I bear witness though she emplaces me in the interstice of life and death.
Over tea of peppermint and ternate in Lucban, reunited for the first time after we met in Dumaguete thirteen years ago, she speaks to me in a language more ancient than my lifetime, a language that reaches for a dead beloved. She is my mentor for the writing fellowship but we talk in disparate languages. I am unable to follow the way she addresses the persona in my works that needs grounding and embodiment. Or how she addresses me, or both of us—sea-changed by sauntering in each of our deepest griefs across the years. She has surrendered to the fact that she will not hear back. I grab at every driftwood of meaning but I am helpless in her ocean of thought.
I am her audience, but also, I am not.
She lost her partner to homicide and robbery in 2012 by four gunmen, one of which was a policeman. She wore white for a year. No language could reach her. Her grief could not be touched by the warmest of loves from family and friends. Books on healing and dealing with grief came pouring in. Her students secretly organized a suicide watch on her, just to make sure. But all constructs of language, she realized, belong to the living—all meaning, all sense. Her extreme grief arrived at the edge of words and entered a threshold of a complex language fueled by a yearning to get to the other side, or get the other side to speak. She stopped writing poetry and started performing them in extreme durations. [1]
She built bridges that nobody could cross.
This is the elegy of Nerisa del Carmen Guevara.
A week after our conversation in Lucban, I find myself in UP Parola Gallery 1, catching the last day of her exhibit, Umbra: mater et filia (Series 1-6), part of "Bakas: Liwanag," the other half of "Bakas: Panahon," which is taking place in the next room. In Umbra, the poet Nerisa photographed her Mom and herself without a camera. She captured the images with controlled non x-ray light on an x-ray film by using silver halide crystals processed by Jay Javier. Her mom had to stay still for long durations so her cast shadow could be imprinted. It reminds me of Thomas Wedgwood [2] in 1802 who attempted to capture silhouettes of objects in chemical coated paper and leather but was unsuccessful in stabilizing the image; of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce [3] in 1826 who tried heliography, or drawing through the sun; of Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre [4] in 1837 who printed photos on copper plates; of Sir John Herschel [5] who used hyposulfite to arrest and stabilize the image on paper in 1839; of George Eastman [6] in 1887 who used paper covered by gelatin and finally replaced paper with celluloid in 1889.
But Nerisa took inspiration from somewhere else: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Extreme light from the nuclear explosion decimated thousands of peoples and objects. The surfaces they shielded became negatives to their bodies. The surrounding surface was bleached and the surface obstructed by the body became the shadow—the photograph. [7] The photograph contained cremated substance. [8] The bodies—peoples and objects—were gone but the surfaces where their outline was formed by their light remained. The image was possible through the sudden violence of radiation. A generation of survivors suffer the after effects of the bombing to this day.
Over time, the shadow would degrade.
On the steps outside the Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, the stone on which a shadow was photographed underwent weathering. So the Japanese cut the stone and preserved it in the Atomic Bomb Museum. [9]
How does Umbra speak to me?
Is it me it is speaking to?
I find myself examining the thin lines between the x-ray films, the spaces that divide the sheets, the figures, the distance between the mother and the daughter.
Inside me, alienation begins to settle.
How much shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lingers here?
Are the traces of war gone?
I think about Ukraine and Palestine and I choke with the shame of how our collective humanity is failing the genocide victims everyday.
I stand in front of Umbra like a witness, though I do not understand clearly what I am witnessing. Nerisa’s art silences me, simulates the empty of loss and the ineffability in the sudden violence that cut off the life of her beloved thirteen years ago, or of the lives of peoples perishing in the name of empire, war.
What about the flowers that the mother and the daughter hold?
The question allows me to inhabit two spaces at once.
The grammar which Umbra creates—me as an audience of an elegy whose language is intended not for me—powerfully constructs a simultaneity where I become multiple and provisional, here and not here, aware of my own mortality and death.
Could it be that grief, through our endurance of its long temporality, is revelatory of its true nature which is love? The elegy is a love letter, a dispatch from life, an anchor which offers a truth for us who are left behind: fluctuation is a continuum, the contingent is always already configured, the human heart persists in creating a new complex language that transcends pain.
I close my eyes and I am back in Lucban. Nerisa introduces to me her new partner, whose silence is steady, whose presence is reassuring, space-making. They give me a gentle smile and prepare for Nerisa and me a tea of peppermint and ternate.
“Great with honey,” they say.
“This is good,” I reply.
Outside the pavilion, the dark clouds crumble. I ask Nerisa’s permission to go. I strip myself half naked and I run under the rain, towards a terraced field where newly transplanted rice seedlings nod softly against the raging storm.
Footnotes:
[1] See Nerisa del Carmen Guevara. “Elegy 5: Wake,” The Kill List Chronicles, August 24, 2017, https://medium.com/@kill.list.lit/elegy-5-wake-1b5f405c1ac7; “Durational Performance: Nerisa Del Carmen Guevara,” Biennale Jogja XV, October 20 to November 20, 2019, biennalejogja.org.
[2] Beaumont Newhall and Naomi Rosenblum. “History of Photography,” Britannica, June 14, 2024, britannica.com.
[3] Colin Harding. ““N IS FOR… JOSEPH NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE, CREATOR OF THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH,” Science Media Museum, November 25, 2013, blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk.
[4] “Daguerreotype Process,” The Historic New Orleans Collection, hnoc.org.
[5] “Sir John Frederick William Herschel,” Getty Museum Collection, getty.edu.
[6] Mary Bellis. “The History of Photography: Pinholes and Polaroids to Digital Images,” Thought Co., January 17, 2021, thoughtco.com.
[7] Stacy Kish. “Why did the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima leave shadows of people etched on sidewalks?,” Live science, March 28, 2024, livescience.com.
[8] “Hiroshima Records 2000 March,” The Chugoko Shimbun, hiroshimapeacemedia.jp.
[9] “Hiroshima Records 1971 January,” The Chugoko Shimbun, hiroshimapeacemedia.jp.
