The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes; Our Autobiography
by Eileen R. Tabios
New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2007.
Paperback. Perfect bound. 366 Pages plus notes.

The more I encounter Eileen Tabios’ writings–(and I mean that word “encounter” exactly as I wrote it, for to read Eileen Tabios is encounter her, no more, no less)–the more I’m convinced that she’s a force of nature instead of a mere scribbling mortal like the rest of us. I imagine Dr. Bucke must have felt the same way about Walt Whitman who time and again in his poems tells us that who touches his book touches him. (Of course his eventual encounter with the aging poet is a different matter.) Tabios manages to do the same thing with this book, and in fact even begins to talk in “we’s” instead of “I’s” toward the end of it. The big question is: how does she manage to pull this transfiguration off in a skeptical age when writing like this must be done with tongue firmly in cheek and a roll of the eyes to escape jeers and sneers? Well, first one must know exactly who one is to do it. Tabios is one of the most consistent personalities in contemporary women’s poetry. We know almost all there is to know about her, and if we don’t know it, a turn of the page or a click on one of her many website links will tell us! But isn’t this just a dazzling show of–narcissism? Absolutely not. Her seemingly artless style of writing draws one in and by the end of whatever it is we are reading we feel as if we were sitting in the living room of a gracious friend leaning near to tell us the story she needs to share with us at that particular moment. Often the tone is like that of a letter from your sister–you feel almost embarrassingly close to the writer. She addresses you as a “peep” and her team of readers as “peeps”! (I turn to the beat-up, jaded face in the mirror and giggle. “You are a peep” I say, feeling completely rejuvenated, but still managing to stick my tongue out just the same.) Moreover, she refers to herself over and over as “Moi”. Moi? So there is the sacred dichotomy in Tabios terms, or in other words, I and the Other. Yes, Tabios knows who she is–she is completely comfortable with her role as Other. But what exactly does that “Otherness” entail? First she is a Philippine-American writer and in her pages she displays the history, the culture, and the mind-set. Next she is a daughter who has lost her father, and we are allowed into the presence of the dead and given the opportunity to mourn with her, to over-hear her mother as she mummers to the body of the man she shared her life with, and to know the details of the mourning, the ritual and the burial. After that we move not only towards a revelation of the transfiguration of her father’s spirit, but a joyful openness and acceptance that takes the form of a series of collaborations with various poets and artists, and this arms-wide embracing of other Others and placing them between the same covers and in the same bindings–well, this is where she becomes larger than her readers and her boundaries drift off the page and assume the receding horizons of the world wide net. What energy! What charm! And this doesn’t even begin to address the many virtuoso forms she displays in her “warm” rather than “cool” experimentalism.