Shō Yamagushiku Reviews Adrian De Leon's barangay: an offshore poem
De Leon, Adrian. barangay: an offshore poem. Buckrider Books, $18.00, 72 pp. ISBN 978-1-989496-36-7.
As I read Adrian De Leon’s barangay, I first feel tides moving across the poems – an ebb and flow, the pulse of an oceanic heartbeat. There is something that might appear to disappear but always returns – something of the body and spirit more so than the mind. The next movement I feel is an intellectual one towards collectivity – a grounded praxis, a commitment to asking how we might navigate these tides together. De Leon’s poems offer the potential to transcend the siloing nations we are born into, demanding we share in the ocean’s frightful power and liberatory potential, “from Luzon to Lanai, from Ainu Mosir to Aotearoa.” Finally, these poems move me inward and earthward. They’re a reminder that the forging of a communal world must reckon with, and shed, colonial inheritances. A constant return to ourselves – that place of mirrors and accountability where waves meet the shoreline.
De Leon asks that we read this work “from the haze.” Haze – a shifting density, sometimes a difficulty – is a warning of the atmospheric colonial amnesia weighing down on us. In one moment, the haze is thick and choking. It is smog birthed from “manila’s screeching steel” – an inhibiting agent to clarity. Then, the haze transforms into a freeing means of disorientation – a chance to embrace the failures of essentialism, a comforting reminder that we may never be a knowable or coherent thing. Still other times, the haze comes forth as an oceanic layer of protection – a breath laden with the memory of water. The kind of fog that envelops you and the whole world goes quiet for a moment.
And so, I join De Leon in viewing his poetic world “from the haze” and, as a means of navigation through, I am offered a barangay of words in formation. According to De Leon, a barangay is an outrigger boat that is both pre-colonial and Philippine. A tension which motivates these poems: how might we inhabit a time outside of devastation when the reaches of the nation are cast as hegemonic? The barangay permits me to move across these choppy waters while also inviting me into the poet’s intimate world.
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Stories of diaspora are often muscled to life through the pleasures of fixed settlement. But De Leon’s stories puncture this assuredness – immigrant life turned conditional, wondering “will we paddle ashore / a stolen land?” as “mushroomed spores dispersed from patria to pools of blood that mingle native land.” This sense of existential grief is given space to breathe in a series of dung-aw, or mourning chants, including one for laborers from Guangdong who helped build the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. These Chinese immigrants, once erased from white history, are now often cast as one of the communities who birthed Asian America. But for De Leon, their labor in building the railroad does not mark the birth a nation – instead, it signals a funerary mass death as they “strike the first notes of the requiem we call the Americas.” Each stake is driven into Shoshone blood, echoing Manu Karuka’s work that documents the key role railroads have played in advancing empire and dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their territories.
Yet, these are diasporic poems still – tentative and heartful – evident perhaps most deeply in De Leon’s love for Scarborough, called forth through the immigrant high-rise complexes of Victoria Park, the Seneca village of Ganatsekwyagon, and an ode to David Chariandy’s work set in the Rouge Valley. In fact, De Leon’s last two collections of poetry – Rouge and Feel Ways (an anthology edited alongside Téa Mutonji and Natasha Ramoutar) – both find their heart in Scarborough, a place of “blackened, browned, and yellowed valleys / not our own,” a place where “double-decker trains wail their lime-green nightmares”. Scarborough leads us to the second definition of barangay offered by De Leon: “the basic unit of Philippine life,” defined less by the constraints of geography and more as a place where the “kneading, stir-frying, pickling homelands into life” becomes possible. Importantly, the barangay does not act solely as a vessel of rosy diasporic nostalgia. It is also a communal space to which De Leon is bound – a place that “scalds the throat….intoxicates the bank account / screaming never free.” A sense of cultural self amidst the logics of white imperial memory. A place that comes with all the weight of living.
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The barangay as “the basic unit of Philippine life” surfaces again through De Leon’s relationship with the barrio of Tanyag, his “Manila outrigger [in] the sea of smog,” a community of Southern Ilokanos who have left their homes in the mountains of Northern Luzon and made their way to the metropolis. De Leon intervenes in the nationalist nostalgia that often confines Asian diasporic thinking by refusing to slough off the village and its particularity. Difference is not collapsed in order to simplify the diasporic experience, but instead it is inhabited. Tanyag becomes “a lifeline from Pasay to the sputtering barangay at the base of the Cordillera.” In this way, the reader, like De Leon, must grapple with multiple overlayings of migration, from the Cordilleras to Manila to Scarborough, all mediated by a linguistic dance – sometimes beautiful, sometimes deadly – between Spanish, Ilokano, and Tagalog. In one instance, the elders weep in Ilokano, a language that "should have been” De Leon’s, but at dinner “they yield to the sounds of Imperial Manila”. He dreams of the day when he can write his grandmother “in her most native Ilokano.” Through this collection, these linguistic tensions are generously made accessible to an English language reader.
De Leon’s poems echo Dylan Rodriguez’s assertion in Suspended Apocalypse that, for the person who comes to be called Filipino, “there is no ‘prior to’ or ‘outside of’ colonial dominance, genocidal conquest and neocolonial rule.” These poems grapple with the inheritance of the constructed Filipino subject, but do not confine our imagination to its colonial shortcomings. And so in this way, the barangay – both the community and the boat – are always up against the storms of empire. Spanish “sounds meant to conquer,” a lolo who “spoke the scraps between the cane” in typhoon storms. For the archipelagos and after Edouard Glissant, De Leon asks “what tempest strands us on the disappearing shores?” A thalassocracy or maritime empire echoes throughout this work.
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Some of my favorite moments in the collection occur on the level of the body. De Leon recounts his memories of a shaman who used guava leaves as part of a circumcision ritual, and recalls a childhood marked by Catholicism, wondering of his own freckles, “which came from Father & which came from Sun.” The body acts as a powerful site of storytelling and a reminder of the ways in which political inheritances play out on a physical level.
De Leon’s work is a small intervention and reflection amidst the relentless workings of empire that haunt the shoreline in all cardinal directions. These poems provide a moment to dream otherwise from political horizons that appear hegemonic. I invite you to take a minute to consider the barangay and see, once nestled within its protection, what wisdom might emerge from the haze.
For more from De Leon, check out his writing on the politics of diaspora and recent elections in the Philippines.
Shō Yamagushiku writes from a world caught between empires with the intention of returning to the elemental. He is working on his first poetry collection and currently lives on the home territories of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, British Columbia).