Folklorist Maria Tatar argues that there is a pressing urgency in the oral tradition. The folk traditions we inherit (particularly those that are not anthologized) are ones in which “those who were socially marginalized, economically exploited, and sexually subjugated found ways not just to survive but also to endow their lives with meaning.” I would argue that Ina Cariño’s work taps into this same urgency in their debut collection Feast. Theirs is an astute ability to deconstruct and honor multiple traditions in a collection filled with caution and generosity. Feast recognizes a hostile world, where even the food we eat is painful to us in fact or metaphor. If the food is sour, if the methodology is difficult, these facts are necessary cures, like salt and vinegar with which Cariño preserves what we need most.
Early in the collection, Cariño issues a challenge, “show me / someone who won’t argue that there’s nothing / sentimental in this world … in exchange I’ll show you how / to nourish yourself,” to “slice through the fattest layer in your gut & eat.” The space Cariño carves after the gut is a gap situated in the reader, the removal of the thing we must find for ourselves. Cariño tells us to excavate our own bodies, to know the thing that will nourish us, to reject formulaic equivalencies for the rewilding of language. With our stomachs, Cariño leads us through an urgent lexicon of lineage and need that rejects waste.
But the challenge in “Lean Economy,” the poem quoted above, is specific in its address. When the speaker says “they say it’s a shame I subsist / on scraps,” they narrow their eyes on the auditor, who is also present in the wreckage where “in this oily paradigm we learn to glut ourselves / on marrow.” The sequence of poems, continuing with “Milk,” addresses not a general audience but “my brown sister.” Like a folktale, the poem is shared from one sister to another as a protective warning, where Cariño renders the white gaze into simplistic, discarded objects — the “onion-skin,” the” candle-stump.” If the poem is a created, structured world, then Cariño wills it to be one that leaves the colonizer toothless, a point without a bite. Cariño inverts equivalencies between milk and purity until they can benefit a brown feminine collective. They make clear that anticipation is not the same as desire as they anticipate the dullness of the white imagining of their body, and in doing so they shield the body from the othering voice:
I met his onion-skin mother his candle-stump father we talked
about Asia you know that giant country onion-mother said
my English was great no accent! candle-father said I looked exotic
are you — Polynesian? they may as well have asked what it’s like
to wake up smelling like dung like tarantulas burnt rice
Feast is a pact between the speaker and the body, between the speaker and the loved one. One that promises that there are moments when the body is not up for translation, even as the speaker’s own body is cataloged with Latinate words in “Soiled” — “that sound celestial — / cervix, vulva, labia majora,” they call out to “the kids / whose kili-kili drip sweat / from scampering down alleyways,” and give them bodies not defined by a colonizing text. As the poem’s title hints, in Cariño’s lexicon “soiled” is not derogatory. It’s the terminology of the earth, a grounding effort. Like wrapping copper around a loved one’s wrist to keep their body attached to the earth, Cariño’s collection can admire the celestial, while still recognizing that, in order to live, we must be earthly bodies.
Throughout Feast, we return to the earth as nourishment itself: “woodears grow in the sinews of trees (they taste of fragrant dirt)” and “palmfuls of dirt, grease rivering.” In “Snapshots of Girl with Galaxy of Spiders Drowning in Sopas,” the speaker describes the desirable alchemy of their own body:
by the sour soup of my own green body fragrant as mud good brown earth insect-leaf sediment soil oh what alchemy & instead of metal to gold it was calcium to acid magnesium to water chalk to oil
Here, the speaker renders a new hierarchy of material. “Soiled” becomes a life sign, a solid, uncontaminated descriptor that confronts the stereotypes of brownness and desirability. When Cariño describes the speaker’s healing body in “Asocena,” they say “you’ll grow up strong, palpable fruit, steaming / stubborn as ice under rain — a wild soiled thing.” The body that Cariño describes is full of contradictions, both “steaming” and “ice,” and yet it is solid, tangible, of the earth, and I can’t help but compare how close solid is to soiled when I consider the terrain of the poem. “Asocena,” as the title suggests, confronts the stereotype that Filipinos eat dogs, not by denying it but by confronting the colonial mindset that offers no solutions for “how to keep the bones warm in this cold.” Soiled becomes a term of empowerment removed from colonial sentiment favoring the whiteness of the body, the whiteness of an empty plate.
I’m interested in how the lyric itself takes on a kind of alchemy, the way, in “Intake,” Cariño dismantles the formulaic (the literal intake form) in order to maintain the individual. In pairing a lyric I with institutional language, the text emphasizes a knowledge base that resembles our senses and the way we smell our food. Feast demands that the jargon of the institution complement the lyric register. But the intake form itself suggests an important shift in audience — what does it mean to present poetry to the medical professional? To institutional knowledge? How can the lyric counteract the flattening impulse that says “I’m a statistic now”? Under the heading of “History,” Cariño complements family medical history with a lineage of critical thought:
into soil sometimes I read stories
about plundering & these days
I sleep alone (though I love many)
The poem, too, is a methodology for studying the body, where the input of history produces the output of lonely evenings, a separation that isn’t without love, but is the calculated product of study. The poem becomes an argument that one study of the body be informed by another, that our language and the memories we index might offer a way forward.
In “Infinitives,” Cariño charts another methodology into the future tense, one that centers the familial image over the colonial gaze:
who’s to say what I will chant
in the face of pale & proper?
I’ll sift honorifics
pluck syllables
from the branches
of lola’s garden opo-opo”
In the limited grammar I know from Tagalog, one of my favorite aspects is how a word might intensify through repetition. How something is more beautiful because beautiful repeats twice. This isn’t always the purpose of repetition but I like the tradition of a structure that affirms with such clarity. I appreciate that in this stanza, Cariño centers the syllables of “yes” as an honorific, as a way to respect and center an elder in relation to the self by echoing a single voice through time with an infinitive action.
Again and again, Cariño signals that where we come from might suggest where we are going. In crafting “When I Say Hello to the Oldest Apples,” Cariño buries one lineage within another so the separation of their own body from the land, from “fathers, decades of dirt,” is a separation that their own body contains and expresses:
I can’t let go of what I think
is still mine — bloodlines flooding the slopes
of the Cordillera, silver in the hills — pine sap
casing my teeth as I say hello to the oldest apples.
Here, at the end of the poem, we return to the poem’s initial image, the oldest apples, an image that in the distance of the poem is shaped by so many fruits in between — in dreams, in memory. And I’m interested, too, in how we return, through the bloodline which isn’t a simplified history — like the Cordillera, which here clearly refers to the Cordillera mountain range of Luzon (Cariño’s paternal ancestral home). But the Cordillera is also a term we find in the Americas, scattered as a result of Spanish colonialism. It’s a term for home that does not “forget / centuries of grey-eyed Spaniards lurking / my veins, knocking the lumber of my heart.” At the center of the poem, Cariño identifies themselves with the same terminology that defines their forefathers. They, too, contain decades of dirt, but the soil is also their mother’s. The soil that feeds the speaker is a physical and a subconscious manifestation: “I confess, I am / a dirty one. in dreams my claws rake the soil / of my mama’s garden as I search for figs.”
Cariño’s is not an argument toward possession but towards cultivation. In essence, the soil is their own, a self-fulfilling effort to cultivate memory, because we live in a society shaped by displacement, by colonized geography, by contested inheritance. Feast is a collection that holds the unsatisfied ghosts that continue to feed us, those who haunt us to keep us whole.
[Published by Alice James Books on March 7, 2023, 78 pages, $17.95 paperback]
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Yesterday’s Traumas, Today’s Salt
my family dines luxurious—peasant food in crystal bowls:
seven-thousand six-hundred forty-one islands jostling in my soup.
here is Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao—grandmother points to mounds
dunking up & down in the saltbroth. & rice, don’t forget the rice,
which she steamed in the old palayok—earthen pot & lid,
red unglazed clay lending its savage tang to the soft white.
grandmother makes the sign of the cross. archipelago is just another word
for slaughtered, amen, & I chomp on palmfuls of dirt, grease rivering
down my neck—push rice into my open maw. remnants of
a sepia life slosh in the silt of my stomach. because my stolen body
is still burdened with salt, my tongue pinched with its bite, I salt
bitter gourd, drown it in vinegar. I salt fish bellies to dry under sun.
I salt the rice heavy when the meat is low, to trick my stomach
out of hunger. my muscles still remember old aches—as if suspended
in the salt of an ocean I crossed alone. how much can the body take?
a certain kind of pain, this accumulation of salt. I was named anguish
before I was born, crooked teeth crowd my mouth, my fangs rake ash
& soil. will I die when the muck hits my bloodstream. yes I salt, keep—
tuck things away—coins still line the hems of my grandfather’s coat.
I clamor at the sight of salt spilled, grit skidding under broom spindles.
but I pucker from too much salt, fingers withered, oldest ginger. tongue
brined, voice washed by white—my name flapping out of my mouth—
an unfamiliar moth. its chalkwings dust my chin as I swallow
seven-thousand six-hundred forty-one islands: the only home I know.
[“Yesterday’s Traumas, Today’s Salt” was first published in Michigan Quarterly Review]