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The most difficult thing about a post-colonial existence can be recovering a sense of self, when the colonizers have so thoroughly left their stamp on not just language and geography, but also custom and aesthetic sense. If our behavior and what we find beautiful is shaped by an external culture, how will we ever know what is truly ours?
The Experiment of the Tropics
As a nest among the trees As a garden among the bigger garden of sea
Mountain View As a wish that were drawn to scale
So the idea became foldable a mere scaffold
Discarded For the long-lasting thing
That revivalist thing Style which was as the master
carpenter implied went beyond road port
Nut bolt wharf a nail
In a railroad port a pipe
that opened and closed
The central portico the color and the texture of
A solid collonade Inday’s silence
Which was her sense of water flowing across the experiment
that was the tropics A river bank made private
A theater of night guards A soda parlor
Of that foreign good whisky tractor
red tin can with the picture of a scarab and a quaker oat
Acquisition That American thing
The good old good
Cheese and grape
There was a tennis court in the club where you hit a ball
and nothing returned
We munched on its brandy biscuit.
We ordered two of it.
is a poet and essayist from Cebu, Philippines. He received an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program of the University of Iowa and an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Highest Hiding Place and is presently teaching creative writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
has been working on the trauma of the military regime through photography, short films, and archival installation. Recently, Che has been working on monuments and statues of North Korea. The Townhouse series (2008-2010) is a project about the environmental issues of the five U.S. military camps in Paju that were left when the army was sent to Iraq in 2003. The ruins of U.S. Army camps have been left untouched for the last ten years due to the pollution of oil spills and the cost of restoring. The problem has not been solved until recently. This work shows the history and present of the U.S. Army in South Korea and reveals the hidden images behind the war. Che's photographs and videos have been shown in major museums and biennale, including the Taipei Biennial at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2008), Les Modules at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), The Korean Peninsula at the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Italy (2014), Surround Audience at the New Museum Triennial, New York (2015), and Accelerated Urbanism in Africa at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2016), among others.
is a platform for writing from across East and Southeast Asia. Read work from our most recent project folio, Residue
Tags: Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Poetry Tuesday, The Philippines, residue, transpacific literary project
