The Gods We Worship Live Next Door Bino Realuyo University of Utah Press $12.95 / 84 pp / paper / isbn 0-87480-861-8 http://www.uofupress.com

Review by Barbara Jane Reyes

Bino Realuyo begins his ambitious, sweeping, and tightly directed, award-winning book of poems, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, with a dedication, “For the Filipino People,” and immediately, we understand this book is a project against a people’s perceived invisibility and silence. “If I became the brown woman/ mistaken for a shadow, please tell your people I’m a tree,” he begins his opening poem, “Filipineza,” whose deliberately sobering epigraph reads: “In the modern Greek dictionary, the word ‘Filipineza’ means ‘maid’.” At the onset of this collection, we are made acutely aware that the Filipino is defined and named by others, determined by the function the Filipino fulfills in others’ contexts. Filipinos therefore enter a European lexicon, a canon of Western language, as embodiments of domesticity, less than human, as indicated by his use of “tree” and “shadow.” This opening poem begins the book’s first section, entitled, “Diaspora.”

Beginning sharply with the present day Filipino Diaspora, Realuyo presents us with the global phenomenon of the Filipina Overseas Contract Worker (OCW), for the Philippines exists in a state of economic ruin in the aftermath of a colonial past and post-colonial present. Predominantly women, the OCW’s represent remittances “back home,” and are therefore valued for boosting the GNP. If the OCW is merely a remittance, then in this global economy, the OCW is a voiceless commodity. But here, each of Realuyo’s speakers is a sharply pronounced “I,” underscoring the voice of one who speaks for herself, rather than be spoken for. Alternately, his speakers address the OCW’s directly as “you,” rather than speaking about them, as statistics, remittances, disposable and replaceable women’s bodies. Two of these constantly spoken about women are Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan, whose horrific but not uncommon stories as OCW’s in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates respectively, thrust them into the center of mass media as rallying figures for Filipinos internationally, for these were women who fought back against their abusive employers and suffered the consequences for doing so. But even this world-wide media attention dehumanizes the OCW, and so Realuyo brings us in closer; in “A Night in Dubai,” we hear the voice of Balabagan:

I will be lashed a hundred times. If it means that for every lash, I will remember less, then let them do it. I will not ask for forgiveness; I will only ask for a moment to hold my mother.

In subsequent sections of The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, Realuyo writes for us a shifting yet precise “I,” who experiences and witnesses a Philippines historically and economically subjugated by Spain, the United States, and Japan. Reaulyo’s “I” seeks to make sense of the foreign invaders planting themselves in his native soil; in “Azúcar,” a (Spanish) invasion of sugarcanes transforms the speaker’s home into an alien landscape:

Every day, I hear the chopping of canes, this tall, thin growth of thorny leaves we have never seen before. The wind sounds different here. The water in the ground doesn’t speak. The canes are always drinking water. I am astounded by how quickly rice fields are replaced by these walls that never sway.

What is admirable is that Realuyo’s language is unadorned throughout; as he writes this shifting “I” who is the Filipino people, the accessibility of his words is important, not because he attempts to construct a singular, authentic Filipino voice, but rather, because it appears he means to minimize the distance between the “I” and his readers, the people to whom he has dedicated this book. As well, Realuyo’s language is unsentimental, for the speakers of his poems have no time to be emotionally overwrought. They are necessarily more invested in survival: “Is it so disturbing that I boarded a plane and held it up for a thousand pesos? That wouldn’t buy a day’s meal as we know it,” he writes in “Because Yesterday I Jumped Out of a Plane,” revealing to us the extremes to which some must go, barely able to live a hand to mouth existence.

There is also another “you,” whom his speakers address. This “you” is the Western foreigner, the perpetrator of invasion and dehumanization. This “you” has named the Filipina “maid,” and has “planted crosses so deep/ they clogged the open mouths of our dead.” Realuyo dedicates “Discovery of Skin,” to Ferdinand Magellan, the legendary navigator who landed upon the Philippine Islands in 1521, bringing with him priests and conquistadors, crosses and swords. This first European visit to the islands bears much resemblance to the sex tourism rampant in the islands today. This poem’s preface reads: “Pasanjan Falls, a mythical natural attraction in Luzon, has become a major destination for pedophiles from western countries.” In this poem’s three sections, Realuyo moves between 1521 and 2001, weaving images of military, religious, and sexual conquest:

… you imagined: tongues on brown nipples, language deciphered through moans, sweat sliding onto shores.

Mira, tierra, mira.

We offered you fruits, rituals, primitive wishes, a dance around the fire, loin-cloth smiles, but you wanted more: to unearth boys and skins, to convert our moons to crosses.

Tranquilo, indios, tranquilo.

He begins the section entitled, “Japan,” with “Pantoum: The Comfort Woman,” and in this Westernized version of an originally Southeast Asian poetic form known as the pantun, Realuyo’s “I,” is one of many Filipinas imprisoned in Japanese brothels, used for Japanese soldiers’ recreation during WWII. This densely worded pantoum’s repetition underscores the pervasiveness of her memories; so much violence and sadism which have irrevocably changed her, such that even her dreams decades later are still as vivid, terrifying, and painful as the experiences themselves:

... a Japanese soldier without a choice, breathing through limbs.
Tanaka in the darkness was as dear as the wait to escape.
Tanaka in the morning was as cruel as the smell of his peers,

these Japanese whose choices were my limbs, mouth, and breath.
I never told you, my dear, that every night, I leave my hands beside you
To carry the rest back to the cruelty of their smell…

Here, “my dear,” is the husband of the speaker, and we see there is no post-war normalizing, of an individual, a family, and by extension, a nation, when these all exist at the intersections of military and sexual conquest, which run consistently throughout Realuyo’s retelling of Philippine history. Entire families, subsequent generations endure the consequences of others’ war making; Realuyo’s family is no exception. He dedicates, “From a Filipino Death March Survivor Whose World War II Benefits Were Rescinded by the U.S. Congress in 1946,” to the memory of his father, Augusto Roa Realuyo, who passed away in 2003. This poem, written in a tone of exhaustion, and in the form of an itemized list of grievances, indicts the many individuals and the governments they represent, responsible for the erasure of the Filipino and the Philippines from the official version of WWII. The father’s decades-long exhaustion fighting against erasure, has been inherited by the son:

19. 46…
20. 06. Sixty years …

Additionally, Realuyo’s repetition of “If you want to know,” is reminiscent of the poem, “If You Want to Know What We Are,” by the much-celebrated Filipino American writer, Carlos Bulosan. Here, Realuyo, the son of a Bataan Death March survivor, rightfully figures himself also as a descendant of a formidable Filipino American literary lineage.

Realuyo relies heavily upon historical and journalisticevidence to reveal theinjustices done upon Filipinos historically and in contemporary times, every dirty detail from which he does not allow us to avert our eyes. In the section entitled, “Witness,” we see “Starry-eyed children [who] sleepwalk in the smog.” They are Manila’s homeless, orphaned street children high on glue, strung out and feral: “mirror of fast tongues,/ of hungry feet ringed by worms and rain.” We read of those who have made their home in the massive garbage dump known as Smoky Mountain, and who must scavenge adeptly Manila’s refuse or be buried alive, “into the womb of your trash, deep in a cemetery with no soil, no crosses, no names, and always, no heart.”