Marjorie Evasco and Richel Dorotan

Welcome to Agam the Climate Podcast, a literary podcast about climate, consciousness, and crisis, but without jargon! We live in a time of uncertainty. Our future is still being written, which means there's still hope. Here we host conversations with writers and artists whose stories we need to guide the way. I'm Padma Perez with Joseph Santos Lyons. Thank you for joining us. For the book Agam, Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change, contributors were sent a photograph to use as a writing prompt. They were asked to consider the words "uncertainty" and "ambiguity," while avoiding words and phrases such as climate change, global warming, adaptation, and mitigation. This process produced 24 poems and narratives in 8 Philippine languages paired with 26 images. In Season 1, we bring you the voices behind the stories and poetry in the book. Hi Joseph. Hey Padma. So in this episode, we speak with Marge Evasco. She is a multi-awarded poet. She's also written biographies and oral histories, and many young people will know her as a teacher and a mentor, and a very sharp but loving critic of young writers' work, definitely someone who doesn't allow us to forget the craft part of writing. And it's lovely to have her sharing some of her creative process and her thoughts on climate change with us in this episode. It was really wonderful to get to meet her in the studio, and she was also here with one of her colleagues, Rachel Dorotan, who is the literary editor for the Bisaya Magazine, which comes out weekly here in the Philippines with a circulation of more than 20,000, and it was really so interesting to have a conversation with them before we got into the interview about the power of language, about how Bisayan, which is also known as Sabuano, because of how the Americans have sort of re-categories and sometimes renamed languages over the Indigenous language, is really being reclaimed and preserved and promoted through both Marge's work and the Bisaya Magazine, and I think for me, you know, hearing them talk about how much history and culture is embedded in the words themselves, which is an ongoing theme as we keep engaging more deeply with the authors of Agam. Yes, and I love Rachel's reading of the piece, and also before we started recording, Marge insisted that he read the entire piece in Bisaya, and not just an excerpt, and partly because she wrote it in Sabuano, but even if I don't speak Sabuano or Bisaya, just hearing him read it, it sounded so right. And I understood completely when Marge said that it would seem almost wrong to read it in English, like she actually said, "Now I don't want to read it in English anymore." Yeah, one also, like when he was reading it, he looked so comfortable, and it felt like there was a deeper connection to just not just the words, but like to that sort of deeper spiritual and emotional connection to what was being said. And I want to say to our listeners that it's fine if you don't understand Bisaya, because his reading is just so beautiful, and parts of the poem, Krutsai that Marge wrote for the Agam book, are based on a folk song. In fact, I think there are two folk songs in the poem, and Richel sang them when he did his reading. So it's a beautiful thing to just listen to the music of the language and let that speak to you rather than the words themselves. Here is Richel Dorotan reading an excerpt from Krutsai in Cebuano, and Marge Avasko reading the English translation. . It's getting gloomier and gloomier in our world. Be on guard, neighbors. The balancing spar shouldn't be abandoned. We must not forget the terror of this typhoon. It brings storm surges, lace wastes our towns. Wake up, get ready to leave. Would a simple fisherman's song suffice? If not, how else would we live? Richel, thank you so much for the reading. It's my pleasure. Thank you. And reading it in Binisaya, am I saying that correctly? Yeah. Binisaya, which is also known as Cebuano. Cebuano for the American people, for convenience sake, it's called Cebuano, but for us it's Binisaya. That's the original indigenous name of the language. Thank you. Well, how did it feel reading Marge's piece today? I feel some kind of affinity for the piece because largely Cebuanos are, we are farmers, we are fishermen, so we can relate to the poem. So I even have my personal experience going to see with my relatives who are fishermen. And what does it mean to you to be able to share that in Binisaya versus sharing it in Tagalog or English? Marge's Ibasco is one of our best poets. It's really an honor reading her poem in its original language, Cebuano. There is so much angst in me while we're reading this piece because the words, the real theme, the cadence of the words feel so right in the poem itself. Excellent. Michelle, you are the literary editor for Bisaya Magazine. Tell us a little bit about your magazine. Our magazine was first sold print in the 1930s at the height of the first wave of publication started during those years. And then until now, after the war, it just stopped publication during the Second World War. And then right after the war, it started again running. And until now, it's still there. And you cannot be called a Cebuano writer unless you get published in this magazine. Well, so tell me about what the magazine is. Is it really for the Cebuano Woodjens? We connect ourselves in this magazine. It is like our journal. This is where we connect ourselves. You know, we understand each other through this magazine because our collective imagination is largely printed in this magazine. So you're saying that Bisaya Magazine is the place to be published, the magazine to read. Yeah. If you are a Cebuano, you must read the Bisaya Magazine because it is where you can read your literary heroes, your aspiration as Cebuanos. It is there in this magazine. And how can folks get a copy of the magazine? We can get this magazine in the newstand. And then we have copies in the selected national bookstores all around the, especially in the Bisayan region, the Vinala region. And we have some in Metro Manila where there are concentrations of Cebuano communities. You can have a copy of this magazine. Thank you so much for being with us today. It's my pleasure, sir. Hello, Marge. How are you? I'm fine. Thanks for inviting me here. Thank you for being here. When we usually start this interview, asking the authors to describe for our listeners the photo that you received for your piece. Okay. I was given a photo of a man in his early thirties wearing wet short pants and standing on bare feet on a sandy yard in front of a thatched bamboo house or hut. So that was all. And how was that process for you receiving this photo and being asked to use it as a writing prompt? Well, first of all, I did a close reading of the visual text because nothing else was given to me. The only data I had was that this was taken in Mindanao. So I said maybe I should just read carefully the visual text and then infer from the photo the man's livelihood in terms of how or what story he could possibly tell. And then after that process, I think I tried to see how I can listen to him. And that's when I decided this man is talking to me in Visaya. So I really just listened to that voice and then I had a shape of the story and it came out this long. I couldn't shorten it. Of course I had to craft it, but that's basically just a straight writing. So his voice came to you and you had a conversation with? I was more or less just listening. And then it was like I had asked him the question, can you tell me what your life is as a fisherman? So that was the unspoken. And then he was preparing himself to tell the story by greeting me and welcoming me. So that was how it went in my head. What does krutsai mean? Oh, I learned the word krutsai in high school when I was singing with a choir. We have to sing the song for a competition. And krutsai is actually the word that the fishermen of Bohol and the Visayas use to call the wind because they travel into the deep sea. And so they have to have the wind with them, the good wind to bring them to where they wanted to go. So you say krutsai, that's the first two notes of the song. Could you sing a little more, maybe two lines? Thank you, that's nice. It's nice the notion of calling the wind. I remember being taught as a child that if you whistle softly when you're feeling hot, a breeze will come and blow. And I love that notion of being able to call the wind when you need it. Why did you choose this perspective for your story? Obviously, the photo is of a man, so that also dictated the story you could write. And the voice that came to you was influenced by the image itself. But what is it about this voice you chose or that perspective that you feel makes for good climate change storytelling? Well, as a Visayan, I grew up enjoying fresh seafood caught by the fishermen. And most of the time in Bohol, you know where the fishermen would bring in the catch. It's not yet even the market. So you actually see who is producing your food. And so they did not just fish, they also farmed. So fishing and farming are very important, I think, to our survival in this world. And so when you say going out to sea or paglangnyau sa kadagatan, I feel that this is a hard, mostly solitary life, but very adventurous. And there could be a lot of stories from that kind of life. So I thought that locating him in a fishing village would be also my way of recalling how it was to grow up on an island. And because they are subject to the changes in the climate, whether it's the wind or the heat, I thought that it would be a very good voice of authority to talk from experience about what it's like to go to the wilderness of the sea. I like that voice of authority because it overturns many people's conceptions of who has authority to speak. So thank you for making that point. You originally wrote Kruzai in Cebuano or Binisaya, we should say. And it's a poem in four parts with headings upon meeting, family and community, questions and anxieties, and lastly, warning. Could you tell us more about the poem's language and form? Okay, it's a free verse in Bisaya, which is maybe the way modern poetry and Binisaya has evolved. And so I relied mainly on the inner rhymes of words in that language, in my language. The first section upon meeting, if you're Bisaya, you will know that this is usually done in the small communities, it's a cultural thing. You set the discursive ground for storytelling. So it's like meeting the other and really meeting him on equal grounds because it's your community after all, and it's your story. So after that introduction, when the man talks about his fishing community, then you can go to the second part, which is the more intimate because you're entering family and community with names, with identity. So he talks about his father, his grandfather, his brothers. And then he talks about marriage and children and the difficulties of marriage. And even the ambition to get a woman to love him. Yes. Was that the courtship song that Richelle sang in this song? Yes. Actually, it's an invitation. It's a Boholano song also. We have a joke about that, but anyway, we will not tell him now. But yes, the Boholano says he's the best lover or the best husband. So after that's done, the more serious questions and anxieties can then be. So it's going deeper and deeper. It articulates what I would call now the ghosting of the seas, of its species and then the rising of the waters and the community's continued poverty, which they had endured for such a long time. It prepares, I think that that section prepares the reader for the last part, which is the warning. And this is really where the voice of authority is, because the warning is just that the seafaring life lends him the authority of experience. He warns his community and others about the changes that they are already experiencing, bringing devastating typhoons, which come out of season. So they cannot read the winds anymore. He changes the words and he changes the words of the old song and brings Krutsai up to our time because it ends with an urgent call to wake up. Those are the last words, get up and then of course the other one is get ready to leave. I think that's a question that we're all asking in the islands. If my island will be covered in water, where do I go? Where do we leave? So it's a crucial question. I'm just taking in that question. It always makes me pause in this question in many different forms. It's really difficult to grapple with what scares you personally about the current climate crisis? The speed of change, which I feel can go to irreversible levels and therefore really make the six mass extinction upon us in a very real personal way. It's too fast going too fast. And what do you do to face that reality or to keep going in the face of that reality? Well we have many avenues of action within our life time, once life time anyway and part of the things that I do for myself is of course I choose to eat plant-based food and I have just planted last month five fruit trees in my garden to add to the other trees that are already there and then I'm very soon going to shift to solar energy. Nice. Personally, I feel like the transition to a plant-based diet is one of the most difficult commitments to make, but necessary, which brings me to an aside is climate change might wipe away chocolate, red wine and more seriously, our coral reefs, which as you said and as your poem suggests is a major source of food and sustenance for so many people, especially on our archipelago. How do you feel about that? Well, chocolate. Yeah, well, I think we love chocolate and have an occasional glass of red wine, but I think climate change will wipe out more than that. And since we are talking about the structural, like the reefs are structures of survival or livelihood, not just livelihood but survival, it makes me feel the urgency of that stark truth that in the Anthropocene, because I'm a writer, I'm probably writing elegies, if not obituaries, I would like to say that part of it is always the shade of hope because after all, you write because you are hoping to reach some sensibility out there, some consciousness out there. But if I'm just writing for myself and I'm listening to the poems, they are probably elegies. What have you seen that gives you hope? Hope is what so many of us need. Yeah, I think actionable hope. And I think writing is one of them. And I was so inspired, for example, by the making of agam itself because you have collaborations of people doing their art to the best skills that they have right now. So it's visually beautiful. It's very substantial and substantive. It calls out and brings your attention in and so actions like that are always very inspiring. Collaboration I think is the way to go. So as I was saying earlier to you, even translations, collaborative work among writers, translating each other, bringing each other's works to the reader is very important. Yeah, I understand you'll soon be teaching a course called Poetry Techniques on a Damaged Planet. Why this title? Well, I added the last one, not as an aside, but really as a way of also accounting for the changes in my own life because after six years of sweet freedom outside the Academy, I realized when they asked me to teach again that I cannot teach it the usual way, that the context of art practice is really the context of reality. All our art is derived from the life that we live. And so if the argument art gives us access to beauty and truth is to be extended, it leads us to how we ought to live. And in our times, I think you need to extend that even a bit further. The furthering of that argument is really how we ought to die. Because if we're part of the Sixth Mass Extinction, what will those that survive say of us when they read our art, when they read our stories? Amitabh Ghosh mentioned this in The Great Derangement. Yes. The denial is also in the arts, can be found among many writers and an artist. And so while we have nascent beginnings of that, I think we need to have more. I think this is one of those instances where silence is a form of denial. Yes, and just not saying that you're not the most important sensibility or consciousness in the world. So I have a first provocation. I'm planning that lecture provocation already, and I hope to have the conversation with my future students to know the difference between egocentric poetry that only looks at the self and the world, the human self and the world, and egocentric poetry. The way the Zen poets and the Chan poets did it, when the world that they were in, that included them, did not necessarily have to put them in the center of things. So that kind of, there is a tradition on that, but I don't know where it went in the modern age, when it became all about me, me, me, me. So you'll be exploring this in the class. And you work a lot with young aspiring poets, not just in the classroom, but in writing workshops also. How is the new generation of writers addressing our climate crisis? Well, I used to be director of the IAS Lasal National Writers Workshop in Bacolod. Before we, before we collaborated with ICSC, I did not have very definite names of writers who were really taking it seriously. But in 2016, after the publishing of Agam, the attention on the anthropogenic condition became more pronounced, and I think writers, young writers here and there were already looking at it. But we did not have them together until IAS said, let's advocate for the writing, writing and the environment, or writing the environment. And that was when we had, I had a surprise of my life, we had scientists from UP applying for fellowships. Yeah, and students, MA students, not doing their biology and botany, but they were interested in using literature. And so we have had three years of that collaboration. And last year, and they get better and better, sharper and sharper tools. And an example of really something that I like this year, we had our first blind writer. Her name is Elizabeth Joy Serano Kehano. And she was writing in Benisaia, because in IAS, we have five languages, the Western Visayas Languages and the Central Visayas Languages, plus English and Tagalog. And she wrote a short story, a really beautiful short story, but it has a strange name. It's the title is called Barrio Tae. And yes, and it's a poignant story of the Katutubu or the Lumad, and how they are coping with economic, political and social pressures on their survival and identity, which I think are part of the entire problem. And so she talks about composting in her barrios. That's why it's called Barrio Taet. That's why it's Taet, which means shit. Yeah, shit. Yeah, but it's so well written. And while we were sitting with her, she was also telling us about the Blaan culture, even how to say Blaan. Yes, it's not Bilaan, it's Blaan. So I think we're growing the writers and gathering them together. And maybe that's one kind of acknowledging the importance of their work. Because sometimes, you know, you say climate change, it might just be misconceived as being on the bandwagon. There's not even a bandwagon yet. I mean, you know, fashion, fashion, no, no, I think they are very serious writers and they're writing very well. That's wonderful to hear, because it's also a source of hope. It is, yeah. We need to, we need to have that. If your best action is writing, then do it. And I think one of my takeaways from this conversation, Marge, is the phrase, actionable hope, rather than just hope. Yes. And the other word is advocacy, which I think is a bit gas gas already, because it's for anything and everything. I think here, hope is crucial to the conversation that we should have on climate. Thank you, Marge, for sharing your poetry and wisdom with us and your time. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Padma. To listen to the full readings of Krucai in Cebuano and English, visit the Agam website or check out the reading list of Agam the Climate Podcast on Spotify. Thanks for listening to Agam the Climate Podcast, a podcast about climate change without jargon. Continue the conversation with us next episode. We are a part of the Agam Agenda out of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities based in the Philippines. You can hear past episodes and engage online with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Agam.ph. That's A-G-A-M.ph. Special thanks to Ground Bravo Studios, Far Eastern University, and you, our listeners, for your support.