A Love Note: The Balikbayan Artist
By Eileen Tabios
Penguin Books, 2024
December 2024
NVM Gonzalez, National Artist of the Philippines for Literature, once told me: Leny, for what you want to do, there is no language. Learn how to paint, dance, and sing instead!
This morning, I told myself: I can also praise those who can…!
So I am writing this in praise of The Balikbayan Artist (2024: Penguin Random House SEA), the second published novel of the poet/writer Eileen Tabios. The first novel, DoveLion (2021: AC Books), and this new novel echo a refrain of the author’s foray into the mythic realm of Kapwa — this cosmic worldview of Filipinos that is embedded in the materiality of its indigenous cultures even though seemingly overcome and subsumed under the perceived and assumed power of corrupt dictators and the minions of modern/colonial bureaucracies..
That’s more or less what I said in the blurb which ended up on the cover of the book: The novel breaks out of the confines of the modern/colonial frame and returns us to the wondrous world of myth-making. This is how Story becomes Medicine.
Eileen Tabios’ poetry, novels, essays, have been my companions on this Kapwa journey. The first essay I wrote about her poetry decades ago was about how she taught me how not to be afraid of Poetry. How not to be afraid. I was also on the path of discovering the deeper significance of KAPWA as mythic consciousness at first as an academic project that then evolved into a practice of embodiment. Re-reading this first essay now as I respond to The Balikbayan Artist affirms this:
What Eileen’s poetry makes me consider is this: When the sorrow of our colonial past is released and we come to know our Philippine history as the history of the world, Eileen’s poetry becomes an act of rounding up the fragments of our narrative. And as she integrates these fragments (those parts of our identities forged by migration and citizenship elsewhere) into her own sense of Filipinoness, I still come away with the sense that the homeland is still the source of that inspiration.
Alternatively this seeming essentializing of Filipino identity can also be read through a wider lens. Kapwa is, after all, like a koan; it is a practice that is learned, not through concepts and theories, but through the discovered delight of our innate relationship to Everything. Literally. This embodied, sensuous, sacred sense of InterBeing (a term borrowed from beloved Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh) is what animates my reading of The Balikbayan Artist … that then becomes Medicine.
The Medicine:
*Each chapter in The Balikbayan Artist begins with an epigraph of the artist’s meditation on Colour. I chide myself for not having thought of Colour and its evocations: as perception; as creating affection; as subversive. The novel’s protagonist, Vance Igorta, is obsessed with Colour and its relationships to paper, to the painter’s world view, to other colours, to the role of the Arts and the artist in the world.
*The epigraph meditations on Colour seem to point to the artist’s lack of sentimental or nostalgic attachment to his fate (The artist thought, “I don’t trust rainbows for reducing colour to sentiment.” p 17); and the limits of language itself (The artist thought: “ Colour is a narrative,” says that poet Eileen Tabios, I think poets talk too much. p.27) … and yet for him Colours creates affection (The artist thought: “Colours create affection.” p 33).
*There is something incongruous about Igorta’s life if we rely on the defunct notions of migration/assimilation and economic opportunity in the U.S.. But this is precisely why he is called ‘the foremost artist of the Manong generation’ …a tricksterish turn of the novel, which makes me smile, as if whispering the lesson: Meditate instead on Colour; keep the theories distant..
*The artist, Vance Igorta, is called “The Foremost Artist of the Manong Generation” — this is a foretelling. The author’s prescient look into how future generations would come to know Vance Igorta/Venancio Igarta via the, sometimes predictable and sometimes not, circuit of flow between homeland and diasporic folks who are weaving threads of exile and return. There is a clue/hint of this foretelling in Chapter 39; it is an invitation for the reader to dream Now of this future.
*In Kapwa, the present moment contains the past and the future.
*The artist returns to Surat, Ilocos and creates a sanctuary for younger artists and political dissidents. He mentors younger artists and aspiring poets.
*Vance Igorta didn’t have time to fall in love, make a family…and yet he made a life of Art and the culmination of that life was fulfilled by a return to the homeland. It mirrors perhaps the longings and desires of many of us in diasporic exile for the ground that will receive us and nurture us. For Vance, that could only happen in the physical return to his roots in Ilocos Norte. But he also found a home in Colour, in Art. He also found a home in being in solidarity with his Kapwa kababayan who are resisting the regime of a dictatorship.
*Didacticism is a theme in the novel as the plot reveals the intersection between art and politics. Didacticism is needed because sometimes it’s the direct way to drive home the truth that politics corrupts. Vance Igorta found a way to meld art and politics with figurative paintings of his various subjects and their ‘dictatorship version’…which, of course, the politics didn’t allow his work to be well known until after the end of the dictator’s regime and after Igorta’s death.
*Death doesn’t end anything. Birth and Death are just concepts. Kapwa is the continuation of the ever present Now.
KAPWA as Medicine: Eileen Tabios is interviewed by Maileen Hamto
*Medicine for what? So many books have been written about colonial and postcolonial woundings in the Philippine context. What’s often been missing, in my reading experience, is the meditation on and the critical thinking of the place of Art (poetry, visual arts) in our cultural healing. Sometimes I also feel this tired repetition of breast beating about human suffering or the exhilaration from superficial temporal resolutions often dressed as “success stories”. Trauma literature is trending but it could also succumb to the capitalist seduction of commodifying trauma with the offer of instant and easy-to-follow trauma-informed modalities.
What is different in Tabios’ writing is the background context of Kapwa as mythic consciousness. In this interview she talks about how she embodies Kapwa where the “I = the universe”; Kapwa is about everything and everyone. In expanding the landscape of the novel, she adds an auto-fiction element and inserts herself as a minor but consequential character in the novel. I think that Eileen always finds a way to transgress the rules of novel writing. She creates instead what she calls “a narrative collage” that hints of an alternate universe-in-the making in the present moment.
In this creation of an alternate universe, Eileen tells the interviewer, Maileen, that she doesn’t allow self-doubt to interrupt as she subverts the English language, breaking its norms, and telling the reader: Follow me and I’ll show you the power of myth-making. And isn’t this what we need today? To embody Kapwa so that it may become a container for everything and everyone.
In this interview, Eileen shares that while writing this novel, a piece of her personal story surfaces: Her grandfather Manong, (like the novel’s protagonist) also left the homeland while his youngest daughter was still in the womb. They would never meet in each other’s lifetimes. They meet again in the afterlife.
I think of the largeness of this subtext as I contemplate my own displacement from “homeland” and wonder about Place. The Balikbayan Artist reminds me of the power of myth-making; of becoming aware of the flawed meta-narratives of the anthropocene era; of re-envisioning what makes Kapwa an enduring foundation. In this novel, I hear Eileen say: widen and deepen your ways of reading a novel so that it becomes the finger pointing to the Moon; so that Story shines like the Sun illuminating the lonely crevice in your heart. We are not Alone. We have each other. We are Kapwa.
