Justine Ramos’s words are like solace in placing your identity when the centre cannot seem to hold in America. This collection of empowering, heartbreaking, and too-close-to-home poems moves in gentle shifts to examine race, oppression, freedom, joy, and love as a Filipinx-American.
The poems Glutathione, Tumaba Ka (You Got Fat), Pilipinos to an American, and Pilipinx-American stay with me because they all deliver brutally straightforward truths.
Glutathione
“So, you drench yourself in a sea of glutathione,
dip your elbows in white-out,
scrub the melanin off your skin,
ball your fists to form white knuckles,
hold your breath to turn pale,
until you’ve
muted the brave faces of your ancestors
with the fear of glowing like the sun and
being as rich as the Earth.”
Reading this poem evoked the reminder of how skin colour and colourism actually keeps us small.
The following two poems struck me hard as I use the term “Pilipinx” and the gulf I’ve encountered between me and Filipinos who don’t regard me as Filipino enough to have a say:
Pilipinos to an American
“That is not how you act Pilipino.
I should know, I am the motherland.
Stop using Pilipinx. We don’t see gender.
Do not butt into our politics, you do not get to talk
while you’re tucked away in air-conditioned rooms and
newly paved roads.
You’re so whitewashed.
Baybayin characters may glimmer on your skin under the rays of the Philippine sun,
Your voice may sound like the crash of waves hitting Palawan sands
Your heart may be shaped like a Manila Mango but
we are not alike.
You do not know struggle,
You cannot know grief
You do not know me.”
Pilipinx-American
“Pilipinx-American is an oxymoron.
Two contradictions forced together like
opposite ends of a magnet.
It seems as though I cannot carry one
without letting go of the other––
I wonder how I could possibly hold
two cultures that seem to repel
I need one to thrive,
I need the other to survive.”
This work is truly an important read if you are interested not only in decolonialization, but want to hear a clear, unapologetic, and powerful voice tell stories that tell our collective one as Filipino-Americans and Canadians.