Kundiman: Our Love Song is Our Commitment

We All Belong to a Love Song Called Kundiman - Part 3

Here are our Origins (aka Part 1):

Here are our Lineages (aka Part 2):

Here is how we create/hold/occupy space together & in the future (aka Part 3):

The Mountains Are Just Ahead of Us | Alison Roh Park

At the time I read Sarah Gambito’s "Paloma’s Church in America" | Addie Tsai

One has to rely on memory so much when one is always leaving: A conversation with Janine Joseph | R. A. Villanueva

and earth still rising: Melissa Roxas’ chorus of prayer | Vanessa Huang

Poems as Evidence | Melissa Roxas

Thank you for your participation in our community!

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Curated by Ching-In Chen

Poems as Evidence | Melissa Roxas

What shaped me as a person and as a poet are the deep connections to peoples’ stories and their struggles, and a deep commitment to working towards a better world, without oppression and exploitation. From a very young age, the more I sought to understand the world around me, understand my experiences, and where I fit in, the more I felt committed to issues dealing with my immigrant family’s story, my own people’s history—with all its conflicts and contradictions—and how that has shaped me as a woman, as a Filipina American. As I became more involved in social justice work and human rights work both here in the U.S. and in the Philippines, more and more the subject of my poetry addressed these issues of oppression and injustice.

I had been working with various poor and marginalized communities in the Philippines when I was abducted, held in secret detention, and tortured by the agents of the Philippine military on May 19, 2009. During those six days that I was in secret detention what came from my body was an internal language that kept repeating certain phrases, certain images. The poems that follow are very raw versions of poems. After surfacing, I wanted to commit to paper these images and words that kept repeating in my mind. During the solitary confinement, secret detention, and torture, it was my protest against the inhumanity and the violence, so I include them in their raw forms here as a testimony to that time.

come before the night hour
come sing to yourself
night comes Melissa
you are flame to the body
the incipient wing that can't fly
the open skin
on a foot
bleeds black
tonight you learn to die
a thousand times
and be resurrected

The worst tortures came at night and I was forced to wear a blindfold and handcuffed the whole time. The aim of torture was not to kill me, not yet at least, but to incur the most amount of pain. Make me learn the many ways to die. The torturers had control of my body and my movements, but one thing I realized they could never control was my mind. I was made keenly aware of this, this was the one thing that I could control and I have to make a conscious choice not to relinquish this last freedom. The freedom to think and to create was what I did during the violence. As much as I could sing poetry, I sang. I sang in my head and I remembered my commitment to the people, my commitment to the cause of good, for truth, for a people fighting for the most basic of freedoms...

     ...the child's eyes look at me by the river
  she washes her father's clothes by the river
 by the river, water he drinks he drinks, fire water
        water  fire, anything he hopes will end the thirst, 
  a silent song kept playing at my heart,
    my heart a silent song...
     the father, the plough, the field
   miles of rice fields
     not his own,  no  not his own,
 fields to be planted not eaten, the rice, no rice for
     mother, for child,
  rice, none for baby James, James, the fly on the lips
   of baby James
    sucking his mother's dry breast
     his tiny hand 
       tiny hand searching the many folds,
  a silent song kept playing at my heart,
    my heart a silent song...

Amongst the many things the military took from me was over two years worth of my poems and writings. During my interrogation it was also something they would often refer to and taunt me about, and be angry because I was writing about human rights violations. They wanted to destroy this body of work and they wanted to destroy me because they thought it would destroy the people's stories and their struggles that I had been witness to. So a lot of my writing now is about reconstructing from memory what I had written during those past years and what I had been witness to working with the community. Many new poems were also born from my experience of disappearance and torture. But something very different about my poetry now is that, as I reconstruct, the language tends to be broken, and also not necessarily following any kind of structure. I now find myself experimenting more with poems. I am discovering that as I write, most of the poems seem to reject wanting to be in any certain form or structure.

The poem below are excerpts from “My Journal and The Interrogation,” which has three voices: the torturers; mine; and passages from my journals I remember during the torture, that represent the voices of the community.

 ...Out of the burning pyre you have kept this one. 
    The smell of the old leather reminds you of your
last military operation in the forest, 
 the smell of roasted flesh    
   of boar and other beasts. 
 
    You undo the string that holds it together and
inspect the curling yellow paper.  
  One more secret thing 
        to add to your personal collection:
bloodstained panties, a picture of a girl in a blue   
dress, 
   a ribbon,  a hair.  
 Your early souvenirs from the military campaign in
Bulacan?...  

        This one is different. 

 It will be for your studies of psychology on the
subject:  

    Enemy  Rebel  Animal
     …...............................................................................................................................

   You banged my head on the concrete wall. 
        “Putang ina.”

 
The most beautiful one he said was bluer than the sky
at blue. 

  You said people like me make it difficult...  

    
Inside its petals it held little black pearls which he
held to his mouth, 

        “it makes business difficult,”

  he said it tasted like lemons    “bad for development”
 mixed with a little bit of earth. 
He climbed     
      down but left it there     

   
because after everything men have taken from the earth, 
   it would anger the gods too much for such bitterness
to be gone.  

        It was unfair you said. 
     You press your hands harder upon my neck.  
                 You said 
    You were doing your country a favor taking care of
us.  

    
He also sold frogs, M, he remarked how strange foreign
people were in the city         because they bought
only the legs.   
 So he took the other parts home 
  and fed his family on the remains of what they           
didn’t want.  

 You wanted to tend the sheep, return them to the fold. 

  
There are no end to things, just the beginnings.  
       -This was your favorite passage.  
           …..............................................................................................

  Then he mixed tobacco with what looked like a red nut
and wrapped it in a greeny leaf. 

 You asked where are the stories of heroes like you?   
       …..................................................................................................

 Black is red, white is white, 
     little bone, big bone.  

   I said my name again.  Melissa 
 
   My name. 
 
    Something breathed in me you could not kill.

.....................................................................................................................

Every day is still a struggle for me and every day I live with memories of that torture. It is almost a year since it happened. I still bear the physical scars of that torture, have sustained physical injuries, and there are also the invisible scars that last much longer, scars that are etched in my being forever.

After surfacing, I spent a lot of time with the families of the “desaparesidos,” or the “disappeared”—these are families whose loved ones were abducted by the military and still remain missing. I have come to realize that if there is a reason why I lived through this horrible experience, is to tell my story, which is also the story of many more still disappeared and tortured. The military cannot destroy these people's stories because no amount of state terror can crush the people's will to keep working towards genuine freedom and democracy. In fact, the actions of the military only further prove the tyranny of the Philippine government, which emboldens the people to continue to fight for their rights and pursue justice. The military also cannot stop me from writing and speaking about what I had been witness to. The family of the disappeared, the people still suffering under repression, and the many political activists that continue to risk their lives because they want a better world—all of them give me the inspiration, the support, and the courage to continue. So, for me, it is not an option not to talk about it, and because I am also a poet, I must write about it. So it has been an obsession for me to write.

What societal norms have dictated women to do since oppression existed is to be obedient, to be silent, and submissive. Once a woman breaks these norms she is seen as a threat especially in the Philippines, which is a country that is still very feudal and patriarchal. Women’s roles in society, the economy, and politics are still very limited. U.S. foreign policy helps maintain this system in the Philippines. So women who transgress these norms and in addition become organized and start to advocate for their rights and empowerment are seen as a threat by mainstream society and the government.

One of the most heinous forms of violence against women is state-sponsored violence as a result of political repression. Rape, other sexual violence, and sexual harassment as torture are often used by the government through its police, military, and security agents to show dominance and power. The aims of which is to destroy the ability of the woman to continue their political work, to instill fear and mistrust, and terrorize them.

Staying silent is then not an option for me. As a woman who rages against repression of women through state-violence; who rages at what the torturers did to me; what they did to many other women and worse; who rages against all forms of violence against women; silence is not an option. Especially because news about the killings, the disappearances, and the torture in the Philippines is something that is not covered very often in the United States media, and not enough people are aware in the U.S. of this issue, even though the Philippines is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in Asia.

Regarding issues of human rights and torture, there is a culture of impunity and silence that exists, that is allowed to exist by powerful countries and powerful interests. These interests block our access to information, and instead provides us with misinformation. More and more our society and mainstream culture numbs us and takes away our critical thinking. This is very dangerous for democracy. I think it makes people afraid. Sometimes people fear what they don't understand, sometimes they fear even after they understand, and it stops there. We must move past this fear, past denial, past indifference.

 Do we know about the massacres?  
Do we notice the disappearances?

There Is No One in the Streets

    There is no one in the streets. Even beggars are gone.
Today there is no one to give them alms.
       James is gone, 
        so is Luisa.
 There is no one in the streets
   Jonas has disappeared.
        No one sits by him in the fire, he sits in a room
with no windows
         there are no gifts there.

    No one in the streets.  No one in the streets  
        to remember me dying.
 No scream is heard As I fall in mad breaks.

 Everyone talks in whispers

   My one good eye can see

         Will you help me?  She is my name

         You know me without wanting to

  A body with untidy beatings   An empty bowl.

  Gone. 
 
  Sherlyn, Karen, Merino, Cesar, Mulong…

   Men are not men. 

  Can you feel as I do.  
      Alive, but with an ache in the world.

(James Balao, disappeared September 17, 2008; Luisa Posa-Domindado, disappeared April 12, 2007; Jonas Burgos, disappeared April 27, 2007; Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeno, and Manuel Merino, disappeared on June 26, 2006; Cesar Batralo, disappeared December 21, 2006; Mulong is Romulos Robinos, disappeared November 17, 2006. Since 2001, there were over 200 cases of enforced disappearances in the Philippines, over 1,000 cases of torture, and over 1,100 extra-judicial killings perpetrated by the Philippine military.)

For me, one way of speaking about these issues is through my poetry. Through my poetry I hope that more people will know about the human rights violations happening in the Philippines, and all over the world. More than this, I hope it inspires more people to support the movement to end all human rights violations, end torture and state repression anywhere it happens. I write and I speak because I must not relinquish that last freedom, freedom to think, to create, to rage against injustice.

If you ask what my Kundiman is, what is my love song, it continues to be about the people and their stories, their struggles, and a commitment to truth, justice, and freedom.

www.justiceformelissa.org

(original formatting on poems altered due to blog constraints)
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Melissa Roxas is a poet, writer, and activist.  She was a 2004 PEN USA Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow for poetry, a Kundiman Fellow for 2005 and 2006, and was selected to participate in Great Leap Collaboratory in 2006.

For the past 15 years, she has done community work in Southern California and in the Philippines. She is one of the founders of Habi Arts, a Los Angeles based cultural organization dedicated to promoting community empowerment and progressive social change through the arts. In 2005 she led the U.S. delegation to the International Solidarity Mission to the Philippines to investigate human rights violations. Since 2007, Melissa has been in the Philippines doing community and human rights work in the disadvantaged and marginalized communities in the Philippines. While conducting community health work in La Paz, Tarlac, she was abducted on May 19, 2009 by agents of the Philippine military and was held in secret detention and tortured for six days. This experience has deepened her commitment to human rights work and to continue writing for truth and justice.

At Kundiman, I had two women teachers, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Sarah Gambito, but I also consider my other fellow kundis during those retreats as teachers.

and earth still rising: Melissa Roxas’ chorus of prayer | Vanessa Huang

I met Melissa Roxas through poetry’s tidings, our heartbody calls and responses to the unnatural quiet in state-sponsored stealings of loved ones near and far.
 
Last summer, Kundiman called my peers and I to “participate in a community of cymbals through poems – bringing noise and sound and outrage and unremitting memory” to Melissa’s abduction and torture while in the Philippines “and what continues to happen to activists and artists around the world who dare to take a stand against injustice. Let us encircle them, encourage them and fight for them. There is power when people agree to stand and speak together.”
 
This call and our ensuing congregation of poets in prayer moved me to tears, having come a few months after the unexpected police targeting, brutality, and arrest of my partner and fellow activists here in the States during a local protest. My partner and many of the others had been charged with felonies – plus terrorism sentencing enhancements – and held at atypically high bail. Even while our communities had quickly and successfully organized for our loved ones to return and stay home, my writing practice had frozen in its tracks for months, still in fear from this break, still recovering courage for truthsong. Even in such different context, my bodymemory began to recognize and empathize with some of the safekeeping practices of my elders, long-time community organizers and activists still standing after FBI infiltration and targeting: namely, breath and patience enough to steal bodyprayer rest, unearth quietpresent, renew the fightdrum.
 
Melissa and I too had distinct, varying experiences and locations – and roles and strategies – in surviving the impact of and challenging state violence. Still, I experienced us, through our words – sounded and unsounded – in kindred yearning for survival through break, in the bodied experience of new patience, new spirit feeding transformation and safety. Through my own silence, Melissa called to me through the words that “kept rising out of [her] during the time they held [her]”

Come before the Night Hour
Come and Sing
before Night
Comes. I am Flame
to the Body.
The Incipient Wing
that can’t Fly.
The Open
Skin on a Foot
that Bleeds
Black. Tonight
I will learn to Die
a Thousand Times
and Be Resurrected.

Melissa’s call to comrades for engaged response (“Come before the Night Hour”), her unapologetic call for beauty’s place, its warmth in break, the unknown (“Come and Sing / before Night / Comes.”), the unrelenting prayer in her repetition (“Come before the Night Hour / Come and Sing / before Night / Comes.”) and alliteration, listing of bodied evidence (“I am Flame / to the Body. / The Incipient Wing / that can’t Fly. / The Open Skin on a Foot”), her simultaneous humility and strength in presence through these words – these all invoked a real power and safety to sound my own words in waiting as I further settled into my responsibility as an engaged poet. Through a time of personal and collective grief, trauma, and healing, my practice as a poet – which had originated from political practice as a young activist choosing to wrestle the terror of police and prison violence disarming resistance of each and all where empire, racism, gender oppression, queerphobia, and silencing meet – became more fully present, unfolded into prayer, embodied in offering.
 
The words I’ve continually returned to through new practice have been gratitude, courage, patience, humility. These my center, encouragement as I continue writing to feed heartbody resilience in face of continued and growing detention and imprisonment, unearth the steady fightdrum, quiet through such stealing – these too a lens to express my gratitude for the continued experience of Melissa’s offerings as a poet and writer following her safe return home and continued engagement in challenging state-sponsored disappearances in the Philippines:

courage

to ground new poemseed in political experience, understanding through letters to friends and policymakers. In her June 21, 2009 letter to friends, Melissa articulates how states use “torture as a form of control […] to instill fear in people in debilitating ways, so they stay quiet and lose their light inside.” Amidst such terror, she reminds us “how precious a birth can be,” “how to appreciate life” amidst what the state wishes would desensitize us, and crucially how “no amount of pain or suffering or fear can stop that earth in [us] to keep rising,” encouraging our continued resilience amidst state violence. In this letter, Melissa’s courage grounds her truthsong, the naming of how fever untreated hardens the softness infant eye; how dehydration tighten infant skin; how this a disease of poverty and oppression and more than alphabet typhoid fever, cholera, malaria; how there’s death too in the stealing of freedom workers and disease in the leaving of children of desaparecidos.

to then call her readers to co-investigate and respond to the irrepressible evidence of poetries from body. In her poem “Disinter,” Melissa calls us to sound, experience the memory our bodies store, the evidence the state attempts to terrorize out of its targets and that continues on, even when seemingly silent (“the heavy screen door, shut / the echo of her voice,” “There is a hush / from the night child / that saw,” “no moan from the open mouth / only a song / the music of people / in my head […] / A silent song / from the people / kept playing at my heart”). 

In her poem “Humus,” Melissa grounds us in the natural decay and transformation of life on this earth, then asks us to examine the unnatural in state torture, the break in earthbody. “The composition of the earth changes every time something is mixed into it,” she writes,

"The rains come and it becomes mud when mixed with water. Seeds, when planted, flower into something that feeds you. The same is true of smell and sounds. Isn’t it often said that when you talk to plants they grow to know your voice? Move with your breath?

But what of sweat that pours into the ground? The markings made from combat boots that trampled the earth? […] What of the blood? From the back of Julito *? From the chest of Ronel **? What happens to the animal sound from the bodies? The slow movements of men with their hands tied to the back, the missing tongues, the knife, the men in uniform whose laugh made the earth remember? There was the odor of musk and wind and rotten calabasa. What will grow from that much soil? The earth grew familiar with Julito’s hands when he planted maiz and vegetables in the farm, Ronel’s feet from hours of planting squash. The earth has known their names forever, Oh, but never like this."

Melissa simultaneously offers prayer to feed our continued examination, future response:

By earth
bound
by earth
bit by bit
by give
by mouth
by trail
by foot
by print
by squash
by earth
unearth
by leaf
by worm
lift by hair
by arm
by might
see the sack
grey and ash
by and by
hack by hack
by bit
by bone
by red by rib
by earth
by lie
they lie
my
o my
by and by
by earth they lie

***

patience
in knowing “there are no deaths that are forgotten, no fathers, no mothers, no sisters and brothers, aunts, uncles, or cousins that are forgotten,” that “they live in the births of new babies each day” (June 21, 2009 letter to friends)

***

humility
in engaging call and response, in her clear ask that we not stop sounding the quiet of chorus with/in ourselves, our loved ones, but continue feeding our collective truthsong:

There are many more desaparecidos, more abductions, torture and extra-judicial killings going on in the Philippines and around the world. Let the new birth come where there is an end to all of the killings, abductions, and torture. Let the noise come from all directions–they are no longer whispers but shouts for justice.

***
 
I met Melissa through these poems and writings, through Kundiman’s call for a chorus of authors’ prayer in lovesong. After months of not writing after my own break – and finally having given myself permission to offer bodyprayer as evidence alongside the official documents, the other voices, the truths the state wishes to hush – Melissa’s and Kundiman’s invocations called me to begin sounding my own quiet of chorus:
 
Let us be this fightdrum still chanting
each Kuya, help me still chanting
each decline to comment still chanting
Melissa your camera memory still chanting
ghost of dead lovers still chanting
showing signs of torture still chanting
medicine for this break still chanting
language evaporate at gunpoint still chanting
stretch and pull each mask still chanting
each door forced open, each left ajar still chanting
each stomach caressing ground still chanting
each muscle fight back still chanting
Melissa your Flame to the Body still chanting
each Foot that Bleeds Black still chanting
each Incipient Wing that can’t fly still chanting
military gone to hide still chanting
each inch tape, each knotted blindfold still chanting
sinking each handcuff’s clasp still chanting
temperature their rifles still chanting
each bomb, each fire, each time still chanting
each death and resurrection still chanting
Melissa your compas inside still chanting
each rib, each palm stronger than cages still chanting
each breath you stole for rest, each whisper a campaign still chanting
each poem that speaks later, each truthsong before Night Comes still chanting
each window of sky, each freedom found in village arms still chanting
each knowing eye, each kind gesture still chanting
each movement til empire fall, each rest in love still chanting
gathering this rebel heartdrum still chanting
all this music poetry still chanting
 
Yes, you live, Melissa,
song of truth rising,
your music is chanting.
 
***
 
For Melissa – with gratitude for your offerings; beauty, resilience, and presence on this earth; your continued call moving us to dialogue and action.
 
Notes:
 
Kuya, help me from Melissa’s affidavit. The rest of the italicized text from the excerpt of my “Kundiman” for Melissa is from her poem composed during her abduction.
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Vanessa Huang is a poet, writer, and community organizer whose practice feeds the resilience and embodiment of people, campaigns, and movement building from the margins. Vanessa was a finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange for her poetry manuscript, quiet of chorus, which has been described as a project that “lifts up the often muffled legacies of resistance to genocide in contemporary life” and home to “lifeworlds that yearn for freedom and wholeness, and help enliven the path forward.” Vanessa has studied with Kundiman faculty Myung Mi Kim, Rick Barot, and Staceyann Chin.
 
Photo credit: Visibility Project