{"id":3736,"date":"2011-05-31T08:00:46","date_gmt":"2011-05-31T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=3736"},"modified":"2011-05-30T20:47:33","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T00:47:33","slug":"process-profile-aimee-suzara-discusses-my-mothers-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/31\/process-profile-aimee-suzara-discusses-my-mothers-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Aimee Suzara Discusses “My Mother’s Watch”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Aimee<\/a>
Aimee Suzara<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Aimee Suzara<\/a> is a Filipino-American writer, cultural worker and educator who has been writing and performing in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1999. Her first play, <\/em>Pagbabalik (Return) was produced in 2006-7 and featured at several Bay Area festivals, and she is developing her second, <\/em>A History of the Body, both supported by the Zellerbach Arts Fund. Her poems can be found in several journals and anthologies, including <\/em>Walang Hiya (No Shame): literature taking risks towards liberatory practice<\/a>, <\/em>Kartika Review <\/em><\/a>, Konch Magazine<\/a>, <\/em>Lantern Review<\/a> and her chapbook, <\/em>the space between<\/a>. She has been a featured poet and educator at schools, universities and arts venues nationally.\u00a0 Suzara has a Mills College M.F.A. and teaches English at Bay Area colleges. She has been a Hedgebrook Resident Artist and will be an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n

For APIA Heritage Month 2011, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. <\/strong><\/em>This year, we\u2019ve been asking several <\/strong><\/em><\/em>Lantern Review contributors whose work gestures back toward history or legacy to discuss <\/em><\/strong>their process for composing a poem of theirs that we\u2019ve published. In this installment, Aimee Suzara discusses her poem \u201cMy Mother’s Watch<\/a>,” which appeared in Issue 2 of <\/a><\/strong><\/em>Lantern Review<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Though I began writing it in 2008, three years after my parents\u2019 return to the Philippines, this poem began on my first visit \u201chome\u201d in 1991. In the opening moment at the bustling palengke<\/em> (market), my mother insisted that she keep on her beloved Rolex, despite the attention I felt it drew. Through the poem, I sought to gain empathy for her attachment to the watch and what it symbolized. At this crossroads where goods are sold and money exchanged, the watch became the entry point to my family\u2019s journey as immigrants.<\/p>\n

And so I traced back the genesis of this watch\u2014more accurately, the events leading to the desire for the watch. I had been piecing together my parents\u2019 story and was fascinated with their uprooting from the slow-paced life of their childhood, to the full-color Technicolor dream of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Elvis songs and surround-sound systems.\u00a0 I was interested in this proverbial upward mobility, how it swept these newlyweds, not more than a few dollars in tow, into a life of shiny hyper-Americana.\u00a0 We were an unusual Filipino family living up the nuclear-family dream, moving frequently, cut off from anything Pinoy. Racism was thick in the small desert town where I spent much of my childhood, and we were taught not to trust anyone.\u00a0 In the age of credit cards and microwaves, we were right up in it, and at times it seemed we lived on an island stocked, as if our ammunition against the world, with Betamax videos, Jiffy pop and Lean Cuisines.<\/p>\n

In peer feedback, it was suggested that this was a poem about privilege and its contradictions. What had been lost, and what could possibly be gained in its place, when a sense of\u00a0genuine<\/em> status or acceptance would always be denied? In the attempt to return to our beginnings, what do we cling to? Now came the questions befit for memoir. Was I treating our story with enough compassion? I felt I had to ask permission; my mother read it, and she did not mind my candidness. In the writing of the poem, the roots of my parents\u2019 desire for the \u201cflashy\u201d began to unravel.\u00a0 Images that pushed through marked my parents\u2019 coming of age in America, and then mine.<\/p>\n

The first draft of the poem was in three parts, but it was suggested that I separate it into more, that it was too rushed and condensed.\u00a0 This made sense for what I wished to convey about time. The watch, like a heartbeat, like our lives, ticked on its own time. In its final version, in five parts, the poem spans at least twenty-five years. In the remembering, and in the writing, time stands still.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Excerpt from “My Mother’s Watch”<\/strong><\/p>\n

IV.<\/p>\n

They do not yet miss their left-behind lives:
\nLolo’s rule in the house with the green metal gate where<\/span>
\nnine kids left for the West,<\/span>one by one by one<\/span>
\nmovie house in the little town by the sea<\/span>
\npopcorn sold out of recycled coffee cans<\/span><\/p>\n

Sine del Sol burns to the ground:<\/span>
\nfatherless ten<\/span>sibling grudges<\/span><\/p>\n

tsinellas shuf shuf shuffle<\/em> across aged wooden floors<\/span>
\ntime<\/span>measured in sunrise and sunset<\/span><\/p>\n

The ones left behind keep time in slow<\/span>
\ntick tock<\/em> the clocks not turning digital<\/span><\/p>\n

send us some Tang, cigarettes, M&Ms<\/em><\/span>
\nmedicine, a change of the curtains<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

From \u201cMy Mother’s Watch<\/a>\u201d | Aimee Suzara | Issue 2, <\/a>Lantern Review <\/a>| <\/em>pp 17-24.
\nClick here<\/a> to read the poem in its entirety.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American writer, cultural worker and educator who has been writing and performing in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1999. Her first play, Pagbabalik (Return) was produced in 2006-7 and featured at several Bay Area festivals, and she is developing her second, A History of the Body, both supported by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[318],"tags":[636,314,353,409,321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3736"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3736"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3945,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3736\/revisions\/3945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}