Chorus: Pinay Narratives Process Notes, Cont.
By Barbara Jane Reyes | January 5, 2012
More on the Chorus manuscript.
First, I am told that Saul Williams has a forthcoming anthology entitled, Chorus. Should this encourage me to find an alternate title to my tentatively titled manuscript?
Now, in the comments section to my previous post, some interesting things –continuing on with my concern of piecing, stitching, “quilting,” disparate narratives and voices into one body, it’s back to basics.
Form, meter, line.
White space. Breathing room.
Another strategy for working with many voices – polyvocal pieces, overlapping, simultaneously spoken narrative, sung lyric.
I hope this is enough. Is it enough?
Now, a poet and former student of mine has asked, how did I come to focus on ancestry, mothering, ritual? I tell her that trying to gauge what other Pinays are writing about in their poems, stories, blog posts, those are some recurring themes. My best guess is that (with ritual and ancestry), this has something to do with writing against the prevalent images of Pinay as OFW, Pinay as domestic worker, Pinay as sex worker. How do we defend/shield/protect ourselves, and can we undo any of that?
I remember way back when, during the flurry of Babaylan anthology events, ca. 2000-2001, editor Eileen Tabios stated that internet searches for “Filipina,” and “Pinay” too often yielded mail order bride types of sites, which is why we had to fill e-space, every space really, with our self-definitions. I wonder whether we’re doing “enough,” and really, what “enough” would be.
I have been thinking also about cultural artifacts, icons, tropes, about overuse and stereotype. I realize it’s not about avoiding cultural markers, but about why and how we write about our cultural experiences, knowledge, history. Do we reduce them to one-dimensional, blanket stereotype, write what and how it’s already been written, and/or in dull, imprecise, non-inventive language? And why would we want to do that? So as I am adding to the narrative’s layers, I am constantly fine tuning the language and the line, and the lyric.
Such an interesting process this is. Where is the duende and diwata? Here perhaps, I hope, and working in different ways than to which I’ve grown accustomed.
67 pages and counting.
2 Comments
Susan Layug on January 22, 2012 at 10:03 pm.
How about interspersing some prose-type narratives between meters and rhymes? Might be an interesting hybrid.
Here’s my answer to one of your q’s I meant to send it weeks ago, but got bogged down by the (mental) bog:
tell me about the sound of your voice.
My voice is tentative. It pauses. in between. the feel of a thoughtandthesound of a longing. It scales the heights (though falls back short) of other people’s minds, other people’s mysteries. It gasps at its own base (for it is a female voice) but amuses itself with the unexpected frowns directed at such un-womanly bellows. It shrieks, it coos, it lullabies. It laments its own loss, it struggles for its own survival. It falsettos, knowing that such act is a pluck at the warrior’s bow, a long-range strain at an elusive target. It sometimes hushes. Sometimes it shushes. But always, always, it tries to be mine.
Susan Layug on January 22, 2012 at 10:05 pm.
*correction” “It gasps at its own bass…”