Poems that question: To document or to sing?
Charlie Samuya Veric’s fourth poetry collection, No Country, published by UP Press (2021), follows up on his previous best-selling poetry books: Histories (2015); Boyhood (2017); and The Love of a Certain Age.
An associate professor at the Ateneo de Manila University, Veric has also authored Children of the Postcolony: Filipino Intellectuals and Decolonization 1946-1972. He holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University where he was awarded the John Hay Whitney Fellowship.
Veric has declared that he is “not your usual poet” but rather an “anti-professional poet.” It’s not that his poems are difficult; they’re different, as I let on in my review of Histories in this space some years back. His poetic voice remains calm, placid in articulation despite frequent musings on the vagaries of his familiar concerns.
In No Country, the first poem, The Ballad of Brown Lazarus, takes up the first 40 pages (though the book is generous with empty spaces). It narrates his arrival for a fellowship at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies. He looks forward to the experience since he’s imagined South Africa as being in the ideal state of postcolonialism.
The narrative-journal is actually a proem, with paragraphs segmented into page sections, inclusive of dialogue with those who greet him upon his arrival. He befriends Amrita from Bangalore.
“We navigated the hilly streets, full of excitement that came with newfound friendship. I had no idea, however, that an Indian woman and a Filipino gay man were a magnet for hostile attention on the streets of Johannesburg."
“What did I know? I was drunk on hope. I thought I had reached the future of the world.”
The naïveté angers the institute’s director, who scolds them for walking out alone at night. Yet unmindful of the city’s perils, Charlie continues on his daily solitary jog. But on their first weekend as a group walking the streets after a literary activity, they are set upon—apparently customary for visitors of any nationality.
“Claiming to be armed, a group of black men attacked us in the middle of a busy street.” Charlie lost his cellphone and wallet. “Though in my heart I knew I lost more.” The lesson keeps him indoors for days. “I wanted as much as possible to deny the trauma: My fantasy of Third World solidarity was in shambles.”
Caught between documentation and singing, I knew what my obligation was. To witness and keep a record of songs from the dark. To write the lyric from decolonization’s ruins.
His “imagined unity of the planet’s dispossessed” comes into constant question, even as he devotes himself to other creative tasks, and begins to write brief poems in conventional form. “Yet a deeper damage remained unresolved, one that was rooted in decolonization’s demystification. To write was to put my finger into that wound to feel the flesh of history.”
Here is where Veric’s unique poetry must be appreciated. Even as his philosophical rationalizations still feed his poems with the big fat words of conceptual isms, we begin to accept such seeming anachronisms when he also manages to slide effectively into lyricism rooted in images, metaphors, and reassuring cadences.
Honesty behooves his insistence on the process of mental calculations ergo shifting judgments. “I was torn between two impulses: to document or sing? I chose both—that is, to revel in the possibilities that resided in their merging.” He arrives at what to him is a comfortable praxis. “The factoid marks the entry of history into poetry. The historical information is preserved as an element of poetry that balks at the notion that the lyrical is the sole manifestation of expressive beauty.”
Further: “Caught between documentation and singing, I knew what my obligation was. To witness and keep a record of songs from the dark. To write the lyric from decolonization’s ruins.”
His lyric passages dwell on graphic observations outside his window, such as of the compound’s guard, pool cleaner, dogs in cages, and avian activities, as expressed in The Idea of Birds: “Where I come from/ the dead visit the living as birds, their gaze carrying// a residue of the underworld. What message do you have/ for me as I rest my hands on the keyboard? Tell me/ about loneliness, such as when lovers look at each other/ before one of them departs forever from this world.”
In Meditation, the lyric subverts reality, myth, and geography. “Teach yourself to stay above water. Let the boats/ Sink into the depths, the babies drown with young mothers. How does one/ Become a father when men catch their breath on the shore/ And weep at their failures. What is the legend of Ulysses for/ As hordes fight the fury of billowing oceans to cross into other continents?”
Starting Logbook of a Radical is a two-line section: “Every day we move/ like the sundials of desire.” Now, how lyrical is that? The last line takes up all of a page, like the preceding summary sections. It states: “We undo history.”
There is no separating the poet from his intellectual romance with what he expects of post-apartheid South Africa, of dispossession and repossession, “the future of the world.” His poems do merge documentation and song, albeit it still weighs heavily in favor of the factoid-laden present, as his latter poems’ titles reveal: Postcolonial History; The Tasks of the New Intellectual; Speculative Exercises on the Permutations of Hate; and Affidavit of Third World Harmony.
From Voices from a Yet Decolonized Future: “What is art that exists for polite conversations?/ What is politics meant for private contemplation?/ In your mind guilt glistens like Gouda cheese./ You wonder how wild flowers bloom. The sun sets./ People depart. On the riverbed the current/ is loosening the stones. Without/ you we exist at last. Night is coming./ Another day will reveal what you have done.”
It proceeds from rhetoric to a diurnal parade, then seals it with a concession of responsibility. Yes, these poems are not difficult, but different, relying on cycles of cerebration that occasionally crisscross what may still be celebrated, including the conceit of obligations.