Terra

Dad was a rural development expert. He was professor of public administration at the University of the Philippines, college dean before he resigned in 1989. He coordinated research and training in rural development while at the Asian and Pacific Development Centre (APDC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 1978 to 1981. He also produced journal articles, book chapters and edited volumes on topics like the management, financing and stakeholder mobilization for rural development. Today would have been his 89th birthday. Here are is a triptych of poems he wrote: "rural development?" (no date); "untitled" (1979) and "the flight" (1985). Each poem distills anger at death and barrenness in the fields, fecundity sacrificed on the altar of modernity.

poems three

When I was ten, I found an old book with an inscription handwritten, addressed to my mom and dated before I was born: "you touch me/ in my most secret moments/ like a vagrant light/ and I am whole." Being an incorrigible show off, I performed the lines for a speech and drama class assignment even if "the fog comes on little cat feet" would have sufficed (undeterred, I unnecessarily performed Anthony's Oration later that year).

Anyway, the author was my dad. University professor by day, occasional poet by mood. He died when I was thirteen. The book was lost but a version of the poem for my mother was typed up along with his other poems and bound into an unpublished folio of sorts.

Happy birthday, Daddy!

If Only

Gabriel U. Iglesias, no date
(circa mid to late 1970s?)


Maybe it's my imagination, but I think you were first writing about Marcos (slash the ruling oligarchs slash the authoritarian state) then at the end, you were speaking to yourself. 

Coming of Age

This process of trying to know my father, who died in Mongolia when I was 13, is never-ending. Because he left this world when I was too young to befriend him, to debate and argue with him, to talk politics meaningfully, to ask for advice on what I should study or what to do with my career or life or kid. The last fatherly “advice” I remember was: no boyfriends until you graduate. 

A minority in a family of females, he is the posthumous butt of family jokes. Like the time in Baguio when he forgot to wear his dentures, stepped into the elevator while grinning at a colleague inside, clapped his hand over his mouth in realization, and ran back to our hotel room.

Or the time we spent hours waiting for him to change a flat tire, being stranded on the winding road to Taal Lake in Tagaytay. In fury, he finally kicked the damn thing and it obediently rolled off onto the ground.

In our family lore is the episode when he first returned from Caracas, weakened by his first major coronary a decade before his death. The flight crew brought him out in a wheelchair. On his lap was an enormous Snoopy, a gift for the baby in the family (me, before my position was usurped by our youngest). The absurd image of this larger-than-life man, juxtaposed with the frailty of a fluffy toy dog, was too much for my aunt to bear and she burst unconsolably into tears. This story always cracks us up when we recall it.

Once, I had to read some kind of poetry for my speech and drama class. Must have been eleven or so. Smart aleck that I was and having already exhausted my teacher’s patience by a theatrical Antony’s Oration the week before, I decided to elevate my Dad’s poetry to performance. I had found an inscription in some book, in Dad’s unmistakable scrawl, that said “You touch me, like a ray of light, in a darkened room. You touch me, and I am whole.” When I had the chance to talk to him, I asked if he had written it for Mom. Of course he did, he said, and sure, I could perform it if I wanted. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased by this paean to him. I’ve since lost the book with its yellowed pages and the pale blue ink of his words.

I have, however, found this and quite liked it.

In a few days, it’ll be 25 years since he died. And my son, “g.” after him, is growing into his own man. I suppose I would rather not really perceive the inner workings and name the demons that drove him. I don’t know if it would have mattered in the end if he really saw me for who I was—not just one of the kids, or the one who used to be the baby—or understood who I’ve become. Yet I hold on to a conceit that “I’m the one most like him”—a little diffuse, a bit too externally oriented, caught up with friends and the world outside, and its conflicts, and the realms of the written. Driven by demons in the wee hours of the night.

Some days, it seems that the sum total of who I am was always compelled by the need to win his approval after he died. To be the person that leaves the girl.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

I have often wondered what moved you to write this. Maybe the street children along President Quirino Avenue, as you drove home? What made you angrier? That you couldn't believe in redemption? Or that other people did? Wherever you are, Daddy, you have your answer. 

by Gabriel U. Iglesias
undated

hallelujah jesu... tagore and villa

'Your father told us that he was a practicing agnostic,' a former student of his once told me. He would start teaching a class and end up telling all sorts of anecdotes about places he's traveled to, things he's done. 23 years since he died and I'm still running into his students all over the world. 'I knew your father,' they tell me. 'He was very funny.'

My Dad, to me, was a gorilla of a man. That is, from the vantage of not being much higher than knee level when I was around four. I was fascinated when he shaved in the morning, and by the way he bounded up and down the stairs, or whistled as he tended to the orchids and the garden. He told off-color jokes in the car as we drove to Church on Sunday mornings. After a long day at work, he'd dispense with niceties, grunt and point at food on the table to be kindly passed over to him. 'What do you say...?' we'd giggle, four girls, prim and proper. 'Kanin', he'd growl--rice--brooking no dissent.

Many years ago, I smoked something that had a really strange effect on me. I regressed to my childhood. I spoke in an odd, high-pitched voice--which left my throat sore for hours afterwards-- in secondhand, international school English.

I was three at first, scared of the dark and not recognizing anyone around me. I talked about my family and how I so badly wanted to go to school with my sisters but wasn't allowed. As the night deepened, I grew up. Four, five, six, seven, eight. As I chattered about this and that, I would once in a while realize that something bad was about to happen. Something was coming.

Thirteen. I re-live knocking on our gate as usual. Tat-tat-a-tat-tat, tat-tat. May opens the door and starts weeping. 'Daddy died,' she barely manages to say. Heart attack. I push past her, asking 'Where's mommy? Where's mommy?' They were still in Ulan Bator. The phone keeps ringing. Arrangements were made to fly Dad's body back via Beijing. Mom would be home in a few days. Gay was on her way home from UP, Anna was still at school and didn't know what was happening. Anna was just eight years old.

At some stage, I retreat upstairs to my room, crack open my Biology textbook and read about earthworms, phylum Annelida, as if it were the most important thing in the world.

by Gabriel U. Iglesias, undated.

ljubljana

I went to Ljubljana last month, finding it the rather prosperous and 'fully European' capital of Slovenia. This was almost exactly 30 years after my father was inspired by what he saw in what was then still Yugoslavia--as yet untorn by war and dissolution.

Dad had been a consultant to the International Centre for Public Enterprises in Developing Countries, in Ljubljana. Throughout 1980 to 1982, he spent his time there on conferences and training. He also worked with the Centre on various management training projects in Karachi, then 'West' Berlin, and Kuala Lumpur.

I explained the family connection to a Slovenian colleague, who speculated that the link could have come by way of Yugoslavia's active involvement in the Non-Aligned Movement as one of its founders.

He wrote here about spring while he was in the midst of autumn. The Alpine vista seemed to evoke a yearning for some elusive repose. Perhaps he was simply depicting a struggle to hold fast to a dream during that moment between unconsciousness and consciousness, holding fast to the moments before the day has to begin.

I myself longed to savor Ljubljana a little longer, but couldn't as, indeed, "in the morning the players depart, somewhere other players are about to start."