Poetry of a multi-stranded heritage
I can’t recall exactly who gifted me with this poetry book last year: Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia, a London-based Brit-American who grew up in the Philippines. It must have been another London-based Filipina author of commanding repute: Alex Quicho whom I had known since she was a child growing up in Vancouver.
I understand from Londoner Gene Alcantara, himself a poet in Filipino, that another byline distinguishing itself in the UK is that of Dani Neywood-Lonsdale, whose recent novel, The Portrait Artist, has been hailed as “brilliant” and “deliciously intriguing.” A Faber Academy alumna who teaches English literature in Oxfordshire, she has maternal roots in the Philippines.
In any case, Sy-Quia’s book was published by Granta Poetry in 2021 when she was but 26. Last year a second book she authored was her debut novel, A Private Man, also well-received.
On Amnion’s back cover flap, she is described pithily as having been born in Berkeley, California and grown up in France. At the time of its publication, she lived and worked in London as a book critic.
Shane McRae writes for the front-cover flap: “Amnion excavates migratory histories, colonialism and class, moving from England to France, the United States, Spain, Germany, Libya and the Philippines. In this chronicle of a family’s history divided by geography and language, Stephanie Sy-Quia explores the reverberations that the actions of one’s generation can have on the next, through acts of bravery and resistance, great and small.”
I should have given this book earlier time for appreciation, as its poetry is uncommon in both form and substance. I agree with McRae that it is “undefinable in form, combining aspects of fiction, epic poetry and the lyric essay, and merging classical thought and contemporary life to show the joy in life and art.”
For this brief review, what I can do is concentrate on the references to our country and the heritage that the poet now banners as an amalgam of memoirs. My intention is to show that poetry written in English by Filipinos displays undeniable mastery of ease in joining eminent status.
Our Fil-Am poets and those who have migrated abroad, such as in Australia and Singapore, have already been contributing richly to global literature. A fine example is the indomitable Luisa Igloria, recently named as Eminent Scholar by Old Dominion University.
“Amnion” refers to “a membrane that closely covers human and various other embryos when they first form.” The book has four parts: “Spandrels,” “Narthex,” “Hapax Legomena” and “Epilogue: Epithalamion.”
An epigram precedes the contents: “I am the utterance of my name”.
The lines are difficult to quote, as they vary from long lines of prose to brief lyric units in stanza form. Here are the first reference to the now-distant but irreplaceable home country.
“One of the story’s beginnings takes place in my grandmother’s nineteen-year-old body. This was a body into which the catechism had been carved so as to keep it blank. She knew nothing of men and their urges.
“… My grandmother was nineteen when she went down on her back/ not/ knowing why—/ the islands,/ her hacienda on a hill,/ and her pearls from the boy/ who later gave her/ two black eyes.
“… My grandmother Lola liked to go to parties. She was the favorite child of wealthy landowners. They lived in a hacienda on a hill overlooking Manila. They had twenty-five servants and hardwood floors. Her father had fifty horses. She has a pair of shoes to match every dress, with gloves and bags besides. I know, because she tells me.
“My father was born because the boy gave her pearls/ and gave her black eyes and the pearls scatter-bounced over the balayong parquet/ (shall I entertain you with the fetishism of a foreign name?)/ because she had not known/ of his scales.”
The Lola winds up in Munich, then Vienna. The poet’s father is sent back to Manila, where he is cared for by his own grandmother. Great-great-aunts Fe, Esperanza and Caridad feature in the “underdiscussed Massacre of Manila (February 1945).”
“… When my father was living under-loved in Spain,/ Caridad sent for him to come back to Manila,/ Ensure he was fed mangoes and adobo.”
These fragments of clan narratives alternate with the author’s own experiences of traveling through the West. They also go back in time to her own parentage.
“My mother and my father met at a ball. … Then in earnest it began/ with a postcard from Zamboanga/ to which my father has never been/ but still.”
In the UK, where her father was written up in the student paper as “Noel Sy-Quia, the Filipino…,” “They spoke German to each other, and annoyed everyone,” until “his student visa ran out.” Her mother phoned him back in the Philippines to say she’d just marry him.
What has been identified as her “multi-stranded heritage” allows Stephanie to engage personally on languages: “There are some words that tether me more strongly in themselves and therefore the world. … My father spoke Tagalog until he was five. All that is lost now. He knows only the monsoon sounds of that season attendant upon his own unpromised birth. There is a lilt in it that sounds like the saddle of the afternoon, before the sky splits like the belly of a fruit. … The Cebuano for ‘I don’t know’ translates as ‘it is not within my head.’”
There is so much more to marvel at in this book. For now the gift I find is the reaffirmed realization that poets of Filipino extraction certainly contribute such unique and substantive images, metaphors, motifs and insights that impact on world poetry.
