THE AND THAT WAS, beautifully illustrated novella-length prose poem

THE AND THAT WAS
MIA TIJAM (illus. Rustom Pujado)
Rosarium Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The and That Was is an archipelago of words: lush and mountainous in parts, civilized veneer in others, almost all of it seemingly born from instances when the forces within could no longer be restrained. The thing about archipelagos is to not view them as chains of islands, but as the space that envelops them.

That is what this collection contains.

The land. The culture. The rustic and the urban, religious and heretical. The fractures. The spaces. The cities without dragons...

The Fairy Tale Reality of the Philippines...

Where the end began and begins again...The wishes that point to what we should have wished. These stories contain–and release. And so do you.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Stories" and "collection" are slightly misleading descriptors. There are under 150pp in this book; there are very cool illustrations on full pages, elucidating angles of seeing on the, the, uhm vignettes or prose poems they're surrounded by; the sum of these parts is less "collection" than stream-of-consciousness novella.

I don't know anything meaningful about the Filipino culture I was within though apart from as I read. I'm very clear that I'm in a world that's dreamlike, delineated in flashes, and in swirls of awareness.. It's bounded and bordered and depicted by the artwork that, malheureusement, I'm not able to show you (put up downloadable samples, Rosarium! you can watermark them!) for added edge-giving. Illustrator Rustom has either read these stories with great care and deep personal connection resulted or he is the male half of Author Tijam's bicameral mind. The prose is deft and rich:

The child gingerly stood up and warily folowed her out of the bodega, into the afternoon light, and through the dirty-kitchen—a hut beside the main house where the old women chopped ebverrything on a long wooden table and cooked in a kiln banked by dried wood.The old nursemaid led her to the deep-well pump beside it. The child wited silently as Nana Kuring lifted the tin basin that was shaped like a soft drink bottle crown and filled with laundry to hoist it on top of her head while bending to pick up the palo-palo used as the laundry paddle. The old woman began walking towards the gate that led to the road and after a dozen stepsm stopped when she realized that the child wasn't following her. The child was looking up at the windows of the old house, at those shuttered shell windowpanes, and then looked at her. Nana Kuring swung the palo-palo in a forward motion to the child, and the little girl hurried after the old woman.

An entire cultural milieu, images sounds and all, is in this brief not-unique passage.

I found the reading experience satisfying on several levels: curiosity about a culture I do not know, immersion in an unfamiliar sensory world, stimulation of visual language fresh to me. I'm sure it's hard to look stuff up, to see the places you don't have a ready-made image in your head to match, at first anyway. It' really worth making the effort and I recommend this work to you as a rewarding place to start your efforts.