Always Moving Toward Justice

Abstract

This review-essay discovers in the poems of E. San Juan, Jr. an evolving and passionate engagement with exile and hope. To be an exile, especially a Filipino exile, is not to be a tourist, idly consuming and colonizing, but to absorb languages and histories that console and inspire. Drawn from the lessons of decades of exile, the poems and the concluding essay confront injustice—the ways, for instance, in which oppressors colonize even time and space—and also envision a future when revolution replaces rootlessness, when migrants come home.