How important are our roots?  To what extent does our experience of our culture, our faith and life in general influence our writing?

In my quest for answers, I came across Barbara Jane Reyes, a Filipino American poet and writer whose work is recognized and acclaimed in literary circles both in the US and in the Philippines.  One who reads her work cannot ignore the voice that resonates off the page.  It is vibrant and alive, filled with energy, awakening the senses and causing us to look beyond what is.  

Prior to receiving her MFA, she attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Ethnic Studies.

Of those undergraduate years, Barbara Jane says that she spent those years not only studying Western canonical literature, but more so the early and contemporary literature of African Americans (the Harlem Renaissance), Native American religions and world views, Southeast Asian mythology and cultures. Most importantly, she studied the histories of "minority" groups' political activism in the face of white supremacy and racist institutions.

During her first year at UC Berkeley, she was brought into maganda magazine by Ray Orquiola, the Filipino student (he was maybe a junior or senior) who conceptualized the publication. She later served as editor-in-chief for maganda magazine and witnessed the emergence of Filipino American literary figures.

Without further ado, here is my interview with Barbara Jane Reyes:

Q:When you set out to write a poem, do you have a specific purpose in mind?  Do you already determine what the subject will be and how the poem will go or do you write out of the passion of the moment?

Barbara: No, I don't always have a specific purpose. Oftentimes, something in the world will grab me and refuse to let go. This is where I start. I wouldn't go so far as to call it “the passion of the moment,” for sometimes what grabs me are rather unremarkable, everyday things and people otherwise overlooked — a homeless man in San Francisco streets to whom I give my leftover food. A dying pigeon in a puddle of motor oil. How the sun is reflecting itself in this puddle of motor oil. Old men playing chess downtown, drinking spirits out of brown paper bags. Something about these glimmer and nag, and from here, I write, and write, and continue to write.

Q: One of your poems, Ave Maria, made quite an interesting read.  Looking at Ave Maria, it made me wonder how your experience of faith has influenced your writing. Do you see your experience of faith as being relevant to your writing?

Barbara: Regarding faith. I attended Catholic schools for 12 years. When I was young, I used to go to church every Sunday morning, every first Friday, every Christmas, every day of Holy Week. I never had a space to discuss faith. I was always told I had an obligation to do these things. They were mechanical, thoughtless acts. I find religion and faith in contradiction with each other, or at least askew from each other. I wrote my “Ave Maria” after many years of consciously breaking free from those mechanical acts, arguing with my mother about not going to church, after many years of thinking about patriarchy and feminism, after many years of watching this city around me in its various acts of cruelty. I am not a religious woman.


Me: You have a love poem in Maganda Magazine. org where you say,
"don’t listen when they tell you
to colonize your brown skin
my brother
because therein lies your strength"

This poem spoke to me in light of the recent furors regarding integration and the issues of culture in Dutch society.

Q:  How much has your being Filipina influenced your work?  Do you believe that your work is reflective of other Filipinos from your generation?

Barbara: I wrote that poem when I was 21. That was well over a decade ago. I am glad it still resonates with readers, and as I understand poetry, and its relationship to the poet and to the reader, poetry becomes this thing with its own life, both fixed in time and transcendent of it.

Being Filipina will always be in my work, whether or not I use specifically Filipino cultural, historical, or Tagalog references. Though, one may argue, for example, that a love poem is a love poem is a love poem. In response I will say, it is “love,” or “desire,” or even just “infatuation” as experienced by this Filipina.

When I do write about Filipino experiences, I write as I, Barbara Jane Reyes, experience being one Filipina American in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as I understand and participate in my family’s and barkada’s (circle of friends) cultural practices. I cannot and will not claim to speak for an entire generation, though perhaps what I write may resonate with others.    

Q: When thinking about identity, how important is it for you that you identify yourself as being Filipina in your work?

Barbara: As above, I believe the Filipina will always be in my work. I find it important to identify myself as a Filipina (in my contributor’s notes) to readers who may encounter my work, regardless of its subject matter or content, in various venues. A literary journal in Iowa, for example. Do I want a reader in Iowa, in the middle of the United States of America, knowing and acknowledging that I am Filipina? Of course I do. Why? Because I want this reader (who is most likely a middle-class white American) to consider that Filipinos write, write in English, write well in English, that we write about many things, and are not/should not/will not be limited to solely Filipino subject matter.

That said, I tend to code switch in my poetry, between English, Tagalog, and some Spanish. I do not provide translation. I reference names and events relevant to Filipino and Filipino American history, cultures, and geography, and I do not provide footnotes or citations. I believe the contexts in which I reference these ought to suffice, and that if a reader must, (s)he may look these up, just as we must tolerate the Latin, French, and other Western European languages and references in most Western canonical writing.    
  
Q: Who were the writers whose works have influenced you the most?  Can you see their influence reflected in your work or in the manner wherein you go to work?

Barbara: Some of my major literary influences are Federico García Lorca, Jessica Hagedorn, Leslie Marmon Silko, Eduardo Galeano, Jaime Jacinto, Frances Chung, Myung Mi Kim, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Anzaldúa. I encountered these authors’ works at various stages of my writing life and career, and subsequently devoured their work in an effort to understand how they accomplished what they accomplished on the page in terms of form, line, image, voice, and tone.

Of younger writers, I can say I devoured the works of Catalina Cariaga and Truong Tran, both of whom were students of Myung Mi Kim in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. In fact, I applied to that MFA program because of those three. Unfortunately, Tran and Cariaga had graduated, and Kim had taken a teaching position elsewhere by the time I was admitted into the program.    

Q: Poetry is probably one of the most personal forms of writing, I think it's also difficult to write excellent poetry that expresses what you want to say without descending into the mundane or becoming ordinary.  I wonder how much your poems reflect your inner life as a poet?  Have you ever felt inhibited about something you wrote because it exposes too much of yourself?

Barbara: Poetry is as personal a form of writing as any other. Poetry can be just as full of fictions and lies as a good novella or short story. That said, I believe all writing can come from a writer’s “inner life.” As a poet, one thing I do is thieve and appropriate the words and images of others — conversation snippets and gestures in public places, works of art that stun and surprise me, words I wish I had invented — in order to communicate what is currently important to me, what is seething or creeping around inside of me.

Consider that a poetic “I” is not always the poet herself, but a persona or character the poet has invented. Consider also that a poetic “she” or “we” may be the poet speaking. Or not.

Re: exposing myself. As authors, I believe we risk the exposure. I believe to play it “safe” is to create dull and unmemorable art. I believe we set parameters of how much we are willing to reveal, how much of ourselves we can manage the outside world glimpsing. I have grown accustomed to a part of my life no longer being “private,” and what remains private, I guard rather vigilantly.

Q: How much time do you spend on a poem before you say that it's ready to be read by the world?

A: It really depends. Sometimes I will have a poem that is first draft-last draft, just like that. These I suppose I write when I am in some kind of unexplainable moment of lucidity or clarity. I keep notebooks full of letters that I do not intend to send, scribbles of observations and descriptions of events and surroundings, words, images, upon which I find myself fixated. And because I am so deep in my own head I cannot make sense of these things, they remain concealed in these black notebooks in my messy scrawl. I forget about them until some time later, when I’ve gained some distance from them, when I am able to excavate and distill them into publishable work.  

Q: What moves you to write?  What subjects are you most passionate about?

Barbara: Everything around me can compel me to write. I cannot say what it will be that grabs me until it has. Yesterday, it was the color orange as it appears in the world — fragrant, dangerous, noxious, manufactured, and breathtaking. Today it was a short piece which begins, “There is a woman stuck between my eyelids,” written by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in his Book of Embraces. Most days it is the rhythms and imagery, the duende of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Most days it is the city moving around me, its inhabitants, its odors, its miracles and dissonances.

Q: Have you ever tried writing something else other than poetry?  

Barbara: I have dabbled in genres other than poetry, though I am most comfortable and confident working with poetry, and from there, pushing the boundaries on poetic form.  

I have also written and published essays on poetic process. Essay is not too difficult for all the years I spent writing academic papers in college and graduate school.

Q: I've read that your work is being used as required reading in some universities. In what way has this affected or influenced your writing?

Barbara: I realize so fully that what I write is subject to criticism and scrutiny. This means various educators and students are looking very closely at every aspect of my writing, scrutinizing it for its political content and formalistic concerns, gauging it against so many other published authors’ works.

This means I must say what I mean and say it well; I cannot be a sloppy, careless, lazy writer in terms of craft and content. I cannot be irresponsible. I am accountable for my words, as we all are, but I have documented evidence of what I have said. “It is written” really resonates deeply for me, for while we are all entitled to change our minds and opinions, we cannot simply “take back” what we have spoken. Leslie Marmon Silko writes in Storyteller that once the story that has been set into motion, “It’s already turned loose.... It can’t be called back.”    

This also means I must let Gravities of Center go, allow it to sit in the hands of capable readers, and let it be what it is, an art object fixed in time, an artifact of who I was and what was important to me at that time.

Q: Finally, you have a new collection coming up.  When can we expect to see it out?  What is the title of this new collection and who is the publisher?

A: My second book is a very long (book length) poem entitled poeta en san francisco. It is due out before the end of 2005, and it will be published by Tinfish Press in Kane’ohe, Hawaii. Tinfish is great, and I am so happy that poeta en san francisco has found a home them, as they promote “experimental” poetry from the Pacific. There is exciting stuff happening in the literary world of the Pacific, literary work which examines and interrogates colonial impositions of language, cultures, religions, systems of government, and which reclaims self and community.