Voices from the fringes: The naming of names

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from a daughter of Filipino immigrants. "Michelle Peñaloza was born in Detroit, raised in Tennessee and currently lives in Seattle. But her experience is that of being the “other”; many of her poems express this delta between the culture of her family and what she finds around her.

I mean—Tennessee…

The history of the Philippines is awash in the empires of others. It was part of the Spanish empire from 1565 until 1898, when the Americans assumed control. Then the Americans were chucked out in 1942 by the Japanese, who managed to compress savagery, racism and contempt for “lesser peoples” into three years of concentrated misery. Since the end of World War II, the Filipino people have struggled with democracy, authoritarianism, the geopolitics of post-Cold War economics and a lot of other things. A lot of their challenges, in my opinion, are the residuum of having been sucked dry by successive empires and then dumped out like yesterday’s garbage.

If you want to completely undermine a nation under your control, you ban their language. The British did that to Ireland for centuries, and the Irish have been struggling for a hundred years to revive the language. For 35 years the Japanese occupiers of Korea banned the Korean language; it was illegal for any Korean to speak or write the language, and they had to take Japanese names. (Two Korean runners in the 1936 Olympics were forced to compete in the Marathon under Japanese names. They won gold and bronze but endured the humiliation of hearing the Japanese national anthem played in their honor. Their real names, for the record, were Sohn Kee-chun and Nam Sung-yong. You can watch the race in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.)

In “Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, or Why My Last Name Is Peñaloza”, the poet takes on the inheritance of colonialism and the imposition of the conquering culture on the conquered.

“Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, or
Why My last Name Is Peñaloza”

People name us
with the separation of their teeth,
the long z of our naming.

It used to be
we were named for our proximity:
kato tabing dagat, the parentage of the sea;
the forest’s lineage, kato ginubatan.

Or we were named for our parents—
anak ni Lina, bunso ni Boyet.
The song of our names
led to the discovery of garlic
growing from our palms,
the scapes forming a second green hand.

But it was in the name of good King Philip
that songs changed to names
and the naming of names became law.

A governor general made a name for himself
with the Catalogo de Apellidos—
a dissemination of empire, a naming of parts
to trace and tax everyone:
whole provinces renamed with efficient alphabetical phenomena:
Padilla, Pacheco, Palma, Paz, Perez, Portillo, Puente, Peñaloza.

Still, there were names we kept to ourselves,
a shorthand between us:

windows lined with votives
jars of holy water

the papaya’s
lush coral and beaded seeds,
shining fish roe

Can legacy exist in short hand?

Papal papa
papel papaya
paalam permission
please

What are the root words
for what we simply know?

How do children born of empire
once removed,

possess the history
of their naming?