In this interview, Barbara tells us what it’s like to be a Filipino poet writing about her homeland in San Francisco.

Barbara Jane Reyes (BJR): I do not have a formal group of Filipino–American poets in San Francisco, but I have made both personal and professional connections with Filipino–American poets over the years. Many of these poets, such as Al Robles, Jeff Tagami, Jaime Jacinto, Shirley Ancheta, Virginia Cerenio, Oscar Peñaranda, and Tony Robles have been in the San Francisco Bay Area for a very long time, and some of them were born in California. Their poetry is about the previous generation of Filipino immigrants to the American West Coast; these immigrants, who were laborers, from the early 20TH century we have come to call the "manongs." This generation of poets and their descendants are very deeply rooted in this place, much more so than in the Philippines, which might be a more distant concept to them.

But the Filipino–American poet community in the Bay Area is diverse, for those of my generation, whose parents as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, bring along a different relationship with America and with the Philippines. We move back and forth between here and there; we have families, extended families, relatives in both places. And so we bring these relationships with place into our poetry.

BJR: The thing about claiming the San Francisco Bay Area as my home is that San Francisco, the Bay Area, and UC Berkeley (where I was an undergraduate), have built themselves to greatness as a result of continued American penetration into Asia. We see very palpable evidence of this in San Francisco streets: We cannot simply go about our lives, going to school, going to work, going to the grocery store, without colliding with, for example, homeless Vietnam veterans, many of whom are so broken, so alcoholic, and so racist that they see in people who look like me the Asian prostitute, the "Gook," their wartime enemy. They tell me/us so, sometimes right in our faces. I can’t pretend not to be bothered or upset, offended, afraid. I can’t go hide and never venture into the world.

In San Francisco, we share space with Vietnamese refugees who were relocated to refugee camps in the Philippines before ending up in San Francisco. And so we form communities based upon these physical, geographic, and historical similarities.

BJR: The Philippines figures itself as an originary point, and perhaps this is clearer in my first book, Gravities of Center.

I was born in Manila but I immigrated to San Francisco when I was very, very young. I have my parents’ memories of life there, and I have my own experiences in the Philippines as a visitor.

The fact that I am a visitor to my own place of birth is sometimes a source of sadness, and so as I read the news, as I learn about the historical and current American military occupation and its violent effects on the people and on the land, I can only really write about my outrage as a simultaneous insider and outsider.

The fact is that I am an American, for better and for worse, as I have lived in this country for over 30 years and was educated here, and so I can’t completely separate myself from the American ideologies which reinforce the American military presence there. I can only indict and self-examine. I do not feel it is my place to claim the Philippines as a home that is truly mine.

BJR: In 1993, while I was studying Comparative Literature with Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo at UP Diliman, I read poems by Marjorie Evasco — excerpts from her book, Dreamweavers, and poems included in the journal Caracoa.

What I especially enjoyed about Evasco’s poems was the blending of what I think of as feminism, this empowerment of women and elevation of women’s roles and social/historical status, with such visually lovely and fragrant poetic language. At the time, the American women of color feminist poets I was reading, I did not think allowed themselves that lovely poetic language, for they were writing from these defiant political platforms. There is nothing wrong with standing upon defiant political platforms; it’s just that as a defiant woman of color feminist myself at the time, I had considered what was lovely, what was aesthetically beautiful to be frivolous, weak. This was not so in Evasco’s work.

More recently, I really enjoyed Paolo Manalo’s Jolography. I think Manalo has done what many of my generation of poets are attempting to do, which is to blend our "native" (or our parents’) languages with the urban and technological vernaculars in which we are immersed. The poets I consider my community — Filipino –Americans, Asian–Americans, Latinos, African–Americans — are trying to do this, affect this blending of languages, because this blending is a more accurate reflection of our ancestral and contemporary, urban realities.

BJR: I have recently completed a poetry manuscript entitled Diwata in which I am concerned with the overlapping of historical accounts, family history and family stories, and oral tradition. Given that my generation of Filipino–American storytellers and poets live and operate by the written word, I am interested in how we take those stories orally transmitted to us, and retain and preserve them.

And so, in Diwata, I have tried to affect traditional storyteller voices on the page. As well, because we start stories "in the beginning," I locate the voice and persona of Diwata somewhere in between the Book of Genesis creation story of Adam and Eve, and the creation story of Malakas and Maganda. That in-between place is akin to the in-between place in which I exist and write.

The next project I am working on is in a very nascent stage, and addresses violations of women’s bodies and human bodies via war and pornography. The poems in this project will most likely be prose poems, for the kind of density and overwhelm the form allows me. Not pleasant, the writing of these poems, but these are the things that preoccupy and upset me when reading the news.