America Through Brown Eyes
America Through Brown Eyes
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: Sunday Globe Leisure, April 21, 1991
"...America the mystic the sweet mysterious Celtic canticle white father to hobos and poets, blind undertaker."
- Juaniyo Arcellana
from America the Beautiful
"Bring on your music, America, and I will sing"
- Conrado B. Rigor
from I Hear America Singing
IN a dream, I saw America dying in a hole it had carved for itself in the ground, a wasted fat man creased and opened out in folds of lard and butter, blue in the mouth, white as death, red in all the hollows. I saw a mighty tremor heave inside this abcess of flesh, pushing out and up and over in a wave of violent seizures that traced the length of carcass until I thought it would pop.
It did. From the cavity in its face rose a steaming geyser of black iron ore, sweet crude, jazz, sex, movies, Chevroltes, armaments and coins of the realm. It was then that the body before me, having vented its wastes into the atmosphere now crimson with hellfire, shot bolt upright on its feet, grinned, threw its face in the wind and walked away. The imagery was chilling, but apt. Everytime America senses death at its door, it sheds its rot like an old skin and rewrites its pacts with God, the devil and man.
Just when we thought that US Embassy spokesman Stanley Schrager was a badmouthed white supremacist a package from the United States Information Service (USIS) slid in with the morning mail courtesy of none other than Mr. Schrager himself. In the package was a hot copy ("hot" as in "just off the press") of the controversial 24th issue of Caracoa, the poetry journal of the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC), which is almost certainly the most respected literary quarterly in the country today. Focusing on highly subjective visions of America by leading Filipino poets writing in English, the issue was published by the USIS in a special one shot deal with the boys from PLAC.
Flipside: Poems on America is the very same Caracoa 24 that some cultural observers of staunch anti-colonial sentiment had been stalking with bared fangs, the same issue printed by the Patriot-style USIS press in Manila, and the very same volume feted in that glitzy evening bash at Ambassador Platt's residence in Forbes Park. This is also the same Caracoa 24 that was conspicuously unavailable (as in "no promotional copies to be found anywhere") at its own launching last month.
Rumors flew fast and thick about that one. Some said that the Americans found the issue much too abrasive for their liking, and had sidelined all copies for shredding. Others claimed that Flipside had merely been a propaganda toy, with America the Generous circulating all of its copies in far-flung sitios where the natives could neither read nor write, let alone savor the nuances of English poetry. Besieged by carnivorous reporters, PLAC President Alfred A. Yuson had a more lacklustre explanation: the USIS had simply failed to set aside promotional copies of the book for guests at the launching, and would be mailing them complimentary editions in the coming weeks.
That I eventually received two copies in the mail—anchored by official-looking letters signed in the original by Mr. Schrager—should put a damper on rumors regarding the book's arbitrary sidelining. Nevertheless, the surrounding controversy has already made PLAC's Flipside issue a collectors' item, the talk of Manila's literati, and a volume well worth looking into.
The unlikely partnership between PLAC and the USIS is not nearly as black a conspiracy as some would prefer to imagine. PLAC, then barely a year old, put out the first issue of Caracoa in 1982, a handsome if somewhat slim affair that looked doomed from the onset to become yet another shortlived oddity. 23 issues and nine years later, it has miraculously survived and flourished, becoming the longest-running quarterly of English poetry in the country, and probably in the entire Asia-Pacific region.
The attainment of that distinction is a story in itself. Michael Adams, an English expat whom PLAC still lists to this day as its Honorary Chairman, went on to underwrite the publication of 18 of Caracoa's best known issues (Volumes 3 to 20) until he had to beg off from the heavy financial strain in favor of an early retirement in Vancouver, Canada. With the journal's reputation firmly established, PLAC's patrons since then have included private donors, the World Ecologists Foundation of Charley Barretto and Franz Viana, and now the United States Information Service, which is well known in local quarters as America's propaganda machine overseas.
The arrangement with Schrager, USIS Counselor for Public Affairs and himself a closet-poet of sorts, was a fairly straightforward one. PLAC would solicit the material and edit the selections for the volume, design and illustrate the issue from cover to cover, and would then turn the volume over to the USIS for printing and bulk distribution. It was agreed that there would be no censorship of unfavorable material nor any editorial meddling by the Americans, and that only the mindlessly vulgar would be scratched off by PLAC's editors.
"What great humors attach themselves to North American brains!"
- Alfredo Navarro Salanga
from Six Poems: 1 February
Because the USIS was intent on circulating copies of the issue to its vast network of outlets both here and abroad, it was decided that 3,000 copies instead of the usual 500 would be printed. Word now has it that 5,000 copies have since come off the press, making it one of the largest local editions in circulation. Strapped for cash Uncle Sam is not!
The volume, as elegant as they come in paperback, features some rather memorable poems by the late great Alfredo Navarro Salanga, Jose Dalisay Jr., Ma. Fatima V. Lim, Rene Estella Ampas, Simeon Dumdum Jr., Felix Fojas, Marne Kilates, Fidelio C. Cortes, Gerard Pareja, Juaniyo Arcellana, Danton Remoto, Lois H. Francia, Jessica Hagdodom, G.B. Calleja, R.C. Sunico, Rowenna Torrevilas, Edith L. Tiempo, Ophelia A. Dimalanta, Alfred A. Yuson, Emmanuel Torres and Ricardo M. de Ungria.
Interestingly enough, the collection likewise begins with nine vintage poems written in the first half of the century and selected for this issue by the poet Dr. Domingo H. Abad from the award-winning book Man of Earth: An Anthology of Filipino Poetry & Verse From English, 1905 to the mid-'50s, which he edited along with Edna Z. Manlapaz in 1989. The otherwise-mothballed lines of Justo Juliano, Fernando M. Maramag, Procopio L. Solidum, Luis G. Dato, Trinidad Tarrosa-Subido, Conrado B. Rigor, Rafael Zulueta y da Costa, Bienvenido N. Santos and Amador T. Daguio provide a fascinating counterpoint to the street-smart scat typical of our more contemporary poets living and working stateside. The contrast alone in the focus and syntax of two disparate waves of Pinoy verse-makers renders the volume particularly noteworthy.
"Transport me by this rite of the Greatest Sufferer
From this despoiled Gethsemane
Of starvation wages and unemployment
To the New Paradise
Of social welfare and hamburgers.
Into thy hands I commend my citizenships."
- Marne Kilates
from The Passion of Donald Rexford Jr.
"Some gifts one can never give like waking up in April to a morning frost..."
- R. V. Sunico
from For Tess Who Loves Scarves
America has never trusted what is hidden from view, which is why it has raised snooping and eavesdropping techniques to the level of an artform. This anxiety, I think, is most manifest in its dealings with the Third World, and with orientals in particular since Pearl Harbor, Koreas and Vietnam. In the American schools that I attended, the threat of the proverbial stab in the back—more imaginary than real—kept the yanks at bay and gave us the edge. Chinks and japs were tolerated, even feared, because whitey believed that behind the stupid grins and blank demeanor were treacherous killers trained in kung fu and jujitsu. On the other hand, we flips were equally dreaded because of the knives we were thought to stow in our trousers like a third leg. It was a lot like insurance, and we grew to enjoy the advantage.
America's interest in publishing Caracoa 24 could be interpreted by the paranoid as a yankee probe into the hidden psyche of their present-day "little brown brothers", a well-timed "frisking" for bladed weapons, as it were, on paper where they are least lethal. If in fact this is so, America's findings would promptly settle its stomach and rob us of our aces. Americans need need never a third leg that wags on cue. Even a pointed one. Even one unsheathed and poised to strike back.
Curiously, although anti-Americanism is all the rage in virtually all underdeveloped countries, the angriest poets in Flipside sound less like the enemy than like the estranged children of a thoughtless, domineering mother. Their verses reverberate with resentment, not hatred. The darkest irony here is often bittersweet, the bars blunted by an aching nostalgia, the reproach coated with sentiment. While we do not always drool over America's white magic, our feeble protests translate more like pained afterthoughts than legitimate threats. Never do we completely reject America for what we clearly recognize to be its exploitative nature, its pretentiousness, its gross disregard for our own nobility and sovereignty. We gladly trade double-talk for malice, potshots for rape, sarcasm for duplicity, and tears for rank abuse. And then we wonder in unison why America cannot begin to respect us for what we are, its illegitimate offspring festering in our own puns.
Perhaps our very fondness for this language already says it for us. It is a sobering message and a sad one. Yankee go home. But take us with you.
I sincerely doubt that Caracoa 24 will be shredded, after all.
* * *
Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “America Through Brown Eyes” (page 1 of 1), Sunday Globe Leisure, April 21, 1991
