When you read a book you remember your life
Lawrence Ypil
Dog-ears in the wrong notebook
ON A lazy afternoon, when there is nothing to do, no when there is nothing to do that is worth doing, at two in the afternoon, when the rest of the world is sleeping, I read a story I’ve read before, but many years ago. I read Kerima Polotan’s “The Virgin” in my copy of Isagani Cruz’s The Best Philippine Short Stories of the Twentieth Century. It is an old copy and I haven’t touched it in years. It’s an old story written in 1951, which I read in 1998, when I was a junior in college, from a book of Polotan’s whose title I have already forgotten. Sometimes it takes, a second read to notice details in a story one might have missed on first read: a description of a wrist, a twist, the wooden sculpture of a bird.
I like “The Virgin” because it the story of desire, but subtly told. I like “The Virgin” because it has one of Philippine literature’s most unforgettable characters: Miss Mijares. Placement officer in a labor agency, old maid, not too pretty who has spent years taking care of her sick mother, her nephews, only to find that she doesn’t know what to do with herself, after her mother has died, and that life, she feels, has passed her by. Miss Mijares who falls in love with a laborer—and his arms. Who finds herself lost in a street, on a rainy night, sharing an umbrella with the man who will change her life. Oh my.
Sometimes it takes reading a story again to realize that a character, once deemed older by youth, 34, is now, this time around, actually younger than yourself (and by two years already!) Oh dear. I am older than Miss Mijares! It is the reader that ages and not the characters in the stories that we love: “In the dark, she turned to him.” To love a story one more time, but now for completely different reasons. Sometimes, it takes reading a story again to make one realize that time has passed and one has in fact survived the twentieth century and come out of it alive. Well, surprise, surprise.
***
One of the best things about being a mentor is meeting a student from years ago and realizing that by some of trick of time they have miraculously become themselves. Not who they were, or who you thought they were, or what you thought they would become, certainly, not what you wished they would become. You meet them as who they are. You meet them as themselves.
A few weeks ago, Nikay Paredes was in town to launch her first chapbook “We Will See The Scatter.” Nikay graduated from the Ateneo a few years back and has received an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry, from the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York. Now she’s back to teach in Manila and hopefully scatter a few of her potent nuggets of poetic energy every time she visits Cebu.
But I first met Nikay when I was still teaching poetry in Ateneo, and I first really got to work with her when she was a student of mine in a summer writing workshop. Nikay’s poems always struck me as enfused with a Cebuano sense of humor (even if she writes in English), and a kind of lateral style all her own. I felt she looked at the world always from the corner of her eye, and when I read her work, I always imagine a DJ at a turntable scratching a disc. Her voices move not vertically but horizontally, from side to side, sliding through and past syntax, and always an enjoyable ride.
In “We will See The Scatter,” we see this same impulse of aesthetic lateralality, but this time with a bite. No surprise. Many of these poems are about or inspired by Manny Pacquiao – a fitting muse for a poet of our times. There’s a punch, then, to these poems, a grit. They are willing to fight, and they do: critical as they are about the diasporic condition, the switching between languages, our obsession with whitening soaps. But they are also about the art of poetry itself: how we find them, make them. They are poems about the need to rediscover poetry wherever we can find it. From the side of the eye or the mouth. I suspect Nikay will make it far and wide. The best thing about mentorship is that one cannot take any credit from your student’s merits. Not at all. The talent is entirely their own. The best one can do is watch and wait and clap. Congrats.
***
When I come back to Cebu, I stay in my parent’s house, in the room that I grew up in. The same bed, the same mirror that has seen me grow up, the same window that overlooks the garden. Some days I feel like nothing has changed, that I am the very same sixteen year old about to leave for college. I believe a part of us is always the age at which we first leave home. Other days though, I feel like I am a stranger stuck in my own room. Whose is the lamp under which I read a book? Whose is this desk? Most days I waver between he who is always somewhere else and he who never left. Well, I am home.
