6.
I moved to Sydney in 2018, two years into the drug war, to pursue a postgraduate degree. I would present this move as a great adventure to loved ones, even though, at its core, it felt like running away. Manila is only two hours ahead of Sydney, but it takes eight hours to fly there, with majority of the flight just the plane arcing over so much land. So much land. Years later, I will encounter Ania Walwicz’ scathing poem, ‘Australia’, and recognise in her words a familiar wonder and anguish: You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. (230)
During my first year as an international student, I joined an event by the university’s Filipino Student Society. I gravitated to a table where they were serving coffee and some local delicacies like lumpia, ground pork and vegetables rolled in pastry, and pancit, vermicelli noodles cooked with soy sauce.
I very recently arrived from the tropics, and surrounded by walls of sandstone, I could feel myself freezing in 20-degree weather. I could see the other new arrivals attired in full-on winter gear, like me: padded coat, scarf, boots. I said hi to a friend of mine who was a practicing lawyer back home and had served as Chief of Staff for two senators. I knew her from my undergraduate days. An activist. The last person you’d think would ‘betray’ the homeland by leaving for greener pastures. I was, to be honest, surprised to see her here.
She introduced me to a friend of hers, another lawyer. They were both studying Master of Laws. “Lawyers are being killed back home,” he told me. “It’s one thing to be attacked online, to be jailed. But to be killed? I’m out of there.”
A sad, callous thought passed through me: Oh, good. I’m not the only coward in this room.
I berated myself for my ungenerosity. Is it cowardice to seek safety? It shouldn’t be. What was upsetting was how the political crisis had broken even the people I believed were unbreakable. If even they had reached their breaking point, what hope was there for the rest of us? For me?
7.
This mindset coloured my stay. There were moments of joy, sure, but there were also moments of intense disquiet. I regarded Australia with a tinge of melancholy, as if I were already mourning my eventual departure. Every migration expense – English language tests, visa fees, private insurance fees, skills assessment fees – is part of the continuous process of proving my identity and my worth, making my existence here feel transitory, as if I don’t quite belong, as if I weren’t actually here.
In my poetry collection, I included a series of poems called ‘Notes on The Official Sydney Guide’, erasing the content of the actual Official Sydney Guide produced by the New South Wales government, and inscribing my own content in the form of footnotes. An ‘official’ guide to any city, by its nature, lends an air of authority and finality to the ‘best’ or ‘must-visit’ sights and experiences in a given space, written in language littered with superlatives that colour our expectations. By erasing this content and offering my own as footnotes, I aim to create another way of looking at Sydney, with gaps that invite the reader to connect the dots or to imagine the content that has prompted the footnoted commentary.
8 Here I sat on a bench thinking of collective nouns to describe groups: a shadow of ibises, a murmuration of cinema complexes, a prickle of jacaranda, a pandemonium of students, a troubling of tourists, a suspicion of locals. 9 a charm of, a bloom of, an intrusion of, an unkindness of (67)
I return to the horror of crime in ‘Crime Scenes’, victims lost in the din of Sydney.
can you please can you can you please can the light slicing through please give in can you as the train approaches can you squares marking can you marking you where you are can you please where you’ve been please this is can you please not the final stop can you Mascot then Green Square then Central then please all stops can you your life can you please timetabled can you please a delay please is unforgivable can you is evidence can you please of this rotten government can you please there is no joy please standing on this platform please in this train car sweating please in close quarters can you please my hand on the ghost of a hand can you and now the train is late again can you what can you please what are you saying can you please cannot hear you please through these headphones can you please the music please the groan can you of machines can you please can you can you please help me (63)
8.
This essay was conceived and written across two countries. In late January, I was in the United States with my husband to bury a loved one. We returned to Australia to take our careful next steps, as my fresh new year had imploded following a series of personal and professional disruptions. Prior to our departure to the US, a father-son duo opened fire on a Jewish celebration happening on Bondi Beach, killing 15 people and injuring 40 others, the deadliest mass shooting in Australia since 1996. In the early days of the investigation, the Philippines was mentioned; Australian authorities investigated the gunmen’s travel to Mindanao, alleging that the pair received military-style training from ISIS, an allegation later disproved (McCready). Shortly after our arrival, conflict in SWANA escalated with the joint US-Israel strikes on Iran, which the Australian government has backed. The rules of migration solidified borders as discrete divisions, but they are porous to hate.
Horror and devastation at every turn.
Becky Millar and Jonny Lee write that a prevalent theme of horror is grief (173). Grief, they argue, is a “disruption of one’s assumptive world” (174), a core feature of horror narratives. Novelist Gus Moreno, dealing with the loss of his sister-in-law and hoping to find meaning in her death, turned to grief books, but found that they “only made me feel like delicate porcelain”. He found true comfort in horror.
I wanted something that would at least acknowledge the pain I was in, not move past it… With horror, there is no ultimate triumph at the end. Even if the characters survive or defeat the monster, there’s no going back to the people they once were. That’s what grief feels like.
As modern horror has ancient roots, so does the response to horror. Poetry provides a language for grief in the form of the elegy, with roots in ancient Greek metrical form (from elegos, ‘funeral lament’). Modern elegies go beyond personal lamentations and gesture towards the metaphysical. The elegiac mood suffuses my writing and the writing I personally like. A pensive, melancholic longing for the peaceful time before the crime, the disaster, the death. In my poems, peace and disaster are juxtaposed line by line, sitting by side, as they do in life.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the subversive nature of joy and love, and how I could include more of these emotions in my writing. I watched Bad Bunny’s exultant half-time performance at the Super Bowl, Alyssa Liu’s jubilant Olympic gold medal win on the ice. But then there was also darkness before these celebrations. Bad Bunny received hateful backlash when he was announced as halftime show-headliner, disparaging his Puerto Rican background and sexuality, and Liu has been open about how the sport has taken over her entire life so much that she almost walked away from it forever. That both responded with joyful performances that do not even once acknowledge the hate they received or felt, was truly inspiring to me.
I’m still not sure how this will shape my future writing projects, but I must also acknowledge: when you write about horror, you write about love. Yes, I would want to inject more joyful moments in my writing, but horror and love (and therefore joy) have always gone hand in hand. Many horror narratives begin with a peaceful, idyllic scene: friends preparing for a road trip, family getting together for a holiday, a couple taking a walk in the park. Living as we all do, with faith that tomorrow will come for all of us. A horror story survivor runs across a field or abandoned building or lonely road or haunted house, hurtling towards the narrative’s ending, crying and screaming and grieving her lost loved ones and upended life. Grief disrupts your “assumptive world” (Millar & Lee, 174) because it stems from a significant loss. You mourn a loss because you loved it. Still love it.
I end this essay with an extract from the poem that also ends my poetry collection, ‘Stargazing’, a small invitation to mourn the losses already here/yet to come, an invitation not to mourn them alone:
Come now, sit here by me. Let us recite the names of the nearest stars— Proxima Centauri, Lalande, Sirius, Luyten— the way we list the games of our childhood. You’re so far away that I see you still. Imagine a farewell that takes a hundred years to reach you, disguising itself as brightness. (82)
