Maningning C Miclat

The author is a distant cousin of mine, who was a language and literature prodigy. Her poet father (my grandfather's nephew,) fled to China during the Marcos regime, where Maningning grew up. A passionate woman, poet, and lover, she committed suicide by leaping off a tower on the Univeristy Campus. I was told she suffered from zealous - and unrequieted - love for man. Her verse (which I only understand in English, and partly in Tagalog) is luminous and haunting; exposing her tenderness and vulnarability as a student in Manila, where as an adolescent she learned Tagalog and English. Her complex self-identity as Chinese and Filipina is a constant theme in her melancholy poems.… (mehr)