How We Spend Our Days: JOANN BALINGIT
How We Spend Our Days: JOANN BALINGIT
November 2024
Saturday, midnight notes
Toni Morrison’s impression for writing
Jazz: “Love as a perpetual mourning (haunting). . .”
That ghosts and traumas might haunt us—perpetually—
but “would not entrap us.”—Black music’s joy insists on this
freedom. Am I writing as someone trapped by the ghosts
I chase, or as someone who has found her freedom
to roam, in perpetual mourning?
Saturday 3:17 a.m.
What what what. Is that a family text thread going off? One of the kids calling me?
No, it’s a notification chime I don’t recognize. A velvet trill from the bedside table lifts me from sleep. I struggle to twist my body beneath the weighted blanket and comforter. October air touches my face, the crisp chill that defines the warmth under the covers. Best sleeping weather of the year. My hand fumbles past water glass, elephant lamp, glasses, books, iPhone. And the chime is not my iPhone. What the hell—my iPad is ringing?
I lift its weight awkwardly, trying not to look at the clock. LL calling. On Messenger. Ok, weird. She knows it’s the middle of the night over here, gotta be a mistake. In Manila, it’s late afternoon of tomorrow. Or is it today? Anyhow, I don’t want to be awake in it. Before I can decide, the screen goes black. She has cut the call. Now I miss her.
I hope my new Sis is doing OK. I’ll message her tomorrow. For now, I drop the heavy iPad onto the book pile, flip my pillow and squirm back into my cocoon.
Saturday 3:20 a.m.
I hope her neighborhood did not flood. In mid-October, Tropical Storm Trami “brought unprecedented flooding” to the Philippines. That’s serious for a country accustomed to seasonal monsoons. Last spring, I witnessed results of years of flooding in low-lying Macabebe, my father’s ancestral town in Pampanga Province, Philippines. Macabebe residents build upward: raise the roads and put new stories on their homes if they can afford to. They abandon the lower floors. New non-sustainable development traps more flood waters. Climate change brings hardship. I walked through Macabebe Church’s nave and sensed its ceiling lower than typical. The wide windowsills, once head-high, now meet the floor last heightened and re-poured in 2019. At festival time, the festival goers lift the santas off their platforms and carry them into the vestibule two by two. Otherwise, the procession would be too tall to fit under the church’s foreshortened entrance arch.
Saturday 3:30 a.m.
Not unreasonably, the air comforted me. Its warm silk, even during rush hour’s heat and exhaust, felt familiar to my body, my skin, to my hair even. My scalp didn’t itch anymore. The breezes sang in the right timbre. I devoured fresh fish for breakfast. My hosts took me and my sons on a bangka trip guided down the Rio Grande de la Pampanga all the way to Manila Bay. The river spray cooled my cheeks, shoulders, arms. When I told a man, “This is my first visit to the Philippines,” my father’s birthplace, he asked,
“First time? Really?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Saturday 3:35 a.m.
I traveled in my 68th year. My father died at age 68. He is my perpetual mourning (haunting). Yes—one of them. He tried to keep secrets from my siblings and me. (And the United States keeps many more that also apply to us, an efficient teacher is colonialism.) I have been afraid of fully becoming who I am meant to be. In my 68th year I learned my Kapampángan father did indeed try to tell me who I might be in so many ways I did not grasp, because I was not listening. For a long time my trauma, and his, were too loud for us to be able to make each other out. Now I hear you, Daddy.
Saturday 3:45 a.m.
I lived in Manila and Angeles City for four months from January to May 2024 on a Fulbright fellowship to do research in Pampanga for my memoir. I arrived excited for the archives and museum artifacts, to find the identities of my paternal grandparents, the name of and images from my father’s barrio circa 1920s. After two weeks I left the libraries. I gawked at trees and flowers, I ate sour sigang, I swam in the blue sea, I walked, sweating, everywhere: to buy a mop, a monggo hopia, a mango shake, a rice cooker. I thought I could find clues to my father’s life and our ancestors at the Arzobispado in San Fernando, in the Lopez Library’s digital files, in John Larkin’s book The Pampangans. But the unknown continues to provoke me. I claimed my Pampangan history by eating and wandering, by listening to people speak in my father’s language, and drawing Kulitan on paper. I learned the music of Kapampángan in the rhythm of people’s days, though I understand few words. I fully comprehended, though Daddy never told me a word, what foods he hungered for, and what rituals he craved and was divorced from. I mourned his loneliness. I grew up completely isolated from Pampangan and Filipino people. I studied whiteness as a girl in Florida. My father grew up in the American imperial era in Macabebe. He was subjected to American whiteness in the first American era schools.
“Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was--that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.” – Toni Morrison
Not knowing but creating, I departed the islands grateful, exhausted, schooled, confused, proud and homesick. The perpetual unknowns multiplied the more I understood. The Kapampángan words I overheard and recognized flew in faster music. I departed feeling very American in my crude anticipation of wider sidewalks, faster-flowing traffic, some icy AC, and sales people who might act indifferent to a shopper please! I didn’t crack the archives, but I cracked my imagination of myself as Kapampángan. I understand myself to be Kapampángan.
Saturday 1:50 pm
A family text thread takes off. My daughter wants to go as a family to Milburn’s, the last weekend for U-pick apples in the orchard, but I am packing a bag to be on Train 87 headed to Washington DC at 5:00 pm. It’s a 90-minute ride south, past the warp and woof of fall colors. My daughter has finally tested Covid negative. She, her partner, and their baby daughter. I stuff a couple masks into my overnight bag.
I am headed to the inaugural East coast “Liwanag Filipino Literature Festival,” a kapwa celebration of Filipino and Fil-Am authors and performers, to be held at a DC northwest neighborhood library and at Loyalty Books, a Black-owned, Filipina-owned, woman-owned bookstore. Could my father, who died in 1971, have imagined just how brilliant this day will be for us? Liwanag is Tagalog for light. In my father’s language, Kapampángan, one word for light is sálâ, as in a ray of sun, as in new beginning.
NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…
1. What one word best describes your reading life?
Slow. Multi-book and multi-genre. Currently spans 175 years from Moby Dick to Regie Cabico--well, not counting a daily Rumi poem.
2. When you're writing, is there something you return to again and again for inspiration?
Flip through Daily Rumi and find a poem. Flip through any volume of poems and model one you like. Right now I highly recommend Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe. Just read more poetry—for image and language and how to inject metaphor into prose writing (or new poems!)
3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?
It is not strange at all, but I love our yard’s reptiles and amphibians, and in this moment I am obsessed with imagining their process of digging in for hibernation, especially our good friends the bull frogs and snapping turtles.
