Category Archives: feminism

Women’s Work: Mentoring and Professor-ing

Just so this is clear: The work I do is not mothering. This needs to be explicitly stated because it is the unstated expectation when we come into positions in which we are required to be knowledgeable, to be leaders, to be teachers. I suspect that expectation for us to mother is about the need for a quick and easy boxing/categorization of us, rather than challenging the dominant paradigm that all women’s work must be reproductive work, nurturing work rooted in private spaces/domesticity, unrecognized emotional maintenance work, in which reproductive work is always subordinate to productive work.

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post in response to Annie Finch, who discussed women poets and mentorship at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. My 2009 blog post has been getting a lot of hits in lately; Google searches specifically for that — women poets and mentorship — have led folks to my blog, and had me revisiting my old blog post. The gist of the post and the subsequent comment section discussion is whether women know how to mentor, whether we’re taught how (and by whom), whether women know to ask for mentorship. What specifically would be asked? What needs would be articulated? What would the measured outcomes be?

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Women’s Work as Guerrilla Fighters, Shipbuilders, Truth Tellers, Dominant Paradigm Subverters

Source: The Atlantic

[Image source (above): The Atlantic]

Here is my presentation for ICOPHIL on teaching Philippine and Filipino American Literature, which will be part of Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program’s panel on (Fil – Phil – Fil Am) intersections. Given that so many people either want my syllabi, reading lists, and/or to be taught (have their work taught) in my classes and/or to come speak to my classes and to be paid honorarium, I am very disappointed that when I ask for advice, when I ask for questions to help guide the crafting of my presentation, I receive only one response.

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Manuscript Progress Report: On Anger, Rage, and Outrage

[Some edits for clarity below.]

I have recently written here that I am struggling with my current manuscript, now titled She is a Picture of Magnificence, after Estrella D. Alfon’s short story, “Magnificence.” The crux of my struggle is that while I have fashioned some very lovely poetry from approximately 20 different Fil Am women/Pinays who responded to a set of very open ended questions, I found that the anger, rage, and outrage with which I have been accustomed to writing has been absent.

Surely, much of this has to do with how each of us individually expresses rage and outrage, no doubt. These differences in expression have to do with aesthetics, with life experience, with how one prioritizes.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has just written on the uses of rage and anger in our work, over at the diacritics website. He asks, “What’s the proper proportion of art to anger?” He acknowledges that we have a lot to be angry about/enraged at, as writers and artists from Southeast Asia,

“whether it’s on the vast geopolitical/historical scale of countries and warfare and colonialism or whether it’s on the much more intimate scale of families and love or the lack of love or the loss of love and so many other things. Even on the intimate scale, though, the horizon lines go directly to the macro-history of all the screwed up decisions and events that shaped us.”

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On Pinay Poetics: “Messing with Hegemony”

I recently and very happily received a comment from Tina Bartolome, a Pinay writer who’s a San Francisco native, and who’s now finishing her MFA at Indiana University. I clicked over to her blog, only to find a treasure of thoughtful writing on her “literary universe,” as a politicized Pinay writer. These are some things I definitely can afford to remember; certainly, now as I write more and more about this Pinay “we” poetics, I want to be able to articulate the things storytelling can do. Some points Tina has outlined:

  • Storytelling as taking inventory
  • Storytelling as collective memory
  • Storytelling as paying homage
  • Storytelling as a comrade to social change (a conversation in progress)

She elaborates on the last point by quoting Martín Espada from Zapata’s Disciple: “Any oppressive social condition, before it can be changed, must be named and condemned in words that persuade by stirring the emotions, awakening the senses. Thus, the need for the political imagination.” And then further down in her post, Tina tells us she wants writing to “mess with hegemony.”

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Towards a Pinay “We” Poetics

[This is a draft of an essay I'm currently writing for an anthology on women and creative process. Indeed, I am surprising myself with this not-so-sudden burst of productivity; I'd recently been asked what inspires me to write, or what do I need to continue writing. I'd responded that I needed external impetus, and thankfully, this came in the form of an invitation to submit new work to Hambone, from Nate Mackey himself. I say this because I am pleased to be acknowledged by him, and because being acknowledged by someone I deem important to my practice meant that I really had to produce work. I submitted new poems, and they are scheduled to appear in the journal's next issue. It's a happy by-product, that there is momentum for me to continue writing.]

[Some edits below.]

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I am interested in a “we” poetics. “We” is a persona in which I’ve been writing for a long time now, and even my “I” is a “we.” This came to my attention fully when poet Nathaniel Mackey articulated this “we,” in his discussion about the ongoing journey/emergence of a people in his serial poem, “Song of the Andoumboulou.” This “we” is appealing to me as a Filipina; indeed, I was raised in a culture of “we.” There are two Tagalog terms, pakikisama, and bayanihan, which speak to the social value of this “we” in practice. We are valued as members of a larger whole, in interaction and relation to others within this larger whole. We know ourselves as members of a larger whole, in interaction and relation to others within this larger whole.

Poetically, I also come from a tradition of a “we”; think of the community organizer, activist Filipino American poets Carlos Bulosan and Al Robles. While Robles wrote about and in the voices of the Manongs, the West Coast Filipino American migrant laborers of the early twentieth century, in Rappin’ With Ten Thousand Carabaos in the Dark, Bulosan invoked Whitmanesque multitudes of working men in “If You Want to Know What We Are.” I, too, have attempted to write as “the people,” this multitude of Filipinos:

We, Malakas and Maganda
We, Moluccas and Magellan
We, Devil and Dogeater
We, Starfruit and Sampaguita
We, Malakas and Maganda
We, Pepe and Pilar
We, Devil and Dogeater
We, Coconut and Crab
We, Malakas and Maganda
We, Eskinol and ESL
We, Devil and Dogeater
We, Igorot and Imelda
We, Malakas and Maganda
We, B-boy and Bulosan
We, Devil and Dogeater
We, Subic Bay and Stockton
We, Malakas and Maganda
We, Gangsta Rap and Galleon Trade
We, Devil and Dogeater
We, Comfort Woman and Carabao
We, Malakas and Maganda
We, Lea Salonga and Lapu-Lapu
We, Devil and Dogeater
We, TnT and Taguba
We, Malakas and Maganda

I think of this poem as conventionally “masculine”; indeed, I have already cited more male poets speaking as “the people,” in an essay about Pinay “we” poetics. I also see how many women have found themselves pushed to the interior, in the province of the domestic, the personal, and private, while the men are charged with handling issues of representation of “the people,” addressing the outside world. Ultimately, many women find themselves pushed so far inside, discouraged from speaking on that “too big” world, efffectively silenced. This is one contradition I am trying to unravel; the fine details of our everyday lives comprise a human being, communities of human beings, and the cultures of communities of human beings in the world.

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Women's History Month

I’ve previously confessed to Claire Light that I do not write profiles of women artists; I do write about their work and my responses to their written work, performance, exhibition. This seems in line with what Claire has just posted on the Hyphen blog, as a part of her series of API women’s profiles for Women’s History Month, in which she has graciously taken my suggestion and profiled Oakland-based Afro-Pinay blues singer Ms. Sugar Pie DeSanto.

I think DeSanto is less of a “hero” than a “role model”, i.e. less a person who has done something almost superhuman, and more of someone who shares traits with us, and has made a go of an admirable life. She’s a singer — not merely someone who sings, but a singer throughout life, someone who has never abandoned performance despite her lack of the kind of superstardom that most people consider the only measure of success. She’s a great role model for artists of all kinds, who must learn to quickly put away ideas of superheated stardom and acclimate quickly (especially in this economy) to aspire to master your art form, the ability to make a living at what you love, and the love and respect of your peers and fans.

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Women Poets and Mentorship: Annie Finch’s Harriet Blog Post

[Edits below.]

A few years back I came across an insightful and sobering essay by a prominent British scholar in the field of women’s poetry (I’ve been searching in my files for the exact citation, not least since I’d like to read it again myself). Each recent generation of women poets, the scholar writes, mistakenly thinks itself immune to the invisible fate of its foremothers. And our own is no exception. Her prediction, based on her expertise in the history of women’s poetry, is that if we don’t ground themselves consciously in the work of the women poets before us, our efforts to add our voices to the ongoing poetic conversation will be in vain; we will be eroded, like decimated soil in a land where there are no trees, no roots, to hold anything together. Like the “poetesses” who once sold better than their male contemporaries but are now almost entirely erased, even contemporary women poets, in all the glorious affluent multitudinousness of our equality, are only as strong as the foremothers and precursors and mentors we choose to claim as our own, to rescue from oblivion, and to ask to reach out from the past, and bless us, and help us to begin to build, at last, a tradition.

— Annie Finch, Harriet Blog, 02/26/2009

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Cleansing the Palate

[A]s we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes.

. . . I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean–in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

— Audre Lorde. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.”
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

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Michelle Obama, America, Hip-Hop, Spoken Word

vogue-michelle-obama

“We want entertaining in the White House to feel like America, that we are reminded of all the many facets of our culture. The Latino community, the Asian-American community, the African-American community… hip-hop, spoken word – we want to bring the youth in, for them to hear their voices in this,” [Mrs. Obama] said.

Yet another reason for me to love Michelle Obama.

Read the BBC News article here.

Do you feel the standard of beauty shifting in America?

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Meat: More Questions on Woman Body

img_23091

Niki Escobar, Native Song (February 2009). oil pastel, india ink, acrylics.

[kundiman]

they call the river goddess whore
deflower bayonet stillbirth fertile

she gathers wind in her skirts
escaping ascension opens a world

they peruse local obituaries
foreign concepts natural causes

she gathers collateral damage
headlines prophecy cycles of birth

From Poeta en San Francisco

Thank you to Bay Area Pinay writer and artist Niki Escobar, who is asking some very good questions on her blog regarding woman body, and I think I am going to be responding to those as I continue on with my Pinay narrative. Talk about cross pollination here, as she has jumped off my work into hers, and I will be jumping off her work for mine. Great when it works out this way.

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