Another Invitation to the Pope to Visit Tondo EMANUEL TORRES

EMANUEL TORRES • A poet, art critic, professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Ateneo de manila and curator of its art museum who was born on April 29, 1932 in Manila • Won the Outstanding Young Men award for literature in 1961, started the Ateneo Arts Club in the same year, and was curator of the Art Gallery from 1960-2001

ANOTHER INVITATION TO THE POPE TO VISIT TONDO

Next time your Holiness slums through our lives, we will try to make our poverty exemplary. The best is a typhoon month. It never fails To find us, like charity, knocking on all sides of the rough arrangements we thrive in. Mud shall be plenty for the feet of the pious. We will show you how we pull things together from nowhere, life after life, prosper with children, whom you love. To be sure, we shall have more for you to love.

We will show you where the sun leaks on our sleep, on the dailiness of piece meals and wages with their habit of slipping away from fists that have holes for pockets. We will show you our latest child with a sore that never sleeps. When he cries, the dogs of the afternoon bark without stopping, and evening darkens early on the mats. Stay for supper of turnips on our table since 1946 swollen with the same hard tears. The buntings over our one and only window shall welcome a short breeze.

And lead prayers for the family that starves and stays together. If we wear rosaries round our necks it is not because they never bruise our fingers, (Pardon if we doze on a dream of Amen.) But remember to remember to reward us with something . . . more lush, greener than all the lawns of memorial parks singing together. Our eyes shall bless the liveliness of dollars.

Shed no tears, please, for the brown multitudes who thicken on chance and feast on leftovers as the burning garbage smuts the sky of Manila pile after pile after pile. Fear not. Now there are only surreal assassins about who dream of your death in the shape of a flowering kris.

Another Invitation to the Pope to Visit Tondo

This poem talks about a time during the Marcos regime when the pope came for a visit. Squatters areas were whitewalled, possibly in order to "make an impression" on the Pope. He saw right through it, however, and insisted on meeting a family from the area. The poem reflects the more realistic angle of the story, a mockery of the Church, in some ways, by alluding to doctrines.

Another Invitation to the Pope to Visit Tondo

It shows how difficult and miserable life was in those years. Although the author is describing and talking about something that happened decades ago, this poem, if read today, is still appropriate for the situation of the Philippines. Poverty is still prevalent and the situation of the Philippines hasn’t changed at all

Another Invitation to the Pope to Visit Tondo

What really stands out from this poem is sarcasm. It is amazing how Emmanuel Torres used sarcasm in the poem to show the conditions the poor are suffering from. He also used sarcasm to describe how people in power have become unaware and apathetic of the living conditions of the poor.

• 1946: The year when the Pope first visited the country • Emphasis on “POVERTY” Another Invitation :Squatters, scavengers, to the Pope to Visit beggars – these figures of the urban excess have served as Tondo important, politicizing images of social contradiction in the vigorous Philippine tradition of protest in literature, film and art from the 1960s to the present

• Setting: MANILA

Another Invitation • The text is full of to the Pope to Visit wonderfully-made statements Tondo with “sarcasm” • Protest poem

• People sees “RELIGION” as a solution to the crisis that they experience.

Another Invitation • The intellectual milieu – filled to the Pope to Visit with sarcastic language emphasizing political and Tondo religious struggle

• People sees “POVERTY” just on the surface level.