Listening Exercises: Towards a More-than-human Poetics

The series of prose poems from which this collection takes its title was inspired by a New Year’s Day walk I took in UP Diliman three years ago. Reeling still from holiday festivities and the dizzying year that had just passed, I wandered under the acacia trees of the Academic Oval alone, until the noise in my head—various regrets and anxieties—faded into the quiet of the campus. Unseen somewhere in the leaves above my head, birds were singing. As I listened to their voices, I sat down on a bench and began to write for the first time in months.

I’ve since returned to UP Diliman, where I now work as an instructor. Despite five years of experience in education, teaching continues to intimidate me, because I’m never certain that what I say resonates with my students who have no choice but to listen. If I’ve done good work, one or two students might pull me aside at the end of the semester to tell me they’ve learned something valuable. I think writing feels the same: the words I put down never feel right, not until, after I spend days or weeks agonizing over a single poem, a reader surprises me by talking about my work with genuine pleasure and understanding. 

I write and teach not because I’m particularly great at it, but because I think if I keep trying, I could be. I like how both challenge me to be better—a better teacher, poet, human being—for people who trust that I have something important to share with them, who in turn entrust their own wisdom with me. Sometimes, the weight of this responsibility overwhelms me beyond words. Then I find myself walking out of my classroom or office and into the cool shade of trees. There, if I listen closely, the words eventually find me.

When I was a student, I’d occasionally wake up early to join a birdwatching group on campus. We’d glimpse birds whose names I slowly learned over time: orioles, shrikes, kingfishers, egrets, barbets. These animals, who sing in the cover of tall grass and shadowy leaves, live alongside us, but seem to exist on the margins of human society. I never would’ve learned to recognize them if I hadn’t sought them out, if someone hadn’t taught me their names. Sometimes I measure the value of a day by the number of lucky sightings I have at work. On one particularly great morning, I saw a kingfisher, a flock of parakeets, and a pair of dogs playing under slanted morning light, bounding towards cattle egrets that took off in a brilliant flutter of wings. I’m humbled by the truth that these sights, whether I catch them or not, are everyday occurrences. That even in the middle of the city they reveal themselves to anyone who takes the time to notice.

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I first learned about more-than-human studies in 2024 at the Silliman National Writers Workshop. Its framework, which rejects anthropocentrism and examines the entanglements between human and nonhuman beings, resonates with my own lifelong love for plants and animals, and challenges the sense of distance I feel from them as a lifelong resident of Metro Manila. My interest in writing about these preoccupations began in 2019, when I joined a rigorous application process for a mountaineering club. It involved lectures on responsible hiking, birdwatching sessions and tree walks, intensive exercise regimens, and several multi-day climbing expeditions. Although I couldn’t complete the application, it fundamentally changed the way I view my relationship with the earth. Struggling with the limitations of my body, I imagined kinship with the mountains I scaled, beginning to see them as massive bodies that, like mine, are vulnerable to illness, crisis, and decay.

Later I joined Rural Women Advocates (RUWA), an organization building grassroots support for Filipino peasant women. While the limitations of my day job meant I mostly stayed in the city and helped organize students and professionals, my volunteer work occasionally brought me to the countryside to meet landless farmers. In listening to their stories and watching how they cultivated and protected the land they tilled, I began to better understand the life-affirming entanglements between people and land, and the way these have been severed by the deeply exploitative conditions of our time. I became more aware, for example, of how agricultural land in the Philippines has become more vulnerable to destruction than ever before—with tens of thousands of hectares always at risk of being converted into real estate, or malls, or industrial parks for foreign corporations—and that peasants who actively resist the eradication of their livelihood are met with violence from private and state forces. 

Donna Haraway writes that under ‘the Great Divides between what counts as nature and as society, as nonhuman and human,’ animals and plants as well as people—‘women, servants and slaves, and noncitizens’—are rendered Other to rational Man. Living in this country, we’re always witnessing the violent Othering of women, their communities, and the land they steward. This year began with the bombing of Abra de Ilog in Mindoro, which killed three Mangyan-Iraya children and one young woman from Manila who’d been conducting community research. Amanda Echanis, a writer and peasant organizer, was only recently released from detainment after enduring five years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. And as I’m writing this, Filipino-American community leader Chantal Anicoche remains under military custody, even with sustained international clamor for her release. 

For a long time, I didn’t think I should write poetry about such injustices, writing the way I do from the subject position I hold. That I’ve always written in English is a marker of my privilege and difference from the peasant women whose stories and voices demand our most urgent attention. But I couldn’t ignore that the impulse was there, and that it grew stronger the more I understood there was no separating myself and my ‘personal’ writing from political reality. How could I, when my very life—the health and well-being of my body—was in the hands of the farmers who cultivate the food I eat?

Like writing and teaching, I continue to do political work not because I’m good at it, but because it’s work that demands commitment, and because there are infinite opportunities to become better. Writing is one way I make sense of that journey: I write to notice things, to explore contradictions, and to hopefully reach a better understanding of the broken and achingly beautiful world I’ve inherited. In writing about landlessness, extrajudicial killings, and climate crisis, I can’t present myself as an authoritative voice—nor do I want to. But in the process of crafting a poem, I can allow myself the space to reflect on these violences, the bodies that experience them firsthand, and the ways in which I find myself life entwined with theirs.

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The way my vision of Listening Exercises has evolved over the years mirrors my own growth as a writer and peasant advocate. At the height of my interest in hiking, I initially imagined the collection to examine connections between my own chronic illness and the effects of environmental crisis most visible to me in the mountains. Eventually, my perspective expanded beyond the mountains and came to include farmlands and the peasants who till them. Thinking of the ways in which my poetry could act as an extension of my advocacy, I envisioned a collection that would confront the systemic destruction of land as well as highlight the hope that exists in collective struggle. 

But my current manuscript isn’t quite that, either. The acts of resistance I write about in some poems are bound up with the mundane troubles I explore in others: trying and failing to care for a plant, watching a beloved dog pass away, learning to live in a foreign country. I want to believe that while these are personal matters, within them exist the same intricate webs of relations that govern our politics and struggle for freedom, justice, and dignity.

My poetry from the past six years is my personal record of what Haraway calls ‘becoming with.’ It charts my encounters with mountains, house plants, friends, cities, wind, trees, dogs, birds, gardens, comrades, farmlands, and other beings. Through Listening Exercises, I’m trying to listen to—to become with—a world in which it’s easy to act as if one lives in isolation. I’m still getting know the bodies and lives I write about. While I’ve learned the names of some birds, I’m still learning to recognize the hundreds of others that live with me in this country. I write because I want to understand them. And to encounter them on the written page, I first need to meet them out here in the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gita Labrador is a teacher, writer, and peasant advocate from Quezon City. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines Diliman and a master’s degree in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Gita is a volunteer for Rural Women Advocates, an organization of artists, educators, writers, and other professionals who advocate for genuine land reform, food security, and the rights of peasant women. Her poetry can be found in Glass, Capsule Stories, Claw & Blossom, and elsewhere.

Workshop Session 9, 65th UPNWW: Listening Exercises by Gita Labrador, Fellow for Poetry