Diwata

Diwata is a Tagalog term meaning, “muse.” Diwata is also a term for a mythical figure or being who resides in nature, and whom human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease, in order to live safely, harmoniously, and prosperously in this world.

In Diwata, using oral traditions’ mnemonic devices of meter, repetition, and refrain, my poetic speaker/storyteller performs call and response with her ever present audience, incantatory verses which verge on song, and the pantoum, for its Southeast Asian origins. I frame her stories between the Book of Genesis creation story, and the Tagalog creation myth, placing her somewhere culturally in between. Also setting the tone for her stories is the death of her monumental grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed onto her the responsibility of remembering. Her voice is grounded in her community’s traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation. In sharp contrast to the global perception of the Filipina as passive, silent, sexualized body-object in Western commerce and military culture, she is an active and vocal agent, embodying and carrying out what she understands has always been the woman’s role as community leader, storyteller, and holder of cultural and historical knowledge. She takes these roles with her to North America, where she finds a way to relate to its natural world’s many Diwata. In this way, North America is not an alien place to her, nor is she alien to North America.

Diwata is my third book of poetry, and it is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2010.