Lost in too many memories, words

I'm really at a loss right now. This whole week was a blur, and I apologize this post is late. My grandmother's viewing was on Thursday, the memorial service was on Friday, and the funeral was on Saturday. I spent so much time with family and crying, and too many feelings have past through me. Excuse the brevity of this post, but I hope I can give as much as I could now, considering how lost I am feeling!

I want to focus on one poet in the selection. Vandana Khanna's brevity in her poems struck me, and her first poem, "Train to Agra," shook me. It read like a homage poem, a tribute poem, and the journey was beautifully painted in such a succinct and striking way. I love the first lines, "I want to reach you-- / in that city where the snow / only shimmers silver / for a few hours." That, to me, focused on what "place" meant in a post-colonial perspective. "Place" is as much physical--the train to Agra--as it is emotional and it is structured as much as it is in the world and in the mind. Here, the narrator is reaching out to a place that represents and encompasses everything that a homeland assumes and extrapolates.

Here are other stanzas I love:

"... Asleep

in the hot berth, my parents
sway in a dance, the silence

broken by scrape of tin, hiss
of tea and underneath,

the constant clatter of wheels
beating steel tracks over and over

to the city of white marble,
to the city of goats, tobacco

fields, city of dead hands,
a mantra of my grandmother's--

her teeth eaten away
by betel leaves. The story

of how Shan Jahan had cut off
all workers' hands

after they built the Taj, so they
could never build again."

This brief passage shows me how Khanna takes the history of the person and ties it with the history of a people. It's a lovely, subtle movement and she does it without stress; it's a natural progression. She moves from the moving imagery of her parents dancing, a still movement, and like a film, expands and expands until the whole city of Agra is in view, quickly panning to the history of the Taj Mahal, the cut hands, and back to the history of the person, compressed in her grandmother's mantra.

It was too much to take in during this time. I miss my grandma. She is my muse. Throughout the whole week, I slept in her small room and explored everything, all the drawers, the big closet of clothes, her vanity table, everything. I wrote her obituary and researched her history as much as I could. I found her notes that told me of the time she was captured by the Japanese during WWII in the Philippines, when she was tied by the neck and hung and yet never relented, never said where my grandfather was, a major and guerilla in the US-Philippines combined armed forces. I found old documents detailing her brain tumor surgery in 1991, when I was only three, and I can't believe them--they tell me she was weak and nonsensical--but the only thing I remember is how much of a presence she held in my life, how much of a tyrant, a tiger mom, she was to me, and I couldn't help but cry and miss her.

I hope this is appropriate, but I wanted to share my own tribute poem I wrote for my lola back in April 2012. Khanna's first poem reminded me of my own. I hope this speaks a little about place and how to deal with place and memory too.

My lola knew I would sound like a bastard child
whenever I tried to color my tongue Tagalog. She mourned
the way I stuttered, how I paused over words that looked
like olds myths. She ran her fingers across my cheeks,
saying, “Here you are. Ikaw ay puti, anak. Ikaw ay puti.”
She frowned.

In the morning, I dig in my soul with a spoon full of rice,
looking for yesterday and yesterday, paper parols dancing.
I force my lola’s hands in mine, asking where my sky was.
Was it here, was it there, where do I stand? Am I of the
brown children or the white, I ask, telling her, please take me there.
She frowned a wave of sorrow, saying our sky was where
the gone things go, tucked away, laid in the folds of yesterday,
yesterday. I see the island and I am a thousand years old,
my lola stands with me, her skin bright like warm coconut milk
mixed with calamansi blood. She sings an old, forgotten kundiman
to my lolo in the woods. He wears a green beret and has a rifle
in his hands. When he sees my lola, his eyes become the Pacific.
He is the myth of the masculine toad, anger lives in his arms.
He sees me and spills ash over the land.

I begin to fade in this island without a sky. When only my hands remain,
my lola takes them, placing them on a rock. She tells me all the things
that I am: I am Ilocano, from Ilocos Sur, my lola is from the mountains,
my lolo is from the sea. I come from a rich farm family, and my great-lolo
died when the Japanese burned his land. The redness from the grass has
become my sky. There was no rain to quench the redness. Everything I am
has become yesterday, yesterday, like the sun goodbying at dusk.

Here is, too, my grandmother's obituary (if you are interested in reading it): https://lissawriting.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/my-grandmothers-obituary-the-tiger-from-aringay/