Online Journal 4: Analysis of Acosta’s ‘Walang Kalabaw sa Cubao’ and Santos’ ‘The Gods We Worship Live Next Door

Both poems are playful yet rich commentaries on social class and the disparities in it. Through the use of Cubao and gods as central metaphors, Acosta and Santos convey their messages.

In Acosta’s Walang Kalabaw sa Cubao, he achieves organic unity by being consistent with building the depiction of Cubao and what happens in the city while using very raw descriptions and words like ‘tang ‘na, hindot, and jakol — typical words that one may hear as you stroll along the streets of Metro Manila.

The images are vivid, even for me who rarely goes to Cubao, a highly urbanized place, and even if the descriptions of the city dates back to the ‘70s as indicated by the mention of Fiesta Carnival, an attraction famous during the ’70s (Aguilar). I imagine a bustling city with kids in awe at an amusement park with “baby-blue horses” and a Tyrannosaurus Rex , and large buildings that house a Goldilocks and an Automatic Center.

Pero sa loob ng videokeng Fiesta Carnival
May mga kabayong baby-blue
At isang kubang Tyrannosaurus Rex
Habang sa magkabilang dulo Ng Goldilocks at showroom
Ng Automatic Center

Then, the image distorts as the persona begins to describe the unlicensed dispatchers of the many Tamaraw FXs. Suddenly, the beautiful fantasy image of Cubao turned into a darker, more genuine side of the district.

Mga bastardong anak
Nina Aurora’t Epifanio
Na ang langibang pusod
Ay kakabit pa rin
Ng matris ng estero;

The persona narrates the different dispatchers in the stanzas that follow. They are the street children, teenagers who reside under bridges, or the rugby boys outside 7/11s. Now, what remains is the scene behind the tall buildings, the scene in the alleyways near the estero, and on the streets of Aurora Boulevard or the winding EDSA.

Reading the descriptions once more, I realized how the persona uses contrasting images to show how wealth and poverty interact within each commercialized space described. These barkers are described beside the wealthy’s Big Dome and Ali-Mall, or the main transportation of workers in the metro — the MRT. However, the way the persona expresses it, I feel a sense of belittlement by establishing a connection between contrasting figures. For example, the barkers and the dirty estero, or the contrast of size in the lines

Mga binatilyong binabansot
Sa lilim ng Big Dome

and the use of shadows in the lines

Sa anino ng kongkretong domino
Ng tinatayong tulay ng MRT-2

By doing this, what comes to my mind is a persona of a higher social class discrediting the hardworking dispatchers of PUVs and by stating their conclusion at the end of the poem:

Walang kalabaw sa Cubao:
Ang Cubao mismo ang kalabaw
At sila ang nakadapong langaw.

The persona scorns these rather dignified hard workers into something as little as parasitic flies leaching off of the commercialized Cubao. As if to say that the rich alone are the ones who should benefit from Cubao since they are the only ones who worked their asses off to establish it.

Acosta uses the carabao as a symbol of hard work and the flies as pests, but who are the real carabaos and flies of Cubao?

Applying the same question that Acosta poses in his poem to a bigger picture, the rich often think how the persona thinks: that because the poor are “dirty, unruly, and vulgar” they are pests in their ivory towers. In reality, however, the rich are the pests by exploiting the poor. They remain rich at the expense of the hard work of the masses that they belittle.

On the other hand, Santos’ organic unity in The Gods We Worship Live Next Door is achieved by describing the so-called “gods” throughout the poem.

In a capitalist society like ours, having the money means having the power, so much like a god. The wealthy are worshipped and feared because of this, but the persona describes the alternatively pristine, glowing, untouchable, and immortal gods as brown, sickly, and mortal — not so different from us, proletariats.

Fear grips us when they frown
as they walk past our grim deformities
dragging with them the secret scent of love
bought by the ounce from gilded shops above
the rotunda of the bright cities.

In these lines, the persona tells us how gods (the rich) downplay us by having grim deformities and exposing them by stating that they do not naturally smell pleasant, rather their scent is also achieved through the use of money, otherwise, they’d smell just like us.

Then, the persona tells us that gods also die in the same way we die, due to normal causes, like “the cold months of fog and heavy rains”. In the end, the persona presents us with a dilemma: the gods die and we outlive them, but their wealth doesn’t die with them because they have offsprings to carry it on without them.

I believe Santos seeks to tell us that since the rich are as human as we are, and die the same death we do, they are powerless without their money. Once we remove the deeply ingrained notion in our society that wealth equates to power, it will be easier to reverse the social triangle.

Both poems tell us how the rich, more often than not, downgrade those who don’t belong to the same social class as them. In the same way, the poems present us with the weakness of the rich (the same thing that gives them their “power”) — money.

References:

Aguilar, Karl. “Reminiscing Cubao: The Fiesta Carnival.” 11 December. 2010.