by Ian Salvaña
Into few verses grappling a hiding poet, a daily sundown ritual,
Brownie interrupts me, losing thoughts I’ve built to find
meaning. What a name, you’d ask, a bland broth boiled with nothing
but water. Even pepper man lang for the taste. Or a pinch of vitsin.
Or soy sauce—a drop of black and it dilutes to brown.
Brownie, because of nothing but brown: fur, skin, tongue, eyes.
She makes her presence known, shoving her head to my arm, to paralyse
my grip of the book’s jacket. Two years into domestication,
she starts this new habit of elbow-licking, gentle scratches as if to
clean a wound. Anyway, she must’ve mustered healing even
amid a night sky’s outpour, a town flood that trained winged creatures
to stay above ground. She came home first, the shape of wild meat
butchered in some Chinese wet market, a basang sisiw, ribs
prominent amid coat. Recalling this now, I remain skeptic at life’s
aloofness, always poised to hide when confronted, a voiceless
void, a feeling creating distance I can’t seem to figure in reading as in
knowing why she never learned how to bark. Some days,
this dog, a wallflower from the streets, just pops up out of nowhere,
from somewhere, to colour the monotones of life in between.
We remain archipelagic, except during what used to be periods
of rain, a mile within our coasts salt water freezes. Even tributaries of Pulangi,
veins reaching the core earth, heart used to be made of liquid,
become whitewashed endless roads, no fish maw waiting for bait, permafrost
all over covering bodies of worn-out barges. It seemed like yesterday,
we were hoping that the heat would leave us, sweat without doing anything
leave us, burning mud burning water burning sky leave us. And
when they did, some others came to stay: rain becoming hail becoming bullets,
shards of lands broken like the breakable glass it’s supposed to be, magma
forcing the birth of new rivers, people their new fish. Moving
became the only escape, and so we prayed and one day one of us dreamt
of the sea parting in opposite ways, giving a slightly damp sand bed
to tomorrow. But what about this rich, rich land? Another questioned, and
afterwards everyone agreed to leave with it. So we prayed
once more, devised a plan, pulled mountains with inhuman ropes
with our navy ships’ grip. After a while, the island started to move, and then
it swam, and then it surfed the melancholia of the world, until,
finally few seas above the Tropic of Cancer, the map changed
once more, a Pangaea but not quite, a refuge of life, complete with all
our backyards, coconuts with no husks, volcanic ash the bricks
of citadel walls, built to withstand wars against the inhuman everything
of this planet. I remember maize used to grow in this land
of wolf snakes, and rice, oh so much rice, all things inhuman feast
of it with us. But today, the war is inside us, hunger,
thirst, centuries-old plague still unresolved, and once we thought
of praying again if ever dreams come to rescue us once more. But no arable
land is prepared for the cold, no budding seed to grow
a tropical jungle, no shades of trees for the breathing, and later no more
trees, not even branches, no black sheep stalks around them.
Hairs becoming white, we kept on asking the world to let us see our enemy.
Backs breaking, some becoming blind, we only see white, tons of white.
Ian Salvaña: Whenever I start to write or read other people’s work, I always find myself contemplating what is left hidden when stories are presented as they are. And it troubles me if the things that seem hidden are really hidden—or abandoned, or at least left in the margins—in stories that hermeneutically uncover them, intentionally or unintentionally, without even engaging directly with them.
In Juan Delgado’s “Perros y Muerte” (Dogs and Death), in the face of circumstances involving death and dying, dogs are presented as accompaniments to people, and rightly so in the three vignettes that put dogs both at the centre and the margins of the poem. Dogs become observers of incidents, signals of intrusions, guards of family members. They sit beside people, they sometimes howl and they look at you with piercing eyes. In the poem, dogs seem to be present but not fully there, lurking, hiding and making their presence known when needed. As a nod to that poem, I’ve written two, one about a dead dog abandoned on the street across from our house after being hit by a motorcyclist and then being ignored by the crowds who rushed to attend to the rider, and another about Brownie. “Some Days, the Dog” is about the latter, the dog my family adopted, who suddenly licked my elbow while I was busy trying to make sense about Delgado hiding and unhiding dogs in his poem to help me ease the difficulty of putting into verses my own story of a dog and death, which happened a few days ago at the time of writing.
“Some Days, the Dog”, however, is not about death but more about abandonment, sort of a product of a premonition that I didn’t know would lead me to finish both poems on dogs: Brownie licking my elbow. The poem is also about my take on hiding and unhiding as both acts of “life’s / aloofness, always poised to hide when confronted, a voiceless / void, a feeling creating distance”. Here, Brownie seems to come and go, and “pops up out of nowhere, / from somewhere”, to occasionally make her presence known, despite being given an unequally bland name compared to our other, seemingly more favoured dogs, and despite being abandoned and lost before and then negotiating her space in my family, first by staying outside the house asking for food and then later sleeping in the living room during humid afternoons.
In the process of hiding and unhiding, meanings also shift, evolve and differ. I consider this central in rendering language as a powerful tool that facilitates a poetry introspective of my identity as someone who was raised (and now back living due to the pandemic) in a small rural coastal town in south-eastern Mindanao in the Philippines. My literary sensibilities are shaped by the daily experience of provincial living in a tropical country. The geographies of the languages I grew up knowing, their fusions becoming a naturally occurring phenomenon throughout time, coincide with the geographies of land and water that have figured in the daily movement of people, coming and going, present and then not, creating distance with and among themselves, their daily living, their homes, and then not.
In another poem, “Today Winter Fell in a Tropical Country”, I tackle abandonment again, but this time through a story of moving across seas and carrying the tropical archipelago that is my country away from too much humidity. I imagined what would happen to us if we actually moved significantly away from the equator. Of course, in reality, everything would change if moving were actually possible: people, identity, land, as would suffering, as would sensibilities, as would stories. In the poem, acts of myth-making and praying foreground the question of why crossing the ocean is not enough to evade the increasing heat, as well as the hope of surviving a withering world while remaining blind of the roots of environmental change. “Hairs becoming white, we kept on asking the world to let us see our enemy.” In the poem, the act of escaping remains hidden and unhidden, at the centre and yet at the margins, present but not fully there, lurking, hiding and making its presence known when needed.
In “Some Days, the Dog”, as in “Today Winter Fell in a Tropical Country”—as in most of my work—I attempt to meditate on self-introspection as a form of hiding and unhiding layers of meaning, piled on top of each other, when dealing with poetry, language and identity. But I suppose self-introspection in itself remains constrained within a stream of consciousness bound by what things I can only know about the world, given the intersectionalities that make me who and what I am. Maybe because there are just some things hidden from me, that which I can never see. Or maybe because most of the time, I just choose to see some other things.
Published: Saturday 25 September 2021[RETURN TO AUDITORY CORTEX 2021]
Ian Salvaña currently writes from Cateel, his hometown in Mindanao, Philippines. He has an MA in Political Science from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and Vienna, Austria, where he received postgraduate specialisations in comparative politics and social and political theory. He writes in four languages, including his native Kinamayo. His critical and creative works deal with human capability and mobility, migration and conflict, identity politics and the ecological space. His latest poems can be read in New Contrast: The South African Literary Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine from Hong Kong.