EILEEN TABIOS Engages
ESL, OR YOU WEREN’T HERE by Aldrin Valdez
(Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, 2018)
Yaaassss! Do I ever love ESL, OR YOU WEREN’T HERE by Aldrin
Valdez! And color my enthusiasm particularly robust because, frankly, I was leery
that I would not care for it. That is, I broke a rule not to read blurbs ahead
of the poems—thus, I opened the book thinking identity is an old story (which
is not to say it shouldn’t continue to be parsed but, in art, the bar keeps
rising for that not-been-done-before assessment). Thus, I was relieved to
almost immediately (second page) come across masterful imagery. With relief, I anticipated
that the poems I was about to read will display a prowess of language. And
prowess they revealed, such as this excerpt from “Tagalog” that made me re-read
to savor:
“The skin on her callused heels is a map of broken streets &
syllables…”
Since ESL, OR YOU WEREN’T HERE is partly about the immigrant experience,
“broken syllables” is as much a reality during immigrant attempts to assimilate,
whether voluntarily or involuntarily. So much is controlled or affected by
language and it’s appropriate to privilege that element as much as “broken
streets” for purpose of beginning this collection’s narrative.
I’m struck not just by the lush, evocative
diction but also by how it’s clearly earned
(versus, I suppose, merely imagined). In “The Albularyo,” for example, there’s
this excerpt (click on all images to enlarge):
There’s a tendency among many Filipinos
to slang-icize Western brand names to articulate various objects or acts. For
example, “Kodakan” means to take photographs. Valdez’s use of “Colgate” is not
mere metaphor for the referenced inability of the persona’s relatives to
accurately identify the persona’s disease. The insertion of Colgate is a
vestige of colonialism such that the word’s presence also raises the issue of
whether a Filipino can ever be at “home” in English, can ever
fully/successfully assimilate (or pass for), or (should) become fluent in a
language whose relationship began through colonialism and imperialism. It’s a
complicated matter, as complicated as the disease referenced in the poem whose
identity can’t quite be revealed.
Logically, there’s a grief and a
grieving throughout the collection. In part, this relates to how the persona
had to leave his grandmother behind in the Philippines when his family
emigrated to the U.S. This person wasn’t
just a grandmother, though; this person also was de facto his mother. For his
actual mother first emigrated ahead of him—she didn’t see, thus raise, her son
for the eight years that she lived in the U.S. This trauma is not just personal
but political: the Philippines has one of the largest diaspora populations, with
overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) a major source of support to the Philippine
economy; in 2011 (last year cited by Wiki), OFW remittances exceeded U.S. $20.1
billion. Such is the backdrop to the book’s title, ESL or You Weren’t Here—“ESL” for the persona starting his days in
the U.S. and “You Weren’t Here” as regards the mother-grandmother who meant so
much to him.
The other side of the story, of course,
belongs to the parents who had to leave and left their loved ones behind.
Thus—and it’s telling that the first poem opens with this—
Nanay once joked that when it came time to move to the U.S.
she’d beg the pilot to turn back. Or she’d jump out of the plane
swim back to
Manila.
The grief simmering throughout the
collection occasionally wells up to be more pronounced. Such peaks no doubt
rely as much on the reader’s subjectivity and, for me, such a keening arose in
“During a brownout” with this stanza:
Think about it: strangers unearthing the
corpse of your pet to eat it. How do humans become like this? Well, here’s one
of my theories: poverty further impoverishes—poverty can make many of us behave
more brutishly. So much of the Philippines’ potential (from its natural
resources, from its hard-working people, from its intelligent people, from its
English-speaking people…) has been squandered such that its pockets of poverty
reveal realities that belong more in dystopian fiction.
What’s also intense about “During a
brownout” is how it need not have borne its title. The dog-pulutan, the child’s
fear of being hit by a father’s belt, the gossips, the ghosts—none of these
need be related to an electrical brownout. Referencing a brownout, then,
creates another layer. Brownouts occur far too often, which sadly means that
the elements noted in the poem occur far too
often. The all of it is a sorrow like “love like a parent’s voice—so close/
in your ear on the phone overseas.”
Another key element to ESL or You Weren’t Here is of the queer
immigrant’s coming of age. Valdez’s treatment is nuanced, replete with
self-awareness, gentle … most of all, gentle.
Like these nuanced
It’s hard to avoid the fact-ness of
colonialism.
Imagery, I stated earlier, is this
collection’s strength and let me share some examples which are both textually
vivid and visually handle the page effectively.
Towards the end of the book, Valdez
writes:
The above doesn’t merely combine the
elements of concern—not combine so much as collide.
There’s so much more in the book than
what I’ve addressed. For a bildungsroman that freshens up the identity
narrative, learn this collection’s second language. Do yourself a favor and be
there for it.
*****
Eileen Tabios is the editor of Galatea Resurrects (GR). She loves books and has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her 2018 poetry collections include HIRAETH: Tercets From the Last Archipelago, MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION: A Poetry Generator, TANKA: Vol. 1, and ONE TWO THREE: Selected Hay(na)ku Poems which is a bilingual English-Spanish edition with translator Rebeka Lembo. Forthcoming is WITNESS IN A CONVEX MIRROR which will inaugurate Tinfish Press' "Pacific response to John Ashbery." She also invented the poetry form “hay(na)ku” whose 15-year anniversary in 2018 is celebrated at the San Francisco and Saint Helena Public Libraries. More information about her works is available at http://eileenrtabios.com.
