Language Sense and Hybridity in Gemino H. Abad's Postcolonial Poetics

ABSTRACT

One common critique of earlier Filipino poetics is that they make much ado about nativist humanism and essentialism, sometimes characterised as reductive and marginalising. This article argues that Gemino H. Abad, a significant figure in Filipino poetry and Philippine literature, ushers in postcolonial principles through his native clearing of the English language and his advancement of suggestive hybridity. His poetics highlights the Filipino poet's native ground, his or her linguistic sensibility and the importance of his or her own interpretation and imagination. Abad's poetics could therefore be viewed as syncretic and underscores the Filipino poet's lived realities and creative struggle as ways to epitomise Filipino consciousness and sensibility and to ambiguate the Americanisation of Philippine literature.