Eileen R. Tabios has developed a
following as a writer, blogger, book collector, artist, and reviewer. Here is an
interview with her, and scroll down for a review of her book PAGPAG by Neil
Leadbeater. I first heard her name from my poetry friends and then saw her poetry
review online journal GALATEA RESURRECTS (A POETRY ENGAGEMENT), an important commentary
on contemporary verse. After relocating to northern California, I looked her
up, and we have enjoyed an ongoing dialogue about our writing, her small book
library, her fostered dogs, and
more. We exchanged questions and answers for
this interview in early October, 2020, as she and her family were displaced by
the Glass Fire.
DL You have a
large body of published work, and the listing of publications is available on
your website. https://eileenrtabios.com/ How does this new book of short stories PAGPAG: The
Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora (Paloma Press) relate to your themes in previous work?
ERT That is a good question,
because this book is an interruption of the writing styles I was exploring.
These stories (except for one I added to cohere the collection) were published
from 1995-2000; they represent me as a newbie creative writer, and I do not
write the way I wrote back then. But I decided to re-issue them as a book in
protest against the cruel policies of current Philippine president Rodrigo
Duterte as well as his complicity in rehabilitating the reputation of the
family of Martial Law dictator Ferdinand Marcos. I thought it important to
remind people that Martial Law occurred, was damaging, and offers a legacy
wherein junior-Marcos-type politicians undeservedly thrive to the detriment of
the Filipino people they are supposed to serve.
Having said that, I
am calling *interruption* only as regards writing style. PAGPAG’s
stories are not that far from a consistent root cause to my poetry, which is
addressing injustice. In my case, injustice helped create me as a diasporic.
But it’s okay that I present from the diaspora because, as I say in my introduction,
the effects of a dictatorship go beyond the obvious killings and torture of
political rebels; the effect continues for generations and beyond national
borders, and one result is the growth of diaspora. The growth in diasporic
movement is not just from opposition politicians fleeing the dictator but also the
population going overseas for work and other opportunities not available
domestically, due to insufficient domestic development policies.
One
aggravating—though not the most important—result of injustice is how it
interrupts Beauty. I am very interested in exploring the many facets of Beauty
(much of my poetry attests to that), but addressing injustice is of course a
worthy diversion. For PAGPAG, the proverbial straw that caused me to
release this book—and it was a very swift process from that decision to
publication, thanks to Paloma Press publisher Aileen Cassinetto, who empathized
and saw exactly what I was trying to do—was when I learned how the word
“pagpag” had turned from its original definition of “dusting off” objects to be
one of when poor people recover food dumped into trash landfills before
attempting to clean them for re-cooking into new meals (you can see, and be
offended as I was by, this video: ).
While PAGPAG
is a short story collection, it also offers poems (inevitably so since I am a
poet), including its ending poem from which I excerpt about the
choice-that-is-a-non-choice faced by the poor:
How to choose between malnutrition versus Hepatitis A
malnutrition versus typhoid
malnutrition versus diarrhea
malnutrition versus cholera
A Filipino scholar
I respect noted that the pagpag practice can exemplify the resilience of a
people who otherwise might starve. Far be it for me to criticize actions by the
hungry and malnourished, but all of those diseases mentioned in my poem can
result from eating food scavenged from trash. So I was enraged at how the
political leadership allowed this fate for poor people. I truly feel a nation
must be judged, too, by how well (or not) it treats its weakest constituents.
The poor are not given enough support, so the least I can do is remind with a
book, even though inevitably I must write from the position of one who was able
to leave and is outside the country. I do say in my Introduction:
"The
aftermath [of a dictator’s actions] is not always obvious like the imprisoned,
the tortured, or the salvaged (murdered); the aftermath goes deep to affect
even future generations in a diaspora facilitated by corruption, incompetence,
and venality."
DL What did you hope to accomplish with writing
this book?
ERT My voice from the diaspora is not as
important as those (in the Philippines) directly helping the poor and working
for political change. But I suppose I just wanted to add my voice, which
perhaps can add another element to illustrating the effects of a dictatorship,
as I describe above. The stories all maintain a “from the diaspora” point of
view but they are from the fictionalized children of the anti-Marcos opposition
that had to leave the Philippines while Marcos was in power. I am just adding a
modest voice to the clamor protesting against those failing in their public
duties.
DL What differences do you find between writing
poetry and writing fiction? Any similarities?
ERT I find I am more didactic when writing
fictional prose—that the about-ness is more privileged than if I was writing a
poem. This, by the way, is why I feel that in terms of effectiveness, the poems
in PAGPAG are not as good as the short stories. The poems elide too much
of the specifics that need to be shared full-frontally about the nature of
political abuse and dictatorship. The poems, thus, are in support of the
fiction which do a better job in communication because of their didacticism
that offers specifics.
This is not to say
that political poems cannot do justice to what they are addressing. I am only
talking about me, and how I prefer in poetry to address Beauty than non-Beauty,
knowing I can go to other forms like fiction when I want to do something else.
DL Often people note that United
States poets fail to write many good lyric poems that are political statements
overtly, as the didacticism detracts from the lyricism. Perhaps here you say
the elision of lyric poetry also makes political poetry more difficult. Thank
you for that insight. You and I have talked about my good fortune in
meeting Bienvenido Santos when he was a professor in my MFA program. He first
made me aware of the political and personal tragedies in his and your homeland.
What else would you like to share about your book or its impetus?
ERT I would not go so far as to say lyricism
makes political poetry more difficult. I only know that part of my position is
not having to be constrained by only writing poems. I can write prose, too.
As for what else I
would like to share about the book, the (abusive) effects due to the extremes
of rich vs. poor and elite vs. disenfranchised are well-known and stretch back
over much of human history. But as a person of my/our time, I notice what seems
to me more drastic gulfs caused by wealth spurred by technology and financially
leveraged products, among others. In the past, we certainly had the Rockefeller
wealth due to oil and J.P. Morgan’s wealth due to finance, and these wealths,
proportionately, may not be significantly different from those of today's
Gates, Bezos, or Musk. But it seems to me that we have more such gazillionaires
today. I speculate that the more you have of such people, the more they are
able to create a culture such as a financial wealth-created bubble; such a
bubble creates thicker borders because there are enough people with whom to
socialize within that bubble.
Then, I suspect
that from that bubble—and economic elite of course can translate to political
and other types of elitists—you start seeing politicians with decreasing
empathy for the weakest among their constituencies. For they are not as in
touch with them, or they recognize the suffering of other people as theoretical
versus lived. In the Philippines, for example, there is a group of families
that usually control economic and political standing. In the U.S., well, how
much empathy has the President shown for people who live in various margins?
In my Introduction
to PAGPAG, I insist that “it’s not okay. Pagpag is never okay—especially
in a land where others spend ‛15 million pesos on a handbag’” when a
serving of a pagpag meal can cost "as little as 20 pesos hard-earned by
the poor.”
I do not know if
my book PAGPAG offers any benefit. But as I write in PAGPAG, “A
writer writes and here I write in protest—I know writing by itself is not adequate…
But I do believe in the ultimate power of the written word and this book would
be among those I’d send back from the diaspora to the Philippines.”
Consequently, too,
I am glad to share that PAGPAG will have a Philippine edition released
by the end of this year. It will be published and distributed in the
Philippines by Wesleyan University Philippines. I could not have expected this
result when I first put together the book. But I am glad because it is fitting
that this facet of my writings return to the homeland. Not everything should
remain in exile. And/or, I do not need to remain exiled.
DL This is almost a note of optimism. Thank you
so much for your reflections.
------------------
NEIL LEADBEATER reviews Pagpag:
The Dictator’s Aftermath In The Diaspora by Eileen R. Tabios (Paloma Press, 2020,
available at https://eileenrtabios.com/fiction/pagpag/) “Pagpag” is a Tagalog word
meaning “to shake off dust or dirt” in the sense of fluffing up bedding to get
rid of dust or shaking off crumbs that have landed in your lap. More recently
it has come to refer to the scavenging of leftover food from garbage cans. Beggars
or scavengers shake the food to remove the dirt that may have become attached
to it. People who scavenge for leftovers in the Philippines will frequently
cook what they find to make it less dangerous to eat.
In this collection of
eleven protest stories, written between 1995 and 2001, Eileen Tabios rakes
through the debris of “the continuing past” of a ruthless dictatorship to
register her offence at having been forced to join the Philippine diaspora. For
her, “pagpag” “heart-wrenchingly symbolizes like no other the effects of a
corrupt government unable to take care of – indeed, abusing – its people.”
In her introduction she
says, “A writer writes, and here I write in protest – I know writing by itself
is not adequate, even as I humbly offer this collection to readers. But I do
believe in the ultimate power of the written word and this book would be among
those I’d send back from the diaspora to the Philippines.”
Throughout this
collection, poverty is described in all its forms and not just in terms of a lack
of money. It is also seen with reference to a lack of opportunity and, more
importantly, a lack of being able to make one’s voice heard and a lack of being
able to do anything about it. There are old men and women sleeping on hard
surfaces, small farmers forced out of business, companies stripped of their
assets and a displaced population from Calauit who end up dying of starvation.
There are also many things
that have been discarded, broken or inadvertently left behind: a diamond ring
and a pair of earrings, halved coconut husks, the broken fragments of a crystal
vase, the mountainous trash heaps of wasted food in the foothills of Manila.
All of these have consequences for the poor.
There is plenty of variety
too, ranging from the politically charged “Force Majeure” and “Redeeming Memory”
to the politically correct “Homeland” and the comic “Pork” and “Tapey.” Ghosts
are present in at least three of these stories, but there is a sense in which
they haunt every one of them as Tabios confronts her past.
The cover image, Self-Contained
(2009) by Rea Lynn de Guzman—an
interdisciplinary artist working in painting, print media, and sculpture—is the
perfect fit to this collection since, like Tabios, she also immigrated from the
Philippines to the United States at an early age, sharing that common bond of
displacement and exile. This is a powerful collection of stories that
illustrates the extent to which the legacy of dictatorship is still being felt
today within the Filipino diaspora.
-------------------
Neil Leadbeater is an author, essayist, poet, and critic living in Edinburgh,
Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published widely in
anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His publications include Librettos for the Black Madonna (White
Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester
Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The
Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014), Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017), Punching Cork Stoppers (Original Plus,
2018) and Penn Fields (Littoral
Press, 2019). His work has been
translated into several languages.
Eileen R. Tabios loves books and has released over 60 collections
of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in ten
countries and cyberspace. Publications include form-based Selected Poems, The
In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets (1996-2019), THE
GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Selected Visual Poetry (2001-2019), INVENT(ST)ORY:
Selected Catalog Poems & New (1996-2015), and THE THORN
ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010); the first book-length
haybun collection, 147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML); a
collection of 7-chapter novels, SILK EGG; an experimental
autobiography AGAINST MISANTHROPY; as well
as two bilingual and one trilingual editions involving English,
Spanish, and Romanian. Her award-winning body of work includes
invention of the hay(na)ku poetic
form as well as a first poetry book, Beyond Life Sentences (1998),
which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry (Manila Critics
Circle). Her poems have been translated into 11 languages as well as
computer-generated hybrid languages, paintings, video, drawings, visual poetry,
mixed media collages, Kali martial arts, music, modern dance, sculpture and a
sweatshirt. Additionally, she has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15
anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays as well as exhibited visual art and
visual poetry in the United States, Asia and Serbia.
