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This Publisher's Column shall feature developments
related to Filipino literature. Each monthly update also shall include
a featured poet and poem. For comments and suggestions, please e-mail
Meritage Press Associate Editor Jade Afable at Jade@meritagepress.com
*****************************************************
July:
July's featured poet and poem is Oliver De La Paz and his prose poem "With
The Grace of Basket Weavers" featured in his poetry collection NAMES
ABOVE HOUSES. Oliver's book -- innovative for transcending genres and
lyrical in spirit -- was published by Southern Illinois University Press
after it won the 2000 annual competition for the Crab Orchard Award Series
in Poetry, judged by Rodney Jones. Oliver was born in Manila and raised
in Ontario, Oregon. His poems have appeared in such journals as Quarterly
West, The Literary Review, Third Coast, Cream City Review, among others.
He teaches creative writing at Utica College (New York).
Of Oliver's book, Rodney Jones states: "a
unique work: a novella in the form of a sequence of prose poems; a lucidly
inventive allegory of migration, exile, and belonging. With grace and
elegance, he evokes the magical, myth-making culture of his Philippines
and brings it to a very real California in the person of Fidelito, a boy
who wants to fly, and his parents, Domingo and Maria Elena. Oliver de
la Paz has the strength and wisdom to step lightly with the heaviest burdens.
He is stunningly good. NAMES ABOVE HOUSES celebrates the trials and indestructibility
of a family and is a durable refreshment, an essential document of life
at the cultural crossroads." (The featured poem is copyright 2001
by Oliver de la Paz and reprinted by permission).
WITH THE GRACE OF BASKET WEAVERS
Fidelito makes halos by soaking bundles of sticks in water for hours.
That is the first thing. They must bend without breaking. He tests one
to see whether it will snap when he applies steady pressure. He knows
the time.
Taking three sticks, he weaves them in and out as he would the hair of
his mother. Forming a ring, he ties the ends as they meet with string.
But that's not the last thing. Fidelito must make it his own, this loop
he will wear about his head. He looks for anything: discarded shirts with
the crust of sea salt from his father -- he tears them into strips. He
cuts the straps off the dress his mother wears when she is most beautiful.
Loose feathers and dry flowers that after being dead for months stay pink;
these are gathered from the yard. Now he threads these into the spaces
between sticks. Only then can he wear this hat to church or school.
Grace is found in the early hours. For the aura, he parades through streets
with his palms upturned to the sky. Inhales. Exhales. The head arched
back so far the ground disappears, and the name, in meditation, opens
in cold air like a parachute.
-----------------------------------
Brian Ascalon Roley's first novel AMERICAN SON (W.W. Norton, 2001) marks
an auspicious debut with its tale of two Filipino brothers and their mother
maneuvering their way through the chaotic world of first-generation immigrants
in Los Angeles, California. The older brother Tomas fashions himself into
a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs to help support the family
who long ago was abandoned by an alcoholic father. The narrator is younger
brother Gabe who tries to transcend both his brother's waywardness and
the instability of a mother unable to provide guidance.
The flatness of Roley's writing is wonderfully deceptive. Its full-frontal
style does not preclude moments of compassion, such that its story resonates
deeply. The moments of tenderness, by offering contrast, serve to highlight
the unflinching development of the narrative. Witness this first paragraph
of Chapter One:
"Tomas is the son who helps pay the mortgage
by selling attack dogs to rich people and celebrities. He is the son who
keeps our mother up late with worry. He is the son who causes her embarrasment
by showing up at family parties with his muscles covered in gangster tattoos
and his head shaved down to stubble and his eyes bloodshot from pot. He
is really half white, half Filipino but dresses like a Mexican, and it
troubles our mother that he does this. She cannot understand why if he
wants to be something he is not he does not at least try to look white.
He is also the son who says that if any girlfriend criticized our mother
or treated her wrong he would knock the bitch across the house."
Ultimately, the brutality of the protagonists' experience lingers longer
in memory specifically because the writing style is so straightforward
that it can seem matter of fact. (Those who have read Bino A. Realuyo's
THE UMBRELLA COUNTRY, another Filipino coming-of-age novel, may wish to
compare the two fictionists' writing styles for achieving a profoundly
moving effect -- but from almost opposite writing styles.) The two brothers'
transition from boys to men brims with, but never totally lapses to, a
searing hurt. Finally, Roley crafts an intriguing ending that makes unpredictable
whether the brothers will become victims to their circumstances. It may
be that the brothers (one, if not both) will survive/transcend their youth
as Roley's plot may also be read as a play on that theme, "What doesn't
kill one, will make one stronger."
This is a book that is also worth reading for presenting, as Helen Zia (author of ASIAN AMERICAN DREAMS) aptly puts it, "a window to an Asian America that is rarely acknowledged." Roley's novel is part of the diasporic literature that has addressed the naivete of believing the streets of "America" to be (consistently) paved with gold.
AMERICAN SON deserves the positive early reviews it has received, including:
"Not since Danny Santiago's award-winning
FAMOUS ALL OVER TOWN came out in the early 1980s and pursued the shifting,
sometimes brutal meaning of multi-cultural identity has there been as
compelling a coming-of-age story out of Los Angeles. Brian Roley with
his debut novel AMERICAN SON joins Junot Diaz, Sandra Cisneros, Naomi
Shihab Nye, and a handful of others who are forging in fiction the new
identity of race."
-- Tom Jenks, editor of HEMINGWAY'S GARDEN OF EDEN
Brian was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in San Francisco. His work
has appeared in such literary journals such as Epoch and The Georgia Review.
He received an MFA from Cornell University, where he won the Arthur Lynn
Andrews award, and was later a lecturer. He was a finalist for the Piper's
Alley/Faulkner Novella Award. More information is available at his website:
www.BrianAscalonRoley.com.
------------------------
Factory School, a learning and production
collective based in San Diego, CA has released THE THIRDEST WORLD: 3 STORIES
FROM FILIPINO WRITERS. This stirring anthology in a stapled chapbook format
presents stories by Gina Apostol and Eric Gamalinda as well as a story
and an essay by Lara Stapleton. Signed limited editions are available
from Small Press Distribution (800.869.7553 or www.spdbooks.org). For
more information, please contact: custodian@factoryschool.org
-----------------------
The PinoyPoetics Submissions Deadline has been extended to August 31,
2001.
For more details, please check the January edition of "Babaylan Speaks."