On the Fil-Am front

Some of our friends among Fil-Am writers have been making waves, as usual. Congratulations are in order.

First off, our longtime buddy Luis Francia has received the 2002 PEN Center Open Award for his book of essays, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago (Kaya Press, 2001), which we lavished with praise in this space last year.

The New York-based Francia is on a princely roll. A special evening at UCLA has been arranged to celebrate the book and its author on May 2.

The invitation reads: "In celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the UCLA Asian American Studies Graduate Student Association (AASGSA), Asian American Studies 2002 Spring Colloquium Series and AISAREMA/Disorient Journalzine cordially invite you to ‘An evening with Luis Francia.’

"Join us for a special evening of readings and discussions of the texts’ themes, including post-war Manila, trauma in post-coloniality, negotiations in the Filipino immigrant, and the search for homeland/self (as) moderated by Pilipino American writer and community organizer Napoleon A. Lustre… and coordinated by Gladys Nubla of AAGGSA and Irene Suico Soriano of Asian American Studies Center."

Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event, which will be held at 362 Royce Hall, UCLA Campus, starting at 6:30 p.m. with a Reception (late merienda), followed by a Reading at 7 p.m.

Knowing Luis, I’m sure he had the event scheduled in time to catch the three-peat-ing Lakers in second-round play at the Staples Center, very likely against the Spurs, especially since he’ll miss his beloved Knicks in the playoffs for the first time in years.

Another Fil-Am Knickerbocker who does us proud is the young poet and novelist Bino A. Realuyo (The Umbrella Country, Ballantine Books, 2000), whose poem "Filipineza" appeared in the Feb. 18, 2002 issue of the prestigious The Nation, a copy of which he graciously sent over.

The poem has an epigraph that goes: "In the modern Greek dictionary, the word ‘Filipineza’ means ‘maid.’"

I’m sure our friend Bino won’t mind our sharing his wonderfully poignant poem – six tercets and a concluding line – in full:

"If I become the brown woman mistaken/ for a shadow, please tell your people I’m a tree./ Or its curling root above ground, like fingers without a rag,// without the buckets of thirst to wipe clean your mirrorlike floors./ My mother warned me about the disappearance of Elena./ But I left her and told her it won’t happen to me.// The better to work here in a house full of faces I don’t recognize./ Shame is less a burden if spoken in the language of soap and stain./ My whole country cleans houses for food, so that// the cleaning ends with the mothers, and the daughters/ will have someone clean for them, and never leave/ my country to spend years of conversations with dirt.// When I get up, I stand like a tree, feet steady, back firm./ From here, I can see Elena’s island, where she bore a child/ by a married man whose floors she washed for years,// whose body stained her memory until she left in the thick/ of rain, unseen yet now surviving in the uncertain tongues/ of the newly-arrived. Like the silence in the circling motions// of our hands, she becomes part myth, part mortal, part soap."

I recall the summer of ’97 when National Artist for Literature N.V.M. Gonzalez got wind of some poems of Realuyo’s that appeared in The Evening Paper, and urged us to fax these to him in Baguio where he felt they could effectively be shared with the UP writers’ workshop fellows. Nestor knew good poems when he saw them, and his generosity would quickly take over.

Most readers appreciate Realuyo for his successful debut as a novelist. Soon, or so we hope, they’ll also be introduced to Bino’s other strength as a writer, when he comes up with his first poetry collection. Remember, you read him here first, unless you were in Baguio with N.V.M. that summer.

On Wednesday, April 24, "A Spring Fever Poetry Reading" takes place at Pusod Gallery, 1808 Fifth St., Berkeley, California.

The come-on reads thus: "Poetry’s embrace encapsulates April as National Poetry Month and Earth Month, three groundbreaking books on love and eros, a fundraising to benefit Earth, and the developing soul-mate relationship between Filipino and Singaporean poets.

"The love and eros feast… will launch and celebrate three books: Love Gathers All: The Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poetry (Anvil Publishing Inc. and Ethos Books); Eros Pinoy: An Anthology of Contemporary Erotica in Philippine Art and Poetry (Anvil); and My Romance: Essays and Poetry on the Visual Arts by Eileen Tabios (Giraffe Books, Manila).

"Singaporean and Filipino/a poets represented in the three books, as well as local Filipino-American poets, shall present poems on love, romance and eros.

"Eileen Tabios, Michelle Bautista, Barbara Reyes and members of Pusod’s Asian American collective ‘Energies in Residence’ shall offer poems along with the following soulmates from Singapore: Felix Cheong, Grace Chia, Aaron Lee, Toh Hsien Min, Alvin Pang and Cyril Wong.

"Proceeds from book sales and door donations will benefit Pusod (Tagalog, ‘navel’) – a Center for Culture, Ecology and Bayan."

Tabios, Bautista and Reyes will be missing the macho company, martial-arts camaraderie and inspired musicianship of Joey Ayala, who ran Pusod till late last year. But hey, they’re not showing it. And they’re ready to have another love feast without him.

The Singaporean poets Cheong, Lee and Pang visited Manila in January last year, effectively starting the increasingly sticky relationship with their Filipino counterparts. When they readied plans for a Bay Area spring swing, no amount of dissuasion on our part could stop them from inveigling us to help arrange a close encounter with our Fil-Am edition. Now I’m sure the love affair will heat up even more when they meet up with the impresaria Tabios and her equally fetching colleagues.

Speaking yet again of Eileen, we still have to get our hands on her, uhhh, latest book. We should ring up Gloria Rodriguez of Giraffe soon for a copy, so we can see for ourselves why Fil-Am dramatist Reme-Antonia Grefalda, the Virginia-based co-editor of Our Own Voice: A Literary Ezine (www.oovrag.com/~oov), wrote something (plus a poem) about awe, in response to the book.

An excerpt from her paean: "My Romance is more than essays on art. More than an art critique joined with related poetry by the author. This book IS Romance, a wild fling 24/7 by an artist high on epiphanies from viewing and steeping herself in the Artist’s soul/sole intent on a lifetime of Art.

"…When I was toting the book around on the metro on my way to the airport, I had to kinda hide the title. In DC, you can’t be that obvious of a Romantic without getting beaten up… with looks!"

And speaking of Our Own Voice, its first issue for the year unveils a new look that enhances the stories, poems, essays and a play that "bring the portrait of the Filipino in the Diaspora…" It also includes a chapter from Vim Nadera’s novel, "Historyador(a)."

Another co-editor is Singapore-based Nadine Sarreal, Mrs. Rodriguez’s daughter. With Flips (all over), the notion of "six degrees of separation" certainly seems too liberal a theory of connectivity. We’re all much closer than that, to the fancy of global literary domination.

And Jessica Zafra still has to put together (soon, soon!) the first issue of her imminent Flip magazine.

I was about to add: "More on the Fil-Am front next week" – when what should walk through the door than a hand-delivered book titled Seven Card Stud with Seven Manangs Wild: An Anthology of Filipino-American Writings, edited by Helen C. Toribio, recently published by East Bay Filipino American National Historical Society.

Accompanying it was a note from Ms. Virginia P. Gapuz, general manager of Great Books Trading at 27 Masikap St., Sikatuna Village, Quezon City (tel. nos. 927-98-58 and 926-47-08), saying that our San Francisco buddy Oscar Peñaranda had requested them to send us a review copy.

It looks very good indeed, with essays and poems by 23 contributors. Surprisingly, only the editor Toribio and the poet Tony Robles seem to be familiar names. Which perhaps tells us that the reflections and memoirs of Fil-Am writers have only had their surface barely scratched, such has been the diaspora of our own voice.

You’ll get to know more about it next Monday, along with news on a mystery Filipina writer whose novel has just come out in the States, arguably hot on the heels of the celebrated first novel When the Elephants Dance by Fil-Am author and success story Tess Uriza Holthe.