FILIPINOS and Filipino Americans have a long rich tradition of written expressions, from love poems and letters to novels and essays. When they journey from the homeland to the U.S., or step from the adobo culture in their homes to something else entirely outside, our writers bring to their stories and poems a voice like no other.
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To honor them – and to give them the wider audience they deserve – the Pagdiriwang Festival will host the 3rd Annual Words Expressed focusing on Filipina Women Writers. The Pagdiriwang Festival is an annual Filipino event held at Seattle Center in June by the Filipino Cultural Heritage Society.

The writers will be reading their own pieces, some of which appear below, on June 7th, 12:00p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Center House Theatre at Seattle Center.

Clairvoyant
By Angela Martinez Dy

It is a gift, say some, but only you
Know for sure. At your fingertips, the future;
But even one such as you cannot discern some simple things,
Such as the reason why everything you set out to write
ends up a love poem. Strange, how you move
Through mirth without recollection, committing yourself
Instead to those times when you were scattered
As leaves, denuding trees in autumn.

You’ve been caught
Picking through roses, searching for aphids,
and instead of a gun, you keep a flashlight
next to your pillow (yes, for the nightmares).
In the dreams you choose to remember, you are
An emergency room doctor, a mountain climber,
A mermaid, one who numbers each evening
How many scales she’s shed. Last night, the count
Was over four hundred, and you knew the shape, size,
And profound iridescence of each fallen companion.

Your reality is not quite this clear.

ANGELA MARTINEZ DY / El Dia is a poet, spoken word artist and emcee with isangmahal arts kollective roots. She is half of the Filipina hip-hop duo 1st Quarter Storm, a collaboration with fellow emcee Rogue Pinay. A performance poet since age 14, she is a founding member and mentor for youth poetry organization Youth Speaks Seattle, and became its Program Director in 2005. She was a finalist in the 2007 Seattle Poetry Slam and the 2007 Seattle Poet Populist competitions. Angela teaches creative writing based on critical thinking to young people throughout the region and and organizes opportunites for them to share their work. She has been integral in bringing young people’s voices to the forefront of the arts communities in Seattle and nationwide.

Excerpt from When the Elephants Dance
By Tess Uriza Holthe

Papa explains the war like this: “When the elephants dance, the chickens must be careful.” The great beasts, as they circle one another, shaking the trees and trumpeting loudly, are the Amerikanos and the Japanese as they fight. And our Philippine Islands? We are the small chickens. I think of baby chicks I can hold in the palm of my hand, flapping wings that are not yet grown, and I am frightened.

Papa is sick. His malaria has returned double strong, and his face is the color of dishwater. He sweats in his sleep but shakes beneath the woven blankets. When he talks there is phlegm and a quaking in his voice that is hard to listen to. As eldest son, I have been given the duty of food trader for the day. I go in search of rice, beans, camotes, papaya, pineapple, canned tomatoes, Carnation milk, quinine for the malaria, anything I can find. Even the foul-smelling durian fruit with its spiked shell would be a blessing. Pork would be a miracle. We are all very thin like skeletons.

Since the Japanese chased the Amerikanos away three years ago, a kilo of rice now costs fifty centavos, more than four times the original price. The Japanese have created new money, but it is no good. We call it Mickey Mouse money. We trade for everything these days, work, food, medicine.

I carry my basket of cigarettes to barter with. I worked twelve evenings in Manila to earn these, serving coffee and whiskey to the families on Dewey Boulevard who have been allowed to remain in their mansions and villas. These families were the ones who stood in the streets and waved white flags for the Japanese Imperial Army when they first arrived. I would walk twenty kilometers south each day from our hometown of Santa Maria in Bulacan province to work these houses in Manila. I kept watch as the men smoked and played mah-jong on the stone-and-marble verandas. Their tables faced Manila Bay, her violet sunsets, and the streets lined with coconut palms.

At the end of each evening, I would go to see the hostess, Doña Alfonsa, her face white like a geisha’s from too much talcum. She sat in her spacious parlor beneath a row of matching ceiling fans. The blades were made of straw and shaped like spades. Each night she lifted opal-ringed fingers and counted three packs of Lucky Strikes. One for every four hours that I worked. She paid me in cigarettes, and I made certain the cups were always full.

TESS URIZA HOLTHE made her literary debut with When the Elephants Dance, hailed by the New York Times as a “formidable first novel.” It is a national bestseller, a San Francisco Chronicle Number 1 Bestseller, a Border’s Original Voices, Barnes and Nobles Discovery and a Top Ten Book Sense Pick. The Los Angeles Times describes her latest book, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes as “More like a necklace of glittering beads than any art form to which the short story might be compared.” Chosen by the American Library Association as one of the Notable Books for 2008, The Five-Forty-five to Cannes was also called by Publisher’s Weekly as “a trove of pleasures that will have fans looking forward to the next.” Visit www.tessurizaholthe.com for more information.

Phone Call from the War Zone
By Toni Bajado

You call me at work and the office
dissolves. Into your voice
goes everything: a gray tunnel
of scattered papers, pens,
the coiled phone cord –
and at the end, a light.

An exchange of facts:
location, time zones, weather
and expletives. Delayed
laughter, delayed
sighs. What else
is there to say?

Silence huddles
eardrum to eardrum,
holding us.

This shared breathing space grows
like a soap bubble
blown by a child through a plastic ring
slowly it grows
big with hope. Through it
you can see me
with my arms open to you, pulling
you to me, your arms open
to me. This
is what I want
to give to you:
the desert, guns, sand
in your eyes
are not there--just
neighborhood houses
nestled between pines,
fresh scent of lilac, a clear
running stream through the park,
green lawns dotted with white
English daisies’ bright yellow buttons
and dandelions
not yet
gone to seed.

TONI BAJADO is the daughter of Filipino immigrants. A native Washingtonian from Bremerton, Washington, she lived in Honolulu, Hawaii, Key West, Florida and Christchurch, New Zealand before moving to Seattle where she graduated from Seattle University with a degree in English. Her poetry has appeared in Calapooya Collage, Fragments, Licton Springs Review, Crosscurrents, and When It Rains From the Ground Up. She was a featured reader at Washington Poets Association’s Burning Word Festival and is a graduate of the Freehold Theatre Diversity Scholarship Program in Acting. Her joy is in sharing views of American life through acting, poetry and playwriting. A section of her first play, Fish, was presented at the Pagdiriwang Filipino Festival in 2007.

*the autumn of my birth*
By Nancy Calos-Nakano

i was not whole when I brought you into this world
many nights
i asked for your forgiveness

i prayed to the feminine face of god
“a girl”
she openly answered and i cursed her

of each passing moon i vowed to give you the whole
unblemished
i breathed you in and wept

beckoning comfort
redemption
yet
repulsed
by my hungry souls charade

the night wind whispered to me
why
the dying leaf before me
why
the willow shed tears for me
twilight was comfort

the echos of afflicted sisters before me
forgiveness
their repetition i could not pay
i was not whole when they brought me into this world

i was not whole when i brought you into this world
unto you endurance has passed
to steady the seasons of your life
a new chapter

NANCY CALOS-NAKANO (The Time The Flower Withered, Adobo) has worked in the arts and entertainment industry since 1977 in various genres (mass media, performing arts, literary, culinary, visual and adornment arts) and in numerous capacities (performer, director, producer, artist, teaching artist, board member, art activist, program developer, writer, pr/marketing, grantwriter). Currently, she is the Artistic Director of the Wing Luke Asian Museum’s Tateuchi Theatre and performs with Living Voices. Nancy has worked as a performer, storyteller, writer, artist and educator since 1977 and has worked with over 100 organizations, locally and abroad.

Silence
By Marianne Villanueva

Teresa’s husband liked to bang doors. So when it was silent, very silent in the house, she found herself holding her breath. Don’t move, she would whisper to herself. The silence was delicious, pleasurable. It usually lasted for only a minute or two.

Her husband was always checking on her. He didn’t like it when she closed their bedroom door, he didn’t like not seeing her because then he would think, She is writing in her journal. It was true that she snatched at a little notebook that she kept tucked away under the bed. One day he caught her writing in it, even though she had tried her best to be discreet.

Once he read it without her knowing. She came home from work and he was waiting for her, red-faced. The sound that came out of his mouth was like a bellow. His eyes bulged. He was ugly, then. She though: How ugly you are. All she could do was bow her head and wait for those seconds of silence when his words were exhausted and she became the merest shadow at the corner of his vision. ***

At work, papers flew under her nimble fingers. The silence there was not around her but inside. Just under her heart, where no one could see it. Her heart beat painfully loud at times, but she was glad that the sound was dampened by layers of clothes.

People were constantly talking over her head (she was short), through her, around her.

The web site needed a coordinator, she heard someone say: She was very good at html. She heard her supervisor say, “Fine. Use Teresa at any time.” She found herself grinding her teeth. No one heard the sound of her teeth grinding. If someone were to glance at her just at that moment, they might think she was a little pale, that was all.

One day she was at a little Vietnamese noodle place where all the people from her office liked to go for lunch. She stood in front of the Vietnamese proprietress, who was doing something behind the counter she couldn’t quite see --- frying egg rolls, perhaps? A hissing sound came from the stove. Though she stood there for what seemed like a very long time, the old woman never looked up. Finally, because she felt embarrassed at standing there so long, she asked the old lady, “Do you have a menu I can look at?” Perhaps she said it with an edge to her voice. She couldn’t be sure.

The old lady seemed angry and threw her a brief, scornful glance. “There,” she said, gesturing beside the cash box.

She reached for the blue sheets, her fingers trembling.

MARIANNE VILLANUEVA is a former Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford, has been writing and publishing stories about the Philippines and Filipino Americans since the mid 1980s. Her critically acclaimed first collection of short fiction, Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Books 1991) was shortlisted for the Philippines’ National Book Award. Her work has been widely anthologized. Her story, “Silence,” first published in the Three Penny Review, was shortlisted for the 2000 O. Henry Literature Prize, and “The Hand” was awarded first prize in Juked’s 2007 fiction contest. She has edited an anthology of Filipina women’s writings, Going Home to a Landscape, which was selected as a Notable Book by the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. She currently teaches writing and literature at Foothill College and Notre Dame de Namur University. Born and raised in Manila, she now lives in the San Francisco

Market Song
By Rebecca Mabaglos-Mayor

Isn’t is strange to hear
your father’s language fall
around you, the sing-song
phrases drawing you in?
You struggle not to hear
the secrets, the bargains of other
Tagalogs laughing behind
your back. You shrink
before howling ghosts
and you are nine again,
standing at the doorway, trying
not to listen, not to know you
are the target of their sharpened
tongues and shaking heads.
Yet your lips yearn to curl over
creamy m’s and rolling r’s,
to share tsismis over pandesal
and Sanka.

Your hips shift and your feet scuff
along the carved brick market floor.
You try not to turn around to pick
up the words among the white
daisies and day-lilies they wind
into ten dollar bouquets.
Did they say something about a house?
A party? A wedding! but the bride
is black and sassy. How sad
for his mother. Matigas ang ulo.
And you swallow bitter as you straighten
your back, round your eyes, lift
your feet and hope you look
like someone other than you are.

REBECCA MABANGLO-MAYOR received her MA degree in English with honors from Western Washington University in 2003 for her thesis “Notes from the Margins,” a mixed work of memoir and fiction. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in the Katipunan Literary Magazine and the online magazine Haruah. Currently she is working on her first novel, tentatively titled Maganda’s Comb, and she performs regularly as a storyteller in her local area. Her blog can be found at wordbinder.blogspot.com

Take Flight
By Melissa Nolledo

Your wounded gaze ignites
the hollow in me that beckons
your skies and summons your stillness.

Don’t cower you say to me.
I swoon
as you falter a caress.

Come closer, you declare
Let us fumble
the uncertainty that surrounds.

find solace
in small gestures that mark with deliberate
ease the growing tenderness
between
and beyond
us

Grow strong with this affinity that
thrusts and compels us
to believe we are capable
of flight.

Song and water gently embrace our
faces that lift for seconds to smiles that linger
in moments
still and remembered.

Take flight.

November 23, 2004
7:33pm

MELISSA NOLLEDO is a photojournalist for Manila Bulletin-USA and staff writer of the Asians in America Project. Her work has graced magazines and book covers and has been part of several exhibitions on both the east and west coasts. A poet, she was born in Manila to renowned writers Blanca and Wilfrido Nolledo, she was raised both in the United States and the Philippines. She studied Humanities at the University of the Philippines during the turbulent Marcos years. Her family returned to the USA in 1989 and she now resides in Eugene, Oregon with her husband and three children. Melissa believes passionately in “promoting cultural diversity and awareness” and serves as a board member of several community organizations such as Asian Council and the Philippine American Chamber of Commerce of Oregon (PACCO). She is a member of two artists’ groups that exhibits regularly around Oregon: Photozone Gallery and New Zone Artist Collective.

Fourteen
By Donna Miscolta

As you slam plates, shove silverware, knock
pots and pans into drawers and shelves, suffer
the loss of TV privileges for some imagined misdemeanor,
hole up in the dark corner of your room – it occurs to you again,
that perhaps you were separated at birth from your real
family, the one with the Palm Springs vacations,
the hired housekeeper,
the effortless adolescence.

DONNA MISCOLTA has received writing awards from 4Culture Artist Trust, Seattle City Artists and others. She’s been a Hedgebrook resident and was selected for the Jack Straw Writers Program in its inaugural year. Her poems have appeared on the King County Poetry Bus Project, and the Poetry on Wheels anthology (Floating Bridge Press). Her short fiction has been published in Raven Chronicles, The Americas Review, Seattle Magazine, New Millennium Writings, and Calyx, and has been aired on public radio. Her story “Rosa in America” is in the 2006-07 issue of New Millennium Writings and Calyx.