A poet’s history of home: Mapping according to Dinah Roma

THERE are thousands of years that separate Herodotus, the so-called “Father of History,” and Dinah Roma, this poet who dares to announce that what she is doing is history. But if we go by the Western standard of Herodotus, we are introduced to a man who never believed we should believe what he wrote or documented. Throughout his career, it is said, Herodotus continued to favor the Ionian definition of history as one that means “research.”

Dinah did her own research and if the first book of history was about names and places, then Herodotus would find a home in Basey—enumerating not only names but also people and the events he heard from them. Dinah was elaborating the nexus between geography and history.

But Dinah is a poet first and foremost and here she is with the language of the maps couched in lyricism rather than historical markers, as she talks of how “Your palm hesitates over an expanse/Of ancient hearsay, where faith wavered/The journey, as if to say,/Grip the courage in your heart/to scale earth and, at last,/ See it not made of matter.

The fact is a poet indeed has to defend her position in historicizing places and persons.

In the first chapter, Dinah charts not the map—exteriorized always, with mounds and hills—but sings of Basey as a poetic imagination.

This poetry proceeds from what she calls “the intersections between humans and their environment.” A whole slew of anthropological literatures cover this field. Human geog raphy. Anthropogeography. Cultural ecology.

What are these disciplines? They have something to do with a book written by Dr. Dinah Roma, who while trying to remember her hometown opted to respect history as allegory. In her book, we see on the cover the title Weaving Basey, a nod to the mat-makers of the place, and a salutary remark to history that is anti-history, to poetry that tries to eschew poetry if only to recover the facts of a place.

Here is the poet in the interstices of history and here is the historian, the socio-political chronicler, making comments in between narratives.

To quote James Clifford in his interview with Alex Coles: “The world seemed to secrete many, divergent, arts and cultures, discrepant modernities.”

In her book about her hometown, Dinah was doing ethnography but this is one that included sensing, feelings—dimensions that were eschewed by classic anthropology that marveled at its power to remain objective.

At the heart of this book are the material struggles of a writer and her memories. Here also are the questions: Are the methodologies of ethnography infinitely expandable? Or do they snap when pushed too far? Are the historical methods infinitely expandable?

To Clifford, “all methodologies, which in the interpretive/historical studies are always modes of partial translation, first get you somewhere and then run out of gas.”

So, to Dinah Roma, we ask this question: how do we avoid running out of gas?

You can stop traveling to where the archives are and stay at your home. In the case of Dinah, she listened to Inna (her own mother) and her own uncle, Isko, talk in the kitchen, where the Pulahanes ceased to be a historical lecture but a reminiscence.

As Dinah recalls, the two would repeatedly talk about Pulajanes. The frequency with Tatay Isko mentioning the group made her think he was part of the movement.

In the same chapter, the muchcited study conducted by Richard Arens, contains the complaints of the historian about “the dearth of materials as a critical challenge to understanding the complexities of the movement.”

Another study by Brian Mcallister Linn on the same movement talks of the “same lack of documentary sources.”

There in the two sentences are the primacy of the text. Literature can save these pulahanes from being accused of mere banditry. The binary opposition is really between the literate and non-literate.

Did Dinah also raise her hands in disgust when she could not find any written documents about her hometown? Or did that signal for her to find other voices—to celebrate the polyphonic? Were texts and written documents the only necessary tools to reminisce about her hometown?

It appears not so. History does not end in the past; it continues on and on. In fact, the mind documenting goes back to the Spanish colonial era when the fear being talked about with the coming of the pulahanes equated with the fear of Muslim marauders who kidnap men, women, and children. The future of fear is also here when the talk of bandits and undue taxation is carried into the news of new subversion present in contemporary Samar and Leyte.

She talks of a multitude of narratives: the Moro raids, the Pulahanes movement, the ancient trade routes…, the haunting shadow cast by the Balangiga massacre and the enduring allure of its skilled mat weavers.

True enough, in Etymologies of Home, Dinah claims: “And with this promise of local history, I add my stake as a poet writing an account of her home, returning home, returning to its home the imaginings made possible by poetry, by the metaphors that enrich the layers of journeys, each poem a closing in of distance a prelude to arrival.

She samples us with her autoethnography, which in the book by Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones and Carolyn Ellis is defined as “proximity not objectivity” as not becoming “an epistemological point of departure and return.”

She has towards the end this wish: that we do not allow the tradition (like the mats) to fray at its edges. Or in the absence of archives, there are always memories, and kinship. Even love for home.

Weaving Basey. A Poet’s History of Home is published by Katig Writers Network Inc. The book was formally launched in De La Salle University on April 13, 2024.