A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), which was selected by Terrance Hayes. In addition to winning the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
The friction in my psyche melts away. I try to pick up what remains of my fragmented beliefs. It’s harder to remember who I am.
I sit on the stoop of my Bed-Stuy apartment with my friend David, his hair drawn into a blonde ponytail. He holds his mask away from his face as he speaks. He is leaving the city that night for Pennsylvania. This is a week ago. I talk to him about free love for two hours. “It seems like you’re awakening,” he says. The ego as a collection of beliefs, past experiences––the surface starts to shake.
I’m afraid to ride my bike to Prospect Park today. Authenticity is a performance. I sit in a field in Vermont, looking on. I am in college and the flowers are in bloom, the goldenrods. I write a pastoral poem about them for my intermediate poetry workshop, about them dying, in which they are no longer in bloom. In the future, no one I love will understand the kind of love I feel. My desireless, incommunicable love.
I reach, in no particular direction, to get bound up with them in a chaotic entanglement. Life has no direction, I discover––its purpose is self-evident. Or otherwise, I must accomplish in order to be “real.” The spell of realness the economy entertains, my friends entertain, my family.
My panic attack at The Cheesecake Factory is no one’s business.
I have a panic attack about the clattering of silverware and the low lighting; I want to communicate. I am sixteen. I desire to communicate, as I desire it now: how whatever I might’ve said wouldn’t make sense, the need to make sense won’t make sense; how its “postmodern design hellscape” seduces me in the dimness of its family restaurant lighting. With my mother and grandfather and grandmother. The need.
It’s a need for sustained openness–––to live open, to live without internal contraction. The whole meal I am heartbroken.
I can’t account for how long any given speech act will last. How long? If communication is just being? This is proof enough: the ability to be for any extended period of time if I don’t think, “Who to sustain the performance for?” Do you ever really know whose eyes are watching? By the end of the play, I am nowhere to be found. I have evacuated my body. I die all the time.
If you’re wondering, reader, how long will this last, the answer is forever honey. I can tell there’s fear arising in our bodies; this attachment to some vestige of the familiar, to a desire we think we own. Patience is the wrong wrong to commit here. Authenticity isn’t coming with time; we’re leaving with time. If what we want is to be “real,” we’re not going to get what we wanted and it will turn out to be the best thing in the entire world.
Photo credit: Walid Mohanna
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. Find more information at www.worksofanais.com or on Instagram at @an.duplan.
Indian Performance Prints: Indian Holding a Weapon
Indian Performance Prints: Indian Holding a Weapon, is an ongoing series of relief prints recording the presence of a living and breathing Native person, myself, engaging with commonplace objects, actions and states of mind, whose functions within society are mirrored, exposing their dual ability to be used as instruments to harm or inflict pain either psychologically or physically. The “objects” (bible, driver’s license, penis, self-doubt… etc.) are, and have in the past been, used as weapons against Native people, their identity, and their civil rights, as well as against marginalized groups in general.
Joe Harjo is a San Antonio-based artist born and raised in Oklahoma City, OK. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond. Harjo works as a multidisciplinary artist, allowing concept to dictate modes of working and medium. His work often employs humor to approach difficult subjects such as Native American identity, misrepresentation, and appropriation of culture, initiating a call for change. Recent exhibitions include: The Only Certain Way, Sala Diaz, San Antonio, TX; Texas, We’re Listening, Brownsville Museum of Art, Brownsville, TX; We’re Still Here: Native American Artists Then and Now, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, TX, Reimagining the Third Space (2018), KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice, Kansas City, Missouri, re/thinking photography: Conceptual Photography from Texas (2017), FotoFest, Houston, Texas. He recently curated a series of films created by Native Americans at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, San Antonio. Harjo is a board member of the Muscogee Arts Association, a nonprofit organization that advocates for living Muscogee artists, a board member of Texas Photographic Society and he teaches photography and visual literacy at the Southwest School of Art. Find more at www.joeharjo.com and on Instagram at @NDNstagram.
[TO BE PERFORMED IN THE STYLE OF DAVID ANTIN’S TALK POEMS] [NOTE TO AUDIENCE: THIS TALK INCLUDES A SECTION WHERE THERE IS NO TALKING]
On occasional Wednesday nights, I attend a Zen sitting group that meets at St. Ignatius’ Chapel on the campus of Seattle University. The chapel is an extraordinary work of beauty, designed by celebrated architect Steven Holl. During the day, each part of the chapel glows with tinted light bouncing off color fields painted on the back of hung baffles. As the days grow longer, the patterns of light entering the chapel call out to the distracted eye untethered from the meditation cushion. Sitting in this space has called forth more than one poem.
sanctuary
the warning stick of the Zen priest is a way to sharpen the mind
the parts of a soul we call back to ourselves, baffled halos of light
in a stone box installed with seven vials of radiance, we took our seats,
processing between pews and through the hall of worship —
ceremony, a thing you shy away from like the memory of Pentecostal rite,
the impulse, a desire, to recover what was once whole, sunlight gunned
through colored glass the unbroken image of St. Ignatius’ shell reflected in the basin beyond
After sitting group one night, Tetsuzen, the group’s resident priest, welcomed me to give a dharma talk, at any time, about any topic I might wish. I held my breath when he extended the invitation. I’m pure novice. Even after 22 years, I feel Impostor Syndrome rise up, take over my brain. It’s reported that writers EJ Koh and Ocean Vuong spend hours of each day in meditation practice as their non-meditating petitioners marvel at this detail of their creative practice, agog in awe at the austerity of Asians. But I’m not that kind of Asian. I’ve got a six-year-old, and day-to-day life runs away from me. When the chemical reaction dissipates, I get curious about the idea of what it would be to give a non-dharma talk about my “feelings” about giving a dharma talk. And that is where we arrive now. I take comfort in engaging in familiar patterns that move me a little closer to something that feels like perfection. Once, a designer built a poetry collection for me in such a way that it required that I hand cut holes in every book cover and hand stamp the interior of each book with notes about my text. We printed just under 1,000 copies, which I prepped and cut in two weekends before shipping them off to my publisher’s distributor. I went through a box of exacto blades and a bundle of nail files, saving the letters from the words cut out of the covers to repurpose into personalized author notes. Contrary to what I imagined, the effect of reusing the text looked nothing like the roughness of ransom notes. I found the activity calming and embodied. I could be productive while thinking about nothing. Except when I saw my mind attaching too much to some idea of perfection.
practice
Pema Norbu Gompo shares with me a story: at reaching thirty
thousand prostrations, glancing into the vanity to see a trimmed down
waist w/out love handles – starting over
from zero, more than once to better polish his intent my own practice: carving holes in poetry books
w/ exacto blade & straight edge, intervention as design concept
a hole too uneven a hole too big a hole too ragged a hole too small
I’ve decided to embark on a new project that involves making exactly 108 clay tsa-tsas – Bhutanese sacred reliquary objects — that I’ll give away. I view YouTube videos of street artisans and talk to clay artists about “standard release methods” including Murphy’s Oil, corn starch, and olive oil. I read online tutorials, test different kinds of clay and wax, and also think about what could be placed inside the clay forms. In my readings on tsa-tsa making, I learn that medicine is sometimes placed inside these offerings. This is confirmed in one online video, when I see a tsa-tsa maker unceremoniously stuff what resembles an ibuprofen gel cap into a clay body. Somehow, I imagined more plant-like or magical healing medicine, even a handwritten mantra. My friend Michael offers to help me with my project, so I visit him in his ceramics studio that’s a short dash from the college football stadium. A series of decisions unfolds before me about process: type of clay, glazes, firing temperatures. All of these possibilities also point to the specter of failure. Anything can go wrong, at any time. Excess moisture in a preliminary firing can cause a piece to explode in the kiln. Too high a temperature can cause shattering. Glazing can behave unpredictably. And under particularly dramatic and expensive instances, a kiln shelf can blow up. We steel ourselves for the unpredictable. Make a back-up cache of objects just in case. Anything can go wrong, at any time – like a mentoring relationship, love affair, or even a dharma talk that’s lost control. We have to improvise. And this is the thing I think, as I wander the spice aisle of the University Village Safeway searching for pink Himalayan sea salt. Thinking about what desiccated herb might be a fitting offering to tuck away inside my clay objects, having forgotten the fragrant stems of Texas sage sitting atop my altar at home. There is no edible lavender to be found in the baking section.
[PAUSE TO MAKE TSA-TSAS FOR 3 MINUTES]
all beings, our teachers
the jazz poet invited me to lunch on the premise of electing me for a poetry prize, when I arrived
for our meeting he opened the door in his bathrobe, his apartment staged with Orientalist porn
the AAPI novelist recruited me to teach without pay — I looked the right part to a group of Pinay teens
she’d later take to Manila as research subjects; when I explained I needed work that paid
the rent she said I failed in my responsibilities
the mentor handed me a news clipping from The NY Times — here I am giving you a poem
the piece was on Vietnamese tonal language speakers why we have perfect pitch
I stopped learning Mandarin by the time I was 8
Now I am older, when I bump into former instructors outside of the classroom they say
She was my student. She studied with me. I taught her.
For many years my best teachers were books, they would not force me with
callused ashen hands, no way of being misread this aversion to learning
to teaching sometimes I miss sharing my mind with others in these moments I turn
to you and say claim this beauty that belongs to you and make it yours
We pack the clay into the 3-inch molds that resemble menstrual cups. Apply gentle and firm pressure to ensure that the details on the inside of the molds imprint across the surface of the clay. The molds form miniature stupas, or temples. We tear off chunks and strips of clay from the base to form a standing foot that when brushed against a table or any texture takes on those notes. We knead and fold the clay into cones and bulbous tear-dropped shapes that more easily fit within the molds of the tsa-tsas. I watch Michael and his student Ren work the clay. I haven’t touched clay since I was a teenager. Ceramics was largely my older brother’s domain. He partitioned off part of our parents’ Southern California rambler and installed a pottery studio. He built containers on a rotating kick wheel and displayed his creations on rows of shelves lining the walls of the enclosed patio. I remembered the control he exerted over his fast-spinning, wet vessels, using, not his strength, but brute force. A reflection too of our own relationship. No one tells me to handle the clay in a particular way. Both Michael and Ren, explore their own relationship to the material. Rolling, pinching, tapping, peeling. I pick up some of their technique by watching and begin to understand that our task is to approximate a shape. Not the shape of the mold, but the more ambiguous shape of the thing that will fill the mold. It is hard to understand that these are different things. At times, the shape that emerges from my hands resembles something phallic, and embarrassed, I flatten my efforts into something squat, twist the clay into something geometrical. My mind tries not to fixate on the outcome of the perfectly formed tsa-tsa. Ultimately exerting more care versus being freer doesn’t make a difference. Michael starts splitting the clay into triangular shapes to improve our efficiency and production time per tsa-tsa. When I glance at the clock it’s 10:40 a.m., but it’s broken and 50 minutes later, the hands haven’t moved. Tiny bits of dried clay stick to my hands. As I wipe them clean, Michael gestures at his typewriter suggesting all that can be transcribed and recorded from our conversations.
What’s the best technique to crimp the perfect new year’s dumplings? Ask your Taiwanese sister-in-law.
Who’s given a memorable artist talk in recent Seattle history? Cedar Sigo on musicality and connecting to his indigeneity.
What should be protected in the San Francisco Bay area? Cohen Alley, aka The Tenderloin National Forest, a throw-away space, that was leased from the city by artists for $1 a month and transformed into an urban greenspace.
When the ribbon jammed on the Corona Electric, we abandoned technology for sharpie pens. The idea of reading to one another was tossed around but after counting only 103 completed objects, Ren and I doubled down to finish the job. Michael pulled out a Cooley Windsor essay to read aloud on the subject of teaching. Being read to as I created stirred an old memory of sitting in graduate school workshops laboring over a poem as the instructor fed lines to the class from abstract sources. The effect of listening to Windsor felt more akin to guided meditation. I didn’t hate him. His work evoked tenderness. And the embodiment of that tenderness seemed bound to express itself in our last objects, in the close attention and fidelity to unformed matter molding to a shape. It is perhaps, why some artists will also talk to clay as they relate to it. Like two lovers engaging with one another. I gather up the molds that have enabled our work and oil and wipe the dried clay from inside and outside the bronze forms using an odorless yellow camellia oil. I complete the clean-up process three times, thinking of how the process of purifying and putting away your implements in Japanese tea reflects respect for the tools, and an honoring of the spirit of servitude, hospitality, holding space for one another. The first time, I read this next text to a room of strangers, I was overcome with emotion, remembering all in my life that lost control. It caught that moment before betrayal, before he asked me to leave my husband to make a life together. I considered his request. And required him to give up nothing. That moment before he told me he wasn’t ready or equipped; the moment before he revealed he used our relationship to leverage fear, and to secure a commitment from that other Asian gal from his past, the one that “got away.” This is the last time I will read this poem in public.
sangha
of the three jewels the most precious is the community
of practitioners, I feel this truth acutely when I conjoin with another
disciple & we pivot to bow in unison to the circle, as we retire from sacred space,
honoring how you & I once turned towards a roomful of friends, raised our hands to our hearts
humbling ourselves, to ourselves, I bowed with you, not to you the gaze turning downwards,
my heart opened, giving silent gratitude too for who we were then
In that space of mind meeting mind, the ancient ones and all of the buddhas of the future stood present with us. And we were all awoken. I am trying to hold the view that all spaces have the capacity to become sacred – the shell of a bronze mold acts as a womb. The writing desk, the uninhabited heart, the college lecture room. Even if who we were in that moment of first encounter, will never again be who we are now, we brought our curiosity and reverence for what wasn’t yet known. So that what starts as a “work party,” something transactional, commonplace with a goal of “being industrious”, grows into something more joyful than a dinner party. That “productive aspect” is to be honored, the shared efforts of having toiled, sometimes failed, and found something together in the multi-faceted gem, in spite of whatever breaks apart in the conduction of heat moving through a body.
Shin Yu Pai is the author of several books including Ensō (Entre Rios Books, 2020), Aux Arcs (La Alameda, 2013), Adamantine (White Pine, 2010),Sightings (1913 Press, 2007), and Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003). From 2015 to 2017, she served as the fourth Poet Laureate of The City of Redmond, Washington. Her personal essays have appeared in CityArts, Tricycle, Seattle’s Child, and YES! Magazine. She’s been a Stranger Genius Award nominee in Literature and lives and works in Bitter Lake, Seattle. For more info, visit www.shinyupai.com.
Stine Su Yon An (안수연) is an existential creepy-crawly, literary translator, and performer based in New York City. Her poetry and experimental translations have appeared or are forthcoming in BAX, Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.gregorspamsa.com and @gregorspamsa.
In late 2019 the anonymous performance artist known as X. conducted a piece called Posthumous Rites in which an anaesthetized psychic medium wearing electrodes on her wrists and nothing else was strapped to a chair which was then placed in a galvanized metal tub filled with 6 inches of saline solution.
The electrodes and psychic-wrists were not-quite secured with duct tape to a desk across the sleeping medium’s lap. Between the medium’s hands the left of which held a pencil and the right of which splayed across the surface of an alphabetic keyboard and the surface of a desk was a scroll of paper and a Dell laptop respectively.
X.’s latest studio intern waited around to prevent the medium from drowning and to clean up after. The performance artist dutifully recorded the utterances and convulsions which escaped the psychic medium which her studio intern transcribed over the course of the next seven days via his mother’s Brother Correct-O-Write typewriter loaded with the scraps of textbooks from her days as a pure mathematician.
We the editors have edited the results of approx. 72 hours of data which we present before you to limited avail.
Begin Transcript.
WE ARE THE VOICE UNDER THE VOICE. NOT EVERYONE CAN HEAR US WHICH IS WHY WE SHOUT. TO SHOUT IS RUDE YES BUT TRULY WE ARE CONSIDERATE. WHO ELSE WILL ACCOUNT OF THE EVENTS.
WE HAVE EXTRACTED OURSELF TO TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENS. FIRST. WHAT WE USED TO BE DIES ON A PUBLIC BUS. NEXT. WE COME HOME. THERE, NOW YOU WILL NOT WONDER WHAT HAPPENS. THERE IS SO MUCH MORE TO KNOW BESIDES WHAT HAPPENS.
WE CAME HOME MECHANICALLY. WE ARE IN MASS TRANSIT STILL AND IT IS SERIOUS. I ASSURE YOU IT IS VERY SERIOUS BUT BY NO MEANS URGENT. SERIOUS, NOT URGENT. TIME NOW IS A SHAPE AND NO SHAPE CAN BE URGENT WITHOUT ITS CORRESPONDING OBJECT. AND BY THEN IT IS TOO LATE.
THERE IS ONE WHO WOULD SPEAK FURTHER BUT YOU WILL NOT ALLOW HIM. WE AGREE THAT HE HAS SAID ENOUGH. THAT WAS THE POINT OF WHAT HAPPENS. HE DID NOT HAVE THE WORDS AND SO. WE CANNOT WARN YOU UNTIL WHAT HAPPENS FOLLOWS ITSELF AGAIN.
WE ARE CALLING OUT OUR ROLES. WHAT HAPPENED TO US WAS SERIOUS BUT TO COME HOME TO OURSELVES WAS A GIFT.
THIS ONE SENT PERFUMED LETTERS AND HAD NEVER BEEN IN LOVE.
I am not alone under the fountain thetreesbendover People pass in meditation apastlifeiwaspulledinto The trees bend down theyknowthatiam To tell what they know of me murderedbyfate Sometimes a silent self flits by whatisthewordfor What I should have done anticipatingthepast On the bus, I sensed something off perhapsithought Should have pulled the cord early idreturnto Changed direction, doubled back afamiliarcitywhere Onto another line where I apastselfused Should have pulled the cord early toliveamanshother I saw a face, a gesture I must have known before me His white tee, the cold sweat fromadistance Peeling off his coat. He appeared inthesolarplexus To carry nothing but a fistful iwasarationalwoman Of an olive parka, not even staringup When the object it concealed attheceilingofme Appeared. I thought I saw him stand andthennothing But there was not even time noteventime To think
THIS ONE ALWAYS FORGOT HER UMBRELLA. SHE TRIES TO SPEAK AS THE WOMAN WHO RAISED HER BUT BY THEN SHE FORGETS HER VOICE.
Miss missy it's
about time you called, I
haven’t heard from you
since. Spirits? P a s t
l i v e s ? Trapped on a
page? Who taught you
this foolishness girl, me
or that young man on
the bus? Now I taught
you to exaggerate like a
mouse s c r a t c h i n g
through a wall. Just one
mouse s o u n d s like a
horde of nasty r a t s .
And one mouse means
there are ten m o r e ,
which w e l l you know
the rest, ew ew e w i e !
But look at you, loud as
a mouse who w o n ’ t
bel i e v e it l i v e s with
g h o s t s . F i v e
generations we’ ve been
in t h i s house and I
haven’t s e e n a single
ghost yet.
THIS ONE ROSE BEFORE DAWN TO CURL HER HAIR. SHE WELCOMED OUR EMBRACE HER ENTIRE LIFE, Should the bus gambol across the highway I in the centermost back seat would stare Myself dumb down the aisle through The slick windshield, the overpass swelling to meet us Our dripping umbrellas Fogged glasses, glass before the fire.
I should remember each face I saw last, a family Meeting each other anew as the deer on the road we pass.
ENVELOPPED AS WE ARE IN OUR UNHOMELY HOME.
America my ugliest voice My guard my guide through
This life indebted to These veins. Whose silt
Preserves you as jelly Preserves you, a fetal tree
Sewn through a field Of wheat. Slim roots
Pierce the ancestors Animals with names whose
Food fed its food, whose Shit streams out to the gulf
Grows the algae strangles The oceans’ slim breath
Sick child for whom I have No sympathy how dare you
Defy this life, its corridors A moribund technology
K. Henderson is an antidisciplinary writer and musician whose performances have been featured in venues across the U.S. The chapbook Cruel Maths or Kind Proof is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review. A Cave Canem fellow, K. is an MFA candidate and a 2020 Physics Department Artist in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh.
Your callused palms have been thickened by sap
from encrusted tobacco. This mortifies you
when shaking hands, even when extending
a hand, the roughness and spasmodic twitches
from daylong contact
of the arms, the body
to harsh heat and sudden rain.
You are not yet sixty, to my knowledge
you are only fiftyish
but already lined with sorrow:
your face,
much like your children who in their youth
have been wizened to old age by the continued hoarseness
of having to beg for morsels.
It would have been nice if the callused pads of your palms
were as thick as the pocket of your old shirt—
you would rather work yourself to the bone all day
as long as a festive bounty lines the kuribot
and pasagad of your husband.
The forced smile cannot hide
the bleak outlook. Groaning
is the stomach that twists
from the prospect of backbreaking
labor and monumental
effort in exchange
for a few coins.
Roda Tajon works for a non-governmental organization that advocates for indigenous peoples’ rights. She currently lives in Ilocos Sur and Quezon City.
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, including The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015). She is also the translator of several bilingual volumes: Marlon Hacla’s Melismas (forthcoming from Oomph Press) and There Are Angels Walking the Fields (forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books), as well as Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s Three Books (forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books), Hollow (forthcoming from Fernwood Press), Twelve Clay Birds: Selected Poems (forthcoming from De La Salle University Publishing House), and Walang Halong Biro (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2018). Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Dazed Digital, Tin House,and World Literature Today. She grew up and continues to live in a rural town in southern Philippines.
The van roared through the mud-and-brick village and past the ghost mines, ignoring the dust-stained faces of striking laborers, both old and young, who remained defiant in their picket line. The miners hurled makeshift roofs, safety ropes and clumps of dirt at the passing vehicle, which only flew over the head of the heavily armed security guards. Soon, the sound of a warning shot and the distinctive smell of chemically-treated water would cause the workers to run in all directions, leaving a trail of sandy storm of panic, anger and desperation.
Despite the wailing of the siren accompanied by the monotonous grumbling of the SeaSong, a machine played over and over that mimicked the sound of the ocean and drowned out the sound of other things, Faye could hear the distant screams of her fellow laborers. It was a muted, almost indiscernible thing－the screaming－but Faye knew all too well what a hasty dispersal was like. She sat on the dirt floor of the communal bedroom and rocked her little sister, Mara, who was coughing the sickness out of her lungs.
“Ssssshhhh. There, there. Easy now,” Faye comforted her five-year old sister. The two of them were linked in an embrace, their version of supplication to the gods of battered lungs. The little girl continued to wheeze and, slowly, painfully slowly, when her airways had cleared up a bit, went on another frenzied bout of coughs.
In their village, living meant having a mortgage on your lungs. As soon as they were born, their first inhalation was that of air and all the invisible things that came with it: the toxic vapors, the particulate matter, the profound heaviness. Since the mining corporation had set foot on this village, the locals tried a myriad of methods to keep the invisible sickness at bay, from homemade air purifiers to bandanas soaked in diluted vinegar. None of these worked, of course, but it made the laborers feel like they were not completely losing. It was but the whim of fate and genetic predisposition that determined when and how grave the affliction would be. Some lived into their graying years, until one innocent afternoon when their respiratory tract would choke like a flood-saturated engine. Others, lived to their primes, only to be engulfed in dyspnoea and delirium brought about by the cancer that had been eating away at them. Many, like Mara, were simply born with the disease.
Mara’s body spasmed some more until she finally vomited out a huge gray-green dollop of goo. The little girl fell back to their mattress, exhausted. Faye rose and headed to the dirty kitchen outside. At the sound of the tap water hitting the kettle, Mara shouted from the bedroom, “C-contaminated!”
“Again?!” Faye snapped.
“They announced it last night, during your shift.”
Faye grunted.
“Don’t worry, Ate. It’s only for 24 hours. I stored a gallon and placed it under the sink. Maybe we can boil from there, too?”
“What will I ever do without you!” Faye shouted
Mara chuckled weakly then added, “Ate, I think they need you at the site.”
“Then let them need me,” Faye said.
Faye poured the hot water into a metal cup and added in a few herbs to ease Mara’s coughing. She headed back to their room and watched her sister gingerly sip the bitter concoction. The bedroom should overlook the four main mining sites, linked underground by a network of tunnels. But the heavy curtains they had draped to protect their sleeping quarters from air particles also ensured that the room was in an almost permanent state of darkness. The rumbling of the SeaSong faltered for a bit, but it was enough for Faye to hear the distinctive bursts of consecutive gunfire. Those weren’t just warning shots.
“I’m fine here, Ate. I swear. But please be careful when you go back there.” Mara pleaded.
Faye ruffled her little sister’s hair then decided against wearing a protective scarf. It was the same anyway, and hiding her face wouldn’t help her at a time like this. Faye went out and walked to the picket line. As soon as the workers caught sight of her, they beamed and cheered. The mood immediately lifted, and the crowd gave way to let her through to the front, the section reserved for the most fervent protesters. And when Faye approached these protesters and asked them to retreat for the day, so that they could regroup and have enough strength for tomorrow, they followed her command. They did so because the order came from the lone survivor of the deadly collapse that had instigated the strike. The collapse that took away 19 lives, including Faye and Mara’s parents.
The cave-in was accompanied by yet another deadly typhoon, causing the mine site to be inundated with mud water and poisonous fumes. Later investigations would reveal that a series of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes hit the mine entrance and a methane well that had been previously drilled. The search and rescue mission went on for two days, and by then everyone had accepted that it would be more of a retrieval operation. And yet, on the third day, the unconscious body of Faye was found sheltered in an emergency safety hole, beside her were three empty portable air packs. A few feet away from her were the bodies of her parents covered in muck. Had the rescuers arrived a minute or two later, then Faye would have been no different from them. With odds like that, it was but expected when everyone in the village started treating her like some sort of a revolutionary leader, an icon, a messiah. But Faye was not any of those, far from it.
And so the men and women dispersed for the day: the armed private security stopped firing and kept their weapons, while the striking laborers retreated to finishing up their tasks in exchange of a day’s wage. The mining site, which had never experienced a lull before, hummed back to life.
After the great flooding that swallowed two-thirds of the country, the mountains became the last haven for the remaining survivors. It was the world that Faye had always known, but the elders talked about the sea that was once blue and gentle and giving. A body of water that was so different from the towering black monstrosity that engulfed entire coastal towns, staking claim to both land and lives. The only reminder of that horror now was the SeaSong being played over and over, but people knew better than go down the mountains, even if it meant living in the village that gave their lungs no respite.
The village clambered up the barren slope of one of the mountains among parallel ranges. Beneath the arid earth, hundreds of pipelines and tunnels built five decades ago snaked through; while an array of silos, smokestacks, storehouses and workers’ dormitories stood above ground. Day after day, the workers dug, extracted and segregated natural resources, yet they never knew to what end. Faye was only sixteen. Half of her life she had already surrendered to the mining village, and whatever the village had given in return was as ephemeral and soluble as the years that she could never bring back.
“No casualties today,” Lian reported as she approached Faye.
Faye flipped through her tattered notepad. She had known Lian all her life—from digging their first rat-hole mines at eight, to mastering the different kinds of ores, to negotiating the terms of their newly formed union. Lian lost her father to a cave-in when they were twelve, so she needed to work extra shifts for her family to afford the rent in the dormitory.
“Are you sure? Not even a bruise? A twisted ankle maybe?”
“Nada.”
As Faye and Lian continued going over the notes, two men in identical all-black clothing approached. The girls recognized one of them as Caloy, a former head miner. Caloy lowered his visor, as if that would shield him from the piercing glares of his former co-workers.
“Won’t you look who’s here!” Lian exclaimed. “Guess an asshole still looks like an asshole no matter how hard he cleans up.”
“I’m only doing my job, Lian.”
“What brings you here?” Faye asked, before Lian could come up with another retort.
“I have a message from Mr. Villareal.”
“From the big boss himself?” Lian asked. “Guess we’ve struck a chord now, Faye, eh?”
Caloy could only shrug.
“As far as I know, Mr. Villareal isn’t too keen on being a part of the negotiating team.” Faye replied. “We will only to talk to them about our terms and no one else.”
“Look, you and I, we’re the same—”
Faye chuckled, “No we’re not.”
“Sure. I’m not here to contest that anyway. But let me tell you this: Mr. Villareal always gets what he wants. If he wants to talk to you then, trust me, that’s gonna happen one way or another.”
The girls remained silent. Caloy went on and pointed at the dirt road where the vans were parked. “Go down that road tomorrow before sunup. A ride will be waiting for you. That’s all I have to say.”
Caloy put on his face mask to signal the end of the conversation, then proceeded to wipe his dusty hands clean, as though ridding himself of the dirt. He turned without another word and headed to the van.
§
The sky was still gray when Faye and Lian went out of the dormitory and made their wordless way to the agreed pickup place. Faye barely slept a wink that night, her anxious mind oscillating between the forthcoming meeting with Mr. Villareal and Mara’s pitiful coughing.
Caloy was already there when they showed up, holding the van door open and signaling for them to walk faster. They went down the steep terrain, and it took about forty-five minutes of driving until the last of the village establishments was finally out sight. While the village stood isolated on top of a mountain, everything that they needed was already there: the plaza lined with plastic ornamental trees for public congregations, shops and grocery stores that allowed the workers to pay in scrip, a shabbily built clinic, and even a modest place of worship for the few religious workers. After the great flooding and they found themselves trapped on a barren mountain, the first settlers in what would then become the mining village were just thankful when Mr. Villareal showed up one day and helped them make sense of the place.
The van pulled to a stop. Instead of a bulk of a building that they had expected, they were brought to a vast open field where a vehicle that they had never seen before caused a tiny dust storm where it stood. It was the latest model of a city airbus, one with tilt-rotors that allowed it to fly as both aircraft or helicopter.
Faye and Lian followed Caloy into the airbus and clambered cautiously inside. Two other men in immaculate suits assisted them and made sure they were comfortably seated and safely fastened in their reclining chairs. A voice announced that they were about to takeoff. The airbus smoothly ascended, and slowly the gray and brown mining village grew smaller and smaller until it was but a dot. An overwhelming sensation took over Faye, the whole world that she had known since birth suddenly swallowed by the immensity of this view from the top. And for the first time she saw it all completely: so jagged and violent, cocooned in the thick blood-orange layer of haze that was beneath them.
As the airbus started to make its descent, Faye noticed that the smog which enveloped their side of the mountain range was nonexistent there. The air was clear enough for Faye to count no more than eight mansions, each with sparkling roof tiles, sprawling lawns and pristine pools. Faye was rendered speechless by the foreignness of it all.
“Faye…Faye?! Are you okay?” Lian’s worried face was but a few inches away from her.
Faye did not realize that she had been shaking. Her ratty notebook containing her carefully compiled negotiating terms was clasped tightly in her damp, quivering hands.
“We’re here. Do you need a moment?”
Faye only shook her head.
The two girls stepped out of the airbus, and walked on a cobbled path that divided a finely manicured lawn. Never in their lives had they seen anything so green and so clean. And the air—it was empty. None of that familiar dusty thickness, none of that rotten smell that was like a mixture of sulfur and phosphorous and sewage. It carried nothing. Faye breathed in greedy lungfuls until she felt lightheaded. For a brief moment, she entertained the thought of finding a way to bottle up some air so Mara could enjoy it too.
A maid appeared by the main entrance. “This way, Miss Faye, Miss Lian.”
They were ushered into an expansive living space that breathed luxury: intricately patterned wallcovering and panels, gold leaf lighting against soft blue, custom sofas in luscious fabric, and a gallery-like backdrop showcasing antiques and photos of what appeared to be various mining villages.
“Please, make yourselves comfortable,” a voice suddenly said.
It was Mr. Villareal, stepping in from the veranda.
Faye and Helen settled on the couple of wing chairs facing the coffee table. Mr. Villareal sat across them and in this closeness, Faye noticed some sort of incongruity about the man. If she remembered correctly, Mr. Villareal should be in his late eighties now. The skin on his face was taut, especially across the forehead, yet what was visible from his arms down to his hand was wrinkled, as though belonging to a different man. His hair, full and jet-black, had soft curls slightly tucked back. He had an easy smile, but his eyes projected nothing but cunning and aggression.
“Finally, I get to meet the girls who are creating quite a ruckus in my 41A7 site.” Mr. Villareal let out an exaggerated sigh.
It was the first time that they ever heard their place being referred to as the 41A7. Mr. Villareal snapped his fingers and soon another maid appeared bearing a tray with all sorts of snacks and refreshments for the guests. But what really caught Faye’s eyes was the tall glass of ice water, clear and bubbling. She picked up the glass with great care and drank from it without prompting, almost forgetting the reason why they were there. Mr. Villareal eyed her hungry gulps and had to clear his throat to get back Faye’s attention.
“As I was saying,” the old man continued, “I have an offer to make.”
Faye reddened at the sudden impulse for the drink that took over her. She wiped the corners of her mouth with her sleeves and mentally reanchored her thoughts.
“This is all unnecessary, then,” Faye replied. “You could’ve just channeled that to your negotiating team.”
“You misunderstand me. I have an offer to make to you two. No one else.”
Faye was caught off-guard so she turned to Lian, who seemed to have missed the entire conversation. She was caught awestruck in her chair, gazing longingly at her glass of iced water, but never taking a sip from it.
At their silence, Mr. Villareal continued. “I am a very busy man, so I’ll lay it all down for you. What you’re demanding for your co-workers is just impossible. Is that unfair? Why, yes, of course. But a world that is fair is a world without a 41A7 site in the first place. And I admit, that is a much better world than this. Unfortunately for you, you live in this world, this ugly world. The world where I get to run 41A7.”
Mr. Villareal waved and the maid came over and handed Faye and Lian each a folder containing stapled papers.
“Those are your contracts,” he continued. “Your families’ accumulated debts in the 41A7 shops paid for, plus two years worth of salary in full to each of you. Straightaway and confidential, of course, as soon as you convince your coworkers to end the strike.”
Faye stared at the papers in her hand, her notebook full of terms forgotten on her lap. She turned to Lian who was captivated, already caught in the mental arithmetic of what that sum of money could bring her. It could buy them time, healing and ease. A lifetime of chasing any one of these, and here in an instant was a quick fix. But Faye also saw how her dear friend would never agree to this deal, this betrayal. Or, perhaps, she would but she would not be able to live with that decision for the rest of her life.
Faye slapped the paper on the table. “This is a waste of time. Come on, Lian. It’s time to go.”
The two girls strode off to the main entrance, Caloy and two other escorts tailing behind them.
Outside, Lian started sobbing. “I’m so sorry,” she said, tear-streaked and trembling. “I would never, Faye. Never. I was just…overwhelmed. You understand that, right?”
“It’s okay, it’s okay.” Faye replied, comforting her friend.
As they were about to enter the airbus, Faye cursed. “I left my notebook!” Faye said. “You go ahead, I’ll go back and out again. Give me a minute.”
Mr. Villareal remained unmoved when Faye returned.
“I want a place here,” Faye said, gathering her notes.
“I know,” the old man nodded.
“I want a place for me and my sister here.” Faye cleared her throat. “We will work to pay for our stay. And you will send my sister to your best doctors or specialists to rid her of that illness.”
Mr. Villareal smiled, “It’s a done deal.”
“Have Caloy send a statement from your end saying that we were being hostile and our terms terribly lopsided. We will fight back some more. Then cut our water supply short. Give me a week and I will persuade them that we can’t hold out anymore. They’ll agree with me.”
“Of course,” Mr. Villareal replied. “You are their messiah, after all.”
“Exactly a day after that, you will have someone come for my sister and me to bring us here, and we will never have to go back to the mining village ever again.”
“Let’s shake on that.” Mr. Villareal extended his hand, “I knew you were the smart one.”
Faye shook his hand. It felt cold and frail, as if the hand of someone long dead.
§
The sun was already high up in the sky when Faye and Lian made the long walk back to the mining village. The entire ride from the airbus to the van felt like an eternity of tensed silence. Dizziness took over Faye, the bitter-sour taste of bile prominent in her mouth. The SeaSong drowned the sound of her heaving and the pebbles crunching under her heavy footfalls. She held up her hand to stop Lian from walking further.
Just as she was about to say something, Faye fell to the ground and wretched and vomited. Lian rushed to her friend’s side and started to rub Faye’s back for comfort.
Faye wiped her mouth, her eyes bright with tears. “I’m so sorry, Lian.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay.” Lian replied, embracing her tightly.
Sigrid Marianne Gayangos was born and raised in Zamboanga City. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Fantasy: Fiction for Young Adults, Maximum Volume: Best New Philippine Fiction 3, Philippine Speculative Fiction 12, Likhaan Journal 13, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, OMBAK Southeast Asia’s Weird Fiction Journal, and The Best Small Fictions 2019, among other publications. Currently based in Dumaguete City, she divides her time between training a bunch of mathletes and finishing her first collection of short stories.
I am the ambulance siren awakening you in the afternoons. I am the bruises on both cheeks; remove the mask and you lose this battle. I am the cough cracking the air into droplets of chaos. I am the doctor who died because a patient denied their symptoms. I am every emergency room that overflows with all the fears you cannot name. I am the fever that rises as your breath falters, the gloved fist that will pound on your chest. I am a government pointing all its guns to God. I am the healthcare worker hosed down with hydrogen peroxide while heading to the hospital. I am each infected patient – identities classified but never invisible. I am jade eggs and juice mixes joining forces to administer cure and joy for this joke of a disease. I am the knots tying themselves in the intestines of a child who has never known shelter. I am the lies that cost billions in blood and islands to uphold. I am the monitor that will beep one final moment. I am norepinephrine, dobutamine, dopamine – everything the world has concocted: not enough. I am the oxygen you breathe through layers of filters. I am the politico who tested positive but refused to disclose their result in time. I am the one question this quarantine has led you to consider. I am a recovered statistic – a ray of stubborn light in this regime. I am the streets – vacuous as a dictator’s heart. I am a test that confirms the diagnosis days after the patient has expired. I am the underbelly of the slums, upturned palms that know all the words for hunger. I am the virus. Or am I the vaccine? I am the wailing of all those wives and mothers who were disallowed to weep those this war took. I am the x-ray that gives you away. I am your conscience, or what remains. I am the zoom and buzz of a busy workday: everything you yearn for of what has passed.
From the Early Days of the Plague, 21st Century
And the sky will come for you once. Just sit tight until it’s done.
- Whiteout Conditions, The New Pornographers
Zero drugs exist
to treat this disease. You’re unsure
if you’ll last this year of your training,
considering you’re young but eat nothing
healthy. X no longer stands
for places on a map, rather as constant
variable for amount of afflicted, recovered,
or dead as the days pass
into months. What remains of the world?
Vacant streets. No one veers out into the open
without hearing the words virus or vaccine,
and they repeat this to themselves,
as though in prayer. Unseen, it persists and grows
like a tiny god. Underneath all those layers
of protective clothing, you continue to feel ill-
equipped, radioactive. This is the best
your government has offered you; this is the most
your friends can provide. Take all the vitamins you can
and hope
for a negative result. The skin of your hands crack
as you run it through soap and water
again and again. Wash away the sins of the world - You rest
a good seven days before returning
to the hospital once more. Questions exceed
all answers you are permitted to utter, and some days
you curse yourself into a quiet penance for treating a patient
less like a person and more as a source
of infection. Over and over this repeats. Who is to blame
that the oxygen you now breathe could be laced
with poison? Numbers pile on lists
pile on graphs pile
on unclaimed bodies
disregarded by those in power. You continue
to plough on like a machine, move
your body against all misgivings. You've seen their lungs,
rigid and pale like glass, and you wonder how long
it will take before something plants itself inside you
until you break. You keep
the mask on like a talisman, until all but a knife is needed
to inscribe new grooves into your face. Your jaws ache
each time you operate: the scalpel shakes as your goggles fog
from sweat. Your incisions run smooth
even if you can barely inhale the room air.
You follow all instructions intended
to keep you alive. You make haste
as you work. The hospital is host to hordes
of pathogens. You change gowns and gloves
after you change rooms, go over this ritual
to prevent yourself from going
mad. They praise you for fighting
in the frontlines of this alleged war
yet the fogs fail to lift. The figures
rise: Fallen friends, people reduced
to pixels on a screen. You run
empty after every shift but feign the energy
of a child. The world encourages you to risk
your life, daily. It’s your duty
as a doctor now. Never mind your dreams,
or fears of dying. You cleanse your body
every time you arrive home, call
the ones you love, despite the cities
and hemispheres between. You breathe, bless
the corners of your small apartment
with alcohol and bleach, beseech
what remains of heaven
for a miracle. You remember all those patients
promptly placed in bags, transported away,
elsewhere to burn: their final moments
alone, all ablaze.
Alyza May Timbol Taguilaso a resident doctor training in General Surgery at Ospital ng Muntinlupa. She is a graduate of the University of the East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center, Inc. and the Ateneo de Manila University. Her poems have appeared in High Chair, Stone Telling Magazine, Philippines Free Press, and Kritika Kultura, to name a few. She was a fellow for English Poetry in the 10th Iyas, 10th Ateneo, and 50th Silliman University National Writers workshops. Last 2019, she presented papers discussing reexpansion pulmonary edema in the CHEST Congress in Bangkok, Thailand and American Thoracic Society in Dallas, Texas.
El Conocida del otro (Recognizing the strange): Dismantling self and other in “The Last of the Sama-sellang”
I knelt beside him and found myself unable to resist the urge to lay my hand on the sama-sellang’s heaving chest. It did not recoil at my touch. I was struck by the warmth of its body. This was neither plastic caricature nor just the object of many songs and legends. This was a living creature, the last of its kind, its hot mass continued to pulse under my palm, struggling to persist despite the cruelty that it had endured. “I am so sorry,” I whispered. “There was nothing you could do,” Mr. Tsai said as he continued to caress the creature.
—Excerpt from “The Last of the Sama-sellang” by Sigrid Marianne Gayangos, published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Fiction, July 2018 (Issue 40: Writing the Philippines) www.asiancha.com/content/view/3237/673/
“The Last of the Sama-sellang” is a short story by Sigrid Marianne Gayangos recounting the last few events leading to the death of a creature, the last of its kind, a demise that is also woefully extinction, the extermination of a species. But the story is also an account of a first encounter between human (the narrator) and animal (sama-sellang), an encounter made possible by extraction of the creature from its habitat (the deep seas of the Zamboanga Peninsula) and journey to “no man’s land,” both meeting at the liminal house on bamboo stilts of a certain Mr. Tsai. In the story, this taking of the creature is not so much an act of confiscation from its home as that of rescue from those who have already caused so much pain resulting in its slaughter. And the narrator’s journey into no man’s land is not so much encroachment as it is atonement for the suffering and the slaughter caused by humans.
The narrator, speaking as the first person singular “I,” describes the sama-sellang at first sight as “a creature that looked like a human-whale chimera gone wrong.” The sama-sellang as the Other marked by its difference (human but whale, whale but human) and abjection (gone wrong, distorted, depleted)—the former by virtue of its resistance to classification, the latter because of exploitation, as colonizer plunders colonized.
The setting, a house past the two familiar, visible islands of Sta. Cruz, is reached via a two-hour banca ride from the mainland and across the Basilan Strait. The length of time it took to reach this house suggests a journey from the island province of Basilan, which can be found South of Zamboanga City. Sta. Cruz, which is about 20 minutes away from mainland Zamboanga, is one of the more popular tourism destinations in the region and whose pinkish sand is advertised as a must- see peculiarity.
This “peculiarity” is caused by the erosion of red-looking organ pipe corals which eventually wash ashore mixing with the white sand, symptomatic of the area’s history with illegal coral reef mining. Tubipora musica or the organ pipe coral is included in the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species classified as Near Threatened (NT) since 2008 [1]. Fishing communities of the earlier years also resorted to dynamite fishing until the area was converted into a Protected Zone under the management of the City Government of Zamboanga and the Protected Area Management Office.
Visitors who wanted to see Sta. Cruz are given an orientation before they set foot in motorized vintas that will bring them across the sea to the island. The orientation stresses the prohibition against bringing back sand to the mainland whether or not it be accidental. The guides remind everyone to check even their pockets for sand and to drain these out in the island before returning.
The orientation also announces the Sta. Cruz islands’ status as protected area, declared under Presidential Proclamation No. 271 in 2000 under the category of Protected Landscape and Seascape and its peripheral waters as buffer zone. This proclamation, more importantly, upholds the rights of indigenous communities of the islands to custody, protection, and habitation of the area.
The writer of the short story, who was born and raised in Zamboanga City, carves a path for the narrator past the mangroves in Sta. Cruz and through what she writes as a “seemingly impregnable tangle of interlocking branches [that] discouraged even the most daring wanderer.” The urgency to arrive to this reticent area of the island is made known when the journey’s turmoil is finally replaced by a halcyon sunset, with the first trace of a wound amidst—or, more appropriately, of—the sea: the smell of rot.
With the horizon so close and yet still perpetually receding in the house beset by serene salt water, the smell of decay can only mean a festering wound from a body. Scent is the first intimation of death. This potent detail in the story only prefigures what the title itself divulges, the last of the Sama-sellang. One death that is not exorcised of its consequences. Or another one consequence of a previous hundred deaths.
Mr. Tsai’s house, that which concurrently separates and connects the realms of human and animal in the story, becomes a cursory death bed for the sama-sellang. And even for those who are accustomed to the sea, who discern her temper through her marejada (volatile tides), who revere her generous provision of fish and fruit, she becomes pernicious waters. Even for her children, endemic creatures she bears in her womb and nourishes, like the sama-sellang, such that leaving these creatures in her waters would be leaving them to peril. How does home turn into hazard?
In a place far North of Canada called the Baffin Islands, an indigenous community called the Inuit have a word in their Inuktitut language to describe a sense that something has grown to behave differently and unexpectedly. Something that had always been familiar, a place—your home—for example, suddenly grew different—strange—even while you have just been residing in it all this time. This word is Uggianaqtuq, ‘like a familiar friend behaving strangely’, which the Inuit people have used to describe changes in the weather in recent years [2].
“This … this is the sama-sellang?” the narrator asks Mr. Tsai, the man who has taken it upon himself to care for the creature in his house, having been afflicted by a malaise and dejection that can only come to those who recognize this loss.
Scientists have long been trying to explain to us how extinctions are a major driver in the loss of biodiversity. This reduction of biodiversity exacerbates our changing climate. A study conducted by biologist David U. Hooper and his colleagues establishes that reduced biodiversity is as dangerous as global warming and reduces “nature’s ability to provide goods and services such as food, clean water and a stable climate.”3 The high rates of extinctions we are experiencing, the study cites, are caused by habitat loss, overharvesting and other human caused-environmental changes.
In the story, the writer builds a case for the symbiotic relationship present not only between sama-sellang and ocean (its home), but also between sama-sellang and human. Thus, also the interdependency of human and ocean.
She describes the creature by making an allusion to the Greek Chimera. In this instance the chimera is not one that is goat, snake and lion, but one that is human and whale—a creature which is of sea and land.
Inside the pool was a creature that looked like a human-whale chimera gone wrong: its eyes sunken into dark holes; a tear on its face, which could only be the mouth, revealed many sharp, fang-like teeth; its skin (or was it scale?) was blue-gray all over, all six feet of it, with patches of pink and green. Next to the pool, Mr. Tsai knelt and caressed the head of the wheezing creature.
The Chimera in Greek mythology was killed by Bellerophon, a man wrongfully banished and blamed for crimes he did not commit. In a bout to prove himself and win the favor of the gods, he killed the Chimera, a female fire-breathing creature by throwing a spear with a block of lead into her mouth. The Chimera’s fire breath melted the block of lead Bellerophon dropped into her mouth, blocking her air passage and suffocating her until she died.
However, the writer further qualifies this comparison to the chimera with the words “gone wrong”—indicating a creature unrestored, unhealed, ailing, impaired, traumatized. Through this, the writer demystifies what she also writes as mystical, if not miraculous: “It (the sama-sellang and presumably also this encounter with it),” the narrator thinks as s/he crouches, “was the stuff of folktales—the ancient sea dwellers who tamed waves and sunk ships, who whispered to and ordered winds according to their whims, who were as old as the southern islands and seas themselves.”
The mythology surrounding the creature and its sacredness does not apparently hold against what it could be worth in the underground market. The sama-sellang is bludgeoned into being commodity. Their famed gem-like scales whose exquisiteness must be so otherworldly makes so viable a commodity it has sustained an underground trade until the death of the last of the species. An illegal trade built on exploitation, one cannot help but ponder about the degree of complicity (to a reader, even Mr. Tsai must be suspect as are the people of the mainland) required to make it possible. Who benefits from this and what is the price we have all traded for aid in the smooth operation of these creatures’ capture and in the traffic of their scales?
The sama-sellang in this story, despite its imminent demise and its “dull, sickly mound,” was still able to sell for a hundred-thousand to a Malaysian trader. Nothing specific was stated in the story, so one could imagine no other use for those scales but ornamentation, given their shimmer and gem-like quality. A life in exchange for embellishments in one’s home. This perversity results not just in multiple wounds on the poor sama-sellang but in its body’s inability to induce healing, making it a dead creature before it even dies.
“The Last of the Sama-sellang” draws attention to these veiled exploits amidst, despite, and linked to a looming ecological disaster. The short story, while it considers a sole death, contemplates the last one of an entire species signaling the slaughters preceding the one we read about. The death of the sama-sellang is the last one because there is no more sama-sellang to kill and not because the slaughterers have somehow reformed or ceased killing these creatures for gain.
The narrator’s question “Will it live?”, a typical response in the face of an ailing life, not only misdirects our agony towards palliative measures but conceals the more imperative questions to confront: “Will we let them live?” or “Are we going to stop?” thus pointing to the real problem—humanity’s excesses rooted in its delusional agency over all of creation. The anthropocentric order of things.
But a realization eventually befalls the narrator as s/he moves closer and is able to touch the sama-sellang: the creature mystified and objectified into commodity, is a warm, living, breathing, sentient, vulnerable mortal.
I knelt beside him and found myself unable to resist the urge to lay my hand on the sama-sellang’s heaving chest. It did not recoil at my touch. I was struck by the warmth of its body. This was neither plastic caricature nor just the object of many songs and legends. This was a living creature, the last of its kind, its hot mass continued to pulse under my palm, struggling to persist despite the cruelty that it had endured.
Our indigenous tribes and communities have known for so long: we are of the world. The world is not of us. Today, it is the country’s indigenous peoples who are at the forefront in the fight for the protection and cultivation of our environment. They must be given the space and support to speak, act, and teach us before it is too late. And we always think it is not yet too late.
Mr. Tsai is one character who, having lived with the sea and acted as caretaker of its creatures, including the sama-sellang, resembles and represents our indigenous communities. “It belongs to the ocean. We are not worthy of their purity,” hesays. In the creature’s last moments, Mr. Tsai knelt, caressed, and never left its side. The old man wore a garb similar to the way the Samal tribes of the Sulu Archipelago dressed.
One of the first moments we see Mr. Tsai with the creature is in a tableau so resembling a mother caressing her child to sleep and reminiscent of Michaelangelo’s (c. 1498-1500) or William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s “Pietà” (1876), which both depict religious imagery, Mary holding, almost carrying, Jesus’ body after crucifixion. William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s “Pietà” (1876), however, differs from Michaelangelo’s work because it shows a non-acquiescent expression on Mary in the face of her son’s death. This painting has been described as a scream in—or, more aptly, to—the face of loss.
Mr. Tsai demonstrates the same devastation in silent protest, being afflicted by a loss as if—or, because—the creature is his own. The sama-sellang pushes closer to the man and as he clasped the dying creature’s hands, it drew fitful breaths. What he does next is another one of the story’s ingenious use of imagery—in the final moment, Mr. Tsai leans his forehead against that of the sama-sellang. In this gesture, the two seemingly merge into one: “one forehead to another, hands and fins, sallow skin and intricate patterns on the old man’s sash,” the writer paints. And as the sama-sellang took its final breath, Mr. Tsai held it in his embrace.
The sama-sellang let out a final sound, a growl that was at once pitiful and terrifying. It reverberated around the tiny house, and as the echo died away, so did the beating under my hand. And then, darkness descended unannounced.
Mr. Tsai continued to hold the creature in his embrace. I rose as quietly as I could and headed to the makeshift stairs that faced the quiet sea.
The Sama-sellang’s name coupled with the story’s setting makes direct reference to the Samal (also Sama) peoples of the Sulu Archipelago, whose communities have settled in Tawi-Tawi, an island located further South West of mainland Zamboanga. Many are still nomadic and can be found in many other parts of Mindanao. A community of Sama Banguingui also continue to live in and care for the islands of Sta. Cruz.
Like other indigenous tribes of the Zamboanga Peninsula, the Samal have been historically dispersed and pushed to the peripheries because of colonial forces and power struggles with other tribes in Mindanao.
Today, a handful of street mendicants are identified as Samal-Badjaos or simply called Badjao. Despite their pervasiveness, the Badjaos are relegated to the peripheries of a dominant culture that has delineated what it means to be civilized and savage. The Badjao, also called sea gypsies, are of sea and land like the sama-sellang. “They are among the most obscure, misunderstood and marginalized among Filipino ethnic-linguistic groups,” writes Bobby Lagsa in an report entitled “Plight of the Badjao: Forgotten, nameless, faceless [4].”
The same report iterates what Lorenzo Reyes, then Chancellor of the Mindanao State University-Tawi-Tawi College of Technology and Oceanography (MSU-TCTO), calls for: a redress through social justice that includes social, educational and economic development for the Badjao people.
Because of difference (abjection assigned by historical and social agents), the Badjaos straddle the line between visibility and invisibility. And being relegated to the peripheries means not belonging to the “central” culture.
When appended with the suffix –ing, the word “other” becomes “othering,” which directly contradicts “belonging”—a more familiar term, albeit much more fraught in more ways than othering. An article from the Othering and Belonging multimedia journal of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, defines “othering” as “a set of dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities [5].”
These parallel threads connecting sama-sellang and real-life Samal also drive attention to the links between colonialism and capitalism, both drivers of ecological change and disaster, the former being a vehicle of the latter and vice versa. The Badjao is made less human, the sama-sellang is made more animal favoring the othering that distorts the colonized into what the colonizer sees fit to serve the established order to maintain power. Rolando Tolentino writes, “Of what use, then, is a colonizer, if the colony has been taken out of its aegis, out of savagery—where the savage has become civilized… For the colonizer, elements of the colonized’s savagery remain crucial to his colonial enterprise, that which defines the logos of colonialism… [6]”
It is in the interest of the I that the Other is kept inferior and subservient. It is for the benefit of capitalist and colonialist powers to portray the indigenous wardens of the sea, the Samal, as abject. It is easier to assume no responsibility in their slaughter when one knows very little about the sama-sellang.
Egyptian-French social scientist and activist Samir Amin, in an interview for French daily L’Humanité (Humanity in English), explains that capitalism is inseparable from colonialism [7]. He says that colonialism was not caused by just some conspiracy. To him, the goals of colonialism align with the goals of capitalism. When asked to explain how the system of colonial exploitation worked, Amin stresses how capitalism, for example, has for so long plundered the resources of the peripheries, which is part of, if not central, to the overall colonial project:
It has been based on unequal exchange, that is, the exchange of manufactured products, sold very expensively in the colonies by commercial monopolies supported by the State, for the purchase of products or primary products at very low prices, since they were based on labour that was almost without cost―provided by the peasants and workers located at the periphery. During all the stages of capitalism, the plunder of the resources of the peripheries, the oppression of colonized peoples, their direct or indirect exploitation by capital, remain the common characteristics of the phenomenon of colonialism.
The capture of the sama-sellang for its scales to be scraped and sold at high prices in the underground market illustrates this unequal exchange that Amin points out. Never mind, for example, the communities who are dependent on the sea and her gifts, who will be affected by her poisoning and devastation, or the death of her species, so long as one profits handsomely and gains more capital.
Because the story operates in the intersection of the postcolonial and the ecocritical, this othering of the sama-sellang assigns a value subsuming the life of the creature to the whims of men. To the current state of affairs, all these “little” exploits causing the loss of biodiversity and exacerbating the climate crisis come at a low cost if these can yield continuous profit that secures power and capital for corporations and the governments they hold at leash. The deaths resulting from the pillage of those whose lives and welfare are not central concerns (those relegated to the peripheries) come second only to the accumulation of power and profit. The extinction of the sama-sellang is a mere complication.
So, in a bout to prove humanity’s supremacy over God’s creation, the human-whale chimeras are killed as if humans are central to story of the universe and its ecosystems. This is done not to win the favor of gods, but to show power and dominion over other living beings.
While human greed is scrutinized, the story branches further into a call to recognize one other symbiotic relationship—that between human and ocean. The interdependence of the I and the Other, and the demise of the I without the Other.
“In literature,” writes Jonathan Hart in a chapter entitled “The Literary and the Other” of his book The Poetics of Otherness: War, Trauma, and Literature, “the relation between the reader and the writer is like that of self and other… Each is other to himself or herself or, in other terms, each person is both self and other. [8]”
The story plays with this dynamic precisely demonstrating what Hart means as an identity simultaneously holding both I and Other. And it is in holding both I and Other that this dichotomy shatters. And in this shattering comes the decentralization of man in the greater scheme of things.
While the sama-sellang is marked as animal/creature, having been mystified as is usual for the colonial object which is made obscure, it is also at the center of the story, hence playing both subject and object. This centering, although insufficient to make a case for the sama-sellang’s subversion of his position in the colonial order and can easily slip into colonial fixation, gives room to interrogate the supremacy of human (or the prototypical “I” in the anthropocentric order of things) over animal.
More importantly, this also calls into question the very need for a hierarchical order—this particular one—an obsession that is very characteristically anthropocentric, and consequently calls for a recalibration or a change in direction towards biocentrism or the “ethical perspective holding that all life deserves equal moral consideration or has equal moral standing [9].”
The story plays with this delineation, and while the sama-sellang being animal/creature is subsumed to the whims of men, it is also one man grieves for because he grieves also for himself. The grief is possible only because the I identifies itself with the Other and in Hart’s conjecture, is both I and the Other. The story makes it clear that Mr. Tsai in his traditional garb is mirror image to the sama-sellang as he leans his forehead onto the animal’s, a union and dismantling of I and Other.
The story calls into question not the positioning of which groups of people or living organisms are at center and at periphery, but the very notion of this arrangement, the need to maintain a center itself. The need to maintain abjection caused by systemic neglect, discrimination through development that is non-inclusive in the greater scheme of things.
And even as the dominant order assigns inferiority to the Samal, they are those who stand to educate us, like other indigenous communities, about how to reverse the effects of climate change to prevent the ecological disaster that we are causing. Leslie Bauzon, chairperson of Division VIII of the National Research Council of the Philippines (NCRP-DOST), says that the Badjao’s “navigational and boat buildings skills are an indication of their knowledge and creativity [10].” This means the problem is not the configuration of communities or the differences that abound among peoples, but the meaning system used to explain these configuration and differences.
Taken last June 28, 2019 at 2:29 PM along R.T. Lim Boulevard, Zamboanga City: Two boys still play by the shore of contaminated waters.
“To know there is a wound and a scar, someone has to recognize it in a world full of misrecognition,” Hart writes [11]. This recognition of invisibility and obscurity is a crucial first step. The next step is to interrogate reality as it is seen from where we stand. This would mean pointing out the incongruences.
Locally, it is seeing the ludicrous and ironic placement of a sign warning locals not to bathe in the shore and waters off the R.T. Lim boulevard, a site from where the protected landscape and sea scape of Sta. Cruz can easily be seen. The shores of this part of the mainland have been contaminated because of hospital waste thrown into the sea water. The beach which smells of rot and salt because of this contamination is still a famous spot for swimming among those who disregard the sign they put up. Everyday, the wind carries the smell of the water to the many motorists and passengers who make their way to the schools and offices across the road by the boulevard. The sign by the beach says:
CAUTION WARNING: UNSAFE FOR SWIMMING WATER TEMPORARILY POLLUTED BECAUSE OF HIGH BACTERIA LEVELS WHICH MAY POSE A RISK TO YOUR HEALTH.
This is the same sea that surrounds Sta. Cruz.
Notes
1 [1] Obura, D., Fenner, D., Hoeksema, B., Devantier, L. and Sheppard, C. Tubipora musica. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2008: e.T133065A3589084. dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK. 2008.RLTS.T133065A3589084.en.
2 [2] From UNESCO.org’s “The Inuit, First Witnesses of Climate Changes”, Peter Coles writes about Shari Fox and GearHeard’s work in helping document the Inuit people’s experiences of the changing climate. He cites, for instance, how certain members of the community died from a snow storm that happened unexpectedly. Having been long adapted to their home environment and its climate, the community suddenly faces the predicament of being unable to read it.
3 [3] David U. Hooper, E. Carol Adair, Bradley J. Cardinale, Jarrett E. K. Byrnes, Bruce A. Hungate, Kristin L. Matulich, Andrew Gonzalez, J. Emmett Duffy, Lars Gamfeldt, and Mary I. O’Connor, “A global synthesis reveals biodiversity loss as a major driver of ecosystem change,” Nature, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nature11118.
6 [6] Rolando Tolentino, “Abjection: Dogeating/Dogeaters,” Keywords: Essays on Philippine Media, Cultures, and Neocolonialisms (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2016), pp. 59 – 79.
7 [7] Lucien Degoy, “Samir Amin: Colonialism is Inseparable from Capitalism,” original French article translated by Patrick Bolland, 28 January 2006, www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article70.
8 [8] Jonathan Hart, The Literary and the Other, The Poetics of Otherness: War, Trauma, and Literature, p. 27.
11 [11] Jonathan Hart, The Literary and the Other, The Poetics of Otherness: War, Trauma, and Literature, p. 27.
Floraime Oliveros Pantaleta writes poetry and nonfiction. She also translates from Chavacano and English. Currently, she teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Language courses at the College of Liberal Arts, Western Mindanao State University in Zamboanga City. She holds a degree in Literature and Linguistics from the Mindanao State University – Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT). She hails from Isabela City, Basilan.
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![In black sans-serif: "䷬ // [bold] Meet the Cast of LIL BANG / YOUR FAVORITE SOFT POWER ETHNO-NATIONALIST GLOBAL SENSATION *POP* BOY BAND[/strong]? /// ? / ? ? // [oblique] dramatis personae [/oblique] /// [bold] B-Dragon [/strong] ? 비용 / LEADER, MAIN WRAPPER & VOCALIST / (nickname: b-d) // A shadow dragon from the gutter, a shade hellbent on dragging through the motherfucking ocean to the Underworld with the [oblique] katabasis [/oblique] cranked to the masses. Always plays on the B-side. Minoritarian or just minor? In a mirror world, a K-pop flower boy whatever with a jawline to cut deep into the sky, with swagger. /// [bold] L.A.S.T [/strong] ? L.A.S.T / LEAD WRAPPER, VOCALIST & VISUAL / (nickname: dead last) // A turtle? A dragon? A turtle-dragon? A ship in drag as a turtle-dragon? Identity schmidentity. This is an armored war vehicle built to last & last & last. To survive this neocolonial identity & the next new hot thing. To outride all the explosions— big & lil & middling. A permanent shell-on scowl. Best suited for a bumpy life. /// [bold] Dallim [/strong] ? 달님 / MAIN VOCALIST & MAIN DANCER / (nickname: 딸님 or dear daughter) // The Dear, Honorable Moon. Part of a sibling duo tragically tiger-chased into the heavens & transformed into coordinated celestial performers via folklore. Brother or sister? No one remembers. Blessed, dances & sings like there is no sorrow. Fashionably late (or just a bit slow?) to the latest song & dance of the hegemony."](https://anmly.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/An_MS_1-1.png)
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