Come forward, and speak.

Here I am, stuck in my husband’s apartment in Norfolk, Virginia, where the wind is howling and the rain falls and falls and falls and falls, never-ending like the view of the ocean on the horizon. I can’t help but be angry and happy and confused—because at least, after 2 months, my husband is snoring peacefully besides me—but after the Navy’s incessant volatility on Friday and two canceled flights due to Hurricane Sandy, I can’t help but think: why can’t life give me a break? Just this once. And these feelings pour into my writing, how I handle the stress, and how I read. I think it’s a wonderful irony that the two books I read for this week are Barbara Jane Reyes’s Diwata and Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, as Hurricane Sandy dominates this city so foreign to me, and I’m stuck here. The instant-now of this moment overfills me like the incessant rain, and I feel overwhelmed yet pleased that the parallel narratives of my life—writing and my marriage—intersect without volition, intention, and I’m stuck to figure out this dilemma with my thoughts and a pen.

In this very transparant status of mind, Barbara’s Diwata spoke to me as if it were a process of reexamining and rearticulating myths, as a way to dismantle, deconstruct them. The words, the narratives, the language spoke to me like the rain did, clear and dominating and incessant. I felt blessed.

Each poem was a conversation on myth, on constructs, whether they were socially accepted (Eve, the Genesis story, diwata, duyong, etc.) or made up (the fictionalized myth in “Why Girls Do Not Speak.”)

The first poem, “A Genesis of We, Cleaved,” opens up the collection in a breathtaking manner, placing the Genesis/creation myth into the mouth of Eve, rearranging the old myth, retelling it, and making it wholly anew and familiar. It also, however, became a conversation on the process of writing, as well as the process of storytelling. In the dark belly of a man, there is a woman who learns how to weave song, and she “torn from the haven of your blood, the cradle of your flesh and tendons.” This poem is juxtaposed by “The Bamboo’s Insomnia,” which is a brief, beautiful poem on the creation of a poet: “I can’t sleep. There is a poet stuck between the love lines of my palms. / And I would tell her to get out if I could, but there is a poet stuck inside / the cradle of my bones and tendons.”

This brings me to Barbara’s poems, “Eve Speaks” and “The Bamboo’s Insomnia 2,” both of which are structured in a similar fashion as the first two poems: one, where Eve speaks and two, a persona stuck within the body. The somatic nature of these four poems bring to my mind our class discussion on immigrant poetics reclaiming the body, as the first step in colonization is telling a single story of the marginalized, and the single story first conquers the marginalized bodies—as a way to dehumanize and ‘other’ the oppressed. Here, Barbara is directly retelling, reclaiming, retaking the woman’s body in “A Genesis of We, Cleaved” and “Eve Speaks”—she is giving the first woman a voice. She dispels old myths by telling the alternative story:

“Lover, do not come near, for I see story in your broken parts. Lover / do not promise, for when you do, I come to loathe words. Lover, do not / speak, for what you say is vapor. / … Lover, did you not / know I wrote my own creation story? Did you not know we all do.”

“The Bamboo’s Insomnia 2” is another creation myth—the act of childbirth—but it usurps the first “The Bamboo’s Insomnia” by changing the person within into a male babe. The mother dies after the birth. It’s violent. “There is no known portrait of her face, he now laments. Only my mosaic / of many scattered stones.” Here, the poem brings out the “I” in the last line. Is this the voice of the mother’s? It may be that it is her and that her stories are “many scattered stones.”

I also want to talk about two more poems, “A Little Bit About Lola Ilang” and “Why Girls Do Not Speak.”

What I love about “A Little Bit About Lola Ilang” is how Barbara captures the ‘voice’ (literally, the syntax and the repetition of “you know”) of the elders via the ‘voice’ of the poem’s narrator. I also love how the narrative moves haphazardly, as if it is a brief moment around the campfire when a manong talks ‘story’—how one moves like a snake telling a tale and starts with a single image of old women: “They flipped their cigarettes with / their tongues so fast.” This poem moves like a film. But it’s also a retelling. It takes an old talkstory and sheds light on how World War II affected a family, but it also goes beyond the retelling and opens up on the lost Japanese soldiers, commenting on the erasure and devastation of war, both on the enemy and the conquered.

“Why Girls Do Not Speak” is a fantastic made-up myth Barbara infused into a poem that directly challenges limiting gender constructs via talkstory and recreation. But it also alludes to another great myth, Plato’s Cave metaphor, where a man travels out of the cave and becomes enlightened by the sun, but when he returns to free his fellow, oppressed, and chained men, they tell him he is insane—they continued to choose to be oppressed by the dark shadows of reality. Here, the woman hunter is the enlightened man. Her tribe’s women are sold off to colonizers who entrap and enslave them, but they become accustomed to their oppression: the whalebone cages and narrow, pinching shoes. When she returns to save them, they claim “they did not recognized her” and “so she returned to Bundok alone.” This poem struck me in a deeper place, and I could not help but relate it to Elmaz’s speech last class, the backlash of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism that enslaves the American public, the oncoming election and my fear of Romney, and how, just when my husband and I were trying to have our first sushi date in months, a woman besides us goes on a rant on why Obama supporters are stupid and Romney is just about making state/local government priority and the “racism is dead now” talk. It made me think of literature being dumbed down and social politics not taught in schools, how our poems and our stories can only do so much to a culture that’s already forsaken books, and how my writing only makes me feel even more isolated and alone when I talk to those outside academia.

It makes me think of the cave. It makes me think of Lispector’s words: “May whoever knows the truth come forward. And speak. We shall listen contritely.”

But the power of our words is innumerable, as is the power of old myths, of dismantling myths, of making new ones. There is a power to our words, which is why are continually silenced. And I cannot help but be thankful for books such as Diwata, and to come across it during the early stage of my writing life, as it shows to me the power we do have as poets of color.

Barbara ends the collection with “Aswang,” which is, as many already mentioned, a female demon in Philippine folklore who preys on fetuses and sucks them from mothers’ wombs. Barbara mentioned at a TAYO reading that I planned way back in 2010 (and at the end of the book) that the ‘aswang’ comes from the colonizing Spaniards who wished to dehumanize the tribal priestesses, as many were in power. It was a way to retell their story, oppress them, strip them of their power, and it worked. Here, Barbara is reclaiming the female body of the aswang. And many Filipino/FilAm writers today are reclaiming her, taking back her distorted body, making her whole again.

Fittingly, Barbara ends the collection with: “Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.”

It is a dare from a witch, from the aswang, from the stealer of life, of babies. Do so, and see what happens.