Editor’s Note: Through the doubled interview of the “Lit in 5!” feature, two authors ask five questions to each other about each other’s new books, in this case, An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders and Bodies of Water by Aileen Cassinetto and Engkanto in the Diaspora by Eileen R. Tabios. After the authors reviewed their answers, they also decided to ask a sixth--or bonus!--question. I hope readers enjoy this dialogue released to commemorate October as Filipino American History Month.
LIT IN 5!—EILEEN R. TABIOS and AILEEN CASSINETTO
Eileen R. Tabios Asks Aileen Cassinetto:
1.
Given your book’s theme, perhaps it’s useful to share some biographical details, for example your own migration experience. But this is a poetry collection, not autobiography—so please also share some of your research to make the poems in this collection, as well as the book itself.
I was a baby during Martial Law and grew up in my grandfather’s house. My maternal family moved to the U.S. shortly after Martial Law began, and because my mother was already married, she had to wait a long time for her family-based petition to come through. With my mother’s parents and all 10 siblings settled abroad, we’ve always felt unmoored. In Manila, I remember the omnipresent fear and silence, how we were warned not to speak about politics at home and at school, how heartbroken I was when Voltes V (a hugely popular Japanese anime series) was banned because it was perceived as being potentially subversive. (I was only allowed TV time from Friday afternoon through Saturday evening, and Voltes V was the best part of my Fridays.)
For the most part, it was just me, my mother, and my sister as my father spent most of the year at sea working on a merchant ship. I attended a Catholic girls’ school until I was 16. My sister and I were raised in the same sheltered way our mother and aunts had been. It was all very structured justified in part by the country’s political climate. A lot of my friends grew up the same way, so we weren’t really the exception. We sought solace in books and read widely. By the time I was 14, I had worked my way through most volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I eventually joined my parents and the rest of our family here in the U.S. more than two decades ago. So much happened during that time that I can only flesh it out through poetry as opening up about it is too mentally exhausting. I've often shared that I came to America literally with a luggage overpacked with poems and the conviction that I can be a poet here. However, it took me a long time to fully grasp the hidden layers of meaning in culture and communication.
Having said that, there were many bright spots. For example, as a frequent flyer in the professional world, one of my favorite jobs ever was with a diplomatic mission. Part of my role was drafting diplomatic correspondence, which I absolutely loved. These official missives follow formulaic tones yet carry the gravity of grief, crisis, or resolution. It’s like being in this strange borderland between ritual and revelation. Small variations like a missing courtesy or a small word choice hint at entire histories. Diplomats read these nuances like tea leaves, searching for signals beneath the politeness. I was fascinated by all that subtext where the most important part of a message is often what isn’t said. There was a time I had to draft a Circular Note that had no precedent, to formally announce the opening of a Book of Felicitations (which I had the honor of naming. This was itself a precedent-setting addition, embraced by that country’s other diplomatic posts. Until then, only Books of Condolences existed.) Drawing on this experience and my familiarity with diplomatic protocol led me to write a poem and an essay.
My other bright spots include being invited to Our Own Voice's literary board six years after I moved to the U.S., publishing my first book three years later, and being appointed poet laureate a decade after that. For me, these served as affirmations that immigrants like myself could bring our layered stories into broader public discourse. The poems in my new collection were shaped by experience and research. My own journey navigating cultures and geographies gave rise to the tensions the poems grappled with. But equally important was the research I undertook. I read oceanography texts, maritime history, colonial trade routes, etc. The poems imagine migration as something fluid, ancestral, and ecological, disentangling what remains against what can’t be undone.
Aileen's grandparents in the late 1960s (Manila)
Aileen with her uncle and cousins visiting from the U.S.
2.
In the book’s first poem, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” you use the word “susurrous.” No doubt the word has been used by others but I can recall only one other poet who’s used that word in a poem—Luis Cabalquinto, also a Filipino poet. I’m speculating that this word is something that’s tied to your Philippine past—perhaps you came across it before you immigrated. Is that right? In any event, can you identify certain other English words that you might be using today because you’d met them in the Philippines? I believe “viand,” the title of one poem, would be in this category? I also wonder about “parturient” and “nowhen” in the poem “Imagine.” And maybe this is a long-winded way for me to ask: what are your thoughts on (writing in) English, given its colonial past?
I think that many Filipino writers gravitate toward words that open up rich soundscapes and textures because our culture appreciates the musicality of language. I was taught English formally in school where I also developed a love of the English lexicon. Many of the words I grew up with, like “viand”, weren’t obscure; they were woven into the language we used everyday. “Susurrous” and “parturient” were words I picked up back when I was obsessed with fancy vocabulary (it’s a bit embarrassing now, but thankfully, poetry gives us permission to use words that might feel too weird or too flowery in regular conversation). “Nowhen” was a term I came across in physics, and refers to a point outside of time. Other English words I first learned in the Philippines that I rarely use now as they can sound unusual outside that context include “recollection,” which within the framework of how we learned and used it back then, referred to a mandatory spiritual retreat; “salvage,” a word I grew up hearing often in relation to activists, which meant “extrajudicial killing”; “canteen” which we used interchangeably with “cafeteria”; and “nosebleed” which jokingly refers to the mental strain of trying to follow what is being said in English, especially in conversation with native speakers. English is undeniably the language of empire, but it is also my language of possibility, imagination, and transformation. Writing in English is to be entangled in power, but I have command of it like many other non-native writers, and therein lies the paradox. Just as it was imposed on us, it’s ours to bend and mend at will (hence the status of Philippine English as a nativized variety of English, having evolved over time in ways that reflected our daily lives). With it we can recast history, write poetry, decide which future gets its own story.
3.
Your title notes the navigations of “borders and bodies of water.” The “and” implies that bodies of water need not be borders, an idea that some of your poems also support. More generally, can you discuss the significance of water for you and/or these poems in your collection?
For me, water unsettles the very idea of borders. Historically, the oceans have been understood as mare liberum or the free sea. Alongside this is the principle of res communis, which holds that certain areas are common to all. Both principles are embedded in U.S. maritime law as evidenced by policies that assert and defend freedoms on the high seas, as well as through the Public Trust doctrine most frequently used in the context of water bodies within U.S. jurisdiction.
I’ve learned that here in the U.S., borders that follow rivers and lakes are often complicated by water’s fluidity. For instance, the U.S.-Mexico boundary along the Rio Grande has shifted over time leading to treaties acknowledging the border itself can move with the river’s flow. The U.S.-Canada boundary through the Great Lakes is another case where shared use of bodies of water is managed by binational commissions.
In the Philippines where ongoing maritime boundary disputes were taught as early as grade school, we learned how certain formations define water boundaries, and what might or might not count as land because that affects how much ocean you control. Also, because the Philippines is an archipelagic nation, it draws straight baselines connecting the farthest islands to define internal waters, but these aren’t always fixed because of rising seas and other coastal dynamics.
So “borders and bodies of water” is meant to disrupt assumptions. Water has always been central to our stories as Filipinos; it has carried galleons, prayers, memories, ashes, and bloodlines across distances, and my poems keep returning to this dichotomy of water as witness and ancestor, cradle and grave, barrier and passage. I don’t think I can stay too far away from water, physically and creatively. I've often said that it was inevitable that I would end up here in the Bay Area, with the figurative seawater in my veins, calling out to the mighty Pacific to find its way back to me.
4.
The sorrow is palpable in this collection, and I can immediately recall only one or two poems where I could rest momentarily for reprieve. No doubt it’s because I read most of the poems as poems of resistance. (At the end of my first read, “Still, Like Air” is my favorite poem but I can’t tell if I favor it because it’s a reprieve from the resistance that steels most of the collection’s other poems.) Where or how does acceptance lie within your poems, if it does?
It’s interesting how you saw my poems mostly as acts of resistance, while I wrote them holding onto shreds of hope. I think what you sensed is the undercurrent pushing against hardship. I think also that the collection leans into sorrow because that is the truth of the histories it carries. Acceptance is complicated for me. A part of me has never accepted certain losses and injustices. But poetry gives me a language to inch toward it, to sit with sorrow and to name it and see beyond it. The poems don’t always offer resolution or even redemption, but the act of making has given me moments of reprieve. I’m a research poet and I’ve found that engaging with academic texts creates its own form of distance, or acceptance, if you will. It removes the immediacy of emotion which allows for clarity without disconnection.
5.
You do readers a big favor by incorporating at the back of the book the “Mapping Migrations: A Personal & Incomplete History.” It’s a timeline of the Philippines’ and your history. I do appreciate how you included certain literary elements, like the years Jose Garcia Villa introduced his “comma poems,” when Carlos Bulosan published his America Is in the Heart, and even when I publicly introduced the hay(na)ku poetry form! What were you thinking, or how did you come to form the timeline in this manner?
I cannot not include you! You’re a foundational figure in my practice and craft, and I see myself as part of your literary lineage. I thought a partial and personal timeline would give readers a sense of context. I wanted us to have this shared frame of reference. It’s selective by design to suggest how certain events have reverberated within my own kinship. I also wanted to remind myself of how these turbulent arcs of Philippine history continue to flow through bodies, families, and landscapes. It’s my way of honoring the individual threads that live within larger histories.
6.
Please discuss your book’s publisher, Paloma Press. I’ve always thought Paloma Press for you was more than just a publishing house. What is its significance to you?
My sister C. Sophia Ibardaloza and I started Paloma Press more as an experiment. We set out to make beautiful books that open new perspectives, but along the way, we asked ourselves, could we actually create a literary space that mattered beyond us, one that could change the way the world sees, thinks, and imagines? We were big on vision, but all things considered, we were still Filipino immigrant women outside the safety nets of institutions, what could we possibly offer? I’ll never forget how your (Eileen R. Tabios) encouragement and mentorship gave us the confidence to power through. The answer to all of it is yes, though not in predictable ways. Paloma Press has actually evolved into this laboratory of culture at the intersection of art, science, and society. Through collaborations, we’ve reimagined who gets to build a press, what poetry can do, how partnership informs publishing, and what counts as impact. Our mission remains the same, and our vision is clearer than ever, and we continue to affirm that every story is consequential and capable of expanding who participates in shaping our shared world. We've carefully considered whether to release my own work, and decided that this book documents my journey as an immigrant, a poet, and a publisher. The poems in the collection first appeared in other literary journals and creative platforms (whose support I gratefully acknowledge), and gathered here as a retrospective archive in anticipation of Paloma Press’ 10th anniversary next year.
~~
Aileen Cassinetto Asks Eileen R. Tabios:
1.
How do you approach balancing personal experience with myth or folklore in your writing?
So, even if I don’t traffic much with mythological or folklore figures, on the occasion that I do, I do so deeply. And that’s because I believe I need to feel great empathy with the characters, such that I’d write entire books or name a dog-child after them. Empathy means I am fully invested psychologically. I would empathize based on something about the characters’ lives; sometimes, it’s not a detail in their stories as I received it but something triggered by that detail. With that empathy, I then create a life that melds each of them and me into a psychologically third person. Whether or not I use the pronoun “I”, I create from that third person’s first person perspective, as follows:
Enheduanna—I empathized for obvious reasons since the Sumerian priestess from about 2300 BCE is considered the world’s first published poet through her writings inscribed on clay tablets.
Rapunzel—I empathized with how she was locked up in a tower since I have hermitic tendencies (though I’m trying to change that as I age). And then I loved the idea that she grew her own hair until it became long enough, when cut, to braid a rope for her escape from (and return to) the tower.
Achilles—I empathized with his greatness as a warrior and yet the impossibility of a life’s total defensive posture as shown by his “Achilles heel.” I named my first German Shepherd after him, but this also means that it’s unclear to me whether my Achilles poems are inspired by the mythological character or my dog who I love most unstintingly among all who I have loved. Unashamedly, I must use this discussion to post a photo of Achilles who I miss every minute of my life; here he is on the left playing tug-of-rope with my second German Shepherd, Gabriela (named after Gabriela Silang):
Galatea—According to the Greek myth, she was sculpted by the sculptor Pygmalion who fell in love with her. He prayed to the goddess of love Aphrodite to make her human. Aphrodite consented. I empathized with the newly-created woman who finds herself under the control of other parties. The myth doesn’t have many specifics for what happened with Galatea after she stepped off the pedestal where’d she’d been placed as a statue. So I concocted a “Galatea” who is interested in poetry, art, and nature (including wine since I live in Napa Valley). I subsequently used her imagined interests to explain why I used her name for a poetry review journal I edited, Galatea Resurrects (I consider a reader’s review or engagement with a poem to be a resurrection of the poem from the page to become alive). Relatedly, my most recent Galatea poem (which I wrote for The Classical Outlook, the official journal for the American Classical League and a publication for teachers of Latin, Greece and ancient Mediterranean cultures) is about a woman who decides what she wants for her life rather than be defined by someone else
Engkanto— I hadn’t known much about engkantos except that they’re environmental spirits in Filipino mythology. For some reason I’d thought they were indigenous characters and I was surprised to learn from scholar Francisco Demetrio that they arrived in the Philippines through Spanish friars. That detail resonated with me because it exemplifies how, as I once heard Eric Gamalinda say, “The history of the Philippines is the history of the world” (a statement I used as an epigraph in the book). For that reason, I empathized with the engkanto’s history which, to me, critiques the notion of Filipino diaspora. Yet there obviously is such a thing as Filipino diaspora because the world, with all its flaws, creates systems of separation, e.g. inside/outside and insiders versus outsiders. The book’s poems don’t shy away from that reality, even as she knows that there really is no “diaspora” for the Engkanto. The Engkanto has always been of both the Philippines and the world outside its notional borders.
2.
To what extent does geography inform your work?
It has informed it through its lack: specifically, the absence of a physical terrain. When I immigrated from the Philippines at age 10, I left what once was a home for the seeming impossibility of home. My geography, thus, has been one of imagination. It’s a choice I made and kept until recently because it’s also been a fruitful muse for my writings. I’m also reminded of how the poet Jose Garcia Villa once wrote, “Land is not country.”
It’s one reason why I’ve considered the internet my homeland—I’ve even joked (but perhaps not really joked) that I’m “indigenous to the internet.” Because, as a diasporic, I have chosen to be at home in the entire world, and the internet is my metaphor for that entire world.
Nonetheless, I think my response to my diasporic situation is not ideal. I think of decolonialism scholar Leny Strobel, for example, who, as an immigrant/settler, chose to refocus her vision on the physical environment in which she’s become located. I think her response which she characterizes as “dwelling in Place” is healthier; it’s something I long considered as to whether it’s a direction I could or should go. I should credit the great and lovely poet Philip Lamantia for pointing me in this direction; many years ago when Philip was still alive, he’d noted that I need to know more about the places I inhabit. I thought about the notion for years before I started doing something about it. And I am exploring that direction now by being a poetry columnist for my local newspaper.
Specifically, I write a poetry column which begins by exploring some experience in, or facet of, my hometown, Saint Helena. Then I use that experience to inspire a poem. So each column ends with a new poem. By exploring my hometown, I hope to be more successful in, as Leny puts it, “dwelling in Place.” But it’s a relatively new initiative by me (only 10 months old) so it’s too early to see how Place will inform my work.
3.
“I know my skin as rust...” is such a striking line. How do you see the body functioning as an archive in your work?
The body as an archive in my work? I believe that’s accurate. My poetry has not come from a peaceful place. Its core is turbulent because it reflects the world which is ever in turmoil. I contain a mostly private but huge mythological cauldron that I stir for poems. My health has suffered for being a poet. Here’s an image I found on the internet (whose creator I can’t seem to find again) that I accept as a visual metaphor for me as poet:
As you can see in the above, the poet’s body can suffer its poetry (perhaps not always but for me it does). I recently posted a photo of myself, sans makeup, on Facebook to explain how writing—especially poetry—can ravage so that you’ve got prematurely whitened hair and various facial marks from poetry’s footsteps. Still, you also see in the eyes a certain awareness created by the poetry practice, an awareness I cherish. Poet and ever gracious Michael Caylo-Baradi commented by quoting from Marguerite Duras’ The Lover: “I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”
My body as a poet's archive is ravaged. Your quoted excerpt is followed by another line that I wish to share for completion of the thought: “I know my skin as rust. I know my skin as ruin.”
4.
What recurring obsessions shaped the poems in this collection?
What it means to be a creature of the diaspora—not just being in the diaspora but shaped by diaspora. So I ask continuously: Where is home? What is home? How to create a home for myself? Is there an advantage, aesthetic or otherwise, to being “homeless”? What is my history? Can I defy that history that’s served to sunder me from my first home and homeland? Can I, not erase but, keep the grief of that history permanently at bey?
Where is happiness? Despite the world, how can joy have the last word? For Engkanto in the Diaspora, I structured the order of poems meticulously, and I believe the last two poems do show that the last word belongs to Joy.
Questioning and questions—that’s the second element that shaped the poems in Engkanto in the Diaspora. The first element would be the faith of Love.
5.
“Can diaspora be home?” How do you personally wrestle with that question?
Diaspora doesn’t need to define a separation between homeland and what’s beyond the birthland’s borders. For me, diaspora has expanded the definition of home to become trans-geographical territory. Diaspora stretches home’s definition to be one of people, of community, and even other elements like writing. It does so through what’s become the primary poetics underlying my writings: Kapwa. Kapwa is the Filipino indigenous psychological trait of “seeing one’s self in the other,” thus connecting everyone and everything to each other.
To this issue, after I had discussed Question No. 2 with her, Leny Strobel shared a meditation (from her yoga practice) with me, and I boldface one of the lines below for emphasis:
Kapwa is beyond imagination
Geography's lines are bounded by imperial discourse
In Kapwa I am not displaced.
Kapwa is beyond imagination
The internet is a space where macro and micro are brewing
Whether diasporic or place-based
It is Kapwa
Kapwa is Love
The love of Mother Earth is real
Not imagined. So I dwell.
To dwell is to be loved.
And as a writer who explored what it means to be a diasporic writer, I discovered that a key definition of home for me in the diaspora is the country of books. Books not only transcend geography but, for me, represent humanity well with their required considerations of issues and the articulations of those issues' significances. Books create my home by manifesting part of the best of what humans are capable: thoughtfulness.
6.
Across various literary and cultural modalities, what vision informs your work as a writer and artist, particularly in relation to the Philippines, and how do you see this in shaping its impact in the world?
Kapwa is my chosen vision. My novel The Balikbayan Artist includes an Author’s Note from which this excerpt is relevant to your question:
“Kapwa,” the Filipino indigenous trait which values the interconnection of all beings across all of time. In what I consider to be “Kapwa Time,” there is no difference between past, present, and future since one is connected to everything in the universe in all time periods.
My thoughts on Kapwa Time were inspired by an image from precolonial Philippine times of a human standing with a hand lifted upwards; if you happened to be at a certain distance from the human and took a snapshot, it would look like the human was touching the sky. Filipino National Artist and novelist N. V. M. Gonzalez mythologizes this human as a creature who, by being rooted onto the planet but also touching the sky, is connected to everything in the universe and across all time—the human is rooted to the past and future so that there is no unfolding of time. This reflects N. V. M. Gonzalez’s notion of the Filipino as a “mythic [hu]man,” as noted by scholar Katrin de Guia: “Gonzalez points out that Filipinos are a people whose past is rooted in the cyclical time of their ancient myths…. These were… times of primordial oneness with the world, where the sky was so near that people could touch it with their hands. The ancient ones were able to connect to anyone and everything at all times.”
I actually learned Kapwa without knowing the practice was/is Kapwa in the sense that for years I've favored poems that create connections among elements that at first would seem to have no (narrative) connection. This approach benefited Engkanto in the Diaspora in that my narrative references can be multiple and varied because the diaspora indeed is multiple and varied. Plus, the world is huge!
Most recently, I’m honing Kapwa’s literary manifestations through the genre of the novel. I consider my novels “Kapwa novels” for including elements that don’t necessarily advance plot lines but nevertheless make the case for their organic relevance simply because everything in this world cannot avoid being connected to each other.
I don't have an expectation for how my work might impact the world. But I know that Kapwa means unavoidably to connect, and hope that connection is relevant to my writings' relationships with readers.
~~OF COURSE: TIME FOR POEMS!~~
From An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders and Bodies of Water by Aileen Cassinetto:
BALIKBAYAN
Ocean-born, I was always bound
to come home to a sea
that has no memory
of me, save for my stars,
long-lived and feather-like.
Bayan kong binabalik-balikan
so close to the coastline,
I hear sounds as they move
just above the water’s surface,
the rare glide upward,
the slide and swing, the extra note.
Bayan kong binabalik-balikan
I hear your heartbeat
this far from your shore.
What we saved at the water’s edge,
we also left behind,
had hoped to endure—cone shells,
red corallines, O love of mine.
Note: “Balikbayan” is a rearrangement of an earlier poem (“Tanaga: After Katy de la Cruz,” Poetry, July/August 2021), set to music by composer Saunder Choi in 2024.
~
From Engkanto in the Diaspora by Eileen R. Tabios
Chant #1,000,061
To impregnate his queen, a male
honeybee’s genitals must explode.
Don’t be fooled by my jokes.
To feel my breasts is
to remember the faces
pressed against my cleavage.
Like those of roses and girls
dropped in orchards of leafless
trees surrounded by winter
fields barren with cut grapevines.
The girls bore holes bulleted
through cruel eyes. Bullets
and eyes the size of buttons
on military coats. Their fathers
hid on mountains, foraging
for “truffles, wild asparagus, tiny
mushrooms… only to find mines”
that seared off the skin from their
bowed faces. This is a world
of defiance defined by muscles
squeezing accordions for non-
Baptismal hymns to which thieves
and priests lock arms to not-
dance. October is a generous
sun against my face and sleeveless
arms as I attempt to salvage meaning,
only to discover I am sprouting feathers
dropped from the backs of raped
brides virginized by poetic metaphors.
Suddenly, I realize: I am writing
a million songs to fuel a non-
existent woman’s funeral pyre.
Note: “Chant #1,000,061” was first published in an earlier version in Rigorous, November 2024, edited by Rosalyn Spencer.
*****
About the Poets:
Aileen Cassinetto is a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and winner of the 2025 Foley Poetry Prize. She is also a co-editor of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (2023), a companion to the congressionally mandated Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), and The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (2025), a Poets for Science anthology and companion to United by Nature: A Knowledge Assessment of Nature and Nature’s Benefits in the U.S. (formerly First U.S. National Nature Assessment or NNA1). More information is at https://aileencassinetto.com/ and IG @aicassinetto
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include Engkanto in the Diaspora; the novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; an autobiography, The Inventor; and a flash fiction collection Getting To One. Forthcoming is a children’s book with Mel Vera Cruz and Jeannie E. Celestial, Tata Efren’s Forever Laughter. Other recent books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was translated in 2024 by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon. Creator of the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form; she has seen her writing and editing works receive recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
No comments:
Post a Comment