Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Is there really a spirit of writing here, in Dumaguete, the sea-facing capital of the province of Negros Oriental, in the Philippines? My guide, fiction writer and heritage activist Ian Rosales Casocot, thinks so. He teaches creative writing at the oldest writing workshop in the country. He has seen many writers, new and established, discover that spirit in their time here. Yesterday I broke my dry spell in Asia and revised a poem that I had shelved. Silliman University, where Ian teaches, is the oldest private American university in Asia. It is a living part of the country's colonial history. As Ian wrote in his blog, when the victorious Americans took over from the Spanish, they imposed English on the country to transmit their values. Ian remembers having to speak English only in grade school. To enforce the rule, the students were made to play a "game" called Badge. Whoever forgot himself and spok...

First visit to the Philippines. Arrived in Cebu on Wednesday. Had dinner in Jollibee near the Maxwell Hotel. On Thursday, visited the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño. The Christ child is the patron saint of Cebu, but a child with dark skin and black curly hair. Devotees lined up to pray to the icon in the chapel but there were replicas for sale in the church gift shop too. Replicas in the basement museum too, which are for traveling around the country and for bathing in the sea on a holy day. Along the cloisters of the church were paintings and stories about the miracles of the Child. The Tuba (drink) Provider. The Fishmonger (the Child plays a prank on a seller of fish). The Patriot (The Child signs up to defend the Philippines). The Speedy Boater. The Rainmaker. Beautiful and cool garden in the middle. Woman sitting under the shade of the Church. Saw Magellan's Cross behind the basilica. Walked through the Carbon market to Ermita neighborhood, which reminded me of Goh Poh Seng...

Village Thought  huge unknown villages would entrust us with their thoughts      Jeanette Miller, “These Green Paths…” The village may smell of mangoes or strike you like a stone. You may be carrying a gun, book or mirror. Your arrival will change everything. Do you dare to be responsible?

TLS March 9 2012 from David Arnold's review of Michael J. Franklin's Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, poet, lawyer, and linguist : [Franklin] ... begins, rather than ends, with Jones's most celebrated achievement--the "world-modifying" address made to the Asiatic Society in 1786 in which he revealed the close affinity between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and hence the ancient connection between India and Europe . * Franklin rejects the idea that Jones was an arch-imperialist, who used his Orientalist learning to help impose Western hegemony over India, whose command of law and language was a route to colonial mastery. Franklin argues that this misrepresents Jones, divorcing his Indian years from his earlier career, and makes a travesty of his lifelong hatred of tyranny. Jones merits recognition instead as a multiculturalist who made deep connections between cultures. *** from Rosinka Chaudhuri's review of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Partial ...

You Ask Me If You Could Paint Me here comes another, this one with a brush instead of a book, or rope, or whip             Dilruba Ahmed, “The Other Side (on Gauguin)” If you will paint me, paint with the good book. Its leather smelling of tanneries and smeared crimson makes a lifelike print. The sermon on the mount may tattoo in blue the blessed head. Paint also with a rope, rub it across the hands that all may see my long self-restraint and guess my release. Then nail the hemp to the canvas, top right corner, to outface me with its reality. With your brush, whip my torso into flesh. The violence without must be met by violence within. Strike! Harder! Let my body writhe, a commotion contained in the cool and hard figure of a pear. for Valerie

Cold Blue Eyes My Brother, if we are not careful, we would burn out our brawn and brains trying to prove what you describe as “our worth” and we won’t get a flicker of recognition from those cold blue eyes.                         Ama Ata Aidoo, “A Love Letter” Trying to prove my worth, I am burning out my brawn and brains. Burning to prove my brawn, I am trying out my brains and worth. To prove my brains, I am trying out burning my worth and brawn. To prove my trying, I am burning out my worth, brawn and brains. To Brains, prove I am trying my brawn and burning out my worth. To Brawn and Worth, prove I am trying out my, my, burning brains. My brains and my brawn trying to prove I am burning to worth? I am burning, my worth, brains and brawn prove to my trying out. Trying and burning brains, out to prove my worth, I am my bra...

In his TLS March 18 2011 Commentary piece, Bill Bell explains the vast institutional apparatus established by the early nineteenth century--supported by religious interests, government agencies and philanthropic organizations--whose sole purpose was to instruct and enlighten the British colonial reader. He disagrees, however, with postcolonial critics like Elleke Boehmer who argues that the British Empire was "essentially a homogeneous textual exercise" [Bell's words]. Instead, he points to the subtle but significance resistance put up by individual colonial readers writing in their journals or putting together their libraries. He quotes Nicholas Jose writing on the presence of highbrow literary texts in the Australian bush library at Borroloola in the late nineteenth century: The library encapsulates both a time and a place. It demonstrates the ties that bound the British Empire and the English-speaking world together. . . . I thought of the books as physical objects...

Friday Speaks Friday was nice, and we were friends. If only he had been a woman! —Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England” The heart is the most delicious part. The part we do not eat is the feet, too tough the meat, like . . . how do I explain it?. . . like shoe leather. They are unclean, associated with the meanest spirits, to be stamped down. They are a . . . what is the word you use? . . . fetish, no, taboo. That’s right, taboo. We pile them up like an ill-assorted heap of shoes, and burn them afterwards. When they burn, they smell different, not like grass, but like the muddy roots of grass. Things are changing now. We wear shoes and so our feet are growing soft. The young men, the wild men, the reformers, are eating them to make their different points. It was not like that. Not so long ago, my enemies brought me to the island to kill me because I had raped one of their daughters. They had a duty to kill me just as I had a duty to run away. But Crusoe saved...

TLS January 9 2009 from Sandra Knapp's review of John Hemming's Tree of Rivers: The story of the Amazon : Undeterred [Alfred Russel] Wallace wrote a book about his travels, then immediately set off for South East Asia, from where he sent a famous latter to Darwin enclosing an essay entitled "On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type"--which goaded Darwin into completing his masterpiece On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection . * Seeds of Hevea brasiliensis had earlier been planted with great success in Malaysia, and establishing a source of quinine was deemed equally important. Some might characterize this as stealing or, more hysterically, as "biopiracy", but plants of importance have always been taken by people wherever they go. Coffee, for example, now the mainstay of many Amazonian economies, was taken from Ethiopia--I suspect if you asked many people where coffee was native, they might say Brazil. *** from...

TLS May 30 2008 from H. R. Woudhuysen's "Bound to please": For Larkin, two sorts of books needed to be readily accessible: "Within reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets on the left". No doubt some of his poets (who included Barnes, Praed, Whitman and Frost) could be found at the Fair in early or interesting editions. I first read "reference books" as Work, and "poets" as Pleasure, but realized they were Work and Work, since Larkin reaches for them from his working chair, and refers to them as if they were his hands. So, my twelve hardworking poets--in other words, huge quarries for my work--are: 1. Shakespeare 2. Milton 3. Pope 4. Keats 5. Whitman 6. Stevens 7. Yeats 8. Eliot 9. Moore 10. Auden 11. Larkin 12. Heaney *** from Zinovy Zinik's Commentary piece "Dinner party test": A major poet can be both a politician and a hermit, but major poetry is unthinkable without a major readership. ...