WRITING AS WITNESSING, POETRY AS AGENCY OF AID: THE FIVE POEMS FROM TYPHOON YOLANDA RELIEF ANTHOLOGIES

The strong typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan), which buffeted the central Philippine region on November 2013 spurred the publication of several relief anthologies, so-called because they were primarily intended to raise funds for the disaster victims. This paper argues that as a distinct method of volunteerism, the poems that comprise the Yolanda relief anthologies are ecopoems which not only bear intrinsic ecological themes that confront an environment in crisis but also embody what Filipino poet Luisa A. Igloria describes as a "work of witness and deep engagement" in a time of climate and humanitarian crisis. In analyzing the five poems from two Yolanda relief anthologies, namely, Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change and Verses Typhoon Yolanda: A Storm of Filipino Poets, this paper utilizes the theories developed by the Filipino poets who are themselves contributors to these relief anthologies, specifically on how poetry is an act of witnessing and functions as an agency of symbolic aid. The findings contribute to the discourse on ethical literature and thus suggest that the existing brand of Philippine ecopoetry allows for poems that articulate empathic and hopeful agency towards climate-related disaster survivors.


INTRODUCTION
On the morning of November 9, 2013, residents in Leyte and the coastal villages of Eastern Samar, Philippines, realized it was not enough that they made it through the night. That day turned out to be just the beginning of the many days of surviving the bedlam. Being in the areas worst hit by Yolanda, "one of the strongest storms recorded on the planet" (Mullen, 2013), thousands of Visayans 1 braced themselves for the worst: living without shelter, food, clean drinking water, and locating and burying their dead.
The destruction that typhoon Yolanda caused in its path was matched with an immense outpouring of sympathy and aid from everywhere. Huge relief efforts from the international community were mobilized as soon as possible for fear that more could die in the wake of the disaster. As nations rushed in for critical aid, local personalities and private citizens organized independent outreach projects. It was a period that North American disaster researchers describe as "a time of community consensus and solidarity" (Hannigan, 2013: 8) when "people come together to plan, coordinate, and expedite effective action, only to disband when the period of crisis ends" (Solnit, 2010: 2). The

"Aid is art": The Relief Anthologies Verses and Agam
In his poem "Ballade: Instructions to an Aid Worker," Dumdum (2014: 45) declares, "aid is art". This succinct remark best describes the efforts of the editors and the contributors of the relief anthologies in their initiative of putting DOI 10.22146/poetika.59485 ISSN 2338-5383 (print) ;2503-4642 (online) together a literary collection through which they can generate donations for the survivors of typhoon Yolanda.
"Relief" was a buzzword in the period that followed the catastrophic event. New World Encyclopedia defines "relief" in emergency and disaster parlance as "the monies or services made available to individuals and communities that have experienced losses due to disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, drought, tornadoes, and riots." It was Dean Francis Alfar who ascribed the term to his book project Outpouring because the anthology, he said, was conceptualized first and foremost out of a response to a period of crisis.
What is worth emulating in this unique relief-volunteerism effort, as Vince Gotera (2014) observes is that it proves the proverbial "power of the word" evident in the poetic response of the Filipino literary community motivated by their faith in their craft's ability to move and transform society. Melissa Sipin describes this form of literary-cum-social initiative as the art of call-and-response: "But within these moments of tragedy, many writers and artists gathered online and encapsulated their shifting emotions in art ... When Juan Felipe Herrera, the Poet Laureate of California, and poet Vince Gotera sent out a call for poems of uplift and healing on the Facebook group, "Hawak Kamay: Poems for the Philippines After Haiyan," the group epitomized the power of the Filipino collective psyche: kapwa (togetherness), kagandahang-loob (shared humanity), and pakiramdam (shared inner perceptions). This great tragedy tied the community together-and in turn, our art shifted into a call-and-response against tragedy." (Gotera, 2014) Sipin further asserts that Verses, as well as the rest of the relief anthologies, is a "communicative act of healing" that exemplified the "[Filipino literary] community uniting during tragedy and through the strength of literature." The majority of the information regarding the making (and completion) of Verses was provided by the writers who are themselves part of this book project, either as a contributor of poems or as an editorial consultant.  There is no room for indifference to the kapwa in a period of crisis. In a time of community consensus, the existential I is drowned in the multitudinous I's, creating what Sipin (2014) calls "a rhythmic chorus that becomes a surge of collectiveness and oneness"-of shared humanity.

The Yolanda Poems as Ecopoems
As ecopoems, the poems that comprise  Yuson (2015: 19) has this to say about the Philippines: "You need to understand that our nation is made up/ of 7,107 islands; nearly everything is by the coastline//". Igloria (2014: 148), in her poem "Afterward," calls the Philippines the "republic of the drowned". Meanwhile, Santos (2011: 67) cites that the Bicol region has been dubbed "Republika ng Kalamidad" and "Orinola ng Bayan". All of these observations allude to the country's vulnerability to typhoons (and the further destruction that they entail, e.g. landslides, flash floods, storm surges, and the like), as well as a spoken intuition on the psyche of the Filipinos living in this kind of reality. Arigo (2008) describes the purview of ecopoetry as the "explor[ation of the] creative-critical edges between writing and ecology." He forwards the view that an ecopoem is founded on "the tension between the cutting edge of innovation and ecological thinking," and observes that "much of the ecopoetry being written seems to take place more in the realm of the innovative, as opposed to more mainstream poetries because innovative po-etries are loci of resistance to mainstream poetic practices (and values) which presumably reflect larger social paradigms". As an artistic representation of the environment, ecopoems provoke new readings of human-nature relationships and have the potential to bring important and sometimes neglected perspectives on ecological issues to the fore. Thus, as ecopoems, the Yolanda relief anthology poems invite readers, especially Filipinos, to reflect not only on our ecological history or "ecological indigenousness" (Chua, 2017) and disaster susceptibility but also on the related issues that Yolanda has given rise to, such as our moral obligation with the natural dwelling that sustains us and with our fellow human beings.

Writing as Witnessing, Poetry as Agency of Aid
In his article, "'Our Common Sufferings': Reflections on the Ethical Dimensions of Contemporary Disaster Poetry," Wang (2009: 115) argues that Adorno's declaration that " [writing] poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" had initially hindered the ethical turn poetry is supposed to take. Wang (2009: 115) asserts that poetry is a more potent literary form to articulate a traumatic ordeal because he considers this "old literary form […] to have magic wings, flying from the border to the center of life and man's vision". Here, he acknowledges that poetry is an intuitive art, and through its structure and metaphoric language, can render the experience more intense and profound. In this new millennium, which saw many kinds of suffering in the Vol. 8 No. 2, December 2020DOI 10.22146/poetika.59485 ISSN 23382503-4642 (online) form of natural and man-made disasters, Wang (2009: 114)  "When the babaylan or mambunong (the priestess-medium, who is also a rhapsode and poet) falls into a trance and begins to speak in other voices, the condition is described in one of the vernacular languages as "naluganan"-quite literally, the state of being mounted (as a steed would be mounted) by an unnamed power-the divine masquerading in another form (s).
The poet-medium is never entirely erased in the process, nor simply reduced to a mechanism of levers and pulleys to throw the voice or thrash the limbs about for dramatic effect. Despite the apparent submersion of her own physical identity, she must be an active, muscular and facile vehicle; the animal (though haltered) whose nose points too toward the goal of poetic or divine utterance-ideally, the state in which steed and rider blur and become indistinguishable from one another (qtd. in POEMELEON; emphasis in the original)." (Agam, 2017)  [What I observed to be the basic emotion was really compassion […] and among writers, since they are compassionate, empathy, or solidarity. One psychologist claimed that Filipinos follow the seven steps to camaraderie. It begins with the act of asking around, getting to know, and going around {people and the circumstances}. The final stage is unitywhen you become one with another. However, with these writers {relief anthology contributors}, there's another level {step}. It's not just unity but, if you'll look closely at their poemspossessed! The relationship is dialectical. While you look at the picture [the commissioned photographs in Agam], the character {or the subject} on the picture gazes back at you, and you develop a connection. The character becomes you, and you become the character.] Significantly, Baquiran refers to the state of becoming "nasapian," a term equivalent to Igloria's "naluganan," to describe that writing the Yolanda poems is to be moved or claimed by an "unnamed spirit, divine power, or force," and in which process the poet becomes the medium of "poetic or divine utterance" (Poemeleon, 2005).
Baquiran (2017) also refers to the compassion that is intrinsic among writers, which for him enables the poets to enter into a "dialectical relationship" between the survivors. He further maintains that this relationship is founded on camaraderie ("pakikiisa", In the coastal areas of Eastern Samar, "rubbles" was not even a fitting term because the small communities had been totally washed out by the repeated strong storm surges (Romero, 2017). As humanitarian relief teams  Strobel (2014: 13) asserts that the power of the poetic language lies in its ability to speak of something other than how news reportage informs. Poetry, she says, deploys tropes and images that "[tease] out the ineffable" to "make us ponder" and see beyond what is. As opposed to a news reportage that is the work of a supposedly unbiased and emotionally detached journalist, "Afterward" promotes poetry as "a work of witness [that] offers a path to more active and humanizing witness, deep engagement, and hopeful agency" (Igloria, 2017). It would have been easy for people to dismiss what they witness or simply look away.
But for Strobel, as for Igloria, art should not leave us cold, thus they believe that poetry is a medium for witnessing-a necessary and humane response in these times that are "no less rife with […] crisis, degradation, and violence" (Igloria, 2017). does not necessarily function as an apostrophic device, but also gives us the impression that the speaker is referring to itself as if in some sort of a monologue. This self-reference is thus likened to a pep talk that people engage in when they build up courage or prepare themselves for the task at hand. International aid worker Sandra Bulling, who had flown in the Visayas soon after Yolanda's landfall, echoes such mood: "The destruction from the storm surge that came with the typhoon is apocalyptic. Driving along the coast, we smell decayed bodies. There are corpses under the rubble. We start to cry in the car and for a while, I can only look straight ahead, not daring to glimpse through the side windows. No matter how experienced you are, seeing dead bodies still shocks you to the core. Looking into the eyes of survivors is not easy either [...]." (Bulling, 2013) Bulling's story about her work during the post-disaster Visayas provides an insight into the delicate position of volunteers as witnesses. Poetika : Jurnal Ilmu Sastra Vol. 8 No. 2, December 2020DOI 10.22146/poetika.59485 ISSN 23382503-4642 (online) These volunteers are rescue agencies on a mission, but as emotional beings they also The disposition for mercy and "active, humanizing witness" is what the speaker in the next poem seeks (Igloria, 2017). In Merlinda Bobis' "Ten Fingers," tragedy hits close to home, leaving the expatriate speaker desperate for empathy from anyone who has heard of (or watched) typhoon Yolanda (Bobis, 2014).
As explicated in Igloria's "Afterward," more than the actual tragedy of Yolanda's catastrophic hit is the tragedy of its repercussions.
In "Ten Fingers," tragedy strikes the speaker twice: first, she has to endure the pain of the distance from her parents upon hearing the news of Yolanda; and now, she is wrestling with the possibility that there is nothing left for her to come home to: Poetika : Jurnal Ilmu Sastra Vol. 8 No. 2, December 2020DOI 10.22146/poetika.59485 ISSN 23382503-4642 (online) So now, I'm at the L.A. airport, going home to what I don't know. To what I can't see in the news: our house, our farm, my father, my mother. I can't see them, or the impending landfall in my chest. (Bobis, 2014) A calamity of such magnitude is indeed a national tragedy, but for the victims and survivors, Yolanda is a personal tragedy, and the grief that it brought upon them could not be completely understood by outsiders. That is why the speaker in "Ten Fingers," as in the poem "Afterward," insists that we grasp beyond the collective statistics generated through news reportage. She pleads the out-

siders-witnesses-those "gasping/ at this tragedy on TV, on [their] laptops and iPhones"
to "see what can't be seen." It is an appeal to the humanity of outsiders-witnesses to recognize the dignity of these people who are casualties of the storm and have been rendered nameless and faceless by the news, among them the one's dearest to her.
Besides a plea, the poem gives the impression of a tribute accorded by a daughter to the memory of her parents. But nobody could know her parents-their daily struggles, their trials, their sacrifices-as much as she does: […] The many times in a year of fixing the roof wrenched away by the many storms. The many times of evacuating because of the flood. The many times of scavenging for rotting rice. … Ten strong fingers in the mud, on the plow and the buffalo, on the rice-grains, on his knees that always ache at night. (Bobis, 2014) Adding to the speaker's struggle is her attempt to make the outsiders see her parents (A beautiful picture of my most beautiful father/ I wish to pass his face around, to all the passengers lining up towards the plane) the way she sees them because it is a violation of their memory not to be honored for who they are and how they live their life. We thus understand that the "ten fingers" are: 1) a synecdoche to represent the totality of the two individuals that Yolanda may have possibly (or has) taken away; and 2) as a metonym that is substituted for the diligence, as well as the sacrifices, of these two individuals: "It is my father, my/ mother and all of twenty fingers holding back this storm." In the last lines of the poem, the speaker's plea becomes more insisting: "Please, I beg/ you. Look closer." She seems to have been rendered irrational by the sheer grief and the muddle of emotions (heartbreak, desperation, loneliness, self-pity) meted out by this collective tragedy which, ironically, she knows she alone must endure. "Ten Fingers" is a compelling and powerful poem because it stirs the readers-witnessesoutsiders-or those that did not have to personally deal with the blow of Yolanda-from indifference to empathizing and becoming an Poetika : Jurnal Ilmu Sastra Vol. 8 No. 2, December 2020DOI 10.22146/poetika.59485 ISSN 23382503-4642 (online) "active witness" (Igloria, "Don't Look Away").
The poem is a vicarious testimony at its best, as it reminds us that a Yolanda survivor and victim's story is not merely her own, but of all of us.
As in "Ten Fingers," the next poem, "Diptych, Hindi Selfie" by Ramon C. Sunico The plea of the speaker for the addressee to take their picture (mamang/ may camera. Kunan nyo na po ako) must not be taken as it is, i.e. as a trivial desire to be the subject of a stranger's gaze. As the central idea of the poem, the plea for a photo opportunity is a symbolic call to action in the hopes that the addressee may be moved to do something for the speaker after their attention has been called towards the latter's current condition. Meanwhile, the next selection warns of the danger that the act of volunteerism and relief donation is reduced to a mere "ritualistic performance during the post-disaster period (Chua & Mendez, 2015). "To the Donors" by Roger B. Rueda (2014) is a reminder that active engagement in a period of the humanitarian crisis is also constituted by the extra measures we are willing to undertake so that the help we extend is especially solicitous and essential.
The speaker aims at the lack of empathy from the part of their relief goods donors. The tone is not to be mistaken as the speaker's-the typhoon survivor and recipient of the reliefungrateful lash at their sponsors. Rather, their dissatisfaction is contained by the sarcastic overtone delivered in lines such as: "You must be a great psychic./ Yes, this is my dream […]." Further, the poem gives an idea of the kind of Poetika : Jurnal Ilmu Sastra Vol. 8 No. 2, December 2020DOI 10.22146/poetika.59485 ISSN 23382503-4642 (online) relief goods handed out to the Yolanda victims: that not only are the supplies unessential in the context of the speaker's urgent condition, but they also reach the level of absurdity.
The line "Thanks for the fur coat" enhances the derision. The relief goods cited in the poem, starting with what the speaker has with them, are unnecessary and absurd specifically for the following reasons which the speaker enumerates: the "high heels" and the "flowing black gown" are not suitable since "the streets of Tacloban/ have been reduced to rubble." Also, a "fur coat" is unnecessary in such "a hot, humid day" and "[b]esides the whole city/ doesn't have electricity yet." Next, the "high boots" the speaker has on and the "Snow White dress" are definitely not comfortable to wear especially if they have chores to attend to: "when I help my mum/ sell rock salt looted by dad/ two days ago," but readers get the impression that the speaker has no choice but to use them since they are left without a piece of belonging after the typhoon.
The speaker then turns to their family to check what they received for themselves. The siblings "enjoy eating/ dry noodles" not because they taste like how noodles are supposed to, but because eating them is like "Chippy," a local junk food. In this specific line, the poem offers a critique of the practice of relief goods donation in the country. First of all, common sense is necessary because it grants the donors the foresight so that they can easily pick which supplies are urgently needed. In the immediate aftermath of a typhoon, it would not have been convenient for the survivors to consume packed goods that still have to be cooked (e.g. noodles). Further, it would take time before the goods are distributed to the affected areas, for they still have to go through several processes, including the preparation, repacking, and delivery. As such, the food commodity must not be easily perishable.
Meanwhile, the speaker's mother "looks like/ Ariella Arida in her yellow gown" and the father "looks like/ a chef from a five-star hotel" who lacks a beret. Altogether, they look like a ludicrous bunch all because the supplies that have been handed to them are dole-outs from neither mercy nor sincere help. These donations are not the type of supplies that would be put together by supposedly concerned witnesses-donors; from the description of the speaker, the goods that have been handed out to them are leftovers, of which the donors no longer find useful and thus "dispose" them as "relief." Chua & Mendez (2015) cite this kind of "volunteering activity" performed by donors only so that they can "connect with the event or to 'come to terms' with it" as "ecominstrelsy" ("0-Plan Tabang"). Quoting Theresa J. May, Chua & Mendez (2015) argues that the opportunities for volunteerism in a postdisaster period are in danger of inviting participants whose engagement is not defined by a sincere desire to aid or provide assistance, but by "self-gratification," or of assuaging their guilt by convincing themselves "that they have Poetika : Jurnal Ilmu Sastra Vol. 8 No. 2, December 2020DOI 10.22146/poetika.59485 ISSN 23382503-4642 (online) done something, anything to help their fellowmen who were in need".
Finally, the derision in the lines, "Oh, wait a minute./ Everyone wants to take/ a photograph of us" is a strike against outsiders who are offensive to the survivors for demonstrating no decency in objectifying the typhoon victims after they have been rendered in such miserable condition than they already are because of Yolanda. "Don't look away," appropriately so as it promotes poetry as a path to more active and humanizing witness, deep engagement, and hopeful agency in a time "no less rife with situations and events that compel and immediate and ethical response to a crisis, degradation, and violence." Poetry, Igloria argues, is the answer to this increasingly "complex and volatile world, [where] it is easy to feel increasingly bewildered and bombarded by the digital-easy to feel as if at once connected, and at the same time separate, from the ways, others experience daily life, struggles, sorrows, joys, hopes…".
Finally, this paper addresses the issue that the act of writing a traumatic experience is neither exploitative nor self-serving because, according to Antony Rowland, while the poems under study are not strictly classified as testimony poetry, i.e. that it is not the Yolanda victims themselves who penned the poems, the very form by which these narratives are written makes the disaster experience trauma "resistant to the proliferation of testimony in the public sphere". Rowland further claims that writing about a traumatic experience is a moral obligation and that poetry ought to consider "life itself and [its] duty as the ethical imperatives of witnessing, testifying and memorializing".

Notes
Visayans are a Philippine ethnolinguistic group native to the whole Visayas (central Philippines) as well as to many parts of Mindanao (southern Philippines).