Chasing ‘Alipato’

I read Alipato and was caught.

I first read Alipato by Benilda Santos just after last summer. Among her three poetry books, of which this is the latest, I found myself very taken with
Alipato, enough to consider it among my favorite books. It deserves distinction for the thoughts and concerns it has inspired in me, the simple emotions – the pauses, the silences – which are evoked by the pictures and memories in the poet’s words.

It took me time to absorb Alipato, to understand it. Sometimes, the insights just popped out immediately after I read the verse, others took a while, like two months. I found that while reading Santos’ poetry gave me pleasure, gave existence to the idea of truth and beauty, it was also an extremely daunting task. Poetry pushed me to think, that thinking then became more than a habit of the mind. It became pain and pleasure tied in a performance.

I remember one teacher who opened her class every time by asking: Have you read a poem today? It was her way of integrating poetry into the lives of her students, of creating spaces in their lives for poetry. These spaces made me think twice about the strange in the familiar, the simple in the absurd. How does distance look like? Is the distance of a mile farther than the distances of the heart?

Another thing I liked about Santos was the quietness of her language. It undid me. In approaching the topic of pain, of beauty, of truth with a "silence" in her words, in the pages, the poet has created a wealth of reality for me to dwell on. The complexities and ironies of her language also add layers to the overall excitement of reading her poetry. I could imagine the poetry as the act of wrapping a good present. I had to get through the layers of wrapping paper first before I could hold the beauty of this gift in the hands of my mind. Dissecting and defamiliarizing constructs in my head, except this time, I thought, I reasoned for the pure enjoyment of poetry. This is what Benilda Santos has given me. Worlds in her words.

For two weeks, I read the book. One particular poem kept coming back to me, even in the middle of an exam or jumping down the stairs and running late to class. The running incident gave way to a new reading for the ending of the piece, "Sa Aking Mangingibig." (I love the reigning image in this poem!) I thought of the chalice (kopita) as a very religious item, something of the church’s. I usually saw it in Mass with the priest during the Eucharist. But in the poem, the poet used it to twist the traditional into another kind of holiness. A holiness not in the likes of any Christian ideology but of lovers shaping the dimensions of their world. And the irony of it, the sad, delicious irony when readers would interpret the lovers in the poem as lovers engaged in an affair society looked upon with censure, something that needed to be hidden from the world. Like the image of "ang dilim ng ating silid." It made me think of their need for hiding from a society that frowned upon their relationship – forbidden – whatever and however the word might mean to many people.

Muli at muli
kapwa tayo
nasusugatan
sa talampakan.

There they were, in a room, trying to be free of each other but failing, always failing in the fulfillment of their desires. There was the reality that they needed to move on but couldn’t because they kept scraping themselves raw while stepping on the debris of the shattered pieces of chalice at their feet. A confrontation. The chalice was just an image, a representation of all the things that kept stopping them from moving on, trapped in this cycle of hello and goodbye. The lovers have flaws, most definitely, but isn’t that what makes us all human? Isn’t that the essence of humanity? We find happiness in these imperfections. The gods must have been laughing over human foolishness for eons. For ages, people have sacrificed, risked their whole lives repeatedly for a shot at happiness, at the things we all desire in life. This is just one example on how people can be, well, people.

The poem, like the other ones, is so full of silences, of moments that stopped the world and kept me suspended in the dreaming, in the telling, in the showing that this was how they loved – how we should love. And over and over, until the last lovers on earth lie in repose, the chalice would keep – always on the edge of falling, waiting to shatter over the precipice of the human psyche.

Benilda Santos’ collection is full of this. The poem "Sa Dalawang Hippie sa Estasyon ng Tren ng Venezia" is a sarcastic comment on how artsy-fartsy hippies act, not bothering with baths, letting their hair grow long. She doesn’t understand this. Then she enters the world of the street children in Quiapo and see how the hippies remind her of another time and another place, of the different, dirty faces of the street kids that she, too, didn’t understand. The last lines where she compares these hippies and street children, describing them like actors in a play and ends with the question "Sino ang aking papalakpakan?" (Who will I clap my hands for?) is a parting shot with all the sharpness of wit and mind that I have always admired in Santos’ voice.

Another beloved line is from her "Ang Aso sa Harap ng Pinto." (Just an excerpt). A friend first pointed this out to me.

Bakit hihintayin
ang pagdating
ng hindi naman
nagpaalam?

She has captured, in four simple lines, the essence, the dogness of a dog. At the same time, you know it’s not just any normal animal of flesh and reality. The poems create a literal world while at the same time, subtly, evocatively, sometimes sensuously pulling you along to another level. The poems of a writer, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a teacher, a woman, she writes all with the fluidity of water that is uniquely Benilda Santos.

I cannot say I understood all her poems, or even got everything she wanted to show in her words but I guess this is where the beauty of learning and reading rests. With pieces that delight, shock, stun, and caress and punch, they make you hang onto your old, traditional views of things and of the world with the skin of your teeth until you let go. Just let go. It might be as slowly as the dripping of honey on one’s tongue or quickly like a tired body falling into sleep, but the end result is the same: To experience everything through a different set of eyes, throbbing with all the sensitiveness of a fresh wound.