Editor's Note: The following excerpts are lifted from the original review published in Otoliths: A Magazine of Many Things (July, 2023).
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| Eileen Tabios |
Through Because I love you, I become war, Eileen R. Tabios unveils inspiration from political strife, the beauty of survival, and resolute action amid social crises. The poet portrays the harshness of life among those who eat “pagpag” (food scavenged from garbage dumps), the anguish of a widow, and the lifelong wounds from an interrupted childhood. These tragedies are made beautiful through carefully weighted words about class struggles, political upheavals, and the Indigenous Filipino notion of kapwa, or interconnectedness.
The complexity of memory and nostalgia has been a recurring theme in Tabios’ poetry and essays. In Because I love you, I become war, the poet dives headlong into the legacy of patriarchy and colonialism in the lives of Filipina (and other) women. This book is for anyone who is disgusted by the absurdity of a Marcos presidency nearly 40 years after a decades-long dictatorship left the country in economic shambles. Anyone deeply concerned about the growing threat of authoritarianism around the world will take away profound lessons. The dysfunctions brought about by power imbalance are not confined to Philippine politics, and Tabios also offers her reflections on the war in Ukraine through the first seven poems she wrote in response to Putin’s invasion.
The poet has always championed kapwa-hood with fellow women writers, as evident in various curations and collaborations with poets, scholars, and culture bearers. Because I love you, I become war takes on a militant, feminist tone, starting with its bold cover, an iconic photograph of the late activist Kerima Lorena Tariman Acosta first published in 2012 in the University of the Philippines’ Philippine Collegian. On the cover, Kerima Lorena is a brown-skinned woman in delicate Filipiniana dress holding a wooden rifle, pensive and ready for war. Poems in the section “Political Science” contextualize the struggle for dignity and humanity matched by red-blooded, fiery resistance against oppression. Tabios invokes Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa who has fought hard against “fake news,” overcomes forgetting, and pens an adobo poem that’s not focused on its recipe but how its protagonist cooks “adobo because it is rare / in Philippine history: it has never / been colonized by its British, Spanish / Japanese and American colonizers.”
Read more at Otoliths.
The complexity of memory and nostalgia has been a recurring theme in Tabios’ poetry and essays. In Because I love you, I become war, the poet dives headlong into the legacy of patriarchy and colonialism in the lives of Filipina (and other) women. This book is for anyone who is disgusted by the absurdity of a Marcos presidency nearly 40 years after a decades-long dictatorship left the country in economic shambles. Anyone deeply concerned about the growing threat of authoritarianism around the world will take away profound lessons. The dysfunctions brought about by power imbalance are not confined to Philippine politics, and Tabios also offers her reflections on the war in Ukraine through the first seven poems she wrote in response to Putin’s invasion.
The poet has always championed kapwa-hood with fellow women writers, as evident in various curations and collaborations with poets, scholars, and culture bearers. Because I love you, I become war takes on a militant, feminist tone, starting with its bold cover, an iconic photograph of the late activist Kerima Lorena Tariman Acosta first published in 2012 in the University of the Philippines’ Philippine Collegian. On the cover, Kerima Lorena is a brown-skinned woman in delicate Filipiniana dress holding a wooden rifle, pensive and ready for war. Poems in the section “Political Science” contextualize the struggle for dignity and humanity matched by red-blooded, fiery resistance against oppression. Tabios invokes Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa who has fought hard against “fake news,” overcomes forgetting, and pens an adobo poem that’s not focused on its recipe but how its protagonist cooks “adobo because it is rare / in Philippine history: it has never / been colonized by its British, Spanish / Japanese and American colonizers.”
Read more at Otoliths.
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