The Gods We
Worship Live Next Door by Bino Realuyo
(University of Utah Press, Salt Lake Gity, 2006)
[First published in The Literary Review / Farleigh
Dickinson University, Fall 2006]
The Gods We Worship Live Next Door is the winner of the 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in
Poetry. I mention this because it makes sense to me to do so. It makes sense to
think of Bino Realuyo's poems as being in conversation with those of the late
poet for whom this award is named, for the Philippines which emerges out of
Realuyo's collection is, like Ali's
Kashmir, a decimated landscape, a place populated by often shelterless
survivors, a country, to use Ali's words, "without a post office." In
fact, many of those for whom Realuyo speaks have been deprived of not only
addresses but names as well. In the prose poem "1899: The Forgotten
Leaf," a man killed in battle during the Philippine-American War describes
those fallen around him, "all dead, and their names, no, they had
none." Later he asks, "Who would remember me on my knees, begging,
and this soldier thrusting through my mouth fifty years of Juan-to-John?"
But because not
everything can be erased and forgotten. The
Gods We Worship can excavate the nation's brutal history of successive
foreign occupations in order to point toward what grows now from events set in
motion more than five hundred years ago. "Did my children know how I
died?" the soldier asks. "Did they know that my body was buried in
the same soil they strode? I was the tree that grew from it, the hibiscus blooming
at dusk, the roots, the memorial of pebbles and dust, the old amputee sitting
in his shadow, the glue-children begging for a few coins."
The current political
climate in the Philippines is not unlike that of the Middle East. Muslims and Christians
have been contending for land, power, and the basic materials of
survival—against each other and against various empires —since the arrival of
Magellan and the Catholic missionaries. Arab traders had introduced Islam to
the Philippines two hundred years earlier, in the late 13th Century. As Realuyo
moves through time— beginning with a cluster of poems in the voices of
displaced Filipinas, victims of the present Diaspora, and turning to the
periods of Spanish oppression, American oppression, and Japanese oppression—we
as readers come to a clearer sense of a growing systemic exhaustion. Though
these poems never push the argument to its inevitable conclusion, Realuyo
brings us into an unflinching confrontation with the erosions of identity and
home that make violent rebellion an increasingly appealing, though nevertheless
desperate, act of self-reassertion. Realuyo's personas always remain the
victims, yet we sense that each carries a growing anger that nurtures something
else. And the spirits of those who have gone remain in the air, transformed
into the fireflies of "The Cycles." "They sit on twigs,
between." In the same poem's second movement, a seemingly universal
character, a dying "you," imagines resting on the pregnant belly of
the angel of death. She speaks, "Inside all of us, there has always been a
child. Yours has been killed many times." Yet the last consideration, even
as we travel through the centuries and seemingly into the afterlife, is for the
future of this world and what might wash it clean: "your ears on her mound
where life kicks within, then the final thoughts —a name, a name for a child
who will one day bring rain."
It is difficult to write
a poem that aspires to something like global significance. Overtly political
poems run the risk of devolving into polemic. One of the strategies which
elevates these poems above invective is the distance the poet puts between
himself and the tales to which he gives voice. Realuyo cedes his singular
Filipino identity in order to generously open a space which can then house the
perspectives of so many others. Every poem in the collection is either spoken
in character or delivered with a measured third person narration.
"Filipineza," the opening poem, is a persona poem told from the point
of view of a woman who has gone abroad to work as a maid. Through her particular
experience, the motivation of a whole class of women is made succinctly
evident, eminently sane.
My
whole country cleans houses for food, so that
the
cleaning ends with the mothers, and the daughters
will
have someone clean for them, and never leave
my
country to spend years of conversations with dirt.
The likelihood that this
mother's hopes will meet with success is undercut, however, by the story she
tells about Elena, another maid, who has disappeared after bearing a child to
her married employer. But, as is the case with so many of the vanished in The Gods We Worship, her demise has
transformed her into something that cannot be forgotten: "Like the silence
in the circling motions / of our hands, she becomes part myth, part mortal,
part soap."
The most common physical
objects, a soap bubble, a light bulb, fish, folded shirts, have been made into
something more, something that points ominously, but not obviously, to the significances
behind them. The collection's central metaphors return, and in this way accrue
added weight. There is an immediate pleasing strangeness and associative power
to the beginning lines of "Filipineza."
If
I became the brown woman mistaken
for
a shadow, please tell your people I'm a tree.
But we come to a deeper
understanding of the centrality of the image when it reappears in "1899:
The Forgotten Leaf." More often the metaphors feel hidden, concealed
within phrases that might be primarily read as literal. Yet Elena has not
literally become part soap. What then does it mean to be soap metaphorically? Has
she become part of a mythology which will one day inspire those who seek to
purge their country of the institutional labor policies, like those behind
"Japayuki," that manufacture suffering? This tension between the
clean and the soiled runs through the collection. "Find Me," another
poem spoken in the voice of the dead, recounts an event at the Payatas
dumpsite. A shantytown built along the edge of the landfill in Metro Manila is
buried under a landslide of garbage. One of the many extensive notes in the
back of the book, a resource I found myself referencing as though it were a hypertext,
informs us that 160 bodies were eventually recovered.
*****
Kathleen Graber is the author of
two collections of poetry, Correspondence
(Saturnalia Books, 2006) and The Eternal City (Princeton University
Press, 2010), which was a finalist for The National Book Award, The National
Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of The Library of Virginia Literary
Award for Poetry. She is a recipient of
fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The New Jersey State Council on the
Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton
University and an Amy Lowell Travelling Scholar. She is the Director of Creative Writing at
Virginia Commonwealth University. Recent
poems have been anthologized in Best
American Poetry 2012 and 2014.
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