Friday, June 17, 2011

A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan


This review is from: A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan (Paperback)
I nodded in agreement at virtually every page. I put the book down frequently to absorb the shock of reading my own experiences, captured in a few incisive master strokes. "Silence is in the eyes of the white girl with long blonde hair searching mine for love." I laughed out loud at the skewering of entitled ignorance: "Did he buy you from a catalog? How come you know all our songs?" (Questions I've Been Asked Ever Since I Arrived in the US in 1983). I breathed deep in appreciation for the painful truths on the 100 years of US colonial history in the Philippines. I gulped "A Book Of Her Own" down in a single day, dancing from poetry to autobiography to mythology to critical essays to history to ritual. This is a book that sings, weeps, re-knits what has been torn, reclaims what has been stolen, avenges what has been violated. Above all, it breaks the toxic silence of colonization, to heal and illuminate.

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