Abstract
There is no poetry collection so far in the Philippines which voices the life of a person living with HIV (PLHIV). Filipino spoken word poet Wanggo Gallaga’s new poetry collection, Remnants, breaks new ground for Philippine poetry written in English. Wanggo’s defiance with the conventions of HIV-AIDS poetry (as compared to the distraught poems of Rafael Campo, Thomas Dunn, and Mark Doty who used the material realities and experiences of AIDS patients as their subjects) proves that there is always a rainbow after the rain. Commonly, stereotypes of brokenness, hopelessness, and wastedness are attributed to PLHIV. Wanggo subverts the norm and creates a fresh autobiographical poem, which at one point is a memoir and in another, a forgetting.
There is no poetry collection so far in the Philippines which voices the life of a person living with HIV (PLHIV).
Filipino spoken word poet, Wanggo Gallaga, releases his new poetry collection, Remnants (2015), which breaks new ground for Philippine poetry written in English. Currently, his exclusive collection is sold in epub format (in Flipreads, Amazon, Kobo, Apple iTunes, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble).
Before this collection, he was known in the public as the son of film director Peque Gallaga. In December 2008, Gallaga broke silence when he came out with his HIV status in public.
Today, he’s one of the most popular Filipino spoken word poets in today’s generation. He was a judge of the “Scarlet Letters from Baguio”, which is the AIDS Society of the Philippines’ HIV slam poetry competition at the Mt. Cloud Bookshop in Baguio. His poems have been published in some of the prestigious publishers like Philippine Free Press, Panaroma, The Philippine Graphic, Anvil Press, and Dagda Publishing.
Wanggo experienced near death experiences with the virus in 2008 and 2010. In the “Introduction,” Gallaga (2015) shares his poems are not explicitly about HIV but “about the living aspect of Person Living with HIV … the stuff that is only discussed with close friends and family, and sometimes, not even” (p. 3).
Remnants opens with a mood of grief and distress?. It reminds of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s Stages of Grief: Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Yet, in Wanggo’s style, the arrangement is divided into themes of pain, suffering, bargaining, hope, and acceptance as signified by each section of his life, “Navigating Loss,” “Disillusionment,” “The Threshold,” “Delirious Script,” “Grace,” and “Remnants.” Wanggo’s poems, considered as remnants of his memories, are magnanimous in vision, as they repainted the microscopic and mundane experiences of a PLHIV.
The bittersweet lyrical self speaks of a situation near the comforts of everyone’s beds. In “Shape,” for instance, the body’s struggle to twist and turn makes sense in understanding how a body’s shape represents tension and bitter loss:
Like any PLHIV, Wanggo also experienced the grief of loving or losing, while confronted by the complex battle of his body with the virus, especially with the fits of symptoms possibly worsening in the future.
In fact, the strength of the whole collection is not in how it showed a life of a PLHIV in poetry, but in its craft of restraint. One of his strongest poems is “The Garden,” where he recollects the mundane yet illuminative experience of nature. He likens his awakening from grief to a lush garden, and at this moment of illumination, he lets go of the burdens that come with the weight of his identity:
This is more than revelation. It is joy that is found in nature and might be at par with English and American romantic poets who valued nature and the freedom of the individual. The weeds, roots, earth, and glories of the sun remind us not to be afraid. There is life even as an HIV positive.
Definitely, Wanggo Gallaga is one of the new poets of this age to voice out the unbearable lightness of a once “heavy” being. He realizes in “Grace” that his “memories of being trapped there are nothing more than just memories. They become stories you tell and they no longer define you.”
Wanggo’s defiance with the conventions of HIV-AIDS poetry (as compared to the distraught poems of Rafael Campo, Thomas Dunn, and Mark Doty who used the material realities and experiences of AIDS patients as their subjects) proves that there is always a rainbow after the rain. Commonly, stereotypes of brokenness, hopelessness, and wastedness are attributed to PLHIV. Wanggo subverts the norm and creates a fresh autobiographical poem, which at one point is a memoir and in another, a forgetting.
Professor J. Neil Garcia (2014) previously mentioned the absence of HIV-AIDS as themes in the landmark Philippine gay literary anthology, The Best of Ladlad: It would take individual efforts by Filipino gay writers (some of whom are HIV-positive, or “Pozzie Pinoys,” themselves) over the next few years to produce the Philippines’s own version of “AIDS literature,” which can only be formally and epistemologically different from what existed in the West when the then-lethal epidemic was in full swing. (p. x)
Wanggo’s work is a beginning of that dream and of that version that can reclaim the Filipino experience of what it means to be HIV-AIDS-stricken in a stigma-infested country confronted with corruption, oppression, and discrimination. First time readers of Remnants must explore and read the poems in their entirety. Gallaga might drown a reader in the sea of his metaphors, but what he leads them into is a dive into the heart of acceptance, forgetting, wisdom, and strength.