All Heathens
Marianne Chan
Reviewed by Sarah Browning
In her debut poetry collection All Heathens, Marianne Chan explores her Filipino heritage by weaving the travels of Magellan in with stories of lumpia, Lola, and “Eve’s Filipino half sister.” Through these stories, Chan profoundly illustrates how the narratives that touch our lives—whether they are inherited, forced upon us, or created—can become a kind of DNA. She creates a tapestry of “shape-shifting” bodies that expand to own and shape and reshape their narratives.
In “When the Man at the Party Said He Wanted to Own a Filipino,” Chan writes, “this story was never about us / being owned, because we will always own ourselves. This story / is about the way the world believes that it owns us.” All Heathens casts out to claim its many rich iterations of the body; the body merges with the earth which merges with the idea of home, and suddenly the earth and the body become as malleable as the home.
The world then crafted is one where “Eve’s Filipino half sister” dances naked and “shoots the shit with snake and tree beneath moonlight,” one where a grandfather lives on in the quack of a duck, and one where we talk of one-eyed chickens and question “Which came first: the coming or the desire to come?”
In “Counterargument That Goes All the Way Around,” Lola concludes that “the body is infinite. It goes all the way around. It grows / round in the belly, round as a world.” Chan has created a collection that is as irreverent as it is sacred, that offers sadness and laughter and death and bright, bright truth; it is a compass for a new kind of voyaging.