I need you to know
I am privileged
That my survival
Depends on asking questions
Instead of swallowing them down.
This is our intergenerational wealth.
Passed down by parents who survived on a steady diet of silence.
I tried to succeed under white judgment; now I survive white surveillance/ignorance/fragility. Sick & disabled Pinay, too familiar with how folks feel our rights are optional, are favours, are unfair — at the cost of our inconvenient humanity.
My body is an act of defiance
That I’m an un/willing accomplice to
Sometimes I revel in how uncomfortable it makes other people.
Sometimes I have to, to keep going.
They “play along” with our personhood until it’s too much work, too tiring, too challenging. They “tolerate” and “allow,” these so-called allies of anti-racism and anti-colonialism. They tell me (token Brown woman, token crip, token queer) about their token learnings, as if they’re gifts I should be grateful to receive. As if unlearning white normativity, capitalism, and colonization isn’t work to free us all.
For many of us, we live here on stolen land because colonialism and racial capitalism have had direct destructive effects on our homelands. Land still being ravaged by colonial capitalism.
Sometimes I never want to step foot in the Philippines again
What it’s supposed to mean to me
Who I’m supposed to be
Will this Land embrace me
Or spit me back, unknown daughter
I’m afraid to find out.
The destruction continues every time whiteness is positioned as normal, as unquestionable, as standard; when whiteness receives the benefit of the doubt, while the rest of us are subject to scrutiny. And it continues every time our people and our cultures are positioned as abnormal, as subject to judgment, as extraneous.
I grieve what has been taken from us. I don’t know what holidays my ancestors celebrated before Spanish galleons broke the horizon in 1521. I don’t know what songs they sang, the rituals they had, or the lives they lived. These stories were systematically destroyed by Spanish colonists, American imperialists, and Japanese occupiers. I don’t imagine some pre-colonial utopia. There is precious little left to imagine at all.
At night
My guides and ancestors rock me to sleep
In a bangka they weave around my bed.
Daughter of infinities, descendant of multitudes
They speak in my Lola’s voice.
Anak, they say.
Close your eyes
Rest now.
Now I am grown
When I reach out for yakap
Only the ancestors respond.
I learned my culture in negatives. Don’t speak Tagalog at work, don’t make trouble, don’t flinch when white men eye my (crip) body like a toy they can take home. We were taught just enough to survive with feet in two worlds. I can still dance the tinikling, and placate a self-righteous white woman with a deferent tone and words to soothe the ego.
The gift I receive from my lineage is to do more than lay low in white supremacy, but to revel in Pilipinx joy and defiance.
The word Brown feels like an anthem
These days
Our rage/pride/love/joy feels like singing
You need to know that this is urgent and painful and necessary for all of us. That my dreams are full of loud Pinoys rebuilding what has been taken, of abundance where we can all hold room for softness and for rage, of our children free and fierce and proud in a world that demands we shrink.
I dream of celebrating in tandem with our ancestors once again, to sing their songs and write new ones.
This is what I need you to know: It starts with naming that things are not as they should be. It ends with us.