In the new book, Becoming Mad and Asking Why the River is Flowing, avant-garde author Allu Kuy takes the reader to an exotic and fantastic world where a fascinating existentialist journey takes place. Her tone and style of storytelling is original and unique which adds to the novelty of this great work.
what does cherry chapstick mean story begins in a very remote mountain place in the Philippines where a group of indigenous ethnic groups lived harmoniously with nature while maintaining a good balance between their original animistic spirituality and the Christian religion introduced by colonizing Europeans and Americans. For outsiders, looking at it from a distance, there appeared to be no conflict between the old and the new religions as the natives seemed to have successfully syncretized the two belief systems. However, in the book, the author intimately described the clash between the old and the new religion as it happened in her home between a shaman grandmother, a Catholic catechist mother and a Baptist elder brother. The religious tension at home unsettled the author's inquiring young mind that she made it a life quest to know and understand the mind of God, or the so-called will of God.
The painful death of her parents during her adolescent years all the more deepened Allu Kuy's desire to understand the will of God and the purpose of existence. As a young adult working in the city, she increasingly felt the burden of merely being alive. She keenly observed the world around her, the lives of both the renowned and the oblivious, the lives of the rich and the poor. She came to the conclusion that life is a meaningless charade, an onerous chore, a struggle for nothing at all that it is more intelligent for the modern man to have mercy upon himself by taking his own life rather than prolonging an absurd, and possibly, needless suffering which we know as "life."