Name of Student: Rey-Anne Camille S.

Rodriguez ENG 210 Philippine Literature

Professor: Ezekiel D. Rodriguez Date: February 01, 2020

THE WEDDING DANCE

AMADOR TAGUINOD DAGUIO

A. Author

Amador T. Daguio was a Filipino writer and poet during pre-war Philippines. He published two
books in his lifetime, and three more posthumously. He was a Republic Cultural Heritage awardee
for his works. He was born on January 8, 1912 in Laoag, Ilocos Norte. His family moved to
Lubuagan, Mountain Province, where his father was an officer in the Philippine Constabulary.He
graduated with honors in 1924 at the Lubuagan Elementary School as valedictorian. Daguio was
already writing poems in elementary school, according to his own account. He wrote a farewell verse
on a chalkboard at least once for a departing teacher when he was in grade 6. For his high school
studies, he moved to Pasig to attend Rizal High School while residing with his uncle at Fort William
McKinley. Daguio was too poor to afford his college tuition and did not enroll in the first semester
of 1928. He also failed to qualify for a scholarship. He worked as a houseboy, waiter, and caddy at
Fort McKinley to earn his tuition and later enrolled at the University of the Philippines on the second
semester. He experienced financial difficulties in his studies until an uncle from Honolulu, Hawaii
funded his tuition on his third year of study. Before his uncle's arrival, Daguio has worked as
a printer's devil in his college as well as a writer for the Philippine Collegian. He was mentored in
writing by Tom Inglis Moore, an Australian professor. In 1932, he graduated from UP as one of the
top ten honor graduates. After World War II, he went to Stanford University to study his masterals
in English which he obtained at 1952. And in 1954 he obtained his Law degree from Romualdez
Law College in Leyte. When Daguio was a third-year high school student his poem "She Came to
Me" got published in the July 11, 1926 edition of The Sunday Tribune. After he graduated from UP,
he returned to Lubuagan to teach at his former alma mater. He then taught at Zamboange Normal
School in 1938 where he met his wife Estela. During the Second World War, he was part of the
resistance and wrote poems. These poems were later published as his book Bataan Harvest.
 He was the chief editor for the Philippine House of Representatives, as well as several other
government offices. He also taught at the University of the East, University of the Philippines, and
Philippine Women's University for 26 years. He died in 1967 from liver cancer at the age of 55.

Published works
 Huhud hi aliguyon (a translation of an Ifugao harvest song, Stanford, 1952)
 The Flaming Lyre (a collection of poems, Craftsman House, 1959)
 The Thrilling Poetical Jousts of Balagtasan (1960)
 Bataan Harvest (war poems, A.S Florentino, 1973)
 The Woman Who Looked Out the Window (a collection of short stories, A.S Florentino, 1973)
 The Fall of Bataan and Corregidor (1975)

Awards
 Republic Cultural Heritage award (1973)

B. Literary Period

On the rocky isle of Corregidor, soon after Commodore George Dewey effectively ended Spanish
colonial rule in the Philippines on May 1, 1898, American soldiers set up the first makeshift
American public school. Then, in 1901, 600 teachers from the United States arrived aboard the
transport Thomas to serve as principals, superintendents, and teachers in the highly centralized
public-school system. Since there are more than 170 Philippine languages, English was employed
as the medium of instruction and communication; the colonial government also began sending
Filipino students and professionals to various colleges and universities in the United States, and in
1908, the Philippine legislature established the University of the Philippines (UP) in Manila as the
national university.

Thus, English effectively became the country’s first national language or lingua franca. It became
not solely the chief instrument for the acquisition of new learning, not only a favored medium by
which to represent the Filipinos to themselves and to the world, but also a principal means to
employment, social status, prestige, and power. Indeed, to the very present, English has remained
the principal medium of instruction in the school system. The country’s literature in English, like its
scholarship, was bred in the university, and UP may justly claim to be the cradle of Philippine letters
in English through its literary organs, The College Folio (1910–13) and The Literary Apprentice
(since 1928) of the UP Writers’ Club, and through its national writers’ workshop every summer
since 1964. (We might note here that the Philippine Commonwealth, established by the United States
in 1935, was disrupted during World War II by the Japanese occupation of the country from 1942 to
1944, and that, in 1946, the independent Republic of the Philippines was founded.)

It is truly remarkable that in only half a century since the first English literary endeavors were
published in 1905 in The Filipino Students’ Magazine in Berkeley, California, the country already
possessed a significant body of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays in English. It may be said that, if
at first the writers wrote in English, later they wrought from it because its use in literature had been
chiefly toward affirming, within the adopted language, a Filipino sense of their world. By the mid-
1950s, “Philippine Literature in English” was already offered as a formal course at the UP.

Philippine poetry in English may be regarded as having passed through three overlapping
transformative phases: a romantic era during the first forty years or so since 1905, a New Critical
phase from the 1950s to the 1970s, and a poststructuralist period from the 1980s to the present.

Because the country already had accomplished writers in Spanish, Tagalog, and other native
languages, the literary apprenticeship during the romantic phase was linguistic and cultural rather
than literary or poetic. The tension that inevitably emerged between the poets’ creative struggle with
the adopted language and their responses to the new historical situation cleared the poetic terrain for
their own sensibility and perception of their circumstances. Such engagement with their own cultural
and social milieu is already signaled in Ponciano Reyes’s “The Flood” in 1905, a narrative poem
that addresses the plight of the working class during a natural disaster. Among the romantic poets of
note are Fernando M. Maramág (1893–1936), Luis G. Dato (1906–83), Angela C. Manalang Gloria
(1907–95), Jose Garcia Villa (1908–97), Carlos Bulosan (1913–56), Amador T. Daguio (1912–66),
and Nick Joaquin (1917–2004).

In the 1950s, the American New Criticism began to hold critical sway: Cleanth Brooks, John T.
Purser, and Robert Penn Warren’s Approach to Literature (1936) was the standard textbook for the
collegiate introductory course in literature from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Indeed, New Criticism
is to the present still conspicuous in writers’ workshops, book reviews, and judgments in poetic
contests. Among significant poets during this period are Edith L. Tiempo (1919–2011) and Ricaredo
Demetillo (1919–98), both graduates of the University of Iowa Writing Program, and Carlos A.
Angeles (1921–2000), Alejandrino G. Hufana (1926–2003), Emmanuel Torres (b. 1932), Ophelia
Alcantara Dimalanta (1932–2010), and Cirilo F. Bautista (b. 1941).
 Yet even among these later poets, the transformation of both language and sensibility owes more to
the poet’s creative toil with language in response to his or her historical circumstances than to the
influence of New Critical formalism. Political activism in the mid-1960s and the martial-law regime
under President Ferdinand Marcos from 1972 to 1986 compelled poets to connect with their social
reality, even as they recognized a formalist imperative. There are many more contemporary poets of
note, among whom are Alfred A. Yuson (b. 1945), Ricardo M. de Ungria (b. 1951), Marne L. Kilates
(b. 1952), Eric T. Gamalinda (b. 1956), Luis Cabalquinto (b. 1935), J. Neil C. Garcia (b. 1969),
Merlie M. Alunan (b. 1943), Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas (b. 1951), Marjorie M. Evasco (b. 1953),
and Luisa Igloria (b. 1961). Of these, significantly, four—Gamalinda, Cabalquinto, Torrevillas, and
Igloria—now reside in the United States.

C. Summary

Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the headhigh threshold.
Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with one bound that carried him across to the narrow door. He
slid back the cover, stepped inside, then pushed the cover back in place. After some moments during
which he seemed to wait, he talked to the listening darkness.

"I'm sorry this had to be done. I am really sorry. But neither of us can help it."

The sound of the gangsas beat through the walls of the dark house like muffled roars of falling
waters. The woman who had moved with a start when the sliding door opened had been hearing the
gangsas for she did not know how long. There was a sudden rush of fire in her. She gave no sign
that she heard Awiyao, but continued to sit unmoving in the darkness.

But Awiyao knew that she heard him and his heart pitied her. He crawled on all fours to the middle
of the room; he knew exactly where the stove was. With bare fingers he stirred the covered
smoldering embers, and blew into the stove. When the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of
pine on them, then full round logs as his arms. The room brightened.

"Why don't you go out," he said, "and join the dancing women?" He felt a pang inside him, because
what he said was really not the right thing to say and because the woman did not stir. "You should
join the dancers," he said, "as if--as if nothing had happened." He looked at the woman huddled in a
corner of the room, leaning against the wall. The stove fire played with strange moving shadows and
lights
upon her face. She was partly sullen, but her sullenness was not because of anger or hate.

"Go out--go out and dance. If you really don't hate me for this separation, go out and dance. One of
the men will see you dance well; he will like your dancing, he will marry you. Who knows but that,
with him, you will be luckier than you were with me."

"I don't want any man," she said sharply. "I don't want any other man."

He felt relieved that at least she talked: "You know very well that I won't want any other woman
either. You know that, don't you? Lumnay, you know it, don't you?"

She did not answer him.

"You know it Lumnay, don't you?" he repeated.

"Yes, I know," she said weakly.

"It is not my fault," he said, feeling relieved. "You cannot blame me; I have been a good husband to
you."

"Neither can you blame me," she said. She seemed about to cry.

"No, you have been very good to me. You have been a good wife. I have nothing to say against you."
He set some of the burning wood in place. "It's only that a man must have a child. Seven harvests is
just too long to wait. Yes, we have waited too long. We should have another chance before it is too
late for both of us."

This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her left leg in. She wound the
blanket more snugly around herself.

"You know that I have done my best," she said. "I have prayed to Kabunyan much. I have sacrificed
many chickens in my prayers."

"Yes, I know."
"You remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work in the terrace
because I butchered one of our pigs without your permission? I did it to appease Kabunyan, because,
like you, I wanted to have a child. But what could I do?"

"Kabunyan does not see fit for us to have a child," he said. He stirred the fire. The spark rose through
the crackles of the flames. The smoke and soot went up the ceiling.

Lumnay looked down and unconsciously started to pull at the rattan that kept the split bamboo
flooring in place. She tugged at the rattan flooring. Each time she did this the split bamboo went up
and came down with a slight rattle. The gong of the dancers clamorously called in her care through
the walls.

Awiyao went to the corner where Lumnay sat, paused before her, looked at her bronzed and sturdy
face, then turned to where the jars of water stood piled one over the other. Awiyao took a coconut
cup and dipped it in the top jar and drank. Lumnay had filled the jars from the mountain creek early
that evening.

"I came home," he said. "Because I did not find you among the dancers. Of course, I am not forcing
you to come, if you don't want to join my wedding ceremony. I came to tell you that Madulimay,
although I am marrying her, can never become as good as you are. She is not as strong in planting
beans, not as fast in cleaning water jars, not as good keeping a house clean. You are one of the best
wives in the
whole village."

"That has not done me any good, has it?" She said. She looked at him lovingly. She almost seemed
to smile.

He put the coconut cup aside on the floor and came closer to her. He held her face between his hands
and looked longingly at her beauty. But her eyes looked away. Never again would he hold her face.
The next day she would not be his anymore. She would go back to her parents. He let go of her face,
and she bent to the floor again and looked at her fingers as they tugged softly at the split bamboo
floor.

"This house is yours," he said. "I built it for you. Make it your own, live in it as long as you wish. I
will build another house for Madulimay."
"I have no need for a house," she said slowly. "I'll go to my own house. My parents are old. They
will need help in the planting of the beans, in the pounding of the rice."

"I will give you the field that I dug out of the mountains during the first year of our marriage," he
said. "You know I did it for you. You helped me to make it for the two of us."

"I have no use for any field," she said.

He looked at her, then turned away, and became silent. They were silent for a time.

"Go back to the dance," she said finally. "It is not right for you to be here. They will wonder where
you are, and Madulimay will not feel good. Go back to the dance."

"I would feel better if you could come, and dance---for the last time. The gangsas are playing."

"You know that I cannot."

"Lumnay," he said tenderly. "Lumnay, if I did this it is because of my need for a child. You know
that life is not worth living without a child. The man have mocked me behind my back. You know
that."

"I know it," he said. "I will pray that Kabunyan will bless you and Madulimay."

She bit her lips now, then shook her head wildly, and sobbed.

She thought of the seven harvests that had passed, the high hopes they had in the beginning of their
new life, the day he took her away from her parents across the roaring river, on the other side of the
mountain, the trip up the trail which they had to climb, the steep canyon which they had to cross.
The waters boiled in her mind in forms of white and jade and roaring silver; the waters tolled and
growled,
resounded in thunderous echoes through the walls of the stiff cliffs; they were far away now from
somewhere on the tops of the other ranges, and they had looked carefully at the buttresses of rocks
they had to step on---a slip would have meant death.
They both drank of the water then rested on the other bank before they made the final climb to the
other side of the mountain.

She looked at his face with the fire playing upon his features---hard and strong, and kind. He had a
sense of lightness in his way of saying things which often made her and the village people laugh.
How proud she had been of his humor. The muscles where taut and firm, bronze and compact in
their hold upon his skull---how frank his bright eyes were. She looked at his body the carved out of
the mountains
five fields for her; his wide and supple torso heaved as if a slab of shining lumber were heaving; his
arms and legs flowed down in fluent muscles--he was strong and for that she had lost him.

She flung herself upon his knees and clung to them. "Awiyao, Awiyao, my husband," she cried. "I
did everything to have a child," she said passionately in a hoarse whisper. "Look at me," she cried.
"Look at my body. Then it was full of promise. It could dance; it could work fast in the fields; it
could climb the mountains fast. Even now it is firm, full. But, Awiyao, I am useless. I must die."

"It will not be right to die," he said, gathering her in his arms. Her whole warm naked naked breast
quivered against his own; she clung now to his neck, and her hand lay upon his right shoulder; her
hair flowed down in cascades of gleaming darkness.

"I don't care about the fields," she said. "I don't care about the house. I don't care for anything but
you. I'll have no other man."

"Then you'll always be fruitless."

"I'll go back to my father, I'll die."

"Then you hate me," he said. "If you die it means you hate me. You do not want me to have a child.
You do not want my name to live on in our tribe."

She was silent.

"If I do not try a second time," he explained, "it means I'll die. Nobody will get the fields I have
carved out of the mountains; nobody will come after me."
"If you fail--if you fail this second time--" she said thoughtfully. The voice was a shudder. "No--no,
I don't want you to fail."

"If I fail," he said, "I'll come back to you. Then both of us will die together. Both of us will vanish
from the life of our tribe."

The gongs thundered through the walls of their house, sonorous and faraway.

"I'll keep my beads," she said. "Awiyao, let me keep my beads," she half-whispered.

"You will keep the beads. They come from far-off times. My grandmother said they come from up
North, from the slant-eyed people across the sea. You keep them, Lumnay. They are worth twenty
fields."

"I'll keep them because they stand for the love you have for me," she said. "I love you. I love you
and have nothing to give."

She took herself away from him, for a voice was calling out to him from outside. "Awiyao! Awiyao!
O Awiyao! They are looking for you at the dance!"

"I am not in hurry."

"The elders will scold you. You had better go."

"Not until you tell me that it is all right with you."

"It is all right with me."

He clasped her hands. "I do this for the sake of the tribe," he said.

"I know," she said.

He went to the door.

"Awiyao!"
He stopped as if suddenly hit by a spear. In pain he turned to her. Her face was in agony. It pained
him to leave. She had been wonderful to him. What was it that made a man wish for a child? What
was it in life, in the work in the field, in the planting and harvest, in the silence of the night, in the
communing with husband and wife, in the whole life of the tribe itself that made man wish for the
laughter and speech of a child? Suppose he changed his mind? Why did the unwritten law demand,
anyway, that a man, to be a man, must have a child to come after him? And if he was fruitless--but
he loved Lumnay. It was like taking away of his life to leave her like this.

"Awiyao," she said, and her eyes seemed to smile in the light. "The beads!" He turned back and
walked to the farthest corner of their room, to the trunk where they kept their worldly possession---
his battle-ax and his spear points, her betel nut box and her beads. He dug out from the darkness the
beads which had been given to him by his grandmother to give to Lumnay on the beads on, and tied
them in place. The white and jade and deep orange obsidians shone in the firelight. She suddenly
clung to him, clung to his neck as if she would never let him go.

"Awiyao! Awiyao, it is hard!" She gasped, and she closed her eyes and huried her face in his neck.

The call for him from the outside repeated; her grip loosened, and he buried out into the night.

Lumnay sat for some time in the darkness. Then she went to the door and opened it. The moonlight
struck her face; the moonlight spilled itself on the whole village.

She could hear the throbbing of the gangsas coming to her through the caverns of the other houses.
She knew that all the houses were empty that the whole tribe was at the dance. Only she was absent.
And yet was she not the best dancer of the village? Did she not have the most lightness and grace?
Could she not, alone among all women, dance like a bird tripping for grains on the ground,
beautifully
timed to the beat of the gangsas? Did not the men praise her supple body, and the women envy the
way she stretched her hands like the wings of the mountain eagle now and then as she danced? How
long ago did she dance at her own wedding? Tonight, all the women who counted, who once danced
in her honor, were dancing now in honor of another whose only claim was that perhaps she could
give her
husband a child.
"It is not right. It is not right!" she cried. "How does she know? How can anybody know? It is not
right," she said.

Suddenly she found courage. She would go to the dance. She would go to the chief of the village, to
the elders, to tell them it was not right. Awiyao was hers; nobody could take him away from her. Let
her be the first woman to complain, to denounce the unwritten rule that a man may take another
woman. She would tell Awiyao to come back to her. He surely would relent. Was not their love as
strong as the
river?

She made for the other side of the village where the dancing was. There was a flaming glow over
the whole place; a great bonfire was burning. The gangsas clamored more loudly now, and it seemed
they were calling to her. She was near at last. She could see the dancers clearly now. The man leaped
lightly with their gangsas as they circled the dancing women decked in feast garments and beads,
tripping on the ground like graceful birds, following their men. Her heart warmed to the flaming call
of the dance; strange heat in her blood welled up, and she started to run. But the gleaming brightness
of the bonfire commanded her to stop. Did anybody see her approach?
She stopped. What if somebody had seen her coming? The flames of the bonfire leaped in countless
sparks which spread and rose like yellow points and died out in the night. The blaze reached out to
her like a spreading radiance. She did not have the courage to break into the wedding feast.

Lumnay walked away from the dancing ground, away from the village. She thought of the new
clearing of beans which Awiyao and she had started to make only four moons before. She followed
the trail above the village.

When she came to the mountain stream she crossed it carefully. Nobody held her hand, and the
stream water was very cold. The trail went up again, and she was in the moonlight shadows among
the trees and shrubs. Slowly she climbed the mountain.

When Lumnay reached the clearing, she cold see from where she stood the blazing bonfire at the
edge of the village, where the wedding was. She could hear the far-off clamor of the gongs, still rich
in their sonorousness, echoing from mountain to mountain. The sound did not mock her; they seemed
to call far to her, to speak to her in the language of unspeaking love. She felt the pull of their gratitude
for her
sacrifice. Her heartbeat began to sound to her like many gangsas.
 Lumnay though of Awiyao as the Awiyao she had known long ago-- a strong, muscular boy carrying
his heavy loads of fuel logs down the mountains to his home. She had met him one day as she was
on her way to fill her clay jars with water. He had stopped at the spring to drink and rest; and she
had made him drink the cool mountain water from her coconut shell. After that it did not take him
long to decide to throw his spear on the stairs of her father's house in token on his desire to marry
her.

The mountain clearing was cold in the freezing moonlight. The wind began to stir the leaves of the
bean plants. Lumnay looked for a big rock on which to sit down. The bean plants now surrounded
her, and she was lost among them.

A few more weeks, a few more months, a few more harvests---what did it matter? She would be
holding the bean flowers, soft in the texture, silken almost, but moist where the dew got into them,
silver to look at, silver on the light blue, blooming whiteness, when the morning comes. The
stretching of the bean pods full length from the hearts of the wilting petals would go on.

Lumnay's fingers moved a long, long time among the growing bean pods.

D. Analysis

The Wedding Dance by Amador Daguio happens to be one of the most hurtful stories in Philippine
Literature set in a tribe in Cordillera Highlands, region known for it’s in culture and its peoples’
obedience and conformity of tradition. The unwritten law also referred as the Law of the Father here
is their bases of their day to day living and therefore, it is the one that controls the whole tribe. This
story is about a husband and wife named Awiyao and Lumnay who were married for seven harvests
but still were not able to bear a child of their own. As for Awiyao to affirm virility and to establish
his place among his tribesmen, he had to look for another wife named Malidumay despite of his love
for Lumnay. This story shows the conflict between the personal love and the love of tribe and culture,
and in some cases, culture prevails. This shows how the culture prevents Awiyao and Lumnay from
their freedom to love each other for lifetime. If we dig deeper to the situation, we can see that both
Awiyao and Lumnay gave up their love not only because of what the culture dictates but also to save
each other from the judgments of the society. If we tend to connect this story to the real life situation,
we can say that people before and today are truly bound with laws that must be followed for our own
welfare but sometimes we can also see these laws which control our own freedom, happiness and
even desires. Sometimes we just wanted to speak out our thoughts, fight for what we think is right
and try to question the law but then, we just feel that there’s always something that pulls us back just
like Lumnay.
There are different Literary Principles used in this story that makes it very interesting to
analyze. The author mainly used the dialogues and actions to reveal the character’s true nature and
as for the setting, he well presented a structure society where Lumnay and Awiyao lived in, bound
with cultural and societal laws which established a certain definition of a true family that has a Father
and a Mother and child or children, this is a clear evidence of the presence of Structuralism. This
law happens to be the one that Awiyao and Lumnay failed to follow but despite of that, they knew
deep in their hearts that they’ve done everything they could just to have a child. In order to stay part
of it, they should be able to accept the reality that as members of that society, they are obliged to
follow the law which is somehow related to Freud’s “The Law of the Father”. Lumnay’s character,
in the story, she was directly suspected as the one who was infertile and the belief of her inability to
bear a child causes her to lose his husband. At this point, we can observe that the writer effectively
used Lumnay’s character to reveal how love can be defeated by culture. However, Lumnay as a
woman has her own strength within herself. She did not act or think passively regarding this situation
despite of being a victim of culture’s superiority. As a woman, she also found her own strength in
herself, she did not easily give in to their culture, instead, she wanted to fight back and defy the
unwritten law. At this point, the Principle that is present is Deconstruction and Feminism (Lecriture
Feminine her cry) can be seen through her words “I don’t want any man. I don’t want another man.”,
“Neither can you blame Me.”, “You know I have done my best. I have prayed to Kabunayan much.
I have sacrificed my chicken in my prayers.”, “It’s not right. It’s not right. How does she know?
How can anybody know? It’s not right.” Her actions and words reflect opposition upon the law and
in the latter part of the ceremony, she attempted to destroy the existing written law (Phallus) by
breaking away, tell the chief of the village and the elders that it is not right thinking that Awiyao is
only hers and he cannot be taken away from her by anybody and would let her be the first woman to
question the unwritten law. Lumnay’s strength as a woman was used by the author in order to show
his attack to culture sovereignty which reflects the inequality of rights and freedom. However, when
she came to the ceremony, Lumnay was not able to have the courage to speak up her thoughts and
end up in living on mountains away from the ceremony and heard the sound of gongs that seemed
to thank her for her sacrifice. She finally submitted herself to the Law (law of the father) but deep
inside of her, she knows that she is not infavoured of that. On the other hand, Awiyao, the husband
represents the clash between love and culture. Awiyao's sadness is just thesame as Lumanay's upon
his marriage to another woman. In the story it really portrayed their defeated love over cultural
superiority. In their dialogues, Awiyao clearly expresses his love for Lumnay but still he claims to
 his submission of himself to what the culture dictates which is clearly following the Structuralism
principle. He is not in favored of what he has done, but still there is a great need for him to do it as
much as how it pains Lumnay. During the wedding ceremony, Awiyao pays a visit to Lumnay,
inviting her to come to the wedding dance despite of the pain. He utters the word which are against
wishes, asserting his love “It is taking away half of his life to love her like this.” He also stated the
superiority of culture," I am very sorry, but neither of us can help it... You know very well that I
don’t want any woman either... I do this for the sake of our tribe.” I can clearly see Awiyao’s passion
for his own tribe that he seemed to do everything whatever it takes just to conform to the society
where he’s living. Awiyao wanted to enter the symbolic order and the only way to achieve it is to
marry another woman who is more capable to give him one. Men tend to save their own pride as
men inorder to prove their masculinity to others, “If I did this, it is because of my need for a child.
You know that life is not worth without a child. The men have, mocked me behind my back.”
Laws are supposed to be the ones that protect all of our rights and in this case, I observed
that the Law is being unjust and being unfair in putting Lumnay and Awiyao in that kind of situation
because a child is not a just a symbol of a masculinity but rather, it is something beyond it. A child
is a gift and it will be given at a right moment of time. A child is a supposed to be product of a true
love not by the culture which dictates itself. If I were in the place of Lumnay, I would rather stand
up and fight for what is right and what is mine because as a matter of fact, I know that this certain
Law which they fear so much can be questioned and can be deconstructed. As for Awiyao, if I were
in his shoes, I would not leave my wife because of a certain law because leaving your wife behind
coz she can’t bear a child is something which is much inhumane act than any other ways to break
the laws. We should learn stand up for what is right and for what we have. It is a good thing that
nowadays, people are more aware of their rights to choose someone whom they truly love, rights to
choose to have a child or not, and rights to speak our own thoughts and all we have to do is to use it
in a right way.

E. Comments

Irvin John Andres

Jan 11
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "I love you, and that's the beginning and end of everything."

The Wedding Dance posits a very simple yet compelling question - "How does one move on from a
failed relationship?" Amador Daguio did a masterful job of bringing the readers to the core of the
conflict by painting a grim picture of how easily relationships may end given irreconcilable
differences.

However, the story is not so much about love as it is about feminism. When Awiyao left Lumnay
just because she could not bear him a child, it spoke volumes of how early ages view women in the
society as mere catalysts in continuing bloodlines. This sad notion, unfortunately, was underscored
by the romantic mood set in the beginning of the story. It was only when Daguio left the readers
hanging about the fate of Lumnay that the focus shifted back to the dire fate of early women.

Cathleen Castro
Jan 13
Amador T. Daguio was a poet, novelist and teacher during the pre-war. He was best known for his
fictions and poems. The short story “ The Wedding Dance” was about the culture destroying the
love of a couple. Awiyao and Lumnay were husband and wife for about seven years , but in their
culture a man should have a child in order to have someone to carry their family name and inherit
the land of his father. This resulted of Awiyao marrying another woman – Madulimay. It was entitled
“Wedding Dance” for it was a way of dancing traditionally for fertility and also for seduction for
women. Before the wedding dance Awiyao went to Lumnay to personally invite her to attend the
traditional dance but she refused. The conversation they had revealed that they both love each other
it so happen that they needed to follow the culture so that Awiyao will not be mock by other man in
the tribe. This story presented how a culture can affect relationship and bond. It also presented the
reality that the love you have to the other person is not enough if you are against all odds.

Rey-Anne Camille Rodriguez

Jan 15
What I like about the Wedding Dance is the fact that it was realistic to the point of disbelief. Much
more, I admire the courage and resilience of Lumnay as she faces the truth that her husband is not
hers anymore. Awiyao on the other hand is such a weak man. He submerged himself to the opinions
of his tribe (but it's just a part). The bigger factor is that he also likes to have a child of his own and
his wife could not bear him a child. I personally believe that Awiyao's love to Lumnay isn't strong
enough to endure hardships.
Kristine Joy Lopez
Jan 16
This story is painful because one should let go because of the social norms/tradition. The characters
in the story was being dictate by culture. What to do when they are so inlove with each other. They
need to follow their tradition. The story is about Lumnay and Awiyao who are member of a tribe in
Cordillera. After seven harvets, Lumnay and Awiyao are still childless.

Alaizah Bartolome
Jan 17
It gives us an insight that a man like Awiyao is actually giving freedome to the woman she loved to
find a better husband than him. In this case, as a person, I encountered several friends of mine that
has the same thing. For me, the pain that a certain couple have when they are still in a relationships.
Another thing is that several of the men do such an act its because they want their woman they
cherish happier if they are with another person. Doing so will bting relief to the both sides, and there
are lesser chances of conflict between the two parties.
If they are broken up, accepting it is the best thing. Considering that a girl is happy with another
person, a man must accept the fact, appreciate the happiness to the girl that he loves, and also, to tge
benefit to all of those who are involved in a relationship.

Jessica Marie Miranda

Jan 17
It's a case of them against the world (society's expectations, to be particular). But unlike in most
stories, their love does not seem to be winning. Awiyao is decided he must have a child to be deemed
worthy of his tribe, and Lumnay is upset by the fact that she cannot give her husband one. Though
they claim their undying love for each other, it is not enough to stop the ceremony that will ultimately
tear them apart, perhaps for life.

The author makes the reader feel the emotions both characters feel, during their romantic yet
restrained exchanges. Though they want to -- they really want to -- but they both know they can't.
Not anymore. There's this pang of sad regret and loss felt throughout the story, some empathy for
Lumnay and an urgency for Awiyao to just stay with her, despite the fruitless marriage.

Lumnay knows it is for the greater good, and to force her will upon the whole tribe would be very
selfish of her. The end of the story, though it sounds open-ended, is actually conclusive for she has
just decided to stand on the sidelines of the wedding and do nothing, but accept her fate.