A Filipino’s Song of Myself c. 21st century

“Manifesto for Myself”

by Eric Gamalinda, Zero Gravity, 1999

Know all persons by these presents

1. Wherever

2. I

3. go

4. I carry the sorrow of my country

5. its memory of water

6. its calendar of inclemencies

7. if my voice sounds far away

8. if I argue with the logic of ideograms

9. I insist I can’t help it

10. this is the language

11. I speak in my dreams

Whereas

12. I carry the light of all centuries

13. everywhere I go

14. I declare myself responsible

15. for the upkeep of their bridges

16. their poor their balconies

17. the fading lamps

18. and evanescence of dawn

19. I claim you as my burden

20. the you I will never meet

21. I bear your music

22. and your histories

23. and your children begging in the streets

24. and your mothers

counting the bullets

in the hollow nest of corpses

25. I am that one made of copper of shadow and salt

26. I have asked my poems

27. to bear the weight

28. of illicit conversations

29. dead letters

30. the insatiable murmur of the penitent

31. the two faces

32. of joy and sin

33. Everywhere that a man

34. goes hungry

35. is denied his speech

36. is driven from his home

37. I am the one who must accept

38. his bitter music

39. his silence

40. his terrifying oracle

41. Wherever I go

42. I remain who I am

43. I bear the weight

44. of light passing

45. over the cemeteries

46. the ripening fruit

47. and the nails

48. yanked from the hands

49. of the crucified Christ

50. Keep this under your hat

51. and when they ask about me

52. Tell them he knew

53. a lot of things

54. but he never learned

55. to shut up.

In “Manifesto for Myself,” Filipino expat poet Eric Gamalinda presents a persona who is the Filipino everyman, one who seems to have seen, witnessed and experienced the travails of his ‘sad republic.’ In particular, the persona is one who is way from his country—so that wherever he goes, he takes with him his country’s geography of sadness, and misfortunes. Perhaps not being able to have enough of his sad republic, and still dreaming much of his “empire of memory,” Gamalinda’s persona speaks in behalf of all Filipinos.

Employing the cataloging technique, this litany of stark realities confronting the common Filipino is beautifully expressed in a sensible and artistic fashion. This manifesto motif renders the poem its charm—the persona through a sort of a legal document, utterly declares to the rest of the world the Filipino race.

Having left his country, the persona feels the need to defend why he is exotic of Other to whom he is speaking—he does not berate himself for not sounding natural to others; rather he takes pride in being what he is because of the language he is born to or with. From the beginning of the poem until line 11, we know the persona asserts how he as a captive of his own country’s geography an sensibility is by nature Filipino, perhaps one who speaks the myriad languages—his country is as diverse as its ethnic groups, an archipelago of differences.

Lines 12 through 24 say much further of his Filipino-ness, which he seems to proclaim. Was it being ostracized or plainly isolated that drove Gamalinda’s sensibility to lament on his own race perhaps marginalized in the western world? Everywhere he goes, he carries the “light of all countries”—the Filipino is himself the emblem of diversity—a hybrid of a number of influences—the offspring of mixed cultures and senses and sensibilities. Being such, he takes responsibility for whatever these cultures imply or entail—favorable or otherwise—as in the fading lamps and the evanescence of dawn.” Ultimately, the Filipino everyman will relish the joys and sustain any ills of these cultures, traditions an influences that consist his being.

Burden to him is the ‘you’ whom he will never meet—the unnamed colonizer whose cultures subjugated him—who is but liable for the children begging in the streets, who feeds on the casualties of war or social unrest, the ones who are answerable to “the mothers counting the bullets in the hollow nest of corpses.” The persona tacitly deems himself responsible for all these—as in the Malay’s sense of bravery or valor.

Further on, the persona slowly reveals himself as a poet of sorts—an advocate of the bitter truths, more of a herald than a victim, a seer who has seen portents of the soul of his own race. His poems, according to him, carry for him a number of burdens—virtually the weight of the world: “illicit conversations” were because the sacred was perhaps mistaken for the profane; “dead letters” render meaningless rhetoric to him who uses them; the penitent is said to murmur insatiably, vacillating between good and evil; truth I traded for convenience or jeopardized by loose morals.

Heralding lots of truths now, the poet persona assumes the moral responsibility for his own kinsmen deprived of freedom, who are stolen their basic rights to life or livelihood. He feels, though, he is not worthy; he is apprehensive about the sad fate suffered by anyone who is continually deprived, suppressed, mothered, and silenced.

Wherever he goes, then, he will go further on to herald resurrection to the lot. Perhaps like Hermes who bore the light for the mortals, the persona hovers the dead countrymen, whose sorrows and malady, he himself continues to suffer.

Carrying the light in graveyards of tears and repression, he will [help] usher in the new life, he will help everyone prevail, “yanking away the nails from the hands of the Crucified Messiah, redeeming his fellowmen from their trials and tribulations.

He promises redemption to come not now but anytime sooner—in the end, he says he knows a lot of thing and he will never cease telling about these things he knows. He will not stop speaking truths; he will go on until truth prevails, until the Filipino everyman prevails.