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Copy to Clipboard. Add italics as necessaryCite as: Mark Anthony Cayanan, ‘The Exophonic Lyric: A Poetics’, in Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 287–321 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.37050/​ci-33_12>
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The Exophonic LyricA PoeticsMark Anthony CayananORCID

Abstract

Situated within the author’s own creative practice and, more broadly, Philippine anglophone literature, this chapter analyses how exophony affirms Jahan Ramazani’s contemporary model of the lyric, which is ‘intergeneric, transnational, [and] translingual’. The intergeneric and transnational qualities of the lyric emerge in its exophonic iteration through the communion of the genre’s transplanted tradition and one drawn from vernacular poetics. A scrutiny of the author’s poetry also exhibits how the ‘compressed heteroglossia’ located within the lyric — the fusion of multiple voices into an ostensibly singular enunciatory phenomenon — may be deployed to signify cultural irreconcilabilities. Supplementing the essay’s preoccupations are sample poems from the author’s manuscript.

Keywords: lyric; exophony; anglophone literature; poetics; opacity

Miracle Fever, A Work in Progress

It is 13 December 1992. Judiel Nieva, then sixteen years old, meets with Catholic priest Roger Cortez and several nuns residing at the Mary Consolatrix Convent. Nieva has claimed that the Virgin Mary has been appearing regularly to her since 1989, relaying messages and granting her the ability to perform miracles — news of these apparitions has already been circulating among the locals of Agoo, a small town in the Philippines. On this day in December, Cortez and the cloister’s Mother Superior interrogate the visionary to determine the veracity of her claims, a procedure which seems to yield a positive outcome, with both religious figures finding Nieva’s responses to be ‘“sincere” and “not contrary to doctrine”’.1 Late into the evening, Cortez decides to say Mass for those already at the convent, which proceeds quite uneventfully until it is time for Communion: the white wafer Nieva receives from Cortez is inexplicably transfigured into ‘pulsating flesh and blood’ while it is in her mouth. Shocked, the priestBeginning of page[p. 288] and the nuns request that Nieva spit out the flesh — they then pass around the transmuted host like a relic, some of them pressing it on their handkerchiefs to soak in a bit of the blood. The last nun to touch the flesh sees Nieva put it back in her mouth, where the flesh slowly reverts into a regular communion host, which the visionary swallows afterward.2

The supernatural event of that day would prompt Cortez and the nuns to publicly support Nieva, a gesture empowering her to gain more devout followers. The visionary and her hometown eventually become steady fixtures on the front page of every broadsheet in the Philippines for a good number of months — and by the first Friday of March 1993, over a million pilgrims would flock to Agoo to see Nieva. Before the apparitions, the town had been reeling from the devastation caused by a major earthquake that occurred in July 1990, which levelled many houses and structures, including the basilica. Moreover, aside from tobacco, Agoo had ‘no major industry to speak of, few commercial establishments, scant power and water supply, poor telephone service, a rudimentary garbage disposal system, and a skeletal police force’.3 The influx of devotees, journalists, and busybodies, therefore, would enable the town to build a thriving, albeit makeshift, local economy, one that was almost wholly dependent on Nieva’s presence and the currency of her visions. Strangers to one another, these pilgrims would linger in the town, swapping not just stories of miracles allegedly performed by Nieva but also photographic evidence of divine ‘manifestations’,4 such as a ‘dancing’ sun, throbbing and shifting into various fantastic colours, or flocks of doves flying overhead during times when Mass was being held, or when the visionary was present at the ‘apparition hill’. Nieva herself would sing hymns while in front of crowds, her voice ‘a clear, even, and melodious soprano, hitting the higher notes without straining or breaking’.5Beginning of page[p. 289]

Even during the peak of the apparitions, however, the Catholic Church — apart from the coterie of Cortez and the nuns at the Mary Consolatrix Convent — was already quite vocal about its reservations. In September 1993, Bishop Antonio Tobias, whose diocese includes Nieva’s hometown, called out the overly commercialized aspect of the ‘Agoo phenomenon’ and asked that the foundation set up by the visionary’s family issue a public and transparent accounting of the donations it had received and the profits it had allegedly made from selling religious merchandise.6 By 1995, the Church would unequivocally declare the apparitions inauthentic, citing, among other reasons, plagiarism: the divine messages Nieva had recorded in a notebook were found to have been almost identical to those received by Western visionaries, as well as by Rufino Bautista, another Agoo native, who, in the 1970s, also professed to have witnessed apparitions of the Virgin, who presented herself as the Lady of Kayumanggi, identifiable by her brown skin, a trait not shared by her 90s iteration, whom Nieva described as fair-skinned.7 The investigative commission also pointed out that the messages transcribed by Nieva were in English, whereas in sites of officially approved apparitions, the divine messages were stated in their native languages.8 The findings of the commission were also tethered to persistent rumours about Nieva’s gender identity, something that the visionary herself would claim public control over: in 2003, while on a media blitz to promote her role in the film Siklo, as a woman who has an affair with her neighbour,9 Nieva would openly discuss her transition, at one point stating, ‘Ito ang kagustuhan ng Mahal na Birhen’ (‘This is what the Virgin Mary desires’).10Beginning of page[p. 290]

My current project, titled Miracle Fever, is a lyric sequence that loosely charts a narrative trajectory of the apparitions while focusing on the haphazardly collective psyche of the town and the devotees. In subject matter and form, the notion of transformation is crucial to my project: many of the poems are uttered from a plural first-person perspective, the antecedents of the pronoun morphing based on provisional instances of solidarity born of oppression and belief, class resentment, historical fatigue, and a keen investment and sense of complicity in the entire devotional extravaganza. One of the challenges I engage with in this project has to do with how the very phenomenon of speaking in poetry as a collective is a reductive, politically fraught move. The danger is that the singularity of voice which often serves as a distinguishing feature of the lyric genre could hijack the profusion of wills and lived lives that the text purports to speak from. That the ‘we’ pronoun is the main perspective for a sequence that involves the historical realities of a town further burdens the project with expectations of mimetic fidelity and conjures up questions relating to the ethics of representation.

I intend for my poetry project to navigate the paradoxes emerging from the encounter between poetic form and historical subject, to gesture toward the unifying idiom of a lyric that derives its authority from seeming communal while also telegraphing the irreconcilabilities that exist within this ostensible community. One way through which I attempt to accomplish this goal is by resorting to appropriation as a method of composition: I imbricate passages that outline the socio-political situation of the Philippines during the apparitions with other materials that metonymically refer to my contemporary subject position. I had already relied on a similar intertextual process when working on previous poetry projects;11 however, in the case of Miracle Fever, appropriation as a procedure seems even more apropos,Beginning of page[p. 291] in that it serves as a transmutation of what occurs when cacophonously social subject matter is reduced into a first-person-plural lyric utterance. Moreover, appropriation makes apparent the very fact that the authorial intervention embodied as the poems themselves unavoidably presents a warped, quite possibly unreliable, model of historical reality. In addition to the process of composition, the formal choices I make encode the complexities of representation: I adopt — alongside poems written in more recognizably lyric formulations — forms that are, on the surface, non-poetic or even traditionally non-literary. Several entries in the manuscript are written as dramaticules, in the manner of Samuel Beckett, or as timelines or photo captions. I absorb these hybrid forms into the domain of the lyric sequence in the hope of being able to display, trouble, and thwart the element of spectacle surrounding the Marian apparitions, as well as my decision to write about them ever so copiously.

I identify the challenges, and their attendant anxieties I let roil in my creative project as a way of accounting for, and of providing a correlative to, the multiple ambiguities that accompany my fascination with my research preoccupation, the exophonic lyric. I discuss, in this essay, how exophony is accommodated within the extroverted contemporary model of the lyric, which, in the words of Jahan Ramazani, is ‘intergeneric, transnational, [and] translingual’;12 and how exophony reconfigures notions of interiority and verbal density, recognizable and enduring features of the lyric. Model is a word Ramazani deploys frequently enough throughout his book Poetry in a Global Age, in which he offers his analysis of the contemporary lyric. Although, or because, he does not expound specifically on what he means by it,13 he capitalizes on the lexical versatility of the term by using it in various ways. For instance, he utilizes model to refer to a specific text that serves as a precedent or guide for the creation of a new one — as in the case ofBeginning of page[p. 292] ‘Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which William Butler Yeats acknowledged as his model for’ his poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’,14 or William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, which served as a model for Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems, especially as regards the latter’s decision to set his poetry in the ‘bounded environment of a city’.15 Ramazani also employs model, interchangeably with paradigm, to bracket the different versions that outline the relationship between modernism and postcolonialism.16

For this essay, however, I depend considerably on the confluence of the terms model and genre in literature, in that both are used to denote abstract categories under which particular literary works may be subsumed, and of which they may be understood as iterations. A genre, according to Tzvetan Todorov, is the ‘codification of discursive properties’, and is created when certain semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, or verbal features of a discourse — for instance, the tendency of an English sonnet to subscribe to the formal constraint of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter — guide the production of individual texts. Just as important, this codification also consequently serves as one of the bases for the interpretation and classification of a literary text by readers:17 it is from the twin perspectives of creation and reception that I consider Ramazani’s model as a condensed catalogue of properties that may be used as a means of unpacking the contemporary lyric, laying open its formal and linguistic operations, as well as its links to extratextual forces adjacent to its creation and circulation.Beginning of page[p. 293]

Exophony and Anglophone Writing from the Philippines

First, a necessary definition (or, in this instance, a range of available applications): exophony is an ‘emerging term’18 that pertains to the practice and presence of literature written in a language that is not the author’s native language or mother tongue.19 While the deployment of a language that the writer is relatively less familiar with is normally accompanied by some amount of difficulty, checked by the occasional disparity between intent and evidence, the Japanese-born writer Yoko Tawada, who also regularly publishes in German, highlights both the capacity for play and the emancipatory possibilities that this disorienting linguistic practice may inspire:

[W]hen you talk in a foreign language, all taboos have suddenly disappeared. You can, surprisingly enough, talk about aspects from your childhood that you had completely forgotten, because they were either too embarrassing or too painful, or because of some unknown other reason. Those memories had been cut off over time, but in a foreign tongue it becomes possible to talk about them again.20

The coverage of the term exophony, it bears pointing out, still seems quite inconsistent. One standard perspective is articulated by Kazuhito Matsumoto, who states that the practice is distinct from the kind employed by writers or subjects ‘who are compelled to embrace a foreign language by either historical or political or circumstantial reasons’, in that an exophonic writer uses, of their own volition, a non-native language in their literary production.21 More recently, however, the term has also been consistently applied to writings by diasporic figures, regardless of the factors that inform their migration, who assume theBeginning of page[p. 294] language of the country they resettle in. Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis argues for the relaxation of the epistemic boundaries of exophony by citing the literary productions of refugees: whether written in the adopted language or the language of their country of origin, ‘refugee poetry is always exophonic’. This is because, according to Davis, the refugee’s sense of their first language is slow to evolve once they escape from their country of origin, the language having become unmoored from where, geographically, it is an indispensable component of lived reality; thus, even their heritage language becomes ‘stubbornly, sometimes agonisingly non-native’.22 Chantal Wright maintains that exophony is closely linked with postcolonial literary practice;23 however, she also opines that the former may be distinguished from the latter because it ‘avoids the imposition of a thematic straitjacket and emphasizes […] innovative stylistic features that can be observed in this body of texts’.24

Because I would like to foreground the formal and linguistic in this essay — without, nevertheless, losing sight of their tetheredness to the political and historical — I would like to view anglophone writing from the Philippines as an instantiation of exophony, a practice that, in turn and in the case of this essay, acquires a more specific shape when viewed through the lens of a national literary tradition. The roots of exophonic Philippine writing in English may be traced to campus writing from the University of the Philippines, founded by the Americans in 1908. The writers, according to Elmer Ordoñez, had the avowed goal of ‘elevat[ing] to the highest possible perfection the English language’ by insisting that ‘[a]rt shall not be a means to an end but an end in itself’.25 This goal — which attended the ‘explosion of English-language writing from the 1920s through to the beginning of the Second World War’26 — emerged from systemicBeginning of page[p. 295] indoctrination into the colonial language and culture enforced during the American occupation, which saw the implementation of pervasive English-exclusive policies in formal education as a means of ‘civilizing’ the Filipinos.27 According to the American George Pope Shannon, then-head of the English Department at the University of the Philippines, the first few batches of anglophone Filipino writers displayed a penchant for ‘slavish imitation’, something that, in the late 1920s, Shannon cautioned them against, without any seeming irony: the ubiquity of Anglo-American literary models and, conversely, the exclusion of material written by Filipinos in various other languages within academic institutions practically guaranteed this tendency.28 The earliest iterations of exophonic writing from the Philippines, then, were marked by considerable incongruity:

On the one hand, Filipinos were expected to produce writing that was acceptable to the general reader, that is, the American reader, or more precisely, the Filipino reader with the literary taste of an American (a taste, of course, developed in the colonial classroom with the Filipinos’ exposure to Anglo-American texts). On the other hand, it was also demanded that Philippine writing in English be original. And to be original meant to infuse Philippine literature with local colour, a quality hardly consistent with the nature of the Anglo-American texts Filipinos were expected to read and imitate.29

The compulsion to declare mastery over the colonizers’ language, perhaps as a way of neutralizing centuries of lingering historical trauma, persists throughout the literary history of the Philippines. Gémino Abad, for example, provides a triumphalist spin in his account, proclaiming in the 1990s that Filipino ‘writers have […] colonised English because its use in our literature has been chiefly toward a native clearing within the adopted language where its worlds are found again toBeginning of page[p. 296] establish and affirm a Filipino sense of their world’.30 In an essay that provides a narrative sweep of the tradition of the anglophone short story emerging out of the country, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, on several occasions, singles out authors whose body of work has exhibited the ability to wield English ‘to express a thoroughly Filipino experience and sensibility’: Nick Joaquin, for instance, is praised for ushering in ‘a new era’ in anglophone production, because of his ‘dazzling use of the English language and mastery of narrative technique [which] was to eclipse anything achieved by his contemporaries’.31 However, despite the ubiquity of anglophone writing, and despite the fact that English is, as stated in the Philippine Constitution, an official language, fluency in it is most often premised on privilege: it may be the language of formal education, commerce, and bureaucracy, but it is hardly the language of everyday life for most citizens and is most often associated with ‘class superiority and snobbishness’.32

While Filipino, the national language, is extolled for its seeming capacity, in literary practice, to replicate the experience of the country’s citizens and unequivocally communicate their need for social transformation,33 English is regarded as a signifier of elitism: whereas the makata, the poet who writes in Filipino, ‘belongs to the people’, their English counterpart, declares N. V. M. Gonzalez, ‘[cares] very little, if at all, for [their] reader’.34 While the field of English writing in the Philippines remains expansive, many of its practitioners have, at some point, expressed remorse over their choice of language, also acknowledging that ‘writing in the vernacular language would be muchBeginning of page[p. 297] more “relevant”’.35 One recourse of anglophone writers to salvage the language they write in from charges of inutility is to lean into its status as an enduring evidence of the irreparable consequences of colonialism upon the nation. Drawing from Bill Ashcroft’s proposition that postcolonial writers engage in a process of ‘inner translation and transformation to produce an English that [is] culturally located [and] specific’,36 J. Neil Garcia argues that the anglophone Filipino writer takes on the indefinitely ‘unfinished task’ of deploying the colonial language to reproduce their lived reality ‘effectively and convincingly’.37 Garcia further explains that the standard literary text written by a Filipino in English is ‘ironic, verbally involuted, representationally ambiguous, and self-reflexive, right from the get-go’; the ‘“unnaturalness”’ of English, he emphasizes, ‘makes it virtually impossible to be transparent to its meanings’.38 In this case, to refer to Philippine writing in English as exophonic foregrounds the kind of semantic distance from the language that the practitioner attempts to bridge at every instance of production.

Exophonic Practice and a Model of the Lyric

The representational ambiguity inherent in exophonic practice finds its generic correspondence in the lyric; after all, imbricated in its history is the evolving relationship of literature with mimesis. While earlier scholarship surrounding the genre preoccupies itself with notions of the lyric’s proximity to its mimetic provenance, Jonathan Culler more recently states that ‘the lyric aims to be an event, not a representation of an event’:39 he even resists models of the lyric (these modelsBeginning of page[p. 298] being primarily Western in orientation) designating the genre as an imitation of the subjective experience of either the poet — ‘a mimesis of feeling’, which was the primary formulation for the Romantic-era lyric — or a fictive persona, the ostensibly prevalent contemporary paradigm which ‘deflects attention from what is most singular, most mind-blowing, even’, in the lyric, ‘and puts readers on a prosaic, novelising track’.40 Leaning into its epideictic origins, Culler emphasizes how the lyric is, instead, an enunciatory phenomenon: the genre’s privileging of sonic effects — ‘rhymes, rhythmical structures, forms of address’ — and its deferral of narrative — it prioritizes ‘voicing’, the instance of speech, a moment that Culler calls ‘the lyric now’, over plot progression — are, he claims, its most noteworthy and consistent features.41 While unpacking the genre’s severance from mimesis, Culler nevertheless references Mutlu Blasing, who describes poetry as ‘a cultural institution dedicated to remembering and displaying the emotionally and historically charged materiality of language’.42 Ascertaining the status of the lyric as enunciation, in this case, also involves a significant appraisal of the etymological and cultural strands encoded within the lexicon that allows the enunciation to exist in the first place. Culler’s summation of the lyric — that it maintains an attentiveness to the historical resonances of language while unmooring itself from mimetic affinity — is a solid premise to the model of the lyric propounded by Ramazani.

The global image of the lyric, to a considerable extent, is shrouded in a rarefied aura: consider, for instance, Robert von Hallberg’s depiction of autonomy as ‘poetry’s special aspiration: an independence from politics, philosophy, history, or theology, so that poetic value does not depend upon political conformity, logical argumentation, historical accuracy, or religious faith’.43 The supposed ahistoricity of the lyric is manifested in the presentation of its persona: ‘The strangeness and point of lyric can be seen when we note that the speaker […] is onlyBeginning of page[p. 299] equivocally named, has in effect a sponsor (the author) but no name, is prior to or posterior to name, is an orphan voice.’44 In Allen Grossman, I recognize a conception of the lyric that bridges the gap between the pedagogy-friendly notion of the lyric as dramatic monologue and Culler’s model, in that the lyric speaker is both a phantasmagoric (because indeterminate) entity and one whose manifestation is as (or only through) utterance. Grossman’s use of orphan to describe this lyric presence is particularly revealing, since the adjective plays out the drama of overt absence and implied presence ingrained in the illocutionary context of the lyric speaker. The lyric as an ‘orphan voice’ is also important considering Ramazani’s conception of the genre, which remains fiercely attentive to aspects of normative form even as it accounts for the intravenous revisions and expansions of the lyric alongside its encounters with various discursive genres, social realities, and linguistic practices. Ramazani states that the lyric exhibits — contrary to Mikhail Bakhtin’s view of the lyric as largely monologic45 — ‘compressed heteroglossia’ in the way that it transmutes conventions and summons information from within its own poetic lineage, as well as from other non-literary genres, including ‘news, obituaries, philosophy, [and] the novel’:46 the ‘orphan voice’ of the lyric, seemingly unitary, is, for Ramazani, actually a compendium of other voices.

Channelling Bruno Latour’s pronouncement that ‘every contemporary assembly is polytemporal’, Ramazani explains that the raw materials of poets — their vocabulary and their tropes, their omnivorous allusions and their techniques — are each informed by their respective history and development across time. These microhistories consequently collide and haphazardly combine into multivalentBeginning of page[p. 300] formulations when lodged within the poetic work. Thus, ‘[p]oems belong to their immediate historical moment and to the longer transhistorical skeins — generic, formal, tropological, etymological, environmental — that they twist together and remake to address their moment.’47 The convergence of histories upon and within the poem also necessarily demonstrates how national boundaries prove porous when it comes to linguistic and aesthetic translocations: ‘poetry participates in global flows, planetary enmeshments, and cosmopolitan engagements.’48 The intergeneric, transnational, and translingual qualities of the lyric — its communion with vernacular poetics, for instance (a process I intend to provide an example for soon enough), or even its malleability, its ‘relative brevity, vividness, and nonmimetic freedom’ making it easily adaptable across cultures49 — parallel the polyglot, heteroglossic dimension of exophonic literature, in that its writer is already immersed in a dialogic process not just of translation but also of affirmation of identity through a language that may not have readily shaped it: Ashcroft declares, ‘The dual dynamic of saying “I am me” in another’s language and “I am other” in my own language captures precisely the dual achievement of the second language writer.’50 Of course, the term transnational, according to Donald Pease, ‘bears the traces of the violent sociohistorical processes to which it alludes’,51 thus foregrounding, for the contemporary lyric, the persistent ‘tension between aesthetic hybridity and cultural decolonization’.52 ‘The transnational’, Pease further states, ‘names an undecidable economic, political, or social formation that is neither in nor out of the nation-state.’53 Siwar Masannat channels Pease’s use of the word undecidable to discuss poetry that deliberately exceeds the epistemic boundariesBeginning of page[p. 301] of the monolithic nation, asserting how it not only moves beyond ‘a critique of hegemony, but [also] opens up undecidability as a site of decolonial agency’.54

I am invested in how these tensions and undecidabilities are played out in the exophonic lyric, especially through its deployment of verbal density and interiority. While exophony may be perceived from a more propitiatory perspective, its literary producers regarded as ‘interpreters and ambassadors’ who mediate between cultures and languages,55 I am more intrigued by an exophonic practice in which the structural elements of the lyric are assembled to signify, rather than conciliation, cultural irreconcilabilities. For this discussion, I emphasize the term interiority because of its ambiguity: even as the ‘lyric remains the literary genre of intimate feeling’,56 its concept of interiority is pried open because of the genre’s encounters with local poetic practices. In the case of Philippine literature, Virgilio Almario argues that the strain of poetry that is paloob — denoting something trained inward — has a long, drawn-out tradition. He cites the bugtong, a gnomic form approximating the riddle, a puzzling utterance requiring an answer, as being paloob: first, the cardinal aim of the bugtong is to defamiliarize, wrenching a subject out of its quotidian social, utilitarian context and imbuing it with mystery.57 Afterward, the bugtong compels the reader to go through a semantic process of reorientation, where the tropes employed by the writer to extricate the previously recognizable subject from its commonplace associative milieu should, despite their function as means of obfuscation, lead back to a recognition of that specific, singular subject, with the reader nevertheless gaining an alternative conception of, or insight (kislap-diwa), into it.58 TheBeginning of page[p. 302] arc that the bugtong traces — from defamiliarization and then to a transformed recognition — Almario suggests, is paloob, as it is made possible by the genre’s immersion in the shared knowledge of a community, allowing the genre to be legible to the community’s members. The transplantation of the Western, modernist lyric into Philippine literary practice in the twentieth century, according to Almario, has allowed the concept of paloob to accommodate other poetic values such as self-reflexivity, ambiguity, introspectiveness, and relative inaccessibility.59

Miracle Fever as Exophonic Lyric

The interiority of the contemporary Filipino lyric may thus be considered an oscillating synthesis of the vernacular tradition and its transplanted version. I rely on this notion of interiority when approaching the exophonic lyric, which, to my mind, may fulfil a function that is just as paradoxical: on the one hand, it may continue to highlight the primacy of the poetic voice, its capacity for ostensibly individual expression through the resources of syntax and sound, while, on the other, creating intimate social clearings for specific audiences and productively establishing semantic restrictions indicative of cultural difference through the deliberate use of referentiality. I am invested in writing poetry that slides in and out of comprehension, wielding the genre’s predilection for privacy. I am, in my project, also keen on recruiting Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, transmuted as an approach to writing that compels the reader to ‘focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components’.60 One of the most potent arguments he makes in relation to opacity has to do with how it mitigates the ostensibly global approach to understanding various other peoples and their cultures, which is informed by a demand for ‘transparency’: ‘In order to understand and thus accept you’, Glissant summarizes, ‘I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments.’61 Transparency, of course, is a word that in literary discourseBeginning of page[p. 303] readily conjures up affiliated notions such as accessibility and legibility: the literary production of a subject from a minoritized culture (that is, relative to the centres of capital and influence) is burdened with expectations of exposition, of having to explain themselves to — and represent their culture before — a reading demographic keen on affirming its inclusivity, even as its chokehold on the literary market demands that it be attended to.

Just as interesting to me is Glissant’s presentation of opacity as a means of evoking the near-inscrutability of identity — ‘there are places where my identity is obscure to me’, he states; furthermore, ‘human behaviours are fractal in nature.’62 A recognition of this near-inscrutability in the individual is a move toward a relationality that is, asserts Glissant, ‘the most straightforward equivalent of nonbarbarism’:63

I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him.64

Opacity, then, may be repurposed as a literary strategy working toward a resistance to what Graham Huggan refers to as ‘the global machinery of cultural commodification’, a structure that, he points out, many postcolonial scholars — and, by extension, artistic practitioners, especially those operating in cosmopolitan spheres — find themselves enmeshed in or are compelled to build their cachet from.65 To illustrate my deployment of opacity, here is one poem from Miracle Fever:Beginning of page[p. 304]

The Wilderness Was the Time Between Prophets66

Not we but the material world, ungenerous surface
we harrow over and over. Not we but
our mud-caked fingers scratching holes into our skulls, in this heat
we are everything we feel. Not we but gunshots let loose
in the night before night untangles itself
from its told stories. Not we but before this unfamiliar century, one
traffic light debilitating the plaza, we would give
way as we’re selfless, we’re too much
time. Not we but yearly and half a millennium in
we rid the saint’s raiment of dust, wipe our fingerprints off
the glass casket. Not we but patience
though patience has no value in this life, and we worry
though won’t ever say it to each other
there isn’t another life we deserve. Not we
but a landscape that fits the loneliness of waiting long
and for what. Not we but without the saviour’s promise
there’s only a crowd without reason. Not we but
in the same space, exchangeable bodies, the mountain we’ve made
is a mountain made of paste. The infinite
has the transparency of evil, the lynched
herald said. Not we because not infinite, not evil
in a manner that’s important. Not we but a competition
for piety, a priest in every family, every unmarried daughter
a nun. Virtue’s a long vigil. Not we but the high-noon
shadow of a minor basilica. Not we but penance on behalf of
methodists and communists, though we’re all
children, some are born better than others. Not we
but magician and scientist, theologian and hypnotist, mob
psychologist and hunger artist, the prophet
who shall come shall make the sun dance and mouth
bleed, not we but the skittish sun.

Beginning of page

[p. 305]

In the poem above, I attempt to write an exophonic lyric that is, in itself, a site of several discourses — those directly germane to my narrative and thematic concerns, as well as those which inform the vantage point I write from as a specific historical subject, including current realities in and outside the Philippines. Ramazani’s model of the lyric, as that which exhibits ‘compressed heteroglossia’, is useful here, given how the vestiges of these discourses are marshalled — that is, granted the illusion of monologism — through anaphora, ‘the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive’ syntactic units.67 As both reader and writer, I find myself constantly drawn to the paradoxical effects of anaphora: the rhetorical device can generate propulsion but also lead toward tedium, an interesting affect when used deliberately. Since the apparent surplus of syntactic invariability could induce a sense of monotony, anaphora gives the reader the licence to break out of the spell of concentration that engaging with a lyric normally warrants and lets them formulate their own reading strategy, one guided by their tremulous, fragmented capacity for attentiveness. In the poem, I attempt to foreground some amount of discordance between the way that anaphora can suggest insistence on the part of the speaker and the lexical reiteration of the phrase ‘Not we’, which paradoxically evokes pathological denial. I also intend, in my deployment of anaphora, to generate some tension between the vocality of the plural first-person persona and their chronic identification with inanimate entities (‘gunshots let loose / in the night’ and ‘one / traffic light debilitating the plaza’), abstract values (‘patience’ and ‘a competition / for piety’), and disembodied imagery (‘our mud-caked fingers’ or ‘exchangeable bodies’). I want to reiterate reduction and dissipation while also intimating the magnitude of those same details.

Anaphora is one of my favourite rhetorical strategies because of how it ‘highlights poetic lines as discrete units while simultaneously binding those lines together’.68 I rely on this oscillation between separation and coalition in ‘The Wilderness Was the Time Between Prophets’ too, as, to my mind, it enacts the general challenge of myBeginning of page[p. 306] project: how to negotiate between the ostensible solitariness of the lyric speaker — I invoke, again, Jonathan Culler’s presentation of the lyric as ‘voicing’ — and my use of the genre to surface a collective consciousness. The proliferative quality of anaphora echoes the polyphony of communities I conjure up in my project, even as the enunciatory phenomenon that is the lyric genre more immediately evokes a singular vocal entity. Adjacent to generic considerations, I am also invested in how the use of anaphora in the exophonic lyric could somehow mirror the real-life metapoetic conflict of my project: how to apparently channel the collective while foregrounding its haphazard, amorphous quality and, more importantly, also telegraphing how this same goal is ethically suspect. Throughout my continuing work on Miracle Fever, I have been acutely aware of the need to resist turning my writing into ‘a commodified discourse of cultural marginality’,69 a trap my project could so easily fall into, given my national affiliation and the even more peripheral status of the locality that the narrative content of my current project derives from: in ‘The Wilderness Was the Time Between Prophets’, the use of anaphora and the general tendency of the poem to rely on sentence fragments are important to me, because I want the discourses circulating in and out of the poem to remain in spectral form, unconcluded and left suspended.

Perhaps one more specific instance I can cite as regards how I employ opacity as a tactic is my inclusion of the phrase ‘penance on behalf of / methodists and communists’. This moment in the poem is wrenched out of one of the alleged divine messages of the Immaculate Queen of Heaven and Earth — a rather campy title that, according to Nieva, the mother of God had asked to be addressed as:

I am your Mother of the Immaculate Heart. You are all my children, whether you are black, yellow, brown or white, whether you are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, pagan, atheist, or any other sect. You are all my children, even sinners, they are all my children. And now I lament for those children who are away from the light and grace of God.Beginning of page[p. 307]

Even communists, they are my children. Pray that they will be converted. If this will happen, the triumph of my immaculate heart will be realised. Remember, my children, this is the era of my immaculate heart. For many years I have been in silence, but now the time has come for me to intervene. Despite my greatest enemy, Satan, spreading darkness all over the world, the light of my immaculate heart will surely save you.70

The message, relayed to Nieva on 12 December 1992, reflects an enduring anti-left sentiment in Philippine society. One of the many troubling legacies of American colonial thinking, this sentiment has been weaponized often enough in various presidential tenures. For instance, President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. — whose family pretty much considers the Ilocos Region, including the province of La Union, where Nieva comes from, as their stronghold — cited the ‘anarchy and lawlessness, chaos and disorder, turmoil and destruction’ posed by alleged insurrectionists egged on by ‘Marxist-Leninist-Maoist’ ideology as justification for the proclamation of Martial Law in 1972.71 More recently, the practice of ‘red-tagging’ was used with impunity by President Rodrigo Duterte to throw the masses off the abysmal track record of his administration when it came to addressing the various social and political ills of the country, not to mention his extreme inefficiency in addressing the pandemic crisis. Under the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), Duterte and his allies branded, among many others, various academics, Indigenous leaders actively engaged in efforts to defend their lands from mining corporations,72 members of human rights groups, and even show business celebrities73 as communists, a practice that has persisted, albeitBeginning of page[p. 308] more insidiously, up until the current dispensation, headed by Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the deposed dictator.74

Of course, all the contexts I have mentioned above are not visibly present in my poem — and to maintain that they be found out is to make the work itself overdetermined, and to insist upon an authorial tyranny that does not actually hold much value in the transaction that occurs between text and reader. Which is precisely the point: I want to be able to write lyrics that play with resonance, that discombobulate readers and slow down their reading process, without having to be bogged down by the burden of exposition. I do not expect all readers — whatever that means for a genre whose presence in the literary market is hardly felt — to understand the subtexts and ideas I let float in the lines; I sometimes do not even remember them fully after the sustained process of writing is concluded. But they are there, nonetheless. I desire a poetic practice that is cognizant of the collisions of texts, contexts, and concepts, one that mindfully variegates its audience as a way of recognizing the multiplicity of situations the work is enfolded in whenever it is engaged with. I believe in the potentiality of the lyric to install porous membranes of legibility and thus gesture toward provisional socialities, and how these layers may summon up cultural affiliations without succumbing to ‘marketable essentialism’, a danger seemingly faced by writers whose embeddedness in a group identity becomes ‘personal capital’.75 Which is why I hope for a poetics that short-circuits possible assumptions of authenticity: as knowledge is not presented in a state of fixity, it is therefore — or, at least, I hope — less prone to sanctioning cultural oversimplification. Here, too, the value of writing a lyric sequence becomes manifest, as it is an extended form that wields the restlessness of its constitutive elements, the narrative gaps productively generated across, in spite, and because of, the overlaps and resonances among individual poems.Beginning of page[p. 309]

I situate my writing within an exophonic practice that foregrounds undecidability, that is mindful of oscillations between languages, the indeterminacy that such a procedure promotes. One last thing I would like to point out as regards ‘The Wilderness Was the Time Between Prophets’ is the slippery quality of we. In Filipino, there are two types of plural first-person pronouns: tayo, which encompasses the speaker, the immediate auditor of the speech act, and other figures the speaker wishes to incorporate in the group; and kami, a pronoun that accommodates the speaker and other figures, but not the immediate auditor. Lines of invitation and exclusion are established in Filipino plural first-person pronouns — lines that remain hazy in English: I am drawn to the we pronoun precisely because of this haziness. I am drawn to the ever-flickering borders of privacy the pronoun conjures up and, in my poetry, the implications that the we evokes and dilutes in relation to the lyric’s attachment to its audience, the material contexts it draws from, and the affiliations the speaker takes on for themselves. Throughout Miracle Fever, the undecidability of the we plays into how the sequence navigates between, on the one hand, a collective that closes ranks to protect its visionary from doubt and to ensure the reach of its claims; and, on the other, a collective — possibly the same one or which at least has shared constituents — that, within their performance as a monolith, is nevertheless fractured by the disparate motivations of their constituents, as well as the gradations of their faith in or disbelief toward the apparitions. In exophonic English, the we pronoun’s determination of invoked communities and, further, of imagined publics remains, excitably, in flux; in the exophonic practice whose semantic values straddle Filipino and English, these ambiguities are possible, crucial.Beginning of page[p. 310]

Poems from Miracle Fever

Fever Cartographers

To let journalists know that, separate from the business of faith, we’re nearly something
we’ve made maps of the town, each in the precise shape of their hungers, our desire
to annihilate them. So too that devotees may know where the banks are, restaurants
nearest them, the best roadside stalls for dried fish.
We’ve kept all our needs predictable
to resist untransformable depletion whenever earth or rain destroys us — we’ve learned
to limit the time in which we lose our minds, confirmations of our fears stitched together
by unknown hands. We cannot ourselves protect everyone, but we are good artisans.
Early evenings, we peel burnt skin off our backs, pleasure from days dwindling before us.

Beginning of page

[p. 311]
To distant cousins who speak ill of us: we’re not thieves, no longer liars, though we’re drunk
on sky we’re two decades into a vigil we’re not sure we want out of, we’re merely in need
of true miracles. Aren’t you? From our skin we release sand, divine a prognosis out of
candle wax. The prophet tells us how misguided we are —
but we’ve preserved their secrets: too late
for us to change. We who don’t know what souls are for in this life dread their helplessness
in the next. A white man’s sound bite is our government’s law: we don’t own the land we farm,
we share our seas with strangers who would rather have us dead. No romance with selflessness.
As the map’s limits are its material’s, we worship in public but sleep in places which don’t exist.

Beginning of page

[p. 312]
To whisper prayers to the dead, we’ve devised superstitions out of rumors overheard from passing
strangers. Our prayers, like our doubts, are repetitious. In the night their unsurprising answers
unnerve our dreams. We expect no intercession, but seen through videos which would define us
on national TV, we expect our angles to be good.
The provenance of the map’s unknown,
the cameraman anonymous. We’d been seen clinging to coconut trees to avoid being devoured
by the ground, mouth an unquestionable deity: the only hotel in town collapsed into memory,
we’ve built several makeshift ones, hollow blocks to ward off salt water. What right have we
to survival, if, walking to the apparition hill, misfortunes no longer inhibit our numerousness.

Beginning of page

[p. 313]
To prepare for death, we spit out talismans and hand them to our oldest sons. Daughters
we introduce to men who speak of leaving town. Our other sons tend to tobacco crops.
Big market day’s every Tuesday, and devotees with their straw bags haggle over bottles
of vinegar and sugarcane wine to bring home to the city.
Here’s a map sketched by the priest, his solitary
walks into the forest held as a template for artistic temperament. Where a clearing used to be
now stands lumberyards and hardware stores: we barter our services so we could patch the hole
in the chicken coop, purchase fertilizer for grains. As a way of cleansing one’s soul, the priest
advised daily trips into tropical vegetation. What followed was the bloodiest war in our history.

Beginning of page

[p. 314]
To fill the absence of the word, we gave them a quest. When the quest overtook us, we retreated
to our evenings. Silence, a solution to everything. Everywhere, people we shared time with
easing back into earth: the exiled dictator, the jueteng lord our grandfathers served, the neighbor
who sold garlands outside the church. In the city,
people spoke of things which took place
in the recent past as though they happened lifetimes ago — our map is a stopgap oath unrevised
by famine, strife, months of plenty. The prophet hoarding notebooks and ungarbling warnings.
A typhoon eventually drowning ink into incoherence. No clumsy words could ever protect us.
We are weak, and so recycle our mistakes, reject displays of bravery when they aren’t ours, expect.

Beginning of page

[p. 315]
To deserve oblivion. To remap the boundaries of what we should’ve always been looking for,
in the meantime, feigning ecstasy. To hear the wind, which forces rain into its penultimate
verdict, promise glories which could outstrip our patience. Everything else locked in sunlight
and vanishes. Servile expressions readied, to muscle
into the throng as at last we profit from our history.

Beginning of page

[p. 316]

And Other Stories

Before the earthquake we were a different kind of earnest. Not a throng but within our town many towns, each with its routines. Mornings, among us were those who expertly could ruche rayon satin, with one sweep of the shears cut fabric across the grain, turn muslin into regular-day robes for statues. Among us were those who idled. But too well we knew how tragedy tests personality. Warm monsoon, unseasonably dry: the historian would call this foreboding, our arms just tired from fanning ourselves. We weren’t yet unsafe, some of us didn’t feel it. Some of us vaguely impatient. Everyone unruly in minor ways. But then: the town chain-sawed into bits, bits of wood, we flew, and flying, fell. That night holding so many stars, unconcerned about most of us, we fled to the mountains before the sea could drag us back. Between disaster and aftermath god had arrived, still unspeaking. But being his children, we moved toward him as we would a winged insect twitching on the ground. We the dead creature too. Diseased tooth, knocked free. Despair, our skintight verdict. We were twenty-seven children gone, no ivory saint destroyed. Jesus, wedged between two pews, hairpiece ruffled but otherwise perfect. Later, when the damage was inventoried — walls of the eucharist sanctuary cracked all over, pipe organ turned into rubble on the floor, shards of chandelier — no mention of houses we built with our hands: either destroyed or no longer trusted. Despite rain, we slept outdoors for weeks. Cattle, we slept on our feet. Mosquitoes drove us back into our homes, doors and windows remained open, we were bodies prepared to jump. No simpler version of hope than knowing what it’s for, men and women of destiny stricken blind so we could see: why doesn’t god leave his mark on everyone whom he smites. Changed, our faces hadn’t changed enough. If there ever were a time of joy, we knew it had ended. The sea receding into itself again, we tire of survival. Despairing, among us were those who prayed and prayed, and no longer could we retreat to being strangers for one another.Beginning of page[p. 317]

Vigil

Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around
like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat, and your laminated spirit
clings to our sweat-weathered shirts — how much closer
must we be? We herd ourselves up the apparition hill
so many of us we’re shadowless, we’re over-awed, hours into
a vigil we’ve kept throughout our lives we see nothing
but the sun blotch into its embarrassments.
Mother of Relentless Charity
give us what you’ve given freely, we can’t think
beyond the rising nausea, some of us
feel less, others more, several just want their boredom
appeased — you ought to divine who among us
deserve the most, and how soon.
Consoler of the Inconsolable
be true to what we’ve named you, we’re locked
inside our bodies, like discarded skin under our nails
we scrape our hunger off us and best
our hopelessness. By this we mean we’re impatient, we can’t
keep spending on prayer cards and holy water
without receiving something more profound
than rain. We’ve been told gratitude’s
the one correct response to living. But haven’t we lived and lived
and lived and lived and lived like this
enough, free us of it.
Woman Who Makes Us Wait
Under a Cloudless Sky, anger-lined silence
settles on us: if through the visible shimmers the invisible
we see that though you exist, like light
you add nothing except yourself. We don’t care
for one another, we’re not all of us neighbors
not all of us envy or envy
the same people, we’re not all of us blind, though
we’ve inflicted violence we’re not all of us
violent, we’re wrong
we delight in singling out those who are, each of us
witless, we perfect our questions into accusations,
where in this unending night are you.
Virgin of the Withering Tree
if you won’t better us, better at least our known hopes. Surpass us.

Beginning of page

[p. 319]

Response by Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

Throughout ‘The Exophonic Lyric: A Poetics’ and the excerpts from Miracle Fever that accompany it, there circulate and hover overhead various senses of trans, which, along with the relationships that Mark Anthony Cayanan suggests between them, raise interesting questions about genre and convention: translation, transnational, translingual, transformation, and transgender. In particular, I find myself drawn in by the detail that the Catholic Church declared Judiel Nieva’s apparitions to be inauthentic — we might say racially, linguistically, and imaginatively — and that ‘the findings of the commission were also tethered to persistent rumours about Nieva’s gender identity’.76

Perhaps adhering to literary critical conventions, the Catholic Church seems to have understood the difference between authentic and inauthentic repetition as having to do with the distinction between (authentically) repeating form — i.e., the Virgin Mary has spoken to me as she has to so many before — and (inauthentically) repeating content — i.e., she said to me the exact same things she said to someone else twenty years ago. Yet the distinction between content and form is, at best, questionable. This is highlighted by the lyric itself, which so often evidences how the particularly complicated relationship between literary content and form clouds their distinction, and given the imbrication in its history of ‘the evolving relationship’, as Cayanan puts it, ‘of literature with mimesis’.77 In the context of literariness, the line between authentic and inauthentic repetition tends to be drawn on a muddy slope, somewhere among interrelated notions of copy, theft, plagiarism, homage, quotation, and convention.

This points to one of the questions that most interests me: what was it about the proximity of Nieva’s apparitions to the ways in which her transness was made to signify in relation to dominant notions of gender and sexuality that was suggestive of inauthentic copying, or deception, as opposed to authentic evidencing of the conventions of apparition as a form or a genre? The philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher has shown how trans people are socially constituted as ‘evil deceiversBeginning of page[p. 320] and make-believers’, in the context of the United States in the 1990s — although her comments remain depressingly pertinent.78 Bettcher shows how social norms of gender and sexuality put trans people in a double bind, granted only the options of being invisible deceivers or visible make-believers. Because this invisibility and visibility hinges on ‘coming out’ as transgender, transphobic violence — including but not limited to the psychic damage inherent in being cast as deceptive — is related to notions of authenticity as well as exposure, discovery, appearance, and reality.

These notions are, of course, highly relevant to Nieva’s apparitions and their acceptance or refusal. And, while outlining this relevance, Cayanan troubles the conceptual basis of authenticity and visibility, which have been shown by Bettcher, along with many other scholars, to be a trap for those who live their genders and sexualities in diverse ways — and particularly for those who are racialized.79 Helpfully recasting the common-sense understanding that the trans in translation refers to a journey taken by unchanging content — from language A to language B, for example — Cayanan embraces the exophonic, exploring how it might, as Gémino Abad puts it, ‘establish and affirm a Filipino sense of their world’.80

Elsewhere, I have thought about how strategies of what I term reality expansion can counter what Bettcher describes as strategies of ‘reality enforcement’, through which trans people are violently subjected to various kinds of ‘reveals’ of their supposed roles as deceivers or make-believers.81 These counter-strategies of reality expansion can,Beginning of page[p. 321] I think, include the use of coding that Cayanan suggests, as well as the challenge with which they engage relating to the singularity of voice. Ultimately, this challenge presents as a struggle with ‘the profusion of wills and lived lives’, highlighting perspectives vying for precedence in a way that troubles oppressive associations of visuality with truth in relation to the various kinds of transness through and with which Cayanan’s writing so evocatively moves.82

Notes

  1. Quoted in Mozart Pastrano, ‘The Virgin in Agoo’, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 5 March 1993, p. 10. ↵
  2. Ibid., p. 10. ↵
  3. Rodolfo Dula, ‘Devil’s Advocate in Agoo’ (second of a series), Malaya, 18 February 1993, p. 1. ↵
  4. Ibid., p. 7. ↵
  5. Rodolfo Dula, ‘Devil’s Advocate in Agoo’ (fourth of a series), Malaya, 20 February 1993, p. 3. ↵
  6. Margot Baterina, ‘The “Dark Side” of Agoo’, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2 September 1993, pp. 1, 8. ↵
  7. Maria Gloria Aguilar, ‘Appropriation and Resistance in Philippine Marian Devotion’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of North London, 2001), pp. 122, 155–56, <https://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/7291/> [accessed 24 July 2024]. ↵
  8. Girlie Linao, ‘Church: Philippine Miracle a Hoax’, United Press International, 6 September 1995 <https://www.upi.com/Archives/1995/09/06/Church-Philippine-miracle-a-hoax/5408810360000/> [accessed 12 June 2023]. ↵
  9. Mozart Pastrano, ‘Apparition Star Judiel Nieva Is Now a Showbiz Star’, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 5 September 2003, p. A29. ↵
  10. Quoted in Jeans Cequina, ‘The Curious Case of Judiel Nieva’, POP!, 7 January 2021 <https://pop.inquirer.net/103517/the-curious-case-of-judiel-nieva> [accessed 5 October 2023]. ↵
  11. In an interview with Singaporean poet Cyril Wong, I explain how, for my last poetry book, Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (published in Australia by Giramondo Publishing in 2021 and in the Philippines by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2024), I resorted to appropriation as a way of combining, in what I hope were productively ‘methodically unmethodical’ ways (to draw from Adorno), the world of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (which serves as the urtext for my book), and the social and textual milieus I was situated in and inexorably writing out of. See Cyril Wong, ‘A Conversation with Mark Anthony Cayanan’, Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art, June 2021 <http://queersoutheastasia.com/a-conversation-with-mark-anthony-cayanan-july-2021> [accessed 25 March 2024]. ↵
  12. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), p. 239 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.7208/​chicago/​9780226730288.001.0001>. ↵
  13. Klaus Stierstorfer observes that ‘model’ is a nebulous concept in literature, one that remains ‘unmarked, undertheorized, and colloquial’. See Klaus Stierstorfer, ‘Models and/as/of Literature’, Anglia, 138.4 (2020), pp. 673–98 (p. 674) <https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2020-0053>. ↵
  14. Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age, p. 59, my emphasis. ↵
  15. Ibid., p. 67. ↵
  16. Ibid., pp. 108–16. ↵
  17. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Origin of Genres’, trans. by Richard M. Berrong, New Literary History, 8.1 (1976), pp. 159–70 (p. 162) <https://doi.org/10.2307/468619>. ↵
  18. Chantal Wright, ‘Writing in the “Grey Zone”: Exophonic Literature in Contemporary Germany’, GFL: German as a Foreign Language, 3 (2008), pp. 26–42 (p. 39) <http://gfl-journal.de/article/writing-in-the-grey-zone/> [accessed 24 July 2024]. ↵
  19. Ibid., p. 27. ↵
  20. Bettina Brandt, ‘Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada’, Women in German Yearbook, 21 (2005), pp. 1–15 (p. 8). ↵
  21. Kazuhito Matsumoto, ‘“Exophony” in the Midst of the Mother Tongue: Resources Between Languages’, in Doing English in Asia: Global Literature and Culture, ed. by Patricia Haseltine and Sheng-mei Ma (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 17–28 (p. 18). ↵
  22. Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, ‘On Refugee Poetics and Exophony’, Poetry, 1 April 2022 <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/157568/on-refugee-poetics-and-exophony> [accessed 12 June 2023]. ↵
  23. Wright, ‘Writing in the “Grey Zone”’, p. 39. ↵
  24. Ibid., p. 27. ↵
  25. Elmer Ordoñez, ‘An Overview of Philippine Literature’, in Ordoñez, Emergent Literature: Essays on Philippine Writing (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), pp. 23–38 (p. 17). ↵
  26. Rajeev Patke and Philip Holden, The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 62 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.4324/​9780203874035>. ↵
  27. Isabel Pefianco Martin, ‘Colonial Education and the Shaping of Philippine Literature in English’, in Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives, ed. by Maria Lourdes S. Bautista and Kingsley Bolton (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), pp. 245–59 (p. 246). ↵
  28. Ibid., p. 254. ↵
  29. Ibid., p. 255. ↵
  30. Gémino Abad, ‘Our Scene so Fair: An Overview of Filipino English Poetry, 1905–2006’, in Abad, Our Scene so Fair: Filipino Poetry in English, 1905 to 1955 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2008), pp. 1–20 (p. 4). ↵
  31. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, ‘The Philippine Short Story in English: An Overview’, in Philippine English, ed. by Bautista and Bolton, pp. 299–316 (p. 303). ↵
  32. Caroline S. Hau, ‘The Filipino Novel in English’, in Philippine English, ed. by Bautista and Bolton, pp. 317–36 (p. 329). ↵
  33. José Maria Sison, ‘Literary Craft and Commitment’, in Sison, The Guerrilla Is Like a Poet / Ang Gerilya Ay Tulad ng Makata (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2013), pp. 213–19 (p. 219) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.2307/​j.ctv2sbm7n2.102>. ↵
  34. N. V. M. Gonzalez, ‘Imaginative Writing in the Philippines’, in Philippine Writing: An Anthology, ed. by T. D. Agcaoili (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), pp. 321–28 (p. 326). ↵
  35. Isagani Cruz, ‘English and Tagalog in Philippine Literature: A Study of Literary Bilingualism’, World Englishes, 5.2–3 (1986), pp. 163–76 (p. 165) <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-971x.1986.tb00723.x>. ↵
  36. Bill Ashcroft, ‘The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures’, Language and Semiotic Studies, 1.4 (2015), pp. 80–94 (p. 83) <https://doi.org/10.1515/lass-2015-010405>. ↵
  37. J. Neil Garcia, ‘Translational Poetics: Notes on Contemporary Philippine Poetry in English’, Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, 7 (2013), pp. 177–94 (p. 179) <https://www.journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/lik/article/view/5062> [accessed 12 June 2023]. ↵
  38. Ibid., pp. 181–82. ↵
  39. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 137 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.4159/​9780674425781>. ↵
  40. Jonathan Culler, ‘Extending the Theory of the Lyric’, Diacritics, 45.4 (2017), pp. 6–14 (p. 9) <https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2017.0017>. ↵
  41. Culler, ‘Extending’, pp. 8–10, emphasis in the original. ↵
  42. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 169. ↵
  43. Robert von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 10 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.7208/​chicago/​9780226865027.001.0001>. ↵
  44. Allen Grossman, ‘Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics’, in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 419–30 (p. 421). ↵
  45. In the essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’, Bakhtin not only states that poetry uses unitary language by default, but goes so far as to assert that the poet is actually unable to escape it, is unable ‘to oppose his own poetic consciousness, his own intentions to the language that he uses, for he is completely within it and therefore cannot turn it into an object to be perceived, reflected upon or related to’. See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422 (pp. 285–86). ↵
  46. Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age, p. 245. ↵
  47. Ibid., pp. 2–3. ↵
  48. Ibid., p. 9. ↵
  49. Ibid., p. 246. ↵
  50. Ashcroft, ‘The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures’, p. 86. ↵
  51. Donald E. Pease, ‘Re-mapping the Transnational Turn’, in Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed. by Winfried Fluck and others (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011), pp. 1–46 (p. 5). ↵
  52. Robert Stilling, ‘Multicentric Modernism and Postcolonial Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry, ed. by Jahan Ramazani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 127–38 (p. 129) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1017/​9781316111338.011>. ↵
  53. Pease, ‘Re-mapping the Transnational Turn’, p. 5. ↵
  54. Siwar Massanat, ‘A Constellation of Transnational Poetics’, Jacket2, 26 January 2023, <https://jacket2.org/article/constellation-transnational-poetics> [accessed 12 June 2023]. ↵
  55. Øyvind Rangøy, ‘Train of Language: Notes on an Exophonic Anomaly’, Interlitteraria, 26.1 (2021), pp. 235–48 (p. 243) <https://doi.org/10.12697/IL.2021.26.1.16>. ↵
  56. Stephanie Burt, ‘What Is This Thing Called Lyric?’, Modern Philology, 113.3 (2016), pp. 422–40 (p. 427) <https://doi.org/10.1086/684097>. ↵
  57. Virgilio S. Almario, ‘Palabas at Paloob: Tambalang Mukha ng Pagtula’, Philippine Humanities Review, 16.1 (2014), pp. 69–91 (p. 74) <https://journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/phr/article/view/4971> [accessed 5 October 2023]. ↵
  58. Ibid., p. 75. ↵
  59. Ibid., pp. 84–86. ↵
  60. Édouard Glissant, ‘For Opacity’, in Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990), pp. 189–94 (p. 190). ↵
  61. Ibid., p. 190. ↵
  62. Ibid., pp. 192–93. ↵
  63. Ibid., p. 194. ↵
  64. Ibid., p. 193. ↵
  65. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 9 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.4324/​9780203420102>. ↵
  66. An earlier version of this poem first appeared in FE. See Mark Anthony Cayanan, ‘The Wilderness Was the Time Between Prophets’, in FE, ed. by Jeff Alessandrelli and others (Portland, OR: Fonograf Editions), pp. 87–88.
    ↵
  67. Jessica Weare, ‘Anaphora’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, ed. by Roland Greene and others, 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 50. ↵
  68. Ibid. ↵
  69. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, p. 20. ↵
  70. Rodolfo Dula, ‘Devil’s Advocate in Agoo’ (conclusion), Malaya, 21 February 1993, p. 1. ↵
  71. Republic of the Philippines, Proclamation No. 1081 (Office of the President, 1972) <https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/featured/declaration-of-martial-law/> [accessed 12 June 2023]. ↵
  72. Jelo Ritzhie Mantaring, ‘PH Remains Worst Place for Land, Environmental Defenders in Asia — Watchdog’, CNN Philippines, 30 September 2022 <https://www.cnnphilippines.com/news/2022/9/30/PH-remains-worst-place-for-land-and-environmental-defenders-in-Asia.html> [accessed 5 October 2023]. ↵
  73. JC Gotinga, ‘Angel Locsin: Red-tagged Celebrity’, Rappler, 18 December 2020 <https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/angel-locsin-red-tagged-celebrity-faces-philippines-2020-series/> [accessed 5 October 2023]. ↵
  74. Amnesty International, ‘Philippines: Deadly Practice of “Red-tagging” Continues Under Marcos Administration’, 22 March 2023 <https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa35/6582/2023/en/> [accessed 5 October 2023]. ↵
  75. Ian Afflerbach, ‘On the Literary History of Selling Out: Craft, Identity, and Commercial Recognition’, PMLA, 137.2 (2022), pp. 230–45 (p. 237) <https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000098>. ↵
  76. See p. 289. ↵
  77. See p. 297. ↵
  78. Talia Mae Bettcher, ‘Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion’, Hypatia, 22.3 (2007), pp. 43–65 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01090.x>. ↵
  79. See, for example, Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), pp. xv–xxvi. ↵
  80. Gémino Abad, Our Scene so Fair: Filipino Poetry in English, 1905 to 1955 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2008), p. 4. ↵
  81. Talia Mae Bettcher, ‘Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance’, Signs, 39.2 (2014), pp. 383–406 (p. 392) <https://doi.org/10.1086/673088>; Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, ‘“People Can’t Say I’m A Man, They Can’t Say I’m A Woman”: Reality Expansion in the Kewpie Collection’, in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, ed. by Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 207–14. ↵
  82. See p. 290. ↵

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