American Poets in the 21st Century
Page 44
novena. on the fortieth day, rosary, offered
to the patron saint against solitary death.
with such elegance, these forlorn gestures.
the door, pulled from its hinges.
(ā' zhə fīl)
n.
1. A non-Asian male who prefers Asian women. This preference is based upon media stereotypes of Asian women, whom he believes are more gratifying sexual partners.
2. A white western male with a pathological, sexual obsession with Asians and their cultures.
3. A non-Asian person, most often a white male, with yellow fever.*
4. A white male with a sexual interest in Asian cultures and Asian women.
5. A non-Asian male who browses Asian porn sites and has a secret Asian porn collection. He frequents bible studies, Asian oriented message boards. In colleges, he is found in Asian Studies courses, learning an Asian language.
He believes Asians are “beautiful,” “polite,” and “agreeable.” Despite this admiration, he addresses them in patronizing, condescending tones that he does not speak to Caucasians.
The more advanced of his kind travels to Asia, historically for purposes of war, and in contemporary settings, “to teach English,” “to complete a doctoral thesis,” “to collect art(ifacts).” There, he patronizes brothels and massage parlors. There, he purchases his Asian wife, spawns biracial children, and soon divorces, before the bruises disappear, after the restraining orders.
*Yellow Fever is also called Black Vomit or sometimes the American Plague.
FROM Diwata
The Bamboo’s Insomnia
I can’t sleep. There is a poet stuck between the love lines of my palms. And I would tell her to get out if I could, but there is a poet stuck inside the cradle of my bones and tendons.
Polyglot Incantation
Siya ay nakatayo sa balikat ng bundok
She stands upon the mountain’s shoulders
Langit ay kulay ng ginto at dugo
Sky’s the color of gold and blood
Sumisigaw siya ¡Mira! ¡El sol!
See how the sun weeps
Tingnan mo! Umiiyak ang araw!
How this mountain slope burns
Nag-aapoy siya rin
Sky’s the color of black pearls
Iyan lagi ang sa aking panaginip
This have I prophesized
Ang mukha ng araw ay umiiyak
And what are these glyphs
Wikang matemátiká
Some human machinery
Símbólo, enkantada, o gayuma
Maker of souls and tongues
Anong pisi o balat ng ahas
What twine or serpent skin binds
Silangan at kanluran
Pearl of the Orient
Este punto del embarco
Fractured archipelago
Ang mga anak mo ay nakakalat
Your children have scattered
Cielo el color de perlas negras
Do not forget that they have names
May sariling pangalan ang aming diwata
The Villagers Sing of the Woman Who Becomes a Wave Who Becomes the Water Who Becomes the Wind
she weaves words into the fabric of sky
she knows the stars, an ascension of pearls
she is witness, keeper of starlight
she weeps silver tears when the moon is full
she knows the stars, an ascension of pearls
she is mother, the deepest ocean
she weeps silver tears when the moon is full
leaf storm, rice terrace, color of midnight
she is mother, the deepest ocean
sunrise, black pearl, blood, and serpent
leaf storm, rice terrace, color of midnight
leaping, spinning, fingertips skyward
sunrise, black pearl, blood and serpent
with tobacco and fruit to appease the silence
leaping, spinning, fingertips skyward
she is a silver-winged bird in flight
with tobacco and fruit to appease the silence
the medicine woman prays for salt
she is a silver-winged bird in flight
she has marked her own flesh with thunder
the medicine woman prays for salt
riverbed fragrance, night herons diving
she has marked her own flesh with thunder
here, the curve of a warrior blade
riverbed fragrance, night herons diving
she is witness, keeper of starlight
here, the curve of a warrior blade
she weaves words into the fabric of sky
In the City, a New Congregation Finds Her
She keeps safe our memory when nothing’s committed to stone.
Sibilant selvedge woman, thread and knots talkstory woman.
She whose memories not paperbound, lover of midnight words.
Scrawled myth upon flesh woman, indigo testimony tattoo woman.
We bring her spirits we’ve captured in bottles.
Fire water woman, imbibes the spirits woman.
We bring her dried tobacco leaves and tea.
Exhales the word woman, fullmoon weaving woman.
She looses her thick hair from its pins and coils.
Litany liturgy woman, stitching suture woman.
She settles into her favorite chair, she always begins like this.
Soul gatherer woman, spiderweb songbird woman.
She breathes steam from tea, steeped stems and petals.
Piece and patchwork woman, down home cookin’ woman.
She crushes anise stars, sweetens nightmare into reverie.
Stone by stone woman, singed and soot woman.
She cups glazed clay between cracked hands.
Silver winged bird woman, riverine dream-filled woman.
She rubs together palms callused, she who conjures for us a feast.
Sugar tinctured moonwoman, twittering songstress moonwoman.
She whose eyes widen with black thundercloud and sea.
Salt luster sirenwoman, winter solstice madwoman.
She whose voice billows and peals, she whose eyes gaze nowhere.
Howling nomad madwoman, cut the bullshit madwoman.
Her lips release language not of paper sometimes (we think) she forgets.
Older than the ocean woman, sargassum and seashell woman.
She who has kept vigil always, she of the wing-kissed sunset.
Sipping starlight woman, before there was a nailed god woman.
Aswang
I am the dark-hued bitch; see how wide my maw, my bloodmoon eyes,
And by daylight, see the tangles and knots of my riverine hair.
I am the bad daughter, the freedom fighter, the shaper of death masks.
I am the snake, I am the crone; I am caretaker of these ancient trees.
I am the winged tik-tik, tik-tik, tik-tik, tik-tik; I am close,
And from under the floorboards, the grunting black pig,
Cool in the dirt, mushrooms between my toes, I wait.
I am the encroaching wilderness, the bowels of these mountains.
I am the opposite of your blessed womb, I am your inverted mirror.
Guard your unborn children, burn me with your seed and salt,
Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.
POETICS STATEMENT
To Decenter English
Lately, I have been asking myself, what would it look like, to truly decenter English in my poetry?
As is frequently noted about my poetry, it is multilingual, incorporating Spanish, modern Tagalog, and Baybayin/pre-hispanic Tagalog script into its predominantly English poetic body. “Incorporate” indicates subsumption, assimilation into a dominant body. This is problematic and insufficient to me, as the body is still identified as an English one. Other non-English elements are viewed as ancillary, and even embellishment. I used to think that not italicizing the “foreign” words in my po
ems was a form of dissent that would challenge the reader’s assumptions of foreignness. I continue not to italicize, though these days, I question whether that affects readers’ perceptions at all.
And so we must question English. A quick internet search will tell you that Filipinos have been ruled in English since 1898, and instructed in English since 1901. Question, though, whether Filipinos are fluent in English—what constitutes fluency, what qualifies as fluency, especially in a (post) (neo)colonially stratified society—or whether Filipinos know enough English in order to mimic, but more so to be ruled and instructed, to execute basic commands. Question also: Which English? Whose English? The poet Jaime Jacinto once used the term “subtracted bilingual” to describe people like us, our fluency in our elders’ tongues disrupted by American education. Look up: Tag-lish. Code Switch. But do not assume all Filipinos are Tagalog speakers.
Question understanding, comprehension, readability—question whose understanding, whose comprehension. Readability for whom?
I was raised and almost exclusively educated in the United States (I spent one semester at the University of the Philippines at Diliman), and still, these questions of language do pertain to me. For many of my parents’ and other elders’ generations of Philippine emigrants, I have learned they never feel entirely “at home” in English. My interactions and communications with them exist in a perpetual state of translation, or in some kind of third space. We collaborate, often clumsily, in an effort to agree on meanings. Much of our system of communication is comprised of gesture, tone, and volume. Mostly, we remain in various states of disconnect. Can my poetry ever reach them, and if not, then have I failed as a poet?
In college, I took two semesters of Tagalog language classes. While I would like to think these classes helped bridge some of this aforementioned disconnect, we also learned a formal Tagalog that felt socially strange to employ. Ikinagagalak ko pong makilala kayo, for example, was not a phrase anyone I knew ever used. Perhaps it amused my parents to hear me say such things, though they themselves would simply say, “Nice to meet you.”
In the 1990s, I was introduced to the Quezon City–based songwriter Joey Ayala, who hails from the island of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines, a non-Tagalog-speaking region. Around this same time, I was also introduced to the Philippine film Sakay (Raymond Red, 1993). What struck me then was that the language of Ayala’s songs and Red’s cinematic dialogues was a Tagalog so poetic and deep, such words I had never heard before. I wanted to use these in my poetry. They were so beautiful.
But my parents’ generation was educated in English (see earlier, re: fluency) and had lived in America for decades. I learned I could not assume my parents could even access the meanings of such “deep” words. To quote my father, whom I think of as fluent in Tagalog, definitely more “at home” in Tagalog than in English: “No, we never use those words,” and “No, those are not words that I know.”
Today, what it means for me to be stuck between languages, and what it means for my father to be stuck between languages are two different things entirely. I want to say I write for my parents. Up until the day he died, my father never read my poetry. I can’t take this personally.
So then we must also question: Which Tagalog? Whose Tagalog? And how thick and impenetrable is that colonial residue which has made Filipinos ignorant of their own Mother Tongues? (Though, to be fair, American speakers of various creole Englishes experience alienation from “standard,” “formal,” “academic,” “institutional” English.)
I grew up in a household that spoke and/or listened in Tagalog, Ilocano, and English interchangeably. Code switch is our real lingua franca. The addressee has always been a factor deciding which language and combination of languages to employ—for inclusion, but also exclusion (Tayo or kami? Atin or amin?)—tracking who does not understand which languages, and who understands how much or how little of each language. This is how you tell “secrets.” This is how you tsismis (chisme/gossip). Perhaps this is why some monolingual folks harbor suspicion toward those of us who (must) operate in multiple languages, who appear to flow unimpeded between them. What slippery motives we must have. What wily Filipinos we all are.
To further complicate language, I know very few Filipinos and Filipino Americans who actually read Baybayin, which I had never seen or heard of until college. My parents had never seen it either. I never knew the Philippines had its own systems of writing (of which the Tagalog Baybayin is just one; Hanunóo and Tagbanua are others)—this is also a colonial mentality, the uncritical assumption that the West brought us literacy and literature. A quick internet search may tell you that preconquest Baybayin was written on impermanent materials (tree bark, bamboo) and used for such things as personal letters and poetry. These days, Baybayin seems to be more of a thing to be looked at. We tattoo the symbols on our bodies, so then we must translate our bodies upon demand.
A colleague in graduate school once said to me, “Don’t use foreign language just because you can,” and I swear, I wanted to lunge across the table at him and sink my fist into his smug, white, hipster face for his tone of inconvenience. But it is offensive also to be told that it’s as simple as writing in whichever one language I am most comfortable with. Either English or Tagalog. That too tidy to be realistic “or” is what I resent, am constantly resisting, and ultimately, would like to decenter. And this is why my speakers and personae are constantly composing polyglot lyric, breaking and reconfiguring language, translating and mistranslating, forking their tongues.
ACTS OF POETRY IN TROUBLED TIMES
Barbara Jane Reyes’s Anticolonial Feminist Voicings
Martin Joseph Ponce
she weaves these words into the fabric of sky, a charm against forgetting
BARBARA JANE REYES, “Diwata”
Spanning well over a decade, Barbara Jane Reyes’s published body of poetry is expansive, heterogeneous, and experimental—in the dual sense, as the product of experience and observation, and as the “action or operation undertaken in order to discover something unknown.”1 In interviews, Reyes notes how she has moved away from, without jettisoning, the autobiographical self present in some of her earlier work and has endeavored to “write not necessarily what I know, but rather, what I want to find out. Much of what I write begins with a question, or a problem, or a visual in my mind that I need to unravel, give depth to.”2 These experiential and experimental impulses—a cultural and historical groundedness intersecting with a restive questing into the unknown—give Reyes’s poetry its political urgency and formal variability. In dialogue with the overlapping fields of Filipinx American, US ethnic, Native American, women of color, and postcolonial poetries, Reyes has recognized in particular the importance for her of several “multilingual American poets,” including “Juan Felipe Herrera, Jessica Hagedorn, Adrian Castro, R. Zamora Linmark, Cathy Park Hong, Javier O. Huerta, Craig Santos Perez, Suheir Hammad, Gizelle Gajelonia, [and] Haunani Kay Trask.”3 In ways that resonate with those writers’ engagements with language, culture, and politics, Reyes’s work addresses such issues as Philippine and Filipino American history; Spanish, US, and Japanese colonialism and imperialism in the Philippines; and racial and gender hierarchies in the United States.
It would be a disservice to her poetry’s complexities, however, to invoke standard binaries of “politicized ethnic content” versus “formal experimentalism,”4 community commitment versus artistic freedom, as measures of evaluation. In her blog and essays, Reyes contests both ethnic and mainstream expectations that her work should embody racial authenticity as well as hardline activist assumptions that associate “experimental” practices with academic elitism.5 Her use of numerous poetic personae and wide-ranging literary techniques—from tanka, sonnet, litany, prayer, prose poem, and pantoum, to (mock) recipes and dating advice; from cinematic stagings and dramatic dialogues, to re-soundings of music and evocations of dance rhythms—complicates understandings of her work as engaged in either racial-gender “identi
ty politics” or post-identity “language-centered writing.”6 Across her five full-length books—Gravities of Center, Poeta en San Francisco, Diwata, To Love as Aswang, and Invocation to Daughters—and several chapbooks, Reyes consistently undermines the dichotomies and protocols that strain to keep art separate from politics, linguistic experiment divorced from personal experience, gender apart from race, tradition at the backside of modernity.7
Despite garnering significant acclaim in literary circles, Reyes’s poetry has not received much academic critical attention.8 My approach here thus traces some of the salient formal strategies and thematic preoccupations that swirl throughout her first three full-length books: feminist critiques of colonialism, racism, and sexism; meditations on place, belonging, and the “broad topography of homelands”;9 and mythical refashionings of female figures, origin stories, and desires. I focus specifically on the ways that Reyes’s use of multiple voices intervenes in the social hierarchies produced in moments of crisis and troublingly reproduced in everyday interactions. Rather than reconstruct a poetic subjectivity made whole out of the traumas of history, Reyes presents an array of poetic personae—voicing the perspectives of colonizers and colonized, men and women, diwata and aswang, alike—that reveal the impossibility of forging a purified, restored lyric self.
Fragments of Empire
The longest poem in Gravities of Center (2003), “Anthropologic,” examines some of the “historical consequences” of the Philippine-American War (officially 1899–1902) and US colonization of the archipelago by interrogating the science of anthropology “as a tool for the building of empire.”10 Participating in the parallel “turn to empire” in US-based Filipino cultural studies that had been taking place since the mid-1990s,11 Reyes’s evocation of this period is intertextually mediated and sparsely articulated. The poem is framed by quotations from Philippine national hero José Rizal and Indian novelist Salman Rushdie (GC 2), then described as written “after Marlon Fuentes’s Bontoc Eulogy” and headed by an epigraph from Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s Woman Native Other (GC 3). It subsequently inserts a passage from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism on anthropology’s ties to colonialism (GC 6); cites a passage from Geronimo’s (Goyathlay, Apache) autobiography His Own Story on the “little brown people” who were brought to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and displayed as primitive dog eaters and headhunters (GC 10); references the narrator’s ambition in Fuentes’s faux-documentary to discover the whereabouts of his ancestor who was (allegedly) brought to the World’s Fair (GC 12); and closes with a satirical one-liner on why US westward expansion extended across the Pacific: “All this, just to vie for a slice of that China Melon” (GC 13).