by Gladys Nubla
 

[introduction]
[bibliography]
POETRY
[web links]

[feature]
Emily Lawsin

[gladys's home page]
Filipina(American)Literature
 
 
 

WRITING POETRY
AS AGENCY

INTRODUCTION

Here following is a handful of poems which were short enough to put on the web and which I felt should be featured on this web site. I have included one of my own, and another of a peer Filipina poet at UCLA, in order to show that agency in writing can come from any of us, big and small.

The topics of the poems featured range from revolution and armed struggle in the Philippines to the changes immigration to America can engender. I have chosen poems that provide examples of some of the ways a woman's gendered subjectivity deals with ideals of feminity and other women. Enjoy.
 


THE POETRY

For Nelia

Why are you so hard? they ask.
Why do you not bend a little? 


They call it grace
Swaying like the bamboo

With the mind.
Listen to it weave

The music of compromise
While it kisses the ground

At you feet.
Even the bamboos however

Could only bend so much.
When the storm comes

Listen to their cracking!
They break one by one.

You could only bend so much.
I would prefer to be a rock

Smoothened by the years
But unswaying.
 

Why are you so hard? they ask.
Why do you not bend a little? 
 

--Clarita Roja
from "The Mass Line"


 





Notes From A University Writing Group
(Or, "From the Woman Who Told Me to Write White")

Well,
I liked the universality
of the story,
she said.
I could really see
this little
family,
see their dinky
kitchen, 
smell the ginger— 
root, is that right? 
Hear Na—NAYYYYYYY,
the mother. 
Oh, sorry, 
it's pronounced 
Nan-EYE? 
Oh, didn't know that. 
Well, I even liked 
the dialogue, 
I could say. 

BUT 

I 
don't think 
I 
would add 
any more. 
I 
found the 
foreign words
distracting. 
Well, maybe it was 
the italics.
And is this really
how life in the, 
in the, 
in the, 
well, ghetto,
e-hem, 
really is? 
Wow.
Wouldn't have known that. 

Geez, Emily, 
how did 
you learn to write English
so well? 

© by Emily P. Lawsin
from Flippin':  Filipinos on America
(NY: Asian American Writers' Workshop, 1996)

 





To a Beloved Friend, On Parting

How lonely it is
The harbor lights
Shimmering on the dark waters
As our boat drifts slowly away.

Beloved friend,
Between us lie
A million harbor lights
Shimmering the years

Out of sight.
But the salt water sprays my cheeks
And I am brought to life,
Cherished comrade,

In my mind's eye
The fishermen's boats dotting the harbor
Their low, mysterious lights
Bringing glad tidings

To an angry, expectant people.
We shall fight,
On so many fronts
We shall arm our people to fight.

Beloved comrade, cherished friend,
Though a million harbor lights
Divide us
We shall be togehter,

As every night in the years ahead
In the dark coves
Of island after island
A thousand mysterious boats land,

Bringing glad tidings
To an angry, expectant people,
Creating trails longer
Than ever any trail has been.
 

--Clarita Roja
from "The Mass Line"

 
 
 
 





River Requiem

Saturday brings the women
by the river with their
wash atop their heads like
curious crowns they
gracefully descend the
aisle of rocks and sit
with limber knees pressed
up against their breasts

In one with the river
the women pound the
clothing between
stones
rock upon rock
the clacking like
wooden heals in
Quiapo Church asking
too for purgation
like the clothes that have
been drenched by many suns

Here, the women
blessed by the
river waters
hands
feet
coming into music
rushes of light laughter
I stand apart and yet
in unison
remembering my mother
who used to among
those women washing
and remembering too
how she crossed the
waters instead 


--Joselyn Ignacio-Zimardi
from Without Names

 





Ate Leslie’s 1988 Story

Charlie, twenty-one, almost albino
except for a spattering of cola-colored freckles
across the bridge of his nose, is the only white boy
at the wedding. Too old for Eagle Scouts,
too old for letterman jackets, but
still too young to tongue a martini, he
swaggers to the table full of 7&7’s and swingin’, “Hey,
there beautiful baby, what if we dance?” He’s asking my cousin
the island princess, who’s too demure and FOB to remain
uncharmed. She takes a gulp of beer, looks
the boy up and down to the dance floor they go. Liwayway and 
   the GI Joe
who will tell her he loves her tonight. Eventually, he’ll
   get her a visa,
throw her two black eyes, make her
two kids the color of plain yogurt,
introduce her to his Hoboken grandmother,
give her a raincheck on that moon,
and assure her that he will, he will, he promises he’ll stop
going to the nudie bar every Saturday night.
She in turn will perm her hair, learn to make
a passing Apple Brown Betty, and write home every month
on Hello Kitty stationery, “Charles, Jennifer, and Dominic are
doing well. Regards to Lola and Manong Enchoy. God bless.”
Then she’ll have the goddamn balls to come up to me and say,
“Hey, I heard you’re talking about me, you goddamn jealous
   Twinkie.”
Imagine that! The same bitch who came to live with my family
and would mumble to me, “Oy, its da Amerikana sixty-cent.”
Now what the hell do you think about that? 

--Rebecca Villanueva
UCLA undergraduate

 





my mother

she is like this:
an ingrid bergman movie
a 1940's silver screen star
       aging gracefully
elegant, jewels tossed on like socks
wearing reeboks
she babysits in americanized pilipino top 40 radio rock-n-roll
still flirts with my 89-year-old father
girlish legs crossed
       head turned just so
always a fedora
       to match her conversation
chismis is the charm she wears in her bracelet
her worries, like dirty laundry
get whirlpool washed once a week
so unlike her sisters, in their flowered housefrocks and tsinelas
the rolling river behind grandfather's house
have yet to wet her delicate hands. 

--Virginia R. Cerenio
from Returning a Borrowed Tongue

 





Conversations with Maria Clara, a lady in heaven

I.

I know it was the same for you, Lady:
The figure, the father, the phantom
Who was not really a phantom at all
But a giant (at least, as I recall) blocking
The hall light that came through the doorway
Of the room I shared with my sisters.  Your

Father could be the same faceless figure, as I
Say, though you’d let your tongue stay
Shut in that pretty pink lipsticked smile
Others’ imaginations have painted on your
Pretty porcelain face, strange to see in the
First place because it was light beige.  I would

Wipe off that same smile from my mother’s face,
Because you know she wouldn’t.  But I would keep
Her eyes – their strangeness when they are seen –
Like yours, opaque brown buttons in blood-threaded sockets
I see also in my mirror, in the morning
Still in dreams, before I remember
The face I think is yours, Lady, is mine.
 

II.

O Maria Clara, heavenly and chaste,
Forgive me my sins.  In spite of your memory,
I can’t help but feel: I don’t have your taste:

My skirts aren’t heavy and don’t keep me from haste,
And I cannot dance your dance, eyes down and daintily,
While you, Maria Clara, bound for heaven and chaste,

Cinched yourself in whalebone corsets that left you dazed
Because “It is of utmost importance, being a lady,
Not the way you feel” – that was the taste

Of those days.  Now still.  My parents tell me “Don’t waste
Your life.  Every good Filipino girl in America wants to be
Maria Clara, so you, young lady, be heavenly and chaste,

Too.”  But I never understood, however they phrased
The lesson: a slap, a belt, an angrily barked decree –
Did you never show how you’d feel when you’d taste

The blood in your mouth mixed with the bittersweet paste
You were made to paint on your lips, after biting them cruelly?
Truthfully, Maria Clara, in heaven are you still chaste
Because up there is nothing to feel, nothing to taste?
 

III.

My aunt came over the other day.  She says her knees
Are giving her the usual (soul) trouble, so I ask her,
Why do you stay in that terrible job?  She only says,
Her eyes not meeting mine – eyes her employers
Probably never see – she won’t ask for more
Than what they will give her: scrubbing.

This is nothing new between us, Lady.  I see
The scrubbing has become a ritual for her
Tough red hands with the dry cracked skin
Which reminds me of how soft and flawless
Yours must have been, Maria Clara. My mother
With her professional ten-hour-a-day job, looks

Down on her for wasting her life, but
Sometimes I wonder if my aunt is doing
The better thing to stay and scrub
Her life away on the floors.  My work,
My books are all I have and only words
In a language my aunt has trouble reading,
Words my mother won’t bother to read. 


--by Gladys Nubla
UCLA Undergraduate