after José Olivarez
actually, I don’t have to yell.
or say anything at all.
we filipinos, we like to
announce our presence.
if you haven’t figured us
out by our brown skin
and brown hair and
brown eyes,
everything brown like
the morning kape my yaya
used to brew,
you’ll place us soon enough.
“pinoy pride” is ingrained in our bones,
our language, our land that
sinks by four meters every year cause
it was made of volcanic rock
but still rises like
abó and air. the way our
resilience forces us
to rise again
and again.
but still,
i walk in.
and i yell “hoy!”
and point
with my
lips,
and all the pinoy boys and dalagang
pilipinas turn to look at me
cause they thought they
just heard their mother.
all of us are shaped
by our mothers
moreso. we
trade stories of
culture and carry-ons and carrying
the weight of two (or more) worlds on
our frail tongues. you see,
in our parents’ homeland,
english is currency, is class, is the colorful
understanding that we can choose
to fit in with our colonizers.
and all that implies.
our parents were programmed
to make themselves palatable
to dear old GI Joe
and figured it would create
doors for their children, too.
but what about my children?
my kababayans’ children?
while the door to this new world has already been opened
will my kids lose their chance to learn about the world their mother left behind
in the language where she first learned how to love?
i walk into every room and yell
asan kayo, aking mga kapwa Pilipino
pakinggan ninyo po ako
that means Listen to me
cause maybe i secretly
fear the day when my father will stop
telling me superstitious tales of the tikbalang and the multó. and my mother won’t make me
pray the rosaryo. and my titas won’t
remind me to aral muna before loving any boy.
and my cousins won’t be around forever
to call me about canceled promises
of pag-ibig and pagmamahal and poreber
while i tell them to
move on ka na lang, dae yan mabalik saimo
in Taglish and broken Bicol —
everything broken about the way i talk
like the bridge between
the land i left and the land i live in
i’m trying desperately
- [ ] not to let crumble completely.
i walk into every room and yell where the Filipinos at
cause maybe i don’t want to lose the language that laps like a wave
over my ancestors’ land,
that reminds me of june typhoons
and hot december days
and spending school in the city
while sweating out summers at sea —
the language that sings to me
like a kundiman - a serenade - into my soul
cause i fear i will forget that
i am made of abó and air,
and not just assimilation;
and maybe that is why i scream
for my fellow Filipino,
in hopes that our resilience
might help us find friends
who will help us swim to the shore,
so we may not have to wonder
how to wander back home.
L.M.B.F. (she/her) is a writer born to Bicolano parents and raised in Metro Manila, Philippines. She enjoys exploring language in all its forms -- through rhetoric and speech, through poetry and prose, and through the intersection of English with her own native languages, Bicol, Tagalog and Spanish. As an incoming high school senior, she completed the International Writing Program’s (@uiiwp) Between the Lines: Identity and Belonging program in July 2019 through a full grant funded by the Doris Duke Center for Islamic Art. Although she is new to publishing and performing her writing, she wants to use her work as an educational tool to help other young Filipinx-Americans connect to their culture in the diaspora.
Contact Info:
Insta: @haliyapoems & @liaa.melissa
Originally published in October 2019.