Introducing A LA CARTE FOOD & FICTION edited by CECILIA MANGUERRA BRAINARD and MARILY YSIP OROSA

Cecilia M. Brainard introduces A LA CARTE FOOD & FICTION, Collected and Edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and Marily Ysip Orosa

(Anvil, Philippines, 2007 and an Ebook published by PALH, CA)

BOOK LINK (click on book cover) 

[A La Carte is the winner of the Gourmand Award
 2008 as the Best Food Literature Book from the
Philippines]

INTRODUCTION

In some places in the Philippines, people greet you by asking if you have eaten: not Good morning, or Good evening but  — Kumain ka na? — Have you eaten?  And even if you have, they will serve you food anyway, and it would be considered an insult if you did not eat. 

Even when I was young, I had an inkling about the special relationship Filipinos have with food.  At home my mother was constantly prodding people to eat more— a habit I have picked up, sometimes to the embarrassment and annoyance of my American sons. 

Another thing that annoys them and my American husband is my difficulty to throw food away, so much so that my refrigerator is filled with bowls of forgotten dishes, some of them with very interesting multicolored mold on them. I had a son threaten to use one of those forgotten containers for a Science project!

I had to explain to them that the inability to waste food came from my mother, who with the family spent the World War Two years in Mindanao, and who, like many other Filipinos during those War years, experienced hunger and deprivation.  But I suspect the reluctance to throw food away runs deeper than that; perhaps to Filipinos, it is clear that food is life, and life should not be thrown away or treated with disrespect. 

Indeed the connection Filipinos have with food is almost religious. Eating is the time when the family gathers, when the community is one, and is something of a sacred time. In the home I grew up in, the entire family sat down for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Lunch and supper were elaborate, with soup, and fish, and meat, and rice, and vegetables, followed by a variety of fruit and/or some sweet for dessert. I believe there are still many Filipino households that have meals like this.  Others, because of their modern hectic lives, have simplified their daily meals, but when it comes to parties, Filipinos still go the full length to have a grand spread. 

It was this deep connection that Filipinos have for food that prompted Marily Orosa and me to edit this collection of Philippine stories and recipes. Marily and I have shared a love for fiction primarily because stories reflect the soul or culture of people. So does food and we thought combining stories and recipes in one book would reveal Filipino culture in a unique manner and would invite lovers of both stories and food to take a look at our delectable collection.

Soon after the release of the other book Marily Orosa and I co-edited (Behind the Walls: Life of Convent Girls, Anvil, 2004) we publicized a search for this collection. Initially, we anticipated we’d get light stories, possibly comic ones. When the stories started coming in, we were surprised to see that the topic of food had triggered some serious stories. We quickly realized that food and eating bring back memories of families and friends, and relationships are always complex. The stories we finally selected were by writers from America, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, France, and Germany. The majority of the contributors are published writers who are well-known in the literary and academic communities. 

An inspiration to this book is Laura Esquiviel’s novel, Like Water for Chocolate. Each chapter in Esquiviel’s book is introduced by a recipe so that the chapters flow out of those recipes. Likewise, the 25 stories in our collection are preceded by related recipes. Following the food theme, we arranged the book like a menu, and so we have categories of Breads, Appetizers, Salads; Soup; Rice; Main Dishes; and Dessert, with the recipes and stories falling under the appropriate sections. 

The recipes included in the book are: Aragula in Blue Cheese Sauce; Shrimps on Leeks; Tokwa’t Baboy; Banana Turon; Pan de Sal; Ensaymada;  Green Mango Relish; Feta Cheese with Greens, Artichokes, and Crabfat; Shanghai Fried Rice; Garlic Fried Rice; Pork Adobo; Manok Inasal; Paella/Arroz; Kare-Kare; Lumpia, Laing, Sinanglay na Karpa; Pork Sinigang; Filipino-Korean Lumpia; Rellenong Bangus; Humba; Escabeche; Binagoongang Baboy; Cascaron; and Halo-Halo. They have not been taste-tested and we suggest that those who wish to try the recipes do so in the spirit of experimentation and adventure.

Some stories in the collection are light-hearted. Edna Weisser’s “Merienda Alemania” is an  autobiographical piece about a Filipina and her husband in Germany who have invited their friends over for merienda, but this time with the German touch. The stories of Dean Francis Alfar and Ian Rosales Casocot, combine magic-realism and slapstick. Alfar’s “Sabados Con Fray Villalobos” relates the Spanish friar’s attempts to win the hearts of Filipino Indios although some Indios have other ideas. Casocot’s “Pedro and the Chickens” is about the blossoming of a romance in the town of Dumaguete and the accompanying strange events that happen to the town’s chickens. The story “Wok Man” (by Jose Dalisay) is about the kinship of a short-order cook and his employer who both find joy in cooking. “Hanging Rice” by Carlos Cortes is a short-short about a Visayan eating Cebu’s common street meal; what’s uncommon about it is how the rice is wrapped in a work of weaver’s art. 

The other stories have a more serious style. “In Bread”  (by Ma. Romina Gonzalez) a 26-year old woman prepares bread as her mother had taught her and recalls the time her father left her mother. “Ensaymada” (by Corinna Arcellana Nuqui) is about a homesick Filipina in the U.S. who in the act of baking visits her past. Margarita Marfori’s “Mango Seasons” is a first-person piece focusing on the narrator’s memories of a special summer, brought on by the cutting down of an ancient mango tree. Alfred Yuson’s “Romance and Faith on Mount Banahaw” is a surreal piece accompanied by the salad recipe (in poetry form) of “Feta cheese, with Greens, Artichokes, and Crabfat.” 

Linda Ty-Casper’s story, “Visit to Myself,” is about a 15-year old girl and a 94-year old woman, and how they, one hurrying to the future and the other living in the past, recognize one another. My story (Cecilia Manguerra Brainard), “Romeo,” focuses on the narrator’s mother, now old and whose sole companion is the dog, Romeo, who had once belonged to the narrator. Janet Villa’s “Close Open” and Joel Tan’s “Sinanglay na Karpa” look at people trapped in relationships that they cannot escape. Marie Aubrey Villaceran’s story, “Sinigang” is about a girl, who while cooking, recalls the funeral of a half-brother and it is also during this time that she comes to terms with her relationship with her father. 

Shirley Mae Mamaril Choe’s “Kitchen Secrets” is about a young girl who struggles to reveal a terrible family secret. Through her weekly cooking lessons, she develops a strong relationship with her mother which enables her to finally share her burden. Reine Arcache Melvin’s “The Fish” is about complex relationships among members of a household that come to head during the gutting of a fish caught after a shipwreck. Erma Cuizon’s “Secret Scent” is nostalgic piece about a woman who yearns for the old life that is gone forever.  “Two Drifters” by Veronica Montes is about a young woman who has to cope with the addiction and brokenness of her family members. Brian Ascalon Roley’s semi-autobiographical piece, “In Memory,” remembers a menacing encounter at summer camp in the ‘70s, involving his Filipina mother and white father. 

Edgar Poma’s “Desperata” is set in Hawaii, about a struggling writer’s break when a firefighter managed to find an editor’s note to have his work published. The firefighter’s visit to Hawaii makes the writer realize that his mother needs more than phone calls, but that, as the firefighter said: “You gotta see her every chance you get while you still can and you gotta hold her in your arms."  Oscar Penaranda’s story, “Mango Lady,” recounts a Filipino American’s visit to the Philippines after an absence of 19 years and his search of the fruit vendor who a part of the memories of his youth.  The accompanying recipe is a favorite dessert, Halo-Halo.

The stories in this book are a mixed bag of joyful stories as well as more somber ones; all of them explore the dynamics of human relationships.  The editors of this book sincerely hope the reader will find enjoyment in them. 

Introducing WALANG HIYA: LITERATURE TAKINGS RISKS TOWARDS LIBERATORY PRACTICE edited by LOLAN BUHAIN SEVILLA and ROSELI ILANO

Lolan Buhain Sevilla and Roseli Ilano introduce the anthology they co-edited, Walang Hiya … literature taking risks toward liberatory practice

(Carayan Press, San Francisco, 2010)

BOOK LINK

Introductions

Letting go …

It has never been easy for me—this process of letting go—of sharing something that’s so close to my heart with others.  But really, what are labors of love if not something meant to be shared? This project began a random conversation in-between meetings—Roseli and I chatting about our writing, questions on how one commits to artist desires amidst hectic schedules balancing full-time economic work with non-paid-might-as-well-be-full-time community organizing, and the role of cultural work within that organizing.  Soon the conversation turned into how we could support one another’s writing. Let’s do a writer’s workshop series!  No, let’s do a zine!  What about a literary anthology? 

Of course, being cultural workers we had to ask ourselves larger questions like: How can literature be used not only as entertainment, but also as educational tools?  How do our personal experiences shape political development?  What is the writer’s responsibility to the communities they come from?  How can we make this project about more than just our own individual writing? 

What you have in your hands now is two years of our lives and the many trials and transitions life threw our way, laden with intentions for engaging Filipinos in the Diaspora with their history, distance, and dialogue the best way we know how: through storytelling. In thinking about "Walang Hiya" as a title, more conversations were had about its meaning, our cultural and literal understanding, as well the possible consequences and backlash for using it.  Sure, its traditionally a pejorative term meant to shame people for their behavior, but we wanted to examine it a step further: Who are the people doing the shaming?  Who are the ones being shamed?  By whose standard are we deeming a person's actions shameful or immoral?  So did we succeed in addressing all these important questions?  Time will tell, in the meantime my hope is that this book transcends us as individuals, reflects how much community love it took to birth this, hella dirtstyle.  Maraming salamat to everybody who’ve laid their hands and hearts on this project.

 Lastly, I can’t help but think of the anthologies and novels that fundamentally changed my life and shifted my consciousness.  This Bridge Called My Back.  Sister Outsider.  Stone Butch Blues.  Philippine Society and Revolution.  Making Face Making Soul Haciendo Caras. The Parable Series.  My wish, with this book in your hands, is that these writers you’re about to read will touch you deeply in that place where inspiration and passion translates into action for the communities you are a part of. 

Makibaka huwag matakot,

Lolan Buhain Sevilla

**

I have always been interested in the power of storytelling; To educate, to inspire action, but most importantly the power stories have to bring people together. Through this anthology, our hope is to create a space for emerging Filipino and Filipino-American writers and poets to share their stories while recognizing the ability the narrative form has in making connections in ways that hard hitting journalism or even political essays cannot. Stories are a touchstone to help us make sense of the world we live in, in intimate and personal ways.

As an editor, my departure point has been a commitment to understanding how we find individual, unique voices and at the same time a sense of community amidst constant movement and dislocation. We are an ever-increasing world of migration. From rural to urban and from the global south to the global north, we have seen the biggest movement of our people in history. Currently 200 million people live outside their country of birth. 3,000 people leave the Philippines every day. My personal experience is one of constant movement, as a child I was transplanted every few years never establishing roots in one single place, and currently my family is spread across the globe on two-year migrant visas. Beyond the experience of the Philippine Diaspora and far beyond questions of identity, I believe you will find that the pieces in this anthology speak honestly to the desire for connection and the change it can bring.

Roseli Ilano

Introducing INVENT(ST)ORY: SELECTED CATALOG POEMS & NEW 1996-2015 by EILEEN R. TABIOS


Thomas Fink introduces INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected Catalog Poems & New 1996-2015 by Eileen R. Tabios 

(Dos Madres Press, Loveland, OH, 2015)




BOOK LINK

            In the United States, the catalog or list poem first made its appearance in the work of Walt Whitman, who himself was evidently influenced by Old Testament verse-lists. Formally and thematically, Whitman was a democratizing force in American, and catalogs in Song of Myself and many other poems refused to separate high and low, significant and insignificant. Many modern and contemporary poets have followed the bearded bard in his forays into list-poems, but perhaps Eileen R. Tabios is the first to gather a Selected Poems comprised entirely of such texts. Since her debut in the late nineties, Tabios has been a restless experimenter; list poems have served as one major  fulcrum for her diverse poetic experiments.

Like Whitman, Tabios has prioritized democratic impulses in the conscious shaping and articulation of her poetics. However, while Whitman stands as a figure claiming centrality for his American-ness and for an idea of “America,” Tabios’ postcolonial—or as she chooses to put it, “transcolonial”—subjectivity has done much to shape her poetics. (Writings on her work by such critics as Leny Mendoza-Strobel and Joi Barrios should be consulted for a thorough contextualization of postcolonial themes, and Tabios herself has frequently commented directly on this matter in autobiographical prose and in her art criticism.) Born in the Philippines during the Marcos era and less than two decades after the U.S. relinquished its last vestige of the colonial authority wrested from Spain in 1898, Tabios is the inventor of what she has identified as a Filipino diasporic poetic form, the hay(na)ku, and she has lived in the U.S. since the age of ten.

The two-columned poem “You Must Have Read Elizabeth’s Many Ways of Loving” (1998), boldly juxtaposes “words you memorized from my mother’s tongue,” a Filipino language, with English equivalents, and most of the words are tantalizingly gendered and intimate. In “Letters from the Balikbayan Box” (2005), lists that come from various Filipinos as reflections encourage us to relate diasporic subjects’ gift-giving to those who remained at home to economic disparities caused by contemporary multinational capitalism. Tabios identifies “a balikbayan” as “someone who ‘brings home the bacon,’ so to speak. He represents the Pinoy quest for the dollar, the deutschmark, the Gulf money, all in the name of prosperity.” “Commodities: An Autobiography” (2007), which offers poignant narrative snippets of the poet’s transcontinental uprooting, speaks of “products [that] were so prized” by Filipinos “that their names were turned into verbs or the labels themselves became synonyms for the products.”

The section from Tabios’ “Filipina Pen Pal” project, also published in 2007, takes aim at the fetishizing of Filipina women by white European and American men. A catalogue of questions like “Can you find the Philippines on a map?”, “Why do Filipinos typically have Spanish names?”, and “Do you anticipate that your wife will be submissive and obedient?”, followed by correct answers, and then point totals with explanations goads the white men to recognize their ignorance of Filipino culture(s) and their projection of vague fantasies on women, though the poem does account for the possibility that some of the men have done “their homework” and might even have legitimate reasons for marrying a particular Filipina.

I have written extensively in my introduction to The Thorn Rosary (East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2010, 15-20) on Tabios’ remarkably historically nuanced list poem about her own father, the national “father” Marcos, and the dictator’s daughter/apologist, “What Can a Daughter Say?” (2007). So here is a passage devoted to the catalog-effect:

At various points in the text’s six sections, Tabios takes statistics… about how many people were killed by such redoubtable evildoers as Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Francisco Franco, Saddam Hussein, Hitler and her major henchmen, Mao… and Stalin. And then there are quite a few villains, including Yasuhiko Asaka, Elie Hobeika, … and Ante Pavelic, who are undoubtedly extremely well known in certain parts of the world or to particular communities but lack name recognition in the U.S. The order of names may not be random, but it is far from chronological. The cumulative effect of this continually interrupted catalog is powerful, but one important aspect that links the poet’s two themes [of atrocity and mourning for her father, with whom she had a fraught relationship in her youth] is the use of anaphora….

       As a counterpoint to “What Can a Daughter Say?” Tabios includes a list poem in this volume that seems to purport to teach the people of the Philippines ways to overcome the horrors of their colonial past, the Marcos regime, and more recent postcolonial debacles. “List(ing) Poem: the New Filipino Society” may imply some valid general ideas like “A Budget for National Self-Reliance,” but the joke is on us: at the end, we learn that all the phrases are taken from the writings of none other than Ferdinand Marcos. (Nevertheless, I think that Tabios should rise to the challenge of a catalog poem that literally tries to prescribe effective sociopolitical measures for the land of her birth.)

            If George W. Bush, one of the most divisive occupants of the oval office in recent memory, self-flatteringly claimed to be “a uniter, not a divider,” Eileen R. Tabios could honestly boast that she is an includer, not an excluder. Any discussion of her catalog poetry should consider how randomness impinges on this work as an “includer” of much that many people might think does not seem to belong together.  In a discursive “Introduction” herein to her “recent work, ‘Murder, Death and Resurrection’ (MDR),” she describes reliance on a “Poetry Generator contain[ing] a data base of 1,146 lines which [she] can combine randomly to make a poem of” varying lengths—up “to 1,146 lines.” But though the poet notes that she “can create—generate—new poems unthinkingly from its database,” “the poems cohere partly by the scaffolding of beginning each line with the phrase ‘I forgot...’ (a tactic inspired by reading Tom Beckett's fabulous poem "I Forgot" in his book DIPSTICK (DIPTYCH)).”

Pointing to her “long-held interests in abstract and cubist language” and the infinite possibilities to reorder line-progressions, Tabios suggests that her process is not exactly random, nor does it signal Barthes’ “death of the author”: she “created the 1,146 lines from reading through 27 previously-published poetry collections.” She “murders” each pre-text while “resurrecting” it, and so “the results dislocate without eliminating authorship.” But perhaps “murder” conveys something far more violent than she is doing in her acts of displacement, which are more positively seen as “relocation” or “recycling” rather than “dislocation.” On the other hand, through effects of randomness, like New York School poets, Language poets, and older Asian-American poets such as John Yau and Tan Lin, she is “murdering” any sense that “the imperial self” (a phrase coined by Americanist Quentin Anderson) unifies poetic discourse. She is especially murdering her own potential imperial self that might otherwise be seen as a foundation of the coherent meditative or narrative lyric. Along these lines, Tabios’ "Babaylan Poetics," “based on indigenous Filipino practices,” emphasizes the cataloging poet as immersed in all other beings, materials, and processes—not separate from them in some sovereign “command” of “her” materials. Or as the poet puts it in “(Muse Poem” (2014),

No reason to censor

mountain from saffron, sky from

celadon, boulder from lavender

bougainvillea from cobalt, grass

from ebony, diamond from cerise

you from me. Me from you

Nothing must be silenced.

Obvious as it might seem, I must insist that what makes Tabios’ use of randomness poetically viable in her “forgetting” poems and much other work in this volume, is not only a fine diversity of represented experience, but the felicity of juxtapositions, as well as departures/returns. Take, for example, these successive monostichs from “In the Beginning, Before Words, There Was Poetry”:

I forgot love is always haggled.

I forgot you were the altar that made me stay.

I forgot you wanted to see her seeing herself…

I forgot, for him, she released milk to orphaned baby birds.

I forgot I yearned for amnesia—

I forgot the joy of eliding the vocabulary found in margins.

I forgot the zoo with retired cages.                          

As in Beckett’s poem, which itself signifies on Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” the speaker of Tabios’ performs an act of remembering an act of forgetting that either recuperates the gist of the forgotten—as, I believe, in all of the examples above—or points to its inability to do so. The fifth line is especially layered or torqued because the speaker has now remembered that she had forgotten about a desire to forget, thus, at one point, fulfilling the desire by not consciously desiring it. In the first two lines above, “love” as a bargaining process (“haggled”) is connected with the influence of concrete symbols of religion (“altar”) on the fluctuation of individuals’ devotion. The third line also may concern love or simply fascination about another’s self-consciousness, but it is surely linked to the latter topic in the penultimate line, in which “vocabulary” of the representation of inside/outside is central to desire and hence “joy.” The “release” of “milk” to the birds is a different kind of love; it may reflect “his” love for the birds and/or her love for him. In addition, note the challenge posed to an overall narrative by the pronoun shifts in the first four lines, as well as the adjective “retired” that makes us wonder why it goes with the noun “cages”: are the animals that should be in the cages dead or released into the wild, or are they in new, high-tech cages? And could “zoo” and “cages” be tropes for the display and confinement of human emotions and behaviors—such as love and loving?

            Another example of lucid juxtapositions can be found in “Untitled (Bookstore), 2000” (2005), a poem comprising a collection of titles of books on the shelves of a San Francisco bookstore,

The Case For Marriage

The Path Of Practice

Field Guide To The American Teenager

The Zen Of Listening

Immutable Laws Of Internet Branding

Darkness In El Dorado

A Brief History of Tomorrow

Brunelleschi's Rome

A book making a “case for marriage” might consider wedded life as requiring the “path of practice,” perhaps of a spiritual discipline, but more likely of communication strategies, including active “listening.” Also, marriage in the U.S. is often complicated by the “wild” nature of “the American Teenager,” for whom parents apparently need their own “field guide”! Of course, Tabios is also parodying the transformation of so many activities into “Zen,” a trend which began with “the Zen of archery,” in the realm of self-help books. Such a use of Zen is in the interest of corporate “branding,” whose “laws” can only be judged “immutable” insofar as one can crunch the numbers of a gigantic batch of sales reports in a way that supports the assertion. Even then, one is exceedingly presumptuous to assert anything like the book title promising an anticipation of “tomorrow’s” “history”—whether “briefly” or extensively. Branding, in fact, is a sign of mutability: whatever it happens to sell proves transient, and branding techniques must continually change to manufacture desire for new products. Even representations of the splendors of something like “Brunelleschi’s Rome” must be attractively re-historicized periodically to re-emerge as saleable. 

Perhaps forgotten and surely discarded, garbage in a dumpster (or a landfill) is the ultimate collection of contiguously placed items that bespeak both randomness and relation. To create “Garbage: A True Story” (2007), Tabios imposed surveillance on herself during the 2005 Christmas season (up to New Year’s day, 2006 in this selection). The result is essentially a group of lists of “trash,” items “saved for re-use,” and items actually “recycled or re-used,” as well as commentary (“notes”) on garbage—for example, from Elizabeth Royte’s book, Garbage Land—and related topics like dumpster-diving. When the “trash” lists are much longer than the other two for a given day, the disparity gives pause. The reader can recall and/or learn a good deal about social and ecological contexts of garbage and trash-disposal, but the overwhelming effect is that the text, if read attentively, forces one to drown in a plethora of things and their tremendous specificity and capability of being differentiated from each other. One can come away from such immersion with a Thoreauian desire to simplify, an enhanced skepticism about commodity culture, and/or a desire for the kind of collectively responsible behavior needed to avert environmental catastrophe. In one of the “Notes,” Tabios writes: “We’re flooding here in Napa Valley. It’s our own taste of the effects of global warming—the tsunami, hurricanes and now increasingly intense rainy weather. I relate the flooding waters to this Trash Project as I know that while I try with recycling, there's still a lot of paper and plastic (especially plastic!) that I trash instead of recycle.” Lists, then, are not “more trash,” but a call to action.

            The push/pull of juxtaposed elements in the catalog poems of Tabios’ Invent(st)ory continually raise questions about the slippery characterization of what is valuable or worthless, what is coherent or fragmented or both, what is to be deemed relevant or irrelevant, what is given to accretion and/or dispersal, what is clear or opaque, what is (politically) inclusive or exclusive, and what is communitarian or atomizing. Yes, her inventories tell stories—complicated ones, full of allusive and overall signifying power—and her stories partake of the processes of inventory.

*****

Thomas Fink is the author of two books of criticism, including “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001), eight books of poetry, including Joyride  (Marsh Hawk Press, 2013), and three chapbooks. He has co-edited two critical anthologies. His paintings hang in various collections. Fink is Professor of English at City University of New York—LaGuardia.