https://www.elcomblus.com/the-safe-house-by-sandra-nicole-roldan/
Dallier, D. J. (2015). “Political prisoner” Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-prisoner.
Houghton M. H. (2010). Safe house in American English. Retrieved from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/safe-house
[Analysis] The safe house by Sandra Nicole Roldan. (2019). Retrieved from
https://k12engnook.blogspot.com/2019/01/analysis-safe-house-by-sandra-nicole.html?m=1
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