Magdaragat, p.12
Magdaragat, page 12
Sweep.
Mop.
Vacuum.
Clean the bathroom. Understand the basics about laundry and household cleaning chemicals, detergents, air fresheners, and cleaning liquids. In a way, we were mimicking the every-day-as-regular-as-clockwork chores of compatriots whose duty it was to work for, serve, and wait on others. Towel-offering house cleaners in resorts and spas.
Coffee-serving baristas.
Cocktail-serving bartenders.
Stevedores, cooks, helpers, cleaners in cruise ships.
Maids, cleaners, and laundrywomen in hotels. At the end of the school term, our eldest daughter Jenny’s English teacher advised: “You should ask your parents to take you to the park or to the CNE. Go somewhere!” Little did the teacher know we only had enough to put food on the table, clothe the kids, or pay for our townhouse rental. But we managed to scrounge enough money to send our two youngest daughters for piano lessons up until they lost interest and began to gravitate increasingly toward school activities. To this day, I have never been to the CNE. My daughters have, with their dad and with their friends. We only went to Canada’s Wonderland a few times: once when my youngest sister and her family visited from the United States, and the other times when we were able to get coupons for half the price of admission. I inherited thrift and frugality from my mother. She managed to put her eight children through school as well as numerous cousins and relatives who boarded with us when I was young. She collected odds and ends of clothing and sewed them into new dresses for me and my three sisters. She went to markets to get fresh fish and vegetables to feed our huge household. I knew how to bargain because I accompanied her in her morning forays to the Blumentritt wet market in Manila. No exclusive private schools for us; my father was a product of public schools. Yet we lacked for nothing as we were well fed and clothed within modest means. Our daughters must have sensed our early struggles in Toronto and tried not to demand too much. A trip to BiWay, the cheapest department store at the time, was like a trip to a big mall. It was a cause for celebration. They did not ask for expensive toys or clothes and shoes, just what was necessary to keep warm in the winter months. They did not complain but were grateful to receive hand-me-down coats and boots donated by old friends.
Looking back, I see the years as a blur, with both Joe and I preoccupied with the business of living: children, home, work. There was no time for slacking as every minute counted. Our children grew before our eyes: their wants and needs, emotional and physical, subsumed by the nurture and love we could manage to offer them. Latchkey children — this word I learned from Isobel, our third daughter, who tried to impress us with her immense and fast-growing vocabulary — were children left at home after school while their parents worked two or three jobs. We each held only one job, but they were left on their own when both Joe and I went to work. So, every time we were free from work obligations, we tried to stay at home and be with them.
Still, our children did not have the constant companionship and care of relatives they used to have when we were living in the Philippines. There were no cousins, aunts, and uncles to chat with or visit or give counsel. It was just us, our nuclear family, with a few friends. We did not have a regular social life, let alone go to parties. Christmas and New Year we spent by keeping to ourselves, making do with small presents and simple fare: the familiar chicken adobo, the proverbial pancit guisado, and fried rice. Our goal was to survive and live as self-sufficiently and independently as possible. Home was ten thousand miles away, and early on, we set it in stone to burn our bridges once we set foot in Toronto. “Survive or perish” was our mantra.
6 Workers among us
Although we opted to migrate to another country, my family’s decision to leave was no different, or more immediate, than the decision of Filipino emigrant workers who chose to leave because of the political uncertainty and economic turmoil in our homeland. The outflux of workers began as early as the 1960s but became more pronounced in the 1970s, when under then President Marcos’s strongman rule, political and economic cronyism and corruption in government drove the average person to further exploitation and abuse. Since civil liberties were suppressed, the rights of workers and farmers to organize and work for reforms were effectively scuttled. Faced with a fast-increasing population, high unemployment, and poor living conditions, and to relieve his government of the need to spend on development projects and social support for the people, Marcos launched a massive labour export program. It began with sailors, then domestic workers — nannies, caregivers, cooks, and cleaners — then migrant workers to fill the lower paid and unskilled sectors in countries in the world with chronic labour shortage.
Before this, the Philippines had already sent doctors, nurses, and allied medical professionals to other countries, in a brain drain that, to this day, robs the country of trained and much-needed professionals. In his book, Migration Revolution, Filemon V. Aguilar Jr. sums up the phenomenon: “If Philippine society was ever a cauldron about to boil over, overseas migration has taken the lid off and released the pressure.”1 In 2012, the economic planning ministry reported that the Philippines could not do without the remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).2 Even the World Bank agrees that cash sent to the country — about $24 billion, or PHP 1,178 trillion, in 2014 alone — is a “key factor” for the resilience of the Philippines.3 Remittances from the country’s close to two million overseas Filipino workers (1,844,406 OFWs in 2015) have enabled the country to withstand recession amid the economic crises of the previous years.4
7 I Just Can’t Stop Loving You
In 1987, the world’s population reached approximately five billion. A rare earthquake that peaked at 5.0 on the Richter scale on June 11 affected fourteen states in the Midwest of the United States and parts of Canada. At the same time, Supertyphoon Nina hit the Philippines, submerging fourteen fishing villages on the Philippine coast under water, leaving one thousand dead.
We had arrived in Toronto in late July, with the top billboard song “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” by Michael Jackson high-pitched and spilling in from everywhere. The air steamed with purpose when summer meant another life to live. From every corner, a mirror to reflect on. Outside our window, the children’s park, though treed, appeared bruised from the dark slits on the windowpanes. Thorny Vineway. Did our new street name augur of tomorrows yet to come? Would our life in this new country lead to a path laid with thorns? We were young at the time, and everything looked promising. We were alive in this new country and were no longer afraid, the years in the future distant and to be savoured. We were ready to be every person we chose or wanted to be.
The days shortened in late October, when the sun sank deeper and the leaves fell on the ground: at first, mustard yellow and blood red; later, turning brown, purplish, and ragged. People here called it mid-autumn. At St. Timothy’s Church, Joe and I and our children filled the half-sung hymns with thoughts of the past we had left behind. The shade of leaves falling, hung in mid-air, marking our days.
But those early experiences were mere spots in our post-arrival years. They would be subsumed by the tracks in the snow when our first winter came. We would remember the pride in the little fire we stoked three decades later. We knew we could get lost on every road and never find our way. We could run out of a country and never leave it. Memorize the shape of our name and never recognize it. Something so clear could be something so vague. Like knowing and not knowing at the same time. Like the day that drowns in the bones. Like the night growing into shadow. Like names echoing many towns, burrowing through stones and fragmentary rocks.
Everywhere was where we wanted to be.
* * *
1 Filemon V. Aguilar Jr., Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age (Manila: Ateneo de Manila Press, 2014).
2 Jodesz Gavilan, “What you need to know about overseas Filipino Workers,” Rappler, December 5, 2015, updated December 19, 2016, https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/iq/114549-overseas-filipino-workers-facts-figures
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
Proximity
Hari Alluri
Oracle Card: Toward Wonder
If you pull this card in diaspora, begin by giving thanks to Anagolay, Goddess of Lost Things, Ancestor of Wandering.
Say: Magandang umaga, magandang gabi, whether under sun or fog or atmospheric river: Salamat.
Remember you didn’t know how little you loved these mountains here before somebody told you they were also grown from lava: ring of fire kapwa to the island mountains where Siya and you (even if a mixie, monsoon on two sides) connect.
Now you can finally admit, these mountains would be beautiful if they weren’t your kapwa. Because they still would be: kapwa.
Send your mind to the edges of our origin, the blade of language holding us. With its incision. Beginning — no longer scraped away. Holding us even after the bone-clean of a meal, bowl-tilt and swipe. Say: I want that to be my name.
Now admit, loving Anagolay as you do: I doubt so much I sometimes feel like wrongness is my only “from.”
Each new re-puncturing, pain and threshold climbing toward surface.
Toward when, in another gender with another name, Siya watched
our bundoks climb and didn’t stop them.
Say portal, say tattoo. When you receive yours, the village your nanay is from already forgets your name.
Popsi, nko? Birthplace, na so.
You are inflected by all the grammars you’ve ever been surrounded by. You as in your body. As in you carry them, and they make you porous to more. You are all reverb.
Apologize to the mountains with the stain inside your voice.
Let the dance floor of it rise the string-tones of an open breeze.
When you hear somebody call for authentic, remember your style is so janky and collage that even your half steps have quarter notes in them: may every checkpoint except the ones that hold the land itself
turn into a disco ball. And loss
into a wave we surf rather than the oil we plunder. Noisiness in your heels at the troubled moss of intimate touch.
Let the touch not rancid. Hear me say it
in your ear.
Respond: May it not become my name.
Open toward when even the languages we’ve lost are where we’re from.
Now in real, remember: a dragon exoskeleton light in blue, flywheel on the railroad tracks: you were looking for Anagolay then. Thinking about the history of railroad here. Walking-balancing on one track with your eyes both closed.
If the card jokes you what that worship means you take a sip of sun.
Recall, a day of work when you had to thank every muscle, ligament, tendon, nerve, bone, joint, organ, inch of skin you could think of in the shower after. Just to get through the shower. Make this the practice of giving thanks every time you shower. Say: Land. Water. Strands. Hands. All are part of your name.
Here’s a story you can’t keep quiet — against the voice of your shame itself: when you strip songs
for the delicacy of where you haven’t been, you remain
what holds you.
There’s only love,
you’ve said that before, in the wake of your family’s loss.
By blood or chosen. You meant it
because for a little while your faith was not the body of a bee
curled up after sting. Your shame at its kindest says:
Regardless of my name: I am afraid to tell you
this: I, always will be.
Here, where there wasn’t a word, now there is. But it was also here
before you. In a language before language, and other ones as well. Between
two precipices. Waiting for the obstacle you are, to become more like a bridge.
“Wonder cuts the keys to doors between the worlds.”
To know you would never have written that if it wasn’t for our loss.
And also if the homie didn’t text you a freestyle that you tried to respond to, but your phone died. That line was all that remained.
Say this: I agree that who the poem waited for was not necessarily me. It’s better when Niki sings it. Eric loves her name.
When you pull the card, these are the conditions:
If mountains are the eyes that make the clouds relax their steps.
If what it takes for mountain-form to be.
If angled off the slightest, this alley at its crouch.
If crow-sex made this valley into city first.
If car-storm breaks, coyotes trot. If bloom
gives way to leaf-turn, fall, whose after-falling purpose (of return) is finally
un-prevented by your hands again this year.
The circles of us widen, even in loss: kapwa.
Kapwa: you must find a branch in water and bring it to speak with the markings on a cedar.
You must give the branch the name of your demon.
Find a tune by Prince dancing in your head, make up a song with the demon’s name
(do not share the first lines here, do not share their name):
Hopscotch and dream smoke. Trouble-cause and flam.
Even when he’s on the run he’s never on the lam.
Searching for the rhythm in a phrase makes you forget. Good. What was next was almost quietness. Free of any names.
The card doesn’t mean to say that you’re not whole (maybe no one is, at least while alive). Only that the image you hold is more like a hologram than a colouring book. Those holograms at the mall in ’95 when the food court had ash trays and you thought that getting discounts on fries was halfway to a date.
Let’s not get into cricket bats, that’s another card. With the pager code for carloads to show up: inflection. Distraction: Hey, check out this pretty running wall, these birds that cross to the island in the ferry’s airstream wake.
This is more like it: the stutter working river step, the fast-food auntie mentoring a grown-ass child she calls anak, tobacco in its spoken form, the price of smoke-packs at Fraser laundromats. Those types of names.
A city, flayed, can migrate, too: do you believe that now? The closer you look, the less the land seems to move, not unlike a name.
It’s clear you want to ask: If I make an incantation of loss, is it still an incantation. You want that, careful, to be your name.
Say this: May I write what I’m calling in. With the ashes I release.
Believe: If anyone finds the word that says: “the last migration of touch before departure” — I understand Anagolay will choose them instead of me.
Good, now the card can tell you: Curiosity, like love, is older than doubt. Put that in your name.
In shapeshift is the residue of each previous shape, like the residue of volcano in the island-sand, labyrinth lines of loss, you say, and the card believes you.
Still, you want to lie and say
the blade of language is a shell, and the shell whistling in the sand is a whistle I can hear.
Do not. Instead, invite the land a little closer, as the oceans do.
Because the land is more beautiful
than long-distance phone calls that make us
more beautiful than we are. And loud.
Now loud: Ingat!
With the g dropping like the word dropping, aaaaaah sound elongated. Good.
Even when your pantry shames from running out of rice: Restoration in the everyday.
If you can, to give Anagolay that, more than just your name.
You must find the cord between you and the rock that calls the phosphorescence, the night of sky and every city light that shuts to give these evergreens their full silhouette of moon. You must not believe that you can ever belong, only that you are here to be with your longing.
When you are, you will quit asking the card to tell you who this is: the one who crosses dimensions, whose bangka is a weather-beaten teeth-grit where the branches crack a smile.
Waves cross over your head from them, engulfing.
It’s up to you — Bahala Na — to hold onto Their name.
Steffi Tad-y
Islands Along Mount Pleasant
Pockets out of quarters
past Pedal Heads
& a row of daffodils
you misheard flawed
as flowered and filled
what was missing
in the air with Yes
everywhere
people flower.
We left an archipelago
whose elders weather
heart
attack &
heat
stroke as
if illness
were a cluster of islands
we kept crossing.
Water rising
up to our hips.
Here we live
in a city that thinks
it can bury the city
it stands on.
Here we live
in a city that unroofs
as often as it rains.
Under a glass awning
we trace patterns
on our palms.
Jellyn Ayudan
Roots
In Manila, home was a two-bedroom apartment that was situated alongside the slums. It was cramped and humble. But my mother always loved to decorate the windows with bright, floral curtains, as if they stood any chance against the dust and pollution. Home was a place where love and laughter resided, but it was no safe haven. I remember a time when it was a place to hide. A dangerous stranger with bloodshot eyes barged through the doors, dismantling three heavy-duty locks in one instant. He was being chased down with a knife by his drinking buddies after a fight over drugs and money. The panicked call from my pregnant mother was one that made me realize how fast I could run home to her.
