agritriptych

I’d like to situate the conventional mistrust of fake women: food and love. Growing up as a girl, I was often willing to starve in both contexts. Either one of those domains erased me.

In the early 1900s, Barangay Bagong Pag-asa was terminable farmland. My local OurLadyOf began as a small kubol on Road 1, named after the Marian apparition to a group of schoolchildren on a farm in France. Beneath a thatched roof made of palaspas, the patron saint of farmers and day laborers, San Isidro, was put next to her, in this inaugurating chapter of the neighborhood church, well after the formal period of US occupation. Socialized housing was already worse off, and several barangays already had the Projects. This part of the city is where I grew up in Metro Manila, that built upon its character from working people, and from schools. The parish priest of Santa Rita de Cascia then had the original Marian statue from the barangay brought to Philam Homes, not too far, the private subdivision where my parents eventually preferred mass. Later I collated some oral histories, mostly of industrial jobs. The rest of this postcolonial history is held together by a Facebook post on Quezon City Traveler. I found that there were rice paddies, after all. But no one remembers the Fordist era for the food.

All my life, the taste I’ve yearned for is something specific. I had to eat it.

Carissa Pobre is a writer from the Philippines. Her books of poetry and essays include Compositions (Everything’s Fine Press, 2023) and Formations (self-published, 2021). Find more about her work here.