Ma. Jhayle Meer
Oyster River Pages: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
Ma. Jhayle Meer: I belong to a literary tradition of Filipino writers writing in English. My education has always been bilingual. The effect I would say is speechlessness. I am a speechless poet. As a result, I tend to believe in muses. What English lines would the muses give me today? Or else, each thing said must be wrought from extreme necessity. My third language is film language, and it is also something I'm actively working on reclaiming. There's an academic term that I subscribe to, which is decolonizing language. Deleuze and Guattari called it writing minor literature.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
MJM: Vulnerability—what a word. Isn't it a certain disposition, sensitivity, and openness to the world? Children are vulnerable, and then we learn how to keep ourselves invulnerable. As an artist and writer, it is almost something you must practice every day. Ever since I started writing, whether on the page or on my laptop, I have always been afraid that someone might come up from behind me and read what I've written. If I can think of at least one person who must not read the work no matter what, then it must be vulnerable work. You always have something at stake when writing, something you could potentially lose by putting it out in the open. But vulnerability could also mean the opposite—in the sense of finding the courage to open up. If you can think of at least one person you would like to show this work to, even if it's someone imagined or dead, then most certainly, you have a vulnerable work. I have so many questions in this regard. Is writing separate from publishing? I can write for myself and publish for just one person, but even that requires vulnerability and readiness.
ORP: What books have you read many times?
MJM: I always read poetry books more than once. But for the book I have read many times, I am thinking of Ariel by Sylvia Plath. I know it's a very popular text, but there's something about encountering a work in your youth and not understanding it fully at first, yet being completely drawn to it. Plath has always been one of my favorite poets, beyond her stature as a confessional poet and her tragic biography. Ariel is a work you would love to teach or just carry around.
ORP: How does writing/art influence your worldview, and how does your worldview shape your writing/art?
MJM: My writing is my worldview. It is how I look at the world and its mechanisms of production and distribution. I am a woman writing in a third-world country. Even before I had that consciousness, writing served as my personal rebellion growing up. It's the one thing I have no practical reason for doing but continue to do. But the curious thing is, I don't know what happens to writing and art in the case of a successful revolution. I've always burdened my work with locating the personal in the political, and vice versa. At the same time that writing energizes and comforts me, I can't help but imagine the rest that is possible if there is no struggle for space, no marginal identities, no colonized people, and if the earth, by any chance, is not dying.
