A prose poem, on our islands

Last May, a group of 30 American students of the vaunted Creative Non-Fiction Program of the University of Iowa came to the Philippines for a month’s workshop course headed by program director Robin Hemley.

They first touched base in Dumaguete, which has enjoyed strong fraternal relations with Iowa City since the writing couple Ed and Edith Tiempo established the now fabled National Writers Workshop patterned after the one they had attended in Iowa in the early 1960s.

It was in May of 2004 when our good friend Robin, himself married to a Filipina, first brought over a dozen of his students to take part in the Dumaguete workshop for a week.

This year, their schedule also spread itself over Siquijor, Cebu, Bohol, and Corregidor. They only managed to be with us in Dumaguete for a couple of days and nights, but the bonding proved instantaneous and lasting, enhanced by farewell parties held before the visitors flew back to the USA from Manila.

Many of our young writers formed friendships with their counterparts from Iowa over nights of carousing and shoptalk. These relations continue to be celebrated through the Internet.

While it was a CNF program the writer-students were focused on, it couldn’t be helped that the group also had a few poets. One of these, Charity Stebbins, we recall to have told us over drinks at Hayahay in Dumaguete how she was so captivated by our country in the short time she had experienced it that she had ceased to be a bleeder with her poetry.

Weeks later, at the farewell gathering, Charity enthused that everything that she had experienced all over our islands had provided her grist and substance, let alone inspiration, so that she had been working hard on a long suite poem that she was entitling “Isla.” She promised to send us a copy as soon as she became confident that it was ready for comments if not outright publication.

Last week she fulfilled that promise. It turns out to be a long prose poem, both central and peripheral in its thematic bounds, and to my mind exhibiting fine if understated energy in the way it coils inwardly, centripetally as it were, even as its also inherent centrifugal force splays itself out to cover, dwell, and ruminate on various aspects of our unique place in the world.

Charity was obviously so taken by what greeted her here — all the possibly picaresque images and what they stood for beyond their purely graphic qualities, and also what they only promised or threatened to further reveal, or conceal.

In her poem, it comes across that most Americans initially take an under-appreciative view of our familiarity with their own culture, to the point of having our own matrix of urban landscapes and countryside appointments simulate Western features. We don’t seem exotic enough; we are but tropical, Asian covers of their own lifestyle elements.

But the poet in Charity had the extraordinary eye that went into acute mode as she pinpointed those intersections of aperture setting and depths of field where our images had been essentially transmuted into curious copies at the very least, and at best, as significations of our own choices as islanders.

Then, too, there are the aspects of Pinoy existence that are sui generis — of its own kind — albeit made part of that flow of casual resolve that makes us soooooo... tan-ta-ra-ran... Pinoy!

Here I share excerpts from Charity Stebbins’ prose poem, with her exultant permission — selecting those parts that appealed to me for their poetic value, in terms of metaphor and felicitous phrasing, and the au courant feature (as I recognize it) that is the offside, elliptical direction a thread often takes.

“You lay in your bed in the house in which you were born, day-dreaming of milkfish and of becoming a doctor. Those people, you thought, have such a love of animals. You dip your aging hands into the water of your hair, matted like tropical grass, the way it webs across coffee-colored ground. You think about the archetypes you see in films, about embraces moving into the eyes of an audience like another island arrives across the water. You wish you could eat the sweet dark fruit of the place you have just been.”

That is how she starts “Isla” — in rather arresting if quiet fashion.

“Tell me how you reached the center of the island before the shore, how you are friendly with the people. Why have you come? I already know what you are drawing. I see the face in my mind of the mixed-up animal. It can be an odd moment when you realize the room is not empty after all, and you have been watched all this time. Laying traps in saltwater with your hands, those identifiers of your humanness. Your impulses are to catch things still living. Tell me how men and women came out of the bamboo trees, far-flung and fully formed.

“There is no beach here, only water. Heaving on the concrete, seaweed is bunched by revolutions in the current. On the hot water dam are crabs and fractals of light. Out in the water a boat is measuring the deepest part of the ocean. Back at the house a bird flies rapidly in and out of the veranda. Another island is visible through the net of a fisherman, through the triangulated arms deep in the sandbar.

“The monkey-eating eagle spreads its seven-foot wingspan over the diver who is looking at parcels on the seafloor. Sometimes the light on the water is the length of a body. Under the acacia tree everyone is staring at your white skin and it feels like home.”

Hmm. Okay, I must say that the copy I received uses large arbitrary spaces between the stanza/paragraphs, something I cannot apply faithfully here. Now I jump a bit.

“Nearby, a woman says, wearing a wide-brim hat, woman says, this would have been one of my last choices. I’d rather go to India, I’ve never been to India. This place is too Westernized (eyed) and I’ve already been here, or someone identically. This place has been altered to resemble me. I want to see myself in a new, feel mutual awe. I want the exotic. I want an exotic people. These people are uninteresting. They have already been consumed.”

The woman referred to is obviously a companion of the poet-persona, bereft of the poet’s sensitivity that translates into that fourth, fifth, sixth eye/s.

“A man is squatting on the shore heaping dead reef into his wheelbarrow. Someone is hosing down the boat. We run over a fish and all of its potential fish. For once, it seems, everyone is watching the parade...

“The insects move into the black light trap. These are the lengths we go to, measuring our own darkness....

“He makes a motion to his jaws, cupping and pulsating his hands, rolling up his eyes, to indicate deliciousness, delight. Turn off your flashes now, so as not to disturb the smallest mammals, the gestation in their mother’s belly, the fiesta in the church. He makes a motion to his face like a sip of a cigarette, half closing his mouth to indicate slowing. Like butter over crabs is the afternoon. He makes a motion to his mouth like speaking, sucking the rinsed egg of delicious soup threaded with embryo. He leaves the shell with the shadow of a dark crowd on his plate.”

Love that. All-too-familiar. Yet exotic. And graphically so.

“Everyone in the camp knows the healer can only cure their backs, their skin, their ailing rashes. She does this alone, with a clear glass of water collecting your rubble. But everyone in the camp goes over to her anyway, with swollen tongues from too much sighing, with modern hearts all cyber-white, their blue-edges, their murder ballads, their falling asleep when it is still light. They come with machines for deflecting their memories, cameras for images of the natural world. They stride in like ghosts on a horse. They pass a shower beside a wire coop and faces children make to frighten one another. They see her enter from a darkened karaoke room.”

So imagistic. And so us.

And then these powerful similes:

“The mayor’s son says the gas leak will be contained. His voice is like construction in the early morning. Your full taxi passes through the shut-up street, the only one in the city that is empty, quiet, like the space between a trauma and waking up....”

“... The gaps in her voice remind you of the way birds fly into any room here, how everything is permeable to creatures, how every morning at the hotels there are a dozen men sweeping up spent fractions of trees, dew-heavy, with long brown needles. How calamansi falls on the outside stairs, citruses splitting into ordinary halves, the millipedes on tile, how you are now accustomed to ants tracing your lower limbs, how in low tide you can walk, ankle deep, to another island...

“... The concierge is spreading her arms like a fern, her head drooping like a flower’s trumpet.

“The island says, devote yourself to me, for I am lonely at night. Continents of sounds, acoustics of swooping bats, like strangers speaking from high windows of an unfamiliar street. Or unspoken, with the familiarity of a husband who helps you dress when you are old, and there are too many hidden things to make any more conversation....”

That “familiarity of a husband...” is wondrous metaphor. Ah, but we have run out of space. Stebbins’ poem “Isla” ends with a “Search (engine)” that asks a litany, including “how do islands get internet...” Then another litany, about the Philippines. She then quotes Rizal’s “En campos de batalla, luchando con delirio...,” etc., in the original Spanish thence English translation.

Her poem itself translates our Filipino-ness very charitably indeed.