Patrick Rosal presents the Foreword to
Azucena (Centennial Edition) by M. de Gracia Concepción
(Persea, 2025)
With your patience, dear reader, I hope you will allow me to indulge in an age-old Filipino practice. I want to mention to you a few delightfully personal connections between M. de Gracia Concepción’s life story and my family history.
Concepción was born a year after my paternal grandfather, Alfonso Rosal, and in the same province of Ilocos Sur. The poet’s birthplace of Santa Maria lies not far across the Abra River from my Lolo Alfonso’s hometown of San Vicente. I also learned from Emmanuel David’s terrific introduction that Concepción was a member of the Quezon Commission, a group of Filipinos who were to travel to the U.S. to negotiate terms of Philippine independence. This fact made me wonder if he knew my Granduncle Vicente Llanes who was also invited to be a member of that select group of Filipino delegates to Washington, DC.
One other somewhat minor but very poignant detail from Mr. David’s Introduction: Concepción— after his decade-plus of living in the U.S.—returned to the Philippines in 1931 on a ship named the S.S. Jefferson. Apolonio Gelacio, my maternal grandfather, in 1929, just two years prior to Concepción’s departure, boarded that same boat and traveled from Manila to Honolulu to work as a sakada, a sugar cane laborer in Hawai’i. Further, that very vessel, the S.S. Jefferson, was constructed by the New York Shipbuilding Company on the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey, at a site which is within walking distance of my office at Rutgers University.
While there are some nifty intersections in our ancestral stories, it’s also clear that I’m a much different poet than the author of Azucena in many ways. The specificities of place, for example, appear often in my poems, not just particular cities and towns, but exact streets and corners. This is not at all the case for the poems in Azucena.
This lack of place in Azucena makes me want to articulate more clearly my fascination with the local. Maybe one of the things I’m trying to do as a poet is preserve my own sense of place; or maybe I’m trying to restore a sense of place for myself because I so often feel placeless; or maybe I’m trying to see a place that is a phantom to me or trying to make myself materialize finally in a place—America—that makes me (like Concepción) a phantom; or maybe, more than document place, I’m trying to invent place out of the fragments of my own movement, my own forgetting, my own heartbreak. On the other hand, Concepción constructs a sense of place by leaving it out; there is no catalog or cartography in his poems. In this way, Concepción and I are both curious about this peculiar wish. He calls it nostalgia. I call it elegy. And I mean elegy as in evanescence and invisibility, as in the mournfulness and longing that arises from that invisibility, elegy as the active and effusive replenishment of a figure in language and in the imagination, whether that figure is a lost love or a childhood hometown across the Pacific or a corner of an industrial borough of New Jersey, whether that figure gets named or goes utterly unnamed. The poem is an outline of desire. Though we sound different and our poems project very different energies, this desire makes us kin.
Maybe the best way to consider desire in Concepción’s poetry is to talk about his title. In Spain, azucena is a lily, a white flower associated with purity and beauty; it even evokes Christ’s mother, Mary (after whom Concepción’s hometown is named, incidentally). But in the Philippines, azucena is a tuberose, which is also a white flower and very fragrant, but it is an entirely separate species. My beloved wife grows a beautiful azucena in a clay pot up in a temperature-controlled room in the attic; it goes dormant during the cold months among some other tropical plants she cares for. When weather gets warm, she brings the plant to the back porch just outside our door, and when mid- to late-summer arrives, the azucena blooms. I love walking out and catching a whiff of its slightly creamy, very sweet smell, especially at night when its aroma permeates the air. Sometimes I can’t help but shove my nose in the middle of its blossoms to breathe it in deep.
The title Azucena, then, is sensory, even erotic. Like the flower itself, the word carries its sensual fragrance throughout. Almost the entire book coheres around a single romantic interest, who is continually addressed. No physical depiction of the beloved appears in the poems, but the poet mentions her eyes a couple times—and they are blue. Maybe it’s hard for contemporary readers to grasp how Filipino men were portrayed as an economic and sexual threat in the United States, as Filipinos were blamed for stealing jobs and committing crimes and social offenses, not the least of which was having relationships with Caucasian women[1]. Fury in white communities especially along the U.S. West Coast had already been rising through the late 20s. In 1930, the Watsonville riots—which saw Filipinos thrown over the Pajaro River Bridge and one Filipino, Fermin Tobera, shot dead—were fueled by outrage directed at Filipino farm laborers dancing during their non-working hours with white women[2]. This is the era that I think of when I read the poems in Azucena. A year after the Watsonville riots, Concepción would return to the Philippines for good.
I have noticed how often Concepción makes reference to departures, something that seems to pop up a lot in my work, too. The despedida, or farewell, is a practice of gathering that I became very familiar with because of my parents. It seemed whenever people came to visit, my family made a pretty big deal about their leaving. That makes sense for Filipinos, and maybe especially for Ilocanos, who have spent more than a century leaving home to go elsewhere for work. Our valedictions swirl with the full spectrum of joy, worry, hope, and sorrow because multitudes of separations are embedded in our story. The despedida-as-ritual becomes an opportunity and a channel for an inner life that often goes unexpressed amid the pressures of working and migrating people. While Concepción’s poetry does not intersect in any obvious way with, say, William Carlos Williams’ observations of immigrants and other everyday people or Phillip Levine’s beautiful working-class portraits, I hope Azucena reaches people who will think hard (and more skillfully than me) about this incredible document composed in a time when early twentieth-century Filipinos were working, fighting, dancing, and falling in love in America.
I also hope that Azucena reaches not just scholars and artists, but regular folk, even audiences who might not read poetry regularly. The themes in this collection, after all, are about love and loss. They sing in such risky and sometimes precious registers about wanting not to be alone. They approach sentimentality, sometimes they charge recklessly toward it. But time and time again, the poet tries to make something beautiful out of not fitting in. It’s a hundred years later, and I think there’s no small number of people who possibly very much still relate.
[1] A labor organizer from Yakima, in a presentation to the Congressional Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, summarizes white anxiety around the presence of Filipinos on the U.S. mainland: “Let it be remembered that most of these Filipinos are musicians, and that the character of their music is of the sentimental and appealing (to passions sort), and that the Filipinos dress flashily, spend their money lavishly on the girls, and Chief Mann [of Toppenish, Washington] said: ‘They are just as dangerous when allowed free social contact with women as that of the negro when given the same liberty.’” [See “It Happened Here: Mobs attack Filipinos in Lower Valley” by Donald W. Meyers, Sept. 18, 2017, Yakima Herald-Republic]
[2] I want to note here that in the Philippines ‘azucena’ is also slang for eating dog. ‘Aso’ is ‘dog’ in Tagalog; and ‘cena’ is ‘dinner’ in Spanish. The poet Luis Francia tells me that this slang was documented too late in history for Concepción to have intended it, but there’s a small part of me that wonders if the term wasn’t already circulating in the vernacular of the American colonial period of the Philippines. In my mind, I make space for the possibility that Concepción was very much aware of the portrayal of Filipinos as uncivilized and that he was naming a collection of largely romantic verse with conscious trickster intent. Generations of Filipino poets, of course, would publish for decades in English after Concepción. Among the most notable is Jessica Hagedorn who would write the seminal novel Dogeaters, a title that plays on the savage misrepresentation of Filipinos and refers to the dog-eat-dog cycle in the postcolonial Philippines.
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