Besieged: Stories from Iligan

• Main Author: Nunez, Ana Margarita R.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2015
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5146
• Institution: De La Salle University

Besieged: Stories from Iligan is a short story cycle held together by a common setting and theme: Iligan, which grounds them in a definite location and milieu and the concept of siege which permeates the city's history, traditions, and psyche. The siege offers the image of a defender standing firm in a fortress to withstand attack, to protect what is precious and acquit himself or herself with honor in the fight. In each story, siege is apparent as characters engage in struggles with forces that threaten home, earth, virtue, womanhood, faith, the body, domestic happiness, and inner peace. Ultimately, the defenses must give way, whether they are codes of honor, personal scruples and principles, or intellectual constructs. With the breaking down of these walls however, comes not carnage and defeat but potential for the creation of new things, an open end that leads to a new beginning that may yet be bleaker or brighter than what came before. In the context of these stories, in both the writing process and the product, fiction, defined as both willing submission to the dream and an active and empowering act of selection and construction, allows the integration of the besieger and the besieged. Thus, fiction becomes a means of defying the terrifying idea of the humans smallness and helplessness, a means of bravely standing up to, and crafting something meaningful from, the circumstances of mortality.