E. San Juan Jr.

Balikbayang Mahal Passages from Exile E. San Juan, Jr. E. San Juan Jr.

This project of "balikbayan" (homecoming) unfolds through poems and one essay-in-progress spanning four decades of exile. It seeks to map one emigre's itinerary through terrains of disruption and dislocation. Written in English and in Filipino (with translations into Chinese, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian), these traces of the writer's journey strive to foreground the ordeals of deterritorialization shared by all colonized peoples--a universal experience given a local habitation and name in the trajectory of this flight in search of passages to uncharted shores. Less a Baedeker for remembering or reaching a destination, this palimpsest of tropes/signs hopes to construct zones of departure for discovering new territory built out of a history of collective sacrifices grounding our dreams and desires. Exile is the name for this material process of renewal and liberation--love for whoever is returning, the beloved fulfilling the promise of redemption in the birth pangs of revolutionary struggle.