Poetry Mirrors Us: In Tribute to Marne Kilates

In 1884, in the heart of the Spanish empire, Madrid, a stirring speech in honor of painters Juan Luna (1857–1899) and Félix Resurrección Hidalgo (1855–1913) was delivered by foremost Filipino propagandist and soon-to-be novelist, the medic and martyr José Rizal (1861–1896).

In his ruminations, Rizal said that Luna’s El Spoliarium and Hidalgo’s Las Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas al Populacho reflect two faces on the same coin that can best encapsulate the cultural realities of the colonial Philippines. Listen to Rizal: “For this reason, in Luna there are shadows, contrasts, dying light, the mystery and the horror, as resonance of the dark tempests of the Tropics, the lightning and the roaring explosions of its volcanoes. This is why Hidalgo is all light, color, harmony, sentiment, purity, as Filipinas is in her moonlit nights, in her quiet days, with her horizon that invites to meditation, cradle gently rocking the infinite.” (Translated from the original Spanish by Encarnacion Alzona for the Rizal Centennial Commission and Raul Guerrero Montemayor.)

But Rizal made other scathing remarks that reverberated even up to Manila, the farthest frontier of the empire. Listen to Rizal again: “Genius knows no race, it is like air, like light, like God, it belongs to all.” Both artists as claimed by Rizal are true sons of Mother Spain and her daughter, the Philippines. It is in this kind of thinking about the Filipino as a hybrid, a mix of sorts, borne out of this incestuous and incredible affair between a mother and a child, that one finds the incipient, influenced, and the incendiary Filipino poetics incarnated by Luna and Hidalgo into bodies of gladiators and virgins about to face their stark deaths in that dark and cold colosseum—incessant in its insurrection.

While the subjects of the Luna and Hidalgo paintings are foreign, both pagan gladiators and Christian virgins, Rizal commented that Luna and Hidalgo tapped the colors of tropical Philippines. Citing the images of powerful typhoons and volcanic activities, ancient and alive in our archipelago, the luminous light that turns our lands into the most verdant pastures and our seas into the bluest incognita, Rizal’s speech almost sounded like a poem.

Here, we see how beauty begets beauty, how imagination is extended and meanings are expanded by looking through the Luna and Hidalgo paintings. The motivation of Rizal is certainly patriotic, but the descriptions of his compatriots’ works can only be described as ekphrastic. As it is painting so as in poetry. It is in line with this ekphrastic imagination that we offer this special section to the memory of Marne Kilates (1952–2024), a Filipino poet from the Bikol region who is also known for his works of translations of Bikol and Filipino poetry into English. In fact, in the early days of blogging and free domains, Kilates launched an online poetry page dedicated to ekphrasis and translation, two creative praxes that show his passion for the visual and the verbal. In his collections, Pictures as Poems & Other (Re)Visions (UST Publishing House, 2012), Lyrical Objects (UST Publishing House, 2015), and Time’s Enchantments and Other Reflections (Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2015), Kilates pursued the entangled relationship that exists between various allied arts, resulting in a kind of interplay that can only be described as poetry, both intellectually illuminating and spiritually uplifting.

Included in this special section is a Kilates poem that is based on Hidalgo’s La vendedora de lanzones (The Vendor of Lanzones, 1875, oil on canvas). In this poem, we see a triptych of voices: the fruit vendor of lanzones, the parish priest, and the local artist. In one popular tale, the fruit (scientific name: lansium domesticum) used to be nameless and poisonous until, to save the village from hunger, it was blessed by a mountain goddess. The only remainder of the potent poison present in this fruit is now indicated in its name: lason (the Tagalog word for poison), hence, lanzones.

Here we see how Kilates conjures a mise-en-scène that reflects the visages and vestiges of our histories, replete with figures of colonial powers—that of the curate who failed to recognize and account for the blessings of the land. The poisonous fruit is now given as a gift, but the foreigner yielded toward its racial superiority that nothing good can ever come from this god-forsaken place that is the new colony. No arts, no cultures, no civilizations. Unmistakably, in Kilates’s lyrical dialogue, we seem to hear the voice of Rizal giving his paean to the artist Hidalgo. The lanzones vendor is hinted to be the goddess of the mountain, Mariang Makiling, saying her blessing to the chosen artist, the Abel in the narrative.

In this ekphrastic poem, Kilates re-created the narratives that one finds from the Book of Genesis, original and originating, we see how he appropriated the characters from the biblical tales that speak about grace and abundance, forbidden knowledge and carnal desires, exile and melancholia, enfleshed not in the proverbial apple but in a lanzones offered by this Indian woman.

In this issue, I have solicited materials from fellow poets from the Bikol region to offer our memoriam to Marne Kilates. Two of these works are ekphrasis: Enrique Villasis from Milagros, Masbate writes a poem based on the painting by National Artist for Visual Arts, Vicente Manansala (1910–1981) and Francisco V. Peñones, Jr. of Iriga City, Camarines Sur, writes about the painted prince, also known as Prince Giolo, who was taken away from his native land so he could be exhibited and examined in London in 1697.

Villasis has a full-length poetry collection of ekphrastic poems entitled Manansala (UST Publishing House, 2023). Peñones, who is also a visual artist, released his collection entitled P.I. (Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2015) which contains some ekphrastic poems based on visual reproductions and contemporary media that speak about the horror of colonialism in the Philippines along with the contemporary military violences in Latin America, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. Themes of time, memory, and geography—perennial motifs also in Kilates’s poetry—abound in the poems of Kristian Sendon Cordero of Iriga City, Luis Cabalquinto of Magarao, Camarines Sur and Jaya Jacobo from Naga, City. One is invited to see how these poems interplay with one another. Visit the seascape of Bankusay in Villasis’s ekphrasis, the Isla de los Muertos and Santelmo in Cordero’s, vis-a-vis the “Depths of Fields” in Cabalquinto. Gaze at the tattooed skin of this “prince,” who, after his death due to small pox, was flayed so that the valued organ could be put on display at Oxford, and counterpoint it with Hidalgo’s fruit vendor now on display at Museo del Prado. Finally, marvel as to how these fruits of the tropics transform into Jacobo’s hiyas (gems) hidden underneath our contested and perilous seas as the pearl of nuestro perdido eden. For indeed, if we are to return to the beginning of our alamat, it could be that the poison in our translucent fruit and the speck of sea dust transformed into a pearl is the gift. Ang lason ang lunas. The poison is the antidote. And this is the gift we have received in the death and the poetic life Marne Kilates lived for us. His poetry mirrors us.