21 Century Literature of The Philippines and The World: Activity Sheet Quarter 2 - MELC 1
21 Century Literature of The Philippines and The World: Activity Sheet Quarter 2 - MELC 1
21 Century Literature of The Philippines and The World: Activity Sheet Quarter 2 - MELC 1
Republic Act 8293, section 176 states that: No copyright shall subsist in any
work of the Government of the Philippines. However, prior approval of the
government agency or office wherein the work is created shall be necessary for
exploitation of such work for profit. Such agency or office may, among other things,
impose as a condition the payment of royalties.
Welcome to 21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World for
Grade 11!
The 21st Century Literature of the Philippines and the World Activity Sheet is a
product of the collaborative efforts of the Schools Division of Iloilo City and DepEd
Regional Office VI - Western Visayas through the Curriculum and Learning
Management Division (CLMD). This is developed to guide the learning facilitators
(teachers, parents and responsible adults) in helping the learners meet the
standards set by the K to 12 Basic Education Curriculum.
The 21st Century Literature of the Philippines and the World Activity Sheet is
self-directed instructional materials aimed to guide the learners in accomplishing
activities at their own pace and time using the contextualized resources in the
community. This will also assist the learners in acquiring the lifelong learning skills,
knowledge and attitudes for productivity and employment.
The 21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World Learning
Activity Sheet will help you facilitate the teaching-learning activities specified in
each Most Essential Learning Competency (MELC) with minimal or no face-to-face
encounter between you and learner. This will be made available to the learners with
the references/links to ease the independent learning.
The 21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World Learning
Activity Sheet is developed to help you continue learning even if you are not in
school. This learning material provides you with meaningful and engaging activities
for independent learning. Being an active learner, carefully read and understand the
instructions then perform the activities and answer the assessments. This will be
returned to your facilitator on the agreed schedule.
Quarter 2, Week 2
I. Learning Competency
Writing a close analysis and critical interpretation of literary texts, applying a reading
approach, and doing an adaptation of these require from the learner the ability to
identify: representative texts and authors from Latin America and Africa.
Among those included in the Latin American literature are the Dominican
Latina writer Julia Alvarez with her novel, In the Name of Salome, rising
contemporary literature star Yuri Herrera from Mexico with his groundbreaking
novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World, Pulitzer Prize-winning Junot Diaz with
one of his earlier short stories, “How to Date a Brown Girl (black girl,white girl, or
halfie),” and Haitian Edwidge Danticat’s short story, “Ghosts.”
Africa is called the “Dark Continent” because most people know very little
about this continent since it remained unexplored over a long period of time. Their
literature contains the body of traditional oral and written works expressed in Afro-
Asiatic, African, and European languages. Modern African literatures were born in
the educational systems imposed by colonialism, with models drawn from Europe
rather than existing African traditions.
Among the African literary texts and authors are : Poems, “My Black is
Beautiful (Woman)” and “My Black is Beautiful (Man)” by Naomi Johnson, Short
Story, “A Private Experience” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Short Story, “Inscape”
by Yaa Gyasi, Short Story, “War for God” by Zaynab Quadri and “The Sack” by
Namwali Serpell.
2. https://21stcenturylitph.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/literature-from-latin-america/
3. http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/curriculum/unit-three/module-
eleven/activity-one/
4. www.topplelearning.com
Instructions: Write a close analysis and critical interpretation of the selection below.
The following questions will help you compose a paragraph. Do it on your answer sheet.
• Were the literary elements like theme, characters, setting, plot, conflict, tone, and
point of view clearly depicted by the author in the story?
• Do the characters portray realistic scenes?
• Does the author use clear and simple language in his writings?
• Does the story contain violent scenes and languages?
• Does the author use sensory imagery to capture the reader’s interest and emotion?
She stands by the door, a tall, elegant woman with a soft brown color to her skin (southern
Italian? a Mediterranean Jew? a light-skinned negro woman who has been allowed to pass by virtue of
her advanced degrees?), and reviews the empty rooms that have served as home for the last eighteen
years.
Now in the full of June, the attic is hot. Years back, when she earned tenure, the dean offered
her a more modern apartment, nearer to the campus. But she refused. She has always loved attics, their
secretiveness, their niches and nooks, where those never quite at home in the house can hide. And this
one has wonderful light. Shafts of sunlight swarm with dust motes, as if the air were coming alive.
It is time for fresh blood in this old house. On the second floor, right below her, Vivian Lafleur
from the Music Department is getting on in years and going a bit deaf, too. Every year the piano gets
more fortissimo, her foot heavy on the pedal. Her older sister, Dot, has already retired from Admissions
and moved in with her "baby" sister.
She herself is worried about the emptiness that lies ahead. Childless and motherless, she is a
bead unstrung from the necklace of the generations. All she leaves behind here are a few close
colleagues, also about to retire, and her students, those young immortals with, she hopes, the Spanish
subjunctive filed away in their heads.
She must not let herself get morbid. It is 1960. In Cuba, Castro and his bearded boys are
saying alarming, wonderful things about the new patria they are creating. The Dalai Lama, who fled
Tibet last year on a yak with the Chinese at his heels, has issued a statement: One must love one's
enemies, or else all is lost. But these are positive signs, she reminds herself, positive signs. It is not a new
habit of hers: these efforts to rouse herself from a depressive turn of mind she inherited from her mother.
Now, playfully, she imagines the many lives she has lived as captioned by the title of one or another of
her mother's poems. How should this new life be titled? "Faith in the Future"? "The Arrival of Winter"? or
(why not?) "Love and Yearning"? The horn honks again. It will probably be titled "Ruins" if she doesn't get
downstairs soon! Marion is impatient to go, red-faced and swearing, jerking the steering wheel as she
turns the car around. "Lady driver," one of the men mutters under his breath.
"Everyone who is anyone is getting out." "Well then, I'll have no problem. ‘I'm Nobody—Who
are you?'" She loves to quote Miss Dickinson, whose home she once visited, whose fierce talent reminds
her of her own mother's. Emily Dickinson is to the United States of America as Salomé Ureña is to the
Dominican Republic—something like that.
"You are not nobody, Camila," her friend scolds. "Don't be modest now!" Marion loves to brag.
She is from the midwestern part of the country, and so she is easily impressed by somebodies, especially
when they come from either coast or from foreign countries. ("Camila's mother was a famous poet." "Her
father was president." "Her brother was the Norton Lecturer at Harvard.") Perhaps Marion thinks that such
reflected importance will stem the tide of prejudice that often falls on the foreign and colored in this
country. She should know better. How can Marion forget the cross burning on her front lawn that long
ago summer Camila visited the Reed family in North Dakota?
She couldn't possibly see me; the professor is thinking. I am already gone from this place before
she leaves, she makes the sign of the cross—an old habit she has not been able to shake since her
mother's death sixty-three years ago. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of my mother,
Salomé.
Her aunt Ramona, her mother's only sister, taught her to do this. Dear old Mon, round
andbrown with a knot of black hair on top of her head, a Dominican Buddha but with none of the
bodhisattva's calm. Mon was more superstitious than religious and more cranky than anything else. Back
then, it was a habit to kiss each parent's hand and ask their blessing before leaving the house. La
bendición, Mamá. La bendición, Papá. When her mother died, Mon thought up this way for her to ask for
Salomé's blessing. To summon strength from a fading memory that every year became less and less real
until all that was left of her mother was the story of her mother.
Years of teaching physical education have kept Marion fit and trim, and her hardy midwestern
genes have done the rest. She is warm-hearted and showy, kicking up a storm wherever she goes. "Are
you Spanish, too?" people often ask, and with her dark hair and bright eyes Marion could pass, though
her skin is so pale that Camila's father often worried that she might be anemic or consumptive.
They have lived through so much, some of which is best left buried in the past, especially
now that Marion is a respectable married lady. ("I don't know about the respectable," Marion laughs.) In
her politics, however, Marion is as conservative as her recently acquired husband, Lesley Richards III,
whose perennial tan gives him a shellacked look, as if he were being preserved for posterity. He is rich
and alcoholic and riddled with ailments.
"In the name of my mother, Salomé," she says to herself again. She needs all the help she
can get here at the end of her life in the United States. Somewhere past Trenton, New Jersey, to keep
her restless friend from further distractions ("Light me a cigarette, will you?" "Any more of those chips
left?" "I sure could use a soda!"), she offers: "Shall I tell you why I have decided to go back?" Marion has
been pestering Camila ever since she arrived a few days ago to help her friend pack. "But why? Why?
That's what I want to know. What do you hope to accomplish with a bunch of ill-mannered, unshaven,
unwashed guerrillas running a country?" Purposely, she believes, Marion mispronounces the word so it
sounds like gorillas. "Guerrillas," Camila corrects, rattling the r's.
She has been afraid she will sound foolish if she explains how just once before her life is
over, she would like to give herself completely to something—yes, like her mother. Friends would worry
that she had lost her wits, too much sugar in her blood, her cataracts blurring all levels of her vision. And
Marion's disapproval would be the worst of all, for she would not only disagree with Camila's choice, she
would try to save her.
Camila takes a deep breath. Perhaps the future will be over sooner than she thinks. "I'm all ears,"
Marion says when they have both recovered. Camila's heart is still beating wildly—one of those bats that
sometimes gets trapped in her attic apartment so that she has to call the grounds crew to come get it out.
"I have to go back a ways," she explains. "I have to start with Salomé."
"Can I confess something?" Marion asks, not a real question, as she does not wait for Camila to
answer back. "Please don't get your feelings hurt, but I honestly don't think I would ever have heard of
your mother unless I had met you." She's not surprised. Americans don't interest themselves in the
heroes and heroines of minor countries until someone makes a movie about them.
"So, what's the story?" Marion wants to know. "As I said, I'll have to start with my mother, which
means at the birth of la patria, since they were both born about the same time." Her voice sounds
strangely her own and not her own. All those years in the classroom. Her half-brother Rodolfo calls it her
teacher's handicap, how she vanishes into whatever she's teaching. She's done it all her life. Long before
she stepped into a classroom, she indulged this habit of erasing herself, of turning herself into the third
person, a minor character, the best friend (or daughter!) of the dying first-person hero or heroine. Her
mission in life—after the curtain falls—to tell the story of the great ones who have passed on. But Marion
is not going to indulge her. Camila has not gotten past the first few years of Salomé's life and the wars of
independence when her friend interrupts. "I thought you were finally going to talk about yourself, Camila."
"I am talking about myself," she says—and waits until they have passed a large moving van,
sailing ship afloat on its aluminum sides—before she begins again.
Latin American Literature are written and oral works created by literary
writers in South America, and the Caribbean. Latin American literature is the literature
of the Spanish- speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere.
Africa is called the “Dark Continent” because most people know very little
about this continent since it remained unexplored over a long period of time. African
literature contains the body of traditional oral and written works expressed in Afro-
Asiatic, African, and European languages.
V. Reflection
1. What did you like most / didn’t you like about the activities?
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