Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0004-7768-6909
Abstract
This essay deploys the Waray word for haunting, apparition, and feeling—paabat—to examine Merlie Alunan’s poems about the Balangiga Encounter of 1901 and its aftermath in the anthology Running with Ghosts and Other Poems (2017). This historical event transpired when the townsfolk launched a surprise attack against the American soldiers stationed in Balangiga, a town in Samar, Philippines. Despite its success, the Americans harshly retaliated by pacifying the entire island through militarization, massacre, and arson. Alunan’s poetry attempts to reconstruct a range of events and subjectivities that constitute this traumatic history. Initially, it can be posited that her poetics and self-reflexivity generate a particular genus of postmemory that translates and appropriates Marianne Hirsch’s theory within the rubric of the decolonial. Working under the sign of memory, this pursuit also looks into how the vernacular complements and, concomitantly, configures the limits of postmemory in postcolonial. Paabat, as a local heuristic device, is strategically poised to cogently resolve the complications of representing trauma that spiral into ethical breach. Through this lexeme, one can describe how Alunan’s poetry negotiates these irreducible aesthetic and ethical concerns. Moreover, a philology and pragmatics of paabat protract its possibilities as a technique of memorial visibility, vestigial sentiments of both victims and perpetrators, and a medium of intergenerational empathy. Thus, the vernacular becomes an organizing feature that mediates the aesthetic and ethical quandaries of postmemorial texts, such as Alunan’s poetry whose artful exploration enables the lyric form and its contemporary readers to access a remote and almost vanished history.
Recommended Citation
Claros, Ian Harvey A.
(2025)
"Paabat: Provincializing Postmemory in Merlie Alunan’s Poems on the Balangiga Encounter of 1901,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
46, Article 18.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2167
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss46/18
