Maileen Hamto


A Review of Eileen R. Tabios' Because I love you, I become war

Eileen R. Tabios
Because I love you, I become war
Marsh Hawk Press
ISBN: 978-0-9986582-6-1
332 pages
$US22.00 + p&h from SPD

Through Because I love you, I become war, Eileen R. Tabios unveils inspiration from political strife, the beauty of survival, and resolute action amid social crises. The poet portrays the harshness of life among those who eat “pagpag” (food scavenged from garbage dumps), the anguish of a widow, and the lifelong wounds from an interrupted childhood. These tragedies are made beautiful through carefully weighted words about class struggles, political upheavals, and the Indigenous Filipino notion of kapwa, or interconnectedness.

The complexity of memory and nostalgia has been a recurring theme in Tabios’ poetry and essays. In Because I love you, I become war, the poet dives headlong into the legacy of patriarchy and colonialism in the lives of Filipina (and other) women. This book is for anyone who is disgusted by the absurdity of a Marcos presidency nearly 40 years after a decades-long dictatorship left the country in economic shambles. Anyone deeply concerned about the growing threat of authoritarianism around the world will take away profound lessons. The dysfunctions brought about by power imbalance are not confined to Philippine politics, and Tabios also offers her reflections on the war in Ukraine through the first seven poems she wrote in response to Putin’s invasion; her first poem is the monostich

Kharkiv

All roses became gray

The poet has always championed kapwa-hood with fellow women writers, as evident in various curations and collaborations with poets, scholars, and culture bearers. Because I love you, I become war takes on a militant, feminist tone, starting with its bold cover, an iconic photograph of the late activist Kerima Lorena Tariman Acosta first published in 2012 in the University of the Philippines’ Philippine Collegian. On the cover, Kerima Lorena is a brown-skinned woman in delicate Filipiniana dress holding a wooden rifle, pensive and ready for war. Poems in the section “Political Science” contextualize the struggle for dignity and humanity matched by red-blooded, fiery resistance against oppression. Tabios invokes Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa who has fought hard against “fake news,” overcomes forgetting, and pens an adobo poem that’s not focused on its recipe but how its protagonist cooks “adobo because it is rare / in Philippine history: it has never / been colonized by its British, Spanish / Japanese and American colonizers.”

From a distance, we revel in the clear-eyed remembering of a child’s pride and joy, such as excelling in a piano recital and writing one’s first book. But we also learn of the grown-up’s evolving understanding of a pivotal incident from her childhood when a mother begged her for a dress to clothe her child. The poems of the series “Bauang Beach” all begin with the same 14 couplets but end differently. The ending of the poem “Why I Am Rarely Nostalgic” is

ravishing with its grief, such
grief

Another ending from “No Guarantees” is

ravishing with its grief, such
grief

Suddenly, someone cried out in
pain—

her nearby daughter had stumbled to
fall

Distracted, she rushed to pick her
up

As she comforted her daughter she began
crying

I realized she understood she could not
guarantee

what she was saying: “It’s okay. Pain will go
away.”

A different ending is also presented in the series’ title poem “Bauang Beach”:

ravishing with its grief, such
grief

Jesus Christ once pleaded,
“Forgive

them—they know not what they
do.”

Tabios’ propensity for experimentation is best depicted in these six poems for “Bauang Beach.” The series is a touching testimony to the lifelong process of excavating memories and understanding the depth of a seemingly simple request.

A purpose and function of poetry is to relay beauty, which opens wide the possibilities for unabashed truth-telling. Previous Tabios volumes have elevated the plight of the forgotten poor, Filipinos tormented by an uncaring and downright exploitative regime. Reading Because I love you, I become war from my positionality as an immigrant, I share sentimentalities about the homeland with many generations of Filipinos in the diaspora. The textures of the everyday life of many Filipinos in the homeland are wretched, tragic, and familiar. Despite it all, people persevere. They build shanties. They harvest food from trash heaps. In the skilled imaginings of a gifted and prolific poet, these catastrophes fuel poems that become fodder for political and social resistance.

P.S. Makibaka. Huwag matakot. (Fight! Do not be afraid.)

Maileen Hamto grew up in Sampaloc, Manila in the 1980s. She was the nerdy, bookish kid who loved to read, write poems, and stay up to date on current events. She endured bullying and was grateful for a few kind friends. Maileen was in fourth grade when the glorious revolution—People Power I in Edsa—set the Filipino soul ablaze with hope and pride. One of her fondest childhood memories was reading the Preamble to the 1987 Philippine Constitution during “Araling Panlipunan” (Social Studies) at Dr. Alejandro Albert Elementary School.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maileenhamto

 
 

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