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EXCAVATING THE FILIPINO IN ME

EXCAVATING

THE FILIPINO IN M E Eileen R. Tabios

E X C A V AT I N G T H E F I L I P I N O I N M E By Eileen R. TabiosCopyright © 2016 All rights reserved

T I N F I S H P R E S SSusan M. Schultz, Editor47-728 Hui Kelu St. #9Ka-ne‘ohe, Hi. [email protected]

Printed in Hawaii Designed by Jeff Sanner

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TINFISH 7” CHAPBOOK SERIES OTHER TITLES:

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L I C H E N L O V E S S T O N E by Jen Crawford

O R P H A N by Joseph Han

E I L E E N R . TA B I O S

Pearl Yasmin (PY): You recently marked the 20th year anniversary of your “career” switch from banking to poetry! And while two decades of consistency at anything is worth admiring, isn’t it too early to write memoirs? And yet you’ve written four? Five?

Eileen R. Tabios (ET): Disrupting the (traditional) form and genre of autobiography and biography is one of my interests, primarily because it amuses me. But there’s certainly many reasons why one (or I) desires to disrupt auto/biography—from the general factors of how one may or may not ever know the true story, how one elides the true story, and how I

believe identity is both constrained by inherited circumstances as well as fluctuates such that any life story narrative is at best a snapshot narrative rather than something that can hold true over time. I call these “general” factors because they can apply to everybody, thus how *knowing one’s self* is one of the most difficult goals to achieve.

But then when, in my case, one is forced to grapple with immigration, diaspora, minority/POC positionings in the land where the migratory transplant ends, then the memoir, by being a genre that posits it can present an accurate life story, becomes a landscape fertile for disruption.

I have a book forthcoming in 2016 from Black Radish Books (whom I cite because they’re a press that’s known for innovatively experimental authors), and that book title says it all: AMNESIA:

Somebody’s Memoir.

PY: What about your prior memoirs?

ET: Before AMNESIA, I tinkered with several books that encourage the autobiographical suggestion, including I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH,

FOR MY BELOVED (2005), THE LIGHT SANG

AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: Our Autobiography (2007) and SILENCES: The Autobiography of

Loss (2007).

I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH…(1), complete with a front cover image of my actual wedding photo to a Caucasian whose whiteness becomes a metaphor for English, posits a love for the English language. Since English became widespread among Filipinos due to U.S. colonialism, I present a love for the language to transcend its imperialistic history. I do so because whether or not it’s realistic I want to attempt my poetry to not be bound by a circumstance I inherited rather than chose, which is colonialism. I also wanted to love my raw material as a poet (since English is the only language in which I’m fluent), feeling that

EILEEN R. TABIOS: A (SELF-) INTERVIEW

3E X C A V AT I N G T H E F I L I P I N O I N M E

love rather than revolution would be a stronger force for my poetry (though love and revolution is not necessarily a binary). And I wanted to forgive in order to let go of colonialism’s shackles. From such (and other) impetus, I present many forms of poetry in the 504 pages of I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH….

THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES(2) was a book that just volcanically erupted out of me as I sought to write out the grief over my father’s death. Dad’s death was so painful, so unbearable, I had to get it out of myself and I did so by writing, writing, writing. But while it became about my father’s death, the poet in me kicked in and I wanted it to be about larger matters—larger in that they would have greater interest to the world rather than an individual story of a particular father. I’ve long believed that it’s a mistake for a poet to think hir particular story is so interesting—our lives are rarely as interesting as we think they are and we are usually the ones most interested in our lives. So, at some point, I poetically conflated the father with not just my Dad but also Ferdinand Marcos, once the father of a nation who became corrupted by power to become a dictator. Also, the subtitle of this book is “Our Autobiography” and this is because this book became the first (but not the last) book where I tinkered with identity by tinkering with the notion of authorship. That is, this book is “by” me and yet it includes the works of other poets because I think we certainly are formed by factors over which we had/have no control.

For example, I’m formed everyday by whatever I’m reading, which is to say, what others have written.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOSS(3) was written after the other two books and, in it, I grapple most discernibly with trying to figure out my story—what poet-critic Thomas Fink in a review called “the impenetrability of the center.”(4) At one point in the book, I presented a list poem that detailed exactly the contents of my daily garbage over 34 days; I thought the list would present something accurate about me—accurate in that its objective threshold of actual trash would prevent a result where I didn’t recognize something or was trying to hide something about myself. But when a reviewer actually interpreted the list, I found it interesting that the reviewer partly interpreted me as someone aggressively courting publication due to my mail debris which the reviewer related to submitting poems and other writings to potential publishers. While I certainly am interested in publication opportunities, the reviewer had not adjusted his analysis for how I edit an online poetry review and thus participate in an active flow of receiving and sending review copies and other related stationery. Not all that material which ends up in my garbage or recycling bin are related to my own creative writings. So I take this incident at yet another example of the difficulty of determining biographical truth.

Indeed, I only discovered a few years ago that


my real birthday is Sept. 10. But for most of my life, including my writing life, I thought my birthday was Sept. 11. There’s even a poem out there entitled “9-1-1” that conflates what I thought was my birthday with the unhappy events of al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks on the United States. Sept. 11 is also a date of import to me because it’s the birthday of Ferdinand Marcos—a piece of information I’d relished until Marcos came to disappoint me (and so many other Filipinos). So when I learned very belatedly from my mother that my true birthday is Sept. 10, it raised the lie to two events that had been significant in how I’d partly located my identity.

As a result, I’m not yet done disrupting the form of the memoir/auto-/biography. In addition to AMNESIA: Somebody’s Memoir, I have forthcoming from the U.K.’s Knives, Forks and Spoons Press a book presenting the conceit of its being the prime number’s autobiography, THE OPPOSITE OF

CLAUSTROPHOBIA: PRIME’S ANTI-AUTOBIOGRAPY. I reference “autobiography” (not “biography”) when I obviously am not prime (or am I?). As a poet, I don’t pretend to know myself; I just embody the search.

PY: I also see some major biographical disruption in your two poems “DON’T” and “Excavating the Filipino in Me.” They are relatively recent work, are they not?

ET: Yes, recent work that still extends my interest in disrupting biography, but in a different

way. Last year I guest-edited a theme issue on the List or Catalog Poem for the literary journal TRUCK. One of the contributors, lars palm, had a poem “(approximate play list new years eve 2014/15)” that included the line and reference to punk rock band NOFX’s “dont call me white.” I found it on YouTube and played it (am playing it as I write this). The YouTube commentary also included someone who lauded its message as a demand not to be categorized (as “white”) but to be perceived as an individual.

While this demand, or suggestion, would not seem unreasonable, it is a position that obviously is different when made by a white person versus a person of color (POC) (different partly due to issues related to “white privilege”). I was interested in exploring the difference between a white person and a POC making that demand.

Thus, I created the visual poem “Don’t Call Me ‘Filipino’.” One thing different about POC is the notion of authenticity—from insults like a black person being called an “Oreo cookie” (black on the outside but white inside) to a POC writer’s work being deemed inauthentic and/or whitewashed if it doesn’t adequately address origin and race. Thus, for me to release a work positing publicly, “Don’t Call Me Filipino” would not just be—as in NOFX’s case—a demand not to be categorized but also lay open the POC author—me—to charges of racial self-hatred and (for a Filipino) colonial mentality.


Yet I also felt, looking at the four-page visual poem, that as a POC my demand to not be categorized but be considered individually has more strength than a white person’s demand for not being called white—an effectiveness made possible paradoxically by the POC person’s past experiencing of racism and colonialism. In this sense, I was initially pleased by this poem as I thought the invisible postscript to this work could be a page with the line, “Call me ‘Eileen R. Tabios’.”

As I meditated more, though, on this postscript, I became uncomfortable with its focus on me as an individual for several reasons, the most important being how I practice what I call “Babaylan poetics.” Babaylan is a reference to healers who were also community leaders in pre-colonial Filipino culture; one of its tenets is a being’s interconnection with all others as in “one is all, all is one.” As a consequence of my discomfort with the invisible postscript, I disrupt the first poem “DON’T” with the next poem ”Excavating the Filipino in Me.” The second poem is crafted from lines culled out of a database of lines I created as I read through my first 26 poetry collections; my culled choices were determined by my memories of lines written with my birth land in mind, thus its title. It is, of course, a complicated goal: identity is both the individual and the individual’s context which is no less than the entire universe.

PY: I know of your disappointment—if not anger—with the Marcos dictatorship. How did you come to conflate him with your beloved father? Specifically in the poem “What Can A Daughter Say?”(5) in I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH…?

ET: Perhaps it’s the poet’s luxury that I can do such an … obscenity. I’m not sure why I feel the conflation is appropriate, at least for that poem. I do feel it’s because my life has to have been affected by Ferdinand Marcos’ decisions, even though I wasn’t one of those very directly—and brutally—affected by his regime. I spent the first ten years of my life in the Philippines and our family left for the U.S. shortly before he declared Martial Law.

I haven’t addressed Martial Law as much in my poetry as I have in fiction—I’ve got in my files an unpublished short story manuscript entitled THE

DICTATOR’S AFTERMATH that relates to Marcos’ adverse impact on various Filipino characters. Sometimes, didacticism is necessary but such need not occur through the poem but instead through other forms like prose.

By the way, I suspect there’s a logic to many poets attempting more than just the one genre of the poem—a logic that doesn’t necessarily extend to those writing in other genres. That is, some poets might be open to exploring other genres specifically as an extension of that poet’s poetry, whereas a novelist, say, may not be curious about other forms. This may be because the


poet comes to understand that poetry is not just writing verse—that it’s a supple enough form to transcend pre-defined genres.

PY: THE DICTATOR’S AFTERMATH shows how, notwithstanding the inward(?) focus on the/your self, you have also written out of a sense of empathy for others. And for your most recent, and 10th edited/curated anthology, you collected poems from about 130 Filipino poets for a book whose proceeds go to relief work in the Philippines after Super Typhoon Haiyan or, as Filipinos call the storm, Typhoon Yolanda. What is the role of empathy in poetry? What are its effects, if any?

ET: Yes, that book is entitled VERSES TYPHOON

YOLANDA: A Storm of Filipino Poets (Meritage Press, 2014).(6) To date, profits have been donated to such organizations as the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns and Kusog Tacloban, among others—every little bit helps as it will take years to rebuild the devastated region. Empathy certainly is a major Muse to poets. Many poems have been written out of the poet’s ability to empathize—I remember writing this poem after learning about the first partial face transplant conducted on Frenchwoman

Isabelle Dinoire after she was mauled by her dog (credit should be given to oral and maxillofacial surgeon Bernard Devauchelle, plastic surgeon Benoit Lengele as well as transplant surgeon Jean-Michel Dubernard):

If I recall correctly, I’d intended the failure of “that kiss” to be a metaphor for the difficulties that Ms. Dinoire experienced; her immune system apparently had difficulty adapting. When I published the poem in my book THE LIGHT

SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR

EYES, I dedicated the poem to Ferdinand Marcos’ daughter, Imee. I don’t know Imee Marcos, but had

just read an article where she defended her father and his legacy … and I was speculating that an intelligent person (like she appears to be) must put on a different “face” to defend actions that one might not consider defending if they had been committed by someone other than a beloved parent. I mean, how does one cope if one is self-aware and is the child of a dictator? Anyway, empathy.

But in the context of the Filipino, empathy also can be attributed to kapwa, which means

togetherness. It also refers to community and is

THE FIRST FACE TRANSPLANT

Surgeons repaired her with someone else ‘s face

The face donor is rumored to have committed suicide

Successful surgery but she can’t purse lips into a kiss

that kiss


the core construct of Filipino psychology. VERSES

TYPHOON YOLANDA manifests the contributing poets’ empathy with the typhoon survivors and, as a project, reflects what the Foreword author Leny M. Strobel calls pakikipag-kapwa

or building-a-beloved-community. What I like about the notion of pakikipag-kapwa is the verb-ness of empathy: you don’t just feel, you act. Even for the poet, hopefully the result of a poet’s empathy is not just the verse but also some beneficial action to and for the world.

PY: There must be a link between kapwa and how you became an adoptive parent? Certainly, orphans are discernibly a subject in at least two of your books, 147 MILLION ORPHANS

(gradient books, 2014)(7) and, with j/j hastain as collaborator, the relational elations of

ORPHANED ALGEBRA (Marsh Hawk Press, 2012).(8)

ET: Well, 147 million is a common estimate for the number of orphans worldwide, though the definition of “orphan” is unstable (in some places, the parents still exist but can’t afford to provide them a healthy upbringing) and I’ve actually seen higher estimates nearing 220 million. Regardless of the specific number, it is a large number and I feel that they comprise the second largest humanitarian disaster of our time (the first being the damage we’re inflicting on the environment). How can one not empathize with the afflicted within these circumstances? Yet kapwa should not just be feeling but action. In this situation,

one need not adopt but there are many ways to help improve the situation for orphans worldwide (my husband and I continue our work in orphan advocacy even today, years after adopting our son; we recently heard of a situation where orphanages were suffering from reductions in government funding and it’s surely no coincidence that orphans—minors who don’t vote or who have adult relatives who vote—are among the easiest to target during budget squeezes).

Loss can deepen one’s capacity for empathy. In that sense, a lost birthland, a lost father and other losses can strengthen you to address others’ losses and the loss that creates an orphan is immense. Poems arise, sure, but hopefully so must some act off of the page. I call it “Kapwa Poetics”!

PY: You are interested in lyric and in experimental poetries. What do these forms do for you in your work? What other poets in the Pacific do you look to for examples of this work, done well?

ET: Absolutely I’m interested in both lyric and experimental poetic approaches—some have set this up as a false binary—in addition, though, to many other forms. If I leave for another day the idea that perhaps all poetries are “experimental” and just address the term the way it’s often commonly used, I will say that it seems to me quite logical that a Filipino poet writing in English would empathize much with the experimental


tendency. For, to know the history of English in the Philippines is to understand its enforced nature—English was popularized in the country as a means by the U.S. to enforce its colonial rule. That, to me, meant a reliance on narrative and communication. In turn, as an English-language Filipino poet, I’ve experimented with English partly to talk back against its history for Filipinos. In the past, I’ve even worked with words to transcend their dictionary meaning. My approach, by the way, can be subsumed by others into non-Filipino-related tendencies like surrealism, abstract language and linguistic materiality. In his Introduction to my first Selected Poems project, THE THORN ROSARY (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010),(9) its editor Thomas Fink noted that some of my poems could have been part of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry.

But just because I experiment doesn’t mean that I am uninterested to how the poem might or might not engage a reader. I’m not writing a poem to create a wall. Lyric, to me, means partly a reaching out (hopefully to what will be a receptive reader). Simplistically, then, I hope to create poems that move the reader in an unexpected way. Or mysterious way. The poem need not be comprehended (in its totality) but to be effective (for a particular reader) it must generate something with which the reader engages in a meaningful way.

As someone who’s lived primarily in the U.S., I am not as aware of Pacific-based poets as I am with

U.S.-residing poets. But to answer your question about which other poets provide fine examples of the lyric and experimental, I would cite Eric Gamalinda, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Arthur Sze and John Yau. They were early touchstones for me. Nowadays, of course, there are many younger poets working as lyrical experimenters or in experimental lyrics (I won’t name names as to offer a list would mean leaving someone(s) out).

PY: Speaking of Selecteds, you’ve just come out with a second Selected Poems project, INVENT(ST)ORY (Dos Madres Press, 2015).(10) I notice that THE THORN ROSARY focused on the prose poem form and INVENT(ST)ORY focuses on the catalog or list poem form. How do these books relate to your experimental efforts with poetry?

ET: What a great question—thanks for asking it! Well, I’ve been prolific and will have released nearly 35 poetry collections by next year. So it would be difficult—at least for me—to do a selection, given the volume of poems as well as that I’ve also attempted with each book to do something different each time. In crafting Selecteds, I decided to focus on poetic form. What’s convenient and challenging about the focus on form is that it allows me to be judged as to whether, as a poet, I’ve extended the form. So you can read THE THORN ROSARY and judge not only whether I’ve written well in the form but also whether I’ve extended the prose poem form. You can read INVENT(ST)ORY similarly as regards what I’ve contributed to the


list poem form. More recently, I’ve determined that my third Selected will be focusing on the tercet form; tercets, of course, will include my invention “hay(na)ku”(11) whose core is a three-line stanza with the first line being one word, the second line being two words, and the third line being three words.

My approach on Selecteds gets back to my explorations of auto-/biography. Poetry is not about just the poet. It’s about itself. So I wanted to show, in my Selecteds, how I’ve respected the poet’s task by not just focusing on me but also the art.

PY: I’m glad you raised the hay(na)ku as no interview with you would be complete without raising your invented form.

ET: Yes, and while the hay(na)ku obviously reflects my experimentations, it also reflects empathy. Partly because it was created at a time when the internet makes communications easier and quicker with other poets from around the world, the hay(na)ku became popular quickly—there have been three anthologies of it so far. But I don’t think the form spread just because it was easy to spread the word about it. Empathy also involves allowing space for others to converse with you, to engage with you. While I presented the core form of the hay(na)ku as a six-word tercet, I was very vocally open to poets crafting their own versions of the form. The third hay(na)ku anthology, thus, even involves visual poetry as

well as collaborations. And I recall being pleased when, shortly after its public release, the hay(na)ku was picked up by a so-called “Poetry for the People” class at U.C. Berkeley. Even now, nearly 15 years after its creation, I’ll be due to discuss the form this semester at a “Writers on Writing” course at San Francisco State University. The hay(na)ku—it’s a Filipino diasporic form, but it promotes relationships with anyone and everyone.

One of its ironies is that I’m not actually, I feel, one of the master practitioners of the hay(na)ku. So many other poets—Jean Vengua, Tom Beckett, Ernesto Priego, Mark Young and so on—have written more fabulous poems than my own efforts. But I like that result: I invent something but I’m not the master of it—that’s up to others. That structure befits my kapwa-based poetics of interconnection.

PY: I just remembered that one of your earliest books, published in the Philippines, was titled ECSTATIC MUTATIONS: Experiments in the

Poetry Laboratory (Giraffe Books, 2001)(12). What do you think…

ET: I apologize for interrupting but, finally, that’s enough about me. How about you, Pearl? What’s going on in your life?

PY (after a surprised pause): Well, I’m a bit bemused at being resuscitated or resurrected by you after, what, more than two decades.


ET: I’m sorry it’s been so long …

PY: But why did you stop paying attention to me, or rather, stop using me? Wasn’t I an effective nom de plume? I—or is it we?—even published a handful of poems under my own name!

ET: Please remind me: which poems of mine did you publish under your own name?

PY: You don’t remember?

ET: Well, no.

PY: You’re so cold. You’re the coldest Filipino alive to forget my beloved poems. Only Ferdinand Marcos is colder and that’s because Imelda has him entombed in a refrigerator.(13) Since you haven’t tracked my poems, let those poems be among those you’ve written and lost … Anyway, shouldn’t you keep better track? You’re a professional!

ET: I suppose I should keep better track. But, you know, those poems are just words.

PY: Well, what is Poetry?!

ET: It’s what enables a poet to create a poem, and what the poem in turn, effects as reaction. The poem, itself, is just a means to something else. But whatever it is, Poetry is not words. It’s an experience, hopefully creating an engagement and then involving an action.

PY: And I?

ET: You are me and I am you. Now that you’re resurrected, you should start writing again!

PY: Really? You’re still a tad confused on identity, moithinks. By the way, how many of us are out there?

ET: Us?

PY: Your Noms de plume—names you write under?

ET: I don’t know yet. I’m still experimenting. I need to determine what happens next in our autobiographies…

[Note: Pearl Yasmin was directed in her questions

through several suggestions by editor Susan M.

Schultz]

Notes or links: 1: http://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/i-take-thee-english-for-my-beloved/ 2: http://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/the-light-sang-as-it-left-your-eyes/ 3: http://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/silences-the-autobiography-of-loss/ 4: http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2007/12/thomas-fink-eileen-r.html 5: As of mid-September, there will be a link online to this poem 6: http://versestyphoonyolanda.blogspot.com 7: http://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/147-million-orphans-2/ 8: http://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/the-relational-elations-of-orphaned-algebra/ 9: http://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/the-thorn-rosary/ 10: http://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/inventstory-selected-catalogue-poems-new/ 11: http://eileenrtabios.com/haynaku/ 12: http://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/ecstatic-mutations-2/ 13: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcos_Museum_and_Mausoleum

DON’T


DON’T —after YouTube performance of NOFX’s “don’t call me white”

DON’TDON’T —after YouTube performance of NOFX’s “don’t call me white”


CALL


ME


“FILIPINO”


I forgot the horizon is far, is near, is what you wish but always in front of you.

I forgot one can choose always to face the horizon.

I forgot how the faces of elders bestow a haunting on others reciprocating with their own weariness.

I forgot how gazes can drop like debris.

I forgot missing teeth and gums full of potholes.

I forgot how shoulders sagged to crumbling ruins as they sat by roadsides under trees whose shade they treasured for costing nothing.

I forgot the young hugging the ground, their damp faces eagerly turning here, eagerly turning there, searching their surroundings for treasures invisible but I also believed existed when I still shared their innocence.

I forgot there is a country somewhere on the opposite of where I stand on this earth, a country whose scents stubbornly perfume my dreams.

I forgot my mistake. The radically old and the radically young are the same in their difference from me—they do not need much, they need too much. They do not ask, they must often plead. I forgot how, unlike them, I knew what it took to survive.

I forgot that survival meant to move on from where a man and a woman joined before the onset of weakness to create me.

EXCAVATING THE FILIPINO IN ME


I forgot that to return bore no relationship to survival, which instead related to you whose path crossed mine in a new land.

I forgot a country somewhere was dying without a protest from me defensively—selfishly—seeking rebirth in your arms.

I forgot my tendency to imagine anything to prevent the onset of shame.

I forgot my grandmother’s house stood solidly on a ground ever shifting, bereft of gutters, dams and other structures to mitigate nature’s tantrums or tears from a gentle rain.

I forgot the mud in monsoon season always sucked at the ankles, non-discriminating, a placid surface but camouflaging sharply-edged stones, gooooey, gooooey, gooooey and brown as the hide on rotten bananas.

I forgot my grandmother’s skin aged like rotten bananas.

I forgot my grandmother, her gum-teethed cronies and other wiry residents of a patient village beaten by the sun.

I forgot the elders whose hides became stained from the excrement of water buffaloes spread over surrounding fields during days of absent storms.

I forgot fingertips deliquesced to black velvet from constantly rolling tobacco leaves—the only luxury many farmers could afford.

I forgot how my mother chastised, “Your grandmother’s home may be meager to Western eyes. But, once, it housed invading generals waving foreign flags.”

I forgot how my mother vainly searched for mangos when she would visit during the wrong season.


I forgot how we shared mangos with grandmother who loved them as we do. In that faraway land, they are eaten before they ripen, with much salt, and often soaked in vinegar.

I forgot the grandfather who willingly faced a fire, fist trembling at the indifferent sky.

I forgot the grandfather who stood before the fire rushing through a legacy untouched by 300 years of Spanish colonialism.

I forgot the elders, shoulders sagged to ruin, dropping gazes like debris and treasuring trees for their shade that exacts no price.

I forgot a country somewhere, always at the opposite of where I stand on this earth.

I forgot an uncle’s water buffalo who provided a lumbering tour of my kingdom whose borders my six-year-old eyes could not see.

I forgot an archipelago where spaces between what are visible are as real as your body whose hands had raised my wedding veil.

I forgot the grandmother who always grinned at me, unashamed her gums held no teeth.

I forgot a house, solid and stolid as a boulder on a ground ever-shifting from nature’s tantrums, gentle but persistent rain, occupying soldiers …

I forgot the mud in monsoon season.

I forgot the mud, a placid surface but camouflaging sharply-edged stones.

I forgot the mud, gooey and bearing the complexion of rotten bananas.


I forgot the mud like the skin of my grandmother, her gum-teethed cronies and other wiry residents of a patient village beaten by the sun.

I forgot a brother.

I forgot the brother who gave me a rainbow trapped within enamel.

I forgot a neighbor who stole my pet pig and ate the evidence.

I forgot fevers refusing to abate even when drenched with seawater.

I forgot lowering the flag of a country I despised. I forgot lowering the flag of a country I loved.

I forgot prominent breasts sculpted on immobilized Virgin Marys.

I forgot discovering the limited utility of calm seas.

I forgot appreciating a delicadeza moonlight as much as any long-haired maiden.

I forgot the rice cooker flirting with its lid.

I forgot I was not an immigrant; I was simply myself who lacked control at how the world formed outside the “Other” of me.

I forgot you dreaming I saw myself seeing myself. Objectively, I saw the flowers of my forgotten birthland: damas de noche, named after a long-haired woman afflicted into paleness by the verb of feel-ing.

I forgot centuries of woodcarvers immortalizing stigmata on the limbs of virgins and saints, eyes wide and white in exaltation—

I forgot those days of unremitting brightness from ignoring all ancestors to stare directly at the sun, only to discover myself clasped by the cool


dimness of a cathedral where hands penetrated marble bowls for holy water whose oily musk lingered on my filigreed fingers as if to sheathe my flesh—

I forgot diving so deeply into salty seas I witnessed coral form skyscrapers upside down as they narrowed towards the molten center of earth.

I forgot schools of fish dispersing to reveal the undulating sea floor as “suddenly flesh, suddenly scarred, suddenly aglow.”

I forgot the pages of my inheritance couldn’t cease crumbling between black leather, the font embossed in tattered gold as “Holy Bible.”

I forgot the rice fields, sometimes melancholy at dusk, sometimes a rippling mirror of a sunset’s maidenly blush.

I forgot to savor my childhood house where grandmother gave births with abundant abandon, where generations died more radiant than a sun’s implosion.

I forgot seashells sleeping on windowsills.

I forgot clouds of cushions recycling chicken feathers to soften every inch of narra furniture. Stitched lace and sequin tempted viewers to believe angels never fell and a harpsichord could last for eternity.

I forgot foregoing milk for tapey rice wine as I preferred my tongue sodden—I forgot meticulousness in preserving memory as proof that someone will always remember you and me.

I forgot Diego lifting eyelashes to reveal soot.

I forgot the Ilokano sea witnessing eighty virgin men dangling from trees to protect me.


I forgot Marisa peeling the skin from a blue-boned fish, Shakira rustling up an old clothesline for tying hands together after mosquitos bit, Doris with ears attuned to lullabyes emanating from the wings of fireflies, Luisa who squatted besides betel-chewing crones with crooked front teeth, and Marjorie who swallowed the scarless sky over Siquijor.

I forgot we accepted a colonizer’s alphabet in exchange for electricity.

I forgot when memory became a colander with generous holes.

I forgot the daughter lapsing to deception as she confronted her father’s legacy as a dictator.

I forgot the daughter blind to the evidence confronting her—akin to Good Morning America’s Charles Gibson seeing the World Trade Center fall and not seeing what his viewers saw him seeing.

I forgot yet another U.S. ambassador who lied.

I forgot the dictator ending his reign as he began it: through deceit.

I forgot music became a jail.

I forgot wandering among the alleys of statistics for the objectivity lacking, claimed a dictator’s daughter, in the criticism of her father.

I forgot the palace of one’s childhood is not just formed by bricks of memory but the heirs of those who were robbed, tortured and murdered.

I forgot to be an effective ambassador is to lie.

I forgot how exile can salvage.

I forgot waiting for Etel Adnan’s new form of absence: “exile from exile.”


I forgot the logic of amnesia.

I forgot what was never called by a name.

I forgot generals—and a son!—begging the dictator to shoot upon the waves and waves of citizens marching to the palace in determined confrontation.

I forgot the dictator’s finest moment: to himself he finally replied, “No.”

I forgot the dictator who refused to shoot me.

I forgot breaking through music’s shackles.

I forgot the jagged edges of music still searching for archetype.

I forgot music ignorant of architecture.

I forgot my father: Ferdinand Edralin Marcos.

I forgot we agreed to toss away the blindfold so that our ears can become more than holes for burning stones tossed our way by a cruel race.

Or stones tossed our way by a venal dictatorship.

I forgot a long-haired woman exists, but outside the frame as has been reality for centuries.

I forgot a girl singing to la luna naranja.

I forgot a girl singing as she spun a globe, its whirl evoking the guarantee of returns with all departures.

I forgot a girl singing, I will become Babaylan!, with notes only virgin boys can muster, only dogs can hear.


I forgot a girl singing to unfurling wings that have never betrayed her.

I forgot a girl singing as she smooched the sun…

I forgot a girl singing forth her benedictions: May you never grow

intimate with cold ashes and burlap. May you never feel tar and

black feathers. May you know what I saw through flames...

I forgot the child soldiers.

I forgot I saw a city bleeding beyond the window and felt Manila’s infamously red sunset staining street children whose hopes concerned absolutely no one.

I forgot a neighbor stole my pet pig and ate the evidence. I forgot my pet pig was pink-skinned and bedded down on my old sweaters. I forgot the keen intelligence in its soft, brown eyes and the black, spiky lashes that protected them. There was a garden filled with too many stones but which we both loved for being the site of our togetherness. I forgot how my pet pig burrowed its nuzzle to snuffle into each of my footsteps as if I knew where I was going.

I forgot stepping on pine cones in Baguio City (“the Switzerland of the Tropics”) and ensuring my smile never slipped.

I forgot English because the universal language (for commerce) offers only one word for “lotus.”

I forgot the lucidity of ancient mountains.

I forgot the original human born only because bamboo was split.

I forgot the white light, white roses, white silk, white lace and white pearls that adorned my wedding—instead I remember this happy day included the whisper, “Mama, glass is easily broken …”


I forgot I happily volunteered my tears. I forgot the sweetness of damp cheeks.

I forgot how poems can set you ablaze until you look at the world with glowing alien eyes—lidless to see better, gold irises to erase the sun’s glare, and unblinking.

I forgot that I prayed, only to have prayer bring forth stigmata in areas of my body usually hidden from public gaze.

I forgot the country of hammocks and waling-waling orchids whose perfume obviated the world’s magnificent indifference.

I forgot the present is thin, and the past thick…

I forgot the dictator who was my father.

I forgot that rare poem all too aware that no one else can be the sentry watching over your life—only you can judge when you have absconded from your distinct possibilities.

I forgot his unbegrudging fall to move on his knees toward the altar. I forgot the altar’s fat white candles whose flames were scented by the blood of fallen priests, virgins, poets, crones, sons, daughters, bastards, politicians, rebels, mothers…

I forgot the rare poetry collection magnified by its lack of compromise: the relentlessness of a gaze atop a sweat-soddened shirt, broken knees, and trembling fingers.

I forgot the poem written because its author, at the end of life, must

stagger back towards love.


Acknowledgments

The visual poem “DON’T” as well as “Excavating the Filipino in Me” were exhibited in the “Chromatext Rebooted” exhibition curated by Alfred A. Yuson and Jean Marie Syjuco at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila, Nov. 6, 2015-Jan. 17-2016. My gratitude to the curators, and especially to Krip Yuson for not forgetting the existence of this Pinay in the diaspora.

The ending phrase in “Excavating the Filipino in Me”—at the end of

life, must stagger back towards love—is quoted from Eric Gamalinda.

For almost as long as I’ve been a poet, I have held Tinfish Press in high regard as one of the most intelligent independent presses existing today. I thank publisher Susan Schultz for asking for this project. I am also grateful to Jeff Sanner for his gorgeous design work.

Eileen R. Tabios loves books and has released about 40 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Recipient of the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry for her first poetry collection, she has seen her poems translated into eight languages as well as inspire collaborations involving comput-er-generated hybrid languages, paintings, video, kali martial marts, modern dance, among others. She also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized ten anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays as well as served as editor or guest editor for various literary journals. Inventor of the poetic form “hay(na)ku,” she maintains a biblioliphic blog, “Eileen Verbs Books“; edits Galatea Resurrects, a popular poetry review; steers the literary and arts publisher Meritage Press; and frequently curates thematic online poetry projects including LinkedIn Poetry Recommendations (a recommended list of contemporary poetry books). More information is available at http://eileenrtabios.com

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