Leny M. Strobel introduces ECSTATIC MUTATIONS: Experiments in the Poetry Laboratory by Eileen
R. Tabios
(Giraffe Books, Quezon City, Philippines, 2000)
A New Twist to Filipino American
Decolonization:
Eileen Tabios's Poetry
We journey Home, whatever
or wherever that Home draws us to, in order that we may wander out again into
the world giving away our gifts because we are full and overflowing.
Coming home to one's roots
— to an imagined homeland, to a cultural and ethnic heritage, to a native
tongue, to an indigenous imagination — is made necessary when we find ourselves
feeling displaced, alienated, not properly belonging to a place. In my academic
research work I have called this the process of decolonization for Filipino
Americans. My writings have dealt with the issue of how Filipino ethnic and
cultural identity is always tied to history. In the case of Filipino Americans
this refers to the colonial/neocolonial/postcolonial relationship between the
U.S. and the Philippines; and to another degree, it includes the colonial
history of the Philippines with Spain. However, in decolonization, we realize
that our sense of history must not begin and end with this colonial history; it
is more important to reclaim and rediscover those parts of ourselves that still
bear the mark of the indigenous Filipino.
The journey of
decolonization allows me to embrace every Filipino in the diaspora. To come to
our sense of loob/soul which roots and connects us to other Filipinos
wherever we are, whoever we've become because and/or in spite of our history
and now our diaspora. This contemporary diaspora finds Filipino men and women
in almost every corner of the world — as immigrants, professionals, skilled
workers, domestic helpers, entertainers, mail-order brides, and other contract
workers — driven away from the homeland by poverty. Because it is an
involuntary sojourn, poet-scholar E. San Juan, Jr. writes that Filipinos have
an incurable ache to return to the homeland or to stay connected even
symbolically with Filipinoness.
The key concept of loob,
according to Filipino philosopher/theologian Fr. Bert Alejo, has the same
meaning as the Greek word Aletheia (truth revealed), Chinese Tao (the
Way), or the Japanese Zen (the Unnameable). Loob has the power to shape
our reality, to unite, link and connect us to our Kapwa (our fellow
human being). Our loob is in a dialectical relationship with the loob
of our others/kapwa through pakikiramdam (the capacity for
compassion, empathy, and sympathy). The deeper our experience of our loob
the more we know and feel our interconnectedness with each other, with the
world, and with Nature and its Creator.
In our diaspora, what
keeps us connected to each other as members of the same Filipino family, has
much to do with our capacity to experience our Loob deeply.
Notwithstanding all kinds of differences (class, geography, generations,
education, and temperaments) amongst us, there remains that part of the self —
our Loob — that is capable of the recognition: We are Filipinos,
Anytime, Anywhere. I recognize this as the potential of decolonization.
In the search for my
Filipino loob, I sojourned into academia and there found a way of making
sense of myself as a Filipino American, as a racialized, gendered, politicized,
and historicized being. This enabled me to meditate on and then write about
Filipino American identity and cultural issues. In most of my research and
writings, I assert that decolonization is a necessary phase in the formation of
a Filipino American cultural and ethnic identity. As a beginning phase in the
process of identity development, we begin by learning how to name our
experiences; learning to open the doors to the cultural and ethnic memory that
has been repressed under the pressure to assimilate; and frame this new consciousness
within the context of our historical past as well as today's political context
in the U.S. wherein Filipino Americans still struggle with other ethnic groups
for equality and justice.
Today I find myself drawn
to those spaces outside of academic rhetoric, to the 'real' world, as my
students put it. Where does it lead but to Poetry, Art, Literature; these
beckon and I am drawn to those voices that express this Filipinoness. That's
how I met Eileen Tabios' poetry, through her book: Beyond Life Sentences
(BLS) which recently received the Philippines’ National Book Award.
But I couldn't at first
access her prose poems. I didn't recognize them as Filipino poems because there
were little references to Filipino images or narratives that I was familiar
with. But the poems were magical. Powerful. They resonated with me emotionally
but I kept looking for "what the poem is about". Except for a section
in BLS called "My Grandmother's Country"—which contained references
to 'immigrant', 'carabao', 'archipelago' — there were very few Filipino images
I can relate to. So what about her abstract prose poems — poems that I would
come to learn were ekphrasis exercises, many inspired by the American art
movement of abstract expressionism? How do I connect with this poetry by a
Filipino American poet when that Filipino connection is not obvious?
In pondering this
question, I began to wonder how the poetry of Filipinos in the diaspora, of
second and third generation U.S.-born Filipino Americans —
poets/writers/artists whose sensibilities have been shaped by both western and
Filipino influences (the latter perhaps always belatedly) — shape our will
towards our collective self-discovery as Filipinos?
In my need to learn about
what might come after one has decolonized, I felt the urgent desire to connect
with Eileen's poetry. She claims 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. In particular, Eileen is inspired by abstract art because she
considers abstraction to be synergistic with her desire to offer a space for
the reader to engage emotionally with the poem without relying on narrative. By
avoiding narrative, Eileen considers abstraction a way to obviate the
historical use of the English narrative as the means for defining power and
privilege during the U.S.-Philippine colonial period.
Consistent with her
thoughts on abstraction, Eileen also uses surrealism and "found
words" from other texts as ways to negate authorial intent. As a Filipino
English-language poet, she says it was inevitable that she question how to
express her-SELF through language. When the results of her search are abstract
works, the result leaps over categories and boundaries of what has been labeled
ethnic literature through its reliance on subject matter.
In her abstract prose
poems, Eileen has challenged me to respond, to take issue, to stretch the
limits of my own intellectual, emotional, and spiritual boundaries. I do
believe that Art can transcend. But at some level, how do these poems address
my need and desire for that connection called "Filipino"? Is this even
important in the realm of the transcendent: in Art, Beauty, Love? I have been
meditating on what indigenous Filipino psychology means when it asserts that
our identity is based on the concept of Kapwa/my fellow human being;
that our identities are all interconnected and interdependent like fried eggs
on a frying pan, eggwhites touching, egg yolks whole. Unlike western identities
which are like hardboiled eggs, insular and individualistic, according to a
Filipino humanities professor, Felipe De Leon, Jr. Thus, I thought that all
this postmodern talk about intertextuality and intersubjectivitiy is something
we have always referred to as pakikipagkapwa-tao. No wonder a Filipino
critic I once talked to brushed aside or scoffed at the postmodern jargon of the
day. He said that the deconstruction of the great western "I" was
necessary because it revealed itself as somewhat pathological and so now this
"I" is in desperation seeking the embrace of its "others."
To the Filipino, intersubjectivity or pakikipagkapwa-tao, is a given.
Is the poet/artist exempt
from the labels of theorists? Eileen often refers to the writings of American
abstact sculptor Anne Truitt in her reflections and here I borrow some of them:
"When
we love one another the most delicate truth of that love is held in the spirit,
but my body is the record of those I love."
"I
have become alert to the frequency with which people tend to act only in the
context of their own
assumptions."
—(Anne
Truitt, Daybreak, 12,16)
These statements make me
wonder if I have merely assumed that the process of decolonization manifests
itself only within my context and the context with which my Filipino American
students found themselves with me. Northern California is a very unique site of
decolonization for Filipino Americans; its diversity can mute or intensify the
need for asserting a Filipino cultural and ethnic identity. My students agreed
on the necessity of the latter and together we sought to flesh out this
process. How would the decolonization process look like outside of the research
parameters that I defined? And so now I must raise the question of how else our
decolonization/our collective self-recovery might articulate itself. Is it even
necessary? Am I assuming there was a loss incurred? Or is our experience no
more unique or different than any other group in the world and therefore we
must not harp so much on "recovery'?
I don't know exactly why
Eileen's poetry raises these issues for me. What do these issues have to do
with my initially finding her poetry abstract, distant and inaccessible? I
believe it’s because I am a "narrative addict" — and she has
withdrawn narratives in her work so that I am left to make sense of my own
responses to her poetry.
Dialogic imagination and
Bahktin. Postcolonial. Hybrid. Diasporic. Polyvocal. Multiply-located.
Postmodern. I am looking for labels to attach to Eileen's poems. I feel that
they resist labels but somehow acquiesce to the reader's whim for labels even
only to indulge my addiction to narrativizing the Filipino American experience.
The gift of Eileen's
poetry to me is the glimpse of those places I haven't visited before —
art-making, word-weaving. A sentence in her poem "The Empty Flagpole"
— "What does it say about me when I ask for asylum in places where people
wish to leave?" — resonates with me and reminds me of the many times I
despise the sacrifices required of me as an immigrant, making me wish for the
other shore of the homeland. Yet over there throngs wish to seek asylum in the
U.S., and everyday hundreds of people line the streets outside the U.S. Embassy
before daybreak for a minute chance of being granted a visa.
What Eileen's poetry makes
me consider is this: 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
poetry 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.
My sense would come to be affirmed by a conversation I later would have with
Eileen when she reveals that, in BLS, she wanted to combine a section of
abstract prose poems with older poems whose narrative style allowed her to
overtly reference aspects of the Filipino culture through her childhood
memories, e.g. incidents with her grandparents, and a goat that was a pet long
ago. "There are also stories whose telling would be hindered by
abstraction," she said, "and if I let those stories be silenced, I
would de facto have become neocolonial when what I want to be is
post-colonial."
I am glad I have persisted
in engaging Eileen's prose poems. Moving beyond the habit of looking for
authorial intent/narrative plot made me realize that if one is already decolonized
then she can engage in other acts of creation which neither forgets, negates,
narrates — and that by simply being herself as a poet, she gives back over and
over again to the Filipino collective effort towards self-recovery or
discovery.
I think it also worth
noting that Eileen felt that it was important to her that her first poetry
collection be published in the Philippines. As a private "performance
act", she would explain, she considered it her way of "giving
back" to the source; in turn, by publishing a (Filipino-)American, she
considers BLS to have become an "act of recognition" on the part of
the Philippine literary establishment which is also a metaphor for
"homeland." In addition, she considered it significant for her book
to combine a variety of topics and poetic styles; Eileen explains: "I
wanted to show the messiness of my search because aesthetic development is more
often messy than streamlined. I wished my book to reflect the history of my
quest — this entailed featuring a rawer process and also because, to me, what's
raw is more interesting than perfection."
It is this
"messiness" that we must give permission to if Filipino Americans are
to decolonize. This reminds me of the story from Filipino scholar Vince Rafael
about 16th century Tagalog-speakers in the Philippines — forced to listen to
the friar's sermon in Spanish, they would "fish" for words that they
understood and later make up their own narratives using those words but with
meanings quite unrelated to the friar's original intent. Thus, the indigenous
Filipino never really believes in the catholic friar's concept of
"Sin" for to "sin" in the indigenous language simply means
"to miss the mark" — something that doesn't deserve penalty or
requires penance. Thus, I like the way Eileen subverts the English language and
how she then makes the language fresh, new and full of courage. Her poetry
becomes a space of transgression while remaining a place of Beauty — what she
once called in a poetics essay the "Rapture to be found in Rupture."
At first reading, I thought
I "missed the mark" of Eileen's prose poems. After second (third and
fourth readings) of the poems, the poems have begun to feel more approachable,
accessible, more familiar. This, I think, results as much from the permission I
give myself to project as much of my own imaginings onto the poems. I think I
finally get what Eileen means when she withholds narrative plots. I have come
to realize that there is no mark to miss, but that subsequent dialogic
reflections between Eileen's poems and my own ideas created that deep
connection with each other's loob. And I have come closer to the
appreciation of ekphrasis and abstract expressionism. Nor will I ever be afraid
of poetry again.
—Leny Mendoza Strobel, Ed. D
American Multicultural Studies Dept.
And Hutchins School of Liberal Studies
Sonoma State University
Rohnert Park, California
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