Tag: zie madayag

Meet Our New Intern: Zie Madayag

In the Philippines, though not enshrined in the official constitution, you are required to pay your class treasurer—for whatever amount agreed upon—if you speak a sliver of Filipino. Slipping out even the smallest word of a particular thing you forgot to translate was unforgivable, even by accident. I can guarantee, maybe eighty-five percent, that most Filipinos who studied in either public or private schools had this odd and stifling rule of an “English only policy” in classrooms historically adapted from the legacy of American colonial education in the nation. It doesn’t begin in classrooms, of course. Often, I hear young children and my cousins speak perfect English—both in vocabulary and accent—yet fail to understand basic Filipino words. I wish I could say that it was the parents’ fault, but as the history of languages goes, it somehow always points toward colonization and its lingering afterlife in cultural and educational spaces.

When I told people I would be taking Comparative Literature in college, it was not a surprise to them. I sounded American and had no trace of a Filipino accent, I knew how to write creatively and academically in English and won awards for it, and I could converse seamlessly with anyone if need be. Sometimes, my friends and I would talk to each other in fake British and Irish accents, because it was fun and because it was practice. We even spoke English with botched French and Italian accents to see if we could pass as natives. When I decided to major in European Literature instead of Asian or Philippine, I was given nods of approval, leaving my decisions unquestioned.

Perhaps to them, Europe held a certain prestige that they didn’t see in the Philippines, that it could open doors for me to migrate abroad and become a permanent resident there. I wish I could say that it wasn’t for selfish reasons but parts of it were. I saw Europe as wider than where I was, that there was something deeper and richer to dig for. I was attracted to their literature more than I was to the books published in the Philippines. I knew many colleagues and professors who did their Masters and PhDs in the Americas or Europe and believed in the sophistication that foreign institutions could bring. I believed it through the decisions I made in college.

From the poems, plays, and fiction I write, English came easier. Forms felt looser, synonyms were instinctive, and creative imaginations seemed natural. In Filipino, writing is laborious, maybe even desire-laden. Words feel thicker, almost viscous, and fluid in a way that asks you to hold it solemnly. I am not twice divorced from the language when it’s Filipino I write and speak in. It’s intimate, private, something I return to when English exhausts or fails me. This was why, sometimes, when I was in class studying classical antiquities of Greece or Rome or modernism in Europe, shame and guilt would inevitably creep in. It would slither in the back of my head and ask me, “you know so much about the other side of the world. What about the one you’re currently in?” I reckon some of my friends felt the same feelings because when our thesis writing began, we would be asked: what is the relevance of your study to the Philippines? And we would answer with something else entirely in Polish, French, Irish, Norwegian, Spanish or Italian. Alienation, I learned, was sometimes self-inflicted.

Now, after graduating from college and continuing to hold tension between two languages, I open myself to the world I know and the world I study. English was a way to become-center, to meld with the majority. However, the margins, the minority, and the peripheral from which I come from is just as important, if not more. I admire the difficulty it takes for craft to take shape in Filipino, the sensibility and humor that rarely translates to English, and the porousness and permeability of language to sink, be swallowed, and bend, and still remain as potent as who speaks it. What emerges when you peel back the rinds are fragments of transition and mutability. In Sundress where marginalized voices are celebrated, I am honored to be part of these very fluctuations that metamorphose the sense beneath and beyond the text.

A brown Filipino woman with her hands behind her back, smiling in front of a brick-walled building. She has black hair and is wearing a gold necklace, and an ivory-colored dress with a green and maroon Sablay (or hand-woven sash) that has Indigenous geometric patterns and Baybayin characters, the official academic costume of the University of the Philippines.

Zie Madayag (she/her) is a writer and academic from Metro Manila. She is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature: European Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has worked and volunteered at non-profit organizations and cultural institutions promoting artistic and literary production. Both critical and creative, her research interests include corporeality and materiality, spatio-temporal entanglements, ecologies, and the rhizomatic potentiality of the periphery.

Sundress Reads: Review of sipèstisyon

The book cover for Mckendy Fils-Aimé's debut poetry collection, sipèstisyon. It features an upper body image of a Black man whose face and shirt are adorned with a variety of flowers. Above the image is the title in red, sipèstisyon.

In sipèstisyon (YesYes Books, 2026), Mckendy Fils-Aimé’s debut poetry collection, language is lacerated by the breath of memory. Titled sipèstisyon, the Kreyol word for superstition, the collection speaks through and against the smothering regime of English by assembling a sonic Kreyol terrain. The oral form of superstitions is invoked to elevate the acoustics of resistance and revival. Truth-telling, herein, does not merely vibrate the ache of trauma and violence but appears as an affective experience suspending us within the temporal orientation Fils-Aimé’s speaker migrates us toward. Vanishing lines are brought closer and vocabularies overflow. 

Though memory is often attributed to interiority and the past, Fils-Aimé writes it as a lived condition, as history. It is the marrow from which all contemplations, anguish, and wounds surface and coincide. The first poem, “sipèstisyon” comes to warn us of the fragility of memory: “If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory” (6) all the while it is made into an entity, an object of interest that can be plundered, with the speaker asking, “if memory is a museum // what happens if it’s ransacked?” (6). It is here where Fils-Aimé’s collection dilates: in the collapse of memory’s infrastructure. We are thrust into the nonlinearity of remembering—its illegibility, obscurity, and entropic tendencies. How, then, must we speak of ruin after it has happened? How do we absorb the shame, not so much as an exercise of erasure, but of personal absolvement? The speaker answers within a position he has occupied, in the register of the interstitial aftermath. 

“mwen pa pale kreyòl” (which translates to “I don’t speak Creole”) agitates his own shame of linguistic in-betweenness when, in telling a story in Kreyòl to someone, the speaker is criticized for the nasally sound he’s making, “laughing at the kreyòl i create / from the cinder blocks & cement // of english” (9). Here, his usage of Kreyòl appears to be awkward, clumsy, with the person listening condemning him that he has made a mockery of their architecture by building it with American machinery (9). The speaker laments this remark and at the same time accentuates the linguistic hybridity he settles between: “owning two skyscrapers // of dialect pressed against the skyline of speech. // i dream of two thin tongues, one in each of my nostrils / & how to sever the one closest to you / at the root” (9). The lexicons of Kreyòl are diluted through the sedimented structure of English, the body of words stiffening in its utterance; and seemingly, at once, the speaker has in front of him a hallway of locked doors with not enough keys to open them (9).

Fils-Aimé vertebrates the somewhat gelatinous nature of memory through language. In the following poem “my father apologizes for giving me a western name,” we are placed at the mouth of the speaker. He wonders if “naming is a culture’s way of colonizing a body, / if my tongue is just another island impaled / by French & American flags” (10). “soup joumou” finds itself in the speaker’s mother’s tongue as well, “shriveling like a snail / in the salt / of my English / i wanted to swim / against the current / of whitewash” (11). What I found striking is how the locus of the mouth is seemingly where Haitian heritage is reinforced as a migrant, reconstituting what it means to institutionalize the very voice they use as something that can both be disciplinal and transgressive. There is this, likewise, an excess and abscess of two languages; and oscillating between them is an embodied but disorienting experience. When the cadence of Kreyòl bleeds into English’s rhythm, the dissonance experienced from being an immigrant becomes less conceptual and more operational. Suddenly, visibility is determined on which is more audible. 

Though Fils-Aimé lingers in the tension of what I observe as “unbelonging,” we see in the poem “bilingual” that reconciliation of being fragmented. He writes:

too bad we can’t push the rewind button
on a lost language, can’t rewrite an alphabet
on the chalk-brushed blackboard of erasure.
best we can do is fill in the fissures
of our vernacular & smooth out the chipping.

listen, pay your teachers no mind
when they say we speak broken French.
they’ve never had to reassemble the remnants
of their mother tongues after mourning (48). 

Here, the speaker reconfigures fracture into fascination—“we open the china drawer / of our mouths, there’s copper / more than anything else” (48). These lines ultimately resonated with me because I understand this continuous, cascading residue that colonialism leaves within a language, this enduring afterlife of language compounded into a container that co-opts it. But Kreyòl is not complicit in becoming a spectacle of the English language. As it fills its own fissures and remedies its own precarities, the isolated fragments, at once, choreograph its autonomy. What Fils-Aimé does here is essentially translating that echo of a lost language into resonance, apprehending the vanishing voice not by strangling it (like what America does to non-English vernaculars), but by suturing it within the already existing polyphony coalescing in the myths, folklores, and superstitions he already understands. 

Language gives memory texture, friction, fibrous moments. In “Invocation for the God of Laughter,” language is exhalation, “a boisterous song // from the quiet orchestra of our lungs…. / O language excavated / from the moments when language is lost” (57). This is perhaps one of my favorite poems out of the collection as it nears its closing. I am fond of this idea—of this interstice—where language cannot be flattened into a smooth surface; that there is this disruption in voice: song, laughter, the very act of breathing. Actions that operate on the very basis of sound and community and are therefore non-isolatable. It is from here I find the power in sipèstisyon. Superstition becomes saturated with chortles, guffaws, rapturous ruckus, bellows, wheezes, giggles (57-58), aural elements which cannot be colonized into syllables. Though what they do is splinter and multiply across the sky. 

We return to the mouth by the last “sipèstisyon.” At this point, superstition has become almost like an inquiry into the possibility of fruition, of the future, of foundation. It reminded me of Natalie Diaz’s “Postcolonial Love Poem” where her speaker has “learned Drink in a country of drought” because Fils-Aimé’s speaker is a “seedless orchard—a drought in a grove / called potential. but I’m as resilient as a fig, / as defiant as a field of echinacea” (66). Both speaking about the aftermath of colonial violence, there is this fluidity that is bred from trembling at the perimeter of loss and reclamation. Fils-Aimé ends his collection with arms unfurling, “to stuff / fistfuls of sunlight into my mouth. / watch me nourish & be nourishment. / watch me become my own harvest.” (66). It ends in a truth we all know too well: there is resonance that remains after undoing power. Language noises out its own emancipation and immersion. And it breaches syntactic containment, seeping, leaking, and unraveling memory with it. 

Purchase your copy of sipèstisyon today!

A brown Filipino woman with her hands behind her back, smiling in front of a brick-walled building. She has black hair and is wearing a gold necklace, and an ivory-colored dress with a green and maroon Sablay (or hand-woven sash) that has Indigenous geometric patterns and Baybayin characters, the official academic costume of the University of the Philippines.

Zie Madayag (she/her) is a writer and academic from Metro Manila. She is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature: European Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has worked and volunteered at non-profit organizations and cultural institutions promoting artistic and literary production. Both critical and creative, her research interests include corporeality and materiality, spatio-temporal entanglements, ecologies, and the rhizomatic potentiality of the periphery.