Found Poem

(www.facebook.com/DomesticWorkerAbuse)

Facebook post from a Filipina domestic worker in Saudi Arabia:

GOD namiss kuna ung me mgsasabing..

Mama pakis ako

Mama kumain kana

Mama ang ganda mo

Mama ang bango mo

Mama haba ng buhok mo

Mama tabi tayo

Mama dito kana lng

Mama sama ako

At

Higit sa lahat

Mama umutang ako ng biskit bayaran mo ha..

— Langga Yenoh Plasus

☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧

Translation:

God, I miss being told…

Mama, kiss me

Mama, let’s eat

Mama, you look lovely

Mama, you smell good

Mama, you have such long hair

Mama, stay beside me

Mama, don’t leave

Mama, take me with you

And

Most of all:

Mama, I got biscuits on store-credit

Pay for it, yes?

(Santa Barbara, CA, 2014)

☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧

                    Found this Facebook post from a Filipina domestic worker in Saudi Arabia. A video of hers circulated on the Internet: a desperate plea to be rescued from abusive employers. It is a supplication we have heard countless times. Her mistress would ill-treat her for various infractions, and when she asked to leave, they locked her in her room. She worried for her parents, who in turn worried for her, and begged the Philippine government for relief. She feared ending up like those who came home in body bags, and clung to life if only for the family who awaited her return. Her life is the bitter stuff of a blues lyric.

                    This Facebook post, written in the Filipino text-messaging idiom, surprisingly works as a poem. It captures in playful language the push-and-pull between mother and child, but also renders the sadness of Filipinos forced by economic need to leave families behind to work overseas. It strangely reminds me of the cutting irony beneath the understated style of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska.

Vietnam

Woman, what’s your name?   —I don’t know.

How old are you? Where are you from?   —I don’t know.

Why did you dig that burrow?   —I don’t know.

How long have you been hiding?   —I don’t know.

Why did you bite my finger?   —I don’t know.

Don’t you know that we won’t hurt you?   —I don’t know.

Whose side are you on?   —I don’t know.

This is war, you’ve got to choose.   —I don’t know.

Does your village still exist?   —I don’t know.

Are those your children?   —Yes.

(trans. by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

                    Szymborska's poem, structured as an interrogation, seems to proceed perfunctorily, until the last devastating line, which is invested with all the shock and horror of war. Read aloud, it can work in both literati cocktail parties and poetry slams.

                    This is more than I can say for what passes as poetry these days in rags like the The New Yorker. Poets churned out of academia, despite their learned air of cosmopolitanism, rather live in constrained, rarified ghettoes. They don’t care to address a public audience, but merely their own fellows in the same writing workshop circuit. They have ears only for the echoes of their own voices. It is a diction ground down to a genteel pap, a studied pose of ironic detachment. Perhaps to make the minutiae of their lives seem more consequential? Yes, even the very stuff of poetry! Nothing is more inconsequential in this world than the travails of immigrant workers. But anyone reading these few lines from a Filipina maid in the Middle East cannot help but be wounded by her loneliness.