Leny Mendoza Strobel
presents a Foreword to VERSES TYPHOON YOLANDA: A Storm of Filipino Poets
(Meritage Press, San Francisco & St. Helena, CA, 2014)
FOREWORD
A philosopher once asked:
What are poets for? A question that is even more relevant in the face of
Yolanda’s aftermath. What language do we invoke to describe Super Typhoon
Haiyan, known as Yolanda in the Philippines? What song can we sing when the
songlines have disappeared and there is no more dreamtime to sing us back to
life? Can we dance again and offer our bodies to the earth to restore balance?
A question that is
answered by the poets in this book.
As I read the poems here,
I am reminded again of the healing power of Poetry. Grief becomes eloquent and
brings me to the shore of Memory. In the outpouring of the sundered heart and
the baffled mind in search of its “Why” the poems simply offer an invitation:
Stay. Read. Be Here. Feel.
For this is the Loob of
our Kapwa connecting with our Damdamin. This triangulation of the internal and
external Filipino sense of self that is connected through the depth of our
empathy for one another is what these poems evoke. You are the mother who had
to let go of her child in the raging waters. You are the neighbor who rescued
the elder woman next door. You are the father who hoped. You are the child who
asked, “Why?” You and I are One. We are each other’s Kapwa.
In these one hundred and
thirty-three poems, we are invited to shed tears
and see and feel more closely
and deeply our Story as a people. There are connections to be made: the
location of our islands on the typhoon belt, the impact of climate change on island
nations, the arrogance of the global north and refusal to reckon with climate
refugees, the history of supremacy and the colonizing gaze that engulfs all in
its path, the numbing effects of consuming, and the internalized shame and
oppression of folks on the receiving end of dominating narratives.
Yet our Story as a people
in the face of Yolanda speaks of something other than the ways in which
CNN has reported about us. The poems in this anthology hint at this, teases out
the ineffable, and makes us ponder.
See where it leads you.
Leny Mendoza Strobel
Editor, Babaylan:
Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous
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