Reflection on Literature Under Pre-Spanish

REFLECTION ON LITERATURE UNDER PRE-SPANISH

According to Eduard Counsel "an interchange of literature is the conversation of nations" For over centuries Philippines has been conquered, influenced by foreign culture. This led to a big impact and sudden change to our ethnicity, to our local culture. During the Spanish colonization, Spaniards brought new items so as new culture to our country that is when we started to lose track to our indigenous culture. The lands that was once ours was taken, treasures were stolen, people were inslaved, natives were forced into hiding, everything was burned into ashes, sovereignty was nowhere to be found, we seek freedom but swords have no match with canons and guns. We almost forgot who we really are. Fortunately, some native groups survived. It said that there are two ways in which indigenous people survive the colonization. First is the resistance of colonial rule, natives fought to death for their ethnicity. Second is the inaccessibility of their lands, some of this native groups lived far beyond the center of colonization. In this way natives manage to preserve their culture so as their literary works.

Our literature before was wealthy. The Philippine literature was already there, it didn’t stop but the Westerns hide it from us. As the researchers conducted another research, we found out that there’s already an original culture in our country before the Spanish era. There are some natives that hide on mountains, forests, or places near the coastal. As you can see, those places are the sources of food and routes. Natives create their literature, one of it is poems, then became a lyric poetry and sometimes they used it as a song. They also said that using poems or songs is their way to show their expressions and their own beliefs. Natives already have their own way on creating our original literature, since decades or thousands of years ago we don’t have a form of writing they do it by verbal or oral story telling or they called it as process of oral transmission. In Filipino we called it as kwentong bayan. Everything was already there 50,000 years ago. The spirit, tradition, culture, we have our own story before anything else.

Speaking of original culture, our natives already created their own stories that reflects their life before the Spaniard colonization. It also describes how they survive and shows their beliefs way back then. In our present time, this history of our old literature teaches us more values, learning’s, and let us understand more what was really the story behind the history of the literature in the Philippines.

I can say that being a Filipino is one of the things that I can be proud of. And if the researchers didn’t conduct another round of researching I guess everything will be hidden forever. To sum it up Philippine literature is originally ours.  Also, they’ve said that “Filipinos had a culture that linked them with the Malays of Southeast Asia, a culture with traces of Indian, Arabic and possibly, Chinese influences.”

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