There were sentences in this book I will never forget. Diwata is one of those collections that when you are all done you still need to go back to see if what you saw is really there. Could she have deconstructed all the walls literature and life has so structurally placed around us. In Diwata, Reyes claims language as her own, yields it as a sword and takes legend for herself. Genesis, meaning beginning was addressed to human kind as a way of explaining where we come from, who created us, in Diwata Genesis explains the beginning of WE of two, of relationship, of interaction, giving and receiving, loss and remorse, it redefines creation and the things that happened right after... it was amazing that in 3 pages the beginning of something so large can be explored sufficiently. I was satisfied in a way that the Bible's Adam and Eve wasn't able to give me.
The beginning is so well explored and given to us...
-these stories I give you, I swear they are the truth.
On the seventh day, my love, I surrendered.
Some say thunder, child of the earth, calls to lightning, child of the sky, because they are twin, split in two by their spirit father.
Before this time, sky was high as a tent. Children poked clouds with bamboo sticks.
This beautiful imagery is weaved into each poem, the language is a lullaby that doesn't let you sleep. Barbara Jane Reyes pokes and prods at you with her relentless visual storytelling. You can find curse words and a subtle deconstruction of American history as it has been shoved down peoples throats initially.
His arms are sturdy from hewing down many of my kin, and his body smells of the animals whose lives he takes.
As for their sons, their bodies come slipping deep into my home. Hands and feet, bound. Salvaged bodies full of soldiers' bullets.
Reyes moves the reader so far past traditional history, traditional storytelling, even traditional religion or mythology is shaken to it's core in this collection.You can find yourself soaking wet in the water imagery. Water connects the pages and allows the poet and the reader to be free in their pursuit to explore dreams and a personal (universal) truth that sways from real to imaginary so easily you can barely decipher the difference, and maybe that's because there isn't much of one. Reyes allows for interpretation as she begins with Others say, or the old ones say, or I've heard it said.... this makes the ground the reader is on such a viable place for growth, the soil is ready for creation. You feel no restrictions on what you are about to hear, believe or resist.
Something about the water who appears as a woman before you.
In a daydream, she closes her eyes, and the warm wave pulls at her shoulders. Slowly she submerges her swollen body, and this is how my mother's womb becomes the sea.
As a reader I am provoked to dream bigger, to lose myself in the water that I am, that surrounds me, that I cannot escape. As a reader I am motivated to think large to think creatively to think freely. The way I came into this world should be poetry, should resemble the motion of water. It should tell of movement and history, emotion and nature. Our human existence should not be told in rigid constructions of the dominant story teller but a collection of stories, all flexible and fierce like the one's I found in Diwata.
I love how you say, "Reyes claims language as her own, yields it as a sword and takes legend for herself." There is is certainly a sense of claiming and, yet it feels like a different or non colonial kind of claiming. As if claiming is outside of the colonial system. Instead it seems essential, somehow, and affirming located somewhere between myth, body, and language.
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ReplyDeleteLlesenia, you captured an emotional level of work in this mythmaking work and you did a great job of connecting it with existing creation stories. I agree with April's response, the sense of claiming means that language can colonize the mythologies. nice work
ReplyDelete"Could she have deconstructed all the walls literature and life has so structurally placed around us??" YES! I was wondering this same thing as I was reading her work. I was almost in disbelief. Like, really? Did she really tackle one of the most widespread and well known stories and completely re-tailor it and made it the most emotionally fulfilling thing ever? And that answer would be hell yes.
ReplyDeleteSO down with alla this! But what stood out to me was "Water connects the pages and allows the poet and the reader to be free in their pursuit to explore dreams and a personal (universal) truth that sways from real to imaginary so easily you can barely decipher the difference". LOVE!! You just pointed out that universal truths do not need to be absolute; that dreams, reality, and what we imagine are all a part of the ultimate story of power that she is painting. Throughout history, most things have been told and retold to serve the purpose of the one telling it, but here, I feel she reconstructs the stories to serve the ancestors and spirits that brought her here thus far, AND sustained The Phillipines throughout its colonial state to its independence. That's some powerful shit!
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