Prayer for the Kababayan
Yvanna Vien Tica
Voice held
inside like a panic.
I could never erase
myself from the narrative. Just people
after people falling & misguided
under the weight of the mountain air. We live
surrounded by them. My grandfather once told me
the mountains used to belong to the communists, another inflammatory
mouth to seduce America from its
imperialist suburbs. I wish I could lie
& say I understand. To this day, our parents
are still afraid of the bodies everyone knows
stay hidden in the provinces
for a reason. I once heard my mother
comfort another crying for her son:
Panginoon, he was a good man. Panginoon, he was only
young & trying unlike the rest of us.
He died officially of a stray gunshot from
someone’s drunk party. No one mentioned
the death threat he received a week ago when he stopped
being afraid of it all. Panginoon, he was only trying
to help this people. Just people after people disappearing
& walking like sunken clouds
grazing the forests for warmth. We live surrounded
by the stubborn hinges of jaws likening
into white masters. Stimulus generalization. How
the body of our language accommodated the Spaniards.
How I used to be proud of claiming the only country in Asia
accustomed to English like a second religion. I could
never bring back those boys who died running from point-blank,
too aware of the indignity. Too aware of their white gods.
Voices held inside like a prayer. Panginoon, we are only trying
to live. Panginoon, we are only trying to relieve ourselves
of our shadows who also resent their darkness. There aren’t enough
words in Tagalog to explain the wish to be
white. My grandfather doesn’t remember a day
when the mountains belonged to
the people. Another inflammatory debt to be washed
and hung to dry. I wish I could lie & say
there are enough words in Tagalog to apologize
to the mountains, their faces betraying
the forced silence like a cry sounding so much
like our mothers. Another mouth weeping. Voice
held inside for all their people refusing to remember.
Yvanna Vien Tica is a Filipina writer who grew up in Manila and a Chicagoland suburb. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Hobart, and Shenandoah, among others. A high school senior, she is the 2021 Hippocrates Young Poet and the 2021 1455 Teen Poetry Contest Winner. She edits for Polyphony Lit, reads for Muzzle Magazine, and tweets @yvannavien. In her spare time, she can be found enjoying nature and thanking God for another day.
Artist Statement: I used to live near Chicago as a legal alien for almost a decade, where I learned about the Philippines through American lens—which is to say that I learned little about the Philippines other than the Bataan Death March and that the Philippines was an American territory granted independence after World War II. As such, upon moving to the Philippines and exploring its history, I was shocked and grieved at my ignorance of the suffering that Filipinos went through before, during, and after the American occupation. Yet, I rarely hear of any dialogue about the trauma that the people went through; the more I explore, the more complex the relationships become between colonial history, the infamous struggle with corruption, and social values, all of which I attempted to expand on in this poem through the grief of knowing how willing we are to forget rather than to confront, and from there, grow from, our history.