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 About the Author

Clarissa V. Militante finished AB Literature at the De La Salle University, Manila (1985). She professionally started as a journalist, having worked as a reporter-writer for the Philippine-based news agency, Philippine News and Features in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. She also was Special Reports Editor of www.gmanews.tv in 2006. She is now the Media and Communications Associate of Focus on the Global South-Philippines. In 2009, Man Asian Literary Prize long-listed her novel Different Countries (Anvil, 2010)

'Character Analysis'

Main Characters

David Magallanes

- is a Clerk at a municipal government office in their hometown Northern Luzon. He has fair skin, tall nose, long lashes, brown eyes and might be descendants of Fernando Magallanes or commonly known as Magellan. His second job is a clerk at City Hall across the Sunken Garden in Manila. He had a wife named Luz and a concubine named Alma. He had one daughter with Luz and two daughters with Alma as well.

Nora

- comes from a poor family. Her father had two jobs a farmer and a fisherman while her mother is a manghihilot. She has two sisters namely Donna and Claudine. She is the eldest and she was named after the legendary actress, Nora Aunor. She is talkative and sometimes senseless in what she was saying. She chose to remain a jolly person and she was happiest when in school. All her decisions in life either caused her survival or death at the end of the novel. The mystery on Nora’s identity is that she is the legitimate great granddaughter of David Magallanes and his wife Luz.

Katherine Roque

- is the daughter of Anna, the wife of Dennis Roque and adoptive mother of Phirun. She works in the field of journalist. Often travels to research and write about her stories. She lived most of the time by the code of her causes and political beliefs. She is a deep thinker and intellectual yet emotional. She was responsible in unraveling the mystery of David Magallanes’ family line. Moreover, she is the illegitimate great granddaughter of David Magallanes and his concubine Alma.

Teresa Magallanes

- is the legitimate daughter of David Magallanes and Luz. She is beautiful, smart and loved by everyone. She was always chosen to represent her school in their hometown, which is National High School. Growing up she discovered that she had leprosy. In Culion Island where leprosy patients are being contained she had an intimate relationship with Emilio and gave birth to a child named Mercedes.

Other characters:

Luz

- is the Legal wife of David Magallanes and mother of Teresa.

Alma

- is a rural girl who is in her twenties. She works as a servidora at a small eatery near Sunken Garden. She fell in love with David Magallanes who she knew had a wife in Northern Luzon. She eventually became his concubine and bears two daughters namely Ronda and Anna.

Mercedes

- is the daughter of Teresa Magallanes and Emilio. She was the Tiya Cedes that Nora was looking for in the novel and paved the way to unravel the mystery of David Magallanes Family Line.

Dante Roque and Phirun

- Dante is the husband of Katherine Roque and Phirun is their adopted Cambodian son.

Plot

The blood relationship brings forth generations that leads the path of one’s life. This is one way to look at Clarissa V. Militante’s Different Countries because of the strong ties of connection between the relationship of bloodlines and its life. David Magallanes made the interesting storyline of Nora and Katherine, the focal characters of this story; and entirely everyone in the story as his blood started all of these complex relationships. The story starts with David Magallanes and ends with David Magallanes, in it are the stories of intricately woven relationship brought by him due to a decision, a life changing decision. His inability to face his leprosy striken daughter, Teresa, and his feeling of a failure in life has lead him to estrange from his legal family to Alma, his second wife. Teresa’s children, born clean without leprosy, are the Mercedes and Dante, to which the focal character of this story Nora’s goal. Her goal is to meet her Tiya Mercedes (who is Dante’s older half-sister). David’s second wife leads to a generation of the focal character, Katherine. Perhaps fate has lead them to meet and fate has lead them to know their roots, and the man that brought this to be was David Magallanes.

Book Reviews

In Different Countries, the plot explodes at once into different directions as it centers around the question of: Where in the world is Tiya Mercedes? The characters traversing the various spatial and temporal corridors of this maze finally converge a third of the way into the novel, in their search, literally for the missing aunt, and allegorically for some meaningful connection with someone or something. It is to the author’s great credit that she never loses sight of each of her characters’ inner life, even as she sets them into violent interaction with events and yes, issues.” – From Dr. Rosario Lucero’s Foreword to the Philippine-published version of Different Countries.

Complicated, intricate, and subtly chained—this is perhaps one of the serious familial ties stories our group has ever read. The family relationships and the mystery of the disappearance of Tiya Mercedes is a medium to the understanding of the intricate relationships between family, even when the connection perhaps has been cut. Who knew that Nora and Katherine were actually related reading the story that has many many point-of-views (POV) our group found it interesting that despite the many POVs, the story is not made to romanticize any deal about familial relationships but rather report on what is reality.

The narrative was easy to follow and straight forward to my surprise. For someone who just started reading novels for quite some time, this is quite an interesting read for its brevity and conciseness. Novels do depend on the author. The author’s point is conveyed and I think the reality check is better conveyed when it’s concise. But perhaps the context of the story and the way it was written complements this case.

On the group’s personal level, we felt quite deeply sad for the relationships that were brought about by one man. His action and decisions have caused the story but at the same time, our group cannot help but feel disappointed by the women who were with him. Could a man’s decision just be the cause? We don’t think so, and perhaps the women that chose to allow the brokenness to happen contributed to this storyline. Teresa was a different story, yet her decisions paved way as well.

In conclusion, Different Countries will be a story for me to remember. As one of the first few novels I’ve read for the first time in a long time, Different Countries will be a memory of a tragic mistake of familial ties. Fate may have lead them to this story, but that fate was paved by a decision of a lifetime. David started this and ended unresolved. Sad, tragic, but that is reality.