From Kawiñtun üyelüwün mew / Ceremonia de los nombres / Ceremony of the Names
KAYU
We haven’t forgotten you, Huichapán, sad wandering puma, we haven’t forgotten you. Do you still carry jerkey and island water in your flour sack season after season? And visions of mushroomsin your eyes fatally wounded by the distance? Puma warrior, do you still sing your mother’s earthly songs when you dream, drunk and alone, before the river of dawn? The wind is the traveler’s only homeland, Huichapán, and the night is the country of the orphaned child fragrant of the sea under the dark waves of trees. Inché kuñifal meu, kiñe rümei nga ñi dungun, küme huentru ngefuli epu rumeafui nga ñi dungu. I wander dejected over your lands, little sister, I wander dejected. But I have my word, but I have my word, the vagabond riches I offer your heart.
REGLE
From Alto Huilío passing through Freire, came Margarita the infidel warria. Oh, body of oak, Ancacoy of the forests, house of the thrush, nest of the light. Will you now sweep the countryside’s leaves, the mud, the rain, the dust of the south? Will you cut firewood, will you drink mate, will you make fry bread for the new sun? Sad Margarita, your mother sings to you, your son dreams about you, the laurel calls your name. Sad Margarita, Ancacoy of the meadow, raulí tree turned green, hidden flower.
PURRA
What will these lands say about me now that I’m returning with my face distorted by the salty pampa winds? Will you even remember my name, sorcer’s stones of the hills, when I pass before you to plead for my fate? Are the enemies of travelers aware I carry potent talismans under a gray makuñ tehuelche unraveled by the snow? As a young man I set out for the eastern passes carefree as the thrushes’ song illuminated by dawn. ¡Kintupurrai inche pingey! –I shouted to the heavens— ¡Kintupurrai inche pingey! Seeker of flowers and waters, a merchant and a pilgrim, I got lost with my pouches of liquor in the immense Land of Apples. Through fields carpeted with Coirons where my caciques reign over sands and lakes, alone I rode. Paillacán, Foyel, Sayhueque, Tereupán, Antuleguén sat singing before the fire to drink from my liquor. Po alué, efkütuaimün, po alué. Kümelkaimün pu fochüm, kümelkaimün. Nekelepe kewan, kuchiyu ñielafimün. Dead souls, join me in a toast. Dead souls, Let no brothers quarrel, we beg you, Let no knives gleam in the fickle cup of night.
AYLLA
We reached the edge of a river, hot shade of Andean cacti. The hills were sleeping like condors beneath the sun’s fierce areolae stricken with altitude sickness. In the bread we carried our rituals along with incessant whispering of defunct tongues. Hummingbirds bled in the air sipping in circling flights from sudden mountain blossoms. In the light, stones were rolling toward the Father of Waters. They asked, Who is your grandfather? Where is your chachay’s horse in the dense afternoon fog? Wallün feytüfa mongen zungu, wallün feytüfa lan zungun – wiñolzunguyiñ. The word of life is circular, the word of death is circular –we responded–, assembled like burnt birds in the tallest, leafiest crown of pain.
KAYU
No te hemos olvidado, Huichapán, andariego puma triste, no te hemos olvidado. ¿Llevas todavía en tu saco harinero charqui y lluvia isleña de estación en estación? ¿Y visiones de dihueñes en tus ojos malheridos por la lejanía? ¿Cantas aún, puma guerrero, las canciones terrenales de tu madre cuando sueñas ebrio y solo frente al río del amanecer? Sólo el viento es la patria del viajero, Huichapán, y la noche el país del hijo huérfano que huele a mar bajo el oleaje oscuro de los árboles. Inché kuñifal meu, kiñe rümei nga ñi dungun, küme huentru ngefuli epu rumeafui nga ñi dungu. Pobre ando por tus tierras, hermanita, pobre ando. Pero tengo mi palabra, pero tengo mi palabra, la riqueza vagabunda que le ofrezco a tu corazón.
REGLE
Desde Alto Huilío pasando por Freire, vino Margarita a la warria infiel. Oh, Cuerpo de roble, Ancacoy del bosque, casa de zorzales, nido de la luz. ¿Barrerás ahora las hojas del campo, el barro, la lluvia, el polvo del sur? ¿Cortarás la leña, tomarás el mate, harás sopaipillas para el nuevo sol? Triste, Margarita, te canta tu madre, te sueña tu hijo, te llama el laurel. Triste Margarita, Ancacoy del prado, pellín verdecido, escondida flor.
purra
¿Qué dirán estas tierras sobre mí ahora que regreso con el rostro trastornado por los vientos salinos de la pampa? ¿Recordarán mi nombre acaso, piedras brujas de los cerros, cuando pase frente a ustedes a pedir por mi destino? ¿Sabrán los enemigos del viajero que llevo poderosos talismanes bajo un gris makuñ tehuelche destejido por la nieve? Joven fui hacia los pasos del oriente, alegre como canto de wilquiles iluminados por el amanecer. ¡Kintupurrai inche pingey! -grité a los cielos- ¡Kintupurrai inche pingey! Yo, buscador de flores y agua, comerciante y peregrino, me perdí con mis garrafas de aguardiente en el inmenso País de las Manzanas. Por los campos alfombrados de coirones donde reinan mis caciques sobre arenas y lagunas, solitario cabalgué. Paillacán, Foyel, Sayhueque, Tereupán, Antuleguén se sentaron cantando frente al fuego a beber de mi licor. Po alué, efkütuaimün, po alué. Kümelkaimün pu fochüm, kümelkaimün. Nekelepe kewan, kuchiyu ñielafimün. Almas muertas, ayúdenme a brindar. Almas muertas, haced bien a los hijos. Que no haya pelea entre hermanos, les pedimos. Que no brillen los cuchillos en la copa veleidosa de la noche.
AYLLA
Llegamos al borde de un río, a la sombra caliente de los cactus andinos. Los cerros dormían como cóndores bajo las apunadas y violentas areolas del sol. Trajimos nuestros ritos en el pan y el susurro incesante de las lenguas occisas. Pu pinza müpüyngün traf kürüfmew iyefingün ta ñi wallünmew ta chi tripachi rayen mawiza mew. Colibríes sangraban contra el aire comiéndose en sus giros las abruptas flores de montaña. Piedras hubo que rodaron en la luz, sigilosas hacia el Padre de las Aguas. ¿Quién es tu abuela?- preguntaron-. ¿Dónde va el caballo que monta tu chachay en plena y densa niebla vespertina? Wallün feytüfa mongen zungu, wallün feytüfa lan zungun – wiñolzunguyiñ. Circular es la palabra de la vida, circular es la palabra de la muerte -respondimos-, reunidos como pájaros quemados en la copa más alta y más frondosa del dolor.
Translator’s Note:
These poems are drawn from the book Kawiñtun üyelüwün mew / Ceremonia de los nombres / Ceremony of the Names, which forms part of Jaime Huenún Villa’s project to orchestrate a chorus of popular voices derived from anonymous people within the Huilliche-Mapuche communities of southern Chile and of urban migrant neighborhoods in Santiago and other cities. In his earlier prize-winning book Reducciones (2013), Huenún interrogated the cycles of conquest and colonization that have laid siege to Mapuche lands and culture, whether in the form of military or religious campaigns, first by Spaniards, then by Chileans, or of economic servitude and social marginalization. Even as the Mapuches have been relegated first to “reductions” (similar to U.S. reservations), and then to the poorest shantytowns of Chile’s cities, they have struggled to maintain a sense of their genealogical and cultural integrity, including command of their native language, Mapudungun. While Huenún writes primarily in Spanish, he also interweaves verses in Mapudungun into his poems, in such a way that they are comprehensible to speakers of either language (and now, with these translations, to speakers of English). The unsung heroes of the poems in Kawiñtun üyelüwün mew / Ceremonia de los nombres / Ceremony of the Names tell us the stories of their families, their work history, their travels, their religious experiences and revelations, their loves and conflicts, even of their deaths. Above all these are stories of resilience and celebration, incorporating the musicality and rhythms of popular song.
Cynthia Steele is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her translations include Inés Arredondo, Underground Rivers (Nebraska, 1996), José Emilio Pacheco, City of Memory (City Lights, 2001, with David Lauer), and María Gudín, Open Sea (Amazon Crossings, 2018). They have also appeared in The Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Gulf Coast, Lunch Ticket, Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, Southern Review, Exchanges, Latin American Literary Review, and otherjournals. Photo by Carolyn Cullen.
Jaime Luis Huenún is a Chilean Mapuche-Huilliche poet, born in 1967, who has received numerous awards, including the Pablo Neruda Prize (2003), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and the Chilean National Council on Arts and Culture’s Literature Award in 2013. Two of his books are available in English: Port Trakl (Diálogos, 2008) and Fanon City Meu (Action Books, 2018). Translations of his poems have also appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Washington Square Review, and other journals. Huenún lives in Santiago, where he works for the Chilean Ministry of Culture. Photo by Alvaro de la Fuente Farré.
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.
“In a groundbreaking article, ‘Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,’ Johanna Drucker offers a definition of the term data (here in the context of a discussion of the digital humanities) as capta, a French word that is the third-person, past historical singular of the term for both ‘capture” and ‘sense.’”
2019. I’m on a swing. My father is yelling, “Pump, pump!” but that’s the last thing I want to do, because my heart is racing and I keep swinging higher and higher, no matter how still my legs and eyes are. I can see pieces of plastic, like two sides of a box, and plants. There are plants everywhere.
No.
I’m totally blind and I don’t know what a plant looks like and my father is dead. I’m at my sister’s engagement party and I’m not on a swing, I’m sitting at a Greek restaurant in a garden somewhere in Florida and if I can just force my feet to stay on the ground, maybe no one will have noticed that I took too big of a hit off my sister’s fiancé’s vape pen and that it’s just caught up with me and maybe gravity will start behaving like it normally does and maybe I’ll be able to breathe again and maybe I’ll stop interpreting my body’s own movements as sensory data, which I’ve read is a symptom of schizophrenia. Jason, my sister’s fiancé’s brother, is getting loud. Lines of conversation snake over and to the left and behind me, like scaffolding.
I can feel people’s eyeballs pulsating. I lean over, tell my mother that I just saw a ceramic flower pot. She asks me how I knew; the pot is to my left, but actually there are pots like that all around us. I say that I tuned into its frequency. My eyes are only building more momentum. I’m running on a treadmill that I can’t stop. The world is too fast. I can see but I can’t breathe.
“Under this hypothesis, I usually tune out the visual signal, as it has been proven to be unreliable. However, marijuana causes alterations in the precision weighting of the visual error signal, so that it becomes more salient. I make better use of the visual error signal, which leads to updated predictions that match the error signal.”
2009. I have trouble telling this story in the present tense. The first time I learned to see, or rather, realized that I was seeing, I’m at my family friends’ lake house. It’s dusk, and I’m smoking a joint on the deck with Jack and Kevin. They’re old camp friends of my dad’s, and they’ve known me since I was a kid. Kevin checks the time on his phone, and I’m startled by the brightness.
“I wonder if it’s the pot,” Kevin says, almost to himself. Jack blows the possibility off, laughs his jaded Jack laugh. But Kevin remains curious. He downloads a strobe light app. The light jumps toward me. It keeps changing: pursuing and retreating, shrinking and thickening and sharpening. First, it’s a spooling thread, then a rope, then a gauzy curtain, then a block of wood, then the glint of a knife.
“Those are colors,” he says. “You’re seeing color, Tash.”
I learn that black is big and white is sharp. Kevin starts to teach me to put names to sizes, his Israeli accent deepening, his voice becoming more and more animated. Without his customary cynicism, he sounds like a small boy, or like someone who would narrate an audiobook about British schoolchildren. Our usual banter is replaced by awed silences. Then Jack sings out, “Who’s ready for tequila?” and all is forgotten.
“In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it’s air-compression waves. The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung.”
2014. A month before I leave for grad school, I try hash oil for the first time, and the effects linger into the next day. We take a friend’s young daughter to the aquarium. I don’t panic when my mom believes that I saw the jellyfish, but I skirt it, taste the metal of it. The jellies are like those orange gummy candies people hand out at bar mitzvahs. We leave the aquarium and sit down for lunch at one of those overpriced cafes on Newbury Street. I borrow my mother’s sunglasses so I can stop replaying their glide projected onto my lips and upper teeth.
Each person’s belief has a different taste or texture, and some are more sustaining or less pleasant than others. My mother’s is like cane sugar, the kind they put in Mexican Coke. Kevin’s used to taste like honey. Dr. Ashtari’s feels like the corduroy pants I refuse to wear. It burrows under my fingernails, soft but not soft. My whole body tenses with the chill.
2012. We’re in the kitchen, doing that awkward Jack-and-Karen ritual where we stand around for hours while Karen and my mom make guacamole and charred broccoli. I start walking towards what I think is a chair, but that thought is based on a slippery, opalescent knowledge, the kind that’s only found in dreams, so I distrust it.
“Where were you going?” Kevin asks.
I look down, abashed. “I thought there was a chair there.”
“Well, is there? Go and see.”
I still hesitate. I was able to describe the triangular fireplace two minutes ago, and I’m loath to be wrenched away from that rightness.
“Go on,” Kevin prods.
I take five steps forward, find the chair. I want to lick the belief off his fingers.
2014. My roommate Sarah and I are lying by the river. I’m supposedly writing an essay about unschooling, but her brother’s hash oil is so potent that I can’t do much of anything. I feel like I’m on a slant, even though the ground is flat.
“You’re seeing the railing,” Sarah tells me. “Look to your left. Can you see the water?”
I can’t, but I think I can see a fence, which is just as fascinating to starving retinas.
Other things I see that week:
* The cups of ice cream in Whole Foods, stacked on top of each other like castles. * My other roommate’s hair. * The couch. * A stack of plates. * Everyone’s hands.
2015. Sarah and I are shopping for lipstick.
“What red do I want, Tasha?” she asks. I expect her belief to have a taste, but it’s bland, like water. At grad school I’ve reinvented myself as the Blind Girl Who Sees, and Sarah’s never met the version of me who doesn’t understand what red is. She knows me as someone who makes startling eye contact sometimes, and unnervingly canny comments about the paintings we’re looking at in our Art and Understanding class, so it’s not surprising she’s treating me like a real girl. The two reds she is considering have different weights, different viscosities.
“The scarlet,” I tell her. “It suits your complexion.”
“A brain-imaging study of 12 people who had been blind from birth, and 14 sighted people, published recently in Nature Communications, shows that while for sighted people, sensory and abstract concepts like ‘red’ and ‘justice’ are represented in different brain regions, for blind people, they’re represented in the same ‘abstract concept’ region.”
2016. I’m at a barbecue at my mom’s house. My eyes are too far away from the rest of my body. I’m sitting in a chair, but they are all the way at the edge of the deck, and I’m stuck, imagining what it would be like to step off that drop, jolting myself over and over and over again. My mom’s friend is asking me a question, but I have no idea what it is. Something about where to get good Thai food in Brookline? When she repeats it, I make my voice extra loud, extra lucid, but the light someone has just turned on starts yanking my hips in the opposite direction. I can’t generate enough force to resist.
Then, Kevin The Psychiatrist is there; Kevin The Friend is absent. “Your jaw is tense,” he says. He takes me inside to wash my hands, tells me to splash warm water on my face.
“Does weed give you panic attacks?” he asks later.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I can make them stop.”
“Or you could stop smoking.” His disapproval has the same chalky consistency as my father’s.
“I’d miss the colors too much,” I manage to get out. I can tell that my lips are still tinged with blue. “They have twelve-step programs for that,” he says. “There’s no glory in anxiety.”
“Lead researcher Dr. Manzar Ashtari said: ‘What we saw should cause alarm because the type of damage in cannabis smokers’ brains was exactly the same as in those with schizophrenia and in exactly the same place in the brain.’”
2017. It’s the Fourth of July and I’m sitting on a blanket with a college friend. The fireworks are like burning sponges, or paintings with no peripheries, or French castles set ablaze by a particularly heinous enemy. I mourn their stability when they wink out, and my friend mourns with me: my burning sponges usually line up with hers. At work the next day, I hold onto the memory until it shrivels, lies limp in my arms. My tutees, with their endless demands, their baggy sentences and rumpled paragraphs, are always there to help me forget, if I want to let them.
From: Joseph Carroll <[address redacted]> Sent: May 15, 2015 To: Tasha Raella <[address redacted]>
Tasha:
Unfortunately, biofeedback is not my area of expertise.
As for Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis, I don’t think the eye movements are interfering with the eyes’ interaction with visual stimuli, there is a more serious underlying degeneration of cells that prevent light absorption. Cannabis is known to increase cortisol and reduce visuomotor integration, so noticing differences in your eye movements or perception is not too surprising.
Best,
Joseph Carroll Professor of Ophthalmology the Medical College of Wisconsin
2014. Two weeks after that day by the river, I learn that if I can shift all my weight into my eyes, I can climb the walls with them. My concentration slackens. I do the wrong reading for one of my classes and raise my hand to say something irrelevant. I sleep late and get up late and when I show up at my internship at a middle school with my freshly gelled hair, it looks wet, unfinished.
I meet my mom for coffee.
“I want to talk to you about something,” she says, handing me my Rooibos latte. “When I have friends over, I know you like to smoke pot and see and that, but it’s not the right time and place, if you know what I mean. Do it when it’s just us, rather.”
“Why?” I ask.
When it’s just us, there’s too little motion and too much predictability. My face turns to sandpaper. I’m remembering last night at Jack and Karen’s. My mom shows Karen a picture of the view from her balcony in Provincetown, and I catch a glimpse of it. I have twelve questions about what I see (what do all the prickly lines mean and why do I feel like I am sliding and what gives the picture so much depth) but I tamp down my exuberance and ask just one. I learn that the prickly lines were edges.
“It hijacks the conversation,” she says. “It’s fine to do when we’re at home, but just not socially.”
2015. It’s Julian’s birthday and all the people in my grad program who smoke are shoved into someone’s bedroom. I pass my pen around. The floor tilts, suddenly. I’m on one of those centrifuge rides that spins so fast you get stuck to the wall. There is something glass in front of me and I can’t pay attention to anything else, even though someone is talking about the professor I have a tiny girl-crush on. I keep projecting my eye movements to my feet, sliding up and down that glass.
“Sorry, I have to sit down,” I say. My classmate Ava walks me to the living room, hands me some too-sweet juice. Her belief is alcoholic. There’s a pillow on the couch. The pattern seems infinite (it’s flowers, I can somehow see the fucking flowers). There’s such a thing as too much certainty. My teeth are all in the wrong places, and the room doesn’t have any edges.
“What else do you see?” Ava is an art teacher, and she asks the question like we’re at a museum looking at some unreasonably abstract painting.
“Nothing now,” I say contritely. “It’s all right,” she says. “What you have—it’s like a staticky radio signal.”
“Sinha showed me a video in which a teenage boy, blind since birth because of opaque cataracts, sees for the first time. The boy sits still and blinks silently, the room around him reflecting in his eyes as a kind of proof of their new transparency. Sinha believes these first moments for the newly sighted are blurry, incoherent, and saturated by brightness—like walking into daylight with dilated pupils—and swirls of colors that do not make sense as shapes or faces or any kind of object.”
2015. It’s late April and Sarah says I can use her semi-porch for my quasi-date. Eiton is at MIT and is working on a project that allows you to listen to the sound trees make through bone-conduction headphones. We eat pad thai and French fries dipped in coconut curry sauce and we talk about what it means to be present. We agree that David Eagleman is a bit of an ass, and the idea of being able to feel Dow Jones scores as vibrations through a vest is gimmicky and capitalistic and a little douchey, but the concept of an umwelt is pretty cool, or at least the word is fun to say. We smoke some Blue Dream and I have one of those moments where I’m transported back to that theatre exercise where you move your arms and your partner mirrors you. Really what I’m doing is making eye contact with Eiton. But I’ve forgotten that it’s not summer yet and that recently weed has started making me cold. I can’t stop shivering, even after we go inside and Eiton piles all the blankets in our apartment on top of me, even after I try to engage in normal conversation for ten minutes, even after he says he hopes I feel better, even after he leaves and my roommate comes home and everyone goes to bed.
From: Bronstein, Adolfo, Ph.D. <[address redacted]> Sent: December 15, 2015 To: Tasha Raella <[address redacted]>
Dear Tasha, thanks for a nice comprehensive email. A detailed discussion would take a lot of time but let me say a few things. Over the years I have seen a handful of patients whose tremor or nystagmus improves under alcohol or marihuana, so I fully believe your story. However it would be nice to see at some stage your subjective and objective data set side by side. Generally speaking a good vestibular therapist should be able to help you to increase vestibular cues and Dr. Merfeld might help on this too. Finally and this is not just a legal disclaimer but plain medical advice, make sure you don’t overdo the dope or get hooked. Discuss this with some campus counsellor?
Sorry I cannot spend more time right now and I hope these few comments help.
Best wishes,
Adolfo Bronstein Professor of neuro-otology and consulting neurologist University College London
2015. Dr. Ashtari can only talk at night, so our phone conversations are always hushed and brief. During the days, I collect my visuals like dead mice.
“You need an amplifier,” she muses once, “something to boost the signal from the retina.”
The next night I tell her about the pink fairy lights I saw in Sarah’s room (the pinkness is real, and it smells like Toys “R” Us).
“Be careful with the marijuana,” she says. “I’ve researched this. I don’t know how strong the stuff you’re using is but it can be pretty abrasive. It can lay down pathways but it can also erase them.”
(Like the time my mom ripped up the carpet in my childhood bedroom to replace it and for a while, there was just the bare cement.) That night I have a panic attack because my eyes spend too long playing in the grid of the heating vent, and then skating up the white, white walls. I don’t tell Dr. Ashtari this. She’s not interested in panic attacks, or flickering radio signals, or ambivalence.
2013. I can’t eat eggs Benedict without making a mess and I can’t make a mess today because Meg and I both have our laptops out. We’re workshopping poems at our favorite brunch place, Misery Loves Company. I’m proud of the imagery in my latest poem, but Meg seems less than enthused.
“I’m noticing something,” she says. “Do you know how many of your lines start with ‘he told me’ or ‘Kevin told me’ or something like that? It’s like, you’re writing is always being strained through a filter.”
This must be payback for the comments I wrote on her latest poem, the one about her “winter boyfriend.” They hit too close to the mark. She must have seen me flinch because then she reaches across the table and pats my arm.
“How sightist or whatever of me,” she says. “I forgot that the rules are different for you.”
2012. Jack and Karen’s again. My mom is cutting open something round.
“What is that?” I ask Kevin. Jack is putting his son to bed and Karen and my mom are cooking, so for the moment, I have his full attention.
“What do you think it is?”
“It looks like a stemless goblet.”
“Interesting,” he says.
“Actually, it was an Asian pear, but here, check this out.” He hands me a potato and a glass, shows me how both have the same contours.
“I thought the Asian pear was a glass, but cutting up a glass would make no sense!” I say. My laugh fizzes, as contagious as a child’s. I pick up the potato and dance across the kitchen.
“Drucker is not suggesting that data be abandoned as a scholarly term, but she does ask how humanists might begin to conceive of data as being ‘constituted relationally, between observer and observed phenomena.’ Drucker makes an important point about data in terms of their inextricability from associational interpretation and additionally highlights the intra- and extra-relational nature of data.”
2019. After dinner at the Greek restaurant, we’re walking back to the hotel. We’re in a parking structure, on a narrow strip that’s just meant for cars. An urban jungle, my stepdad calls it. My cheeks still feel as if they’ve been slapped, and there’s too much tension between my arches. When we emerge onto the street, which is lined with high rise apartment buildings, my eyes keep shooting upward, throwing me farther off balance. My ridiculous wedge sandals aren’t helping. The quality of the air here reminds me of Vegas. I have no language to explain why. I mistake a neon sign for sunlight.
Tasha Raella’s work has previously appeared in Wordgathering, Breath and Shadow, and the anthology Barriers and Belonging. She has been totally blind since birth and holds Master’s degrees in social work and education. She is an academic coach at a college in Boston.
I. Ode to the Sidewalks that Lead to My Grandfather’s House
My father once told me how his father often pushed him into the street. No traffic to fear in this small town, just white folk mad that a Black boy almost brushed the hems of their shirts.
II. Ode to the Tree Near My Grandfather’s House
Its branches built for swinging, rope wrapped round its boughs held a cast off tire in place. Older cousins taught those younger how to lean back before their feet met the grass. How to twist the rope so tight that heads spun with each release.
A plant native to the Americas, trees are like graves, except trees can grow by themselves.
Used in a sentence: “Magnolia trees are a pastoral scene of the gallant south” * “That tree across town has the best figs. But after last summer, I won’t go near it.”
Synonyms: uncle, cousin, brother
* This line contains a quote from the song “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meeropol and performed by Billie Holiday
Chavonn Williams Shen was a first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Contest and a Best of the Net Award finalist. She was also a Pushcart Prize nominee, a winner of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series and a fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature. A Tin House and VONA workshop alum, her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in: Diode, Yemassee, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. When she’s not teaching with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she can be found in her house obsessing over her plants. Photo credit: Peter Limthongviratn
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.
The bus I rode arrived at the terminal in Digos at high noon. The driver might have been holding his bowels because he drove the Mindanao Star bus like a maniac. And because I was also in a hurry, I didn’t complain. When the bus turned to its designated corner, the passengers from Davao got up. Some of them carried boxes printed with the words “Nutristar” and “Boysen.” Others were carrying plastic bags from the NCCC supermarket. Some men brought big bags and it was clear on their faces that they wanted to get out. There were mothers carrying or tugging along their children. One child had thrown up during the trip.
When I glanced outside the window, vendors stared up at me with eyes that said, “Buy from me, buy my wares.”
Before, the vendors could climb into the bus to sell water, nuts, boiled egg, durian candy, Chippy, Nova, pork rinds, and other items they carried on their shoulders. Now, they could only stay outside, unable to speak to passengers beyond the closed windows. Most of the buses to Kidapawan or Cotabato had air-conditioning. It had been years since I’d taken a non-airconditioned bus.
Sometimes, it was nerve-wracking to take the Mindanao Star bus because of the accidents their drivers had been involved in. But it was the same with passenger vans. Because of their reckless driving, a lot of horrifying accidents had happened, most of which quickly posted on Facebook. You could clearly see blood and brains splattered on the pavement. That was why whenever I take the bus or a van, I never forgot to pray, looking up at the sky. Even if there was a fear of accidents, I had to go to Davao every so often to transact with GSIS, NSO, and other agencies of government.
My body was exhausted from waking up early just to line up at GSIS. Good thing the transaction was quick and I was able to go home right away. The heat was oppressive even if the news said that the northern winds had begun and blow. Passengers flocked to the terminals because it was almost Christmas. And bus operators took advantage by indiscriminately increasing fare.
Good thing I brought my ID from UM. I was still taking a master’s degree, but I wasn’t sure if they’d accept my ID for the student discount. Fortunately, the bus conductor barely looked at the ID I handed over.
Sitting beside me was a woman of a certain age. She said to me, “The fare’s too high, Day, right? Last week, it was only 95 pesos, and now it’s 111. Ah! It’s Christmas after all!”
“Really,” was all I could say.
When the bus conductor went over to punch our tickets, he asked where I was headed.
“71 only,” I said.
“Ma’am, I’ll still give you Bansalan ticket, Ma’am, okay?” the conductor said, punching the tickets.
The conductor said to the woman: “Was that your box in the compartment below, Nang? We’ll charge 20 pesos more, okay?”
The woman nodded at the bus conductor, and then asked me: “You’re getting off 71, Day? I’m also from Matanao, somewhere in Tinago. But I’ll get off Bansalan because I have a lot of things with me.”
I nodded, too tired to make small talk. I wanted to go home and sleep.
The passengers going to Digos got off the bus. Some passengers went down to the terminal to go to the restrooms, leaving behind their backpacks. Sometimes I’d wonder if there were bombs inside the bags left behind, we’d all be gone.
Then I’d ask myself: “Would I go to heaven? Lord! Please let my soul in.” This was my silent prayer.
Sometimes I grow paranoid when taking the bus and going to terminals. I remembered a pastor who was inside a bus, waiting for his wife. The person sitting next to him had a bomb inside his bag. They recovered only half of his body. I could still recall the pastor’s face. He was actually good-looking. That was why I listened and gazed at him when he delivered sermons. They had just gotten married when the bombing took place.
Perhaps the fear never left you if you were from Davao or Mindanao. Vigilance and doubt overcome you whenever you were on a bus or at a crowded terminal often targeted by terrorists.
Apart from terrorists, there were also the panhandlers. If the terrorists brought fear, the panhandlers brought inconvenience. The frequent panhandler at the Digos terminal climbed into our bus. Slowly the familiar face emerged, wearing a large and blackened t-shirt, denim pants torn at the knees. He even wore an ID where his name and face appeared. His name was: Robin Nabaro.
One of the things I disliked were people who panhandled. They depended on handouts. A lazy bunch. They’d use their misfortunes just so they could beg. Others who asked wouldn’t even accept a peso but five. There are others who might have a “disability” but still work hard. There was also a law about prohibiting people from giving to panhandlers. “Anti-Medicancy Law,” I would always tell my students whenever they asked if it was right to give alms. I would never give, because if I did, I would not have been able to help them. I would have helped in pushing them further down.
He began with his script that I’d already memorized. Since I’d been in college in Davao, I’d been taking the bus. That was why I recognize his face very well. Until now, he still used the same lines.
“I am Robin Nabaro. I was a victim of a hit and run. I’m only asking for spare change, to buy some food. Just to buy some food, Mamser, Mamser, just spare change. They say it’s better to ask than to steal.”
In my mind, I mockingly recited his lines, “I am Robin Nabaro, blah, blah, blah.”
He began to collect coins. He treated the small aisle inside the bus. The passanger in front of me pulled out some coins. He even struggled because he had a large belly. In my mind, I was pouting. “Don’t give him anything. He’s gotten used to it already. There are blind, mute, and people without limbs who work to earn their keep. He’s just lazy.”
When he reached my seat, I looked out the window so our eyes wouldn’t meet. But then, to my surprise, something pierced my heart. An emotion I couldn’t grasp. He got off the bus, carrying with him my deep regret upon not giving anything.
“No one else still in the restroom? Nobody in the restroom? Because we’re about to go,” said the bus conductor who brought me back to my senses.
The bus pulled away and turned. Lindsey Store, RB Gowns and Botique, Bamboo Resto, and other signs that were still in the city. When we left Digos, the sign boards disappeared one by one, giving way to a view of rice fields, grassland, the wilderness. As we passed Barangay Mati, I saw several potted plants along the road. There were so few of them this time, the cogon and bamboo huts receding from the road because of “road widening” projects.
Upon reaching the Capitol in front of the Davao del Sur Coliseum, I sent my husband a text message saying that I was about to arrive: “Just a few minutes, I’ll be home.” Barangay Colorado, Sinaragan, Camanchilles.
“Oh, 71, we’re at 71!” said the conductor. Carrying my black shoulder back, I squeezed myself sideways along the narrow aisle of the bus. The bus unlatched the door, as though hissing. After the bus had left, as I was about to cross the street, a red car suddenly appeared before me. Deafening, the car sped off.
In a blink, the surroundings went dark. And in me stirred unease, dread, fatigue, regret, and horror.
“I am Robin Nabaro…” came my last thought.
Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano is a graduate of BA Mass Communication. She is a college instructor teaching Development Communication in Southern Philippines Agribusiness and Marine and Aquatic School of Technology (SPAMAST)–Malita, Davao Occidental. She is proud of her Ibaloi, Kapampangan, and Blaan roots. Her writings are her advocacy for the indigenous people of Davao del Sur, and are focused on the indigenous people, and on motherhood and children, as she is also a mother and a wife.
John Bengan teaches writing and literature at the University of the Philippines in Mindanao. His stories have appeared in Likhaan, Kritika Kultura, Asian Cha, and BooksActually’s Gold Standard, an anthology of Asian fiction from Math Paper Press. His translations of Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano’s fiction have appeared in Words Without Borders, LIT, World Literature Today, and Shenandoah.
He told me one day, I will leave soon, I’m going to miss you, I said. No, you won’t, I’m just a shadow, I am here, always, but never really there fleeting, you’ll never see but always there, whenever you think of me. I’m in the street of Pratunam haunting, walking aimlessly, looking but not finding, lost in the profusion of colors, in Babel of tongues, I am there fleeting, you’ll never see but always there, whenever you think of me. I asked, Would you remember me? Perhaps, when the wind blows from the Southeast, or when the storm ravages the land, or when I smell the brewed coffee, or a cat meowing, waiting for my attention. Fleeting, I’ll never see you but always there whenever I think of you. I said, Fleeting, like a shadow, I’ll never see you but always there whenever I think of you.
Coop Hostel
I make bed again, in this room, that was once strange, now a home, for the night,
for many nights, I no longer count how I lay my head on a pillow curve by hundreds of heads from different times and places,
I sleep in a bed, that comforts tired bodies from roaming around the city that never sleeps,
dreamless, waiting for the next body to lie down with.
Eunice Barbara C. Novio is a Thailand-based freelance journalist. She has been an EFL (English as Foreign Language) lecturer at Vongchavalitkul University in Nakhon Ratchasima since 2014 and an adjunct professor at St. Robert’s Global Education-Philippine Christian University in Pratunam, Bangkok since 2017. She also writes poetry while having coffee, which is almost all the time. Her poems are published in Philippines Graphic, Sunday Times Magazine, Dimes Show Review, Blue Mountain Arts, and elsewhere. Her first collection of poetry translated into Thai language, O Matter was published in Thailand in February 2020.
Alongside, she writes for Inquirer.net, and her articles have also appeared on the Asia Focus segment of Bangkok Post, Asia Times, America Media, and The Nation. She is a two-time Plaridel Award winner of Philippine American Press Club for feature/profile stories.
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