ACADEMIA SYSTEM GLOBAL COLLEGES

Subject Code: HUMSS 06 Subject Title: Creative Nonfiction

Module No: 12 Topic: Making the Private Public:

The Personal Narrative

Teacher:

I. OVERVIEW

Making the Private Public: The Personal Narrative" explores the intentional sharing of
intimate aspects of one's life with a wider audience. It involves crafting personal
narratives through various mediums such as literature, art, and digital platforms to
create connections, challenge societal norms, and promote empathy.

In literature, authors utilize autobiographies, memoirs, and personal essays to share

their life stories, struggles, and triumphs. By weaving personal experiences into
narratives, they invite readers to empathize with their journeys and reflect on shared
human experiences.

A. LEARNING COMPETENCY
The learners can be able to:
a. present a commentary/critique on a chosen creative nonfictional text
representing a particular type or form (PERSONAL NARRATIVE), and
b. write a draft of creative nonfiction based on memorable real-life
experience.

B. SPECIFIC LEARNING OBJECTIVES

The students can be able to:

a. describe the personal narrative as a type of creative nonfiction;

b. analyze a sample personal narrative;
c. express his/her opinion on the content of a personal narrative; and
d. write an epilogue for a sample personal narrative

LET’S BEGIN

A. Share it with the rest of the class.

B. Which aspect or aspects of one’s life should not be shared? Why or why not?
C. What do you think is a personal narrative? What characteristics do you suppose does it have?
Do the word association map below.

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 II. LET’S DIG DEEPER

Comparing Notes

A personal narrative shares some aspects of the traditional structure of fiction such as
characters and setting. Like the other types of creative nonfiction, however, the details of
such a narrative should not just revolve around events; they should also incorporate the
narrator's personal (hence, the term) thoughts and feelings. One should also employ literary
devices used in traditional fiction such as figurative language, say, in describing a place or a
character in the story. While the personal narrative should be about a real event, for example, the
narrator may find it useful to use a figurative language, say, exaggerations. Such additions are
aimed at making the narration more colorful, more vivid, and, therefore, more effective. The
personal narrative, of course, as the term itself suggests, is told from the first-person point of
view. But not like the autobiography which deals with a chain of events, the personal narrative
often concerns a particularly happy, sad, humorous, or outrageous episode in one's life.

III. READER’S CORNER

A. Pre-reading
1. How different is life in the city from life in the countryside? Give examples.
2. Would you wish to live in the city or in the countryside? Explain your reasons.

B. Cultural- Historical Background

It is no exaggeration to say that Filipinos are all over the world. At present, it is estimated that
about 10 million Filipinos, or roughly 10 percent of our population, are living or working outside
the country. The numbers may even be higher, with more than 6,000 Filipinos leaving the

Creative Nonfiction
country every day according to 2014 data. The primary reason for going overseas, of course, is
employment. Professionals seek jobs somewhere else instead of devoting their knowledge and
skills to the service of their country and their fellow Filipinos. The unsavory result is of what is
commonly known as "brain drain." To confound it all, some of these professional land jobs that
may be below their level of qualification.
Hence, for example, we have college degree holders working as domestic helpers or
entertainers in exchange for wages that would be difficult to earn while in the Philippines. Worse,
several migrant workers become susceptible to abuse, discrimination, and many other forms of
maltreatment. Finally, the Filipino in exile lives an alienated life far from the country of his/her
birth, uprooted by circumstances over which he/ she has no control. Indeed, there is always in
the Filipino migrant a yearning for home
Fortunately, flexibility is a patent trait of the Filipino in exile. He/she easily adapts to the new
environment, including its people. He/she easily learns the tricks to survive the vagaries of life
away from his/her country of origin. Living in the Philippines has instilled in the Filipino migrant
the value of simplicity and the importance of companionship in the face of uncertainties

C. Previewing
Scan the text below for the answers to the following questions:
1. What is the name of the village?
2. Who is Anna Liza?
3. What are the ardoise?

D. Vocabulary Building
Give the meaning of the underlined word. Choose the letter corresponding to the
correct answer.

1. Her claustrophobia influenced her decision to live in a big house, with more than enough
space for her and her two-year-old boy

a fear of heights
b. fear of enclosed spaces
c. fear of open spaces
d. fear of the dark

2 It was my first time to leave the Philippines, but I found solace in the hospitality shown by
my fellow workers.

a sadness
b. anger
c. consolation
d. joyfulness
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3. There was a time in US history that being black in an all-white school was quite an oddity.

a. something sacred
b. fear of enclosed spaces
c. fear of open spaces
d. fear of the dark

2 It was my first time to leave the Philippines, but I found solace in the hospitality shown by
my fellow workers.

a sadness
b. anger
c. consolation
d. joyfulness

3. There was a time in US history that being black in an all-white school was quite an oddity.

a. something sacred
b. something strange
c. something immoral
d. something racist

[Link] there was widespread hatred against Asians in the area, I, a Filipino, tried my best
to be as inconspicuous as possible.

a. not worthy
b. not devoted
c. not obvious
d. not concentrating

5 Almost nightly, I would pass through that silents meander among bamboo and balete
trees with much apprehension and fear.

a. wist
b. ground
c. night
d. hole
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 E. Reading

The following personal narrative is about its Filipino author's brief stay in a remote village in
France. The title itself suggests the author's attitude toward the place. Pick out details showing her
impressions of her French village, and how different they were from her fellow Filipina's own
impressions. Note also the examples of irony in the narrative.

MY FRENCH VILLAGE
Criselda Yabes

Les Ardennes is hidden in the northeast region of France. The French don't give it much of a thought,
unlike the Riviera in the south, the countryside of Normandy in the north, or the waves of the Atlantic
against Brittany. If by any chance they've come across it, they'd say it's at the end of the world, or describe
it as "the finger stuck in the ass" of Belgium with which it shares the frontier.
For three consecutive summers, I stayed in a small village referred to as part of the region's la valleé. Even
that has an ominous ring to it, that being in a valley depicts the imagined claustrophobia of a people, its
small- mindedness, its fear of strangers; and that I, being an Asian, from a country many had probably never
heard of, was an oddity.
My village, Haybes, faces a wall of a thick green forest that people find oppressive, as if it keeps
them imprisoned. I should have been surprised but wasn't when I discovered that a Filipina has
been living here among 2,000 souls, married to a retired French man and making herself as
inconspicuous as possible.
Anna Liza rang me up one day when she'd heard of me while at an errand at the pharmacy situated by the
river and across the steel bridge as one enters the village. That was normal: the pharmacist is my ex-
husband who had had the urge to return to his place of childhood, this damn valley as he would sometimes
say out of frustration.
There's not much to be done in Haybes; it doesn't even have a decent café. The restaurants would be far
from seeing their names in the Michelin guide. The pizzeria run by an Italian is ranked lower than its
counterparts in the next town about ten kilometers away. The bakery has had its ups and down with the
clientele that finds the baguette a tad below its taste.
What this village has the entire valley for that matter-is the one thing I could not escape from: nature.
And so I invited Anna Liza, my fellow Pinay, for a stroll in the woods just behind my house. It was where I'd
go for walks in the late afternoons and it became like a park for me, choosing any of the trails that wove
through other villages, a silent meander among pines and oaks and other trees not seen in my own country.
Having been here more than 20 years, raising a daughter, tending to a household in what resembled a
subdivision, the forest was a strange apparition for Anna Liza. She was afraid of snakes. She feared getting
raped (although there had been no such incidents in our part of the woods). I showed her there was nothing
dark to it, making her listen to the soothing run of the stream, pointing out to her the infrequent marks of
caves from which stone slates known as the ardoise were gathered in the old days.
The ardoise had been the valley's industry, along with other massive manufacturing and metallurgical
factories that had made this region wealthy, enticing migrants from Italy and Spain through the first half of
the 20th century. But it had been more of a relic, until the village historian made a rather impressive movie
about what took place in Haybes during the First World War.
That was one of the rare occasions when residents came out of their dwellings for a public gathering. At
the very least they were proud of what the community had done one hundred years ago, trying to defend
the village from the German soldiers. There had been a massacre. The church survived razing by the enemy,
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the only structure in which Anna Liza was hoping to find solace as she would have done back home; but it
has been locked to keep away vandals and is opened only for weddings and baptisms.
She arrived in Haybes in the early 1990s when prosperity was already waning, the rich protecting
themselves in their enclave while the growing unemployed, the immigrants, the poor Arabs put up in social
housing were pushed the backside of the village. Arma Liza seized me ma panic when Ve rat me Muslim
teenagers playing by the creek.
In my house made of the ardoise thin purple slates fitted to the walls, I would wait for the sun to shine.
The valley's worst reputation is for its rain consistently wetting the forest and filling up the river. The mist
covers the village like a phantom that comes to visit from time to time. At the slight him of the bright rays,
I'd be off on my bicycle, trundling down the hill until reached the level ground of the track along the River
Meuse.
That was where chanced upon Anna Liza a few days after our forest hike. She was walking to the
pharmacy to buy some creams on a doctor's prescription. Her legs had swollen from a rash after we’d sat
on a bench in the arboretum felt guilty and made up for it by inviting her for a bike ride along the Meuse as
autumn was fast approaching She came for the sake of exercise when the weather called for it
But the river for her was useless, "Walang silbi she said, because the sight of the water made her pine for
the seas back home thousands of miles away came to Les Ardennes for this river looping around villages,
sending out the ducks, geese, swans to the banks, displaying the hues of the verdant preens love this river.
It made me daydream, it made me go forward, and gave me a certain amount of strength.
The biking track from one end to another stretches to about 90 kilometers. starting from the city of
Charleville-Mezieres-home of the rebel poet Arthur Rimbaud of the late 1900s to the frontier town of Givet
that Belgians flock for the restaurants by the quai, the shops and supermarkets and the odd McDonald's by
the fields. Givet is the nearest thing to civilization from our village .
We would go there for the movies and for the patisserie that sells the Paris Brest I’d boast to everyone as
the best tasting one in the whole of France-and I am, of course, exaggerating. Luckily for us, a new salon de
the opened close by this summer, in the town where my ex-husband grew up his family home already sold
when his parents retired to the Riviera. It is right across the river and I could bike to it if I wanted to.
It's our saving grace in our comer of the valley. If you ask me. The pastries are good enough to boost us
out of our afternoon gloom. We take home baguettes for our meals for the days ahead and the croissants
saved for our Sunday breakfast treat. That's how little it would take to make me happy being in Les
Ardennes
I am tempted to call my village simple. My days followed the weather. mostly to be able to schedule
hanging out the laundry by the terrace of the garden, the clothesline tied to a rowan tree that Anna Liza
made me swear never to cut because she said it was lucky. When it gets gray, other women friends come by
for tea and we do an exchange of homemade fruit jams, particularly the summer blackberries picked from
the shrubs along the river.
One Sunday morning, after buying fruits and vegetables from the friendly Turk who unloads his produce
at the plaza rain or shine, I saw a striking, gray-haired woman getting off her bike by the river. I watched
her remove her socks and then her shoes. She balanced herself on a rock by the banks, found her place to
sit, and dipped her feet in the river. That was one of the small things that made me happy about Les
Ardennes, and I thought that I might do the same if or when I return to my French village.

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 IV. WE’RE ON OUR WAY

DIRECTIONS: Choose the CORRECT answer of the following questions. Write the
letter and word/s on a whole clean sheet of paper.

1. Where is the village of Haybes located?

a) In the south of France
b) In the northeast region of France
c) Along the Atlantic coast of France
d) In the Normandy region of France

2. What is the predominant industry of the valley where Haybes is located?

a) Agriculture
b) Manufacturing and metallurgy
c) Tourism
d) Fishing

3. What is the significance of the River Meuse to the protagonist?

a) It reminds her of her homeland
b) It provides her with exercise opportunities
c) It serves as a source of strength and inspiration
d) It is a place for social gatherings

4. What is the protagonist's initial reaction to the forest behind her house?
a) Fear
b) Disinterest
c) Curiosity
d) Awe

5. What is the primary reason for the protagonist's interactions with Anna Liza?
a) To alleviate her own loneliness
b) To help Anna Liza adjust to life in the village
c) To learn more about the local culture
d) To engage in outdoor activities together

6. Which event from the village's history is highlighted in the story?

a) A massacre during the First World War
b) The construction of a new church
c) The establishment of social housing
d) The arrival of immigrant workers

7. What role does the river play in the protagonist's daily routine?
a) It provides a scenic backdrop for her walks
b) It serves as a source of drinking water
c) It inspires her to write poetry
d) It is a barrier that isolates the village

8. What is the protagonist's opinion of the pastries sold in Givet?

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 a) She considers them overrated
b) She believes they are the best in France
c) She thinks they are too expensive
d) She has never tried them

9. What does the protagonist consider to be the saving grace of her village?
a) The friendly locals
b) The beautiful scenery
c) The pastries sold in Givet
d) The sense of community

10. How does the protagonist describe her relationship with Les Ardennes?
a) Complex and challenging
b) Exciting and adventurous
c) Simple and contented
d) Isolating and lonely

V. HOW FAR HAVE WE GONE?

DIRECTIONS: Answer the following questions.

1. How different is the author from her friend and fellow Filipina, Anna Liza?

2. The author claims, "I am tempted to call my village simple." What details in the story indicate this
"simplicity"?

3. What was it that the residents of the community had done "one hundred years ago"? Why were
the contemporary residents of the village proud of it?

4. Why did Anna Liza say that the river for her was "useless" or "walang silbi'? What feeling was
reflected by that impression?

5. What did the author like about the village?

6. As a personal narrative, what linguistic or literary strategies do the piece employ?

VI. WALKING THE EXTRA MILES

The brief narrative ends with a suggestion of the author’s desire to go back to the
village. Let us suppose that after twenty years, she does get the chance to return. But
by that time, the village will have transformed into a highly industrialized area, with
just a few reminders of the quiet, laidback rural village that it had been. Write a short
first-person paragraph about that imagined encounter.

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VII. REFERENCES
Creative Nonfiction Claiming Spaces: Understanding, Reading, and Writing Creative
Nonfiction. A Textbook on Humanities and Social Sciences
NOEL CHRISTIAN A. MORATILLA, Ph. D
JOHN IREMIL E> TEODORO
Elineth Elizabeth L. Saurez, Ed. D (Project Director)

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