blame as subversion

To end on Blame me. Oh my. 

I read Diwata in one sitting because I got trapped inside it feeling claustrophobic, freed, angry, vindicated, seduced, enchanted, soothed and amped up all at the same time. I have to say, I've had Diwata on my shelf for some time now. I've picked it up a few times and read the first poem and decided to put it down because I could feel, from the very start, that this book was a journey through a wildnerness of intricacies that needed, demanded, attention and devotion that at that moment I didn't have. I sensed, almost intuitively, although actually it was the sense cultivated from the remarkably crafted first lines (On the seventh day, my love, I surrendered) that I could not pick up and put this book down as it suited me. It was a mythology as much as a present and internal account, and this book would make me adhere to its own internal logic and follow in its rhythms. And oh my, did it ever.

When I say wilderness of intricacies it is because this book pulls on so many themes - Christianity, mythology, languages and multilingualism, gender, power, sexuality, empowerment, colonization, musicality, internalized oppression - all within a shape and form that does not allow for any of these "themes" to be external. It is as if Reyes places us directly inside a space of many many kinds liminality and guides us through all the multiplicities of experiences/feeling/visions that this liminal space engenders. Liminal spaces, because of their complexities, are usually simplified, watered down for more "accessibility". Words are defined, contexts are given, voices pull away from contradictions. But there is no simplification in Diwata. Things (implications of misogeny in Christianity, the origin stories that aid in survival of Filipino mythology, translation or the impossibility of it, voices otherwise not heard) all come together in poems that are deeply centered, clearly spoken, with a complete lack of confusion amid the complexity.

As I read I kept thinking about syncretism (combining of different (often seemingly contradictory) beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. may involve the merger and analogising of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths). It is a term, despite its definition, is used as a diminutive. Except that often syncretism is a survival skill, a measure to keep traditions alive, and to cultivate belief systems that most represent cultural and personal realities. Diwata feels like a work in syncretism all on its own - one that profoundly weaves religious and mythic tales with anti-colonial and empowered gender visions.

And to end with Aswang, the indigenous women priest who speaks all the thing that were ever said about her to discredit her power, and in doing to unveils that in fact her power hasn't been unrooted. Her power has become transformed. Blame me, she says, and with its utterance she subverts the colonial and patriachal myths about her, returning us to a power of wholeness with the land - I am the caretaker of the ancient trees - Blame me.