Deconstruction in "Lament for the Littlest Fellow"

Deconstruction in “Lament for the Littlest Fellow” by Edith Tiempo
Perci Paras / AB/BSE Literature / PNU


One of the aims of deconstruction is to expose the gaps, the incoherence, and the contradictions of the text. These gaps are present in the language because of what they assume about language.

In the poem “Lament for the Littlest Fellow” by Filipina Poet Edith Tiempo, there are gaps, incoherence, and even contradictions that make the poem a little confusing and challenging.In the persona’s point of view, everyone is a marmoset; a bushy haired little monkey.
The man holds the bars of the cage, which is why the one inside the cage would think that the one who holds the bars of the cage is the one inside the cage. Notice that man is being compared to a marmoset. We can say that they are binary oppositions and that commonly, the animal (compared to a human) is the less privileged side. Here, it is the marmoset.

According to one tenet of deconstruction, meaning is made by binary oppositions, but one item is unavoidably favored over the other. This hierarchy is arbitrary and can be exposed and reversed. Like in the poem, the monkey can be described as ugly and unpleasant compared to the man, but it can also be wiser and can outsmart a man.

Jacques Derrida, a Frenchman who has relentlessly and astonishingly exposed to uncertainties of language, once said that the signifier and the signified are not a unified entry, but rather an arbitrary and constantly shifting relationship.
In the poem, it says that the monkey is the one in the cage and not free:

“He held the bars and blinked his old man’s eyes…”

But later in the second stanza, Tiempo exposes the idea that the man is also in “a cage” and not free:

“Sometimes in your sleeping face upon the pillow,

I catch our own little truant unaware,

He had fled from our rain and the dark room of our cage…”

What is being said is a “living cage” – which can talk about the physical body, and problems in life. The monkey can be literally in bondage but men’s soul will never be free from the physical body, not until death comes. This suggests that man can never experience the freedom from our life and will never escape the sad reality of life aside from the force of death (apart from being born again spiritually [John 3:3, The Bible] which is a different topic :) hahah).Moreover, men are also imprisoned by our own trials, burdens, and problems in life, making the man lesser privileged over the other. This idea reminds us of the arbitrary and unstable nature of the text – giving the text a different meaning. (So if the Son set you free, you will be free indeed –Bible.)