Poet as Orator: A Pinay Poet in the Southeast Asian Studies Commencement Ceremony

Alternate title: How I am struggling through writing this Southeast Asian Studies Department Commencement Speech.

Commencement Ceremony is this Friday.

Holy God (Dewata?) (Diwata!) (Jayadewa!) (Batara?) (Bathala!) This is hard!

Anyway, I am trying to cement some intuitions that I have regarding the connections between Philippine and other Southeast Asian languages and mythological stories.

I am still questioning what value anything I say as a Pinay poet has to a group of Southeast Asian Studies graduates.

I am trying to remember my way into the Southeast Asian Studies Department, where I actually did take a couple of classes sometime in the early 1990’s.

I am remembering a then-graduate student there, named Jacqueline Siapno, who submitted some poetry to Maganda Magazine. There was one poem in which she placed two versions of it side by side, and I don’t know which version she wrote first and which language(s) she translated: the first was the English version, and the second she wrote in what I understood to be a hybrid of Philippine and Malaysian languages. To me, what was most remarkable about the Philippine/Malaysian version was that I understood most of it.

That was part of my way in, as Asian American was not something with which I felt a strong connection, culturally and linguistically, though I did politically.

Learning various insular Southeast Asian mythologies was more exercise in cultural familiarity.

(Speaking of mythologies, some excerpts of Diwata might come in handy in this speech; I always include my or others’ poetry in my speeches. I am a poet after all.)

At any rate, as I am cranking this speech out, I am thinking that this is my third commencement address to write and deliver in three years, and I am thinking about Debbie’s comment to Oscar’s blog post on Nikki Giovanni, and how it is I have been consistently called upon to orate, i.e. going beyond reading, reciting, performing poetry to audiences. Debbie says that there are some poets who clearly are not orators. I agree with her, having witnessed some poets speaking and having these instances be painful to witness. So I want to say that not all poets should be called upon to orate. Still, we poets work with crafting clever, precise, witty, ironic combinations of words in anticipation of effect upon readers. Some/many poets engage in theatrical or dramatic performance of their work. Orating should be a sixth sense. Ay, I just want to understand; maybe writing this speech would get easier if I understood.

But after this minor catharsis, I think I will be OK. To the gentleman who recommended me to the department, and to the professor who invited me: you guys owe me a single malt scotch.