1.

All her life my grandmother, Teresita Meer, taught at the University of Santo Tomas. She was the second eldest daughter among 13 siblings, and her family resided in a compound, once a big house, in Navotas City. Already deteriorated by the time I was born in 1994. My father would tell stories of how my grandmother’s father, Lolo Anghel, was a fierce activist imprisoned during Martial Law. Somehow, it was my grandmother’s teaching position that saved us all from poverty, though barely. But I didn’t want to see it that way as a rebellious teenager, didn’t want to accept that she was our breadwinner for a time, and so I had fights with my grandmother as a teenager, fights that I could only laugh about with regrets now. My grandmother was a single mother. I had often suspected her of missing her other half. My grandfather, Jose Meer or Lolo Joey, lived in America for most of my father’s childhood and ours, separate from us until we were grownups. Everyone around me said he was a controlling and manipulative person, a womanizer. He was old when I met him, but I became all too familiar with having strong and wounded fathers. My grandparents both passed away from cancer, only a few months apart, one right beside me, another one in America.

It is easy and difficult to relate my past to my grandmother’s. I once wrote these lines about her: “She used to be so bitter toward me, my grandmother / But I became her favorite one summer / When she finally saw I could become a woman.” I remember our last date vividly, how she sat across me in the restaurant, smiling and talking politely about work and her check-ups. It was like she was a different woman, suddenly graceful and poised. She was already in pain and would only eat small portions of meat. My grandmother was known for her bursts of anger. I once drove her mad for something trivial; she threw a fit and was brutal with words. She must have understood how I felt when, one day, as an adult, I fought with my father, her son, and broke down. Like my grandmother, I carried for years a quiet rage inside me, not realizing that the past reached out to me, and that my ancestors’ wounds have become my own.

I grew up in Tondo, Manila, where my mother hailed from, surrounded by extended relatives from my mother’s side. In a small apartment, my father played chess in silence and smoked behind a table profusely. His life looked like a chess game to me, a tactic to survive and provide us with the best life. He was toughened up by Lolo Anghel enough for my grandmother to become slightly scared of him. I did not have a terrible childhood that I remember, except one night when my father broke my Barbie doll house, smashing it alongside other furniture. When he did it, it had nothing and everything to do with me. It was the night I first gritted my teeth, what would result in a bad case of bruxism and constant dreams about falling teeth over the years. The rest of the night unfolded like a bad scene from a soap opera until my grandparents from my mother’s side would finally come and take away my mother, and with her, my younger sister.

My older sister and I were left in the care of my father and grandmother. The doll house was kept in the shadows for a long time until our family got back together. One day I opened the doll house and found a nest of baby rats inside, small and skinless newborns wrapped in dirt and hair. Even after we cleaned it, I asked my mother to give my beloved doll house away for good.


2.

Nowadays, I often think about when a work starts and ends – like really starts and ends. It is possible to trace the beginnings of a poem to childhood, not because you wrote the poem from childhood, but because the work could be happening inside you even before you named your pain, before you wounded a page using black ink. A work began from childhood could end in your thirties, a few years after you moved out from home, thinking marriage or writing could save you. You could have been returning to visit your grandmother, just before she passed away, just before you knew she would go. The words, though inexact, could finally spill out, as you try to make sense of the crushing, somewhat oppressive temporality of lives. You might realize that perhaps the work did not begin with your childhood but your grandmother’s childhood, from earlier events seemingly outside of you. Such was the work I have been doing in my manuscript, Love is a River from Hell. I want to highlight movement in this work, to move as I have been moved, to let the river of words constitute memory, even if it is a hellish undertaking. Because the pain of my ancestors is my pain. In these poems, I write about the wounds we inherit from our mothers and fathers, and how all of it carries us ever forward, and forces us into our present body.

Growing up, I studied at the school where my grandmother had taught, a close commute to where we lived. I try to recall a mythic conception of my writing life. The beginning resembles a story we already know: a girl, having known shame, becomes the high school outcast. She would treat the church as her sanctuary, its dark and quiet hallways, its refracted light and saintly gestures, but it was only a physical sanctuary, a place where she can hide. In her body she carried wounds of silence, intangible wounds she couldn’t show to anyone. She wrote by herself in school and in the long summers without school, but she did not readily write about all the things inside her. She would write diary entries, half poems, unsent letters, and factual notes with no understanding of what the writing meant to her, no desire to make poetry into a project. When she attended her first writers’ workshop at 14 years old, it bruised her heart. Her poems were never any good but she could not have put down writing then. What was most necessary was to persist in writing, to survive, to pass the time. In a way, she was careless with time. She was young and unafraid of death, caught unaware of loved ones fading away.

Like bell hooks, I recognize that writing began for me in the heartbreak church¹, from familial wounds that made me silent as a child, but like her, I do not want to worship in this church. When I searched my poetry for the original wound that compelled me to write, I saw how patriarchy affected generations of women in my family. I was both complicit witness and victim to the violence of love. In my mythic conception of a writing life, it is not bell hooks’s wounds of passion I find on my body, but wounds of silence. The symptom of this wound was always my writing. When my grandmother passed away on 1 September 2024, what was a record of my wounds was transformed into a record of her life, and I wrote to record some more. Vis-a-vis death, I wrote poems as documents that existed in liminality, ever incomplete and ongoing. I was writing time to save and forgive myself.

Time informed my work. It was clear that generational trauma flowed inside me like a river, sometimes raging, sometimes calm. My grandmother, a single mother, a teacher, was a woman we managed to hurt as a family unit, and it was writing about her that made me free of my broken doll house. When I recognize the source of my wounds, it finally no longer belongs to just me, even though writing it for myself was necessary, was what saved me. My grandmother’s hurt was the hurt of my father, because she was his mother. It will be the same for myself and my mother. This story was set in stone from the moment I was born, from my first childhood trauma. We are destined to be hurt, no matter if we are also loved, but I am not a firm believer I will write the same story over and over again, because I have written about other things. As long as I am alive, I can write about other things. It is this hope that keeps me writing still, that makes still writing an act of faith.