Review: Patrick Rosal's My American Kundiman

Current critical thought encourages us to consider poetry as an autonomous creation, separate from its creator; the poet’s background should be kept out of the evaluation of the poem. However, I argue that a poet’s biography is not only relevant, but necessary to grasp a fuller understanding of his or her work. The kundiman is a tradition of Filipino descent, and as such must not be overlooked in favor of a more “poetless” reading. It is also essential to this collection of poetry, which indicates immediately through the title that we are dealing with deeply entrenched cultural identity which, just as it is to the poet himself, is irremovable from the work.

My American Kundiman is a solid second book from Rosal, whose first collection, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, received positive reviews for its musicality and drive. Thomas Lux called it “[An] astonishing first collection by a young poet of immense gifts” and it was the winner of the 2002 Members’ Choice Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop. Kundiman follows well in its predecessor’s footsteps, equaling it in rhythm and sound play, and surpassing it in emotionality and depth.

Rosal opens his book with a brief historical note on the kundiman, identifying it as a traditional Filipino song of unrequited love. He writes, “The kundiman was a coded desire, a manifest longing in song, a beloved poetic subversion composed and sung in a time when overt expressions of love for the Philippines were looked down upon, if not completely prohibited by the nation’s occupiers.” This definition stays with the reader throughout the entire body of poetry—the idea of an emotion that encompasses love, longing, and even mourning. It is not sung to a specific individual, but to the larger concepts of country and heritage.

Rosal weaves future, present, and past together artfully to make his “kundiman” to all aspects of his personal chronology: his identity as a Filipino and as an American, as well as pondering what the future will hold for him and his loved ones as immigrants. It is interesting to note, then, that My American Kundiman both opens and closes with a poem dedicated to or written about the poet’s family members. “Meditations on the Eve of My Niece’s Birth” leads us into not only birth—
the beginning of life—but also the expectancy that goes with it. Rosal writes:

Who sow buckshot glitter from Cape May to Arthur Kill
Who weave rush-hour Kyrie from lanes of masonry
and steel Who stammer boldface gospel on Newark
subway steam What rot feed one man Who record
his rasp Who transcribe his song Who unknot his
gut What spectral redshift beacons ancient
boogie-on-down What heats the heart’s
enthalpic pth Who stop the clock—
submit to speed of light When
have I listened—child—How
will I begin When shall I
open my mouth
and let half
the world
fall in (3)

Questions such as “how will I begin” and “when shall I open my mouth” point our thoughts toward the future, toward things yet to come. This is appropriate, given that the title of the poem intimates a new birth in the poet/speaker’s family. The questions posed at the end of this poem are then answered the final poem of the collection, “Photo of My Grandmother Running Toward Us on a Beach in Ilokos”:

Consider how happy she is
carrying the whole load of an ocean

on her head the way some women carry
water or fruits or fish My Lola

and the whole goddamned ocean
Tides Whalebone Reef And my dark

dark cousins stomping through the breakers
She is closing her eyes running

toward her American grandchildren
who wait for her on the shore

She is sopping wet trying to balance
an entire sea on her head Her arms are

flung wide open And she laughs
as if she were asking us

to bring our burdens too (65)

While the above poem indicates a time and place that are in the past—however recent, we do not know—it, too, connects to and emphasizes the overarching chronology that defines the book. Although ostensibly it appears that Rosal is addressing his timeline in reverse, going from contemplation of the future to reminiscing about the past, I hold that to be only a half-truth. On one level, yes; it is a reflection upon the poet/speaker’s grandmother at an earlier time. This roots the poem in the past. However, Rosal’s choice of ending in “Photo of My Grandmother Running Toward Us On a Beach in Ikonos” also indicates a sense of future potential, as well as tying in the family’s leap from the Philippines to American life and culture.

If we can say that the book begins in the future and ends in the past, the second section of the book is the present. The poem that begins the second section, “Kundiman In Medias Res,” itself embodies being present in the moment. The title and first lines of the poem indicate a “beginning in the middle”—neither at the very beginning, nor at the end of a process.

and I like sometimes to begin
in the middle of things
your breastbone/navel
the small of your back
your hand’s syntax pausing
at the comma of my thumb
I love your 700 questions
each strand curled long
across my lips the sudden
punctuation of your spine
Your mouth an interrogative
sliding from unknown
to unknown They say
one sign leads to another
I say each tastes vaguely
like blood Along my body’s
broken lines I am still unwritten
by your fingers’ calligraphy

Love—decipher me
Speak me with your first tongue (29)

This poem speaks with intricate double entendres and word play about the poet/speaker’s thoughts on his heritage and where he stands now, with one foot in American and one in the Philippines. The sexual and romantic language embodies the essence of the kundiman—a sense of love and longing that reaches beyond the physical yearning for an unnamed, indirect female character, but also for connection and self-knowledge. Images such as a “mouth…sliding from unknown to unknown,” the taste of blood, and the desire to be “deciphered” and spoken to in someone’s “first tongue” all deftly entwine sexual innuendo and deep longing for the poet/speaker’s roots.

However, the poet/speaker’s relationship with his own Filipino heritage is not the only thing at stake in this collection of poetry. As the title of the book implies, Rosal aims to create a connection between his past—and the collective past of his family, as immigrants—and his future in America. Inevitably, then, the subject of racial must then come up, as it does most in the third section. Many poems in that section relate the poet/speaker’s struggles and ponderings with his own ethnicity, and “outsider” status in America, the most emotionally and stylistically significant of which is “For My Childhood Friend Derek who First Told Me I Could Call Him Nigger”:

I don’t know when

the white kids in our neighborhood got permission to use it
or how they figured it was safe for them to say around me—for I wasn’t

one: Not dark enough—I mean—to scare their mothers yet not cracker
enough to date their sisters Know this: I didn’t think of you as black

until the day you said I could call you nigger You meant to say we were
brothers So know this too: Since that day I have shouted this word inward

and let it echo throughout the dim continent of my skull I have split it open
with my bare hands like a plum and sucked its purple juice from my thumbs

I have cut it up into eleven pieces rigged its razored gears fermented it
in my spleen to gin and razed whole fields with it by blaze What shouldn’t

a yellow boy like me know about a noun doused in 500 years of burning
What could I do when you poured its fire into my palms and said Take this

Drink And when did I learn to say it proud as a white boy How did I put it then
to my lips How easy to love the turn of a single word’s blade cutting

every which way at once (44)

What is most intriguing about this poem is its ability to connect not only one, but three different ethnic groups through the use of a single word. “Nigger” is, of course, a derogatory term for an African-American, but also a word used by that group of people that indicates a sort of brotherhood and camaraderie. In “For My Childhood Friend,” Rosal relates that this word was used in his childhood by “white kids” as well as African-Americans, and is in turn given to the poet/speaker by his friend like a gift. Independently, the poet/speaker is wholly separate from his peers: “…for I wasn’t / one: Dark enough—I mean—to scare their mothers yet not cracker / enough to date their sisters” (lines 3-5). However, after the childhood friend gives the poet/speaker permission to call him “nigger,” his entire worldview is changed. He is included in a group of people, rather than being an outsider—although he knows that with that inclusion comes the history of oppression that accompanies the use of the word, its inherent destructiveness.

Stylistically, this poem stands out from the rest because it at once allows and defies grammatical and structural norms effortlessly. Without lineation, the poem would read as a piece of well-crafted prose; however, choosing to break the sentences into lines lends it rhythm and pacing that would be lost otherwise. Additionally, here, as in other instances throughout the book, Rosal uses only capitalization to indicate where one sentence ends and a new one begins. This allows for more internal flow—a continuation of thought, rather than a stopping and starting—as well as not creating a visual mess upon the page with scattered fragments of lines here and there. Both of these techniques are effective in pacing and rhythmic control, which enhance the reading of the poem both visually and aurally.

Writing a poem of this caliber about racial identity could not be accomplished by someone who has not experienced the awkwardness of living amongst those of a different ethnic or racial background. This is but one example I cite as to the necessity of not disregarding a poet’s background in the evaluation of their work. Rosal’s experiences as an Asian American man in this country undoubtedly inform his poetry, and his unique and skilled craft choices sculpt those experiences into a true kundiman for past, present, and future.