Fragile Arena: The Struggle Between Protest and Confinement in Three Sugilanon

Abstract

Though the Hiligaynon prose narrative form called the sugilanon appears innocuous enough, it can also be—and has been—used as a channel of social protest. As a protest text, the sugilanon can expose, criticize, and propose alternatives to perceived social wrongs such as the oppression of one individual by another or of one social class by another. This paper seeks to explore the protest aspect of the sugilanon through three examples of the form. The three texts are analyzed and evaluated in terms of the extent to which they manifest recognition of and engagement with, the oppression in the world that they create and/or in the world that surrounds them. At the same time, since these texts exist within contexts where the power relations tend to confine protest, this paper also analyzes how each text manifests such confinement, or conversely, how it manages to “escape” confinement.