Shirley Ancheta: Pinay Poet – Barbara Jane Reyes

I have been an admirer of Watsonville poet Shirley Ancheta for many years. I came to her poems when I was a wee undergrad; she became known to me as one of the formative poets of the Kearny Street Workshop and 1970’s Flips. She’s one of our most talented Filipina poets who have not yet seen publication of a full-length poetry book.

I should provide some context here. In Northern California, the generations of Filipino American poets previous to mine are predominantly male, writing what I read as very masculine narratives. The prevalent theme of the work is the Manongs, which is an Ilocano term for a male elder, possibly a Filipinization of the Spanish “hermano.” The now elderly, surviving Manongs first came to the West Coast in the early twentieth century. They were laborers in agriculture, in fisheries and canneries, in the service industry. They became objects of racial and class violence. They became activists. Some went on to co-found the United Farm Workers. They’ve been quietly erased from American History, despite their labor majorly contributing to the building of California’s economy. Much of the earlier literature of Filipino Americans focused on previous decades’ tumult, and current twilight. This is particularly apt to mention now; as I write this, it’s International Workers’ Day.  

In the 1980’s, Kearny Street Workshop published volumes of poetry, some authored by the descendants of these Manongs, American-born Filipinos, for whom the Philippines was a distant, mythic place. The anthology Without Names, the poetry collection edited by the Bay Area Pilipino American Writers (1985), includes three women among a total of 15 writers. Only one of these women found full-length book publication; this is not Shirley Ancheta. Lucky for us, her poems are anthologized and therefore not forgotten. Within this lengthy context, I present her layered and intensely feminine poetry to you. Her poem, “Stairs,” from Without Names, tells us something of her poetics:

        Now she steps out of her shoes
And divides herself in two. She watches
Herself standing in a black dress,
[...]
This is the moment a slipping woman deepens
In her pale turning toward herself.

The prose poem, “Kristine,” from Going Home to a Landscape, balances adeptly the contrasts and confluences of intense sexual desire, earthy pork blood stew, and pineapple fields, in the memory of Kristine, who slips in and out of consciousness in a San Francisco street, just struck by a car:

She thought she was kissing a boy in the dark, in the back of the house near the pineapple field. His hands could hold down a pig for the killing. They were caught by her grandmother who threw her slipper across the yard...

In “Tryptich,” from Babaylan, the Tagalog creation story is rearticulated from the point of view of the first woman, emerging from the bamboo, together with the first man:

Whoever I am
I am the same,
Carrying in my mind and body
The darkness I am from --
Worthy of reflection
In the dark green
Of the river’s mirror.

I am interested in those internal spaces in which Ancheta dwells; I think of these internal spaces, meditative and self-reflective, in direct contrast to the highly politicized work of her male counterparts, whose poetry is oftentimes aggressive, and edged with indignation. Still, Ancheta’s poetic speakers are acutely aware of the world they inhabit, as in “A Woman is Taken,” in Premonitions:

I tried to run the other way.
Black hair, he said.
The feel of it, in his mind.
        But inside him
The lit tongues swelled and
His voice grew louder
Shouting the body parts
He would take from me.
        And when he tore my lips
My hair         my genitals          I no longer
Felt him.

In “Taro,” also from Premonitions, her tercets’ clipped lines begin and halt, then open a meditative space, then begin again:   

I think of that woman
Who enters me from across
The long dreams

On which the nights bring her
Like a blue star pulsing
Like that unraveling cord

Between us, Mother,
Light upon light.
Each word of mine

Is a light you cannot see
Untouched and undone....

Knowing the possibilities and danger the Pinay faces in the world, Ancheta gives us Pinays who speak their truths and lamentations in full and complex voices.

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), recently noted as a finalist for the California Book Award. She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is co-editor with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, of Doveglion Press, and adjunct professor in Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco.