Domestic Violence, Men's March

Domestic Violence Is Not, Never the Way to Go

 A Solver Agcaoili

(Note: This is what I am going to say at the Men’s March to be held at the State Capitol, October 9, at noontime, in celebration of the Domestic Violence Month. I thank the organizers, specifically Joe Bloom, director of Caritas Hawai’i, for including me as one of the speakers. The Men's March Committee has been doing the men's march since 14 years ago. Many organizations will join the march, with speakers from the State House of Reps, the prosecutor's office, the Honolulu Advertiser, local community leaders, and the Domestic Violence Action Center.) 

I come before you wearing many hats.

Ever since that death that made my stomach churn—the death of Erlinda Adviento—things have never been the same for me.

As a poet, domestic violence has become for me the antithesis of the poetic: it snuffs out the life of words, it snuffs out the healing power of words, and it snuffs out the redeeming power of words. 

In death, there simply will no longer be a speaker. Word will be absent. 

In death, there simply will no longer be a listener. Word will be absent. 

Speaking and listening—the very heart of a healthy relationship—will simply not happen.

I tell you my story: I am a husband.  

I am a father of two daughters. I am a father of a son. 

Like every husband and father, I go through a lot but I pray that anger will not get hold of me, that rage will not get hold of me, that destruction will not overcome me. And I am here to say that domestic violence of whatever form is never ever the way to go in resolving domestic conflicts even if in life we have a good share of them, these conflicts that if we only know how to resolve them will make us stronger, wiser even. 

In that ping of a computer on that dark night that I first heard of Erlinda Adviento’s death via e-mail, I remembered my wife. I remembered my two daughters. I remembered my son. 

I looked out the window of my office in the stillness of that dark night, a late night, and in the silence, I could hear the weeping of children, the weeping of mothers, the weeping of women, and the weeping of those who loved the dead woman. 

I have not heard of Erlinda Adviento before—and she probably had not heard of me. But on that late and dark night I knew, I knew that the only way to get out of the cauldron of mixed emotions that gripped me was to translate these emotions into a creative rage, into a poem, a poem for this dead woman I do not know, a poem for all the other Erlinda Advientos that came before her and that came after her.  

In that poem is the covenant that I have with all people who go through hell because of domestic violence. 

In that poem I asked Erlinda and all the women why did you stay? 

But in that poem as well, I asked men—my manner of asking more and more and more of incomprehension and disbelief—the men like me, why, why did you hit? Why, why, why did you kill? Why, why did you use the gun to settle your domestic differences? 

In all these incidents, this epidemic of domestic violence, I think of my wife, and I tell myself, in a prayerful wish: domestic violence will not be our route to make peace, in our home as well as in our heart. 

I think of my two daughters, and I tell myself, in a prayerful wish: domestic violence will not get into your heart; it will not get into your homes; and it  will not blight the beautiful lives you lead. 

I think of my son as well, and I tell myself—and I tell him in a prayerful wish: domestic violence will not reside in your heart. You will not use those hands that I held with care when you were young, hands you used to hold onto me so you can hold onto the world and see for yourself the beauty of life. I tell him you are going to use those hands not to hit anyone but to take good care of everyone. 

I have witnessed enough of domestic violence and I do not want to become a witness to another one. 

For each death that I come to know on the papers, there is sorrow that builds up upon my chest, and the sorrow swells, and the sorrow becomes a volcano until I cannot write a poem any longer. 

All I want is the fundamental poetry of life. 

All I want is the hidden magic of words that come from the lips of people who know peace and quiet, people who know justice and love, people who know what care and kindness are all about. 

All I want is the magic of those words that will save us eventually from the hell that is domestic violence. 

All I want is the magic of those words that will reveal to us the surprises of what love can do to heal all of us, words that will teach us what gracious kindness can do to our communities so that we all become aware of our duty to take good care of others. 

I come here to speak as a Filipino as well: we all know that many of those who have died in the hands of their intimate partners, their lovers, their husbands, or their relatives are women of Filipino descent. Of those Filipinos, majority of them are Ilokanos. 

This reality hits me hard in the way every one of us is hit hard: why, why? What is the connection between being an Ilokano and Filipino and this ugly business of domestic violence? Pray, tell me, what?  

Deep within, this is what I know: we need to get educated to the challenges of putting an end to domestic violence—and Ilokano men and women must join hands to finally say, Stop the Violence. 

Our men also love—they know how to love, this I am sure. 

But our men are hitting their women—and some kill them as well. 

This abomination has nothing to do with our ethnolinguistic community; it has something to do with us as men; it has something to do with that lack that we have in our heart as men; and it has something to do with that lack that gnaws at our soul. Sure, we can blame society, but the blame game boomerangs on us. 

In the attempt to offer a healing covenant with our women, we need to name that lack in our heart, that void in our heart, that darkness in our heart and say, with finality, that domestic violence, indeed, is not the way to go. 

In our attempt to become one again with the community of women and children we have hurt, in the attempt to heal our hurts as well, we need to look at our soul again, and fill that lack that gnaws at our soul with a love that heals and that makes us whole again. 

This is our solemn vow now: to commit ourselves to ending this crime against our women and against our children and against ourselves. 

May all men grow in wisdom to know the difference between a loving heart and a violent one. 

Mahalo and good day. 

Curiouser and Curiouser

Last night's incident of a revelation with a revelation is one for the books.

The inner circle of GUMIL Hawai'i associates--the circle is 'inner' in the sense that these are the constants in almost all of the association's gatherings--went to offer fellowship to the family of an associate, a couple in fact, who are key members of our writers group. 

A brother based in Virginia suffered a major stroke and they went to that state to bury him a few days ago. 

But last night's was the Ilocos Norte way of doing the umras, the ceremony of invoking God's mercy and forgiveness and of summoning the welcoming spirit of place called Eternity as promised to all those who believe. And the brother and his brothers--they are five brothers in that family, all immigrants, the three in Hawai'i, the two in Virginia, but now there is only one brother there, with the demise of the youngest, at 50--thought of putting in their share of remembering the youngest and giving their blessings so he would finally find rest. 

In my gallivanting life as an immigrant in this country, I have had the chance to visit various Ilokano communities, exilic as ever, with the pinakbet almost a reminder of the hodge-podge Ilokanoness that we are, with our okra coming from the Africans, and our lima beans coming from South America, possibly up there in Lima, Peru, hence the name for that gentle 'patani' that climbed our fences made of bamboos and some sturdy main branches of the madre de cacao whose blooms of purple dot the landscape of sloping hills and mountain foothills in the summer, the scene a riot of bloom in the relentless Philippine tropical heat and that steady brown-red colors of the Ilokano earth. 

But this communing with the family of a beloved deceased whose life was remembered and celebrated in the umras was what seduced me into joining the throng of friends yesterday evening after spending some time tinkering with the computer to write something about the nature of serendipitous truths from the many moments of our lives that we did not plan, least of all did not expect.

And the umras incident was one of them. 

I wanted to experience what umras was in the diaspora, and right here in Honolulu where nine of every ten Filipinos are veritably Ilokano or Ilokano-descended, and where ethnic pride is on the sway, some flaunting their Ilokanoness, some despising it, that umras ceremony, indeed, could be a clue to variety and difference. 

Oh well, about that reality of ambivalent Ilokanoness, you cannot have it all.

In the smorgasbord of our cultural lives in exile, and in the buffet kind of ways by which we perform our everyday lives in estrangement and alienation, you can expect everything including those Ilokanos who have the capacity to fake their accent and pass themselves off as everything except being Ilokano, with claims that run the gamut from "Marigatanak nga agilokano, sika!" to "Apay nga agad-adalka iti Ilokano ket Ilokanoka la ngaruden?" 

The cultural and ethnolinguistic morons are everywhere, and the communities of Ilokanos are not spared of their just share of the harvest of moronic lives lived in culturally moronic ways.

So there, at Kalihi, not from from the Catholic Church of Kalihi that, last year, was the venue for my first-ever recitation of a poem for a domestic violence victim, Erlinda Adviento, that sparked some interests from various communities, cause-oriented and profit-oriented. The same poem would lead me to other places, including a generous exposure from The Honolulu Advertiser, both newspaper and online video. But that is not the point: St John the Baptist church evoked first-time memories when I did not know anyone except those who were involved with DV causes and works to empower Filipino-American nurses, the works Adviento, I was told, was a beneficiary when she passed the state licensure examination and began to work as a registered nurse, only to end up a battered wife, a suffering wife, and dead.  The husband, in jail, had many things to do with those and that church, in these two evenings that I was there, served as the vessel of all the currents of tears that could not well down my cheeks, suppressing and suppressing more and more the choke on my throat as I read the lines of the poem I wrote for the nurse whose face I saw only for the first time when she was lying in state and lying stiff, her remains awaiting shipping back to the homeland, in the Pangasinan of her youthful dreams. 

We got to the house of the other brother of the deceased, the brother a former schoolroom teacher back in the Philippines but decided to embark on another profession as soon as he got to Honolulu in the 70's in the name of the mighty dollar, this currency that sends your shrivers in order to transition you into its easy and ritual worship that puts those memorized words on your lips: "O dollar, dollar, our might dollar, come, come to save us!"

His story of not going back to the classroom is classic, and each time you meet former school teachers in the Philippines doing other works other than teaching, you hear the same plot simplified for that self-defense: "Agpada met a kuarta ti birbiroken!"

His place is by the hillside of Kalihi, on the mountainside, and on one shoulder of the hill, a huge car plant looms large like a capitalist phantom that reminds you of sellers of cars most of which you do not need while close by is the freeway that does not sleep but keeps on humming and sleepwalking, the speeding cars on its listless lanes onrushing to beat time and temper and the tender mercies of sleepless evenings.

We got to the site of the umras, and there were the people oneing with the family, the old women kneeling before the umras table of an atang that was to remain there, in the altar, and guarded by members of the family until four o'clock the following morning. That would be the time when the atang could go through the akas ritual--removed from the atang table--with the food permitted to be eaten if not yet spoiled. 

Outside where we waited for the prayers for the dead to end, we remembered our performed Ilokanoness in the Philippines, a country soon to be renamed with something else in an effort to right the linguistic and social injustices that had befallen our peoples. We remembered as well our performed Ilokanoness in our diasporic communities, the performance a variety, indeed.

In moments like this, I go on an ethnographer's mode, listening and listening intently, marking off the cultural signs and symbols and trying to commit everything to memory. At some other times, I would scramble for a pen and tear sheet and write what I can, the words a jumble of a mumbo-jumbo reminder of what I should do to make out what I have learned from the field. 

I sat in my corner transfixed by all the rich exchange of cultures and cultural experiences, and planned a tactic about how I would turn these experiences into something written when an old man, in light checkered cotton shirt with the geometric designs of some cultures from the Pacific came around, looked at all of us, and looked at me more intently, and looked at me some more. 

And then, with outstretched right hand, he addressed me, "I am your tatang, Mr. Television Man!"

Instantly, I did not know how to respond. Taken aback could be an appropriate English term, and it was so, the immediate feeling giving you chicken skin, per the term used in Hawai'i pidgin English. 

Since I started a television talkshow, 'Talkback', on public TV, I have received calls on my work phone, the calls almost always a generous hectoring on for me to continue the program so that the Ilokano people would be educated of who they are. 

But that was it, a phone platitude of how much one is doing, and how much some segment of a community is appreciative of what one is doing, until yesterday evening, when one man past his prime but sensitive to how Ilokanoness is performed over here, recognized me instantly and offered his hand to me in fellowship.

"I watch your show," he told me.

"Dios ti agngina, tatang," I told him, the moment teaching me what humility is, not allowing the recognition to give me those misplaced feelings of self-importance, feelings I pray hard I would not have to battle with in the years to come.

Kalihi, Honolulu, Hawai'i

September 28/08