Gelacio Guillermo responds to Eugene Gloria’s Poem, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.”

This is so interesting. This essay/letter was forwarded to me by two separate people, wanting to know what I thought of it. The truth is, I am having a little bit of a hard time piecing this story together. I do know for sure that Eugene Gloria did, indeed, write a poem entitled, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.” This poem was published in The Literary Review in March 2000 (link here).

Gelacio Guillermo (note the correct spelling of the name) is a real person. He came across this poem in 2008, and now responds with very valid points:

Despite the mis-spelling proceeding from mispronunciation of foreign names so typical among North Americans, I thought I was being referred to in the poem and would like to take issue with you on the question of the poet’s responsibility when he takes on the life history of a dead or living person as subject for creative work.

The poem’s speaker is presumably a woman whom I believe Eugene Gloria “invented.” Gloria fabricates a background or position for her. She is Filipina in/from the Philippines, and part of this narrative takes place during Martial Law. She is the daughter of a colonel in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), which speaks to some level of privilege. In the poem, she brings up her own breaks with the church, and her rebellions, which I read as the reasons why she is compelled to express kinship with “Gellacio,” whom she imagines has gone to “the mountains,” implying he is a political insurgent. She is addressing her fabricated, imagined, romanticized, and sexualized version of “Gellacio Guillermo”: “Your brindled skin is sweating in Iowa sun, // your hair in a tight chingon, / you, barefoot and G-stringed like a Manobo / prince in St. Louis…”

I am wondering why she imagines him G-stringed, tribal, regal. In his letter response to the poem, Guillermo points to the term, “brindled,” and its etymology:

The “brindled skin” has a far earlier provenance: the black slaves during those centuries of slave trading were assessed, like livestock in the market, according to their animal strength and the gloss of their hide. “Brindled” originates from the late ME [Middle English] “brended,” a variety of “branded.” Vestiges of racist arrogance of the West die hard.

I am wondering if she is the one objectifying “Gellacio Guillermo” as this “barefoot and G-stringed … Manobo prince,” or if it is Eugene Gloria objectifying “Gellacio Guillermo” as he imagines a Filipino national/Filipino from the Philippines, or if it is either or both she and Eugene Gloria anticipating “Gellacio Guillermo’s” objectification by white middle Americans in Iowa.

The real Guillermo was indeed in Iowa; in his letter, he reveals that he spent six months (October 1970 to April 1971) on a writing fellowship at Iowa University’s International Writing Program. Guillermo then, was a writer; he was a Filipino writer in middle America. “Gellacio, / I am reading you in English,” the unnamed Filipina persona says. I am wondering why this is so remarkable; Filipinos in the Philippines have been writing in English and reading in English since the late 19th century/early 20th century.

I am wondering if Guillermo’s six months in Iowa University on a writing fellowship is comparable to the Philippine Reservation of the 1904 St. Louis World Fair, to which the speaker has made reference.

I am wondering why “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City” whom she believes has previously gone into the mountains has become her symbol of rebellion, and why she has come to need “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City” as this representative of the “salvaged.” I am wondering why she needs a representative of the salvaged at all. And here, do note that the “salvaged” in a Philippine (specifically Martial Law?) context are not the saved, but the dissidents drowned in the Pasig River and other bodies of water for their dissidence.

Mostly, I am wondering why Eugene Gloria created this unnamed Filipina persona to address this imagined “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.” Guillermo points out: “I am named; why isn’t she?”

I want to go back to Guillermo’s original point in his letter: “on the question of the poet’s responsibility when he takes on the life history of a dead or living person as a subject for creative work.” Is Eugene Gloria’s poem “irresponsible”? Do we get away with not taking responsibility all the time, never expecting our poetic subjects to gain access to our work and have the opportunity to respond?

Maybe I understand the poem, but I suppose I don’t understand why the poem. And I don’t think I have answered any of my own questions about responsibility here.