Criteria and rationale for choosing the poems I did

I have created this blog to post my Top 5 Poems by Filipino American Poets that were published during the 1980s and 1990s. I specifically chose Filipino American poets simply because I am half Filipino. I chose poems that were published during the 1980s and 1990s because they were written by contemporary poets that are still producing work today. The criteria I used in order for a poem to make it on my "Top 5" list is if I liked it, could relate to it, or learn something about the Philippines or its people from it. 

With creating this blog, I hope to put Filipino American poets in the spotlight in order to spark more interest and inspire others to seek out and appreciate artwork created by Filipino Americans. I also hope for readers of this blog to learn about Philippine history, culture, and issues through these poems and to also take pleasure in them as I have. Happy reading! 

“First Mango” by Vince Gotera

Remember that June before our wedding we spent

in San Francisco? That first morning you woke

to my brother in silver sequins singing like

Diana Ross? What must have gone through your mind?

What kind of people were you marrying into?

My father who laughed a lot but was schizophrenic.

My stepmom who’d tried, they say, to stab him in the back

with scissors. Love may be blind, but not stone blind.

Then, one Sunday we bought at the corner market

one perfectly ripened red-gold mango.

How carefully I slit the skin with my penknife

…rivers of yellow juice, the furry seed…

then sliced the golden half-moons into quadrangles,

open petals. Your first bite of our sweet life.

Paraphrase: The speaker is reminiscent about their life before he and his wife got married. He wonders what his wife thought about his family when she had first met them.

Analysis: The speaker seems a little unsure of what his wife thought of his family when she first met them because his family is a little dysfunctional. However, in the second stanza, he seems more sure about his wife-to-be when they share a mango, and she has her “…first bite of [their] sweet life” (line 14).

Why I chose this poem: I thought this was a sweet love poem and I really liked that the author of this poem used mango, the national fruit of the Philippines, to really unite the couple as one. 

“An Afternoon in Pangasinan with No Electricity” by Regie Cabico

In the yellow of butter

My mother colors my skin

In the yellow of sun

My skin becomes brown

In the yellow of yolk

My grandfather finds an egg

In the yellow of noon

We eat the baby chick

Balot, they call it

“Long life!” he says

And discards the purple shell

Paraphrase: The speaker describes a day in the life of his family, more specifically, what they did the day they had no electricity.

Analysis: The word “yellow” is used repeatedly throughout the poem, symbolizing the Asian race. Lines 1 and 2, “In the yellow of butter / My mother colors my skin,” reinforces that this family is of Asian descent. Lines 8 and 9, “We eat the baby chick / Balot, they call it,” implicates that this poem is about a Filipino family because Balot is a popular egg snack in the Philippines.

Why I chose this poem: This poem reminded me of my dad because he grew up in the Philippines and went to the beach everyday and  “In the yellow of sun / [his] skin becomes brown” (lines 3 and 4). He also told me that he used to eat balut, but doesn’t know how he did it because it doesn’t appeal to him nowadays. 

“Milkfish” by Eugene Gloria

You feed us milkfish stew

and long grain rice, make us eat

blood soup with chili peppers,

and frown at us when we lose our appetite.

I remember when I was young and you

told me of that monsoon: the Japanese occupation –

stories of a time before you met my father,

when you learned the language

of an occupied city in order to feed your family.

You were the pretty one at seventeen,

your skin, white as milkfish.

The pretty ones, you said,

were always given more food –

the Japanese soldiers, sentried above

the loft where you worked dropped

sweet yams and you caught them

by the billow of your skirt.

I remember you in sepia-brown photographs

of a mestiza who equated liberation

with Hershey bars and beige nylons

from American GIs – and the season of the monsoon,

as dark as hunger, was not about suffering

but what you knew of beauty.

Paraphrase: The speaker is reminiscing about his Filipino mother telling him stories about her time being interned by the Japanese in the Philippines.

Analysis: The Japanese occupation of the Philippines was seen as a dark time in Philippine history to most, but not to the speaker’s mother, however. According to the speaker, his mother saw “…the season of the monsoon, / as dark as hunger, was not about suffering / but what [she] knew of beauty.” The speaker’s mother was favored during internment because she was “…the pretty one at seventeen,” so she was given special treatment, therefore not suffering like many others.

Why I chose this poem: I don’t know much about Philippine history, so after reading this poem, I did a little research. I learned that the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the Philippines just ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Japan occupied the island from then on, but American and Filipino troops continued fighting until Japan formally surrendered in 1945.

            I also chose this poem because the lines, “blood soup with chili peppers, / and frown at us when we lose our appetite” (lines 3 and 4), remind me of when I was younger and my aunts would make dishes, such as blood soup, and tell us kids to eat, even if we weren’t that hungry. 

“There Is No Word for Sex in Tagalog” by Noel Mateo

look it up

you won’t find it anywhere

it’s not in the dictioinary

instead – metaphors for the unspoken

euphemisms blinding enlightenment

implied in its mystery

something comes lose

a word of the streets

where sex was thought to belong –

whisper kantotan in their ears

with mischief in your eye

guilt, maybe shame

the titi and the puki

spoken in the adolescent murmurs

sex in the shadows

assumed knowledge

repressed and pretended

to be there but never spoken of

talong the long eggplant

dark purple smooth phallic

saging ni pasing

ITT CO MAKATI

ang titi ko malaki

you wish

mani and cherry

who’s afraid of vagina cool

hidden underneath the saya

all covered in guilt

why you so afraid of it

Filipina the mahinhin

Pinoy must be lalaki

he who must wear the pants

after all these years

still a Catholic colony

you had to have done it sometime

too many of you

for immaculate conceptions

or sitting on public toilets

so give it a name

call it wonderful

God’s gift to you

you beautiful and tragic tongue

Paraphrase: There is no direct translation for the word “sex” in Tagalog. Instead, there are other Tagalog words that are used to implicate the word.

Analysis: The speaker suggests that because there is no word for “sex” in Tagalog, that the Filipino people are trying to uphold a pure and chaste reputation. However, there are “too many of you / for immaculate conceptions” for that clean reputation to be true. Because of this, the speaker wants the Filipino people to just “give it a name” already!

Why I chose this poem: I am half Filipino, but my father unfortunately did not teach me Tagalog as I was growing up, so I am taking an introductory college course in Filipino right now. So far, I have not been able to find a Filipino word for “sex!” 

“Scrambled Eggs and Garlic Pork” by Michael Melo

Sheila and I spent the night talking about French.

I’ve always thought French to be such a sexy language

and yet how awful my French became as I tried

more and more to woo her with cool Frenchy words –

“voulez vous couches avec fromage sussois”

did not make the hair on the back of her neck

stand like “Kumain ka na. Meron kanin at adobo

dito.” It’s funny, I don’t remember much

Tagalog, I’ve lost it the way sex

transforms a virgin to another Joe Schmoe

in the crowd. And yet Sheila says no, she says

I am still very much Pilipino even if I choose

not to believe it. And she says even a white girl

like her can tell I’m the real thing

by the way her legs grind tight together –

she purrs on the phone

when I speak of browned scrambled eggs and garlic pork,

and how we should clean the toilet,

“Mag linis tayo nang kubeta ngayon,” she finds it sexy

and I’m thinking god, her pale legs are rubbing

together, they are making more heat than we ever did,

I find this out now, when she in Boston,

I find this out now, she was here the whole summer

on my blue bed in my apartment, not once did

our hips meet, and yet now I can count

from isa to tatlong-po, and slowly drag my

vowels, isa, dalawa, tatlo, apat, lima,

anim, and count her sighs and heaves,

and shit goddamn

why did I

forget so much?

I think of my father as I twist these words

for good phone, I remember his black tape player

on his desk. And after he’d been cutting hearts

and livers and tongues from Vienna Sausage

he always brought home these thick

textbooks and every night he would kalong

my brother on his lap, and together they would

learn how to pronounce English correctly.

I would go to bed and see the light underneath

My door, and go to sleep listening to

My father spit his Fs & Ps on the table.

Fair. Few. Finger. Fat. Frogs. Fire.

Pumice. Polka. Pat. Pitted Prunes.

We didn’t have Fs in our alpha bet.

When he’s get confused and say “Fark,” people would laugh,

especially the folks at work, those Polish

and German Americans, they were merciless at

the butcher shop. My father, degreed and educated

in Luzon was just another cow to be punched around,

each day I could tell when he came home

another man made fun of his tongue, it just wouldn’t

go the right way today, or yesterday, or tomorrow.

Few and fine and park and pickle and fieve and fuck,

They were only words but they meant the difference

Between not good and never good enough in America.

And me? Here I am, figuring out how to woo

and woo my love to bed tonight and I bet

if we could, my father and I would slice tongues

and trade in an instant.

Paraphrase: The speaker of the poem is a Filipino American man trying to seduce his significant other by speaking one of the most popular romantic languages, French. Instead, the speaker’s significant other finds the speaker’s native language, Tagalog, more seductive. The last two stanzas of the poem introduce the speaker’s father, who is an immigrant from the Philippines to the United States, and his relationship and struggle with the English language. 

Analysis: The fact that the speaker knows English and Tagalog, but is trying to learn French in order to seduce his significant other, perhaps implies that the speaker is trying to “hide” his Filipino side and is trying to fit in with American culture by learning French to woo American women. However, his significant other prefers that he speak Tagalog, therefore the speaker now wishes that he knew more of the language because he is slowly forgetting it.

The last two lines of the poem, “if we could, my father and I would slice tongues / and trade in an instant,” maybe shows that the speaker is taking the fact that he knows how to speak English well for granted and that his father would gladly have his son’s English-speaking skills in order to fit in America. The speaker would like to “trade tongues” with his father so he could be fluent in Tagalog in order to seduce and entice is significant other more sufficiently.

Why I chose this poem: I think it’s a poem that many Filipino Americans, as well as immigrants from other countries, can relate to because the speaker wants to be more American and in turn, starts to forget his native language. However, his significant other makes him realize that his diversity is sexy and that’s what makes America unique!

Works Cited

Carbo, N. (1995). Returning a borrowed tongue. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House

Press.

Nick Carbo brings together poems by Filipino American poets that

“represent …parts of ourselves that have been denied, lost, hidden, or forgotten” (XIV). With this anthology, Carbo propels contemporary Filipino American poets into the spotlight that are still producing important work today. Some themes of the poems included are immigration and migration to America, struggles with the English language, nostalgia for the Philippines, and exotic encounters. 

Hong, G. (1993). The open boat: Poems from asian america. New York:

Doubleday.

Garrett Hongo brings together poems that celebrate the character and strength it takes for Asian Americans to survive in adversity. Race, ethnicity, religion, and culture are the main themes of these poems and showcases that all Americans, no matter what country you have descended from, share the same fears, hopes, and aspirations.