Dwelling in Possibility: A Conversation with Isabel Cristina Legarda about Beyond the Galleons
We are the vowels of our villages’ lives,
supplying meaning and depth, sometimes invisibly,
but ever-present in the stories unfolding.
“Reading Tutorial for a Jesuit Missionary, 1668”
If home is where the heart is, as the saying goes, for many people of diasporic communities, that heart is found within the stories of generations past and carried in the contemporary voices descended from that resilience and strength. Isabel Cristina Legarda is one of these voices. She is a writer and practicing physician residing in Massachusetts whose work speaks to her Filipina heritage, the lived female experience, and the multifaceted nature of identity.
Isabel’s debut poetry chapbook, Beyond the Galleons, is forthcoming from Yellow Arrow Publishing and will be released in April 2024. Beyond the Galleons is a meditation on Filipino experiences of colonization, ancestral connection, alienation, and the ghosts that haunt people living in geographic or psychological diasporas. This collection combines reflection on the echoes of historical events and rumination on the character of culture with a tribute to the strength of women the author admires, both known and unknown.
Beyond the Galleons is available for preorder (click here for wholesale prices)! Follow Yellow Arrow on Facebook and Instagram @yellowarrowpublishing for Friday sneak peeks into Isabel’s incredible words. Pick up your copy today and make sure to show your love to Isabel in the comments.
Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow interviewer, and Isabel engaged in conversation where they discussed the creative inspirations behind this collection and the process of forging compelling poetry from themes both delicate and complex.
What inspired this project? Can you talk about how this idea developed into a poetry chapbook?
These poems were written over a couple of years, many of them in workshops led by poet Caroline Goodwin, a beloved mentor. (Shout-out to poet Diane Lockward, whose craft books we used and whose prompts generated so many poems in these workshops.) Being Filipina emerged as an important, recurring focus in my writing, and when I had a critical mass of poems written, I started grouping [them] together around that focus.
The dates, locations, and historical details included in your poems are a powerful thread throughout. What did the research for a collection like this entail?
I’ve had an interest in the Philippine-American colonial period for a long time. A few years ago, I found an eye-opening collection of political cartoons from that period entitled The Forbidden Book, some nonfiction work about the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and first-hand accounts by American women who went to the Philippines as schoolteachers, including a diary I was able to physically handle and read at the Schlesinger Library [at Harvard University]. Those [words] inspired me to keep searching for articles about that period online as well as contemporary photos. I’m interested in Spanish colonialism, too, of course, and one day stumbled across what Father Alcina wrote about women being good readers, which made me want to explore those centuries as well. I could spend hours happily falling down these rabbit holes.
There is a strong message of feminine strength that simmers among these pages. Can you share a little of your personal experience with this strength and why it is important to share?
My widowed maternal grandmother got her PhD at Stanford [University], then became a respected professor of history at the University of the Philippines, all while raising my mom as a single parent. Years after her teaching career was over, her former students would rave about what a phenomenal teacher she was. My paternal grandmother, who came from a tiny island near Palawan, was a suffragist and a civic leader. Both of my grandmothers were wonderful writers. My mother started [medical] school at 17 and was a practicing pediatrician by her mid 20s. My mother and grandmothers are all survivors of war. I have another role model in an older first cousin, an attorney, who prosecuted a congressman for sexual assault of a child and won. I’ve been fortunate to have grown up surrounded by such exemplars of tenacity, integrity, and courage. When I’d feel discouraged or nervous about something, my mother would often remind me that the genes and spirit of these brave, intelligent, hard-working women are part of me. I’ve always seen women as strong-willed and capable of anything. I think it’s important to remind the world—and ourselves—that that’s who we are.
Orange clouds: not sunset,
but Manila burning in the distance.
//
How can I be brave like you . . .
“Far from the Tree”
Who are some female-identified writers who have inspired you and your poetry?
The first woman author who inspired me was Natalie Babbitt. I read her novel Tuck Everlasting when I was nine, and it was life changing. She showed me what language and story could do, in ways I had never encountered or imagined. I had the privilege of meeting her at a Q&A for kids at a bookshop I [now] miss, The Cheshire Cat in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Growing up I idolized mostly fiction writers: Madeleine L’Engle, Isabel Allende, Flannery O’Connor, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston. For poetry there are so many now—almost too many to name. I’ve been inspired by Sandra Cisneros, Lucille Clifton, Paisley Rekdal, Pattiann Rogers, Caylin Capra-Thomas, Leila Chatti, Michelle Peñaloza, and of course my mentor Caroline Goodwin.
What was your process for capturing such strong experiences and emotions in such small spaces?
My writing almost always starts with an image I can’t stop thinking about. Sometimes it’s a line I “hear,” but most often it’s something I “see” in my mind—I’m a very visual thinker. If the image stays with me and really won’t go away, I eventually have to write about it. Usually there’s something about it that carries significant emotional charge, and if I keep close to the image while I write—follow its energy closely—that emotional charge can find a habitat in the emerging words. My poem about Saint Lorenzo Ruiz is one example of that process. He came and stood in a corner of my living room with his rosary and wouldn’t leave till I wrote that poem. Not literally or paranormally, of course—I don’t see ghosts or anything like that. But in my mind he waited there, patiently, silently, until the words were down. I was supposed to be working on a poem for a workshop based on a totally unrelated prompt, but I ended up turning in Lorenzo’s poem instead that week.
There is a rich discourse on language in the lines of your poetry. To what extent do you think a language shapes a person’s identity?
I think language and identity are inextricably entwined. (When I see people who are not genetically Filipino or Austronesian speaking a Philippine language fluently, I perceive them as having real insider understanding of our culture in ways that ethnic make-up can’t automatically provide.) I was raised in three languages—English, Spanish, and Tagalog—and I think that gave me early exposure to the way language not only forms but also reflects cultural difference and how we relate to the world. Language can shape our very reality, or at least how we think about it, depending on the language we use, but it also arises from the way we live in that reality in the first place. In the communitarian Tagalog culture, there’s not a great word for privacy as we know it in English; we have to borrow the English word, alter a Spanish word, or use an inexact Tagalog word for it. In English there isn’t an equivalent for gigil, sometimes translated as the uncontrollable urge to squeeze something cute, or nakakagigil, an adjective meaning “making you grit your teeth together out of delight,” for instance when seeing a cute baby (do non-Filipinos clench their teeth together when they find a baby cute?). Growing up with a word with no exact equivalent in other cultures, a word for a particular idea or experience, must surely shape a person’s self-concept and perception of the world.
(I actually just published a whole essay on this topic, in case you’re interested: herstryblg.com/true/2023/02/24-poetry-in-a-second-language-why-i-cant-fully-decolonize-my-life.)
No mere condiment, bagoong becomes a meal’s soul
in the way mere salt cannot, the secret of a dish’s complexity,
an ocean spirit possessing the food.
“Bagoong Alamang”
I appreciated the vivid descriptions of Filipino dishes and delicacies in your work. Can you expand on the relationship between food and culture and its importance to the diaspora?
Food is most definitely a love language in the Philippines, and for Filipinos in exile, it is a lifeline home. We need to eat to survive, but we love to eat because of the sensory pleasure, contentment, and sense of home food has the power to bring us. I feel that sense of home, that kinship, any time I share a bowl of rice or a coconut milk-based dessert with someone, and we both close our eyes for a moment just savoring the morsel in our mouths. No words needed. Full understanding of a lifetime of experience in one moment. Shared moments over food bring a little warmth from home into our colder diasporas, console diasporic loneliness, and can restore a sense of identity and community when we feel a little lost or alone.
We released the gorgeous cover of Beyond the Galleons with this interview. What do you think about the final version?
I am in awe of what [Yellow Arrow creative director] Alexa Laharty produced and absolutely love the cover. With no visual art ability or aptitude, I had only vague ideas as to what a fitting design would be, and she brought together images that really capture the themes of historic memory and cartography, literal and figurative, that I try to explore in many of the poems.
What would you like your readers to take away from this collection?
I would like us Americans and us Filipinos to be aware that our shared history includes Americans putting Filipinos in a human zoo in Saint Louis as well as thousands of Americans dying on battlefields while helping us during World War II. I would like readers to understand that having your homeland or language or physical self or mental or spiritual self devalued, dismissed, assumed to be inferior, or taken away hurts deeply, but moving past trauma with dignity and grace can be redemptive, just, and peacebuilding. I would like people to know that Philippine women are a force to be reckoned with and deserved the power and equality they had before white men started to fear and subjugate it. Finally, I want readers to know that by virtue of our geographic reality as an archipelago that’s been a crossroads for so many cultures traversing the globe, Philippine history is complex and Philippine culture multifaceted, dynamic, flawed yet beautiful, worth caring about.
Are there any future projects you would like to share?
I’m trying to find a home for a second chapbook (a collection of poems I’ve written about the writing life). I’m also pursuing a years-long dream of completing a short story collection. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll go back to a novel I started working on but put away last year. I dwell in possibility.
You can find more about Isabel and follow her publication news on Instagram and Twitter @poetintheOR. You can order your copy of Beyond the Galleons from Yellow Arrow Publishing at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/beyond-the-galleons-paperback. We’d love to get this collection out far and wide! If you know of any bookstore in your community or local school that would be interested in adding Beyond the Galleons to their shelves, please add a comment below or send an email to editor@yellowarrowpublishing.com.
Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She holds degrees in literature and bioethics and is currently a practicing physician in Boston, Massachusetts. She enjoys writing about women’s lived experience, cultural issues, and finding grace in a challenging world. Her work has appeared in America magazine, Cleaver magazine, The Dewdrop, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Ruminate, Sky Island Review, Smartish Pace, Qu, West Trestle Review, and others.
Melissa Nunez makes her home in the Rio Grande Valley region of south Texas, where she enjoys exploring and photographing the local wild with her homeschooling family. She writes an anime column at The Daily Drunk Mag and is a prose reader for Moss Puppy Mag. She is also a staff writer for Alebrijes Review and interviewer for Yellow Arrow Publishing. You can find her work on her website at melissaknunez.com/publications and follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.
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Thank you, Isabel and Melissa, for sharing your conversation. Preorder your copy of Beyond the Galleons today. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women-identifying writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we AMPLIFY women-identifying creatives this year by purchasing one of our publications or a workshop from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, for yourself or as a gift, joining our newsletter, following us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or subscribing to our YouTube channel. Donations are appreciated via PayPal (staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com), Venmo (@yellowarrowpublishing), or US mail (PO Box 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.