Reading Notes: Filipino Tales, Part A

This week I read the first half of the Filipino Tales unit. The story I found most interesting was the "The Monkeys and the Dragon-Flies." I like how this one went because there was a clever end to the story. This story began with a dragonfly trying to get shade from the hot sun. Unfortunately, a monkey found him in the shade on a tree the monkey had claimed. This resulted in the monkey telling the dragonfly that it could not stay on that tree. Obviously, this upset the dragonfly, so she went to tell her brother which was the king. This began the callings for a war since the king's sister had been so insulted by the monkey's rude behavior. This war began with monkeys seeming to be at an advantage because they brought sticks to the fight while the dragonflies arrived with no weapons in sight. The fighting began with the monkeys ordered to hit the dragonflies out of the sky. As a clever strategy, the dragonflies were ordered to land on the foreheads of the monkeys. This quick wit helped the dragonflies win as the monkeys still kept to their command and tried to attack the dragonflies while they were on the heads of other monkeys. This resulted into many blows on the monkeys heads which brought their ultimate demise.

This story stuck out to me as a more appealing read compared to the other tales in the unit. This one was about a tale of battle with no super graphic descriptions. The other tales in this unit often had a female basically up for sale to a manipulative male by a manipulative male or had fairly graphic violence as a key plot to the story and often towards a female. Violence was still a point to the plot of "The Monkeys and Dragon-Flies," but it seemed to at least be for a reason and it was not as cruel as the others. Since violence is not my main goal when writing stories, if I must include it, I would try to minimize the description as this story did.

Bibliography

The Monkeys and the Dragon-Files, Filipino Popular Tales by Dean S. Fansler (1921)

Image Information: Dragonfly, Wikipedia