Barrelhouse Reviews: Feast by Ina Cariño

Reviewed by Amanda L. Andrei

Alice James Books / March 2023 / 76 pp

A feast has been set. It’s twilight, the glow of the sun softening so night creatures may emerge. It starts raining, trickles turning into torrents, your pupils widening in the diminishing light as you come closer to the tables. What dishes are laid out? What steams and bubbles and dares you to consume it? What might satiate your hunger or stick in your throat? Such sumptuous and bold choices are the spread of poems in Ina Cariño’s debut collection, Feast.

Divided into three sections, takipsilim (twilight), ulan (rain), and balintataw (pupil, with the additional connotation of the third eye), these poems span a transoceanic history of diasporic Philippine speakers making sense of what nourishes them, what starves them, and what feeds off of them. The opening poem of takipsilim, “Bitter Melon,” invokes the infamous vegetable with several of its names in English, Filipino (Tagalog), and Japanese (balsam pear, ampalaya, goya), a reminder of its use across Asian cultures and the diaspora. These names and the subsequent code-switching between English, Tagalog, and Ilocano convey flavors, ingredients, and feelings as the gourd and speaker become one: 

like your nanay did. like your lola did.
            like your manang braving hot parsyak—

you’ll wince. you’ll think of the taste
            of your own green body—mapait

ang lasa. Your sneer. Masakit, dugo’t
            laman. It hurts, this smack of bitter.

 There’s a defiance in these lines. The speaker’s train of thought spills over into multiple languages because the emotional and physical sensations of bitterness are so great, the desire to merge with the food so strong. In many ways, the bitter melon and other plants appear to be a proxy for land, as though the speakers yearn to be enveloped in their ancestral homelands. Skip ahead to “Terrible Bodies,” the first poem of the ulan section, where the speakers declare:

we began in soil     mountain-
roughed    soursop-smeared.

These speakers could be humans or plants, sprouting from the same environment and hearkening to animist thought and reverence. They turn into characters dealing with typhoons, conquistadors, and “false homes,” with a reference to “Dogtown, USA.” This small community in St. Louis, which hosted the 1904 World Fair, was associated with the exhibition of over one thousand Filipinos, including an “Igorot Village” which drew fascination from locals who wanted to see the “dog eaters.” It comes to no surprise, then, that bitterness once again makes an appearance towards the end of the poem as the speakers observe (or perhaps command):

taste mother taste father    bitter
as herbs from a bastard country.

Bastard country – the Philippines? The United States? It’s a phrase that makes you wonder what country isn’t a bastard—what makes one nation more legitimate than another, from where notions of legitimacy even arise. But this poem doesn’t need to answer the question. Its advice for existence is of a more elemental nature, calling upon tree guides and the precarious power of the written word in order to survive:

do not bend. be as narra heartwood
culled for its burl. be as fissured nib—

ink your terrible body onto paper:
that whitest of worlds.

The first poem of the balintataw section likewise calls upon ampalaya’s flavor as a source of strength, “as iron behind the teeth,” and promises:

you’ll grow up strong, palpable fruit. steaming
stubborn as ice under rain—a wild soiled thing.

Back to the earth, back to soil, and back to an entity that mingles the flesh and spirit of humans with that of plants. Back to the flavors that make your mouth pucker, that carry with them resentment and heartache. Through these painful sensations, the voices in these poems grow, taste, sneer—and create forms of defiance against the weight of colonial and neo-colonial history and displacement.

Several of these forms appear in the shape of the poems themselves. Word placement on the page extends an invitation to the reader to read differently and challenges the typical linear direction of English across a page. “I sing despite the tender stench outside” and “When I sing to myself, who listens?” can be read in multiple directions to create thousands of meanings. The poems feel not unlike rain, the drops gathering on skin, then dripping off to create new patterns on the next surfaces they encounter. “Names are spells, & I have four—” collects its words in one slim rectangle to the side, evoking a candle and enough negative space that I felt the urge to write my own name or spell next to the poem.

The pain of separation from heritage languages comes through the poem “Infinitives,” which turns a verb conjugation into a quilt for time and activity, as a chorus and speaker “spit prayers,” “mutter / charms, soak our cheeks / with prophecies,” and “whistle / in fractured color, / fill fissures with birdsong.” It’s as if the speakers have been starved of their ancestral languages, and so in response, their English gushes with visceral images and reaches for oracular truths. The speakers grasp for Philippine words and chew up structural rules, creating a new sustenance to nourish hungry diasporic peoples.

And we are hungry. We are hungry to understand our histories and our families in all their gluttony, temperance, and appetites. We want to know their stomach pangs, their favorite flavors, how they like to eat and how we can prepare that food for them. We are hungry for a poet who can put all this into words. Graciously inviting us through twilight and rain with the guidance of their balintataw, Ina Cariño provides us with this luscious, mystical, defiant Feast.

Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, theater critic, and community archivist based in Los Angeles. She writes epic, irreverent plays that center the concealed, wounded places of history from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women, and she translates from Romanian to English with Codin Andrei, her father. www.amandalandrei.com