20 Minutes before Takeoff

Reading Leoncio Deriada’s “Airport on Mactan Island”

In Leoncio Deriada’s “Airport on Mactan Island,” a family who has lived near the Mactan airport for a decade, is presented with a number of dilemmas.

One day, the mother, unable to stand the noise of the “steel monsters” or airplanes, frets and desperately wants to leave their house. The father’s dilemma is caused only by the dilemma of the wife. His wife pressures him to consider moving out despite the lot’s sentimental value to him. He is torn between leaving the land—which he inherited—and helping his wife ease her troubles. Their son, meanwhile, is caught up with his own problem. He is exploring the possibility of getting a job in the factory and at the same time is helping his father sell guitars. He is more inclined, though, to get the job rather than help his father.

After I asked my juniors class to stage it in the classroom, three students turned in noteworthy insights, clarifying a number of realities raised by the literary work.

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In a piece titled “Just the Way It Is,” Irene Grace Lim begins, “In a usual family setup, the man’s decision is final. At times, his decision is unchangeable. We see the same in Deriada’s “Airport on Mactan Island.”

“The husband’s decision was still the final decision for their family. And although the wife was already starting to lose her mind, out of desperation she wanted to get out of that place, the husband still stood with his unshakeable decision to stay. For him, there’s nowhere to go and there’s no one interested in their land. The man said they could get used to the noise of the airport just like the way he did.

“Though his wife was already desperate, driven to leave the house and even the man she married, the man stood by his decision, which shows that essence that while woman wavers, man maneuvers, then prevails.”

Lissa Angela Suyo, meanwhile, focused on the wife’s character, labeling the piece as a matter of “Faith vs. Fate.” She writes, “Like most Filipino Christians in Cebu, the mother’s faith in the Divine Being is on the Sto. Niño. She prays fervently to the statue so that their condition will improve and so that her son’s job away from their place could somehow change their fate. Unfortunately, faith alone did not help her get what she hoped for. With her husband not cooperating, her son getting rejected, with their home daily bombarded daily, she broke down. She lost faith even in her own self that she could maintain her sanity. She was disgusted with her fate. She hoped that by being a wife, her life would change. She wanted to change their fate, but she did not take action to do that. All she did was to complain.

“The wife was so desperate for a new life that she fell apart when she found out that her son, their last chance, didn’t get the job. She believed that to live in poverty was their fate. She thought that by having faith in the Sto. Niño, her fate will change. In the end, she broke apart...she has lost faith in the Sto. Niño, which strengthened her belief that this was, indeed, her fate.”

Then, in a more sweeping effort to read the piece, Casten Guanzon writes, “Leoncio Deriada opens our eyes to some of the more overlooked aspects of the marginalized poverty, what goes on in the home. The play does not focus on poverty or exploitation but rather the domestic scene in a family whose lives have been twisted by progress. The play starts building momentum when the wife and the husband are left alone in the house and it is here that we see two things in contrast: desperation and action.”

For Guanzon, “Desperation is displayed by the wife who nags the husband to leave the place, eventually hating him as much as the airport and its demonic noise. Her husband, almost her exact opposite, is always controlled and calm in his replies except for some emotional peaks on his part. In the end, she breaks down when the Sto. Niño fails to help her son get the job ultimately failing to deliver her from her own hell. She is distraught and unstable, eventually driven to attempt desecrating the statue as her final act to stop the noise.

“But what of action? After all, is it not the wife who starts making plans and suggesting other places? Yes it is; but it is the husband who has done something and, having failed, focuses on adapting to the airport and improvising for anything in their life it has changed. The husband is the one portraying action here. He is practical. Having tried and failed to sell the land, he focuses instead on maintaining their status of life. The wife, on the other hand, is prepared to make blind leaps in her eagerness to escape that hundredth circle of hell filled with its unholy abominations of steel. She is blind to her husband's reasoning because she, in her state, does not or chooses not to see its sense.”

While Lim and Suyo recognized the distraught character in the wife and the composure of the husband, Guanzon saw the play’s binary opposites—the husband’s action and the wife’s desperation.

All of them agreed on how the dilemma of the wife, which embodies the tragedy designed by the author, is not resolved at all.