Nínay

Nínay is a novel in the Spanish language written by

The novel explores the life and love story of the female protagonist named Ninay, a heartbroken young woman who died of cholera. Her heartbreak was due to her separation from her lover Carlos Mabagsic. Ninay's misfortune became harder to bear because of the loss of her parents. A pasiam, the novena for the dead, was being said and offered for the lifeless Ninay. Framed with this melancholic atmosphere of nine-day prayer for the departed, the novel opens up a succession of narratives that present "variations of unrequited love". The first condemned relationship was between Ninay and her lover Carlos Mabagsic. When Ninay was still alive, Mabagsic was falsely accused of being the leader of a rebellion. Mabagsic's accuser was Federico Silveyro, an entrepreneur from Portugal. Mabagsic went abroad. Upon his return, Mabagsic found out that Ninay confined herself in a convent. Mabagsic became a victim of cholera and died. Ninay also died of cholera. The other victims of the wickedness of the Portuguese Federico Silveyro were the couple named Loleng and Berto. Silveyro was the cause of Loleng's death. Berto avenged Loleng's death by killing Silveyro.^[5]

Description

Reviews

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According to Adam Lifshey, an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. of the United States, Ninay is the first or inaugural Asian novel written in the Spanish language. Being such, Lifshey further described Ninay as a landmark text, an artifact that was deterritorialized and is fundamentally transnational because the novel is both Asian and European.^[2] Apart from being a window to the national customs of the Philippines, Ninay is a historia crítica or "critical history", a mode of writing based on historical documentation or historiography wherein Paterno attempted to confirm the Filipinos' claim and assertion of having a civilized status and civilization that existed prior to the arrival of the Spanish explorers in the Philippine archipelago, and to defend the Filipinos' fundamental resemblance to other peoples and the universality of the Philippine culture and customs.^[1]

Although published in Madrid Spain while the Philippines was still a Spanish colony, Ninay was conceived and written by an author who considered himself as a true Filipino. Ninay, the book, had been labeled as the first Filipino novel because it fell under the literary classification of the novel, meaning Ninay portrayed the contemporary life of human beings, in this case the Filipinos and their customs during the 1880s. However, although Ninay was a realistic and "fully developed novel", it has its imperfections. These flaws include having an artificial formal structure, having an inadequate melodramatic plot structure, a narrative lacking literary merit, being an undistinguished and loosely conceived story, and that it was created in order to entertain readers. In addition, it was a novel that deviated from the native narrative tradition of the Philippines.^[6] Despite of the negative literary criticisms, Ninay is still an important novel because it was both an effort and a gap-filler in the literary history of the Philippines. The novel concentrated on the cultural aspect and characteristics of the Filipino people.^[6] Although described as a novel without valuable literary qualities, Ninay was an "exaltation of the pre-hispanic traces of civilization in the Philippines" and a work that prompted the production of other novels that highlighted the characteristics of Filipino identity.^[7]

Characters

The characters in Ninay is a mixture of native Filipinos (known then as indios) and peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain), thus - in a way - a community of mestizos (half-breeds) with a hybrid culture. This is la filipinidad or "the Filipinoness" that Paterno showed in the novel.^[1]

Ninay, the character, appeared as a specter at the latter part of the novel. The apparition of Ninay represented the "ghostly image" or the spirit of the seemingly absent yet present Filipino image or national identity. The national identity of the Filipinos, according to Matibag, is personified in the traces of Ninay's presence but "contextualized" by the memory of Ninay.^[1]

Dedication

The original Spanish version of the novel was dedicated by Paterno to his father, a dedication that was written using the