A Discussion of Jessrel Escaran Gilbuena’s “Chemical/Physical Change” (for Literature Teachers)

This short article was originally read as part of a discussion on contemporary Philippine literature on Sari-sari: Panitikan at Kulturang Filipino ng Radyo Katipunan 87.9 (Ateneo de Manila University), held via Zoom and recorded on March 4, 2021.

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When I was first asked by CB [Christian Benitez] to participate in this discussion on contemporary Philippine literature, I figured this would be a great opportunity to highlight the work of a fellow millennial writer from the province of Cebu, but one who, in some ways, subverts certain expectations or assumptions many of us may have upon hearing the term “Cebuano literature.”

At first, said term may seem pretty easy to pin down. In his essay “Ang Sugboanon: The Cebuano,” scholar Resil Mojares states that the most obvious hallmarks of a Cebuano include “language, local residence, or orientation to Cebu province as a cultural or sentimental ‘homeland’” (266). To add to this, the average Cebuano also tends to be trilingual, with Cebuano serving as the mother tongue, and English and Filipino spoken with varying degrees of fluency. [I would like to qualify this statement, however, with the personal observation that more Cebuanos in recent decades, particularly among younger generations and those of middle- to upper-class upbringing, now speak English as a first language, with Cebuano serving as a second “auxiliary” language where a straight English utterance would fall short. One may easily note how Cebuano English speakers still work in expressions like diay (“particle indicating speaker has received new information,” as per Wolff, similar to the Tagalog pala) or nalang (when wanting to hint at a complacency), or the preference for the more succinct (thus convenient) na and pa despite the direct English equivalents of already and still, respectively.] According to Erlinda Alburo, the term “Cebuano literature” may apply to both “works produced in Cebu province” and “works in the language generated by Cebuanos in other parts of the country” (104). While these parameters are quite helpful in their own respective ways, they are far from all-encompassing, and the more one learns about the province, the more one realizes just how much diversity exists in such a small portion of the country.

            Hailing from the island of Bantayan, north of the mainland, Jessrel Escaran Gilbuena’s first language is neither Cebuano nor English, as is usual for many Cebuanos, but Bantayanon. During a little writers’ workshop I asked him to panel last year, he described his mother tongue as a “creole” that blends words from various Visayan languages like Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Waray (in addition to the influences of Spanish and English). The language is not particularly known on the mainland (even I myself found out about it only recently) and is also not mutually intelligible with Cebuano or Binisaya. As Gilbuena put it rather humorously, Bantayanon speakers may easily ridicule (“libak”) a Cebuano in their presence, but not the other way around. Additionally, while Gilbuena is better known for his poetry in Cebuano, he also writes in his native Bantayanon, a sadly underrepresented language in the larger Cebuano literary landscape.

            For this discussion, I will be focusing on three prose poems of his written in English, a language Gilbuena occasionally feels best suited for certain works. Although rendered in a colonial tongue, “Nephew,” “Beach Resort,” and “Technology”—compiled together under the title “Chemical/Physical Change” and published in the July 2018 issue of the Cha Asian literary journal—are composed with a distinct viewpoint that could have only come from one who has spent a good part of his life and still identifies with an island quite a distance from the more urbanized mainland. The fact that said island, however, has since developed a reputation as a “resort island” and a travel destination, particularly during Holy Week, makes it rather obvious that Bantayan is not entirely spared from the incursions of modernity.

            Right off the bat, the most immediately striking aspect about these three poems is their form. A few weeks ago [prior to my original discussion], when I asked my HUMSS and ABM students in 21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World how one can distinguish poetry from prose, the two primary divisions of literature we all learn during our formative years, a number of them raised their hands to answer this extremely easy query: the former is written in verse, and the latter is written in sentence and paragraph form.

            More recent literature, however, has challenged or blurred such distinctions. I first learned about the prose poem in a Poetry and Fiction class I took up as an undergraduate literature major at USC [University of San Carlos]. Non-majors or those who aren’t really all that interested in literature may not be acquainted with this type of poem. In essence, the prose poem is a poem that, at first glance, appears like a work of prose by virtue of its imposing, brick-like paragraph structure. If the reader were to take a closer look, though, they will find it still contains many of the basic elements one associates with poetry. Some examples in the case of “Chemical/Physical Change” that a literature teacher may point out [highlighted in yellow in the image below] include a meticulous attention to rhythm (in “Nephew,” this comes in the form of Gilbuena’s frequent use of punctuation marks such as colons, commas, em dashes, and periods), stark imagery (“a concrete seawall overlapping the shore, fretting the sand,” as written in “Beach Resort”), and even a hint of irony (“Vacant lots were blank,” from “Technology”).

            For writers whose artistic sensibilities lean more toward the poetic, the composition of a prose poem, I imagine, can prove to be somewhat of a challenge, given its mass and the volume expected to fill up a page. But, according to Gilbuena, the writing process of these poems turned out to be quite an intriguing “experiment,” which ultimately revealed a “sequence” that tied well with the larger overarching theme of the collection.

            After discussing the more formalist elements of the collection, a literature teacher can segue into an enriching discussion on theme by mentioning to the class how literary works can and ought to be read beyond how they immediately appear to the reader. Relevant, contemporary themes both within the individual poems and throughout the suite can then be probed by the students. An initial read of “Chemical/Physical Change,” for instance, will lead one to determine that the persona clearly hails from an island. Lines such as “We live on an island” in “Nephew” and “I ruminated that an island is an introvert” from “Technology” [highlighted in green] are obvious giveaways. Islands are typically associated with distance, isolation, perhaps even resistance. One need only to think of Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago, whose inhabitants have lived their lives largely isolated from the outside world, chiefly by resisting any attempts by sailors, fishermen, academics, and missionaries to land on their shores. Or perhaps even the many Pacific Islands, which were among the last areas of land to be populated and settled after our ancestors’ exodus out of Africa.

            But there is something about the island (or islands, assuming the personas in the three poems come from different islands) in “Chemical/Physical Change” that suggests its days of isolation or “introversion” are nearing their end, if they aren’t over already. [See lines highlighted in cyan.] In “Technology,” for example, the persona laments how they “wanted out of the city,” only to find much of the alienation associated with an urban milieu replicated in their home island. In “Beach Resort,” the seawall intended to demarcate the boundaries of the titular establishment is described as an “attempt,” specifically by man to tame nature, only for this to result in failure, as evinced by the broken pieces of concrete that conclude the poem. In “Nephew,” the persona remarks how tourism—that modern phenomenon which has come to indicate humanity’s coalescence into a single global village, oftentimes to the detriment of local ecologies and populations—has become a “major livelihood” on their island. Because the persona is color blind, he relies on his much younger nephew to set apart or point out certain objects that appear to be of a similar hue. When the pair chance upon a “bold black line” of pollution along the shore, the older persona views it as a disruption to the natural landscape, but the nephew, having no memories of a time when the sea lapped the shoreline unimpeded, merely sees it as an inextricable “part of the sea.”

            “Change is the only constant in life”—we’re all quite familiar with the saying, which, in our current era, has unfortunately been used to indiscriminately justify or rationalize the most brutal forms of development and progress—specifically the sort contingent on extractivist practices, the violent altering or wholesale destruction of natural landscapes, and the further marginalization of rural populations. To illustrate: In his defense of a reclamation project that’s received a lot of pushback from labor and environmental groups, the mayor of the Cebu municipality on which said development was to be implemented described it as a project that would give “another face” to his local government unit.

            No doubt many adherents of this particular brand of change welcomed this assertion. One may also infer, based on social media reactions to local news thumbnails about x promising business venture or y soon-to-be-accomplished infrastructure project [case in point: the all-praises for CCLEX] that there are quite a number of Cebuanos who don’t really take the time to assess or interrogate how certain changes affect both “the physical and the non-physical” aspects, as Gilbuena put it, of a certain place.  

            The three poems in “Chemical/Physical Change” prompt the careful reader to ask if infrastructure projects—from the high-rises of the metro to the beach resorts in small coastal towns—or the introduction of addictive technologies should really be measures by which we determine progress. Those of us of a more urban background and upbringing, who can be so easily reeled in by what’s new and trendy may readily buy into this belief that all change is proof of societal advancement. But works by writers like Gilbuena—who’ve witnessed firsthand just how destructive many aspects of modernity can be to their home localities—can serve to snap us out, however momentarily, of this collective trance.

            Thank you.

 

References

 

Alburo, Erlinda. “Pulong: Cebuano Language and Literature.” Cebu: More Than an Island. Ayala Foundation, 1997, pp. 104–125.

 

Gilbuena, Jessrel Escaran. “Chemical/Physical Change.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, October 2018, https://www.asiancha.com/content/view/3161/672/. Accessed 27 February 2022.

 

----. Personal correspondence. 2 March 2022.

 

Mojares, Resil. “Ang Sugboanon: The Cebuano.” Cebu: More Than an Island. Ayala Foundation, 1997, pp. 266–278.

 

Sagarino, Mary Rose. “Consolacion Mayor Alegado: Seafront City reclamation project will continue despite opposition.” Inquirer.net, 25 October 2021, https://cebudailynews.inquirer.net/408103/consolacion-mayor-alegado-seafront-city-reclamation-project-will-continue-despite-opposition. Accessed 2 March 2022.

 

Woolf, John U. Cebuano Dictionary for Android. Version 1.3, Cornell, 2013.