HIRAYA: Literary and Arts Magazine

Alexine Ticman President

Micah Maguisib Briseis Manato VP-Internal VP-External

Hans Fontanilla Team Manager

Sarah Vasquez

Jelaine De Jesus

Mariah Miciano

Tracey Gayahan

Jasmine Bontilao

Secretary Working Comm. Head Treasurer Auditor

Creatives Team

Bianca Nicole Cruz

Symon Dimaapi

Jarene Talavera

Adella Dela Cruz

Saskia Jaminola

Asst. Secretary PRO Finance Director

Avienne Febrero Head of CT

KYLAMARIECHELLEVIAJAR

ClaudineJanolino

JODIE

MARCDANIEL QUINTANA

MARIEL ROANNE BARRO

EARL EDWARD JAMIR

LORRAINEJANEAREYES

p pp y gy is the collection of stories and epics originating from, and part of, the indigenous Philippine folk religions, which include diverse ethnic faiths distinct from one another. Philippine mythology incorporates elements from diverse sources, including Indonesian and Malay mythologies, as well as Hindu, Muslim, Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian traditions, such as the concept of heaven: kaluwalhatian, kalangitan, kamurawayan, and so on.

Hell on the other hand are: kasamaan, sulad, and so on. The human soul, also known as kaluluwa, kaulolan, makatu, ginokud, and so on. The lives and acts of heroes, deities which referred to as anito or diwata in various ethnic groups and legendary animals are used to explain the nature of the world in Philippine mythology. The majority of these myths were passed down orally and kept with the help of community spiritual leaders or shamans such as babaylan, katalonan, mumbaki, baglan, machanitu, walian, mangubat, bahasa, and community elders. Historically, the myths and indigenous religions of the Philippines have been referred to as Anito or Anitism, which means "ancestral religion." Anitismo, a Hispano-Filipino translation, and Anitera, a pejorative form used by the majority of Spanish clergy, were also employed.

Nevertheless, today multiple ethnic peoples continue to practice and conserve their unique indigenous religions, notably in ancestral domains, although foreign and foreign-inspired religions continue to influence their life-ways through conversions, inter-marriage, and land-buying. A number of scholarly works have been devoted to Anito and its various aspects, although many of its stories and traditions have yet to be recorded by specialists in the fields of anthropology and folklore

The Tagalogs

Angeli Morente

In Philippine mythology, the Tagalog (Tagalog: "Sky People") are a race of supernatural beings that dwell in the sky. They are said to have created the stars when they were still children. They also used to live on Earth and would come down at night to play with humans. The Tagalogs were thought to be an early form of humankind, but they were also believed to be more advanced than modern humans.

The Tagalogs lived in caves and other remote areas, and they had no need for tools or weapons since they could chop down trees with their hands.

They lived in harmony with nature until one day when a great flood occurred that destroyed all living creatures except for those who survived on high mountains or islands. Afterward, these survivors moved out into the open sea and became known as manikins (from mani-kini, "little people").

The Tagalogs are described as having golden skin, red eyes, and long black hair. Their bodies were said to resemble those of humans except for having wings on their backs and another pair on top of their heads for flight or swimming underwater.

Untitled Adella Marie Dela Cruz

Life is known to be fast and fleeting As fickle as the waves are roaring. As fast as it may be, it is also slow, It's as slow as watching a seed grow.

There are days where it's fleeting as a short story, But times where it's as slow as a documentary of history.

These fleeting days are found doing what you love, The slow are only known in work you are sick of.

We may never know how life will unfold, But this is something I've been before told, Regardless of how fast or slow, life is a concept we all know. How quick or un-rushed, that is something unknown.

Embrace Feeling Lost

Alexine Ticman

I had been walking for what feels like aneternity.

One step in front of the other, one breath after another— until one turned intoahundred, and then into a thousand. “I must be goingsomewhere,”Ithoughttomyself.

I had to have been, right? After all, whyelsewouldIwalkthislongwithout a purpose? But somehow, when the days blurred into nights and the sun andmoonwerenothingbutpasserby,I forgot. Like a chip on a ceramic cup, likeamissinghandinacompass.HadI left it on the boulder where I turned right? Had I left it by the river where I glimpsed a brief reflection of myself? DidIeventrulyhaveittobeginwith?

With a stuttering step I stumbled. Down the hill, through the bushes, against theboulders. All the nights I’ve spent climbing aimlessly up, came crumbling down. While the wind sings itseulogy,Iwasplummeting.Whilethe useless maps and broken compasses tear and break, I was descending. Yet somehow, I let myself fall. I busked on the euphoria of going down the high. As if I knew that at the end of this pain, lay something worthwhile. And for once, I got it right. Because after the momentum had left and time stood still, I brushed off the dust and I saw her.

“Anagolay,”Iwhispered.Aquietprayerintothenight. “Daughter,” she answered as she reached out her hand. “My lost, beautiful daughter,” her arm slipped around my shoulders, her hand on the back of my head, and she just–heldme.

She held me like a mother does to a child. She held me like she knew I was breaking and she’s not afraid to pick up the pieces. She told me that the fall was the most graceful and brave thing she’s ever seen. The goddess of lostthingstoldmethatshehasme.Sheseesme.Andthat was when every morsel of self-preservation disappeared. BecauseIwaslost,andsowhat.

So I cried for every painful step I endured just to claim I was going somewhere. I weeped for every wrong turn I trekked because I was lost and the road was empty. I sobbed for every heaving breath I took because they told meIhadtoclimbtobevalued.Thensecondsturned into minutes, turned into hours. When my grieving whispersturnedintodesperateconfessions turnedintoscreams,Ihaveneverfeltmorelost.

Butoh,feelinglostisenthralling.

“Embracethefeelingofnotknowing,”shemumbledinto my sobbing soul, “embrace the journey of the road. Embrace the butterflies of being naive.” She was healing me, I realized. Anagolay is stitching up my wounds and patchingupmytatteredclothesbutIcouldn’thelpbut notice that my compass and map lay still. No magic, no fixer-upper.

“Thejourneyofbeinglostandbeingfoundistheepitome ofhumanity.”

Embracethefeelingofbeinglost,mydaughter.

Feminism of the Femme Fatale Zazzie

Sanoy

Women all over the word have been battling for equivalent privileges for themselves and for others since the dark ages. Indeed, we're still regularly confronted with blunt discrimination based on our gender however genuine changes has been paved for our convenience. To celebrate International Women's Day, we have written a list of iconic and influential women throughout the years as a means of inspiring this generation to free themselves from the stereotypical limitations our society has chained usfrom.

The game of chess has truly captured the value of queens and women overall in a historical society led by men with close minded and traditional beliefs. It is always a hypocritical argument that women are the ones who love drama, when history has proved that monarchies are more successful and flourishing whenqueenregentsleadthemratherthantheirmale counterparts. Parchment after parchment of amendments and records of reign have shown the resilience of women born with little to no power but has fought the odds of a male dominated position. Strong examples of iconic queens are Cleopatra, the cunning seductress that caused one of history's greatest betrayal of the Roman Empire; Queen Teodora who worked for women’s marriage and dowry rights, anti-rape legislation, and was supportive of the many young girls who were sold into sexual slavery; Queen Elizabeth I who is considered England's greatest ruler with her politicallystabilizingforceofGreatBritain'scolonial expansion, and as a patronage of the arts that led to Shakespeare; and Queen Catherine, the formerly penniless Prussian princess who used her wits and cunning to usurp the throne, spearheaded judicial reforms, dabbled in vaccination, founded the country’s first state-funded school for women and draftedherownlegalcode.

Moving on from royalties and medieval times, it was always a controversial predicament to grant the female gender of the full education that men alwayshadtheprivilegeofachieving.Eveninthe Tudor era, it was an accepted ideal that women should be taught to cook, clean, knit, and just be overall submissive to their husbands' whims and desires. It was only in the 19th century that the blossoming of higher education for women really startedtoacceleratearoundtheworld,anditwas actually jaw-dropping for the men from those times to learn that their counterparts were rising up the ranks of geniuses despite millions of years of setback. Perhaps an underrated list of women that paved the path to the advancement of education and technology are: the actress Hedy Lamarr who was not credited enough for being the inventor of WiFi, and the radio system that was used in the World War II; feminist Margaret Sanger who wrote the pamphlets for women health clinics and coined birth control; Jane Goodall on her extensive research, which had spanned almost 60 years that provided some of the most groundbreaking insight into the minds and social lives of our closest relative - the chimpanzees; MarieCuriewhowasagiantinthe fields of physics and chemistry, and the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes; and Katherine Johnson, a pioneer of African American women at NASA on her complex calculation that helped achieve the first landing onthemoon.

Feminism of the Femme Fatale

A correlation to the evidences of the genius of the female race are their roles in literature, and its evolution throughout history that lead women to develop into strong, independent influences. The interesting voice of female minoritiesisatypicalsubjectinmanycomingof age books that permit every writer to lay out a different personality for their characters and themselves. A list consisting of well-known femalewritersthatchangedtheadvancementof book publishing are: the rebel feminist Jane Austen, who paved the path for the appreciation of English Literature with female character leads and their experiences on oppression; Anne Frank, who was a young Jewish girl that chronicled her experiences during the Holocaust, thus helped historians to better understand the heinous acts of Adolf Hitler; Virginia Woolf who was considered an ambivalent activist of politics, but a confident supporter of feminism and anti-homophobia acts throughout her literary career; and lastly, Betty Friedan, who was best known for writing 'The Feminine Mystique', in which she encourages women to seek more opportunities for themselves outside traditional home-based roles and founded the National Organization forWomen.

With the 'stereotypical' achievements of the female species said and understood, it should notbeshockingtoknowthatwomeninpolitics andmilitaryhavebeenshiningintheirpositions sincethe20thcentury.Itmaybehardtobelieve since it was just in the 1920s that women were granted the right to vote and participate in acts that were once only acceptable to the male gender, but it was truly the quickness of these ladies'braveryandpoliticalstatutethatresulted intheseimmediatesuccesses.

OutstandingexamplesofthatareformerUNHuman Rights Commission Chair Eleanor Roosevelt's advocation to women and children’s causes; Grace Hopper being the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics,andthehighrankofrearadmiralinthe U.S Navy; Edith Cowan being the first ever female member of the parliament for her women’s rights activist despite controversial backlash; and Amelia Earhart, for her fearlessness to be the first woman to fly solo across the world. As for the latter who is probably the most popular name on the list, Earhart not only preceded her mysterious disappearance on the Atlantic Ocean but her legacy lives on through her flying accomplishments, contributions to American aviation, works to motivate women to pursue their careers, and her support of the Equal RightsAmendmentaswell.

These examples of women and their impacts have significantly set the standards of feminism of the femme fatale for centuries to come. Each and every one of them were once little girls who never would have thought that they would be more remembered and loved than the princes they wished to be. All of them may be pioneers on very different fields and advocacies, but their one great similarity is that they are all mothers who dreamed of a world more accommodating and open minded for their children compared to the cruel and harsh society they were forced to adjust in. It is truly just beyond fascinating to think that women have reached a success so immenseandiconicinaman'sworld.

In a faraway land lived a fairy with two beautiful daughters – Araw and Buwan. They are known forbeingtheexactoppositeofeachother,Arawis the kind one, and Buwan is the cruel one. There would be times when Buwan would discretely do cruel things towards Araw to pick on her and there would also be times when Buwan would secretly hate on her. One day, their mother came home and caught Buwan mistreating her older sister,Araw.Theirmotherfeltsobadandhelpless so she asked God for help. Even before this time, God had already prepared valuable gifts for both ofthem.Thesegiftsweretwoenormousdiamonds thatcouldlightupthewholeuniverse.

Upon hearing the prayer from their mother, God went down and disguised himself as a beggar. He carefully assessed both of them and observed that Araw was really the kind-hearted one and Buwan was the opposite. He then decided to only give Araw’s diamond. Consequently, Buwan was angered by the favoritism of the Almighty so she went to heaven and stole the other diamond. However, she found out that the diamond she stole was not as brilliant as Araw’s. God found out what she did and commanded two angels to punish her but the angels didn’t listen to him. They abused their commission and seized both sisters and threw them into the sea. Their diamonds were then thrown into the sky – the brightest stone was named after Araw and the otherwasnamedafterBuwan.

This was the story of why the sun shines more brightly than the moon – which people commonly know. However, no one knows the origin of Buwan’s anger and envy. No one knows how a beautiful lady turned out to be a cruel one. What she did was wrong but did she really mean it? Or wasshejustforcedtodoso?

MariahLouiseMiciano

Buwan was born years after Araw so there were alreadyalotofexpectationsfromher.Theyexpect her to be as modest as her older sister, as kind as her older sister, and as optimistic as her older sister. However, Buwan was naturally playful and excited. She would go around pulling pranks and tellingjokesbecauseit’sherwayofmakingpeople laugh. She would also go around running and chasing animals because they were her only friends. She was also very clumsy so she would oftengohomewithsmallscrapewounds.

MariahLouiseMiciano

People praise her for being joyful but would most often compare her to her modest sister. They would compare how they act and how they talk. Buwan grew up being compared to her sister but shenevergotmadandneverkeptagrudgeagainst her. It was until she felt that her mother favored Arawmorethanherbecauseshewasmorehelpful when it comes to household chores while she was just making a mess because of her clumsiness. It was a small thing but for Buwan, it was the start ofhercomparingherselftohersister.Whatdidn’t matterforhersuddenlymattersandhurtsher.

Since then, Buwan started to drift away from her original personality. The harmless pranks turned into cruel ones, the jokes turned into insults, and she started avoiding and glaring at people she encounters with. People wondered why Buwan had suddenly changed and just assumed that it was because her ‘true color’ had finally shown. It got worst as she grew older, especially that time whentheirfathercamebackandrefusedtoaccept thatBuwanwashisbecauseofhercruelbehavior.

Buwan felt so betrayed and neglected that her grudge and envy grew and grew until she couldn’t control it anymore. She grew to hate herself more andreleaseditbyhurtingeveryoneandeverything aroundher.Shehadahardtimechangingbecause people had set their minds on her cruel behavior evenwhenshewaslittleandevengotharderwhen she became one of her enemies. Her own self became one of her greatest enemies she couldn’t fight.

Just like their stones that are now lighting up the whole universe, Buwan may not be as bright as Araw but she is also shining brightly in her own silveryandluminousway.

AnDreamAsian

Over decades, the world has gone thru drastic human rights changes, yet we cannot deny the fact that many are still excluded and treated with contempt for being who they are – being an Asian. We hear awful incidents involving Asianpeoplefromallovertheworldthatmade headlines on various social media sites. The pandemic has further resurfaced the negligence of hate crimes committed toward the Asian community,evenastheysurge.Racismagainst Asianpeoplehasnotyetbeensolved.

Reports of Asian migrant workers who are discriminatedintheirworkingenvironmentare still dominant these days. Edelman Trust Barometer in May 2021’s survey says that 67% of their Asian – American respondents believe that business has largely ignored the problem of racism against the community. In June last year,twoJewishpractitionersatStanfordhave complained with the Equal Employment OpportunityCommission,accusingthatoneof the university's diversity, equity, and inclusion programs forced them to participate in a "racially separated 'whiteness accountability' alliancedesignedfor‘staffwhoholdadvantage viawhiteidentity.'

Hans Fontanilla

An Asian Dream

Hans Fontanilla

With the current coronavirus crisis, there has been an upswing in documented incidents of racist behavior against people of Chinese or AsianheritageintheEuropeanUnion,according to the European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights. Similarly in the US thousands of racism episodes have been reported in recent months, ranging from being hawked, verbally abused to physical assault. These are racist attacks, according to advocates and organizers, and are frequently linked to discourse that condemns Asians the development of COVID-19.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) recognizes the existing and permanent dignity as well as the inalienable rights of every human as the foundation of freedom and justice around the world. Thus, the United Nations entitles everyone without any discrimination the freedomtheUDHRprovides.Effortstosuppress racial discrimination were everywhere to be seen, policies and legislations were reformed in a way whereeverybodywillbenefit.

In 1964, the United States Federal Government declared the 14th Amendment of the state’s provisions,theCivilRightsActof1964hadbeen the standard for the civil rights ruling in the country.TheActmadeprejudiceinpublicvenues and federally funded programs illegal. Also, it increased voting rights enforcement and school desegregation efforts. The ratification of the United States policies gave birth to a new era where everything is possible whoever they are. In addition, the European Union (EU) as well has moveditsarmsagainstracialdiscrimination.

From 1980s, EU has been one of the pioneers in combatting racial discrimination. In 1997, EU policy makers devised the Treaty of Amsterdam where matters of human rights policies were then elaborated. In the same year was the year for EU’s European Year Against Racism where the parliament started working to make a European strategy to support the national response to end racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism in the culture. We see, these efforts tend to create a wonderful new world for people to interact freely withnoreasonstobuildwallsagainsteachother.

It must be pointed out however that amending legislation would not change people's hearts. In many ways, racial tensions around the world are stillpresentandalarmshumanrights.Rightnow, many are still denied access to essential and basic human rights. This means we will still hear violence. Yet, our hopes for a development in cultural acceptance, in which all persons, regardless of race, are treated with respect and fairnessstillmustnotbeexhausted.

Once I hear Joe Biden address, “Hate can have nosafeharborinAmerica.Itshouldhavenosafe harboranywhereintheworld.”Wecannotlivein a promising future if we are still living with the awfulpast.