By Janalee Tabayoyong
Lately, I have had more time to reflect on my poetry, on the written word that entangles with my identity and role as a first generation Filipino American. I had taken the time to ask my parents, immigrants from the Philippines who haven’t returned since leaving in the 1980s, to share stories of their calloused journeys from the motherland into the birthing horizons of a new country. These stories I cling to. Stitched together, they are the beginnings of my narrative.
In a time where it seems as if our stories are being narrated and written for us by politics and media, it feels significant that we take the time to understand our own narratives and become historians for our families. Marianne Chan immerses herself in this intimate endeavor when she writes: “If no one will remember our history, then we will reenact a version every year.” It is this tender and urgent line from her debut book, All Heathens, that articulates how our movements forward lead us to the past. All Heathens, a collage of prosaic poems, reverberates the history of her Filipino culture — a culture that is rooted in familial memories, religious renderings, and one that stretches beyond the colonialist history of her home country.
At 74 pages, with an array of narratives that anchor the reader to moments in Chan’s life, the book is short enough to finish by nightfall. Despite its brevity, each poem lingers. I’m convinced that the speaker of the poem is living within the moment of the poem itself but also beyond what is written on page. I’m convinced because I think I am that speaker.
It’s the first poem of the collection, “Momotaro in the Philippines” that tethers me to Chan’s history. She starts with: “Here.” This word of placement, of groundedness forces me to question where I am in the specific space and time of Chan’s intersection of cultural history. Perhaps I put myself at its focal point because her culture reflects my own. She sets the tone by describing Filipino foods and spirituality, between milkfish and pandesal meals in “Seafood City” and sifting through Catholic ambivalence in “The Lives of Saints.” Her recollections of the culture resonate with me vividly as if to help me weave together the sheer fabric of my continuing narrative.
These memories are what drives the speaker in Chan’s narrative beyond the colonialist history of the Philippines, but it’s the stories of those early Italian conquistadors, of Magellan and his scribe, Pigafetta, that reflect Chan’s personal agenda to rewrite the erasure done by their voyages and inscribe once again the humanity and language of the Filipino people.
Chan’s speaker in “Some Words of the Aforesaid Heathens Peoples” is the outsider looking in. The poem details a list of Bisaya words and translations included in Pigafetta’s journals, words learned while on the island of Cebu. Most of these words: “cinnamon” / “mother-of-pearl” / “boats” are items that could be exported. Pigafetta even includes the word for slave, but Chan writes: “He does not / include the word for ‘forgetting.’” This gap in language and memory effectively mirrors Chan’s resolution to fill that chasm, to remember the language of her mother, one that is fleeting and with colonial influence. She ends the poem: “I’m writing this down, / like Pigafetta, alongside his list of words, all of them ours, all of them / heathen,” further reclaiming the translation and rewriting her family’s history into existence.
It’s interesting to see the title of the collection, “heathens” as a reference to the reclaiming of her family’s origin. I understand Chan’s ardent need to rewrite the narrative of a people who have been colonized for centuries. This colonization often leads to both passive and aggressive stereotypes and myths. “When the Man at the Party Said he Wanted to Own a Filipino” reflects this misrepresentation and blatant racism that is all too apparent in today’s culture. Chan dissipates the stereotype of the passive Filipino by writing: “We will parade / around your living room in a linen cloth and feed you / turtle eggs and cornioles meat from a porcelain dish” and at the end of the poem: “And we are not / amenable as much as we are insidious. We are the carnioles, / who, after being eaten alive by a whale, enter the whale’s body / and take small, tender bites of the whale’s enormous heart.” This illustrious metaphor captures Chan’s delinking of such stereotypes and reaffirms that the Filipino people have always owned themselves.
Throughout my musings of Chan’s poetry, I’m presented with her ability to circumnavigate the poems to start a conversation and return to the past. It is the final poem in the collection that serves as a true testament to her written endeavor, of understanding her future by first diving into the histories of her past. The Philippines is a country that is filled with waves of diasporic people and exploring the history of her family brings the notion of discovery and remembrance.
“Counterargument that Goes all the Way Around” begins by questioning whether the world is reversible, whether running backwards means regressing. She writes about her grandparents, her lolo and lola, and her great great grandparents. They remind the speaker: “Coordinates tell you where to stand” but “Around the world, we are the same people. We have merely moved / our feet.” These concluding lines intertwine the relationship between ourselves and the history of our relatives. In full circle with the first poem, we are “here.” I’m faced with the question of whether I’ve really moved at all in retaining my own culture and wonder where my narrative goes from here. Chan’s articulately aware presence of her Filipino culture displayed in this collection captures both the loneliness of colonization, the wholeness of familial love, and the liberating endeavor of remembering one’s history. As her words linger, so too does the Filipino presence.
All Heathens is available from Alexander Book Company, City Lights Bookstore, Eastwind Books, The Last Bookstore, and Powell’s City of Books.
Janalee C. Tabayoyong is a first generation Filipina American and a Long Beach native. Her prose and wit have been published in CSULB’s 22 West Magazine and have been nominated to the AWP Intro Journals Project. She likes pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. When she’s not teaching English, you can find her volunteering, singing 80s karaoke, or catching sunrises in other countries. Janalee invites you to change the world with her.