"I want our legacy as POC [people of color] writers to be that we helped shape the American story for years to come," says Jason Bayani, a Filipino American poet who has three anthologies to his name, the latest entitled Locus.

A founding member of Proletariat Bronze, a Filipino American spoken word troupe, Bayani makes this statement as a writer who vows to legitimize people of color as essential to the American experience. But the words to accomplish his mission don't come to him as though bestowed by some divine force. A soaring verse demands plenty of soul-searching and just as much labor: "You're keying into this thing inside of you that wants to come out and you're exploring how it comes out and you don't quite know what it is."

Bayani has been immersed in exploration his entire adult life, starting with "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin. A freshman English teacher had introduced him to the text. The complex fraternal bond it explores paralleled his own relationship with his older brother, whom he describes as smart and organized, his polar opposite at that point in his life when Bayani didn't yet know where to go with his future. His brother was so efficient in his daily routine that he would prepare breakfast the night before, while Bayani was "drifting."

Although classical literature had never interested Bayani, Baldwin's short story fed a childhood fascination with storytelling that consisted of X-men comics, Dungeons and Dragons, and fantasy books such as C.S. Lewis' The Narnia Chronicles. Bayani was at San Francisco State University only because he wanted to run for the track team. He thought he would major in nursing or physical therapy, until his English teacher, based on his essays, took him to the creative writing department and announced that he was going to be a writer. "I still don't know to this day what she saw," Bayani says of his classroom writings.

Perhaps what she saw was a fire within. Every writer draws on one's own past for material, and at such a young age, Bayani's history was already an armory of dramatic ammunition: mental health issues; immigration; chemical dependency; and racism. As a dark-skinned Asian he also faced discrimination within the Filipino community. "Racist white folks just make you feel like you're nothing," he says. "Other Filipinos can make you feel ugly."

And so Bayani expanded his self-expression from short stories to other avenues such as storytelling and acting. Then he saw poet Barbara Jane Reyes do a reading at a community center in Oakland. Her performance, which Bayani remembers with awe as "powerful" and "fierce," was an epiphany. In slam poetry, he discovered an art form unnerving in impact because of the distinctive fusion of theater, oratory, and music. He had found his niche at last.

In the 24 years since, Bayani has earned recognition through competitions, most notably National Poetry Slam and the International World Poetry Slam. His works have appeared in World Literature Today and Fourteen Hills, among others. However, the struggle to produce is ongoing. Candid about his mental health, Bayani reveals that his condition can be so enervating that, on some days, he is bedridden. He perseveres by maintaining a matter-of-fact attitude about personal battles. What also helps is his indefatigable quest for enlightenment: "I have to stay dedicated to the work, to the exploration. I have to maintain my curiosity, just knowing that I'm not all the way there, that there's still so much more to find."

Even more crucial to his artistic survival is family. His parents' immigration to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Bayani was born, was a saga of heartbreak and final farewells in search of prosperity in a mythic land where the grass is always green. This past summer, Bayani accompanied his family to the Philippines. Many of his father's siblings had already died, except the eldest. The reunion was happy -- his father had thrived -- but it was tinged with a sadness that stretched 45 years and 7,000 miles. A stoic, his father had sublimated the anguish of separation in his determination to assimilate into a new culture. Bayani knows this: "He holds that for this life that he's given us, this life where I get to be a writer and my brother gets to be a dancer… I don't want to waste it."

“Bayani has earned recognition through competitions, most notably National Poetry Slam and the International World Poetry Slam.”

There is another family to whom Bayani attributes his creative passion -- the Filipino activists and fellow artists who have welcomed him into their fold, giving him the platform to voice the collective odyssey of Filipino Americans. "The best part has always been how this has led me back to my culture and my community," he says.

Ultimately, as we pass on and leave our mark, Jason Bayani would like to be remembered through his poetry – a cry for solidarity indelible in its quiet might and haunting beauty:

Maybe if I say enough, I’ll get to become a memory
inside of someone else. Maybe they’ll care for me better
than I’ve ever cared for myself. Maybe they’ll say my name
back to me, and it is with all of the tenderness I have tried to learn
and failed at learning. Maybe there will still be time to become
something newer, that time isn’t escaping it’s just shifting
the lens a little. I am much more mortal than I was the day before.
I’d like to be a thought someday. A heavy one.
Something that gets slapped on the table and shudders the body of whoever it gets laid in front of.

- from 21 Spirits

Visit Jason Bayani's podcast:

https://newbooksnetwork.com/jason-bayani-locus-omnidawn-publishing-2019/

Rafaelito V. Sy is the author of Potato Queen, a novel about the relationship between Caucasians and Asians in the San Francisco gay community of the 1990s. Please visit his blog of short stories and inspirational essays on film: www.rafsy.com.

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