Donita Faith L.

Aborde 11-Issachar

To Those Who Turn a Blind Eye

We all have the ability to create a masterpiece and we just have to take that leap of
believing in ourselves. Authors, armed with their passion and dedication used literature as an art
of expressing themselves, with them having their own techniques, stylstyles e and purposes. Not
going too far away, our own country comprises of renowned writers from different regions with
exemplary works that give life to our own literature and culture. One of them is Felino Garcia Jr,
an author with an Ilonggo core who uses Hiligaynon, who seems to write to those who turn a
blind eye.

Despite the possibility of not being prominent unlike those who write in English, Garcia
continues to write in his mother tongue, Hiligaynon, and encourage native speakers to use the
language that they seem not to practice speaking consciously and correctly in the present. He
tries to reconnect his fellow Ilonggos to the language as he does what he's best at, his craft,
writing. He seems to let the people of his own region see how rich their own literature is, and that
it should not be restricted to one dominated language that the majority uses because a literary
work should not be assessed on what language it is written alone but on how the writer was able
to make the whole world relate by using the local principles and ideas from whatever region or
culture he was cultivated in. That makes a work universal.

Felino has no intention of extremely stylizing his narratives or putting deep symblic motifs
in his stories. He decided to veer away from this practice because although writing aesthetically
is beneficial to writing, he personally thinks that a literary work should also express honesty and
sincerity to achieve what is important when they write from their own lives, authenticity. This
point of view seems to awake people blinded by literatures full of symbols and dazzling style
that they weren't able to see its concealed weakness and lack of substance.

Garcia was also known as an English poet. He published a book containing some of the
best love poems you can ever read as said by many. Writing from his own perspective and
position as a middle class gay in the Third World, he often tackles homosexuality and has gay
theme in his collection. He wrote in a language that everybody understands, love. He
compared love to nature and body elements, showcases beginnings and endings, as well as
loving and longing. Through this poems, he tries to write to those who still refuse to see that them,
despite being who they are, experience love and pain like men and women.

People can turn a blind eye on what's truly happening, whether it's about the obscurity
of regional writers, weak narratives concealed by aesthetic or that each and everyone of us
have different circumstances or sufferings we go through it's just that not everybody shows it.
But if there's someone we need to be honest to, it's to ourselves. Felino Garcia is a writer who
chose to be proud of what region he came from, of what language he grew up to, and who
he truly is. He chose to be himself rather than complying to what the world dictates him to be.
He chose to be involved on what is truly happening through his works, writing to those who turn
a blind eye.