Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish: A Labor of Grief: The Homie (2/5)
This series documents and reflects on the critical, creative, and lived processes of drafting, revising, and mourning. Since the passing of a dear uncle in February 2018, Jason Magabo Perez has been drafting, performing, and thinking through a one-sentence-long narrative which eventually took on the title “Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish.” Along the way, Perez has mourned and continues to mourn multiple additional deaths: a homie (July 2018); a colleague (August 2018); a collaborator (August 2018); a cousin (November 2019). In this prolonged mourning, in an attempt to de-fetishize the literary art object, using this single narrative work-in-progress as a point of departure, return, and escape, this 5-part series investigates the poetics of revision and the labor of grief. Each part shares the same pattern: A) a distillation of mourning; B) excerpts from drafts of “Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish”; C) passages from concurrent and related reading; D) fragments from proximal texts, i.e. e-mails, tweets, revision notes; E) a revision or experiment. Ultimately, in attending to that which haunts and generates the creative process, this series performs and archives a mourning. In Part 2, Perez re-imagines the passing of a dear homie and comes to terms with the unit of the sentence as something worth overburdening and breaking but also as something that might never wish to end.
A.
By this time, 580 days later, you’ve misplaced the mini yellow sticky note full of those detailed imageries that would hopefully, someday, help you generate an elegy, or a scene, a prayer, something that holds together a longing for your hometown, Oceanside, not Mira Mesa, another hometown, and the mourning of The Homie, who, coincidentally, shares geographic affinities with Mira Mesa, and also with The Cousin who you will lose a year and half later. It will become all so deeply intertwined in your sadness. It is said that The Homie, who died on the corner of Crouch Street and Oceanside Boulevard, tried to stand up after his motorcycle slammed into the truck. You want to re-imagine that scene: The Homie, in a brown and black pendleton, in a white T, in pressed khakis, in Chucks, black shades, is cruising down Oceanside Boulevard. You and the others, who wait at the corner of Oceanside and Crouch, can hear the faint hum of The Homie’s Harley. The Homie’s family is all there. They, the kids, the lolas, the lolos, the aunties, the uncles, the cousins, are all wearing T-shirts with The Homie’s picture on it, red and black Ifugao-patterned cloth, and Chucks. The Homie’s father, in a barong, in a denim vest, in long Dickie’s shorts, and Chucks, is singing along to a video of the The Homie singing so drunkenly and lovingly Keith Urban’s “Blue Ain’t Your Color.” On the sidewalk, there is a cardboard box overflowing with dried roses waiting for The Homie to come through. You and the cousins and the other homies are toasting, downing the deadliest of mixes: one shot of Patron, one shot of Maker’s Mark, and one shot of 151 — Galvatron. You pour some on the sidewalk beside the cardboard box. Someone else lights the sidewalk on fire. Those with bikes replace the sky with the sound of their revving engines. It so loud, you cover your ears. You know the The Homie is coming through. You just know it. You hear his Harley approaching. You see The Homie, his shades, his pointy beard. As he passes, The Homie nods, smiles, and turns and rides up the mountain forever and ever into the blue. The Homie’s aunties dance. The lolas dance. And dance. And dance.
B.
Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish, Draft Excerpt, 9/27/2019.
now stops by for one last time Seafood City to scarf down the saltiest of dilis, then drinks a six-pack of Red Horse, then boards the bus, then hums for the dead at every street lamp altar of candles, rosaries, and dried roses, then travels one exit down the 805 South, to La Jolla Village Drive, where he once went on strike at the Marriott, where he once at the hotel bar fantasized about pouncing on a white man for calling him stupid and dirty and unwelcome, then rides down to the VA Hospital, where he now smokes a handful of Benson and Hedges as he treks down the hill, through the neighborhoods where the wealthy and white live, where university chancellors settle atop Native bones, down to La Jolla shores, across dead grass, into sand, past college kids and their cheap tequila and bonfires, this old man who against the setting sun, in the middle of this clause, forgets then remembers, then forgets again who he is, what is ghost, what is bone, what is land, what is water, where is syntax, where is sentence, where in this migration is he
C.
In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the narrator provides this meditation on the sentence:
“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast” (10).
Throughout the drafting of “Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish,” I hid behind the framework of the sentence. I’d encourage students to revise revise revise because I’d been — and still am — working on a single sentence.
What can a sentence hold? How much weight? How much contradiction? How many layers can a clause offer? What happens when the sentence is so heavy it begins to fall apart?
Despite teaching students that stories shouldn’t have their own contents and elements compete for your reader’s attention, I wanted, perhaps still want, this sentence, this flash narrative, to hold everything: my longing for Mira Mesa, where I lived and loved from 2002–2003, 2008–2016; my then recently passed uncle; the lolos in pendletons outside of Seafood City; the lolas on the bus; all of the loss that happened while I was trying to figure out this sentence; all of it.
Knowing the work was unpolished, I’d perform “Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish” during my book tour. As a prayer. But I’d escape feelings by bragging: “This is one long sentence.” That became the distraction, the mis-direction. I was hiding. I was performing.
Perhaps I never wanted the sentence to end. I didn’t want closure. Perhaps I kept and keep hoping for a ‘place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.’
D.
Revision Notes, 9/27/2019.
REVISION PLAN
● separate imagery into mini scenes/moments
● distinguish between two characters: Mira Mesa, manong
● intensify description of Sacred Starbucks & scene of metamorphosis (pattern: all 5 senses); create parallel points of reference b/w initial description of manong & final description of manong
● establish patterns of self-reflexive “parts of sentence” signposts
● establish patterns of intentionally disrupting syntax/grammar
● clarify establishing shots (signposts) for geographical movement
● bring sections together, edit for clarity (i.e. verb tense, breaks, shifts, etc.)
[For some reason, I’m never attending to these mechanical fixes, for I’m convinced there is something deeper in my fixation on the unit of the sentence.]
E.
The most recent draft can’t let go of Mira Mesa. Here, I create space/breaks so that the imagery can breathe, and annotate moments that I continue to question.
Here, inside of this sentence
stretching toward the Pacific, [the narrative, the sentence ends with a scene at/in the Pacific Ocean — do I need this foreshadowing?]
here, was a boomtown, a hillside, a military suburb —
the set of Top Gun, [I actually don’t care about this Mira Mesa history, or maybe I do?]
here was a rancho,
here on Kumeyaay soil, here now, [This does nothing really to acknowledge the land in any meaningful way. It operates like a shout-out, a political nod. I’m thinking here with what I’ve heard the brilliant Chicana and Cahuilla/Tongva/Luiseño writer Casandra Lopez describe as “deep setting.” I’m thinking about how providing a deep setting is a kind of solidarity/acknowledgement. Perhaps I’ve been refraining from doing the deeper research into the land because at that point, the sentence might fall apart, which, I think, would be a good thing politically.]
in the glow and violence of historiography,
between bone and ghost, a past never [This still reifies the absence of or romanticizes/fetishizes Native life.]
passed, here out front of
a one-bedroom apartment —
its walls stacked with bunkbeds and migrants since long ago,
here out front of yet another out-of-business Filipino restaurant,
along a sidewalk of abandoned shoelaces
and grocery lists, here
on the corner of Black Mountain and Mira Mesa,
the smell of beef broth and gasoline,
basil and burnt rubber,
cilantro and fresh asphalt, [In an earlier version I cannot locate, I had the smell of In-N-Out in there — If you drive on this stretch of MM Blvd., you know already know.]
here waiting at the bus stop with students,
with tech workers,
with lolas y abuelitas in straw sunhats and sun visors —
they carry reused plastic bags sagging
full of bleached white socks and the salvaged of yesterday’s chichiria,
here: so many un-English languages
a familiar song, familiar longing,
a mutation of litany,
a tin and garlic syllable every now and again —
Tagalog, Ilocano, Vietnamese, Español, Gujarati, here
at this bus stop,
in the screech of brakes
and brake and whir of high noon transit,
here, at the helm of yesterday,
the helm of a father’s laughter, [Here, I’m alluding to The Laughter of My Father by Carlos Bulosan, but I don’t know why. Now I’m inclined to revisit Carlos Bulosan’s verbs to help me here.]
lives the subject,
a quiet and unremarkable man,
a labor of a man…
Read all of Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish: A Labor of Grief:
1. The Uncle
2. The Homie
3. The Collaborator
4. The Colleague
5. The Cousin
Works Cited
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Press, 2019.
AUTHOR BIO: Jason Magabo Perez is the author of Phenomenology of Superhero (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016) and This is for the mostless (WordTech Editions, 2017). Perez has also written and performed three live multimedia works — The Passion of El Hulk Hogancito (Kularts, 2009); You Will Gonna Go Crazy (Kularts, 2011); and Blue Bin Improvisations (MexiCali Biennial, 2018). Blending poetry, prose, performance, film/video, and oral history, Perez’s body of work investigates the historical presence of colonization and state violence. NEA Challenge America Grant awardee, formerly featured artist at New Americans Museum and community scholar-in-residence at San Diego Public Library, Perez has performed at notable venues such as National Asian American Theatre Festival, International Conference of the Philippines, La Jolla Playhouse, Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. A VONA alumnus, Perez holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness from New College of California and a dual PhD in Ethnic Studies and Communication from University of California, San Diego. Currently, Perez serves as Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University San Marcos and is a forthcoming artist-in-residence at the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T).
