Water vapour hangs like memory in the air: a review of Alton M. Dapanas’ Towards a Theory on City Boys (Newcomer Press) by Cat Chong

Alton Dapanas’ Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (Dapanas, 2021) uses longing  like a noun, longing searches the city in an endless revision of desire and distance. Flight  and exile, hiraeth and nostalgia – the longing for a place that perhaps was never really  there – propels this collection that bristles with queer spite and displacement. Set across  the islands of the Philippines, this cataphatic work speaks with intensities that reset the  boundaries of the body, desire, and city limits in a method of numeration, calculating, and  counting in which the social margins of the community come to mirror the edge of the  land. Part confession, part psychogeographic mapping of all the boys the second person  singular pronoun has loved before, this genre queer subversion speaks from the twice  rejected edge of the flattened world, rejected by overwhelmingly Christian sociocultural conditions and by the postcolonial legacy of gatekept poetic language; this collection  wrestles with its own wrenching sensation of being twice removed, twice out of the way.  

Tracing their way across the edge of the land, from cities where the urban extend all the  way down to the sea where the end of the city means an end to the land, to abandoned  rural villages – bodies of water present a dynamic and impassable boundary. In this  collection, living on small islands intimately connects the conception of an elsewhere to  the crossing of water. As these poems track the places prominent to the poet, I decided to  collect these names as I was reading creating a small map of names, locations, roadways,  islands, and restaurants that mark the collection’s geography, this map can be found here. It feels like a list of the places the collection  has tried to call home and it still calls out to.  

Throughout the work, the conception of home becomes a sensation we’re continuously  immersed in. Home is found in the ‘smell of floor wax’, ‘the noise of the Disney Channel  or Nickelodeon voiceover’, and ‘the steam of champorado flavored with condensada’ (p.  20) in ‘I. JASAAN, MISAMIS ORIENTAL’; in the place ‘between the wood posts where the  pigs and firewood are kept’ and the ‘the stinky backyard poultry’ (p. 21) in ‘II. ALUBIJID,  MISAMIS ORIENTAL’. The house contains traces of what haunts us, as the ‘you’ of the poem  drifts ‘from daydream to nightmare’, ‘see[ing] this house in places where it shouldn’t be:  on top of a hill in Batanes, by the coast near Laguindingan airport, beside a grotto of the  Our Lady of Perpetual Help in a postcard, like an apparition in your travels’ (p. 22). In  Cagayan de Oro City, we gain a partial glimpse inside the empty structure to see the  ‘dusty photos of the dead in a sala table’ (ibid.) in the ‘urgent artifice’ of ‘abandonment  personified’ (ibid.). This glimpse is fleeting before we join these traces left in indelible  space ‘swear[ing] you aren’t like the rest who left without a trace, without a word, until  the day came that you actually did’ (ibid.). Drifting from present, to future, to present, to  past, time breaks down in the encounter of memory, of ‘you’, and all haunting loss. The  dead might still be a spectacle as it appears masquerading as another way out; the queer  necessity for an elsewhere propels our desire to escape. 

The ‘you’ of the poem isn’t the only one leaving, the coastlines, the villages, even the  cities – every space is littered with loss either personal, ecological, or industrial. On the  northern coast of Mindanao in the poem titled Macajalar Bay, ‘tonight, this seaport will  avow on a million little plagues of absence’ (p. 11), ‘there is a void’ (p. 54) in Cogon  Public Market, and a ‘babel of the lost’ (p. 52) in Siargao. Like the ‘short-term memory  loss’ (p. 17) between Iligan City & Cebu City, ‘you’ are perpetually on the boundary of  ghosthood and we are surrounded by its echoes. Exiled from sociocultural longevity,  nowhere offers a safe haven, even ‘in our usual haunts… we emerge as bodies that still  ache towards leaving’ (p. 26), perhaps we’re the spectres we always felt ourselves to be.  This is a collection in which ‘[t]here is no return’ (ibid.) to nostalgia, to virginity, to the time before our escape. Eventually we ‘become what this city wanted us to be:  gone’ (ibid.). This desire to depart remains constant, it reappears again and again, in  ‘SCENE: PORTRAIT OF HUNGARIAN BOY’ the ‘I’ requests, ‘[t]each me, / I who know only  know the tropics, its wet and dry seasons […] we are not coming back’ (p. 29), as though  this necessity is absolute – if the poet dies the demand remains: ‘[p]lant my remains in a  coffer’ (ibid.), allowing the body to retain its mobility, aesthetic value, and ability to  travel the world.  

Perhaps this is why ‘[y]ou wake up to a dream’ (p. 23) as the delineation between the  external and internal landscape collapses. The city swarms about the banished and  disowned body in ‘the wet quietude of early September’ (ibid.), amidst the ‘steam of tuna  in coconut milk soup, a lingering squeeze in the arm of an old friend, the call to prayer at  dawn of a nearby mosque […] colorful balloons […], a sleepless student nurse […], an alley  of stalls of street food like caked pig’s blood and unhatched duck embryo[s]’ (ibid.). The  city becomes a place of love and devotion to dismantle rejection and ultimately a place to  soak in, but ‘you’ are still haunted by the same desire, memory, and sweat that it pours  out. Sex, water, and humidity – there is more water in the air – and in the suspended  particulate, memory congregates, continually looking back to the last epigraph from The  Opposite of Nostalgia by Eric Gamalinda that reads, ‘“Between you and memory /  everything is water”’ (p. 3). As an archive of love-sickness, this collection still follows the  maxim set out by Madame M in the preface that states; ‘“[o]nly when your ideas are  wrapped up in emotions… when you’re lovestruck or lovelorn, should you write a  poem”’ (p. 6). Fundamentally, this collection feels impelled into language through loss,  love, desire, and water.  

The personal pronoun ‘you’ maintains its instability throughout the text as it moves  between a targeted second person, a rhetorical manoeuvre, a self-address, and a hail that  interpellates the reader into the poem. Within ‘i. Ting-init’ the ‘you’ becomes an  indication of the poet’s gaze is turned inwards inside the parentheses as ‘you’ wonder,  ‘(Aren’t you appropriating South Asian culture with lotus pose?)’ (p. 27) inquiring how far  ‘you’ can enact a decolonial gaze. In other poems ‘you’ refers to a specific person, in  ‘SCENE: PORTRAIT OF MARTINICAN BOY’ written ‘for Antonin’ it’s assumed that ‘you’  refers to him; ‘[y]our glutes from the land of Aimé Cesaire, a fitting tribute to the prose  poem’ (p. 30). Whereas in the footnotes of ‘A Catalogue of City Boys with Common Names’  we, as readers, are called to as the poet asks a question which they know cannot be  answered; ‘I must ask you, dear reader, should he know he remains an imagery of erotic  poems’ (p. 15). The ‘you’ retethers constantly, recasting us as witnesses to a collective  and communal address affecting an eternally liquifying sensation that feels like an  immersion in the water that suspends this collection’s memory.  

Towards a Theory on City Boys revels in its humidity – the water hangs in the air – until  ‘you’ too deliquesce in the encounter of memory, becoming a rain drop ‘where once I was  solid and still, now I take the shape of the stretch of your skin’ (p. 57), clinging to this  force through surface tension; the property of the surface of a liquid that allows it to  resist an external force, due to the cohesive nature of its molecules (Water Science  School, 2019). Sublimating into every form of water, perhaps that’s the closest description  of this collection’s genre; as ‘you’ become water molecules perhaps there is nothing else,  only memory which becomes you which has become memory. Here, if you are water, you  are memory standing on the horizon of the monsoon at the edge of the Philippine Sea, the  ‘thunderous sea, / which owns me, / in the side mirror’ (Dapanas, 2021, p. 58). Like  water, the poem concludes that to disappear is to evaporate from the land that has  rejected you. The final poem ‘On How To Disappear: A Guide’, provides a numbered litany  detailing how to be alone, isolated, deluded into ‘your’ own superiority, how to live like  love is a lockdown. This is how ‘you’ leave the city; this is how the city is forced to leave  ‘you’, ‘star[ing] at the departing ships from a distance. Breathe in the air coming from the mainland […] never go home again’ (p. 63). At the end of the collection we join with  memory, the death we can yet come back from.  

References  

Dapanas, A., 2021. Towards A Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems. 1st ed. London:  Newcomer Press. 

Water Science School, 2019. Surface Tension and Water. [Online - accessed 28 October 2021].