American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  This restless citational practice connects with other abbreviated references scattered throughout the poem to formally reflect and frame the fragmented knowledge produced about Filipinos then and now. “Howling General,” for example, refers to General Jake Smith, who ordered his men to level the island of Samar into a “howling wilderness” by killing any male over ten (GC 3), while “Benevolent” “Assimilation” names—and questions through the quotation marks—President McKinley’s governing colonial policy (GC 4). “Jingoistic political cartoons” of “Nappy-haired black-faced babies” and “Naked throwers of spears and tantrums” evoke the black, Native, and infantilizing racialization of Filipinos before and during the war (GC 4), while the anthropological investigation of indigenous tribes is rendered through mock appraisals:

  Subject: Ayta

  Assessment: Missing link

  Subject: Ifugao

  Assessment: Headhunter

  ………………………………………………

  Subject: Igorot

  Assessment: Dog eater

  At the bottom corner of the page reads the civilizing “Plan: Elevate, Improve” (GC 7). The following two pages round out this condensed rendition of colonial war, science, and popular culture with an allusion to the song “Meet me in St. Louie” and a schedule of the indigenous peoples’ daily routine of “savagery” (“Barbecue of stray dogs”) and “ritual” (“Scripted marriage vows”) (GC 10, 11).

  Echoing the elegiac tone of Fuentes’s film Bontoc Eulogy, “Anthropologic” concludes with tropes of invisibility and amnesia that abound in diasporic Filipino studies: “Gawkers now neglect // Names never recorded // Phantasms of former selves” (GC 13).12 The once highly visible “world” spectacle has become invisible to the majority of Americans, the colonial war in the Philippines that created the conditions for Filipino migration to the United States all but forgotten. The poem thus seeks to inscribe what has been erased, typographically illustrated in this deconstructive form:

  Babaylan

   Datu

   Rajah

  Catalonan

   Hari

   Sultan (GC 6)

  The formal elements of “Anthropologic”—the intertextual citations, historical allusions, precolonial and Muslim categories of religious and social distinction put under erasure, use of “a whole lot of white space”—work in tandem to destabilize a discrete, unitary “I” that might anchor the position of colonial ruler, resistance fighter, or even ethnic “ambassador” presumed to display “my exotic foreignness to American audiences,” as Reyes writes in her essay “The Building of ‘Anthropologic.’”13 For the reader, the white spaces create a sense of “disturbing impersonality,”14 while also functioning as “psychological caesuras” that “create a site for interaction.”15 By declining to “humanize” the poem through the perspective of an “individual” reified into an “artifact,”16 Reyes’s poetics of “impersonality” is less Eliotic than postcolonial, more concerned with revealing the objectifying effects of colonial representation and subsequent erasure than with surrendering the poet’s personality to a canonical tradition.

  Crossroads of Colonialism

  Reyes’s second book, Poeta en San Francisco (2005), expands on these issues by exploring the personal and social dislocations produced by US and other colonialisms. She notes that her “family’s transplanting here [in San Francisco], had everything to do with its geographic hence historical position in relation to the Pacific Islands and Asia, where Manifest Destiny continued in the forms of wars of conquest.”17 Poeta’s formal mapping of the social histories that constitute its titular city, however, is hardly straightforward.18 Reyes has described Poeta as a book-length poem “consisting of many segments/fragments/movements,” and as an “epic poem,” but those parts are not connected by a continuous voice, perspective, or narrative thread. Her interest “in building, and in cycle” results “in a structure which is spiderwebbish, subjective, fortified, and perhaps orderly, per haps not.”19 This recursive, rhizomatic structure—what the speaker in the “prologue” calls “crescendos of text” that “honor movement”20—is “ordered” into a three-part arrangement (orient, dis·orient, re·orient) framed by a prologue and an epilogue. But it is also “dis·ordered,” so to speak, insofar as the book doesn’t present a linear trajectory of, say, violation to redemption, “the opposite of eden” (Poeta 20, 33, 57) to its utopian reconstruction. Though Poeta might be (an) epic, it does not follow the modernist “mythic method” of “giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”21

  Indeed, Poeta presents various forms of opacity: passages whose syntactical deformations confound sense making and resemble the “surrealism” of the book’s predecessor, Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York;22 Spanish and Tagalog words, phrases, and poems that appear throughout; and Baybayin poems and their homophonic translations that are comprehensible only to those literate in the precolonial script (Poeta 43–51). Such deformations, multilingualisms, and rapid shifts in point of view—what Craig Santos Perez describes as “a lacerated lyric and decentralized perspective”23—certainly pose formidable interpretive challenges. And Reyes seems to anticipate perplexity toward the end, when the speaker archly asks in “Confession[al]”: “wanna peek into my notebook? there may be clues hidden in it: instructions for viewing subjective catastrophe” (Poeta 107). Bereft of such paratextual “clues” as footnotes and glossaries that are “typically expected of non-Western cultural, linguistic, and historical reference[s], as if these are in essence obscure (and not obscured),”24 readers are left “to read the actual poetry,” as Reyes wryly says in another interview, “How’s that for a radical idea: read the poetry.”25 To read Poeta as a book and not a collection of discrete poems is to account for its internal cohesions and resonances as well as its fragmentations and dissonances. Here, I consider how Poeta places some of the political concerns in Gravities in a transnational context and presages the elaborate practice of feminist myth making in Diwata.

  Whereas “Anthropologic” focuses on the Philippine-American War and the 1904 World’s Fair, Poeta enlarges the scope of anticolonial critique to include other empires and sites of colonization. For instance, Reyes transforms Mark Twain’s satire “The War Prayer” into “[the victory prayer],” rendering it applicable to the contemporary “War on Terror”: “lord, make us steel against their pleas for mercy as we crumble their homes, their infidel wives, their devil offspring” (Poeta 24). This kind of recontextualization is further enacted in the allusions to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. In “[Kumintang],” the name for a precolonial war song, the speaker asserts her existence against Marlow’s exploratory erasures: “That blank space on your map, that’s where I was born. / The more blank your map, the more darkness for exploration” (Poeta 36).26 The speaker proceeds to indict those who commit gruesome deeds during war and the rewards they receive:

  Gold stars pinned to your chest for every military and civilian slaughter, for every child defiled, for every rice field set ablaze, for every leveled village, for every racial slur coined in those blank spaces on your map, for every new howling wilderness, for every incineration of flesh, for every gasoline victory smell in the morning. (Poeta 36)

  While “[Kumintang]” links Conrad’s Belgian Congo with America’s Southeast Asia through allusions to Samar (“howling wilderness”) and Vietnam (Apocalypse Now’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”), other parts of the book depict San Francisco itself as a palimpsestic crossroads of empires. Using the phrase “El Camino Real ends here” from Alejandro Murguía’s “16th & Valencia” as an epigraph, Reyes locates San Francisco within the history of Spanish colonialism’s twenty-one civilizing and Christianizing missions built during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along the “Royal Road.” Such historical excavation redresses the forgetting of Native genocide, while making recourse to the colonial languages now
used in the region: “we find ourselves retracing the steps of gold / hungry arrogant spaniards, […] aquí, en esta ciudad sin memoria, / where padres roped indians vaquero-style, / dropped their corpses into unmarked graves / after searing and coveting bare flesh—” (Poeta 19). The refrain “en esta ciudad” geographically links the disparate moments of the sixteenth-century Spanish explorers’ vain quests for gold, the eighteenth-century missionization project, the US takeover of California after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), and the Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century to the twentieth-century war in Vietnam and its return-effects within the imperial metropole.

  Reyes’s cartographic critique intersects with a feminist critique of colonial, urban, and aesthetic forms of Asian women’s hypersexualization. Nostalgic homeless Vietnam vets “pray their tropical dreams will come / true again: blow jobs under a sticky table” (Poeta 21); male sex tourists in San Francisco’s Japantown, Chinatown, and Manilatown seek out “cherry blossoms” (Poeta 62) and “hot chicks” (Poeta 66); military strategists and mail-order bride traffickers negotiate for geopolitical positioning and Filipina bodies (“[why choose pilipinas?]” and “[why choose pilipinas, remix]”); and Asiaphiles, obsessed with “Asian porn” and “Asian Studies courses” alike, travel to Asia for purposes of war, teaching, or research, and exploit and abuse the women (Poeta 84). The numbered series that begins “dis·orient” takes specific aim at the modernist artist’s penchant for travel, discovery, and appropriation of primitivist elements for the sake of “avant garde experiment” (Poeta 43) and reinvigorating the “lack luster” “edifices of his own empire” (Poeta 45). Opening with a pseudo-dictionary definition of “(nū, nyū)”—“as in, make it …”—the framing piece links Pound’s dictum to his borrowings from the Chinese: “what pound appropriation of the ancient oriental” (Poeta 43). The sequence recounts the male voyager’s conquering of foreign lands, fetishizing non-Western women, imposing Christianity, and twinning sexual and military force. The last three pieces return to the critique of modernist-sexist appropriation/inspiration (“because he posited her simply as his other. / because he invoked her, a muse for signification” [Poeta 49]) and linguistic theft (“he speaks words that were never his to speak” [Poeta 51]). Underneath these poems, however, are Baybayin rewritings of Pound and, under those, homophonic translations of the precolonial script.27 As Timothy Yu avers, the use of Baybayin “disrupts” the “white, male writer-explorer’s desire for the ‘foreign,’” while its relative opacity makes “it a site of resistance to the monolingual Anglophone reader.”28

  Threaded throughout these scenes of colonial violence and sexual exploitation is an intermittent series of “letters” that are addressed “dear love” to an unidentified recipient. These pieces expand the critique of colonialism into the domain of popular culture via allusions to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the documentary about the film’s production Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, and the Clash’s punk song “Charlie Don’t Surf.” The epistolary pieces also propose—then tellingly withdraw—the possibility of cross-cultural erotic intimacy. The connection between what appears to be the Filipina speaker and her Vietnamese addressee (“they have mistaken my home for a hollywood set of your home” [Poeta 23]) is forged on the fact that Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines with the aid of Ferdinand Marcos’s military dictatorship. Although the two figures bond over the shared misrecognitions that the film disseminates (“your country is not a war. my country is no longer mine” [Poeta 23]), the speaker eventually seeks to “dissociate” (Poeta 52) herself from her interlocutor, who, she suggests, displays too much “fervor” in performing “your mimicry of prescribed other” (Poeta 83). Rather than appropriate the Vietnamese war victim as a poetic “emblem” or “trope” (Poeta 52) of suffering in modernist fashion, the speaker forsakes the seductive “tenderness of our peripheral geographies” (Poeta 83) and elects self-immolation: “there is a prayer stuck in my throat. douse me in gasoline, my love, and strike a match. let’s see this prayer ignite to high heaven” (Poeta 92).

  If the epistolary pieces counteract ambivalently, at best, the colonial brutalities evoked throughout, what of the other female figures in the book—“the mermaid, the virgin, [and] the bar girl”?29 These unnamed figures first appear in the “procession” toward the beginning—“la virgen de guadalupe on a float of roses, / a weeping siren, a brothel girl” (Poeta 19)—and their fates are no less ambiguous. The virgin serves as the addressee of the numerous prayer-apostrophes, anaphoric litanies, invoked in the intercessions interspersed throughout the book: “Mother of severed tongues” (Poeta 70), “Virgin most desexed” (Poeta 72), “Queen of virgins sold into sex trade” (Poeta 74). The brothel/bar girl is presumably the figure harassed by racist Vietnam vets; she may be the “teenage runaway [who] wonders if tonight / will be the night she will sleep unmolested” (Poeta 61); and she might also be the “brown girl” who “laid down / on the train tracks” and “just gave up” (Poeta 76). The siren/mermaid is equally indeterminate: she seems to have been hooked on heroin (“weeping siren’s lesions and track marks” [Poeta 22]), found “febrile” by a man and reduced to an “objet d’art” in a “victorian claw tub” (Poeta 28), and later “suture[d]” by a “grandpa fisherman” into “trashy talismans” for sale (Poeta 86). Her devastation, dismemberment, and commodification notwithstanding, the siren also becomes the paradigmatic figure of migration, hybridity, and music: “she wasn’t born in this city. […] hybrid beyond memory. songbird, adrift, this city’s misplaced siren” (Poeta 87)—a surrealist “mission street rhapsodist” (Poeta 102). In a rare moment of contestatory hope, the poet issues a warning to the imperialist that “one day she will build a temple from detritus, dust of your crumbling empires’ edits” and erasures (Poeta 94). Unlike “your” imperial pretensions and prerogatives, this reforged female will eschew the justifications of war, patriarchy, and religion (“it is for no glory, no father, no doctrine”) and, “with the fire you once took to her flesh, she will melt down your weapons, forge her own gods, and adorn her own body” (Poeta 94).

  Reforging Gods, Reclaiming Myth

  From a “state of emergency” (11) to “subjective catastrophe” (107), Poeta is a dark book, replete with “violated bodies,”30 that gives us only glimmers of possibility and redemption. In her third book, Diwata, Reyes shifts from the confrontational politics of Poeta to the realm of the mythic, proliferating the non-autobiographical voices articulated in her work,31 while also engaging a feminist practice of reclaiming precolonial or non-colonial stories.32 Indeed, Diwata elaborates on the mermaid/muse in Poeta’s “[diwata taga ilog at dagat]” (diwata of the river and sea), an indigenous “goddess, part woman, part sea,” who was “christened” a “demon” by the invading Christians and thus “forbade […] offerings” (Poeta 30). Honoring the diwata as both “a deity or a spirit that resides in the natural world” and a “muse,”33 Reyes “forge[s] her own gods” and goddesses, adorning their bodies with “the swirls of our village stream” and “the curve of a warrior blade.”34 In this regard, Diwata is part of a broader effort among Filipinx American cultural workers and scholars to center women’s experiences and narratives, shed critical light on the gendered stratifications of colonialism and nationalism, retrieve suppressed archives and strategies of resistance, and provide platforms for self-representation: “each female figure is the native woman telling her own story, speaking her way out of dispossession, rather than succumbing [to] others’ objectified versions of her.”35 While Diwata makes copious offerings to diwata and other animist deities, Reyes’s postcolonial, diasporic project does not naively resurrect the precolonial past; rather, it pursues a symbolic “return” to the indigenous and the homeland, “the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery,” in Stuart Hall’s words.36 Even as Reyes adopts “a more indigenous world view,” which, she acknowledges, “is truly not my own,” she also tries not “to fetishize” it:37
“I do not believe in a return to a pure, idyllic indigenous Eden, nor do I wish to perpetuate the stereotypes of the Noble Savage and the native as our primitive foils/Dark Others.”38 Her engagement with myth derives from her “grandparents’ and family elders’ penchant for storytelling,”39 her own ethnographic investigations of “the river’s mermaid” in Cagayan province, and her reading of texts such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy.40 Using the prose poem to produce a kind of “density” that contributes to Diwata’s “spider’s web” form,41 Diwata’s “combination of creative archaeology and crafted innovation in poetic language and structure”42 results in speculative fusions and revisionings of various mythic traditions.

  For example, the eight-part title poem “Diwata” not only retells and remakes origin stories (the creation of thunder and lightning, the “first coconut tree,” and land [Diwata 15, 16, 17]), but also improvises on the Greek myth of Prometheus as well as the Iroquois story of the Woman Who Fell from the Sky:43 “Once a diwata stole fire. He brought it to the riverbanks where the earthdiver shivered, unclothed. This was her fate for peering through the hole in the clouds while her father hunted the red deer and the wild boar. […] How she’d wince as her father’s sharpened teeth pierced his prey’s liver” (Diwata 17). The story turns emphatically feminist when the “earthdiver” remembers Lawin (Tagalog for hawk) seducing her with sweet words, abducting and dropping her on “the eldest tortoise” (Pawikan), and raping and impregnating her, before she flees to the “glowing darkness of salt caves,” where she calls on diwata to have mercy on her (Diwata 17). The version told in the woman’s voice in the fifth part links the modified myth to more recent historical events: “Upon the shell-mound of kind Pawikan, there, Lawin took me and took me, and Pawikan could do nothing. I knew my brothers too would do nothing. There, he tore me in two” (Diwata 18). This scene anticipates a later World War II poem, “Call It Talisman (If You Must),” which depicts a young washerwoman’s rape by a Japanese soldier on the banks of a river: “there, the soldier took me and took me, and the river could do nothing. I knew my brothers too could do nothing. There, he tore me in two” (Diwata 54). This is but one instance where Diwata’s “figurative voices,” as Craig Santos Perez points out, “radiate a kind of haunting historiography” that brings indigenous myths to bear on “the present.”44