Liaa Fernandez

Do You Speak Tagalog?

Liaa Fernandez

after Kaveh Akbar

I remember learning how to pronounce one of my mother tongues the way my colonizer would

English is a language that asks you to close your mouth shrink syllable after syllable until the words only rattle out in the space where tongue collides with the teeth

like the sound of a knife grinding on broken glass until every corner of your mouth is cut by the need to survive

until you forget the way your mother moved her tongue to form a kundiman to sing you to sleep

self-portrait without country

Liaa Fernandez

sometimes i still think i could have been her i could have been the girl the kundiman sings of in those old Tagalog love poems about country

instead i was born from the womb of a mother who lost her mother and in my girlhood i became a daughter who lost her country

at the international arrivals terminal in miami a customs and immigrations officer chuckles at my green card & says [i’m] so close to becoming part of this country

and i think he means to say when the green card is switched for a blue passport the music will start to make sense at least one country

will remember my name will know how to mother me or will listen as i translate instructions but instead it was this country

that cut open my mother’s womb my first home i do not mean to sound like an ungrateful daughter who cannot learn to love a country

that will not love her back but maybe i am not looking for someone to love only a home only a country

that can contain my perpetually teenage longing for somewhere to belong when asked to name my desire i want for a country

that can hold me in its lap before i lose myself thinking about all the things i had to lose when i learned to live without my mother’s country

Ars Poetica

Liaa Fernandez

on my birth certificate in metro manila / my mother’s first name becomes my second / when i begin catholic school in north carolina / i omit my second name from all papers / and practice saying my first name / with a different accent / i tear my own name in my own mouth / and this is my first attempt at forgetting / i ask the virgencita to forgive me for self-sabotage / go to friday mass and say a prayer / holy mary mother of god pray for me a sinner now / after all / i come from a long line of women / who only know how to disappear / i watch the doctors cut my mother’s chest open / feel my own heart tear with it / then ask my classmates in maryland to call me / [ liaa melissa ] / i am twelve years old / the daughter of orphans / and i have never been more afraid / for the first time / remaining present in my own body / becomes an act of defiance / i am thirteen when i learn that / before i am my own person / i am somebody’s daughter / they call me / [unica hija] / [aki ni melissa] / [dalagang pilipina] / all the names of who i belong to / are found in languages i tried to forget / but / when i learn that [ liaa ] comes from / a tagalog doctor / because my mother wanted me / to be a doctor / i am sixteen and do not ask her / a question i fear to be too invasive / :

is this your way of telling me i am the one who will heal us that i must be the first to try to remember who we were before the world gave us too much to heal from

Liaa Fernandez is a writer and activist from Metro Manila, Philippines. Currently based in Washington, DC, she is a 2019 alumnus of the International Writing Program’s Between the Lines youth cultural exchange programs.