Ambahan

In 2002, Elena Garcdoce Francisco, a 102-year-old Tumandok woman, journeyed to Iloilo City from her mountain home in Panay. She sang an ambahan, protesting the destruction wrought by militarization in her ancestral lands. These military incursions date back to at least 1962, under then President Diosdado Macapagal.

This practice of telling stories through poetry and chants remains an intrinsic part of the communal life of many indigenous villages. However, notes writer and poet Gelacio Guillermo, the traditional content of these poetic expressions have been giving way to expressing new ideas, feelings, and aspirations—ones related to militarization, logging, mining, land-grabbing, the destruction of forests. Indigenous women continue the practice of ulallems, agayams, and salidum-ay. These poetic expressions are intended as a collective experience, with no barrier between the performer and her audience.

Gardoce Francisco’s chant could have been a galvanizing moment, bringing a common understanding of how communities are being imperiled and immiserated by a confluence of multinational and local elite interests.

But we—urban and lowland dwellers, schooled in Western-style universities—are painfully unequipped to understand her words. We are unable to see ambahan, agayam, salidum-ay, ullalem, as knowledge production.

Renga

Last semester, members of my grad cohort had dinner with a very cool queer theorist who was guest speaking at the university. We were thrilled to meet her and discuss her work. We were even more thrilled when advisors later told us, “Professor G loved you! She said you were so  [inset gaggle of compliments].” We beamed like kindergartners awarded gold stars.

Then our advisor added, “Professor G was so impressed that you were so uncompetitive with one another.”

Hmm.

That last comment threw me a little, because I’ve never seen myself as non-competitive. Was I losing my edge?

I later learned that Professor G felt the students at her R1 were competitive in a destructive way. They’d ask questions not out of genuine interest in one another’s work, but in an attempt to one-up one another by tearing each other’s work down. That’s competition?

I think back to the members of my cohort. F works on art activism in queer communities of color. C’s work is on trafficking of women. B is looking into transwomen of color in the diaspora. N studies how colonial legal systems have enshrined violence against women. Professor G was right. They’re each doing vital work, and I’ve no desire to try to tear that down.

* * *

(Re)thinking Running

I used to think that I loved running because it made me free.

But lately, the runs have been harder. Not any less satisfying, just harder to get into. Harder to enjoy. It’s not that my runs have changed, but the purpose.

Lately, I’ve been running to get away from people. I’m not quite sure how this happened.

This is not a trail

That sign, “This is not a trail,” drives my dog crazy. Because right behind the sign is. . .a trail.

Apparently, it’s a trail full of coyote scents and potato bugs and other curiosities that his mama won’t let him explore. There was a beautiful trail just waiting to be sniffed, he could see that. No matter what the sign said.

My dog’s reaction brings to mind other official versions of “This is not…”

This is not torture. (At least not when we do it.)

And according to the Philippine government, this is not an abduction.

Any additions to the list?

Kinatay

[Edit: Cross-posted sa Racialicious. Makisali sa diskusyon.]

Let me get this out of the way first. This is not a movie review. It is a review of movie reviews about Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay. Spoilers follow, though the title pretty much tells you what you’re gonna get.

Last weekend, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza won the best director award at the  Cannes Festival for the movie Kinatay (”Slaughtered“). Mendoza’s win was a surprise, considering how Kinatay is probably, as Prometheus Brown puts it, the most hated film at Cannes.

Exerpts from Maggie Lee’s synopsis and review at The Hollywood Reporter:

Newly married Peping, who attends the police academy, receives an offer via text message to make a fast buck with a shady friend. By nightfall, he is in a van with a group of vicious gangsters who have kidnapped a bar hostess to demand a loan repayment under orders from an elusive general…

The real time pacing, feels like being stuck in a traffic jam, but the dramatic thrust is relentless as one hears through the muffled darkness, the woman being gagged and beaten mercilessly. The horror escalates to rape, murder and dismemberment. None of this is left to the imagination, with the men’s verbal sexism being equally distasteful.

That was a positive review. (See here to view Kinatay excerpts, and here for a round-up of reviews and more background on the film.)

Roger Ebert’s review, charmingly titled “What were they thinking of?”,   is typical of how critics who hated Kinatay approached the movie. There is hardly any discussion of the merits of the movie itself, and instead a whole lot of indignation over the unpleasantness that viewers were subjected to:

It is Mendoza’s conceit that it his Idea will make a statement, or evoke a sensation, or demonstrate something–if only he makes the rest of the film as unpleasant to the eyes, the ears, the mind and the story itself as possible…

No drama is developed. No story purpose is revealed…

Ebert adds that:

the sad thing is, the opening scenes in his film give promise of being absorbing and even entertaining.

How dare a film expose its audience to a woman’s violent murder and dismemberment? A form of violence against women that, by the way, happens not infrequently in the Philippines?

And how dare the film depict this violence in a way that is unpleasant, rather than entertaining?

Outside

It’s been a pretty cool but intense semester, both online and off. I’m in a couple of postcolonial theory classes, so my offline writing has gotten way too cultural-lit, although there’s been a lot of valuable reading that I eventually hope to incorporate. One of those po-co theory classes has been particularly tense, because it’s an anthro class full of defensive white anthropology students who are “interested” in Africa.

So when the weather turned nice around mid-March, I got on my mountain bike and went riding. My unconscious plan was to ride away from all this for a while, to ride deep into the trails where there are no people, and to get away. I’d only read bicycle blogs and discussion groups and just go into bicycle stores and I will totally avoid arguing about race or class or gender or sexuality and just ride ride ride.

Hala, that was just privilege on my part, because you don’t get away from this. One of the most obvious points–there are hardly any people of color riders. Okay, I take that back. There’s me, there’s a Black rider, there’s my partner. A few more poc here and there, but this is Los Angeles, so the dearth of people of color on the trails is quite noticeable. The cost of a good mountain bike and the lack of proximity to the trails are factors that immediately come to mind. Not everyone has the luxury of spending hours on the trail. The necessary accessories like a good helmet and padded shorts can also be expensive.

Obligatory birthday post

Not mine. The blog’s.

I totally missed the first blog-anniversary, in fact, since Tanglad was born in April 2008. It’s been a cool year. I look back at what I previously wrote. Some of it, I’m happy about. Some of it makes me cringe.

But I’m happy that I’m writing and thinking. I’m happy to be in conversation with people who are helping me struggle through these issues. Salamat for all that.

Some people stumbled onto this blog googling for lemongrass and tanglad, but there are also searches for feminism, capitalism, women of color, export processing zones. Then there are other interesting and recurrent search terms, like:

• “Is militant angeleno filipino?” [My answer: I don't know.]

And some disturbing ones, like “killing [racial slur]” Wtf? Why would a search like that land here?

And some funny/puzzling ones:

• throwing knives events
• gay boots
• fake vasectomy certificate

I wonder what searches are coming.

What’s been your most amusing or surprising search term?

The Deviant Mother

(Late reflections for Mother’s Day)

Of all the made-up commercial holidays, Mother’s Day, for me, is the least irritating. After all, if I was going to be guilted into blowing money on cards, flowers, and the obligatory brunch, at least it was going to be for Mom. So to moms everywhere, y’all rock.

And this goes double for the moms we do not celebrate on Mother’s Day — the ones  who get painted as fiscally and sexually irresponsible, the deviant  mothers who are subjected to discipline and sanction.

For decades, the deviant mother has served as a convenient scapegoat for state ills. As Anna  Marie Smith has observed, “the State lays the blame for poverty at the door of the deviant mother who is ideologically constructed as black, heterosexual, unmarried, and sexually precocious.” These are the mothers who are somehow painted as undeserving.

Ruptures

My first full-time teaching job was as a sociology instructor at Career U. Unlike other career schools, this one actually gave me freedom to design my own Intro to Sociology courses—certainly not the norm at most career schools. I met some pretty cool students in those classes, and we did good work. My job helped to promote critical thinking among the students.

Hooray for me!

So this week’s class reading, Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Teaching for the Times,” was quite jarring. In this essay, Spivak writes:

Proctor and Gamble, a large U.S. multinational corporation, sends students specializing in business administration abroad to learn language and culture. Already in 1990, the National Governors’ Association report queried: “How are we to sell our products in a global economy when we are yet to learn the language of the customers” . . . We are caught in a larger struggle where one side devises newer ways to exploit transnationality through a distorting culturalism and the other knows rather what transnational script drives, writes, and operates it. [emphasis hers]

I’ve been reflecting on my role in this transnational script, on how the classes I taught over those past three years at Career U were actually in service of this “distorting culturalism.” How many students eventually went on to use their knowledge in service of the various Proctor and Gambles?

Towards making globalization palatable to people in the Third World, the very people who would also be made to shoulder the resulting devastation?

* * *

Complicity

I realized I hadn’t written about the US-backed Israeli attacks on Gaza. I was busy reading and learning, so the silence was unintentional. But Teo rightly points out how only a handful of Filipino bloggers have expressed solidarity with Gaza and Palestine. So this is me adding my voice.

In the mid-1980s, my dad made a living by exporting Pinoy food for Filipino contract workers in Saudi Arabia. His partner, Tito Ahmed, would visit Manila and take our family out for McDonalds during the long stretches that my dad worked in Jeddah. One day, over fries and a milkshake, I mentioned that I could not find his home country Palestine in my atlas.

Tito Ahmed got agitated, a marked contrast to his sweet disposition. When I was a boy, he told me, Israeli soldiers came to his farm. His family had to relocate for a few days. No, they were told, you could not bring your animals. Just leave them enough food and water for two weeks, then you’ll be back. The family spent their last day in the farm shoveling feed into chicken coops.

That was almost forty years ago, he told me. They never did see that farm again. He would need a visa to even set foot in the town where he was born. A visa, he yelled, pounding the McDonald’s table with his fist. It’s like you needing a visa to visit Laguna.

Why would anyone need a visa to visit their home province? It was a question that my twelve-year-old brain filed away. I never really understood until recently that Tito Ahmed and his family were displaced by an occupation. Based on the number of careless rehashes of “Hamas fires rockets from their civilian areas so Israel has to defend itself,” the fact that Palestinians are living under a US-backed Israeli occupation still eludes many Pinoy bloggers.