Red Earth, Brown Earth (Revised)

Characters:

Flip 1: Local born-American
Flip 2: Local born-American
Fil-Am 1: Immigrant - Americanized with papers
Fil-Am 2: Immigrant - Americanized with papers
Fil-Im 1: Foreign born but here on Visa
Fil-Im 2: Foreign born but here on Visa
Ghostly Chorus:
Chorus 1 – Brown Earth
Chorus 2 – Red Earth

Setting: Hawaii, at a basi-drinking gathering. The present. Stage bare. Characters bring their own set.

Scene: (In a dream, 6 main characters in the 4 corners of the stage.)

Ghostly Chorus: (recited like a limerick, mocking, or can be set to a metallic rock music to create cacophonous sounds, jarring, confusing, clanging, but forceful and fierce. These 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 us.
Fil-Am, Fil-Am, Fil-Am.
You belong to us.

The brown land is you;
The brown land is yours
Filipino immigrant
Fil-Im, Fil-Im, Fil-Im


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, and sushi.

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

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

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

Fil-Am 1
I am Fil-Am number 1. I am found and I am lost. The Brown Earth of the forest leads
me to confusion.

Fil-Am 2
I am Fil-Am number 2. Loneliness is everywhere in this Red Earth. I want to go back to my Brown Earth. But the Red Earth beckons me.


Fil-Am 1
I dream of returning to the Brown Earth. That is what will save me from forgetting.
My folks say you need to refuse being buried on the Red Earth.

Fil-Im 1
Red Earth, the Brown Earth, are they ever us?

Fil-Im 2
I dream of the Red Earth as a curse. First, it was welcoming ball of fire, fiery, and cold. It says, Welcome, welcome stranger. Dumanonka, dumanonka!

Fil-Im 1
And then you got into this 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 2
You get into the world of the Red Earth and never go 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.

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.

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

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

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

Chorus 1 & 2
Flip, Fil-Am, Fil-Im.
Stranger in this Red Earth
Cannot, cannot find a home
In this Red, Red Earth
Hahahahahahahahaha!

Fil-Im 1
Ah, the Brown Earth is where I go back to.

Flip 1
We don’t where we are going.

Flip 1
We don’t 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!

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

Flip 1
We don know where we are going.

Flip 1
We don know where we came from.

Chorus 2 – 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/ Fil-Am / Flip
We need to reclaim ourselves.

Chorus 1 – Red Earth
Fil-Am, Fil-Im, Fil, Am.
Consider, consider, consider.
Do not ever regret.

Chorus 2 – Brown Earth
Flip, flip, flip.
Remember, remember, remember
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 though of the shape of the good life. How does it look like, now, 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 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-Am 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 thought we wanted. The America that creates magic out of our lips, the magic in English enchanting us.

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

Chorus 1 – Red Earth
You do not know.
You can never know.
Flip, flip, flip
You can never escape
The big Brown Earth.

Chorus 2 – 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-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.

Fil-Am 1
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 to the ways of the impoverished.

Flip 1
It is the accent, man!

Fil-Am 1
Bumperrr to bumperrr.

Fil-Im 1
Krakerrr!

Fil-Am 2
Rranglerrr!

Fil-Im 1
Hamburdyer.

Flip 2
Hear this, hear this.
My politicized mother called the Philippines. There was a state of emergency down there, as the case everyday.. like Gloria Macapagal Arroyo saying: enough already ngarud. Enough na of rali-rali and the kudeta. State of emergency, state of calamity, state of war. Istet, mother says. Istet. Like the United Istet?

Fil-Im 1
(Dials the operator.)
Hilow, operator.
Heilow, upereter. Ha!
I wan to kol da Pilipin.
Ya, ya da Pilipin ya.
I like call my daughter.
Here da number in Manila. Yeah dey lib in Manila now.
011-632-788-5525.

Fil-Im 2
Helo?
Where are you?
Many people der now? What?
Many trak?
Many uzi?
What? Full metal jacket?
Ay, Apo! Diosko!
Go home. Go home now.
Hari ap! Go. Go. Go!
Bambay you’re dead.

Ghostly chorus of the Red Earth perform a frenzied dance and move to center stage.

Scene 2

(Main characters carry their chairs to the center. Ghostly chorus becomes the table, pasts, 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.)

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

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

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.
I was born here.

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.

Flip 1
My grandparent tell us all the time, we don’t 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 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-Am 1 / Fil-Am 2
We are lost.

Flip 1 / Flip 2
We can be found again.

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 an salt on their bowls, and ready for the rice throwing ceremony. Choruses become a table, post, 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 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 she says, and she dances, blood dripping in circles the front of our house, all over the ground.

Flip 1
My grandpa when I got sick one day got rice and salt. Mixed them on a coconut bowl. (Brings out one from pocket. Puts in rice and salt and throws it on stage and to the audiences.) he went outside, in the dark and recited: umadayokayo, Apo. Umadayokayo. Baribari, Apo, baribari.

Fil-Am 1
(Gets his coconut bowl, puts rice in it, mixes it with salt, and recites the oracion, in English.)
go away, go away, you spirits of the bad earth. 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.

Fil

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 their earths.

Fil-Am / Fil-Im / Flips
Coming home to the Brown Earth.
Coming home to the Red Earth.

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.)

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. In our maniness, we are one. (Before they sip, )Bagiyo, bagiyo, apo.Kukuayo Apo.


CURTAINS FALL.


Written for the April 2006 College Summit, University of Hawaii. The author thanks Prof. Precy Espiritu, play director, for the revisions. Written in Waipahu, Hawaii, in February 2006 during my visiting lecturership at the UH; revisions were done in March 2006.