Apon Ti Exilo

2012-02-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

The Road to College Education,
The Road to the Manoa Experience

By Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

All roads to college will lead to the University of Hawaii at Manoa on February 25.

The annual event is called the Manoa Experience.

Planned and hosted by the University of Hawaii at Manoa Office of Admissions, more college-bound and students in high school dreaming of gaining access to college will participate in the event.

Some of the roads that end up in Manoa are well traveled.

But some are definitely less traveled, depending on who is dreaming of a destination place.

And the destination place is college education.

For the immigrant communities, particularly the community representing the descendents of people of the Philippines in the State of Hawaii, many of these roads have yet to be trodden on.

For the Ilokano Americans—those descended from the ranks of the plantation workers who came to Hawaii to take active participation in the growth and development of the plantation economy of the state—the February event represents a sliver of hope.

It is a chance to dream again, to dream beyond the historic menial jobs that most Ilokano immigrants are subjected to as soon as they set foot in Hawaii.

It is a vicious circle, this story of Ilokanos becoming tied to work with their hands and never rising from this lot in life, except for a few who are able to get by and send their children to college, and thus able to give their children that one fat chance to change the arc of their story as working class people since 1906, the year the first fifteen plantation workers from the Ilocos set foot in the islands.

Access to higher education is the new gospel for every Ilokano immigrant in Hawaii.

It is the new gospel for every immigrant of Philippine descent as well.

The Center for Philippine Studies of the University of Hawaii estimates, from a census data, that Ilokanos represent 85% of the immigrant Philippine population of the state.

Estimates from the Philippine Consulate General corroborate this data, and even tells us of a continuing migration of Ilokanos at between 85 to 90% of the yearly total of about 4,000 to 5,000 of immigrants from the Philippines.

The urgency of sending Ilokano children to college is borne by these hard facts.

The Filipino American Education Institute speaks of students of Philippine descent in public schools as ‘the invisible majority.’

Students of Hawaiian descent, at 28% or about 49,000 remain the majority, but they are visible.

Students of Philippine descent stand at 21% or about 37,000, but they are unseen, unheard, and neither here nor there.

These students are second to Hawaiian students in terms of number; they are also second to bottom in state assessments in reading proficiency and math skills.

Numbers add up, but numbers are a stigma too, as is the case of the 85% comprising the Ilokano population of the state.

The practice of collapsing the term Filipino with all of the ethnic groups in the state has given rise to the urgency of seriously considering the problems of Filipinos and Filipino Americans in terms of their access to college education.

But to regard Filipino as an ‘ethnic’ cover term, and not minding the diversity of ethnic groups included in that term, has resulted in the disparity of approaches to addressing critical issues in public education, including the lumping of immigrants from the Philippines as Tagalog-speaking even if they are not.

There clearly are problems in access to college education, and a conscientious approach to how best to deal with these problems has been explored by a variety of programs including retention and promotion under the UH Office of Multicultural Student Services and the UH GEAR-Up, and the UH College Opportunity Program.

Challenge Grant is currently funding a program specifically geared towards giving students of color access to higher education and retaining them in college. The Student Equity Excellence and Diversity is running the program.

Jeffrey Acido, lecturer of the UH Ilokano Program, says that the issue of access to college is real one among communities with high Ilokano population.

Speaking from his experience as a graduate of Farrington High School in Kalihi, he says of the almost infectious thinking of Ilokano students that college education is not for them and that as soon as one gets out of high school, all one has to do is look for work and start contributing to the family income.

“With parents putting in so many hours for a double job at meager wages, and with no quality family life and interaction resulting from involuntary parental absence, we cannot expect much from Kalihi unless we break free from that kind of an almost collectivized thinking,” Acido says.

Asked of the need to insist on a more sensitive ethnic term in addressing issues of social importance, Acido says of the urgency of radicalizing our approach to addressing the issues of college access and to revisiting the issue of retention and promotion.

“I was once a public school student, and I know whereof I speak. It is not enough that we are called Filipinos. It is urgent that we also affirm our being Ilokanos so that our bigger social problems such as education would be properly addressed. There are definitely some problems that are unique to the Ilokano experience and one of them is the economic cost of sending our young people to college, what with our parents receiving meager wages,” Acido explains.

Julius Soria, a long-time advocate of the Ilokano language and culture, and himself an instructor of Ilokano in both high school and college, speaks of the stigma attached to being Ilokano.

“You claim that you are Ilokano, you are automatically bukbok, a weevil that destroys any of those wooden structures. The comparison is not apt, of course, as it is most derogatory and does not represent what the Ilokano is capable of,” he says.

Drawing from his doctoral research of five Ilokano students studying Ilokano at Farrington High School, Soria talks of the kind of defenses an Ilokano student resorts to when confronted of his being Ilokano.

Soria, drawing from his years of work as an Ilokano heritage instructor at Farrington, explains the urgency of advocating for heritage rights in public education, and using these rights to their languages and cultures as educational resources.

“I see it more as giving hope to students and empowering them that they are capable of going to college regardless of their background, FOB or not, with accent or no accent. The FOB thing, fresh off the boat, is an ugly term. Sometimes, there are stories—subtexts—that suggest to students that they are not ‘college material.’ Sometimes, they internalize this. We need to falsify these messages, negate them, and affirm our students by prodding them to make a choice to go to college. We need to dialogue with them about the importance of college and providing them access to get there. Involving their parents is one of the keys to do that. It is important that we provide them awareness to these activities, such as the Manoa Experience, so they can come up with an informed choice,” he says.

The defenses as varied, including the conscious hiding of the infamous Ilokano accent when a student talks; the hiding of his ethnic identity by not being forward with his being Ilokano, or Filipino for that matter; and the almost automatic claim that he is ‘local’ or ‘local born.’

These conscious acts are safety nets against the assault on what one cannot do, what one does not possess, and what one can never become.

“I went through the same rite myself,” Soria says. “It is some kind of a rite de passage that you cannot escape from if you were born in the Philippines, or if you come from an Ilokano household. You cannot afford to be caught with your r’s as heavily as the old Ilokanos do. You learn to fake your accent. You learn how to lose it. And the faster you do, the better for you.”

There is a long way to go before the Ilokano Americans can pursue the American Dream.

At best, the pursuit of the dream is still elusive.

But a number of programs have been put in place to help students of Ilokano descent transition to college, stay in college, and get their degree before getting out.

One of these programs is the UH Ilokano Program that has been in existence at the University of Hawaii since 1972 and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

The program offers both a two-year language program in Ilokano and a four-year Bachelor of Arts program with concentration in Ilokano.

Aside from these programs, it also offers a minor in Ilokano and a variety of culture courses in Philippine diasporic literatures, Philippine critical discourses, Philippine popular culture, modern Philippine drama, modern Philippine film, and Philippine cultural mapping.

Another Ilokano program has been put in place in UH Maui College since the last two years.

In high school, a two-year Ilokano program as part of the world languages curriculum is now in place at Farrington High School and Waipahu High School.

Many of the students who will participate at the 2012 Manoa Experience will be coming from these programs and schools.

For all immigrants dreaming of going to college—of wanting to learn many of the avenues to going to college, stay there, and get a degree—join us at the Manoa Experience on February 25, at the McCarthy Hall of UH Manoa, from 9:00 AM-2:00 PM.

Observer/
Feb 2012

The Education of the Ilokano Immigrant of Hawaii

2012-01-29T13:21:00.001-08:00

Education and Capacity Building

The tragic in the Philippine experience in the diaspora, including that of Hawaii, is that so many of the Americanized Filipinos have not gone past the ‘service industry’ mentality.

If we scratch the surface, this mentality extends the very logic of the plantation economy, with the coming over of the first 15 Ilokanos to Hawaii in 1906.

That initial Ilokano participation would eventually involve other ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines, with the Visayans joining the Ilokano farmhands in 1909.

With 1906 as the reference point, we have 105 years of presence, or the equivalent of more than four generations.

It is a long story—and history—this.

And despite our claims to the many ‘firsts’ in the state, such as a first governor of a Philippine descent, an exhibit of our capability indeed, we cannot show much further than that.

The burden of proof remains with us.

In a capitalist economic structure, those who have the money to invest remain the captains of a community’s day-to-day existential narrative, that narrative dictating among others who get to be employed in which job, given certain job requirements.

The playing field is not yet leveled, with social and institutional structures remaining the same as that of the plantation economy days.

The base—or the economic infrastructure—remains in the hands of the same people, or their surrogates, as that of the old days.

Simply put, you do not have the money for capital—or if you wish, big investment—you cannot set the direction on where the Philippine peoples would go for a work to make them live, even when they have those many multicolored dreams to live on.

The service industry—people who work for hotels, resorts, and the similar playgrounds of the rich and financially able—is still dominated by the same people as that of the plantation.

The site of service has changed, true.

We have gone away from the big plantations, even if some have remained rooted there with their soiled hands, gnarled fingers, and burnt skin.

But the service mentality has remained intact among the immigrant peoples of the Philippines.

And this service mentality has been passed on from generation to generation for reasons that are complex, including that infectious and contradictory idea, particularly among Ilokanos—and by extension among immigrants—that one does not have to get an education to get by in Hawaii.

The logic is simple and yet twisted—and reduces the believer to a zealot: ‘You get an education, you get and employment, you earn. You do not get an education, you get an employment, you earn.’

In Ilokano parlance, one of those distorted formulas we hear on the streets, it is called the logic of ‘da same ting.’

Elaborated, it means: with or without education, you earn a living.

Never mind that there are parents who believe otherwise.

The key here is the infectious capacity of that belief—and the reduction of the immigrant people into the new servants of the industry for which Hawaii is known.

Never mind that among the ranks of immigrants working as chambermaids and maintenance people are Philippine college-educated people with an accent, and because of that accent, cannot land in jobs requiring that one has to lose one’s accent.

There is lesson to be learned in this—and to be learned the hard way and with seriousness.

We cannot leave our young infected with this service mentality any longer.

Together with them, we have to explore doors for them to get to college.

Together with them, we have to make them see that going to college, and getting out with a degree, will give them some fighting chance to make their life better, better than what many of us know.

________________

We urge, therefore, our young people who are college-bound, and those who are dreaming of going to college, and their parents, to come and join as at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Experience on February 25.

A Agcaoili/
Observer Editorial, Feb 2012

UH Ilokano Program, UH Manoa Experience

2012-01-29T13:20:00.001-08:00

Kallautang

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

The UH Manoa Experience 2012 and
What It Means To Our Young People

The statistical data on college education retention and promotion among the ranks of children of immigrants in the islands remains something we can only hope for to change for the better—and soon.

In real terms, we have a lot to do to improve our standing in these numbers that remind us we have not done a lot yet.

In real terms, we have to yet to hit a number that will make us say that our immigrant peoples take college education as a matter of obligation to self and to community.

The Obama Administration has never been remiss in its constant reminder that our key to the integral development of the United States, to the enrichment of our community in general, and to the development of our individual capacities for a more qualitative life—in short, to the pursuit of a real and honest-to-goodness American Dream—is dependent on increasing the number of our peoples who have gone to college and have gotten out of there with new expertise, skill, value, and competence.

The production and reproduction of the right mix of knowledge for nation and community building is a nation-state’s political, cultural, and economic commitment.

It is also its best resource, its best capital.

We have an educated population, we have citizenship ideas and practices that are at the service of both our nation and our people.

We have people who are skilled with multicultural sensibilities and competencies, we have ideas and practices that are hewed on tolerance and understanding.

We have people who are skilled in industry and in the professions, we have people who are willing to take part in national development that is not only economic but also human and humane.

These are grand ideals—but all these are at the base of what the UH Manoa Experience is all about.

For several years, we at the University of Hawaii Ilokano Language, Literature, and Culture Program have taken part in this yearly gathering and re-gathering of cultural workers, educators, college students, high school students, and community members and partners.

At the UH Manoa Experience, high students and their parents are given the opportunity to understand what college life is all about.

Booths—some call them tents—are put up, and each both represents a number of the academic programs offered by UH Manoa.

Some other institutions outside the UH System also come to participate, which widens, and enriches, the scope of this academic experience.

The intent is to familiarize the high school students with options for college life, options that given the right mix of interest and abilities, might have help them choose their own career path.

We expect, therefore, a bunch of high school students particularly those with high English Language Literacy population to come and take part in this academic get-together.

Several of the lead participants in the UH Manoa Experience are various programs of the University’s Student for Excellence Equity and Diversity such as the Office for Multicultural Student Services (OMSS) through its Challenge Grant, and the GEAR-Up.

Two public high schools where Ilokano is taught as part of their World Languages curricular offerings have signed up to participate: Waipahu High School and Farrington High School.

The UH Ilokano Program has benefited much from the UH Manoa Experience. Through it, the Program has been able to reach out to many students who have come to take part in this one-day gathering.

In a more particular way, the UH Ilokano Program has been able to draw students across the various program of the University to its Indo-Pacific courses, such as Philippine Critical Discourses, Modern Philippine Film, Philippine Critical Discourses, Philippine Cultural Mapping, Modern Philippine Drama, Philippine Popular Culture, and Philippine Diasporic Literatures.

For those contemplating of going to college, the 2012 UH Manoa Experience is an opportunity for you to see what it takes to go to college, and get out of it with your own college degree.

Mark you calendar, please: February 25, at 9:00 AM, at the UH Manoa grounds.

Observer/
Feb 2012

Heatland Poems-11

2012-01-26T11:24:00.001-08:00

Ballawang

You are the long silence
between speech and grief.
There are no consonants

in your language, no vowels.
I hear you saying something
out of thin air, the elements.

It is fresh water I cup to quench
this stale searching that has been
so long, one for a home,

and another for a blessed land, a combo
of what can be drawn from dream
to a page so I can see the contours

of colours coming to a cartography
of journeys joyous and profound.
But here, in these strange islands,

I cannot see what you are. Maybe
you are not here afterall.
Maybe what you have is fire,

to ignite from the heavens
the warmth of spring. Winter
forgets its promise sometimes,

and we have all these blizzards
and rains and feet of snow
we must raze down, the way we

adjust the points of our fuzzy plans
to live life the second time around.
In my Ilokano mind refusing to let go

of what I have come to know,
and knowing each in the colored
sinews of what I am, you are

the dead silence of what one becomes.
Ballawang, come again
for a visit, so we understand

what is to listen once more
to the songs of our people.
We have left our shores to come

to another, and all we know
are more shores more stranger
each time. We find home wherever

we can. But here, in these islands,
are seas of our own making.
The sun rises in the west,

the moon comes from the sea.

Hon, HI/
Jan 26, 2011

Heartland Poems-10

2012-01-26T10:24:00.000-08:00

Ballaibo

Evildoer, you: some thousands of miles
away you chose to die without us listening
to what you can finally reveal to us. Were you

ever the false person of some false
name, powerful and flaunting,
this man your big brother the color of money,

the shape of what cannot be? Is he your older
kin true and true, one of the same flesh
and so compelling the logic of misdeed

that this last love for a suffering land
is nothing but a mirage for a wicked man
that knows so much? What fallible fear is

within the walls of a palace with its
rotten pillars, and you know that?
Somewhere in the crevices of those heights

from floor to floor are the dark shadows
only Jose Pidal knows and you, dying man,
you know that. And now you have left us

with nothing but your dead silence. Did you
leave anything written from somewhere,
on the edges of toilet paper a murderer

wipes his hands with, him murdering
hopes that are yet to come, and now
with your death, aborted before

they will ever see the light of our blighted lives?
We now wish you were more honest
with us. We are your brothers and sisters, too,

and in the twisted arguments of our bloodlines,
we are born of the same flesh, the same
faith for a callous, cancerous, corrupting land.

Hon, HI/
Jan 26/12

Heartland Poems-9

2012-01-26T00:38:00.000-08:00

News of His Death

He dies, and goes to the underworld
to keep her deepest secrets, his too. From this
afternoon onwards, there shall only be silence

about what tragedies of a country he knows, all those
she inflicted upon us, all those he inflicted
upon her, and all those both wife and husband

inflicted upon the simple truth we hold dear.
We can never know this any longer.
The general has killed himself, and all the colonels

and majors of grandiose conspiracies, they have promised
to keep the vow of grave stones and street pavements
on which we blurt out what we cannot form

into words whose memes are our people's rage.
He dies alone somewhere, in the loneliness
of London, in the sterile ward that reeks of sin

and what it can offer to a man silenced
in the name of a brother’s flimsy honor, the family
more important than what this sad history

can uncover to tell us of wealth he did not deserve
but held it close to his chest nevertheless.
Brother and brother loving each other,

one brother the keeper of another, and here,
in these islands, they can go on to make another myth
of their greatness, and our people will never

ever remember how cruel this is, not anything, including
the calculations of generous dividends these brothers
will expect from not saying what needs

to be said. Words are cheap in this homeland,
and so are lives, but the wealthy die in
dedicated death rooms you pay in dollars, pounds,

or what class can offer. It is dying in style.
In the meantime, the poor die poorly,
dirt on their lips, dust on their loins.

Hon, HI/
jan 25, 2012

Heartland Poems-8

2012-01-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

Rituals of a Waipahu Morning

You wake up to the tune of traffic
heading its way to another day,
one of those you mark on a Hawaiian

calendar of lei-ed men and women,
bronzed and bored by the words
of patriotic politicians on Fox News.

It is the same each morning, like
the jam of news sensationalized
so you become angry. It is anger

that makes you aware you are alive,
and these days, you need the emotion
more and more. To calm you down,

you go to your corner altar
and commune with water on a bowl.
You pick up the day-old offering

and think of all the gifts you have given,
the ones you received, and last
night’s rite of teaching students

the route to rage. They have become
too American, these people, and have lost
the lilt of the language of a suffering land.

You cannot blame the weather
for this change of heart, even if
for this winter, we only have warmth.

In the spring, the storms come,
and they tell us of the urge of the earth
for an upheaval of sorts. Several are

dead in the continent, the power
going away from the helpless
and the hapless. In the meantime,

by Waipahu, a couple last night
talked of sorrows by our street
pavement and the woman called

it quits with the remaining daylight
with her scream: ‘I want a morning
ritual with us!’ Your daughter calls

the police and says with disgust:
‘These people do not know
the quiet of our nights. Come,

pick them up. Or they will kill
the only hope we have got!’
And so today, at this hour,

you change your steps to the sacred place
on a corner: you look out the window
and mark the place of hatred last

night. From here, the freeway looms
large with its traffic of the rush hours.
Morning comes in Waipahu

and you say your prayers one more time,
one for your four Ilokano souls,
four for your wandering heart.

Waipahu/
Jan 25/12

Translation--Bayan Ko

2012-01-24T10:30:00.001-08:00

O Ilik a Filipinas

(Bayan Ko in Ilokano Translation by Aurelio Solver Agcaoili for IP 499: Philippine Cultural Mapping, January 25, 2012)

O ilik a Filipinas
Taeng balitok ken ‘ti sabong
Iti palad ket ti panagayat
Nangidaton pintas rimat

Ket iti emmana ken pintas
Nabalani ti baniaga
O ilik, nakulongka
Napan karigatan

Koro
Ayam man ket agwayawaya
Ikulongmo ket agsangit
Ili pay ngata ingget pintas
Di mayat a makaruk-at

O Filipinas a mutmutiaek
Umok ni lua ken ni rigat
Daytoy ti kalat:
Makitaka a nawaya

Hon, HI/
Enero 24, 2012

Hawaii Aloha (in Ilokano Translation)

2012-01-24T10:07:00.001-08:00

Hawaii Aloha

Trans. by Aurelio Solver Agcaoili for IP 499: Philippine Cultural Mapping, Spring 2012

Verso 1:
O Hawaii, nakayanakan
Pagtaengan
Agragsakak bendision ti langit
O Hawaii, aloha

Koro:
Naragsak ubbing Hawaii
Agrag-o! Agrag-o!
Pul-oy umapiras
Pammateg ‘ti Hawaii.

Honolu/
Enero 24, 2012

Poemas Politicas-2012-01

2012-01-21T11:03:00.000-08:00

I, Mohamed

"Mohamed suffered a lot. He worked hard. But when he set fire to himself, it wasn't about his scales being confiscated. It was about his dignity." —Mannoubia Bouazizi, mother of Mohamed, Tunisia, in K Andersen, Time, Dec 14, 2011

I, Mohamed, am about
to do what is right.
I am going to set fire
to myself, and now,
and extinguish what I can
from my soul. This is Tunisia,
and its moon and sun
were my life, or what
passes for one. Its air
was my breath, its stars
my guiding light.

I walked the streets,
peddled what strength
can be vended from door to hope,
from the gawking eyes
of those who can manage
to give out what mercies
can be given each day.

The cart was my life,
its rusty wheels
in slow motion leading me
to a dream of food for mother,
an uncle who lost the courage
to go on in life for another day,
siblings desiring to dream
like the Pharaoh’s or sphinx’s
in every act of pushing
that leads to a ritual riddle
of want and more
while those who have the riffle
the strength of their voice
the baton to whip out what
honor has left of our sinews
beat us up to send the message
that we are not what we are.
I am a child of these claims
to life and faith,
and here I am, an orphan
of many promises
even as I look for no one
who has done before,
not in these streets,
not in this homeland
of my forefathers. It is this
fire that will bring out the gold
from this mulct of our lives,
and we will have pride,
on the table as in our prayer,
in our shrines, mosques, temples
as in our search for truth
we can feed on and on,
the good that comes out
of our death, given in freedom,
given for freedom.

Honolulu/
Dec 15, 2011

Heartland Poems-7

2012-01-20T19:24:00.000-08:00

Tender Mercies

I look at you, heartland dear,
from this thought. You are a
landscape of drought
and parched fields,
home to blood martyrs
dying for what death can offer
to those who desire to dream,
or remember all that can be
remembered. I ought to come
and visit you once again,
say the prayer for the saint
that gives abundant rains
so the seeding of the soil
can begin.

You are the amorphous light,
in between the Manoa
clouds of white fluffiness
and the dense mountaintop,
rich with its promise
of a cold night. You tease me
in this yearning, like the rain
thirsting for the earth,
or the dying sun for the stillness
of an alien's sleep. How could I
have run away from you,
and speak in a language
whose phrases are of pain
and sorrow? No, this thought
grips me so, keeps me beholden
to the sentence of quitting you.
Heartland dear, there will be
no return. At your airports,
I now fall in line
in the stranger’s queue, like one
thief sneaking into your inner room,
and there leaves his shadow
underneath the sheets
that smells of regrets,
the scent a trespasser’s grief.

Waipahu/
Jan 12, 2012

Heartland Poems-6

2012-01-16T07:36:00.000-08:00

Water’s Wound on the Toes

In the middle of this American Dream,
I am here, but you wake me up, you
the farm’s water’s wound on the toes.

You are Ilokano in the syllable
of a thought that wanders like this sadness
driving away this Hawaiian ennui.

I rise up from sleep so I can confront
you in each step that leads
to the cold of January, the time

the drizzle begins to fall, and then
the rushing light rains, and then the raging
downpour overnight that becomes a deluge

on the palm of those claiming
citizenship of this land. I am that,
or I am one of them. We cry to

the heavens, sick with longing of the plains
of Kunia like the worn souls queuing up,
the Ilokano workers of the soil bidding goodbye

to the earth they furrowed
to the fields they struggled with
so what with the gathering of the night in Waipahu

the darkness of not knowing where to go
accompanies them home. On the dining table,
we partake of something that warms

the epigastrium, the wild fowl
that in the other island permits itself
to be hunted so that on my plate

would my hungry portion be,
I who sold my strength and welfare the whole day.
In my falling asleep, you, water’s wound on my toes,

you are the yield of all agreements
when I lie to welcome my bruised body.
At the end of a hue-filled dream

you are there, in the interstices
and curves of words: these cannot be
interwoven with a story’s prologue. You are

a pain that does not go away, water’s wound,
in the middle of moist toes that feel
the absence of the soil I know

the loin of the tillers that dance in joy
with the father’s, or a mother’s lullaby.
Water’s wound: remind me

of the bygone days. You wake me up
from this nightmare. In my running after
the watchful hours that wake up so early

in these days of aimlessness, you be there
in each moment, become the beat, the pulsing
of the enchantment of love. Water’s wound:

you reside in this slumber,
in the warm pillows, in the Ilokano blankets
that are feverish so that on my bed

would be the thought that goes to rest.
Water’s wound, you who reminds,
please come home to me. Come.

Waipahu/
Jan 15, 2012

Heartland Poems-5

2012-01-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

Tarindanum

Addaak ditoy, iti katengngaan ti panagarapaap
nga Amerikano, ngem lukagennak, sika
a tarindanum dagiti lagip iti kataltalonan.

Ilokanoka kadagiti silaba ti panunot
nga agallaalla, kas ti sennaay iti barukong
a mangiginggina iti Hawaiiano a pulkok.

Bumaringkuasak manipud iti ridep
tapno sangnguenka iti kada addang
nga agtunda iti lamiis iti Enero a rugi

dagiti bayakabak, sa dagiti aggangganat
nga arbis, sa dagiti makapungtot a tudo
nga iti agpatnag ket agbalin a layus

kadagiti dakulap dagiti makisiudsiudadano
iti daytoy nga ili. Siak dayta, wenno
maysa kadakuada nga iti panaglua

ti mail-ila a langit kadagiti mabibbibi a kapanagan
iti Kunia ket dagiti maintar-intar a kararua,
dagiti Ilokano a mannalon nga iti malem ket agpakada

kadagiti kinasinnanggol nga inurit,
kadagiti kinabalubal a kinelleng
tapno iti panagsaknap ti Waipahu

a malem ket ti agsipnget kadagiti amin
a panagmalmalanga. Iti komedor
ket ti panangsango iti pangdengngep

iti rusok, ti ballog a manok
nga iti sabali nga isla ket agpakemmeg
tapno iti latokko ket ti mabisin a labay

a para kaniak, siak a naglako iti pia
ken karadkad iti imigrante nga agmalem.
Iti pannakayepyep, sika, tarindanum,

sika ti bunga dagiti amin a kontrata
iti panangiyidda iti bannog. Iti arinunos
ti de-kolor a tagainep ket addaka sadiay,

kadagiti ginget ken sikkusikko
dagiti balikas, saan a maibinggas
iti pakauna ti salaysay. Paan-anawaka

a panaas kadagiti saka, tarindanum, iti baetan
dagiti agbabasa a ramay ti mangrikrikna
iti kaawan kadagiti nakariingan a kinelleng

dagiti agpamfandanggo a sellang ni mannaniw
nga ama, ni managduayya nga ina.
Tarindanum: ipalagipmo kaniak

dagiti amin a napalabas. Riingennak
kadagitoy a bangungot. Iti pannakilumlumba
kadagiti naridam nga oras kadagitoy nga aldaw

ti panagtawataw ket sadiayka kadagiti darikmat,
agbalinka a bitegbiteg, sugat iti nasalamangka
nga ayat. Tarindanum: agindegka iti pannakailibay,

kadagiti pungan a nabara, kadagiti ules-Ilokano
nga aggurigor tapno iti idda ket ti isip nga aginana.
Tarindanum, sika a palagip, umayka. Umayka.

Waipahu/
Enero 15, 2012

Prayer to a dark god

2012-01-10T15:19:00.000-08:00

NAZARENE’S FAITHFUL. Unfazed by President Benigno Aquino III’s terror warning, millions of Filipino Catholics took part in the annual procession for the Feast of the Black Nazarene from the Quirino Grandstand to the Quiapo Church in Manila Monday, Jan. 9, 2011—Inquirer, Jan 11, 2011

We come in barefoot
as required and the street
pavement is a bed of hope
for this god-forsaken land,
our own.

It is a sea of maroon, your
color, dark hardwood of Mexico
carved out of the passion
of colonized hands, veined
for crossing our fingers now famished
for what truth is, what is in here,
in this Quiapo sun shining through
even if night has come
to conquer us.

From afar, between a memory
and an experience shaped in words
a hundred times, we see you,
crucified of the earth looking
for what faith can do to lead
us to a road back to where
we all should go. Our president
speaks of terror lurking in between
the shadows of fear and another.
Bahala ditan. The gospel is the same
for each one, as in death too
when it comes. In the meantime,
we take our kerchief, wipe it unto
which part of your feet, lord, colored
and wooden from a faraway sea,
a he-god with thorns, your blood
dripping with our sweat, you
who will see us through
until the end of time, our own.

We promise a day of reverence,
and a full night too, the whole cycle
of the watch hour by the Mercury
that tells us of drugs we need
to buy to ease the pains on the knee
after walking from shrine’s grieving door
to your mourning altar.

Hon, HI/
Jan 11, 2011

Heartland Poems-3 Ilokano

2012-01-09T09:59:00.001-08:00

Maskara ni Patay

Jigsaw: Hello Gloria, I want to play a game. So far in what could loosely be called your life you've made a living watching others. Society would call you an informant, a rat, a snitch. I call you unworthy of the body you possess, of the life that you've been given. Now we will see if you are willing to look inward rather than outward to give up the one thing you rely on in order to go on living. The device around your neck is a death mask. The mask is on a spring timer. If you do not locate the key in time the mask will close. Think of it like a Venus flytrap. What you are looking at right now is your own body not more than two hours ago. Don't worry, you're sound asleep and can't feel a thing. Taking into account that you are at a great disadvantage here I'm going to give you a hint as to where I've hidden the key, so listen carefully. The hint is this... It's in Singapore. How much blood will you shed to stay alive, Gloria? Live or die, make your choice.—From a Jigsaw Picture, December 31, 2011

Pagraemanmi nga Exselensia
a Babai a Presidente:
Panawenen tapno kadakam

ket ilawlawag
panangilemlemmengmot’
pakasaritaan nga insurat.

Kenka nga inyawatmi
iti manilengsileng a bandeja
a pirak tulbek ti pagarian.

Agrabrabii iti sibubukel
nga aldaw amin a tiempo intedmi
amin a masapul panangitunda

kadakam pagturongan,
adayo kadagitoy nga ammo
kas iti madagdagullit a pananggulib

dagiti presidente, iti panangipalubosmi
panangabalbalaydat’ balikas sapatami iti ili
a di makaammo a mangsuplit’ pammategmi.

Ti sapata ket karikaturat’ panagul-ulbod
sangaribu dagitoy, ket inikkanda met tiansa
panagpartuat sumagmamano pay manipud

lumlumteg a bassit-usit a dayaw.
Daga kadagiti makaammot’ agsukay.
Pagbirokan makabael a mangged.

Wayawaya kadakam a managtagtagainep.
Manipud adu a revolusion dagiti maris, verde
iti panangloko iti biagtayo manipud pupok ti amarilio

ti lualo a lualo a reformista ti balo
adda tapno ay-ayuenna laeng dagiti makasapul
ay-ayo, isuda nga agsasao iti Espaniol,

Ingles, Tagalog, karkarna a pagsasao amin,
di mangiyebyebkas kenka iti buya ti panagabuso,
panawenen tapno ibagam kadakami

ti narayray a maskara nga inusar
sa ti nangisit itan a naiparabaw iti ulo.
Kitaem ditoy, iti uneg ti maskara,

dagiti eppes a frase a rantam a ballikugen,
urnosen tapno dumawatka kadakami
iti pammakawan iti maminsan pay.

Makiay-ayamka iti daytoy maudin
a linnemmengan. Aglemmengka iti lawag
ti aldaw ket birokendaka.

Birokennakami iti sipnget
ket aglemmengkami. Impalladawmin
tulbek, binay-anmin nga agbirok

bukodna a tanem
iti barangabang panagpabus-oymi.
Mangabakka, maabakka pay laeng.

Hon,HI/Jan 1, 2011

Heartland poems, 3

2012-01-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

Death Mask

Jigsaw: Hello Gloria, I want to play a game. So far in what could loosely be called your life you've made a living watching others. Society would call you an informant, a rat, a snitch. I call you unworthy of the body you possess, of the life that you've been given. Now we will see if you are willing to look inward rather than outward to give up the one thing you rely on in order to go on living. The device around your neck is a death mask. The mask is on a spring timer. If you do not locate the key in time the mask will close. Think of it like a Venus flytrap. What you are looking at right now is your own body not more than two hours ago. Don't worry, you're sound asleep and can't feel a thing. Taking into account that you are at a great disadvantage here I'm going to give you a hint as to where I've hidden the key, so listen carefully. The hint is this... It's in Singapore. How much blood will you shed to stay alive, Gloria? Live or die, make your choice.—From a Jigsaw Picture, December 31, 2011

Dear Your Excellency Madam President:
It is time to account what you have
kept away from the history you write.

We gave you on a shining silver
platter the key to the palace. All night long
all day long all time long we gave all

what you need to lead us to where we must go,
away from all these that we have known
like the redundant deceptions of presidents

we allowed for them to tinker the words of our
oath to a heartland we love but that does not know
how to love us back. The oath has none

of those caricatures of your lies,
a thousand of those, and we allowed
you to create some more out of your

swollen, puny pride.
It is land for those of us who till.
It is job for those of who can.

It is liberty for those of us who dream.
From the revolutions of colors, a green to fool
the life out of our incarceration to the yellow

of a praying reformist of a widow
out to appease what needs appeasing
like the elites of old who speak Spanish,

English, Tagalog, strange languages
that do not speak us to your spectacle of abuse,
it is time to account the bright mask you wore

and now the black mask in your head. Look inside
here what empty phrases you plan to reverse,
reorganize to ask for forgiveness from us

one more time. Take this final game
of hide-and-seek. You hide in the daylight
and we seek. You seek in the dark and we hide.

We have thrown the key away,
have it seek its grave in the abyss of our tolerance.
You win, you still lose.

Hon,HI/Jan 1, 2011

Heartland Poems, 2

2012-01-01T04:34:00.001-08:00

Korte a Di Suprema ti Sanabagan

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Umuna nga aramid: itungtungkuam.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikadua nga aramid: kinnumpadrean.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikatlo nga aramid: palangguadam.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikapat nga aramid: ikkatem ti bain.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikalima nga aramid: pabengbengem ta rupam.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikanem nga aramid: killuem ti linteg.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikapito nga aramid: lintegem ti killo.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikawalo nga aramid: sisiem ti nabati pay a lalat ti ili.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikasiam nga aramid: manglutoka iti hukuspukos.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikasangapulo nga aramid: agbitlaka maipapan iti wayawaya.

Korte a di suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikasangapulo ket maysa nga aramid: alaem ti gatilio.

Korte a suprema ti sanabagan.
Maikasangapulo ket maysa nga aramid: ikantam ti madam.

Hon, HI/Enero 01, 2012

Poems for the Heartland, 1

2012-01-01T04:20:00.000-08:00

Taste of Sin

Ex-military comptroller in plunder rap now a lay minister in prison—Inquirer, December 30, 2011

The taste of sin is the companionship of bars,
cold in the Bilibid nights. I have come here
in the womb of this dark imprisonment,
listless with a conscience heavy with

the weight of light. It gets into my marble heart,
this light, its golden ray the gold I used
to count, in bundles as in bars, real
or its substitutes, like cheap loves whose supply

is more than I can demand. I am lonely
here, the saddest of the happy men
used to abusing the happy hours.
I need the company of god, my god,

any god, the better if he sports a Jesuit’s
ID, the better if he requires penance
so I can begin to dream of absolution,
pray the Pater Noster a thousand times,

recite the Ave Maria another thousand times,
and declaim the Glory Be, in ejaculation,
another thousand times.
I should like to be a reformed adorer,

like the Adoration people in the evenings
of a Wednesday romance, before the crucifix
as before a candlelight, when my sin is recounted
before the shy judge of a controller’s lie.

I am a shy man, you see. Shy, too shy.
There are things one can do right.
There are things one can do wrong.
It is this absence I cannot name,

touching me so even as I bead
the decades of grief away
in all the glorious mysteries
filling me with delight. I have millions

of dreams, true, and a million ways
of not saying a word to spare
The Madam the trouble. Her generals,
even the one who died in his own

dirtied hands. I am not going
tell anything about her commands,
thousands of those sorrowful mysteries
in the guttural incantation of a convent

girl bred in hypocrisy from Day One.
Now I kneel, learn how to say
the De Profundis, its words
not spelling regret, not my own. It is forgiveness

I seek in the dance of starless nights, penitent
as a penitent can be when the habited
are around. It is the white bread,
a tasteless piece of a savior’s body,

that I give to others now. I give hope
while I touch the bars of my prison cell
with my preying hands.

Hon/Dec 31, 2011

Poem for a Father Passing On

2011-12-31T09:22:00.000-08:00

Light On Your Way

(For Tyrone Antonio, our dear father, on his passing, December 31, 2011)

It is the early morning hour over here,
in these places you have not seen
but want to come to. Yes, volcanoes

erupt anew, in the chest. They give birth to feelings
and forms of our islands of grief in these
long distances. A lighted lonely candle is for you.

It is Yuletide cinnamon and apple.
it is pine and sweet basil, its faint glow
mixing with our tearing up, our

emotions on a holiday uncertain in these last
moments of the old year. We know this would
come, your passing on like a skilled thief

a drunken trespasser of the coming year,
the dragon with its fire. Last night,
we shopped for the lucky number

we Walmart-ized for the lucky
signs, the yellow color on your
daughter’s wish for you to meet

up when she comes on Valentine’s.
She never said the word we do not say
but last night, we knew but not quite.

Between the promise of your life
and your death, it is seven thousand miles
of liquid water, and our alien tears

now go with the Waipahu waves, and we
send them all to you. We ask
the current’s undertow to bring you

the blessings of our year bidding
goodbye so a new one can come.
We cannot be with you as you

go. We can only be with you
in the intimacy of your father's smile
we remember in family rituals

we come to at your home:
years of Tondo Christmasses,
more years of your cooking

and now all these without you.
Decades of Maria Payo New Years,
and now without your bang!

And the feast of the Santo Niño,
like Papa Vincent, brother of yours, leading
us to where laughter can lead us to.

We will miss these now,
short occasions, brief and full, to keep
us going in life, celebrating

what we can, and burying
dreams we cannot pursue.
And now this, your passing on.

We have eternity in the memories,
many and varied, you leave behind.
You go to where rest is defined

in the timelessness of Time.
Please say aloha to our mother
whose death you saw.

I see you going away from
her grave, and in the noontime
hours, your faint smile

unraveled to me your need
for you to be allowed to go.
At this hour, our hearts throb

in anguished pain, our feelings raw.
The hazy mornings are cold,
the days are wintry, and we wrap ourselves

with whatever we can hold on to keep us warm
including our deathless recollection
of you, alive in your booming voice,

silent in seeing how all your children
have come unto their own
with and without you. In your death

leave behind the blessings we have known
leave behind the grace of life
we have yet to know. But, yes, you go!

Waipahu, HI/
December 31, 2011

Observer Editorial, January 2012

2011-12-30T11:16:00.000-08:00

Resolving Anew

This New Year is another chance to get things right.

The year that is behind us now has extended the very logic of our sense of sacrifice and our sense of hope and we are not going to permit this to keep on being dragged into the New Year.

We want something new.

We want something refreshing.

We want something salving.

It was not the easiest of the years of our life even if last year’s was memorable for what pains we can remember, and what lesson we can draw from these pains, lessons that we pray will make us stronger so that we can do things better.

Part of this resolve—the need to recast our framework of looking at life anew—is to revisit the language we use to reword the vision we have for this year and all the years to come.

The poet T. S. Eliott reminds us of this responsibility when he wrote about the need for us to begin again in a new light, in an ever-new light: ‘For last year’s words belong to last year’s language/And next year’s words await another voice./And to make an end is to make a beginning.’

So many things went wrong in 2011.

So many went right as well.

Plus or minus, in the general scheme of things, there is a deficit of realizations as there is a deficit of the good events that should have visited us and given us some sense of the good life.

Truly, we need to demand from life. And this is a new language.

Truly, we need to demand from our society, community, state, and country. And this is a new language.

Truly, we need to demand from others. And this is a new language.

But truly so, we also need to demand from ourselves so that the vision we have to turn things right might come to a realization. And this is a new language too!

For a dream is only good if gives us the energy to go on, if it moves us, if it makes us hope for the best.

So many of us have been left with only one thing at this time: hope for the morrow, hope for the better.

Given this as our only weapon to fight it out and struggle for this dream to come true, we need to hold on to what this hope can offer us, including its power to instruct us of what is just and fair, of what is good and valuable, of what makes sense.

In our resolve, we need to trust again in our abilities, in what we can do, and in what we are willing to do to pursue something grander than our puny dreams and puny selves.

Out there is a world deprived of what we have, things we sometimes dismiss.

Out there is a world that has not experienced our experience of abundance during the holidays.

Out there is another world that reminds us that our world in this country is one of luxury, excess, surplus.

Out there is another world we cannot see because we have been ensconced in a position of convenience and comfort and as a result we can no longer see the inconvenience and discomfort of others.

Out there is another world that does not look like our own—and we refuse to recognize this world: one of misery, one of wretchedness, one in dire need of redemption.

The challenge for the coming year is this: to see once again that this world, in light of the message of hope for us all, can be made a better place for the many who have less in life.

For the many who have been deprived of their basic freedoms.

For the many who have been deprived of the day-to-day expressions of the good life.

For the many who are still dreaming of the blessings of real democracy and true justice.

Happy New Year to all of you!

Observer/Jan 2012

An Interview with Hon. Julius Torres

2011-12-30T10:50:00.000-08:00

Aloha to a Public Servant--
Consul General Julius Torres Comes to Hawaii

By Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

I knew it would be tough getting a schedule to interview the new Consul General Julius Deloso Torres.

He had just arrived, and my request was too soon.

Even when then Consul General Leoncio Cardenas was about to retire, I already wrote to Deputy Consul General Paul Cortez to ask for a chance to sit down with the incoming consul general who would be coming from Amman.

He was warming up and trying to get settled, and here I was, egging on, asking for the moon, and asking for the impossible. He had out-of-state appointments, the appointments secretary told me.

But he was gracious, and in between my final examinations at the sate university where I teach, I got an afternoon to sit down with him. I was to probe his mind.

I arrived at the Philippine Consulate General on Pali Highway some ten minutes earlier than the schedule, with an Observer staff photographer in tow.

There was light rain on the streets. Towards the west, two rainbows displayed their spectacular colors as if announcing to all those who would like to watch that in the days ahead so many good things will come for the people of the Philippines.
I went straight to the main door, past the consular offices.

Not far away, two men got out of a car.

I have not met Consul General Torres before and I had no idea how he looked like. One of the men wore a green long-sleeved barong, the verdant color of life. I knew right there and then that he is the new consul general.

“Are you coming for the interview?” he asks.

“Yes, sir,” I respond. “I have a schedule with the new consul general. At two.”

“You came on time,” he says. “We just had lunch.” He offers his hand.

“Thank you for giving in to my request,” I say and I shake hands with him.

He lets us in into a huge receiving room by the first floor of the consulate general. A portrait of President Benigno Aquino III hangs on a wall that leads to another inner room that I have become familiar with because of a previous media briefing I had to attend prior to the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in November.

From a stint at the Philippine Embassy in Jordan as the ambassador for about three years, Consul General Julius Torres comes to us with a fresh vision of what it is to serve the people of the Philippines everywhere.

His more than thirty years of career service with the Department of Foreign Affairs plus a hands-on experience as press officer of the late Foreign Affairs Secretary Carlos P. Romulo have prepared him to go where his service is needed.

He has been all over, with postings in a number of embassies: Bucharest, Saipan, Brussels, Canberra, Koror, and Toronto. His degree in journalism and his training in civil law, both at the University of the Philippines, came in handy in his various posting, able to merge both the requisites of diplomacy and the need to take good care of Filipino citizens in these places of assignment.

He did not plan to become a career diplomat.

Fate had it that he would become one when, at the height of his activism during the now famous First Quarter Storm, a time when the basic rights of people existed as a fiction during the dark days of Martial Law, he resolved not to give in to the temptations of becoming a factotum of big business, the economic structure that has closed all avenues to giving a fair chance to the people of the Philippines.

He understood the meaning of capital, and the need to put in place the economic infrastructure of the Philippines state.

But he did not approve the unjust ways of exploitation and dehumanization, concrete realities he himself had seen as a young student of Philippine Science High School where he received his initiation into the just cause of fighting for the basic rights of the people.

Instead, he vowed to serve the people by going into public service.

There are a number of things that are clear to him—and one of these is that his service to the people of the Philippines would never be negotiable.

It is a commitment wrought in stone.

It is a commitment wrought upon realizing full well that the need to create a just and fair society for the people of the Philippines remains an ideal worth pursuing.

This was to be his motive for going into public service, for joining the diplomatic corps.

He came from a town in Zambales that spoke Zambal and Ilokano.

But it is Zambal that stuck to him, with some ability to converse in Ilokano when forced, but not confident enough to carry a good conversation. It is in Zambal that he is most at home with, the language of his family, the language of his place, the language of his people.

He knows of the importance to picking up the Ilokano language to serve the majority of the Philippine population in this state.
He says he is looking for someone who could teach him the rudiments of good, and effective, Ilokano. He says he is ready to learn.

From PSHS, he moved to the University of the Philippines at Diliman, and there registered for the sciences, in chemistry, for his bachelor’s.

But activism had its own energy in those days of disquiet in the late 70s, when life was snuffed out from the minds of the young people looking for a chance to contribute their talents and gifts for the homeland.

The dark night of misrule raged on, and its own rage got into his young heart.

He began to speak the language of social change, of democracy that had substance, of liberty that spoke of the good life for everyone.

Awakened to the realities of an indecent regime with its indecent, abusive ways, he resolved to take part in the struggle, for which reason forced him to drop out of school for a time and take part in activism in a more meaningful way. It would take him several years before going back to college, and finish his degree in journalism, instead of chemistry.

Journalism and its emancipatory promises led him to the doorstep of then Foreign Affairs Secretary Carlos P. Romulo.

There, he would be trained in the rudiments of writing, public relations, and public administration.

It would also open his eyes to the possibilities of a government service.

He took the Foreign Service examinations while in law school, and he passed. That was to be the beginning of his work in international relations and the end of his dream of becoming a lawyer.

We exchanged notes on our experiences.

There were serendipitous circumstances that led to the crossing of our paths.

While a faculty at the University of the Philippines at Diliman, I had my office fronting the avenue that was used to film Ruben Torres’ life.

The film, Kadre, would star Cesar Montano, and I watched the shooting from my window, curious as to how they used fire trucks to simulate rain dripping from the dense branches of rain trees that formed a canopy along the oval that stretched from the famous naked man in oblation by the administration building and back to University Avenue.

Julius D. Torres the consul general is the younger brother of Ka Ruben, the famous kadre.

The older brother is known for his earlier activism, and for the political leadership that he played during the early days of the Aquino Regime, right after President Marcos’ ouster from power.

I did not know the connection before that—and the serendipity began.

We talked of the FQS, when I was still in the province as a mute witness to the political activism of those priests and college students of the better colleges of my small city in the North.

The governor, Elizabeth Marcos, would paint the walls enclosing the capitol in pristine white. When the police people were not looking, the activists would turn the while walls into a canvass of rage and denunciation, the big words, in red paint, I would memorize.

“You were involved?” I ask.

“Only the deaf and mute would not be involved.”

“Were you afraid?”

“We were. But there was no other choice.”

“Do you regret?”

“No. My only regret is that I had to go back to UP to finish my degree. Nine years before getting my degree.”

“Is this activism the same energy we expect in Hawaii?”

“It is. And more. My stint in Jordan taught me valuable lessons. I had to fight for our people. I had to fight the people who were not in the know. Our people’s right to live the good life is non-negotiable to me. You cannot just simply say that we have to stop deploying our people. We do not have many options in the Philippines. And even if we officially say that, our people would figure out a way to go to Jordan illegally. In that way, they are at the losing end. In that way, there was no means to protect them. The best option is to negotiate with Jordan. And I did.”

“What is your view of our foreign affairs?”

“We ought to have a lean and mean bureaucracy. And an efficient one. We want trained professionals who know the merits of multi-tasking.”

“If you were offered the job of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, would you accept?”

“I would do anything to serve our people.”

We talked more about our people, the prospects for a better homeland, the blighted lives of our wretched poor.

And we talked about the Ilokanos in Hawaii, their enduring spirit, and their capacity to survive.

Observer/Jan 2012

Remembering Rizal, Forgetting Gloria

2011-12-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

SEVEN TIMES SEVEN YEARS OF SOLITUDE: RIZAL,
HISTORY, AND THE FUTURE

Dear Ayi, a firstborn:

Yesterday, you emailed me about what is happening back there in the home country.

You know well that even from afar, I keep tab of what is dished out by spin doctors who are in the business of tampering with history—or if you so wish, this business of writing history from their perspective, from their dominant position as power-holders who, for centuries and centuries on end, have not let up with their project and program of rationalized greed, wanton accumulation, and systematic prevarication to perpetuate, in an unceasing way, their stranglehold on us.

You are right, son, you are absolutely right.

These people, though born of the land, have not learned from the lessons of the past.

You were citing Jose Rizal in your letter, your phraseology renewing the same wisdom he shared with us in order for us to learn and see and know and understand.

You said: the book of the past is a book of knowledge since it is the repository of all the things that give us a handle, a direction, a sense of self, an idea of what is to come.

You said too: we need to take to heart this book of the past in much the same way we need air to breathe, air to live.

I do not know what to say even if I am your father and in linear time, in a reckoning that cuts up history into empty moments, time, and events, I am the past and you are the present and the future.

I can only laugh now and from my perch here abroad where the wind is cold and the mornings are foggy and the future of other lands and peoples are also divined and dictated in the war rooms of generals and presidents who have appointed themselves as guardians of democracy and Christianity, I see the distance between us: a distance in time, a distance in mind-set, a distance in the manner of loving our very land, our very heartland.

You say you want to take part in the remaking of history when I warned you of your going to the anti-war rallies, you and the rest of the young in the state university crying out loud that warning to the president and her cohorts and allies and jesters about their not knowing history and not learning from the past.

You were quoting Santayana, son—well, not exactly citing him but you and your battalion of idealists were restate his case: Those who do not learn from history will be condemned to repeat it.

You all were a mile away from the pretenders of intellect of the inangbayan, they who can only know how to corrupt Rizal and Santayana and the wise philosophers of old who talked of justice and love and peace and equality as not separate dreams but concrete realities that are part of a continuum.

Perhaps they did not read Diokno or they never understand how he articulated that intertwining of history and collective dream and the task of nation building.

Land and liberty, he said, are extensions of each other.

So do justice and jobs.

So do food and freedom.

What a way of reading history—of opening up its can of worms in order to name our pains, christen our sorrows, diagnose our seven times seven years of solitude.

Ah, that biblical number comes to me like a ghost lurking at the back of my head even as I try to distance myself from this little talk we have—a father and son talk, if you so wish to call it that way.

But I would like to believe that the reverse is truer: That you set this whole discourse into motion, you who are so young and yet pestering me with our business towards the future.

Is it the case that you have read so much about the need to reread our history by reclaiming our stories and allow the real actors to come forward and narrate of their actions and courage and boldness and daring?

May the good Lord of life and history, you who are so young and yet who are conscious of our destiny be blessed more and more.

The Lord of liberty and freedom and justice is the Lord of history, son.

The incarnation story, minus all the gender and sexuality references, tells us so much about history power and truth in our quest for meaning and substance and redemption.

These people whom today play on our fate and our future are the very people who have come on our shores and took part in our feasting uninvited.

I heard you translating this long duration of oppression of our people into a mystical metaphor that harks back to two covenants of Israel, the old one that was so obsessed with the law of law and the second one that pillared on the law of love.

This oppression has been going on for a long time in human history and history itself has sided, it seems, those who have the cunning and gumption to rule over other unjustly.

You called this phenomenon as “the seven time seven years of solitude of our people” a la Gabriel Marquez in his artistic treatise of the solitude of the Latin American peoples and their centuries of oppression under Spain and Portugal and their allies, the priests and other religious leaders most specially.

Perhaps you were thinking of Rizal’s conclusion that when a country does not have the boldness and daring to open the books of its past, that country will never have stake of the future?

You said you are worried about the future and in your youth, at eighteen and in your prime, I should tell you that you have no cause for worry.

But to be honest: I have so much cause for worry even as you also tell me that perhaps there is a fair, fighting chance with that actor who never died in any of his films but always ended up vanquishing the cruel overlord and then, of course, hailed by the people as their hero and redeemer and savior.

But then again you said that this actor might not stand a chance at all since a broadcaster with the baritone to hide his ambition and to convince every foolish voter that he is indeed sincere and ever willing to be crucified on the cross in the name of the last Juan de la Cruz is offering himself up for immolation in the fire of the nation’s politics.

And then of course, the reigning queen in our politics-as-usual collective life wants us to believe her, she with her rice stalks for a bouquet in that multicolored poster splashed on all the city walls and house doors and concrete posts, she with her big American roses smiling sheepishly as if saying: Give me a chance, give me chance.

We must now reckon, however, in the way we must reckon everything in history: that we gave her the presidency on a silver platter in the hope that she would do better than the Erap of the masses, the Erap whose life was a product of programmatic publicity stunt.

Los Angeles/Dec 2004

Wayaway, Maysa nga Araraw

2011-12-26T09:26:00.000-08:00

Sika ti pul-oy manipud iti taaw,
Wayaway, angin-daya, mangiparparabur
Elemento a mamagtignay kaniak. Ita ket
Ti panagbettak ti bannawag
Ket daytoy a tagainep tinagikukuanak
Idinto ta addaka nga agwaywayas,
Aprosam ti kalachuchi,
Bulong nga adda iti tawak iti daytoy
A kutimermer iti panawen ti lam-ek.

Kadagiti kabambantayan ti Makakilo,
Idiaykan ita, agkumkumpas iti aweng
Dagiti kumaripas a biag, adda kadagiti lugan
Tapno mangibienes iti oras
Kadagiti dadakkel a tattao iti Waikiki. Daytoy
A ritual ket tapno makaidasar
Iti makan iti lamisaan, ket daytoy ket madagdagullit
Kas iti panangpanawpanawmo kaniak.

Kumutukot ti lammin kadagiti tultulang
Ti baniaga a kas kaniak,
Gapu ti iyaalusiisko a mangiyebkas
Iti daytoy a kararag iti maminsan pay
Iti sulinek nga altar ti aldawko:
Dinak tallikudan angin, anges
Ere, pul-oy. Agtalinaedka iti nabaybayag
Ket iyarasaasmo kaniak ti anag
Ti maysa a bigat iti Honolulu
Ken ti wagas iti seremonia
Ti panangselebrar iti sao
A maisurat iti daytoy a pagina, a daytoy
Ket maipapan kadagiti pakarigatanmi.

Ita nga aldaw, isayangkatmi manen
Ti maysa a pannakigasanggasat
Tapno matimudmi ti bukodmi a timek.

Baliksenmi iti nangatngato a timbre,
Nalawlawag itan. Masapul a mangngeganmi
Ti isawangmi. Kas iti panagbettak ti agsapa,
Makitami a sumangbay
Ket iti di agbayag ket ti agmatuon
Nga agbalin nga adu a sagrado nga oras
Kadagiti biagmi nga agbalbaligawgaw.

Wayaway, pul-oy-daya, agbalinka koma
Nga Amian, ti pul-oy-amianan, ket punuem
Dagiti pusomi. Ayabam met ti Abagat, ibagam
Nga agindeg kadagiti nabartek a rabiimi,
Ikkannakami iti pannakausaw,
Sipupuot kadagiti duayya ti Pangagdan,
Tapno sadiay, iti ilelennek ti init,
Umay kadakami ti pannakapnek
Iti darepdep ti ballailo a gapu
Ti panagbayanggudaw ditoy.

Translated from the English original/
Honolulu, HI/ Dec 26, 2011

Budubudo iti Dakulap

2011-12-26T08:44:00.001-08:00

Ita a Paskua ket daytoy ti pasamak:
Ti panagbudubudo ti dakulap.

Kas iti aginaldaw a Paskua dagiti pulitiko
Pulis, dagiti agpulpulpog iti aso

Ken bantay. Isu nga ita ket daytoy:
Ti layus a kasta unay a mangigibus

Iti anges ti amin a nabiag.
Saan nga umuna daytoy a pasamak

Iti Cagayan de Oro, ken saanto a
Maudi a rason ti dung-aw.

Versikulo a madagdagullit daytoy
Ta kanayon a nakaungap

Dagiti agbudubudo a dakulap
Dagiti agtagtagainep a pulitiko,

Agar-arapaap kadagiti barato
Pasuksok, pakimkim, aminen

A pangnochebuena, rabii man
Wenno aldaw, panaglamut a din

Sa ketdi agleppas iti sinam-it
No di ket iti adu pay nga am-amangaw.

Litania ketdi dagiti sainnek
Ngem saan a pulos ti babawi

Ta kasano nga agnakem dagiti anak-ti-diakes
No iti didigra ti danum ket addada

Kadagiti kastilio a fuerte
A kinabite dagiti adu a panagbudubudo

Ti dakulap iti bannawag ken agpatnag.

Hon, HI/ Dec 26, 2011

FAO FEATURE. December 2011

2011-12-25T22:31:00.000-08:00

REVISITING CHRISTMAS: THE WAY IT WAS, THAT WAY IT IS, AND THE WAY IT OUGHT TO BE

For the almost twenty-five percent of the population of Hawaii who descended from the various ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines, Christmas in the land of exile is not the same as Christmas in the homeland.

The comparison is real, the nostalgia palpable.

For the many who have had a taste of what Christmas was in the home country, the contradictions of the celebration itself dwarf the message it brings to us: the coming into world of a God-made-man.

The master narrative—the grand story of epic proportion that has informed this practice introduced by the Spanish colonizers largely from the medieval interpretation of the Catholic faith—shaped and formed the Philippine understanding of what Christmas is all about.

It is a story of human salvation—all the salvation announced to mankind by an angel.

In the Philippines, as this story took root across centuries, the folk traditions had their way of interpreting what this was.

This paved the way to the summoning of the indigenous dramatic traditions that eventually paved the way to the ‘panagpadanon,’ or ‘panagpatuloy’ or sometimes known in the Tagalog regions as the ‘panunuloyan.’

Here, in this folkloric rendering into a dramatic genre of the story of the first family looking for a place to stay for the night, we have a pregnant Mary in her full term and Joseph, the saintly man who stood by his wife in thick or thin, that wife who bore a child ‘without knowing any man.’

Versions of this are everywhere in the Philippines, as is the renditions of this in stylize form in the diaspora, sometimes in Honolulu.

Central to the practice of celebrating Christmas, though, is food—and food galore.

The best menus come to town, so to say, in a tongue-in-cheek way, and are laid on the Christmas table.

But this is for those who have the means.

Those who have lesser in life have to contend with some other ways to celebrate Christmas the best way they know how: that aroskaldo, or rice porridge, with margarine to taste, and with some slices of chicken meat thrown in to suggest abundance and celebration.

In schools, there is that almost mandatory gift-giving, that, across the years, has given rise to so many names: manito-manita, grab-bag, or binnunotan.

All these are poor intimations of what is beneath the act of that God-made-man: his act of self-surrender, of getting into the human story by assuming flesh.

It is, of course, the big story Jesus the Christ.

At the other end of the human spectrum of the frenzied lives of people, and their complex wish for happiness is the subtext of commerce and gain.

It is Christmas that has been transformed into bargain sales, discounted rates, and that ubiquitous box wrapped in colorful ribbons, that, if you do not have, will make you less of a person.

This is Christmas turned upside down.

This is Christmas giving in to the power of profit.

At day-end, however, is the constant reminder that with the puto, bibingka, and usual Christmas party, we need to remember: that behind all this is the message: that we learn to give ourselves to others.

For a family in Hawaii, there is no better way of celebrating Christmas other than spending some quality time together.

It is this presence that reveals to us about the salving, the redeeming.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

FAO/Dec 2011

FAO EDITORIAL. December 2011

2011-12-25T22:28:00.000-08:00

The Meaning of Hope

“I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope,” so says Aeschylus in the Agamemnon.

Given the challenges of our days, we are all exiles now, out into a world whose challenges are difficult to name.

We live in interesting times, indeed, and these present themselves to us in various ways, but with the same storyline at day-end: there is hardship in our days.

The statistics of our American lives speaks of something so different from that dream through which we have found the road to here, in these shores and beyond.

Our children, so the news says, are at the receiving end, with their education at stake with the new talks of budget cuts, of controlling government spending, and of removing subsidies for the poorer families.

The numbers do not tell us something better: about one of every four children is deemed poor.

With job prospects dim, and unemployment at a rate that does not suggest some light at the end of our bleak world, we welcome the birth of a man-god with these thoughts.

In Oahu, the corporal work of mercy—the feeding of the homeless—has become a ritual for some people of the Philippines who have found their lot in life a bit better than those who sleep on road pavements and in parks.

They are the same people who were swept away like dust during the week of the Asian Pacific Economic Conference, and hidden somewhere for the delegates of the other twenty-one countries to not see.

For this is Paradise—and as such, the beggars and the homeless and the poor and the wretched are not to be found here.

These are the thoughts that hit us hard as we hum our way to the day of Christmas, thinking of silent nights and mistletoes and some Santa Claus coming from somewhere riding on a sled pulled by a reindeer with a human name.

In our tropical days, the images are not even apt, and yet we swallow these hook, line, and sinker presuming that this might give us good luck.

At the back of all these is the loss of the meaning of Christmas, and that meaning that relates to a living hope that the man-god gave us.

Despair is easier to name when one cannot hope any longer.

And so this leads us back to our duty: to give hope to the hopeless.

Some one said that: ‘Never deprive someone hope; it might all they have.’

In deed, in a world such as ours, we need to go back to the meaning of meaning itself, and say, that in life as in our need to live on, ‘Hope is only love of life.’

There is much promise of Christmas.

There is much promise of this man-god of history, this man-god of our times, this man-god of our dreary days.

That promise is none but the promise of hope.

We keep this promise of hope, indeed, a dream because it is the only one we have got.

We can only hope for the best, even as we say that hope will spring eternally from the heart that loves.

Merry Christmas—and the best of the New Year to everyone!

Published/FAO
Dec 2011

REDEMPTION, A NOVEL. Chapter 2.

2011-12-25T22:05:00.000-08:00

(The novel tackles the life of five daughters and a mother. Two of the daughters are in the United States; the three are left in the home country trying as much to live life they could in earnest and in the raw. All the five daughters carry with them the wounds that precede redemption: the wounds of life, the wounds of memory, the wounds of family, the wounds of relationships, the wound of discovering the rugged path to self-discovery and healing. The novel is an allegory of the Filipino condition, with the mother going nuts and out of her senses, losing sight of the particularities and demands of time, losing awareness of the healing power of forgiveness, and leaving her daughters to trek through life’s rough roads without her, without her blessing, without her word that ought to have soothed and salved them. The daughters, after forgiving each other, discover their common pains. They learn to forgive themselves and all the people who wronged them. In the end, they conquer their own private purgatories to inaugurate their own redemption.)

January 20, 2005
Barangay Sinamar
Linglingay, Isabela

Lagrimas, Adingko,

Things are not easy either down here.

I am at the cocoa and coffee fields of mother’s father.

Auntie Sita asked me to come by here and go figure out what are in the fine prints of our family’s mortgage with the bank.

I understand that the government’s bank—or what used to be the bank of the people but is now in the hands of the capitalists as soon as President Corazon Aquino rose to power form the ashes of her husband’s traitorous assassination by the enemy—is asking our family to pay up grandfather’s loan including the onerous interest.

Their demand is under the pain of foreclosure. So everyone is so concerned about what would become of the land if it goes into the wrong hands.

Grandfather had asked that he be buried in the land. The older sons did, his grave perched on one side of the hill overlooking the brook that irrigates our corn and coffee. So here, in these parts, is the memory of the difficult life of going through the terror of forgetting. If this land will be foreclosed, there is no way we can recover who we are.

Or part of who we are.

We all have run away from this land.

All of us.

Only the caretaker is left there, the tenant who has seen to it that after the death of grandfather, the land would be taken care of properly by believing that he will outlive all of us.

I really do not know much about loans and mortgages, you see. What has life in the religious convent taught me except to keep on with my recitation of the rosary during angelus and go after the kids of the rich during the day?

I have my degree in commerce, the education I got by sweating it out with the sisters who told me that they were working for Christ, that they were workers of Christ. I did all the sweeping and the hard labor and they were working for Christ, for Christsakes!

I swept floors and scrubbed clean the latrines of the convent school.

I prayed a lot when Lola Madre took me from Cauayan and brought me to this convent down in Urdaneta. She was friends with the sisters, you see. One of the sisters, she told me, was her novice in their convent up the hills in Baguio.

Oh I cleaned the dirt and dust of the convent, helped in the kitchen, did the laundry. And I prayed and prayed a lot too.
I prayed for healing and I prayed that Nanang would have been better as dead meat.

I was her daughter, true.

But I knew in my heart I was not her daughter too.

I was her mistake.

I was her very, very costly mistake.

People were talking in that little barrio where I came, and from where we all came from.

The nights had ears.

The days had eyes.

The winds had both ears and eyes.

The people had evil thoughts, and they thought that were right.

And true enough, I began to see the big picture.

That I was to be the reminder of that act that led to her perdition.

Perhaps I had been her first mistake.

I do not know, Ading.

All I know is that I had an elder sister.

Nanang named her Josefa after the birth name of Lola Madre who had to drop it when she took the habit and became a mistress of novices in the bright, airy, and sweet-smelling hills up in Quezon, in Baguio, that city by the hill carved out of our tropical heat by the colonizing Americans who needed to imagine what mountain air was in order to survive in the Philippines.

Josefa had bright eyes as a child. There was laughter and joy and contentment in those eyes that spoke of innocence mother knew nothing about.

She had curly hair like those of the young corn in Tatang’s field.

She lived a few months after the guardian angel left her.

She lost her name and they had to give her another name.

I cannot remember now.

Must have been Wayawaya in honor of the memory of people on a June day when at school we had all those elaborate ritual on flag raising and reciting our oath to love our country and motherland.

I remember those independence ceremonies that would require us to wear something ethnic, something that came close to a parody of the revolutionaries against the Spaniards and then eventually against the other colonizers.

How I wish I were Mother Philippines.

I would imagine my being the motherland, me in my flowing dress of red, white, and blue silk sewn by the best dressmaker in town.

In my suit of the three colors, I would declaim: “Mother Philippines, beloved teachers, parents, guests, ladies and gentlemen: I come before you to say that today marks our independence day, this glorious day of our freedom, this glorious day marking our desire to be free again.”

Even as I imagined that I would be our country, I had Nanang monkeying with my dreams.

Again and again she would run away even on Independence Day that my imagination was wildest and purest.

I was five when she first did it, as far as I know.

But then Tatang said she had run away before right after Manang Josefa died.

Maybe she was looking for her lost child, Tatang said to me one day before he decided to die and end all the shame and embarrassment Nanang brought into his house.

I say Tatang decided to die. I knew in my heart he wanted to die.

For many times he met death and each time he would spring back to life and pick up the pieces again only to end up dying again, dying gradually, painfully, taking in all the pain, the shame, the shame, and more shame.

She would run away with her free spirit with a new man.

She and her man would go to the mountains, romp the valleys, hide in forests and hills and in the bottom of seas and rivers.

She and her man would hide in the dark of the night.

She and her man would hide in the light of the young moon.

She and her man would hide in her dreams of vaudeville.

She and her man would hide in the comedia of the town, in the words of the characters she would love to mimic.

She and her man would hide in the meaningless words she would utter.

She and her man would hide in her actions of washing her hands every single second, every single minute, every single hour.

She said her hands were dirty.

She said her hands were bloodied by the death of her dream for the lost child, her dead child’s ghost haunting her, taunting her to give her some of her milk and not be selfish with the juice of her nipples, her body, and her womanhood.

She spoke of Manang Josefa in the present tense even when I was born, Tatang said.

When I was born, Nanang was calling out to Manang Josefa even as I was crying out for attention when the midwife was cutting the umbilical cord and Tatang was ready to put the other part of me on the earthen pot that he would hang in the tree top so I would end up on top of the world and not at the bottom.

I am grateful Tatang did that.

Or the Tatang that I knew to be my Tatang.

Or the Tatang that in death I realized was not my father after all.

This is where my sad, sad story begins, Ading.

There is sadness here and this sadness makes me alive.

It makes me remember.

It makes me remember all, all the details of this sorrow that has been my lot for a long, long time.

So, I write this letter to you from the land of the grandfather we never had the chance to live with because he ended up giving up so much of himself to the cause of the revolution.

He lived on this land.

He died on this land.

He died because of this land.

His death was witnessed by the trees he planted, the small brook he protected as if it were his own child, cleaning its sides, cutting the tall grasses on its sides, and shooing the reptiles that lived on its verdant banks.

I am here now to remember.

I am here now to reconnect all that which overtook us and make us hostage to the past.

I had to save my soul by getting into the nunnery and there, for years and years on end, I have thought of you all, you who are begotten of the same mother that begot me.

I never knew any place to run to. I never knew where to go.

Lola Madre, you see, had to save us. As soon as she learned that Nanang went nuts, she took charge of giving us a future.

One day she just came to Bai Regina’s house where I stayed as soon as Father had himself bitten by a rabid dog and in three weeks, he was dead.

Where would I go?

I had no one.

Our brothers had gone away looking for something real after they had their own minds.

It was a hard life, Ading.

A difficult one.

We had to part ways because there was no way we could live under one roof.

When father died, I was eleven. I just had my first of these rituals of womanhood even if I was just a child.

Manong Ben was fifteen and he was dreaming of a life of his own. So he went to live with an uncle who was a priest. The priest was running after his secretary and had many kids by the time Manong Ben caught them in the church belfry.

Duardo was thirteen. What, tell me, what could young people like us do when the only inheritance that was left with you were the bad memories, the terrible days of want and deprivation?

From this town, I will move to the field tomorrow, to the Linglingay of our grandfather’s dreams. The revolution in these parts started in his coffee and cocoa fields. There, he would entertain the revolutionaries of his fantastic tales during that revolution of his youth.

Sometimes I wonder why each generation has to have a revolution of its own.

I will write to you again when I get to Linglingay.

I will tell you about the memories that are alive because they are of the fields.

Because they are of our people.

Because they are of our earth, our piece of the earth.

With all my love now,

Manang Ria

REDEMPTION, A NOVEL. Chapter 1.

2011-12-25T22:04:00.000-08:00

REDEMPTION

By Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

(The novel tackles the life of five daughters and a mother. Two of the daughters are in the United States; the three are left in the home country trying as much to live life they could in earnest and in the raw. All the five daughters carry with them the wounds that precede redemption: the wounds of life, the wounds of memory, the wounds of family, the wounds of relationships, the wound of discovering the rugged path to self-discovery and healing. The novel is an allegory of the Filipino condition, with the mother going nuts and out of her senses, losing sight of the particularities and demands of time, losing awareness of the healing power of forgiveness, and leaving her daughters to trek through life’s rough roads without her, without her blessing, without her word that ought to have soothed and salved them. The daughters, after forgiving each other, discover their common pains. They learn to forgive themselves and all the people who wronged them. In the end, they conquer their own private purgatories to inaugurate their own redemption.)

Chapter One

November 1, 2005
Waipio, Hawaii

Manang Ria,

I could not have said it in words.

I could have forgotten the right words even before I could utter any rational sound if I said this on the phone.

This is why I have chosen to write to you.

It is the time of the Internet but I have chosen to write to you the old-fashioned way.

I want our daughters to have a handle of what we have gone through and so I am leaving this letter as some kind of a trace, a palimpsest if you wish. Through this, my daughters will be able to begin to form their idea of our sad story. With this story, I hope that all our daughters will find grace and relief, that redeeming grace and redeeming relief we all have been looking for a long, long while.

It is evening here and as I light a candle in front of my house down here on Waipio that looks out on the lonely Pearl Harbor, I can sense the pain you are going through.

Darkness envelops the valley now and I could hardly imagine the silent vastness around me. Only the flickering lights come with their flimsy radiance, subdued as they are by the hidden sorrows the young night offers.

I think of myself now more often, me as an exile, an exile in so many ways. An exile through and through. A wandering, aimlessly roaming exile. I cry each time I realize I have run away from our common memories and from the land of our sufferings.

There is much pain in me as well.

This pain has no name and if you can help christen it, I will owe you my deepest gratitude. I will owe you my redemption too.

I do not know if I can ever forgive you for a past that we both do not have full control of anyway.

Perhaps, I miss so much the distinction between what you were capable of doing and that which the events in our lives simply pushed us into doing.

We were young, Manang.

We were so young—and unknowing.

And hungry.

And famished.

And unloved.

And impoverished.

There we were in that remote past of our lives fighting it out with the morsel of love that our parents were not capable of giving in the first place.

Things are not clear to me as of yet.

But I am beginning to see the bigger picture however faint the seeing is.

Many questions do come to haunt me.

Like, am I really your sister? Do I belong to you despite that fact that we do not share memories together?

Even as I ask these questions, other questions come cropping up like some kind of a ghost that does not know finitude but the eternity of lurking in shadows, in bad dreams, in phantasms.

Indeed, it is true. I have lived through all these and even from afar, I can say, I can say from my heart that I do not know you.

Well, I do not know myself either.

At a distance, I can see the hatred you have for Nanang.

I see this hatred transforming into some kind of matter, solid and hard as if it were a hardwood.

Or cement, able to withstand all the storm and the quake and the typhoon in the ravaged country, in the Ilocos as elsewhere in all of the islands where to go through the vagaries of the seasons is as quotidian as our own pains, our lamentations, our tears, our fears.

Manang, I had been so afraid of going hungry again.

Or going through the motions of everyday life without seeing any hint at that which is salvific.

I know—and deep in my heart I understand now—of your hatred for Nanang like the earthen tile that walled the convents of friars in our town in order for our ancestors to be shielded from the evil that they did, the abuses they seemed to have a natural fondness for.

O the friars!

We came from them, Manang. We came from them, from their sins and excesses and their promise of heaven.

On our mother’s side are the Martinezes of San Carlos.

They came from the illicit relationship of one Dominican friar with one of our own and the affair, consummated in the dark chambers of the convento down towards the river, bore the first ever of the Aguilars that gave us our mother’s father.

The Solvers, ha! They were land grabbers and manipulators.

Like all those mestizos who learned to live close to the municipio and close to the church and close to hearing the bells each time the Angelus was recited, the Aguilars took center stage in the affairs of the local government.

With the blessings of the friars that seemed to be as avaricious and greedy as the Aguilar whose skin had now turned to something lighter than light, something that resembled the Castilas, they gained entry to the civic affairs of the locality.

One of the Aguilars became a factotum of the gobernadorcillo. That was the beginning of more land grabbing, and the beginning as well of the Aguilars going outside San Carlos and moving to Dagupan and then eventually to the Ilocos and Isabela.

There, they had the land grants courtesy of the conniving friars, the Spanish rulers using the Aguilars for ends that had something to do with their occupational and colonial motives.

The Aguilar women played their role to the hilt as well with two of them bearing illicit sons from the illicit affairs of two more Castilas. The sons, bless them, did not live long to tell of their stories of being bastards as we all were—are.

This is going to be a long story, Manang.

I am taking the last light of the young evening to reclaim myself.

I have been running away from our memories.

I have been running away from the terrors and torments of Nanang as well even if at times I would have wanted to end it all, this striving to make ourselves saved, redeemed, forgiven.

I tell you it has not been easy, this constant running away.

Even from afar, from the islands that speak volumes of what possibilities there are for us over here, I am running away from our shadows.

And from our sad sad lives.

Our sad sad life story.

And now I say: I do not to go through this sadness again. No, not ever.

Even as I face the darkness of the night, I think of your there, all of you. This time, I am particularly thinking of you and our three other sisters.

I am not so certain if we are linked in a way with a biological father.

I am certain of one fact though: That we come from the same mother.

That we were nourished by the same body, our mother’s wild wild body, with her wild wild craving for anything that could challenge the sacred and the moral, the true and the beautiful, the good and the virtuous.

For mother did not know any of those, I suppose.

In these last lights, I can see what fragile stuff she was—is—made of.

Her imagination romped wild, went away with the many men that came after her, ran away with them to some far away places only to return to Tatang one more time.

That was a ritual, a given.

That going away and running away with her men happened many times.

Tatang was the father I did not know.

Tatang is the same father I now know.

Well, I never got to call him father.

I never even had the chance to hold his hands, feel the roughness of the calluses in those hands, feel the terror that hid in those hands, feel the sorrows hidden in between his tired fingers.

What a sad tale, this idea that I could have had the chance to get to know my biological father but the circumstances did not permit me to even say hello to him, not in a single instance that I could remember despite the fact that the little village we lived in all knew that which I should have known.

I only heard the knowledge in whispers. Do not blame me.

Now that father is gone, I do not know if I can ever forgive myself.

This business about us, five daughters of our mother of perpetual parody, what tough luck! Five daughters of three different fathers, well, that is something we can never run away from now.

We have to face this now with courage.

We have to face this now with daring.

How I wish I had that courage to tell Nanang what I have in my mind.

I cannot talk to Ditas about this.

I cannot give a hint to Lorena about what we all had to go through to destroy ourselves.

I cannot open up to Rosario about what evil visited us.

I look at the evening darkness now. There is this soft wind on my face. I feel the elements oneing with me, joining me in this sorrow, joining me in this hope for the morrow.

I close this note now, fold it three times the way Nanang taught me when I was six.

In her rare moment of sanity when Nanang was not running away, she would sit down with me and tell me stories about the hacienda of his father in Angadan or some such other exotic places to the Sierra Madres that spelled something sweet and hopeful like Sinamar.

She told me about the letters she would send to her Bai Regina in Dagupan.

The matriarch of the clan, Bai Regina had all the lands to her name.

Her two other sisters gave up their right to the land.

One of them was in the convent as mistress of novices in Baguio and who would forever dedicate her life to the cause of redeeming her family from sin. From the vestiges of original sin, she would say, in her fluid and frank Spanish.

The other sister was in Manila renting out her apartment rows to callboys and prostitutes and drug pushers aside from the regular and decent families who would come in for some time but leave right after discerning that they were in bad company. This other sister did not need much. She had sent her children to good schools and one ended up serving a President in Malacañang while her husband served as one of the Presidents close-in security.

Nanang wrote those letters as if there were no tomorrow, in a penmanship she learned in convent school in Baguio before the demons got into her head and eloped with Tatang to run away from the hard life of starting it out in the vast and rugged land of her father.

Nanang hated the land.

She wanted the glamorous life of the vaudeville, the superficial laughter, the paid smile, the noise for a fee.

She wanted all the dancing and the teasing on stage and so she dreamed of ending up like Atang dela Rama.

On hilltops, Nanang imagined life in Manila, in the cities, in movie houses, in theatres.

Nanang recited from memory the story of how her family had to leave Dagupan.

Her father ran over two schoolboys. They died on the spot. The families of the boys asked her father to leave Dagupan or else his whole family would be killed.

And so they had to run away, the whole family, run to where the vast lands were, rugged and needing coaxing and care and concern.

Three folds, neat and nifty for the letters. The same holds for this letter to you.

Three folds, as if in the trinity of our solemn wish to be able to forgive ourselves, to forgive mother, and to forgive each other.

Bye-bye for now, Manang.

With all my love,

Lagrimas

2011-12-18T09:50:00.000-08:00

The University of Hawaii Ilokano Program
The Waipahu High School Ilokano Program
The UH GEAR-Up/OMSS Challenge Grant
The GEAR-Up Club of Waipahu High
Nakem Conferences & Nakem Youth

The Word From Waipahu
Writeshops for a Change

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, PhD
Writeshop Director & Facilitator

DAY 1
In the Beginning Was the Word
December 19, 2011
0900 AM-12PM

Waipahu High School
Farrington Highway
Waipahu, Hawaii

WRITESHOPS FOR A CHANGE
“In the Beginning Was The Word”
Day 1, December 19, 2011
0900AM-12PM

The Nature of Writing

The Nature of Creative Writing

Language and Human Expression

Language and the Significant Human Experience

Diction and More

Finding Ways to Find Your Voice

Your Voice and More

Other Voices, Other Speech

WRITESHOPS FOR A CHANGE
“The Word is the World”
Day 2, December 20, 2011
0900AM-12PM

Making Sense of That Which Makes Sense

Writing Makes Sense

Expressions That Make Sense

Sense and the World

Writing That Makes Sense

Writing Makes Sense of the World

A Voice That Makes Sense

Other Voices, Other Worlds

WRITESHOPS FOR A CHANGE
“Word Becoming World”
Day 3, December 21, 2011
0900AM-12PM

Making Sense of the World

Writing Makes Sense of the World

Expressions That Make Sense of the World

Sense and the World of Waipahu

Writing That Makes Sense of the Waipahu World

Writing Makes Sense of the World in Waipahu

A Voice That Makes Sense of Waipahu and Beyond

Other Voices in Waipahu, Other Worlds in Waipahu

WRITESHOPS FOR A CHANGE
“Wor(l)ding/Wor(l)dings”
Day 4, December 22, 2011
0900AM-12PM

Word and the World: Craft and Art

Wor(l)ding: Essentials

Wor(l)ding Techniques, 1: Fixing It

Wor(l)ding Techniques, 2: Revisiting It

Wor(l)ding Techniques, 3: Recasting It

Wor(l)ding Techniques, 4: Rewriting It

Wor(l)ding Techniques, 5: Rewriting the Rewrite

Wor(l)ding Techniques, 6: Self-Editing

WRITESHOPS FOR A CHANGE
“In The End is the Word Becoming World”
Day 5, December 23, 2011
0900AM-12PM

Day 5, December 23, 2011
0900AM-12PM

Writing is Writing It!

Craft and Some More

Making it More Creative

The Old Word, The New World

The New World, The Old Word

Making All Things New

Making All Things Interesting

Creative Writing and the Creative Vision

We wish to thank the following for their help:
• Trixie Soria, Ilokano Language Coordinator, Waipahu High School/UH GEAR-Up
• Rachelle Aurellano, Ilokano Language Teacher, Waipahu High School/UH GEAR-Up
The GEAR-Up Club of Waipahu High
• Glenda Duldulao, Fellow for the Ilokano Program, UH Manoa
• Ie Agcaoili & Camille Agcaoili for the artwork and for assisting in the writeshops
• UH Manoa Ilokano Program
• UH SEED/GEAR-Up
• UH OMSS/Challenge Grant
• Nakem Conferences
• Nakem Youth
• Guild of Ilokano Writers Global/TMI Global

Letter to a Firstborn, 2

2011-12-16T15:35:00.000-08:00

SEVEN TIMES SEVEN YEARS OF SOLITUDE: RIZAL,
HISTORY, AND THE FUTURE

Dear Ayi, a firstborn:

Yesterday, you emailed me about what is happening back there in the home country. You know well that even from afar, I keep tab of what is dished out by spin doctors who are in the business of tampering with history—or if you so wish, this business of writing history from their perspective, from their dominant position as power-holders who, for centuries and centuries on end, have not let up with their project and program of rationalized greed, wanton accumulation, and systematic prevarication to perpetuate, in an unceasing way, their stranglehold on us.

You are right, son, you are absolutely right. These people, though born of the land, have not learned from the lessons of the past. You were citing Jose Rizal in your letter, your phraseology renewing the same wisdom he shared with us in order for us to learn and see and know and understand. You said: the book of the past is a book of knowledge since it is the repository of all the things that give us a handle, a direction, a sense of self, an idea of what is to come. You said too: we need to take to heart this book of the past in much the same way we need air to breathe, air to live.

I do not know what to say even if I am your father and in linear time, in a reckoning that cuts up history into empty moments, time, and events, I am the past and you are the present and the future. I can only laugh now and from my perch here abroad where the wind is cold and the mornings are foggy and the future of other lands and peoples are also divined and dictated in the war rooms of generals and presidents who have appointed themselves as guardians of democracy and Christianity, I see the distance between us: a distance in time, a distance in mind-set, a distance in the manner of loving our very land, our very heartland.

You say you want to take part in the remaking of history when I warned you of your going to the anti-war rallies, you and the rest of the young in the state university crying out loud that warning to the president and her cohorts and allies and jesters about their not knowing history and not learning from the past. You were quoting Santayana, son—well, not exactly citing him but you and your battalion of idealists were restate his case: Those who do not learn from history will be condemned to repeat it. You all were a mile away from the pretenders of intellect of the inangbayan, they who can only know how to corrupt Rizal and Santayana and the wise philosophers of old who talked of justice and love and peace and equality as not separate dreams but concrete realities that are part of a continuum.

Perhaps they did not read Diokno or they never understand how he articulated that intertwining of history and collective dream and the task of nation building.

Land and liberty, he said are extensions of each other.

So do justice and jobs.

So do food and freedom.

What a way of reading history—of opening up its can of worms in order to name our pains, christen our sorrows, diagnose our seven times seven years of solitude! Ah, that biblical number comes to me like a ghost lurking at the back of my head even as I try to distance myself from this little talk we have—a father and son talk, if you so wish to call it that way.

But I would like to believe that the reverse is truer: That you set this whole discourse into motion, you who are so young and yet pestering me with our business towards the future.

Is it the case that you have read so much about the need to reread our history by reclaiming our stories and allow the real actors to come forward and narrate of their actions and courage and boldness and daring? May the good Lord of life and history, you who are so young and yet who are conscious of our destiny be blessed more and more. The Lord of liberty and freedom and justice is the Lord of history, son. The incarnation story, minus all the gender and sexuality references, tells us so much about history power and truth in our quest for meaning and substance and redemption.

These people whom today play on our fate and our future are the very people who have come on our shores and took part in our feasting uninvited.

I heard you translating this long duration of oppression of our people into a mystical metaphor that harks back to two covenants of Israel, the old one that was so obsessed with the law of law and the second one that pillared on the law of love. This oppression has been going on for a long time in human history and history itself has sided, it seems, those who have the cunning and gumption to rule over other unjustly.

You called this phenomenon as “the seven time seven years of solitude of our people” a la Gabriel Marquez in his artistic treatise of the solitude of the Latin American peoples and their centuries of oppression under Spain and Portugal and their allies, the priests and other religious leaders most specially. Perhaps you were thinking of Rizal’s conclusion that when a country does not have the boldness and daring to open the books of its past, that country will never have stake of the future?

You said you are worried about the future and in your youth, at eighteen and in your prime, I should tell you that you have no cause for worry. But to be honest: I have so much cause for worry even as you also tell me that perhaps there is a fair, fighting chance with that actor who never died in any of his films but always ended up vanquishing the cruel overlord and then, of course, hailed by the people as their hero and redeemer and savior.

Then again you said that this actor might not stand a chance at all since a broadcaster with the baritone to hide his ambition and to convince every foolish voter that he is indeed sincere and ever willing to be crucified on the cross in the name of the last Juan de la Cruz is offering himself up for immolation in the fire of the nation’s politics.

And then of course, the reigning queen in our politics-as-usual collective life wants us to believe her, she with her rice stalks for a bouquet in that multicolored poster splashed on all the city walls and house doors and concrete posts, she with her big American roses smiling sheepishly as if saying: Give me a chance, give me chance.

We must now reckon, however, in the way we must reckon everything in history: that we gave her the presidency on a silver platter in the hope that she would do better than the Erap of the masses, the Erap whose life was a product of programmatic publicity stunt.

Los Angeles
December 30, 2003

Daniw Ken Manang Nellie Somera

2011-12-09T17:37:00.000-08:00

YOU ARE A POEM NOW

Maysaka Itan a Daniw

Ken Manang Nellie Somera, iti rabii ti mansayagna,
Mililani, Hawaii, Disiembre 9, 2011

You are our poem now, as it has been.

Maysaka itan a daniw,
Kas idi.

Always we see the spark of life in your eyes,
Our elder sister and friend, compatriot
To our exilic laughter and this pain
That goes with your leaving us sooner.

Kankanayon a makitami ti aron ti apuy
Kadagiti matam, sika manangmi, pagayam,
Kadua kadagiti exilo a katawa kas iti daytoy
A leddaang a kabulon ti ipapanaw.

You have come a long way, Manang Nellie.

Adayon ti nagtengmo, Manang Nellie.

You have come a long way into life,
And tonight this is what we tell:
Go, go to that river yonder.

Adayon ti nagtengmo iti biag,
Ket ita a rabii daytoy ti madakamat:
Mapanka iti ballasiw ti karayan.

There, tell again of our dreams,
A lot of those,
The dreams of poets who seek a prayer
From the lines we write to celebrate
What promise of life is there
In this your going away.

Idiay, ibagam manen dagiti tagaineptayo,
Adu kadagitoy,
Tagtagainep dagiti mannaniw nga agbirbirok
Iti kararag manipud iti binatog dagiti naisurat
Tapno iti kasta selebrarantayo ti biag sadiay
Iti daytoy nga inka ipapanaw.

We are certain now, a joyful story
The happy plot of
Our days getting older.

Ammotayon ita, daytoy a naragsak a sarita,
Ti addaan rag-o a singgalot
Dagiti aldawtayo a lumakay.

Somehow, we fix this memory, broken
And then fixed again only to find out
That it is coming to life again.

Uray no kaskasano, taramaanentayo daytoy
A lagip, narakrak tapno tarimaanen manen
Tapno makitatayo nga agungar manen.

For here we are, in life as in death,
Here we are with our promises for you,
Broken, fixed, and then broken again
Rewritten in the recalling,
As we celebrate your passing.

Gapu ta addatayo ditoy, iti biag kas iti ipupusay,
Addakami ditoy kadagiti karimi kenka,
Marakrak, matarimaan, santo marakrak manen
Tapno iti pananglagipmi ket maisurat
Ti rag-o iti ipapanaw.

We wish you to tarry along,
Remain with us
In the cold of days of December,
Dance to the tune of Christmas carols.

Kayatmi koma nga alusiisenka a pumanaw,
Addaka iti sibay
Kadagitoy nalammin nga aldaw ti Disiembre,
Agsala iti tono ti kanta iti Paskua.

You see: the mornings come darker,
And the winter shadows shorter.

Makitam: dagiti bannawag ket nasipsipngetda ita,
Ket dagiti anniniwan iti panaglalam-ek ababbabada.

But our memory of you is forever,
Woven into the lines of your story
You leave behind for us to say each time
You absence fills up the void in us.

Ngem ti lagipmi kenka ket agnanayon,
Naiyabel kadagiti linia ti saritam
Nga ibatim kadakami tapno saritaenmi
No kasta a mariknami ti pannakapunno
Ti ubbaw kadakami.

We see you now with your words:
You are alive, laughing,
and laughing more!

Makitadaka ita kadagiti balikasmo:
Sibibiagka, agkatkatawa,
Ken agkatkatawa pay!

We listen to you in the silence,
And there,
Between our doubts and certainties,
We know we are coming to grief.

Dumngegkam kenka iti ulimek,
Ket sadiay,
Iti baet dagiti duadua ken kinasigurado,
Ammomi nga agsensennaaykami.

We anticipate what is in there,
Past the phrases of our finiteness.

Sinanamakami no ania ti adda sadiay,
Iti labes dagiti frase ti kaaddat’ patinggami.

For tonight, you are a free verse.
You are a stanza, and more,
Moving us away from our lonely imaginings.

Gapu ta ita a rabii, maysaka a verso libre,
Maysa nga istanza ken adu pay,
Iyad-adayonakami iti leddaang iti isip.

You have come to us one last time.
From afar, we know this now:
You are ever-present, and always
You stand there, seeing what can be seen
And with our hearts in lament and in song
We can only bid you goodbye, Manang Nellie,
Elder sister to our longing.

Immayka kadakami iti maudi a gundaway.
Manipud iti adayo, daytoy ti ammomi ita:
Addaka a kankanayon, ket ditaka nga agtakder,
Sikikita kadagiti mabalin a makita
Ket kabulig dagiti pusomi ti dung-aw ken duayya,
Dakami ti agpakada, Manangmi a Nelli,
Manang dagiti adu a pannakaila.

Hon, HI
Dis 9, 2011

Wayaway, A Prayer

2011-12-05T08:36:00.000-08:00

You are the breeze from this sea,
Wayaway, eastwind, giver of an element
That moves me. It is the crack of dawn
And this dream caught me so while you
Take things in stride, caress the plumeria
Leaf by my window, in this cold of winter.
By the Makakilo mountains, there
You are now and dancing to the tune
Of whizzing lives, on their cars to put in time
For the big men in Waikiki. The whole rite
Is to put food on the table, and this becomes
A repetition the way you leave me so.
The cold gets to my stranger’s bones,
Making me tarry to say this prayer
One more time in the corner altar of my day:
Do not leave me wind, breath
Air, breeze. Stay, stay longer and whisper
To me the definition of Honolulu morning
And the means to the ceremony of going
Through another celebration of the word
Coming onto a page, this one about
Our pains. Today, we launch yet another
Chance to hear our own voice. We say it louder,
Clearer this time. We need to hear what we say.
Like the daybreak, we see it coming,
And soon is the noontime segueing
Into the sacred hours of our exilic becoming.

Wayaway, eastwind, become our
Amian, our northwind, and fill our hearts
With a song no one wants to sing.
Call out to the Abagat, tell it to reside
In our drunken nights, and make us sober,
Alert to the lullabies of the Pangagdan,
So there, with the amber sun setting, we get
The fulfillment of a new rainbow’s dream
For which reason we gather again.

Hon, HI
Dec 5, 2011/ At the launching of 'Panagtaripato: Parenting Our Stories, Our Stories As Parents'

Selda Onse

2011-12-02T08:21:00.000-08:00

MANILA, Philippines — The presidential suite of the Veterans Memorial Medical Center (VMMC) in Quezon City is ready for occupancy, hospital Medical Director Nona Legaspi said Friday. C. Yu. Radio Inquirer, Dec. 2, 2011

Agur-uray ti kuadrado nga espasio
Ti pawaywaymi kenka nga aldaw.
Basol man wenno saan ti nagan ti darikmat
A kadakam ket impaidam, itan ket
Bukodam dagiti uppat a suli dagiti balikas
A kadakam ket minemmem, rinabsut
Kadagiti bibig dagiti ubbing ti lamlammiong
Tapno kadagiti bilog ti tagainep
Ket ti arinebneb
A demokrasia ti mannanakaw.

Adu a kari.

Adu a pammatalged ti matay.

Adu a patibong ti aglusdoy
Tapno iti krimen kadagiti mannibrong nga isem
Ket ti sabidong a sagut ti mapaay.

Tinagikukuam amin a matagikua:
Tapok, tirania, dagiti arestado nga anges.

Kukuam amin a matagikua:
Lupot iti bagi nga ulbod, kas ti kararag
Kadagiti tumeng a nakasursuro
Nga agparintuod, ket iti ginget dagiti isusuko
Ket ti deklarasion a ti ili ket balud
Dagiti benditado nga am-amangaw
Dagiti obispo, padi, pulis, pulitiko
Ken ti kansion ti koro a mabayadan.

Madagdagullit ti pammakawanmi kenka.
Ngem dimo pinakawan dagiti pammigatmi.

Madagdagullit ti pammakawanmi kenka.
Ngem dimo pinakawan dagiti pangngaldawmi.

Madagdagullit ti pammakawanmi kenka.
Ngem dimo pinakawan dagiti pangrabiimi.

Ta sika, kas idi punganay, sika ti pagapuan
Dagiti amin a tig-ab nga iti karabukob
Ket di met makalasat. Agbugsot dagitoy kas
Kadagiti amin a pammaidam
Kas kadagiti maudi a rayray ti mangrabrabii a bituen
A tinagikuam, impempen kadagiti baul
Tapno kadagiti sardam ti utangem a sipnget
Ket bilangbilangem kas pakaragsakam.

Idinto a dakami, iti sulinek dagiti tagainepmi
Ket ti namnama iti kakaisuna a makan nga itan
Ket sinandiam iti kararag, pammati, allilaw.

Kadagiti uppat a suli ti panawen, dita
A riknaem ti panagbisim, iti balikas
Kas iti diminto ited a wayawayam.

Kadagiti rabii ti panagmaymaysa,
Padasem ti makidanggay kadagiti agpuypuyat
A kanito tapno ti anghel a kasisigud
Ket dinaka inggaan, kas iti aliwit matallikudam
A masakbayan.

Dis 1, 2011
Hon, HI

Darepdep iti Sabong a Palusi

2011-11-22T05:40:00.000-08:00

Ket bumaringkuas ti mannaniw iti di pay nakariing nga alas-tres tapno ikur-itna ti maipapan iti daniw ti palusi a sabong tapno iti panagikur-it ket mataginayon ti sao, nga iti isip, sadiay laeng a maimtuod.

Agawem daytoy iti mamarparbangon a tagainep.

Ta ita ita daytoy nga agmurmuray a bigat
Ket daytoy a balikas manipud kadagiti naruay
A pampanunoten: palusi, ti sabong a puraw
Nga immuna a naranaan iti istoria ti inabraw.

No kasano daytoy nga immapay iti panunot
Ket di matunton dagiti rugi ti silaba
Dagiti adu a buttuon, iti man panagbirbirok
Iti kaipapanan wenno iti pannakabirok

Iti kaikarian. Tawen kas kadagiti makaltaangan
A rabii ti panagbirbirok iti sabong a puraw
Ket segun iti tagainep ita, daytoy a sabong,
Sangadosena a naimula iti sisesegga a bengkag

Ti nagannak ti gayyem ket iti turod ti mannalon,
Sadiay nga agsampaga, kas iti kayanga,
Wenno ti nabanglo a kampupot.

Kasariping ti palusi ti tao, kas ti daga
A nakaitukitan. Ditoy ti rugi ti amin
Maipapan kadagiti posible, uray
Iti bigat a mariing ti rikna a manglagda
Iti agellay a pasdek ti binangon a derrep.

Segun iti darepdep, iti kampay-idi
Dagiti mabalin nga isayangkat,
Agtitimpuyog dagiti apostol ti palusi
Kas ti disipulo ti amin a banglo

Dagiti mairanud iti seremonia ti angot,
Kas iti pintas kas iti salamangka
Ti palusi a sabong, ket iti ritual
Ti surnad ket iti tutok ti bantay daytoy

A maaramid ti inauna a libot.
Sabong kas iti sabong, daytoy a palusi
Ti napukaw idi a taraon!

Waipahu, HI
Noviembre 23, 2011

Istasion ti Panagsagaba, 1

2011-11-20T09:15:00.000-08:00

After more than an hour, the fighters decided they could get the other four captives off. They were helped out of the front door. Gaddafi remained where he was, on his own at the back, silent and aloof. “The Capture of Gaddafi’s son,” NYT, Nov 20, 2011.

Kas idi damo, kasta met iti udi.
Ita ket martir ti sao, wenno traidor.
Kasano nga iyebkas dagiti tawid a basol
Iti dara dagiti kabusor nga idi ket adipen
Dagiti amin a kalbario a ti walang
A tagainep ti ama ti akimpatanor?
Pammagusto kadi ti ulimek
Tapno dagiti amin a makita ita,
Dagiti palagip iti panagsagaba
Nga iti ili ket impanamnama,
Patiray-ok kadi dagitoy iti babawi
Nga insao koma idi un-unana?
Iti isip ket ti napukaw a trono
A balitok a tinenneb dagiti saning-i
Ti mapadso a burayok. Kasano
Nga irugi ti sabali a pakasaritaan
Kadagiti disierto? Iti panagam-amangaw,
Nakitam kadagiti dagiti Ilokano
Nga iti kada kalio ket ti buteng
Ti kada tribu iti ilim tapno
Ti kintayeg ti selula ti kinaasinno
Ket ti panagkumbawa iti ama
Nga agnanayon nga amo?
Agtalappuagaw kadi dagiti bukod
A tagainep tapno iti pananglaga
Iti pagilian iti sabali a ladingit
Ket ti ikakaasi nga umuna
A panagsangit?

Hon, HI
Nov 20/11

An Exclusive Interview with the Honorable Leoncio R. Cardenas Jr.

2011-10-31T20:59:00.000-07:00

Mahalo to a Consul General—
The Honorable Leoncio R. Cardenas Jr. retires

by Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

Photographs by Ie Agcaoili
Cover photo courtesy of Philippine Consulate General

When he came back from a posting elsewhere, we said in our 2009 Fil-Am Observer feature story that his was a narrative of service coming full circle.

He had served as a deputy consul general in Honolulu in the 80s, during the most difficult political times, when loyalties were divided, and the nation was in its ‘days of rage and nights of disquiet’, as one writer has described in a book about this period of contemporary Philippine history.

After the political turmoil, a new team came over to Honolulu; he was posted elsewhere.

Immediately prior to his second Honolulu posting he was the Philippine Ambassador to East Timor, then a newly independent country.

On July 29, 2009, he came back after almost two decades of absence as the consul general.

I interviewed him at the start of his term.

It was a first meeting, and right on, I hit it right with him, the tone of our conversation crisp and light, the texture of our words that of the breezy and gentle wind of the northern Ilocos where we both came from.

I got to know him from afar, from a press release, from a consular announcement, and from second-hand information I gathered from acquaintances; he did not know me from Eve.

During that first meeting, he in his dark and crisp barong, and I in my jeans and rolled long-sleeved shirt, we seemed like long-lost friends reuniting, laughing and exchanging notes about many things from Ilokano poetry to diplomacy and democratic institutions we sorely needed as a people.

It was a delight speaking with him.

In that interview, I came to know of the integrity of the man.

At the height of the struggle for the basic rights and freedoms of the people of the Philippines everywhere, he resolved an ethical dilemma by siding with the Filipino people.

It was service to the people—that commitment he was sworn to protect—that moved him to do the most difficult of all acts.

And history would prove him right.

He did not regret taking sides with the people; it was the most honorable thing to do.

The second interview was on a Sunday morning, on October 29. It was to be at his official residence by a ridge east of Honolulu city proper.

We came in on time. The consul general opened the door for us.

He was helping prepare a late breakfast for a couple, a newlywed from the Philippines, the bride his godchild.

We declined his offer of breakfast; we accepted the steaming coffee he himself brewed.

Here is an official of the land so down-to-earth, so easy to reach, I thought.

He is still the same official I interviewed more than two years ago.

“I have a trepidation with interviews like this one,” he emailed me back when I asked him for a schedule. “I do not usually grant one. But I trust you. And I trust that you will do justice to your material.”

“This interview is the Fil-Am Observer’s way of thanking you for the good work that you have done to our people. It is our way of saying goodbye to you as well,” I explained as soon as we sat down, he facing the balcony of his official residence where below the ridge the sea spreads boundlessly, the sea calm and blue, serene and unmoving.

I sit across him, facing the entrance and towards a two-lane road that slopes down at about 40 degrees. Beyond are the stately homes in this part of the city and county of Honolulu.

“Your coming back to Hawaii for the second time to complete your work as a career diplomat is a blessing,” I said.

“It is so,” he answered. His voice lilted, like a musician’s, soft and sure, confident and caring.

His face brightened up, perhaps thinking of his retirement that will come in a few days, right after the visit of President Benigno Aquino III. “It is very rare that diplomats are given a chance like the one that I have. When the Secretary of Foreign Affairs called me to say that I would be posted in Honolulu and that I had to leave my ambassador’s post in East Timor, I thought that this was a blessing. I enjoyed my work in East Timor. I had good working relationships with the political leaders of that country right after their independence, after going through their most difficult test as a country, and leaving them was something that saddened me. But I have fond memories of Honolulu and the Filipino people I would be representing. To come and serve them again is something that does not happen all the time.”

“You are coming full circle with your work as a foreign service official with this posting,” I remarked.

“It was one way of completing one’s career, one’s mission, one’s vocation,” he replied. “But I am going home after retiring. I will have another life. I will enjoy my new life to the full. I will be involved in a ministry.”

“What is home to you? Where is home?” I queried. I remembered all of the poets of the Ilokano people pining for home, remembering the Ilocos of old so many of them have never seen in a long while.

He thought for a moment, his pause that of a music coming into its most beautiful and haunting lyrics and notes. There is a musician’s mind and heart in the consul general, and that music would keep him company everywhere he was posted. “Home is where the heart is. Home is what we remember. So: geographically, it is Badoc, Ilocos Norte, where I was born, grew up, got educated. Then again, Manila, particularly Makati, is also home to me. I have a home there, literally, and I will stay there for a time as well. But home is also San Francisco’s Bay Area where my family is, my children in particular. In a sense, the entire Philippines is home to me. I must admit that I will have to fly to the Bay Area some of the time to reconnect with my family, with my children.”

“Was it difficult being in the foreign service?”

“I have no regrets. It was a good life. It was a good career. There is nothing nobler and more rewarding than serving our own people.”

“Do we have a hope for our country? People are quitting the homeland. Can you share your thoughts about this as a private citizen? You will soon be a private citizen. There is pessimism in the homeland. There is despair.” I took my cup and sipped from it. The warmth of the brew soothed my parched throat. We had talked for some time.

He sipped from his cup. And then he said: “Even as a private citizen, this I can say: there is hope for our country. We have to trust the current leadership. President Noynoy Aquino means well, and surely, he is showing us the way to do the right thing. I understand the pessimism. I understand the despair. I know of the figures of those who lead wretched lives. The act of doing sweeping changes to correct the errors of the past is not pretty, is not always pretty. But it is being done. We have hopes for the homeland. We have to keep on hoping for the homeland.”

“Is this hope the reason why you are going back?”

“One of the many reasons. But it is a major reason.”

“You said you are going to have your ministry.”

“I am thinking of putting up a non-profit organization for the elderly. The senior citizens have to have something concrete, some reasons to hold on to dear life, some ways to live meaningful lives. I will start this ministry in Badoc. This is to honor my parents who had to put up a lot for my education, for my future.”

“You have made a lot of strides bringing the consulate to our various communities. It is a huge footprint you are leaving behind.”

“To work for our people is always a challenge. When I came in, I simply followed the good deeds of my predecessors. And this I must say: the younger career officers have so much to give. They are oozing with talents and gifts and dedication. Older career officers like us—older senior diplomats like us—must give way to the expertise of the younger ones. The world is changing—and it is changing past. We leave behind a memory, and the fruits of the small things we have done. In the meantime, we look forward to the future and take stock of what we have yet to do so we can do them.”

“Your music will play a role in your retirement?”

“My music has always played a role in my life, both personal and professional. In all my postings, I always had a choir that I worked with. When I retire, music will not take a back seat.”

“Your message to our people in Hawaii? Our people in the Philippines?”

“Thank you for the opportunity of serving you. It was worth it, this life of service in the name of our people, in the name of our country. I am amazed at how our people in Hawaii are always on the ready to give back to our people in the Philippines. I have been part of various drives to help flood victims and other calamities. I have seen up close what kind of energy there is among our people in the state. About our people in the Philippines—there is much to hope for. Let us do the work of building our nation and soon, the good and equitable life will be ours.”

I gave Consul General Leoncio R. Cardenas Jr. a copy of the Contemporary English-Ilokano Dictionary I wrote.

“You sign it, please,” he told me.

“I already did, Apo,” I responded to him.

He flipped the pages of the dictionary to look for my dedication. He reads from my notes in my handwriting. “I will have use of this dictionary in my retirement.”

It was about noon when the interview was over.

We said goodbye to a man we are truly proud of.

Observer
Nov 2011

Series on Preserving Ilokano/Other Languages-Conclusion

2011-10-30T19:47:00.000-07:00

PRESERVING ILOKANO AND OTHER LANGUAGES, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY
(Conclusion)

Aurelio S. Agcaoili, PhD

Nakem and its work could be understood as our own language of critique.

It is also our language of possibility.

Our work of Ilokano language and culture instruction at the University of Hawaii does the same thing.

The simple fact that Nakem Conferences came out of our desire to put in context the centennial celebration of the first 15 Ilokanos to work in the plantations of Hawaii already implicates the intrinsic connection between what we do at our university and at Nakem—and between what our Nakem partners in the Philippines, through the Nakem Conferences consortium and our Nakem Conferences International which is housed at our UH Ilokano Program.

This proves that there is this beautiful but delicate dance that we are doing in our respective organizations and academic institutions.

It is beautiful because we have come to a point where we can now speak who we are, not in the fullness of human speech yet because of constraints that are largely external and systematic.

These constraints are traceable to much ready are our educational bureaucracy such as the Department of Education, the Commission on Higher Education, and the TESDA in listening to what we have to say, things that have been kept deep in our hearts for so long a time because speech is not the best virtue of our educational system but acquiescence, silence, and acceptance without the benefit of critique and reason.

There is the delicate dance in our pursuit of the MLE goals, this we have to admit.

And the dance is delicate because we are walking on new ground even if we resist the old ground and insist on our freedom to walk on this new one.

Certainly, we are learning along the way, even as we try to respond to the challenges of the various MLE goals and its six areas of focused activity.

What we envision and what we want done at Nakem is the evolving of a new educational practice of “being more-so”, a practice that takes into fundamental account the language of the students and the language of teachers teaching these students.

We refuse here to look at language and its reality as something akin to a tool in learning, in education, and in understanding the world.

In our account of the new educational practice of being more-so, we look at language, like the hermeneutist Hans-George Gadamer, as that which mediates our understanding of the world, that which middles, that which is between us and the world.

Thus we can only come to an understanding of this world through language.

There is no other way.

The fact that this language must be always in the concrete, that it must be ours even if we accept that it is also beyond us, makes all the more relevant in understanding the place of MLE in our pursuit of education that emancipates, and that it emancipates because it grounds itself from the humanity of our students and our teachers, a humanity that is always life-long and thus demanding a life-long, continuing, ceaseless educational practice.

Now, we summon the poet Machado and we say: Indeed, there is no road.

But we make the road while walking. We have begun to walk hoping that the road appears.

FAO
Nov 2011

Observer Editorial, November 2011

2011-10-30T19:42:00.000-07:00

Something to Thank For

On this day of Thanksgiving, we have many things to thank for despite the grim statistics of our lives.

Sixteen Americans are unemployed.

One of every five children is poor.

Many more are falling in the cracks of our uneven economic lives, with the number of those unable to access basic social services increasing each day.

There is a widespread discontent among Americans.

And in the streets of Manhattan that lead to the citadel of commerce and capital, the famed Wall Street, there is uproar on what has become of our iniquitous lives.

The main motive of the pilgrims, the pioneering peregrines of our immigrant lives in this country, is the search for a better life, one marked by quality, not mere quantity (read: the possession of even the most unnecessary).

It is a life marked by freedom and liberty.

It is a life marked by respect for life—one’s own and another’s.

It is a life marked by abundance, not by want, deprivation, dispossession.

On Thanksgiving Day, this is all what it means: a return to the basics of our life as a people in the United States of America.

United in our diversity, united in our struggles, and united in our need to reclaim the very essence of our collective life—our union despite the odds.

We have so much to thank for despite the challenges that we see each day.

We have so much to thank for despite the increasing number of the homeless on our streets in Hawaii.

We have so much to thank for despite the need to take stock of what else we need to do so that next year, our Thanksgiving Day will be a bit better, more joyous, more bountiful.

Like the peregrines of old, we need to come to the table again, and with a thankful heart, remember that there is much to give even as there is much to ask for.

_______________________

Hurrah to the Consul General

We join the Filipino American community in thanking the Honorable Consul General Leoncio Cardenas for his years of service as a foreign affairs officer in the name of the people of the Philippines.

His coming to Hawaii for the second time is his way of coming full circle with his passion and dedication for the homeland of the immigrant Filipinos of Hawaii.

Even as we bid him adieu, we will always remember the work that he has done for our communities, his engagement with our various civic organizations, and his abiding presence in the many things that matter to us.

We say, saludos, Apo Leoncio Cardenas! Agbiagka! Mabuhay ka! Long live!

FAO Editorial
Nov 2011

An Exclusive Interview with The Hon. Leoncio Cardenas Jr

2011-10-30T19:37:00.000-07:00

Pannakatay iti ugis ti anniniwan

2011-10-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

Pannakatay iti ugis ti anniniwan

He came to power with brutality, and he ended his life in equal brutality. -- Victoria Cummock, a widow of a PanAm 103 flight passenger reportedly ordered bombed by Khaddafi in 1998, NBC Miami, October 20, 2011

Pannakatay iti ugis ti anniniwan,
Dayta ti imbatim kadakami a lagip.
Iti kadi kanal, wenno aripit
Wenno iti limdo dagiti pait,
Sadiay, kadagiti sulinek dagiti kuadrado
A buteng, sadiay kadi met nga indulin
Ti inauna a kintayeg tapno kadagiti pakaasi
Ket ti katik ti gatilio nga ukom ti rumbeng?
Mano kadagiti umili, iti lawag kas iti sipnget,
Ti nagkararag kadagiti sakaanan
Tapno iti buteg, lua, pannusa,
Saplit kas ti panagdawat iti maminsan
Pay a pammakawan ket ti linteg koma
Kadagiti imam nga itan ket kibkibkiban
Ti agarsab a tapok ken
Ti agsambuambo nga egges
Kas iti di mabilang a paidam?
Intedda kenka ti talek.
Impanmo ti namnamada kadagiti darepdep
Iti landok, semento, estatua,
Ayat iti agebbal a puso
Kas iti agmanas a kararua
Nga iti kadarrato, kadagiti manmano a pul-oy
Iti disierto, ket ti kaltaang dagiti ranggasmo.
Agapitka itan kadagiti immulam.
Kas kadagiti annak, nga iti ugis ti anniniwam
Ket ti ugis met laeng ti inwawam a salakan.
Leksion daytoy kadakami
Iti sabali a lubong, nupay iti pakasaritaan
Ket ammomi ti ugis ti kinamauyong,
Ti sukog ti anniwan dagiti patibong.

Okt 20, 2011
Honolulu

40th Year of the UH Ilokano Program

2011-09-27T19:26:00.001-07:00

40 Years of History and History-Making:
The UH Manoa Ilokano Program

The Fil-Am Observer Staff

Part of the diasporic narrative of the people of the Philippines in the United States is the accounting of programs that have served their various communities in exile.

Of landmark achievement, for instance, is the Operation Manong that paved the way for a respectful recognition of the contributions of the many hardworking people of Philippine descent, such as the Visayans and the Ilokanos.

The two groups have come to Hawaii to eke out a life far better than they had in the homeland.

And they have found a better one over here, thanks to their industry and perseverance, and their untold, at times unnamable, sacrifices

It was a catchall phrase—this search for the good life as a reason for leaving the familiar landmarks of the land of one’s birth.

But this grand reason has the ability to capture the mixed motivations of those who had come here more than one hundred years ago—and these mixed motivations can still be encapsulated by that phrase.

But history was not always on the side of these people of the Philippines.

The tragic histories of execution, and other forms of oppression, in the fields and outside the fields, are now ingredients of the larger story of the presence of the various peoples of the Philippines in the State of Hawaii.

But the accounts of their resistance and persistence are everywhere to give instruction to the next generations of people of the Philippines, immigrants and local-born alike.

One of the institutions that have survived all through the years is the Ilokano Language and Literature Program of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Established in 1972, it began to offer Ilokano courses to children of immigrants who came to the university to further their studies.

Many of these students have now become professionals, and are now leaders of the community in their own right.

The forty years of service to the students and the community—the forty years of bearing witness to what language and culture resources can do to enrich the larger community of Hawaii—are years of struggle and surprise.

Tapped to lead in designing the Ilokano Program that in later years was called the UH Manoa Ilokano, Philippine Drama and Film Program, was Professor Precy Espiritu.

For more than thirty years until her retirement from teaching in 2006, Professor Espiritu expanded the program until it became a degree-granting program in 2002.

The fact that Ilokano is being taught with academic rigor is something that the various universities in the Philippines have missed for the last forty years that the UH Ilokano Program has consistently been offering Ilokano courses each semester.

As a direct result of the institution of a national language, Ilokano has since been practically banned in the Philippine basic education infrastructure.

In the name of unqualified nationalism, and in the name of the sacrosanct national language, all Philippine languages—the mother languages of the children who are going to the schools—have been practically banned.

Empirical studies document the prohibition, directly and tacitly, by the fine-system being imposed upon students caught speaking a word in the Ilokano language, his very own language.

The going rate is at five pesos per word, according to some educators who are in the know.

The State of Hawaii, in 1972, adopted a different tack to the whole story.

After years of denial and deprivation as a result of many factors, including the cultural denigration of Ilokanos themselves, the Ilokano language finally gained a public space in the halls of academia as an academic and foreign language course, one that could take its place side by side with the other major languages of the world, including the majors languages of Asia, languages that have strong connections to the economy, politics, and culture of Hawaii.

The one-course program became two courses, and the two-course, one-year program became two years, until it became a full-blown bachelor’s degree program under the rubric of Philippine language and literature.

All through the years, students have come and gone—and those who passed its portals went out to the world and brought with them a renewed appreciation of what the Ilokano language can offer, of what the Ilokano culture can share, and of what the university program can do to students who are interested to reclaim their heritage, or students who want to learn more about the language and culture of their parents.

Part, therefore, of the Filipino-American History Month Celebration is the institution of the Ilokano language at the university.

Prior to 1972, the Ilokano people had to wait for seventy-four years before their language could take its own place in the academic discourse of the university.

Coming in 1906, with the centennial of their coming to Hawaii celebrated in 2006, the absence of the language of the plantation workers in the intellectual discourse of the state is something that begs explanation.

The children born of these plantation workers did not have access to the intellectual resources of their ancestors.

Some did not even have access to the language of their parents, by reason of the systemic denial by the educational institution—the schools—of the children of these workers of their own heritage language, a repeat, or duplication, of what was happening in the homeland.

The Tagalog Program of the University, instituted in 1971 through the leadership of Dr. Teresita Ramos, antedated the Ilokano Program for a year.

It was also Professor Ramos, cognizant of the need for the intellectual space for Ilokano discourse and practice, that made it sure that the Ilokano Program would have a good start, and hence, giving the free rein to Professor Espiritu to develop the Ilokano Program and push for its growth and development through all the years.

Many students of the Ilokano Program speak fondly of their own experiences as students of this program.

Three of these students, Julius Soria, Abe Flores, and Jeffrey Acido have joined the instructional faculty.

Other graduates of the program are either working as interpreters, youth development workers, teachers of Ilokano language in Waipahu High School and Farrington High School, both on Oahu, or government workers.

In partnership with other civic and culture organizations, the UH Ilokano Program has been in the forefront in mother language advocacy, in heritage language education, in cultural nationalism, and in cultural pluralism and diversity.

In 2006, the Ilokano Program began the Nakem Conferences, a movement that aims to pursue the very aims of diversity and the need to celebrate—and cerebrate—it.

Today, Nakem Conferences movement has grown, and has spread all over the Philippines.

In the summer of 2012, it will hold its 7th International Conference on “Pag-angkon: Our Right to Our Language, Our Right to Education That Emancipates,” in Tacloban City, Philippines.

More needs to be done, and one of them is to continue erasing totally the acquired—even learned—cultural denigration of the Ilokanos, their hatred of their language and culture, a hatred that makes them conveniently deny they are Ilokanos, a hatred that makes them bury any sign that they have anything to do with the Ilokano language and culture.

Even at the 105th year of the presence of the Ilokanos in Hawaii, we continue to experience this denigration everyday.

For it is not easy becoming the doormat of history.

It is not easy becoming the subject matter of an immigrant history that does not even want to remember itself.

It is for this reason that during this Fililipino-American History Month—a commitment to memory and to memory making, a commitment to resist forgetting—becomes urgent.

In May 2012, the UH Ilokano Language and Literature Program will hit its 40th year.

In the years to come, another good 40 years would assure us of Hawaii’s commitment to diversity and heritage, and another 40 years afterwards would make the UH Ilokano Program a commitment for all time.

Six or seven instructional faculty now run the university’s Ilokano Program at any given time.

These are the new breed of leaders who inherited the wisdom and vision of the first leaders who have since retired.

From a faculty of one and a handful of students, the Ilokano Program has grown and hopefully, it will continue to grow even as it assists, and partners with, other llokano Programs in schools and colleges, in Hawaii, and outside Hawaii.

FAO Features/
October 2011

Preserving Philippine Languages- Part 5

2011-09-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

PRESERVING ILOKANO AND OTHER LANGUAGES, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY

Fifth of a Series

The path we took at Nakem was never easy; it is not yet easy until today, this we now know full well.

When Ricky Nolasco was chair of the Commission on the Filipino Language, we made it sure that he knew what we were doing at Nakem.

For two consecutive years, in 2007 and 2008, we asked him to come to our conference and lend his name to the cause, which he did, and for which Nakem will always be grateful.

We sometimes feel that Nakem pushed him to side with our cause at the expense of his position as chair of the commission.
All told, what Nakem did and what Nakem continues to do in the interest of the goals of Education for All in 2015 is a commitment first to our peoples of the Amianan.

We are clear on this.

The six EFA Goals can never be vague to us as these are concerns that have not left us even when we were discriminated against, even when the tolerance for our languages and cultures was not the virtue that we saw, heard, and experienced during all these educational regimes that did not regard the difference and diversity that we offered as something of value to the development of our cultural and political citizenship.

Nakem could not be vague with what universal primary education was.

We went to school sharing seats with others, even walking barefoot for hours to experience the traces of words that were not ours, to go through the rite of getting into a world we do not understand because the words in that world were not ours.

Nakem could not be vague with increasing adult literacy: we owe it to our communities that our adults could read and write in the Ilokano language again.

With about eight million people in the country and millions more abroad, we have only a single monolingual magazine to speak of, with a weekly circulation of 50,000.

This means that a fraction of one percent (or .6%) only reads—or buys. Given that people share their reading materials with others, we can extrapolate and increase the number of readers to four per magazines per week.

We have these facts: the original number based on the weekly circulation reveals that: 6250 out of one million read.

With the multiplier, we have: 25,000 out of one million read. So here we say, “Houston, we have a problem!”

This problem, of course, is compounded by the fact that many of our magazines and newspapers do not live long because: (a) the number of readership has always been a problem and (b) the overall environment for adult education does not support the learning process in the Ilokano language.

There are of course business issues related to the failure of these publications but this is not concern of this paper at this time.
Nakem could not be vague with the need for an education that is geared towards gender equality.

While the issue of gender equality takes as a subtext the issue of patriarchal privileges, our people are not blind to the immediacy of responding to inequalities resulting from these privileges.

We have not succeeded in all respects and that we need to educate ourselves further along these lines.

But given the right mix of motivations and incentives such as the learning environment, we will evolve a fairer and more just society for our people.

Our language, certainly, is not pure but polluted as every language is, but the fact that it accords respect for varieties of gender, for the equality of the sexes, and for the recognition of the virtue of acceptance and tolerance is enough data to make us proceed with our reading of this world of gender parity.

To be continued
Published in FAO
October 2011

Observer Editorial

2011-09-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

THE ILOKANO PROGRAM OF THE UNIVERSITY:
SERVING THE NEW GENERATION,
SERVING THE COMMUNITY

The University of Hawaii’s Ilokano Language and Literature Program will turn 40 next year. This year marks a kick-off that presents the best of the program’s students and the best it offers to the community.

Passing through the portals of the program were students who have come unto their own, now becoming their own person, for which reason the program can never be prouder.

Peerless—there is not any single university anywhere else, not in the United States, not in the Philippines, where studies on the Ilokano “language, literature, and life” is being taught with academic rigor—the UH Manoa Ilokano Program has proven time and again that (a) instruction is the key to academic training and the preparation of students to appreciating life-long learning, (b) research makes faculty and students on the look out for what is best out there, the best that is yet to be known, and (c) extension work with the community and all other sectors in and outside the university is what relevance makes—relevance that ought to be the twin of every heritage (or academic) program.

Starting from a handful of students in 1972, students who were curious what kind of language was being spoken at their homes, and sometimes, at their back, the UH Ilokano Program has grown to hundreds, averaging 150 students every semester for the last five years.

Even with budget cuts and all other financial recourse universities all over the country are resorting to balance their budget, the UH Ilokano Program has proven to be a resilient program, with students coming in knocking to get enrolled especially in its culture-oriented courses.

It is not easy to sustain a heritage program like this one.

The challenges are all over the place, including the onslaught of an attitude that favors one national language, a thinking that has become rampant since the 30s with the institution of a single language as a national language, and giving it an army and a navy, and all the resources that are required to develop and make that language dominant, and in the process, indirectly killing the other languages of a country.

The facts of the case of linguicide are real—with the Philippines on the road to homogenizing everything from language to thought-formation.

The UH Ilokano Program, together with other advocates, has done its share to help avert this woeful condition in the homeland with its advocacy for mother language education.

While the focus of the UH Ilokano Program is the education of the heritage and foreign language learners of Ilokano at the university, it has joined forces with other language and culture advocates to advance the cause of cultural pluralism and diversity, in the Philippines, in Hawaii, and elsewhere.

To this end, the UH Ilokano Program has been instrumental in the putting up of the Nakem Conferences, now a movement that has a country chapter in the Philippines, the Nakem Conferences Philippines.

In partnership with other educators, researchers, cultural workers, and students, Nakem Conferences has since held six international conferences, all meant to advance the cause of language and culture rights, the right to be educated in the mother language, the right to have access to one’s own language, and the right to preserve, promote, and perform one’s own culture in one’s own language.

These tasks are no mean feat during the difficult times of belt-tightening, cost cutting, recession, unemployment, and widespread poverty even in a rich country like the United States.

But the UH Ilokano Program, with the help of the community, has gone a long way to serve the new generation of Ilokano Americans, the new generation of students wanting to specialize in studies on the Ilokanos and the peoples of Amianan, and the new generation of students, who despite the much-touted globalization, have refused to acknowledge that a homogenized view of the world is the best view, but instead have found ways to get to value otherness, difference, diversity, and multiplicity.

In all these, the UH Ilokano Program bears witness to history, particularly to the Ilokano American history in the islands, a history that is itself implicated in the history of the people of Hawaii, and the history of the United States in Hawaii and the Pacific.

Extend that logic to other Ilokanos in the continental United States, and that pride could be the same—the pride that can only come from resisting the destructive attack of similarity and sameness without any qualification.

The UH Ilokano Program remains steadfast to its commitment to bearing witness to history, to history-making, to the reclaiming of heritage, and to the struggle for a liberating education for all Ilokano and Ilokano-descended people in Hawaii and all over the world.

FAO Editorial
Oct 2011

Welga Piece/ Hyatt Strike

2011-09-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

WELGA! WELGA!

By A. Solver Agcaoili

(for the Hyatt Regency Strike; performed by students and workers of the hotel at the road pavements of Waikiki, September 13, 2011)

Chorus 1:
Welga, welga, agwelga
Dakami ket agwelga
Agwelga ta irupir
Karbenganmi, irupir!

Welga, welga, agwelga
Dakami ket agwelga
Agwelga ta irupir
Karbenganmi, irupir!

Chorus 2:
Abuso, abuso, abusero!
Hyatt, Hyatt, abusero!
Give us dignity, give us life
Give us liberty, give our jobs!

Narrator 1:
We have come in here to show our solidarity with our hotel workers. We are students learning to find our way in the real world.

Worker 1:

Immaykami tapno makikammayet kadakayo. Immaykami tapno iti nagan ti panagkaykaysa a panangirupir kadagiti kalintegantayo ket ti namaymaysa met a pagbanagan daytoy a panagwelgatayo.

Worker 2:
For them to take our jobs is the same as taking away our chance to live with dignity.

Worker 3:
They have subcontracted our jobs to other subcontracting companies. And the subcontracting employees are getting less than what they work for.

Child of Worker 1:
My mother leaves early in the evening.

Child of Worker 2:
I do not see her till late at night.

Child of Worker 3:
She shows me her callused hands.

Worker 4:
Look at my hands. They are the hands of people who work all day. This callus is one for the tourist from Asia. This callus is for the tourist from the mainland.

Worker:
Look at my hands! This callus is for the tourist from Europe! This callus is for the tourist who has all money in the world—all!

Chorus 1:
Kalio, Kalio, kalkalio
Agkalio ti imayo!
Kalio, kalio, kalkalio
Kalio-kalio ti imayo!

Chorus 2:
Show me your hands!
Show me your hands!

Student 1:
(Sings)
Mother, mother, how many beds did you fix today?
Mother, mother, how many rooms di you clean today?
Did you ever eat your lunch?
Did you ever eat your lunch?

Child of Worker 1:
She tells me of the beds she fixed today.

Worker 1:
Sixteen! Sixteen! No, seventeen!

Child of Worker 4:
She tells me of the rooms she cleaned today.

Chorus--ALL:
Sixteen, seventeen,
Fourteen, fifteen,
Sixteen, seventeen
Fourteen, fifteen!

Worker 5:
Out of our labor comes their profit.
Out of our sweat comes their money.
Out of our sacrifice comes their dollars.
While we are left here by ourselves.

Chorus 1:
Kalio, Kalio, kalkalio
Agkalio ti imayo!
Kalio, kalio, kalkalio
Kalio-kalio ti imayo!

Student:
We need all these business ventures. We need all the business initiatives. We need the capital coming into our state. But to say that our labor should be last before capital…

Worker 6:
Out of our labor comes their profit.
Out of our sweat comes their money.
Out of our sacrifice comes their dollars.
While we are left here by ourselves.

Worker 7:
The cost of living in Hawaii is more than twice the average cost in the land.
The credit card debt is third highest in the country.
Where are we going to get the money to put put on our tables?

Worker 8:
How are we going to raise of children?
How are we going to send them to school?
How are we going to pay our mortgage?
How are we going to pay our rent?

Chorus 2:
Out of our labor comes their profit.
Out of our sweat comes their money.
Out of our sacrifice comes their dollars.
While we are left here by ourselves.

Chorus 1:
Kalio, Kalio, kalkalio
Agkalio ti imayo!
Kalio, kalio, kalkalio
Kalio-kalio ti imayo!

Worker 9:
While we work so hard, the Goldman Sachs earns millions.
While we work so hard, the owners of Hyatt are able to earn millions by selling their stocks.

Chorus 1:
Kalio, Kalio, kalkalio
Agkalio ti imayo!
Kalio, kalio, kalkalio
Kalio-kalio ti imayo!

Chorus 1:
Welga, welga, agwelga
Dakami ket agwelga
Agwelga ta irupir
Karbenganmi, irupir!

Welga, welga, agwelga
Dakami ket agwelga
Agwelga ta irupir
Karbenganmi, irupir!

Welga! Welga!

2011-09-13T23:42:00.000-07:00

To live in another land, take up all the accidents of becoming one with the people of your new land, including giving up your own citizenship right in your former homeland, and yet witness the same vestiges of greed and selfishness that can only come from unrestrained capitalism is something that comes with a shock value.

It is most immoral, and the immorality is concrete.

Even in Los Angeles, I took part in those mass mobilizations when at one point Los Angeles, and therefore California, turned hostile to immigrants, with or without the proper immigration documents.

I witnessed the surge of people, like the waters of Sierra Madre surging to fill up the puny rivers of polluted Manila to create what could be a deluge never seen before.

The people did not come to the United States to sit on their hands and steal from the coffers of California, in much the same way that the hotel workers of Waikiki, ninety percent of them Ilokanos, did not come to steal from the coffers of them big time hotel owners, some of whom went bankrupt and had to the bailed out like Goldman Sachs, now the big-time owner of Hyatt Regency, the same hotel whose workers are now striking.

Tonight's persformance is one of rage, righteous as righteous can be.

It is the Philippines all over again, with us joining hands with the people fighting for their just rewards.

The sinister ways of unbridled capitalism are that: sinister as sinister can be.

The tactic is this: lay off the workers, and in their stead put in a new hire paid so little because that worker does not work directly under the hotel any longer but from a labor subcontracting company. So she is paid less so that the subcontracting company could be paid more.

That is how it goes now: subcontract labor, as if labor is now a commodity that can be traded, sold, bought.

From the fact sheets I gathered, I wrote a guerilla theatre piece, Welga! Welga!

The piece would see its premier performance on the pavements of Hyatt and in the adjoining hotel, both overlooking the famous Waikiki beach.

What an irony this: while others are enjoying the sunset view, others are suffering the view.

While others are frolicking under the warm sun in the early morning, others have started to turn these hotels into clean spaces of more fun.

But these other who do the bed fixing and cleaning do not ever have the chance to enjoy these clean spaces: these are for others to enjoy--and to have fun!

Some hotel workers are cleaning so many rooms they do not even have the chance to eat their lunch.

The stories are many--and the stories need to be told.

So tonight, we brought in our students and together with the Local 5 Union Workers, they rehearsed Welga! Welga!.

And then their performance of a lifetime.

For all the rehearsing, I lost my voice, and had to run home to drink of the cup of salabat from the cup of suffering of our Ilokanos of Hawaii. Losing one's voice is not that bad, when you know you have become one with the people.

The plantations have not closed shop.

They have transformed into hotels, motels, resorts, and other fancy names they call these houses of greed, profit, and labor abuse.

Waikiki, HI
Sept 13, 2011

Panagpaburek iti Dara

2011-09-04T12:22:00.000-07:00

Kastoy ti panagpaburek iti dara:
agaludoyka nga umisem
tapno amin a saiddek
ket iti ungot
nga ipaitalimeng.

Sadiay, iti lukong daytoy,
sadiay a bilangen amin
a saiddek, kada balikas,
kada aweng nga iti panawen
ket ti babawi ti panangirurumen.

Kas koma ita nga aldaw:
iti Golden Coin, iti daytoy
nga oras ti panagsasarak,
isuda iti falso ti am-amangaw,
sika iti karit ti imbag.

Ngem agburek ta agburek
ti dara nga iti adu a tawen
ket inkan pinabpaburekan.

Aron dagiti sao, kas ti aluten
nga iti kada sungrod ket ti alipaga
ti pananglimlimo, isuda
iti basbas ti privado nga ulbod,
sika iti namnama ti pudno.

Ket ita a panagsasarak
ket ti rubrob ti dalikan,

isuda iti madagdagullit
a panamagsisilpoda iti riro,

sika iti kakaisuna a pauyo
nga iti ulimek ti sulinek ket kadua
iti ngatangata ti pannakairubo.

Sumrekka iti bangketa ita a malem
tapno iwarasmo dagiti kaasim
kadagiti mababain nga isem,
sika iti balligi ti apuy,
isuda iti keltay ti kayo
nga iti alipaga ket manursuron.

Waipahu, HI
Septiembre 4, 2011

2012 Nakem International Conference

2011-09-03T18:46:00.000-07:00

First Announcement: 7th Nakem International Conference

7th Nakem International Conference
Leyte Normal University, Tacloban City
May 23-25, 2012
“OUR RIGHT TO OUR LANGUAGES,
OUR RIGHT TO EDUCATION THAT EMANCIPATES”

Hosted and Sponsored by
Leyte Normal University

Jointly sponsored by

University of Hawaii Ilokano Program
University of Northern Philippines
Ifugao State University
Mariano Marcos State University
Nakem Conferences Philippines
Nakem Conferences International
St. Mary’s University
University of Northern Philippines

Convened by
Evelyn C. Cruzada, Leyte Normal University
Aurelio S. Agcaoil, University of Hawaii
Bonifacio V. Ramos, St. Mary’s University
Alegria T. Visaya, Mariano Marcos State University

RATIONALE
The 7th Nakem Conference, “Pag-angkon: Our Right to Our Languages, Our Right to Education that Emancipates,” aims to highlight the link between language and education, and between the right of peoples to their languages and to an education that emancipates. Arguing from the framework that diversity matters to an education that makes sense to citizens, the conference revisits the issues of nation-state, citizenship, and cultural literacy, and tests these issues against the ideals of an education that forms citizens, that makes citizens sensitive to difference, and that makes educands literate in their culture and the cultures of other people.

The use of the Waray pag-angkon—claiming—designates the clear-cut political direction of the conference: it univocally states the non-negotiable right of peoples to the dwelling-place of their souls, their languages and cultures, rights that are protected by various international covenants, and rights that, because of flawed government policies, have been denied of the various ethnolinguistic groups and communities in the Philippines and elsewhere. The act of pang-angkon is thus a categorical imperative for all peoples of the world in search of a form of education that makes sense, and it makes sense because it emancipates.

The specific aims of the conference are:
• To revaluate the role of the language of the community in the education of students;
• To redefine the meaning and practice of emancipatory education in the context of cultural diversity and difference; and
• To provide a venue for the exchange and diffusion of the best educational practices that employ the language of the community.

Paper Proposal Requirements
Paper proposals submitted for consideration by the Abstract Selection Committee must zero in on the theme or the specific goals of the conferences.

Some topics for considerations are:
• Auxiliary language for a non-auxiliary learning
• The cultural citizen in the Visayan classroom
• The cultural citizen in the Luzon classroom
• The cultural citizen in the Mindanao classroom
• Indigeneity and emancipatory education
• The case of diversity and difference in Philippine education
• Education for cultural pluralism
• Best practices in the use of the language of the community
• Best practices in MTB-MLE
• A second look on the Visayan, Luzon, or Mindanao educand
• Return to the basics: Why our languages matter in our education as citizens
• Literate in my language, literate in my culture, and educated for
for the future
• The future of Philippine languages and the future of Philippine education
• Towards a Philippine education that emancipates

Only abstracts of 300 words are accepted for presentation at the 7th Nakem International Conference.

Each abstract must zero in on the theme, or one or more of the topics listed in this Call for Paper.

All abstracts must be sent to all the following on or before December 31, 2011:

Abstract Selection Committee, 7th Nakem, nakem2012@gmail.com;
Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, chair, U of Hawaii, aurelioa@hawaii.edu; Bonifacio V. Ramos, co-chair, St. Mary’s U, bonifacio50@yahoo.com; and Alegria Tan Visaya, co-chair, Mariano Marcos State U, atvisaya@yahoo.com.

Notice of acceptance of abstracts will be emailed to conference paper proponents on or before January 31, 2012.

Notices will be emailed. Only e-versions of Notices of Acceptance will be sent. No other versions will be used; hence, all proponents are advised to have their email addresses.

For inquiries in the Visayas and Mindanao, email Dr Evelyn Cruzada, President, Leyte Normal University, Tacloban City, evlida12@yahoo.com; or Voltaire Oyzon, member, 7th Nakem Steering Committee, v.oyzon@gmail.com; or Michael Carlo Villas, mykllvillas@yahoo.com.

For additional inquiries, you can write to the members of the 2012 7th Nakem International Conferece LNU Steering Committee:

Firie Jill Ramos, firelady547@yahoo.com;
Michael Carlo C. Villas, mykllvillas@yahoo.com;
Rutchell B. Enriquez, rutchenriquez@gmail.com;
Facundo Rey Ladiao, reyladiao@gmail.com;
Jonas P. Villas, jonasvillas@yahoo.com;
Mel Brian Berida, melberida@yahoo.com;
Ariel Salarda, arielgsalarda@yahoo.com; and
Ian Phil Canlas, lordphil2003@yahoo.com.

REFS
First posting/first announcement
2012 7th Nakem International Conference
Leyte Normal U, May 23-25, 2012
Pag-angkon: Our Right to Our Languages, Our Right to Education
That Emancipates

Pakauna iti libro ni Severino Pablo maipapan ken Presidente Marcos

2011-08-28T18:53:00.001-07:00

Ti Sarita iti Pakasaritaan, Ken ti Pakasaritaan iti Sarita:
Texto ken Kontexto ti Biag ni Presidente Ferdinand Edralin Marcos

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili
Universidad ti Hawaii

Kadagiti padak a nagubing iti Ilocos, kadagiti padak a nakasaksi kadagiti pasamak ti kontemporaneo a pulitikal a pakasaritaan ti pagilian, manmano dagiti kakastoy nga obra a mangpadpadas a mangkonstrak iti kontexto dagiti nagkaadu a texto ti pakasaritaan ti pagilian a nakaigameran ti liderato daydi dati a Presidente Ferdinand Edralin Marcos.

Kas kaniak a nagtawid iti kastoy a pakasaritaan, ken kas natural nga agus ti narativo ti ili iti ania man a lugar ken tiempo, adda dagiti kontradiksion a mangipasimudaag kadagiti babassit ken dadakkel nga elemento dayta a narativo.

Importante dagitoy nga elemento ti narativo: ditoy a tumrarong ti sintesis a genesis ti pudno.

Ngem kadagiti adu nga Ilokano a nakasaksi iti naglabas a panawen a nangsakup iti dekada saisenta aginggana iti dekada noventa—nga agarup tallopulo a tawen a panagturay iti nivel a lokal ken nasional—adda klaro a papel ni Presidente Marcos iti pakasaritaan ti pagilian.

Iti aspekto ti pulitikal a filosopia, sentral ditoy ti nalawag a kapampanunotan ni Presidente Marcos maipapan iti panagbalbaliw a sosial, ti reforma a masapul nga ipatungpal, ken ti sirmata nga awan kaasping no di ti pannakaragpat iti makunkuna a nasayaat a panagbiag para iti kaaduan, no di man ket iti amin.

Maipalagip kaniak ita ti maysa a tesis ti maysa nga adalak iti filosopia—impingetko nga adalenna ti pulitikal a filosopia ni Presidente Marcos babaen ti serioso a panangbasana kadagiti libro a sinuratna iti sakbay ken iti kangitingitan ti Linteg Militar—ket dita a giniyaak ti agad-adal tapno makitana ti adda iti panunot ti nasao a lider pulitikal.

Ditoy a nakitak ti kontexto ti aramid ni Severino Pablo, ti retirado a bibliotekario ti provinsia ti Ilocos Norte.

Kadaytoy a narativo ti kabibiag ti nagawan a presidente a patanor ti provinsia, ken patanor met ti ili a Laoag (numan pay patanor met dagiti sabsabali nga ili, kas koma ti Sarrat ken Batac) a nangpatanor kadakami ken Manong Severino, makita ti fuersa ti estoria, ti energia dagiti balikas, ken ti dinamismo ti memoria a saan a kas karina a pagpuonan dagiti narativista a kas ken Manong Severino.

Ta dagitoy ti ramen ti kastoy a panagestoria: ti kaadda a kas testigo kadagiti pasamak tapno iti kasta, iti panagestoria, prima facie a sika mismo ti makaibaga ken makaited iti pammaneknek kadagiti pasamak tapno dagitoy ket agbalinda a nabiag a ramen ti dakdakkel nga estoria para iti masakbayan, para iti sumuno a generasion, para iti agnanayon a panawen.

Adda panagrarana—wenno panagsasaip—dagiti panawen ken purok.

Ket iti daytoy a panagrarana a di panangigagara (wenno inggagara ngata ti dakdakkel a fuersa ti pakasaritaan ken gasat?), maipalagip kaniak ti panagsaksi ni Manong Severino iti panagsukimatko iti pakasaritaan ti ili, iti gandatko a mangibuksil iti dakdakkel nga estoria ti kontradiksion ti biag a pulitikal ti pagilian.

Iti panagsuksukimatko, naynay idi nga alaek ti bus manipud iti Manila tapno iti kabigatanna ket mapanko kuriruen idi iti biblioteka ti provinsia nga imatmatonanna.

Adu idi dagiti saludsod nga insangsangpetko—binugsong no ar-arigen, ket adu met dagiti sungbatna kaniak a mangipasngay kadagiti adu pay a saludsod. Kasta idi ti relasionmi a personal ken profesional, relasion a namuonan iti laingna a mangidokumento kadagiti sarita a ramen ti narativo, a ramen ti panagsaksi, a ramen ti pakasaritaan.

Ket iti panangdawatna nga ikkak iti pakauna daytoy nga aramidna, diak ninamnama nga agkurus manen ti dalanmi tapno iti kasta ket ituloymi ti agdaliasat a dua iti nagan ti pakasaritaan ti ili, ken iti nagan ti historiografia ti biag ti dati a Presidente Marcos!

Nangnangruna a diak ninamnama nga uk-ukopanna gayamen ti maysa nga obra maestra maipapan iti maysa nga anak ti ili nga iti kaano man ket maipagpannakkel iti pakasaritaan.

Adu dagiti agkunkuna—ken kastoy met ti timpla ti obra ni Manong Severino—a ni kano Presidente Marcos ti maysa kadagiti kalalaingan a nangiggem iti liderato ti pagilian.

Adu met dagiti mangibagbaga kadagiti pamilawan—ket natural iti maysa a lider ti kasta.

Iti panagituray, saan nga amin a tao ket maparagsak ti maysa a lider pulitikal.

Adda latta dagiti umili—ken paidauluan—a paan-anawa.

Adda latta dagiti di makasippaw iti sirmata ti panangidaulo.

Adda latta dagiti addaan iti perspektiva a maisupiat iti perspektiva ti agig-iggem iti poder ken turay, ket iti wagas ti naindemokrasiaan a panagbiag a pulitikal, natural laeng dagitoy a ramen ti panagbiag iti gimong.

Ta saan a maymaysa a lente ti mabalin a maaramat iti panangited iti definision ti nasayaat gapu ta naimprogresuan a panagbiag.

Ta saan a maymaysa ti logika a mabalin a mausar iti panangtunton iti nalinteg a panagituray ken panangmanehir iti publiko a panagbiag.

Dagitoy ti ramen ti panangidaulo: ti abilidad a mamagkammayet kadagitoy a kontradiksion a natural a ramen ti kinatao, ti kinagimong, ti kinatentativo ti mortal a biag, ti man biag ti maysa a tao wenno ti biag ti maysa a gimong.

Paset ti naindemokrasiaan a panangtunton iti pudno ti deklarasion ti ammo a pudno ken ti panagkompromiso iti wagas ti panagtunton iti dayta a kinapudno.

Paset ti naindemokrasiaan a panagbiag ti panangipirit iti sirmata a saan a para iti bukod a pagsayaatan no di ket para iti kaaduan.

Dagitoy dagiti ingrediente iti pulitikal a narativo ti biag ni Presidente Marcos, ingrediente nga ipakpakita kadatayo daytoy a pakasaritaan ti biag nga insagana ni Manong Severino.

Manmano laeng ti nangpadas iti kastoy nga aramid ni Manong Severino.

Malagipko ita ti panagipatarus nga aramid ni Gregorio Laconsay, dagiti salaysay a naipablaak kadagiti magazin, ken dadduma pay a sinurat kadagiti mabilbilang a warnakan iti Ilokano.

Ngem iti suma-tutal, nakisang dagitoy nga aramid, ket gapu ta nakisang ti panagestoria, bangbangir ti ammo dagiti agbasbasa iti Ilokano maipapan iti daytoy nga anak ti ili, saan a balanse ti makitkitatayo, ken nakarkaro a di rumbeng a maymaysa laeng ti perspektiva a maar-aramat tapno maikkan iti nainkalintegan nga evaluasion ti aramid ni Presidente Marcos a kas lider pulitikal.

Ti kayatna a sawen, masapul iti pakasaritaan ti kina-Ilokano dagiti kakastoy nga inisiativa.

Masapul dagiti kakastoy nga aramid nga aggandat tapno iti kasta ket maidokumento dagiti aramid dagiti amin nga umili iti Ilocos nga iti mortal a biagda ket nangiburayda iti laing, wada ti panunot, kinabaknang ti panagpuspuso, ken kinasudi ti sirmata para iti ili ken kadagiti umili.

Adu dagiti mamaingeltayo.

Ngem iti kinaaduda, kasta met ti kinamanmano dagiti dokumentado a pakasaritaan maipapan kadagiti aramidda, kadagiti kananakemda, kadagiti tagtagainepda.

Maysa kadagiti dakkel a kibaltang ti sibubukel nga Ilocos ket ti kibaltang iti nagan ti lipat—iti nagan ti sistematiko a pananglipat, iti nagan ti sistematisado a panangtallikud kadagiti estoria ti ili.

Ta awan iti sibubukel nga Ilocos daytay sistematisado nga aramid a makikonkontrata iti pakasaritaan—aramid a mangkidkiddaw a masapul a ditay ipumpon dagiti amin nga aramid dagiti nakautangan iti imbag ken lagip, iti sakrifisio ti panangidaulo, iti sirmata ti panagpaay para iti kaaduan.

Ti aramid ti Ilocos ket daytoy: iti panangidulin iti tanem kadagiti umilitayo, isu metten ti panangitanemtayo kadagiti pakasaritaanda.

Ditay maamiris daytoy: nga awan biag—ania man a biag ti umili—a di maikabit iti biag ti ili.

Babassit wenno dadakkel a tattao, nalatak man wenno saan, dadaulo man wenno paidadauluan—amin dagitoy a biag ket mangipakita iti sibubukel a nagpasaran ti ili iti panaglabas ti panawen.

Kunada: kasinggalot ti biag a personal ti biag a pulitikal. Iti udina, maimplika ti biag ti umili iti biag ti gimong, kasta met ti biag ti gimong iti biag ti umili.

Mano koma, kas pagarigan, ti nakaaramiden iti kastoy nga obra—ti panangirakurak ken panangwarwar kadagiti genesis dagiti motivasion ti liderato ti Presidente Marcos, genesis ti panagituray a maipuon iti kabibiagna iti Ilocos, kabibiag a narativo met laeng ti kada Ilokano, ti kada ili iti daytoy a paset ti pagilian, maysa a lugar a tinubay ti rigat ket darepdep, ti rikki ti daga kasta met ti gandat a makasagpat iti pantok ti balligi, ti kinnit ti init iti kataltalonan kasta met ti panaglak-am iti rang-ay?

Adu kadagiti kailiantayo ti pimmanaw iti Ilocos tapno kadagiti sabali a lugar ken tiempo ket sadiayda a makibalubal iti fuersa ti pakasaritaan ken biag. Iti ipapanawda, naikkat kadakuada ti gundaway nga agbalin a testigo kadagiti nagkaadu—ken komplikado—a paspasamak ti pakasaritaantayo.

Kadakuada daytoy nga obra.

Adu met dagiti ubbing itan a di makaammo kadagiti narikut—ken nasipnget—a nagpasarantayo.

Kadakuada daytoy nga obra.

Adu met dagiti di makaammo a mangbasa iti pannakaabel dagiti pasamak tapno koma adda mapartuat a binakol ti kinapudno ti pakasaritaan.

Kadakuada daytoy nga obra.

Kadakami iti sabali a pagilian partikular kadakami iti Hawaii a nangsangladan ni Presidente Marcos ket ti familiana kalpasan ti makunkuna itan nga EDSA People Power I segun iti panangawag dagiti historiador, adda iti lagipmi dagitoy a pasamak a pinanawanmi.

Iti likkaong ken patag, iti bantay ken sang-atan, iti karayan ken kataltalonan daytoy a narativo, sadiay, kadagitoy a luglugar a kankanayonkami a sumursurnad tapno dagitoy ket agbalin a templo ti lagip.

Tapno ditayo makalipat.

Tapno dinatay tagikukuaen ni lipat.

Ta awan ngatan nakaskas-ang no di ti pasamak a ti maysa nga ili ket makalipat iti bukodna a pakasaritaan.

Ngarud, kastoy ti usar ken anag daytoy nga obra ni Severino Pablo maipapan ken Presidente Ferdinand Marcos: ipalagipna kadatayo nga addaantayo iti etikal a responsibilidad iti pakasaritaan.

A ti pananglipat ket saan nga umiso nga aramid ti maysa nga umili.

A ti kankanayon a pananglagip ti pagrebbengan ti maysa nga umili iti ilina.

Saludarantayo ni Severino Pablo iti kastoy nga aramidna, kas ti panangsaludartayo kadagti amin a dadaulo a patanor ti ili, a patanor ti Kailokuan, a patanor ti pagilian.

Sapay ta iti sumuno nga aldaw ket adda pay dagiti tumanor a testigo ti kaputotan nga Ilokano tapno iti kasta ket dagiti sabsabali pay a narativo ket maidokumento a kas iti wagas ti panangidokumento ni Manong Severino.

Honolulu, Hawaii, Estados Unidos
Septiembre 2011

Panagalana ti Rikna iti Adayo

2011-08-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

Dimo magawidan ti maab-abbed a rikna.

Kuna ti mannaniw a dina masbaalan
Amin a dagensen, kas ti awit ti busel
Iti pannakisinnanggolna iti angin ti bagiw.

Ngem ita, ditoy adayo, bilangem
Amin nga addang a mapan iti barukong,
Dagiti agkamang kadagiti purgatorio
Nga adda iti nagukraden a sabong,
Ita nga aldaw, ita a darikmat
Ti umad-adanin a panagrururos.

Mariknam dagiti kanito ti kinaestranghero
Kadagiti linia iti agledleddaang nga eropuerto.

Sika iti pilapila dagiti turista:
Babelda dagiti sao, kas balikas
Ti al-alidukdoken a rusok,
Sika iti nagtallikud nga anak ti daga,
Isuda nga umay tapno lumidok
Iti arak ti lang-ay a di met wayawaya.

Isuda iti kaatiddogan a pila:
Dagitoy dagiti kailian idi.

Isuda dagiti agaw-awid a rikna
Mapan agapon, umay umapon
Kadagiti templo ti nakem a bumakasion
Iti mamimbiit tapno iti bulbuloden
A tiempo ket ti panagriing
Iti parbangon a mangikasaba
A rumbeng laeng ti panagtalappuagaw
Kadagiti disierto tapno sadiay
Iti kapanagan dagiti babantot
Ket ti panagbirok iti singin ti sagot.

Ngem sika, iti katengngaan dagiti balikas,
Kukuam ti agalana nga iliw nga iti maleta
Ket sadiay nga imbaul
Tapno kadagiti tatak ti pasaporte
Ket dida masursuro ti gumarut.

Hon, HI
Agosto 26, 2011

The Language Struggle Must Go On!

2011-08-24T00:35:00.000-07:00

PRESERVING ILOKANO AND OTHER LANGUAGES, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY

Fifth of a Series

The path we took at Nakem Conferences was never easy; it is not yet easy until today, this we now know full well.

When Ricky Nolasco was chair of the Commission on the Filipino Language, we made it sure that he knew what we were doing at Nakem Conferences.

For two consecutive years, in 2007 and 2008, we asked him to come to our conference and lend his name to the cause, which he did, and for which Nakem Conferences will always be grateful.

We sometimes feel that Nakem Conferences pushed him to side with our cause at the expense of his position as chair of the commission.

All told, what Nakem Conferences did and what Nakem Conferences continues to do in the interest of the goals of Education for All by 2015 is a commitment first to our peoples of the Amianan.

We are clear on this.

The six EFA Goals can never be vague to us as these are concerns that have not left us even when we were discriminated against, even when the tolerance for our languages and cultures was not the virtue that we saw, heard, and experienced during all these educational regimes that did not regard the difference and diversity that we offered as something of value to the development of our cultural and political citizenship.

Nakem Conferences could not be vague with what universal primary education was.

We went to school sharing seats with others, even walking barefoot for hours to experience the traces of words that were not ours, to go through the rite of getting into a world we do not understand because the words in that world were not ours.

Nakem Conferences could not be vague with increasing adult literacy: we owe it to our communities and our people that our adults will be able to read and write in the Ilokano language again.

With about eight Ilokanos in the country and millions more abroad, we have only a single monolingual magazine to speak of, with a weekly circulation of 50,000.

This means that a fraction of one percent (or .6%) only reads—or buys. Given that people share their reading materials with others, we can extrapolate and increase the number of readers to four per week.

We have these facts: the original number based on the weekly circulation reveals that: 6250 out of one million read.

With the multiplier, we have: 25,000 out of one million read, or a measly 200,000 out of some 8 million.

We cannot even compare the gravity of the situation when someone calmly said, “Houston, we have a problem!” in that calm NASA-speak.

We have an astronomical crisis pointing to the eventual disappearance of our language!

The tell-tale signs are there: you initiate a conversation in Ilokano with the young in Ilokandia and chances are you get a response in Tagalog or some foreign language.

This problem, of course, is compounded by the fact that many of our magazines and newspapers do not live long because: (a) the number of readership has always been a problem and (b) the overall environment for adult education does not support the learning process in the Ilokano language.

There are of course business issues related to the failure of these publications but this is not concern of this paper at this time.

Nakem Conferences could not be vague with the need for an education that is geared towards gender equality.

While the issue of gender equality takes as a subtext the issue of patriarchal privileges, our people are not blind to the immediacy of responding to inequalities resulting from these privileges.

We have not succeeded in all respects and that we need to educate ourselves further along these lines.

But given the right mix of motivations and incentives such as the learning environment, we will evolve a fairer and more just society for our people.

Our language, certainly, is not pure but polluted as every language is, but the fact that it accords respect for varieties of gender, for the equality of the sexes, and for the recognition of the virtue of acceptance and tolerance—this is enough data to make us proceed with our reading of this world of gender parity.

A Language of Critique, A Language of Possibility

Nakem Conferences and its work could be understood as our own language of critique. Our work in the Ilokano language and culture instruction at the University of Hawaii does the same thing.

The simple fact that Nakem Conferences came out of our desire to put in context the centennial celebration of the first 15 Ilokanos to work in the plantations of Hawaii already implicates the intrinsic connection between what we do at our university and at Nakem Conferences—and between what our Nakem Conference partners in the Philippines, through the consortium between Nakem Conferences Philippines and the Nakem Conferences International which is housed at our UH Ilokano Program.

This proves that there is this beautiful but delicate dance that we are doing in our respective organizations and academic institutions.

It is beautiful because we have come to a point where we can now speak who we are, not in the fullness of human speech yet because of constraints that are largely external and systematic but in the new courage we have found we do have.

These constraints are traceable to our educational bureaucracy such as the Department of Education, the Commission on Higher Education, and the TESDA.

This courage is an antidote to our having been rendered mute by the educational system, by the pressure of the school system to enjoy our acquiescence, silence, and acceptance of the status quo without question.

There is the delicate dance in our pursuit of the MLE goals, this we have to admit.

And the dance is delicate because we are walking on new ground even if we resist the old ground and insist on our freedom to walk on this new one.

Certainly, we are learning along the way, even as we try to respond to the challenges of the various MLE goals and its six areas of focused activity.

New Educational Practice of “Being More-So”

What we envision and what we want done at Nakem Conferences is the evolving of a new educational practice of “being more-so”, a practice that takes into fundamental account the language of the students and the language of teachers teaching these students.

We refuse here to look at language and its reality as something akin to a tool in learning, in education, and in understanding the world.

In our account of the new educational practice of being more-so, we look at language, like the hermeneutist Hans-George Gadamer, as that which mediates our understanding of the world, that which middles, that which is between us and the world.

Thus we can only come to an understanding of this world through language.

There is no other way.

That we have to perceive Ilokano to be always in the concrete, that it must be ours even if we accept that it is also beyond us, the fact that after taking a long hard look through numerous and diligent studies the United Nations has declared that it is the birthright of everyone to learn in his own mother tongue at least during the early stages of his education—all this makes it all the more relevant in understanding the place of MLE in our pursuit of education that emancipates, and that it emancipates because it grounds itself from the humanity of our students and our teachers, a humanity that is always life-long and thus demanding a life-long, continuing, ceaseless educational practice.

Now, we summon the poet Machado and we say: Indeed, there is no road. But we make the road while walking. We have begun to walk hoping that our efforts will shine on the road that materializes before us.

FAO
Sept 2011

On Migrants and Their Fundamental Rights

2011-08-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

Editorial

Standing With The Migrants From The Margins

There are two things that have greeted us during the last few weeks—and these two things concern us all immigrants and migrants of this land.

We are not going to enter into debate on whether the more appropriate technical term that we use is that of being settlers—for we are, indeed, settlers as well, coming as we are from another land, our ways to coming to America and settling here varied and rough and unpaved at times.

The fact of the case is this: that we have been able to carve out a piece of our earth under the sun, and now trying to guard this piece of earth as fiercely as we can.

It is our prize for eking out a life here.

But the stories of our coming over—of our migrating to America, of our ‘coming to America—are not of the same beginning, not of the same middle, and certainly not of the same denouement.

Out there are the others—because Othered—migrants and immigrants, some of them branded, like herd, with that label that does not do justice to their sufferings and sacrifices: indocumentado, illegal, ‘tago-ng-tago’ (or someone who keeps on hiding, hiding away from the shadows of immigration officers who are out there to handcuff and deport them).

We have editorialized about the DREAM Act—Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors—and we have argued for the benefits it will give not only to the potential naturalized citizens who have come to this land, but to the larger American community.

We look at the same issue now, and we follow the same argument: that the Obama Administration initiative to give a chance to a number of those who can contribute to the fulfillment of that American Dream while at the same time pursuing it, is worth a try.

President Barack Obama, in his executive order, has said it right: that a path must be cleared to those people who have come here as a child, who have had no mind of their own but had been brought here involuntarily, have imbibed the ways of American life, have not known any other country but the United States, and have equipped themselves with citizenship skills by, among others, educating themselves to the ethos of America that they know as their own homeland.

The initiative is worth a try.

Cecilia Muñoz, White House director of intergovernmental affairs, has stated clearly what this initiative is all about, what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Memo of June 17, actually means: an initiative that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice the task to review and ‘clear out low-priority cases on a case-to-case basic and make room to deport people who have been convicted of crimes or pose a security risk.’

Echoing the same argument for having the yet-to-be approved DREAM Act as a legislative initiative that has given some hopes to the deserving migrants, ICE Director John Norton says of the ‘prosecutorial discretion’ of his agency, that includes nineteen factors, including the coming of the potential beneficiary to the United States as a child of 15 or below, the pursuit of at least two years of college education, or service in the military.

There are criticisms to this initiative, of course, including the accusation that this is a dictatorial act on the part of the president, and that it is a categorical relief for any form of immigration violation.

Add this to the charge that this is unconstitutional.

We believe otherwise.

The initiative is at the heart of what the United States is all about.

We have much to gain when we recognize that this country of immigrants will be made greater by the influx of human resources that have much to offer—and our marginalized migrant deserve this recognition of what they can do, and the relief the magnanimous spirit of our laws can offer.

There are about more than 10 million estimated illegal immigrants in the country at the present.

Of this number, there are 300,000 cases for review in the immigration system, many of which do not fall under the category of ‘posing a serious threat’ but promising a contribution to the greatness of the United States.

Apart from the indigenous peoples and the native Hawaiians, we all have come to settle—to migrate—to this land at one point of our family narrative and history.

The United States that we know is built upon this vision of a great land and a great mix of peoples with their great mix of gifts and potentials.

We cannot now afford to watch from the sidelines and see the indocumentados, the ‘illegals,’ and the ‘tago-ng-tago’ children and young people to lose their chance at pursuing the American Dream for which they have come here through their elders, and for which dream they have been living for most of their young lives.

Our ethical duty is to stand with them—to stand with the marginalized migrants—and be counted.

There is nothing nobler than this act at this time.

FAO Editorial
Sept 2011

Peter La. Julian: The Return of an Award

2011-08-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

WHY I RETURNED THE PEDRO BUCANEG AWARD

The Pedro Bucaneg Award is the highest medal of honor in Iluko literature. But I returned it in support of a noble cause--the unnecessary "attack" in the Internet against Apo Ariel Agcaoili of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the unexplained expenses of funds of the major national association of Ilokano writers. The political act was made through a letter dated August 5, 2009 to the then president of Gumil Filipinas, giver of PBA, through Ariel Tabag, then secretary- general of the organization.

Iti suratko, imbatadko nga adda dua a kondision iti panangisublik iti PBA ket maisurat koma iti pakasaritaan ti Gumil Filipinas:

1. "Peter La. Julian, Pedro Bucaneg Award insublina a kas simbolo ti pannakipagriknana ken pannakitaktakunaynayna ken ni Apo Aurelio S. Agcaoili a nangtunton iti husticia iti pannkarabrabngis iti dayawna."

2. "Peter La. Julian, Pedro Bucaneg Award insublina a kas simbolo ti luksawna iti saan a nalawag a pannakadagup iti nau-or a pondo ken pannakagastos iti kuarta iti pannakabangon iti Balay ti Gumil idiay Suso."

Saan a nasungbatan ti suratko ngem inikkatda ti naganko iti listaan dagiti immawat iti kangatuan a pammadayaw ti Literatura Iluko.

Saan nga umno ti inaramid da Elizabeth Madarang Raquel, Ariel Tabag ken dagiti kameng ti hunta directiva ti gunglo. They should correct themselves to bury once and for all the perfidies committed by officials and members of GF.

At this point, Gumil Filipinas has lost its credibility to bestow the award because, by their misdeeds, they have dishonored Pedro Bucaneg.

The Indifference of Collaborators & The Silence of the Audience

2011-08-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

This is a theme that metamorphoses into the same over and over again in Ilokano literary history.

As an insider looking in, I can only grieve for the younger generation of writers who know only one way: the herd mentality of elders, not necessarily men alone, but women as well.

For here is what it is now, over here and yonder: there is but one and only one Word with respect to Ilokano literature, and it is the Word of the self-righteous who can afford to laugh in the face of injustices committed by a number of wannabe and inutile leaders.

Manong Amado Yoro, esteemed for his passion for what is right and intolerant of the excesses of others especially their endless need for power and their greed for recognition, wrote in one of the emails going around that one group kept on with the guffawing in light of the steps taken to right the wrongs done by someone who had wormed her way to power.

What a delight they could have had.

For indeed, these are writers who should know better, who should be sensitive to oppression and all those things that should be the focus of the pen to expose for the world to know.

What has happened to Ilokano writing is something the younger generation will have to work out, redeem, salvage, save.

Indeed, the indifference of collaborators.

Indeed, the silence of the audience.

In Elie Wiesel's 'Night,' night is here.

Honolulu/
August 11, 2011

Thoughts on a Baguio Talk

2011-08-07T13:56:00.000-07:00

August 5 was a date at memory-making.

Imagine a roundtrip ride to Baguio, minus two nights of sleeplessness, one for going, and the other for returning to your base somewhere in some other boondocks in the metro.

Imagine you are awake in all the hours that you get to the terminal and take that bus ride to the other cooler mountain up in the Amianan, and at five in the morning, you wake up the dawn as you get to alight from that bus and take your first cup of coffee under the pine trees, the mountain air crisp and smelling of the new earth spilling into the rain-soaked streets.

This is Baguio once more, a city you pine for, its secrets yours to keep forever, remaining unrevealed.

It is a talk that brought you there--and the autograph signing of the dictionary you have been able to put together after years of struggle with the Ilokano word.

Let us do the memory-making here: August 5, 2011, 1-3 PM, at the Social Science AVR, UP Baguio.

Earlier, you and your group paid a courtesy call to the Chancellor Dr Priscilla Supnet Macansantos.

Earlier, you and your Nakem group planned for the next big clandestine thing to wage a cultural and an epistemological and literacy war at the 7th Nakem in Leyte, with partners in that part of the country.

You thought that the meeting went well, and the talk too.

You thought that you had fun answering even the most difficult questions about Ilokano hegemony.

And you thought that you did not go there to pander to the convenient thoughts of the young people but to challenge them to think otherwise, including the need to get out of the herd, to get out of the mass.

We all sow the seed.

It now all depends on what ground the seed is sown.

We will see.

We shall soon see.

Baguio City/
August 5, 2011

2012 Nakem, The 7th Nakem International Conference

2011-08-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

The 2012 Nakem Conference Abstract Selection Committee will begin to accept paper proposals that zero in on the conference theme, 'Pag-angkon: Our Right to Our Languages, Our Right to Education that Emancipates'.

Details of the call will be uploaded to the Nakem site, nakemconferences.blogspot.com, to the Nakem FB site, and to other dedicated sites such as the sites of the sponsoring institutions.

Venue and date details of the conference:

Leyte Normal University, Tacloban City, May 23-25, 2012

LNU hosting, with UH Manoa Ilokano Program, Nakem Conferences Philippines, Nakem Conferences International, and Nakem institutional members co-sponsoring. Also co-sponsoring is 170+ Talaytayan MLE.

For details, email:

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, aurelioagcaoili@yahoo.com, U of Hawaii at Manoa
Volts Oyzon, v.oyzon@gmail.com, Leyte Normal U
Alegria Tan Visaya, atvisaya@yahoo.com, Mariano Marcos State U

Linguistic Democracy and Liberation, Series

2011-08-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

All these issues of displacement in historical consciousness are not easy to spot in an increasingly homogenized society like the Philippines, like the United States, and like any other country pretending that nationalism is equal to the singularity of a language spoken by all its citizens under the guise of national language.

The fetish for national language must be called as such: a fetish that has given rise to our growing inabilities to go multicultural and diverse, to relate to each other using a variety of perspectives, and to be aware that we are not the only people in the country or in the world.

What we have continued to deny, to repress, and to hide is the fact that that the Philippines is a nation among nations.

All told, many of our writers insisted on writing in the Ilokano language even if they also dabbled in other languages.

This act of resistance, however inchoate, issued out a memorandum to those proponents of a national literature that believes only in the literature written in the national or international language.

From the ranks of teachers, there were those doing “clandestine guerilla” cultural work in their classrooms, such as the one done by Joel Manuel using Ilokano to teach high school physics somewhere out there in Banna, Ilocos Norte

In the same vein, another superintendent of schools, Norma Fernando, saw to it that for the first time, a student paper in Ilocos Norte was produced in Ilokano, with only sections in English and Filipino, a reversal of the more official and DepEd sanctioned campus journalism practice of a school paper in the dominant languages of instructions.

These acts, while admittedly individual, reflect the political climate that we must recognize as present in our educational practice.

It is not true that the Ilokano teacher in his Ilokano classroom cannot create an Ilokano environment of instruction and education following the route of the clandestine teacher.

How much he can sustain this without the support of his superiors in the pecking order of educational hierarchy and power remains a question.

Never mind that in coming up with these innovations, his students learn more and better.

Never mind that his students come to a fuller understanding of his world.

What cannot be delayed, however, is the immediacy and urgency of making knowledge possible for his students.

These realizations made us sit up at Nakem Conferences. No, we cannot sit back, relax, and enjoy the educational specter of a continuing cultural tyranny and linguistic injustice among our young people.

We know at Nakem Conferences that we are here trying to come to voice, to understand once more what we have lost, what have been left of us, and what we can to do retrace ourselves back to the what, in bell hooks’ words, “education as the practice of freedom.”

Our coming to voice—the realization that we have not had our own speech in a long, long while—is an act of courage that we did not know we had in the beginning.

Ilokanos have been taught to make subordinate their claims to their own sense of nationhood.

While that sense was clear prior to the onset of the Spanish colonization in 1572, that has been totally wiped out in lieu of a political project called the Philippine nation-state, a latter-day product of a political imaginary borne of centuries of repression, oppression, and colonization.

In 2008, Nakem Conference problematized this reality in its conference, and called its conference, “Imagining the Ilokano and Amianan Nation.”

The Honorable Carlos Padilla, in his keynote address at the conference, said that the Ilokano and Ilokanized people need not imagine the Ilokano—and by extension, the Amianan—nation because that nation exists, that it is real, and that it has remained intact.
We did not realize that our small acts of resistance at Nakem Conference, if you can call it this way, were acts that take their energy from other people doing the same thing for their own people and for others, such as Myles Horton for Highlander School, and Paulo Freire for his theory and practice of liberatory education, his ‘pedagogy of the oppressed.’

We realized later on that this rendering of the sense of nation of the smaller ‘nations’ within a nation-state into something obsolete and unnecessary is a tactic of all nation-states to centralize and consolidate their full control of the personal and collective lives of their peoples, so that in their full control and consolidation, they can project that the life of their own nation-state has primordial value over the life of that nation-state’s constituent indigenous communities.

Philippine historical narrative is replete with this official positioning, with Manuel Luiz Quezon preferring a Philippine nation run like hell by Filipinos to a Philippine nation run like heaven by other people but that nation that is in his mind was patterned after the 19th century nation-state of Europe particularly England, Germany, France, and Spain—nation-states all that consolidated power by invoking oneness minus plurality of cultural lives and that took up the task of implementing an officially sanctioned ‘national’ language.

What we have for long in the Philippines, even as we sanctified the nation-state project and even as we give entitlements and privileges to other languages, is the continuing denial that this country, that this homeland, is not only the homeland of a few but a homeland of the many that is us, the many and varied ethnic groups—each individually unique—that are called Filipinos, yes the many that are called by other names such as Ilokanos, Cebuanos, Hiligaynons, Bicols, Kapampangan, Pangasinense, Chavacanos, Ivatans, Kalanguyas, and so forth.

Observer/
August 2011

Language Access is Equal Access

2011-08-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

There is a move to completely abolish the Office of Language Access under the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, according to Serafin Colmenares, Jr.

Colmenares is the current executive director of OLA, an office established during the term of office of then Governor Linda Lingle to “ensure that no person is denied access to state and state-funded services due to their limited ability to speak, read, write or understand English.”

The recommendation for OLA’s defunding, and then its complete abolition, came from the director of that department, Dwight Takamine.

In the State of Hawaii, there are about 140,000 individuals who are not proficient in the English language.

This number, a big chunk of the state population, represents the urgency of the need for interpreters and translators in order for these individuals to gain access to basic government services.

At the heart of OLA is equal access.

Equal access here is the ensuring that every individual in the State of Hawaii is not denied of her right to access state programs whether that individual understands English or not.

This premise springs from the notion that language access—the access to all government programs through the language one is most at home with, which, in a country of migrants like the United States means the use of the first language of the immigrant—is a matter of civil, and thus human right.

The federal government, through its many enactments, recognizes the fundamental character of this right.

And now, here is the twist.

A federal pronouncement defines this right in theory and practice, and a state defines it another way.

Following this argument, the move to defund, and thus eventually to completely abolish this crucial service of providing “centralized oversight, coordination, and technical assistance to State agencies (the executive, legislative and judicial branches of Hawai‘i’s state government) and organizations that receive state funding” is a contradiction.

The move to have it abolished will deprive the individuals with limited English proficiency to have access to government resources that are aimed to mainstream them into a life of full citizenship.

The move to have it abolished will deprive us of oversight of those government and non-government organizations that receive funding from the state, and from the federal government.

The move to have it abolished will deprive us of coordination work in the providing of efficient access to government programs most needed by individuals with limited English proficiency.

The move to have it abolished will deprive us of technical assistance that we most need in making it certain that those LEP individuals who come into this land do not end up as liabilities but useful, even productive assets for our new homeland.

For this is what we are as American people: welcoming, and with a welcoming heart.

For this is what we are as the old, and the new, American people: fair and just.

For this is what we are as natural-born, or naturalized, American citizens: freedom loving, and capable of celebrating our differences.

In our welcoming ways as well as in the fairness and justness of what we do is the very principle of our American nation, the principle of unity in diversity, in the ‘e pluribus unum’—in the ‘out of many, one’—vision that has defined our homeland.

One of the hallmarks of diversity is the respect for the new immigrant, the potentially new American that brings in so many gifts and talents, so much vision and hope, and so much love for our democratic way of life.

There is no better way of demonstrating that American welcome and its vast possibilities for a new American people except to be true to the very tenets of our democratic life.

Given this context, language access is equal access.

There is no short cut to this.

Observer Editorial/
August 2, 2011

Kallamo

2011-07-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

It is keeping secrets, this.

Like writing in the old kur-itan
Where you hide what needs to be hidden.

But yours is the opening up
Of language to what it cannot reach.

A pillow you get, so says the tale,
And you expose its bowels
For the drunken north wind to play on and on
And you see the cotton dance,
The feathers too, or whatever
Remnants of demonic memory and self
You have put in there, evil woman:
Words you bloodied, butchered too.

And you made us believe
Of the lie you called truth
Even as you led us to the dark
Corners of our fear. There,
The sun is a shy young man,
Unable to say into a syllable
What needs to be said about
You being the smiling temptress,
Evil woman and more so, cavorting
With alien friends, unable to see
What seeing is or ought to be.

Now, we have come to know:
This apprentice novice which is you,
Appended to what we could
Have become, better and better be.

In the Ilocos of your hand,
Its hollowed land is not hallowed.
Not anymore as you wreaked
Havoc on our words.

You have taken away the holiness
Of our pain, and you have sold
It all, thirty pieces of silver.

And more.

You could have become a leader,
And could have led us to freedom
We have not possessed
Not for a long long while.

Instead you danced around, swayed
Your fat hips to the beat of songs
Whose lyrics you do not know,
Do not take to heart.

Praying evil woman, what have you become
Apart from the evil you have become?

Tagbilaran City/
July 15, 2011

call of nature: Talastasan @ UPB w/ Dr. A.S. Agcaoili: Cultural Na...

2011-07-21T02:37:00.000-07:00

call of nature: Talastasan @ UPB w/ Dr. A.S. Agcaoili: Cultural Na...: " Posted on Facebook by Junley Lazaga (DLLA, CAC, UP Baguio) The College of Arts and Communication University of the Philippines Bagui..."

Talastasan at the University of the Philippines Baguio

2011-07-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

The College of Arts and Communication
University of the Philippines Baguio

presents

Talastasan
with

Dr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili
University of Hawaii at Manoa

"Cultural Nationalism
and the Languages of the People of the Philippines:
Towards a Theory and Practice
of Liberatory Literacy and Education"

The talk addresses the current concerns on the need to revisit several conceptual issues in the Philippines, to wit, cultural nationalism, language diversity, and liberatory literacy and education. Arguing from the framework of emancipatory education, cultural difference, and the question of nation and state, the talk weaves a reasoning that pushes for a rethinking of the Philippine nation-state concept, for a critiquing of the practice of Philippine basic education, and for a revisiting of the constitutive elements of Philippine literacy in the context of citizenship.

August 5, 2011, 1 PM
College of Social Sciences Audio Visual Room
U.P. Baguio

Open to the public and free of charge.

Kagun

2011-07-19T16:57:00.000-07:00

Sabali nga ulimek daytoy.
Adda kadagiti sulinek
Dagiti kuadrado a balikas
Ti babai a mangiyaw-awan.
Isuna ti pader, ken ti sabali,
Babai kas lalaki dagiti sao
Nga iti silo ket pangal
Tapno iti panagtalappuagaw
Ket ti galut kadagiti ramay
Dila, saka, santo ti puso.

Kadakami a saksi kadagiti
Adu a patibong, kas iti silo
Nga iti warnakan ti puli
Ket matuontuon, adda bendision
Dagiti ulimek a nabunniagan
Iti takrot, panurdurog, lamlammiong:
Sika iti teltelko, siak iti teltelmo
Tapno iti awan patingga a kinnudkod
Ket ti awanan ressat met a
Panag-urisay baboy:
Urisay, baboy, urisay, baboy
Iti kakaisuna a ringgor
Dagiti mayat a maturturtor.

Madunggiaran dagiti rabii
Kas ti sipnget nga iti sennek
Ket ti oras nga agbalinsuek
Tapno ti kannag ket iti patibong
Ti babai nga agrennek.

Urisay, baboy,
Urisay, baboy:

Kagun daytoy
Ti daniw ni Ilokano a maibarbarayuboy.

Tacloban City/
Julio 14

Kabuntala

2011-07-19T04:01:00.000-07:00

It is east, you are.
From your clouds there rises
My heart, longing for the same longing
You have of my heart. We rise from the ashes
Of your night, and our dawn will come
And pick us up from the midnight
Of our brightening lives.
It is who you are, Kabuntala.
There, between the ridges
Of our dreams peaking
From the mountains
Of our hopes, there,
There you are announcing
What gospel there is
To reside in our broken
Lives. Morning comes soon,
Too soon for us to welcome
The the break of day
As we wake up more alone.

Colon, Cebu City/
July 15, 2011

Undayas

2011-07-17T04:34:00.000-07:00

Bangkirig daytoy ti turod
nga iti rabii ket ti kasukat

a kulay-ot ti bituka,
iti russuod ti rusok.

Adda dagiti lagip iti dara
ken ti balikas nga adda iti daytoy.

Agkarayam kas apuy
ti puor nga ipasngay

ti undayas ti lengguahe
nga iti patag ket maitibkol.

Lasunglasong ti rason
iti mangganggantil a patibong

nga iti silo dagiti aldaw
ket ti di mamingga

a karanukon, nagmanto
kadagiti silabat' panagmauyong.

Kastada dagiti mannaniw
iti ili. Isuda ti agibulsa

kadagiti kaipapanan
a kadagiti linabag koma

ket sadiayda nga agbirok
iti puraw a salakan.

Marikina/
Julio 18, 2011

University of the Philippines Baguio Talk

2011-07-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

Cultural Nationalism and the Languages of the People of the Philippines:
Towards a Theory and Practice of Liberatory Literacy and Education

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili
University of Hawaii

University of the Philippines Baguio
Baguio City
August 5, 2011
1:30 PM

The talk addresses the current concerns on the need to revisit several conceptual issues in the Philippines, to wit, cultural nationalism, language diversity, and liberatory literacy and education. Arguing from the framework of emancipatory education, cultural difference, and the question of nation and state, the talk weaves a reasoning that pushes for a rethinking of the Philippine nation-state concept, for a critiquing of the practice of Philippine basic education, and for a revisiting of the constitutive elements of Philippine literacy in the context of citizenship.

Ukkuag

2011-07-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

Samira dagiti oras.

Awan panawen a pinerdim
Tapno agperdika iti panawen
A koma ket nailatang para kadakami
A sangsangailim.

Ipatom a tagikukuam dagiti pitik
Ti aldaw ngem adda aldaw
Iti kada pitik ti nakem a sudakem.

Pagayam, kunam kaniak.

Ngem pagayammo a dadaelem
Tapno ti korona nga iputongmo
Iti ulom ket kukuam laeng, sika
Nga iti agkabsat a darikmat

Ket lansetaka iti kanito
Ti maat-atangan a mangyaw-awan.

Sika dayta, babai iti ukkuag.

Sika ti kasingin ti kumaw

Ti agabalbalay iti mannibrong
Tapno iti kada pammutbuteng
Ket ti agraraay a panagkumbawami

Kenka, babai nga agindadaniw
Iti verso nga Ilokano a verso a naiyaw-awan.

Dua a tawen ken adu a sennaay.

Dua a tawen ken adu pay a pannakapaay.

Dua a tawen ken adu a panangmulit.

Dua a tawen ken adu a puggaak.

Dua a tawen ken ti maniobram
Iti pudno tapno ti falso ket matagikuam.

Awan bagnos kadagiti rabii
Nga iti sidir ti rikna ket ti manglimlimo

A leddaang. Kukuak daytoy, naminribu
A tinagikuak.

Nagmanto dagiti bannawag a maipasngay
Iti kada bigat dagiti naunday nga aldaw.

Sika ti adda kadagiti panes a dagdagullitek
A karkaragan iti orasion ti ballatek

Tapno dagiti rurog dagiti ukkormo
Ket iti tanemda nga agbanag.

Ditoy, iti pagpumponan dagiti ulpit,

Ditoy ti ukkuag ti baro nga aldaw.

Ita ti rugi ti panangsamira
Kenka ti impaidammo nga ayat.

Julio 12, 2011/
Marikina

FAO Editorial June 2011

2011-07-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

Making Sense of Our Freedom

The next two months for the American citizen of Philippine heritage will be one of two separate but interconnected political meditations.

One, in June, is the official celebration by the Government of the Republic of the Philippines of Philippine Independence Day.

The name of the national holiday is a giveaway: it is the landmark day, when, at the height of the struggle of the peoples of the Philippines against the abuses of the Spanish colonizers, our people finally came to their senses that from that day onwards to make sense of our freedom in the way that makes sense to us all is an ethical and moral obligation of every citizen.

Two, in July, there is going to be the Fourth of July, a sacred day for all citizens of the United States of America.

It is the day the Americans declared their independence from the colonizers, the Brits.

Both the Philippine June 12 and the American Fourth of July have parallel narratives made powerful by the fact that people had come to their realization that independence—hence, freedom—matter.

The people of the Philippines who have come to the United States are placed in a position of privilege for having become the beneficiary of this rich historical reality, a legacy, indeed, of the people before them who knew what freedom is.

It is the freedom that creates opportunities to have sufficient food on the table.

It is the freedom that relates to the respect for the fundamental liberties of people, a respect that creates opportunities for labor, and for that dignity of labor to be held sacred.

It is the freedom that relates to justice: that basic justice in the economic front that calls out to people to help in the renewal of the possibilities of the earth.

It is justice that is articulated by the providing of jobs to all able citizens so that in that act of working, there are able to real themselves.

The formula for our sense of freedom is simple enough. There is no waste of words here but a mantric transformation of our ideals into some words that refuse to remain words but word becoming worlds in the end, the word and the world one and the same.

In light of our current concerns in the Philippine and the United States, we are challenged by the contradictory realities we around us.

In Hawaii, we live by the power of the spectacular, the power of tourism, which, essentially is about the act of seeing without necessarily knowing.

In the Philippines, we live the power of the psychology of the mass, with promises for scholarship to children of the Overseas Filipino Workers when their cases of capital punishment in other countries become a sensation.

Either way are the ugly realities lurking in each utterance that we have become free, that we have become as free as a bird, that we have become as free as the early morning breeze.

While we see excess in the United States, there is much misery in the country’s hidden places, in the marginalized places, in the peripheralized places.

While we see abundance in the money enclaves of the rich in the Philippines, there is much misery in the country’s slums, streetcorners, makeshift homes and communities under bridges, and far-flung barrios.

While we see palatial homes in Hawaii, we see at the same time tarpaulin homes in places where tourists do not go.

While we see concrete homes with landscaped gardens in the big cities of the Philippines such as Cebu, Davao, and Manila, we see at the same time cardboard houses that serve us dwelling places for those who have luck but less.

But we know that in the making of a society of decent and just people, we cannot settle for less for those who less in life.

That we cannot settle for those who have less in life is the very spirit of the law that provides for the compensation of the not-so-good things that we do to make our political life more tolerable.

FAO/ June 2011

Casamiento (Ilokano version)

2011-07-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

Casamiento

(Ken Lydia ken Max, iti kasamientoda iti nagan ni ayat)

Apagisu a gatad ti panaguray, daytoy nga ayat.

Siglosiglo a panagbirbriok iti maysa ken maysa
Tapno ipateg no ania ti ayat
Iti nagbaetan ti leddaang ken leddaang
Ken sabali pay.

Ngem ita, dagiti pakasaritaan
Ibugasanda ti no ania
Ti ukarkaran ti balikas,
Isu met laeng a rinugianyon
Nga inaramat tapno nagananyo
Ti ray-aw nga inkayon
Nasarakan.

Ti panaglangan ti maysa ken maysa
A mangsagsagid iti kaadda
Ti maysa ken maysa
Ket ita, addakayo, agayan-ayat,
Maysa ti ipatpateg, ken kasta met
Ti sabali!

Dimtengen ti aldaw,
Ket ita daytoy.
Ita nga oras ti rugi ti Agnanayon
Ket tagikukuayo ti Panawen,
Maysa ken maysa ti kayatmi,
Daytoy a panangidaton
Iti bagi
Ken espiritu, ken kararua
Daytoy a sagut nga Amin-nagan
Ken awanan-nagan
Kas iti rabii nga agpasngay
Tapno umay ti parbangon,
Sa ti rabii maminsan pay.
Iti parbangon
Di makaidna.
Panaginana.
Pannakaila.
Pannakarnek.
Panagbirbirok.
Pannakabirok.
Amin dagitoy iti naganyon ita,
Dua a tao a tinanikalaan
Dagiti espasio a di agpatingga.

Marikina
July 4, 2011

Casamiento

2011-07-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

(For Lydia and Max, on their wedding in the name of love)

It was worth the wait, this loving.

Centuries of seeking for each other
To love what love is
Between grief and one more.
But today, histories define
What can be unravelled by word,
The same ones you have begun
To use to name what joy
You have finally found.
Each other's absence reaching out
To each other's presence
And here you are, lovers,
One beloved and another so!
The day has come, and it is today.
Eternity begins at this hour
And it is your Time, one in the other
We want, this gift of body
And spirit and soul, this gift
All-name and nameless
Like evening birthing so dawn
Comes, and then the evening
One more time. It is restless.
It is rest.
It is longing.
It is satisfaction.
It is seeking.
It is finding.
All these are in your name now,
Two people bound by
Spaces going beyond.

Marikina
July 4, 2011

Bong Dies Alone Away From Home

2011-06-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

From a call this early morning, June 29, 2011, a migrant dies alone of heart attack at his rented place somewhere in the West Coast. He was a spouse's classmate years back, and he will come home, in a coffin or in an urn, either way, as the law and money permit. This is a poem to honor his life, and to honor his sacrifice. Rest in peace, co-pilgrim in the United States of America, and in life. Go in peace.

Your death is familiar.

It is every person of this homeland
Trying to make sense of what exile
Can bring to those wishing
To make amends with what
We all can change. We make

Vagabonds of ourselves,
Our deep and dark desires to
To witness what can be seen
From other places, like
Winter giving in to spring

With the all-color flowers,
Wild and in technicolor abandon
Carpeting the hills and mountains
Of our dreams to climb life's peaks
To reach the pinnacle we have not

Been too and seeing from there
What can be seen from the heights
What is deprived of us from below.
We walk through the same path,
Peregrine people that we are

Making sense of this non-sense
That we do to eke out a life
Or what passes for one, in places
We do not know but we dare go.
You died alone with your dream

And this makes us grieve for you
Even as we grieve for ourselves.
We inherited a land that pushes us
To other shores, driving us crazy
To go find the stump of the rainbow,

Like this tree that grows dollars
On twigs, stems, and trunks
As if all we do is pick the monies
Dump these into our knapsack and send
Them all to our home and country.

What could have been the last hours
Of your mortal life? Did you cry for
Help one last time? Did you remember
The names of your children and the sad
Smile of your awaiting wife?

You are a memory now, and if you were
Ilokano, you could have become
An atang, the food offering we give
To all the dead we still remember
To all the dead we have begun to forget.

What were the streets of exile looked like
The lonely paths you walked on and on
To look for that one fat chance of a job
You could never get? To hide, and hide,
And hide, in a land you are not from

Is one story without any beginning.
But is a story that does not last,
As it ends in dying by your lonesome
Like you did to us, dying on us,
And dying without telling us

What is it to live alone and away
And from the far reaches of where you have gone,
Tell us what is it to have a holiday with your
Blankets covering your body to forget
The meaning of laughter and fun.

Go now, go in the peace of life.
Go where dreams come into fruition
Where life is complete, and the hiding
Becomes temporary as in our fight to run,
Run where salvation finally is ours.

Marikina/
June 29, 2011

Panic Sets In

2011-06-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

Panic sets in,
panic sets out
to look for you.

You welcome
the meaning of the oath you take,
this new one you rehearsed before
the cold morning wakes up Waikiki.

It is death staring you in the face.

The guns, deadly and
coming from the States,
are turned against life,
and the scene is somber,
like the dark taking its place
as you walk down Farrington
to build your road.

It is the deadly dollars
that free you, the mantra is all over,
like a piped-in announcement
for every journeyman everywhere.

It is our dollars that in all time
will screw you. Bullets, and more,
this is one language
they know. Rulers and emperors,
they are brothers,
and together they plan
how to commando
the best means to murder
our desire to dream
our dream
of food and freedom,
this last one breaking
our back.

You look for these dreams
in their gossamer form.

You see them in paid banquets,
at fifty dollars a night the equivalent
of a day of backbreaking labor,
the Dionysian dinner
you go to out of ritual and rite.

You have prosperity laid out
on your long tables.
The accents are there:
a centerpiece of
a white orchid, living and blooming,
springs forth from a mantelpiece
of Hawaiian hibiscus and plumeria,
the colors coming alive from death,
and the concerted moves
of uniformed servers
giving you black coffee
or hot tea, green or jasmine,
the taste you have acquired
to inaugurate your new self.

You live in a new world
now you have wanted
to come into. Here
democracy has been defined,
and will always be, between
those who can and
those who cannot
come to celebrate
what life, abundant and filled
with promises, can offer you.

The contradictions, countless
as your immigrant blunders,
are there, the same ones
you knew, the same ones
you do not know.

It is everywhere,
like Waipahu wind, traitor
and friend, that,
in the loneliness of exile
you can never come into.

To be here and not here,
to be there and not there:
this is one question you will
have to respond to all
through your days.

In the meantime, you count
the years of longing
to be somewhere
between life and living.

It is panic setting in,
and you will have to swear
you will need to be patient
like the morning sun making a
peek-a-boo from
the Diamond Head
each wintry morning.

Waiapahu
May 15, 2011

FAO Editorial

2011-06-27T18:11:00.000-07:00

DREAMING OF AN ACT

In consideration today at the United States Legislature is the DREAM Act, an initiative that is almost ten years old.

Its name suggests the clarity of its purpose: Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors.

It is meant to give a path to students—or former students—to become conditional permanent residents, later on to become legal permanent residents, and eventually, to become citizens of the United States.

First introduced on August 1, 2001 and reintroduced on May 11, 2011, the bill provides conditional permanent residency for “certain illegal and deportable alien students who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, arrived in the U. S. legally or illegally as minors, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior the bill’s enactment.”

Accounts from various sources speak of about 825,000 to 2.1 “illegal and deportable alien students” who could benefit from this initiative as soon as it is enacted.

Of this number, we do not know how many of them are students of Philippine descent, students who have come to live here, stayed in our classrooms, and learned the rudiments of American citizenship and the responsibilities of becoming one.

But we are certain of one thing: that a good number of them are students of Philippine descent who came with their parents or relatives to the United States in pursuit of a better life not found in the home country.

For such is the route of a number of people of the Philippines in their pursuit of one living hope: that the United States will give them a better opportunity, that given the chance, they will make it here despite the setbacks, the adjustments, the culture shock, and the numerous sacrifices that gain some credence, shape, and form only when told again and again in their rawness.

We have the story in Antonio Vargas’ narrative, a powerful testimonial to the greatness of what we can do to this potential human resource.

Vargas is the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who came forward with his story of being an undocumented student—and being an undocumented writer—published at New York Times.

Vargas came into the country assuming a different identity, with a fake passport.

He was barely in his teens when he came, and did not know anything about what he was getting into.

As soon as he got into the country, he assumed his old identity, became known as himself, but with a fake Social Security number and a fake permanent residency card that he could not use when he tried to get his California driver license.

He was devastated when he found out about the limits of what he could do as an undocumented student with so much ambition, with the dream to make it here, and live a life better than what he had known at a young age in his home province in Zambales.

Vargas maybe an extraordinarily gifted “illegal and deportable alien” who went through high school and college in the United States, and learned all the ways to becoming American, even winning the much-coveted journalism award.

But his case represents the estimated 825,000 to 2.1 million students and young career professionals who will benefit from the Dream Act.

Arne Duncan, currently the Secretary of Education, says it aptly about our need for these “potential beneficiaries”: “We just need this human potential, the tremendous capacity, to contribute to society, to contribute to our economy.”

At the core of the Dream Act is our offer to provide a path to citizenship to those who have come to our shores and to share with us the blessings of American life.

It is recognizing—and admitting—that our country needs all the young people who have so much promise, so much potential, so much faith in our way of life.

Rahm Emmanuel, mayor of Chicago, says that this path to citizenship is what the dream of becoming American is all about.

It is taking part of that dream—of participating in it.

It is pursuing a dream—and realizing it—the way the first immigrants pursued, and realized, their dream of becoming a new people.

Doing the right thing for our students who have come to share our American life is the right thing to do.

It is dreaming of an act—it is pursuing the dream to become American.

And it is the right thing to do.

FAO Editorial, July 2011

Preserving the Ilokano Language, Part IV

2011-06-27T16:23:00.003-07:00

PRESERVING THE ILOKANO AND OTHER PHILIPPINE LANGUAGES, PART IV

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, PhD

Kur-itan, now seen only in tattoos and other ‘exotic’ or nostalgic representations, kept a record of what we wanted remembered and expressed in a more lasting way. Except for some vague traces of that palimpsest based on the accounts of the frailes of what they intended to do in turning us all into rote memorizers of “Amami” (the Pater Noster) and “Abe Mariya” (the Ave Maria) and other formula prayers, we have really inaugurated the death of our being, the death of our being-more-so, so that what we have at this time is a bad prognosis: the commencement of our being-less-so. And we seem to enjoy this, masochistic people that we are.

Response to Erasures in the Diaspora

Let me provide the context of our struggle in Hawaii and connect this to the struggle that we have in the Philippines.

Each year, about 5000 people get into the state as immigrants. Ninety percent of these new immigrants come from the Ilocos and Ilokanized areas of Northern Philippines.

The number translates to 4500 Ilokanos in Hawaii each year. With three the average number of children per family, we have half of these coming in as children, easily translatable to more than 2000 Ilokanos. Now where do these children go? How do they get settled in the public schools?

Here comes the power of the state to turn these Ilokano children into Americans by having them get into the English as a Second Language or English with Limited Proficiency classes and there remind them that unless they shed off their skin as Ilokanos, like the snake shedding off its skin, they can never become Americans. So your guess is as good as mine: the trauma resulting from this is both personal and social, and the traumatized vows to become American as fast as he could.

First off the bat: Speak English.

Second, Speak English the way the locals do.

Third, Pick up the Pidgin to completely erase your Ilokanoness.

Do not claim that you were ever born in the Ilocos but say that you are local even if the Ilokano accent—the accent you are denying—sometimes comes back to haunt you.

But while this is true in Hawaii, it is true here in the Philippines as well. Those who have come to Metropolitan Manila, when they go back to the Ilocos, bring with them this dominant posturing. Back in their homes, they refuse to speak Ilokano, preferring to speak in the dominant language, as this, for the dominant group, is the mark of having arrived at the pedestal of a ‘cosmopolitan’ culture that is unlike theirs. We have comic stories about them, all intended to bring them down and make them realize that they have no business becoming reactionary and adopting the dominant group’s posture.

We have other tragic stories in Hawaii—and in our work with the federal government that involves other states in many ways.

Our Ilokano Language and Literature Program at the University of Hawaii is the only degree-granting program of its kind in the world, with a full program for a major in Ilokano, a minor, and a certificate.

There is not a single university in the Ilocos, in Cagayan Valley, and in the Cordilleras—all within the rubric of what is called Amianan—that offers any semblance of what we do at the UH.

Pretty soon, we are expanding the offering of Ilokano language and culture in another college within the UH System, the Maui College, side by side with an expansion of a pilot program, under a different grant, for Ilokano for high school students in two huge public high schools. We have started the Ilokano Plus Program, also at Maui College, and we hope to expand programs of this kind as soon as we have prepared our teachers.

Even as I say these things, we are aware that our initiatives in Hawaii, first formalized with the offering of the first-ever Ilokano class in 1972, are not of the same kind of an initiative that you need here in the Philippines particularly those institutions of basic and higher education in the three regions of Amianan, or Northern Philippine (Region I, Region II, and CAR).

The University of the Philippines at Diliman, for instance, is even better off in giving opportunities to students specializing in Philippine Studies to study a full year of Ilokano and some undergraduate and graduate courses in Ilokano literature. Some universities and colleges in the Ilocos do not seem to know what the Ilokano language and Ilokano literature are all about, because, as some teachers and instructors would say, Why do they still need to learn what they already know?

There is thus a whole scale working up of consciousness of self and community here—with so many of our people unable to use the lens provided by their language and culture and instead use, however handicapped they are, other lenses.

Why, indeed, do we have to insist on the need to educate our young in the language that they already know?

Why don’t we educate the Cagayanon in French and Italian and English so that they will be gainfully employed in France, Italy, and England?

If the Cagayanon only knows Bisaya, where would he go? We don’t even care to venture beyond whichever lens we fancy to wear to ask why the Americans or the English who are born with English as their language from their homes, in school and in their communities—why they still have to be taught English at various levels in school, why the Japanese or the Chinese or the Koreans all of whom learn to speak their own mother tongues at birth still have to study their own mother tongues in their schools.

Published in FAO, July 2011

Preserving the Ilokano Language, Part III

2011-06-27T16:14:00.000-07:00

Preserving the Ilokano Language and Other Philippine Languages, Social Justice, and Cultural Democracy

Third of a Series

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

But these teachers have their own army of supporters, apart from the official sanctions of administrators.

We have a big number of these among our students, among our parents, among our community leaders.

And some of these have so much power they have demonized the few advocates of the Ilokano language in the school system.

They have turned them into opponents of nationalism, into violators of the Philippine Constitution, and worse, into ‘miseducators’ for prohibiting us from exploring what our languages can offer us to mediate our act of reading the word and our act of reading the world with our students.

This leads us to another group that tries as much as it can to hold onto what is left of the vague traces of Ilokano language that, in the near future, if something drastic and revolutionary is not done, will end up like our kur-itan, our way of writing.

This group is a bundle of contradictions too: they espouse cultural democracy when what is needed is remitting the dollar and the dinar to prop up the flailing Philippine economy.

Its members talk about cultural heritage rights when our uninformed political leaders tell us to speak English the way English-speaking peoples in foreign lands do so that we can have our service contracted to English-speaking new lords and new masters—and there, in these foreign lands, we can start to dream about the good life away from all the country that has given us so much sorrow.

They talk about writing the literature of our people when the more current literature is about the exploits of Jake in Na’vi-land in that techno-fireworks but empty movie called Avatar.

Among the Ilokanos, many of them go gung-ho on the latest but do not care a whit about the latest poem in Ilokano even if this poem is about their history of capitulation and cooptation with the dark forces of Martial Law and the dictatorship that came after.

And these people are not afraid to write in the Ilokano language and lend their names to spearhead a renaissance of Ilokano writing.

We have not seen this happening in a long while—about half a century—when those who had the courage to write in Ilokano were also university teachers and college instructors and school administrators and students and ordinary people who knew what kind of a magnificent and luminous and true world is being opened up by their Ilokano language.

Nowhere is the recognition of this ‘courage to create’ by writers of this kind demonstrated than the analysis of a state university president in Ilocos Norte who knew all the problems we are going through and offered her university to be the first headquarters of Nakem Conferences Philippines. Dr Miriam Pascua writes in her introduction to the book, Sukimat: Researches on Ilokano and Amianan Studies:

“…in the act of resisting our homogenization in the interest of an abstract project of Philippine nationhood, we ought not to lose our names, we ought not to lose our sense of self, we ought not to lose our nation in an ethnolinguistic sense, as it were. We know that cultural diversity and the political agendum towards cultural pluralism are terms that cannot be used for selfish ends but are to be pursued to ascertain that the ends of cultural and social justice are being served. Indeed, we are a nation among nations, as some scholars on Ilokano and Amianan life have asserted. We must make a vow to make it happen that the ‘nations’ in the equation in the bigger notion of the ‘nation’ are not to be left out but are included as terms in that equation. In failing to do that, we shall have failed our people, we shall have failed our communities, we shall have failed the Ilokano and Amianan nation, we shall have failed the Philippine nation as well.”

Published in FAO, June 2011

Exile, 3

2011-06-25T06:07:00.000-07:00

We do not have to leave to live,
The son, in his insolence, says,
His words a knife lodged in my heart.

I have come back to run away seven thousand miles
More from my shadow, each sunset I see
A promise of morning the colors of which
I do not know.

I have become blind to all
The colors of misery.

I have become
Unhearing to all the sounds of pain
In my country.

Never mind the people
Who stretch their hands in each
Corner of earth they know, the dirt
Of the streets in their smiles, perfunctory
And rehearsed as tears are natural
To their sunken eyes.

I can live here, and stay afloat,
Says the insolent son who had come
From the Mendiola with his banners
In times past when a woman housesat there
To count what mysteries she could find
Her prayer beads gleaming in the candle light
Even as she repaired her broken heart.

He fought her, this insolent son,
And now he gives me the same stance,
Arguing from the falsity of his youth
That to stay put in one's homeland
Is the glorious sacrifice of his kind.

He taught college one time,
Led young people like him dream
Of reason and of the world.

Now he commands calls, gets the beating
From somewhere with their English tongue,
He with his acquired Texas drawl, them with their
Arrogance devoid of wit and grammar.

What shall I do there? he asks,
And I look at the sun after the deluge
These two days past.

What shall I do there?

What shall we do here?

June 26/11
Marikina

Exile, 2

2011-06-24T17:44:00.000-07:00

For Jeffrey Acido, in response to his accusation that I do not write poems anymore

Yours is a question I have asked myself
again and again. I do not write poems anymore.
Not the kind that kills the wasp stinging
what conscience is left in my grieving heart.
I have come to the end of the road,
And my identification card has been replaced
With something else I could not have wanted
If given one fat chance to choose between
Being a traitor and a holy man. Even words
are not true to us, you see, even as we
Are not true to our words. The lie is somewhere
Between desire and intent, and the need to watch
The spectacle of what we all have become.
We ran away, and we keep on with the running
Only to come back in the full circle of our
Exilic lives, stories, narrations, depositions
Of bounded covenants we keep to insure
Us of the corner we have got.
In the strange country, our language
Gives us away: it is the Ilokano of our soul,
And the accent, however much we try,
Will reveal the loyalties we have, not a lot,
But include the case of our people,
The case for food and freedom,
And the case to speak of our failures and dream
In the syllables that can only come from our hearts.
There is no abbreviation here, no contraction,
No slang, but the blood of each letter we sound off,
Each combination of vision and want
As concrete as the Ilocos sun rising fast
Streaking through the dense forests
Of our unforgiving mountains that hide
The souls we keep to save our bodies
From becoming an exhibit of terror
One more time. We cannot be history
as yet. We must make history with this exile
That is us. I do not write poems anymore,
Not the kinds that lead to a hundred lies.

June 26/11
Marikina

Exile, 1

2011-06-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

You cannot take it back,
This betrayal. It is your
Story now as you queue up
Fall in line with the rest of 'em,
Presenting yourself as someone
Else you are not. The document
In your hand is something new
You have become.
It comes from your years of exile,
Wintery nights of wanting to fly back
To where you should spend
The dark hours of tembling and dread
Until you get to confront your lonely god.
Visitors here, says the immigration
Man who has forgotten to smile,
Who wears sorrow on his face,
A regret you have of your birthland.
You are back into your home country,
The harsh realities of living reminding you
You are home to where you are a stranger.
Visitors here in this line, says he,
This man with the badge of a drunk,
His little power the equivalent of a mound
Where dwarves dwell to recite about
Lost loves, like those part-time Ilokano
Poets who have learned to lie a thousand times
And sleep with whores who write to deceive
Them who cannot figure where symbols
Begin to cheat you of your sense of truth.
Visitors here, he repeats, and you fall in line,
Right where the others you are not are.
You swallow what grief is left
In your heart. You summon the saliva
In your dried mouth, the fluid now sour
To make the swallowing easier,
To make the betrayal complete,
Perhaps on its way to the eternal.
You recite in silence the mantra
You can make out of fuzzy words,
Welcome, welcome home,
Fake foreigner, sweet stranger,
Homing exile.

June 25/11
Marikina

A Poem Without a Reader

2011-06-24T14:46:00.001-07:00

For Ie, for asking that question

The son says, why write poems
No one reads? We are in the middle
Of a storm, its eye some kilometers
Away, unto the eastern part
Of our dreams where we will take root.
One raging wind and the stalk
Of a tree the poet planted years back
Comes to earth, away from the spaces
That do not know borders and land.
I write for myself, he says,
For healing and for naming
My wrath, virulent as virulent
Can be until healing comes.
My homeland has wounded
Me so, and life too, the lacerations
In the mind refusing to let go
Of memories of blood and gore
The roads filled with the tears
Of my people, bodies too,
Lying cold on pavements
Or what passes for home
In shanties animals do not dare go.
Tell me if there is a poem
In all these, the images
Haunting me so.
He has his son's silence,
And the storm comes one more time,
Secretly preying on their words,
Ripping apart what conversation they can have.

June 25, 2011/
Marikina

Night Wakes Up

2011-06-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

Night wakes up after the storm.
It is the Falcon, this wind
Coming in to rip what hope
We have in this wretched land
The priest's bible talks about.
Having nine children, like
The nine lives of a cat is all right,
Alright. We have people to send
To shores away, send in the dollars
Back to us, like tornados
Whirling back to define what
Lives in flooded streets we
Can have. We go with the life
Of a promise, political or otherwise.
In the meantime is the threat
Of pandesal rising, in truth
And in fact. The former president
Appears to us in the apparition
Of her lies, and we begin to believe
One more time that prayer is all
We have got. The revolution is none
On the breakfast table even if
After the fact, after the hunger,
This is all we have got.
The night wakes up.
It is morning here, the morning
After the day that unleashed
The wrath of drunken gods,
They in their habit of punishments,
Us in our delight for spectacle
And sacrifice. Lives have been lost
As rivers swell, and we begin
To rebuild dreams demolished
By the long night.

June 25/11
Marikina

Night Sleeps

2011-06-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

Night sleeps in his corner of the world.
The hours go by, as the verses in his head
Take turns in looking for their own corners
Of his world. Tonight is not the same
As the other nights of terror and truth.
Some days, just some days, the minutes
Speed up to catch up on him, and in
The betweenness of sleep and song
Is the long wait for home.
At last, home to where the hours
Get tired as the bodies that live
In the entrances of temples he will never own
Like that one church where the Black Christ
Dies to watch him from post-mortem stillness
Like the sirens that have found the way
To stop making warnings to riverbank
Dwellers from his sleepless city where lives
Are subsidized by the people's prayers to absent gods.

June 23/11
Marikina

Nalabaga a Bulan iti Kaltaang

2011-06-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

Isu daytoy ti nalabaga a bulan iti kaltaang.
Ti tagainep ket ti ipupusay tapno agbiag nga awan ressat.
Nalabaga, kas iti revolusion iti panagmayana
Kas iti ayup a tinaraken
Biniag manipud kadagiti bagitayo
Kadagiti linabag dagiti daniwtayo
Uray ti tured iti kinaagtutubo.
Agleppasen ti panawen ti kalgaw ditoy
Kas kadagiti rikna iti ili
A dati ket pasetnatayo a kas pul-oy
Ken angin ken lawag. Kasta met kadagiti bagiw.
Ken ti pakasaritaan dagiti eklipse
No kasta a ti pulitika ket tinapaytayo
Ket addatayo ditoy tapno lalo a mabisin
Tapno lalo a mawaw iti laksid
Panangpakalma kadagiti nerviostayo iti kaltaang
Ti nalabaga a bulan nga agsublinto
Kadatayo, ti obituario ti leddaangtayo
Ti resesion dagiti ayat.

Junio 24, 2011/
Marikina

Red Moon at Midnight

2011-06-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

It is this red moon at midnight.
The dream is dying to live on and on.
It is red, as is revolution in heat
Like this animal we have reared
Brought to life from our bodies
The lines of our poems too
Even the courage of our youth.
It is past summertime here
With our feelings for a land
We used to be part of as wind
And air and light. Storms too.
And then the story of eclipses
When politics becomes our bread
And we are here to hunger for more
To thirst for more even as we
Calm our nerves at this midnight
Of the red moon that will come back
To us, its obituary of our grief
The recession of our loves.

June 24, 2011/
Marikina

Bukanegan: Adal wenno Pirak

2011-03-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

SUDI NI ADAL WENNO RAYRAY NI PIRAK

(Bukanegan nga iparang ti TMI Global, Marso 18, 2011, Empress Restaurant, iti okasion ti “Sudi ni Laing” Scholarship Fundraiser, TMI Global, Honolulu, HI, iti panagakem da Natividad Cacho, Perlita Sadorra, ken Letty Manuel)

Sinurat ni Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

MANGIBABAET

Naimbag a rabii kadakayo a sangaili

Itoy a tallaong ket saritaan a pasalsali

Agdinniskutir dua ta dua a dayag

Agpinnasig nga agsinniglat iti galad.

SUDI NI LAING

Siak ni Sudi ni Laing, ti mamati iti kababalin

Mangipapati nga iti udina ket sudi ni laing

Daytoy ta daytoy laing ti mabalin a taklin

Gameng ti asinno man tapno iti biag agbalin.

RAYRAY NI PIRAK

Siak ti rayray ni pirak, siak ti agipalnaad

Siak ti mangipapilit a ti importante pirak

Doliar nga umat-atipukpok, kas makunak

Ta daytoy laeng ti mabalin nga irakurak.

MANGIBABAET

Ngarud nangngegantay ita, kakabsat

Naammuantay disposision ken ayat

Toy maysa a babai ket ti sudi ni laing

Ti met sabali a babai ket pirak di ibain.

SUDI NI LAING

Ngamin daytoy a Kulasa ket kastoy ti kunana:

Ti pirak kano latta ti pagrukodan iti biagna

No kano ta adut’ kuartana adut’ maaramidna

Ngem saanak a mamati iti kawaw nga ibagana.

RAYRAY NI PIRAK

Dinak met maallukoy daytoy a babai

A ti nasudi nga adal ti agtunda iti kari

Adu dagiti nakaadal dita ti kakaasi

Ada kadakuadat’ kaskasdi met a durgi!

SUDI NI LAING

Agtartarimaanka sika a Kulasa:

Dimo ipapilit a ti pirak adda gatadna

Awan ta amin daytoy ket mapukaw

No dumteng ti nairanta nga aldaw.

MANGIBABAET

No ti saritaan ket bennaten piman

Kuna ni Kulasa ti adal kapatgan

Kuna met ti sabali a Kulasa a saan

Ta ti rayray ti piraknat’ pamaangan.

SUDI NI ADAL

Pudno ti kunam sika a mangibabaet

Ta iti daytoy a biag adal ti langdet

Kaskenan iti amin uray no nagaed

Ta mapukaw pirak iti imat’ masaet

RAYRAY TI PIRAK

Saan a ti rason ti pannakapukaw

Ti pirak iti kakastoy nga aldaw

Ta umanayen ti kinabaknang

A pangpunno iti kalkalawakang.

SUDI NI ADAL

Ti adal ket iti bagi a naikapet

Ti adal ket iti panunot a dimket

Kasano koma nga iti babaet

Ket mapukaw ti nasalimetmet?

RAYRAY TI PIRAK

Kadaytoy a panawen ti adal magatang

Ngem ti kinabaknang saan ta saan

Kasano a gatangem ti gatad ti pirak

No ti pirak mismo ti ibirbirakat?

MANGIBABAET

Ti pagsasaritaan ket no ti adal mapukaw

Ti tungtongan ket no ti pirak agmawmaw

Kuna ti bangir a ti pirak ket sanikua

Nga iti kaano man ket matagtagikua.

Kuna met ti sabali a ti adal ti kaskenan

Ta dinto iti amin a panawen ket malibtawan

No ania ti makunayo dakayo iti tallaong

Ket iringpastayon daytoy nga iti ulo ket buong.

SUDI NI ADAL

Uray iti ania man a panawen ket ti adal adda

Saan a kas iti sanikua a no adda ket adda.

RAYRAY NI PIRAK

An-annuem ti adal no awanan rayray

Saan a kas iti pirak a ti sileng ti agsarday?

SUDI NI ADAL

An-annuem ti pirak a puro a rayray

Nga iti kawaw nga ulo ket ti sennaay?

Ta buong ti ulo ti adu unay a pirak

Ta bukbok ti kararuat’ naruay nga atik!

RAYRAY NI PIRAK

Saan nga amin nga adal ket makaanay

Saan amin nga ammo ket makaalalay!

SUDI NI ADAL

Saan nga amin a pirak ket agsileng

Adda pirak a tinagikukuan barengbaren!

MANGIBABAET

Umatiddog, kakabsat, ti saritaan a kastoy

Saan nga agugpot uray no dumteng pul-oy

Serraantayo ngaruden tapno jusgaan

No sadinno ti addan iti rason iti saritaan.

Ni Sudi ni Adal kadi ti innya sipatan

Wenno ni Rayray ni Pirak ti saluduan?

Agyamankami kadakayo, apo a tallaong

Iti awan labas a palakpak, gumgumluong!

People Power Revisited

2011-02-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

We have seen it coming long before this domino visiting many countries in the Middle East.

And it will not stop in that region: it will visit other lands that have had history of deprivation and denial of the fundamental rights of peoples.

This social convulsion will change the face of the unruly world of unruly rulers wherever they are found.

The Philippines has had two, and we have forgotten, how, in the cusp of people’s rage, destructive and creative at the same time, and driven by the eternal need for freedom, justice, and respect for human rights, the mightiest of the rulers unable to hear the pained anger of brutalized people can meet their rule’s end almost instantly.

And in shame.

There are always two instruments and tactics available: either to remain brutal or to hear, for the final time, the stones crying out.

China had a crackdown, and at the dawn of its democratic reform from its repressive communist rule, thousands of students, many of them their most brilliant and thus, its potential leaders and visionaries, shed their blood on Tiananmen, the square of idealized revolutionary cry eventually becoming the altar of sacrifice.

We learn—or at least some countries do.

We learn—or at least some rulers do.

But many do not, and so the frenzied rule of unstable rulers with their unstable ideas about what makes their nation and country continues, the rights of their people trampled upon, the masks of their atrocities reinforced with the public relations campaign of benevolence and kindness and staged social equality.

But many do not, and so make everyone believe that their years of misrule are the best years of the life of their own people, with that penchant for a calculated passing on of power to family members, some of them not better than their despotic parents.

Today, the world has changed.

Today, the people have seen other ways of living the life that honors their humanity.

Today, the people have seen that they can no longer be muted and silenced and muffled forever, and that, in the deepest of the night, in the darkness of the hours of fear, that voice that cries out for freedom and democracy must come out into the open and finally blurted out for all other people to hear, for all our societies to hear, for all other countries to hear.

Egypt it was. And then Tunisia. And now Libya. Among these three countries, are almost one hundred of oppression and misrule, of masquerade and tyranny, and of untold atrocities and brutalities.

Among these countries is almost a century of misguided priorities, and deprivation and wretchedness never seen since the days of conquest and colonization.

We cannot justify these acts that can only tell us of what we have done to humanity.

We cannot give reason to any form of wretchedness when rulers are enjoying the perks and pelf of power.

Desperate, that young man who doused himself with gasoline and then set himself on fire before the public galvanized the Tunisians and made them realize that we cannot have resorts for tourists who can pay in dollars and euros and yet so many people cannot even come close to these resorts for pampered tourists.

No, we cannot have two kinds of citizens in any country.

No, we cannot have two kinds of people in a homeland.

No, we cannot have two rights in a nation: the rights reserved for those who are in power and the rights, crumbs as they are, given in mercy to those who are powerless.

No, we cannot have two privileges in any nation-state that has self-respect and that makes it as its commitment a fundamental respect for its own people.

Social injustice everywhere is social injustice everywhere.

We know social injustice when we see one—and all rulers of the world must take notice of what people can with the power they have in their hands.

This is what democracy is all about. And no less.

FAO/ Mar 2011

English-Ilokano Dictionary, US Limited Edition

2011-01-04T08:52:00.000-08:00

This dictionary took so much of my time. It challenged my ability to pray to the gods and goddesses of languages and cultures. Ten years hard word--hard labor!--is something, indeed. I hope this humble work will be of help in advancing the cause of MLE all over the country, in general, and among Ilokano and Ilokanized communities, in particular.

Fro the Philippine edition, check it out with the publisher, Cornerstone of Arts & Sciences, Quezon City. Contact information is found in my FB wall.

Panagur-uray

2011-01-01T02:27:00.000-08:00

Elderly woman dies while waiting in line to watch TV show-Philippine Daily Inquirer, 12-24-10

Alejandra Santos, 72.

Willing Willie, iti Channel 5.

13 nga oras a panagur-uray.

Ramen dagitoy ti gasat nga iti oras

ti milagro ket ti kinadaksanggasat.

Gasat a limlimo kadagiti kanito

ti dagaang iti ili ti santilmo a

mangiyaw-awan.

Kimkiman ti maregmeg

kadagiti iking ti latok ngem ta, iti panagkamtud,

ket ti panaglusdoy dagiti ar-araraw

a masirpatka uray iti apagdarikmat.

Sika ti mangikari iti nam-ay, talinaay,

kappia, abunaw, dur-as

kadagiti adu a panagparintumeng.

Bituen dagiti pannakapaay,

bituen dagiti tarumpingay nga iti telon

ti rigrigat ket sika, sika,

o dios a babassit ti entablado,

ket sika ti mangdegdeg adu pay

a panagur-uray. Ken panagsaraaw.

Matay ti mabisinan a bagi,

iti panagur-uray a masirayanka,

kas ti agkurkuranges nga ili

nga iti iskrin ket maiwarwaragawag

umuna a panangngaasi.

Ta kasta ti biagmi ditoy:

adda maganab a nagabay

a bendision kadagiti sipsipat nga addaan

gatad, lima gasut iti maminsan,

sa riwriw iti kapamindua.

Adda basbas kadagiti agkiraykiray

a silaw ti panagarrap, iti man pannakangngeg

ti kari a nasayaat, iti panaglayus

ti lua kadagiti agrekrekkang a bengkag.

Siak ni Alejandra Santos, ti agbuya

kadagitoy a daeg ti panangallilaw,

ti umuna a premio iti maudi a pangngaldaw

tapno iti ipupusay ket ti pannakapaay.

Dis 10/10

Marikina

DAYS

2010-12-03T09:50:00.000-08:00

Days of our lives,

This we can only say.

We count the hours

Between hymns we remember

But want to hide

From the heart that sings.

We count the blue moons,

Each hand at a time,

And then the other,

And then the darkness.

We count the sorrows

We assign another name,

Something to keep them

Away from a sentence.

Exiles do not count

In those consonants

Of our cheap talks

About how war is won

In this struggle we call

Our language of sense.

We go the ways

Of angels, fallen in traffic.

Our prayers, sad as always,

Come in to proxy

What we cannot say in words.

It is phrases we cannot turn

Into as minutes, their length

Of time's endlessness

Our private grief.

Life goes on, we say.

We believe it is.

And the sun by the Diamond Head

Rises to a greeting of hope

Coming alive like the marongi leaves

After the first rains.

Waipahu, HI/Dec 2, 2010

STRUGGLE IN HONOLULU

2010-12-01T06:33:00.000-08:00

There is so much to be said about the Ilokano struggle in Hawaii. There are the burning issues. There are the words that burn as well. It is the same struggle you have seen elsewhere: in Manila, in Laoag, in Los Angeles, and now in Honolulu. The issues go with you. They do not leave you alone.

In your homeland, the issues were about the many rights trampled upon by the powerful, from writing to students rights, to the rights of the poor like you, to the right to call it quits with a president who did not know how to preside over the affairs of a county and a people except to his own sense of country and to his own sense of people.

Which means that his country is his cabal of impostors and pretenders shanghaiing all that can be shanghaied from a country already shanghaied empty by others.

Which means that the people are simply this: his own people.

Which defines as his coterie of greedy relatives and friends and hangers-on, who would go berserk with him with irresponsibility, song, and wine.

The Honolulu struggle is a bit different. It is one marked by a complication—as if in a medical case where the patient needs all the suero you can find. The vital signs are giving away the clues.

Temperature check: no sweat, it is darn too cold or darn too warm, depending on who you talk to and who you deal with. Lydia Abajao has a term for this: quever, bibiangko.

Pulse check: too weak or too fast, depending on who are involved, like this talk we had at one fancy restaurant today, November 30, by King Street, a reverend who means so well, a young activist who means so well, and myself who is in between meaning so well and being mean. LOL would define the pulse of the moment.

To struggle for a people and with your own people is one hard task to do.

To follow the way to your self-promotion and self-aggrandizement is one easy thing to do. It is the easiest thing to do. Some of those who can write in English—and so well—has a name for this: PR work.

The first leads you to crucifixion. The second leads you to a false heaven.

One has to choose; you need to choose.

I write this reflection while I look out the window, and there, in the dark, with the bright lights of Makakilo, I see the outlines of a mountain promising social justice, the kinalinteg, to all who deserve it.

From my window sill the December rain drops, and the music it creates lilts like a morning song announcing the breaking of day.

It is 4 o’clock, and soon the freeway will be filled with people rushing to their ambition, some to their crucifixion, and the others to their false heaven.

Honolulu is paradise too, but not so.

Honolulu, HI/Dec 1, 2010

TI UMUNA A TUDO ITI MAYO ITI MARIKINA

2010-12-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

Dimtengka kadagiti nabara nga oras

Iti maar-arakattot a sardam, sa iti agnerbios

A bannawag iti ili a nagkamangan,

Adayo kadagiti amin a dangadang

Iti lagip a naggapuan, kas iti panagtalappuagaw

Ti nakisang itan a danum ti Padsan.

Adu a pakasaritaan: ti daniwmo iti presidente

Nga iti panagtabon ti kararuana ket piman

Ta maitantantan kadagiti arimukamok,

Kadagiti bisibis ti tudo nga iti angrag

Ti tiempo ket ti maidagel a panagkulay-ong.

Kadagiti talon a masaripatpatan dagitoy

Kalpasan ti panagpadara ti nakem

Iti madagdagullit a kompesar ti kalgaw

Iti agur-uray a kanalbuong ti gurruod

Wenno ti anak-ti-sal-it, agkimat tapno

Iti apagapaman ket ti daga nga iti agmatuon

Ket ti pammadso ti nabaybay-an a gimong.

Saan nga ili ti adda kadatayo ita.

Saan a pagilian nga iti kansion ket ditoy

A maarikap ti sonata ti linteg nga iti sirmata

Ket adda kadagiti maidasar nga un-unnoy

Ti konsierto dagiti dadaulo nga agmauyong.

Liriko amin dagitoy ti gasat a ditay inay-ayat.

Liriko dagiti dayyeng nga iti agsapa

Ket ti pait dagiti bigat nga iti komedor

Ket ditoy a mabalasa ti numero a naimbag.

Kas iti loteria dagiti tagainep, kas iti pinnusoy

Tapno kadagiti papaayat ti ginnasanggasat

Ket ti agtagitao koma a ragragsak.

Ita ket ti umuna a tudo iti arununos ti kalgaw

A panagawid ti mannaniw manipud

Panagtalawataw kadagiti antigo a sursurat.

Inkur-it dagitoy kadagiti pakasaritaan

Nga iti kannag a bulan ket ti isasangbay

Ti umuna unay a pammakawan.

Itapaya ti mannaniw ti nakaungap a dakulap

Tapno iti appupo ti mangted bang-ar a danum

Ket ti kari a di pananglipat

Kas iti panaglaing iti tian iti sarsaraaw

Ti adu a pananglanglangan.

(Naisurat, May 10, 2010, Marikina, Filipinas)