Editor’s Note: The Halo Halo Review is pleased to offer a new feature: “Poetry-in-progress” where poets focus on the making of a single poem, from the poem’s inspiration to various drafts until the poem reaches its “final draft.” In this feature by Eileen R. Tabios, comparing the first draft and final draft can show how far a poem travels before reaching its "final" version.
“Rewriting History: An Innocent Version,”
A Poem Rooted in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Samoan Period
By Eileen R. Tabios
This essay has two sections. An early version of the first section, "The Poem's Roots & Inspiration," was written as one of the poetry-related columns I write each month for my local newspapers, The Napa Valley Register and Saint Helena Star. The column then inspired me to reconsider its themes from the perspective of poetry-in-progress, which make up the essay's second section, "The Resulting Poem."
The Poem’s Roots & Inspiration:
According to Wikipedia, I am one of just two percent of its readers who donate to keep the “Free Encyclopedia” available to all. That’s because I use Wikipedia a lot—it’s a convenient way to check on anything. Of course, if you want to do deeper research you should go beyond Wikipedia which can be incomplete or flawed in its presentations. But for a casual check, I’ve found Wikipedia useful for almost any topic I input onto its web page.
This also means that, through Wikipedia, I’ve become a catch-all receptacle for data that don’t necessarily have any relevance to my immediate interests. I think of such as information for information’s sake that I hoard simply in case I can use it in future stories or poems.
But when I learned recently that Robert Louis Stevenson’s 175th birthday is this month, specifically Nov. 21, I dived into my mental inventory to remember something I’d once read on Wikipedia about the author of Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped. Wikipedia’s description includes Stevenson’s “political engagement in Samoa” where he had moved to spend the last years of his life. Stevenson was supportive of the people of Samoa which was beset in the 19th century by the imperial powers of Britain, Germany and the U.S.
What grabbed my attention and stuck in my memory was Wikipedia’s description of what Stevenson “perceived as the Samoans’ economic innocence—their failure to secure their claim to proprietorship of the land through improving management and labour.” Just months before his 1894 death, Stevenson had addressed the island chiefs:
“There is but one way to defend Samoa... It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country... if you do not occupy and use your country, others will. It will not continue to be yours or your children's, if you occupy it for nothing. You and your children will, in that case, be cast out into outer darkness."
In the above excerpt, I italicize the words “occupy” for emphasis—that is the word that makes it difficult for me to forget Wikipedia’s feature on Stevenson. For when I think of the word “occupy,” I usually associate it with invaders, colonizers, or settlers coming to occupy a land that was not previously theirs. In Stevenson’s and Samoa’s case, though, the matter is of an indigenous people occupy-ing land where they already reside.
Stevenson’s thoughts were based on “Lockean” property rights. The philosopher John Locke developed a theory through which property ownership would be created by the application of labor. As implied by Wikipedia’s description, the Samoans’ failure to adequately apply their labor and management on their lands helped create, five years after Stevenson’s death, the partitioning of the Samoan Islands between Germany and the U.S. (Britain gave up its rights there by concentrating on West Africa, Tonga and certain Solomon Islands).
Reflecting a more recent application of Locke’s philosophy, Elon Musk has appeared on videos discussing SpaceX, his space exploration company, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “Occupy Mars.” While the phrase refers to the Occupy movement, it also reflects a futuristic version of Lockean property rights, whether or not Musk had Locke in mind, as he strives towards SpaceX’s goal of colonizing Mars.
Wikipedia’s write-up seemingly creates a cause-and-effect between the Samoans’ failure to manage their lands in the Lockean manner and subsequent actions by Britain, Germany and the U.S. But it’s not clear whether Locke’s philosophy comports with Samoan values. Indigenous culture usually considers nature as not something (“other”) to occupy and be “used.”
Moreover, these three “great powers” likely would have done what they did regardless of Samoans’ actions; imperialists are rarely that considerate as they move to control others’ resources, in this case Samoa’s harbors and copra and cocoa bean processing.
I confess I’m thinking this way because, just prior to writing this essay, I read Elaine Castillo’s essay collection How to Read NOW (Viking, 2022). In her Author’s Note, Castillo clarifies that reading, here, is not just reading books; it’s viewing (reading) “our world now.” Specifically, Castillo means “how to dismantle the forms of interpretation we’ve inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen.”
Castillo’s concept seems relevant to Wikipedia’s presentation on Stevenson. Unlike with what Wikipedia currently implies (although with Wikipedia one never knows if what is implied is what is actually intended to be stated), I don’t buy that the Samoans contributed to their takeover by not having exercised Lockean property rights. This does not mean that the Samoans did not act in ways that made it easier for outsiders to take control, i.e. through their inter-clan wars. But I don’t believe in blaming the victim, so to speak, for the victim’s supposed ineptness at fighting back; the blame should remain with those who perpetrate harm, in this case, of taking or using resources that are not theirs.
Nonetheless, Stevenson’s push for Lockean property rights was part of his love for the Samoan people. Whatever he might have thought of their capacities to withstand European and American encroachment, he considered the Samoans like his own Scottish countrymen in being “fine people… brave, gay, faithful.”
~
The display also includes a silk and wood shoe by Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, that is about the size of my palm; its caption endearingly states, “Fanny Stevenson was always proud of her dainty and ladylike feet, as this diminutive shoe attests. However, upon moving to Samoa and going barefoot, her feet widened. She later would refer to others of ‘how her feet had grown’.”
The mementos flesh out how Stevenson developed a life in Samoa that resulted in his love for the Samoan people. The love was reciprocated; Wikipedia notes that after his death, the Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night before bearing him on their shoulders to Mount Vaea where he was buried. Stevenson’s beautiful poem “Requiem” was inscribed on his tomb, and later translated to a Samoan song of grief:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will
This be the verse you grave for me
Here he lies where he longed to be
Home is the sailor home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill
I’ve not addressed everything in Stevenson’s Samoan experience. And Samoa is just one of several, equally fascinating periods of Stevenson’s 44 years of life. I recommend visiting the RLS Museum which houses over 7,000 items including manuscripts, letters, artwork, furniture, photographs and publications. All the objects housed by the museum contain stories worth considering, and then (as suggested by Castillo) reconsidering.
~
Reconsidering what I learned from visiting the RLS Museum, I recalled my favorite object in the Samoa Corner—the tortoise shell page turner described as used by Stevenson to prevent newspaper ink from staining his hands. As I considered the notion, it seemed cumbersome to me to be using a ruler-sized object to turn a newspaper’s pages (see image below). So I turned, as is my wont, to Wikipedia and discovered, to my surprise, that no such object exists (Wikipedia uses the term “page turner” for a person who turns sheet music pages for a musician; the titles for movies and television dramas; and a literary festival).
I researched some more and came across an article, “The Mystery of the Phantom Page Turner” by Ben Marks in Collectors Weekly. The article was on professor and researcher Ian Spellerberg who wrote Reading & Writing Accessories: A Study of Paper-Knives, Paper Folders, Letter Openers and Mythical Page Turners (Oak Knoll Press, 2016).
According to Spellerberg, objects described as “page turners” were actually “paper-knives” used for cutting folded signatures within bound books. During the Victorian Era in which Stevenson lived, long sheets of paper were folded to create a “signature” of pages. While most of the book’s signatures were cut during its binding process, some were not and only could be opened later by being cut. Paper-knives made such books readable.
Spellerberg called page turners “the unicorns, if you will, of office collectibles, mythical objects that tell us more about how we imagine people lived rather than how they actually did.”
Looking at the cover image of Spellerberg's books, one can see examples of these accessories and how some might be applied to turning pages. Based on the shape, I wonder if Stevenson's object was a "folder" versus "paper-knife." A folder was used to fold signatures.
I (especially the geek in me) was amused by this unexpected issue and the possibility that an object might be mislabeled in the RLS Museum. Granted, Stevenson lived in a time when paper-knives and folders were commonly used for books and he certainly could have used one for turning a newspaper’s pages; but that still would make the object technically a “paper knife” or "folder" rather than “page turner.” (Caveat: I’m not an antiques expert so I make no definitive conclusion on the matter.)
**
The Resulting Poem:
I very much enjoyed discovering the possible error in the museum’s labeling. Even if my theory is proven wrong in the future, I enjoyed experiencing the discovery of its possibility because one is rarely in a position to correct something like a museum’s determination (I assume a museum’s objects are vetted before being presented to the public). But I was sufficiently tickled to be inspired to write a poem based on my speculations. Here is its First Draft:
As one can see, it is a prosaic draft. But it articulates the poem’s—or, at this early writing stage since poems frequently transcend authorial intention, my—concerns. I knew I’d be editing the poem.
First, I knew that I would lift the Spellerberg quote from the bottom of the first draft to become an epigraph to the final draft. While most of the poem’s words at this stage clearly reflect what I’d described previously, I felt that Spellerberg’s notion of romantic page turners was what created my impetus to poeticize the matter. I thought it might be good, for emphasis, to use his quote as an epigraph rather than putting it into the body of the poem.
I also thought, as one can see on the handwritten notes on the above image, that the poem would be more welcoming if it began with descriptions of page turners which often use wonderful material like filigreed silver, shaped olive wood, carved bone, and so on. In editing the first draft, I came up with a poem in the form of four quartets:
As one can see from the above, once I’d determined the poem’s four-stanza form, the poem underwent edits which I also list as follows:
First Stanza:
2nd line: the initial word “half-moons” was changed to “quarter-moons” to better describe the thinner curve of a page-turner’s “blade” that could be shaped like a curved ruler.
4th line: I reversed the initial order of “emeralds and sapphires” to improve the sonics (you can test whether my change was an improvement by reading the stanza out loud to see which sounds better: the initial line of “dots of sapphires and emeralds” of the final draft’s “emeralds and sapphires”.
Second stanza:
2nd line: reversed the order of the initial “blunted edges” to “edges blunted” to create a forward momentum from the 2nd line’s last word into the 3rd line’s first word.
4th line: the initial line was “might feast some more”. I first added “on words” to make the line “might feast some more on words”. I was still dissatisfied with that line as I wanted more emphasis on the idea that the “eyes” had feasted first on the lovely items noted in the first stanza, and that the eyes now are feasting on the book’s interior text. So I added “too” and “starker words” to the final version. I liked “starker” for more radically contrasting the image of (presumably) black-and-white letters/words with the first stanza’s lush(er) references to bone, ivory, tortoiseshell, filigreed and enameled silver, emeralds, and sapphires.
Third stanza:
1st line: A verse on the page is visual as well as text. So I tossed the at times reductive “show, don’t tell” rule to insert the adjective “alluring” because the added word extended the line length to more match the other lines. I also think “alluring” is a fabulously-resonant word that seems applicable to these page-turners from an earlier time period (Victorian era).
3rd. line: I changed the initial word of “slicing” to “to slice”. I felt “slicing” and then the 4th line’s “revealing” created too obvious a rhyme. I also felt “slicing” is too mellifluous for the line’s crisper idea of cutting the edges of the book’s signature(s). But upon further consideration, I changed the word back to "slicing"—changing my mind about the mellifluousness being problematic—and amended the 4th line instead.
4th line: I changed "for revealing" to "to reveal" to avoid the double "ing" rhyme (which, again, I felt was too obvious). I also changed the initial phrase of “their words and art” to “wisdom and delight” because I wanted more specificity as regards the significances of words and art. In addition, I chose the word “delight” because I felt it added to the sense of whimsy—or something akin to whimsy—with which the poem was going to end as delineated by the 4th stanza.
Fourth stanza:
2nd line: I changed the original M-dash to a colon simply to avoid tainting the use of the M-dash at the end of the first to third stanzas.
Finally, I recall that I wanted the notion of “writing history” to be reflected in the poem, and did so through the title “Rewriting History.” But I added “An Innocent Version” because the matter at hand is rewriting history to call a paper-knife a page turner; this obviously is more benign than how one rewrites what actually occurred to show a particular party in better light, e.g. when it comes to imperialism. As the saying goes, “It’s often the victors who write history.”
That saying, of course, should be reconsidered if not disputed for both the definition of “victor” as well as adjusting the bias in reporting. I feel the poem’s title captures this reconsideration so that a reader who is concerned with history—how the past affects present and future—would understand that, ultimately, the poem is less about cutting paper and more about how words cut.
Here is the poem’s Final Draft (or final draft, for now):
Rewriting History—An Innocent Version
“The thought of using a hand-held blade for turning pages seemed rather romantic.”
—Ian Spellerberg, author of Reading & Writing Accessories: A Study of Paper-Knives, Paper Folders, Letter Openers and Mythical Page Turners
Bone, ivory, tortoiseshell,
filigreed and enameled silver,
wood shaped into quarter-moons,
dots of emeralds and sapphires—
How pleasing to hold and wield
these knives with edges blunted
for turning pages so that our eyes
might feast, too, on starker words—
But these alluring objects were
created for another purpose:
slicing open a book’s folded papers
to reveal wisdom and delight—
Born as “paper-knives” centuries ago,
known today as “page turners”:
even falsehoods can be goldened
into the luminous sheen of Romance
*****
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; a novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; an autobiography, The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography; and a flash fiction collection Getting To One. Other books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon and two French poetry books, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery). Forthcoming in 2026 is a selected art stories collection, The Erotic Space Around Objects. Her literary inventions include the "Kapwa novel"; the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; and the monobon poetry form based on the monostich. Her books have been translated into Filipino, French, Spanish, Thai and Romanian; other writings have been translated into Binisaya, Russian, Bengal, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, and Greek. Her her writing and editing works received recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
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