Negotiating Identity, Transacting Nationhood: The Case of Filipinos in the United States of America

(Prepared for the University of Hawaii at Hilo, February 23, 2006. Sponsored by the Ilokano Program, Dept. of Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures, Dept. of English, Center for Philippine Studies, Dept. of Ethnic Studies, and the National Foreign Language Resource Center).

Summary:
THE IDENTITY OF THE FILIPINO AMERICAN IS THAT OF A NECESSARY EXILE AND A NECESSARY FICTION—AND THIS IDENTITY IS NECESSARILY PLURAL

Who am I? This question of identity is always a question that is as fluid as the watery vastness separating the Philippines from the United States.

A Filipino American—the Flip, the local born—might not have the same answer as the rest of the immigrants from the home country. He has lost the memory—or he has no memory of the home country that could have made the question of identity different, perhaps more complex and more complicated than the way his elders would frame that same question.

Ask that of the one who had to scratch out a life from the uneven terrain of trying and trying it out some more just to survive the first days and first years in the United States and the question is transformed into some kind of trope memorializing the long wait, the arduous struggle, the persistence of the spirit, and the numerous prayers that went with the dream to pursue good life. He is your Filipino immigrant through and through—the one who has seen it all: the ugly and the beautiful in immigrant life, the opportunity and opportunism, the consistency and contradiction, the reality and the illusion. Because all these ground the immigrant experience that has touched base with the primal passion and faith that goes with eking out a new life in a new land under totally new circumstances.

Ask that of the bagong salta—the newly arrived—and the answer could be between estrangement and welcome, between wandering and wondering, between self-redemption and self-destruction. The days are long for the bagong salta, the tears generous, the sorrowing equally so. The colorful wall calendar announcing a vacation in an island paradise called Boracay becomes a mute witness to the thousand circles of questioning-and-answering with the lonely and isolated soul that longs for home, for the fiesta and Friday devotion in Quiapo, for the coronation night in Gumamugam, for the carefree life on the shores of Tagbilaran, with the bald mountains giving you the stage to mount your imagination of what is it to live in exile. The bagong salta tries to bury deep in his heart the betrayal of People Power I and People Power II and think of the dire days in the homeland as some kind of a cheap moro-moro or comedia or vaudeville for the retarded leaders with their stunted mindsets about how to build a nation from the dreams of those citizens who have decided to stay put and love the motherland the way the revolutionaries had loved her.

For here, the question “Who am I?” is a question that strikes at the core of being of anyone asking whether one is a Flip, a Filipino American, a Filipino immigrant, or a bagong salta.

The question is a difficult text—it is, in truth and in fact, a question of difficulty: the difficult days in the past and the difficult days of the present, the difficult dream and the difficult pursuit of that dream.

The difficulty is as real as the tenuousness of luck, the uncertainty of the coming years even as the one asking wrestles with the terrors and surprises of the answer. But even here, even with the promise of the future, the divide between terror and surprise may be as unclear as the foggy skies in the foothills of the mountain ranges that drop to the sea that connects you to home. For in the imagination, that other side of the vastness is the country that has promised nurture and sustenance and yet failed to deliver.

This is why the Filipino immigrant asking that identity question now ran away.

Because somewhere in his mind, there is something that is profoundly missing. It is the lost memory. It is the memory of a people coming alive and kicking and needing remembering.

Because somewhere in his soul, there is something that begs to be heard. It is the song of a country the ancestors had vowed to love in eternity, the song begging to be sung again and again until it becomes the song of the immigrant’s everyday life, until it becomes the mantra that links him up with a past that is now as fuzzy as the answer to that question “Who am I?”

Because somewhere in his spirit, there is something that commands him to stop, to look, and to listen. It is the crossroads, the multiple crossroads that the immigrant has to trod on, delicately at first, delicately because the steps, initially are uncertain even as he keeps on asking that question about him whether he is American or Filipino, whether he is Filipino-American, whether he is American-Filipino—or whether he settles for a compromise and simply accept that he is as ethnic as the person next to him.

Because somewhere in his body, in that material body, there is something that makes him go back to the topography of the land and memory that he left behind—or the land and memory of his heritage. It is the movement of limbs, the sway of the hips, the taut action and reaction of the torso as he imagines himself communing with the community of rallyists and protesters challenging the powers-that-be in the land of overseas contract workers, in the land where many exiles come from, in the land where the delicate dance of self and society has to be learned. That delicate dance of self and society has something to do with, on one hand, the obligation to the everyday, to self and family, to self and kin and, on the other, the obligation to pursue the bigger causes beyond the self like the obligation to do justice to others, the obligation to do what is right and fair, the obligation to build a community of morally upright citizens and people.

The mind, the soul, the spirit, the body—these are sources of the response to the question posed by the immigrant asking that question “Who am I?” The question begins with the inner resources of the person and goes outward, ending in that difficult answer that says, you immigrant are two nations in one.

He closes his eyes and he sees the hollowed hills of the Hollywood and sacred spaces of the American Indians in the Rancho San Pedro that lead to the endless sea. He imagines the question—he imagines the answer: You are two nations in one now.

The answer continues—but the immigrant knows that the answer contains the genesis of new questions. You are a necessary exile now. The song comes in, the memory revisits, the contours of the homeland appear in a mirage, and the words of the ancestors come to bless your wandering heart, mind, body, soul.

You are a necessary fiction now—a construct, a contract, a negotiated identity, a negotiated self. But the construction has not ended: it will go on and on and on—and it will go on and on and even as you have begotten you own children and their own. For this is the circle of life of an immigrant: to begin to negotiate an identity from so many nations, so many cultures, so many selves, so many identities, so many memories and out of them form his own in a tentative way, exploring the limits of the possible and going beyond those limits, transcending the boundaries in order to create a new and a renewed self, a new and a renewed identity. You call this the plural selves becoming one—and yet this self generating others, having in it the kernel of life, of lives, of ever-new questions, and ever-new answers. The circle does not end but expands in order to account life as it is lived in earnest even if lived in exile—exiled from old selves, old identities, old country, old memory, old loves, old stories, and old song.

Because the question “Who am I?” renews the narrative of life in the pursuit of the better life elsewhere, in this bosom of the America of the dreams of the many who have been left behind in the home country.

Because the question “Who am I?” itself hints at the answer—and that answer is the contract: That you are, indeed, two-nations-in one—and by that you are always already plural.

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY, TRANSACTING NATIONHOOD:
THE CASE OF FILIPINOS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


By Aurelio S. Agcaoili


(Prepared for the University of Hawaii at Hilo, February 23, 2006. Sponsored by the Ilokano Program, Dept. of Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures, Dept. of English, Center for Philippine Studies, Dept. of Ethnic Studies, and the National Foreign Language Resource Center).

Summary
THE IDENTITY OF THE FILIPINO AMERICAN IS THAT OF A NECESSARY EXILE AND A NECESSARY FICTION—AND THIS IDENTITY IS NECESSARILY PLURAL

Who am I? This question of identity is always a question that is as fluid as the watery vastness separating the Philippines from the United States.

A Filipino American—the Flip, the local born—might not have the same answer as the rest of the immigrants from the home country. He has lost the memory—or he has no memory of the home country that could have made the question of identity different, perhaps more complex and more complicated than the way his elders would frame that same question.

Ask that of the one who had to scratch out a life from the uneven terrain of trying and trying it out some more just to survive the first days and first years in the United States and the question is transformed into some kind of trope memorializing the long wait, the arduous struggle, the persistence of the spirit, and the numerous prayers that went with the dream to pursue good life. He is your Filipino immigrant through and through—the one who has seen it all: the ugly and the beautiful in immigrant life, the opportunity and opportunism, the consistency and contradiction, the reality and the illusion. Because all these ground the immigrant experience that has touched base with the primal passion and faith that goes with eking out a new life in a new land under totally new circumstances.

Ask that of the bagong salta—the newly arrived—and the answer could be between estrangement and welcome, between wandering and wondering, between self-redemption and self-destruction. The days are long for the bagong salta, the tears generous, the sorrowing equally so. The colorful wall calendar announcing a vacation in an island paradise called Boracay becomes a mute witness to the thousand circles of questioning-and-answering with the lonely and isolated soul that longs for home, for the fiesta and Friday devotion in Quiapo, for the coronation night in Gumamugam, for the carefree life on the shores of Tagbilaran, with the bald mountains giving you the stage to mount your imagination of what is it to live in exile. The bagong salta tries to bury deep in his heart the betrayal of People Power I and People Power II and think of the dire days in the homeland as some kind of a cheap moro-moro or comedia or vaudeville for the retarded leaders with their stunted mindsets about how to build a nation from the dreams of those citizens who have decided to stay put and love the motherland the way the revolutionaries had loved her.

For here, the question “Who am I?” is a question that strikes at the core of being of anyone asking whether one is a Flip, a Filipino American, a Filipino immigrant, or a bagong salta.

The question is a difficult text—it is, in truth and in fact, a question of difficulty: the difficult days in the past and the difficult days of the present, the difficult dream and the difficult pursuit of that dream.

The difficulty is as real as the tenuousness of luck, the uncertainty of the coming years even as the one asking wrestles with the terrors and surprises of the answer. But even here, even with the promise of the future, the divide between terror and surprise may be as unclear as the foggy skies in the foothills of the mountain ranges that drop to the sea that connects you to home. For in the imagination, that other side of the vastness is the country that has promised nurture and sustenance and yet failed to deliver.

This is why the Filipino immigrant asking that identity question now ran away.

Because somewhere in his mind, there is something that is profoundly missing. It is the lost memory. It is the memory of a people coming alive and kicking and needing remembering.

Because somewhere in his soul, there is something that begs to be heard. It is the song of a country the ancestors had vowed to love in eternity, the song begging to be sung again and again until it becomes the song of the immigrant’s everyday life, until it becomes the mantra that links him up with a past that is now as fuzzy as the answer to that question “Who am I?”

Because somewhere in his spirit, there is something that commands him to stop, to look, and to listen. It is the crossroads, the multiple crossroads that the immigrant has to trod on, delicately at first, delicately because the steps, initially are uncertain even as he keeps on asking that question about him whether he is American or Filipino, whether he is Filipino-American, whether he is American-Filipino—or whether he settles for a compromise and simply accept that he is as ethnic as the person next to him.

Because somewhere in his body, in that material body, there is something that makes him go back to the topography of the land and memory that he left behind—or the land and memory of his heritage. It is the movement of limbs, the sway of the hips, the taut action and reaction of the torso as he imagines himself communing with the community of rallyists and protesters challenging the powers-that-be in the land of overseas contract workers, in the land where many exiles come from, in the land where the delicate dance of self and society has to be learned. That delicate dance of self and society has something to do with, on one hand, the obligation to the everyday, to self and family, to self and kin and, on the other, the obligation to pursue the bigger causes beyond the self like the obligation to do justice to others, the obligation to do what is right and fair, the obligation to build a community of morally upright citizens and people.

The mind, the soul, the spirit, the body—these are sources of the response to the question posed by the immigrant asking that question “Who am I?” The question begins with the inner resources of the person and goes outward, ending in that difficult answer that says, you immigrant are two nations in one.

He closes his eyes and he sees the hollowed hills of the Hollywood and sacred spaces of the American Indians in the Rancho San Pedro that lead to the endless sea. He imagines the question—he imagines the answer: You are two nations in one now.

The answer continues—but the immigrant knows that the answer contains the genesis of new questions. You are a necessary exile now. The song comes in, the memory revisits, the contours of the homeland appear in a mirage, and the words of the ancestors come to bless your wandering heart, mind, body, soul.

You are a necessary fiction now—a construct, a contract, a negotiated identity, a negotiated self. But the construction has not ended: it will go on and on and on—and it will go on and on and even as you have begotten you own children and their own. For this is the circle of life of an immigrant: to begin to negotiate an identity from so many nations, so many cultures, so many selves, so many identities, so many memories and out of them form his own in a tentative way, exploring the limits of the possible and going beyond those limits, transcending the boundaries in order to create a new and a renewed self, a new and a renewed identity. You call this the plural selves becoming one—and yet this self generating others, having in it the kernel of life, of lives, of ever-new questions, and ever-new answers. The circle does not end but expands in order to account life as it is lived in earnest even if lived in exile—exiled from old selves, old identities, old country, old memory, old loves, old stories, and old song.

Because the question “Who am I?” renews the narrative of life in the pursuit of the better life elsewhere, in this bosom of the America of the dreams of the many who have been left behind in the home country.

Because the question “Who am I?” itself hints at the answer—and that answer is the contract: That you are, indeed, two-nations-in one—and by that you are always already plural.

Brown Earth, Red Earth

Characters:

Flip 1. Local born.

Flip 2. Local born.

Fil-Im 1. Foreign born.

Fil-Im 2. Foreign born.

Chorus 1, representing the Brown Earth

Chorus 2, representing the Red Earth


Setting:

Hawaii. The present. Stage bare. Characters bring their own props.

Props requirements:

Chorus 1 in brown and Chorus 2 in red costume. Coconut bowls—buyuboy—for main characters. Rice and salt for the rice-throwing ceremony.

Scene 1

(In a dream, 4 main characters in the 4 corners of the stage. At the center of the stage are the Choruses, halved, one half representing the Brown Earth and the other half representing the Red Earth. Main characters have with them their coconut bowls—buyuboy—filled with rice and salt.)

(Main characters have long umbilical cords still tied to their gut and being held by the ghostly choruses. Through a frenzied dance movement, a struggle between holding on to the umbilical cords or cutting them off completely is depicted. In the end, main characters are able to get hold of their umbilical cords and have them tied around their waist.)

(Ghostly Choruses recite their line like a limerick, mocking, or can be set to drums and flute or other forms of ancient, tribal Filipino music to create cacophonous sounds-- jarring, confusing, clanging, taunting but forceful and fierce. This could be done for all the ghostly chorus lines.)

Chorus 1-Brown Earth
You are us
You are ours.
Flip, flip, flip
You are ours.

You belong
To this brown land
You belong
To this brown memory
You belong to us
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
You belong to us.

The brown land is you
The brown land is yours
Filipino immigrant.

Chorus 2-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Confused, confused flip
Nothing nothing going
For the brown brown flip.
Hahahahahahahahaha!

Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Browned by the sun
Nothing nothing going
For the son of a gun.
Hahahahaahahahaha!

Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Brown brown pilgrim
Immigrant, immigrant
From the brown brown land.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Flip, Fil-Am, Fil-Im
Stanger in this red earth
Cannot, cannot find a home
In this red red earth.
Hahahahaahahahahaha!

Choruses go to the main characters and snatch from them the coconut bowls they are holding and move to the audience to make the warsi—the rice-and-salt throwing ceremony.

Chorus 1
Fli, flip, flip
Umaykayon, flip.
Dikay agbatbati.
Come, flips
Do not linger in the Red Earth.
Come back, come back soon.

Chorus 2
Flip, flip, flip
Umaykayon, flip
Agbatikayo, agbatikayo
Ditoykayon nga agindeg
Go away from the Brown Earth
Leave the Brown Earth
Leave its brown memory.

(Choruses stand still, like ghosts, like poles. Main characters snatch their cords back and tie them around their waist. Choruses take possession of the coconut bowl.)

Flip 1
I am Flip Number 1, local born. Born in the suburbs, west of here in this place, down where the river meets the sea. I grew up with the sounds of English and the crowing of chickens and the smell of basi, burger, sushi.

I have this bad dream. The Brown Earth. It says we come from its ugly bowels.

Flip 2
I dream in English. The Red Earth.

Flip 1
I always dream in English. The Brown Earth and the Red Earth colliding and uniting, in contrast and in unison.

Flip 2
The Filipino words have long been buried in me. I never heard them. I am Flip Number 2, Americanized, twang, mind, memory--all.

Flip 1
I find myself in the sounds of the Oahu winds and the caresses of the waves in Waikiki. There is no other place I can be at home with.

Flip 1
Cut my umbilical cord. Cut my memory.

Fil-Im 1
Born in the islands, with the memory of salt and despair. I am Filipino immigrant number 1. I have cut my umbilical cord.

Fil-Im 2
Born of poverty and want. Sorrow and joy. I am Filipino immigrant number 2. I came to this Red Earth to scratch out a life. I have put an end to all connections.

Fil-Im 1
When we left the home country, I was about to understand the meaning of love for a land that does not know how to love you back.

Flip 1
I want to cut my umbilical cord, tie it to the peaks of mountains where I was born and leave it there for the weather to consume. I am Filipino Immigrant Number 1.

Fil-Im 2
It is the brown earth giving birth to me, like a big womb opening itself up to the universe and I am there, there in the hallow of that womb, sacred and holy as if I have been there forever.

Fil-Im 2
I dream of the the Brown earth swallowing me up to protect me from harm.
It folds itself, this Brown earth like the universe of a flower protecting itself from a predator.

Fil-Im 1
It is the Read Earth. We need to throw rice the way our old people did.

Flip 2
It is the earth of all the colors! It is rice and salt we need to throw. The earth is hungry. We take tack the coconut bowl from the Red Earth, from the Brown Earth.

Flip 1
It is the brown earth preying on itself. We need to feed it with our memory.

Flip 2
I dream of all the colors of the earth swallowing me whole and entire.
The colors come life the craters of a volcano opening up, hungry and terrorizing.

I dream of a red earth swallowing me up. It is a huge earth with the big mouth eating me up whole and entire.

Fil-Im 2
I dream of returning to the Brown Earth. This is what will save me from forgetting.

Fil-Im 1
My folks say you need to refuse being buried on the Red Earth.

Flip 2
Like a huge ball of fire ever ready to consume everything.

Fil-Im 1
The Red Earth, the Brown Earth. Are they ever us?

Flip 1
I dream of the Red Earth us a curse. First, it was a welcoming ball of fire, fiery, and cold. It says, Welcome, welcome, stranger. Dumanonka, dumanonka!

Fil-Im 2
And then you got into its world. Like me. There was enchantment, was there?
Isublidak idiay Filipinas! Have me back in the brown land where I came from!

Flip 1
First it opened up into a world of milk and honey as the dream was. There was bounty. A paradise, fresh and clean and rich and unspoiled.

Fil-Im 1
You get into the world of the Red Earth and never got back to yourself. You lost your direction, your senses, your sense of self. You spoke English. You spoke only English. And the Red Earth got bigger and bigger and swallowed you up.

Flip 1
Each time I spoke English only, the Brown Earth shrank. And I cannot control its shrinking. I am sick, I feel this sickness all over my tongue, my skin, my body, my mind, my fingers, my speech, my feet, my legs, my person.

Flip 2
A contagious sickness. Like the anthrax the Americans and the British are so much afraid of.

Fil-Im 1
An omen. The Red Earth says I should only drink its waters, breathe only its air, live only on its produce, and taste only its soil, bowing only to it with reverence like a ritual, and vowing to love it like no other.

Fil-Im 2
Signs of all that which will condemn us in the end. The brown of memory lost forever. We have only the red of fire.

Flip 1
The red of rage.

Flip 2
The red of anger.

Fil-Im 1
The red of the blood that betrayed us.

Fil-Im 1
The red of revolutions their names we do not know. Ah, the brown earth is where I go back to.

Flip 2
Like us not knowing who we are.

Flip 1
We do not know who we are.

Flip 2
We do not know were we are going.

Flip 1
We do not know where we came from.

Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Go home, flip
Flip, flip, flip
Got no home, flip.

Chorus-Brown Earth
The red earth
Is your curse
The red earth
You are cursed.

Chorus-Red Earth
Go home, flip
Go home, Fil-Ams
Go home, Fil-Ims
Immigrant, ethnic!
Flip, flip, flip
Go home, flip.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Come home, flip
Come home to the brown earth
Come home, immigrant
Come home to the brown land.

Flip 1
I want to forget, I want to remember.

Flip 2
I want to remember, I want to forget.

Fil-Im 1
We do the rite again. We throw the rice again.

Fil-Im 2
We need to reclaim ourselves.

Chorus-Red Earth
Resist, resist, resist
Flip, flip, flip
Resist, resist, resist.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Remember, remember, remember
Flip, flip, flip
Do not ever forget.

Fil-Im 2
I do not want to go back to the Brown earth. The memories haunt me so.

Fil-Im 1
I cannot even dream of the good life there. The old country, the old country. I have no thought of the shape of the good life. How does it look like, this good life?

Fil-Im 2
Do they sell the good life in the streets the way they sell the votes? The leaders, the leaders of the old country. They can only act. Ah, brown earth.

Fil-Im 1
I can only dream of snow and the wide spaces and the malls. This is my America. America is me now. This is my Red Earth. My Brown Earth is gone. I had it buried in my heart, my memory, my soul.

Fil-Im 2
No trace. Not a trace of who I was.

Fil-Im 1
I think of us all in this land as children of the Red Earth. It is the land adopting us.

Fil-Im 2
This land. This America whose air we breathe. This America giving us all the freedom that we never want. This America that creates magic out of our lips, the magic in English enchanting us.

Fil-Am 2
I think of your dream. It is my dream too. Its world is peopled by ghosts haunting us. The Red Earth is the omen.

Flip 1
We all come from the Brown Earth. But here, in the US of A, here, do the colors ever collide? Do they ever come into a fusion?

Flip 2
Have we permitted the colors of the earth to be us? Brown Earth as us, Red Earth as us?

Flip 1
Have we permitted the colors of the earth to feel us, to be them? Brown, red…?

Chorus-Red Earth
You do not know.
You can never know.
Flip, flip, flip.
You can never escape
The big Brown Earth.

Chorus-Brown Earth
You can never fit.
Flip, flip, flip.
You can never escape
The big Red Earth!

Flip 1
Go away. Go away.

Flip 2
I want to go away from the Brown Earth. I want to come to the Red Earth.

Fil-Im 1
I do not even want to think about it. My dad wants me to talk American English.
No pidgin, he says.

Gardemet, gardemet, he says.

Fil-Im 2
Speak English like the Washington lobbyists and you will go places.

Fil-Im 1
This is what this Red Earth is for.

Fil-Im 2
Speak the language of rulers and you will rule.

Flip 1
Say the language of colonizers and you will colonize.

Flip 2
Declaim the language of invaders and you will invade other lands.

Fil-Im 1
You will invade other peoples.

Fil-Im 2
You will invade other cultures.

Fil-Im 1
You can invoke McKinley and posit God’s benevolent intention in the argument. Hahahahaha!

Fil-Im 2
So God decreed that we, the moral and political guardians of the universe are destined to govern others, to rule over them till kingdom come. Hahahahaha!

Flip 1
This is Hawaii, ha, father says, red wine on the left hand from the Napa Valley in California.

Flip 2
The way your father holds the glass, you could see: like the newcomer trying to impress upon the host that you have the dignity to come to America and the self-respect to do all the things that the new oppressor wants you to do.

Fil-Am 2
My dad was a teacher in the grades back in the old country.

Fil-Im 1
Your father came here and he washed dishes and taught himself how to pronounce fillet mignon and Sorbonne and Paris and buffet the French way.

Flip 1
Oh, how your father flaunted his knowledge of the great America without the warts, the blemishes.

Flip 2
Ahhh, dis is the greyt kawntri, he says.

Fil-Im 2
Your English, no good, says the school principal, when father applied to teach in the grade school. You will pollute the language of the children.

While he washed dishes, my father, he dreamt of his classroom in the grades, the school children with their eager faces, eager to get some skills so they can go abroad and earn dollars so the homeland would not go the ways of the impoverished.

Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip.
You got nowhere to go.
Flip, flip, flip.
Nothing ‘bout you.
Accept, accept, accept
The Red Red Earth.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
No Americano
Flip, flip, flip
No Filipino.
Accept, accept, accept
The Brown Brown Earth.


Scene 2

(Main characters carry their chairs to the center. Ghostly chorus becomes the table, posts, and walls in what looks like a dap-ayan, a talking area in the purok. Main characters sit around the table with a bottle of basi at the center. )

Flip 1
We need to go the ancient ways of the ancestors.

Flip 2
Say the word.

Flip 1
Say the word, say it. We need to reclaim ourselves.

Flip 2
It is memory. We need to know who we are.

Fil-Im 1
Memory binds us to the Brown Earth, to the homeland.

Fil-Im 2
Memory links us to the new land, to the Red Earth.

Flip 1
The oracion.

Fil-Im1
The ritual of our remembering.

Fil-Im 1
We call the spirits of the Red Earth the way the folks did.

Flip 1
We call the spirits of the Brown Earth. We toast to them.

Fil-Im 2
Been here for a brief period. Accent always gives me away. The ghosts of the pro-English sakadas may not like it. Can’t say the oracion.

Flip 2
And your skin, immigrant brother. Brown as the brown leaves.

Flip 1
Or the earth that decays, unable to withstand the elements.

Fil-Am 1
The Brown Earth of the forest that leads you to confusion.

Flip 2
This Red Earth that leads us to wandering.

Fil-Im 2
We are lost. We have to find our way back.

Fil-Im 1
The forest is enchanted. The brown of the forest is enchanted.

Flip 1
I don’t have a desire to go back to the old country. I do not know it. It is not my country. Only this Red Earth I like, ya?

Flip 2
I do not have any idea what it means to have a homeland.

Flip 1
Never been to the homeland myself. I do not know anything. The Red Earth is my homeland. This America is my heartland.

Flip 2
Homeland, heartland—they are one and the same. This is my Red Earth.

Fil-Am 2
There is no point going back to the Brown Earth. You have not left it, right?

Fil-Am 1
Our folks talk of going back all the time. Mom says, I do not want to die here.
I want to be buried in that same brown earth I was born, she says. And she says that almost every week as if to remind us that we have an obligation to bring her home and bury her there when she is gone. Does that even matter if we bury her here in this Red Earth?

Flip 1
My grandparents tell us all the time, we do not want to live in nursing homes. Bring us home. And they are in their home in Honolulu. What are they saying?

Fil-Am 2
My grandfather says, I am American. The misshapen nose, the nostrils their opening bigger than cherry tomatoes, allowing the air to freely come in and out. Oh, it is magic. The coming and going of air in his pug nose. And he says he is an American the way John Kerry says he is. No heritage, just American, plain American. We challenge him and he runs to get his passport from the drawer and shows it to us, Dis, dis, dis! Dis makes me American! Many would die to get dis!

Flip 2
Are we lost?

Flip 1
Do we know who we are?

Fil-Im 2
Who are we?

Fil-Im 1
Where is the basi?

Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Something for me.
I am the spirit
The kick in the basi.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Come on, come on, come on.
Give me a drop
Give me a drop.

Chorus-Red Earth
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Give me something
Give me some loving
Where are you going?

Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Flip, flip, flip
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im

Flip 1
We are lost.

Flip 2
We can be found again.

Flip 1
We can find ourselves again.

Flip 2
There is a way to turn back.

Fil-Im 1
We do the ritual.

(Main characters move to where the choruses are. They forcefully snatch the coconut bowls from the choruses holding them. A struggle ensues while the choruses recite their lines).

(Another struggle ensues: choruses grabbed the cords from the waist of the main characters. Choruses win. They hold the cords while they form like tables, posts, mounds of earth, walls.)

Chorus-Red Earth
Some more denying
Some more depriving
Some more unknowing.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Denying, denying, denying
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Depriving, depriving, depriving
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Unknowing, unknowing, unknowing.

(Main characters put rice and salt on their bowls and ready for the rice throwing ceremony. Choruses become a table, posts, and walls again, not moving. )

Fil-Im 2
We call the spirits of the Brown Earth.

Flip 1
The spirits of the Brown Earth, the spirits of the Red Earth.

Fil-Im 2
My father, even here, does the bloodletting of chickens. Gets the stewing chicken. Slits the neck and dance the dance of his father and all the fathers before him.

Fil-Im 1
My grandmother says, Go away, go away. Go away, you spirits of the rotten earth, you spirits of the spoiled earth, you spirits of the decayed earth. Come, come, you spirits of the good earth, the brown earth, the red earth, the earth that blesses us, the one that gives us life. Come, he says, and he dances, blood dripping in circles in the front of our house, all over the ground.

(He performs the ritual of his father, dancing the tadek in a frenzied way, losing himself in the process).

Flip 1
My grandpa when I got sick one day got rice and salt. Mixed them on a coconut bowl. (Brings out one from his pocket. Puts in rice and salt and throws it on stage and to the audience). He went outside, in the dark and recited: Umadayokayo, apo, umadayo kayo. Baribari, apo, baribari. Didakayo masapul, umadayokayo.

Fil-Am 1
(Gets his own coconut bowl, puts rice on it, mixes it with salt, recites the oracion, in English). Go away, go away, you spirits of the bad earth. Go away, go away. Come, come, come spirits of the Brown Earth. Come, come, come spirits of the Red Earth. Red Earth, Brown Earth and all your spirits, come bless us.

All:
For the spirits of the Brown Earth, for the spirits of the Red Earth.

(Main characters move to the center, pour out basi on their bowls and ritually pour out basi on the Red Earth and the Brown Earth who are now slumped on the stage.)

All:
For the spirits of the Brown Earth, for the spirits of the Red Earth. We see them coming together, these spirits, happy and proud and contented.

(Together they drink of the basi from the coconut bowl).

Ghostly chorus, in a dance:

Flips, flips, flips
Coming home to themselves
Fil-Ams, Fil-Ams, Fil-Ams
Coming back to their senses.
Immigrants, immigrants
Going back to their earths.


CURTAINS FALL

BROWN EARTH, RED EARTH-A PLAY

Characters:

Flip 1. Local born.

Flip 2. Local born.

Fil-Im 1. Foreign born.

Fil-Im 2. Foreign born.

Chorus 1, representing the Brown Earth

Chorus 2, representing the Red Earth



Setting:
Hawaii. The present. Stage bare. Characters bring their own props.

Props requirements:
Chorus 1 in brown and Chorus 2 in red costume. Coconut bowls—buyuboy—for main characters. Rice and salt for the rice-throwing ceremony.


Scene 1

(In a dream, 4 main characters in the 4 corners of the stage. At the center of the stage are the Choruses, halved, one half representing the Brown Earth and the other half representing the Red Earth. Main characters have with them their coconut bowls—buyuboy—filled with rice and salt.)

(Main characters have long umbilical cords still tied to their gut and being held by the ghostly choruses. Through a frenzied dance movement, a struggle between holding on to the umbilical cords or cutting them off completely is depicted. In the end, main characters are able to get hold of their umbilical cords and have them tied around their waist.)

(Ghostly Choruses recite their line like a limerick, mocking, or can be set to drums and flute or other forms of ancient, tribal Filipino music to create cacophonous sounds-- jarring, confusing, clanging, taunting but forceful and fierce. This could be done for all the ghostly chorus lines.)

Chorus 1-Brown Earth
You are us
You are ours.
Flip, flip, flip
You are ours.

You belong
To this brown land
You belong
To this brown memory
You belong to us
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
You belong to us.

The brown land is you
The brown land is yours
Filipino immigrant.

Chorus 2-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Confused, confused flip
Nothing nothing going
For the brown brown flip.
Hahahahahahahahaha!

Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Browned by the sun
Nothing nothing going
For the son of a gun.
Hahahahaahahahaha!

Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Brown brown pilgrim
Immigrant, immigrant
From the brown brown land.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Flip, Fil-Am, Fil-Im
Stanger in this red earth
Cannot, cannot find a home
In this red red earth.
Hahahahaahahahahaha!


Choruses go to the main characters and snatch from them the coconut bowls they are holding and move to the audience to make the warsi—the rice-and-salt throwing ceremony.

Chorus 1
Fli, flip, flip
Umaykayon, flip.
Dikay agbatbati.
Come, flips
Do not linger in the Red Earth.
Come back, come back soon.

Chorus 2
Flip, flip, flip
Umaykayon, flip
Agbatikayo, agbatikayo
Ditoykayon nga agindeg
Go away from the Brown Earth
Leave the Brown Earth
Leave its brown memory.

(Choruses stand still, like ghosts, like poles. Main characters snatch their cords back and tie them around their waist. Choruses take possession of the coconut bowl. )

Flip 1
I am Flip Number 1, local born. Born in the suburbs, west of here in this place, down where the river meets the sea. I grew up with the sounds of English and the crowing of chickens and the smell of basi, burger, sushi.

I have this bad dream. The Brown Earth. It says we come from its ugly bowels.

Flip 2
I dream in English. The Red Earth.

Flip 1
I always dream in English. The Brown Earth and the Red Earth colliding and uniting, in contrast and in unison.

Flip 2
The Filipino words have long been buried in me. I never heard them. I am Flip Number 2, Americanized, twang, mind, memory--all.

Flip 1
I find myself in the sounds of the Oahu winds and the caresses of the waves in Waikiki. There is no other place I can be at home with.



Flip 1
Cut my umbilical cord. Cut my memory.

Fil-Im 1
Born in the islands, with the memory of salt and despair. I am Filipino immigrant number 1. I have cut my umbilical cord.

Fil-Im 2
Born of poverty and want. Sorrow and joy. I am Filipino immigrant number 2. I came to this Red Earth to scratch out a life. I have put an end to all connections.

Fil-Im 1
When we left the home country, I was about to understand the meaning of love for a land that does not know how to love you back.

Flip 1
I want to cut my umbilical cord, tie it to the peaks of mountains where I was born and leave it there for the weather to consume. I am Filipino Immigrant Number 1.

Fil-Im 2
It is the brown earth giving birth to me, like a big womb opening itself up to the universe and I am there, there in the hallow of that womb, sacred and holy as if I have been there forever.

Fil-Im 2
I dream of the the Brown earth swallowing me up to protect me from harm.
It folds itself, this Brown earth like the universe of a flower protecting itself from a predator.

Fil-Im 1
It is the Read Earth. We need to throw rice the way our old people did.

Flip 2
It is the earth of all the colors! It is rice and salt we need to throw. The earth is hungry. We take tack the coconut bowl from the Red Earth, from the Brown Earth.

Flip 1
It is the brown earth preying on itself. We need to feed it with our memory.

Flip 2
I dream of all the colors of the earth swallowing me whole and entire.
The colors come life the craters of a volcano opening up, hungry and terrorizing.

I dream of a red earth swallowing me up. It is a huge earth with the big mouth eating me up whole and entire.


Fil-Im 2
I dream of returning to the Brown Earth. This is what will save me from forgetting.

Fil-Im 1
My folks say you need to refuse being buried on the Red Earth.

Flip 2
Like a huge ball of fire ever ready to consume everything.

Fil-Im 1
The Red Earth, the Brown Earth. Are they ever us?

Flip 1
I dream of the Red Earth us a curse. First, it was a welcoming ball of fire, fiery, and cold. It says, Welcome, welcome, stranger. Dumanonka, dumanonka!

Fil-Im 2
And then you got into its world. Like me. There was enchantment, was there?
Isublidak idiay Filipinas! Have me back in the brown land where I came from!

Flip 1
First it opened up into a world of milk and honey as the dream was. There was bounty. A paradise, fresh and clean and rich and unspoiled.

Fil-Im 1
You get into the world of the Red Earth and never got back to yourself. You lost your direction, your senses, your sense of self. You spoke English. You spoke only English. And the Red Earth got bigger and bigger and swallowed you up.

Flip 1
Each time I spoke English only, the Brown Earth shrank. And I cannot control its shrinking. I am sick, I feel this sickness all over my tongue, my skin, my body, my mind, my fingers, my speech, my feet, my legs, my person.

Flip 2
A contagious sickness. Like the anthrax the Americans and the British are so much afraid of.

Fil-Im 1
An omen. The Red Earth says I should only drink its waters, breathe only its air, live only on its produce, and taste only its soil, bowing only to it with reverence like a ritual, and vowing to love it like no other.

Fil-Im 2
Signs of all that which will condemn us in the end. The brown of memory lost forever. We have only the red of fire.

Flip 1
The red of rage.

Flip 2
The red of anger.

Fil-Im 1
The red of the blood that betrayed us.

Fil-Im 1
The red of revolutions their names we do not know. Ah, the brown earth is where I go back to.

Flip 2
Like us not knowing who we are.

Flip 1
We do not know who we are.

Flip 2
We do not know were we are going.

Flip 1
We do not know where we came from.

Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Go home, flip
Flip, flip, flip
Got no home, flip.


Chorus-Brown Earth
The red earth
Is your curse
The red earth
You are cursed.

Chorus-Red Earth
Go home, flip
Go home, Fil-Ams
Go home, Fil-Ims
Immigrant, ethnic!
Flip, flip, flip
Go home, flip.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Come home, flip
Come home to the brown earth
Come home, immigrant
Come home to the brown land.


Flip 1
I want to forget, I want to remember.

Flip 2
I want to remember, I want to forget.

Fil-Im 1
We do the rite again. We throw the rice again.

Fil-Im 2
We need to reclaim ourselves.

Chorus-Red Earth
Resist, resist, resist
Flip, flip, flip
Resist, resist, resist.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Remember, remember, remember
Flip, flip, flip
Do not ever forget.


Fil-Im 2
I do not want to go back to the Brown earth. The memories haunt me so.

Fil-Im 1
I cannot even dream of the good life there. The old country, the old country. I have no thought of the shape of the good life. How does it look like, this good life?

Fil-Im 2
Do they sell the good life in the streets the way they sell the votes? The leaders, the leaders of the old country. They can only act. Ah, brown earth.

Fil-Im 1
I can only dream of snow and the wide spaces and the malls. This is my America. America is me now. This is my Red Earth. My Brown Earth is gone. I had it buried in my heart, my memory, my soul.

Fil-Im 2
No trace. Not a trace of who I was.

Fil-Im 1
I think of us all in this land as children of the Red Earth. It is the land adopting us.

Fil-Im 2
This land. This America whose air we breathe. This America giving us all the freedom that we never want. This America that creates magic out of our lips, the magic in English enchanting us.

Fil-Am 2
I think of your dream. It is my dream too. Its world is peopled by ghosts haunting us. The Red Earth is the omen.

Flip 1
We all come from the Brown Earth. But here, in the US of A, here, do the colors ever collide? Do they ever come into a fusion?

Flip 2
Have we permitted the colors of the earth to be us? Brown Earth as us, Red Earth as us?

Flip 1
Have we permitted the colors of the earth to feel us, to be them? Brown, red…?

Chorus-Red Earth
You do not know.
You can never know.
Flip, flip, flip.
You can never escape
The big Brown Earth.


Chorus-Brown Earth
You can never fit.
Flip, flip, flip.
You can never escape
The big Red Earth!

Flip 1
Go away. Go away.

Flip 2
I want to go away from the Brown Earth. I want to come to the Red Earth.

Fil-Im 1
I do not even want to think about it. My dad wants me to talk American English.
No pidgin, he says.

Gardemet, gardemet, he says.

Fil-Im 2
Speak English like the Washington lobbyists and you will go places.

Fil-Im 1
This is what this Red Earth is for.

Fil-Im 2
Speak the language of rulers and you will rule.

Flip 1
Say the language of colonizers and you will colonize.

Flip 2
Declaim the language of invaders and you will invade other lands.

Fil-Im 1
You will invade other peoples.

Fil-Im 2
You will invade other cultures.

Fil-Im 1
You can invoke McKinley and posit God’s benevolent intention in the argument. Hahahahaha!


Fil-Im 2
So God decreed that we, the moral and political guardians of the universe are destined to govern others, to rule over them till kingdom come. Hahahahaha!

Flip 1
This is Hawaii, ha, father says, red wine on the left hand from the Napa Valley in California.

Flip 2
The way your father holds the glass, you could see: like the newcomer trying to impress upon the host that you have the dignity to come to America and the self-respect to do all the things that the new oppressor wants you to do.

Fil-Am 2
My dad was a teacher in the grades back in the old country.

Fil-Im 1
Your father came here and he washed dishes and taught himself how to pronounce fillet mignon and Sorbonne and Paris and buffet the French way.

Flip 1
Oh, how your father flaunted his knowledge of the great America without the warts, the blemishes.

Flip 2
Ahhh, dis is the greyt kawntri, he says.

Fil-Im 2
Your English, no good, says the school principal, when father applied to teach in the grade school. You will pollute the language of the children.

While he washed dishes, my father, he dreamt of his classroom in the grades, the school children with their eager faces, eager to get some skills so they can go abroad and earn dollars so the homeland would not go the ways of the impoverished.


Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip.
You got nowhere to go.
Flip, flip, flip.
Nothing ‘bout you.
Accept, accept, accept
The Red Red Earth.



Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
No Americano
Flip, flip, flip
No Filipino.
Accept, accept, accept
The Brown Brown Earth.




Scene 2

(Main characters carry their chairs to the center. Ghostly chorus becomes the table, posts, and walls in what looks like a dap-ayan, a talking area in the purok. Main characters sit around the table with a bottle of basi at the center. )

Flip 1
We need to go the ancient ways of the ancestors.

Flip 2
Say the word.

Flip 1
Say the word, say it. We need to reclaim ourselves.

Flip 2
It is memory. We need to know who we are.

Fil-Im 1
Memory binds us to the Brown Earth, to the homeland.

Fil-Im 2
Memory links us to the new land, to the Red Earth.

Flip 1
The oracion.

Fil-Im1
The ritual of our remembering.

Fil-Im 1
We call the spirits of the Red Earth the way the folks did.

Flip 1
We call the spirits of the Brown Earth. We toast to them.

Fil-Im 2
Been here for a brief period. Accent always gives me away. The ghosts of the pro-English sakadas may not like it. Can’t say the oracion.

Flip 2
And your skin, immigrant brother. Brown as the brown leaves.

Flip 1
Or the earth that decays, unable to withstand the elements.

Fil-Am 1
The Brown Earth of the forest that leads you to confusion.

Flip 2
This Red Earth that leads us to wandering.

Fil-Im 2
We are lost. We have to find our way back.

Fil-Im 1
The forest is enchanted. The brown of the forest is enchanted.

Flip 1
I don’t have a desire to go back to the old country. I do not know it. It is not my country. Only this Red Earth I like, ya?

Flip 2
I do not have any idea what it means to have a homeland.

Flip 1
Never been to the homeland myself. I do not know anything. The Red Earth is my homeland. This America is my heartland.

Flip 2
Homeland, heartland—they are one and the same. This is my Red Earth.

Fil-Am 2
There is no point going back to the Brown Earth. You have not left it, right?

Fil-Am 1
Our folks talk of going back all the time. Mom says, I do not want to die here.
I want to be buried in that same brown earth I was born, she says. And she says that almost every week as if to remind us that we have an obligation to bring her home and bury her there when she is gone. Does that even matter if we bury her here in this Red Earth?

Flip 1
My grandparents tell us all the time, we do not want to live in nursing homes. Bring us home. And they are in their home in Honolulu. What are they saying?

Fil-Am 2
My grandfather says, I am American. The misshapen nose, the nostrils their opening bigger than cherry tomatoes, allowing the air to freely come in and out. Oh, it is magic. The coming and going of air in his pug nose. And he says he is an American the way John Kerry says he is. No heritage, just American, plain American. We challenge him and he runs to get his passport from the drawer and shows it to us, Dis, dis, dis! Dis makes me American! Many would die to get dis!

Flip 2
Are we lost?

Flip 1
Do we know who we are?

Fil-Im 2
Who are we?

Fil-Im 1
Where is the basi?

Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Something for me.
I am the spirit
The kick in the basi.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Come on, come on, come on.
Give me a drop
Give me a drop.

Chorus-Red Earth
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Give me something
Give me some loving
Where are you going?

Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Flip, flip, flip
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im

Flip 1
We are lost.

Flip 2
We can be found again.

Flip 1
We can find ourselves again.

Flip 2
There is a way to turn back.

Fil-Im 1
We do the ritual.

(Main characters move to where the choruses are. They forcefully snatch the coconut bowls from the choruses holding them. A struggle ensues while the choruses recite their lines).

(Another struggle ensues: choruses grabbed the cords from the waist of the main characters. Choruses win. They hold the cords while they form like tables, posts, mounds of earth, walls.)

Chorus-Red Earth
Some more denying
Some more depriving
Some more unknowing.

Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Denying, denying, denying
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Depriving, depriving, depriving
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Unknowing, unknowing, unknowing.

(Main characters put rice and salt on their bowls and ready for the rice throwing ceremony. Choruses become a table, posts, and walls again, not moving. )

Fil-Im 2
We call the spirits of the Brown Earth.

Flip 1
The spirits of the Brown Earth, the spirits of the Red Earth.

Fil-Im 2
My father, even here, does the bloodletting of chickens. Gets the stewing chicken. Slits the neck and dance the dance of his father and all the fathers before him.

Fil-Im 1
My grandmother says, Go away, go away. Go away, you spirits of the rotten earth, you spirits of the spoiled earth, you spirits of the decayed earth. Come, come, you spirits of the good earth, the brown earth, the red earth, the earth that blesses us, the one that gives us life. Come, he says, and he dances, blood dripping in circles in the front of our house, all over the ground.

(He performs the ritual of his father, dancing the tadek in a frenzied way, losing himself in the process).

Flip 1
My grandpa when I got sick one day got rice and salt. Mixed them on a coconut bowl. (Brings out one from his pocket. Puts in rice and salt and throws it on stage and to the audience). He went outside, in the dark and recited: Umadayokayo, apo, umadayo kayo. Baribari, apo, baribari. Didakayo masapul, umadayokayo.

Fil-Am 1
(Gets his own coconut bowl, puts rice on it, mixes it with salt, recites the oracion, in English). Go away, go away, you spirits of the bad earth. Go away, go away. Come, come, come spirits of the Brown Earth. Come, come, come spirits of the Red Earth. Red Earth, Brown Earth and all your spirits, come bless us.

All:
For the spirits of the Brown Earth, for the spirits of the Red Earth.

(Main characters move to the center, pour out basi on their bowls and ritually pour out basi on the Red Earth and the Brown Earth who are now slumped on the stage.)

All:
For the spirits of the Brown Earth, for the spirits of the Red Earth. We see them coming together, these spirits, happy and proud and contented.

(Together they drink of the basi from the coconut bowl).

Ghostly chorus, in a dance:

Flips, flips, flips
Coming home to themselves
Fil-Ams, Fil-Ams, Fil-Ams
Coming back to their senses.
Immigrants, immigrants
Going back to their earths.


CURTAINS FALL

Redemption: An Ilokano Novel in English

(Abridged version of a talk prepared for the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, February 22, 2006. Sponsored by the Ilokano Program, Department of Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures, the National Foreign Language Resource Center, the Center for Philippine Studies, and the Department of Ethnic Studies. The talk is part of the Centennial Celebration of the Filipino Sakadas in Hawaii.)


The Genesis of a Novel

There are always certain issues that a novelist must confront himself with when going down to the serious yet playful business of writing a novel in whatever language he imagines the world of the novel from.

In my way of doing things, I strongly hold on to the view that language is a site and that when a writer begins to create a world in his world, he does create that world from that site which is language in the here-and-now, a language in the particular, a language in the concrete.

In my case, for instance, I have blessed to have been able to navigate three sites afforded by three languages.

These three sites have given me a certain perspective of worlds made richer by a productive encounter with the language of the Ilokanos which is the language that I was born into even I could say that I am only half-Ilokano, with my mother being a Pangasinense, another one of those major Philippine languages in Northern Philippines; the language of the nation, Tagalog, sometimes passed off as Pilipino with either a P or an F; and English, which is the language of my academic life.

In my academic life, I have had the chance to get into a nurturing environment, one that did not frown upon the other Philippine languages but had pushed for a rethinking of an appreciation and a political and moral duty to recognize and allow these languages to become part of the repertoire of national language and discourse.

So while all throughout my academic life as both a student and eventually a teacher—and while I was bombarded with things “American” and things “English” as is the case of every colonized people when they put a premium on the values and ethos of their colonizer—I had held on to the English language, Philippine-style, as my passport to peace and progress and productive scholarship, I was also dabbling in the language of father which was my first language and the language of the nation that went from one metamorphosis to another.

I have always been drawn to language and its possibilities, more so because I believe I could write and that I knew how to play with the terrors and surprises of language.

Also, I had specialized in philosophy of language for my graduate studies in philosophy and was particularly captivated by the issues about symbols and meaning, the question of the artistic, and the hermeneutic theory of interpretation.

All of those would force to look at language up close so that when I was about to write my doctoral dissertation, I knew right there and then that I would use the novel form to write my ethnographic account of the 100 years of struggle of the Ilokanos to free themselves from oppression and bondage and injustice.

The Ilokanos are a logical choice.

First, I was born into their culture, not exactly in a place where “pure” Ilokano was spoken but the kind of an Ilokano brought by Ilokano exiles and immigrants in Isabela as they moved away from the hard-scrabble life in the drought-and-famine ridden Ilocos countryside. Pure or not pure, the Ilokano spoken in Isabela is Ilokano still.

Second, because of this jus soli accident of birth, I somehow felt a kinship with my people in Isabela even if by the time that I was about to enter pre-school, we moved back to Laoag where there, in the innocence of barrio life, I had a first-hand exposure to all things Ilokano done in the ancient ways of the ancestors who thought that life is multi-layered and that the dead could come back and leave signs for us to understand what the afterlife is all about, and that life is one of celebration and not a tragic annihilation of all things that have meaning and relevance.

Third, there is that immediate admission that the Ilocanos as “my people” in an ethnographic-anthropological sense is more familiar than any of the possible “my people” in any research field.

This sense of the familiar, of course, is misleading in the end because that which seems to be familiar, like my nose, like my own self, like my own emotions, are not necessarily logically easier to understand. I realized this too late-- that to learn the ethos and the narratives of struggle of your own people is not as easy as learning your ABC. It is most difficult to learn anything concrete about your own people.

As a writer tinkering with the possibilities of the three languages available to me, I was most at home with English, initially. The reason is obvious: my colonial education. I knew more about Mayakovsky, Dostoyevsky, Sylvia Plath, Neruda and Hemingway than any of our writers writing in Ilokano; my first bible was in English and my first-ever dictionary was in English as well. I must have read Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” many times over than any of the Ilokano pieces that I eventually learned to like.

Where does that lead me to this talk on “Redemption: an Ilokano Novel in English”?

It is not a simple act, this one—this act of writing “Redemption.” It is a novel-in-progress and has been, at least with the first ten chapters, written in English. And I am happy that I am writing this in English.

Now, what does this mean, this decision to write in English for a long work such a novel?

The question is not easy to answer. But I give you a clue: that my having become an exile is a big factor, one of the newest fresh of the boat/fresh of the plane immigrants of this country of immigrants, of this nation among nations.

I wanted to speak to my people in exile, in the diaspora, among the invisible immigrant communities.

I wanted to speak to them about the homeland and in a language that the people of the diaspora would understand, the English of the new homeland, but the English that they understand everyday: familiar and light, celebratory and ruminating, not so academic and difficult but free-flowing, with the narrative strategy somehow structured along the way we think with all the criss-crossing thoughts coming in handy, with the thoughts somehow contradicting each other and yet able to come up with a synthesis, a compromise, a clarity and coherence.

I wanted to reach out to the middle class forces in the country, the middle class forces that do not know much about the sufferings of the poor but do not know as well the excesses of the elites and thus, have not been corrupted in some sort of way by the corrupt and corrupting practices of the a-historical, amoral and yet overly-political ruling class.

I have left out the poor in this piece. It is their life story, any which way you go. And then, of course, they do not have to be reminded of their misery over and over again.

So there—there are my readers—those that I want to reach: the exilic community, those who have gone away to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

There are the middle forces, the professionals, the workhorse of the mental life of the nation minus the filthy rich who have nothing to lose during any of the social turmoil affecting the homeland of the Filipino exiles in the United States except those social events that they go to where they flaunt their riches—and their power over the suffering masses.

The Choice of Language

The recognition that language is a site of aesthetic experience and the creative imagination makes the writer realize that he is duty-bound to look make a choice of the language that he uses if he has that alternative.

For the many writers who are monolingual, this should not be a problem. But for exilic writers and writers of the diaspora who usually come from other heritage languages, this luxury of a monolingual world does not apply.

The exilic writer has to keep on navigating between and among languages that he carries in his soul.

This is my particular case—the writer writing from exile, the writer writing as exile, the writer writing about exile.

And so my choice of a language is borne by a need to speak the language of the exile, the language of the Filipino in the diaspora.

On a large, demographic scale, those in exile in the U.S. are professionals. And professionals, being of the middle force, tend to speak the language of colonial education, administration, and commerce. It is English.

One other thing: the choice of a language is sometimes dictated by the aesthetic requirement of the material on hand.

This means that: the literary material dictates the language to be used.

There are certain text that cannot be written in other languages, well, not in the way we would write that text in question in the language we feel it should be written.

This is where the notion of “original” language in which the text is written takes its cue on meaning, fidelity to the issues raised, the accounting of meanings, the accounting of sensibilities and sensitivities.

It is also in this light that “translation” remains a translation, a movement from one world to another world, a re-articulation of sense and meaning of the material in which it was originally written.

I chose to speak of “Redemption” in English because of these reasons.

What is this “Redemption” all about?

It is the story of a family—but I am working on the stories of the women making up this family.

There are six main characters:

Ria, born 1964, 42 years old, 2 kids, married to an overseas Filipino working in an American base in Guantanamo bay.

Lagrimas, 1970, 35, years old, 3 kids, living in Hawaii with family; came to the U.S. an adopted child of an aunt and an uncle.

Rosario, 1972, 33 years old, 1 kid, divorcee, living in Florida with a son; came to the U. S. as an adopted of an aunt and an uncle.

Ditas, 1976, 30 years old, single parent of Wayawaya, separated from husband who was mending the house of the rich.

Lorena, 1978, 28, years old, married to an unambitious man who works as a Kristo in a cockpit.

Nanang, 1940, born during the war, at the time of the evacuation during the war; married young, got involved in many entangling relationships; was forced to evacuate again during the militarization campaign of the Marcos regime; and then during the late part of the Marcos regime, lost her mind and from there, on and off, she becomes crazy and she becomes sane. She becomes a witness to all that has been promised to the Filipino people from the time she was born till the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo regime; during her sane moments, she joins the rallies and protests about so many social issues affecting the Philippines.
Though their stories, written largely in epistolary form, we get a glimpse of what they have gone through in life.


Personal Stories as Political

But I refuse to believe that the personal stories of my characters are merely personal stories; my take about life stories is that they are always-already entrenched in the life of a community, in the life of a country, in the life of a people.

There is no personal story that to me is plain and simple personal.

This idea of a story linked with the historical is untenable.

For me, even the fantastic story, in whatever form, is always-already rooted in history.

Because every story of an individual is a part of the story of a larger community.

Because every good and happy story of an individual is part and parcel of a happy and good story of a community; each bad and sorrowful and sad story of an individual is part and parcel of the bad and sorrowful and sad story of a larger community.

Stories are all we are—this we know very well. If we are not stories, what are?

If we are not stories, what are we then?

The answer is: If we are not stories, we are nothing, we are no-thing, we do not exist, we simply are not.

For me, the question of existence is a question of the “storyness” of human life.

Like the mindset of the Ilokanos who are peopling all of my stories, story is linked with history: sarita—story—is the root of history, pakasaritaan.

In my way of dealing with the realities and demands of “storyness” I always refer back to this fundamental connection between story and history.

I see the connection clearly: one implicates each other.

This is my story technique; this is my methodology for accounting the complex lived experiences of a people who are part of a bigger whole.

As always, one thing that I have learned is to permit the voice of a people to speak—and speak even the unspeakable, to say the unsayable, to name the unnamable, to turn into a speech that which has been muted for so long, muffled for so long, stifled for so long.

In doing this, I use the tools and techniques of critical ethnography: an accounting of a thick description of a culture.

In a sense, I am making full use of my training as an ethnographer to put together what I believe would constitute a good story of a culture, a novel.

I will now give you a reading of some of the chapters of “Redemption.” I would say that some of the chapters come as independent short stories—or episodes if you like.



Conclusion

I do not know where I ever got the title “Redemption.” While I recognize its religious overtone and undertone, I do not think I ever got it from religious sense but from the long history of struggle of the Filipino people that has talked about kaligtasan/pannakisalakan since the coming of the Spaniards. Redemption, is not a Christian teleology but the dream of the good life a society for its people: good because that life is just and fair, good because opportunities are afforded to each one to pursue their dreams.

I think of redemption as some kind of a primal, unconditional, non-negotiable need. I had always thought that the Philippines as a homeland of a wandering people and the Filipinos as the new exiles need to look for the formula for social redemption if that is at all possible.

Perhaps, the word formula linked with the collective act of self-redemption is not apt; perhaps it is not formula that we need but small and big stories that are put together to come up with a grander, more socially relevant story that will remind out of our commitment to life lived with meaning and truth.

So what makes an Ilokano novel? What makes an Ilokano novel in English? When you tell the story of the Ilokanos using their language and framing their story with the grander dynamics and demands of social history—when their stories of the Ilokanos are intertwined and mapped out in the larger history of the country. That to me, is the Ilokano novel. And when that story is told in the language of exile and diaspora—that is the Ilokano novel in English.

Redemption: An Ilokano Novel in English

REDEMPTION: AN ILOKANO NOVEL
IN ENGLISH

By Aurelio S. Agcaoili, PhD



(Abridged version of a talk prepared for the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, February 22, 2006. Sponsored by the Ilokano Program, Department of Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures, the National Foreign Language Resource Center, the Center for Philippine Studies, and the Department of Ethnic Studies. The talk is part of the Centennial Celebration of the Filipino Sakadas in Hawaii.)


The Genesis of a Novel

There are always certain issues that a novelist must confront himself with when going down to the serious yet playful business of writing a novel in whatever language he imagines the world of the novel from.

In my way of doing things, I strongly hold on to the view that language is a site and that when a writer begins to create a world in his world, he does create that world from that site which is language in the here-and-now, a language in the particular, a language in the concrete.

In my case, for instance, I have blessed to have been able to navigate three sites afforded by three languages.

These three sites have given me a certain perspective of worlds made richer by a productive encounter with the language of the Ilokanos which is the language that I was born into even I could say that I am only half-Ilokano, with my mother being a Pangasinense, another one of those major Philippine languages in Northern Philippines; the language of the nation, Tagalog, sometimes passed off as Pilipino with either a P or an F; and English, which is the language of my academic life.

In my academic life, I have had the chance to get into a nurturing environment, one that did not frown upon the other Philippine languages but had pushed for a rethinking of an appreciation and a political and moral duty to recognize and allow these languages to become part of the repertoire of national language and discourse.

So while all throughout my academic life as both a student and eventually a teacher—and while I was bombarded with things “American” and things “English” as is the case of every colonized people when they put a premium on the values and ethos of their colonizer—I had held on to the English language, Philippine-style, as my passport to peace and progress and productive scholarship, I was also dabbling in the language of father which was my first language and the language of the nation that went from one metamorphosis to another.

I have always been drawn to language and its possibilities, more so because I believe I could write and that I knew how to play with the terrors and surprises of language.

Also, I had specialized in philosophy of language for my graduate studies in philosophy and was particularly captivated by the issues about symbols and meaning, the question of the artistic, and the hermeneutic theory of interpretation.

All of those would force to look at language up close so that when I was about to write my doctoral dissertation, I knew right there and then that I would use the novel form to write my ethnographic account of the 100 years of struggle of the Ilokanos to free themselves from oppression and bondage and injustice.

The Ilokanos are a logical choice.

First, I was born into their culture, not exactly in a place where “pure” Ilokano was spoken but the kind of an Ilokano brought by Ilokano exiles and immigrants in Isabela as they moved away from the hard-scrabble life in the drought-and-famine ridden Ilocos countryside. Pure or not pure, the Ilokano spoken in Isabela is Ilokano still.

Second, because of this jus soli accident of birth, I somehow felt a kinship with my people in Isabela even if by the time that I was about to enter pre-school, we moved back to Laoag where there, in the innocence of barrio life, I had a first-hand exposure to all things Ilokano done in the ancient ways of the ancestors who thought that life is multi-layered and that the dead could come back and leave signs for us to understand what the afterlife is all about, and that life is one of celebration and not a tragic annihilation of all things that have meaning and relevance.

Third, there is that immediate admission that the Ilocanos as “my people” in an ethnographic-anthropological sense is more familiar than any of the possible “my people” in any research field.

This sense of the familiar, of course, is misleading in the end because that which seems to be familiar, like my nose, like my own self, like my own emotions, are not necessarily logically easier to understand. I realized this too late-- that to learn the ethos and the narratives of struggle of your own people is not as easy as learning your ABC. It is most difficult to learn anything concrete about your own people.

As a writer tinkering with the possibilities of the three languages available to me, I was most at home with English, initially. The reason is obvious: my colonial education. I knew more about Mayakovsky, Dostoyevsky, Sylvia Plath, Neruda and Hemingway than any of our writers writing in Ilokano; my first bible was in English and my first-ever dictionary was in English as well. I must have read Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” many times over than any of the Ilokano pieces that I eventually learned to like.

Where does that lead me to this talk on “Redemption: an Ilokano Novel in English”?

It is not a simple act, this one—this act of writing “Redemption.” It is a novel-in-progress and has been, at least with the first ten chapters, written in English. And I am happy that I am writing this in English.

Now, what does this mean, this decision to write in English for a long work such a novel?

The question is not easy to answer. But I give you a clue: that my having become an exile is a big factor, one of the newest fresh of the boat/fresh of the plane immigrants of this country of immigrants, of this nation among nations.

I wanted to speak to my people in exile, in the diaspora, among the invisible immigrant communities.

I wanted to speak to them about the homeland and in a language that the people of the diaspora would understand, the English of the new homeland, but the English that they understand everyday: familiar and light, celebratory and ruminating, not so academic and difficult but free-flowing, with the narrative strategy somehow structured along the way we think with all the criss-crossing thoughts coming in handy, with the thoughts somehow contradicting each other and yet able to come up with a synthesis, a compromise, a clarity and coherence.

I wanted to reach out to the middle class forces in the country, the middle class forces that do not know much about the sufferings of the poor but do not know as well the excesses of the elites and thus, have not been corrupted in some sort of way by the corrupt and corrupting practices of the a-historical, amoral and yet overly-political ruling class.

I have left out the poor in this piece. It is their life story, any which way you go. And then, of course, they do not have to be reminded of their misery over and over again.

So there—there are my readers—those that I want to reach: the exilic community, those who have gone away to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

There are the middle forces, the professionals, the workhorse of the mental life of the nation minus the filthy rich who have nothing to lose during any of the social turmoil affecting the homeland of the Filipino exiles in the United States except those social events that they go to where they flaunt their riches—and their power over the suffering masses.

The Choice of Language

The recognition that language is a site of aesthetic experience and the creative imagination makes the writer realize that he is duty-bound to look make a choice of the language that he uses if he has that alternative.

For the many writers who are monolingual, this should not be a problem. But for exilic writers and writers of the diaspora who usually come from other heritage languages, this luxury of a monolingual world does not apply.

The exilic writer has to keep on navigating between and among languages that he carries in his soul.

This is my particular case—the writer writing from exile, the writer writing as exile, the writer writing about exile.

And so my choice of a language is borne by a need to speak the language of the exile, the language of the Filipino in the diaspora.

On a large, demographic scale, those in exile in the U.S. are professionals. And professionals, being of the middle force, tend to speak the language of colonial education, administration, and commerce. It is English.

One other thing: the choice of a language is sometimes dictated by the aesthetic requirement of the material on hand.

This means that: the literary material dictates the language to be used.

There are certain text that cannot be written in other languages, well, not in the way we would write that text in question in the language we feel it should be written.

This is where the notion of “original” language in which the text is written takes its cue on meaning, fidelity to the issues raised, the accounting of meanings, the accounting of sensibilities and sensitivities.

It is also in this light that “translation” remains a translation, a movement from one world to another world, a re-articulation of sense and meaning of the material in which it was originally written.

I chose to speak of “Redemption” in English because of these reasons.

What is this “Redemption” all about?

It is the story of a family—but I am working on the stories of the women making up this family.

There are six main characters:

Ria, born 1964, 42 years old, 2 kids, married to an overseas Filipino working in an American base in Guantanamo bay.

Lagrimas, 1970, 35, years old, 3 kids, living in Hawaii with family; came to the U.S. an adopted child of an aunt and an uncle.

Rosario, 1972, 33 years old, 1 kid, divorcee, living in Florida with a son; came to the U. S. as an adopted of an aunt and an uncle.

Ditas, 1976, 30 years old, single parent of Wayawaya, separated from husband who was mending the house of the rich.

Lorena, 1978, 28, years old, married to an unambitious man who works as a Kristo in a cockpit.

Nanang, 1940, born during the war, at the time of the evacuation during the war; married young, got involved in many entangling relationships; was forced to evacuate again during the militarization campaign of the Marcos regime; and then during the late part of the Marcos regime, lost her mind and from there, on and off, she becomes crazy and she becomes sane. She becomes a witness to all that has been promised to the Filipino people from the time she was born till the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo regime; during her sane moments, she joins the rallies and protests about so many social issues affecting the Philippines.
Though their stories, written largely in epistolary form, we get a glimpse of what they have gone through in life.


Personal Stories as Political

But I refuse to believe that the personal stories of my characters are merely personal stories; my take about life stories is that they are always-already entrenched in the life of a community, in the life of a country, in the life of a people.

There is no personal story that to me is plain and simple personal.

This idea of a story linked with the historical is untenable.

For me, even the fantastic story, in whatever form, is always-already rooted in history.

Because every story of an individual is a part of the story of a larger community.

Because every good and happy story of an individual is part and parcel of a happy and good story of a community; each bad and sorrowful and sad story of an individual is part and parcel of the bad and sorrowful and sad story of a larger community.

Stories are all we are—this we know very well. If we are not stories, what are?

If we are not stories, what are we then?

The answer is: If we are not stories, we are nothing, we are no-thing, we do not exist, we simply are not.

For me, the question of existence is a question of the “storyness” of human life.

Like the mindset of the Ilokanos who are peopling all of my stories, story is linked with history: sarita—story—is the root of history, pakasaritaan.

In my way of dealing with the realities and demands of “storyness” I always refer back to this fundamental connection between story and history.

I see the connection clearly: one implicates each other.

This is my story technique; this is my methodology for accounting the complex lived experiences of a people who are part of a bigger whole.

As always, one thing that I have learned is to permit the voice of a people to speak—and speak even the unspeakable, to say the unsayable, to name the unnamable, to turn into a speech that which has been muted for so long, muffled for so long, stifled for so long.

In doing this, I use the tools and techniques of critical ethnography: an accounting of a thick description of a culture.

In a sense, I am making full use of my training as an ethnographer to put together what I believe would constitute a good story of a culture, a novel.

I will now give you a reading of some of the chapters of “Redemption.” I would say that some of the chapters come as independent short stories—or episodes if you like.



Conclusion

I do not know where I ever got the title “Redemption.” While I recognize its religious overtone and undertone, I do not think I ever got it from religious sense but from the long history of struggle of the Filipino people that has talked about kaligtasan/pannakisalakan since the coming of the Spaniards. Redemption, is not a Christian teleology but the dream of the good life a society for its people: good because that life is just and fair, good because opportunities are afforded to each one to pursue their dreams.

I think of redemption as some kind of a primal, unconditional, non-negotiable need. I had always thought that the Philippines as a homeland of a wandering people and the Filipinos as the new exiles need to look for the formula for social redemption if that is at all possible.

Perhaps, the word formula linked with the collective act of self-redemption is not apt; perhaps it is not formula that we need but small and big stories that are put together to come up with a grander, more socially relevant story that will remind out of our commitment to life lived with meaning and truth.

So what makes an Ilokano novel? What makes an Ilokano novel in English? When you tell the story of the Ilokanos using their language and framing their story with the grander dynamics and demands of social history—when their stories of the Ilokanos are intertwined and mapped out in the larger history of the country. That to me, is the Ilokano novel. And when that story is told in the language of exile and diaspora—that is the Ilokano novel in English.

VAGINA MONOLOGUES IN ILOKANO-15

VAGINA MONOLOGUES IN ILOKANO-15

Aurelio S. Agcaoili


Ti spotlight ti V-Day’s ita a tawen ket mairaman ti global a panagkaykaysa nga aramid tapno mailaban ti pannakasupapak ken pannakabigbig kadagiti “comfort women.” Dagiti ‘comfort women’ ket dagidi ubbing a babbai nga aggapu kadagiti sabasabali a puli ken nailian a kinaasinno a pinuersa nga agbalin nga adipen ti sex ti Gobierno ti Hapon iti panawen ti maikadua a sangalubongan a gera iti baet ti 1932 ken 1945. Adda kadakuada dagiti menor de edad; adda dagiti niloko dagiti rekruter; sabsabali pay dagiti naipupok ken nirabsutda tapno pagpapasanda. Makuna nga adda agarup 50,000 agingga’t 200,000 a ‘comfort women.’ Idi arinunos ti 1990, dagiti Koreano a biktima ti sexual slavery ket binurakda ti panagulimekda ket impalnaadda dagiti pasamak kalpasan ti dandani gudua’t siglo a panagul-ulimekda manipud iti maikadua a sangalubonga a gubat, simmaruno dagiti nakalasat idiay Tsina, Taiwan, Amianan a Korea, iti Filipinas, Indonesia, Malaysia, ti Netherlands, ken Akindaya a Timor.

Ita, dagiti nakalasat a ‘comfort women’ ket nataengandan iti 70-90. Ket gapu ta saggagaysadan a sumina, ti laeng arapaapda ket ti opisial a panangdawat ti gobierno a Hapon iti pammakawan, panangipudno iti inaramidda kadakuada. Aginggana ita iliblibak pay laeng ti gobierno a Hapon ti legal a responsibilidadna. Ita a tawen, dagiti estoria dagitoy a nakaam-ames krimen ti gera kontra kadagiti babbai ket inikkatda iti pakasaritaan ti Hapon ken kadagiti textbooks.

Babaen kadaytoy a V-Day 2006 Spotlight, kaduaenmi dagitoy a ‘comfort women’ ken dagiti grupo dagiti babbai nga aggapu iti Daya ken Abagan-a-Daya nga Asia ken iti intero a lubong iti panangdawattayo iti hustisia ken panagbayad kadagitoy a krimen ti gera.

Iti kastoy a naynay a panagadu dagiti armado a rinnupak iti daytoy a siglo, ti pakpakauna nga awa kabutbuteng ti panagaramid kadagiti kinaranggas a sexual iti panawen ti gera ken dinto maipalubos. Ti padas dagiti comfort women ti nangted iti maysa a pardon ti sistematiko a panagrames ken panagranggas a sexual a maitultuloy itatta kadagiti luglugar dagiti armado a rinnanget kas idiay Sudan, Congo, ken Iraq, ket iti kasta, ti pannakabigbig kadagiti panagbalusingsing kadagiti karbengan ti tao nga inaramidda kontra kadagiti babbai idi panawen ti maikadua a sangalubongan a gubat ket maipangpangruna unay-unay.


BALIKSEM

Para kadagiti ‘Comfort Women’

Dagiti estoriatayo ket addada laeng kadagiti ulotayo
Iti uneg dagiti talipupos a nadadael a bagbagitayo
Iti uneg ti panawen ken lugar ti dangadang
Ken kinakawaw
Awan dokumento a pagilasinan
Saan nga opisial kadagiti libro
No di ket konsensia laeng
No di ket daytoy laeng.

Inkarida kadatayo dagitoy:
A pagserbian ti amak no sumurotak kadakuada
Nga addanto pagobraak
A pagserbiak ti pagiliak
A papatayendak no diak sumurot kadakuada
A nasaysayaat nga amang sadiay

Ti nakitami:
Awan dagiti bambantay
Awan dagiti kaykayo
Awan danum
Amarilio a darat
Maysa a diserto
Maysa a bodega a napno iti lua
Ribo a babbalasang a madandanagan
Ti sallapidko kinartibda a kontra iti pagayatak
Awan panawen a panagaruat iti panti

No ania ti impapilitda nga aramidenmi:
Baliwanmi ti naganmi
Agusrakami laeng iti maysa a pidaso a kawes nga
Addaan butones nga alisto a luktan
50 a soldado a Hapon iti kada aldaw
No dadduman sangabarkoda amin
Karkarna a barbariko a bambanag
Aramidenmi uran no agdardarakamin
Aramidenmi uray no dikam pay nagdara
Nakaad-aduda
Dagiti dadduma dida pay ikkaten dagiti badoda
Iruarda laeng dagiti lukditda
Nakaad-adu a lallaki isu a diak makapagna
Diak maiyennat dagiti sakak
Diak maikukot
Diak.


No ania ti inaramidda kadakami manen ken manen:
Pinagsasawan
Tinungpa
Tiniritir
Pinirsaydakami a pinadara iti uneg
Kinapon
Drinoga
Inablatan
Dinanog


No ania ti nakitami:
Maysa a babai nga agsamsamal iti banio
Maysa a babai a pinatay ti bomba
Maysa a babai a minalomaloda iti riple manen ken manen
Maysa a babai a tumartaray a mangidungdungpar iti ulona iti diding
Maysa a kuttongi a bangkay ti babai nga imbellengda iti karayan
Tapno malmes.

No ania ti dimi mabalin nga aramiden:
Ugasanmi dagiti bagimi
Mapan iti sabali a puwesto
Mapan iti doctor
Agaramat iti kondom
Aglibas
Taraknen ti anak
Bagaam nga isardengna.

No ania ti naganabmi:
Malaria
Sipilis
Gonorea
Natay nga ubing iti uneg ti matris
Tuberkulosis
Sakit ti puso
Nervous breakdown
Hypochondria

No ania ti impakanda kadakami:
Inapuy
Sabaw a miso
Atsara a singkamas
Inapuy
Sabaw a miso
Atsara a singkamas
Inapuy Inapuy Inapuy

No ania ti nagbanaganmi:
Nadadael
Ramramit
Baog
Dagiti ab-abut
Lasag
Exilo
Napaulimek
Agmaymaysa

No ania ti imbatida kadakami:
Awan
Maysa nga ama a nakellaat a din naglaing
Ket natay.
Awan sueldo
Piglat
Gura kadagiti Lallaki
Awanan iti anak
Awanan iti balay
Maysa a lugar a dati nga adda sadiay ti matres
Arak
Sigarilio
Babak
Bain

No ania ti inyawagda kadakami:
Ianfu-Comfort Women
Shugyufu-Dagiti babbai nga adda iti pagbirokan a di disente

No ania ti nariknami:
Ti panagsasabong
Ti biagmi.

No aninakamin ita:
74
79
84
93
Bulsek
Nabuntog
Sisasagana
Addakami iti embahada ti Hapon iti kada Mierkoles
Dikamin mabuteng

No ania ti kayatmi:
Itan nga insegida
Sakbay kami a sumina
Ken dagiti estoriami ket pumanaw iti daytoy a lubong,
Pumanaw ti panunotmi

Gobierno ti Hapon
Baliksenyo kadi
Pangngaasiyo.
Dispensarenyo, Comfort Women.
Ibagayo kaniak
Dispensarenyo kaniak
Dispensarenyo kaniak
Kaniak
Kaniak
Kaniak
Baliksenyo.
Yebkasyo ti panagdispensaryo
Ibagayo ti panagdispensaryo
Balikenyo Siak
Kitaenyo Siak
Baliksenyo
Dispensarenyo.


Eve Ensler

Naibasar iti ‘Dagiti Testimonia dagiti Comfort Women’
.

VAGINA MONOLOGUES IN ILOKANO-14

VAGINA MONOLOGUES IN ILOKANO-14

Aurelio S. Agcaoili


INTRO—ADDAAK IDI ITI SILED

Daytoy a piesa ket naiparang a mano a daras a di nadakamat ti pannakaipasngayna. Maysa daytoy a nakakaskas-ang a pannakalipat. Ngem uray, maysa a lalaki nga agiwarwarnak ti nagsaludsod iti saan pay laeng nabayag “Ania ti koneksionna?”

Daytoy autortayo, ni Eve Ensler, ket adda idi maipasngay ti apokona a babai. Nagsidsiddaaw kadagiti uki sakbay kadaytoy a kanito, adda iti nauneg a panagrukbab itan.

ADDAAK IDI ITI SILED

Addaak idi aglukat ti uki.
Addakami amin, ti inana, ti asawana ken siak,
ken ti nars a naggapu iti Ukraine, ti sibubukel nga imana
iti uneg ti ukina a mangrikrikna ken mangar-arikap a kadanggayna
ti guantes bayat ti pannakisasaona kadakami—kas iti panangbidingbidingna
iti gripo nga agub-ubo.

Addaak idi iti siled idi mangrugi dagiti pasikal
a nangparigat kenkuana tapno agkaradap,
nagpartuat kadagiti unnoy nga agubo kadagiti buttaw ti kudilna
ket adda pay laeng sadiay kalpasan ti adu nga oras a kalpasanna ket bigla a nagriaw
makabugtak, dagiti imana ket indanogna iti elektrik nga angina.

Addaak idi nagbaliw ti ukina
manipud iti mababain nga abut a sexual
agingga iti mayas nga arkeolohikal a tunnel, maysa a sagrado a labba,
maysa a kanal a Venetian, maysa a nauneg a bubon nga addaan iti nailubbot nga ubing,
agur-uray a maisalakan.

Nakitak dagiti kolor ti ukina. Nagbaliw.
nakitak ti nasugatan a naperdi nga asul
ti agkapkapuyo a kamatis a nalabaga
ti dapo a derosas—ti nangisit;
nakitak ti dara a kas ling-et kadagiti ik-iking
nakitak ti amarilio, ti puraw a likido, ti takki, dagiti nagpipirutong a dara
nga agrarana a rummuar kadagiti abut, rummuar ta rummuar,
nakitak iti abut, ti ulo ti maladaga
gargarumiad ti nangisit a buok, nakitak sadiay iti likod
ti tulang—maysa a natangken a nagbukel a lagip,
bayat ti panagbidingbiding ti nars manipud iti Ukraine
ti imana a nagalis.

Addaak idi saggamaysakami, ti inana ken siak,
a nangtengngel iti sakana ket impakayangmi panangiduronmi babaen ti amin a pigsami a kaludon ti panagiyeddekna
ken ti lakayna ket serioso nga agbilbilang, “Maysa, dua, tallo,”
ibagbagana kenkuana a “igaedmo, ala pay.”
Kinitami isuna.
Dimi mayalis dagiti matami kadayta a lugar.

Nalipatanmi ti uki—Aminkami
ania koma ti mangilawlawag
iti kinaawan ti siddaawmi, ti kinaawan ti panagdaydayawmi.

Addaak idiay idi ti doctor
ket babaen kadagiti Alice in Wonderland a kutsara ken kinautna ti uki
ket sadiay bayat ti panagbalin ti uki a kas maysa a dakkel nga operatik a ngiwat
agkankanta iti amin a regtana;
umuna ti bassit nga ulo,
kalpasanna dagiti abuen a lupaypay nga ima, kalpasanna ti aglanglangoy a bagi,
aglanglangoy nga umay kadagiti agib-ibit a takiagmi.

Addaak idiay idi idi agpusiposak ket nasalamaak ti ukina.
nagtakderak ket binay-ak ti bagik a makakita ti panagkayangna, sibubukel a labus,
narangrangkay, limteg ken napirsapirsay,
agpadpadara kadagiti ima ti doctor
a sitatalged a mangdadait kenkuana sadiay.

Nagtakderak ket ti ukina ket dardaras
a nagbalin a nga akaba a nalabaga nga agpitikpitik a puso.

Ti puso ket makabael nga agsakripisio.
Kasta met ti uki.
Makabael ti puso a mamakawan ken aglunit.
Mabalinna ti agbaliw iti sukog tapno mapastreknatayo.
Mabalinna ti dumakkel tapno mapadisinatayo.
Kasta met ti uki.
Mabalinna ti aggagar para kadatayo ken mabalinna met ti agbennat para kadatayo, ti matay para kadatayo
ken pagdaraen ken pagdaraennatayo iti daytoy narikot, nakakaskasdaaw a lubong.
Addaak idiay siled idi.
Malagipko.