An analysis of a 21st Century Literature Entitled

"The Safe House"

                          by Sandra Nicole Roldan                             

 

`                                

 Introduction 

“The Safe House”

 *knocks* *peek in a small opening of the door*

 “Where is your father?” the old man asked

“He doesn’t live here anymore” the girl replied

“Why?” asked the old man

*Close the door slowly* 

Background of the author

Sandra Nicole Roldan

·         Authorial information:

o   Sandra Nicole Roldan is the author of “The Safe House”.

o   She lives in Quezon City, National Capital Region.

o   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 been criticized by the government.

o   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.

o  
Sandra Nicole Roldan also writes the “At The School Gate” and was originally published in the year 2018.

·         Textual information:

“The Safe House” was published on July 3, 2017

"The Safe House"

     From the street, it is 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 genteel middle class living. There is a clubhouse, a swimming pool, 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 here.

    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 up 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. Many 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 one particular uncle’s voice, rumbling through the dark like thunder. He is one of her newer relatives, having arrived only that morning. All grown-ups 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, may be like a pirate, he has only one eye. She presses her ear against the wall. If she closes 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 crowded around the television. She wants to change the channel, watch the late afternoon cartoons but they wave her away. The grown-up’s 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: Humandakana, Makoy! Mamatayka! Pinapatay mo asawa ko! Mamamatay karin 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 in 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 grown-ups 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. Her mother is always crying quietly in the kitchen. Sometimes the girl sits beside her mother on the floor, listening to words she doesn’t really understand: Underground, resolution, 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 approached. 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 favourite has 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 in the balcony and reads another picture book from China. It is about a girl who cuts her hair to help save her village from Japanese soldiers. The title 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 a 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 k4 this very same house. Muddy boots on the bridge over the koi pond, strangers poking guns through the water lilies. They are looking for guns and papers, they are ready to destroy the house. Before the colonel can give his order, they see The Aviary. A small sunlit room with a hundred lovebirds 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 girl asks. The birds are long gone, the grandparents say, 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 guru 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 surrey, 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 amaze the size of the playground at school, but 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: some just visiting, others lucky enough to stay with their parents all the time. 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 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 really relatives, and had told her names not really their own. To a grownup, an old friend’s face can never really change; in a child’s fluid memory, it 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 does not 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 ply board 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 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 be opened 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

A.    Literary Genre

21st Literary Genre is the new genre for literature that 21st Century authors wrote, created, and published from 2001 to present. Its purpose was to separate the new kinds of literature. Why? This century is full of new and young generation writers here they think and write much more creative than in past ages. 

 

 

Our chosen 21st Literature uses metafiction, which is a narrative technique in which the work self-consciously calls attention to itself as a work of fiction. Similar to breaking the fourth wall in theater, metafiction suspends the disbelief of the reader by respectively addressing the reader or discussing its status. 

 

 

Metafiction is created in many different ways but always includes an awareness within the fiction that it is indeed just that, a work of fiction because the story emphasizes how it constructed and continuously reminding readers that it is fiction.

 

 

 

     The author used these following techniques:

• addressing the reader
• a story within a story
• story with a narrator that exposes himself as both a character and the narrator

 

B.   Analysis Guides

Together, let us understand the message behind "The Safe House" by discussing a variety of categories that will help us to comprehend the story.

Reader Response

We like the story for the fact that it is not the usual plot we usually encounter compared to other literary pieces we had read before. We are amazed at how the writer gave the twist and put flavour in it. Reading it for the second time has a huge impact on how we will perceive the message of the story. It feels like we are in that situation though it is a work of fiction.

 

Plot and Structure

The parts have a great connection to each other that makes the story complete and understandable. The story ends up sad and tragic. Based on the literary piece that we chose, the conflicts are the mental capacity of the little girl to understand what is happening in this period. And since most of the people are against the Martial Law, it leads to revolutionary of the people.

 

Setting

Sandra Nicole Roldan based the story in real-life situations. This happened during the reign of Former President Ferdinand Marcos in the year 1972. Most of the events that occurred during this time are in what they called “safe house”.

 

Tone

            The attitude of the writer is negative when delivering the story, it feels like she has anger in the government because of what happened to her family during that time. The tone she presented gave life and power to the story for the reason that it was her experience, and there’s an impact on the people who encountered the Marcos regime. The story serves as the voice of the people who lived on the span of Martial Law.

Character

          The protagonists in this story are the little girl who is the witness of the Martial Law, relatives which serve as activists, and the leader of the activist who is her father. 

 

Point of View

It is third-person point of view because the author exposes herself as both character and

narrator.

 

Diction and Style

           This story used many formal words such as "many”, "cause", and “explode”. She uses this so that it would be easy for the readers to understand the story for the reason that these formal words are appropriate to all readers disregarding their age that’s why she avoids using slang words.

 

Images and Symbols

            Blood and scared people come through my mind while reading this story imagining how they survived this situation. At the beginning of the story, many brief descriptions about the surroundings and characters are being told. Also, the author used the safehouse as the image of the story. Safehouse refers to a place you can be safe and this could be a hideout too. We can say this because we put ourselves in the shoe of the protagonist or the actor to feel the emotion of the story's impact.

 

Theme

            The story shows what is the truth behind Martial Law because the voice of the people was silent by the law ruling that time. 

     C.    Contextual Analysis

    The story used a Biographical Context. Sandra Nicole Roldan was the one who writes, “The Safe House.” She was conceived in prison during conjugal visits when her mother visits her father that was a political prisoner. The reason why she wrote it is because of her childhood experience during martial law   

  SUMMARY

                        It was 1982 at that time, and there was a five years old girl that experienced difficulties in the period of Martial Law in the reign of former President Ferdinand Marcos. It was the most remarkable event that happened in Philippines history. They were hiding in what they called "safe house." She was confused about why there are so many people in that house. She asked her father, who are they, and the father replied, they are his relatives, her uncles and unties. The thought that it was a safe house was not she expected.

            It was 1982, early in the morning, the girl goes to a room that is full of unknown people, and she was wondering what are they doing. Her father came, and she asked him who and what are they preparing. The father replied, they are all our relatives, and when she tends to ask again, her father got irritated, and he commands that she must go to her room and play toys with other kids. But, in that room, the father and all his comrades are planning to attack and kill Marcos. If you are confused about who they are, they were a rebel in that period. Her mother is serving their relatives with no sign of happiness. Sometimes she saw her mother crying in the kitchen because of the taxes and unpaid bills. The mother soon leaves the house, and she knows that her mother will never come back. It was in 1984, an afternoon of August when her father got arrested right in front of their house. The neighbors are watching, afraid to create a noise, but when the soldiers left, murmurings begin. It is also the year where she and her brother go to their grandparents because they don't have a parent to care for them. They visit her father in his new house, which is Camp Crame. Every weekend, she slept in her father's cell. She was fourteen, in prison, and she's having the time of her life. The events that happened in their past became a thought that the safe house was not safe at all.

REFERENCES

           

            Below is the sources where we collect some of our answers in the analysis questions. We rest assured that we give what the authors of these sources claimed.

 

	AUTHOR/S	TITLE OF THE BOOK/WEBSITE	TITLE OF THE ARTICLE/TEXT	PUBLISHER &PLACE OF PUBLICATION	WEBSITE LINK
1	Luke MicahelOrtilano	WordPress.com	The Safe House – by Sandra Nicole Roldan		https://lukemichaelortilano.wordpress.com/
2	MisaelBacani	University of the Philippines	11 Sandra Roldan		https://www.up.edu.ph/in-photos-up-writers-night-2018-celebrates-40-years-of-likhaan/11-sandra-roldan/
3	James Fuertes	Brainly	Summary of safe house by sandraroldan		https://brainly.ph/question/445799
4	Maria Gabriela P. Martin, Alona U. Guevarra, EmarIvery Del Campo, Ma. Socorro Q. Perez PhD	Beyond Borders: Reading Literature in the 21st Century	B. Exploring Texts and Contexts	PHOENIX Publishing House [2016]