Oh, anak! My shining star! You know how much I love you. I’d do anything. You, with the leaves in your hair. My little poet. Don’t tell anyone. I’d kill myself if you leave. You’ll become a para-alcoholic. You’ll take on the characteristics of my disease, even if you never pick up the drink.¹ Please. You know how much I love you. You know

I still hear the frogs, the crickets, the birds and night critters.

It’s like

they make up

the air mattress I breathe in.²

Addiction is a family disease.¹

In America, I have no family.

Here, the Western imperialist identity integrated itself first (“my root is the strongest”) and thus conveyed itself as a value (“a person’s worth is determined by his root”). The conquered people are then forced to search for an identity that deteriorates in opposition to the Other. This is the crux of Rhizomatic theory, or “the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”³

Calla lilies are rhizomatous. Calla lilies were at my mother’s funeral. Calla lilies are wherever I go. Where else could I go? I became depressed. I became / worldless.⁴

It returns to me in frag        me n t s. Sweaty lips,

a whisper of Maybelline.        Floral skirt, bunched up at the thigh,

calla lilies

crushed

between hands. Callused hands.

Boot paint and tobacco. My mother’s tongue, unfurling into a filmstrip,

orbiting the whites of my eyes.

The neighbors and I sit in a sweaty circle, clotheslines whipping around us. The air reeks of garbage and ash. Amidst the squabbling of my grandfather’s roosters, one of them reaches over to caress my hair. Santo Niño, she calls me, her teeth broken like seashells. Amerikano, gorgeous curls. Except this doesn’t make sense because I’m not American and my country idolizes me more than it loves me and Jesus was never white in the first place and

From this imperialist origin flourishes an entire body of literature surrounding the concept of hybridity. Devised by Homi Bhabha, hybridity “means to locate interstices between different cultural subjectivities to study the effects of imperialism on identity, culture, and society.” The exchange between “you” and “I” (or the self and Other) creates an ambivalent “third space,” where hybridity thrives.⁵

When you breathe in,

you   capture the spirit

of things.

Did you know that?²

I’m breathing my people but it makes me dizzy. Jozé Rizal was mestizo, too. His parents adopted additional Spanish surnames under the decree of Governor-General Narciso Clavería, and he spent his life largely rejecting his own heritage.⁶ I could rename myself but you’d still remember me this way, sleeping whenever my legs gave out. Grassy field, blank space.⁴ There are

no borders here.

When my mother died, the world lost meaning. What was left to breathe? To be foreign is to be entombed. America is simply the afterlife. In my memory are lagoons. Wounded lagoons. They are covered with death’s-heads, not calla lilies. People here couldn’t pin my country on a map. Do we exist if no one observes us? We are island scars of water. These islands, dynamited by alcohol.⁷ All this fire!

So much burning, I don’t know how to explain it.²

Rizal hid his final poem, “Mi último adiós,” inside an alcohol stove shortly before his execution.⁸

It’s been so long now, the images are b r oke n inside me.

At some point, I was there. I was

everything.

My mother’s vomit, the razor blade against my skin.²

Liquid sun of rums,⁷ pouring through the sky of my throat.

At some point,

I remembered.

I was the only person pulled out of line after arriving in New York. I spent four years inside the immigration office and woke up one day in a stranger’s bed. Aren’t you glad to have houses now? she asked, kissing the petal of my ear. Don’t worry about a thing, love, you are of superior intelligence! You will never relapse into ordinary native life.⁹

It goes without saying that the binary system encircling this third space has historically been preserved through violence. By comparison, while the rhizome is an “enmeshed root system,” the manner in which the network spreads lets no “predatory rootstock [take] over permanently.” This is in direct opposition to the totalitarian root of colonialism.³

No one can love me, not while I’m diseased. I want to settle down, but the law of settled life depends on its intolerant Root.³ I’m regurgitating all this in class when my professor bursts, It’s not enough, it’s not enough! The United States can’t beat down armed resistance. A huge army must be maintained to keep the natives down.⁹

That night, I call my sister in tears:

I’ve been searching for so long, but the only thing

I found was the dirty end of the world.⁷

How could mom do this to us?

I can’t breathe,

I can’t breathe.

Exile is still movement,

Even if it’s self-imposed.

It doesn't matter.

I’m forgetting mom.

I’m f org et t in g everything.

The roads, the trees, the house on the hill.

How she seized us, how she begged,

Please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please

Go back to sleep, kuya, my sister says. For me.

In the postcolonial system, the conquering person’s Root is consolidated as strongest, and of more value than the conquered. Through a “denaturing process,” the colonized person is quested after an identity that opposes the procedure of identification as initiated by the invader. “The sacred — but henceforth unspeakable — enigma of the root’s location” embodies a thrilling moment in the Poetics of Relation.³ The ambivalence of one’s root is holy in its subjectivity.

My third space is liminal. Stairwell into nothing, lotto booth with no vendor. Best Western off Newark. International missionary school, drainless channel for all the water of the world.⁷ My mother’s dead body, bloated with cheap liquor. Here, I confuse love with pity. Here, I have sick needs.¹

My professor was right about one thing: we shall belong to America by right of conquest. My ungrateful people, striking the first blow. How we reciprocated their kindness with cruelty, their mercy with Mausers. We’re no different than Louisiana, by purchase, or Texas, or Alaska. Save us from ourselves!⁹

Can I tell you something? For a long time,

I was afraid

of being unable to finish

this poem.² Addiction is unique, a stock

taking all upon itself and killing

everything around it.

Colonialism becomes an addiction.

Addiction becomes                a rhizome.

The relation is tragic.³

All these years, all these years.

Oh, anak, where                have you been?

… Running away, I guess.²

_________________________________

¹Tony A. (1978). Laundry List. Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families. https://adultchildren.org/literature/laundry-list/.

²Dubourg, I. (2023, February 7). The Memories I Ran From Found Me. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/opinion/cuba-the-missing-parts.html.

³Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation. (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1990).

⁴Cohen-Vera, B. (2022). The World. Shenandoah. https://shenandoahliterary.org/712/the-world/.

⁵Banisalamah, A. (2020). Colonialism, Sexualities, and Culture: A Transnational Interrogation of Caribbean Subjectivities. Papers on Language & Literature, 56(2), 167–197. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

⁶Bondoc, J. (2017, October 10). A reader’s query about ‘alias Rizal’. The Philippine Star. https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2017/10/10/1747570/readers-query-about-alias-rizal.

⁷Césaire, A. (2001). Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. (C. Eshleman & A. Smith, Trans.) Wesleyan University Press. (Original work published 1939).

⁸Andrade, P., Jr. (2015, December 31). Rizal’s alcohol lamp was actually a stove. Philippine Daily Inquirer. https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/218103/rizals-alcohol-lamp-was-actually-a-stove/.

⁹Sawyer, F. H. (1900). The Inhabitants of the Philippines. Sampson Low, Marston & Company.