ROMALYN ANTE

Pusikit: On Working as a Poet whilst Working for a Living

Can I tell you a secret? In 2010, when I was applying for British residency five years after my mother brought the whole family to the UK, I confused ‘middle name’ with ‘middle initial’. In the Philippines, it’s customary to write the first letter of our mother’s maiden name between our given name and surname. So, across the petal-bright paper of the official form, I scribbled my mother’s maiden name: Pusikit.

When I think of this blunder now, I am reminded of poet Richard Blanco’s words in ‘My Father in English’: “the exile who / tried to master the language he chose to master him”. Despite living in England for many years now, I still cannot seem to tame the language of the country that has so much control over me and other migrants like my family. When I started writing poetry in the midst of April snow in 2012, the same year I graduated as a nurse, people made comments about me and my writing: “You will never be a poet here in the UK, your grammar is just bad.” Worse, some people also assumed that not being able to talk like them meant I understood less. Someone even asked me once, “Do you really get what this book means?”

However, there is a memory, a place, that goes beyond people’s discouragement. When I think why I write, I am sucked back to my childhood years when my family could not afford a tricycle fare to send me to school. To reach the school where I could learn English, I waded through the intense heat, my cheeks stinging in the sun, my backpack indenting its weight into my shoulders. I also got soaked in the sharp rain of June, the sole of my worn-out shoe slapping the wet asphalt like a dead person’s tongue.

When I was about eleven, my playmate-neighbours joined their nurse-mother in Canada. My siblings and I clambered over their steel gates to rummage through the left-behind boxes of books. Those thrown-away things were treasures for us: books with damp bindings, pages with corners embroidered in yellow-green mould. But the letters, the words, were still ebony-stark, as if they were printed yesterday. I did not grow up in a house tinged with the smell of old books but whenever the moon rose from behind the dark-blue misted peak of Suso ng Dalaga in the distance, my maternal grandfather, Tatay Lolo, would gather me and my siblings to recount myths and folk tales. We would gape at his gesticulations as candlelight flickered across his wrist and hand. Through his voice, I grew to love language, its music, and the sweet perfume of the evening breeze suffusing his words.

The truth is, in our village, Tatay Lolo’s surname Pusikit equated to only one thing: poor people. His mother died in childbirth when he was eight. By the season of rambutan, his father brought a new woman into their home and turned to his five half-orphaned children and said, “You must stop going to school now, since you’ve already learnt how to count.” If you know how to count, you can work the menial jobs without getting duped. So at such a young age, Tatay Lolo became a kargador in the market, fetching basins of water from the river for the fishmongers, scrubbing gut-stenched stalls at the end of the day. Sometimes, he would sleep on a butcher’s table, staring at the Milky Way’s diagonal blur in the sky before closing his eyes.

The Pusikit were notorious for coming from angkan ng mga mahihirap or the clan of the poor. But Tatay Lolo never stopped working. At thirteen, he started sweeping the floor of our town’s barber shop. He swept and swept until a panel of sunrise on the black marble swelled into the buzzing of customers, extending to the raucous cries of vendors from across the street. He swept and swept until the owner clicked the door locked.

A barber offered him a job in Manila, where he was taught how to trim hair and blade the edges of the back clean. At night, Tatay Lolo climbed into the attic of the barber’s shop, where he was given a bed (a mattress, really), but he would scramble down again to lie on the green plastic bench next to the scissor rack because his mattress was infested with surot: biting ticks which left his arms and chest stinging in blisters. I imagine him lying on the bench (as he once did on the butcher’s table), still gazing beyond what was above him, past the monsoon moths around the light bulb, until the shadows buried him in the rustling darkness.

When Tatay Lolo was eighteen he went back to our town, carrying nothing but a black pouch with two scissors and one plastic comb, to start his own venture. On the first day, he had one head to trim, on the third, it was doubled. He met my grandmother, Nanay Lola, who was working as a helper at a tiny boutique across the road from where he found a space for his barber’s. The other vendors told Nanay Lola, “Don’t go for that man, he’s poorer than a rat.” But young people’s hearts, though naive, see deeply into things that the knowledgeable can be blind to.

They married and rented a space on the ground under someone’s stilt house, living among the chickens and a stray dog. When Tatay Lolo’s tally reached a hundred heads per day, they could afford a small room. Days and years passed like snippets of hair falling into dark drifts, and they managed to build a small hut they could at last call their own. But they were struck by fate again when their first son, Donald, fell ill. Their son was eight years old when he was diagnosed with a congenital heart disease. One morning at the hospital, Donald sat up in bed, called for his siblings, and turned to Tatay Lolo and said, “Tatay, magaling na ako.” Tatay, I’m healed.

When his three siblings arrived – my mother, the youngest among them – he kissed each one on the cheek and turned to Tatay Lolo again to ask, “Tatay, ako’y inyong buhatin.” Tatay, carry me in your arms.

“Tatay, ako’y ididlip lang.” Tatay, I’m just going to take a nap.

Tatay Lolo lulled him, feeling his son’s head dangled over his right shoulder, his breaths gurgling at his neck, his little chest caving in, as if collapsing into his. Soon, the exhalations slowed until there were no more breaths. That year, the monsoon season was dimmer and trees pelted against Tatay Lolo’s roof. Lightning flashed across the rafters and it sounded like Donald’s laughter. One morning, Nanay Lola ran to Tatay Lolo to hand him a purple umbrella. “Go to the cemetery. Our son might get wet in the downpour.”

“Darling, our son is dead.” Tatay Lolo looked down at his feet.

When we were growing up, Tatay would gather us children on the terrace. Candle flickering at his wrists, Tatay would tell us that ghosts are real – for on the night of Uncle Donald’s wake, he had seen him at the foot of his bed, gazing down at him in his burial shirt made of the cheapest pineapple fibres. A curtain billowed and he was gone. At that time, I understood only that kind of haunting.

French-Cuban American diarist and essayist Anaïs Nin said: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Perhaps this is true. But perhaps writing goes further than to serve the writer in private too. I’d like to think that when Tatay Lolo narrated his story, writing those words in the wind, he also invited us to live it, so, like him, we could make sense of it, learn from it, and, perhaps, acquire values from it. Be strengthened by it.

When my mother grew up, Tatay Lolo sent her to study nursing.

“You can’t do it,” his fellow barbers said. “You can’t send your daughter to college. Nursing is a course only for the rich!” When Ma got pregnant during her second year of college, the barbers said, “Do not send her back to college since she has a husband now.”

Still, Tatay Lolo snipped as much hair as he could, trimmed many sideburns clean.

“Why would you discourage someone who perseveres?” Tatay Lolo once asked, when I was on an international call to him. Though I knew the question was not just for me.

Whenever Tatay Lolo got home after working all day in the barber shop, I’d pull off his shoes and massage his feet to find little snippets of hair in between his toes, as if they were fine black needles jabbed into his skin. I’d massage his palms to feel the bumpy callouses from the scissor’s grip.

Tonight, I am on a call to him again. The window shines with the amber glow of powdered snow. I have just qualified as a nurse, working in a renal dialysis unit. Like many Filipinos who grew up from angkan ng mga mahihirap, I’ve always promised myself that I would get a secure job so I can help my family in the future. This means only one thing: go into nursing. I wanted to do a writing course at the university, but I was too scared to borrow money from the bank, thinking that in the end I would only have a writing diploma and an empty pocket.

Today, I am telling Tatay Lolo about the patients I care for: those whose kidneys shrunk like Nanay Lola’s. For a moment, we remember what Nanay Lola told him after she developed kidney failure, and our family’s resources (Tatay Lolo’s decades of savings) started to drain away: “Sell our wedding rings, sell this small house. Are you just going to let me die?”

I think of the young me, stepping onto an upturned, empty paint jug to...