THE WEIGHT OF BEING SEEN

An open letter to a friend who performed at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, where the Philippines is the Guest of Honor, despite the fair’s silencing of Palestinian voices.

- CZYKA TUMALIUAN

When I first wrote this letter, it wasn't meant for publication. It began as a private note to my friend, poet and translator RR Cagalingan, who was invited to perform at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, where the Philippines is the Guest of Honor. I wrote as his friend - and as a mother, a writer, a fellow Filipino who has spent much of her creative life in the service of movements for radical change.

As I send this, I just saw his performance at the fair online. And whew, he made that stage feel smaller, our language larger, as if the whole room had to learn how to listen. He is, in many ways, a protest. Salamat, R.

I release this now out of restlessness: a need to ask what art can still do when belief in it begins to waver. Motherhood has taught me that care is not always soft; sometimes it's a form of vigilance, a refusal to look away. Making public this correspondence between friends is mainly for my daughter, Sophie, and for the young Filipinas just learning to speak, to make meaning, and to live with the world's contradictions — not despite it.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart," wrote the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, "and try to love the questions themselves."

Literature, at its best, makes room for chaos and confusion. It reminds us that the world is never tidy, that even language fails us — and still, we write.

AN OPEN LETTER TO RR CAGALINGAN

Huuuy R,

When you told me you're flying to Germany on my birthday to perform at Frankfurt Book Fair, I felt proud and afraid all at once.

Proud, because few poets I know carry the fire of the Filipino the way you do — fierce, unyielding, pulsing with our mother tongue. You are one of the few who can stand onstage and still echo the street. My favorite optimist. I don’t know where you get hope. Alam mo, isa ka sa mga paborito kong makata.