text:
CA+T Center For Art + Thought
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curated exhibition
Empire's Eyes: Colonial Stereographs of the Philippines
Queer Horizons
RaceCraft
Queer Sites and Sounds
Food Worlds
Sea, Land, Air: Migration and Labor
Storm: A Typhoon Haiyan Recovery Project
working blog
The "American imperial photography complex" is an archive that "shaped events and ideas" associated with U.S. empire in the Philippines. — Nerissa Balce
As the ambiguity of "carework" suggests, Filipinos care for the physical well-being of their employers and also those employers' emotional and psychic lives.
Citizenship and belonging
"Citizenship is not just a matter of formal legal status; it is a matter of belonging..." ---Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Colonial and imperial legacies
At a nexus of colonialism and neocolonialism for five centuries, Filipinos confront the legacies of colonial and imperial engagement in their daily lives.
"Filipinos ... did not necessarily move through borders, but rather, borders continually enfolded them." --- Allan Punzalan Isaac
Digital cultures
How have digital and new media technologies created new social and creative possibilities that have transformed the lives of Filipinos and others around the world?
"[Slow violence] is neither spectacular nor instantaneous [but plays out in] a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes." --- Rob Nixon
Food ways
"Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are." -- Brillat-Savarin
Genders and sexualities
"The bare brown bosoms ... were markers of savagery, colonial desire, and a justification for Western imperial rule." --- Nerissa Balce
Everywhere and nowhere, what makes Filipinos who and what they are?
Indigeneity
"We had to find some way not only of retaining, but rediscovering, our culture." -- Joel Jacinto, Kayamanan ng Lahi performing arts group
Laboring at home and abroad
A "labor brokerage state ... actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad." --- Robyn Magalit Rodriguez
Making cultures
"All foreign influences were not adopted outright, but adapted ... just as they were transformed in other areas of culture ..." - Doreen Fernandez, "Why Sinigang?"
Memory and nostalgia
"Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims." --- Judith...
Queer Lives
"Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing." --- José Esteban Muñoz
"The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay." --- Chinua Achebe
Transforming spaces
Filipinos transform, deliberately and accidentally, the spaces that they enter and leave, unsettling national imaginaries and material spaces.
"The 1899 Philippine-American War is not the sort of topic the Filipino public likes to talk about." --- Reynaldo C. Ileto
Aestrid
Filomeno
Alarilla
Yoeu
Alidio
Gentei
Kaijo
Arcega
Ascalon
Nerissa
Balce
Banta
Kuratomi
Bhaumik
Wafaa
Bindra
Burzon
Buxani
Zean
Cabangis
Cabañes
Cabusao
Marylene
(Stephanie)
Camposano,
Choy
Atopos
Counihan
Cuajunco
Peña,
Dizon
Ercilla
Bantigue
Fajardo
Fantauzzo
Gamboa
Yoyogi
Gaspay
Gavilan
Gonzalves
Sifuentes
Henze
(Patsy
laLove)
Igloria
Punzalan
Johannesson
Kiam
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Ji-Song
Farsad
Labbauf
Seung
Legaspi
Libarnes
Liebelt
Linmark
Dindo
Lê
Mackrandilal
Madianou
Brides/M.O.B.
Manalansan
Manalo
Marasigan
Zavé
Martohardjono
Senalka
McKay
Montelibano
Wawi
Navarroza
Tamiko
Nimura
Oracion,
Orquiza
Osterloh
Maghinay
Padios
Peñaloza
Peñaredondo
Pisares
Poethig
Estuar
Magalit
Rosete-Wolfe
Sapigao
Schleitwiler
Echavez
Sicat
Sipin
DeNNiSOmeRa
Songco
Suzara
Nobue
Syjuco
Neferti
Tadiar
Quiray
Takemoto
Takigawa
Teresia
Teaiwa
Tongson
Ueunten
Vernadette
Villote
Namita
Wiggers
Woolfalk
XienHow
Imin
Each installation in the DIALOGUES series brings together a selection of artists, writers, and scholars for a sustained, thematically-driven conversation. Taking place over an extended period and moving between email, Facebook messaging, and other electronic forms of communication, the interlocutors bring their academic, artistic, and personal knowledges to bear on questions and dynamics relevant to the Philippines, the Filipino diaspora, the arts and literature, and beyond.
Tamiko Nimura
Vince Schleitwiler
Break, Burn, Hoard: For an Atlas of Lost Afro-Asian Worlds
How do you write the history of a world that never came to be? How do you map it? In Break, Burn, Hoard, Vince Schleitwiler and Tamiko Nimura reflect on the challenges of recording a lost Afro-Asian imagination. Perhaps what survives in memory--quotations from novels, disappeared neighborhoods, family secrets, the words of a beloved teacher--may be consigned to an archive of flames. In a world on fire, as Walter Benjamin never said, nothing that didn't happen should be regarded as lost to history.
Dylan Rodriguez
Gina Apostol
Joi Barrios
Kale Bantigue Fajardo
Sarita Echavez See
Beyond the Horizon of Death? Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda and Unnatural Disasters
In Beyond the Horizon of Death? Gina Apostol, Joi Barrios, Kale Bantigue Farjardo, Dylan Rodriguez and Teresa Teaiwa reflect on the enabling conditions and aftermath of, as well as the way forward from, Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda's devastating 2013 landfall in the Philippines. Together, their conversation reveals that Haiyan/Yolanda is precisely an unnatural disaster, and they draw on their backgrounds--as novelist, poets and scholars--to connect the ongoing devastation of Yolanda to the US's colonial and military history in the Philippines and to climate change that disproprtionately threatens the Global South. With Sarita See as moderator, they produce a palimsest account of the deeper origins of Haiyan's horrors, and they anticipate the alternative affiliations that could make up what Epeli Hau'ofa calls--as Fajardo and Teaiwa remind us--the Pacific's "sea of islands."
Allan Punzalan Isaac
Nadine Naber
Filipino Workers in the Middle East: Frictive Histories and the Possibilities of Solidarity
The next installation of the DIALOGUES series, Filipino Workers in the Middle East brings together the anthropologist Nadine Naber and literary critic Allan Punzalan Isaac to talk about the many ways in which Filipinos as caregivers have become part of the national family throughout the Middle East. As Naber's experiences with Filipino nannies on the cusp of the Arab Spring and Isaac's analysis of the Israeli documentary Paper Dolls reveal, Filipinos' incorporation into the family is frequently ambivalent and always strategic. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Martin Manalansan, they consider how "frictive histories"—the distinct histories and experiences that trail migratory bodies into sometimes uncomfortable contact—mediate and complicate the possibilities for worker solidarity between Filipinos and Palestinians who are variously and unequally deployed by the Zionist state in its construction of racial and geographic hegemony.
UPDATE: On March 23, 2014, Dr. David Lloyd interviewed Dr. Allan Isaac and Dr. Nadine Naber about the situation of Filipino and Filipina guest workers in the Middle East and Israel. The interview was broadcast by SWANA Region Radio (KPFK 90.7fm in Los Angeles, CA).
You can listen to the interview here
Spring-Fall 2013
Karen Tongson
R. Zamora Linmark
Theodore S. Gonzalves
Migrant Musicians: Filipino Entertainers and the Work of Music Making
Migrant Musicians: Filipino Entertainers and the Work of Music Making brings together Theodore S. Gonzalves, R. Zamora Linmark, and Karen Tongson in a conversation moderated by Sarita Echavez See. Informed by their creative and scholarly work and by their own histories and experiences, they reflect on how Filipino musicians have circulated as part of a global entertainment industry. Their discussion ranges from their family memories and mythologies about music's transportative power to their encounters with the legal realities of Filipino musicians' experiences as overseas contract workers. As See remarks, the processes of migration and survival transform "living song into living labor" — a process that can disguise and deny the work that undergirds the making and feeling of music.
Tamiko Nimura, Vince Schleitwiler
From: Vince Schleitwiler
Via: E-Mail
Subject: Get lost with us!
This past fall, I had the good fortune to do a residency at this site, producing a couple of rambling serial essays for a blog I called "City of Refuge." I was still recuperating from finishing a book, but the blog let loose all sorts of questions which I've been chasing around ever since. Afterwards, the team here at CA+T graciously agreed to host this dialogue with the writer Tamiko Nimura.
Elsewhere on this site, CA+T explains that its mission "takes the Philippines and Filipinos around the world as a point of departure—rather than a point of arrival—for bringing into focus and understanding other histories, spaces, and communities." It is a testimony to the capaciousness of CA+T's vision and the genius of this diasporic perspective that a pair of stealth, mixed Asian Americans could find refuge in these digital halls, to bond over our shared Japanese American heritage. The constitutive absences of JA heritage—of its intimate histories and public memory—operate like a kind of black hole at its center, even as its centrifugal desires spiral across all manner of lost Afro-Asian worlds.
(For what it's worth, the one with a German name is half-Nikkei, and the one with the Japanese name is half-Pinay.)
What begins as a meditation on our shared investments in recording the elusive stories of the Afro-Asian century becomes, by the end, a deliberate preference for the condition of being lost, for taking refuge in an archive of flames. Just because nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history does not mean that everything hidden is seeking to be found. And if remembering will never suffice to save all those worlds that are forever coming and going, you can still learn to ride the surge and swell of memory's longing out toward its farther shore.
So this exchange ends—if you are prepared to follow us that far!—with a call to collective action, half-formed but entirely sincere: we would like you to write back to us, for we are interested in making something together and we are looking for collaborators. But this ambition to imagine something as encompassing as a map of lost Afro-Asian worlds becomes apprehensible to us only by means more intensely personal—contemplating the traces of family, or of whatever broken contraptions of intimacy and dependence that carry you here and there in their own blind and weaving course.
This dialogue is dedicated to my late grandmother, the time-traveler Rose Noda Tajiri, who in the long years before her death released her memory to the air like an uprising of birds.
Subject: "All organizing is science fiction"
Dear Tamiko,
One of the great pleasures of my residency with CA+T was that it allowed me to have conversations with folks that I should have been having for years. And I was thinking about your writing and your interests throughout that project, because, in all kinds of ways, I've been following in paths you've travelled ahead of me for many years now.
As you know, I'd planned a project on "Lost Afro-Asian Worlds"—about the ways that black and Filipino people understood their futures, in relation to each other, as they made their way around the planet in the 20th and 21st centuries. Right from the beginning, the project took a more personal turn, and so I included Japanese Americans in the story, as well.
This writing took me in other unexpected directions afterwards, but at its core, I think it was about taking the imagination seriously as a historical force. "All organizing is science fiction," after all, as Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have pointed out.
This means taking seriously everything that's supposed to be just imaginary, as opposed to real: grand plans that fell apart, dreams that were betrayed, errors of memory that should have been corrected, homesickness and nostalgia for times and places one doesn't even pretend ever existed.
And then my residency ended, before I had a chance to follow any of the unexpected openings the writing made for me—speaking of grand plans! But lost worlds are lost for a reason, I guess.
How does this look from where you stand?
From: Tamiko Nimura
Subject: Whatever happened to Third World solidarity?
Dear Vince,
I really love the idea of taking the imagination seriously as a historical force. I'm grateful that you think you've been following me, but I think of you as companion more than follower. Some historians are going to be upset with us, I'm sure, but I've always thought that history had its greatest power for me in the last part of the word, "story."
Believe it or not, I actually woke up the other night, thinking, "what does the lost geography of the Afro-Asian century look like?" Or rather, I think it was "what does it feel like?" To say that it's lost somehow implies that we had it in the first place, and misplaced it. The Afro-Asian century feels fleeting. It feels like longing. It feels lost—but I agree with you—it's one of those geographies of loss that are made more legible by their absence.
For me, as you know, in grad school the Afro-Asian century looked like so many small but crucial moments of coalition, moments that are both hopeful and fraught: the moment in Toni Cade Bambara's novel The Salt Eaters when an African American character mentions camp history, or where a character asks, "whatever happened to Third World solidarity?" The moment when soon-to-be-failed politician John Kwang says in a campaign speech, "I am speaking of histories that all of us should know." Janice Mirikitani's poems to her Afro-Asian daughter in her book Shedding Silence. Or it looks like interracial friendships and relationships: Chris Rock and Jackie Chan in Rush Hour. More recently: the young adult novel Under A Painted Sky, about a Chinese American and an African American, both teenage girls on the run and cross-dressing in the Old West. In thinking about the Afro-Asian century, I think I wanted to stay (unfortunately) at the level of individuals. DuBois and Mao. Yuri and Malcolm. I held up pictures of these figures and moments and kept them at the level of "holidays and heroes." My atlas was beautiful, if incomplete—but the fact that it existed at all? For that I'm indebted to two of my most influential professors, Johnnella Butler and Ron Takaki.
Rarely has the Afro-Asian century looked like anything as epic and cohesive as a century or a geography, which is maybe part of your point. What I keep forgetting is that the Afro-Asian century also looked like the Los Angeles 1992 uprising, like Hisaye Yamamoto's short story "Wilshire Bus," the story you mentioned. It looked like rupture.
What has the Afro-Asian century looked like for you?
Subject: The flames of memory
Hey, it's such a joy to hear an old teacher's voice out of the blue! When I read what you wrote about history and story, even before you mentioned her name, I could hear Johnnella Butler, years ago now, introducing Ron Takaki at the University of Washington. History is nothing if it does not burst with telling! What does the Afro-Asian century look like to me? It looks like Dr. B and Ron Takaki, on an auditorium stage, speaking in at least two or three languages at once, and telling the truth in all of them.
But it feels like a tear in the fabric, a rupture or gap or opening, edged all around with extravagant hope, so from one side it looks like loss and on the other it looks like possibility, and the feeling sometimes makes you forget which side is which.
Which reminds me of something you wrote recently, in your interview with the writer and illustrator Allan Say. You wrote that your oldest daughter (ten already!) was curious about an episode in one of his memoirs where he burns his sketchbooks. I was just as interested in what she thought of that as I was in Say's answer! And I couldn't help thinking about that inevitable scene, in all kinds of stories about the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II, where parents burn or bury their family heirlooms—objects associated with Japanese language or culture that might enflame suspicion, as well as treasured possessions they'd rather destroy than leave behind.
Fans of Asian American literature might also recall Frank Chin's story about rediscovering the novelist John Okada, just a little too late. For, when they finally found his widow, Dorothy, she told them she'd recently burned his unpublished second novel because no archive would take it. And then again, I think about how writers like Hisaye Yamamoto and Cynthia Kadohata transform this trope of immolation into scenes of conflagration—of the destruction of property in urban racial uprisings—which is something I've tried to write about elsewhere.
I'm a bit of a hoarder, myself, so I love archives. But I can't help but admire whatever it is in a person that is willing to release beloved objects to destruction. (And not for the sake of tidying up! That austere, serene, charmingly ruthless aesthetic from Japan that Westerners always imagine as life-changing magic—nothing else makes me feel so hopelessly Japanese American. I dream about it too, but I come from people who ride buses with more bags than hands.)
What did your daughter finally think, about Allan Say, if you don't mind my asking? What do you think?
Subject: On hoarding and survival
It's funny, I didn't make that connection to Say burning his sketchbooks and JA's burning their family papers before camp. But as Say wrote, the pictures were probably better in his memory than they are now. C really liked his response, and it made sense to her. I'm not sure I would have been able to burn my own sketchbooks, but you know, he had to give up so much in those early years of his life, it makes sense that he had to travel light.
I'm a hoarder, though I've been struggling with that. However, there is something to the hoarding mentality that speaks of loss and even trauma. So many of my family members on both sides are hoarders, and I understand that better now. Having lost so much in one chapter of a life can mean that you cling fiercely to what you have in your new chapter, even stockpiling as if to prepare for future loss.
Say also represents for me another pocket of Japanese American history that needs more representation: the stories of those who came from Japan after camp. Those who did not have camp as the touchstone of their history, for better or worse. A little while ago I wrote a profile of the Japanese American artist Fumiko Kimura, and one of the things that moved me the most was just how similar she was to my Nisei aunties, but different—she was allowed (or carved) a great deal of creative expression in her life. I wondered how different their lives would have been, had they too been allowed by space and time and circumstance to be creative beyond survival.
I think about survival a lot as I'm writing about my Filipina mom, too.
Subject: A gang of orphans
Oh, that photograph of your mother in the Philippines is haunting, almost abstract. And you write about it so beautifully that when you stop, it's wrenching. I was letting myself be carried along, expecting more to come, and then all of a sudden I was left with almost nothing of her story, realizing I'd taken for granted even the few details I'd already been given. Which is how memory works in families, of course. A story breaks off in the middle and you can wait decades to hear more.
(And what if the continuation makes your life or lives different after all? What if the story can alter space and time and circumstance? What you said about your Nisei aunties sent me back to Audre Lorde's "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," and now I'm hung up on her question, "who else will feed them?")
I was fascinated, too, by the way the picture's unsettling resemblance to you as a child carries you into a world you have to invent within the walls of your mother's silence about it.
I thought of all the times I've seen my mother's eyes and expressions in my own daughter, of course, and then of books I've read to her where kids imagine that their own parents turn into children in order to play with them. And I realized that I used to be too quick to dismiss grown children for inventing pasts for their parents, to fill whatever silences their parents have handed down to them.
Which reminds me of Shawn Wong's gorgeous novel Homebase, whose protagonist loses his parents in childhood and comes of age by dreaming of their lives and the lives of his ancestors, and then I think of how Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel riffs on his story, making its subtext explicit: what was Asian America but the reckless imagination of a gang of orphans?
Maybe all the stories folks invent and all the clutter they accumulate in those spaces of absence in family memory aren't meant to fill them, but just the opposite. I imagine that, for a Nisei who spent the war in Japan, the story of camp must feel like a strange gap. It does for me.
Subject: Story as possibility
(Yes—the story does alter space and time and circumstance—isn't it the way we make sense of things? and the act of making sense makes us act differently in the future? But maybe that's just my literary optimism? Or maybe it is a belief, both concrete and abstract, in another part of that same Lorde essay: "Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy." What about story as possibility?)
Oh, and the photo of my mom? What I wrote about the picture is really a peek at the novel I'm writing about my mom's adoption and emigration from the Philippines. So many levels of family secret-keeping went into her adoption. So you'll have to stay tuned for more. But I'm glad you're intrigued.
Cryptically yours,
Subject: Where I'm from
Well, now I know we're onto something. I'll be waiting to hear more about it, patiently or not. Family secrets! Funny how everyone thinks that keeping secrets is something their own family does, more than any other. I have some relatives who think that keeping secrets is a Japanese American thing, or a Japanese thing, and others who think it's a Catholic thing. Shame, keeping secrets, drinking, hoarding, being bad about time—everyone always blames these things on the people they came from, whether that's family, ethnicity, nationality, religion, what have you.
It's not that some families have secrets, it's that some secrets will make a family.
And that's why families always need someone to come along, every now and then, to let those secrets free. A family that keeps its secrets too long is pretending not to be broken, and any family that pretends it has never been broken can only be a trap.
That photo made me think of the work of Lynda Barry, the cartoonist and all-around visionary, whose comics have been a part of my world since I was a kid. I think I've told you that it was only years after I began reading her that I realized that these comics were about growing up in Beacon Hill in Seattle, in the kind of multiracial poor West Coast city neighborhood that barely exists anymore.
In Barry's work, her mother, and her family history, is mostly unknown territory. But I think she's used the term "lost worlds" to talk about her own childhood. To me, neighborhoods like Beacon Hill are like a lost homeland—my grandfather grew up in a part of L.A. that was very similar, decades earlier. And I only heard second-hand, after college, that my mother had described our neighborhood in Chicago, Rogers Park, as the first integrated neighborhood in the city. (Some folks claim it's the most racially integrated neighborhood in Chicago. Faint praise, for sure—but I still miss it.)
Subject: Where we begin and end
Secrets and families—yes. Since my Filipina grandma was Catholic, that means I've got Catholic secrecy on top of JA secrecy! It's a wonder—or perhaps it makes perfect sense—that I chose writing as a profession.
Your comments about Lynda Barry—who I've just come to know as a stealth Asian!—reminded me of the Asian American newspaper GIDRA. I wanted to wrap up our conversation for now by talking a bit about that. I remember seeing it in college archives in the 1990s—you called it something like "a sacred text," and that's what it was for me too. Pan-Asian, "Third World" Sansei activism, documented and fierce. I have an odd sort of nostalgia for that movement, thinking that I was born too late for that wave of activism. That's a lost world for me.
Thanks to serendipity, Densho's post that it's digitized the GIDRA archive came across social media just as I was writing my letter to you. Here's a statement from Mike Murase, one of GIDRA's de facto archivists, talking about Manzanar.
Manzanar has no geographic boundaries and is not bound by time. Manzanar exists today … in many forms, in many places. And in each, the people must work together to insure that it will not go unnoticed and unchanged.
Replace Manzanar with "Afro-Asian century," and I wonder if that's something that we can use to begin. That it's about taking each moment as it comes, in its form and place, and working together to make sure it's not unnoticed. So in that sense, the lost Afro-Asian century is, as you've said, a work of the imagination. But we're literature readers and scholars and now writers. The imagination is where we begin, even if it's where we might not end.
Subject: Everything that comes after the ending
Let's not-end here, then—in the middle of the kind of time loop that writing always is, because you started writing that last message before I published the last entries on the blog in December, thinking of Mike Murase's words, and somehow months have passed, and that beginning became the end of our exchange.
And let's not-end with a promise: somewhere in our side conversations as we were composing this correspondence, you said, "we need an actual Afro-Asian lost world map." I love this idea! We need to make one—one, two, three, many maps!
All those worlds—the fleeting "Negro-Nisei" civil rights coalitions after WWII, the Third World student movements, '70s-'80s women-of-color feminism, the segregated neighborhoods of West Coast cities before the 60s, the forgotten darker-races internationalists of the interwar Midwest—ended for a reason. But coming up through Third World nostalgia as a student of color in the multiculturalist '90s taught me what a culture of solidarity could be. A bunch of people working on a giant map!
(Clare Counihan, part of the collective brilliance that is CA+T, has tactfully pointed out several continent-sized holes in the map we've been sketching: what about indentured Indians in South Africa, what about the expulsion and continued cultural presence of Uganda's Asians? what about the turn towards a "trans-Indian Ocean" historiography, black internationalism in the South Pacific, and all the reverberations of Bandung and non-alignment that cast U.S. people of color as lost provincial cousins? what about Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, she asks, or Achmar Dangor's Bitter Fruit? This is why we need so much help, to see all the rabbit-holes beneath our feet!)
Earlier, you quoted The Salt Eaters: "Whatever happened to Third World solidarity?" It's a lost world! Let's all get lost together.
If you've made it this far and you're still with us, then in some way you must be partly responsible: we're serious now about trying to build something together. How do you find a way to a lost world?
Would you be interested in helping us create a map? several maps? an atlas? a calendar or timeline? What does your culture of solidarity look like? What memory or strange dream has stayed with you, all this time, coming back to you over the air like an evening breeze or a muffled phrase of music? Tell us, write to us! Where have you seen ruptures?
—Vince and Tamiko
Dylan Rodriguez, Gina Apostol, Joi Barrios, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Sarita Echavez See, Teresia Teaiwa
From: Sarita Echavez See
Wednesday, December 4, 2013, 7:49 PM EST
Subject: CA+T Dialogue about Haiyan
Dear Teresia, Dylan, Kale, Joi and Gina,
Thank you so much for agreeing to take part in this CA+T Dialogue over email (or Facebook, if folks prefer that). It's such an honor to bring this particular circle of teachers, scholars, and artists together.
But first I want to send deepest condolences to Kale Fajardo on the recent loss of your mother. Kale was able to travel to the Philippines at the end of last week in order to be by his mother's side. She lost that struggle this past Sunday, but she departed while surrounded by her family. Kale: I thought long and hard about whether or not to disturb you during this time of loss. Please feel free to completely ignore this email thread. However, as I've learnt from my own experience dealing with losses in my own family, it can be good to take a break and reconnect with one's community of colleagues, even or especially amidst grief. So I'll leave it entirely up to you as to whether or when you'd like to join our conversation.
In the face of the incomprehensible loss, displacement, and trauma wreaked by Haiyan/Yolanda, I appreciate being able to reach out to the five of you. With this conversation, I hope to draw on our collective hearts, talents, and minds so as to learn from and teach each other about the unnatural histories and conditions that created Haiyan/Yolanda and its aftermath. We then will publish this installation of DIALOGUES on CA+T's website so as to provide the broader public with the kind of alternative knowledge and perspectives that we are so desperately in need of. With the waning of the media's attention, we also hope that the publication of this Dialogue will draw renewed attention to the kinds of relief efforts that demand our continued support and donations.
By way of introductions, Gina Apostol is a novelist. Joi Barrios is a poet, Filipino language instructor and author, and former dean at the University of Philippines. Kale Fajardo is an interdisciplinary anthropologist and queer studies scholar. Dylan Rodriguez is an ethnic studies scholar, and Teresia Teaiwa is a Pacific studies scholar.
I'd like to open up this Dialogue with a prompt for Gina about Jenifer Wofford's work: What do you make of the other's renditions of Douglas MacArthur? Jenifer Wofford's series of drawings, MacArthur Nurses, appeared in Sea, Land, Air: Migration and Labor and explicitly recreates MacArthur's 1944 landing. In your work you have referenced the history of General Douglas MacArthur and the statue in Tacloban commemorating his 1944 return to the Philippines. You also recently wrote the essay "Surrender, Oblivion, Survival," which helped me to remember how Leyte "has always attracted opportunists" and has multiple histories of plunder and invasions.
I look forward to seeing where this conversation takes us.
With my respect and gratitude,
From: Gina Apostol
Thursday, December 5, 2013, 9:25 AM EST
Subject: Re: CA+T Dialogue about Haiyan
I have just finished watching a video of the independence rites of the Philippines, July 4, 1946, while researching this new novel I am writing, William McKinley's World, and it was interesting to see that the speaker at the center of the independence hoopla is not Paul McNutt, the ambassador and stand-in for Harry Truman at the rites, or Manuel Roxas, the new president (take that, Back to the Future in the Philippines—he's the granddad of that bumbling botcher of the relief efforts in Tacloban, Mar Roxas!). The man of the hour who gives the speech that the newsreels repeat is Douglas MacArthur. He is smarmy, teary, sincere, and terribly troubling and, to me, repellent all at the same time.
I grew up with MacArthur, as I always say—with MacArthur, Imelda [Marcos], and typhoons. A trifecta of horror, I could call it, except that I liked the typhoons. We used to practice what we called "playground dancing demonstrations" for the rites of remembrance of Leyte Landing: October 20, 1944, a date I'd remember in sleep. We'd be trundled in cleaned-out garbage trucks to dance for the Americans, old soldiers who always mispronounced the name of the city, plus of course Imelda, who liked to go home to Leyte to do the honors, it seems (she was not there all the time, I imagine, but in my recollection she hovered over my childhood in Tacloban, her bibingka of hair always finding its way home, at our school's Christmas pageants, being our alumna, and so on).
Anyway, what struck me watching that video is how central, in an absolute way, without any question about its rightness, Douglas MacArthur is—the man of the hour on our day of independence. I understand the event's closeness to war, which makes him the star: World War II has just ended, and thus, the event has an emotional misreading—that our link to our independence is the war, as if this day were a culmination of the American and Filipino response to our recently dead and the horrific suffering we have just come through, though of course Tydings-MacDuffie had already set the independence date in the thirties. (I will not go into the betrayal and history of revolution in the country that makes this independence day, given "voluntarily" by America, problematic, as that is a different though corollary angst.)
But why does the prominence of MacArthur make my skin crawl? That is the question I would ask the scholars, as I am still quite unclear, aware as I am of my own biases being a kid who grew up with a chip on my shoulder about MacArthur, a crummy statue I could not stand. My reasons, if I spoke them, might need a novel, not a polemic. I was horrified on Tacloban Yolanda online sites, just after I had finished writing that op-ed in the [New York] Times, to see the reactions of the people of Tacloban to the arrival of the American carrier on Red Beach, MacArthur's Leyte Landing beach, this November [2013]. People made instant Facebook collages of MacArthur wading into Tacloban side by side pictures in the Times of the US aircraft Carrier George Washington and its soldiers; the Tacloban instant posters repeated, Thank you, America, MacArthur returns! I tried to save those pictures, should have made screen shots; they have disappeared from the sites (the Yolanda Update people cleaned out the weird politics, it seems), but here is a video of MacArthur's speech in 1946: his voice quavers as he speaks of his love for the Filipinos.
My initial, knee-jerk answer to my question to you, Sarita, about why MacArthur and why he makes my skin crawl, has to do, I think, with the way my own city has long responded to this bipolarizing American vision, which in some ways makes us schizophrenics of history—just as it has responded to the Marcoses and stuck with Imelda's family, the Romualdezes, all these years. All these histories are somehow connected, a primordial goop of blindness and dysreadings of self and time. I keep having to deal with the historical oblivion that commands the place I am from and the contortions in a heart and troubled brain that must try to understand and love my city all the same. I am part of our blindness, I imagine, too.
So maybe for me, it is my city's rendition of MacArthur, which may be a pervasive Filipino rendition, I am not sure, that is the "other's rendition" here that I am grappling with. For me, there is always the "other" in us Filipinos, the voice of the colonizer and history of power that is also ourselves, part of us, that we must constantly struggle to recognize, deconstruct, resolve, if not vanquish.
Friday, December 6, 2013, 5:29 PM EST
I'm blown away by your email, your description of the horror called up in you (and, certainly, me) by the creation and circulation of different renditions of MacArthur and how that manifestation of colonized gratitude and oblivion might just be part of what Dylan has called the "Filipino condition." To me, that condition has much to do with the history of defeat, and that's why your essay, "Surrender, Oblivion, Survival," has resonated so powerfully with so many. By that, I mean that when peoples experience defeat, there is the kind of sweeping, utter loss from which it is not possible to recover. And though, as a cultural critic, I am committed to and I believe in the power of the importance of learning how to notice and cherish the traces of that loss, the larger context is that history of defeat.
Gina's email reminds me of how, in the introduction to his book Suspended Apocalypse [University of Minnesota Press, 2009], Dylan compares the unnatural disasters of Huricane Katrina and the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. Dylan: Would you mind talking about what you mean by "suspended apocalypse" and why you specifically chose Katrina and Pinatubo as illustrative events (or structures)?
Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 7:09 PM EST
Via: Facebook
Gina -- I also wanted to clarify that by asking you about "the other's rendition" of MacArthur, I was wondering what you thought of Jenifer Wofford's series of drawings called MacArthur Nurses. Here's a link so you can see what they look like.
From: Dylan Rodriguez
Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 5:21 PM EST
Subject: Haiyan/Yolanda/Beast
Hi Sarita and everyone, here is my contribution:
Haiyan/Yolanda is what we call it, but the tracks of death defy compartmentalization. The beast of racial colonization is a conquest that sees no end, at the same time that it is perpetually declaring victory. It is precisely this circuit of TOTAL VIOLATION—of spirit, intimacy, land, knowledge, physiology—and ABSOLUTE VINDICATION—of "rationality," "democracy," nation-state sovereignty, military hegemony—that constantly devastates any attempt to secure a "Filipino/a" identification with the United States that does not also bring one back into a relationship with the terror of complete subjection, including deferral to the long colonial ascendancy of global white life. Sarita has asked me to think about the notion of suspended apocalypse a short four years after the book's publication, and this is how I both resonate and reinterpret its meaning.
I worked in Suspended Apocalypse to frame an analysis that begins to illustrate the unshakeable connectedness between state violence, racial-colonial genocide, and Filipino/Philippine intimacy with instant and unexpected (though never completely unanticipated) death. My struggle in the final chapter of that book (Sarita: small correction, this discussion wasn't in the book's intro, it was in Chapter 5) was to make sense of how state- and human-planned ("natural") racial disaster flows into perhaps unexpected confluences with anti-Black genocidal logics. I was trying to mark "natural disaster" as a force through which racially marked, Black places and people (from Black Americans in the Lower Ninth Ward to Aeta/Negrito peoples on and around Mt. Pinatubo) are seemingly instantaneously differentiated from all others, in the process of being ("naturally") subjected to a complete disordering of life, ecology, body, health, and community.
At the time of that writing, the social aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was only beginning to crystallize as a mind-numbing dispersal and strategic liquidation of Black life in the Gulf Coast region (and New Orleans in particular). This moment forced a deep reflection on how the political and popular narratives of destructive natural forces are inseparable from the long historical processes through which certain (Black, enslaved, colonized) populations are targeted by an ensemble of state, cultural, and structural forces for some form of planned obsolescence (per the teachings of Native Hawai'ian liberationist Haunani-Kay Trask).
Here, then, is the urgent point I was trying to make to all of us who identify in some way as "Filipina/o": that the grounds of our identification are formed in a relation to American modernity (including, but not limited to, the modern United States itself) that continually proliferates and amplifies the genocidal logics of race and that produces delineations of counter-Filipino identification (including within the Philippines) that emerge with a vengeance in the moments of (natural) disaster and acute terror.
What if the complex ideological, economic, cultural, military, and epistemological structures of global-colonial white supremacy were understood as constituting and permeating (rather than merely "colonizing" or otherwise opposing) the integrity of Filipino/a social life and identity, in its local and diasporic forms? The Aeta/Negrito position, in the context of Mt. Pinatubo, explodes Filipina/o identification by forcing it to confront how it is secured within the planned obsolescence of the Philippine Black Native. I am convinced that if this confrontation is inhabited as a form of political possibility rather than a surrender or fatal concession, there may emerge forms of radical praxis against this beast that uninterruptedly stalks.
There is, in this sense, a politics of struggle that can and must be articulated through the generally symbiotic but sometimes divergent power relations of race and colonization/ colonialism. Let's be clear about that.
(P.S., fuck Douglas MacArthur.)
Thursday, December 12, 2013, 12:52 PM EST
Subject: Re: Haiyan/Yolanda/Beast
Thank you for this, Dylan. A beast, indeed.
Joi: I know you were traveling, but would you like to pick up on either Dylan's account of the "beast of racial colonization" or Gina's account of the horror surrounding the various renditions of Douglas MacArthur? Alternatively, I know that you and Lucy Burns were interviewed and then completely censored by an NPR [National Public Radio] journalist just days after Haiyan hit. What happened with that interview—about faith and religion, right?—that went nowhere?
Thursday, Dec 12, 2013, 1:19 PM EST
Hey, guys, I was censored by NPR too!!
I want to hear about this NPR thing!!!
Monday, December 16, 2013, 6:08 PM EST
Joi! Hoy!! Are you still there?
From: Joi Barrios
hi Sarita,
I am a loser … pramis … will contribute … I am just finishing all the materials for my excellence review (this is my sixth year at [the University of California] Berkeley as a Lecturer) so I can keep the job. the committee is meeting on Friday …
thanks …
Joi,
You are, of course, not a loser. You are "excellent"!! Good luck finishing up your materials, and sending you all the best with your review. UCB is so lucky to have you and they should know that. When the dust settles and you have the time, please do send along your account of what happened with NPR.
In the meantime, I warmly invite other folks to jump in and either reply to Dylan and Gina or start a new thread. Thanks again, everyone, for being part of this!
P.S. I will have intermittent internet access for the next two weeks. So I apologize beforehand my slower response time and for the automated vacation response that my email program will be sending out.
From: Teresia Teaiwa
Wednesday, January 8, 2014, 11:12 PM EST
Subject: CA+T Dialogue
Kia ora [hi!] from Aotearoa New Zealand, and warm wishes in the New Year to all of you. Especially those caught in the polar vortex at the moment. I hope that Kale will also join the conversation soon, too … as he is the only one of you that I know personally. I've been inspired by glimpses of the celebration of his mother's life via Facebook. May she rest in peace.
I've followed the conversation so far with great interest and a certain amount of awe. I was especially riveted by Gina's NYT article, "Surrender, Oblivion, Survival." It's going to take me a while to articulate a fuller response to what I've understood so far and how I see it resonating (or not) with discourses around climate change and natural disasters in the Pacific Islands region east of the Philippines. I think it will be inevitable as well for me to make some comment and comparative observations on intellectual history, culture, language and the proximities and distances between Filipino Studies and Pacific (Islands) Studies both in and outside of American academe, and I'd also like to share some preliminary thoughts on the alternative possibilities for thinking opened up by Filipinos and other Pacific Islanders in diasporic communities outside of the US. But for now I just wanted to pipe in to say I'm still tuned in, and ruminating.
Salamat,
Friday, January 10, 2014, 4:38 PM EST
Thanks so much, Teresia, for this. I would love to hear you spin out your thoughts especially on the kinds of proximity (intimacy?) and distance that work and don't work when it comes to the crucial comparative work that we need to do and that, in my opinion, no lone person can do. Hence, this kind of collective dialogue and rumination!
Joi! Happy New Year! Know that I'm still so curious to hear about what happened with the NPR journalist if you have time to share.
From: Kale Bantigue Fajardo
Friday, January 24, 2014, 12:14 PM EST
I'm writing to you from the Heart of Indian Country in the Indigenous homelands and waters of the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples in historic Phillips neighborhood where I live among Natives, Refugees, Immigrants, Working and Poor People, and some white folks. Phillips is one of the most racially diverse and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Minneapolis, [Minnesota,] by the way. And I'm telling you all this because I want to situate myself in/on Native Land and where I am in relation to multiple racial diasporas.
I appreciate everyone's patience with me. I know I went AWOL [absent without leave], but my Mother died in early December and that sorta blew my world. I'm doing ok though and learning a lot about deepening my sense of connection and compassion. I, of course, do not think of my Mother's death as anything exceptional (although extremely sad for me and my family), but rather, I have thought about the thousands, millions of people who instantly lost loved ones during Haiyan and Katrina and the "Asian Tsunami" and the myriad of other environmental disasters and also Wars. So, despite being AWOL, I have been feeling and thinking.
What struck me is Gina's words: "For me, there is always the 'other' in us Filipinos, the voice of the colonizer and history of power that is also ourselves, part of us, that we must constantly struggle to recognize, deconstruct, resolve, if not vanquish."
I believe this is all so true. I am especially reminded and inspired by the powerful notion that the voice of other dispossessed and colonized or decolonizing peoples—e.g. Natives or Refugees or Poor People, etc.—are also in us. And thus, I am glad that my dear friend Teresia is part of this dialogue.
While I have been so inspired by important critical/foundational(?) thinkers in Philippine Studies (e.g. E. San Juan, Neferti X. Tadiar, Reynaldo Ileto, among others who have helped me understand Philippine colonial and neocolonial history, resistances, capitalism, and political economy), I find great inspiration from Pacific Cultural Studies and the way that politics and poetics and place come together. Reading Epeli Hau'ofa reminds me that there is something special about being Islanders and Sea People—even if Hau'ofa did not fully recognize that among Filipino/as and which I take up in the introduction to my first book, Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization [University of Minnesota Press, 2011]. And hearing and LISTENING to Teresia speak when I was in graduate school as she talked about Pacific Basin politics (e.g., what was going on in Hawai'i and also the history of atomic testing in the Marshall Islands/Bikini Atoll) and the beauty and power in her voice and how she talked about these fucked up histories really resonated and inspired me.
This is why I believe there needs to be a stronger and deeper conversation between Filipino/as and Pacific Islanders and other Islanders in general because, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo (a Cuban American literary critic) once said, the Caribbean is a Repeating Island (of European colonialisms, violences, etc.). This idea of things Repeating—like Epeli Hau'ofa's notion of "Our Sea of Islands" (to describe Oceania as a vast network of connected Islands and Sea)—seems so important if we are going to think not only locally, but transoceanically and globally, which I strongly believe we must do.
So I am interested in the poetics AND politics of decolonizing island and sea spaces—including local/global climate change, extreme weather, disaster capitalism, etc. And, I must also say, I am interested in learning practical skills to address the New Normal of extreme weather and rising seas. As we continue this dialogue, I very much want to discuss how the Philippines is in an extreme weather/extreme typhoon hotspot and what the political, poetic, and practical implications are and also the kinds of exchanges that can happen across different Island-and-Sea-based/Native/Decolonizing fields.
I hope I am making sense. I'm writing a little bit extemporaneously and wanting to share some of the things I've been thinking about in the last few months and moments and also what you've all sparked in me. I look forward to reading and sharing more with you all. Very honored I was invited to participate. You all are brilliant.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 11:54 AM EST
Thank you, thank you, Kale. Teresia, might you have any thoughts to share with us? Perhaps about any specific poets, organizers, scholars or phenomena that have influenced you in the creation of your own widely influential body of work on "our sea of islands," to go back to Kale's invocation of Hau'ofa's phrase?
And Joi, please do feel free to jump in at any time!
Thursday, January 30, 2014, 12:44 PM EST
Thanks so much, Kale, Teresia, Dylan, and Sarita. I just want to say I am so pleased to be among you and reading about and knowing your work (though I do know Joi and some of Kale's and Sarita's work, and I just saw Jenifer's great, wow, provocative work on the Nurses), especially as I am working on William McKinley's World, and now reading about Theodore Roosevelt and Cabot Lodge and Hawai'i (and looking at "our sea of islands" from the perspective of both Kale and Roosevelt is just mind-boggling).
I did want to say, in response to Dylan, that yes, absolutely, the political, the "politics of struggle" is what I am going for, all the time, whenever I write: for me, for us (I imagine) writing and articulating, even and especially writing the "history of defeat," as Sarita calls it, is a key way to engage in struggle. It is not so much that I speak all the time in outrage (which exhausts me), but I recognize that when we articulate our history we are creating a wedge—a political wedge. That articulating that history is a way to engage in struggle. We do not, I think, write about that defeat and surrender with a sense that it is all we have. We write—at least I think we do—to articulate somehow a self-knowledge, which, we hope, leads to a form of action. We write for ourselves and for the reader that we hope to move into action, into some self-knowing. (In my op-ed, I know I was specifically talking to the people of Tacloban, my city: I was berating them, in my mind, by throwing back to them our city's history, but really all I wished was for them to just change, to just stop voting for idiots).
What do you make of that—that the writing of what we know about ourselves, which includes that "history of defeat," and our understanding of the colonized and colonizer within us and, as Kale very crucially points out, also the "sea of islanders" that is also us, with its chains of anguish and resistance, including the Caribbean, including Africa, including New Orleans and Katrina (but not, it seems, Sandy and Staten Island, at least not immediately): that that writing also and always seems to require that deflection? No, we are not saying it in defeat, we are saying it in resistance, and we are saying it also to spark self-knowing, which is part anyway of a too-long struggle. This constant need to deflect and explain is not peculiar to us, but it is tiring nevertheless.
As for NPR, yes, I gave back to Steve Inskeep that same history, and it was wide-ranging and quite cordial, I thought, but all he included from a thirty minute conversation was one phrase: "I grew up with MacArthur and typhoons." And what did he choose not to include? The howling wilderness of Samar in 1901
(I mentioned that the bodies of the dead killed by the American forces in 1901 had an eerie resonance with the bodies in photographs of typhoon Yolanda in 2013, and the numbers of the dead killed by American forces in Samar in 1901 and killed by Yolanda 2013 are not so mismatched);
the American betrayal of the Filipino revolutionaries, used as tactical pawns to occupy Manila in 1898, and American betrayal of their own ideals
(Inskeep asked, a bit belligerently I thought, "But how exactly did America betray the Filipinos in the Philippine-American war?," a question that, to be honest, I did not understand until I realized he maybe viewed the Filipinos as a rebel insurgency in their own land—duh. I had to explain to Inskeep Dewey's military ruses about Aguinaldo and, briefly, Roosevelt's trickery before McKinley had even declared war, [which are] quite well-documented in even conventional accounts of the war; how the progressive, anti-trust Roosevelt was also a kind of early neocon[servative], part of a loose pro-war group using notions of freedom to create war, as in Iraq; and I had to explain to Inskeep the pathos of the Katipunan's ideological and ironic attachment to George Washington: "they thought they were Washington but forgot Washington was an Indian-killer anyhow. The Filipino revolutionaries ironically did not realize that to the Americans they were not Washington but the INDIANS!," I said to Inskeep. And I also mentioned the Katipunan's earnest translation and, to be honest, outright and touching plagiarism of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, the American revolutionary ideals the Filipinos believed in and that American empire betrays);
the use of the Filipino upper classes to establish American "benevolence"
(Inskeep said, "But didn't you learn English, didn't you get to have elections, and so on," and I said, "That is the shrewdness of American colonialism, their excellent form of occupation," and I discussed the smart cooptation of the collaborator upper classes, very early on before the war had even begun, and its dire consequences in the dynastic corruption we have even now [though of course the reasons for that corruption are not singular]—which happens to be the plot of my novel anyhow);
the wrong-headed notion that America "saved" us in World War II
(this is the crux of Steve Inskeep's fantasy, it seems to me—the American fantasy—really central to the modern American relationship to the Philippines—this historical whine: but we saved you from the evil Japanese in World War 2!; and I said, well, Americans first abandoned the Philippines then "returned," for one thing [one among many other possible responses to this fantasy]; and the only newspaper completely in Waray that I have ever read, I told Steve Inskeep, is the Leyte Shimbun—a paper published during the Japanese occupation; so the Japanese, whatever their faults, and they were horridly cruel, of course, were novel in that they encouraged Filipino languages in a way that the American occupiers never did—trying to say there are layers to the story of good and evil that people like Steve Inskeep prefer [and I do recognize that he speaks for many ordinary Americans, quite logically for NPR, and to be honest, speaks for too many Filipinos, too, but I need not be party to those illusions]);
and lastly, America and climate change
(Steve Inskeep asked, "But what do you think of the help America is giving to the victims of Haiyan—would you accept that aid?"—implying, would you now resist aid because you think America has historically oppressed your country? Isn't America good by giving you aid? Which, really, is beside the point in terms of Yolanda, and I said so. I said, of course, Yes, aid is aid, we would accept it, as we should, and not only America is giving aid, you know; but the point of typhoon Yolanda, really, to me, I told Steve Inskeep, is not the relationship of one country to another because of a tragic history or not—considerations of the Filipino-American relationship pale before the planetary issue of climate change, right now, so I do not see why anyone would see aid in terms of American history with the Philippines—I said the issue of this typhoon has to be about a commitment to the larger issue of planetary devastation and the stake we all have in it—that is what we are looking at here, with Yolanda.)
Interestingly, the person at the radio station (I was in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Inskeep was in Washington, DC; and so someone in Amherst was the technician) came out of the booth after this discussion with tears, kind of, in his eyes, saying, "I am so sorry; we Americans are just not told about our history, and I just did not know what we had done in the Philippines." He also said that Steve Inskeep was a lot more prepared with this interview than he usually is. I did think Inskeep had a lot of prep that he displayed during the interview (he knew Dewey and Aguinaldo and so on). And the next day all Steve Inskeep puts in is Gina Apostol, a novelist, and my single, throwaway joke: "I grew up with MacArthur and typhoons." The End.
Thursday, January 30, 2014, 3:04 PM EST
[Inskeep's interview with Gina Apostol:]
Devastated Philippine City No Stranger To Calamity
Novelist Gina Apostol, who grew up in Tacloban, says there's been much looting after the typhoon.
Thursday, January 30, 3:05 PM EST
This is what immediately follows: Jojo [Patricio] Abinales and Steve Inskeep.
Philippines Has A 'Love-Hate Relationship' With U.S.
One low point was when U.S. troops brutally suppressed a war for independence.
Friday, February 14, 2014, 12:50 AM EST
Last call!! Joi, Gina, Teresia, Dylan, and Kale-- If it's okay with everyone, I'd like to start to bring this DIALOGUE to a close. What do you think of a deadline of about two weeks from now to put in your two cents, e.g. by March 1st?
Please do feel free to contribute minor and major thoughts, images, links, really anything that you're able to post or upload. I especially welcome posts by Joi and Teresia!
Friday, February 14, 2014, 1:15 AM EST
yes ... will do ...
Excellent! Looking forward, Joi. I know you've been so crazy busy and I appreciate your--and everyone's!!--time and generosity!
Sunday, February 16, 2014, 5:17 PM EST
Of Interviews, Cultures, and Politics
Disasters suddenly thrust one's country into the spotlight. And surprisingly, one can become a interview subject not because of one's body of work, but because perhaps one can say something about a country he/she has not visited for the past four years.
When typhoon Haiyan struck, I got an email message from NPR asking me if I would be willing to speak. Note that N stands for National. Where I am, the university town of Berkeley, CA, that seemed big—a lot of coverage, and yes, I thought I could pitch for the relief efforts of NAFCON (National Alliance for Filipino Concerns), having been named as one of the group's spokespersons for the relief campaign.
But no, no, no. The NPR program was Interfaith Radio, and they wanted me to speak about faith and disaster. I wished then that I had images of some man holding a statue of the Virgin Mary (from a photograph in some other typhoon) or an anecdote about a family that prayed and was miraculously saved. But all I could think about was the story of a church that had refused shelter to the survivors.
The story was not inspiring. At the very least, it was about an uncharitable action that exposed the true colors of some people of faith.
Now, many months later, I can perhaps talk about a clip of a nun who was helping the victims out. But again, the nun, whose interview I had watched on a Filipino news program, was speaking out because of the lack of government efforts in rebuilding.
The nun's interview, however, sheds light into the discourse of faith and disaster. I believe it was unnecessary to talk about her faith because her work in the community was her expression of faith. Similarly, I did not feel the need to talk about my Catholic faith with NPR—not because it was unimportant, but because I was more concerned about the relief campaign.
In the poem I had published right after the disaster, and which I am reposting below, I speak about resilience and how in many news reports, Filipinos were praised for their resilience: "the bamboo curse." For some time, there were no commentaries on the slow pace of aid, the environmental responsibility of corporations, or government unpreparedness.
In short, as important as the discourse is the lack of discourse. What do we speak of? What are we silent about?
Right now, I am disturbed that the disaster will be an excuse for the increased US military presence. That is the conversation I would like to start.
POEM FOR SURVIVORS OF TYPHOON HAIYAN (YOLANDA)
Poet's Note: This poem is for the survivors of typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) in the Philippines. The English translation follows the Filipino original. To contribute to relief efforts please consider donating at http://nafconusa.org/.
SUMPA NG KAWAYAN
Joi Barrios-Leblanc, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) Women's Desk
Matibay ang kawayan.
Iyan ang sumpa.
Hayaang ipaghampas-hampasan
ng unos,
lumangoy at magpaanod
sa baha.
Pigilin ang hininga
at baka malanghap
ang bangkay na naaagnas.
Tiisin ang gutom ng sikmura
na kahit sa papuri,
ay hungkag na hungkag.
Kalimutan natin ang kasakiman
na sa kabundukan
ay nagpapatag,
at nagbabago sa daloy
ng hangin at dagat.
Kalimutan ang pangulo
na mainit ang ulo
at sa sariling pulong
walang pakundangang lumalabas.
Kalimutan ang ayuda
na higit na bumabagal,
sa ating paghihintay.
Yumuyuko at umiindayog
sa hangin ang kawayan.
Ngunit kami ay tao, tao lamang,
Balat at dugo, luha at buto.
Ipagpaumanhin ang galit
at pusong nagpupuyos.
Naghahanap kami ng katarungan
sa gitna ng dalamhati't pagluluksa
sa aming di matapos-tapos
na dalamhati't pagluluksa.
THE BAMBOO CURSE
Resilience is the curse of the bamboo.
Suffer the storm,
swim through the floods.
Bear the stench of corpses
and the hunger that does not go away
with praise.
Forget the greed
that levels mountains
and changes wind and seas.
Forget the president
who walks out,
Forget the aid
that crawls slower
as we wait.
The bamboo bends and sways
with the wind.
We are human, only human,
All flesh and tears and bone and blood.
Forgive us our anger
as we seek justice
in our grief,
in our inconsolable grief.
nafconusa.org
Monday, March 3, 2014, 6:29 PM EST
Hallo, all! I'd like to put out a final LAST CALL for contributions to our Haiyan dialogue, especially to Kale and Teresia. Remember that your input can be in any form or medium, as long as it's possible for us to upload it to our website. Thank you!
Thanks for the reminder, Sarita. Any chance of extending the conversation 1-2 more weeks? I want to contribute more but have been moving slower this semester due to my mom's death. I would love a little extra time if possible. Thanks for considering this request. Salamat at Ingat [thanks and take care], Kale
Via: Facebook Chat
Hi, Kale! Hope you're doing a bit better now!
Thanks, Gina. I am doing better. Comes and goes in waves, as I think you know. Focusing on work strangely helps, thus my request! Definitely want to dialogue more with everyone.
ingat [take care]! kita tayo sa SF [Let's see each other in San Francisco] for AAAS [Association for Asian American Studies conference]! hi, Sarita!
i wasn't planning on going to AAAS kasi [because] my family was going to celebrate our parents' 50th wedding anniversary in Puerto Rico that same weekend! So, more than likely I'll see you next year or perhaps in N[ew] Y[ork City].
With Mom gone we're not meeting up ...
ay, have fun with your family anyway! that should be more fun!
Yes, of course, let's extend for 1-2 more weeks. Thanks so much, Kale, for proposing this!
Monday, March 3, 2014, 11:56 PM EST
I appreciate the extension, too. There's so much to respond to and try to share as well. Can you clarify, Sarita, whether contributions might be edited to seem more conversational? Or do you try to leave the order of things pretty much the same as when they came in?
Thursday, March 27, 2014, 1:18 PM EST
Teresia and all -- I'm so sorry for the long delay! This dialogue is turning out to be more like a palimpsest of different works and voices rather than a traditional conversation. So I suspect that, during our editorial process, we most likely will leave things in the sequence or order in which they came in. I hope that makes sense?
In the meantime, as we lurch toward the end of the month and the beginning of April, I'd love to see if Teresia and Kale might have anything to share?
And in case you haven't seen the video remixes of Pharrell Williams' "Happy" song, which is getting reappropriated internationally, here is the link to the post-Haiyan Philippine version:
And an article arguing that Pharrell's "Happy" has become an unlikely protest song:
How This Became the Surprising Protest Song of Our Generation
Monday, March 31, 2014, 10:49 AM EST
Hello Mga Kaibigan/Kapatid (Friends and Siblings), I am answering Sarita's last call, as if I am in a bar with you all (though I am not a big drinker!). I would like to go back to Gina's original thoughts about why Taclobeña/os (is that how you all identify yourself? I am a Maloleño—someone from Malolos, so I'm just assuming that Taclobeña/o is appropriate. Correct me if I'm wrong, please) welcomed the US military (back) in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda making landfall in the Eastern Visayas (specifically Leyte). One of the things that is so obvious, but I'm not sure we've clearly articulated it, is the way in which the Pacific (Ocean and Islands)—including the Philippines—has been militarized and occupied by the United States. When going back and reading our thread and seeing the original question and Gina's comments, I thought about the documentary film, Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai'i, directed by Anne Keala Kelly (2011). In the film there is a scene where a US (military) tank is at a park (perhaps for recruiting or just to join in some kind of local event), and there are children playing on the tank. This scene and the narrator suggest/reveal how the militarization and occupation of Hawai'i is so incredibly naturalized in Hawai'i—to the point that it's ok and natural for kids to be sitting on top of tanks or seeing them at parks or local events. In the context of the Philippines, the aftermath of Haiyan suggests a similar postcolonial/neocolonial situation where "of course" the US would be welcomed back and "of course" the US military is there to "help."
(the term we use is Taclobanon. Mga Taclobanon, if plural.)
I would also direct folks—activists, artists, scholars—to think about how the Philippine Sea is a contested space, specifically the Spratlys (small islands/atolls/reefs east of Palawan). This is an informative NY Times interactive essay with video, photos and text.
The NY Times essay says,
To understand how Ayungin (known to the Western world as Second Thomas Shoal) could become contested ground is to confront, in miniature, both the rise of China and the potential future of US foreign policy. It is also to enter into a morass of competing historical, territorial and even moral claims in an area where defining what is true or fair may be no easier than it has proved to be in the Middle East.
The Philippines, China, Taiwan and Vietnam are all making claims on the Spratlys.
And for the Philippines, the nation's claim is "based mostly on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea from 1982, which established an Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nautical miles off the shore of sovereign states." (Which to my mind is pretty damn reasonable and compelling!) The fight there is for resources.
The NY Times essay states the following: "According to current US estimates, the seabed beneath the Spratlys may hold up to 5.4 billion barrels of oil and 55.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. On top of which, about half of the world's merchant fleet tonnage and nearly one third of its crude oil pass through these waters each year. They also contain some of the richest fisheries in the world."
Since the Philippines remains a key ally in Southeast Asia and in Asia-Pacific as a whole, we should only anticipate that the Philippines will remain a militarized zone—with a heavy US naval presence in/near the area—since the US is competing with China in the region. The Philippines, as in WWII, remains strategic for US foreign policy, and so we can read their (US) "help" in the Visayas after the Super Typhoon as part of this policy of "engagement" and neocolonial militarization.
The Philippine state, which has historically been seen as "weak" (in terms of military power and even reach in the archipelago), must therefore continue its dependency on the United States (military).
The other thing I would like to connect in terms of Super Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan and the US military presence in our islands and waters is what happened in one of our UNESCO World Heritage sites, namely Tubbataha Reef. Here is a NY Times article about what happened there last year.
It blows my mind that a US naval ship, the U.S.S. Guardian, could run aground into one of Planet Earth's World Heritage Sites, which happens to be in the Philippines and which is a special marine/oceanic cultural/environmental site.
The Philippines gets a lot of flack for being one of the most environmentally destroyed places on the planet. See [Robin Broad's Plundering Paradise (University of California, 1994)], which chronicles the destruction in our archipelago. Although most of us know that the Philippines also has a dedicated, strong, and vibrant environmental justice movement.
If you follow the news in the Philippines (like I do), you read a lot of accounts of environmental destruction, but there are also stories of local Filipino/as who are active in environmental justice movements and activism. So you might find something like this.
All of this is to suggest that the US military presence is tied up/part of environmental injustices that are happening in the Philippines, and it's not just multinational corporations who are plundering/damaging the Philippines.
For those of us who live in the Global North, we also have to listen to what our counterparts are saying in the Global South about climate change and the need to reduce emissions. And so I think we also have to go back to some environmental "basics" about our carbon footprints and participate in environmental justice movements locally, regionally, and transnationally.
I will end my comments by talking about what I'm doing in my hometown of the Philippines. As many of you know, Malolos is the birthplace of the Philippine Republic. The first congress met there, and basically Malolos was the Philippine capital prior to the US-Philippine war and US occupation in 1898. I am working on a cultural heritage preservation/tourism project in Malolos, working with cultural heritage advocates at Bahay-salisikan ng Bulacan (Center for Bulacan Studies)
Bulacan State University
and also The Women of Malolos Foundation.
In Malolos, there are cultural heritage preservation advocates working to protect and preserve Malolos's "bahay na bato" (an iconic style of residential architecture from the late 19th century). If you go to the Women of Malolos Foundation's website, you can see some of their important work and projects. My contribution to what's going on in Malolos is that I'm also trying to understand, document and help to preserve the "aquatic or riverine" cultural/environmental heritage of Malolos. Because Malolos is not just about fancy churches, nationalist histories, or Spanish/Philippine style houses. Malolos is part of a riverine/estuary system that flows into Manila Bay, and there's a rich fisherfolk history there that most people don't think about. Malolos and other parts of Bulacan - like Manila and Tacloban (and other towns and cities in the archipelago) - have experienced severe flooding in recent years.
And so the problem of cultural heritage preservation (or cultural heritage preservation tourism) is a complex one where we must also think about how we do this kind of work in the context of climate change. In Malolos, I am learning about and researching architectural preservation of bahay na bato, but I'm also researching the fisherfolk/marine cultures of Pamarawan, a barrio/island that is still part of Malolos City and which are part of waters that connect to Manila Bay.
Philippine and Filipino/a cultures are diverse and complex, and it's very important to understand, document, archive, preserve, critique, and question our various histories, cultures, places, and narratives. So I'm interested in how people are participating in cultural preservation advocacy work (in Malolos and elsewhere in the Philippines) while local folks (what I call "Phil Fils" ) are dealing with flooding, typhoons, neoliberal economics, US militarization, massive out-migration and so on. I hope there can be solidarity and collaboration among and between people who call the Pacific "home" (Epeli Hau'ofa, in his essay "The Ocean in Us," says anyone who lives in and loves the Pacific can be an "Oceanian"), so as I started my comments in this dialogue, I think Filipino/as would benefit from dialogue and collaboration with Pacific Islanders, for example, but we will also probably benefit from dialogue and collaboration between different regions and provinces and towns in the Philippines - e.g., from Malolos to Tacloban or other kinds of city/town, regional/province connections. Maraming salamat [thanks] to you all—and special thanks to Sarita and the folks who make CA+T happen. Peace, Kale
Monday, March 31, 2014, 4:24 PM EST
Wow, Kale! Ok. I'll add to the palimpsesting/dialogue tonight! Fascinating process!
Wow, on my end too! Great connections and questions, Kale. I agree with everything you said. And it completely entered my mind that the help for Haiyan was very much related to US's military interests—the docking of a US aircraft carrier to bring relief goods was absolutely a sign, in that Saussurean sense. I really like the link between Tacloban and Malolos—especially as historically one capitulates to foreign forces while the other is the seat of independence, but both are equally "at sea," struggling with a response in our climate change days.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 7:02 AM EST
Mabuhay and Kumusta [Hello and how are you!], interlocutors. As I said earlier, I have found this process fascinating. I really appreciate the invitation to participate, but I have to admit to feeling at a loss for how to contribute meaningfully before Kale made his contributions. The connections that Kale was able to make between the Philippines and the region of the Pacific Ocean that I live in opens up the possibilities for engaging in more dialogue in the future. In fact, it was early in the wake of Haiyan that Kale and I had brainstormed the idea of co-authoring an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times in response to an article they had published in November last year [2013], which purported to raise awareness about climate change issues in Kiribati but which I found problematic and suspect because the author was someone who had previously published quite sensationalist pulp about Kiribati. In the end, for various reasons related to work and family, Kale and I didn't try to co-author that piece. And then Sarita's invitation to this dialogue came along. I have learned much from the exchanges so far but was also somewhat relieved when Sarita introduced the concept of palimpsest as a description for the process as it has eventuated, as I feel the conditions are not quite right for the kind of dialogue that Kale and I could have one-on-one. I can't help thinking that someone like Vince Diaz (at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), could probably have done more and better than me to help bridge a conversation about climate change between our different parts of the Pacific. Again, maybe that's something for the future. For now, let me contribute to the palimpsesting …
In the past four weeks, the Marshall Islands has been experiencing unprecedented sea surges and king tides. The following video was made by an American scientist, Dean Jacobson at the College of the Marshall Islands, who is critical of US-funded coral mining activity in the Marshall Islands, which is destroying the protective reefs and exacerbating the effects of climate change:
Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 7:04 AM EST
Of course, the Marshall Islands were part of the former UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, granted to the US after WWII.
And the history of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands will be familiar to some of you. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a Marshallese poet who has written about both the history of nuclear testing and the contemporary challenges of climate change.
Poetry has been an important medium for social and political critique in the islands to the east of the Philippines … especially since the 1970s. More and more, it is galvanizing political activism. For a region that has the smallest population in the world (around 12-14 million if you don't count West Papua, Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai'i …) but has that population spread out over sixteen sovereign states and a further eleven non-self-governing, semi-autonomous or colonial territories … it is quite an achievement for us to act in concert on issues of common concern. Many Pacific artists, activists, and even regional bureaucrats have been inspired by Epeli Hau'ofa's (1993) revisioning of our region as an oceanic sea of islands united by the historical and contemporary oceanic connections rather than as islands scattered in a far sea, and defeated by our geography.
Kale has invoked Hau'ofa's work a couple of times in his contributions. But Hau'ofa was also robustly critiqued by scholars in and of the Pacific Islands, and although I owe much to him in my career, I have had my own moments of despondency about the potential for our island peoples to unite in a just cause. At the moment, many of us are finding [that] our own governments are working at cross-purposes to their own rhetoric of climate change activism. There has been much talk of a green economy for the Pacific Islands by heads of government over the past year, at the same time that many of those leaders are aiding and abetting the environmental plundering of their countries through resource extraction by multinational corporations. But my biggest despair, and one I feel keenly in conversations like this, is about our demographics … and how small our educated classes are. How few our intellectuals. How small in number our indigenous researchers and writers. How stretched the ones we do have are. Which is what makes it easy for "others," like the guy in the LA Times to speak/write about/for us. Which is what makes it urgent for friends and allies like Jacobson to make that video and send it out into the world for the Marshallese. It's complicated …
And of course, neither is happening in the absence of Marshallese or other Pacific Island voices, right? It's just that the world is a big place, with a short and fragmented attention span, and for all the attempts to capture the attention of global media—through strategically placed banners at international climate change conferences in Copenhagen, with touring dance theaters of pathos—none of this is stopping the water from rising. My uncle is a law professor in Washington, DC, and last year he told me he judged a national law students' moot where one of the cases being argued was whether the sovereignty of Kiribati could be said to exist if the nation went under water. As Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner quotes Henry Kissinger's infamous dismissal of her islands ("There are only 80,000 people, who gives a damn?"), we might well wonder if the world holds the same attitude about countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu today, with populations of 100,000 and 10,000 respectively. Ironically, our greatest enemies and our greatest allies in relation to climate change have both come from the west. But as global power shifts inexorably towards Asia, our region is attracting more and more neocolonial attention from Asian governments and corporations, without much counter-hegemonic Asian support to balance that out. It will be tragic for us if Asian governments and corporations consider us a region worth securing/exploiting, while Asian progressives think we are simply too small as fish to fry.
I really like this op-ed from the Indian newspaper The Hindu in 2011. In it there's a photograph from the global conference on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009, in which activists hold up a woven mat from Tuvalu that says "Our Island, Our Future." None of the activists are from Tuvalu, which illustrates what I was referring to earlier, in terms of our demographic (and economic) disadvantage--Tuvalu simply didn't have the resources to send enough of its citizens to Copenhagen to hold its banners. Then the op-ed articulates a rationale for increasing India's engagement with the Pacific Islands region, that manages to braid both altruism and self-interest together.
Engaging India's Far East
(Note that the author of the article, Bhatia, gives 32 million as the population of the region--but he's counting Australia and New Zealand when he does that.)
Sorry guys, will have to wrap up tomorrow, as my laptop has frozen. Posting this from my iPhone, but I couldn't finish up from this small screen. Thanks for patience. T-
Maraming salamat, Gina and Tere. Gina, your assessment of what Tacloban and Malolos have in common is great. I hadn't quite thought it through in that way, so thank you. And Tere, having you in the mix enables us to think about the Pacific in broader terms (spatially and historically). Your evoking "east of the Philippines" is provocative and productive as I do think there's a tendency to think of the Philippines either primarily through the Asian continent, included in "mainland Southeast Asia" or certainly in relation to Japan and China, or the extreme east which would be the continental US. The way that you discuss the Marshalls and Kiribati and the South Pacific or Basin reminds us of the importance of considering what's east of the Philippines.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 5:52 PM EST
Check this out and quite timely! The President of Kiribati visited the Philippines and went to Tacloban and Samar to learn about Super Typhoon Yolanda and its impacts and visited Tacloban and Samar. According to this report, "He wanted to study, interview people in areas affected by Yolanda. It was a serious preparation for a disaster of this magnitude."
Do You Know the Way to Kiribati?
Wow, cool! I was also going to post an item about a campaign to nominate Anote Tong, the Kiribati President for a Nobel Peace Prize because of his tireless advocacy for climate change awareness. I'm so impressed that he's gone to the Philippines and Tacloban! It really opens up the space for more dialogue in the future! I'm still off my laptop, though ... but will try to wrap my comments later today. Kam na tekeraoi [wishing all of you good fortune]. May you all be blessed. T-
Thursday, April 3, 2014, 7:10 AM EST
Here is a Radio Australia story about the campaign to nominate Anote Tong for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Committee to Campaign for Nobel Peace Prize for Anote Tong
I guess the point I want to end on is that Tong's outreach to the Philippines and Tacloban is unprecedented on a state-to-state level, but he is actually building on a tide of growing public interest in the Pacific Islands in Filipino popular culture. I'm a bit out of the loop on this, but I've been given to understand that Filipino teleseryas have growing audiences in Kiribati, Samoa, and in diasporic Pacific communities in New Zealand [NZ]. Korean dramas are also gaining popularity, and one of our graduate students is planning to do research on this phenomenon. But the flow is not just one way, in terms of Asian exports to the islands. The flow of Filipino migrants to NZ and the Pacific Islands has been steady over the years. Last November in Fiji, my father underwent surgery with a Filipino doctor who he's been going to for close to twenty years. NZ now has a population of 40,000 Filipinos, when in the early 1980s there were only 400 or so. A nephew of mine, of mixed Kiribati, Banaban, Fijian, Indian and European heritage, recently celebrated the christening of his baby boy whose mother is a Filipina from Bacolod City in Negros Occidental. My nephew met his partner while they were both working in the elder care industry, which has become quite the contact zone for Pacific Islanders and Filipinos in this country. What fascinates me about these and other Filipino movements into this part of the Pacific is the opportunity for new perspectives on race, culture and global politics to emerge—particularly perspectives that are not so constrained or overdetermined by US-centric narratives and logic.
I'm still musing on all these things, and I don't think I'm able to adequately summarize or re-articulate myself more clearly … so I think I'm done now. Thanks again for the education and provocations. T-
Thursday, April 3, 2014, 11:04 AM EST
Thanks for your final thoughts, Teresia! It's all very interesting to me. Quick comment: The ship I voyaged on from Oakland to Hong Kong (discussed in my book) was a majority Kiribati crew! The State-State/Island-Island connections are all very cool. I would be very interested in bringing Pacific Ialander and Pin@y scholars, writers, artists, and other cultural workers together in the Philippines and, say, in Kiribati. I bet we could get a grant for such a dialogue. Thanks for participating with our mostly Filipino crew and let's stay in touch about future projects! Have a great day, Everyone.
Kale, I saw your book at UP [University of the Philippines] Bookstore. Is there a US edition?
Yes. University of Minnesota Press and Amazon sell copies.
Friday, April 4, 2014, 4:51 PM EST
Teresia and Kale -- Thank you, thank you, for these contributions, these gifts, which, woven together, underscore the political possibilities and the utter despair of what it means to be "at sea." I especially appreciate all the resources and URLs, from Kale's work in Bulacan Studies to Teresia's shout-outs to Jetnil-Kijiner and her poetry.
Everyone: Dylan, Gina, Joi, Teresia and Kale: Thank you so much for hopping into and riding along in this bangka [boat] for this long while. If it's alright with everyone, I will leave this Facebook dialogue open over the weekend. And then I'd like to close it down at the end of the day MONDAY APRIL 7.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 6:10 PM EST
Ok, folks, I'm declaring this Dialogue officially CLOSED. Thank you so much!
Thank you for the invitation, Sarita, and all the best with the editing process for this and your other project/s. Vinaka [thank you] and kam rabwa [goodbye] to everyone. T-
Allan Punzalan Isaac, Nadine Naber, Sarita Echavez See
Monday, December 10, 2012, 4:44 PM PST
Subject: CA+T Dialogue: Filipina/o workers
Dear Allan and Nadine,
I am so happy to introduce you to each other.
I know you are both CRAZY busy. But I hope that this dialogue will be a productive way to bring you back to your research. I know how hard it us for to carve out the space and time to write, but with this experiment, I hope that email will be a source of inspiration for your research rather than a source of distraction.
I wanted to bring you two together since you both have started doing research on the Filipina/o labor diaspora in the Middle East. Broadly speaking, your work touches on issues of migration and political conditions in that region. But when Allan and I were brainstorming last month about this CA+T dialogue, we thought that it might be better to not think strictly in terms of a defined region:
·Instead, how could we challenge static notions of the "region" and traditional notions of the comparative?
·Drawing on Martin Manalansan's [unpublished] work on "frictive histories," how could we think together about histories and experiences that rub up against each other?
·What happens in the places that Filipinos land, which these days are everywhere, from Israel/Palestine to Italy to Hong Kong to Canada? When people coming from different trajectories land in a place and then have to deal with one another?
But let me step back from the academese and start things off with two simple questions:
QUESTION FOR NADINE: As long as I've known you, you have had that special way of making friends with people wherever and whenever. Would you tell us about your recent experience in Egypt meeting Filipina nannies even as the Revolution was under way?
QUESTION FOR ALLAN: What made you turn to your current research on Filipina/o workers in Israel? What first caught your eye and ear about Tomer Heymann's 2006 documentary Paper Dolls?
Thank you so much for trying out this experiment with me!
More intro details: Allan: This is my sister-friend Nadine Naber. Nadine is an anthropologist and an Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is the co-editor of Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (with Rabab Abdulhadi and Evelyn Alsutany, Syracuse University Press, 2011), Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (with Amaney Jamal, Syracuse University Press, 2007), and Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology (as member and co-founder of Incite! Women of Color against Violence, South End Press, 2006); and author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (New York University Press, 2012).
Nadine: This is my comrade Allan Isaac. Allan is the chair of American Studies at Rutgers and an Associate Professor of English and American Studies. He is the author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and a founding member of CA+T's board of directors.
From: Allan Punzalan Isaac
December 11, 2012, 5:36 AM PST
Subject: Re: CA+T Dialogue: Filipina/o workers
Dear Nadine,
Wonderful to meet you here as I have heard wonderful things about you. Thank you, Sarita, for the introductions.
I look forward to the experiment!
From: Nadine Naber
Dear Allan and Sarita,
Allan: Thanks for writing. I'm excited to be talking with you/writing with you on this.
Allan and Sarita: It took me a while to get started for a few reasons.
My stories are about my relations with a few foreign domestic nannies in Egypt—none of whom expected me to be writing about them—and about an incident that happened with someone I know in Jordan. I was staying at their house, and the incident involved how they treated their Filipina worker. Also, the story is about me—and I'm still not so sure about writing about myself! So I've been struggling with the idea particularly of writing about people who didn't agree to it. Then I thought just today, how about if I just write it out for now and we can strategize later about how to frame the piece and issues of confidentiality/anonymity, etc.
It took me a while to get started and I spent two single-spaced pages just setting the story up. I have to end for today, but I'll include it here [below] just to get some excitement going among us about this work together. I end at the part that will actually include the real issues related to Filipina and other nannies ...
Here you go, and thank you, Sarita, for getting us going!
I arrived from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Cairo in July 2012 for a six-month research trip. I was sub-leasing a flat from a professor who works at the American University in Cairo. The flat is located in the affluent neighborhood of Zamalek. I was there with my family, including my two boys, ages one (Nile) and five (Kinan). Having lived with my bouncing-off-the-walls-with-energy older son for five years now, I immediately looked around for what we would do with our spare time. I quickly realized that privatization since the Sadat years meant there were virtually no public parks, and the streets were full of too much traffic for running around outside. I recalled our life in the US when we had to take Kinan out for sports or just running around for another two hours at the end of each day even after seven hours of play and sports at his pre-school before we could even come home. I panicked over the potential challenges—and the tantrums—that might lie ahead if we were going to be spending a lot of time indoors.
It turns out that across Egypt, sporting clubs are the primary site for socialization and sports. In fact, as middle class people spend a majority of their time outside of school and work at sporting clubs, the relational ties built at sporting clubs come to operate as alternative forms of kinship. We joined the club closest to our flat, the Gezira Club, and we were thrilled that our son would be playing soccer in a country where soccer is a key part of the national popular culture and where the national soccer team ranks among the top in the African Confederation.
Founded in 1882, the original 150-acre Gezira club was leased to the British military under the British colonization of Egypt, and only the British army and their guests had access to the club. The Egyptian revolution of 1952 led to the nationalization of the Gezira Club. Since then, and after many changes over the years, it remains an elite club and offers luxurious outdoor gardens and restaurants for socializing as well as somewhere around twenty-six sporting activities ranging from golf and equestrianism to soccer, gymnastics, ballet, and swimming. At the time I joined in 2012, it was much easier and less expensive for people with a US passport, like me, to join than Egyptians. I ended up paying just what I paid for a middle class gym membership in the US. Yet most Egyptian members gained their membership only through their family name or through working within high-ranking military positions. The Gezira Club, through its membership policies, instituted its exclusivity by giving access to foreigners, in this case, Americans or Europeans, plus historically elite Egyptians.
I felt conflicted joining this club considering that I was about to gain access to the privileges of Egypt's elite while most Egyptians are struggling for jobs and food and while Egypt was in the midst of a socialist revolution in which I had committed to participate. I prepared myself for how I would engage this context, and I hoped to find like-minded people concerned with the class injustices within the club even while our children played sports there. I did not anticipate that beyond the typical class hierarchies that I expected to encounter, I would also be immersed within the injustices that foreign domestic workers endure in Egypt.
Getting clearance from the massive security apparatus at the door and walking through the high stone walls, Kinan and I entered Gezira club and went straight to the playground. While Kinan blissfully ran off towards the bright red and yellow, highest twirly slide he had ever seen, I tried to wrap my head around the extreme differences among the kinds of adults accompanying the children around me: there were a few highly elite Egyptian parents and then a much larger number of poor women of African (Nigerian, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Eritrean) and Filipina descent. While there was very little commonality between my life and that of the foreign domestic nannies who filled most adult spaces in the children's areas of the club and at the doors of many of the kids' sport areas (gymnastics, soccer, swimming, tai kwon do, etc.), it became clear that I did not have much in common—socially or politically—with the elite Egyptian mothers who I saw around me.
Throughout the club were signposts requiring nannies to distinguish themselves from the "real" members: "nannies must wear nursing attire." On benches, outside of the sporting areas, nannies sat together in large groups while the few Egyptian mothers who took their kids to their sporting activities stood across the pathway that divided them.
In the meantime, Kinan had been making all kinds of friends in the playground. Nearly every day, while I supervised his play with other kids, an African or Filipina nanny was supervising the play of his playmates. And this is how I became close friends with three nannies in Egypt—Lubna, Anna, and Almaz.
Editor's note: The names of the nannies have been changed to protect their identities.
January 9, 2013 9:07 AM PST
Dear Nadine and Sarita,
Many thanks, and many apologies for tardiness (MLA, holidays, admin and my own foolishness notwithstanding). Nadine, I am so pleased to read your account. Below I paste what begins our dialogue—with a cue in the end as Sarita suggested. I can elaborate and what not ...
Many thanks, Sarita and Nadine!
[PROMPT:] What made you turn to your current research on Filipina/o workers in Israel? What first caught your eye and ear about Tomer Heymann's 2006 documentary Paper Dolls?
Flying to Tel Aviv from New York, I sat next to another Filipino who was part of a tour, probably hitting the Christian sites. I visited Tel Aviv in the summer of 2008 to learn more about the 41,000-strong Filipino community there made up mostly of temporary caregivers and domestics after seeing Tomer Heymann's Paper Dolls (Bubot Niyar). In the Philippines, Israel has been alluded to in popular and indie films as a migrant worker destination, though not as prominently as other Middle Eastern locales like Dubai or "Saudi," as Pinoys say. I was pleased to see an Israeli filmmaker feature queer Filipino subjects onscreen. A.O. Scott [a New York Times film reviewer] described Paper Dolls well as a portrait of the friendship between the director Heymann and the five Filipino male caregivers featured in the documentary. As with his other films, Tomer Heymann does not argue for objectivity but is committed to documenting an intimate involvement with his subjects, in this case, as caregivers, as bakla,1 as performers, and as friends. Tomer and his family were as visibly and narratively part of the story as his Filipino interviewees and their employers. I found out later in my research that in the period of the documentary's televisual and later film festival release three Israeli films, documentary and fictional—Do They Catch Children Too? (2003), directed by Hedva-Galili Smolinsky; Alila (2003), directed by Amos Gitai; and Meduzot (Jellyfish, 2007), directed by Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret—and at least one Israeli music video—"Sleep without Dreaming," by pop-singer Dana Berger—had prominently featured Filipino caregivers and labor issues. As with the films' depiction, Filipinos are, not surprisingly, part of Israel and the Middle East region's landscape and imagination.
My interest in going to Israel was also fueled by the fact that my father visited Israel/Palestine in 1963, with grant funding from the University of the Philippines, as part of the young Israeli government's economic and good-will program that invited young African and Asian bureaucrats from newly emerging nations outside the Middle East to showcase kibbutzim, industrial goods, and how mixed economies worked. My father was a young lawyer then and worked for a union in the Philippines; other African and Asian representatives were in similar positions. I grew up looking at pictures of my father in Israel and Jordan with other Third World representatives during that tour. I visited Israel almost fifty years after my father. Unlike the early 1960s when the Philippine economy held so much promise, overseas Filipino workers have become commonplace and crucial to the Philippines' economic and nation-building programs in the twenty-first century. Overseas remittances, as many scholars have pointed out, keep the Philippine economy and families afloat. In Israel, the turn to Filipinas specifically as caregivers, called the Filipino Plan (Ha Tokhnit Filipinit), happened under the Rabin administration in the 1990s as part of the plan to privatize some medical services and to tighten border controls.
The different historical moments and spaces my father, then a Filipino citizen, and I, as an American citizen, occupy in relation to Philippine history and the decades that separate our visits led me to think through divergent nation-building projects that have evolved and rubbed up against each other and at what and whose expense such were being implemented. Martin Manalansan, in "Queer Dwellings" [unpublished], has suggested that a consideration of migratory culture makes visible "frictive" relationships and, by extension, "frictive histories." That is, not only do different peoples encounter and rub up against each other but so too their histories come into contact and exchange, often in uneven and uncomfortable ways.
Watching Paper Dolls, I found Tomer's portrait of his relationship touching but also so heavily melancholic and sentimental. Having met Filipinos working as cooks in Italy, in domestic service in Hong Kong, in bars in Japan, in duty free in Morocco, in clerical jobs in Dubai, and in airports in Austria, I was missing the unrelenting humor even amid (or perhaps because of) unfortunate situations. (I should note that Manila theater had recently produced a brilliant musical that responds to the documentary's sentimentality). I was also struck at how the film conflates the search for work outside of the Philippines with the search for sexual freedom and family belonging. While the documentary focused on the hard working and caring Filipino subjects, tropes of family and nation kept multiplying and overlapping in the documentary. This Israeli film about queer, foreign caregivers who lip-synched in drag on their nights off offered a complex of overlapping notions of performance. Targeted to an Israeli audience and originally broadcast as an eight-part documentary on Israeli television, the film continually framed the caregivers as part of the Israeli domestic (national and familial) scene while they were suffering from unjust racism in the gay and mainstream scenes. Alongside or against this visual domestication, the Filipino subjects in performing at migrant clubs and events were also invested in the recreation of home and belonging in other ways—"re-creation" in both its world-making and pleasure-making sense.
The Tagalog word palabas describes this double duty (on their time and performance) well. Palabas means both spectacle on the stage or screen as well as emotional display. Palabas is deliberate expression, with emphasis on deliberate. Using this double-meaning, we can read the Dolls' lip-synch act not simply as an outlet from the drudgery of work but rather as a different "labor of love"—a type of care-giving that is not recognized nor funded by either the Philippine or the Israeli state—that catalyzes a temporary communality among other migrants. (This would explain that painful, though I think avoidable, scene at the large gay nightclub where they fail miserably as performers as that performance was largely based on capital and brand expectations.) However, the imbricated (rather than doubled/ duplicitous) meanings of palabas would cast doubt on the paid work of caregiving. Is caregiving as a "labor of love" simply an alienated performance, going through the motions of care without emotion? The imbricated meanings of palabas perhaps expose as false the binary of interior and exterior as well as the binary between authentic and inauthentic emotions.
As I read through Nadine's opening account, I was struck by the notion of the conflicting demands of class, gender, nationality, and race and how these conflicting expectations are negotiated, physically manifested, embodied, performed, and perceived. Whether returning to Manila in the summers or walking in Tel Aviv on a workday as a Filipino male without a tour group or an older ward to justify my presence, I note the historical, cultural and political demands, depending on my interlocutor, placed (by me and others) on my speech and bodily movements.
Nadine, might I ask you to speak more about your observations regarding the care-givers' and your own physical embodiment of "place" and belonging in such a class-charged space like the club?
1Bakla covers a range of gay male behaviors, relationships, corporealities, and genders, from cross-dressing to cis-gender behavior, from effeminacy to "straight-acting."
January 25, 2013 5:08 AM PST
Here is what I wrote. I don't know where to take it from here? After Allan's response, maybe we each have one more short response? So maybe Allan's next prompt/question for me could be a final question for brief concluding remarks? What do you think?
Allan, I read your reflections about Filipino caregivers and labor issues in Manila and Tel Aviv with great interest. For at least fifteen years, I have been acutely aware of the struggles of Filipina domestic workers in Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East, such as Lebanon and Jordan, but less informed about the struggles of Filipinos/as in Israel. I realized I am still immersed in previous research that accounts primarily for the racial hierarchies between Palestinians, Europeans, Africans, and Arab Jews as well as Russian immigrant workers in Israel.
One problem in many Arab countries and their diasporas is that progressive politics (including the Arab revolutions) tend to center issues such as Israeli colonization and expansion, US imperialism, poverty, dictatorship and repression, and sectarianism (issues that directly impact nationals and citizens) while ignoring struggles relevant to "foreigners"—particularly foreign domestic workers. While some organizations and activists have been linking the struggles of foreign domestic workers to other social justice struggles, these groups are few and far between. Sometimes I wonder to what extent progressive Arab communities become trapped within our own reactions to Orientalism. We have learned that Zionists, racists, and the like enjoy using our discussions of anything "negative" about our societies against us—as a justification for racist arguments about "Arab-Muslim backwardness and savagery." Perhaps this historical pattern accounts for part of the relative silence on migrant rights and injustices related to domestic workers in public debate, particularly in debates involving "western" audiences. At the same time, it also seems that some of our progressive discourses (as we saw throughout the Arab revolutions) continually revert to nationalist paradigms that define "a people" through the interconnected concepts of language, land, and culture and therefore cannot account for broader concepts of community and community accountability—concepts that could, for instance, integrate the struggles of "foreigners" living among us into our own liberation struggles (even when some of these same "foreigners" are raising our children and sleeping in our homes).
Indeed we need more discussion of these issues—discussions that are historically specific and contextualized within local conditions but that can also account for transnational processes and cross-border similarities and solidarities. For instance, the realities of Filipino caretaking and labor in Israel to which Allan refers are distinct, considering that Filipinos entering Israel are entering a settler-colonial state founded upon and based in European constructs of race. Consider, for instance, the racial hierarchies between white European Jews, Arab Jews, and African Jews (see Ella Shohat's essay, "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims," Social Text 19/20 [Autumn 1988]). Racial formations and injustices that are indeed informed by European histories also structure Arab societies but in different ways, and the racial and immigration politics that Filipinos enter into in places like Lebanon and Jordan are complicated by the influx of Palestinian and other refugees (i.e., Syrians and Iraqis) displaced by the very structures of Israeli colonization and US imperialism. In this sense, we need a distinct analysis of how transnationalism operates in these different contexts. At the same time, keeping in mind Martin Manalansan's work on "frictive histories" that rub up against each other that Allan cites, we might also consider that Filipino/a caregivers are entering into a complex interplay between the empire (the US and its watchdog, Israel) and the various Arab nations (each with their own set of complicities and struggles with the empire). For instance, how might we envision social justice campaigns by and for Filipino/a caretakers within a colonialist state like Israel, or in alliance with Palestinian liberation movements, or in relation to Jordan's puppet government supporting US and Israeli interests, or within the context of the Egyptian revolution for democracy and against US-led imperialism?
Returning to Allan's question about my observations regarding caregivers in Egypt, I would add that in Egypt, the legal system helps explain the silence around the struggles of foreign domestic workers. Consider, for instance, that labor and union laws exclude foreign workers from membership in trade unions or professional syndicates, and that Egypt does not actually permit foreigners to work as domestic workers. Egypt's labor laws do not recognize foreign domestic workers (unlike in Jordan)—even though more and more people are employing foreign domestic caretakers in Egypt. The workers' having no legal status makes abusers less accountable to the law and also keeps the issue generally off the public radar. Changes related to the Egyptian revolution, including new laws against human trafficking, have made it slightly more possible to prosecute abusive employers.
These legal structures helped me understand why the nannies I interacted with at the Gezira sporting club in Cairo found it so difficult to challenge their employers' authority. I spent time with Lubna on a weekly basis. Perhaps Lubna and I bonded over our political location as non-Egyptians or outsiders within the context of the club, despite our explicit socio-economic class differences. Because we were both at the playground and sports areas caring for children, we were able to talk. This was the only possibility for nannies to socialize with other adults: at the club, if there happened to be other adults nearby while they were chasing the young children they were caring for or feeding them in the restaurant areas. While running around with the kids, Lubna told me of verbal abuse from her employer (the mother of the kids she cared for). Her employer often yelled at her in public places and refused to give her money for food when she was taking the kids out for all-day outings. This was the same employer for whom Lubna was practically totally and completely raising her children (two boys, ages three and five). Like Lubna, Anna and Almaz, nannies who were often part of our conversations at the club, lived in limbo. They were in Egypt as a result of traumatic socio-economic circumstances, and they had the sense that they had no other option For example, Anna worked at a factory in China before she came to Egypt, where factory equipment and chemicals damaged her body. They had no family in Egypt, and they spent most of their time working as nannies so they had little or no opportunity to form friendships or intimate relations, even though all of them hoped to meet a significant other and/or have children of their own. They could not really change jobs as they were not allowed to be there in the first place. Sometimes, Lubna would joke about whether or not I could bring her with me to "America," the apparent land of opportunity.
Amidst all of this was insurrection. The most vivid image in my mind is of the nannies caring for their employers' children while listening to music with ear-buds in their ears. This was the trend in the playground at the club where oppressive structures produced a parenting strategy in which nannies miserably raised their bosses' children: mothers and fathers did not exist, and children spoke, cried, and yelled to deaf ears.
I also recall a visit to Jordan. In an acquaintance's home where I stayed, Cheri cared for an elderly Jordanian woman. The Jordanian woman's family, using typical tactics that facilitate abuse, confined Cheri in the home and forbade her from seeing her sister (also a nannie in Jordan) and barely allowed her to speak to her son in the Philippines. Overworked, underpaid, verbally abused, and miserably depressed, Cheri decided to run away. She left. She was gone. The problem is that escaping abusive situations rarely leads to improved conditions. Her options might entail returning to her embassy or working in the informal labor market …without her passport … and if the employer did not apply or renew her permit … then she is also without a visa or permit … which then means she will accrue huge fines for overstaying her residency.2 Ultimately, as feminist critics of the mainstream trafficking discourse have contended, we need to stop criminalizing the workers and start holding the states, corporations, and employers accountable for the displacement and abuse of workers. I will end by also mentioning the Egyptian activists working in solidarity with foreign domestic workers, including Hossam Bahgat of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
Allan, your piece helped me think through what you referred to as "divergent nation building projects that have evolved and rubbed up against each other"—not only in terms of Filipinos/as in Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt but also in terms of my own relations with nannies in Egypt and the silence about their struggles in my interactions with the broader Egyptian revolution. Reading your piece, I wonder what you think of the political location of Filipino/a caretakers in Israel in relation to the history of Israeli colonization and Palestinian displacement? Or why this location may or may not be obscured in these texts/films? Previous generations of scholar-activists attempted to build alliances between the Arab Jews exploited within Israel and the Palestinians (Arabs) Israel has tried to displace from their land ... Are these two separate histories, Palestinians and Filipinos/as, in relation to Israel? How can we begin to talk about labor-based displacement to a settler colonial state or the different Filipino/a and Palestinian displacements? Is the concept of "frictive histories" useful in thinking about multiple colonizations and displacements that rub up against each other?
2http://www.hrw.org/reports/2011/09/27/domestic-plight-0.
January 29, 32013 2:34 PM PST
Allan and Nadine,
At the risk of oversharing, I wanted to let you know that I actually dreamt about your email conversation last night! So much food for thought.
I know that it's a lot to keep this up when the teaching and meetings get going. But I think it would be so great to do about two more rounds of exchange. I hope that sounds do-able. If so, then I'm looking forward to Allan's response!
With my thanks,
February 8, 2013 9:41 AM PST
Hi Nadine and Sarita,
I wanted to send this out for time's sake, but I think:
1) I need a cue at the end for Nadine.
2) Nadine, if I misunderstood your questions, please tell me and I can revise.
3) Perhaps I should elaborate more on the Filipino community or personal stories about the encounter?
I will confess that quite a bit of the attached response (also pasted below) was cut from an article I just completed for a collection, Philippine Palimpsests, that Martin [Manalansan] and August [Espiritu] are putting together.
I await the blizzard here in NYC [New York City] and will tweak as you two see fit ...
Nadine, you make a crucial point about how resistance and social justice questions continue to be limited by the nationalist frame. Oftentimes this frame bleeds into affiliation and belonging as genealogical metaphors. Yet, this nationalist frame is a necessary anti-colonial struggle over borders that overlap, break, move unilaterally, through violent means. When you mention a defense against "Arab-Muslim backwardness and savagery," you remind me of Fanon's essay "On National Culture" [in The Wretched of the Earth, 1961] in that resistance against colonialism in the second stage requires a stand on national-cultural ground. The metaphor of blood as elision among the concepts of family, nation and sacrality is strong. Yet this erases subjects within disputed borders to create precarious subjectivities.
The foreign caregiver as household member (familia in the Roman sense) troubles those secure borders of nation, family and blood in discourses of security and opposition. As you say, "even when some of these same 'foreigners' are raising our children and sleeping in our homes." Engels would remind the reader in Origins of Family, Private Property, and State (1884) that the original meaning of the word "family" (familia) is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present-day philistine; among the Romans it did not at first refer to the married pair and their children, but only to slaves.
You are absolutely right that we need to attend to localized discourse about this complex interplay. Distinct histories clash when a nationality is recruited as racialized labor to enter into a set of complex hierarchies. In the Filipino migrant case, an English-speaking people of a client-state and former US colony arrive as temporary labor in another client-state and settler colonial state. Filipinos join other non-Jewish groups—West Africans, Thai, Chinese, Romanians, among many others—in Israel, each group recruited for a specific occupational niche, from construction to agricultural to domestic work.
The Filipino community in Israel is quite cohesive with socio-cultural organizations that hold Filipino and religious celebrations, three community publications, and an embassy/consulate that keeps in continual touch with the community. When not living in Israelis' homes, many have flats they share (with anywhere from three to ten other workers) on the weekend day off in the Central Bus Station area, a somewhat seedy (to the non-migrant) area inhabited by different migrant nationalities. Filipino goods and food items are sold at stores inside the Bus Station and in the nearby market. In many ways this area is marked off to recreate national lines in, but not of, Israel. Among the Filipino population, there is a separation between those women who have converted and married Israeli citizens and those who are temporary migrant workers. There is also a thriving gay community of nurses and caregivers within this community that I met at a club around the Central Bus Station. I should mention that a group called Kav LaOved [Worker's Hotline] works alongside a few other groups on behalf of migrant careworkers' rights in Israel, advocating against employer abuse and exploitation and illegal deportation of employees and their Israel-born children.
The documentary I was discussing [Paper Dolls] does not deal with the Israel-Palestine issue at all but depends entirely on extending the family/nation metaphor to Filipino/a caregivers who perform intimate tasks within the Israeli home. As Rebecca Stein in Itineraries in Conflict (Duke University Press, 2008) points out, the earlier Rabin era also put in motion representational practices in film production and tourism development to shore up the intelligibility of Israeli borders by making such Israeli cultural representation Palestinian-free. These policies effectively delineated state and private borders against undesirable internal migrations in material and representational terms. In the documentary, the Filipino foreign workers poised between belonging to a host family yet not belonging to the nation-state create this rift, finding resolution only in melodramatic familial emotionalism as its liberal exhortation. Thus, their assimilable racial difference in the familial frame produces the affective wall that makes visible the outlines of a benevolent Israeli nation-state at the same time that these guest workers are a dispensable part of it.
In terms of a different local perspective, I thought about the Philippine musical, Care Divas, produced in Manila last year [2012] and the year before, about queer Filipino caregivers. It was wildly popular, produced by the left-leaning Philippine Educational Theater Association [PETA], and later produced by local celebrities. The musical captured the imagination of Manila audiences for two years. Inspired in part by Paper Dolls, the musical follows the protagonist Chelsea, by day a caregiver in Israel and by night a member of a Filipino drag queen troupe with other temporary migrant caregivers. Some in the group have overstayed their visas and are working illegally, while others have been working in Israel for many years. Chelsea finds romance with a Palestinian worker, Daniel/Faraj, who has entered Israeli territory illegally to work and initially poses as a Jewish Israeli. This romance becomes a cause of tension with Chelsea's friends when Faraj, having lost employment, seeks refuge in their flat away from the immigration police. Thus, the musical maintains a complex view of migrants and migrancy, comparing the plights of foreign and sometimes legal migrants with that of a domestic, colonized and illegal-ized subject. The romance leads to Chelsea's tragic demise at the end of the play when she is caught in a blast set off by a female suicide bomber while running after Faraj who is fleeing from the police. The smash-hit musical explored how multiple intimacies and histories rub up against each other and enable temporary collectivities and affinities. As a South-South or non-Western grappling with social and national precarity, the musical was able to articulate the frictive histories of Palestinians and Filipino migrants in Israel. I would argue that it also reveals alternative, albeit temporary, socialities based on a shared social precarity in relation to the Israeli nation-state.
Butler defines precarity as designating "the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence and death … [and] exposure to violence without protection."3 Retooling Benedict Anderson [in Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991)] slightly, social and temporal precarity could apply to migrant subjects who are not necessarily in sync with national homogenous empty time but who are continually compelled to conform to capital demands and social histories of two or more nation-states. I would suggest that this precarious time is non-identical with the national time effected by the negotiation with spaces and histories that do not necessarily belong to the migrant.
Since the foreign caregiver is at once part of the extended family and a national outsider, this insider/outsider position makes the caregiver an ambivalent figure at times of extreme border policing, and she can shift easily from invited guest to foreign threat, much like Faraj. In the context of refugees and border crossers in the U.K., Sara Ahmed, in "Affective Economies" [Social Text 79 Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 2004)], has described how very different alien figures can be connected in state-sponsored paranoia. Thus, foreign caregiver and colonized subject both cast out from the national family remain under state custody. For a Filipino audience, the musical illustrates how the migrant situation continually rubs up against other precarious histories and conflicts, thus expanding the scope of what labor and migratory politics might mean for Filipino activists in the Philippines.
3Judith Butler, "Performativity Precarity and Sexual Politics," AIBR. Revista de antropologia iberoamericana 4.3 (2009), ii.
February 8, 2013, 6:15 PM PST
Hi Allan and Sarita,
This is really powerful, Allan. I learned so much, and the way you've framed the issues is really useful. I think you understood the questions. I have to confess, though, I'm sort of at a loss. Since I don't do research on this issue (don't have very much knowledge ... historical context ...) and only interacted briefly with a few Filipinas while in Egypt at "the club"… I'm sort of at a loss on what else I can possibly say on this.
So maybe it's a good thing that Allan didn't write a cue ... Sarita, as someone who knows me and what I "do" and as facilitator or editor guide, do you have any suggestions on Allan's potential cue for me and/or how I could add to this discussion at this point? I feel I've said all I can on this topic in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon ... i could try to push myself to reflect more ... but sort of struggling. i was thinking maybe i could shift into something else i'm more familiar with … but not sure how to do that or what to take up? i'm trying to think of how to connect this to broader studies/research on gender violence and since i'm teaching a course on gender violence and moving into issues of "trafficking" over the next few weeks (through March 1), it may be best if i think about this over the next few weeks and then write after I teach those sections? That's one option, i guess.
April 17, 2013, 10:24 AM PST
Dear Nadine and Allan,
I'm so sorry for the very long delay in pulling together another "prompt" or "cue" for this dialogue. But I do hope you know how deeply grateful I am for your participation in this dialogue.
Nadine: Would you like to pick up the dialogue in relation to your broader research on gender violence? It'd be wonderful to see where you're at especially after the past couple of months teaching your gender violence course, particularly the section on "trafficking." But I've also included some prompts below for you and Allan to consider.
I asked Matt Andrews, a sociologist and newest staff member at CA+T, to review the dialogue, and we agreed that the main questions in the dialogue center on a theme sparked by Allan's reading of the Philippine musical Care Divas. This quotation in particular stuck out to us:
"Since the foreign caregiver is at once part of the extended family and a national outsider, at times of extreme border policing this position makes her [Chelsea, the Filipino caregiver] an ambivalent figure that can shift easily from invited guest to foreign threat, like Faraj," who Allan describes as "a Palestinian worker … who has entered Israeli territory illegally to work and initially poses as a Jewish Israeli."
This led us to wonder: What is "displacement" in the "frictive" experiences of Filipino and Palestinian laborers in contemporary Israel? Can the displacement of the Filipino foreign caregiver, brokered by the Philippine state to labor in another country, be compared with the displacement of a Palestinian worker who has been rendered an "immigrant" and "illegal" in his/her homeland? How can we talk about solidarity/alliances with "frictive histories" while avoiding the trap of making false equivalences?
We think that these are key points in this dialogue that warrant further attention and stay true to an honest discussion of using "frictive histories" as a critical comparative lens.
So here are two prompts to consider:
1. How would you—Nadine and Allan—consider these questions via your personal experiences (Nadine in Egypt and Allan in Israel)?
2. Are there analogous cases of the struggles of foreign laborers in other settler colonial states (e.g., US, Canada, Australia) that you would like to point to?
May 18, 2013, 7:10 PM PST
I wrote a reply but frankly, my head started spinning, so I needed to spend a bit more time with it. Here you go!
Thanks to you both. This really got me thinking—as you will see.
I have been thinking about Allan's discussion of the social and temporal precarity of Filipinos in relation to the Israeli nation-state and the idea of the foreign caregiver as at once part of the extended family and a national outsider and as both invited guest and/or foreign threat. Allan's contextualization of Filipino caregivers' positions in Israel can open up possibilities for thinking about solidarity or alliances between Palestinians and Filipino caregivers. If we are to take Martin Manalansan's idea of "frictive histories" as a starting point, then we might consider these questions simultaneously: what brings Palestinian and Filipino histories in Israel into a similar political frame, and what renders them distinct? These questions (with the concept of "frictive histories") are crucial for envisioning solidarity in ways that avoid making false equivalences.
Indeed, the same political structure that has been fundamental to maintaining the Zionist colonization of all of Palestine (that is, the establishment of an Israeli state for Jews only and maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel) has also structured the exclusions of Filipino caregivers in Israel—in different ways and to different degrees. Thus, to discuss solidarity we must look at Israel's distinct nationalist discourses and practices as well as their roots in the establishment of Israel as a settler-colonial state created out of the context of late nineteenth century European expansion and based upon displacing indigenous people from their land. Yet it is not enough to map Palestinian workers and Filipino workers' differential entanglements in this structure—as truly avoiding making false equivalences will require distinguishing between Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza working in Israel and Palestinians living in present-day Israel. (These Palestinians are the indigenous people of present-day Israel, the Palestinians who remained on their land when the state of Israel was created and became second class citizens.) We also need to consider how varying Palestinian and Filipino histories rub up against the multiple racial and hierarchical Jewish communities in Israel who are also hailed into Zionist settler colonialism differently and to different degrees.
For Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli settler colonialism has meant expansion (control of the majority of land through settlements, Jewish-only roads, the apartheid wall, checkpoints, and so on) and displacement (many Palestinians are refugees displaced from their original homes and villages). But it has also meant a continued and massive increase in poverty, unemployment, and starvation. As a result, Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza have travelled to work within Israel in larger numbers, particularly before the start of the first Palestinian Intifada [uprising] in the late 1980s. Once the first Intifada began, Israel limited the entrance of these Palestinian workers into Israel and replaced them with foreign workers, such as Filipinos. Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, brought in as cheap labor, were easily pushed out, disposed of, and replaced. Filipino guest workers have entered Israel as the nation's new disposable labor. While assimilable within the realm of family (as Allan illustrated), at least half of the Filipino workers in Israel do not have legal papers and face the threat of arrest and deportation at any point. Beyond this reality, today there are currently around 30,000 Palestinian laborers living in Israel without permits who face similar struggles as Filipinos who do not have papers—labor intensive jobs, poor pay, few rights, hazardous work conditions, and limited opportunity to claim rights due to the fear of arrest or deportation.4
A look at the structures of gender and sexuality that permeate dominant Israeli nationalism sheds more light on these "frictive histories." While Israel requires Palestinian men to be fathers in order to legally work in Israel, Israel demands that Filipino workers be childless in Israel. Especially since Israel began decreasing the number of Palestinian laborers allowed into Israel, Israel has required most Palestinian men to be married fathers and over the age of thirty-five to obtain a legal work permit. For Filipinos, Israel encourages the deportation of workers after five years or when they have children. Filipino workers' children rarely obtain legal status and are often deported. To insure that Filipinos who have children in Israel do not stay, Israeli recruitment companies are paid only when they recruit new workers, not workers already living in Israel. Within Israel's colonialist-nationalist concepts of gender, the Palestinian man working as a day laborer from the West Bank and Gaza (constructed as potential enemy terrorist) is only allowed entry as father—as if heternormative family and reproduction make him "safe." The Israeli colonialist-nationalist logic renders Filipinos (constructed as foreign threat to the [European] Jewish-only national identity) safe when they have joined an Israeli family (as temporary caregiver). With children of their own, they threaten the Zionist necessity for a Jewish majority and must be expelled or replaced.
The Zionist project of maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel also permeates the "frictive histories" of Filipino workers in Israel, Palestinians living within Israel, and the multiple hierarchical Jewish communities in Israel. Filipinos who have obtained legal papers are required to assimilate—including by speaking fluent Hebrew—yet they cannot join the Israeli army, a pre-requisite for full citizenship and national identity in Israel. Israel treats Palestinian workers in Israel as second-class citizens through its budget and economy, laws, political representation, and the general framework of Zionism (which requires the state to empower and maintain a Jewish majority at the expense of its non-Jewish citizens). And how do Filipino histories run up against the different histories of Jewish settlement in and displacement to Israel (European, African, and Arab Jewish, for instance)? The dominant Zionist narrative relies upon a nationalist binary of Jews vs. Arabs to maintain the idea that Israeli is a homeland and safe haven to all Jews who face the threat of the uncivilized Arab terrorist enemy. This is also the binary discourse that justifies Israeli military violence against Palestinians through the logic of protecting national security and self-defense. This framework defines Jewishness in terms of an idealized European Jewish identity, obscures the existence of non-European Jews (African and Arab, for instance), and marks non-white Jews as not-quite the right kind of Jew (unless they assimilate).
4http://972mag.com/palestinian-employment-the-phantom-workers-of-israel/61526/.
September 2, 2013, 5:50 PM PST
Hello from southern California! The moving dust has started to settle. And I finally managed to piece together our Dialogue about and beyond Filipino workers in the Middle East, which were (fittingly) scattered across my several email accounts. Thanks so much for your patience!
I think that the last thing that happened with our Dialogue was that, on May 18, Nadine sent us an updated reflection that responds to Allan's February 8 email. (Yeah, I know, can you believe that this Dialogue now spans over nine months?? We started this in December!) If you two feel okay about this, I'd like to issue a "last call" for your thoughts, questions, suggestions, declarations and/or conclusions. Shall we attempt to wrap up this Dialogue in about three weeks by Friday September 27?
For my part, I'll clumsily attempt to convey the richness of what I've learnt over the past nine-ten months of witnessing this conversation unfold. I really hope I'm not completely misrepresenting your writings and interchange when I say that I simultaneously take heart in and I am devastated by your different accounts of instances of what Allan calls the "shared social precarity" between Filipinos and Palestinians who live and work under a plurality and range of conditions of dispensability. But it's precisely what is not shared—what is different and what is "frictive"—that seems to be crucial to the maintenance of the dominant Zionist framework. Thus, the highly gendered representation of the "assimilability of Filipino racial difference" seems to do the work of rendering invisible not only Palestinian migrant and indigenous histories but also, ironically, Filipino institutional exclusion. (I say "ironic" because certain representational forms of Filipino visibility seem to secure the systemic invisibilization of Filipinos, according to Allan's account.) In her recent blog post "New Grass," the poet-historian Kimberly Alidio summed up this paradox with the question: When do Filipinos land? I think it's brilliant of Kim to move from the question of "where" to the question of "when" because we—in Filipino and Filipino diasporic studies—are then obliged to interrogate how our current dominant historical narratives of migration and settlement are not sufficient when it comes to the frictive and violent interplay between the dispensability of bodies and the obfuscation of the land. Indeed, Nadine reminds us that "'exclusion' in its multiple forms [is] fundamental to the continuity of the Israeli state in its current form."
What you've woven together here is an invaluable reminder about the high stakes of "alliance-building." How to share lives and spaces. Why dominant forms of both familial and state power are so invested in prohibiting and destroying those tentative, fleeting, and powerful moments and movements.
October 8, 2013, 1:19PM EST
Subject: updated piece
Thank you, Nadine, for your thoughtful and generative response. You have made me rethink some of my objects as you remind me of the specific intersecting differentials among the various groups, such as that between Palestinians in the West Bank and those inside the territory and how both these groups mesh with the racial hierarchy within Jewish Israeli citizenry. So, we would think about settler-colonial discourse and practices as consolidating multiple, flexible narratives and technologies of exclusion to produce its many (and protean) subjects and borders. These intersections shape how nationalist discourses imagine cultural and physical borders and, therefore, how oppositional nodes coalesce (or could share a political frame, as you say). Solidarity is as much about the coalescing of different histories into what people perceive as a material, organized body or cause. Frictive histories remind us that solidarity is about diverse bodies at a political crossroads negotiating the meaning of the various trajectories.
Two thoughts come to mind in reading your latest response. First, border-making technologies of settler-colonial discourse include narrating national time. Official histories and timelines delegitimize outgroup claims. As Fanon's work suggests, colonial spatial and temporal dislocations create narrative and psychic conditions for negotiating and imagining multiple spaces and times. Colonial and postcolonial conditions establish the coexistence of nonsynchronal and hierarchized temporalities. The coexistence of these spaces and times embedded in dominant representations provides alternative channels for imagining alternative political frames. Second, as Devon Carbado has demonstrated in "Racial Naturalization" [American Quarterly 57.3 (2005)], naturalization into citizenship is also naturalization into a racial hierarchy. A migrant body is read or comes to have a meaning only in negotiation with pre-existing national narratives about her/his difference. To reside in a place is to take one's place in the evolving racial structures of the national imagination, a national history beyond one's personal one. The two ideas involve national others—migrants and colonized—to assert continually creative translations of their place in the nation.
I find the gendered aspect of the border quite fascinating. As you astutely point out, the closing of the Israeli borders or restriction against Palestinian workers brought about the selection of gendered and sexualized, not just racialized, bodies to perform various labor: Eastern Europeans, West Africans, and Chinese for construction; Thai for agriculture; Filipinas for caregiving, among others. The legibility of non-Middle Eastern bodies serves as visual markers for internal security and surveillance. For Filipinos, the privatization of health needs in the early 1990s made possible the entry of mostly female migrants to be integrated into Israeli homes. Many migrants continue to stay without legal papers and become targets of xenophobia alongside Palestinians from Occupied Territories. You add another dimension to this selectivity as regards reproductive sexuality. Male Palestinian workers are to be middle-aged fathers, while Filipina caregivers are to be childless and part of an extended Israeli family. As Care Divas, the Philippine musical, stages, the queer romance between the two illegal workers, Palestinian and Filipino, may be read as similar struggles for home and belonging emerging from different trajectories, the Palestinian alienated and illegal in his own homeland, the Filipino/a bakla once invited as family member then alien as soon as his family sponsor dies. Here I wonder if the perception of non-reproduction by queer subjects added to the appeal of Tomer Heymann's documentary Paper Dolls.
My visit in Tel Aviv years ago coincided with the celebration of Philippine Independence there. The celebration took place in a park and was a makeshift, well attended event with shows and, of course, a beauty pageant, in which contestants dressed in western, traditional Filipina, and indigenous Philippine attire. Many children of Filipino and Israeli Jewish parentage were around. There were at least two types of Filipinas participating. The Society for Asian Ladies is comprised of long-time residents of Israel since the 1980s who married Israeli citizens and converted to Judaism. They converted so that the children are Jewish, thereby maintaining the genealogically Jewish character of the state. The other Filipinas, post-Intifada migrants, were younger and more recent arrivals, with and without families, who are temporary workers. Each group, workers on one side and Jewish-Israeli wives and mothers on the other, was subject to different forms of belonging and roles regarding reproduction and reproducing the nation-state.
In the meantime, the view from the outside differs greatly. I return to NYC [New York City], and I find the advertising efforts of Israeli Tourism to be actively creating something of a multicultural face of Israel. Right before a movie here in the upper west side of Manhattan, the invitation to visit Israel as a tourist features prominently a female Israeli, most likely of Ethiopian descent, wearing her Star of David. Of course, in Tel Aviv, the Ethiopian face is commonly found working in grocery and convenience stores, Russian faces as sherutim [service] drivers for public vans, etc. For the American touristic gaze, the multicultural face with a Jewish genealogy was the entry and foreground to the picturesque landscape background-- free, of course, of physical and cultural borders, checkpoints, and conflicted bodies.
October 9, 2013, 11:56 AM EST
This is amazing, Allan. Thank you.
For me, the conversation between you and Nadine compels me to re-engage anew with words like "multiplicity," "flexibility," and "solidarity" that have become so hackneyed and abstract because of the way they often get tossed around (including by me!)
And I appreciate the way you circle back to our opening gambit about "frictive histories." I'm not sure if you and Nadine would agree, but I think that the idea of friction in relation to solidarity also permeated this Dialogue. There are very real differences between your and Nadine's work and approaches and positionalities. And I am so grateful that you both gave so much of your time and heart, for lack of a better word, into making this Dialogue possible. More than that. What becomes clear over the scope of this conversation is that we need and deserve the space and time to build trust and build coalitions with one another. And I look forward to the three of us meeting up face-to-face in real time one day soon!
Nadine: If it's alright with you, I'm going to close the Dialogue unless you have any final thoughts that you'd like to share.
October 9, 2013 at 12:28 PM EST
Subject: Re: updated piece
Hello Sarita!
Thanks for your beautiful e-mail, Sarita. I have nothing to add at this point and yes—what you've said about solidarity and frictive histories is right on and exciting to think about. I've learned so much, and my eyes were glued to the screen when reading Allan's last piece. It's fabulous. I do think we've really started a genuine-organic intellectual conversation here—enriched by the ways we were not restricted by institutions (publishing/funding and so on). To be honest, reading Allan's last piece, I wanted to keep writing ... replying ... and continue. More and more just keeps opening up with each post among us. How cool!
Thank you, Sarita, for bringing our work and ideas together and giving me this very new, challenging, and extremely generative writing experience.
October 9, 2013 at 3:24 PM EST
Thank you, Nadine and Sarita, for the kind words and encouragement and for making this exchange possible. I have learned quite a bit in the process and look forward to more discussions.
My deepest gratitude.
Karen Tongson, R. Zamora Linmark, Sarita Echavez See, Theodore S. Gonzalves
November 25, 2012, 10:23 PM PST
Via: Email
Subject: Discovery about my grandfather
Dear Karen, Zack, and Theo,
This summer I was procrastinating as usual and decided to Google my Filipino grandfather's name, "Pastor Echavez." I don't know too much about him. My family has told me that he was "hot-tempered" and owned and played all kinds of musical instruments. He had migrated from the Visayas to the Midwest in the late 1920s because he had attracted the attention of Silliman University's president, who was from Kansas. The president paid his fare to America, and my Lolo worked as a houseboy either in the president's house or in the president's sisters' house in Kansas. He eventually earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Kansas and then he decided to go back to the Philippines in the 1930s, where he married my grandmother and moved to Manila.
So I was shocked when I actually found something online. It was a brief reference to him as a performing musician in Lawrence, Kansas, in the 1930s. It was in a newspaper article about Lawrence's Business and Professional Women's Club called "Women's Group to Aid with Project." My Lolo was part of the entertainment program, which included "Hawaiian and Filipino music." Here are screen shots of the newspaper:
I had no idea that he performed at all. I have never met my grandfather. He died the year that I was born.
TO KAREN: I'd like to start this four-way dialogue with some questions for you:
I know that you have many musicians in your family and that you carry a pretty mean tune yourself. You grew up moving around as the daughter of working, traveling musicians and at one point lived in a hotel in Singapore, right? What was that life like? And how is that related to the research project that you're doing now?
Before we go too much further, a quick round of introductions:
Theo Gonsalves is the chair and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In addition to scholarly works on Filipino dance and performance, he is an accomplished musician.
Zack Linmark has written three poetry collections, as well as two novels. His novel Rolling the R's has been translated into a play. He's also written several essays on working and traveling Filipino musicians.
Karen Tongson teaches in English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In addition to her scholarship on race, sexuality and pop culture, she grew up among the musicians we'll be discussing.
Looking forward to seeing where this e-mail dialogue goes ...
From: Karen Tongson
Hi Sarita, Zack, and Theo,
I'm away from my home computer, but I'll be sending a separate e-mail later today with some visuals (newspaper clippings, photos, links, etc.), plus captions and anecdotes to flesh out the narrative and perhaps open the conversation into broader areas. I focused quite a bit on my own family's story here, but I tried my best to make sure I answered Sarita's question about what any of this has to do with my own (current) work. Enjoy! And I look forward to hearing what y'all have to say in response.
Here it goes ...
I was named after Karen Carpenter. My mom, Maria Katindig-Dykes, and my bio-dad, Henry Tongson, met in a Pinoy production of Jesus Christ Superstar in the early 1970s. They were also members of the legendary OPM ensemble, the Circus Band, alongside folks like Tillie Moreno (I referred to her as Tita [Aunt] Tillie when I was a wee one), Basil Valdez, and Hajji Alejandro (who happens to be my ninong [godfather]). In 1978, when I was four going-on-five, my mom and I became the first two members of my family to migrate from the Philippines to the U.S.: specifically, to Honolulu, Hawai'i. My folks split at some nebulous point in the mid-'70s, and, while they were sharing the bill at the top of the Hilton in Manila, my mom fell in love with Jimmie Dykes (the man I consider my Dad): a haole [white] pianist and musical arranger born in Riverside, CA. He was traveling through the Philippines as the musical director for Roberto "Bert" Nievera's shows.
As much as I've been prone at various moments in my life to mythologize these origins and the interwoven desires and musicianship that led to my life here in the States, it is with a blunt historicism and facticity that I've come to understand that music was simply the family business. And business—or a lack thereof—is really the reason we moved around so much all over the Pacific Rim, back and forth from Hawai'i to Manila and into the Desert West when I was a child. It's striking to me that Sarita began with a story of her grandfather's diasporic labor and education and the surprising discovery that amidst it all, he managed to entertain, to play music! I, on the other hand, can't quite imagine my family's relocations without entertainment—and who needs it, who will pay for it—as the motivating factor.
I suppose for my mother, it was scripted in the stars. She was born to the Katindig clan, who are credited with innovating Latin jazz in the Philippines from the mid-1950s onward (my mom was born in 1955). The legendary jazz pianist, Romy Katindig, was my grandfather, and though he wasn't really around much when I was a kid—he and my grandmother, Linda Onas Katindig, were separated by the time I was born—his status as patriarch and band leader lingered over the family compound that he built with my grandmother at #7 Capinpin Street, San Antonio Village, Pasig, Metro Manila. I remember that my mom's brother, who is also a jazz pianist and a "smooth jazz" luminary, Boy Katindig—yes, another Tito Boy!— used to have his barkada [crew] over after gigs. He was in a KISS cover-band back then, and they used to scare the crap out of me when they were in full costume and make-up. Tito [Uncle] Boy and his crew would take over the large outdoor sala [space] with a "tropically tuned" (read: humidified) upright piano, a sitting area, and several mahjong tables ruled by my grandmother and her pals. The first time I ever heard The Beatles' "Let it Be" it was in the form of a San Mig-fueled, after hours sing-along. We were all eating grilled tahong [mussels]. I think this explains a lot about my own "hootenanny" approach to pedagogy, scholarship, and sociability!
It may also have something to do with why, in my academic work, I've segued from writing about geographic relocations and suburban imaginaries to consider- ing seriously, theoretically, technologically, and philosophically, what it means to do karaoke; to sing-along along with, in, and through a medium like "criticism." While I'm working on this new project, which is called Empty Orchestra: Karaoke. Critical. Apparatus, I'm also starting to gather both the official and incidental narratives of my family's involvement in music in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and the Desert West, including the Inland Empire and Las Vegas. I'm hoping to fold some of these stories into a larger research project, Circuits of Leisure: Pinoy Musical Labor from the Pacific Rim to the Desert West, that contextualizes the export of Pinoy entertainers with other narratives of diasporic, "overseas" work. Something tells me the family stories might lead me astray, though ...
November 28, 2012, 3:32 PM PST
Subject: pictures, captions
My mom (dark shirt, center) and "bio-dad" Henry Tongson (next to her with the muscle shirt), with my uncle, Boy Katindig (seated, hiding behind his bob), during the Circus Band OPM days, (c. 1972).
Circus Band in action. My mom is in the overalls just to the right of center, holding the mic.
Newspaper clipping of the Circus Band (without my mom—I believe she may have actually been pregnant with me at the time), but featuring my bio-dad, Ninong Hajji, Tita Tillie, and Tito Boy, among the others.
Romy Katindig (my grandfather, who's standing in the dark suit) and his band the HI-CHORDS, consisting mostly of his brothers (clockwise: Eddie Katindig, Joe Katindig, Rey Lacsamana, and Panting Katindig).
Two ads in Singaporean newspapers for Romy Katindig and his combo "direct from Manila" at the Rosee d'Or, Lido Grand (c. 1963).
Promo for Pacifica, my mom and (step) dad Jimmie Dykes' combo, Honolulu, Hawai'i (1979).
Clipping from the Singaporean newspaper The New Nation of my parents' ensemble, Pacifica, which had a six-month residency at the Hyatt Regency in 1982. I lived in the Hyatt with them and spent most of my time attending their gigs, or watching lots of Singaporean TV and ordering room service.
One of the rare moments my grandfather was back in Manila (he and my grandmother had been separated for a couple of decades at that point) in 1981. They're standing in the center, near the giant wooden fork. My parents (mom, Jimmie Dykes, and I) returned to the Philippines in 1980 (after about three years in Hawai'i) and stayed in Manila, with a short stint to Singapore in 1982, until landing back in the U.S., in Riverside, CA, in 1983.
The family home in Pasig, #7 General Capinpin Street.
Via: Facebook message
Here are some images connected to what I just sent you guys via e-mail.
Grandpa Romy Katindig
A Romy Katindig and the HI-CHORDS featurette in a Singaporean magazine
Romy Katindig album labels
My mom, Maria Katindig-Dykes, with Eartha Kitt in 1977 (my mom is on the left)
Gigs with Pacifica (the band my mom shared with my stepdad, Jimmie Dykes):
TOP: 1981 at the Hyatt Regency, Singapore Jazz Supperclub, Nutmegs
BOTTOM: 1982 at the Playboy Club, Manila (Silahis International Hotel, Malate—no longer there)
Her 2008 album cover and back cover, recorded with my stepdad Jimmie Dykes.
My uncle (mom's bro), Boy Katindig, on his 1980 album, After Midnight (front and back covers), both pulled from random sites on the Internet.
And the front cover of his recent album, The Boy Katindig Jazz Competition (after he won an Awit lifetime achievement award1).
1 Given by the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry, the Awit awards are the most important recognition for musical achievement in the Philippines. Awit means "song" in Tagalog.
From: R. Zamora Linmark
KT: yr uncle gave me a disc of his jazz back in july. loved it.
hi sarita.
From: Theodore S. Gonzalves
Great photos, Karen!
Subject: Re: Discovery about my grandfather
Karen, Zack, and Theo,
If you are destined to be "led astray" by family stories and photos, then this is a gorgeous way to go down the path of hootenanny ruination, Karen "Close-to-You" Tongson.
There is so much here. The business of entertainment and relocation. Humidified pianos. Biography as "cover" and "covers" as biography. Singaporean TV. And, of course, giant wooden forks and Tito Boy.
I don't know where to begin. So I'll just start with a confession. Karen, I have this "thing" about voices. Singing voices. And if you're confessing to the occasional mythologization of your "origins," then I unabashedly plead guilty to the total idealization of the singing voice. To me, you've either got it or you don't got it. You can sing or you can't. I don't and I can't. I've got a serviceable alto but it's not "a voice." And I can't riff for the life of me. I want the kind of vocals that clearly seduced the reviewer of your Mom's performance in 1980s Singapore. It's a horribly gushing review (I've attached Karen's clipping below). But I completely identify with the reviewer's note of envy throughout: "I winced in admiration."
So my question is: Why do I idealize the singing voice? And how did that voice become Filipino?
And Zack and Theo, please jump in at any time. Zack, I know you just interviewed Karen's uncle in Manila …
December 1, 2012, 12:45 PM EST
Zack! Hoy! How come you met up with Karen's uncle in Manila? Was this Tito Boy or another uncle? And what was on the CD he gave you? Sarita
December 3, 2012, 3:16 PM PST
I know folks are still gathering their thoughts, and I don't know if this will drive us off-course, but I've been doing some work on a new talk about the Empty Orchestra project. I'm reading a collection of essays, called Karaoke Culture (2011), by a Croatian novelist/essayist named Dubravka Ugresic. The collection isn't entirely made up of essays about karaoke; in fact, there's only one substantial essay on the topic that opens the volume, and the rest of the essays reflect on everything from—as the back of the book says—"jaded youth, [to] the ways technology has made us soft in the head, or how wrestling a hotel minibar into a bathtub is the best way to stick it to 'the Man.'"
While flipping through other parts of the book, I noticed an essay titled "Filipinas," which I assumed might have something to do with karaoke (given the book's title and all), or with musicality, or technology broadly defined (as per the back of the book's description), but it actually doesn't. It's about the diasporic community of Filipinas who live and work in Hong Kong, some of whom "marry British men." Most of it is pretty insulting, but I thought I'd share these two paragraphs with all of you, just so you get a sense of how deeply disturbing it is:
The shenanigans soon got underway. The Filipinas wiggled their butts, wrapped themselves around invisible poles, and flashed their breasts. Lining up one behind the other, each grabbed the hips of the woman in front, bumping and grinding their pelvises into her rear. Or one would stick her rear out and another would bend down and nestle her nose where the other's anus had to be. This vulgar pantomime was accompanied by peals of laughter. Each wave of laughter rang out like a command for others to laugh along. One Filipina popped her breasts out, asking those present to rate them. "Don't pay any attention," said my hostess, catching my disapproving glance. "They always carry on like this."
Yes, Filipinas. Some are married to "Englishmen," and others are on their way to finding one, says my hostess. The husbands, "English" businessmen, come to Hong Kong to earn money and lay the foundations of family life. That's how it starts out: They bring their wives over, have children, earn money—and then a Filipina turns up on the scene. I spoke to an Englishman at the bar, a friend of my friends, who told me that he had an adult daughter and a wife in Australia, and here, in Hong Kong, a Filipina. As we spoke, she kept coming over, rubbing herself against him. It was as if she were running around on an invisible leash, like an impatient dog.2
I was like, WTF?!? Especially after I read some of Ugresic's claims about karaoke itself, e.g., "karaoke culture in all its manifestations unites narcissism, exhibitionism, and the neurotic need for the individual to inscribe him or herself on the indifferent surface of the world …"
The disgust she expresses separately, for each of these "things" (karaoke and Filipinas), is essentially the same: a particular kind of narcissism, exhibitionism, and need. I'm working out my argument about the juxtaposition of these two things in the same volume, despite the absence of actual karaoke in the "Filipinas" essay.
I'm also interested in how this author—as a post-Cold War, Eastern Bloc subject— assaults karaoke on the grounds of its crass, capitalist, individualistic exhibitionism, while the authors [Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale] of the book Karaoke Capitalism (Praeger Publishers, 2005) cast karaoke as the exact opposite: as a model of conformity, strict mimesis, and (implicitly) somewhat socialist.
Anyway, perhaps these ramblings will activate other thoughts on the voice and Sarita's relationship to it—about having it or not, about who "owns" one, and how that ownership is made manifest.
2Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture, trans. David Williams (Rochester, NY: Open Letter Press, 2011).
Greetings, all. I'm sorry for the late reply. Thank you, Sarita, for getting us off to a start.
Let me state how envious I am to read that Sarita and Karen hail from such awesome musical stock! Like a lot of folks, I've always been fascinated by musical families—whether their last name was Osmond, or Jackson, or Kantindig. While my folks loved to sing and dance (especially my dad, who claimed others referred to him as "King Mambo" during that dance craze's heyday), they never encouraged me to become a professional musician, and I've always felt like I missed out on the experience of coming from a large family where this lore gets handed down and around. Even though no one else in my immediate family played an instrument, music came into my life early—as a kid whose parents wanted me to be well-rounded in terms of interests but was not actually encouraged to think about it as a career. I think they nearly fell out of their chairs when I told them I had packed my bags soon after my Ph.D. qualifying exams to head back to San Francisco to become a musical director for a theater troupe. I sometimes wondered what the hell I was doing during all those rehearsal hours, staring at the stage floor while another scene had to be set up or scratched or whatever else was going on between the actors. I suppose I had rationalized that what I was doing with that group—along with my working trio—could somehow inform my scholarship. When I wasn't kidding myself, I was just trying to make a living, earn my union card, and figure out if an academic life was what I really wanted for my day job. San Francisco was, and still is, an expensive city and [mayor] Willie Brown seemed determined to give parts of the city away to developers. All the networks and dailies carried the same stories—a one percent vacancy rate for rentals, gentrification, more of the same. If I hadn't worked as a professional musician at that time, I probably would have had to teach even more classes than I was. It was a hustle, but I met a lot of great players and was lucky to fall in with a savvy group of performers. I ended up finding my extended family.
As to Sarita's question about the importance of the singing voice … I started reading David Irving's Colonial Counterpoint (Oxford University Press, 2010), which is one of the few (is it the only?) book-length works published recently that takes seriously the act of music-making during the Spanish period. One of the aspects of the book that stands out is the nature and significance of colonial education through music. This threw me back to recall a scene in [Roland] Joffe's The Mission (1986). A young Guarani native boy stands up in a trial-like setting and sings a hymn (really, it was a faux-hymn by [Ennio] Morricone) to prove that he and his fellow tribesmen are worthy of being saved. Of course, the slave-runners who figure in this weird hearing couldn't care less if the kid can carry a tune. But re-reading Irving's text made me wonder about that long tradition of colonial education in ritualized behavior, whether singing, kneeling, praying, weaving, dancing, and so on. A good voice was a ticket to salvation—access to authority, a modicum of freedom, a version of power. Can you imagine being that kid's friend as he watches his buddy make his way to the podium to belt one out? "Don't screw it up or we're all finished!" A lot has been riding on good singing voices. I don't think it's just fidelity to the original. Sure, that's that obnoxious b.s. that Karen called out in that essay, which I found reminiscent of Pico Iyer's take on Filipino mimicry in Video Night in Kathmandu (Vintage, 1989). Being true to the original is a value in itself, but what about the manifold reality of singing tied to salvation?
December 6, 2012, 6:08 AM PST
Theo, Karen, and Zack,
Theo: I love your reference to hustle, the crazy dance that we do getting in and OUT of academia. That gives me a whole other insight into your writing of The Day the Dancers Stayed (Temple University Press, 2009) and Stage Presence (Meritage, 2007). Would you mind telling us a little more about the stuff that you did after you finished your qualifying exams, packed up your bags, and moved to San Francisco?
And I can't believe you brought up The Mission. I bought that soundtrack when the movie came out. The sound of—or the sound toward—salvation and Morricone's faux-hymn are seared in my brain for lots of reasons including my own half-Catholic, half-atheist upbringing. (Mom is a Roman Catholic, and dad is an atheist trained by Jesuits.)
December 7, 2012, 11:06 AM PST
At the risk of starting two threads in the same convo, I've cut-and-paste below Zack's e-mail to me off-list about meeting Karen's uncle last summer. Karen and Theo: Do you have any questions for Zack about his e-mail?
But I still would love to hear more about Theo walking away from academia postquals. Theo: If it's not prying too much, would you tell us more about what you did when you moved to San Francisco both with theatre and your working trio? And what kind of union card were you earning?
Also, please note that Zack's e-mail account seems to have a word limit, so I'm not including the whole thread here.
Subject: Re: oops—please reply all to this
i first met karen's uncle in late summer of 2011, to interview him about the jazz scene during martial law for a noir novel that i'm currently researching. the informal interview was held at a coffee bean tea and leaf cafe in ortigas, right behind megamall. reason for interview was to find out from him what the atmosphere was like for musicians during martial law. from what i remember he told me that jazz was privileged by the regime more than rock b/c it was classy, ergo wholesome/tasteful, whereas rock—or the appearance/message of rock—implied rebellion, gruff, unruliness. ferdinand [Marcos]'s kids also gravitated toward jazz, which was very popular during the seventies. jazz of all sorts, not just standards but also fusion jazz like spyro gyra, hiroshima, etc. karen's uncle, in fact, went to school with bongbong marcos and got backlashed for it during and after marcos' dictatorship. he said his band was basically on ferdinand's and imelda's beck-and-call. any band for that matter. so if the conjugal dictators were throwing a party and needed a jazz band asap, they'd go to wherever karen's uncle was playing and interrupt him from his gig, creating panic for the club owner to find a spur-of-the-moment replacement. the perk for musicians like karen's uncle was, of course, a pass that allowed him access to the city during curfew hours.
hope this helps. let me know if you have any questions. might be able to answer them.
After my qualifying exams, I returned to San Francisco and joined a theater troupe called Tongue in a Mood (TIAM). The group was originally founded by four standup comics—Allan Manalo, Rex Navarrete, Ron Muriera, and Ken Kabasares. They decided to perform sketches and put up comedy shows at places like the Holy City Zoo. I'm not sure how long the four stayed together, but they eventually decided to go their separate ways with Allan forging ahead under the TIAM banner.
Around the same time—about the late '90s—a handful of Filipino American performing artists were attending theater, music, spoken word shows in a venue in the South of Market Area (SOMA), Bindlestiff Studio. Founded in 1989 by Canadian transplant Chrystene Ells, Bindlestiff Studio was a forty-nine-seat black box theater and a troupe that had mounted dozens of shows over the decade, earning a decent rep for edgy theater. By the late '90s, Chrystene and her crew were burned out from performing and running a theater. Allan and a few others had been attending some of Chrystene's shows, befriended her, and started staging TIAM performances at Bindlestiff. Ells handed the administration of the theater off to Allan and a group of us, and by 1997–1998 Bindlestiff Studio morphed into a distinctly Filipino American performing arts venue with Allan as managing director of the theater and artistic director of the troupe. The troupe now consisted of holdovers from Chrystene's era (meaning, a handful of beautifully crazy white folks) and our own mix of Filipino American performers—comics, musicians, dancers, and oddballs who had no experience running a venue.
I signed on to TIAM as musical director, which meant composing, arranging, and leading a small group of musicians on stage to accompany the live action. Sometimes we'd be drafted into speaking roles, but for the most part, I held down a corner spot at the keyboard. Everyone was involved in working some aspect of the theater—whether painting the black box, cleaning up the place, writing publicity copy, and so on. We supported all of this with door sales; we had no grants or other income.
When I wasn't working on TIAM or other Bindlestiff shows (other acts rented the space), I joined a band called Bobby Banduria (which grew out from a TIAM show) and led my own trios. Bobby Banduria enjoyed some success; we played in clubs and joined the theater troupe as an opening act in shows that took us to Florida, Texas, California college/university campuses, and even the Philippines. Some of you know Christine Balance, who was also a TIAM cast member and a member of Bobby Banduria before I joined. She used to perform topless, with an accordion strapped to the front of her. A lot of folks in the group ended up dating and breaking up from that scene. At times, it felt a little like Fleetwood Mac in there.
When I first started playing in the city professionally, I thought that getting a union card would be as difficult as landing a SAG card. It was actually more difficult to stay in good standing. Because there's a lot of non-union work in San Francisco for musicians, members of Local Six like myself often fell out of status because we'd take non-union gigs and/or fail to pay dues. The same thing happened to me in Honolulu when I tried to join Local 677.
One of the things I loved about that time was being a part of a group of folks who were putting together music and theater that stood up in stark contrast to the machine-like entertainment industry that the Sony Metreon represented just a few blocks from our space. I'm sure my memory continues to embroider a romantic version of what really happened there. The Metreon was a shiny new movieplex that featured Hollywood fast food. Working at Bindlestiff at times felt like it was a rebel outpost for all the jokes and tunes we wanted to try out.
(It's the last week of the semester.)
December 13, 2012, 12:14 PM PST
At the risk of e-stalking you three, I'd like to give Facebook e-mail a try instead of conventional e-mail.
ZACK: If it's not prying too much, would you give us a teaser about the noir novel you're working on? Are there musician characters in it?
December 13, 2012, 2:20 PM PST
hi, sarita: the noir novel takes place during the height of martial law. it centers on a bunch of tondo beauty-queens-turned-prostitutes (biniboys). an excerpt will appear in jessica hagedorn's upcoming anthology of noir writings. i originally was gonna write about the japanese jazz harpist who got murdered by one of his boytoys (he went to philippines during martial law and even played in a concert with karen's uncle), but i could not, for the life of me, get the story started. a case of too much excitement and research and not enough imagination.
Hey Zack! What's the title going to be of the excerpt in Jessica's anthology?
And I'm very sorry to hear about the (second) death of the Japanese jazz harpist character, first at the hands of one of his boytoys and then at the hands of the author. RIP.
December 19, 2012, 12:18 AM PST
it's called "carino brutal." the anthology is called Manila Noir, part of the noir series of akashic books (June 2013).
Love the story's title, Zack.
By the way I tracked down your 1995 essay "And This Next Song Is for Everybody: Filipino Lounge Bands in Manila and Seoul" in Muae: A Journal of Transcultural Production. What's the back-story again? Walter Lew commissioned you to follow a Filipino band from Manila to Seoul, right?
Theo and Karen: Check out Zack's essay!3
3The essay will be available on CA+T's website, temporarily, through the link above until late August, 2013.
the original/ideal plan was to find a band in manila who was about to leave for seoul, korea, and then follow them to the land of the morning calm. the problems, of course, were time constraints and budget. so, what ended up happening was going to manila for, like, four or five days, tracking down lounge bands that had already performed overseas, then going to seoul for another three or four days and interviewing filipino lounge bands that were playing at five-star hotels such as the new renaissance. this was my first attempt at journalism. i had just signed the contract to rolling the r's and only had, like, ten vignettes.
Zack: Did the Muae assignment have an effect on your process of writing of Rolling the R's (Kaya Press, 1997)? And have you since done other journalism assignments?
sarita: writing the article gave me anxieties at first as i had never done that sort of writing before. but because walter lew was so open to whatever style, however i approached the assignment, it gave me lots of room to play with the form. as for rolling, i was in a i-dont-know-what-zone i was in. the vignettes just rolled out of me. that became the gage for me, whether the vignette was working or not, if it just rolled out of me, and all i was doing was typing it. if i had to think much of it, if it took awhile for it to be written, then it wasn't part of the collection. i guess that's why the book is so energetic, b/c of the way they were written—the urgency, the snappiness, the frenzy of wanting to get the stories told and be circulated asap.
You really were rolling your r's, Zack!
What a great piece, Zack! I'm glad Sarita shared it. I remember that [Lawrence] Chua piece ["The Postmodern Ethnic Brunch: Devouring Difference," Muae 5 (1995)] from this issue. It scared the crap out of a lot of students!
Question for Zack: What did you find was the normal length of the musicians' contracts? Six mos.?
Theo: standard contract was six months, then they had to return to the Philippines to renew their contract/visa, i.e., if they were re-hired by the same hotel/venue.
Zack: There's so much music in Rolling the R's. Do you think that had anything to do with writing "And This Next Song"?
sarita: i'm sure they fed off each other b/c i was working on the article at the same time that i was writing the vignettes. the incorporation of lyrics into the text, for example.
Zack: You wrote about overseas contract worker musicians in 1994, and then a decade later in 2004 you found yourself doing another project on performing arts musicians. You traveled around Japan with professional Japanese photographers, right?
hi, all:
yes. come to think of it, ten years after the seoul/manila assignment, i went to japan to conduct similar research, on the lives of filipinos there. it started with entertainers then it branched out to filipinos, in general, as i wanted to show a wider spectrum of experiences. part of the grant [with the US-Japan Creative Artists' Program] gave me the opportunity to collaborate with a japanese artist—so i chose a photographer, shinya ochida. he and i travelled around japan. i interviewed filipinos while he took pictures of them. it was a mind-opening experience for both of us.
Zack: What is an example of a "mind-opening experience"? I think you mentioned to me that Japanese law was changing exactly at the time that you were traveling in Japan for this project. And that these changes in the law—in response to human trafficking—were having a direct impact on some of the workers you were meeting?
Karen and Theo: Please feel free to jump in at any time!
Sarita: Mind-opening as a Filipino, American, and artist. Prior to my six-month residency in Japan, I had never been there, except at Narita Int'l Airport. That was as close as I got to the Japan experience. And although there are many Japanese in Hawai'i where I migrated to and practically spent much of my life, I soon discovered that they were as American in the eyes of the Japanese as the Filipinos in America are to Filipinos in the Philippines. So, it didn't take long for me to realize that soon upon settling in Tokyo, I was like one of those bento lunch boxes—compartmentalized, divided—Filipino, American, writer, student of introduction to Japanese language and culture. And I use the bento box model b/c that is the one thing that struck me about Japanese culture: how everything has a place, a compartment of its own. That sense of orderliness, of assigned/designated space. A shock that I share with many Filipinos who were coming from the chaos-driven Philippine sphere.
When I got there in 2004, the Japanese government had just passed a law granting "amnesty" to those who had been staying/overstaying in Japan illegally. The targeted group, of course, were the entertainers, where the majority of human trafficking was allegedly coming from. The most affected group were Filipinos who comprised ninety percent of imported entertainers. The law basically gave the overstayers the chance to surrender themselves, to avoid imprisonment and paying the fine of two million yen ($20,000). The punishment is that they wouldn't be allowed back in Japan for two years, just two years, or so the Japanese government claimed. The deadline was mid-November. I arrived in Tokyo on the third or fourth day. I remember that day vividly because it was a national culture holiday in Japan, and George Bush Jr. was just re-elected.
Zack: This is utterly fascinating, to say the least! How did these ongoing changes in Japanese law affect you, the photographer Shinya Ochida, and the whole project? Did you meet or work with any immigrant advocacy groups? And where did you travel to besides Tokyo?
Sorry I've been so silent! I got caught in the holiday shuffle, during which I dug up more crazy family photos that could very well illustrate some of the migration/immigration laws and entanglements that have been brought up in this thread thus far. I'll gather my thoughts and respond again within the next couple of days.
I know that my Tito Boy (who is, incidentally, back from the Philippines right now for a few gigs, one in Riverside tonight and another in Glendale in a couple of weeks after a Bellagio gig for New Year's Eve), was also in Japan for awhile and ran into some immigration snags there—if mostly as a result of becoming involved with a patrician Japanese girl whose parents didn't appreciate their daughter consorting with a Pinoy musician. My grandfather's brother, Eddie Katindig, was also deported from the States after gigging here and staying here illegally for awhile. Not sure that should be shared or if it's appropriate for the "broadcast" of our convo, but I can find a more elegant way to allude to some of these entanglements.
My parents and I actually ran into a problem leaving Manila for Singapore back in '82. An F&B manager who wanted to book them for a gig in Yemen got very peeved about the fact that they took the Singapore gig instead, and he prevented us from leaving the Philippines by putting us on a "block" or "do not fly" list. It took a lot of greasing the wheels and finding more powerful judiciary connections (on my grandmother's part) to finally arrange for our departure about five days to a week later. Ah the Marcos era ...
More soon …
I have to say, this conversation with you three has been such an eye-opening experience for me. These are the "entanglements," as Karen puts it, knots, and traps that constitute the norm rather than the exception. And it's so ironic to me that part of what's getting revealed here is that music and the musician—usually so bound up with the rhetoric of the harmonious and the universal—are in fact tied (down) to particular bodies, which at times get to move around a lot or too much and at other times get trapped and stilled.
Sarita, Karen, Theo: To answer yr question, Sarita, I volunteered for Migrante in Nagoya, for the last three of my six-month residency in Japan. There, I got an in-your-face experience of what a Filipino entertainer, both legal and illegal, goes through, his or her everyday reality, and let me tell you it is far, very far from what the kind of romanticizing/self-absorbed crap some Fil, and especially Fil-Am scholars (and I'm not going to name names), have written about in their "research" in Japan. Anyway, my job at Migrante was to answer phones a la Filipino-in-crisis hotline, usually from kababayans [fellow Filipinos] in trouble or seeking shelter from their employers, spouses, etc. I worked directly with the director of Migrante in Nagoya, who, alongside a Catholic priest, tried to mediate or assist those in crisis. Some of these were documented in photographs taken by Shinya Ochida.
Shinya and I concentrated mostly on Filipinos living in Tokyo and southward, as far south as Fukuoka. In text and photographs we documented Filipinos in Tokyo, Yokohama, Chiba, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Nagasaki. These photos were exhibited at my end-of-grant presentation in the International Hotel in Roppongi, Tokyo, on May 2005. I plan to finish My Tokyo Notebook-like novel by end of this year.
Zack: I have a thousand more questions but I'm going to restrain myself since I feel kind of like I'm cyber-stalking you (and KT and Theo).
KT, Theo, and Zack: I am so grateful that you took the time to participate in this conversation, which I know unfolded over a much longer period than expected. It'd be great if each of you could POST YOUR FINAL THOUGHTS AND/OR QUESTIONS.
Here are some prompts:
KT: Would you like to add photos and/or thoughts to your thread about your family's experience and "entanglements" with im/migration law?
Theo: When we talked on the phone a while back, you referred to the history of Filipinos participating in the Chautauqua events, an outdoor entertainment and information circuit before the age of television that ran parallel with vaudeville in the Midwest and East Coast. I think you brought this up in response to my story about my Filipino grandfather's work in Kansas. How did you come across the history of the Chautauqua, especially in relation to Filipino entertainers?
Zack: If you don't mind me prying, I'd love to hear more about your My Tokyo Notebook-like novel.
The Tokyo Notebook-like novel is patterned after the haibun (prose with haiku interjections) travelogues of classical poets like Basho and Issa (an excellent model is Basho's travelogue, Narrow Road to the Deep North written in the seventeenth century). It's basically about what I had gone to Japan for in the first place: A Filipino-American writer who travels to Japan to research on the lives of Filipino migrant workers.
January 1, 2013, 6:01 PM PST
Hey Sarita,
Jean Vengua turned me on to the history of Filipinos performing in the Chautauqua series. The Library of Congress has a nifty site, which features programs and bios of performers like the Manila Filipino Orchestral Quartette, the Collegians, or the Varsity Four.
If I recall correctly, Jean's family had performed on this circuit. I had become interested in that early twentieth-century era. I've written about vaudeville-era performances in Manila, and I wanted to read about that history in the U.S. The Chautauqua circuit wasn't exactly a rival to vaudeville theaters, but another curious avenue for a handful of Filipino college students during this time.
January 2, 2013, 11:16 AM PST
Last call, folks! Final thoughts, questions, rants, photos? KT??
How about yourself, Sarita? What prompted you to launch into this topic? Have you come across any work on Filipino/Filipino American music-making that has struck your fancy, or are there persons or scenes that you'd like to see written about?
Oooh … You are evil, Theo. Turning it on me, I see.
KT and Zack: I'm disappointed that you didn't pull the trigger before Theo did.
Will pull some thoughts together and post in a bit.
Ok here goes nuthin, Theo.
I've known for a while that my Filipino grandfather loved music and collected a number of instruments that must have been scattered around my grandparents' house for people to pick up—piano, ukulele, guitar. But they seem to have gotten stored, unused and dusty, in the attic after my Lolo died except for the grand piano that went crazy out-of-tune. So I started this convo with a prompt about my Lolo as a kind of indirect personal history recovery project.
I also was in Manila a year ago and went to a restaurant with a small group of friends. The restaurant hires regular musicians—a singer and two guitarists who wander from table to table. I usually hate being serenaded under any conditions. But as soon as this singer started, I lost it. She really had the soaring voice of an angel, making everything—from Pilita Corales classics to Beatles ballads—sound so true and meaningful despite the sticky heaviness of the sentimentality that necessarily pervades these tunes and lyrics. And I was embarrassed to find myself tearing up about the whole scenario, the conditions we live in and work in that curtail and take advantage of the potential of voice and that convert living song into living labor. Yet time and again that voice comes through.
In addition to the three of you, the writing on music-making that I know of and that inspires me is by Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire, New York University Press, 2012) and Christine Balance. Cynthia Marasigan and others have written about the Philippine constabulary bands during the Philippine-American War.
What I'd like to see more of is a dynamic and fruitful encounter between African American and Filipino American writers, musicians, and artists about the nexus between work and music. A rapprochement that perhaps involves less fetishizing and more "frictive" history, to riff on Martin Manalansan, an encounter that recognizes from the get-go the frictions and contradictions that exist between and amongst us.
I totally understand what you mean, Sarita, about the encounter with a voice that melts your cynicism enough to forget the labor that makes that encounter possible. In Singapore, my mother sang for a total of fourteen shows, seven days a week, and I have intense recollections of her putting her make-up and "costume" on (for that gig, Jazz-age/Gatsby-era black-and-white attire), while sipping a glass or two of white wine. Enough to loosen the voice, but not enough to make her forget the repertoire. Her voice would always be hoarse, down several octaves from the previous day, but as she warmed up with vocal exercises and Pinot Grigio, it would inevitably regain its shape.
Witnessing the labor "behind the music," if you will—from that scene, to all the memories of my dad hauling equipment, staying up all night to write arrangements, and driving and flying anywhere there was a gig—is part of what prompted me to select a more "stable" and "rooted" career like being in the academy (ha!). I decided to "become a teacher" later in high school, because it seemed to me like a great gig where you could, at once, perform and fashion encounters like the one you described with the restaurant serenaders. This is why Theo's path utterly fascinates me. It is an incredibly brave one, I think, to keep playing, performing, gigging, while at once committing to another career that presents "security," but demands similar forms of transience; that is also determined by a peculiar combination of luck, hustle and "talent" (whatever any of these things mean).
The fact that Zack was able to capture the range of these experiences—of migration, dreams, and in Martin [Manalansan's] words, "biyuti and drama"—through his own peculiar music, through various writerly media, from Rolling to that gorgeous article, both laced with song lyrics that accomplish so much; that conjure the encounter at the restaurant you described, Sarita. I think about it as another form of karaoke. I used Joshua Clover's concept of "critical karaoke" to describe this method in my book Relocations. It's part of what has inspired me to explore karaoke itself, even further, to understand the kata or techniques that drive its aesthetic.
It's such a privilege to have had this conversation with all of you, and to take the migratory detours inspired by Sarita's grandfather, and the music that may not have explicitly animated his movements to and from but were certainly always reverberating through his every aspect of being in the world, wherever work and life's other detours took him.
I don't really have copies of any more pictures for now, but I'd recommend checking out the one I posted earlier of my mom with Eartha Kitt (they performed together at the Top of the Hilton in the late '70s in Manila).
January 3, 2013, 7:40 AM PST
Karen: Your mom and Eartha Kitt!!! The '70s!!
Zack: Any last words, rants, or tunes? Not sure if you want to go there but I am completely intrigued by your reference to Fil and Fil Am scholars' romanticization and self-absorption. It's definitely something I try to think about in my own work, but I'm sure I don't succeed, and that's why I find Dylan Rodriguez's love/hate letters to (bourgeois) Filipino America so necessary.
And I'm sure I'm digging a deeper hole for myself for asking.
I should clarify that in my hastily written "final thoughts" message, I didn't mean to suggest that it was a good thing that the beautiful voice momentarily obfuscates the labor behind its production. I was merely describing that process.
The photo of my mom with Eartha Kitt was snapped when Eartha sat in with the Carding Cruz band, of which my mom was a member for a while. They performed nightly at the Top of the Hilton in Manila. The woman to Eartha's right is Carding's wife, Vicky.
Sarita: feel free to include the im/migration anecdotes I included in this correspondence.
Re: romanticization and self-absorption.
I consider myself something of a Wildean (or at least I'm fascinated by Wilde's deeply self-absorbed, if not exactly Romantic, approach to criticism as an art form). In other words, I think we might be able to think of these things as endemic to all forms of criticism, and not just Fil Am scholarship—although, I can understand that romanticism and self-absorption in Fil Am scholarship manifests in its own distinct (and sometimes irritating) way. As I mentioned in my first post, I sometimes fret about my own proneness to transposing my life experiences amongst musicians and artists into that kind of solipsistic (nay, onanistic) Romantic work. But thus far, I think—or at least I hope—that in both Relocations and some of the newer work, I've figured out a way to strike some sort of balance between personal rumination, history, critical thinking, and other research.
I'd like to put out one last call to Theo or Zack to post final thoughts.
Many thanks for so generously contributing to this conversation and helping me to shape the first "CA+T Dialogue."
It's been an absolute pleasure to do this, and I'm glad you invited me!
Take care, and happy new year to all of you!
January 3, 2013, 11:38 PM PST
Yes, I agree with you kapatid [sister] Karen that we, either artists or scholars or both-in-one, must be engrossed with our interests, otherwise, what's the use or good of pursuing them; we must have that Wildean in us to keep our hearts and minds fueled. But, I also like to think the self-absorption is via passion (we're too far and deep into the work to even see reflections of ourselves). If anything, self-absorption via passion, labor, devotion.
Parting words: It was truly an honor to engage in this dialogue with you three. It is scholars and artists like you who make me want to keep writing, who make me want to embrace the next challenge and amplify it. Whenever the question of audience is brought up at my readings, I say, I write for no one. A selfish reason, yes, but if I were forbidden to leave the interrogation room unless I come up with an answer: it is scholars (i.e., you three, and your students) because they were the first ones who took interest in my madness for disco and drama, and the poetry that results from such union. They make me think and re-think the world I just created, and, above all, inspire me to create another world, as complex and challenging as the previous ones.
Salamat Ulit, mga kapatid!5
To buy a hand-pressed and -bound limited run print edition of this dialogue, please visit our Publications page.
5"Thanks again, my brothers and sisters!"
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