(Marsh Hawk Press, New
York, 2010)
It is
fitting that Eileen R. Tabios’ first Selected
book should consist of prose poems, as the bulk of her first collection, Beyond Life Sentences (Pasig City,
Philippines: Anvil, 1998) and the entirety of her second, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (New York: Marsh Hawk Press,
2002), are prose poetry. While Tabios is also noted as the inventor of the
concise diasporic Filipino poetic form, the hay(na)ku, she has steadily produced
prose poems throughout this decade.
Several
recurrent themes are prominent in Tabios’ prose poetry and in her work in general. One is the problem/delight of eros,
where intimacy, vulnerability, defensiveness, and an awareness of the
rhetoricity of amorous utterances interact. Another theme involves indirect or
overt dramatization and figurative evocation of the experience of exile within
a postcolonial (or, as we will discuss later, transcolonial) frame, and
speculation about its effects. A third explores the salient intensity, mystery,
viability, dubious value, or even impossibilities of aesthetic strategies and
encounters, whether in visual art or poesis. If some prose poems seem to
concentrate solely on one of these topoi, at other times, Tabios’ movements
from one set of tropes, images, or abstractions to others allow for the
flexible development of an interplay between two or more subject areas. These
themes—and, of course, quite a few others—might reflect, refract, solicit,
supplant, and commingle with one another. The dynamic of interaction or
quasi-disjunctive displacement does not harden into an aesthetic,
psychological, sociopolitical, or other program; it happens differently each
time.
In a review of The Light Sang as It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography (New York: Marsh
Hawk Press, 2007) in Cordite Poetry
Review, Nicholas Manning situates Tabios’ work in a trend characteristic of
experimental poetry “in this new century,” “a genre” involving “the writing and
rewritings of the poetic self. . .in which the self is less a ‘basis’ for
certain convictions about ‘what poetry is’ than an opening: an aperture or
aporia to diverse inventions, collaborations, languages, traditions, and
histories.” Differing from the stably presented self of fifties and sixties Confessional
poetry, “this ‘radical autobiography,’” according to Manning, is “seeking
diversity over singularity” in “polyvocal, polyvalent, trans-historical and. .
. increasingly trans-geographic” ways. The fact of selfhood is not trivial, yet
it is less important than shifting interrogations of intersubjectivity and the
historical imprint of formations/deformations of communities in contact with
one another.
The “trans-historical” and
“trans-geographic” dimensions that Manning identifies in Tabios’ work are
specified in Leny Mendoza Strobel’s essay “A New Twist to Filipino American
Decolonization: The Poetry of Eileen Tabios” (first published in Tabios’ Ecstatic Mutations: Experiments in the
Poetry Laboratory [Quezon City, the Philippines: Giraffe Books, 2000:
5-10]). Citing “how Filipino ethnic and cultural identity is always tied to
history,” including “the colonial/neocolonial/ postcolonial relationship
between the U.S. and the Philippines,” as well as previous Spanish rule, and
how Filipinos need to undergo decolonization to recover “the mark of. . . the
‘indigenous’” in themselves, Mendoza Strobel asks of the some of the early
“abstract” prose poetry collected herein, “How do I connect with this poetry by
a Filipino American poet when that Filipino connection is not obvious?” The
critic acknowledges the poet’s claim “that her poetics are inspired by visual
arts, partly postmodern and yet also postcolonial because of her political
intent to subvert the (English) language that has been used as a colonizing
tool, i.e. English was introduced 100 years ago to the Philippines when it
became an American colony.” (Note the allusion that informs Tabios’ prose-poem,
“Returning a Borrowed Tongue.”)
Mendoza Strobel notes that “abstraction”
is “synergistic with [Tabios’] desire to offer a space for the reader to engage
emotionally with the poem without relying on narrative,” and thus, she is able
“to obviate the historical use of the English narrative as the means for
defining power and privilege during the U.S.-Philippine colonial period.” While
engaging with the poetry’s anti-narrative impetus, the critic perceives it as
serving the crucial cause of a greater narrative, almost alluding to the
conservative T.S. Eliot’s radical modernist “shoring” of “fragments” “against
ruins” in The Waste Land: “When the
sorrow of our colonial past is released and we come to know our Philippine
history as the history of the world, Eileen’s poem becomes an act of rounding
up the fragments of our narrative. And as she integrates these fragments (those
parts of our identities forged by migration and citizenship elsewhere) into her
own sense of Filipinoness, I still come away with the sense that the homeland
is still the source of that inspiration” (9). Mendoza Strobel identifies
“interconnectedness” and “interdependence” as central aspects of indigenous
Filipino philosophy, and so her assertion of the centrality of “Filipinoness”
to Tabios’ work would not contradict the poet/art critic’s deep interest in
modern abstract art or her fascination with ancient Greek aesthetics. Manning
writes in the review quoted above: “Tabios continually draws this complex
parallel between the difficult ‘relationships’ of poetry—between structures,
syntaxes, lexicons—and those of life. Everything ‘relates,’ and Tabios becomes
thus, in the course of the work, other poets, other individuals, at other
points in time.”
The question of what degree
narrative intention is recuperable from non- or anti-narrative modes is
challenging. Reading the prose poem “Helen” on his blog on June 19, 2003 (a
piece later reprinted in Tabios’ I Take
Thee, English, for My Beloved [New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2005]), Ron
Silliman calls it “a dramatic monolog” (488), and he speculates (without quite
insisting) “that Tabios wanted to structure a narrative with an extraordinary
degree of tension—. . . as though she wanted to see just how far she could pull
it apart without having the sense of his unity dissolve, to approach without
crossing some intuitive breaking point” (489). Given that the poet’s beginning
intentions may be difficult to trace, the burden seems to rest on each reader’s
“intuition” about whether Manning’s Derridean “aporia” or Strobel’s “rounding
up” should take precedence. And Tabios’ frequent invocation of the reader as
the one who “completes” the text—see, for example, a statement on the back
cover of I Take Thee, English. . .
.—uses authorial authority to support the sense that it (she) should not have
the final word on the narrative/anti-narrative issue.
A compelling example of Tabios’
encounter with the ancient Greeks is the three-paragraph “Purity,” which opens
with sentences that obliquely explain a basis for the desire for aesthetic
purity and a problem sewn into that striving: “Once, the Greeks tolerated
subjection to obviate chaos. But an attitude of detachment is like anxiety—a
flower in a glass prison.” Is some “subjection,” then, inevitable, whether a
submission to “chaos” that threatens autonomous action or to an emotional
restraint, “detachment,” that anxiously parallels “anxiety”? The poet moves on
to consider war as a raging chaos that led to the subjection of a Greek city:
“So ‘the entire male population of Miletus was put to the sword and the women
and children were sent into Asia as slaves.’” The reference to a location in
“Asia” might allude to Spanish and U.S. imperial adventures in the Philippines,
but, if so, the parallel is indirect.
The sentence about Miletus is woven
into the theme of purity/impurity in the next paragraph, because it is
interrupted by a consideration of a future present, “the dying days of the 21st
century”: “I am feeling the inhumanly fast beating of a woman’s heart as she
raises a rifle, then shoots a canvas with pellets of paint. I am feeling a deer
quicken its leaps. The artist avoided the aftermath of wounds, but I see red.”
The artist’s act adheres “purely” to procedure. Perhaps additional intentions
do not interfere with the unpredictable effect of paint flow (and
canvas-puncturing) generated by the interplay of technology and uncertainties
of human touch. However, despite the lack of violence done to animate beings, impure thoughts due to powerful
associations induce the observing (or imagining) poet to “see red” (not
communism!), to experience a loss of
“pure” detachment and an influx of anxiety.
At the beginning of the second
paragraph, Tabios addresses another loss of freedom following “the fall of
Miletus” to the Persians: the Athenian leaders censored a play about this
subject to banish the “impure” memory “‘of afflictions which affected them
intimately.’” The repression of history as a kind of “purification”—the poison/
medicine logic of scapegoating (the pharmakon
) analyzed in Derrida’s Dissemination—often
engenders greater chaos in the long run rather than “obviating” impurity. Next,
the poet’s speaker ponders an individual’s impulses to embrace and burst out of
such repression: “I consider my search for unrelenting intimacy—a search I
conduct despite my heart’s cocoon of encaustic.” In “Come Knocking,” Tabios
writes: “I know you admire encaustic for protecting forever the fragility of
paper.” Through epigraphs, poem-titles, and direct statements, she has
testified to the importance of John Yau’s book, The United States of Jasper Johns, to her poetics, so these two
references might signal an allusion to Johns, whose painterly re-productions of
the American flag are visible beneath encaustic.
Yau shows how Johns’ work confounds the questionable desire for purity—as in
nationalistic unity—with a critically forceful, complex impurity. When we see
the “flag” under encaustic, are we witnessing its simultaneous burial and
display? Do we encounter its desecration, distortion, careful preservation, or
veneration? Is the “heart” pure when protected from intimacy’s dangers, or is
its separation from “natural” emotion evidence of troubling impurity?
Toward the end of this marvelously
dense paragraph, Tabios moves to the territory of Mondrian and other geometric
abstractionists: “I consider how a grid is supposed to eliminate gesture from
paint. Although paint, finally, must return to its nature and flow like a menstruation—ooze
with a viscous intensity unmitigated by geometry.” If “gesture,” the province
of an abstract expressionism that this poet admires, equals intimacy and
emotional intensity, the “grid” signifies purity and detachment. The grid is
designed to provide a culturally- and perhaps spiritually-based transcendence. While,
for the time being, a Mondrian’s geometry prevails on the wall, the imperative
(“must”) of all materials’ transience condemns such apparent solidity to a
“return” to liquid (oozing), like a return of the repressed. Despite a museum’s
best archival practices, the painting will not
retain its hard, geometric edges in a thousand years. On the other hand,
Tabios’ lines are also relevant from a short-term perspective if taken as
providing tropes about the failure of applied cognitive and aesthetic
structures to rein in psychological energies.
At various junctures in the prose
poem, one sees how notions associated with purity and those with impurity
attract people, who make attempts at decisive choice and synthesis, however
unsatisfactory as enduring solutions. The third paragraph begins: “Though the
Greeks would come to thwart the Persian invasion, I believe it noteworthy that
such a victory belied intention. The Greeks—like all of us, through all of
time—first attempted compromise.” The melting of wax, “failure” of “encaustic”
suggests how precarious such compromise, as well as “pure” formalism is; “the
heart” is so powerful as to merit a supplementary figure that gives it “eyes”
to get outside the self and “stare it down”: “Now, encaustic fails and my heart
looks me in the eye.”
“Purity” concludes with questions
so evocative, so lyrically charged that they call for our answer: “Why do I
weep before a square canvas depicting a square? Or a circular canvas depicting
a circle? Have the Greeks attained purity? Attained perfection? Have I earned
the moments I made my mother cry?” Overwhelming pleasure in form and color
might elicit tears in front of an “Homage to the Square” by Joseph Albers or a
tondo by Tabios’ friend Max Gimblett. Or one might mourn the great disparity
between the “purity” on the wall and an awareness of sufferings caused by
impure, imperfect daily experiences.
Whether one thinks ancient Greeks
like the mathematician Pythagoras or their society as a whole—an early
democracy that permitted slavery and granted extremely little freedom to most
women—“attained” either “purity” or “perfection” depends on the terms’
definitions. By most contemporary standards, the answer would be “no” on both
counts. And if “purity” and “perfection” are suspect nouns, which terms for the
pursuit of excellence or psychosocial development might usefully replace them? Or
are we stuck with using these nouns “under erasure”? Surely, a daughter who
strives for “purity” and “perfection” could bother her mother, who might have
pressing pragmatic concerns about her child’s security, a great deal. However, in
adjudicating between the claims of the autonomy of one and anxieties of the
other, should the success of the child’s efforts or the authenticity (purity?)
of her intentions be taken as a primary criterion? Aren’t both of these factors
hard to calculate? The reader leaves the poem with more specific uncertainties
about aesthetic and social purity/impurity.
Spanning ten pages of many
single-sentence paragraphs interspersed with some slightly longer ones, “What
Can a Daughter Say?”, first published in 2007 in The Light Sang as It Left Your Eyes, is one of Tabios’ longest
prose poems to date, and it needs to be. It is both an elegy for the poet’s
father, who died of brain cancer the year before, and a reckoning with the
Marcos era’s impact on the Philippines. The text’s epigraph, taken from a
website called “More or Less: Heroes & Killers of the 20th
Century, calls Ferdinand Marcos “one of
the biggest thieves in the history of the planet” and estimates that, in
twenty years, the dictator stole between $3–35 billion, which is especially
tragic because his country’s “economy”
was “struggling just to pay the interest
on its foreign debt. . . .” Of course, the United States, the nation to
which Tabios and her family emigrated when she was ten, was a crucial supporter
of Marcos.
At various points in the text’s six
sections, Tabios takes statistics from “More or Less” about how many people
were killed by such redoubtable evildoers as Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier,
Francisco Franco, Saddam Hussein, Hitler and his major henchmen, Mao Tse Tung
(indicted not for murder but for starving “14 to 20 million” of his people “during
China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’”), Slobodan Milosevic, Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot, Mohamed
Suharto, and Joseph Stalin. And then, there are quite a few villains, including
Yasuhiko Asaka, Elie Hobeika, Efran Rioss Montt, Kim Il Sung, and Ante Pavelic,
who are undoubtedly extremely well known in certain parts of the world or to
particularly communities but lack name recognition in the U.S. The order of
names may not be random, but it is far from chronological. The cumulative
effect of this continually interrupted catalog is powerful, but one important
aspect that links the poet’s two themes is the use of anaphora, beginning in
the very first paragraphs:
Oh Heart, my father is not Idi Amin
who killed 100,000 to half-a-million in
Uganda.
Oh Heart, my father is not Ion
Antonescu who killed 300,000 Romanian Jews and half-a-million Russian soldiers.
This seems a way for Tabios to remind herself through a
broad perspective that a difficult parent-child relationship, though deeply
felt by her, should not be magnified into a real atrocity. But the anaphora takes
on surprising significance, which will only become fully evident at the end of
the prose poem. For it is important to note that the anaphoric catalogue is
juxtaposed with the reflections of Imee Marcos, the dictator’s daughter, and in
Section VI, the object of comparison/contrast becomes Marcos and the eight men
who served as President during the Tabios family’s years in the U.S.:
O Heart, my
father is not Ferdinand Edralin Marcos.
My name is
Imee.
O Heart, my
father is Lyndon B. Johnson
Richard Milhous Nixon
Gerald Ford
. . .
George W. Bush
O Heart, my
father is not Ferdinand Marcos.
O Heart, my father is Ferdinand Marcos.
Tabios’ use of Marcos’ middle name makes
the dictator seem vulnerable to inspection, because “Edralin” was not used in
common reference any more than William Jefferson Clinton has been. Most
obviously, Eileen “is” Imee to the extent that both are Filipina daughters of Filipino
fathers. The central (male) political figure of a country assumes the symbolic
position of that nation’s “father,” and in a household conforming to
patriarchal arrangements, the father is the “leader.” In her formative years, a
daughter would experience a father’s impact in ways comparable to how a
nation’s citizens would be influenced by their president or dictator. But these
are just preliminary generalizations.
When Tabios collages what Imee
Marcos says, she underscores the problem of articulation in the prose poem’s
title. For Imee, herself a member of the Philippines’ House of Representatives
from 1998 to 2007, to acknowledge her father’s prodigious thievery and other
crimes against Filipinos would be incredibly difficult.
(Tabios has never met Imee. In 1975
the dictator’s daughter and I sat next to each other for a semester in the
front row [center] of Professor D.W. Robertson’s Chaucer class at Princeton; I sat
on the left and Imee on the right. We agreed that Robertson was hard to hear.
Whenever the professor let out a marvelously eccentric laugh while explicating off-color
passages in The Canterbury Tales,
Imee and I turned to each other and smiled. When we once asked each other’s
majors and I heard that hers was Politics, I said, “That makes sense.”)
Long after a collective judgment
has been rendered on her father, Imee Marcos wishes to defer assessment. Imee’s
appeal for Filipinos to “‘study. . . the Marcos era,/ before, during, the
Martial Law period,/ applying intellectual rigor over emotion,/ scholarship,
not partisanship’” uses the rhetoric of disinterested research to mask the
vexation she must feel about hearing her father condemned. She does not
interrogate a basis for objectivity in assessing historical causality or
account for the role of one’s subject position in developing interpretations. When
Tabios responds to the passage above, “How much do we need to know to master
the past?” one can ponder the difference between the verb “master” and the verb
“understand.” In Nietzschian terms, Imee does not admit her “will to power” in invoking
historical analysis, which can depend more on not knowing and/or evading
knowledge than on presenting what one knows:
She says, “Exile has been merciful/
[for allowing me to] remember/ my father
as well,/ strong, playful and
brilliant.” . . .
She says about being “a child of a
dictator”—“I don’t remember.” . . .
She
says, “I think it should be clear/ that to torture was never/ a matter of
policy./
He didn’t order the military/ to do
these things.” . . .
She
says, “Martial Law/ was like/ another lifetime.”
As “‘a member of the succeeding
generation,’” Imee purports to be calling “for an ‘objective appreciation’ of The Marcos Era” because she “knows too
little about our [Philippine] past.” As an adult, long after living in her
parents’ palace and being “protected” from understanding current events, has she
still been blocked from studying that period in her nation’s history? Had she
conducted that research, the results would likely have placed an immense
psychological burden on her and poisoned happy family memories forever. Indeed,
she seems to regard the subjective public
airing of some of those memories as a potent strategy of rehabilitation. When
Imee tries to establish positive aspects of Ferdinand Marcos’ personality,
intellect, and aesthetic sensibility, she probably wants to trigger empathy for
her position by reminding other women of their deep feelings for their fathers:
She
says, “My dad is hugely patient,/ a very indulgent and playful/ father.” . . .
She
says, “He had this playful/ story-telling ability/ and this skill of playing/
with
kids.” . . .
She
says, “My dad was happy/ to talk about things other than politics./ His
reading material can hardly be called political;/ he was extremely well-read.”
. . .
She
says, “My dad could/ recite/ blocks and blocks/ of poetry.”
Perhaps Imee’s subliminal message is that this poetic
sensibility, and not the “false” image of the greedy, brutal dictator, is the true Ferdinand Marcos.
One motif that keeps resurfacing,
along with the catalog of murderers/ statistics and Imee’s words, involves a
discovery made when Filamore Tabios lay dying of brain cancer: “How many
centuries until it was known that Judas was Jesus Christ’s greatest apostle,
not his greatest betrayer?” Well before martial law, Marcos was viewed as a
“Kennedyesque” “idealist”; Imee may hold out for the hope that her father will
eventually be seen as a great Filipino leader and not as the Philippines’
“greatest betrayer.” Although Tabios reminds us through the Judas example that
historical inaccuracies are often eventually brought to light, in the case of
Marcos, grim facts are too well documented.
At one point, Imee gets a bit more
specific in her “objective” vein: “’I need evidence/ of specific salvaging
cases./ [The Marcos family is] willing to apologize/ provided we know/ what we
are supposed/ to say sorry for./ Look at us/ with an open mind./ Give us a
chance.’” The spokesman for a family that has obviously gotten so many
“chances” by squirreling away so many of its country’s assets acts as though
the charges are nebulous and have unfairly prejudiced the public against
Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. It is not clear what she would agree to consider proof, but Tabios immediately
complies with the pseudo-request for “evidence” in the next paragraph: “I stand
here before you. That I am alive makes me insufficient evidence?” Tragically
common during (and after) the Marcos era, the economic exile of the poet’s
family from the Philippines is the kind of evidence that Imee, prey to what
Tabios calls “the logic of amnesia,” keeps evading.
Near the end of the prose-poem,
Imee’s prior call for objectivity gives way to quasi-inarticulate gesturing
toward the ineffable, toward “destiny” as (non)-explanation; such stress is put
on a highly intelligent polyglot that she sounds silly: ““She says about the 1986 People’s Revolution that overthrew her
father, ‘At a certain level, I’m very [Filipino]./ I don’t know if there is a right
way./ Sometimes destiny takes over/ and you just happen to be there./ I
supposed it is destiny because/ the things that happened were not/ typical of
the people who did it.’” It is as though Marcos’ expropriations of his nation’s
resources had nothing to do with his overthrow. Imee waxes pleonastically
mystical: “’Too many unexpected things happened/ that I couldn’t explain.
Maybe,/ at the end of the day,/ there simply are limits to logic./ I can’t
explain it.’” But then she stops fumbling and finds a way to “spin” the
situation, creating a sense of logic and counter-logic: “Because my father was
the most in-charge leader/ you ever met. And here he was,/ he simply wouldn’t
fight back./ His statements were clear. . . . he explained/ that he was
courageous when he battled/ against foreigners. But if it’s a fellow Filipino,/
he could not fight. It was so atypical.”
Imee presents her father as a hero
for sacrificing his precious power to preserve many of his people’s lives,
despite their opposition to him: “His generals—his son—begged for his order to
kill those who would overthrow him. The dictator looked beyond the palace,
stared at the expanding sea of flesh, and said, No.” Compared to the killers on the “More or Less” list, Marcos
seems “decent” and “gentle.” Tabios could say, “Oh Heart, Ferdinand Marcos is
not Idi Amin,” etc., but she leaves that to readers. “At the end of the day,”
the prose poem includes a recognition of good within the predominantly evil
Marcos as an individual and patriarchal “leader” of the Philippines, who “would
not shoot the Filipinos” and “would not shoot me” (Tabios). The text ends: “My
father is also Ferdinand Edralin
Marcos.” In something like a feminist gesture, the poet not only allows us to
feel compassion for Imee in her difficult bind but lets the daughter act as the
means by which the dictator’s positive aspects are now remembered; yet she
thwarts Imee’s quest for exoneration through the gaps and absurdities in the
apologist’s own rhetoric, as well as through pointed juxtapositions between
different elements in the collage-prose-poem. What is unforgivable in Marcos’
actions remains dominant, but the transcolonial
poet looks toward the day when the Philippines will overcome the imprint of
colonialism and the Marcos regime; assertion is the first step in imagining
what exceeds the “music”/ ”poetry” of (post)colonialism: “I break this music’s
shackles. My name is Eileen and I will
not be jailed inside a poem.”
When the prose
poem’s aesthetic freedom took hold of Tabios in the mid- to late-nineties, she
was not yet aware of how “Language Poets,” building on earlier work by such
figures as Gertrude Stein and the John Ashbery of Three Poems, had developed new possibilities in this hybrid genre.
She had yet to read, for example, Ron Silliman’s “The New Sentence,” and yet “Purity”
and similar prose poems in this volume—had they existed in the eighties—could
have served as excellent specimen texts for that crucial essay.
Tabios is probably the first
Filipino/a poet to bring experimentally tinged post- and trans-colonial
concerns to the genre of prose-poetry—specifically and uniquely an integration
of disrupting the narrative inherent in language as a colonizing tool with the
influence of abstract art. She also figures as one of the first Asian-American
poets to publish work in this experimental vein. The socioaesthetic benefits of
her innovations accrue, of course, to all readers who can recognize them.
*****
Thomas Fink is a poet, critic and painter: http://www.thomasfinkpoetry.net
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Fink_(poet).
His work appears in The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s),
and he is the author of A Different Sense of Power: Problems
of Community in Late-Twentieth Century Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson UP,
2001) and co-editor of Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary
Innovative American Poetry (U of Alabama P, 2014).
His paintings hang in various collections.
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