Reviewing Eunice Andrada's Flood Damages

For Empty Mirror, Kaya Lattimore looks at Flood Damages (Giramondo, Australia), Eunice Andrada's poetry debut. Themes of "diaspora, family and heritage, the brown female body, religion, language, and sexuality" are "brought together by the recurring imagery of water," writes Lattimore. More:

Andrada’s histories and heritage aptly manifest themselves in the physical body. There is sickness in the form of lupus – “one of my mother’s multitude of mothers” (“novena for sickness”). There are skin allergies that betray her body’s foreignness (“Marcos conducts my allergy test”). There is the violence that is inflicted on the body (‘first creation’), and the scars of a body’s becoming (“bedtime stories for my stretchmarks”). In the context of inheritance and bodies, the appearance of blood is “no coincidence” (“honeysuckle”) – blood is both “memory” (“for my womb”) and “the truth of the body” (“for my womb (reprise)”).

The truth of Andrada’s body is that of a female body, a female body of colour. It is a body “in the context of black hair, brown girl, unfair and lovely” (“poem in which I,”). A body that comes “from women / who didn’t choose their bodies” (“habeas corpus”). In this brown skin, Andrada confronts the colourism rampant not only in the Philippines, but in much of Asia, a stain left by colonialism (“alternate texts on my aunt’s lightening cream”). But despite this collection’s keen awareness of the systemic injustices that surround her skin colour and gender, Andrada owns her brown body unapologetically...

Read on at Empty Mirror.