The Border Against Belonging
From the border cities of Juárez and El Paso to America’s courtrooms, Sasha
Pimentel’s For Want of Water is not a collection to chart a way home. It’s
a way to claim one.
By Asa Drake https://aaww.org/postauthor/asa-drake/
Kentucky National Guard
The eruption cloud from Mount Pinatubo, taken from the US-operated Clark
Air Base on Luzon Island in the Philippines. Photo courtesy Kentucky
National Guard
ESSAYS https://aaww.org/category/essays/#toc | ASA DRAKE
https://aaww.org/tag/asa-drake, FOR WANT OF WATER
https://aaww.org/tag/for-want-of-water, PHILIP METRES
https://aaww.org/tag/philip-metres, SASHA PIMENTEL
https://aaww.org/tag/sasha-pimentel, BORDER
https://aaww.org/tag/border DECEMBER
12, 2018
The Philippines has a unique term for Filipinxs caught between borders:
Balikbayan. For citizens who have lived abroad for over a year, including
overseas workers, former citizens who visit home, and the children of these
citizens—citizens of other countries—Balikbayan privilege
http://www.immigration.gov.ph/faqs/visa-inquiry/balikbayan-previlege offers
the ability to return to the Philippines for up to one year without a
visa. It’s a romantic proposition, a country that promises *you can always
come home*. Even your children can come back. I am such a Balikbayan, the
child of another Balikbayan, but my Balikbayan status is contingent on my
mother. As the foreign national child of a Balikbayan, I must be traveling
with my Balikbayan parent in order to claim the same privilege. As long as
my mother is living, I can go back. But once my mother is dead, no
authority in the Philippines will recognize my homecoming. To lose a parent
is to lose your way home, forever.
Born in Manila and raised in the United States and Saudi Arabia, Sasha
Pimentel is Balikbayan but her poetry collection For Want of Water is
not. In this second collection, she explores the borders of American
identity, a perimeter widened by American military presence, a global
economy, and, perhaps most importantly, the dispersal of families across
border cities. In doing so, Pimentel presents borderland as something
human-sized. She presents a body able to rupture the border against
belonging. We are so rarely told about the sovereignty of our own bodies.
We see the body attacked. We hear threats to our safety, hear how our
relationship with this county can be altered. In New Jersey this year,
Baljinder
Singh, a citizen, suddenly was not
an ordinary man denaturalized over paperwork. With the widening control of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement from the border cities of Juárez and El
Paso to America’s courtrooms, Pimentel’s is not a collection to chart a way
home. It’s a way to claim one, even when home is a notion caught in
America’s mythos.
For Want of Water is grounded in the bodies of speakers and populations
in motion. If water is the border, as it is between Juárez and El Paso, as
it is between the Philippines and the United States, then how should we
imagine the human body, made nearly entirely of water, if not as a border?
If water is the border, then the border is not motionless. It pushes. It
erodes. And like our bodies, the borderlands move. In “Sea Change,”
Pimentel constructs a border like a trick of the morning light, momentarily
cast over two cities:
Morning, and light seams
through Juárez, its homes like pearls, El Paso
rippling in the dark. Today I understand
the fact of my separate body, how it tides
to its own center, my skin crumbling from thirst
Light is stitched onto the landscape of El Paso. The speaker describes
Juárez as an illuminated city, but the “seam” suggests a secondary
definition, the “seam” that is a vulnerable gap. Pimentel presents Juárez—a
city so often defined as the embodiment of the dangerous effects of
U.S.-Mexico border politics—as shining. She attaches Juárez to her own
America, “its homes like pearls” on that string, not dangerous, but in
danger. And in doing so, she recognizes the smallness of the Rio Grande,
the shared fate of two cities strung along a border.
When the speaker asks, “When did my heart / become a boat,” she places
herself as a vessel caught between countries while simultaneously becoming
the vector between them. Her body is placed into the seam, the border, and
yes, the body is in danger. Even within the intimate borders of a house,
her body’s safety is uncertain:
through translucent bone. I walk
into a room where a man is
sleeping. I walk out,
and my mother dies. Water
hammers behind the walls and in my knees.
Crossing a threshold invokes a floodgate and yet, Pimentel guides the
reader back into the body, sustained by equal pressure “behind the walls
and in my knees.” The body is also a boundary, an effort of Newtonian force
held against other walls. If the body is borderland, then occupying any
space is a struggle for sovereignty.
The emigrant who has left their country of origin has yet to arrive at a
destination. Such is the case in “School Terrorist Exercise, 2005,” a poem
whose title is immediately followed by “*Sapulpa, Oklahoma,*” a city name
that sits on the page less as a dedication than as an epigraph—here is a
poem derived from the politics of place, not dedicated to them. Pimentel
gives us the expectation of disaster next to the language of absence, “the
exiled,” the “emigrants.” While the poem has a pinpointed time and space,
our narrator drifts through both; after all, “no matter the city my body’s
in, / there is always a possible fire.” Her singular body draws one
nation’s tragedy into another. Students in a school rehearse what it would
look like to save themselves from an active shooter; the speaker and her
mother watch the Khobar Towers bombing, an attack orchestrated under the
pretext of removing an American military presence in Saudi Arabia; and they
recall when Mount Pinatubo erupted, a natural disaster which in 1991
resulted in the removal of all American Armed Forces from the Philippines
until 2012. Years after Mount Pinatubo’s eruption and the ensuing storm
which covered the Philippines in a mixture of volcanic ash and water, she
recounts the devastation in the present tense. Still, it:
*is raining: *So even if hugging your knees to the sound
of Lola singing each Hail Mary worked, if for such
recitation the right terrain gave way
to guide the lava away from your home, all you needed to do
to die was to step outside and breathe. Emigrants kiss
their rosaries, thinking, it wasn’t us.
And yet, it is hard to say “it wasn’t us” to a mother who “searched each of
the passing faces /… as if every gray, caked oval could be / her own.” The
speaker rehearses the many moments “it wasn’t us.” She is still practicing
the moment when she’ll need to pray for “an act of god / against the other
acting god,” which is to say, she is still approximating her distance from
disaster. News is piecemeal with “all the calls long / distance, the
wringing of hands.” Media reports are insufficient to recognize a place she
knows should be familiar to her. So the emigrant manifests the events she
has escaped. She fills in the gaps in official reports. It is not the
speaker’s empathy that is surprising. Her lack of information is
surprising. After all, these events are, at least, peripherally American:
the American school, the sleeping quarters of American Air Force personnel,
an American airbase buried at the foot of a volcano. She imagines “such a
recitation” of holy song where “the right terrain gave way,” a recitation
that takes control of her geography.
And within Pimentel’s collection, the terrain does give way. Pimentel
allows the speaker to encircle her borders. In “Bodies, and Other Natural
Disasters,” she tells us how she subverts the physical terrain she lives
in to protect her mother:
beyond the plane. Bodies stack upon bodies, the tide
withdraws its claim. She says, mag-ingat ka, anak,
*the *Wall Street Journal says the drug war’s crossed over,
*don’t you know minamahal pa rin kita?, *and I keep
my borderland from her, say nothing of our yielding
necks. She must see the mounding dead here
The speaker is possessive of the dangerous borderland: “my borderland.” Her
proximity “here” to “the mounding dead” threatens to dehumanize her.
Perhaps this is why the peripheral, the drug war (the war at all), is kept
close to her mother’s love, both italicized: *“the drug war’s crossed
over,/ don’t you know minamahal pa rin kita?”* When her mother hints at the
borderland, it, too, is pushed into italics, without translation. It’s a
small diversion, a protective act in which a mother shares her love and a
daughter cherishes her mother’s language, an act that in itself can “guide
the lava away from your home,” if we can make such invocations. Pimentel
suggest that we can.
Within the same poem, Pimentel returns to an imagining of Mount Pinatubo’s
eruption: “Walls break, people run, and in the middle of this, / I imagine
a girl, also baring her expectant palms, her life / line, love line,
crevices seeking water.” Here, the danger is historical, and expressly
imagined in contrast to “the mounding dead” who the speaker doesn’t mention
to her mother, the dead “here,” in El Paso, in Juárez. Pimentel provides
the imagined, too, with a place in the body. When the girl she manufactures
points to “her expectant palms, her life / line, love line, crevices
seeking water” we know these places in our own bodies. I know that in my
hand is also a place my mother has marked for future danger, a short life
line, a crossed love line. In the middle of disaster, I, too, will be the
girl turning to my hand to locate this eruption. Pimentel makes danger a
fact for the body to know. The body tells me that the earth is a fluid
thing. We are given the evidence: the volcano, the river, the body with
“skin tender as water.” It is that simple. We are shown the evacuation. We
are able to imagine an open hand, and we use it to read into a real future.
In the future, we are the “emigrant” in America, as if we do not come from
a land occupied by America. The American military’s departure from the
Philippines after 94 years of occupation goes untelevised
. https://aaww.org/the-border-against-belonging/#_ftn3And yet it is this
proximity between documented history and the undocumented experience that
Pimentel’s poetry embodies. We are shown an American experience within
events dismissed as foreign broadcasts, and, as a result, we must redefine
borders, alter a global scale, its allocations which define one tragedy as
ours and another as someone else’s.
If we are going to talk about the emigrant, if we are going to identify our
origins with our mothers, then certainly, the body is a borderland
susceptible to other borders. Our proximity to one another is unavoidable:
“House of her body, animal in grief. I carry my mother on my shoulder, cage
her voice / against my cheek.” We carry the bodies who have carried us. We
occupy the nations that have occupied homelands. So we move with them. We
are moved by them, as much as the Rio Grande moves two countries beside it.
And yet, the border incurs costs. A border means having to pay.
My mother, a first generation immigrant, explained to me that love in our
language means expense. Mahal. Because “ours” was always a small family, I
thought she meant the language of the Balikbayan. In this definition, the
Balikbayan’s is a body that must produce its proof of love, and in doing so
holds back language. In Pimentel’s “13 Ways of Knowing Her” the speaker can
no longer ask her mother “where she is”:
I buy her a plastic owl on amazon.com.
It’s solar-powered, neck pivots, eyes glow.
The adult in me no longer wants to love. Like this. But I remember the
prayer of her armpit on my shoulder, her breasts crescent on my nascent
own, the smell of carpet and carrying her cramped and dragging legs. Mor-
timer!—, my mother—
her voice on the phone sobbing my name keeps
my anger still in motion, and I click for priority ship.
By the end of the poem, we have a speaker who can only “try to tell” about
her mother. When she cannot make her mother understandable, the speaker
looks to the body, the physical overlapping of her mother and herself, “the
/ prayer of her armpit on my shoulder.” Language fails, but the body
manages to be memory, a shared sensation, a shared weight.
What I want is for her roving eye to keep still.
Instead I mimic her voice, my throat heaving with trill.
Language fails but language is part of the body, and to perpetuate even a
mother’s failing mother tongue, that too is a form of preservation.
Belonging demands being caught in one another’s borders, to know that
proximity is a shared experience. Pimentel rationalizes that our bodies are
enough for others to understand us. When I call my cousins on Skype, no one
understands my Tagalog. I’m mimicking my mother’s voice, inhabiting a few
sentences from her throat, a dialect lost half a century ago in the
provinces. I have only my mother’s accent to repeat, the way I have tried
and tried to resemble her, and it is enough. The people on Kaingin Rd.
recognize my mother’s sound from my throat. Isn’t that also romantic, that
our anatomy could make us recognizable, the border like a new skin that
anyone might recognize us in and welcome us home?
https://aaww.org/the-border-against-belonging/#_ftnref1
Asa Drake https://aaww.org/postauthor/asa-drake/ is a Filipina American
writer and public services librarian in Central Florida. Her most recent
work is forthcoming or published in The American Poetry Review, *The
Georgia Review*, and Poetry Northwest. She is the recipient of
fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Tin House and
Idyllwild Arts. Her chapbook, “One Way to Listen,” was selected by Taneum
Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest.