Rina Garcia Chua
Biography
Rina Garcia Chua (she/siya) is a creative and critical scholar from the Philippines who is currently based in British Columbia, Canada. She is a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, an Affective Currents Environmental Humanities Institute Fellow with the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College, and she received her PhD from the University of British Columbia. Rina is the editor of Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry (UST Publishing House, 2018), and co-editor of Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific (University of Michigan Press, 2022). She is also co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada and is currently completing an anthology of Southeast Asian Eco-Writings with Esther Vincent Xueming and Ann Ang (Manoa Journal, University of Hawai’i Press, 2023). Her current scholarly book manuscript develops the framework of a migrant reading practice in analyzing curations, collations, and anthologies of literary and visual cultures, while her in-progress poetry chapbook, “A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards, is a visual and poetic response to migrant and arrivant cultures, liminal environments, and violences of form and language.
Poetics Statement
Photo Credits: Maude Roxby
Alt text: author photo of Rina Garcia Chua posed outside on a bridge (picture left), with the water, mountains, and grey and white clouds in the backdrop. Beside her and in the backdrop are also trees. Chua has her hair down, and is wearing a pendant necklace, a grey cardigan and turquoise blue shirt.
“I create from the liminal environment that I occupy as a migrant in North America. My poems are of the juxtapositions among disparate time-space compressions that I have experienced and observed as someone who moved across an ocean. Mostly, I create from grief—I process emotions through the words in my poems, and allow these feelings to take shape through the maps I base my poems on.
This work reveals counternarratives that are difficult to unpack in the realm of material and spatial precarity. Migrant labourers separated from their children; violent migrant border crossings; lewd and vicious internet comments on small town publications, or the sudden loss of a friend, parent, a partner—these themes fuel my writing and allow me to respond to the overwhelm in a cathartic (perhaps productive?) way. Mostly, I create from a space of truth within me.
As a daughter of a flight crewmember, I grew up staring at maps and clouds from within airplanes. I was incubated in flight, my mother used to joke. I lean on this unique upbringing in the way I shape, write, and perform my poems: I can occupy a space of freedom and truth with my creativity, where everything makes sense to me and where, for once, I am not in the liminal. I am home. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
113 Submerged Reefs[1]
113 Submerged Reefs[1]
The Spratly Islands are located in the so-called South China Sea and consist of a number of small islands, reefs, atolls and rocks. These islands have been disputed with varying degrees of intensity for more than 50 years. They continue to be a point of dispute between six different states to this day. The Spratly Islands are claimed in whole or part by The People’s Republic of China (PRC), The Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan), The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.
- Lin Alexandra Mortensgaard, “The Spratlys Dispute”
No maps have tracked
unlived lives be fore. Organic matter stretched to reef shores &
there is oil here created these islands. Coral reefs jutted
from the ocean floor & inhabited the
waters. No maps have tracked un
lived lives before. Fringing
there is oil here heat existed but there
is no foot print. there may be oil here
Zones blend
& disappear
with the tides. Boats are
there may be oil here swallowed by lawless liquid. there is oil here
Even the fish are there is oil here frightened by
the wild. You may call there may be oil here there is oil herethose islands islands but
what is inhabited shall resist cartography there may be oil here
and steeled cement. there is oil here Where do
you stay? These reefs sink with the full moon. there may be oil here there is oil here
[1] Previously published in g u e s t 17 edited by Melanie Unrau, and The Global South 19.1 with editors Laura-Gray Street and Ann Fisher W.
[1] Previously published in g u e s t 17 edited by Melanie Unrau, and The Global South 19.1 with editors Laura-Gray Street and Ann Fisher W.
As he pleases
Winter, 2019
from where I am,
El Niño is a god.
he wakes children
up by wiping their
foreheads wet
with sticky sweat
when they go out
to play before lunch,
he makes sure they
run back home
before their skins
sizzle, blister and
peel
siesta is sleep spent
swimming in beads
of sweat and jerking
awake from the
burn of the lazy 3
pm sun
if in school, they’d
be folding their
Catholic school
sleeves or ripping
open the first
three buttons of
their brown-stained
pleated white shirts
sometimes, Anna
whispers, “It’s too
hot,” and Bugoy
answers, “It’s
El Niño.”
This man moulds their
worlds into pliable
horizons; where
the sun at its peak
bends everything
that’s 20 meters
away in sharp
golden zigzags.
yet, at night,
El Niño is the diablo.
armed with raincoats
and umbrellas printed
with a smiling red
bumblebee, they all
rush home, running
in the Crocs they
keep at the insert
of their trolley bags –
lest he sees them;
lest he strikes.
he pours into cities,
provinces, farmlands –
angry, angry, angry
and bringing with him
water that overflows –
water they needed
this morning when
the river was drying
up from the mud –
water they needed
to clean the pigs with
or to wash the smelly
dog’s fur –
he brings so much more,
like Santa Claus, but with
lightning bolts that jolt
30-story condominiums
and thunder that forces
children to settle under
covers earlier than bed
time –
El Niño tilts his burlap
sack and there he releases
all his pent-up rage onto
the roofs until the land
can take no more –
until the rivers swell and
the ocean rebels –
until children close
their eyes and wish
for the wet to go away.
While in another part
of the world, across the
ocean that birthed this
angry man, a blonde
toddler looks up at his
father while he swallows
his beer:
“What’s El Niño, dad?”
A heartbeat blooms
in the silence that follows;
shreds of snow pelt
their cold cheeks.
They say winter
is mild this year,
on the West Coast,
because of El Niño.
This El Niño feels good,
the father says, and the
toddler smiles at him.
“It’s El Niño,” he says,
with another swig
of dry beer. Belches.
It snows, barely.
From World Literature Today’s Climate Change Issue 2019: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2019/summer/three-poems-philippines-rina-garcia-chua