DRY THE RAIN #01: "In Place of Emotion" by Anina Abola

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the first of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




I believe that to equate and/or counterpoint the discussion of the Body with Geography is one of the easiest and most dependable things to do in poetry. It is easy and dependable as it is something people have been doing since at least the dawn of consciousness of the body and the land, something that people start doing a few months after birth once the realisation that the self exists as an object and it exists within a certain space with other objects existing beside it, i.e., the mountain range looks like a reclining young woman thus we give it a woman's name.

It is a curious and timeless equation for us solipsistic egotistic animals, and elevated towards poetry, I see our interest represented thusly: at the moment of conception, our body rides a steady track towards obsolescence and death, while the mountains and the rivers and the trees all seemingly merely replenish themselves, so, to equate the body with the land is on the surface level to halt entropy of the body, or if not halt then at least delay the onset of entropy, if not in reality then at least in art.

But living in a city in a country in a world where our constant two-billion-year steady consumption of natural and unnatural resources is finally also consuming us, this equation is now horribly inaccurate and potentially dangerously irresponsible in its pollyannaish view of life. I think one response to this reality would be Anina Abola's "In Place of Emotion," in its equation of suffering the survival of a loved one's death with apocalyptic imagery refracted through geography. This is not the first time Abola has applied this particular device in print: her three poems in the anthology CROWNS AND ORANGES (Anvil 2009, edited by Ishikawa and Bautista) all use the body and nature and entropy of the body and nature to talk about romantic long-distance love, a mother's (I assume) cancer, and the persona's body image issues, to varying degrees of success, but she uses it well enough and varying enough - and notice the arc of the four poems, from love to disease of a loved one to reflections of flaws in the self to the death of a loved one, and the echoing theme of absence and the body and nature and entropy - that I feel there is a poetry book somewhere in the gaps of these four poems.

They don't push the imagery and technique too far from the self - "In Place of Emotion," despite the title, is still very much self-centered, especially in its reflection/representation of mood as geologic upheavals a la the Sandra Bullock-Ben Affleck romcom FORCES OF NATURE - but it is already several thoughts away from the largely far more simplistic sublime pastorales of recent decades. In fact, I'll even posit that if we actually bother to ask pastorales to take into account the constant threat of impending global ecological collapse, we will come up with poems like this. Here, the mountain is still omnipresent and gigantic and to climb it is to fall towards the earth head over heels, but it is also craggy and bald in places, and as "years pass, not to heal, / but that they do", the wind and the rain and all the illegal logging will wash this mountain away, turning it into more mud and dust, to be moved only elsewhere.