FOREWORD to THE BEGINNING OF LEAVING by ELSA VALMIDIANO

 Jean Vengua presents the Foreword to 

The Beginning of Leaving by Elsa Valmidiano

(Querencia Press, 2023)

 

FOREWORD to Elsa Valmidiano’s The Beginning of Leaving

By Jean Vengua

 The “journey” is an ancient and popular metaphor in the human narrative. A journey in search of a better life, as escape, or as hunger represents a deep imperative in humans to physically survive and thrive. It can also be a way to fulfill emotional, psychological, and intellectual needs. Often, there is a focus on destination, the end of a journey and the potential fulfillment of a dream.

The title of Elsa Valmidiano’s collection of essays, The Beginning of Leaving, points the reader to the moment of decision-making and action. An open-ended term, “leaving” implies hope, seeking—and consequences. Departure is also letting go of something, however difficult that may be. What does it mean to carefully place your foot upon the ground, or to “hit the ground running”—knowing that what you encounter will change you, perhaps significantly? Later, in looking back on the journey—one reviews what happened, choosing what truths to reveal or suppress. And once we know the truth, how will we hold it? 

These essays set off on routes familiar to most Filipinos and already taken by many—though not all—of Valmidiano’s family members, a people whose archipelagic history has run the gamut of peaceful exchange through language and culture as well as revolt against colonial violence and domination. The journeys are not only “diasporic”—but also journeys of escape and confrontation, exploration, healing, and renewal. The author follows her own paths to understand how those histories of departure are entwined with her own. 

One lesson that leaving teaches is the value of home and security. But what if you long for or embrace more than one home? Valmidiano is a global traveler. Her infancy was spent in the Philippines in Las Piñas, “in the subdivision of Moonwalk on Soyuz Street.” A place where streets are named after spaceships and imbued with the desire to escape gravity. She thinks of home as Carson, California, yet, she professes “a love, longing, and fascination for our Motherland,” the Philippines. For her mother, Ubbog, La Union, is home, a place her daughter can touch through mother, family members, and ancestors. 

Writing is often like detective work, and Valmidiano is indefatigable. While visiting her parents’ ancestral homes and talking to relatives, her explorations of family, its threads of belonging and trauma, are persistent. Laying in bed with her Lola Fely, she writes, “Stories were buried in her body. I wanted them.” The author moves ever forward; with words she gently prods at painful memories (including her own), pulls back, collects traces of those who suffered, those who disappeared, and those who survived. In the process, the author also explores her own very personal routes through wonder and grief, birth and death.

Memories of closeness seem key here. The physical and sensory experience of family, embodied in greetings, the mano po, the touches and sniff-kissing: 

As the elders come out of their homes to greet us, there is a combination of performing the mano po and swooping me, my older brother, and two sisters into their arms, inhaling us very hard. There’s kissing, hugging, and inhaling, a combination of all three, burying their noses several times into our cheeks and breathing in our scent. It seems we disappear into their lungs.

Physical connection, “skinship,” is significant throughout these essays, as are the moments of wrenching, personal and physical loss. Valmidiano dwells in such moments, or sites—the “diasporic body”—while showing us how the actions and outcomes of colonial and capitalist systems and white supremacy have exerted forces on minds and bodies through generations. How it shocks and scars, shames or silences us and our forebears—although, with luck and courage, time may release the stories that we take with us into the world. 

Spirituality and long-held beliefs, too, exert an influence, whether as a rebellion against institutions, balm for loneliness, or as reminders to respect ancestors and their sacred lands. Family members long gone appear again as ghosts to portend important events, or to greet and carry away those who, in dying, depart this world. 

These essays are particularly relevant for women navigating the current anti-abortion movement in the United States and other countries. Valmidiano relates her experience as a child with anti-abortion “sex education” in a Catholic school—the beginning of trauma that would extend to her early experiences with sex and abortion, and even into her workplace. Because of her experience as a reproductive-rights activist and counselor in the Philippines, her writing is especially tuned in to women’s experiences of birth and death, whether writing about her own abortion and post-abortion experience, and its spiritual dimensions, or the birth of her mother during World War II in the Philippines.

Diasporic tales can be revelatory, but such stories—for victims and conquerors as well as those who dwell in the liminal seas between one culture and another—do not always lead to resolution. The reality of trauma, lingering through generations, does not always allow it. Sometimes one must leave. Sometimes, grief is the only healing. This is why writers like Valmidiano—who dare to voice the dung-aw—who look back and follow the tracks of departure, both painful and promising, are necessary.

I grew up in postwar housing in the US, almost completely isolated and independent from extended family. My mother and I were the family unit. Period. But there was another “family” across the ocean, sa Pilipinas, which seemed to be primarily my mother’s—accessed only through letters and the rare phone call. My father, too, as a crew member on a merchant marine ship, was always overseas. So, I’m struck by Valmidiano’s ability to reach out empathically and connect with individuals in her family, even those she has never met, but can imagine, and to see herself in their shared history and kapwa—shared identity—and touch their lives. How does one begin? Perhaps by reciting the names of places and people: Ubbog and Lapog, Quezon City, Aotearoa, Tbilisi, Lisbon, Tacloban, Oakland; Lilong Tito, Lola Fely, Lola Ising, Lilang Poten, Martinez Valmidiano . . .

There are many powerful moments in this book, embodied in the author’s writing-to-understand how the colonial encounter is passed on through generations in our bodily experience; how trauma is dealt with—through suppression or empathy, projection onto others, or via exploration and the curiosity-driven work of writing. Just as powerful are the processes of healing, which I think these essays represent.

The Beginning of Leaving should be considered an invitation for you to explore your own departures and arrivals, family and ancestral histories—not just the stories that you have been told, but the silences, which are also speaking.

*****

Jean Vengua is a California-born-and-raised writer, poet, and visual artist. Based in Monterey, Vengua is the author of Prau (Meritage Press), The Aching Vicinities (Otoliths Press), Corporeal (Black Radish Books), and Marcelina (Paloma Press). With Mark Young, she co-edited The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, and The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II. Her poetry and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies. As with her writing, Vengua’s visual art leans toward the experimental and process. She publishes an art and culture newsletter, Eulipion Outpost. Her website is jeanvengua.com.