Eileen Tabios. Dovelion: A Fairy Tale for
Our Times. AC Books, 2021, 309 pages. ISBN: 978-1-939901-19-4.
https://www.acbooks.org/dovelion
Eileen R. Tabios' Dovelion is a slipstream
work of fiction. It has characters, and a plotline develops, slowly, in the
background, like a novel. Some of this work is fictional, some
autobiographical. The central site is in an imagined place, Pacifica, which is supposedly
connected to the Philippines (where Tabios was born before moving to the United
States). But rather than autofiction, the narrative is a work of Indigenous futurism
as it shifts among strands of transcolonial experience. "Transcolonial," not
postcolonial, is the better term to describe the book's political critique, to
suggest how imperial powers have dominated Indigenous peoples like those of the
Philippines and how their influence continues and will continue in myriad
guises globally. The author is simultaneously a rebel against erasure of Indigenous
sovereignty and a visionary who offers new expressions of cultural traditions and
personal wholeness.
Indigenous futurisms writers generate
literary and other artifacts that revise western European literatures. With her
textual inventions, Tabios disrupts the expectations of English-language genres.
Poetry, geography, political science, dialogue, prose poetry, culinary arts,
visual art critique—all wend their way through the sequential and gradual
unmasking of the characters in Dovelion. This is Tabios' method of
character development. There is a through-line present in the novel-like book: a
Marcos-like dictator and his family terrorize the populace and exploit the
environment, until overthrown. Two lovers are children of enemies. The woman's pregnancy
results in a child and then grandchildren who commingle bloodlines of the
feuding families. Events occur and recur in the narrative fabric, like
revisited memories.
Tabios' body of work includes other experiments
with form, including invention of the tercet form hay(na)ku.
Several of these are embedded within the work: "When I bleed / I camouflage /
tears" and "When I weep / I camouflage / blood" (71-2). Each diary-like section
begins with a day and month, but no year. The dates are not sequential, but
instead seem random. Tabios created a random language generator for her project
Murder Death Resurrection: A Poetry Generator (2018), so the nonlinear
system for dates in Dovelion is consistent with the author's modus
operandi. Jumbled dates suggest entry into an alternative time, where linear
sequence is irrelevant. Like oral tradition stories, the same incidents repeat with
varying emphases. Point-of-view shifts among characters.
Thus, Dovelion's underlying scaffolding is a three-dimensional
clothesline upon which to hang moments of all shapes and sizes.
All entries begin with the fairy-tale phrase
"Once upon a time." The chapter entitled "12 April" illustrates one of the
unexpected directions of the prose; it begins with reflections on the love
affair and proceeds to a quotation from "the poet Eileen R. Tabios," who is,
the narrator avers, "a strong influence on my work" (60). The book's narrator
and author separate here and elsewhere and re-engage, as Tabios interrogates
the act of authorship.
Sequential chapters, one through twenty-five,
order the book, an overlay on the randomly dated subsections. And Tabios further
divides the book into three overarching sections that create another mapping:
"There Was Is," "There Became Is," and "There Will Be Is."
English verb tenses collapse into a single tense of presence. Time is a
recurring concern of the book.
Decolonization through restructuring of
language and genre is one dimension of Dovelion. Another is
revitalization of Indigenous values. Tabios writes about her book Murder,
Death and Resurrection: A Poetry Generator:
I also wanted to deepen my
interrogation (and disruption) of English which had facilitated
twentieth-century US colonialism in my birthland, the Philippines.
. . . I wanted to develop a consciously closer link to the Filipino indigenous
value of "Kapwa." "Kapwa" refers to "shared self" or "shared identity" whereby
everyone and everything is connected." (Jacket2, June 2, 2019)
Dovelion defines, explicates, reveals, and dramatizes
the timeless value of "kapwa." A "nanny" first explains the term in the book as
"despite diversity, One is All and All is One" (57). In another embedded
quotation from the author's own writings, she explains a poetics that expands
on the meaning of kapwa:
The human, by being rooted onto
the planet but also touching the sky, is connected to everything in the
universe and across all time, including that the human is rooted to the past
and future—indeed, there is no unfolding of time. In that moment, all of
existence—past, present, and future—has coalesced into a singular
moment, a single gem with an infinite expanse. (DoveLion 60, originally
published in The Awakening, 2013)
The author also explains kapwa in terms of the
science of physics, explaining that "it's not only a
cultural belief. Various physicists have long proposed time is not linear. Some
call time a dimension of spacetime and, thus, [time] does not pass because
spacetime doesn't" (156). The theory is a praxis. The
restoration of the intact, healthy culture is predicted by its onetime
existence in the past. The Filipino child's tale "An emerald island sits upon a
blue sapphire ocean and both glow under the beam of a 24-carat sun" is a
continuous refrain throughout the narration and a continuous expectation.
Islands are a motif in Dovelion, from
the invented island country of Pacifica to the Philippines to a "large grey
building" where the two lovers meet in isolation. Each individual is a discrete
"island" of individuality, which links to others through sex, children, and
social relationships. Kapwa links each person. Unspoken is the John Donne poem,
"No man is an island," but it is present nonetheless as all writings in all
time exist simultaneously in Kapwa time.
Tabios does not allow decolonization
principles to devolve into rhetoric without action. Rather, she previews a
future where enemies reconnect in alliances against dictatorships. She shows
how the restoration of a continuous concept of time corrects the fallacy of
linear time, where the past falls off the left-hand edge of the page and can be
ignored (like nineteenth-century US treaties with Indigenous nations). Tabios
offers options. She recognizes June 12, the day the Philippines overthrew Spanish
rule, through an imaginary website June12.com. She restores Indigenous values
in new form. Dovelion is a blueprint for further investigations into a
future where Indigenous knowledge structures the narratives.
Denise Low, Baker
University
Works Cited:
Tabios, Eileen. The
Awakening: A Long Poem Triptych & A Poetics Fragment. Theenk Books, 2013.
–––.
"Murder Death Resurrection: Another Way for Poetry." Jacket 2. June 2,
2019. Murder death resurrection | Jacket2.
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Murder Death Resurrection: A Poetry Generator, Dos Madres, 2018.