How Shall I Greet Thee?

We've been receiving a few annual christmas letters from friends around the country.  Mostly folks from our "former lives" -- friends from husband's high school, our friends from a church we attended 30 years ago, friends that we only hear from during christmas. Most of the letters talk about what folks did during the year - travels, new grandkids, retirement, volunteer work.

I guess this dates me. Younger folks no longer mail christmas cards and letters. They tweet, facebook, instagram, pinterest, etc. Why wait for year-end to regal your friends with the highlights of your year when you can do it on a daily basis?

I've been thinking of how to greet my friends this holiday season. I will have to write different kinds of letters -- to the high school classmates that I've reconnected with, to former office mates when I worked for a corporation, to childhood friends from back home, to friends in various organizations that I belong, to colleagues at work, to former church-mates, to new friends, etc.

These are the parts of myself that connect with these different groups. They knew me when ...and so if I reciprocate with a letter of my own, shouldn't I let them know how I have changed over the years? But would they want to know? I am not sure. When I read these letters, I don't get that sense of wanting to connect at that level. It may be enough for them that we know that they are still alive and active; that they are living meaningful and fun-filled lives. That they have the money and privilege to do so.

If I write this letter, my preference is to take this opportunity to reconnect at a much deeper and more meaningful level. To speak from my heart about what really matters to me at this time of my life. But I hesitate and I'm wondering why.  It's the same dilemma I wrestle with when a friend asks: Leny, how come you don't talk or write about your inner spiritual practice? In response, I said that, on the contrary, I've been quite public about my inner processes/reflections. For the past twenty years, I've written about my process of decolonization and indigenization. To me, this is spiritual work. It is integral. It is wholistic. It is political. It is personal. It is sacred.

The more I move away colonial thinking (binary, linear, fragmented, hierarchical, non-indigenous), the more I find it hard to talk in terms of what is spiritual and what isn't.

Same with these holidays. Christmas is part of my Methodist childhood. So there is always a part of me that gets nostalgic for the church Christmas programs, the caroling, Handel's messiah, simbang gabi. I've since deconstructed the religion of my childhood - how Protestant Christianity is married to capitalism and empire -  so, of course, the shopping frenzy (to feed the near-death capitalist system) didn't escape me.  I tried to be as wise as I could be about it. I didn't contribute to the coffers of mall shops and bought mostly from local merchants.

So this going local was the theme of these holidays for me. This is part of my growing commitment to sustainability, to creating a smaller carbon footprint, to lesser use of resources. It is part of a commitment to develop a relationship to a Place.

For the past decades, the search for a Place of one's own was more or less a symbolic process for me. The search for connection to a Home and Land, to Homeland, led to a desire to acquire knowledge about Filipino indigenous knowledge systems and practices. But this couldn't remain an academic pursuit alone. The idea of belonging to a Place  became a call to consider the Indigenous worldview as a starting point. What does it mean to be indigenous to a place? Can I be indigenous to a Place that originally belonged to the Coast Miwok, Pomo, Kashaya, Wintun, Wappo, Numlaki, and other tribes in this region of Northern California?

Yesterday, I looked at the pile of books next to the bed and noticed how they are mostly by Native authors writing about indigenizing the academy, Original Instructions, ceremony, native science, traditional ecological knowledge, and other related topics. I noted that this is a marked departure from my previous academic interests. Maybe this is a good sign. No, not maybe. It is a good sign. It feels so.

A friend forwarded me an essay about how the idea/image of Santa Claus was influenced by the shamans of the northern tribes who inhaled a lot of mushrooms that made them see fat and floating beings. Hah, I thought, so there goes the indigenous roots of a modern christmas icon. There is a continuity here, a sort of shape-shifting, that if acknowledged can signal that boundaries are quite porous. Having said so, I am ever more vigilant in seeing how open and generous frameworks from the indigenous worldview often get abused and appropriated by modern, colonial thinking folks.

See, I have circled back again. This is the politics of the sacred.

So how shall I greet Thee?

connecting the dots

massacre of children in Connecticut today
typhoon Pablo devastate parts of Davao
no more coconuts, bananas
mountain boulders descend into town
relief work
appeals for donation
melting of ice in Greenland
need for gun control
drones continue to bomb Pakistan border
 Israel and Palestine
Syria
extreme weather
king tides
Pacquiao knocked out
end of unemployment benefits
fiscal cliff debates
RH bill passed
Supreme Court and gay marriage
North Korea launch missile

Notes from Pedagogies of Crossing/Jacqui Alexander

108-109-110
Every native of everywhere is a potential tourist. And every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native would like a way out, every  native would like a rest. Every native would like a tour. But some natives, most natives in the world, cannot go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the realities of their lives. And they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place the tourist wants to go. So when the native sees you, the tourist, they envy you. They envy your own ability to leave your banality and boredom. They envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself. (Jamaica Kincaid).

Collectivized "envy" is not the same as individual "envy." When collectivized, envy can ask important questions about how banality comes to be made into a source of pleasure, about who manufactures it, and about what can be done to transform it. ...Without these understandings, we will be unable to map the lines between our own location - between where we are, what we see, and what we do. We would be left to render only incomplete, skewed accounts of history...We need to develop a similar urgency around relational curricular projects that put us in conversation, not domination, with a range of relational knowledges. There is something quite profound about not knowing, claiming not to know, or not gaining access to knowledge that enables us to know that we are not the sole (re)producers of our lives. But we would have to apprehend the loss that comes from not knowing and feel its absence in an immediate and palpable way in order to remake ourselves enough, so that our analysis might change. We have to learn to intuit the consequences of not knowing, to experience their effects in order to reverse some of the deeply embedded deposits on which imperial psyche rests - a psyche that still holds on to the idea of manifest destiny and the fiction of protection and safety from an enemy, who is either calculating on the borders outside or hovering on the margins within. We would love to visit the devastation of living segregated lives.
**
A new conceptual map with an implied pedagogy that requires:

• painstaking labor of reenvisioning curriculum, which at the very least does not reside within national and disciplinary borders
• which takes account of the broad tempos and movements of history, while paying close attention to historical specificity
• which demystifies the fictitious boundaries between the academy and the community
• a division that leaves community work to particular disciplines, and worse, to particular bodies
• which brings self-conscious positionality to the knowledge we produce, the contradictory positions we occupy and the internal systems of rewards and privileges from those very positions
• which pays close attention to the questions we bring inside the classroom as we instruct students in the delicate task of learning how to pose questions.
• and yet we confront a major difficulty in reconciling desire with practice, of teaching a vision we have not fully lived, of moving inside and across the outlines of a map, with no guarantees.
• Such work places a great demand on the imagination, on practice, on reconfiguring the relationship between practice and theory and on building solidarity with different communities, while remaining aware of the suspicion that academic knowledge bears.

Leng's Bangka Journey

The sea is calling.

I have watched her dream unfold for years on the sidelines. I've known Leng Leng for many years. I have watched her shape-shift over the decades as she followed her sariling duwende. Always, I sensed she was following a storyline. Sometimes she would drop a clue but wouldn't say anything more. It was as if she was tracking the footprints of an ancestral spirit.

She dropped her public health career and started to walk the open road which led her to many return trips to the Philippines, to the Northwest where she connected with Indopinos who were part of a canoe  ritual ceremony. She met Turtle Island canoe builders who gifted a log to her.

Now she is making an open call. If you hear the sea calling, if you hear the call of your ancestors to connect the earth and sky, if the ancient stories are calling you Home -- would you build this canoe?

Thank you, Leng, for this invitation. There are lessons for me here...and they are Beautiful. Thank you for following your vision and your dream.

To healing community. To healing Earth and Sky.

THis is for Christine Balmes --
I write this because I care about Fil Am/Canadian scholars who would like to pursue an academic career but are  conflicted by what is perceived as issues of oppression and marginalization within the academe. Additionally, they lament the disconnect between scholars and the community leading to missed opportunities to affect social transformation.

This is also for Therese who is contemplating whether to pursue a phd in ethnic studies to study decolonization and indigenization or practice as a public interest lawyer serving the Fil Am community.

Both of these young women have told me that they see my scholarship and community work as a model of what they want to do. They have read my books and they resonate deeply with my writing and respect and admire the community advocacy that I have been doing.

But do you know?:
- that I have an Ed.D. and not a Ph.D.  Most academics with the latter look down on the former. They think that theory (phd) matters more than praxis (edd).
- that my writings have been published in peer-reviewed journals, in book chapters, ezines, community media but my books were published in the Philippines because publishers in the US didn't know how to categorize my work?
- that some Fil Am scholars (with PhDs) do not take my work seriously and have not engaged it in their own scholarship?
- that i have received tenure and rank of full professor because I have built a body of work that is referenced by scholars, educators, cultural workers, community workers?

I used to tell folks that one shouldn't have to get a phd or an edd to decolonize.

But, in hindsight, I know now that my doctoral fellowship, my mentors, my search for community rounded out the journey that started as a lonely search for answers to my sense of alienation, non-belonging. Assimilation didn't work for me so I strayed off the path that usually ensnares immigrants.

So what about young aspiring scholars. Where does one go to do a phd in Philippine Studies? If back to UP, does the program there sufficiently address the issues and concerns of diasporic Filipinos? If there is no similar program in the US, is there a phd in Ethnic Studies program with potential Fil Am mentors who are interested in decolonization and indigenization?

Elegy

I need a song to mourn the passing of the sister-self who has served me well. She is self-righteous. She is in control at all times. She is strong. She is unemotional. She is organized. She is elegant in her civilized manners.  She has served me well. I have loved her for how she has helped me survive this flatline culture. This culture that is full of hungry ghosts. I mourn for them now but for so long I have thought that they were real and that I should try to be like them.

I need a song to mourn the passing of the sister-self who had the certainty of purpose. Now the purpose is changing and she knows it and she is trying to hang onto the burning embers of the old fire. She doesn't know that there is a sacred fire that is calling her. Maybe she knows but she is afraid to let go.

I loved this old self. How can a love affair end? Why can't we stay together longer? When you are gone how will I navigate my way in the still unfamiliar realm of shadow and light, of spirit familiars and spirit guides? I have always been fearful of shadows. When I was a child I was told that there are aswangs and tikbalangs in the trees outside the window. In the dark, I can imagine them being there still.

Oh, my heart, listen to the longings of your soul, to the lament of your Kapwa; watch the river of tears flowing. Where and how can you keep hiding behind the curtain of rationality and stoicism? I know you feel deeply and you often carry your grief inside your pocket. Why the fear of your own vulnerability?

Say goodbye. Let go. Let her leave. Let this sister leave. You have been in her underworld for so long. Your ancestors have already sent you so many messengers in the past two decades. Tune in more closely to what they are saying. Tune in more loudly to their plea.

She said: I can die now. My time is up. My service days are over. I have indeed served you well.
I long to rest now and let you, my sister, to emerge as the keeper of dreams, the keeper of stories, the keeper of memories. Do you remember your dreams about lahar threatening to wipe off your home off the map and you said you will never let it happen? Well, the work is before you now.

Remember your dreams of coming home and you couldn't get home because you have too much baggage and too many other people's business to take care of? You can leave those bags at the airport now. Remember your dreams of wanting to save your family from drowning? Remember the lucid dream you had of leading them out on a bamboo raft you built? You flowed down the river towards the mouth of the ocean. As soon as you reached the ocean, the whales and dolphins welcomed you and the birds in the air dropped fruits on your raft. You survived. You are alive. You are safe.

Kapihan with Kidlat Tahimik

Just taking a break from cooking: vegetarian lumpia, vegetarian munggo, pork spareribs in blackbean sauce, chicken adobo, black rice salad, kale salad, pineapple, buko with pandan gelatin, lemon grass tea with yerbabuena, broccoli and romanesco. It's going to be a feast!

When asked why I cook everything from scratch when Costco has all kinds of convenient ready-to-eat dinners, I said that I cook to honor what my mother has taught me. Because I love the people I'm feeding. Because I love the reason for our gathering.

And the reason is Kidlat Tahimik! An excerpt:

Tahimik’s postcollege sojourn in Germany resulted in a friendship with Werner Herzog (who cast him in The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser), a marriage, and a deceptively ramshackle debut film, Perfumed Nightmare (1977), whose easygoing interrogation of neocolonial identity, Philippine culture, and global economies turned it into a surprise international “hit.” Praised as “the joyful discovery of blasé film buffs from Berlin to Belgrade and beyond” (SF Chronicle, 1980) and “likely to become some sort of classic” (Village Voice, 1980), the film is now heralded as a key text of both Third World Cinema and the personal essay film, offering a pairing of politics and pleasure that has continued throughout Tahimik’s oeuvre. Never shying away from embracing a proud, postcolonial identity, yet always grounded in personal observation and a quiet, understated humor, Tahimik’s works take special joy in highlighting the indigenous cultures and history of the Philippines and beyond, whether honoring Tahimik’s beloved bahag loincloth, profiling local craftsmen and women, or recounting tales of Magellan’s Filipino navigator/slave. Assembled from countless hours of filming, drawn from months and years worth of work, “my footages are like tiles in a mosaic,” he writes. “You shuffle them, change them around. In my process, nothing is permanent.”

I'm glad to see the visibility of Kidlat's body of work today. Many Fil Ams have not heard of him. When I showed his film, Perfumed Nightmare, in my Asian Am course a few years ago, the students didn't quite know how to take it in. Many of them have never been to the Philippines and the cultural references in the film are unfamiliar to them. Secondly, many of them have never taken a course on the Phil-US colonial relationship and have never encountered the concept of colonial mentality prior to taking the class.  Even after discussing the film as a form of critique of colonialism, the students seemed to struggle with the idea that  assimilation is not the only way. 

Fast forward. The decolonization and indigenization movement in the Bay Area has been gaining momentum and visibility. The Center for Babaylan Studies is not the only organization that is contributing to this movement but I think it's safe to say that we are the only that is articulating this: 

In an email to a friend, I wrote:

We, at CFBS, have decided to organize the Second International Babaylan Conference in 2013.  Our theme will focus on the relevance of indigenous paradigms in the age of globalization. Questions like: What does it mean to reclaim our Filipino indigenous identity in the diaspora? How do we connect with our ancestral roots in the homeland? Why is it significant to do so? We raise these questions because we feel that we are riding a wave of transformation of consciousness as everyday we see signs of crises facing our planet. The modern world system is unraveling in front of our eyes and our political and economic systems seem unable to solve our precarious dilemma. On the other hand, we know that indigenous peoples around the planet have survived to the present because for thousands of years they lived sustainably and in deep relationship with the places they belonged to. The movement, Another World is Possible, drafted at the World Social Forum, and similar  social justice movements worldwide recognize the importance of reclaiming and renewing our indigenous consciousness and indigenous paradigms. 

As far as I can tell, within the Filipino American community, CFBS is the only organization that is articulating this. In the Philippines it is articulated by the Heritage and Arts Academies of the Philippines led by Kidlat Tahimik and Katrin de Guia and,  together with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, have organized the KAPWA conferences. 

So this Kapihan with Kidlat Tahimik tonight is part of our ongoing conversation on how we can connect the work that we do in the homeland and in the diaspora. May we all find our sariling duwende and the indigenius in each one of us.