MAILEEN HAMTO Engages
Tattered Boat by Luis H. Francia
(University of the
Philippines Press, Quezon City, 2014)
Luis H. Francia’s stamp on the literary world is
legendary among Filipino-Americans. He is recognized and celebrated as a poet,
writer and academic who battled the odds — and won — in an unforgiving U.S.
literary industry that is often full of itself, condescending even to its own
shadow. He persevered during a time when racism ironically inspired a
generation of foreign-born poets to write hard, proving themselves equally
good, equally worthy. His scholarship, teaching and editorship have
elevated the works of many Asian American and Filipino American writers in
English.
The eye of the critic appears in many poems in his
collection Tattered Boat. For
instance, readers infected with and on the mend from Catholicism would find
solace in sharp critique evident in “Dream of the Ascetic” and “Savior of No
One.” Deeply mired in soul wounds left open, the poet contemplates meaning and
“the promise of oblivion“ in “Words, Words, Words.”
Some poems in Tattered Boat even made me
feel inadequate, as if I needed to brush up on the history of Western
colonialism and religious conquest simply to keep up, retraumatizing myself in
the process. Others provided glimpses into the poet’s struggles with
acculturation, pondering “How many masks do you wear?” in order to face “All
the quarrels with America.”
But Tattered Boat
also made me consider other questions, like, Who is the poet?
I write a review of Luis H. Francia’s Tattered Boat, and it is
from this perch that I look intently for signs of the Filipino. In this
collection, Francia’s social identity and location are not always readily
apparent.
One could argue that anyone could write the poems in Tattered
Boat. The metaphors, point of view, vernacular and voice are not distinct
or exceptional enough to be discernible from what one would expect from
whitebread English-language poets.
In this volume, he leaves ethnic crumbs for us to follow
here and there. However, he never fully takes our hand to show us the
Filipinian charm of his Ate’s cotillion. He pays homage to Carlos
Bulosan in an elegy to trees, but doesn’t lead us to groves of Narra or Balete.
He mentions and footnotes the dama de noche, yet stops short of invoking
its full power in the Filipino imagination.
Were it any other poet but Francia, one might even wonder
if it’s an act of survival: the poet choosing to brush his verses clean of
racial and ethnic allegories, because brownness, and the mind and tongue that
it came with were never good enough to all the relevant publishers and critics.
Yet, in the critical lens of decentering Whiteness, why
do I expect an immigrant writer to make art primarily from a cultural
perspective? Don’t we all bleed the same blood? Aren’t we all part of the human
race?
Perhaps because so few ascend to the literary status that
Francia occupies, U.S.-based brown Filipino readers like me expect the poet to
write those lines that only he can write. Verses that grow out of pliant
bamboo, drenched with indigenous blood, surrounded by a coastal forest of
coconut trees. Verses that portray the newcomer’s “ambivalent joys” in
this “slice of the American pie.” Verses that not only deconstruct the
colonizer’s religious baggage, but displays the heaviness of centuries of
self-flagellation, guilt and shame permeate the deep recesses of the Filipino
animus.
Reading poetry is akin to remembering one’s dreams: how
does a poem make you feel? What parts of your consciousness are activated?
{Poet, who do you write for?}
*****
Maileen Hamto was born and raised in Manila, Philippines during
Martial Law. She was 10 years old during
the first People Power Revolution (Edsa 1) that overthrew the dictator. A
highlight of her fourth-grade experience is memorizing the Preamble to the
country’s newly drafted Constitution. She attended Esteban Abada High School in
working-class Sampaloc. Her family arrived to the U.S. in the 1990s by virtue
of their matriarch’s career in nursing. And so began the lifelong journey
toward decolonization, toward making sense of racial stratification in the
U.S., always sharpening the proverbial bolo knives.
(She could include details about three academic degrees earned
in the U.S. and how she pays the bills, but there’s LinkedIn for that.)
