Cockroaches.
“The place just smelled of cockroaches,” said the actress Claire Danes offhandedly of Manila, in the Philippines.
But R. Zimora Linmark loved that city--his home city--“crowded with cockroaches and people who walk without legs, and stare imperiously at you without eyes.” And he, the poet, novelist, and satirist, responded so in his 2008 book The Evolution of a Sigh.
Even before this response, the poet had spent his career detailing the culture of his homeland, overlooked by the actress. Not to mention lambasting American media and society, detailing the tribulations of gay-outed youth, and playing with language through a mixed Filipino-American-Hawaiian form of prose and poetry.
The Evolution of a Sigh
The 2008 book The Evolution of a Sigh, though not autobiographical, goes a long way in detailing the trials of the author’s life. Born in the Philippines and raised in Honolulu, Linmark found himself first in a student-exchange program in the United States before arriving in London in 1989. Traveling to Budapest and Madrid by 1991, Linmark’s first novel, Rolling the R’s, was published in 1997.
With his newer novel, the reader finds links to author’s life. In The Evolution of a Sigh, the book is split into four sections, and features the fictional poetry of a man coming to terms with life in four different realities: as a Filipino, an American, a gay man, and an educated professional.
“He is made up of these parts,” said Linmark, “parts that inhabit a world of their own, parts that, at times, are in conflict with each other.”
Unique style
The Evolution of a Sigh, released in April 2008, follows in the artistic steps of earlier works. Written in a unique vocal language, both his fiction and poetry are a product of his upbringing. Born to two languages, he combined a broken-English and Filipino style, known as a pidgin, to create a unique reading experience, starting with Rolling the R’s.
“Foreign words get redefined,” said Linmark. “Idioms take on a local twist. Language is a project that’s always undergoing renovation or beautification, and these even extend to the languages of technology, to text and instant messaging.”
While Rolling the R’s embraces a dark and comedic look at coming-to-age among diversity in Hawaii, Part Time Apparitions in 2005 established Linmark as an oddity—a modern bard with a quill in classic word-play and one in modern story telling. His second book emerged as him, in his poetic words, “listening to Gershwin while looking for Freud in Woody Allen movies.”
"A poet on-call"
Linmark may or may not have been referring to himself in his 2005 poem “The Muse This Time”, when he said “I am a poet on-call because poetry only comes when it wants to.” But he certainly has emerged as a contemporary voice in a culture askew with differences in language, orientation, and lifestyle.
