Arasahas by Jaya Jacobo, translated from the Filipino by Christian Jil Benitez, PAWA Press in association with Paloma Press, 2024
My initial encounter with Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas (Savage Mind Books, 2023) was primal. The title, a Bikolano word deliberately left unchanged by Christian Jil Benitez in his debut translation with PAWA Press, depicts a sensory experience; roughly translated from one of nearly two hundred languages in the Philippines, arasahas describes the warm, humid weather central to life in the tropics. My skin tingles when I read the word, and I recall the inescapable, invisible stickiness that life in the Philippines is steeped in. To the English reader, the word arasahas hisses, sizzles—even without its meaning, its sound, by virtue of the repeating a and s, coils and lingers in the ear. It clings.
A sharp poetic decision by both author and translator, the title invites the reader back into their body, and it is from the body that we approach the text. This is vital, because Arasahas is a collection that dances around what is almost, if not absolutely, unnamable but deeply palpable. It is a book of vivid, concrete images—a perfume bottle breaking, a bird’s nest delicacy, the tugging of “something within”—to allude not just to the abstract, but also the spiritual. In these acts of gesturing is the sense that there is something more, be it the supernatural or divine, that seeps into and transforms the everyday. I am reminded of how humidity, the invisible but ever-present water in the air, is fundamental to the proliferation of life. Similarly, Jacobo’s allusions and references perforate the text, and within these chasms are the hints at meaning that Arasahas alchemizes. Boundaries are challenged; left porous. In Arasahas, this simultaneity of meaning is not mere technique, but a sensibility formed by the lived experience of the poet.
Jaya Jacobo was born in Naga City, Bicol Region, Philippines, and has lived and worked in multiple cities within and outside her native country. Currently, she is back in the Philippines teaching women & gender studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman, but she had also been an assistant professor at Coventry University, lived in Rio de Janeiro as part of her postdoctoral research, and completed her PhD in the United States. Her rootedness and cosmopolitanism, developed through her experience as a trans woman from the global south intimately encountering all kinds of places and people, is evident in her debut collection. The collection contains: an epigraph of a tanaga—a Tagalog poetry form—written in old Tagalog; influences of the prevalent folk Christianity practiced in the Philippines; words and phrases in French, Portuguese, and Bikolano; and references to artists from cities all over the world. At the same time, these expansive allusions express a feeling of estrangement as the deftly woven connections reveal inherent differences, like when the foreigner addressee in “Nest Dreams” pronounces the word balinsasayaw successfully, but not quite:
In your tongue, the sound
remained whole
though the bird
seemed incapable
to fly anymore—
Importantly, Jacobo uses these gaps to highlight a yearning, providing a glimpse of how she sees the world: both fractured and deeply interconnected, much like the archipelago that is our home country. The water that both bridges and separates, that, in a typhoon-vulnerable tropical country both gives life and takes it away, shapes a sense of liminality. Instead of resisting, Jacobo dances in the in-between, a disposition I find particularly radical at a time when instability is answered by calls for starker boundaries and further division. Arasahas shows us not just how to hold multiple truths at once, but also how to embrace uncertainty: “To wander in forest is holy, pure if blind once more / First rays of light are mere shards of broken shadow.”
At different points, the reader is transported to realms both beyond and between: beyond historical time yet between histories, between states of being and beyond definition, between languages and even beyond language itself. Consider the first image in the opening poem “Primata”:
There she sits
atop a wooden tree—
lemur queen.
A half-woman, half-animal figure evocative of folklore and mythology greets the reader. I begin my journey into the book’s universe in the gaze of the large eyes of a lemur on a body bearing the power and authority of a queen. Striking and eerie, this figure seems to mark a mythical threshold that I, as reader, am beginning to cross. Here, too, is the first example of Benitez’s masterful debut translation. The original reads:
Nakaupo siya
roon sa tuktok.
Punong unggoy
sa punongkahoy.
Benitez chooses to translate “punongkahoy” literally as “wooden tree,” though in Filipino it simply means “tree,” and in English, the phrase is redundant. Notably, he also gives the lemur, which in the original is an ungendered monkey, more distinct characteristics. “Punong unggoy,” literally the “head monkey,” becomes “lemur queen,” informed partly by the title “Primata.”
In making these rather bold choices, Benitez sustains Jacobo’s wordplay between “punong” and “puno” through the assonance of “queen” and “tree,” and even “wooden” and “lemur”; localizes the text through a reference to the Philippine flying lemur, a species endemic to the country; embeds the recurring theme of things being more than what they seem, since Philippine flying lemurs are neither primates nor lemurs; and highlights the notion of gender that, in the original, subtly flowed beneath the Filipino language’s predominant gender-neutrality.
This gender-conscious translation is visible throughout the entire collection, such as in the poem “Homo Erectus,” where a wise and ancient personified nature laments the naïveté of humanity. While the speaker in the original is the talahib—a wild sugarcane grass, sharp as blades, regarded largely as a weed—Benitez’s translation instead features an amorphous “she.” Here, the feminine stands in for the personified wildness, an ecofeminist translation choice that not only highlights the dichotomy of man and nature, but also of the masculine and the feminine. The context that may have been lost to a speaker unfamiliar with talahib is sustained anew through the feminine that, in most Western paradigms, is regarded with the same disdain.
Another translation choice that stands out is Benitez’s use of the ampersand in lieu of “and.” Not once is the conjunction spelled out in the translation. Formally, “&” more closely resembles the visual space taken up by the Filipino “at,” especially in cases where “at” is contracted when the preceding word ends in a vowel. We see this in “Morning in Partido,” where “sa bangis niya’t / kawalang-muwang” is translated into “wild / & far from naïve.” Fittingly, it is also deployed for translations of Filipino adverbs that use repetition to convey a repeating, continuous action, such as “paulit-ulit,” which is translated into “Over & over” in “Contrabass.” Perhaps my favorite use of the ampersand is in that same poem, where Benitez transforms “Anong kilabot!” into what is mostly punctuation: “&, O!—”. “Kilabot” literally pertains to the experience of getting goosebumps in the presence of something frightful, supernatural, or even incredibly beautiful; in other words, the sublime. Whereas “sublime” is abstract, “kilabot” is visceral, and the near non-verbal translation captures that speechless sensation wonderfully.
Jacobo articulates her critical inquiry into selfhood and belonging in an ever-changing world through this wisdom of nature and the body. In “Gems” she ponders:
& yet what is lost
if they all change
places, a gemwith another gem—
like plague
merely dancing
in circles
She playfully highlights both sameness and difference in the gems in question—a pearl and a fruit—as both are considered treasures for different reasons, and thus the importance of context in discourse about either. Taking it further, she also draws from indigenous wisdom in poems like “Oriol’s Song,” a poem about the Bicolano serpent goddess Oriol, where she asserts a single identity without flattening its multiplicity:
not a woman
nor a bird
nor a snakeGoddess bare.
The collection rejects binaries, blurring the lines between categories that, elsewhere, are rigid (“The fence, so long left / open”). Jacobo presents these binaries to the reader and reveals that the answer to the question, “Which one?” can be “neither,” “both,” or “depends on when you ask.” That which emerges from this fluidity appears, at first, as acts of transfiguration, but as I walk deeper into the lush world of Arasahas, I instead find that these phantasms are not simply the poet’s inventions, but revelations about our deeper natures. Neither domesticated nor wild, woman nor animal, singular nor collective, Bikolano nor Filipino, native nor stranger—we were never just either or. In all of us is an inherent queerness, a truth we had perhaps once known but forgotten. The translation adds yet another layer of tension as meanings fall into the water in the ferrying from one tongue to another, picking up new insights as it travels to the other shore. What a pleasure it is to be reminded of our complex entanglements with one another, and with the many worlds we move within, into, and beyond. I walk out of this book sticky and electric.
Born and raised in Manila, Lian Sing currently writes from central Texas. Her first chapbook Revelations (Factory Hollow Press, 2024) was selected by Hoa Nguyen as the winner of the 2023 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She received her degree in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines Diliman and has work published in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Meridian, Quarter After Eight, Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, and elsewhere.
*****
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