September 30, 2026 — Conchitina Cruz, from the Philippines, and Zeina G. Halabi, from Lebanon, crossed paths at Civitella in 2025. Part of the same group for six weeks in residence, Zeina recounts connecting with Conchitina’s work during her presentation at the Castle—a spark that called Zeina to translate her poem “The Wife”. A much longer version of the poem, on which this version is based, was published in Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. You can also read Zeina’s Arabic translation now in Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, where she writes:
The poet Conchitina Cruz (Manila, 1976) stands on a low podium, barely visible behind the microphone. She is a poet who navigates spaces so as not to occupy them, so that neither her poetry nor her presence, she insists, leaves a trace. With a soft voice and slender, hunched frame, Cruz chokes up as she recalls how her poetry speaks to the political violence and alienation she has experienced—and how her political sensibility was shaped with the end of Marcos’s dictatorship, through Duterte’s tyranny over the past decade, to the return of the Marcos dynasty to power in recent years. She identifies with a generation of Filipino writers and activists who continue to cling to language and imagination—despite their limitations—as paths toward liberation.
Cruz shuns immortality and the aura of the writer, advocating instead for oblivion. Yet she has published four collections of poetry, two of which—The Second Skin (1996) and The Shortest Distance (2001)—have won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Poetry, the Philippines’ most prestigious literary award. She has also received the Philippine National Book Award for her collection Dark Hours (2005). In her poetry, Cruz turns to unknown realms and to minor details—those small, ordinary and incomplete archives that no one pays attention to—and transforms them into spaces of memory, transient spaces in which she reflects on collective loss.
Although Cruz tends to make poetry a space for dissent, she insists on the specificity of poetry, describing it as ‘a vast field of language, offering a space for intimacy,’ a means of reflecting on individual losses that can only be interpreted collectively, and on collective losses that settle like tattoos upon the bodies of exhausted poets. Parallel to the tragic sensibility that pervades Cruz’s aura, two large hibiscus tattoos gleam on her arms. The climbing hibiscus plant stands out as if to emphasise the finitude of the poet’s body, hidden in the earth; as if the exhausted body has become a resting place for flowers that commemorate those who are gone; the body of the poet as the remaining space for mourning.
Cruz critiques the economics of literary publishing, examining how creative writing institutions shape prevailing literary tastes. In her own way, the poet confronts the monopoly exercised by major publishing houses, by supporting publications in local languages and independent and collaborative ventures that fall outside dominant norms. Yet Cruz’s poetic imagination and publishing activities transcend national boundaries: She situates the question of liberation in the Philippines within the broader context of global liberation struggles, drawing inspiration from them for a poetic language that opposes tyranny. Perhaps this is what led her to turn her attention to contemporary Palestinian literature, from which she selected Adania Shibli’s story “The Sea is Mohammad al-Khatib’s” (2021) and republished it with Piper Trail Projects, the publishing house she co-founded with Adam David. The press focuses on experimental and political poetry by Filipino writers working at the margins of the literary canon.
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Conchitina raises the microphone and begins by presenting her new project. She situates it within her growing interest in the tension between subjectivity and objectivity in the practice of archiving, and in the ways her poems draw upon “the alphabet, the index, the timeline, the diagram and the lexicon” as literary forms she seeks to save from decay and erasure. In doing so, she confronts these forms with the structural violence that frames them, while also cataloguing their meanings. Cruz examines the “objective” in legal language—its coldness and precision—in an attempt to reveal the violence inherent in it.
In her long-term poetic research project, The Wife, Cruz examines patriarchy as embodied in the religious and legal institutions that define the values of marriage. The Philippines is one of the few countries in the world where divorce is not legalised. The only legal avenue available to couples seeking to end their marriages is therefore to file for annulment or a declaration of nullity, a process designed to take years, drain couples’ resources, and drive them into conflict, making annulment virtually impossible. Nevertheless, some couples continue to pursue annulment despite these obstacles, taking their cases to higher courts. In the cases they bring, couples primarily resort to narratives of blame, which require one spouse to prove that the other lacks, as the law stipulates, “the psychological capacity to fulfil basic marital obligations.”
Cruz explores in her poem “The Wife,”[1] the ambiguity of “psychological incapacity,” as defined by law and applied in annulment courts over the past three decades. The poem engages with six of the eleven cases brought before the Supreme Court in which annulment was granted since the Family Law Act came into force in 1987.
The poet selects words, phrases and sentences from these six cases, in which the husbands cite their wives’ psychological unfitness. She delves into the violence embedded in the language of the cases, particularly in the legal arguments presented to prove a woman’s psychological unfitness for marriage, and into the poetic quality these arguments reveal—or rather, acquire despite themselves. She focuses on the grounds for the charges, arranging them alphabetically, a technique that disrupts the unity of any single narrative and renders the sequence of charges cold and dry, like the language of the law. Yet the charges form a rhythm of their own, not devoid of poetry, transforming the series into a poem. Through this scattered list—which nevertheless appears verbatim in the judgments of the six cases—the legal mind is revealed as a fusion of patriarchal authority and the values of a male-dominated society.
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I heard Conchitina read her poem and felt an immediate desire to translate it, to gauge the depth of its violence when transposed into Arabic and its different cultural context. However, the alphabetical order adopted by the poet in English was not feasible in Arabic for a number of linguistic reasons, including differences in morphology and inflection between the two languages.
It was therefore more fitting to reconsider the alphabetical order of the long list of charges and seek an alternative approach that would remain faithful to the violence of the legal text, with its abundance of enumeration and reluctant poetry. I decided to divide the legal grounds into groups corresponding to the principal charges levelled by the husband against his wife and arrange them in ascending order: charges relating to the wife’s actions, followed by her shortcomings, her words, her motives, her manner, and her character, culminating in the nature of the wife herself—that is, everything that constitutes her essence and being. Scattered throughout these hierarchical groups are isolated accusations that border on the absurd and the comical, resisting classification or comprehension. By organising the accusations into ascending groups, I established a different structural framework for the poem, rewriting it while retaining the anguish, violence and farce that Conchitina Cruz had envisioned in the original.
In Arabic, the poem’s impact shifts: the conventionality of its institutional language, when translated into another language, acquires new dimensions, revealing different layers of discipline and raising broader questions about how the intersection and friction between Arabic and English—that is, between their respective social and linguistic contexts—shape the poem’s effects, complicate its meanings, and redefine its political stakes.
The aesthetics of Cruz’s original poem in English, as well as its journey into Arabic, lie not only in the intensification of the linguistic and moral violence perpetrated against women, but also in the range of accusations levelled against her: their ordinariness, strangeness and absurdity, and the narrowness of imagination they betray. We read the poem in fragments, in sequence and as a whole, and a portrait of a woman gradually emerges before us. It is enough that she works, stays up late, plays, has endured a difficult childhood, or has needs and desires; in the end, it is enough simply that she is a human being for her to be deemed psychologically unfit for marriage.
Conchitina reads her poem with the solemnity of someone perusing a legal text, and with the humour of someone pointing to the absurdity of the violence inherent in the charges levelled against wives. Later, in private, the poet whispers, “I hope to bear witness to this legal victory in the Philippines, and finally become nobody’s wife,” as hibiscus climbs her arms.