My Nicaraguan Father: Reflections on Feminism, Letters, and Digital Media

My Nicaraguan Father: Reflections on Feminism, Letters, and Digital Media

Dedicated to Don Manual Montiello

My Nicaraguan father, who I had not seen in eight years, died this week. A man with a heart condition, he fell onto a street, his face purple, and died. He was walking the barrio, our home, Catorce de Junio, in Nicaragua where I used to live.

I don’t know where this piece is going. Like a storm, I sense something brewing. The signs are there: quiet moments (dark clouds), tears (rain), and fear (wind). A perfect writing storm. This time, though, I have no predictable end. Something is needing to come out and so I write. I write. There’s a lot that’s been thrown in the eye of my hurricane. I’m going to try and let it out…

* * *

In feminism, particularly the feminist blogosphere, the word “intersectionality,” is strewn around like a popular masthead. For those unfamiliar with this term, in a nutshell, it’s a nugget word of the third wave of feminism, a term to explain one’s ability/responsibility to see/understand the complex layers of oppression and severity. It is a theory by I don’t even know who that suggested we look at the varying intersecting locks of lived experience. To put it bluntly, it says that the middle of the wheel is braced together by several spokes. Look at the spokes, it suggests. Consider the spokes.

I’m not the best person to talk about intersectionality. I’m not the best person to talk about intersectionality because I was introduced to it in the feminist blogosphere and the way I have observed its lack of application – its sore failure – makes me a non-believer in the term. I just don’t see any difference “intersectionality” has made in the lives of womyn offline.

My momma raised me to see the soul, not spokes.

* * *

February 11, 2009
I am in a coffee shop. I see a sign: Imported from Nicaragua.

A small thump hits my gut.

* * *

March 2000
“Buenas dias, Dona Adelia! Como estas usted?” I called out to a neighbor while I was walking in the barrio. It is a hot morning in Managua.

My friend Julia who was walking beside me smiled as Dona Adelia opened her mouth and fired off a response so quick and urgent, I blinked in surprise.

Julia translated for me, “She said, ‘well, that depends. Do you want to know how I am doing economically, physically, emotionally, mentally, politically? It depends.’”

I’ve thought about Dona Adelia’s reply to my simple greeting for nine years. She is a woman, elderly in her seventies, who loves people with so much strength that I pray I am like her when I mature into my later years.

One moment. One response. To my face. And just like that. I understood “intersectionality,” or the multiple intricacies of being. Language, culture, soul. There are so many layers to people; so many things that affect how we perceive one another.

I didn’t need a theory. I needed a teacher.

* * *

The failure of intersectionality is not surprising. Most correlate the term as a method to measure oppression and study its affect on diverse individuals, as if there is a way to truly trace the insidious and camouflaged roots of societal and social demons.

What troubles me about this method is its obsession with oppression and lack of focus on liberation. From what I have observed, most feminists want to understand the surreptitious spreading and practice of oppression - they want to understand that justice is unevenly distributed because of skin color, race, ethnicity, physical and mental mobility, religion, citizenship, class, education, property, age, sexual orientation, gender, and sex – but they don’t want to listen when it comes to transforming the world for liberation.

If liberation means a radical, and by radical I am referring to the Latin origin of radical meaning ROOT, transformation of the world, we need feminists to become more visionary. And fast.

Intersectionality is useless if it merely raises your consciousness but does little else. Ok, so YOU’RE enlightened. Great!

Now what?

The life of intersectionality is brief. It’s a theory. Nothing more.

* * *

April 2000

Don Manual has a heart condition. Somewhere, in the maze of awkward translation, I learn his quiet demeanor cloaks a very gentle man. After a long trip to Bluefields, the eastern coast of Nicaragua, I return to my home in the barrio. Once in my room, exhausted, I begin unpacking.

Don Manual walks into my room.

Puzzled and a bit anxious because he has never entered my room before, I turn to face him.

Just a few pebbles of his words were caught in my translation. There are two things I remember, “Allegra. Muy allegra.”

He was happy to have you back home. He was relieved. Others translated the conversation for me later.

And then I remember that he covered his heart, his weakened and diseased heart, as he spoke. He softly tapped it as he told me he was glad I was home. Then he and his eyes smiled into me and turned away.

* * *

Thursday, February 12, 2009

I am nearing the end of my three month writing stint at Bitch magazine. The experience has taught me so much about writing and confidence, I find it difficult to translate it to those who do not engage in writing practice.

Recently, I wrote a piece about Nadya Suleman, the woman who recently birthed octuplets and is now a mother of fourteen. In my article, where I raised questions about the issue of choice outside the realm of abortion, I asked that we engage in critical and rich discussion but to do so without berating any one woman or a segment of population of women.

That didn’t go over well.

The feedback and comments ranged from, “I think this has nothing to do with race, I never even thought of the idea until people like you to inject race into the subject to cause controversy,” to suggesting that I “become a conservative,” to “What a goddamned shithead.”

Simultaneously, I received an email from Alex Blaze, the managing editor at The Bilerico Project, who let me know that there had been good news concerning a post I had written two months ago about Agnes Scott College, a private all woman’s college, allowing a degrading and anti-feminist movie film on its grounds. The update alerted me to heightened policies the college had adopted in response to the online noise generated by senior, Louisa Hill.

I learned about Agnes Scott debacle from Jess Hoffman, a visionary friend and co-founder of make/shift magazine, where I am a section editor. It was through her that I heard about it, connected with The Bilerico Project, and helped create some online shaking.

The result: not perfect, but improved policies.

While the situation at Agnes Scott College is not the most ground breaking news or the most inspiring story, it gave credence to the power of blogging and communities working together. As Blaze wrote in his email, “Blogging can improve the world!”

Indeed.

It can also destroy.

These are the opportunities before some of us. And there are many sides to align yourself with. What do you choose?

Do you align yourself with the offense, berating women like Nadya Suleman, defining what is right and good for a woman of controversy and poor decision, but nonetheless a women in the name of feminism and “liberalism”? Or the side that tries to outreach and make one corner of the universe slightly better than it was yesterday?

It’s not that simple, I know, and the situation calls for reflection.

But is calling her a “shithead” how we move forward?

* * *

Thursday, February 12
A friend is driving me through Cedar Lee, an area of independent theaters and coffee shops. A wide sidewalk is cleared for winter, but in the summer, Christina says, the restaurants have great outdoor seating.

Out of nowhere, a thought slips through my window

I haven’t talked to my Nicaraguan family in years.

And here is where they have five dollar theater tickets with all you can eat popcorn.

I haven’t even thought about them in months. What happened to when I used to think of them everyday?

You’ll love it here, Lisa.

Raquel would be…my G*d, twenty-one years old now. They wouldn’t want to hear from me. What would I say anyway? My Spanish has depleted so much. Let it go.


* * *

Both on and offline, it’s not our race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation or any other spoke on the wheel of “intersectionality” that divides us. It’s our objectives. It’s how we measure liberation and what we are willing to do with our privileged lives in the name of transformation. The differences in our objectives are as transparent as our URLs. Some are here for fun and professional advancement. Those of us who are here for more than business are here to question the systems that contort liberation.

Is there any wonder that there is a divide?

For me, there is only one question: what are you willing to do for liberation?

If it begins and ends with blogging, then don’t bother reading the rest of this piece.

If you say you want a world without rape, what are you doing to transform binary definitions of sexuality, relationships, and love?
If you say you want a country of peace, what cost is paid by other countries?
If you say you don’t know the answers, what are you doing to rectify that?

These are the questions before us. What are you doing?

* * *

The face of G*d for me is the liberation of those in pain, myself included. My definition of feminism is not a worded explanation, limited by my westernized and elitist tongue. It is a drive, dare I write spiritual drive, to do what I can, when I can, and make one thing, or as many things, better for another human being born in my lifetime, on our planet, this place we all call home. With all the mystery and fear in my body, soaked in ethnocentric alcohol, I sober my life by sitting on the edge of my bathroom sink and pulling the bathroom mirror into my face.

I look up.

* * *
February 16, 2009

I open an email letting me know about a post raising questions about feminism and digital colonialism.

* * *

For the most part, generation X has been the largest population which the digital age has watered. We’re the first generation of this “new media” and its shifted the way we think, communicate, and organize. It’s even changed our dreams.

As little girls, I would bet those who journaled and dreamed about writing imagined hard cover books or putting pen to physical paper; their name in print.

Blogging has ushered in a new alternative to traditional publishing and while it has created this avenue for information exchange and sharing, it has also created a monster. We, privileged activists and writers with the most immediate form of communi/gratifi/cation at our disposal, gladly reap the surface benefits of new media and, I fear, are satiated by that. We’ve yet to fully incorporate a feminist energy and discourse to digital media. Bloggers, writers, web-users have yet to fully embrace the power and responsibility to transform knowledge, journalism, and expression and bring it to a feminist standard of acceptability and practice.

We’re working on that. We’re still debating and defending privilege.

There has been no sustainable on-going and consistent effort to confront the communication patterns of womyn/gender-centered/feminist blogs or dialogue ethos. Who has time to create that analysis, to write about it? To try and put a lasso on a thousand bucks gone wild?

We’re either too busy feeding our children, finding sustainable employment, caring for our ourselves and loved ones, and making ends meet to commit to dismantling the ways blogging and new media perpetuate the existing kyriarchal systems. It is, after all, a flick of a hand to turn off our screens or we can simply walk away.

Or we’re too busy maximizing our latest idea to utilize blogging as a means to further our professional careers.

There’s a pull in two legitimate different directions that leaves the middle empty. What’s left? The space of blogging. THIS space that we say is the resting pulse of the “women’s movement.” All of it goes unchecked, with no accountability, no rules. We can call each other out, but in the end, if you think it, you can write it. We obviously don’t want a hierarchy or limitations on our speech, right? It’s as if we have lost the capacity to freely explore options and conversation, we don’t know how to dictate basic premises of decency on how to relate to one another over lines of difference.

And so the cyclic, vicious feminist problems continue. The conferences are divided, the blog wars are revisited, the colonialism/racism/classism/capitalism/ everything-ism continues in its original score. Actually, I think this screenplay was written decades ago by our ancestors. We’re all just assuming their roles.

(Who wants to play Sojournor Truth?)

* * *

February 16, 2009
I receive an email telling me of Don Manual’s death just hours after he had passed. I read the words and am confused.

My emails are usually about the latest happenings in the activist world, listserves I love, writers I follow, blogs I cherish, and updates from friends. This message was nestled in the midst of RSVPs to my 30th birthday party. Requests from writers to blog about a spreading story. The message startled me, but not more than my own reaction.

My heart continues to audibly break with each letter I type to admit this: momentarily, I didn’t even recognize Don Manual’s name.

That is how removed I have been.

For a moment, I did not recognize the name of someone with whom I lived, had spoken, formed some of my brightest moments of life, embraced, and breathed.

* * *

That night I muster every strength I could to get over my own guilt and self-consciousness.

I call my family in Nicaragua.

With no fallback of translators, my mind rewinds itself to its rusted Spanish files, long put away.

I speak first with my sister, Lynette, who now has three children. When I lived with her, she only had one son. She is mopping and I can hear her smile into the phone.

Her father just died and she smiles at me.

“Necessitas, Lisa, regressar a Nicaragua pronto.”

You need to return to Nicaragua, soon.

Yo se.

I know.

I sputter out my condolences, whatever is left in my vocabulary and try to twist it, try to offer whatever G*d-awful limiting words that remain and tell her how much I miss her and will always miss her father. How grateful I am for all that they gave me.

All I can make out from her response is “triste.”

Sad.

She asks if I want to talk to her mother.

Dona Marta.

I remember why I was so afraid to speak to my host mother. She was soft spoken and that made translation even more difficult. I am shaking inside.

Unearthing itself after nine years, my intense desire to articulate the depth of my emotions runs again into the language barrier and I feel ashamed at my lack of Spanish practice.

It’s not just about language. Language, as once famously stated, is the house of being. It is a bridge of culture, a valor of heartfelt effort and humility. It’s not just about communication; it’s about respect and offering.

Her voice is barely audible and I want to weep in her arms. Or have her weep in mine.
Neither would happen.

I tell her that she and her entire family is always in my heart.

We have deep pauses of silence. I let them rest between us knowing the loss of her lifelong spouse cannot be explained in language.

We communicate what we can. We communicate love.

* * *

There comes a time to revisit our promises and commitments. We are forever in need of smoothing them over, enhancing the details for better fits.

I remember promising to write my Nicaraguan family. I said those words. In English. They understood.

I promise.

But I broke that promise, repeatedly.

I broke that promise to write when I decided to put it off and write about what I knew - feminism - instead of a what I needed to write, letter to my family. For every post on this blog, now past seven hundred, I allowed myself to slip away into what I knew was so dangerously easy about life in the United States: living individualistically.

Oh, I’ve learned how to be a married activist, a warrior poet salivating after Audre Lorde. I’ve written letters to lovers, biological family, posts, articles, and even begun book projects. I’ve collaborated with strangers who became confidants and healed broken relationship.

“Individualism” is no longer about singularity, it’s about living in a disconnected state, where we are accountable only to those who are like us, agree with, nod with us. Nuanced individualism is serving not just ourselves but only those we choose to be in our communities, those whom we deem supportive and relative, staunchly defining who we want and gives us what we need.

Gifts of baking pans, trinkets, and money mean nothing without connection and in some realms of life, attempted communication trumps clarity. I wanted to communicate safely, with a translator so they knew precisely what I meant and they understood me. I forgot that tapping one’s heart in gesture can convey more about concern and relief than words.

I waited for perfect communication. That day never comes.

In my subconscious fear of not wanting to be uncomfortable or reminded that I lazily let my Spanish subside, I never wrote a letter. Not one. I didn’t want to be reminded of my helplessness, the nightmarish panic I had of not being able to connect transnational experiences with my own damn life. I didn’t want to look at the clock and see that I had allowed so much time to pass.

And in the customary selfish rape of wandering foreign lands merely for one’s own enlightenment, I took my “enlightenment” and applied it to my own life.

I never wrote one letter.

I’ll set up a feeble social network online and write flip responses on the digital walls of high school acquaintances who have taught me nothing, but I won’t confront my own fear of inadequacy and contact a community, a family who gave me shelter and food.

Gringa.

And for those who do not understand the significance letters hold, paper that’s traveled the winds of ocean, just know that it delivers more than anything that can be conveyed in language. It conveys that they, the recipients of the letter, are remembered in a walled country that makes you forget.

* * *

Feminism is not about self-flagellation or “saving” the world, or even piping ourselves up by saying we have the capacity to do so. But I do believe it is about living an authentic existence that challenges our comforts, our talents, and agenda. I believe that we, those with unspeakable luxuries that we cannot put in context because few other nations can even compare to our excessiveness, must be held accountable to our neighbors. Not out of obligation, but out of love.

We are accountable. In our lives. In our letters. In our writings. In our blogs.

As I repeatedly learn in painfully elementary ways, “Not everything is about you.”
Your guilt. Your discomfort. Your understanding. Your. Your. Your.
“I don’t feel like engaging.”
“I don’t want to be attacked or misunderstood.”
“I don’t want to risk.”
“I don’t want to put myself out there.”
“I’ve earned this.”
“I already explained myself.”
“I need to defend myself.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

I. I. I.

If you can, unstick yourself.

Move beyond your self-consciousness.

We are accountable. To someone.

Without accountability, without liberating practices for all, there is no “Movement.”

Only noise.

Find someone to whom you are accountable.

Everything In the Sink: Writing, Health, Feminism, Poetry

In response to a piece of writing that moved me.

* * *
For $3.70, I bought a bagel and the most luscious hot chocolate you can imagine, and sat down to read the walking series between Jess and BFP.

For $3.70, tax included, I sat in a warm room and read Jess’ thoughts while I allowed the flowers of an Everything bagel to bloom in my mouth and the sticky sweetness of the whip cream and chocolate syrup avalanche everything in my mouth with sugar.

I’m celebrating.

It is the birthday of a friend. Jennifer, 32 today, an amazing mother and activist in the Philippines who fights a fight that would leave me scared shitless, but one that she levels with her eyes every morning in hot Manila. It is the day of her birth, entering the world so helplessly and, after a little over three decades, has exploded into a warrior for art, equality, understanding, and love in Quezon City, Philippines. I’ve known Jennifer for six months. I love and miss her dearly.

To celebrate, I read Jess’ work and envision her walks in Los Angeles. I hear her soft breath climbing the mountains of California and sense the spinning in her mind as she wonders what to write about on BFP’s site. I feel envious of their walks. No, that’s inaccurate. I feel envious of their partnership, the evidence that two people can agree to walk, think, offer... That’s more than what most people in this world will do in a lifetime.

I sneakily decide to walk with them. In my mind, I decide to stay a figurative block or two behind them so they can’t see me or worry I’m eavesdropping on them.

Monday
I get a library card from the local public library and rent Yoga videos for beginners. In the midst, I grab “The Namesake,” a movie I had already seen about the torrent of cultural identity and family.

To convince myself that I don’t care and it doesn’t matter if I can do the moves or not, I do the first video with regular clothes on and leave my hair disbanded. Everything’s loose.

Tuesday
I think about my quads. They feel stretched but not sore. Again, I put on un-Yogalike clothes and put a thin headband through my hair to keep it out of my face, but still lets it flow freely. I begin to fall in love with one move, the one where you pretend you’re flying. On one foot, I balance while I kick the other leg back. The upper body is surged forward, the back leg kicked straight out, the arms extended into wings. Hold the position. Breathe. My mind has wings.

Wednesday
I add an aerobic workout before yoga because I feel like sweating and wanting to build that fire again. My body feels differently. Like it’s been contorted, twisted, wrung. My blood feels thin and easy flowing. I try the relaxation pose and impatiently cut get up, hating it. I do not feel at peace.

Thursday
I have a doctor’s appointment for a hysterosalpingogram. The feel of metal in my vagina brings waves of violent thoughts that do no belong to me. I think of the literal and figurative bayonets stabbed into the bodies of women in a thousand wars.

I shake my head, the thoughts spill away.

The test is horrible, but the results are good. Everything’s clear and functioning. He hands me a towel to clean myself up. I look up and begin to cry.

Friday
I put on Yoga clothes and pull my hair into a ponytail. The balance is not there anymore and I waver, uncertain.

I try the flying pose again.

Looking down, I search for my focus spot and my eyes well up. There is no balance, only sadness.

* * *
Out of nowhere a 40 degree wonder sweeps Cleveland. I am loosely bound with one sweatshirt and gloves and take a long walk in the snow.

I pass a house boarded up where three little girls died in a fire one year ago, before I lived in the neighborhood. The surviving parents are pregnant again and want to eventually live in the house again, the home their little girls loved so much. My head shakes from side to side. Everything flows in seasons, even life.

I notice that I have stepped away from the internet because I have had reoccurring thoughts about Andrea Dworkin and how she wrote her life into death by sitting, writing, and barely moving. To be that disconnected from the body scares me.

I walk further.

There is a man my age at the end of his driveway. A hoe is grasped in his hands as he hacks into the thick ice. Our eyes meet and I nod and smile a greeting. The snow of his teeth show brightly as he smiles in return. I need more of this.

I think about Jess’ thoughts of perfectionism, depression, and achievement. Her honesty whispers louder than the crunch of my boots and I wish I had someone to talk to about my writing, my journey and relationship with its power and the purity I’m desperately trying to hold onto.

* * *

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was seven or eight years old. In my attic, I have bins of crushes, confusion, suicide, sex, and drugs preserved in words. Or, at least, I have them preserved in the way I thought they were.

On Saturday, I read the introduction of Audre Lorde’s biography by Alexis De Veaux. De Veaux writes that Audre never felt like she found a home. Never, even in her last days battling cancer, did Audre feel spiritually settled. Looking for what, no one knows for sure, but there was a mystical homelessness about her and I’d like to think that maybe I’m not alone in feeling the same way.

There is something restless about the creative spirit that yearns to be embraced, yet by its very definition cannot be comforted. And so the Spirit creates. It creates to survive because to be still, to stay in one place and consider the enormity of never feeling comfort is too real, too frightening. The possibility of what that eternal wandering could mean is too harsh to accept.

But Audre accepted it, eventually, writes De Veaux.

Thank God and too bad that I’m not Audre.

It is because of writing and this roaring for which there is no volume control, I am homeless.

* * *

I revisit Jess’ thoughts about achievement.

"I had no idea in that moment that not everyone defines human worth by work and work-related accomplishment."

What does that mean for me? I grew up in either a private institution or a private family that worshiped the credentials that came with academic achievement. Credentials, academic accolades, degrees, awards, intellectual distinction was not about superiority. It was about survival. Education meant survival. As immigrants, education became the means to provide for your family. Licenses to practice, exams to study for mean providing for yourself in the United States and making life a little bit easier for someone back home or for whomever you sent your money. For every degree, ten more people could be fed or another person could go to school. That equation wasn’t exact, but there was a sense of responsibility I felt to do well, to do excellent and one of the ways sacrifice is repaid is through the success of children. There was never room for anything but medicine, law, or, at minimum graduate school.

I wanted to be a writer.

Perfectionism is most certainly not a culture-specific phenomenon. It transcends race and ethnicity and plays out differently according to context and quality of measuring stick. For the Philippines, a country colonized first by the Spaniards and then by the US Americans, education became a golden ticket out of poverty. It was a privilege to even have the opportunity to succeed and if the opportunity rested on your door, who are you to not answer?

Educational achievement became a sweet addiction, how I imagine a post dinner cigarette tastes to smokers. It melted in the form of intellectual stimulus and in watching the widening of pupils when I listed my degrees, schools, and ease of which they came. It came in the small upturn of my parents’ lips. These successes, somehow, meant everything and nothing all at the same time. Addiction is like that.

Admitting how important education is to me and my family means revealing a colonized mind that I was ashamed to admit. Of course my parents thought education was important. “This country is about one thing: credentials. Without your degree, you’re nothing.”

How could I deny something so true to their immigrated experience? Each hostility, each slap, each shove, every cold shoulder they experienced somehow related to the fact that they were foreigners in this land that both needed them and despised them. The only way to stand their ground was to hold onto whatever was stable: education. That saying about your degree – once you attain it, no one can take it from you – wasn’t just about achievement, it was about defense.

What does it mean to admit a part of your very success, the goals you had set for yourself were set forth by a colonized agenda, a strategy to keep a people oppressed, a way to ensure the submission of servants and maids, garbage diggers and farmers, the sick and the dying?

And what made matters worse: I wanted to be perfect in that system.

That elitism, that view from the top from the tower, meant everything. It was never explicity stated as such, but it didn’t need to be. Watching what happened to my mother, without a college degree, a woman who traded in her life in the Philippines for me and my siblings in this country was enough evidence. 29 years of watching the discrimination against her face, her accent, her words, her perspective, her existence in the Midwest was enough lesson for me to want to screw the system by succeeding in it and calling it out on its racist, elitist bullshit. No matter what I felt – in addiction or anger – my plans always included extraordinary measured achievement. I always turned to structured pathways of the academy to prove my worth, “justify my existence.”

Then I found feminism.

"…I was still looking through a really isolated-individual lens in a lot of ways, and so unaware of all the ways privilege would have played out had I continued along that path, breathlessly pursued that book deal in my twenties, etc., etc."

How empowering to find feminism, I first thought. A human organized rallying for equality. And, look! You don’t have to have degrees, it embraces every individual, it both uses and questions theory and can be as personal as it political and as grand as a march or considering the farmer of your daily apple.

I found BFP’s blog when it was simply a gathering place for women of color. This was before I had any knowledge of the dynamics of internet organizing, media justice, or the trouble that could brew with one singular blog post.

To this day, I don’t know if I’m grateful for discovering the feminist blogosphere, something that I partition away from BFP’s blog, or I wish I had never found it. It was where I have laid many foundations of thoughts, but have witnessed more and more arbitrary and useless destruction – and it is competition among women by the way – for book deals, recognition, and speaking tours. It is cleverly covered with labels, “communities,” and learning curves. It has its good moments, but after so many years, the definition of “success” has morphed into a narrow and stubborn party of a few while the majority of women still suffer from sexism and violence. Blogging has the potential to teach and transform, but we’re not ready to accept that responsibility as organized bloggers and writers. That requires something more profound than vision. It takes listening.

Somewhere I found myself writing more and more but feeling less and less grounded, the opposite of my usual catharsis. I began writing about important issues because that’s what I thought mattered to the world, not realizing the world would be much better off if I write about what matters most to me.

In this ridiculous and unbelievably fast internet world, I have come to disengage with the feminist blogosphere as I dig more into my own feminism. The earth of my life, the soil which needs human hands, not my keyboard fingers, needs kneading. I’ve spent so much time confessing my faults that my line of creativity has bounced from productive to masochistic depression, measuring my worth with white, mainstream feminism which I don’t even like or agree with. And it’s not about blame. It’s just more of the same.

The longer I read blogs and the regurgitation of news that consistently licks the ethnocentric boot of US women, the more I am convinced I am on the right path of disengaging, ceasing my own internal battle to publish, publish, publish, and write a book, write a book, write a book.

I want to offer the world a compiled story of my experiences, of my life, not a reaction to my experience with feminism. All of this I now realize, 24 days before my 30th birthday.

The goals I had etched for my 30th were more about finding audiences, not my writer’s voice and building rails for my walking so that I walked straight, head up.

I walk. I walk in circles, with my head roaming the sky, behind my shoulder to see my boot prints in the snow, and sniffling from the cold, Ohio air.

bell hooks puts the geography of her writing into her writing. She asks and centers what it means to write from Kentucky. What does it mean that BFP writes from Michigan, or that Jess writes from LA? Or that most feminist mainstream bloggers write from New York, Brooklyn, or San Francisco? It matters. Our walks, where they lead us, matters.

What does it mean that I long to write from any place but where I am? How have come to be so ashamed of my Ohio place of writing that I feel un-credentialed, as if I have no authority over my own life? How have I come to deny myself in accordance to a colonized agenda as I read about colonization?

By measuring writing with a published book stick, the epiphanies that used to come to me like dreams and orgasms slowed to a dulling halt. No more reactions, no more opinions. Everything I wrote was first sanctified by my excitement and then nullified by a voice that whispered, “What do you know? You’re just another another.”

Another another.

Dreamer. Philosopher. Warrior. Poet. Yearning for truth with dripping insecurities.
And privilege.

That’s what made it even worse. I am a woman of color with intensely rare privileges.

How trite. How boring.

I’m tired of writing disclaimers of my privilege. I’m tired of apologizing. Even as I write that, I'm sure it reads RESISTANCE to acknowledging my privilege. But it's like, no matter what I write about, no matter how much I paint the elephant a traffic cone orange color and acknowledge it, point at it, sit next to it, and then I write my thoughts - someone, somewhere (usually "anonymous") comes in and reminds me, "don't forget - you're a privileged person of color. You don't have that much experience in oppression." Here’s the thing: I don’t know how to acknowledge it any more than I already have. And if I stop acknowledging it, I'm sure someone will call me a "leftoid cunt" again. I don’t want to spend my life writing about privilege. That would be a sardonic tragedy all on its own.

* * *
There is storm in its full state
everyday, plump,
- throbbing red -
birthing another and another
so I have a womb full of wind.

Its carnage bleeds out white women,
my husband, books, and screams,
but I never grow pale.
I have an endless supply of
angry blood, I suppose.

I’m waiting for it to stop.
Waitin’ for the sky to part,
for the rain not to be wet anymore.
I wonder if this is my Call.

To no longer seek the world
and its problems
and Write in observation of war,
but instead
to sift through my own debris
and believe,
with my entire mind
that it is good and I am whole.
And the debris
- the ugly wreckage of life –
is food.
-lfb

* * *

The relationship between health (mental and physical), writing, and practice of both are cyclic in relationship. The only thing that keeps my own destruction – my storm of depression, self-paralysis – in check is movement. That alone may sound unoriginal, but consider the trends of technology and season. The other day, I reached for the door knob before braving the winter, and paused. I could barely sense the skin on my stomach. I didn’t know if I was breathing in or out because it was buried in a bra, camisole, shirt, sweater, scarf, gloves, hat, and enormous parka. The weight and expansive coverage of cloth on my body prohibited movement. And that was just to my car where I would sit again.

My body couldn’t feel itself.

* * *

I waited for the groundhog to say good news.

* * *

Instead of waiting for external sunshine, I wrote this instead.

Bi-Cultural Pinay

This is an essay I wrote for a writing contest whose mission is to uplift the online Filipina image and challenge the destructive online stereotypes of Filipino womyn.  Learn more about the Wikipilipinas: Filipina Stories

Sometimes it is the field between the two roads where the richest soil is toiled.

Where do Filipinas fit in the United States? Where do I want to fit in the United States? Growing up Filipina, bi-cultured, and questioning my identity was an unanswered and fathomless feat. It was not until my mid-twenties when I began to sharpen an under-utilized tool: my voice. Independence, significant relationships, and deepening my career brought a carriage of hard-edged stones as I contemplated heavy issues, such as belonging, ethnicity, sexuality, race, and gender.

I was born and raised with Brown skin and thick black hair in middle-class, blond and brunette Midwest North America. In the classroom, I rebelled against the model minority stereotype in my love of writing, not natural sciences. In any free moment, I wrote poetry, essays, and letters about the world, my world, and dreams of being a journalist. My brothers and I wrestled. I sang Broadway classics with my sister while she played the piano, and my family reunions were legendary in time and food consumption.

Growing up, there were a thousand precious elements of my culture held dear to my Filipina heart, but I related to them differently than my parents. I feared showing my true colors to Philippine-born Filipinas because I didn’t know how to speak Tagalog or dance the Tinikling. I grew up with Filipino food, but I didn’t know how to cook many dishes. I attended Filipino parties and picnics, but did not have many Filipino friends. Belonging to either side was an endless footpath of negotiation and uncertainties.

It can be psychologically, emotionally, and socially destructive to never be fully seen or counted, both literally and metaphorically. Questions about my ethnicity, “Chinese, right?” grew irritating and the proverbial Asian umbrella which grouped Asian women together proved entirely too small for my questions. This enduring isolation led me to separate my Filipina self and operate under conditioned fragments. The more I questioned, the more I unraveled.

Wherever I went, wherever I traveled, the mystery of Filipinas followed. No one really knew what Filipinas were about except what they had briefly observed in the news or the stereotypes projected by popular culture. Filipinas were sexy, docile, domestic workers or mail order brides. They were quiet, submissive, and eager to please. They loved serving their husbands and tending to their children. Filipinas, most importantly, were born in and from the Philippines.

I was none of those things.

I wanted to know who else was out there in the world of Filipinas. In all my education, there were not many resources for Filipina mentors, models, or heroes. In the United States, communities of Filipinos reside primarily in coastal cities, particularly in the west. The majority of programs and opportunities to cultivate and influence the image of the Filipina were never in my grasp. The more I looked into the media, the more I understood how Filipinas were misrepresented. The exploitation, objectification, and sexualization of the Filipina began to hold personal insult and outrage. My angry thoughts grew deafening and eventually unchained themselves from a wall of silence and complacency.

Then, I began to blog.

In the explosion of the online world, blogs have come to hold various meanings and purposes. As it as with any other facet of a corporate driven society, opportunities for financial gain often come at the expense of others. Online businesses have pushed the image of the Filipina as a woman for sale, always ready to meet men, and marry in any circumstance. I contend that any blog, site, or organization that promote ads which feature Filipinas as dependent and/or exchangeable commodity, should be refuted by the entire Filipino community. Our online ethos must commit to decrying this type of marketing and media. If Filipinas do not stand to gain more freedom, respect, and visibility, I will not and do not endorse the blog, site, or organization.

Bloggers need to raise awareness of the social injustices that jail the Filipina spirit (such as global sex trafficking, abuse of domestic workers overseas, immigration issues, and enslaving poverty) and they also need to be aggressive in their denouncement of Filipina commercialization. To enhance the online image is to affirm the authentic presence of the Filipina. It is time for us to come out of the dark with strong voices, accents, poetry, opinions, music, intelligence, theories, and ideas. Bloggers need to do this by promoting work, featuring accomplishments, and highlighting leadership roles held by Filipinas.

My online voice is the one facet of media in which I can contribute to a new definition of the Filipina. She is just like you – filled with conflict, hope, joy, and life. She has a past that rests behind her eyes that holds the power of her foremothers who are presidents, doctors, engineers, poets, mothers, nurses, teachers, policy makers, lawyers, gardeners, and healers. The Filipina is the woman who has risen and fallen in the history of governmental corruption, war, and colonization. She is also the woman who has fought, endured, and organized against oppression. The Filipina is everywhere. She is a powerful force; formed to the contours of her native country, and shaped by whatever citizenship she holds.

As a Filipina blogger, I embrace the opportunity and responsibility to make the unknown known. I accept the challenge to change the online image of Filipinas by introducing my whole self, my own bi-cultured spirit. By expanding the online definition and image of the Filipina diaspora, I hope it transpires into offline empowerment for both myself and other Filipinas around the world.

A Bi-Racial, Bi-Cultural Pinay Sings Maybe

In the musical, Annie, there is a song called, "Maybe." This song frames the small corner in which orphan Annie wonders about the whereabouts and hobbies of her biological parents. Growing up, my sister, an intrinsically talented piano player used to glide her hands over the ivories and order me to sing along in my loud and often off key voice.

Maybe far away
Or maybe real nearby
He may be pouring her coffee
She may be straighting his tie
Maybe in a house
All hidden by a hill
She's sitting playing piano,
He's sitting paying a bill
Betcha they're young
Betcha they're smart
Bet they collect things
Like ashtrays, and art
Betcha they're good
(Why shouldn't they be?)
Their one mistake was giving up me!
So maybe now it's time,
And maybe when I wake
They'll be there calling me "Baby"
... Maybe.
Betcha he reads
Betcha she sews
Maybe she's made me
A closet of clothes
Maybe they're strict
As straight as a line...
Don't really care
As long as they're mine
So maybe now this prayer's
the last one of it's kind...
Won't you please come get your "Baby"
Maybe

While I am most certainly not an orphan, I sang this song frequently enough and loud enough to memorize its words and contemplate its tugging profundity. Singing, I would often try and project how I would feel growing up without knowing my roots, who I belong to, and yearn for a sense of history. Belting the lyrics out time and time again brought me to a deep connection with Maybe. For me and my family, love was never in question, but belonging and history was always in doubt. With two immigrant parents, I struggled for every inch of self-understanding. In my younger years, life was much smoother feigning disinterest and apathy toward my ethnic roots.

In Nadia's deep pool of reflection she asks children of immigrants: Do you think your parents thought that being born in the u.s. means you are outside the influence of their home country/culture? Do your parents think of you as americans? The old truism says that immigrants are in search of a better life for their children; what were your parents seeking for you?

My parents are legal American citizens, but they will tell you that I am all-American. Two worlds, equal in force, combat for my brainpower and loyalty. In one corner is my Filipino-Spanish blood; a living paradox of the colonizer and the colonized beating in the same heart. In my Filipino existence, there is family-centered prayer and religion, loud gatherings, food, rice, music, raucous dancing, and an almost ridiculous disregard for time and deadlines. No home is complete without an altar in the living room, no dinner is worth having unless it's eaten three times over. In my Pinay eyes, mistaken identity is my identity. If not Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian, Vietnamese, Indian, Mexican, Loatian, Malaysian, Samoan, or Native American - then I was rendered invisible. The only place where I ever felt racially understood was with my own family. Not only did my siblings understand what it meant to be Filipino, they understood what it meant to be Filipino-American; to be raised Filipino while living in the United States. That bond, sealed with the most intimate clarity, can never be broken.

In the other corner is my American world. This is the east coast born, Midwest raised existence. This is where I made a salad for the first time in college and began questioning Catholicism. My American identity is the fast driving, fast talking, eye rolling independent
daughter who couldn't stand Filipino summer picnics and hated making eye contact with any other Asian Americans because it was a lightning-quick reminder of the awkward reality that I was more comfortable navigating an all White crowd of folks than connecting with another grrl of color. Back then, even if it's hell, familiarity always triumphed. This side of me that effortlessly understood White society through private schools, privileged friends, also took in the cool absence of any other grrls of color in my White mainstream Midwest manners. She lived in the forefront, elbowing and trying to beat the Pinay out of me. She almost won.

The Pinay, thankfully, overcame. And in the epitome of Filipino spirit did not expel the American out, but, rather, invited her in as a passenger. They both existed in equal position, but only one had the steering wheel.

Endlessly explained in simplistic and binary terms, bi-culturalism is the fusion of two cultures,
yielding a rare lived experience that specializes in multi-understanding, multi-reasoning, and multi-facets. Children of immigrants have a wider periphery than most. It's both a characteristic and reward of our dueling/dualing lives.

When I think about the years I spent in utter anguish and rage, I wonder why. I wonder what would have helped ease my acidic bitterness. It was not so much that I was different, it was more the fact that everyone assumed that I was just like them. The visual difference was evident, my brown skin spoke more across a hallway than anything. In the face of difference, most people just try to comfort themselves by drawing commonalities. Normally, forging connections in hopes of establishing a relationship is acceptable and expected. Over time, however, relentless emphasis on sameness and commonality qualifies the differences as insignificant and dispensable.

There never was or ever will be an entire reconciliation between cultures, tongues, creeds, and lifestyles. After realizing that separateness was no longer necessary, there were no longer two individuals in the car. There is no longer one passenger and a driver, there is only one driver: Me, a conglomeration of two worlds that is not accepted into either world as a whole. Without fluent Tagalog, or trips to Manila, I am a not a "real" Filipino. Without peanut butter and jelly and baseball, I am "foreign" or "exotic."

This country, my country of origin, is obsessed with Black and White as the only two races, as the only racial conflict, as the only communities of conflict. In every experience of academia, media, and social conversation about race, Black and White are polarized to model the dynamics and yawn-boring patterns of racial tension in the US. Shameless in its ignorance, the United States frequently groups Asians in one category, one hand glossing over our black hair and smudging our skin until its all yellow. I am Brown.

The Latino community continuously gains signficant ground, but Asians are the wallflowers of the race conversation. Deemed pleasantly invisible and poetic in distinct features, Asians are Asians and nothing more, nothing less. If we continue to operate in the same outdated model of an umbrella-ed Asian category, I shudder to think of how many lifetimes it will take until bi-racial and bi-cultured issues will come to surface.

I grew up to be my own self translator. To this day, I still walk into every room and automatically survey its occupants, my mind quickly calculating likelihoods, conversations, percentages, and potential detonating bombs. After almost three decades, my intuition is dead on accurate. It is a learned survival skill to know when to relax or guard yourself. Navigating the Midwest as a grrl of color was like a stepping through a mine field. Careful, careful.

My parents did not come to this country to give their unborn children a better life. They came to this country to help their families who were alive and poor, sick and marginalized, stuck and helpless. My parents came to work to send their earnings home, to do better not for themselves but for their immediate families. Selfless, sacrificing, and urgent, my parents reaped the benefits of this country for others, never themselves.

I was sixteen when I attended my parent's naturalization process. Uncertain as to why I was resistant to their American citizenship, I watched with sadness as they proclaimed their allegiance, but could never articulate exactly why. Their legal ties to the Philippines, on paper, were gone. A land I had never seen except through stories of poverty and heat, the Philippines cradled my parents' hearts and loyalties. Today, I see the reasoning as to why becoming a citizen was necessary for them, but the ceremony rang false to me. I kept questioning the logic, "Why not let patriotism be reflected through human service, merit, decency, and dedication, rather than history tests and ceremonies? Why ask my parents to essentially choose between birthplace and home?" It did and continues to seem like such an unjust choice.

My parents were in constant flux in how to let their children be Filipino-American. Only now I can appreciate how difficult it must be to pass traditions along to your children in a completely unfamiliar environment and then watch it simply be considered and sometimes disregarded. The sound of cultures clashing arrives in the form of unasnwerable questions. Is dating in the US better because we have freer sex with less guilt and more condoms? Is American Catholicism better than Filpino spirituality that celebrates family prayer, tradition, and rosaries? Is it better that college students in the US typically blow off their undergraduate experience in favor of beer, experimentation, and spring break roadtrips? Do I lead a "better" life than my parents?

It depends on who you ask. If you ask any US born citizen, they would say that I have a more comfortable, stable, and privileged life. Is that "better?" I don't think so. Is it better to leave home and be considered an American adult at 18 or live with your parents until you are more certain of what you want from life and have latent independance? Is it a better life to live with your elders and learn how to take care of them or send them off to nursing homes and/or hire personal nurses? Is it better to have have endless choices with indecision or fewer choices with less freedom?

I am 28 years old an have been married two and a half years. I am childless and live in city where I do as I please and answer my cell phone in restaurant booths. My mother, by the time she was my age, had flown halfway across the globe to work at the United Nations and attend Columbia for two years while she supported her family and sent her siblings through school. She quit Columbia after realizing her benign-tumored ovaries weren't going to give her the timeframe most woman would have. At 28, she was married with one child and another on the way.

Do I live a "better" life than my mother? Easier, perhaps. Better? I don't know. I've often questioned as to whether I am as strong as my mother. That, also, I don't know. Our lives, cluttered with various obstacles and failings, cannot be compared. I will never know the pain of leaving my country of origin to rebuild my entire life in support of others. And she will never know the unrelenting pain of isolation and misapprehension.

The question of authenticity used to haunt me. The stiff armor built due to racist, belittling degradation and the humiliation of admitting I cannot speak Tagalog once paralyzed me. I now keep a healthy perspective of authenticity, grounded in the Pinay pride I carry; the knowledge that I am a product of two worlds; two mothers who nursed with radically different idelogies and I am not 50/50. I am 100% original, unprecedented, authentic, and rare.

I still wonder about my roots, my history, and whether I will ever truly find belonging. The difference now, when I sing Maybe, is that I am singing in reminicence of how I once was lost, orphaned by a Black/White only debate. I also resist the notion that bi-cultured, children of immigrants are wondering lost and then suddenly, one day, are self-found. We are in constant state of unfolding, each moment bringing more sense and experience to our natural state of bi-plexity. I have always been in this process. The difference now is that I am less afraid.

The Differences Between Womyn

Changed my mind last night and didn't want to. Fell asleep in Adonis' arms. Woke up with my bare back chilled from an unblanketed night of sleep. Looked at the alarm clock. Threw some clothes on. Took my journal to the window and made a list of goals I want to accomplish. Adonis wakes up, kiss goodmorning. I rip off a page of paper and ask him to write his visionary goals. Silence as we both work. We share our goals, laugh over our similarities. MHM! over the new ideas we exchange. Talk about tomorrow's OSU/Michigan game.

Call my sister. Talk about her date. Dish the dirt about Tom. Laugh over how he asked if our family plays board games. Crawl back in bed while we giggle about the impending family stres around the holidays. Check my email. Create a plan for one of my supervisees who is struggling. Send it to my supervisor for edits. Unroll my yoga mat. Stretch.

Eat red berries and Kellogs with vanilla soy. Check my and other blogs. Watch the last 25 minutes of Ocean's 11 on TNT. Send work emails. Throw half of a leftover chicken sandwich on the George Foreman. Fix Adonis a salad while I watch him do laundry.

This is my life for the past 5 hours. I wonder on any given morning, what did you do? What did other womyn do? Every sentence I just wrote is laden with privilege, beauty, and pleasure. That is the morning I have had. Not every morning is like this. Some are worse, some are better. But these are the differences between womyn, the details in our lives. These are the details that shape our feminism, shape our perspective. There are a thousand things I did not list - the events that took place last night and the things I know I will do in 2 hours. The differences lie in the details.

The complexities of the feminist voice are rarely acknowledged to the details. Feminism takes on hard tackles like welfare, rape, racism, immigration, repro rights, etc. But the details of how those issues affect womyn, womyn of color specifically, are rarely told in detail. The womyn who woke up with another womyn. The womyn who didn't wake up. The womyn who never slept. The womyn who can't sleep. The womyn who sleeps too much from depression, medication, sickness, abuse...the differences are in the details.

These details shape our perspective which ultimately shape our feminism. It is indeed an unjust reality that the details that mark the differences between womyn become the lines that divide them. The line influences whose voices are heard, whose details are better to note and easier to read, and whose story is worth more praise.

What did you do this morning? What's your feminist morning?

Simplicity Asks of Feminism

About seven years ago, I began attending a discussion group entitled, "Voluntary Simplicity," that incorporated a slim book collection of writings about simple living. I only attended a few sessions, but the energy and lessons of those thrice attended meetings lingers today.

A few months ago, the connection between feminism and simplicity began to knock around in my head. Simplicity, often confused with "going-without" and "cheap" terms, concerns itself with the center of desire, determining what is most necessary for sustainability and advancement, and then choosing that exact thing. It's about mining toward the gold - whatever that might be - and focusing on that, without frills or whistles.

The companion workbook is excellent. Several authors rouse the readers with essays on consumerism, satisfaction, human need, and fulfillment. It's spiritual in its essence, but it's anything but light. What does that have to do with feminism?

Plenty.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one’s work for peace.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one's work for peace. The frenzy. The activist.

I have been meditating upon these ideas, these ions of brilliance and it leaves me wondering what kind of pupil for peace I have been. As a western-born North American, everything can easily become about production. More, more more, and better, better, better. Even in our strategizing for peace and equality, it soon becomes about awarding the most profound of the profound, recognizing the great art from the art, and advancing forward in our agendas.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one's work for peace.

Choosing one, or a handful of commitments has stood next to impossible. Every time I read, my heart follows the author. In my mind I have been in raided factories with blood-stained walls, I have filled my mouth will soil to stifle my cries after my children were killed in front of me, I have wandered in the streests defeated by schizophrenia. How can an activist choose when there is so much that needs to be done, so many voices that need to be projected?

Then I think of my life, my one, singular solitary life in which I was given, like everyone else, only two hands, one heart, one voice. And like so many others, I am limited by circumstance, resources, and a culture of self-serving apathy regarding the poor and disenfranchised. To make up for what others do not care about, I become a promiscuous activist, wanting everything, but committing to nothing.

It's a frenzy alright. A carousel of passion, fury, pain, and exhilaration. Activism, however, should not be a carousel, it should be walk. A never-ending walk of life that adapts to the speeds and slows of my life, of who I am. The frenzy can burn you out. The frenzy can haze and distort you. What I fear the most of frenzy, is what it can take from you. It takes away hope, potential, and the exchange of ideas.

There is nothing, nothing more sacred to activism than the safe exchange of ideas and honesty.

Simplicity, as outlined by Voluntary Simplicity, questions our human need to hoard and settle. It questions our constantly gathering arms full of berries, shoes, books, lamps, and shoestrings. It wonders aloud, "What do you need?" It asks this of our spiritual, psychological, and material worlds. It prefers a choice that endures through time and mood. Little to do with price, simplicity guides the Conscience to answer to the earth, the environment, the less fortunate, our neighbors. Money, time, technology, farming are all related in our quest for contentment.

As a Feminist Simplicist or a Simplistically Feminist writer, I question my choices. I question my inability to choose. I have taken second and third glances at how many frivolous news and reports ruffle my feathers and I allow myself to be taken away once again, by the carousel. I hve chosen, on numerous occassions, to minimially understand ten issues instead of mindfully engaging in one. There has never been a time where I considered myself to truly know and be known to one thing. Why is that? Am I afraid? If I am, what of?

Last night, I attended a lecture by Vandana Shiva, a stunning author from India who has written dozens of books about the mass food production, corporate globalization, and its impact on the farmers, women, children, the poor, and all of our health. Her latest book (which I have not yet read), Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, is the most current tool in digging up the truth of where our food comes from, why it tastes the way that it does, and discovering who is growing our seeds. From the earth, into our mouths, Shiva delivers bone-quivering truths about the business practices of our leading nations, and the cost to our bodies.

She teaches, "To get rid of immoral laws you must creat moral laws. You must create laws of equality, law of stability. You must create laws that celebrate the eco-friendly and non-violating methods."

I listened, pondering again, simplicity, the art of choice, the expense of peace and non-violence.

"It's like Starbucks Chai Tea. 'Chai' means 'tea.' They just put words together to make it sound exotic. When you order, all you're really saying is 'Tea Tea.'"

The crowd murmurs. No doubt the Starbucks down the street will go down in profit this week.

Some other points Shiva's lecture included is to get rid of convenience; understand the real price of things; ask where the farms have gone; get rid of convenience; question why you eat seasonal vegetables year round; support local growers; get rid of convenience; eat from your community and natural regional harvest. Get rid of convenience.

Somewhere in my path as a feminist activist, confusion of identity and placement clouded my vision. How often have I let myself get swept away by cheaper things like shoes and bananas; how much more often, however, have I let myself get swept away by ideologies that I do not agree with but do not engage in debate? Who have I let grow my feminist food? Who have I taken information from? Whose agenda have I swallowed and what has it done to my body? How many times have I forgotten what I, I want to work for instead of what the world insists is important? Even among, or rather, especially among, feminist circles, how have I supported and expanded my own feminism to be more inclusive, more deliberate, and more relevant? How many times have I stepped aside instead of stepping up because of my inability to reign in my emotions? Passion and emotion are two distinct, and necessary, qualities, but allowing the latter to run free distills the potency of the former.

Frenzy, no more.

No to More.

Confronting Split Women

Confronting Split Women:
Using Asian Feminist Theology as a
Lens for Bi-Cultured, First Generation F/Peminists

Immigration
The Filipino people are the second largest Asian population and one of the three fastest growing demographics in the United States.1 Despite being second in number only to the Chinese, this population remains largely unknown and virtually invisible in the media and public eye. With is history of colonialism, the Filipino people have struggled to sustain its distinct identity, which is influenced, but not determined by Spanish culture and the United States’ long-term military presence.

The story of Filipino women, Filipinas, or Pinays, is richly unique and diverse. Women of Filipino blood face different forms of hardship and discrimination on separate continents, but demonstrate trademark resilience and strength in times of struggle. Under the suffocating blanket of extreme economic poverty, women living in the Philippines are highly susceptible to fall prey to the international migration of female labor – to become nannies, domestic workers, and sex workers around the globe.2 These women go to such measures for the survival of their families or to escape the economic oppression and lack of employment. On the opposite spectrum, other women who migrate to the United States do so for similar reasons, but under drastically different conditions.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought waves of educated and highlight skilled Filipinas to the United States. For whatever winds that brought them to North America, there are cultural characteristics embedded in Filipinas that become implanted in the soil of their new homes. Religion is one of them. Unlike other Asian countries which have various religions and practices, the Philippines is 85% Roman Catholic.3 For of Filipinos, religion is closely tied to cultural roots and practices – praying novenas and rosaries, and creating makeshift altars in their homes. For many immigrant Filipinas, their spirituality can be a source of strength and comfort as they face discrimination, sexism, isolation and a longing for community.4 Certain Filipino spiritual values, especially establishing a close community and extending and accepting hospitality, can assist Filipinas in dealing with these issues that stem from painful immigration, reports Thelma B. Burgonio-Watson, the first Filipina to be ordained as a Minister of the Word in the Presbyterian Church. These values can help Filipinas deal with “the more individualistic lifestyle of the mainstream American culture” as they strive to form their own identity.

First Generation, Bi-culturalism
Today, one in five Americans is either foreign-born or first-generation, the highest level in the history of the United States. 5 As Filipina immigrants have brought or continue to birth Filipina American children in the US, a new era of cultural fusion has begun. First generation,6 bi-cultural children are growing up in a world of schizophrenic messages and conflict of upbringing.

Due to the influx of Filipinos after the Immigration and Nationality Act, more Filipinas are being born on American soil with Philippine-born parents. This is the first generation of bi-cultured individuals inculcated with both eastern and western influenced lifestyles. These women vary in terms of geography, language, and class. As Filipinos remain a largely hidden people in the United States, and because Filipinos are subject to the same patriarchal oppression as the rest of the world, Filipino women and their complexity remain mysteriously unknown.

Isolation plays a large factor in their invisibility. This population of women and their families are isolated for numerous reasons. As the Immigration and Nationality Act encouraged highly skilled and educated immigrants, especially medical professionals, to work in the United States, the children of these immigrants were quickly moved into middle to high class neighborhoods. Unlike some ethnic communities who face socioeconomic hardship and live in close proximity for support and/or necessity, Filipino families, products of Immigration and Nationality Act that brought highly-skilled professionals to the middle to upper class of the United States, are often left isolated and are left to assimilate or survive on their own. Thus, a two fold problem occurs.

Immigrants themselves are forced to navigate the cultural conflicts with transitions while their children are silently marked cultural hybrids and are forced to find answers for themselves. In the privacy of their homes, Filipino ethos – collectivism, religion - are enforced. Outside the home, in school, or with peers, they may experience feelings of being ostracized, racial discrimination, or their heritage is ignored altogether.7 Ultimately, bicultured Filipinos may grow to resent or deny their own ethnic identity because it causes so much confusion and pain.

Problems of Verbal Identity:
Pinayism/F/Peminism vs. “Asian American”
The benign nature of the term “Asian American” often generalizes and blurs the very distinct lines that exist between Asian cultures, especially Filipino culture. The term “Asian,” conjures up the more popular and familiar races of Asia: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. For Filipino Americans, when swept under the term “Asian American,” they experience difficultly in maintaining an authentic identity, especially when the label nonchalantly groups varying peoples and practices under one unifying and non-specific label. When navigating the “Asian” and the “American” components of the label, it might be more accurate and appropriate to insert a hyphen between the two, to represent the merging of two worlds, two distinct globes full of historical roots, practices, and expectation.

Another semantic challenge exists even within cultural vernacular. Filipinas must confront challenge in identifying themselves in their chosen speech when using the letters “F” of “P.” In the seven major dialects of the Philippines, there is no letter “F” in the alphabet.8 This has led to an increasing debate as to whether identify as Filipina/o or Pilipina/o. With over 300 years of Spanish colonization in its history,9 to use the native “P” sound is an avenue of phonetic dissent to challenge the colonizer’s use of the “F” sound.10 Even in simple name, Filipinas must decide how they want to identify.

Pinay is slang in Tagalog, the main dialect of the Philippines, for a Filipina woman; to describe a woman with Filipino descent. This empowering word has evolved to mean many things, but in more contemporary times, it is used to affirm the Filipnas living in the United States.11 Pinayism is one of the first efforts to theorize the contemporary Filipina experience.
As feminism is largely thought to be consumed by White, liberal, middle-class agendas, many individuals across other races, religions, and ethnicity do not identify with the word “feminism” because of its assuming history of speaking for all women’s experiences and western political affiliation. As other critical voices, such as bell hooks who speaks about African American women, have emerged to widen the scope of women’s experiences, Peminism rises. In the echoes of third world feminist theory, peminism resonates with Gloria Anzaldua who advocates for “mestiza consciousness,” which calls for individuals to “[develop] a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity…She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in pluralistic mode. Not only does she sustain contradiction, she turns the ambivalence into something else.” This is particularly appropriate for first generation, bicultured Pinays who experience split lives in their daily existence.

Another strand of separation for Pinays stems from the mainstream, western feminist thought that has segregated the pivotal role and significance of spirituality from the conversation of feminism. A Filipina must seek out alternative tools to deconstruct and find meaning in her bi-cultured identity, which not only includes, but is heavily linked to her religious and spiritual experiences.

Asian Feminist Theology
“There is no one way to do Asian Feminist Theology, and Asian feminist theologians in recent years have increasingly paid attention to their differences, not just their commonalities.”12 This main tenant of Asian Feminist Theology stands as a critical feature for first generation Filipinas negotiating their spirituality, identity, and religious practice in the context of the United States. Asian Feminist Theology is based upon the Asian women’s perspective, but that perspective comes from all over the world, including Asians who have never been to Asia or their mother country.

In one vein, identifying with Asian Feminist Theology, with the forethought that it must come from women living in or having lived in Asia, could be problematic for first generation, bi-cultured Pinays who face discrimination for not being “Filipino enough” (speaking the language, regular visits to the Philippines) or completely American. Some first generation Pinays may not have ever seen land beyond their own state or country, let alone the Philippines or Asia as a continent.

However, an individual will soon come to understand that Asian Feminist Theology is an open invitation that pushes beyond sweeping terms; it is an arena that intentionally seeks a “multivocal” conversation.13 This conversation can withstand and even welcomes the differences of generation and citizenship. Identity encapsulates much more than birthright. It includes the overlapping layers of family history and migration. For split Filipinas who struggle between the individualistic western culture and the culture that promotes the centrality of family and community, Asian Feminist Theology remedies the notion that Filipinas must be one or the other.

There is no one true identity for first generation Filipinas. They exist on the peripheral, translating their own lives at the connecting door of two worlds. They are not just Asian or just American. They are both and more. Asian Feminist Theology may very well be the most hopeful space a bi-cultured Filipina may find in her efforts to find a place that can hold the natural tension of her duality.

In the effort of bi-cultured Pinays to sift through their catholic upbringing in the United States, Asian Feminist Theology stands as a flexible and essential body of re-examination. “Asian feminist theologians find that they have to reinterpret sin and redemption anew in the contemporary context. The traditional emphasis on the individual and spiritual dimension of sin proves to be less than helpful for women. Women are not just sinners; they are the sinned against too.”14

Even though many Filipinas must painfully co-exist with Catholicism and f/peminism, fleeing the Catholic Church is often not a viable or desirable answer. Theologian Rachel Bundang reflects, “I cannot help but see Allan Figueroa Deck’s characterization of Latino theology as similar to my own stance and project. He writes, ‘Among Latinos the unity of the Church does not revolve around the resolution of differences of creed or doctrine…the commitment out of which they write and teach is not so much the confessional…as much as the cultural and social class commitment of their communities, their gente, their pueblos.’”15

F/Peminist theologians must be able to find a place that can hold the exchange, where the goal is not sameness or resolution; where peace is the space that can withstand the action of living in friction. Rachel Bundang asserts, “Theologies and the study of Asian Americans’ religious experiences in the United States are not yet a point where they can even deal with trying to settle on a name like womanist, mujerista, or teologia de conjuto (collaborative Hispanic Protestant theology)…I do not think that naming, in this case, is as important as the struggle to articulate what is yet unspoken, unseen, unknown.”16

Moving the Unknown Forward
What is unspoken, unseen, and unknown is the contemporary spiritual Filipina experience. The American and European feminist movement in the 1970s called for the expansion of the women’s experience by expressing in the written, narrative form. As the attempt to validate Women Studies in the academic realm continues, many have suggested a cease to the narrative, or at least a decrease in using the narrative as a tool for credibility. The narrative, some feminists argue, does not offer empirical data for Women Studies to be deepened or theorized.
The bi-cultured Filipina has yet to be heard, or even asked about her experience. The limited space in which women of color have had for their stories is an outrage and a disservice to all those working on behalf of women’s liberation. Chung Hyun Kyung, an Asian woman theologian, writes, “Throughout my eleven years of theological training, I have written countless term papers and theological essays for highly educated people who were my teachers…I no longer want to write so-called ‘comprehensive’ theology seeking to answer question of privileged Europeans. I want to do theology in solidarity with and in love for my mother so as to resurrect crucified persons – like her – by giving voice to their hurts and pains.”17

According to theologian Rebecca Chop, ‘knowledge is itself always historical, always related to power and interests, and is open to change and transformation.’18 Asian Feminist Theologians argue that because their experiences have been left out of the theological reflection, they must do their own theology.19 For Asian Feminist Theology to advance the narrative cannot be over; it is just beginning.

For bi-cultured Filipinas to become a part of the theological conversation and to fight their own cultural and systematic oppression, they must put their own life stories forward and speak from the marginalized places in which they reside. They must distinguish themselves and affirm their rights to “do theology” by deeply contemplating and offering their split lives as theological testimony and join the Asian Feminist Theology movement to magnify the pieces of their brokenness and strength.

1 United States Census Bureau, 2000.
2 Ehrenreich, Barbara and Horchschild, Arlie Russell. Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Hochschild. 2002.
3 Root, Maria P. Filipino Americans: Transforming and Identity. Sage Publications. Thousand Oaks. 1997.
4 Root, pg 328.
5 Fountas, Angela Jane. Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally. Seal Press. Emeryville. 2005.
6 The term “first generation” has been used to describe both immigrants and also those whose parents are immigrants. For consistency, the term “first generation” is used exclusively to refer or describe individuals who are born in the United States, whose parents emigrated from another country.
7 Root, pg 198.
8 Jesus, Melinda L. de. Pinay Power, Peminst Critical Theory: Theorizing the Filipina/American Experience. Routledge. New York. 2005.
9 Jesus, pg 14.
10 The Spanish colonizers named the islands “lasIslas Filipinas: after Philip of Spain. In 1898, with the American Takeover, the “F” sound was further enforced.
11 Root, pg 14.
12 Pui-lan, Kwok. Introducing Asian Feminist Theology. The Pilgrim Press. Cleveland. 2000.
13 Pui-lan, pg 10.
14 Pui-lan, 80.
15 Pui-lan, 66.
16 Pui-lan, 67.
17 Pui-lan, 28.
18 Pui-lan, 39.
19 Pui-lan, 39.

Domestic in Domestic Violence

It's a common known fact and an irrepressible belief that statistics are more than a bit screwy. They are. They serve nothing more than to be helpful guidelines to indicate a general perception is either true or false.

October is Domestic Violence awareness month, and, let's be honest. The statistics are strewed because of underreporting. If there was a way to document the physical and sexual assaults, stalking, rapes, intimidation, coersion, threats, and abuse - the numbers would be out of this world.

And they are not numbers, they are usually womyn, womyn of color, women of poverty, womyn in incarceration, womyn suffering from addiction, women with mental illness, womyn with disability, transgender, gay, lesbian, transexual, and gender-questioning womyn. Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States.*

I don't agree. Those numbers are too low.

I once worked as a sexual assualt educator and advocate in Aberdeen, Washington. In just 11 months - 11 months - I had worked on almost a hundred cases of rape, incest, sexual assault, stalking, and domestic violence. Of those cases guess how many of those cases were investigated and went through an actual court with a real judge and attorney? One. And he was set free for molesting two young girls.

There are so many womyn whose stories are untold, whose mere survival is a damn miracle because no one could intervene or find resources for these womyn in a decaying town, ridden with poverty and secrecy.

One day, back in the spring of 2002, I received a phone call. A breathy whisper kept calling back to my agency, asking if there was a way to get her federal education loan money even though she plans on not going to class. I couldn't make sense of the connections. "No one knows," is how she describes his violence, his years of keeping her close with threats and beatings. She whispered in description of her background, how her husband will come after her, how he'll twist the story and say she has problems and needs to be found and try to get people to help him find her.

A few weeks later she stopped calling.

A few weeks after that, I noticed fliers going up in the community with pictures of a beautiful young Latina women who was in school and went missing. I began to worry. The language pleaded, "Please help find my precious baby. We just want her safe back home. She is missed."

Immediately, my boss, who had been taking some of her calls as well, recognized her as our caller, "She got the money. The loans came in a few weeks ago. This is her. She got out. This is her husband, trying to find her."

"You don't think that he did something to her and now he's just saying she's missing?"

She shook her head, "No, he wouldn't go to that much trouble trying to put attention on her unless he can't find her."

I slowly began to understand the demonic mind of DV and the courage of the womyn who find a way to escape.

"She got out."

My boss started walking in front of me with a soft smile on her face, a face once beaten down by her own partner, "Good for her."

*Patricia Tjaden & Nancy Thoennes, U.S. Dep't of Just., NCJ 183781, Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey, at iv (2000), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/183781.htm

Only Monied Feminists Allowed to Ponder 9/11

I did a brief search of what came up if you Google "feminism and 9/11" or "a feminist perspective of 9/11." There are two surprises that should not be surprising:

1) There isn't much
2) What is available - you gotta pay for it

Now, I'm no fool. I know that writers and thinkers need to make money somehow. I know scores of feminist writers who are scrimping by and need means to live so they can continue to offer their fem perspectives of cultural issues and global conflicts. However, why am I surprised that all the articles you must pay for are all academic? All scholars? All the ones you gotta pay for are housed in the academy.

No $ = No Reading of Feminist Perspectives of 9/11
Maybe I can't be stimulated cuz I ain't got the bucks to pay for some words.
I get pissed like that.

I'm a thinker. I'm an initiator, but I'm also a young feminist reactor. I need to read to be further stimulated for deeper reflection. There ain't much out there about feminism and 9/11. What do I do on this anniversary?

I don't have much. My skin is stll crawling from 9:03am, 9/1//01. I don't pretend that I have a conspiracy theory or that I even have a feminist approach to what transpired in my country that tragic day. Over six years, I have gathered questions, documentaries, clips of loud politicians, and have stayed away from anyone who supported the war that 9/11 spurred.

i have a small bag of rocks, my divots, my kickings of 9/11 and what my country has done to the world since that fateful day:

I hate what the government has done post 9/11 and has inflicted a war upon a country that has no ties to 9/11. [Stop your Saddam arguments right now, please.]

I do not believe in justifying violence in the Middle East - or anywhere in the world - to liberate women. Liberation via fallacy? No. We are not liberating anyone, we are killing, starving, squeezing the throats of women and children in the poorest areas of the world. Even before 9/11, our nation has imposed sanctions on nations that have thwarted the livelihood of hospitals and social service agencies that provide basic necessities to the people who most need it - usually women with children.

I can't stand Ann Coulter for calling the widows of 9/11 "broads" who were milking the system after their husbands were killed in the line of duty as police officers, EMTs, firefighters, and emergency responders.

I have trouble reconciling the fact that so many citizens believe that our billion dollar military makes our communities safer.

I question how so few us define patriotism for ourselves and leave it to bumper stickers and ribbon magnets.

I wonder when we will suffer further attacks.

My eyebrows furrow when people say that 9/11 proved that our country is not safe. WOC and POC communities are born into a reality where safety is never assigned or assumed.

I wish we all better understood the relationship of utilizing fear of the Al-Qeada as a tactic to bring a country to war.

My memories my friends who could not be faithful to their partners who were serving in Afghanistan and Iraq still makes me nauseous because of all the intimate pain of both people.

Blame is easy these days. I don't blame just one president or one party or one attack or one generation. Violence is rarely a spontaneous act, it is often pre-meditatied, lurking in the minds of the powerful, waiting for the right opportunity to attack.

My Pet Goat became just as symblic as the towers, PA site, and the Pentagon that day.

I still wonder how I was expected to function that day at work.

Osama Bin Laden. Who is this man?

How have so many people forgotten to be one, not as a country, but as a world?

Muslims, religion, radicalism, violence, misunderstanding, violence, misconception, fear, hate, war. Violence, violence.

If I could create a headline tomorrow that signifies what I have seen of my country and many of its citizens since 9/11, it would be: A US-Adopted Mentality: "Out of Sight, Out of Mind"

Remember this: Not Hillary, Michael Moore, Obama, Everybody's Mayor, nor Edwards can fix this.

The most sacred of things are also the most easily tarnished - unity, remembrance, silence, and Truth.

"They" are "us."

Stop making movies about 9/11 that do not entirely benefit those who suffer/ed the most.

Why don't we have flag at half mast during wartimes?

Six years is a scattering of dirt on one of thousands of coffins.