Observer Editorial-May 2009

 

May and Memory-Making

 

There is so much in the making of memories and in the telling of truth in relation to that moral act of memory.

 

For one, our stories, the ones that live for all time, are grounded on that capacity of memory to keep those that matter to us as peoples, as communities, as narrators.

 

They say that we are all stories and that if we are not stories, we are nothing.

 

And in this May of our recession-filled lives, there is nothing grander, there is nothing more sublime, there is nothing more redeeming than our ethical engagement with truth-telling and memory-making in that delicate dance we call ‘story-making’.

 

For the Filipino community in Hawai’i—and by extension, in the diaspora—the month of May is a riot of fiestas and flower offerings for the many religious rituals that give reason for the diasporic communities to gather and re-gather in celebration and collective reminiscing of the homeland.

 

In more ways than one, the religious, such as the Flores de Mayo festival, comes as an excuse to gather and gawk at the spectacle of ternos and tiaras that both glitter in the sun and give some measure of success for the wearers.

 

The month of May becomes an occasion of prayer, too, what with the santos going around as was done in the Philippines in the past when diaspora was not yet in the lexicon of everyday life of Filipinos and when leaving the homeland, whether forced or voluntary, was some form of punishment as it was also a form of banishment to the strange and the unfamiliar, to the alienating and the foreign, and to that relentless rite of rooting an re-rooting in a land not your own.

 

While we admit that the fiestas that we stage in our diasporic communities are sometimes far better in administration and management than the ones we have back in the homeland—and far better sometimes in terms of its popular cultural appeal, what with popular singers and popular television personalities coming to entertain and thus, coming to enthrall and make us forget in many ways the tragedy of everyday life in the home country and in the adoptive land—these fiestas need rethinking as they should be.

 

For unless they tell us of our duty to truth-telling particularly of that broad story of why many peoples of the Philippine have left the homeland to eke it our in other places, these fiestas will fall flat in the general scheme of things, and will end up as empty exercise of a stage show whose meaning lasts only while the spectacle lasts.

 

For unless these myriad of activities that highlight Philippine popular culture become themselves instruments of consciousness that make us see and hear and feel and sense and touch critically of what we need to understand about our life as a collective, in the Philippines and in the diaspora, what we do will simply turn out to be one of those endless spectacles that will leave us empty-handed in the end.

 

Because what we need really are cultural instruments and programs that make us remember our responsibility to tell the truth of our being members of the collective in light of our engaging and rich diversity, in light of our need to preserve the memory that will make us celebrate both our sameness and our difference—and in Hawai’i and in the diaspora, our triumphs against all odds, with both triumphs and odds equally recognized, remembered, named.

 

For truth-telling ought to be part of our commitment to our collective story.

 

For memory-making ought to make us morally engaged with our history.

 

Both truth-telling and memory-making are intricate parts of the same act of telling who we are as a people across time.

Published, Observer, May 2009

Hon, HI

 

 

Editorial: A difficult love, again

Observer Editorial

A Difficult Love, Again

On practically the ‘eve’ of the celebration this February of our sometimes commercialized and commodified understanding of love and the affairs of the human heart, a death occurred: a violent death, a death that follows the route of domestic violence. 

This time, the one who is stabbed to death is a man and the one who stabbed him is his girlfriend. 

Let us put names to the faces—and faces to the names: John Shaniyo and Rachael Berta. 

On January 5, this killing that should not happen happened—something that the larger Hawaiian community, in partnership and collaboration with other not-for-profit organizations—have always been working hard to address. 

And it happened in Kahului where peace and quiet and tranquility could be its other name. 

We go to Kahului from any point in Maui and the vast and calm sea greets us with its foam of waves, its fluid dance one of dynamic stillness, rhythmical in its constant teasing of the shore where the land begins.  

The town’s verdant palm fronds reach out to the blue skies, and the tops and shoulders of mountains invariably remind us of spring and summer that both come in time and beyond time, with these two seasons proudly showing us the fresh flowers endlessly abloom on the town’s roadsides in that riot of colors we can only see in a land touched by human hands, true, but the touching suggests care, concern, and commitment to what is alive, to what makes life, to what sustains life. 

But this death in Kahului rattles us off from our grace-filled tranquility. We simply cannot be still, not when domestic violence has that haunting presence in our midst.  

While it is so that by the quantities, women outnumber men in that sad tale of women taking the beating and men doing the beating, we cannot take domestic violence as a simple case of men against women. It is much more than that.

While it is that in past, the pattern tells us of women dying—being killed—by the very men who have vowed to love and protect them, we cannot take domestic violence as a simple case of women going to the grave and men going to jail and repenting after committing the deed. 

There is something awfully wrong somewhere in every phenomenon of domestic violence. Some people have called it power and control—a circle that is vicious: who wields, who yields, who can up the ante, who loses beyond loss, who is maimed, who dies, who threatens, who scares, who blackmails in the name of love or its substitutes. 

It is February and it is the month of love—but how can we enter into a celebration when out there, so much of the loving has yet to be defined for what it is in the light of fundamental human justice, and defended for what it is in the light of our commitment for another human being?

Many of us will go through the familiar annual rite: the bunch of pink roses on hand, the chocolates in red beribboned boxes, and the candles with their dancing light giving off that glow that can only reveal the texture of romantic moments.      

Let it be.

At the end of the day is that one difficult question we need to ask: what is love in this time of difficulty, in this time of extreme need, in this time of crises, in this time of recession, in this time of financial want and burden? 

What is love when the jigsaw puzzle of life seems not to fall into the right places so that we are left wondering which are the pieces that need to be worked out?

What is love when worries come knocking on the door? When the world is turning upside down, when all our cares do not make sense any longer?  When instability of all kinds makes us go haywire? 

Domestic violence is a difficult text of our life—one text that needs to be eradicated totally. We do not need another death whether man, woman, child, parent, friend, neighbor. 

Every death diminishes us.

Every death of this kind makes us loving less and less. 

Every death of this kind invalidates what The Day of the Hearts means.

A. Solver Agcaoili

Published, FAO Editorial, Feb 09

Hawai'i