Memory Is All We Have Got
Aurelio Solver
Agcaoili, PhD
In the end, we become memory. But the important thing is
that we resist—we keep resisting—so that the power of forgetting will not lead
us to perdition. Instead, this power of memory leads us to eternity, this power
of memory that is living, this power of memory that has life, this power of
memory that has no end.
This is what I see as one of the central themes of this
collection of Delia. This is the reason why I gave this same kind of title to
this collection when she gave me the freedom to give a name to this first-ever
collection of her poetic works.
But let me return to the nature of memory and its one of its
antonyms, forgetting.
Simply put, memory is bifurcated.
The first of this is memory that comes off in an instant,
gets into the mind for a moment, and in its surrender to the tick of time it
becomes a faint outline of a strange reality like the fading away of the mist
when the rays of the bright sun comes and the mist disappears from the mountain
top.
The second is the memory that is present in all the time of
mortal life, in the finitude of that which makes us human, in the boundary of
all that a creature can do to resist the authority and power of forgetting.
This is the memory that counters every extinction of things that are important in
the life of people, in the meaning of that life, and in the ways that make
everlasting that life in the matrix of the finitude of that life, of its having
an end, of its having a telos.
Many people say that it is man’s moral obligation not to
accept, and thus resist, forgetting.
The reason is that in forgetting there is the extinction as
well of personhood, of the creative power of thought, and of that freedom that
goes around the universe. In that act of freedom going around comes the
discovery that there is a promise that is hidden from the experiences that come
to our understanding, from the segments of the past that come to us, and from
those small stories we keep so that because of these and through these, we become
ready in recognizing the landmarks that guide our journey.
When I went on a journey to Madrid because of a research for
the data for a book that I was planning to write, I had the chance to shake
hands with Delia and to also know her more personally. Before that, we got to
know each other through one of those social media sites, our way of getting to
know each other prompted by my search for possible informants for a book I was
planning to write.
Before our personal encounter, I have seen a true poet, true
to her craft, and in our meeting in Madrid, in the city of memory of the
colonial experience of the Philippines and its many citizens, whether these
citizens are in the country or have gone abroad like me, I have mixed feelings
in reading her poems.
There were many heroes who had long passed on and who stayed
in Madrid, and in my treading on the avenues they trod on in the spring time,
like that one splendor witnessed by a poet when he went to Heidelberg, for
instance, I witnessed too the hidden sorrows in the lines of Delia’s poems.
I am well aware of the need for sadness in a person who is a
poet: that a poet must be sensitive and that a poet must have that elevated
sense of things when she begins to take notice of the familiar and look at this
again in a new light.
I am well aware that in every true poet there is that
activist of life, a protester in the classical definition of that public person
who broadcasts and denounces those things that are not right but nevertheless are
happening.
I am well aware that in every true poet there is a person
who reflects critically of the many layers of events in the life of a person
that continues to remember the things that are past-qua-present and are
present-qua-future.
The settings in the poems of Delia are clear: the city of
many challenges, a Balungao that gave her enough sense of consciousness, and
the foreign country that opened to her a door and where she could see the
possibility of hope.
I became a wanderer in Madrid and the other places in this
nation state in Spain, but I was given the opportunity to get into a more
intimate relationship with the many Ilokanos of that old city, the reason why I
became a witness to the texture of life of the immigrants there.
Becoming an immigrant is not a new experience to me: I left
the Ilocos, and then I left the country. For two times, I became an aimless
wanderer, and I used these experiences to get to know better the discourse in
the poems of Delia.
It is not easy to paint a picture of experiences like
these. More so, it is not easy to paint a picture of the ethical situation
where the ethical agent must make a decision, and in his decision-making, its
twin, grief, is there.
Delia, for instance, has painted that event in life, in a
poem dedicated to her husband who has passed on to another life:
To be alone is not easy to accept.
Doubts get to become twice.
And in your absence, there you are
In the sadness.
And she begins to narrate of her
many tribulations by remembering her fundamental experience:
We were poor
But in the midst of uncertainties
With you there was nothing
missing.
Your touch in the early evening
hours
Is a bonfire that gives off warmth.
The joys we gave each other,
Mine I give to you alone.
Delia sums up her sorrows, and while looking at the children
who are the fruits of their love—she and her spouse who has gone to the
beyond—she feels the presence of the absent spouse, and he is absent because he
has passed away, because he has moved on to another life:
You counsel the children,
You teach that in your absence,
You are there.
These thirty poems in this
anthology have clarity of perspective. We see here a mother, a wife, a sister,
a compatriot, and a daughter. We see someone who ekes out a life in another
place, like the Metropolitan Manila where she worked, where she started her own
family, and which she left behind to search for that other land promised her.
Her leaving Balungao behind is
with the condition that she would return at the appointed time, and in her
returning would be the renewing, again and again, of the living memory, of the
memory that has become an ingredient for working so hard, of the sad memories
of poverty so that all of these would become a well of mental strength, a well
needed to search for the ways to have a better life. She speaks to Balungao,
her hometown:
It is in the midst
Of time’s moment moving slowly
Where there I wait for that caress.
Memories come flooding.
There is typhoon in the chest
On the landmark of a mountain
Of how far away I am, there
I reach for the heaven.
In the living spring,
There, joy knows no death.
My thirst is quenched
By the scenes produced by the
water.
Here we encounter what Salma
Rushdie has said about the role of a poet’s work: ‘A poet’s work is to name the
unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world,
and stop it going to sleep.’
It is not easy going back to the
hometown one has left behind.
It is not the case that the door
of the house we turned our back to is open all the time.
It is not the case that each of
the sea we need to cross is calm all the time or it is peaceful in all of the nights
and days. There are relationships that are destroyed because of one’s
departure, and in the meditations of Delia about the nature of leaving—like
leaving behind one’s own children in order to take care of other children and other
families—there is that choking quality of this experience, that choking that
when one does not know how to address it, leads the one who left to catch her
breath.
I remember Delia’s personal
story to me—that first time that she left her homeland. Her youngest was still
to young at that time. She was drowning with sorrow. She felt her whole body
was melting each time she took a step farther away from her home, from her son.
But she had to remind herself to be mentally strong. That she needed to stand
up so that in her standing up she would be able to rebuild her family that was
challenged by the serious sickness of her husband.
Her children were still young in
those days—a stage of life that reminded her they needed her presence.
But that was the time when she
needed to give her obligation to her husband who was then recuperating from kidney
transplantation. Her youngest, her only son, told her: “Mother, when you come
back, we are going to build a second floor of our house, yes?”
“Yes,” Delia replied. And she never turned her
head to look at him one last time. Instead, she walked fast in order for him to
not see her tears profusely welling on her cheeks.
We read these raw and fresh
feelings in these poems. There is no sophisticated technique to hide these
domestic experiences. In her treading the path to the memories of her leaving
to go far away, but going far away only to return at the right time, there are
sorrows that come to roost, and there are wandering hurts that are sometimes
outside language. That is the reason why sometimes the topography of the
language deployed by Delia is not even. Instead, you see in that topography
clods of earth, the wetlands, the small ponds that at an instant could become
the native drum or the native trumpet that reminds us of the collective
ceremony of emotions, of a re-gathering to meet up one more time, of communing
in order to remember, in order to re-member or become a member again of that
human community we have not know for a while.
In this topography is a mixed
bag of feelings.
In there is a faint complaint.
In there is the laughing that
springs from the comedic way of looking at human experiences.
In there is the delicate way of
summoning nameless loves, the recalling of an intimation of the heart, an
intimation understood only by another one, the beloved.
In there are the numerous
complaints of a mother against her child, complaints that are common because
these are everyday in the life of a family, and despite its being everyday there
is the plain fact that the experience of a domestic help in one place is the
same experience of a domestic help in another place—an experience that does not
discriminate one’s identity but makes the condition of an OFW all the same:
like a slave, indentured, at the mercy of the rich bosses.
We see in this excerpt the
hopefulness of a worker of the fields:
You firmly hold the cut rice plant
And its stalk surrenders, wilts
So that to you is the gift of
grain,
You harvest with persistence,
Hull removed with desire
That lives beneath the sun
So that in the paddies are the
furrows
There the seedlings
Of a dream multiply.
And the disposition of a beloved:
But the music that is you
I shall listen
The tune that is you
Is a gift.
In a number of the poems of Delia is the power of
instructing.
It is possible that a number of critics who follow the
ideology of writing patterned after postmodernism and post-structuralism and a
number of readers schooled in another ideology of writing and reading might not
approve of the texture of these poems. But this we say: didacticism as a form
has a role in a literature anchored on the oral tradition.
The truth is this: since 1620, with the publication of the
Doctrina Christiana for the first time so we can see the Romanized form of the
Ilokano language from its native form of a script, the ‘kur-itan’—a syllabary
and an abugida form—this form of literature has not gone past its audio form to
inaugurate a fixed form of the visual and intellectual. The written for has
just begun for the Ilokano language.
The competency and literacy requirements of these two forms
of language are not the same, and thus, didacticism as a genre of literature is
always based on the oral, on the sounds, on the lips. These kinds of poems are
a warning, a caution, a reminder. In this way, Delia’s works are grounded on
the nature of the orature. We see the following, in her own way of discoursing
about the life of a person who grew up poor, and continues to face the challenge
of the field, the daily form of wretchedness, the weight that is ever-present
in poverty.
In the early morning hours
You rise, and quickly move like
time.
The crystalline dew
Wets the thickened skin
Of the poor farming folk
Like my father
Like my mother
Like my sibling
Like my elder brother
Like my relative
Like me
In the same cycle
Of wretchedness.
.
In the level of language, we see here a calculated way of
seeing, a prosody that is creative, and a phraseology that has an imaginative
way of looking at the ordinary experience of people. But this ordinary
experience of people becomes extraordinary because of the creative use of
ordinary words, and of the pushing of these words to the limits of their
magical boundaries so that they would bring you to the peak, in that swing of
emotions coming into an ambivalence, and in the terror of the crevice of
imagining: the hour rushes, she says, and this is the hour of the poor person who
goes to the field to struggle, the poor rushing in the same way the hour rushes!
In the rushing—that act of running after time—is the
everyday episode of the life of the poor, whether these are in Balungao or in
Madrid where some of the Ilokanos have found a place to stay. But this is not a
unique experience: in cities as in the barrios where there is that commitment
to work, we do not need the tick of time to work diligently. As soon as we are
awakened, there are the chores one after another, chores that need to be done
in between rushing, chores that we repeat the following day in that wheel of a life
of the poor people. There is no pillow to lay our heads on—there is nothing to
lean on—except our own consciousness: strong, whole, and daring. Like this way
of affirming:
If they can do it,
I say I can do it as well.
The mantra on my mind,
A thought I have for all
time.
I invest upon my own strength,
industry, prayer
All the images in my head
I paint like all the scenes in the
field.
The poor poet is left with an ad populum for herself, a
self-flattery that substitutes her commiserating with her sorrowful condition.
In a complex situation like this—a situation forcing the poor poet to choose
between extremes, we see her responding to the many situations that she comes
to witness, her own situation, and a situation that she needs to overcome.
The enchantment of memory—the magic of remembering that has
its own autonomous life—this is the capital Delia deployed in creating these
works.
In each poem is the act of remembering, and in each act of
remembering is the seed of a poem that in the enchanting power of a pure plan
becomes an insistent act, the act finding its realization in the words she
summons at the appointed time. The insistent act as a reminds us of the many
obligations a poet has, whether these obligations are to her personal life or
to her life as a poet of her ethnolinguistic community. Gregory Maguire,
through Candle in “Son of a Witch,” has this to say about memory, and the
obligation of the writer to that memory: ‘Memory is a part of the present. It
builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts
pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds
our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.’
We have many reasons to go on a
journey
Even when there are thorny
branches.
Far away, I recall what I left
behind:
Shadows.
Home-grown remedies
To scare off the plates
Deprived of food then
And now.
I hear a vision that is a protester, a human thought that is
a protester, and a poet’s pen that is a protester. But this protester has yet
to be christened, still unnamed, still without a design. It comes to the mind
at the appointed time to face the danger of waging war in life in the country
or in other shores, but we gradually see the epiphany of the good plans, and
these are good because these include the collective life. In this way, the
entirety of memory appears like daybreak, the daybreak born of a memory that
heals, a memory that cures, a memory that gives rejuvenation and invigoration
to the four Ilokano souls.
In the poems of love, we see here the muted voice of Leona
Florentino, the declaration of immaculate love, the ever-readiness to make
sacrifices, the love that is forever. Here is a voice that knows full well the
architecture of love, the telos of love that is creative, the apocalypses of
love that renews the experiences that make one miserable, the story that ropes
the foot and prevents it from stepping forward, the cantata of the early evening
hours that announce the coming dawn.
Some of the feminists might call that this kind of love is
that of a martyr, with martyr understood in the negative sense. But isn’t that
the aim of love is to give back the love offered by another, a requiting of
that love that is beyond the political discourses on what and which is to be
the priority, or who has more right compared to another person?
I whisper my hunger
Into your heart so you take from
me
This container of tiredness
This bag of sorrow.
And this:
I shall wait for your warm arms
Imprisoning me
And feel that you
Are life’s spirit, you who are a creator
Of sorrow and hardship,
You who are creator
Of this plentiful joy.
The premises in the poems are premises that spring from a
frank face-to-face encounter with the challenges of life. The speaker is a
woman and mother and sister and wife and daughter. But at day’s end, this
speaker is a poet, a poet beyond these categories, a poet that soars in the
clouds so that in her soaring high and free and unbridled she becomes one of
the theoros, one of the goddesses that look down upon the mortals of the
earth.
In our formal way of evaluating the merit of her work, this
anthology leaves behind a promise, and that promise is based on a bold way of painting
human experience that mirrors a poet who thinks, and she thinks because she
continues to be reminded of a voice that tells her that to write is urgent,
that it is a must that she does not stop writing. There is some unevenness in
her work, but this unevenness is a natural deficiency for those who come face
to face with the challenge of the page for the first time. No poet is ever
fully dressed when she was born, to literally translate an Ilokano adagade.
Only her experience and her memory will give her the garment that gives her
warmth in the winter cold.
This we know: that if Delia continues to write—if she continues
to hone her skills in reining her ability to look at the world in a visionary
way—she will launch other works that prove that both Balungao, her first
homeland, and Madrid, her new homeland, have produced a good poet.
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