Dugo Sa Bukang-Liwaway (Bleeding Sun)

’What will become of our grains, Father?’ Simon asked with apprehension. He had helped his father plow the fields and, like him, the storm had crushed his spirit, too. On the night Simon is born, his mother passes on from childbirth. Their landlord had refused to lend Tano his car to take his bleeding wife to the hospital. Belonging to the poorest province, Tano toils tirelessly on the fields and raises Simon. He sends him to school in the hope of giving him a better future, a different fate. As old age catches up with Tano, the landlord fires him and refuses to let Simon take his place at the farm-- the fields Tano had tilled for almost forty years. When Tano passes on, Simon is left all by himself. He graduates from high school and leaves the village, a silent vengeance growing inside him. Would Simon return to the village? Will he get his revenge? The journey of a poor farmer’s son, Bleeding Sun is a novel about agrarian reform.

Rogelio R. Sicat left his hometown San Isidro, Nueva Ecija, in the 1950s to work on a degree in journalism at the University of Santo Tomas. After serving as a campus writer and literary editor of The Varsitarian, Sicat went on to become one of the greatest pioneers of Philippine fiction by deliberately choosing Filipino as the language of his prose, and by veering away from the concerns and conventions of the Western modernist writers. Sicat’s work, which rejuvenated Philippine literature’s tradition of social consciousness, first appeared in the Tagalog literary magazine Liwayway. Ma. Aurora L. Sicat is the second of Rogelio’s five children. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Filipino degree at the College of Arts and Letters in the University of the Philippines Diliman. She has worked for GMA Worldwide, Inc., as a freelance translator where she translated their Tagalog television programs and movie shows to English. She also ventured into freelance writing and copywriting but has now retired.