Life with a Cut: Historical Time and the Mediation of Coloniality in Francisco Balagtas’s <i>Florante at Laura</i> and Lope K. Santos’s <i>Banaag at Sikat</i>

Abstract The dedicatory preface to Francisco Balagtas’s 1838 Tagalog poem, Florante at Laura , introduced a new conception of time to Philippine literature by referencing mortality as “búhay ma,i, mapatid,” or “life with a cut.” Mapatid , meaning “cut,” contradictorily has the same root word as the Tagalog word for sibling, kapatid . Zeroing in on the term’s simultaneous connotation of cessation and relation, this essay seeks to better understand the specificity of time’s emergence as an object of representation in Philippine literature through mapatid . It examines Lope K. Santos’s 1906 Tagalog socialist novel, Banaag at Sikat ( Soft Glimmers before Dawn ), for its omission of a representation of US colonial rule. I argue that this omission is a development of Balagtas’s notion of time and that cutting the historical context of US colonialism allows the novel to criticize colonialism.