Banna in the Mind

(For Joel Manuel, inheritor par execellence of a heritage)



This is the right way to decipher the wall of language,

The englishes we learn from winter winds, white wisdom,

Snowy christmasses, kissing santa clauses with ruddy lips.

Haha! Tell it to the marines, those that got the boondocks

From the mountain ranges and brought home the madness.

No mas, señor Manuelito maestro, no mas puede, ngamin,

Ngamin ta bulbulitor a napeklan ti mannanakaw a kaibaan,

Oh yes, the elegant elf comes ransacking the rusty rice bin

And finishes off the ugaw and gracia of the kankanen.



I got my license now to teach English to all who lust

To learn again what language is, the word of the world,

Worlding what is, what ought to be, what we are,

Pilgrims all in this life, journeymen looking for luck,

Much luck when you have yet to sell your name,

More when you breathe the mountain air of Banna,

The farms in wildfires even in the coldest of heavy rains,

The fires from the fertilizers we buy dignidad por almuzar

The fires from the water we barter smile for pangngaldaw

The fires from the certified seed mortgaged with linugaw.



Haha! You are damn right, absolutely right, señor,

The politics of language is in the bad teaching,

The domination that comes with instilling the amen,

That yes that goes with imitating immaculate dreams,

Those that come to us without the colors of coaxing

The arid earth to give birth again to low skies, clear

In the quiet seasons for recounting mushroom picking time

To midwife green fields and forests with the fern

And the promise of a full meal, the scent of cooked rice

In the altars of lived lives, fully lived, our lives,

With the sweet singing, in falsetto, of the Pamulinawen

The singing sober and alert, in step with the Arikenken.



Haha! Keep on, señor Manuelito maestro, keep on

With the language studies that frees us from the decrepit,

The one that shows us the way to liberating the verbs

That make us violent, arrogant, self-centered, Western chic,

The language studies that breaks down the wall that excludes

Separates us from our separateness, we who desire

The enchantment in names, the magic of nouns,

The unmasking of the conjugation of our faked foreignness.







Aurelio S. Agcaoili

Carson Library, Carson, CA

Nov. 12, 2004