TAKING STOCK 2 (PART 3): The Third Decade of my Exile

TAKING STOCK 2 (PART 3): The Third Decade of my Exile

It occurs to me now that the cycle my life followed in the Philippines is quite similar to the one I pursued in exile. In Canada as in the Philippines, I earned a livelihood as a writer and journalist for my first 10 years, taught in Career Colleges for the next 10, and ended up in politics for the last 10 before retiring to a more “civilized” life of reading, writing, travelling, and avoiding the urge to prepare to “kick the bucket.”

When I quit teaching here, Career Colleges started sprouting all over Canada. Every hapless immigrant wanted some kind of training to earn a living. PhDs in physics think it is criminal to work as taxi drivers when this country of some 35 million needed scientists, not to mention first class minds.

Doctors from the Philippines have to go back to school to get themselves certified to work as physicians whatever specialties they have. After a year or two, they immigrate to the United States and work there as physicians. Our loss, their gain south of the border. Nurses and teachers from the Third World countries end up being nannies, caregivers, or even masseuses in sex parlours that masquerade as spas.

Little wonder then that fraudulent schools and diplomas sprang from the woodwork. Now, the government is running after these institutions that somehow bridged the gap for the professionals who immigrated here only to be treated as second class citizens. Oh, they would employ the doctors as operation room nurses, academics as pizza delivery boys, and engineers as Casino croupiers.

Teaching in the International Business Schools (they have since folded up when enrolments dwindled because the Ministry of Education realized that high schools here could teach the same vocational skills to help immigrants get jobs as soon as they win landed immigrant status or citizenship after three years), provided me with insights into how public education could easily take over from these “career colleges” which, after all, charged criminally exorbitant tuition fees only to issue diplomas that are scarcely respected by employers anyway. I met a good number of disillusioned professionals who thought coming to America would get them better professional and economic lives.

Certainly, business entrepreneurs hereabouts still skirt hiring educated employees because they join unions and demand higher pays. “Slave labour” from “seasonal labourers” temporarily employed from Mexico, the Caribbean Islands, and other Latin American countries has become a source of embarrassment.

From my occasional appearances on television promoting these career colleges, I gained some dubious exposure, wide enough to win me a school board election after my academic stint. I wanted to get my hands on education policy.

Filipino expatriates thought I was foolhardy running in Mississauga’s most affluent area – wards made up of the wealthy and established gentry (both the Federal Member of Parliament and Provincial Parliament Member, and two City councillors lived in my riding). I had twenty years of “work experience” and I was ready “to give back to my community.” I also needed a job.

In that first campaign in 1999, what stands out is the closeness I had finally developed with my family (children, in-laws, and even grandchildren) who doggedly fanned out to a vast area (the largest riding in Mississauga, Wards 2 and 8, with a population of practically one third of the 700 thousand that populated this sixth largest city of Canada, Mississauga).

On a weekend, during the campaign, one of my grandchildren, then 3-year old Taylor Lauren Kwan, wanted some candy while helping to distribute those leaflet trumpeting grandpa’s credentials. Grandpa said, “Ask your Mommy. Candies may not be good for your little teeth,” I pleaded.

From out of left field, she screamed: “Vote Jim Dore! Vote Jim Dore!” That’s my school activist, White Anglo Saxon, long-time Irish emigre, opponent’s name!

I gave her the candy. Lesson in political quid pro quo, I muttered. I thought the campaign was going the wrong way. But I won by 33 votes. The next elections, won 86% of the vote, and by my ninth year, I had served as Chairman of the By-laws, Policy, Procedures Committee , Contracts Committee, Faith and Education Committee, and Administrative Committee. I thought I was ready to run for Chairman of the Board; I was denied that honour twice, having run against a long-time British-born chairman and a young veteran trustee from a neighbouring city.

I needed to stir the board to more progressive educational matters. I knew I was one of those outspoken trustees who challenged the wisdom of the Ministry of Education when it took over the board for not balancing the budget. I was a marked man. I lost the elections in 2006.

But I lost valiantly, realizing that I was bucking the Provincial Government’s effort to emasculate the Catholic Education Board, and cutting funding wherever they found it politically expedient. The effort to micro-manage the school boards seemed to have extinguished the fire in my belly. I ran to serve, not play petty politics. (More of these issues later.)

Summing up, nevertheless, I feel proud of having written policy that reemphasized the core of Catholic Education – the development of students according to the teachings of Christ and the Holy Magisterium of the Church. Catholic education need not clash with secular society’s goals.

I protected as best I could the right of my constituents to retain school bus service for their children when cutting these seemed fashionable.

I fought for a more dynamic cooperation among the three pillars of Catholic education: the triumvirate of school-Church-parents. I wrote policy to inculcate in the curriculum the development of Christian Catholic values that strengthened a democratic way of life.

In the schools (some 22 of them that I presided over), we introduced Schools for the Arts, and improved courses that would equip the high school graduates with vocational skills that could get them jobs as soon as they finished their secondary education. This was calculated to help them earn money for their college or university education, if they decided to pursue tertiary education. Scholarships and student loan subsidies were scarce.

There is a small Filipino community in my riding. I hardly heard from them except when a parent would ask me to intervene for a child suspended for some misdemeanour. Or a paisano wanted a job at the school board – maybe as a principal, a teacher, or even a maintenance man (janitor, really). It was no different from when I served as a civil servant in Malacanang, with the Department of Public Information. Filipino politicians are largely still regarded as padrinos, short cuts to advantage, really.

But I am happy to have worked hard for a Filipino Senior citizens organization, the Sampaguita Seniors Association, to get Provincial and Federal funding for their activities – among them physical, educational, social, and cultural activities that kept them participating in the community as exemplars of good citizenship and inspirations for the youth.

My wife’s aunt, Mrs. Ephrena Chaves, an 82-year-old senior citizen who emigrated from Cagayan de Oro City in the Southern Philippines, keeps herself busy organizing the tenants of the retirement home for their regular socials, exercise sessions, karaoke nights, picnics, computer-training programs, excursions, and volunteer activities to teach the youth baking, the arts, and other cultural activities.

The one time another Filipino got in touch was when I got a call from a columnist of one of the Filipino newspapers, urging me to run for Provincial politics. I said I was happy serving in the lowest rung of Canadian politics, where I am closest to those who needed services for the most important legacy of the community – education. It was a little recognition that I valued for what it was worth.

Where I was unsuccessful back in the old country politics, I made it here where the citizens are truly sovereign and demand the best of its civil servants. I have come full circle.

When I lost the 2006 elections for a fourth term, I was awarded the usual severance salary for civil servants. I told my wife that we had enough to bring the entire Casuga clan for a long-needed vacation. I thanked my family for helping me realize a third dream in a strange and cold country. We had a week-long summer break in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, where one of my daughters conceived my ninth grandchild – Louis Martin Lalonde.

I have retired. I am “re-tired”. That’s why I got myself into this “blogging” business. I am still working on something I like and love.

How can you top that?

Oh, en passant, I am taking a week-long pre-Christmas break in St. Lucia, in the Caribbean on December 12, with my wife, Veronica.

In exile, I have built within me and my family, a happy country.

TAKING STOCK 2 (Part 2): WRITING POTBOILERS

WHO IS AFRAID OF THE YEAR 2000 AND BEYOND?
(Click on the image to read through the monograph)

I am. Afraid.

Look for shudders below. (Meantime, welcome to one of those "potboilers" a writer can line his bare pockets with in a strange and cold country, in exile.)

Computational Infrastructure has wreaked havoc on my plans to live a simpler life.

In the essays above, I cheerfully advised all and sundry that the computers have arrived as handmaidens of the "knowledge industry." One has to learn how to use them, or they will "use and wear" you down.

I am, therefore, a case of a prophet who got entrapped in a prophecy gone berserk.

Computers, the Internet, the web --- all computational infrastructure from the satellites to the servers and down to the home station --- they have promoted "high-tech" mayhem: theft of identity via the internet, real-time pornography via cameras attached to desk computers or even laptops, hacking into bank accounts that salt away even hard-earned pensions of senior citizens, ad nauseam.

Of course, I should have also written about these; but who would pay a Cassandra who would warn that the Devil lurks, too, in the bytes, the hard drives, and even the high-tech vandals' worms and viruses?

The whole week, last week, I fumed and ranted because my personal computer crashed. I lost all saved documents and all types of stored memento (Baby pictures of the grandkids, for instance). Forgot to "back-up"; so, when the grinning techie "fixed" it so I could get online again, my curses got out of line, and I am glad I grunted my expletives in Ilocano, Filipino, Spanish, and, because he did not bother to learn French in this bilingual country, in my most nasal Francophone m--de yet. (Multilingual violence, too, Dr. Cruz of LOL)

He shot back: "Backed it right up for you, too, Sir." A compu-whiz grandchild thought aloud: "Did he say 'right back at you,' abuelo?"

And I thought as a communications man, I have also learned the language of the "knowledge industry." Dread is all there is left to hope for.

Beware then the Word that has twisted around to confuse all men unto sanity! Welcome back to Babel.

TAKING STOCK 2: (PART 1): HOW I SURVIVED MY EXILE

TAKING STOCK 2. (PART 1)
How I survived as an Immigrant worker, Writer in Exile, and Academic Manque

1980. That’s when I left the Philippines for Canada. I endured two lonely years without my family; they left in 1978 for this North American country for reasons I am still angry about.

I was not prepared to lose my job as a civil servant at the Department of Public Information under the Martial Law Government. Francisco S. Tatad, the university classmate who recruited me to work for President Ferdinand Marcos’ s government, had left the Information Department which he headed as the youngest Philippine Press Secretary in the country’s history.

He ran successfully as his province’s (Catanduanes. “The Philippine island which is geographically closest to the United States,” Tatad describes his province, tongue-in-cheek.) representative to the Philippine House of Representatives, but I could no longer go back to my academic post at the De La Salle University (as an English and Literature Senior Instructor) where he recruited me from. Tatad had to fend for himself, too, having been accused of “unexplained wealth” by the Martial Law government. The case did not prosper while Marcos stayed in command. Nor thereafter.

Labelled as one of his “cronies”, I was not about to retain my job as Technical Services director under Tatad’s replacement. Even as a career service civil servant, I could not be “salvaged” by then Presidential Executive Secretary and Civil Service Commissioner Jacobo “Jake” Clave. I asked that I be posted as Region I Information Director (the region included Clave’s Pangasinan province where he was hoping to run for governor before Marcos would leave his teetering government) so that “I could be of some help to him” when the time came.

My credentials did not count. So much for being a civil service employee, a established writer, and an academic from two of the most prestigious private colleges in the country (San Beda College (Benedictines), and De La Salle University (Christian Brothers). I was writing for Philippine periodicals, television, and ghostwriting speeches for business and government leaders. I was not information man enough for Gregorio Cendana who took over Tatad’s job. Clave said Cendana thought I was “arrogant”, and I proved him right by not begging for the job.

(Cendana, himself, left the Philippines for the U.S. of A. when Marcos was toppled.)

So I left for Canada, a repentant husband and father, who could not hack it as a La Union province politician, unlike Tatad who made it to the Batasan (Philippine National Legislative Assembly) even when he parted ways with Marcos, and I was a Kapisanan ng Bagong Lipunan (Marcos’ New Society Party) wannabe politician in my home province where the dynasties (cronies of Marcos), then as now, reign – yes, the Ortegas are still there. Three of them (Francisco, Jr., Pablo, and Manuel) were my students in high school and university. And I was a come-back kid of the old Casuga dynasty (San Fernando Mayors and La Union governors, Lauro, Mauro, Alejandro, and Constante, who were there even before the Ortegas. But their issues could not win elections thereafter, and I was an ambitious grand nephew who would like to raise the dynasty from its political grave.)

So much for dynasties under the revised Constitution under which present President Gloria Arroyo ran -- she herself has perpetuated these dynasties with two of her sons serving as Congressmen in the province of her husband, Miguel, and her own province in Pampanga.

How did I fare in Canada? In my exile, did I like James Joyce “forge into the smithy of my soul, the conscience of our race”?

No. Like any father and husband reconciled finally in a strange, cold country, I had to find a job quickly, so I could resume the job of “provider” while the children grew up. Started from scratch. One thing I am proud I did not do was the suggestion of a sister-in-law that I “could always pump gas at the kanto station if I could not find a job in my field.”

I found that self-esteem-preserving job with my skills as a writer. I was not licensed to teach in any school, so I settled for a copy editor’s job at the Metroland Publishing Company, a subsidiary of the Torstar Corporation, publisher of North America’s biggest daily, The Toronto Star, and owner of the most profitable romance/pulp book publishers, Harlequin.

For the next 10 years, until my whole department – Editorial Production -- was replaced by editorial-staff-handled computers, I edited copy (stories, ads, promos, and what-have-you). Talent will out; and I got a short-lived whack publishing and editing one of Metroland’s 24 publications, S.M.I.L.E., the life, entertainment, information features magazine that supplemented the 24 community papers, (mostly advertising rags, really) that remain to this day as the Torstar’s moneybag.

It was at this time that then Globe and Mail business-page reporter Oscar Rojo and I invited the owners of the Filipino diaspora “newspapers” (Atin Ito of Vic Lee, Balita of Ruben Cusipag, and Bong Koo’s Filipiniana – all distributed free to Philippine expatriates through the countless convenience stores and bakeries ran by Philippine immigrant workers) to put their resources together, form a corporation, and publish a decent weekly paper to service the needs of the Philippine community in Ontario (about 90,000 paisans then).

It was also at this time that the Corriere Canadense, an Italian newspaper, was being published monthly like those Pinoy papers. The Filipino publishers demurred; they wanted to have their own niches, thank you.

Today, ((two decades later) the Corriere is a daily and it pays its staffers handsomely, while the Filipino-run papers are still handouts, hardly subsisting on ads from tardy-paying Philippine-run businesses, and in fact, they have grown to more sporadically-published monthlies and bi-weeklies, that are really advertising sheets of the Filipino-run restaurants and stores that seem to fold up after a year or two. Writing for the ethnic diaspora here will not pay. I could not have put up my own paper in this clime of mediocrity and ego-sustained vanity publications. The writers are volunteers who can hardly put sentences together. The “society” news is staple – drum up a party, publish pictures in Balita, and you have something to boast about in the “community”.

As of this writing, Hermie Garcia’s The Philippine Reporter is still around (he was with the Manila Times before it shut down under the martial law government). It is the best-edited diaspora paper hereabouts, but advertising ads are barely shoring the monthly up. Ace Alvarez has the monthly Media Monitor, and some other stragglers that have served the Chinese grocery stores as wrappers for tilapia and lechon . Not unlike the 7000 islands or so in the old archipelago, Filipinos anywhere on earth will always be “islands on their own.”

There are also associations for every two Filipinos that can excite a “ningas cogon” (brushfire) interest in an issue that get scuttled by court suits on who is stealing whose contribution to donated calamity funds for the old flooded country. Whose election was legitimate? Who is the “bida” (starring role) in the diaspora?

When I ran for the school board after my retirement (served for nine years) from wage-earning, I did not depend upon the so-called Filipino community hereabouts. There is no such thing as “Filipino” community. There are only permanent Filipino individual interests. But that’s for another blog.

When the Toronto Star, our mother company newspaper, could not absorb me into their retrenched staff (that was a bad recession Canada had in 1990), I accepted a teaching job at the International Business Schools (at the Toronto School of Business) teaching English as a Second Language, Writing Effective English, Business English and Communications, Marketing and Promotions.

I fell back on academic skills I had back home, and the writing skills were always something I could fall back on. I put up my own marketing and promotions agency, between jobs, and managed to hold on to writing copy jobs that augmented my severance pay and pension from Metroland. In fact, I parlayed this to become the Communications director of the school that IBS got me into, The Toronto School of Business in the cities of Mississauga, Brampton, and North York.

In that school, I was commissioned by the IBS to write a Career Education and Employment Trends monograph for its schools in Canada, which I reproduce below, (see part 2) to give blog followers an idea of what a writer gets into when one is pushed against the ropes to earn a living.

At that time, futurists writing about what’s in store for the years 2000 and beyond were in vogue. Toffler, Naisbitt, and Kiechel III were authors whose future-visions were quoted like mantra in business circles and in the graduate schools.

Because I had to teach immigrants (Chinese, Indian, Nigerian, Filipinos, Romanians, Easter European, Italian, etcetera, a diversity that astounds me up to now) how to speak and write English, not to mention effective business communication and English, I got IBS to publish my Fundamentals of Writing (English), which is a carryover from my penchant in the Philippine schools to write a book for every course I taught.

I did not get into full-time secondary or tertiary education teaching in my adopted country, but being afforded gainful opportunity to write compensated for the regular cheque. (I would even win literary contests for the cash! No vanities here. Cash is good.) Besides, when I got elected as a member of the school board, I had a chance of writing policy for education in Canada.

Was this a vast departure from what I had going for myself back in the Philippines?
In a new country, it could appear that way. After all, in another life, in another country, one could have had a cycle of it. Yes, I lived by writing, too, in the Philippines. While I taught, I wrote those textbooks for my classes and earned royalty which I surrendered to my wife to augment family income. I wrote for Philippine television (“Our Doctors” – Tommy Abuel et al, directed by Geoge Rowe; “Oh, Rosemarie” directed by Kitchie Benedicto, starring Rosemarie Sonora et al). I wrote arts and culture features for the Philippines Herald circa Nestor Mata editorship. I wrote for the pittance that magazines could pay me for the poems, short stories, and features (Philippines Free Press, NOW Magazine, Sunday Times, Asia-Philippines Leader, Graphic Magazine, Solidarity, Philippine Writing, La Salle’s Library Magazine edited by Marcelino Foronda. Jr.) I even won first prize for poetry in a national contest, Parnaso, where I was awarded a handsome 1000 pesos that my wife gleefully received to add to her grocery money. (Yes, all the paltry sums I earned writing went to her bank account.)

I knew I could not live by writing alone, but I was able to live in order to write by earning through other writing venues.

This habit continued in Canada, my strange and adopted country.

It is for this reason, that including this in my blog of recherché du temps perdu, means including for archival purposes where (what clime, what hapless instances) writing could bring the writer to – if only to prove true to his reason for being alive. To write until he writes 30.


Next: Taking Stock 2 (Part 2)

WHO IS AFRAID OF THE YEAR 2000 AND BEYOND?
(Click on Images to read the monograph).

A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK: ON "BASURA DAYS"

A WRITER’S NOTEBOOK: ON “BASURA DAYS”

My daily constitutional is a three-kilometre walk to my daughter’s house where, by noontime, I am able to join my wife and grandchildren, Chloe Dominique and Louis Martin, for lunch.

Along the way, on Garbage Day, I distract myself with the refuse I espy on thrown pell-mell into the city-mandated bins. Mississauga remains a clean city because of these containers; and I --- willy-nilly --- guess at the ethnic backgrounds of the sources of this garbage as I walk along the bin-lined sidewalks. A diaspora of diverse immigrants, their garbage is equally diverse; I find discarded mementoes among litters of ethnic newspapers, (French, Italian, Indian, Portuguese, Irish, Scots, Filipino, Spanish, German, Chinese, a truly multicultural community) on Fifth Line West Street.

Why not write about discards, this avenue of the rejected? This salon of the rejected? By the time I got to Robin Drive, I had a poem heavy on my head. I jotted some notes before the two Francophone grandchildren could overwhelm me with chatter that I look forward to at the end of my walk.

Because the context provided me with a chance to write a poem using the languages of this diaspora, I thought I would get Dr. Isagani R. Cruz’s attention by putting form to his theories on multilingual literature.

Blog-time got me playfully writing a poem that stretched from one to six sections, a virtual objective correlative to my constitutional. From garbage, I would find some haven that centrifugally spun from the images of the garbage-lined street.

“Basura Days” took on the format of a Wasteland. When I got feedbacks from literary scholar Isagani R. Cruz and Philippine poet Francisco R. Albano, OSB, I was surprised to realize that the poem virtually wrote itself on a centrifugal-centripetal energy that was described by Rev. Albano as mystical.

Here’s Fr. Albano’s take:


(Firing me an email, poet Albano analyzed the poem)


“In the name of all, specially of senior citizens, thank you for the poem.
“My reaction after reading: Silence. Then sartori. I shall read the poem to my Aesthetics class this semester.
"Word" of multilayered meanings, of the last stanza climbs the ladder from garbage to dangerous historical memories, to book, . . . to Verbum Dei which blesses the poem with transcendent mystical quality.
“And I remembered an old journal entry of mine:

CUMPLEANOS ON GOOD FRIDAY
Today I complete another year in God’s Kingdom.
I awoke, rose to the chirping of swallows,
Went out to the veranda to praise the Lord
For wide sky and long sierras and a valley heavy with corn.

And suddenly I remembered a parable from Down Under:
There was this master of a an estate who called
One of his servants and gifted him with a superb stallion.
This is for you, the master said.
And what about me, said another servant. Do I get anything?
Oh, said the master; see that stable there? It’s yours.
And the servant ran to the stable, opened it and saw it
Full of shit from ground to ceiling.
At once he got a shovel and started digging, saying:
There’s got to be a horse in here!

[This is the word of the Lord.]

Poetry in garbage-shit.”

In response, I sent this e-mail:

Dear Dave,
Because of readers like you, I continue to write the poems that otherwise would be left unwritten, buried in my skull. Thank you for the the reminder on the WORD, and the parable from Down Under. Isagani Cruz sees the parable, too, in Basura Days...Sa Basura may langit din -- Indeed, has anyone written about basura in mystical measures? I like your last line: poetry in garbage-shit. Poesia hallada de basura mierda. Much like the Dhamyatta -- one dies in order to find life. One digs deep through this stable of mierda (Styx, the last time we looked) in order to find the horse there. There's got to be a stallion down there. Abrazos, hermano. Until the next poem? ALBERT

* * *

In his LOL Literature in Other Languages, Dr. Isagani Cruz reacted to “Basura Days”:

Multilingual poem by Albert B. Casuga
“There are all kinds of variations to the saying that "we use German (or English) to talk to dogs, Italian to talk to lovers, French to talk to cooks (or soldiers), and Spanish to talk to God." For example, some old folks in the Philippines say that we use Tagalog to talk to maids, English to talk to foreigners, and Spanish to talk to God. While sayings of that sort today sound racist, they do point to a genuine theological problem: what language does God use to think (assuming that divine beings think in the way we understand the word)? The answer, of course, is that God thinks in all languages. The best way to reach God then is to write in as many languages as you know at the same time.

Albert B. Casuga's most recent poem, "Basura Days," takes the theme of Christianity as T. S. Eliot understood it and applies it to today's most universal phenomenon, namely, garbage (trash, junk, shit, or whatever you want to call it) and builds a modern parable taking off from the Biblical insight that whatever we do to the least of God's creations (animate or inanimate), we do to God”

In my blog comments to Dr. Cruz’s comments, I facetiously asked if he is providing a theological rationale for multilingual literature.

“A theological rationale for multilingual literature, Dr. Cruz?

It was a playful percolation of refuse images, then it turned pious, angry, and -- for old friends --- solicitous. Pray that I have not elevated garbage to a status of Eucharistic surrogacy. We might yet find a good poetic excuse for colonization. Their languages for our Weltanschauung --- fair exchange?

It occurs to me at this point that multilingual literature could be an antidote to an inchoate Phil Lit.”


* * *

For the archives, here is a translation of the Filipino section of “Basura Days”.

5.
Onto my dying days, I, an old man on the streets of dung,
Shall recall to any lad or lass who would listen: Ang Kagalangalangan,
Kataastaasang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan ay siyang gumulpe
Sa mga Kastilang nagbenta sa Amerika ang Inang Bayang Pilipinas,
At tumuli sa mga dayuhang Yanqui upang ang Pilipinas ay lumayang muli.
At ang mga Bolomen? Hindi nga ba sila ang mga gerilyang pumutakte sa
Mga sakang ng Bayang Hapon nang ang Pilipinas ay muling nagwagi
Maski na hindi nakabalik on opportune time si Heneral Douglas McArthur
Upang kanyang tuparin ang kanyang pangako: I shall return?
Sila man din, itong mga kababayan ay lahat mistulang dukha, pulut sa basura
Ng tadhana, namayani, ang tuloy na ring sumugpo sa karimlan maging ito’y
Digmaan or dili kaya’y baha, martial law, GMA, at iba pa. Sa Manila ngayon,
Basura sa baba, basura sa gitna, at basura para rin sa kataastaasan.


English translation:

Onto my dying days, I, an old man on the streets of dung,
Shall recall to any lad or lass who would listen:
The Honourable and Supreme Organization of the Country’s
Children (KKK) destroyed the Spanish colonial master
Who sold the Philippines to America and also cut the Yankee
Balls asunder so that the Philippines would again reign free.
And the Bolo Men? Did not its freedom fighters wreak havoc
On Japan’s bow-legged troops to win yet another war despite
The tardy return of General Douglas MacArthur who pledged:
I shall return? They, too, these impoverished compatriots,
Veritable recruits from the dumpster bins of Colonial Fate
And fortune, have overcome the grim disasters be they wars,
Floods, martial law, GMA (Gloria Macapagal Arroyo), etcetera.
In Manila this time around, there’s garbage below, garbage
In the center, and garbage, too, above.

Poems are hard to come by these days, but when I find them pummelling my brain while I walk for my senior-citizen’s santé, I grab the ligne-donne, and run away with it.

A NEW POEM FOR ALL THE OLD FRIENDS

BASURA DAYS
(Sa atin din may Wasteland)

FOR ALL THE OLD FRIENDS
(For Cesar Leyco Aguila in Australia and Isagani R. Cruz who advocates this type of multilingual writing.)

--- I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
---T .S. Eliot, The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock

1.
It’s garbage day today; it’s time to discard the refuse.
An inspiring mantra, I mutter, before I slip into autumn galoshes
Looking brightly at a voyeur’s walk through neighbourhood muck
Arranged immaculately into green, blue, grey, and sepia bins
Mandated to guarantee that the week’s basura and mierda ---
Prophylactics and sanitary napkins, masticated fries vomited
With the arrant fish bones, newsprint-wrapped pet faeces,
Faded pictures of grandmere leering at grandpere glancing
At some tightly dungareed wench flaunting palpable haunches
Sans underpants that was last millennium’s acceptance of taste
If not coyness or even breeding in vaulted manors of delicadeza ---
Are picked up by the City Dump Meister on an antiseptic mission
To rid these fallen-leaves-strewn paseos of accidental memories,
Recuerdos de faltas pasadas, putrid waste of body functions
And memento mori gone past their memorial usefulness.

2.
These streets are the starkest salons of the rejected.
But I, an essential old man of windy spaces, I build caminos
Of broken dreams, the day’s fleeting temple of crumpled portraits
(A lass on a pony, a go-soon clamping down on a pell-mell skirt
Blowing up with the wind come to frolic with limbs on a swing
Of wings, (Aieeee….que bueno! Que linda! Siempre fuiste la razon
De mi existir! Las lindisimas mujeres! Sangre del amor! ), a campesino
With the ugliest-looking bass this side of the Credit River dangling
From the rod of ages, old women in antediluvian bloomers
Cavorting with Holocaust-surviving skeletons picking grapes
From a refuge of Neapolitan vineyards. Forgotten portraits,
Forgiven hurts, nurtured loves, haunting desires:
C’est mon vocu le plus cher.)

3.
On garbage days, I walk the boulevards of refuse absented from
Their satiated origins, pick up discarded whistles or some such
Aeolian reeds, pick up reusable stuff better known as un tesoro
Hallado de basura de otro hombre – televisions, computers, ipods,
Stereos, stoves, microwave ovens gone kaput or obsolescent,
Bathroom douches, screws, nails, tacks, pens, mock penile-shaped
Doorstoppers, and music boxes still wound to play Volver a Sorento.
The dumpster looking majestically impregnable upon its pedestal
At the Senior’s Home is spray-painted with blood-red letters “J.C.” ---
A startling graffiti proclaiming “SAVES” (a jumble of garbage chutes
Astride the metal bin) makes one cogitate: JC SAVES. Jesus Christ
Saves. The Catcher in the Rye, indeed. El hombre propongo,
Y Dios Dispongo. What man has built on his crumbling sandboxes
Only God can make last, like the Temple J.C. built upon some Rock
“Where the Gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

4.
I, an old man, accept the wisdom of the dumpster: How much
Garbage, indeed, has Jesus as dumpster caught that they may
Be delivered to the proper dumpsites of vile, filth, and dirt
So that they may, as human dregs, be recomposed as food
For the worms, the essential worms? On a morning constitutional,
A cathedral is no better than the dumpster where J.C. saves
The refuse of a lost paradise as compost for a paradise regained.
I am in good company as a picker. The Good Fisherman picked
His minions from the dissolute fisherfolk and bade them fish
Where fish was not. The Great Mao gathered his rebels as firesticks
On Hunan and burnt the hills to bear the fruit for the wakened Tiger.
Did not Mahatma Gandhi-ji gather his poor to cram the railways
That rendered them supine and in penury, that they may rise
And subdue the Empire that once did not see a sunset? Shantih.
Shantih.

5.
Onto my dying days, I, an old man on the streets of dung,
Shall recall to any lad or lass who would listen: Ang Kagalangalangan,
Kataastaasang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan ay siyang gumulpe
Sa mga Kastilang nagbenta sa Amerika ang Inang Bayang Pilipinas,
At tumuli sa mga dayuhang Yanqui upang ang PIlipinas ay lumayang muli.
At ang mga Bolomen? Hindi nga ba sila ang mga gerilyang pumutakte sa
Mga sakang ng Bayang Hapon nang ang Pilipinas ay muling nagwagi
Maski na hindi nakabalik on opportune time si Heneral Douglas McArthur
Upang kanyang tuparin ang kanyang pangako: I shall return?
Sila man din, itong mga kababayan ay lahat mistulang dukha, pulut sa basura
Ng tadhana, namayani, ang tuloy na ring sumugpo sa karimlan maging ito’y
Digmaan or dili kaya’y baha, martial law, GMA, at iba pa. Sa Manila ngayon,
Basura sa baba, basura sa gitna, at basura para rin sa kataastaasan. (1)

6.
Its garbage day on Tuesdays here, Hermano, and that’s when I go picking
Refuse, myself included. I pick my decrepit body up from its hapless
Detritus, and whistle for the wind. We cannot be old men here,
Where when we reach the end of our walk, a little boy or girl awaits
With outstretched hands, running on the wings of love and glee, to give
Their grand abrazo, besito y abuelo, abuelo! The old man is back.
He did not perish along the way. So should you not, Hermano.
We need to walk through more garbage days. Because I have not seen
Any discarded book along the way, I promise you garbage days
Are good while the Word is not yet muck with the filth of waste.
Do you have garbage days in Wales? Sydney? The Outback?
In garbage days we trust.

ALBERT B. CASUGA
Missisauga, Canada, October 27, 2009

__________________

(1)English translation:
Onto my dying days, I, an old man on the streets of dung,
Shall recall to any lad or lass who would listen:
The Honourable and Supreme Organization of the Country’s
Children (KKK) destroyed the Spanish colonial master
Who sold the Philippines to America and also cut the Yankee
Balls asunder so that the Philippines would again reign free.
And the Bolo Men? Did not its freedom fighters wreak havoc
On Japan’s bow-legged troops to win yet another war despite
The tardy return of General Douglas MacArthur who pledged:
I shall return? They, too, these impoverished compatriots,
Veritable recruits from the dumpster bins of Colonial Fate
And fortune, have overcome the grim disasters be they wars,
Floods, martial law, GMA (Gloria Macapagal Arroyo), etcetera.
In Manila this time around, there’s garbage below, garbage
In the center, and garbage, too, above.

A NEW POEM BY FRANCISCO R. ALBANO, OSB

CHOSEN

I chose a ministry of service and applied.
Silence rejected me – a long dumbfounding silence
Of sky, of unplanted seeds, and untapped water.
Then, unscheduled it came, transcending memories;

The invitation came to serve and care for the Other –
Him Her It All waiting to be named but not owned.
Slowly Face defined my mind and heart and spirit;
A hand chucked my chin; a finger drew my lips.

The Word came, saying: “It is I have chosen You.
Arise, come and transform, as an eagle in flight
Obeys the wind; as earth follows command
Of a river winding to Love oceanic and free.
Unfold me true as Way of Life to my Future,
In the red march of toiling people bearing gifts.”

--FRANCISCO R. ALBANO

[Retreat 09-24-09, Maryridge, Tagaytay]

Rev. Fr. Francisco R. Albano, OSB, is a seminary rector at a Catholic Diocese in Isabela, Northern Philippines. In the 1970s, he served as chairman of the San Beda College English Department at Mendiola. Most of his poems --- published under a penname --- are gems of spiritual and social relevance. Committed to the amelioration of the proletariat, Fr. Albano has celebrated the courage as well as humility of militant priesthood.

The poem above is his re-commitment to the ministry which he re-invigorates during his annual retreats in Maryridge, Tagaytay. An act of Introibo ad Altare Dei, his pristine mandate is to uplift his people --- "to unfold me true as Way of Life to my Future...in the red march of toiling people bearing gifts."

His earlier poems were collected in Rituals, a book published after the Quarter Storm.

From this vantage point, he is the truest poet of the Period of Protest. His plea has matured in the indelible hope for the Filipino people to overcome the millstone of poverty in body and soul.

He is an important Philippine poet.

TAKING STOCK 1: I OWE ALEJANDRINO G. HUFANA MY BEING A POET

In the previous entry, “Taking Stock”, I intimated a pause from writing, pleading “weariness” in a verse from Ecclesiastes: “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it.” It is sometimes called a “writer’s block”; no scribbler is exempt from it. It could be triggered by physical maladies; but, more often than not, it is almost always a psychological monkey wrench. No self-respecting writer makes an excuse of it when he runs dry creatively. Therefore, rather than foisting it as a demurrer, one can still get away with euphemisms like “taking stock,” “summing up”, “refilling the tank”, “revving up”, “harvesting ripened grain”. Much like an “inventory” at the corner store: “we’re out of stock.”

A good excuse not to shut down, of course, is the surfacing of stock not displayed before; collector’s items (rare books, manuscripts, brilliant literature, say). I am not shutting down yet.

Too precious to languish in an out-of-print collection of poems, for instance, is the late and lamented Philippine poet Alejandrino G. Hufana’s “Introduction” to my first book of poems, Narra Poems and Others (San Beda Publications, 1968, Manila).

Browsing through another “collector’s item” in my unkempt library, 7X 10 World Poetry Choices by Seven Filipino Poets, I thought that instead of me writing about the poets who have influenced my poetry --- as these poets have in the book --- I would rather have the “Philippine’s most important poet” (according to another titan in poetry, Jose Garcia Villa) trace these in his generous introduction to my debut collection. Hufana was cogent when he found poetic affinities in my poems to those of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Francis Thompson, the Metaphysical Poets, and some Chinese poets. While I value the comparison and edified by the close reading of my poems by a decidedly superior poet, I felt that Hufana’s analysis of my poetic energies is too good a piece of literary criticism to consign to unread archives.

Alejandrino G. Hufana was the mentor-poet from my hometown whom my high school physics teacher, Dr. Cleofe Bacungan, thought the world of. She commended his work for me to study if I wanted to become a writer. She was our school paper’s adviser while I edited the La Union TAB, the Philippines' pioneer high school paper, in the late 1950s. True to my promise to this brilliant teacher, I studied Hufana --- (although I never even met him in our hometown where my physics teacher boarded in their ancestral home; I met him finally at his faculty residence at the University of the Philippines, where he taught literature and creative writing at the Humanities Department) --- and wrote about his Poro Point: an Anthology of Lives (a collection of poems) when I did my undergraduate work at the University of Santo Tomas (Manila).

Philippine Writing I (at that time the country’s most prestigious literary journal edited by the internationally-acclaimed novelist the late N.V.M. Gonzalez) published it. When the fictionist came to our campus to deliver a homecoming lecture to our arts and letters students, he asked if I was in the audience. All eyes were on the puny, 90-pound geek who stood up from the last row of the auditorium --- he said he had a cheque for me (found money for this starving student because I did not expect it) for the essay on Hufana. “Good writing,” he said. That was the last time I saw him. Both Hufana (+2003) and Gonzalez died in self-exile in California, U.S.A.

Manong Andring, I called him when I finally met him, asking for this “Introduction.” He made me stay for lunch, treating me like a prodigal brother, and said I could come back for the introductory material in two days.

Later, when he became director of the Philippine Cultural Centre Library and editor of the CCP’s Pamana (a literary journal), he continued to show interest in my work, publishing some of my poems in the Centre’s literary journal.

I owe Hufana my being a poet.

(Click on the Image to Read Pages 1 - vii)

(Bio From Panitikan.com.ph)

Alejandrino Gurtiza Hufana , bilingual poet in English and Iloko, is also a playwright, painter, and literary critic. He was born on October 22, 1926 in San Fernando, La Union. He earned his AB in English in 1952, and MA in Comparative Literature in 1961 from the University of the Philippines, after which, on a Rockefeller fellowship for art librarianship, he obtained an MS in Library Science in 1969 from Columbia University. In 1957 he went on a special year-long study leave to the University of California at Berkeley, then returned in 1961-62 on a Rockefeller creative writing fellowship, finishing there Sieg Heil : An Epic on the Third Reich , later published (1974).

He was a professor of English at University of the Philipines where he began teaching in 1954. He was UP poet-in-residence from 1979 to 1983, Director of the UP Creative Writing Center from 1983 to 1985, Director of the CCP Library, and editor of CCP's Pamana when he emigrated to the United States in 1986.

Awards include a Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature in 1965, Palanca, 3 rd prize for poetry in 1976, Outstanding Ilocano Writers and Journalists Award from the National Press Club in 1980, Tawid Award for Arts and Letters from Ilocano Heritage Foundation) in 1981, Parangal from Writers Union of the Philippines in 1984, and the Gawad Pambansang Alagad in Balagtas in 1995. He passed away on August 1, 2003.

Among his works are Poro Point: an Anthology of Lives, Sickle Season / Poems of a First Decade, 1948-1958 (1959), The Wife of Lot & Other New Poems (1971), Curtain-Raisers / First Five Plays (1964), The Unicorn / A Dance Drama (in Pamana , June 1971), and Mena Pecson Crisologo and Iloko Drama (1965).

(From panitikan.com.ph)