Lit14 Midterm Essay PDF

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The Nobility of OFWs in Marne Kilates’s “Delotavo’s Diaspora”Marne Kilates’s “Delotavo’s Diaspora” is an ekphrasis or a poem in response to Antipas Delotavo’s painting, “Diaspora”, which depicts people with their backs behind the viewers, carrying their bags and luggages, heading off to somewhere un...

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The Nobility of OFWs in Marne Kilates’s “Delotavo’s Diaspora” Marne Kilates’s “Delotavo’s Diaspora” is an ekphrasis or a poem in response to Antipas Delotavo’s painting, “Diaspora”, which depicts people with their backs behind the viewers, carrying their bags and luggages, heading off to somewhere unknown. Delotavo is known for his paintings showcasing social realism, such as the painting in discussion. Kilates, meanwhile, is a Filipino poet who had published three books on poetry and translated works of major Filipino poets into English. His poem interprets Delotavo’s painting as a picture of overseas Filipino workers heading off different countries for work. The elements in the poem all point towards an allegorical response towards the painting and displays both the nobility and the loneliness in being an overseas Filipino worker (OFW). To start off, one must understand the meaning of the word “diaspora”. It means the dispersion or migration of any people outside of their homeland. The word in itself encapsulates the heaviness in leaving home and going off into the unknown because migrating from one place to another automatically implies that there is something that must have been left behind. The form of the poem is irregular. It is composed of five stanzas, four of which are made up of five lines. There is no particular rhyme or meter that is being followed as well. As for the persona in the poem, he is someone who’s on the other side of the pre-departure area of an airport, someone who’s watching these OFWs pass by, someone who had to send someone off himself. He narrates the poem in the third-person and makes a very clear distinction between him or “us” and “them”. Throughout the poem, this separation becomes more distinct. The persona seems to be highlighting the difference between those who are leaving and those who remaining in the homeland, given his very solid separation between him and “us”, and “them”. This evident gap between the two elevates the status OFWs as other beings. The clear-cut linguistic emphasis on “us” and “them” in the poem is not out of detachment and discrimination but out of reverence and respect – an acknowledgement of and a homage to the work and the service of OFWs. In the first stanza of the poem, it was described how they take good care of their luggage and its contents “Because those are what they are/Including what they’ve left” and because their bags would take them places. “What they are” is composed of their own possessions, their personal effects. “What they’ve left” corresponds not only to pictures of their loved ones who they leave behind, but also their hearts. They leave their hearts back home to their families, and the irony is, they must carry it with them to be able to continue their work precisely for those that they left behind. The second stanza described how OFWs have their backs turned on us. Turning one’s back could mean disregard, but in the poem, the act is a display of resolve and courage “because they must look ahead”. It is an act of nobility because they feel the loneliness, but push through and carry on anyway. They turn their backs not to abandon others but because they must or “death would mock us, if they’ve never left”. OFWs are one of the country’s leading source of economic growth. So quite literally, the country needs them not just to provide the needs of their own individual families but also to keep the country afloat. In the third stanza of the poem, the persona observes people in pre-departure, noting those who walk alone or in twos, or leave as a family. The line “glad for the company” proves the loneliness that is indeed present. Those who depart as family take with them everything,

“roots, branches, memories”, “if indeed they had chosen to become/Their destinations”. These lines suggest that there is a sense of being uprooted upon leaving and of being planted again into another place and completely settling in. There is courage as well to be found in uprooting and then replanting oneself in foreign ground. An interesting thing in the last stanza are the lines “between them and us, a widening/Gulf, no matter how we cling to memories/Like flotsam”. “Gulf” is separated and capitalized as if it’s a synecdoche to mean the Arabian Gulf or the middle east, where the majority of OFWs are concentrated. It is also interesting that a gulf is a body of water and flotsams are floating pieces of ship wreck. The persona describes the motion of people walking away from us as a “widening gulf” and in between us and them, in this gulf, there are memories, fragments, discarded material of what was once something whole. Memories become the remaining pieces that are left from a painful wreckage – the physical separation of families, of lovers. We cling to these memories because “we refuse to know, who between them and us/Are the survivors of a wreck”. We cling to memories because we are uncomfortable with confronting pain, with seeing those who are the most damaged and affected by the separation. The irony in all this is that these people must leave behind and “wreck” their families and those closest to them in order to save precisely those they have wrecked. But this is exactly what makes the act of leaving for the betterment of loved ones noble – to look forward and continue despite the wreckage left behind....