Returning a Borrowed Tongue:
the Filipinos Are Coming
Dateline: 2/27/97
Right now! Asian American writing is poetry’s energy and it's centered in the Filipino community. It’s feedback time: the rewriting of US pop culture through the lens of colonialism’s "switch" to benignly triumphant "capitalism" makes for a scathing deconstruction of the American Dream.
To mark the moment, the monumental Al Robles, manong #1 of the Kearny Street (San Francisco) scene, finally has a book. Rappin with Ten Thousand Caribou in the Dark is a masterpiece of spoken word situated on the page. As it should be -- Robles is the primo storyteller in the Filipino community, he’s raised generations via word of mouth, and if this is the payoff from the hoopla around poetry performance, I shout Hallelujah! and want a roomful of Amen. Note, please: Rappin is published by UCLA Asian American Writers Center (3230 Campbell Hall, LA, CA 90095). As multi-culti spoken poetry kicks the academy walls down, a hush -- the poet speaks, uniting the street and the intellectual, Robles overlays San Francisco with Manila:
Carabao is nice to you
When you come in the afternoon from the ricefield
He go home too, by himself
After the sun go down he lay down
Goddam! Like a human being.
International Hotel Night Watch
Manong-carabao
I ride you thru the I-Hotel ricefields
One by one the carabao plows deep.
from "International Hotel Night Watch"
Jessica Hagedorn’s new novel, The Gangster of Love, is the story of a boho artist’s rise and breakthrough into motherhood. We follow singer/poet Rocky Rivera, rocker and demimonde denizen, from her birth in the Philippines, youth in San Francisco, life on the road and in New York. There’s a wild cast centered around Rocky’s mother, Milagros, who puts in a hilarious appearance in Rocky’s coldwater flat after baby Venus is born. There’s lots of rock and roll music -- Jimi Hendrix puts in a death-defying appearance -- and an insider’s view of the whole avant art scene con muchas lumpias. And then all of a sudden, at the very end, you draw a bead on who the gangster of the title really is, and go, why yassss. A tighter tale than Hagedorn’s earthshaking first novel, Dogeaters, this is a story of the courage of love, and the drive to create.
Two anthologies, well, let’s make it three, document this surge in Filipino lit. Many of the poems in Returning A Borrowed Tongue (great title, editor Nick Carbo! hard to get humor and politics into a kiss, I mean title) from Coffee House Books, seem to melt in your hands, leaving you with all heart. No, you cannot generalize, but there does seem to be an aesthetic at work here, of humor and pop striving to create a culture up from under.
The poetry and fiction in Flippin’: Filipinos on America (ed. Luis Francia and Eric Gamalinda) is generally harder-edged, more on the direct political tip. This book is published by The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 37 St. Marks Place, NY NY 10003, which combines two weekly readings, all manner of workshops, a bookstore/fashion shop (literary fashion, yes yes), and the new Poets Theater run by Nancy Bulalcao and Regie Cabico into the most active activist poetry scene in the country, circa 1997.
A third anthology, Walter Lew’s Premonitions (Kaya) must be mentioned here. An anthology of new Asian North American poetry, this book has 73 writers descended from all regions of Asia, whose aesthetic take blasts out a new definition for the arts. Lew’s book is designed like a culture, not a tome, and feels like the way the world might become if these words were made flesh. Smart beauty.
And finally, there’s Nick Carbo’s biting first book, El Grupo MacDonald’s (Coffee House). A fiery sweet debut from a poet who’s going places, and taking us with him.
RESOURCES:
AKDA - An online anthology of Filipino lit.
Hala Bira! - "A Celebration of Philippine Literature" at which you can see many of the writers mentioned here if you're in New York on Saturday, March 8.
