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

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September's featured poet and poem is Tony Robles and his "Baliktad" which is featured in his rough diamond of a chapbook: ENEMY LINES. Tony Robles was born in San Francisco in the year of the dragon. He says he "chose poetry because i'm too lazy to write short stories." Published in DisOrient Journalzine, The Northridge Review, and the forthcoming Seven Card Stud and Seven Manangs Wild, he likes writing, eating Chinese food and hanging out with his uncle Al. Here is his poem:

BALIKTAD

The old man had
the right idea

he'd been a restroom
attendant for many
years

He'd seen many men
from many walks of
life pass through

presidents, athletes,
actors with chickenshit smiles
who wouldn't tip

The old man noticed that
when these various men
entered the washroom to
take a piss,

they'd unzip,
let it go

vigorously or gingerly
shaking off the excess
and washing their hands
in the sink

"no, no...that is not the
way to do it" he'd say in
his Pilipino accent

"They are doing it backwards. You
wash your hands first before you
touch yourself, then... you pee"

That advice has stayed
with me

One small
tip

I haven't been
able to

shake

Tony's ENEMY LINES is available for sale, with all proceeds to be donated to the Manilatown Heritage Foundation whose mission is to preserve and foster the rich cultural and artistic traditions of San Francisco's Filipino American community. An excerpt from its mission statement says, "We also seek to record and share the Filipino American community's history and contributions to American life. The Manilatown Heritage Foundation will offer artistic performances, educational opportunities and exhibitions in a cultural center/museum that will be affordable and accessible to the community. Our organization serves as a bridge that links the twentieth century generations of Filipino American nation builders to the new generations, present and future, who will benefit and never forget the towering achievements of the past."

You can order Tony's chapbook by e-mailing him at towerofpower73@hotmail.com, or sending $5 to:

Tony Robles
1895 39th Ave
San Francisco, CA. 94122

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Congratulations to Alfred "Krip" Yuson for receiving this year's Palanca Award for First Prize for Poetry written in English. As a result, Krip has been elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame which requires five First Prizes in any of the Palanca categories. In addition to his 2001 award, Krip received First Prizes in the Short Story in 1975, Poetry in 1978 and 1981, and the Grand Prize for the Novel in 1986. Krip also has won several second place positions in prior years' contests involving Poetry, Essay and Children's Story. He is believed to have established the longest track record for winning Palancas, having done so in five different decades, starting in 1968 for a third Prize in the Short Story. Recently, Krip was unanimously elected the Chair of the Unyon ng mga Manunulat ng Pilipinas (UMPIL) -- the Writers' Union of the Philippines. We are delighted to share "Pillage," the title poem to his winning collection of ten new poems:

PILLAGE

Stones. We had to deprive them of stones.
Clearing the paths to the village, we sent
the old men and the children home. Flowers.
No one could ever raise a yard of color.
Our machetes went to work. The women wept
when they saw how sweat beaded our brows.
The river flowed, now as fast as stories told
of loss of face. How could they smile toothily
at one another, even when mornings promised
our departure? How can they look one another
in the eye, thump breasts and shoulders, suckle
from mothers? Their mountains were as forlorn.
Without stones, without flowers. But that is how
wars are won and dark souls are remembered.
So said our generals, who always knew better.
We had to suck away their spirit, leave no chance
for rebirth of courage. We took away all their stones,
the polish of their dreams. We buried the love
that made them strong. We burned all buds and flowers.
Now there are no heroes even in their bravest songs.

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You are invited to two celebrations involving Filipina Literature and Arts:

FILIPINA LITERATURE IN THE DIASPORA -- AN INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE

When: September 30, 2001, 1 p.m. (not 3 p.m. as posted elsewhere)
Where: San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin Street, Downtown San Francisco.
Sponsor: Aunt Lute Press

Moderator: Eileen Tabios
Participants: fiction writer Merlinda Bobis who is in the United States to discuss her new short story collection THE KISSING; decolonialism scholar Leny Strobel; poet Barbara Pulmano Reyes; "Pinayism" philosopher Allyson Tintiangco; and spoken word artist and activist Iren Faye Dueller.

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FILIPINA LITERATURE AND ARTS IN THE DIASPORA

When: October 17, 2001, 7 p.m.
Where: 16 W. 32nd St., 10th Floor (AAWW space), New York City 10001
Sponsors: Arkipelago and Aunt Lute Press

To help launch Merlinda Bobis' THE KISSING, Eileen Tabios, Lara Stapleton, Gina Apostol, Angel Shaw and Perla Daly join Merlinda Bobis in a unique presentation of Filipina literature and arts.

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Aimee Nezhukumatathil's MIRACLE FRUIT manuscript has been selected by poet Gregory Orr as the Grand Prize winner for the Tupelo Press First Book Prize. Aimee recently joined State University of New York-Fredonia as Assistant Professor of English. Here is "Swear Words," one of her award-winning poems:

SWEAR WORDS
Even now I laugh when I see the look on my mother’s face
when I swear in Tagalog. I have no idea what these phrases
really mean, but they’ve been spattered on me since I was still
a fat, bawling baby---and scattered onto my head when I’ve toppled

juice glasses on white carpet or come home past curfew.
Sometimes even the length of my skirts or driving her through
a red light produces ones with a bit of a gasp, a wet sigh
of disapproval. Now I catch myself saying them out loud

when I knock my knee against the coffee table,
slice a bit of my knuckle with paper. When I asked her,
she told me one phrase meant ‘God,’ so of course I felt guilty.
Another is ‘crazy female lost piglet,’ which doesn’t even

make sense when I think of the times I’ve heard her use that.
Still others, she claims, are untranslatable. But the one
I love best is Diablo---devil---pronounced: Jah-blew! She uses it
as if to tell me, "I give up! You do what you want but don’t

come running to me," after I tell her I bounced a check
or messed up a romance with a boy she finally approved of.
Diablo! Diablo! Here comes a little red devil running past
the terra-cotta flower pots in my mother’s sunroom, tiny pitchfork

in hand. Diablo! Diablo! And still another from behind
the kitchen curtains, a bit damp from the day’s splashes of the sink.
Today when they meet, they dance a silly jig on the countertop, knock
over the canister of flour, leave little footprints all over the place.

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Meritage Press would like to share a letter from poet and cultural activist Jean N.V. Gier on P.C. Morrantte:

Dear Eileen, Jade and Meritage Press:

Did anyone take note of the fact that P.C. Morantte passed away in April of this year? Morantte was truly a pioneer of Filipino writing in the United States. I don’t think he has received proper recognition as a writer, although he wrote plays, poems and fiction, and his memoir of Carlos Bulosan, Carlos Bulosan: His Heart Affair With America, is often consulted by students of Filipino American studies. His obscurity may be due to the fact that much of his output was in the form of non-fiction, reportage, and editorial. During the Depression Era and later, he edited and wrote for many Filipino newspapers and magazines in the U.S.: book reviews, literary commentary, travelogues, and editorials. Later in life he was published by a Philippine publisher: New Day.

During the pre-WWII years, Morantte took some rather gutsy positions on writing and writers in various newspapers and magazines; Jose Garcia Villa and Marcelo de Gracia Concepcion both suffered his critical barbs: "Villa may be dead as a short story writer, but he is too spiritually alive in his poetic imagination to admit of intellectual disintegration...[he] tried to be at once imitative, experimental, intellectual and provocatively modern in his stories. This was tragic."; "one cannot help but deplore the fact that [de Gracia Concepcion] fails to follow his initial triumph with productions of a more commanding interest" (Philippine-American Digest, 1941). Even his friend, Carlos Bulosan was not entirely free from criticism, for Morantte wrote that Bulosan’s writing was often tinged with "an overtone of hysteria in his pleadings for justice...always a strain of overdramatizing in his manner of calling attention to social evils and economic ills" (Remembering Carlos Bulosan, 62). Although Morantte appreciated Richard Wright’s Native Son as "a work of art," he felt that the Bigger Thomas character was portrayed too negatively: "too much a sample of moral disintegration and less a symbol of race vigor..." (Philippine-American Digest 1940)

Morantte strove to clarify the issues that Filipinos lived with in America, whether they were literary, political or cultural issues. In an essay on "Filipino Life" in the Philippine-American Digest, he noted with seeming despair that "[Filipino] dreams and...aspirations have been influenced so much by the American and Spanish ways that the indigenous substance of their true beings has been crushed or lost." He gave voice to a situation that many Filipinos of that time seemed to experience: "...one immediately perceives that I do not belong: I am a Filipino, but a creature that has been an offshot [sic] of the strange elements outside the pale of my native world...it is a sort of spiritual or psychological bondage." (1941)

In Morantte’s perspective, the microcosmic experience of the Filipino fieldworker or writer in small-town America translated to something larger and more disturbing; he detected patterns that would echo in the experiences of Filipino immigrants into the next century:

The City of Los Angeles was teeming with Pinoys, or Filipinos whose lives had become modified for the worse by the harsh realities in the American milieu; they had become split personalities...They loved American bread and butter and they also loved rice and fish...To practically all Pinoys the abundant Philippine life, the Philippine state of free, happy, peaceful and idyllic life which was the dream of their forebears, had now been supplanted in their memory by the charm of American life. But many of them, insofar as their emotional and mental outlook was concerned, were simply floating in the substratum of American society where the muddy currents were sluggishly buoying them up"(Remembering 76).

Although this passage was published in 1984, I think that Morantte’s writings reveal that he sensed the psychic "split" that Filipinos were undergoing, even as early as the 1930s.

Morantte chose to live out his last years in the small town of Lompoc, California, in an area imbued with the history of Filipino Farmworkers and laborers. From this somewhat remote spot, he kept in touch with his many writer friends, among them the Bulosan brothers, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Bienvenido Santos and Carlos Angeles. In later life, he became interested in questions of philosophy and religion. N.V.M. Gonzalez dubbed him "a secular contemplative."

I think that Morantte contributed to a "West-Coast sensibility" in Filipino American writing. Somewhat suspicious of experimental and "art for art’s sake" writing (he wrote of the "puzzling incoherence" of Gertrude Stein), he seemed to value humanistic writing that conveyed meaning with pragmatic clarity. He contributed to Filipino American literature in his quest for meaning and wholeness. We can benefit from his insightful evaluations of Filipino life in America, from his courage to recognize and discuss both the weaknesses and strengths of Filipino writing, and from his recognition of the necessity for Filipinos and Filipino Americans to unite through knowlege disseminated via the written word.

Many of the pioneer Filipino writers living in the United States seem to be leaving us now, among them, Stanley Garibay, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Trinidad Rojo, Alex de Leon Fabros Sr., and of course, Jose Garcia Villa. I understand that Morantte died in his 90s, in a hospital in Lompoc, California. Perhaps you are already aware of his death. If not, Morantte is certainly one writer whose passing deserves mention.

Jean N. V. Gier