Gamalinda's Gravitas

A review of "Zero Gravity"

By Alfred A. Yuson

A month ago, Ric Barot from the Stanford University posted a poem at the Flips e-mail list run by poet-academic Vince Gotera from the University of Northern Iowa. Like a good number of home-based Filipino writers, I had the privilege of being a Flipslist member, allowing me to download the electronically exalted poem.

It was Eric Gamalinda’s “Zero Gravity.” On the subject heading was written: “A Book You Should Look Into.” Below the poem it said: “ From Eric Gamalinda’s Zero Gravity, Alice James Books, 1999.”

He had done it again, my kumpare -- brought out a collection of his latest poetry through a reputable US press. After becoming the first Filipino writer to have a short story published in the eminent Harper’s magazine a few years back, Gamalinda has gone from strength to strength, winning literary awards and grants in the tough arena that is New York City.

All the while, too, since gaining an immigrant’s visa as an “alien of exceptional abilities,” he had busily turned into a colony rat, doing hangtime in such desiderata of literary pilgrimage as The Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio by Italy’s Lake Como, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland’s Midlothian, The MacDowell Colony, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of new mexico.

The continuing run of fellowships has obviously paid off. The novel he completed in New Mexico, My Sad Republic, ran off with the first prize in last year’s Centennial Literary Awards. The poetry he crafted in Spain now finds itself in his latest collection.

I was familiar with the title poem, having seen it among a batch of verse he had submitted last year for possible publication by the U.P. Press. Sometime after, he e-mailed Jimmy Abad to ask that the manuscript be withdrawn, as he stood a good chance of having the collection published in the States. That didn’t stop his mafiosi friends from the U.P. Creative Writing Center from selecting the poem “Zero Gravity” for inclusion in the Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature in English (which, by the by, was launched recently at U.P.’s Balay Kalinaw.)

Now I see good friend Jimmy having a Rainier Jacobi time tracking down versions of Gamalinda’s poems for revisionist comparison, since Eric maddeningly practices incessant retooling and reinvention.

In the Likhaan version of “Zero Gravity” runs thus: “The dry basin of the moon held either bones/ of a race or something pure, not yet beginning./ All summer we had waited for it to fill the screen./ In the hushed room our faces were radiant, off-blue.// Eight children in our family gather around,/ to observe two figures digging dirt in outer space,/ mother repeating Neil Armstrong’s words as though/ she were learning a prayer, electronically conveyed.// The dunes gleamed like ancient silk, like crushed/ pearls. In the constant lunar night this luminescence/ was everything. It was a creature unto itself./ It poured into the room like a gradual flood// of lightning, touching every object with the cool burn/ of something not quite on fire. If we stepped out/ Manila would be somewhere else. Already this was/ limbo, a state of abeyance, a final way-station.// it didn’t matter, at that moment, where our lives/ would lead: one brother would disown another,/ one sister was going to die. Not yet unhappy,// we were ready to walk on the moon. Ready, also/ to know this time there was no turning back./ It was black ether, in whose space we were no longer/ the selves we had been, our bags already packed,/ the future a religion we could believe in.”

In the book of the same title, the revised version of Zero Gravity reads so differently, having acquired fresh phrases while dropping less than taut prosody.

“The dry basin of the moon must have held/ the bones of a race, radiant minerals,/ or something devoid of genesis, angel, heavy,/idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it,// our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen./ Nothing could be more ordinary -- two figures/ digging dirt in outer space -- while mother repeated/ Neil Armstrong’s words, like a prayer// electronically conveyed.The dunes were lit/ like ancient silk, like clandestine pearl./ In the constant lunar night this luminescence/ was all we hoped for. A creature unto itself,// it poured into the room like a gradual flood/ of lightning, touching every object with the cool burn/ of something not quite on fire. If we stepped out/ Manila would be a blank ether, way station,// a breathless abeyance. It didn’t matter,/ at that moment, where our lives would lead: father would disown one brother,/ one sister was going to die. Not yet unhappy,// we were ready to walk on the moon. reckless/ in our need for the possible, we knew/ there was no turning back, our bags already packed,/ the future a religion we could believe in.”

Why, only the last line has been retained exactly the way it previously read, and in the exact same place. Some other lines have remained, but assumed new placements.

Ironically, the later version made it to the printed page first, as Zero Gravity was released by the Alice James Poetry Cooperative in Maine several weeks before the Diliman edition.

No matter. Both poems, or poem versions, read excellently. As Rody Vera writes in reaction to the final version’s e-mail re-posting at Rayvi Sunico’s Speakeasy, “where do I buy this book -- just reading eric gamalinda’s exquisite poetry brings tears to my eyes. even if i half understood it the first time i read it, probably because the words just poured froth one after another, there was no time to think. this is brilliant. available ba ito sa atin?”

Well, I’ve got good news for Rody. Copies will soon be available, courtesy of Anvil, shoe boss-lady Karina Bolasco worked out a deal with Alice James Books last month when she saw Eric in new York. In fact, Karina brought back some signed copies for Eric’s friends and benefactors (the latter a list I belong to, belat). So here’s sharing it as much as I can philanthropically can.

Indeed, I’m enjoying Eric’s book. All of 34 poems, the collection has that quiet elegance that suddenly stuns with the gravitas of personal concerns, even as these are articulated in the cutting-edge subtlety of eloquence. You know, that modernist mode that doesn’t hurl lyricism as a javelin to impale the emotional sod, but rather contours itself elliptically, more like a discus, along the rarefied Olympian route of insights and inklings. Then, too, Gamalinda’s collection has that pandemic quality of wry grief, mock exultation and virtual philosophy that characterizes the assured poet.

Am I making sense? How can I? We’re talking good poetry here. Take such samples of “clandestine pearl,” ye overtly rational swine, as the following:

“Long ago I had a question for everything/ but now I know better: everything goes/ and only the questions remain./ I must have been drawn// to the impossible alchemy,/ the silence with which/ all things let go/ and become water.” (from “Blue, Kind of”)

“...I am always learning the same thing;/ there is no other way to live than this,/ still, and grateful, and full of longing.” (from “the Properties of Light”)

“Everything’s the same: the lovesick rooms, the record/ hiccuping on the phonograph. Don’t touch anything./ Everything I’ve said today took a lifetime to get here.” (from “Lullabye,” a painful yet imaginably therapeutic remembrance of the poet’s father)

“When my friends decide/ they’ve had enough of America/ they start longing for the odor/ of fish sauce. the silky texture/ of newly cooked rice, warmer weather,/ the privilege of cursing/ in their own tongue.//... Someday I will send everyone a card/ with nothing in it, only/ the calligraphy/ of a river, and in the back/ with invisible ink I will say:/ Forgive my happiness,/ I have betrayed you all.”

Gamalinda’s expatriate career clearly gives him little room for regret. The poems written in Spain assume a sensuous musicality that refuses to atone for the sense impressions of, and deference to, a half-familiar history. I particularly liked “Definition of Flamenco in 245 Words,” “Five Tango Sensations,” “Uqbaresque,” and “ Las Ruinas del Corazon” with its powerfully surreal recounting of Juana the Mad’s erotic cannibalism.

Gross out over dauntless poetry: “She wanted to possess him entirely, and since not even death/ may oppose the queen, she found a way to merge death and life// by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until he was entirely/ in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the fragrant skin,// then sliced thick portions of his once ruddy cheeks. Then she ate/ an ear, the side of a thigh, the solid muscles of the chest,// then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the large intestine./ Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like testicles// and washed everything down with sweet jerez.”

Some of these poems had also been posted previously in E-Mail Company’s Speakeasy. Three other poems we had earlier made acquaintance with -- “Klee: Cold City,” “St. Francis on the Hudson,” and “Motion Sickness” -- had appeared last year (the latter two in preliminary versions in Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing.

Titled “Century of Dreams,” the Volume 9, Number 2 issue of the highly-acclaimed journal published biannually by the University of Hawaii press had a special focus on new writing from the Philippines, led off by Gamalinda’s introductory essay “One Hundred Years of Invisibility.”

He writes: “When I was still living in Manila, I often used to have this alarming vision of my country as a ship going nowhere but full of rambunctious, energetic, insatiable, unstoppable poets and writers.”

Such a one is Eric Gamalinda, who need not fret any further over such a voyage. With him among the prolific Fil-Am poets and writers at the prow, that ship is certainly breaking icebergs, defying gravity, and heading proudly everywhere.

Alfred A. Yuson writes regularly for the Manila-based Philippine Star, where this article was originally published.