SHEILA
BARE Reviews
Salu-Salo: In Conversation with Filipinos: An Anthology of
Philippine-Australian Writings, Edited by Jose
Wendell P. Capili and John Cheeseman
(Casula Powerhouse & Blacktown
Arts Centre, Australia, 2008)
“Salu-Salo is a celebration of writing that provides food
for thought for anyone interested in the Filipino-Australian community—[. . .]
welcome [. . .] to the feast.” John Cheeseman
Published
in 2008, Salu-Salo: In Conversation with
Filipinos: An Anthology of Philippine-Australian Writings edited by Jose
Wendell P. Capili and John Cheeseman “is the first anthology of
Filipino-Australian writing revealing the positive contributions of Philippine
communities in Australia.”(1) A Tagalog word, “salu-salo” is a get-together
and a feasting, a party, and, as is often the case with Filipino parties, food
is always abundant. The anthology thus
invites readers to feast on these offerings by the diasporic Filipino community
in Australia.
The
short anthology, a collection of creative works in prose and poetry, all
written in English, by Filipinos in Australia, contributes to the study of
Filipino writings in the diaspora. Capili’s
introduction provide historical context of the socio-politico experience of Filipinos
in Australia, and the creative works are themselves a reflection of the
writers’ navigation of the social and political landscapes of Australia even as
they reflect upon the homeland. While
the geographic and historical space of Australia vis-à-vis the Philippines and
Filipinos are contextualized, equally important is the way in which Capili
situates these writers’ experience and their works vis-à-vis the West and the
Cold War global restructuring. The
writers’ transnational sensibilities, in other words, are informed by events in
the Philippines from as far back as the country’s colonial, postcolonial, and
neocolonial histories, World War II and the Japanese occupation, to the more
contemporary history of the Marcos dictatorship, the enforcement of Martial
Law, and the homeland’s overall political and economic instability; policies
and events in their adoptive homeland, such as John Howard’s “One Australia” policy, Pauline Hanson’s “One
Nation” party, and the “White Australia Policy,” none of which included native
Aborigines or other peoples of color, immigration and exclusion policies, antimiscegenation
laws, the child removal policy (a phenomenon known as the “Stolen Generation”
or the “Stolen Children”), race riots, and so forth; and the Vietnam War that
further destabilized the region.
It isn’t
any wonder, then, that home—whether it be the Philippines or Australia—and
notions of identity, for these writers, are always already vexed and
fraught. Their writings reflect the ways
in which they navigate and mediate the definitions, borders, liminality, and
fluidity of home and identity.
Paschal
Berry’s “The Folding Wife,” a “text for performance,” written from the
perspective of one woman who, through anecdotes, reveals what the two
generations of women before her experience.
Berry’s chapters are not laid out in linear fashion, signaling the
fragmented subject position of the speaker, Grace. This fragmentation is due in part to the
history of unrest in the homeland coupled with the alienation and experience of
otherness in her adoptive home. Through
his enthralling language, Berry depicts a home that is gendered in the extreme. It is a home where the women “sit and wait”
for “wars to finish,” for “men to come home” (60). Lola Clara, tells us through Grace that she
has “sat here through decades and felt this unrest [. . .]. Our women must go through this. Every decade or so reveals discontent. You either get up or you stay seated. If you have the will. . . . if . . . but will
is also about staying. Is it not?” (60
ellipses in original). Not only does
Lola Clara invoke home’s history of unrest, but the question of leaving or staying
also brings up notions of diaspora, overseas workers, and mail-order brides.
Lola
Clara and Dolores, Grace’s mother, also teach her that it is by “bending and
folding into recognisable shapes” that one “become[s] resilient” (69). In this home, women are practiced
shape-shifters to weather the storms of multiple colonizations and a
patriarchal, masculinist, even misogynistic nationalism. If there is subversion or resistance, it is
through subterfuge. Grace, for instance,
tells us that “Lola was held together by lace.
Neatly pinned and tucked by a brooch.
In her diary my mother Dolores described her as unfaltering. But I remember her as fluttering—the quick
opening and closing of a fan” (61). Lace,
of course, denotes daintiness. But while
unfaltering equates to strength and resilience, fluttering equates to agency in
making the body a bit more comfortable from the tropical heat. The adjectives also invoke the butterfly,
which leads us back to Imelda Marcos as noted earlier. Later in the play, Grace will remember a time
when as a schoolgirl, she, like many other school children, waited for Imelda
Marcos to come, “Waiting for our alibangbang—butterfly” (65). Performance is thus a form of
subterfuge. Lola Clara, Grace tells us,
“loved to tell stories and hold court” (61), she will teach Grace to keep her “eyes
to the ground but always seeing the entirety of a room” (62). When the Australian, Arthur, comes to take
Dolores and Grace away, Dolores “links her arms around his and lays her head on
his shoulder. The smile is not for me,”
Grace tells us, “but for a bittersweet artifice” (69). As a young girl, Grace is also practiced in
this “artifice”: “Isn’t my mother beautiful?
She laughs. He laughs. They all laugh. We are at play. The script is going well” (69). The young Grace learns that women put on a
performance to attract the Western, or rather, white, male saviors.(2) This white male savior will then take them
away to a distant land. With her
admonishment to “Marry a foreigner. With
any luck an American and get out of this country and take me with you,” Lola
Clara voices the profound implications of the American neo/colonial empire in
the Philippines. Imelda Marcos herself
had been known to have “met with Marlon Brando,” “the Pope,” “the Reagans,”
“danced with Martin Sheen,” and “partied with the Nixons” while “we [the
masses] wait,” a nation waits for its salvation in the hands of men from the
West.
As a
schoolgirl, Grace, too, remembers having to wait for hours in the noon-day sun
for Imelda to arrive. “We are panting,”
she tells us, “little hearts are small drums,” fluttering, perhaps, “voices of
angels singing well rehearsed songs” (65):
I will give you these hands to build
our country.
Imelda is coming!
I will give you my legs to support
your ambitions.
She hardly comes to Cebu!
I will give you my eyes so you can
see your future.
She has come to grace us with her
beauty!
I will fight for you! I will die for you!
We wait.
(65, emphasis in
original)
In the
midst of the massacres, bombings, and civil wars, Grace recounts, “We still
have fiestas. We still have
siestas. We still have kite flying. We still have universities. We still have rumba, the cha cha and the
kuratsa. We still have powdered milk and
corned beef in cans. We still have ice
cream. We still have concerts in Fuente
Osmena” (64). That life goes on despite
civil unrest shows the resilience of the people; organized concerts in a park
named after a former Philippine President hints at statecraft in distracting
the masses to keep from seditious acts and to keep them blinded by a government
riddled by graft and corruption; and while the “fiestas,” “siestas,” and the
dances keep them rooted in colonial Spain, “powdered milk and corned beef in
cans” invoke U.S. presence in the islands.
But it
is perhaps Berry’s use of the trope of blood and bleeding, as in the bleeding
from the wounds of war, bleeding from menses, and/or bleeding from parturition,
that wars and civil unrest in the homeland become a gendered affair. Grace was born the year Martial Law was
declared, 1972. Of her birth, she tells
us, “They split her stomach open [. . .].
She is hacked open while the streets are vibrating from religious
devotion. Her world is on
fire—massacres, bombings and civil wars are hot under her feet. And I grow inside her” (64). Learning her own history from Lola Clara and
her mother, the prepubescent Grace discovers, too, that parturient and
menstrual bleeding may have a connection to the phenomena of the querida, a
Spanish word for “mistress,” and is a practice common among rich Filipino men
in a country where divorce is not recognized.
Grace herself is a result of Dolores’ dalliance with a married Filipino
man. Lola Clara disparages Dolores,
saying, “Why would you pressure a man with so much responsibility? A very dashing and promising politico who
would have taken care of her?” (63).
Lola Clara here demonstrates the complexity of the querida question: If
she isn’t being abused, she is showered with material wealth, a golden
handcuff. In a way, having a child
ensures the man that the querida will stay.
Grace, of course, sees through Lola Clara’s opacity: “’Hello? With a
wife and five children!!!” (63). It is
no wonder, then, that Grace refuses to bleed: “I will not bleed, I will not
bleed, I will not bleed” is what she thinks when her mother tells her she is
“no longer a child” and that she will “bleed soon” (67, 66, original emphasis).
If her
homeland is riven by civil unrest, then her adoptive home is alienating and
uncanny. It is in Australia that Grace
learns about racism and an insidious “multiculturalism.” Arriving there, she sees that the “median
strip is lined with black people in rags.
A language I do not understand is shot like gunfire” (72). Perhaps sensing her apprehension, Arthur
tells her, “Cop an eyeful of our natives darlin’. Lazy stinkin’ bastards, stay clear out of
their way and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble. There’s no helpin’ this lot” (72). On “Australia Day,” Grace tells us, “We are
gathered in the name of Multiple Cultures.
We are our parent’s hopes for assimilation. We are lined up as the United Nations. All made up to highlight ethnicity”
(73). She blushes at her mother’s
“appropriation” as Dolores “waltz[es] with a Pavlova cake” (73). They laughed that someone brought noodles,
“Noodles Grace, just in case we were homesick!
Have you ever tasted such tasteless garbage!” (73). Guests at their home check for dust and tell
Dolores, “Oh you’re such a good cleaner, you run a tidy ship” (74). They insult Dolores by asking whether she
went to school, and they ask whether the Philippines is in Asia. “If anyone ever insults you,” Dolores
instructs Grace, “tell them you can trace your family as far back as the
1600’s—to great men of Spain. That should shut those convicts up” (74). Dolores’ rejoinder comes out of frustration
and is made only to her daughter; it is in response to her feeling of otherness
and inferiority. Grace, though, can
apprehend their condition far more than Dolores can. “Great men of Spain,” Grace tells the
audience. “Wow Dolores. Our great men. Our men are present only in anecdotes unable
to defend themselves. Always absent”
(74). It isn’t any wonder, then, that
when Grace does meet a boy, a boy whose “face [is] haloed by a golden crown,”
she tells us, “In the shadows I feast on him.
[. . .] His eyes search for me,
but I am opaque. Unbending, unfolding,
unwilling. He cries when we finish. Love is his fragile cargo. How delightful that he is so careless. His heart beating in my hands. And I finally understand. I will never fold. I will never fold, I will never fold, I will
never fold into myself” (75). Grace has
learned that the women in her family wait all of their lives for a white male
savior only to take them away from a home torn by civil unrest to a home where
state policies foster a culture of inferiority and alienation among their
non-white denizens. Grace will wait for
no white male saviors; she will be her own saving grace.
Following
Berry’s drama is Merlinda Bobis, short story, “The Making-Better Herb.” This time, the Australian is not the “savior”
but rather a journalist who falls in love with a rebel “Kumander.” The journalist sends his reports to his
writing patron, who, unbeknownst to the journalist, is an informant for the
military. Both the journalist and the
Kumander “disappear,” a term used by the rebels and their allies to suggest
that the military had executed them covertly.
The herb, in Bobis’ story, is lemongrass, an herb that is difficult to
differentiate from kogon grass. But
though the latter is a common weed that overruns the landscape, the former
“aspires to flavor the earth,” does alchemic wonders to dishes from the lowly
soup of chicken feet and papayas to the fatty aftertaste of pork. The story suggests that the herb would
“sweeten [the] graves, or the mouth [of those who have “disappeared”]. To rid it of grief, like that pernicious coat
of fat, so we can make better the truth that we speak” (83).
Erwin
Cabucos’ short story, “The Bleached Hills of Cotabato,” like Berry’s drama,
deals with the mail-order bride and is a commentary on Filipinos’ attitude of
exalting western standards of “whiteness” and beauty while denigrating their
own, darker, skin tones. Cabucos’ turns
to religious iconography to demonstrate how the masses, in their adoration and
religious fervor, were gripped to worship the white-skinned Jesus and Mary.
“Manila
Bay,” and “Taft Avenue,” Noonee Doronila’s poetry offerings, deal with the
literal landscapes of Manila. “Manila
Bay” begins aesthetically enough, we see people strolling along the bay, some
are rowing in the water, fishing, lovers “gazing at each others [sic] eyes”
(101). It is a place where people
congregate to enjoy the sights and breezes, to fall in love. But the bay’s “Gentle waves nearly still /
With seaweed, paper, plastic, tin / floating so closely, so still / waiting”
paints a different picture (102). The speaker tells us that people are “Staying
for dusk’s delight / For the quiet / Before the evening’s night life / The
lights that line / This bay of delight………” (102, ellipses in original). The ellipses here tell of delights to come,
delights that perhaps prudence prevents the speaker from naming. The jetsam and flotsam that litter the bay,
like the people who loiter at the bay, speak of more unsavory goings on that
the darkness conceals. That the “coast
guard [is] waiting for the inevitable incident” hints at something more
insidious that the nation-state promotes.
Though we may be looking at something pleasing in the beginning,
innocence is lost in the end.
In “Taft
Avenue,” the speaker depicts the hustle and bustle of a crowded street where
vehicles and vendors litter the street.
“Chowking, MacDo, Tapa King, KFC [. . .] You name it, the gastronomic
delights of western society / Splashed at the eskinita” (103). The speaker “splashes” the poem with Tagalog
words, “Bilisan mo / Baka ka masagasaan,” (hurry up / you might get run over)
fusing West with East, because, though we are “In a globalized world,” the
speaker confesses, “But oops we still like our rice” (103). Though western capitalism is firmly
entrenched, the “MacDos” and the KFCs still have to cater to the desires of the
local consumers.
Doronila’s
final poem, “The Calm,” much like “Manila Bay,” lures the reader with a
pleasing beginning, “The storm calms / Amidst the silence / That lingers” with
a wind that
slightly blows
Through the windows
Gently
Raising the curtains
Lacy
White
Pure
So pretty and so feminine
(104)
The
poem’s rhythm can not only be sensed in an oral and auditory way, but also
through the visual. There is a
copiousness of space that seem to relay a slowness and gentleness, much like
wind blowing through the lacy, white curtains.
“Lacy,” while denoting fragility and therefore must be treated gently—it
is “so pretty and so feminine”—is a homonym of lazy, a slothfulness and
lethargy that affects the body. But this
slowness of rhythm belies a raging storm, a typhoon perhaps, as
A lash of wind
The curtains fly
Like Kites
Away from their poles
And away
Struggling to hang on
And away it goes
(104)
The
“lacy”/lazy curtains are now “struggling to hang on,” the wind that blows
“gently” is now a “lash of wind.”
Perhaps this is a phenomena everyone who has been through one of the
typhoons in the Philippines experience.
Nevertheless, be warned. Don’t
let the calm fool you, as if the speaker is saying, for the typhoon may blow
you away.
Crystal
Gail Shankgkuan Koo’s short story, “Benito Salazar’s Last Creation,” tells of a
futuristic Manila where novels are not only written and read but are
technologically crafted and seen through a holograph. The story treats narrative fragmentation not
as a writerly skill but as a “glitch” in technology, and where a younger,
“wunderkind” has put the Philippines in the literary map because of his
putative “invention,” though it is more like an “accident” he stumbled upon
(110). Salazar’s writer’s block, a
result of his feeling of insecurity and inadequacy in the face of a looming
deadline and in light of the “wunderkind”—who is praised by critics and even
has a theory named after him—will likely ring familiar to many writers, yours
truly included. The story pits a
carefully crafted and honed skill of the past, to the mass produced,
technological advancement of modernity.
For
writer Xerxes Matza, the dynamics of being a Filipino raised in Australia comes
to a collision during family get-togethers in his short story, “Kick Some
Butt.” Here, the family is troubled by
their aging mother—grandmother to our narrator—and who is suffering from the
advanced stages of dementia. When he
suggests a nursing home, his aunt complains that he doesn’t “understand
Filipino culture anymore. What would you
know? You’re an Australian, she said
pointedly. No love for the elderly”
(127). While for his family, the speaker
is “not Filipino enough” as he was raised in Australia and therefore has
acquired Australian values and culture, he nevertheless is subject to derogatory,
racist remarks: “Council should get these Asians out of my street; they dump
rubbish everywhere” (128). And living in
“John Howard’s Australia,” where his policies of “One Australia” do not include
people of color, the speaker “can’t help wondering whether will [sic] there be
polices in place to safeguard [his] interests when [he] grow[s] old?” (129). His choices are either returning to
the Philippines, a land he no longer knows, or euthanasia.
“Monsoons
Volcanoes The Interisland Ship,” a poem by Robert Nery, is irreverent in its
word-play, interspersing untranslated Tagalog into a fragmented prose
narrative. “Black Nazarene,” a
ninety-minute video essay written, shot, and edited by Nery himself, focuses on
Holy Week crucifixions in Manila, and is reminiscent of Eliot’s “The Waste
Land,” and Yeats’ “The Second Coming.”
Finally, in “The Servant,” the speaker is a “balikbayan,” or one who
returns to the homeland to visit, and is shocked at the changes that has
transpired.
In “Becoming
Australian: A Filipino Woman’s Journey,” Deborah Ruiz Wall reflects on her work
as a proponent of Aboriginal issues by interweaving personal narrative with
poetry. In doing so, she provides
historical information on the plight of the Aborigines and contextualizes the
dynamics of peoples of color in Australia in relation to settlers of European
origin and the policies and practices that come out of over eleven years of John
Howard’s government.
And
finally, the poems of Noel Giuvani Ramiscal, “If You Read This,” “Nanda Devi,”
and “The Kiss,” all aesthetically sketched, provide refuge from the identity
politics and whisk us away into a global and timeless milieu. “If you Read This,” the speaker tells us, you
may be in the “Eupalinion tunnel” built in Greece; or a dentist’s office in
Marikina, Philippines; an attic in Wollongong, Australia; star-struck in
“Hollywood Vine”; trysting with a stranger in Efes, a Turkish name for the
ancient Greek city of Ephesus; or perhaps in a hotel in Frankfurt listening to
a the “radio / tuned into some Dresden murder” (163-4). But then again you may be summoned by the
mountain itself, “Nanda Devi”; or you anticipate that long-awaited kiss in the
final poem.
(1) http://todaimitaka.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html. April 19, 2015. 3:46 pm.
(2) Here,
I use the term “Western” to designate not just Europe and the United States but
also Australia, areas of the globe where the hegemony is designated as “White.”
Sheila Bare is an independent scholar and a life-long student. Lately, she has been studying Buddhism. When her nose is not in a book or in a cooking pan, you may find her on a yoga mat or out for a run. And there are those days when she tries to write. Best to stay away from her during those times. Unless, of, course you bring with you a good bottle of wine and talk about books. She was raised by two parents and now lives somewhere on planet earth.
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