ATANG by Patrick Rosal

Atang: an altar for listening
to the beginning of the world

Quili-Quili Power Press. 2021. Self Published Book Improvisation

An Engagement by Leny Mendoza Strobel (January 2023)

I begin with a confession: I haven’t been reading Filipino/a/x American literature lately. I told a friend that I am looking for themes beyond the linear immigrant narrative, the colonial trauma narrative, the American Dream narrative, the escape-from-the-poor-homeland narrative, etc. I’d pick up a book, start reading and then I couldn’t finish. Sometimes I can appreciate the craft, the audacity of voice, the heartfelt attempts at truth-telling, the sigh of a found angle of repose. Yet, there is something I am looking for and it’s not there. And I know this isn’t about the authors but about me as a reader. I understand the need to tell our stories. I encouraged it. I’ve told my own. But I’m older and in the stage of life where I am looking for a different kind of company.

So then came ATANG and suddenly the flash of recognition engulfs me. This “self-published book improvisation” by Quili-Quili Power Press makes me laugh. Dear reader, you do know that word, right? It’s one of the first words we teach our kids when we want them to pick up a Pilipino word for their body parts. Your kili-kili stinks!! We kiss the baby’s kili-kili and we gigil!!

“500 years of making shit up as we go along” — Patrick Rosal. In ATANG, Patrick makes up all the shit that isn’t shit and plays with historical events triggering memories, ghosts and haunting, ancestral imprints, diasporic stories — and everything comes alive for me. YES! I shout silently. This is what I miss! This is what I’ve always wanted to see emerge: the blurring of genres, boundaries and maps…and still what I get in the end is the clarity of transfiguration. A Love beyond the page. A Joy beyond language. Kapwa.

But how can your father be a priest, Patrick? Priests are supposed to be celibate. I’m glad he fell in love with your mother. Maybe St Augustine or Francis Aquinas did their bidding on his lonely heart. That is Blessedness because you are here now. Another peal of silent laughter as I read about your convoluted family history. The fatherpriest you didn’t want to be and so you didn’t become one. Yes, all of our family histories are convoluted. How can they not be? Everything is convoluted from the beginning. Here you are now fathering from quili-quili power! Bringing many children into the fold and gold of your mythic imagination.

As you are much younger than I am, I couldn’t relate much to the pop culture you grew up in: turntables and djing and punk and hip hop — and yet I feel the pulse of these energies. They are shamanic. They are ontological and chthonic as they say in academic jargon. Of the underworld. Subversive. Emergent. Our people are good at these kinds of shit even when they think it’s because of their devotion to the Sto Nino.

I like the parts of ATANG where you write about your struggle with tinnitus, the uninvited sounds of crickets 24/7 drowning out conversations; the mixtape they create in our heads. For you, it is a reminder of what our navigator ancestors must have learned from listening to the waves of the ocean. Sound as Teacher. You make me believe that we still have those skills or can regenerate these skills if we know the power they carry. If we get to know our bodies.

Perhaps this is why you have included Language lessons in Ilokano in ATANG. I am not Ilokano so picking up new words in Ilokano makes me feel connected to what the words carry: Rebbeng, Dungaw, Manganup, Mangisuro. I can hear the affinity of Austronesian languages. Marian Pastor Roces, museum curator and art and cultural critic, urges us to always think beyond the 500 years of colonial history and get to know our five thousand year old Austronesian history and cultures. You are doing this here and Ilokano works its magic.

NVM Gonzalez, our national artist for literature, once told me: “Leny, for what you want to do, there is no language; learn how to sing, dance, paint instead.” Your drawings and collages remind me of this, Patrick. Because English is a borrowed tongue and hardly adequate to translate our sensibilities, we draw and make art. Thank you for keeping records this way.

Making collages about historical moments allows curiosity in your reader so they learn to take our history more seriously. We need more historians who are also poets and visual artists.

Toi Derricotte: Joy is an act of resistance! — how she, too, makes me tear up because she spends $100 a day to pay someone to feed her $1.98 fish while she’s away. I have a son who loves fish so I understand this lavish love. Thank you for mentioning Joi and how she lightens your grief.

Altars — because “the ancestors are never impoverished”. ATANG as the altar to everything under the Sun but especially to your own experiences as a settler, migrant, exile, diasporic, person of color, academic, poet/essayist/interdisciplinary artist. This is Sacred. I will not use the word ‘human’ here because it has so much baggage that needs unpacking. The unpacking that you are doing here; undoing the received/imposed narratives that so many of us still carry around.

Salaysay and Despedida: I, too, have been revisiting memories of a beloved who waved goodbye as I made my way to the checkpoint at NAIA. Of another who kept calling after I got married. In both instances, I finally acknowledged how these two beings are not of the past but of the present that I have become because they were once upon a time in my life. Patrick, you may never know the stories your mother could have shared. I tell mine to you now as a way for her story to not end with mystery. Perhaps somewhere in the imaginal realms, our stories have already met. Maybe or maybe not. It’s all good.

On Black-Filipino Kinship: David Fagen. A local author, Michael Morey, approached me years ago while at work on a book about David Fagen. I wonder if you’ve read him. I also like Charity Bagatsing Doyl’s speculation that Fagen wasn’t really captured by Funston but under the protection of Filipinos his death was faked and Fagen went on to live with his Filipino wife in the mountains of Nueva Ecija. I mentioned your ATANG and this last chapter to Justin Jones, a Black-Filipino activist who was recently elected to Congress in Tennessee. He was wowed by your story and is grateful for knowing of another bright spot in Black-Filipino kinship.

Thank you for reminding me that “remembering in communion expands our inner lives, the richness of our solitude. It is a practice of shared joy, shared sorrow, shared outrage, shared feeling.”

Thank you for this gift that opens 2023 for me. I know I will keep revisiting your ATANG in days to come. Salamat.