Many Worlds Live In One House

By: Elaine Lehman

 

Filipinos have been part of and contributed to the American landscape for more than 100 years. Beyond ludic multiculturalism, we have created our own unique cultures in the United States that explore our place in U.S. history and society – and in American literature.

Most Filipino expatriates and Filipino American writing use the motifs of departure, nostalgia, incompletion, restlessness, leave-taking, and dispossession, with the Philippines as always either the original or terminus point. The lament for redemptive return and the surrender to the cult of perceived “exile” is tempting dilemmas that could easily lead to elite ethnocentrism. But the politics of identity for Filipino descent communities In the United States is diverse and complex. It cannot be reduced to either/ or proposition: either Filipino or American. The betwixt-and-between conundrum highlights the American and Filipino relationships and the process of cultural synthesis. The expressive culture of the Filipino American cannot be subsumed under a framework that theorizes it as an extension of the Philippines. Nor should it be viewed as an imported, bastardized version of Filipino devoid of originality or distinct meaning. Expressive culture is meant to nurture and to fill the needs of a particular community. This perhaps is nowhere better illustrated than in poetry.

We find a good example in the poetry of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who was born in Chicago in 1974 to a Filipina mother and South Indian father. Recipient to multiple prestigious awards for her works, including the Global Filipino Literary Award, Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a professor of English in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Nezhukumatathil is known for writing poems that sit at the intersection of three cultures: Filipino, Indian, and American.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes, “Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems are as ripe, funny, and fresh as a precious friendship. They’re the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve, rich with sources and elements … taste and touch … Aimee writes with a deep resonance of spirit and sight. She’s scared of nothing. She knows that many worlds may live in one house. Poems like these revive our souls.”

In these days of stay-athome, let us revive our souls with Nezhukumatathil’s delightful piece:

Naming the Heartbeats

I’ve become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie,

Honeybunch, Snugglebear— and that’s just for my children.

What I call my husband is unprintable. You’re welcome. I am his sweetheart, and finally, finally—I answer to his call and his alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out into the evening’s first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras, a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl and sleep, when shadows of moons we don’t yet know brush across our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying to remember a path or a river we’ve only visited in our dreams.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Image: Poetry Foundation)