THE WITCH (Short Story)
(Summary)
Stories say that a witch known as Minggay Awok (awok, meaning witch in Visayan language)resides nearby the creek separating the barrios of Libas and Sinit-an. Her strange appearance, solitary life and rare visits in the barrios feared the people. She has always been blamed whenever strange things happen. Thus, Minggay was often subjected to various killing attempts in order to stop the curse that she allegedly placed on them. However, their suspicions were never proven. One day, a boy who occasionally visits his uncle in Libas met an old woman while fishing in the creek. She had been so kind to direct him to a spot where he can get more shrimps. They chatted for a while until the boy finally realized that she is the "witch" that he had heard about. He immediately walked away with the shrimps and the dilemma of his encounter with the witch's contrasting image with the old woman by the creek.
Short of writing a complete short story or a poem, there are any number of creative "pre-writing" exercises the teacher may avail herself of. I shall be discussing two of them presently—but since poetry's been rumored to be my unfortunate specialization, I'm afraid my declared bias will be toward the finished poem, the writing of which being, to my mind, one of the best ways to end, summarize or highlight any significant discussion of poetry.
Strangely enough, the two poetic exercises I give students in the initial stages involve the writing of prose. The first aims to test and hone their skills in description, the other their ability to imagine from, or to make creative use of, memory. In both exercises, an implicit principle that I do not quite spell out until a little later in the semester is one of "design" or "order" —otherwise called "concept." I don't commence the reading or writing of poetry with a discussion of theme, because, in the early stages of the course at least, I am more interested in getting my students to write in as free and unhampered a manner as possible, for fluency in the language is, in my opinion, the bedrock of all learning.
Message or theme, on the other hand, is something a student must arrive at on her own—through the interimplicating processes of reading and writing, through her increasing awareness of the world she inhabits, through life. What I find to be lacking in most students is the simple ability to use words to describe what they perceive around them—even, tragically sometimes, what they feel. It seems the world and their very own lives have become, to many young people nowadays, most difficult things to articulate.
I must qualify, at this point, that my experience in this university as far as students' facility in the English language is concerned has been, in the main, not all that dismal. This, despite the much bewailed deterioration of verbal aptitudes—both in English and Filipino—among our youth already famously noted by language departments in many Philippine colleges and universities, including the English department of this school. I don't know if I've simply been lucky or if the innate cheerful recklessness of youth (one quickly passing me by: ahh, the bloom is off the rose!) has something to do with it. I suppose I've been able to cope better with this worsening national crisis (a crisis, I sometimes like to put it, of "a darkly encroaching wordlessness") because I am willing to be convinced of anything—even, you might be surprised to find out, of the idea that young people are not hopeless, that they do dream of better things to come, and that they are worth educating, still and all. In other words, I confess to being of the deluded opinion that students will heartily take to literature only if they are shown the good that they can get from it. And this can only happen if the teacher can bring herself to care enough to show them how.
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