Alessandra Panares is a lifelong storyteller. She is a queer Filipina American woman who has lived in three countries and five cities and spent most of her youth looking for a place to call home. She thinks she's finally found it in Boston, where she works at one of the local museums and goes home to her sister and her cat.
"Being ourselves in a world that is not particularly supportive of our existence is in itself a political act."
the needle in the haystack
by: Alessandra Panares
“Each time a girl opens a book and reads a womanless history, she learns she is worthless.”
-Dr. Myra Pollack Sadker.
you don’t find girls like me in history textbooks.
i mean, well;
it’s still hard to find girls in history textbooks, generally,
but you don’t find girls like ME,
so i have made do with stealing fragments
of other people’s stories.
broken my own history into pieces
and tying them on to someone else’s to try
and fit in the grand scheme of things.
i started loving history
by reading a historical fiction series about young girls.
girls who later become queens and empresses
but for the span of a book were young girls like me,
writing in diaries in the hopes of leaving a mark on the world.
none of these girls looked like me, but it was close enough,
right?
i found my filipino self in history by looking at other asians—
they were a start—
could find echoes of understanding colonialism in
india and pakistan
find people in america with eyes
almost like mine in the chinese,
it was close enough, right?
when i first realized i identified with the lgbtqia+ community,
i searched from the stone age
to stonewall,
trying to trace the paths of these people
i had something in common with.
no one i found identified the way i did,
but it was close enough, right?
(no.
it hasn’t felt ‘close enough,’
so i keep looking anyways.)
loving women’s history
is what got me studying it in the first place;
i have been lucky to know enough of where to look
to find that part of me in the broader tale
but it took college to start to find better fits to the rest.
the first time i found more than a sentence on the philippines
in a history textbook,
i wrote three poems and cried;
highlighted every single mention
like it was a fact i never wanted to forget.
the first time i found out about someone in the past
defining their sexuality like i do mine
the happiness bloomed in my chest like a rose.
there is a very particular joy in finding a needle in a haystack,
especially when the needle is proof that people like you have existed
since before YOU walked this earth
and the haystack is the dominant narrative of history
that needle becomes worth a thousand times its weight in gold.
my professor defines history as the study of change
and continuity over time
and i am always changing my lenses,
searching for proof that people like me have existed
and will continue to exist over time;
searching for evidence of girls not just almost like me
not just 'close enough,’
searching for ways to make history something
that isn’t just THEIR story,
but also,
finally,
mine.
Reflection
by: Alessandra Panares
“Look at me,
I will never pass for a perfect bride.
Or a perfect daughter...”
I hate my family.
There are always too many arguments and hurt feelings.
Always too long a history of pain and heartache.
Always too large a gap between my liberal-minded self,
And my conservative, Catholic parents.
I hate my family.
Because every video call
Or vacation has me denying a part of myself.
I hate my family.
But here’s the thing:
I love my family.
They are the only ones that have known me my whole life.
Been there for every move and funeral,
Every birthday party and goodbye.
In the Filipino culture, family is everything,
And you can see that in every decision we make.
My grandfather
Came to America for a better life.
My mother
Raised me to have lofty goals.
I
Told no one that I wanted to die when I was thirteen
Because I am not the one who has given every sacrifice.
I told no one I had started cutting
Because I did not want them to blame themselves.
I have told no one I am asexual,
Because I do not know what they will say.
If they will invalidate my existence,
Or pray for my soul.
I am my father’s eldest child.
My Lola’s first granddaughter.
I will not be the one to tear apart our family
With what they see to be shame.
I love them too much for that.
And so, the silence leaves cracks in my soul that nothing can fill.
My white friend tells me,
If I had been raised wholly as a Westerner,
The shattered shards of myself would be less jagged.
That my people’s pride in family kills my burgeoning individuality.
Tumblr tells me
To get rid of the ‘toxic people’ in my life.
That I owe nothing to those that brought me into this world
If they cannot understand my identity.
But this is something they do not understand:
I am a Filipina.
My family is my life.
Yours may have left your ancestors’ shores on the Mayflower
Without a backwards glance,
But mine came here clinging tight to each other to stay alive.
I am proud to carry the bones of my ancestors on my shoulders.
Proud to say that their blood is mine.
When you tell me to walk away from my family,
You are telling me to leave a part of myself behind.
But I am also asexual,
And my family comprehends only the L and the G and the T
And barely the B,
And so I cannot tell them about the glorious other letters
That include my own sexuality.
So I sit there on video chat, smiling,
Hiding rainbow flag and ace scarf
As we talk about how my baby brother is doing in school.
I love my family.
You cannot ask me to leave them behind.
And so I stand here,
A broken mirror reflecting different images to different people
And wonder
“When will my reflection show
Who I am inside?”
TS: Tell me about your first exposure to poetry.
AP: I think I started writing when I was in the fourth grade, so early elementary school. We had various assigned books that we would read for class. With children’s books in particular, there’s always a sort of poetic sound to them. As I got older, I expanded and pretty much read everything I could. E.E. Hummings was probably my favorite poet. Oh and Shel Silverstein! Read a little Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. Then I started reading more books from people coming from the spoken word community like Sarah Kay, Andrea Gibson, Phil Kay, people like that.
TS: Tell me about your journey through poetry, what content did you deal with, what forms have you explored?
AP: I read a lot in general. Starting in high school, I listened to a lot of spoken word on YouTube, especially Button Poetry. There are some fairly consistent Youtubers who post spoken word poetry and we watched a couple of them in high school my freshman or sophomore year and I just got hooked. It’s such a great medium, an interesting way of sharing poetry and bringing out the theatrics that you don’t always get reading poetry from paper. I’d been writing for forever at that point, but really when I got to college was when I started falling more in love with the spoken word aspect. I was involved in a lot of slams when I was in college, I went to local slams in the town I was going to school in.
TS: What have been your influences?
AP: Obviously, my experience as a queer person has been a big one! I actually performed in front of a really big crowd for one of the first times at this college conference in the Midwest called MBLGTACC (Midwestern Bisexual Lesbian Gay Trans Asexual College Conference). They had a bunch of different panels but they would always do a spoken word component, or some kind of poetry component. They either had a workshop, or a performers, or a combination. One of the first things that I performed in front of a large group, was a queer poem about the interplay of being an Asian woman but also a queer woman, specifically an asexual queer woman. At the time, it was around 2014, it was still something on the marginalized edges of the queer community, so I wasn’t entirely sure I had a place in the community at the time. I read a lot of poems about my experiences generally, as an Asian woman, and about my family. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I talked about not having a place that you can call home. A lot of my poems more and more these days are on the political, social justice atmosphere. I write a lot of nerdy shit too! I’ve recently been working on a chapbook that I more or less have finished now that is basically about the hero in any particular piece of fiction and the person who loves them who may not necessarily be buying into the cause as much, but they support it because they know it’s what the hero is drawn to. They know that they’re never really going to have the hero’s full attention as long as the cause exists. It’s a whole amalgamation of lived experiences, media, history.
TS: How has your poetry changed from before to after coming out?
AP: Coming out is a consistent process as we all know. I don’t watch the tv show One Day at a Time but I did see this gif that was going around on Tumblr for a bit where one of the main character’s aunt, who also identifies with the queer community, was saying that at first when you come out it’s like “I’m gay! I’m gay!” then eventually it’s still a part of you but it’s not the entirety of you. I think I’ve see that reflected in the way I’ve been writing too. I was raised Catholic so this was really not something on my radar at all, but when I first started to realize I wrote a lot about how I was feeling and wondering what that meant for me. Initially I thought I was just ace but not really queer in any of the other senses, like still fairly heteroromantic, but then I realized I was really into women and non-binary folx as well, there are a few poems about that. Now, given the political climate, it still is there, as an undercurrent, but not nearly as prevalent. It’s still a part of who I am, but it’s not the whole of who I am. I write about a lot of other different things too.
TS: What challenges have you faced as a queer POC writer?
AP: I haven’t made concerted efforts to get published just yet. I have submitted to a few things. But I haven’t had experiences the way others may have, that sense of discrimination in response to queer writers just trying to be themselves. I think I’ve experienced more difficulty as a queer reader, than a queer writer. As a queer writer, my main sharing platform when I was still sharing most of my stuff was on Tumblr. I knew there were people in droves that were interested in what I was writing based on the responses I was getting. I felt very supported as a writer, specifically in the Tumblr community.
When I was doing this research project, I went to slams in the states, and I was in one in New York and I decided that I was going to do a couple of poems. But I wasn’t certain about how the crowd would take it, also my mom was in the crowd and I hadn’t come out to her yet. So I had to dial it back and play around with the set idea that I had going in. It’s a lot of being very aware of the audience that you’re in. It’s the idea of code switching, that we are seeing people do in their daily existence, something that as POC or queers we’re usually very familiar with. So I have had to do a lot of that, maybe more than I necessarily would like but also understanding that’s how society is functioning right now. Going back to the queer reader aspect though, there’s a lack of representation in mainstream media. It was a lot easier to find people who identified more like myself in the spoken word and online community, not necessarily in my day-to-day life and that can be hard sometimes.
TS: Can you talk about the power of reclaiming space, and how you do that with your writing?
AP: I’m gonna babble a little about my research project because it really ties into this. To provide some background, I was looking into the way that marginalized groups, specifically women, POC, queer people and also dabbling into the disability community, used poetry to craft these alternative historical narratives that run in contrast to what we’re seeing as the standard “history” written by cis white heterosexual men. It was validating. I fell into this project, I didn’t go out with the intent of starting this but as I started looking more into the spoken word community it presented itself to me. One poem that has always stuck to me was a persona poem, it was written from the perspective of Alexander Graham Bell’s wife who was deaf. Bell didn’t want his wife to learn sign language. And it’s wild, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone couldn’t communicate with his wife. So this poem was about that from the wife’s perspective. I had never heard anything about that and I imagine a lot of people in the crowd felt the same way. That’s just one example, there’s a whole host of them if I go back and dig them up. When I wrote this paper, I called it “History Speaks” because it was history speaking, but from the perspective of people who haven’t had a chance to speak. So I see spoken word as a space to reclaim some of the narratives they haven’t gotten the chance to say.
TS: Do you consider yourself an activist, how does this shine through in your writing?
AP: I don’t know if I would say I am as active as I used to be. At another queer college conference that I went to, it was a queer POC kind of caucus, so we got together and had a chat about how it feels to be a queer POC. This was a conference specifically for queer POC who went to Catholic universities, so there are a lot of layers there. Something that I said there, that I’ve always held true, is that being ourselves in a world that is not particularly supportive of our existence is in itself a political act. In that sense, yes I’m still an activist because I’m still existing and still very proud to be myself. I would like to get more involved. I moved up here to Boston a couple of years ago,I had a rough patch there, so I wasn’t really involved with the community. Now I’m in a much better place, have a much better job, it’s amazing what can happen when you no longer go to school. But now that I’m better established, in such a great community, I am hoping I could get more involved. I have been doing research, looking for organizations to volunteer at, my schedule can be a little funky but I’m hoping to be more active than I am.
TS: How do you think you’ve healed through writing?
AP: Particularly when I was younger, there was so much I wanted to say, especially to my family, since my relationship with them was not always the strongest. There’s so much I wanted to say to people that I feel I didn’t have the right to say or had the words to say. Poetry was always such an easier way of getting it all out there. There have been multiple times in my life where I come home from a trip or an experience and I have to write about it, because there’s no other way for me to express what I need to say. And that’s not necessarily just part of the healing process but it’s just part of the living process, being able to understand what’s going on in my head and being able to express it and share it with people who may or may not feel the same way. Maybe it’s a chance to find a community. When I was still sharing my works on Tumblr, seeing the amount of people who related so heavily to a lot of what I was writing, made me feel a lot less alone. Nowadays, it’s just to get the feels out there.
TS: Can you name a poet or poem that has impacted you the most and why?
AP: There are so many! I have two. Sarah Kay is someone I’ve always considered to be my biggest influence in the way I perform. She comes from a slightly different background than me but I still relate a lot to what she has written. I always want to write like her, and I’ll perform her poems at open mics that are just for funzies. She’s a wonderful influence in terms of performance and stylistically, I think I’ve copied a lot of her ways of writing. When it comes to content and feeling, Andrea Gibson is probably the biggest one for that. I just recently saw them perform when they were in Boston. Every time you go to an Andrea Gibson poetry performance, you cry. It’s the good kind of pain but also the bad kind of pain. That was the second time I’ve seen them in Boston, in the same venue. The first time I saw them I was in such a bad place, it was not long after the Orlando shooting, so there was still a lot of pain that we were feeling. A lot of people in that room were part of the queer community, since Andrea Gibson is probably one of the more known queer poets in the spoken word community.
TS: Tell me a little about the poems you sent me.
AP: The Reflection poem was from being at the Midwestern conference that I was telling you about. That was one of my first performances that I had ever done in front of a really big group of people. I was so nervous and scared but I had to get it out. I think I had written it that day during a poetry workshop. The conference was focused on queerness, about the queer experience but there wasn’t a whole lot about the intersectional experience and looking at what it’s like to be a person of color. In the Asian community specifically, as you probably read, our families are very important to us. Asians speak in very broad strokes, we generally tend to be a community focused society rather than what you see here in the states where people are more individualistic. So being a queer Asian woman in America is a very interesting space to walk. For example, I’ve had folx tell me, who are white people within the community, that if your family isn’t supportive of you, to drop them like a hot potato and yeet out of that situation. For me and for most Asian people, that is just not an option. It’s so ingrained in you that you are part of your family and even with all of the struggles I’ve had with my family, I cannot conceptualize an existence without my family. So the idea of willingly giving that up, even to save my own sanity and to be able to live my own identity, is just wild to me. I’ve come out to quite a few of my family members in the time since I wrote this, including my parents actually, it’s ended up a lot better than I feared it would at the time. I was so small when I wrote this and so scared, that is the one thing I think about when I look back at this, I was terrified. I was just starting this journey and had no idea about anything.
Needle in the Haystack was a couple of years later. I actually picked these poems really well, but I didn’t really think about it. I wrote it when I was writing my research paper. I presented this paper a couple of times, a couple of different ways. The first iteration of it was that I wrote a couple of poems of my own and also presented poems that other people had written relevant to the topic. The primary emotion in this isn’t fear anymore. The closest would be rage, but not even that really, it’s more passion or desire. The desperate need to find myself in a space. Representation is so crucial and that’s why I brought up my difficulties as a queer reader because if you don’t see yourself in a space, then you’re not gonna feel like you’re allowed to talk in that space. That’s why it’s so wonderful that there are so many spoken word poets that are occupying space and reclaiming space, by putting themselves out there and talking about their history. It makes you feel like you’ve been a part of the world from the beginning. I was really feeling this sense of not really being in the history books, even though statistically somebody in the broad span of history had to have identified in all the ways I do, whether they knew it or not. I still feel that a lot today, but I’ve been trying hard to learn about Filipino history, which isn’t easy especially if you’re wanting to look at more pre-colonial stuff. But I got to go back home recently and picked up a lot of books so I’m hoping that will bring me to a place where I’m feeling a little more seen.
Review + Analysis of "the needle in the haystack" and "Reflections"
by: Tanairi Sorrentini
Having had context about the time between writing these poems, it’s remarkable to see the growth between the two in terms of content. In “Reflection”, she is dealing with a conflict, both internally in deciding how she feels about her family, but also externally in deciding whether or not she can present her full self in front of them, as she is forced to hide her “rainbow flag and ace scarf” on a video call with them. In “the needle in the haystack”, she demands that her history be told, in all of the ways her identities intersect and scours through history books to find herself in them. “needle in the haystack” features a shift in tone, an agency that was only beginning to emerge in “Reflection”. When the language moves from “the silence leaves cracks in my soul that nothing can fill” to “i am always changing my lenses/searching for proof that people like me have existed/and will continue to exist over time”, you can’t help but cheer for her as she discovers that, despite a lack of representation of her identities in history, she is here to create that representation and amplify what she has found in history books— she has realized that her existence is both valid and beautiful.