Worlds: Flight to Bilbisan

• Main Author: Ortega, Christine Godinez
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2010
• Subjects: Creative Writing; Fiction
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/1477
• Institution: De La Salle University

This dissertation is a postmodernist novel entitled, “Worlds: Flight to Bilbisan.” It is submitted with an introduction that gives the author’s creative process, and discusses how she has attempted to reclaim the voice of the epic chanter by relocating it in the novel, a western invention. The novel has an original plot and is of mixed media. It tells the story of Yaga in quest of her sweetheart, Lumawed. Indigenous materials and narrative techniques and fantastical elements from selected Mindanao epics of Central and Northern Mindanao are reinvented and retold, and are juxtaposed with illustrations, poetry, features, news stories, and special reports to show varying timelines. In her journey, Yaga discovers a world that parallels our natural world. She thinks she is an outsider of Lumawed’s tribe, Newilian, but, in fact, towards the end of the novel she realizes she is a member of the tribe too. This novel attempts to show the significance of the folk literature of Mindanao especially the folk narratives orally transmitted from one chanter to the next, and how these were used in a written work such as the novel.