Kabel Mishka Ligot is currently a first-year MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also works as an instructor in Creative Writing. Originally from Quezon City, he received his bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. He'll are reading at Intersections 2018: Writing from Planet Earth on April 22 at Olbrich Gardens.
ALL Review: What are the narratives and themes that drive your work?
Kabel Mishka Ligot: I write a lot about the Philippines, where I was born and raised. Until recently it’s the only place I’ve known, and until now it’s something that’s quite challenging to articulate or describe, even to people who are from there as well—let alone folks who have never set foot in (or heard of!) the place. The country I’m from speaks nearly two hundred languages, has a hundred million people spread across seven thousand islands, and moves at breakneck speed. When I’m not writing about the country and its histories, cultures, and peoples, I still bring that baggage with me—I perceive the world around me through the lens of that particular space, one that is colorful, chaotic, bursting at the seams, and contradicting itself from time to time.
I find that a bulk of my work revolves around this idea of space and text—how we define or experience certain spaces and how certain spaces ascribe meaning onto us. I’m also interested in how language creates those spaces and negotiates between person and space, how we use language/s to articulate those spaces and record them. When we talk about the temporal and geographic places that we come from or the spaces that we’ve experienced, we create texts. Do these texts replicate that space and time accurately, or do we construct our own versions and permutations of those spaces? I wouldn’t be quick to say that my work has any particular answers for these questions, but when I write feel like I am always making such an inquiry.
ALL: What personal experiences brought you to your medium?
KML: Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m quite talkative—and if that person is a really good, trusted friend, they’ll be honest enough to also point out that I really do run my mouth (sometimes irresponsibly). Poetry became an opportunity to be the opposite of that, to distill my thoughts into a concentrated form that I can look back at without cringing or come storming back in for a rebuttal or addendum. Like the busy metropolis I’m from, there’s a lot going on in my head all at once—different sounds, textures, voices, languages, tastes. When I write poems, it feels like being in control of that noisy space in my head and choreographing all that noise together on the page in order to make sense.
I write because the world around me just keeps going on and there’s a lot to take in. Poetry is also a means of processing—either structuring something fluid or finding structure in something. When we re-tell things through writing, we examine not only the world around us but the texts that construct that reality. In this age of fake news, saturations of narratives, and the rapidness of information exchange, I find I write a good deal about the news, particularly news in/about the Philippines. I don’t think we’re aware of the power that narrative holds over us, or how easily it can be manipulated. Political campaigns and scandals, even notions of national identity are generated through the medium of duplicity and doublespeak, the privileging of some narratives over others—for example, back home, the son of the late Dictator-President Ferdinand Marcos is currently bending over backwards in order to not only clear his kleptocrat father’s name but also perfume it in order to maintain (if not expand) his family’s political dynasty, all executed through the vehicle of misinformation.
Leaders before and after Marcos and his son have been able to skew and generate narratives, taking advantage of the fact that Filipinos can be such suckers for text (gossip, posts on the internet, folk tales, decade-long soap operas, commercials, radio talk shows) but we aren’t very good at writing it down—a process that demands wrestling with it, keeping it in check. For me, poems are a way of figuring out the best way to articulate what’s true—sometimes telling the straight truth about something is just as hard, if not more difficult then constructing an airtight, elaborate lie to cover it up.
ALL: How has moving from the Philippines to the Midwest impacted your writing?
KML: Coming to America made me hyperaware that not everyone is going to understand my writing even if I execute it in the same language as they do, so I’m constantly trying to negotiate that space between trying to define something or its context in someone else’s terms (thus adulterating what’s to be said), or marking clear boundaries between myself, my work, and possible readers. I don’t think there’s a perfect combination—one just has to figure out how far each specific work can go. I truly appreciate the readership I get from my peers in the MFA program because I get to see how my work stands outside the context/practice of writing in my home country. Although I speak Filipino as well, I’ve always written in English: the two languages coexist and stomp about in my consciousness. I find that the issue with writing across cultures isn’t purely linguistic; I don’t particularly struggle with the limitedness of one language to describe a space “alien” to it (although who’s to say that English isn’t a Filipino language, or that the English I read and speak and write in is the same type of English that my American peers use?).
The Midwest is also quite flat, topographically and culturally (with the exception, I guess, of Chicago), so there’s this strange sense of being in a blank, monotonous space completely antithetical to the environment I come from. The frigid lakes and plains of the region inspire in a different way than, say, the familiar mountain ranges, beaches, and crowded cityscapes do. I think living in Wisconsin has instilled this sense of restlessness in me—a linguistic horror vacui of sorts. I’m trying to channel that anxiety into my writing. It’s also made me conscious that despite my best attempts, I can never serve as a spokesperson for the whole of something. Writing in the Midwest has opened up that caveat. There are times when I meet someone who’s never met a Filipino, or whose perceptions of the people/s and the country are skewed only by secondhand (and often patronizing or condescending) American views, and while I take it upon myself to explain my own cultural context as well as I can, there’s still a limit to how much I can thoroughly articulate until I begin encroaching or speaking over the lived experiences of other Filipinos.
ALL: What are you currently working on? Where can we find more of your content?
KML: My cohort’s currently wrapping up with our first year at our MFA program at UW, which has been a fantastic two semesters full of reading, writing, re-writing, blowing our paychecks on pizza and the local book store, and working with some of the most fantastic professors and visiting writers. Soon, we’ll be working on our respective thesis manuscripts. I’m embarrassed to say it, but I don’t particularly feel like I’m working on something independent of the MFA. Everything still feels so new—I’m still getting the hang of living in America, let alone the practice writing here. The program’s workshops have been very generative, of course, but I’m anticipating the freedom of summer for the space to churn out stuff that’s untethered to any particular requirements and undistracted by any miscellaneous responsibilities.
I’ve got a meager amount of work online: a poem in volume 2 of Bukambibig, the journal of Spoken Word Philippines, and a small suite in Akda: The Journal for Asian Literature, Culture, and Performance’s inaugural issue. There seems to have been a couple formatting hiccups that took place in between sending the pieces out and having them published in the latter journal, though—do shoot me an email and I’d be happy to provide a corrected copy of the work/s! It’s also interesting to mention that a couple handmade, self-published zines that my friends and I made back in college have somehow materialized in the Special Collections of UCLA’s library—to this day we still don’t have any idea how they got there! If we’re being generous with the definition of “content”, I also tweet a lot and spend an unfair amount of time on the internet (is “keeping in touch with the folks back home” a legitimate justification?).
ALL: What issues will you bring to your upcoming reading at Intersections 2018: Writing from Planet Earth?
KML: This is my first reading in Madison—a reading about place, no less!—so I’m going to try to be as representative of myself, my work, and my origins as I can: translation, the naming of islands and provinces, food trucks at Coachella, multilingualism, my grandparents, being at a loss for words, winding mountain roads, overhearing other languages on campus, typhoons, spaghetti made from banana ketchup and sold in plastic bags, the Thai Pavilion at Olbrich, and maybe a cricket or two. Sometimes when you fixate on one particular thing you end up uncovering such variety.