Unang Ulan ng Mayo

1. Unang Ulan ng Mayo is Sicat’s sequel to her earlier novel, Paghuhunos. Here we see that after the death of her husband Carlos, Gloria tried to organize his journals; but when people outlive their beloved, his presence paradoxically overwhelms them in his very absence. As soon as Gloria realized this, she admitted to herself that she wanted to write her own stories, and thus her journey as a writer began.

This is not another novel about writing a novel, however. It is a woman’s journey into understanding, and getting into, the psyche of a writer (hence in hindsight forgiving her husband’s seeming shortcomings as her partner and father to their children), and initiation into the much complex reality of current Philippine literary scene: publications, critical and popular receptions, awards, and the prestige and honor that come with them, and how they potentially sustain, on the one hand, and cripple, on the other hand, one’s writing interests.

2. The first chapter of the novel, “Alimuom,” is also the title of Sicat’s first short story collection, published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press (incidentally available through GoogleBooks) and introduced by Edgardo M. Reyes, who is most likely the Edgar in the novel from whom Gloria would seek literary counsel, besides her eldest daughter. This certainly sets ground for one of the major interests in the novel—to depict Gloria’s creative process: her thoughts on, and the incidents that led to, the writing of particular stories that certainly echo what Sicat actually wrote and included in her collection. Perhaps incidentally, but Sicat elevates the nature of intertextuality in Filipino fiction and also its reference to reality: despite the difference in names (Gloria, not Ellen), no Filipino contemporary fiction in recent history dared to refer to her own earlier novel in a second novel.

3. Gloria would outline her stories in verse, even if she would not consider herself a poet, because she associates poetry with memorability, and she sees storytelling as an act of remembrance. This is therefore also a novel-testament to her own poetics. She would reiterate the need to use the vernacular in local literature, perhaps initially as defense to her own admission as colonial, and so she would talk with the common people, and would hear them speak, and would try to capture the tone and rhythm of their language and the sentiments and humor they contain. They are afterall her intended readers; she knew from the start that she would speak to them if she were to write at all.

4. Sicat’s expertise in comic dialogue manifests in several occasions, and it is definitely her most formidable tool in sustaining the reader’s interest with her stories. She knows how to laugh at herself, laugh with her characters, and make her readers at least smile once in a while. Even if many parts would sound like an apologia for her not being a "real writer," the whole novel is an assurance that we are in good hands, and that after all, Ellen might not be Gloria, or at least not fully, with the latter’s often shifts from false humilities to arrogance to indifference to sheer fear. But are we not all made of these stuff that make us truly human: so complex that we are unpredictable, as the first summer rain is, even to ourselves?

~ After Ellen L. Sicat's Unang Ulan ng Mayo (2009)