THE FIGURE OF THE FILIPINO EXILE IN THE POEM “HERE” BY CONCHITINA CRUZ

In an essay by critic J. Neil Garcia entitled English and the Filipino Imagination: A Critique of Gemino H. Abad's Poetics of Filipino poetry in English, he unpacks and discusses the controversial essay by Gemino Abad (One Hundred Years of Filipino Poetry from English: Language as Site of Nationhood) which purportedly serves as a cartography of Philippine literature in English, and in which, it is stated that the current phase of literary production in the Philippines has reached the point where it can already be called an “open clearing” because “poets from this period follow the structures of the New Critical poem less, finding themselves becoming increasingly interested in other issues: social and political realities, semiotic theories etc.” The problematic thing however, and Garcia is quick to point this out, is that Abad argues rather absurdly that this turn in the logic of production and aesthetics of Filipino poets, this negation of New Criticism as a mode of poetic practice via subscription to more theoretical discourses, is something that happened out of the poet's inner curiosity and not because of outside factors that influenced her/him, privileging therefore the poet's artistic autonomy. Adding another blow to his already searing criticism of Abad, Garcia states that this discourse of Abad is just a “refunctioning” of Almario's nativist discursive agenda in which the latter essentializes “Filipino language as sui generis and pronouncing the culture that this language represents as fundamentally incomparable.” Abad's theory, therefore, is just a copycat of Almario's with just a few minor tweaks.