To take up the White Man’s burden, I look for lessons regarding haunting, specters by the
thousands. Send forth the best ye breed, I text my lover at 3 am. While reading about entire
societies possessed by deeds that are systematically occurring and are simultaneously denied,
I leave my phone on vibrate. In the American version of events, the battle for the Philippines
went on by land and sea. To send your sons to exile. To not speak. The language of denial
ensures that normalization becomes in time a state of nervous exhaustion. I’m terrified to
meet my lover’s parents. When it became apparent the colonizers were there to stay, the
natives signed a guarantee from the American commissioners. Every time I close my eyes
and look, guileless ghosts squat together in tight quarters, crying out between the real and the
unthinkable. To wait in heavy harness. On the evening of the Philippine-American War the
Filipino troops were resting and many of the officers were at the theatre on Saturday night
and were arrested shortly before the outbreak. To see inside the archive your own
resemblance, the faces of people that you know and do not know and love. In the indigenous
silence of my bedroom, my phone explodes amid the loud bombardment of Malate, Paco,
Santa Ana, and Malabon. In the frightful slaughter of fluttered folk, it is estimated that
roughly 4,000 turned to something other themselves. To be a bag of bones in the hands of a
descendant I’ll never know I have. To think in English, the way my language opens like a
weapon, the armament of talk. A bag of bones is not the same as people blinking in the
different light of history. I want to tell my lover that an ordinary building harbors the facade
separating screams from the silence coming after them. Half devil and half child, the entirety
of memory becomes enmeshed in the traffic of the dead. Who compelled the inhabitants to
leave their houses? In Manila, there is rain and it is terrifying. To abide the veil of the threat
of terror, to check the show of pride. At the invitation of the Americans, the Iloilo
commissioners arrived at the capital and when they returned, they found the pillaged bits, the
looted pieces turned to silt. To drag the personal into the poem I text across the density of a
nation’s reminiscence. To echo the geopolitical forces in my lover’s face, the cultural
pathways of the tango and the pampas in the way I try to say to them I love them, the debts,
the international economies of money and national pride, the courageous political resistance.
Isolated and laid bare, a different kind of knowledge, the ghosts returning through the
alphabet with their demands.