a thousand voices whispering by Arlene Biala
Published by Sampaguita Press (2025)
Learn more @ Sampaguita Press
Published by Sampaguita Press (2025)
Learn more @ Sampaguita Press
RECLAIMING MENTAL HEALTH, AND THE INHERITANCE OF ITS THREATENED ERASURE
A Book Review of Arlene Biala’s a thousand voices whispering
by Elsa Valmidiano
A Book Review of Arlene Biala’s a thousand voices whispering
by Elsa Valmidiano
In a thousand voices whispering, the fifth poetry collection of acclaimed Filipina-American former Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, Arlene Biala defies the colonized mindset about mental health, erroneously believed to be a luxury afforded only to white privilege, and proves that mental health, i.e. to live—and know how to live—an emotionally stable life, has always been part of everyone’s survival and existence.
Through poignant and brave interviews that she conducts with her family—blurring the lines between anthropological record keeper, journalistic poet, and the designated “family therapist”—Biala examines how she and her family are reclaiming a name to mental health, while investigating how our ancestors probably had a nuanced name for it, and yet diasporic descendants are left to feel excluded and disconnected today from their own mental well-being, just as colonization and war left Philippine ancestors excluded and disconnected from their lands, their bodies, and each other.
What makes Biala’s collection groundbreaking is that it confronts the subject of mental health in a Filipino immigrant family, likewise the experience of many POC immigrant families having to confront and examine what mental health is, especially where the very notion of it eventually became taboo. As Biala examines this plight regarding mental health in her own family—immediate and extended—she finds how it had been bargained out by generational trauma and violence inflicted by imperialism on our ancestors, where physical well-being took precedence, while our collective and individual mental health got left behind, and the inheritance of its threatened erasure got passed down generations later.
Biala examines how resilience mitigated with silent acquiescence had been one of the only ways to move forward in the name of sheer survival. Biala not only challenges this colonial inheritance of acquiescence that has long excluded our mental health, but she seeks to reclaim mental well-being as seen through her family’s own words. In “uncle rafael says,” Biala’s uncle lyrically puts into his own words what depression feels like for him:
i wasn’t home
i wanted to go to a place called nowhere, and do a lot
of nothing with somebody named nobody. just for fun (83).
Biala shows us the full breadth of psychological survival through poetic storytelling in the voice of her grandmother, mother, aunts, maternal uncle, cousin, and nieces. Her storytelling is not linear, just as grief and healing are not linear. She summons maternal voices who suffered through war and violence, and lived to tell it. While maternal voices lead the charge in opening the gates of silence around depression, anxiety, grief, and sadness, Biala also confronts the painful fates of her maternal uncles and a nephew who all succumbed to suicide, where discussion around male vulnerability and masculinity are met with just as much compassion and gentleness.
Biala emphasizes that mental health is not just a singular position, but that it is collective, where family and community carry responsibility in the overall mental well-being of the individual. Where one suffers, the collective suffers in symbiosis. As heirs to the denial of mental health, descendants must piece together what remains, where guilt and regret propel surviving loved ones to acknowledge grief and trauma in order to figure out together what kind of healing is necessary in order to move forward and hopefully somehow thrive.
Biala’s decolonized storytelling through poems captures the disjointed emotions and memories where depression is not an easy experience to describe. She places us squarely in the position of what depression might look like and feel like, where Western clinical terms are not meant to exist within the parameters of one size fits all, especially for the Brown body and mind. For instance in “mirror salming”, she exposes the mental health challenges encapsulated in cultural nuance that feel almost impassable—juxtaposing her own journey with post-partum depression after the birth of her first child, while simultaneously trying to be the strong, obedient Filipina daughter to a mother undergoing cancer treatment:
where was everyone? the entire house and backyard felt
like death. sitting in the backyard swing. you would take turns
with kai. i felt so weak in my helplessness to take care of you,
to take care of myself (116).
In her punctuation where all words are lowercase throughout her collection, she captures the smallness felt by the individual, and the desperation and isolation of the situation itself, while equally capturing feelings of guilt and inferiority as if depression might feel like something facetious that we are selfishly blowing out of proportion in comparison to the more significant generational trauma experienced by ancestors who came before us.
What might feel like Depression Olympics in Biala’s poems is, in fact, a complex and multi-layered threading of familial, generational, and global experiences that directly engage in dialogue with each other. She opens the deep wounds of family members and herself, where her poems serve as prayers to cauterize wounds—of the past, present, and future.
Particularly within the current political climate we are facing, Biala intertwines the deeply personal in “talking about war,” where we watch families get ripped apart simply for being Brown in this country, where we all must wonder what the impact of separation and being terrorized by an authoritarian force will do, not just to a child’s overall mental health, but how that child’s DNA has been forever altered through trauma, affecting many generations to come, while their experience is simultaneously minimized and ignored by the governing state:
i wonder if the unfathomable grieving of a wife for her husband,
a mother for her child, of the last living person in a martyred family
will heal or destroy us. how do we play god. we’ve become too good
at blocking out the background noise. constant drone of whispers
confessing we don’t know how to stop. slumping into oblivion
while malicious men draw maps, then rip and burn them for kindling (121)
Biala’s collection is a valuable intersectional discussion around mental health that stretches across different POC communities facing similar issues. She debunks the myth among immigrant communities who might believe that mental health is an unnecessary luxury, as erroneously believed by our elders who once had no choice but to center their survival on physical wellness, when mental health has always been, in fact, a fundamental part of our existence.
Through poignant and brave interviews that she conducts with her family—blurring the lines between anthropological record keeper, journalistic poet, and the designated “family therapist”—Biala examines how she and her family are reclaiming a name to mental health, while investigating how our ancestors probably had a nuanced name for it, and yet diasporic descendants are left to feel excluded and disconnected today from their own mental well-being, just as colonization and war left Philippine ancestors excluded and disconnected from their lands, their bodies, and each other.
What makes Biala’s collection groundbreaking is that it confronts the subject of mental health in a Filipino immigrant family, likewise the experience of many POC immigrant families having to confront and examine what mental health is, especially where the very notion of it eventually became taboo. As Biala examines this plight regarding mental health in her own family—immediate and extended—she finds how it had been bargained out by generational trauma and violence inflicted by imperialism on our ancestors, where physical well-being took precedence, while our collective and individual mental health got left behind, and the inheritance of its threatened erasure got passed down generations later.
Biala examines how resilience mitigated with silent acquiescence had been one of the only ways to move forward in the name of sheer survival. Biala not only challenges this colonial inheritance of acquiescence that has long excluded our mental health, but she seeks to reclaim mental well-being as seen through her family’s own words. In “uncle rafael says,” Biala’s uncle lyrically puts into his own words what depression feels like for him:
i wasn’t home
i wanted to go to a place called nowhere, and do a lot
of nothing with somebody named nobody. just for fun (83).
Biala shows us the full breadth of psychological survival through poetic storytelling in the voice of her grandmother, mother, aunts, maternal uncle, cousin, and nieces. Her storytelling is not linear, just as grief and healing are not linear. She summons maternal voices who suffered through war and violence, and lived to tell it. While maternal voices lead the charge in opening the gates of silence around depression, anxiety, grief, and sadness, Biala also confronts the painful fates of her maternal uncles and a nephew who all succumbed to suicide, where discussion around male vulnerability and masculinity are met with just as much compassion and gentleness.
Biala emphasizes that mental health is not just a singular position, but that it is collective, where family and community carry responsibility in the overall mental well-being of the individual. Where one suffers, the collective suffers in symbiosis. As heirs to the denial of mental health, descendants must piece together what remains, where guilt and regret propel surviving loved ones to acknowledge grief and trauma in order to figure out together what kind of healing is necessary in order to move forward and hopefully somehow thrive.
Biala’s decolonized storytelling through poems captures the disjointed emotions and memories where depression is not an easy experience to describe. She places us squarely in the position of what depression might look like and feel like, where Western clinical terms are not meant to exist within the parameters of one size fits all, especially for the Brown body and mind. For instance in “mirror salming”, she exposes the mental health challenges encapsulated in cultural nuance that feel almost impassable—juxtaposing her own journey with post-partum depression after the birth of her first child, while simultaneously trying to be the strong, obedient Filipina daughter to a mother undergoing cancer treatment:
where was everyone? the entire house and backyard felt
like death. sitting in the backyard swing. you would take turns
with kai. i felt so weak in my helplessness to take care of you,
to take care of myself (116).
In her punctuation where all words are lowercase throughout her collection, she captures the smallness felt by the individual, and the desperation and isolation of the situation itself, while equally capturing feelings of guilt and inferiority as if depression might feel like something facetious that we are selfishly blowing out of proportion in comparison to the more significant generational trauma experienced by ancestors who came before us.
What might feel like Depression Olympics in Biala’s poems is, in fact, a complex and multi-layered threading of familial, generational, and global experiences that directly engage in dialogue with each other. She opens the deep wounds of family members and herself, where her poems serve as prayers to cauterize wounds—of the past, present, and future.
Particularly within the current political climate we are facing, Biala intertwines the deeply personal in “talking about war,” where we watch families get ripped apart simply for being Brown in this country, where we all must wonder what the impact of separation and being terrorized by an authoritarian force will do, not just to a child’s overall mental health, but how that child’s DNA has been forever altered through trauma, affecting many generations to come, while their experience is simultaneously minimized and ignored by the governing state:
i wonder if the unfathomable grieving of a wife for her husband,
a mother for her child, of the last living person in a martyred family
will heal or destroy us. how do we play god. we’ve become too good
at blocking out the background noise. constant drone of whispers
confessing we don’t know how to stop. slumping into oblivion
while malicious men draw maps, then rip and burn them for kindling (121)
Biala’s collection is a valuable intersectional discussion around mental health that stretches across different POC communities facing similar issues. She debunks the myth among immigrant communities who might believe that mental health is an unnecessary luxury, as erroneously believed by our elders who once had no choice but to center their survival on physical wellness, when mental health has always been, in fact, a fundamental part of our existence.
Elsa Valmidiano is an Ilocana-American essayist and poet. Her debut essay collection from New Rivers Press, We Are No Longer Babaylan, was an Editors’ Choice selection from their Many Voices Project competition in Prose. Her second essay collection, The Beginning of Leaving, was published by Querencia Press, and was recognized as part of the American Writers Museum’s Filipino American History Month Reading List for Memoirs. Recently, she was a 2025 Writer in Residence at France’s Château d’Orquevaux International Artists and Writers Residency. She is currently hard at work with her third essay collection to be released this summer.
