Interviewed by Coeditor of Line Rider Press, Jess McDermott
Marco Llanes is a 16 year old Filipino non-binary poet and dancer born and raised in Quezon City, Philippines. New to pursuing poetry as a serious artform, they explore themes of queer identity and colonization/decolonization as a Filipino and Leftist. They can be found on Instagram: @psevdanor and on Twitter: @pseudanor.
Jess: How did you become interested in writing poetry?
Marco: Honestly, I’ve written poetry all my life. My late mother was a writer and editor, so it’s something I’ve always been close to. I have poetry from when I was eight, and I like to think about how thrilled she must’ve been to find out one of her kids had inherited her disposition to writing. I had only ever thought of it as a sort of a habit though–something I would find solace in during times where it was the only way I felt like I could say something. I had never thought of it as a serious vocation to pursue, as I did with art curatorship or voguing/Ballroom. But that changed going into quarantine. To keep things from becoming a biography, a multitude of things had built up inside me until I just couldn’t dance anymore, and had to turn to writing instead.
I used voguing and Ballroom to explore and liberate myself when I needed it. It was through wild and heavy hips and flashing, kaleidoscopic hands that I confronted my queerness, and unleashed it into unapologetic and hyperfeminine heights. I danced because I needed to, but once it had done its job of liberating me, I didn’t need to anymore. I found there were now other things I had to explore and liberate, and I realized that to do this, I had to turn to writing.
I could say that dance is to my queerness, as writing is to my colonized/Filipino experience (though honestly, writing is for almost everything inside me.) My very sudden and steep dive into recognizing writing as something to pursue was coincidental with the beginning of my conscious personal decolonization. It’s only been four or five months, and I’m doing my best to be patient with myself, and to revel in what I feel is my incubational stage of exploration.
Jess: Tell us more about the creation of the world myth described in your poem, “Creation Myth,” when did you first hear of this myth and what moved you to write about it?
Marco: I think that’s an interesting question because of the way colonized people relate with our myths. Most of us never actually hear about them, and those of us who do don’t hear them the way they were meant to be told–passed down through songs or poems, painted on pots, embroidered across tapestries. Instead, we often have to unearth them beneath piles of obscure books and anthropological papers, digging through like scavengers in search of fragments of our heritage. This was the case for me.
The shock when I realized how much I knew about classical mythology, but absolutely nothing about the mythology of my own people overwhelmed me with a profound shame and sadness. It was an epiphany which had me dropping everything I was doing and completely redefining my creative direction. From looking on at bygone movements of faraway continents, to just looking right behind me and under my feet. Filipino mythology was honestly a huge catalyst in radicalizing myself further into my personal decolonization.
After years and shelves of living only the imaginations of people whose soil I’ve never even stepped on, for the first time, I actually felt a deep connection with what I was reading. For once, myself and reality were recognizable. These are mountains and rivers I’ve known since childhood–not ones which might as well be fictional. This goddess’s skin is my skin, and this hero’s nose is my nose. I am in this myth; I am of the people in this myth; and where this myth takes place, I was born and grew up.
In the collective consciousness, the colonized body is perpetually trapped in an unmoving horizontality–starving, filthy, pitiful, dead. It is never seen or imagined standing, leaping, and fiery with power and divinity. So beyond just this earth-flesh connection I felt, there was also something incomparable and so profoundly moving about finally reading stories where for once, brown people like me were in the places of gods, demigods, and heroes–places which for so long in my imagination, only white people had occupied.
Reading Filipino mythology was also to realize and viscerally face how empty and suffocated the centuries long erasure of my people’s histories, myths, and legends has left me. It became clear that to deny a people their myths is to deny them their right to imagine. The mere act of telling a pre-colonial myth can feel immensely powerful in itself. Because of colonialism, there is an inherently subversive and revolutionary spirit to the legends and myths of colonized peoples, where for once we are the slayers of beasts, we are the commanders of seas, and in this case, where we are the creators of worlds.
In particular, the creation myths of a colonized people take on a significance of independence and self-sufficiency/determination. To tell a Filipino creation myth is to tell a story about Filipinos creating our world for ourselves. It’s to reject the white man as discoverer and maker, and as wielder of our destiny. It’s to revel in our own capacity for creation, and to recognize that our hands have always been for making our history. For 500 years, we’ve been taught our creator is this big white man in the sky–why can’t it be someone who’s actually one of us?
I named the poem Creation Myth, not simply because it was inspired by this particular Ilocano creation myth, but also because I wanted to equate this image of someone who is essentially decolonizing with someone who is creating–creating themself, creating their land, creating their people. I wanted to equate decolonization with creation. In fact, I initially paired the poem with a clip from “Concerning Violence” (which I had actually watched right after I first read the creation myth in question), in which Lauryn Hill reads out a line from Fanon’s conclusion: “Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.”
There was just something about Fanon’s words, Lauryn Hill’s delivery of them, and this pre-colonial creation myth from Ilocos which all came together and moved me to write this poem.
Jess: What does the dancing referenced in the poem represent to you?
Marco: I think this definitely calls back to what I described in my answer to the first question–how dance to me will always mean liberation, and on an especially personal level, internal liberation. And while these two things do constitute a lot of what the dancing in the poem represents, I find there are still so many more ways to approach dancing in the decolonizing context I use it in.
For instance, as a voguer, my personal understanding of dancing and what it represents in my writing is inseparable from the very nature and origins of voguing itself. Voguing emerged among working class Black and Latinx gay men and trans women as a form of escape, liberation, and resistance. Everything that happens to the body at a ball (i.e. movements and clothes) is designed to subvert the status quo on levels of gender, sexuality, class, and race. Every movement is hyperfeminine yet in the most athletic way; it’s where the poorest claim and redefine opulence for themselves; and where all sense of white/Western moral code is rejected in a celebration of what it devalues the most. There’s an undeniable mastery over the body and glamor at a ball–the voguer allures just as much as ze provokes.
So voguing has always been more than just self-expression for me. Every hip thrown is to celebrate those whose are never celebrated, and every dip made is a call to revolt. There’s always been a revolutionary feeling burning inside me when I vogue, and thus dance in general. If anything, voguing is a war dance, with the catwalk as its march, and the runway as its battleground.
That being said, voguing is a rather vicious dance style–not just in its movements’ actual loudness, but also in the very way it’s engaged with. Though it is above all a subculture built on community, at the core of Ballroom is competition. Battles are the beating heart of the ball, and at its simplest, are held to determine who gets the trophy at the end–the prize, the praise, the recognition. At their most electrifying, battles can often feel like you’re dancing with blades up against each other’s throat–but they’re always in the spirit of bonding or learning from each other. In the end though, battles are really just a way to win and make someone else lose. They’re a chance to be recognized for those who never are, a chance to triumph for those who never get to.
And then beyond voguing, I find there are also peripheral meanings dance in general takes on in a broader postcolonial context. The verticality and activity of dancing undoes the “unchanging horizontality” which the colonized body has been cast in. Dancing can be a ritualistic or cathartic exorcism of the trauma of colonialism. It can also be a reclamation of a barbarism perceived by colonizers. And of course, like in Ballroom, dancing to the colonized is a celebration of our bodies which are hardly ever celebrated.
All these things that make up a bulk of what dancing means to me, and what’s behind why I use it in my poem.
Jess: When did you become interested in leftist thought? Was there a specific moment when you began to identity as a communist? What led you to this moment?
Marco: In a word, I’d say it was basically inevitable. There are lots of factors of course, but I think to start, being a zoomer is a pretty big one. Older people find it quite strange to witness teenagers and young adults already so convicted in their political stance at such early ages, but I find it’s quite a logical and natural reaction to the world we’ve lived in the past two decades. Growing up with the Internet, we’re all basically exposed to all the terrible things that are piling up around us. Climate change, the debt crises, the refugee crises, all the wars, and now a pandemic. The list goes on and I haven’t even started on what’s happening in the Philippines. It’s hard not to feel like we’re at the end of the world, and a lot of us can’t even imagine growing old the same way previous generations could. In fact, I don’t think a lot of us even want to. We don’t want to just complete college degrees, have weddings, and raise families anymore–we want change, and it’s because we don’t really have any other choice at all. The Philippines is going to be literally underwater if this fire capitalism set the world on isn’t put out, so why could we think about raising families if our children won’t even have a chance to raise their own? The Internet doesn’t just plunge us into despair and hopelessness–it moves us into action. We have all the information in the world at hand because of the Internet. It gives us all the answers we seek. And the answers are leftist thought.
In regard to my own personal radicalization, being queer and Filipino in the Philippines obviously play huge roles into the rabbit holes I found myself in to come out as a communist; but my twin sister would also be essential to mention. I put words to my un-cis-hetero-ness at a very young age (around 8-10), and my realization of my own queerness was the first way I related to the world as part of a marginalized group. The safe spaces I discovered myself in on the Internet were my first gateway into politics and any semblance of “leftist” thought. I came to have ideas of “good” and “bad”, but in truth, my queerness and the Internet at the time only led me so far as to liberalism. And this is where my twin sister comes in. If it were without her, I’d probably be much less radicalized; and worst case scenario (I shudder while saying this) I’d probably be supporting Biden or saying insufferable things on Twitter. My twin sister and I are really close, and there’s a sort of constant feedback loop of information between the two of us. I learn something and I share it to her; she learns something, and she shares it to me. She discovered she was trans because of me, and I’m a communist because of her. She simply got into reading Marx before I did. Whatever her gateways were, she was mine.
The actual conditions which led both of us to identifying as communists are obviously far too multilayered and winding to explore and describe here, but at its simplest to recount, that’s how it went. Time passed and things were learned, and there was no other way for either of us to live further in this world–especially as queer Filipinos–without making sense of it in some way, and knowing how there could be justice for people at the end. And that end would be communism.
Jess: What role do you think art/poetry play in building a socialist future?
Marco: That’s a big question with even bigger answers! And one I’m honestly a bit intimidated to jump into. There’s a lot to say about the role art and poetry play in revolution, especially as a Maoist, but I suppose I’ll speak from where I am at the moment.
I mean just to start, art and poetry are forms of labor like any other. In the end, there’s really nothing which sets them apart or above. The concept of “art” as an exceptional form of labor is specific to Western society anyway, and quite a new one at that. So in regards to building a socialist future, art and poetry play roles as essential and varied as any other form of labor; they are, to quote Mao quoting Lenin, among the many cogs and wheels of the whole revolutionary machine. In particular, two prominent roles would be to uplift the masses and to secure the people’s cause. I like to think of that quote by Bambara, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” But this all poses the question: what kind of artists and art then should be put forth? What is the art that uplifts the masses and secures the cause? There are obviously lots of answers, but I feel like as working-class and/or colonized people, we already know the answers to these questions ourselves; we know what we want and don’t want, we know which paintings and poems uplift us to fight for our liberation, and we know what’s created to work against that.
As a colonized person, the importance of art and poetry in revolution is very intuitively apparent. When we decolonize unto socialism, what art do we want seen, what words do we want read? Obviously not that of the colonizer and ruling class. We have enough paintings of white people and books from Europe. It’s time everyone else is seen and heard for once. We’re building a new society after all, and there’s no society without art.
This calls back to a lot of what I described in my long response to the second question, that there’s something inherently and undeniably moving about just experiencing another Filipino/colonized person simply express themself. There’s just such an absolute scarcity of it in the foreground. And this is a big reason why I write–to be among those who change that. If I can inspire other Filipinos to self-liberation as other Filipino poets have inspired me, I’m more than happy with my work. Art, the mere act of public vulnerability for any colonized person, is a fundamental step towards self-liberation, especially since it’s something that’s been denied from us for so long.
I was genuinely so thrilled to find your publication, Line Rider Press–even if it is more generally working-class, than specifically post-colonial. This is all a testament to the scarcity I speak of. There were absolutely no publications I could find which prioritized platforming and voicing colonized poets in particular, especially from a leftist perspective. Among the many publications I’d gone through, Line Rider Press was the one whose vocation resonated with me most, and which I honestly felt most comfortable to be platformed by. I hope in the future there will emerge publications more fit to what I feel most important as a colonized person, but until then, I’m glad that yours is among those working towards that, built on the truth that building a future for everyone begins with expressing it.
Jess: Anything else you’d like us to know about you or your writing?
Marco: I’ve definitely spoken more than enough to reveal so much about myself, and I wouldn’t want to exacerbate the length of this even more, so I’ll keep this short.
I feel like I’ll end this with what I remind myself every day. I’m terribly new to poetry, and even newer to using it to face and understand my experiences as a colonized person. I’d like to thank this publication for being a first step for me in becoming a published poet. I’m a Filipino who writes for Filipinos, and in the end, for Filipinos only. My one hope is that through this platform, another person of colonized experience might read my poem the same way I’ve read many others, and is moved to speak out through a poem themself.