Characters:
Flip 1. Local born.
Flip 2. Local born.
Fil-Im 1. Foreign born.
Fil-Im 2. Foreign born.
Chorus 1, representing the Brown Earth
Chorus 2, representing the Red Earth
Setting:
Hawaii. The present. Stage bare. Characters bring their own props.
Props requirements:
Chorus 1 in brown and Chorus 2 in red costume. Coconut bowls—buyuboy—for main characters. Rice and salt for the rice-throwing ceremony.
Scene 1
(In a dream, 4 main characters in the 4 corners of the stage. At the center of the stage are the Choruses, halved, one half representing the Brown Earth and the other half representing the Red Earth. Main characters have with them their coconut bowls—buyuboy—filled with rice and salt.)
(Main characters have long umbilical cords still tied to their gut and being held by the ghostly choruses. Through a frenzied dance movement, a struggle between holding on to the umbilical cords or cutting them off completely is depicted. In the end, main characters are able to get hold of their umbilical cords and have them tied around their waist.)
(Ghostly Choruses recite their line like a limerick, mocking, or can be set to drums and flute or other forms of ancient, tribal Filipino music to create cacophonous sounds-- jarring, confusing, clanging, taunting but forceful and fierce. This could be done for all the ghostly chorus lines.)
Chorus 1-Brown Earth
You are us
You are ours.
Flip, flip, flip
You are ours.
You belong
To this brown land
You belong
To this brown memory
You belong to us
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
You belong to us.
The brown land is you
The brown land is yours
Filipino immigrant.
Chorus 2-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Confused, confused flip
Nothing nothing going
For the brown brown flip.
Hahahahahahahahaha!
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Browned by the sun
Nothing nothing going
For the son of a gun.
Hahahahaahahahaha!
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Brown brown pilgrim
Immigrant, immigrant
From the brown brown land.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Flip, Fil-Am, Fil-Im
Stanger in this red earth
Cannot, cannot find a home
In this red red earth.
Hahahahaahahahahaha!
Choruses go to the main characters and snatch from them the coconut bowls they are holding and move to the audience to make the warsi—the rice-and-salt throwing ceremony.
Chorus 1
Fli, flip, flip
Umaykayon, flip.
Dikay agbatbati.
Come, flips
Do not linger in the Red Earth.
Come back, come back soon.
Chorus 2
Flip, flip, flip
Umaykayon, flip
Agbatikayo, agbatikayo
Ditoykayon nga agindeg
Go away from the Brown Earth
Leave the Brown Earth
Leave its brown memory.
(Choruses stand still, like ghosts, like poles. Main characters snatch their cords back and tie them around their waist. Choruses take possession of the coconut bowl.)
Flip 1
I am Flip Number 1, local born. Born in the suburbs, west of here in this place, down where the river meets the sea. I grew up with the sounds of English and the crowing of chickens and the smell of basi, burger, sushi.
I have this bad dream. The Brown Earth. It says we come from its ugly bowels.
Flip 2
I dream in English. The Red Earth.
Flip 1
I always dream in English. The Brown Earth and the Red Earth colliding and uniting, in contrast and in unison.
Flip 2
The Filipino words have long been buried in me. I never heard them. I am Flip Number 2, Americanized, twang, mind, memory--all.
Flip 1
I find myself in the sounds of the Oahu winds and the caresses of the waves in Waikiki. There is no other place I can be at home with.
Flip 1
Cut my umbilical cord. Cut my memory.
Fil-Im 1
Born in the islands, with the memory of salt and despair. I am Filipino immigrant number 1. I have cut my umbilical cord.
Fil-Im 2
Born of poverty and want. Sorrow and joy. I am Filipino immigrant number 2. I came to this Red Earth to scratch out a life. I have put an end to all connections.
Fil-Im 1
When we left the home country, I was about to understand the meaning of love for a land that does not know how to love you back.
Flip 1
I want to cut my umbilical cord, tie it to the peaks of mountains where I was born and leave it there for the weather to consume. I am Filipino Immigrant Number 1.
Fil-Im 2
It is the brown earth giving birth to me, like a big womb opening itself up to the universe and I am there, there in the hallow of that womb, sacred and holy as if I have been there forever.
Fil-Im 2
I dream of the the Brown earth swallowing me up to protect me from harm.
It folds itself, this Brown earth like the universe of a flower protecting itself from a predator.
Fil-Im 1
It is the Read Earth. We need to throw rice the way our old people did.
Flip 2
It is the earth of all the colors! It is rice and salt we need to throw. The earth is hungry. We take tack the coconut bowl from the Red Earth, from the Brown Earth.
Flip 1
It is the brown earth preying on itself. We need to feed it with our memory.
Flip 2
I dream of all the colors of the earth swallowing me whole and entire.
The colors come life the craters of a volcano opening up, hungry and terrorizing.
I dream of a red earth swallowing me up. It is a huge earth with the big mouth eating me up whole and entire.
Fil-Im 2
I dream of returning to the Brown Earth. This is what will save me from forgetting.
Fil-Im 1
My folks say you need to refuse being buried on the Red Earth.
Flip 2
Like a huge ball of fire ever ready to consume everything.
Fil-Im 1
The Red Earth, the Brown Earth. Are they ever us?
Flip 1
I dream of the Red Earth us a curse. First, it was a welcoming ball of fire, fiery, and cold. It says, Welcome, welcome, stranger. Dumanonka, dumanonka!
Fil-Im 2
And then you got into its world. Like me. There was enchantment, was there?
Isublidak idiay Filipinas! Have me back in the brown land where I came from!
Flip 1
First it opened up into a world of milk and honey as the dream was. There was bounty. A paradise, fresh and clean and rich and unspoiled.
Fil-Im 1
You get into the world of the Red Earth and never got back to yourself. You lost your direction, your senses, your sense of self. You spoke English. You spoke only English. And the Red Earth got bigger and bigger and swallowed you up.
Flip 1
Each time I spoke English only, the Brown Earth shrank. And I cannot control its shrinking. I am sick, I feel this sickness all over my tongue, my skin, my body, my mind, my fingers, my speech, my feet, my legs, my person.
Flip 2
A contagious sickness. Like the anthrax the Americans and the British are so much afraid of.
Fil-Im 1
An omen. The Red Earth says I should only drink its waters, breathe only its air, live only on its produce, and taste only its soil, bowing only to it with reverence like a ritual, and vowing to love it like no other.
Fil-Im 2
Signs of all that which will condemn us in the end. The brown of memory lost forever. We have only the red of fire.
Flip 1
The red of rage.
Flip 2
The red of anger.
Fil-Im 1
The red of the blood that betrayed us.
Fil-Im 1
The red of revolutions their names we do not know. Ah, the brown earth is where I go back to.
Flip 2
Like us not knowing who we are.
Flip 1
We do not know who we are.
Flip 2
We do not know were we are going.
Flip 1
We do not know where we came from.
Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Go home, flip
Flip, flip, flip
Got no home, flip.
Chorus-Brown Earth
The red earth
Is your curse
The red earth
You are cursed.
Chorus-Red Earth
Go home, flip
Go home, Fil-Ams
Go home, Fil-Ims
Immigrant, ethnic!
Flip, flip, flip
Go home, flip.
Chorus-Brown Earth
Come home, flip
Come home to the brown earth
Come home, immigrant
Come home to the brown land.
Flip 1
I want to forget, I want to remember.
Flip 2
I want to remember, I want to forget.
Fil-Im 1
We do the rite again. We throw the rice again.
Fil-Im 2
We need to reclaim ourselves.
Chorus-Red Earth
Resist, resist, resist
Flip, flip, flip
Resist, resist, resist.
Chorus-Brown Earth
Remember, remember, remember
Flip, flip, flip
Do not ever forget.
Fil-Im 2
I do not want to go back to the Brown earth. The memories haunt me so.
Fil-Im 1
I cannot even dream of the good life there. The old country, the old country. I have no thought of the shape of the good life. How does it look like, this good life?
Fil-Im 2
Do they sell the good life in the streets the way they sell the votes? The leaders, the leaders of the old country. They can only act. Ah, brown earth.
Fil-Im 1
I can only dream of snow and the wide spaces and the malls. This is my America. America is me now. This is my Red Earth. My Brown Earth is gone. I had it buried in my heart, my memory, my soul.
Fil-Im 2
No trace. Not a trace of who I was.
Fil-Im 1
I think of us all in this land as children of the Red Earth. It is the land adopting us.
Fil-Im 2
This land. This America whose air we breathe. This America giving us all the freedom that we never want. This America that creates magic out of our lips, the magic in English enchanting us.
Fil-Am 2
I think of your dream. It is my dream too. Its world is peopled by ghosts haunting us. The Red Earth is the omen.
Flip 1
We all come from the Brown Earth. But here, in the US of A, here, do the colors ever collide? Do they ever come into a fusion?
Flip 2
Have we permitted the colors of the earth to be us? Brown Earth as us, Red Earth as us?
Flip 1
Have we permitted the colors of the earth to feel us, to be them? Brown, red…?
Chorus-Red Earth
You do not know.
You can never know.
Flip, flip, flip.
You can never escape
The big Brown Earth.
Chorus-Brown Earth
You can never fit.
Flip, flip, flip.
You can never escape
The big Red Earth!
Flip 1
Go away. Go away.
Flip 2
I want to go away from the Brown Earth. I want to come to the Red Earth.
Fil-Im 1
I do not even want to think about it. My dad wants me to talk American English.
No pidgin, he says.
Gardemet, gardemet, he says.
Fil-Im 2
Speak English like the Washington lobbyists and you will go places.
Fil-Im 1
This is what this Red Earth is for.
Fil-Im 2
Speak the language of rulers and you will rule.
Flip 1
Say the language of colonizers and you will colonize.
Flip 2
Declaim the language of invaders and you will invade other lands.
Fil-Im 1
You will invade other peoples.
Fil-Im 2
You will invade other cultures.
Fil-Im 1
You can invoke McKinley and posit God’s benevolent intention in the argument. Hahahahaha!
Fil-Im 2
So God decreed that we, the moral and political guardians of the universe are destined to govern others, to rule over them till kingdom come. Hahahahaha!
Flip 1
This is Hawaii, ha, father says, red wine on the left hand from the Napa Valley in California.
Flip 2
The way your father holds the glass, you could see: like the newcomer trying to impress upon the host that you have the dignity to come to America and the self-respect to do all the things that the new oppressor wants you to do.
Fil-Am 2
My dad was a teacher in the grades back in the old country.
Fil-Im 1
Your father came here and he washed dishes and taught himself how to pronounce fillet mignon and Sorbonne and Paris and buffet the French way.
Flip 1
Oh, how your father flaunted his knowledge of the great America without the warts, the blemishes.
Flip 2
Ahhh, dis is the greyt kawntri, he says.
Fil-Im 2
Your English, no good, says the school principal, when father applied to teach in the grade school. You will pollute the language of the children.
While he washed dishes, my father, he dreamt of his classroom in the grades, the school children with their eager faces, eager to get some skills so they can go abroad and earn dollars so the homeland would not go the ways of the impoverished.
Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip.
You got nowhere to go.
Flip, flip, flip.
Nothing ‘bout you.
Accept, accept, accept
The Red Red Earth.
Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
No Americano
Flip, flip, flip
No Filipino.
Accept, accept, accept
The Brown Brown Earth.
Scene 2
(Main characters carry their chairs to the center. Ghostly chorus becomes the table, posts, and walls in what looks like a dap-ayan, a talking area in the purok. Main characters sit around the table with a bottle of basi at the center. )
Flip 1
We need to go the ancient ways of the ancestors.
Flip 2
Say the word.
Flip 1
Say the word, say it. We need to reclaim ourselves.
Flip 2
It is memory. We need to know who we are.
Fil-Im 1
Memory binds us to the Brown Earth, to the homeland.
Fil-Im 2
Memory links us to the new land, to the Red Earth.
Flip 1
The oracion.
Fil-Im1
The ritual of our remembering.
Fil-Im 1
We call the spirits of the Red Earth the way the folks did.
Flip 1
We call the spirits of the Brown Earth. We toast to them.
Fil-Im 2
Been here for a brief period. Accent always gives me away. The ghosts of the pro-English sakadas may not like it. Can’t say the oracion.
Flip 2
And your skin, immigrant brother. Brown as the brown leaves.
Flip 1
Or the earth that decays, unable to withstand the elements.
Fil-Am 1
The Brown Earth of the forest that leads you to confusion.
Flip 2
This Red Earth that leads us to wandering.
Fil-Im 2
We are lost. We have to find our way back.
Fil-Im 1
The forest is enchanted. The brown of the forest is enchanted.
Flip 1
I don’t have a desire to go back to the old country. I do not know it. It is not my country. Only this Red Earth I like, ya?
Flip 2
I do not have any idea what it means to have a homeland.
Flip 1
Never been to the homeland myself. I do not know anything. The Red Earth is my homeland. This America is my heartland.
Flip 2
Homeland, heartland—they are one and the same. This is my Red Earth.
Fil-Am 2
There is no point going back to the Brown Earth. You have not left it, right?
Fil-Am 1
Our folks talk of going back all the time. Mom says, I do not want to die here.
I want to be buried in that same brown earth I was born, she says. And she says that almost every week as if to remind us that we have an obligation to bring her home and bury her there when she is gone. Does that even matter if we bury her here in this Red Earth?
Flip 1
My grandparents tell us all the time, we do not want to live in nursing homes. Bring us home. And they are in their home in Honolulu. What are they saying?
Fil-Am 2
My grandfather says, I am American. The misshapen nose, the nostrils their opening bigger than cherry tomatoes, allowing the air to freely come in and out. Oh, it is magic. The coming and going of air in his pug nose. And he says he is an American the way John Kerry says he is. No heritage, just American, plain American. We challenge him and he runs to get his passport from the drawer and shows it to us, Dis, dis, dis! Dis makes me American! Many would die to get dis!
Flip 2
Are we lost?
Flip 1
Do we know who we are?
Fil-Im 2
Who are we?
Fil-Im 1
Where is the basi?
Chorus-Red Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Something for me.
I am the spirit
The kick in the basi.
Chorus-Brown Earth
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Come on, come on, come on.
Give me a drop
Give me a drop.
Chorus-Red Earth
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Give me something
Give me some loving
Where are you going?
Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Flip, flip, flip
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Flip 1
We are lost.
Flip 2
We can be found again.
Flip 1
We can find ourselves again.
Flip 2
There is a way to turn back.
Fil-Im 1
We do the ritual.
(Main characters move to where the choruses are. They forcefully snatch the coconut bowls from the choruses holding them. A struggle ensues while the choruses recite their lines).
(Another struggle ensues: choruses grabbed the cords from the waist of the main characters. Choruses win. They hold the cords while they form like tables, posts, mounds of earth, walls.)
Chorus-Red Earth
Some more denying
Some more depriving
Some more unknowing.
Chorus-Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip
Denying, denying, denying
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am
Depriving, depriving, depriving
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im
Unknowing, unknowing, unknowing.
(Main characters put rice and salt on their bowls and ready for the rice throwing ceremony. Choruses become a table, posts, and walls again, not moving. )
Fil-Im 2
We call the spirits of the Brown Earth.
Flip 1
The spirits of the Brown Earth, the spirits of the Red Earth.
Fil-Im 2
My father, even here, does the bloodletting of chickens. Gets the stewing chicken. Slits the neck and dance the dance of his father and all the fathers before him.
Fil-Im 1
My grandmother says, Go away, go away. Go away, you spirits of the rotten earth, you spirits of the spoiled earth, you spirits of the decayed earth. Come, come, you spirits of the good earth, the brown earth, the red earth, the earth that blesses us, the one that gives us life. Come, he says, and he dances, blood dripping in circles in the front of our house, all over the ground.
(He performs the ritual of his father, dancing the tadek in a frenzied way, losing himself in the process).
Flip 1
My grandpa when I got sick one day got rice and salt. Mixed them on a coconut bowl. (Brings out one from his pocket. Puts in rice and salt and throws it on stage and to the audience). He went outside, in the dark and recited: Umadayokayo, apo, umadayo kayo. Baribari, apo, baribari. Didakayo masapul, umadayokayo.
Fil-Am 1
(Gets his own coconut bowl, puts rice on it, mixes it with salt, recites the oracion, in English). Go away, go away, you spirits of the bad earth. Go away, go away. Come, come, come spirits of the Brown Earth. Come, come, come spirits of the Red Earth. Red Earth, Brown Earth and all your spirits, come bless us.
All:
For the spirits of the Brown Earth, for the spirits of the Red Earth.
(Main characters move to the center, pour out basi on their bowls and ritually pour out basi on the Red Earth and the Brown Earth who are now slumped on the stage.)
All:
For the spirits of the Brown Earth, for the spirits of the Red Earth. We see them coming together, these spirits, happy and proud and contented.
(Together they drink of the basi from the coconut bowl).
Ghostly chorus, in a dance:
Flips, flips, flips
Coming home to themselves
Fil-Ams, Fil-Ams, Fil-Ams
Coming back to their senses.
Immigrants, immigrants
Going back to their earths.
CURTAINS FALL
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