francisco arcellana's "the flowers of may"

THE FLOWERS OF MAY
Francisco Arcellana

It is May again. It is still generally sultry but it has begun to rain in the afternoons and the evenings are clear, the skies are of the utmost blue; new grass is breaking from the earth everywhere.

It is especially pleasant in the afternoons after the rain. The air is clear and fragrant, the sky has a new washed look, and everything looks clean and newborn.

Maytime makes me think of rain and flowers. It makes me think of my father and mother, my brothers and my sisters, the living and the dead. It makes me think of churches and how it is inside churches on May afternoons.

Maytime is running in the rain and gathering sampaguita buds. It is Father standing by the window, watching the rain, his grief for the dead Victoria deep and unspoken; and it is Mother standing beside Father, trying to share and understand that grief. It is Manuela and Juaning and the dead Victoria and Peping and Narciso and Ting and Lourdes and Gloria and Monserrat and Toni and even the dead Josefina and the dead Concepcion whom I did not know. It is the church in Tondo and the chapel in Gagalangin and the churches in the Walled City and the churches in Ermita and Malate and San Address and Baguio and all the places I have ever been.



Rain in the Philippines begins in May, but May is still actually considered a summer month. May in the Philippines is the time of town fiestas and merrymaking, flowers and flower festivals, Santacruzans and beauty pageants, and out-of-town trips either to the beach or to the mountains. From a religious angle, it is also the month of the Virgin Mary. In May, young girls in white dresses go to church every afternoon to pray, sing hymns, and offer flowers to the Virgin Mary. These Maytime practices are all evident in the passages above, which compose the first four paragraphs of Francisco Arcellana’s “The Flowers of May,” one of my favorite short stories written by a Filipino author. Why I like “The Flowers of May” is not entirely clear to me. I suppose, however, that it is mainly because of the sadness that the short story evokes, which is somehow disconcerting, since sadness is not a feeling usually associated with the month of May.

“The Flowers of May” is basically about “Father standing by the window, watching the rain, his grief for the dead Victoria deep and unspoken; and it is Mother standing beside Father, trying to share and understand that grief.” Moreover, it is also about the narrator’s own feelings about Victoria’s death—thus, the narrator feels compelled to think about rain, flowers, churches, and the little girls who sing in churches in May afternoons, all of which are tied up in Victoria’s death. (Victoria died from a sickness that she developed after getting caught in the rain one May afternoon. She was a singing girl in church and had been out gathering flowers.) While in the short story, there seems to be a resolution in which all the family members have realized that Victoria is indeed dead, in the telling of the story, it seems that it is actually in that realization that they find themselves unable to deal with Victoria’s death. Thus, the narrator keeps going back to past.

Linguistically, the sadness in the short story, the narrator’s deep and continuous contemplation of the past, and the narrator’s inability to let go of the past are evident. While death may cause sadness in any context, I believe that the juxtaposition of conflicting images of life and death—rain, flowers, and the living, on the one hand, and churches, Father’s grief and Mother’s confusion, and the dead, on the other—makes the sadness in this short story particularly striking. For instance, the first two paragraphs suggest life and renewal, which is then countered by the mention of death in the next two paragraphs. This juxtaposition of images thus makes the grief of the Father, the confusion of the Mother, and the narrator’s own feelings of loss more profound. That all these take place in a month that is supposed to be merry, bright, and full of life reinforces this feeling of sadness as well.

That the narrator seems to be engaged in deep, long, and continuous contemplation of the past is apparent in the construction of many of the short story’s sentences. With the paragraphs above as examples (e.g., “It is still generally sultry but it has begun to rain in the afternoons and the evenings are clear, the skies are of the utmost blue; new grass is breaking from the earth everywhere” and “It is the church in Tondo and the chapel in Gagalangin and the churches in the Walled City and the churches in Ermita and Malate and San Address and Baguio and all the places I have ever been”), there is a dominance of long sentence structures achieved primarily through the use of coordination—that is, one structure is connected to another through the use of the conjunction ‘and.’ These coordinated structures have a long and winding effect, which, in a lot of ways, is similar to how thoughts just seem to flow and go on and on when a person is in a state of serious contemplation. The use of repetition (e.g., the repetitive sentence structure as in the sentence, “Maytime makes me think of rain and flowers. It makes me think of my father and mother, my brothers and my sisters, the living and the dead. It makes me think of churches and how it is inside churches on May afternoons” and the repetition of images such as “rain,” “flowers,” “May,” and churches) signals the narrator’s deep contemplation as well, in that the narrators seems to be simply following one image to the next through the process of association, which is how, to a great extent, thoughts tend to flow when one is thinking deeply.

Finally, the long coordinated sentences, the repetitive sentence structures, and the repetition of images suggest the narrator’s inability to forget and let go of the past. The use of coordination, instead of subordination, to connect sentences together is generally perceived as a lack of sophistication or mastery of the language on the part of the writer. In this case, however, what the use of coordination seems to suggest is the narrator’s inability to forget and let go of the past in that the narrator seems unable to make connections between the different images and thoughts presented. The narrator only enumerates these images and thoughts; the narrator does not provide the relationships between them, which the use of subordination can actually do. The reason for this may be that the narrator does not have a clear idea yet of how these images and thoughts actually connect to each other. In other words, the narrator does not seem to have processed these thoughts and images yet; they remain a series of thoughts and images. The repetitive sentence structures and the repetition of images further suggest the hold of this particular memory over the narrator by reinforcing the memory’s realness, urgency, and presence. It seems that the narrator keeps going back to these same thoughts and images without necessarily resolving anything, much like the narration’s compulsion to go to church in May afternoons, smell the flowers of May, and listen to the singing of the little girls every time the month of May rolls around. But what signifies the narrator’s inability to move on in the most apparent manner is the use of the present tense of the verb in the telling of the story. The use of the present tense renders the narrative as an urgent and present reality, which the narrator has to contend with over and over again.

Overall, “The Flowers of May” depicts summer as a season of joy, ripeness, celebration, and life. Thus, when something like death happens in the summer, it makes the grief, pain, sadness, confusion, and loss all the more painful. In the end then, summer becomes a kind of illusion, for reality is nothing at all like the flowers of May. Then again, it may well be that the flowers of May do not suggest joy, ripeness, celebration, or life at all. For the narrator in this story, these flowers may as well be symbolic of grief, sickness, mourning, and death.