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American Exile /dreams

11/30/2014

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Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1999

I have these dreams: I live and breathe under water, a shimmering light green air. Or: our country is occupied. The enemy, hidden, is everywhere. We are the resistance, hide underground, moving and fighting, terrified to be seen. Or: I have learned to fly, a highly technical skill that I learn in a series of dreams. It's a secret.

As far back as I know, I have been white. Passing through the yard, they say, "ay manika!" (doll) and pinch our cheeks. Manika: fragile, pretty, pale, precious. By sixth grade, I am not manika enough. Too much: clumsy, nose too high, a whiteness bright like neon signs in Quiapo, Makati, anywhere.

We grew up in the limbo of exile.  Home, an American family island in the Philippine Sea. Our world teemed with a mix of aromas: banana-q, garbage, sampaguita, and wind, sun, and music wilder than the American life of grandmother's  house.  I learned how to be Filipina and that I was not; knew my U.S. passport's privilege but didn't know how to be one. My sisters and I were ex-manikas, "white monkeys," Manila girls in a world pummeled by typhoons, wildcat strikes, student riots, and then, in 1971, curfewed nights.

I live with the name, white monkey, because it's apt enough. A curse for the children of white fright, colonial blight, American might.

Before Victoria and I left on our five-month trip through India, I had another kind of dream: I travel with a woman lover to meet her people in a secret mountain encampment. We stop at a bar enroute. Some women are playing pool. One glances at me, turns to my lover and asks, "Have you told her yet?"  "No", she says.  The dream shifts, as if unlocked.  I am inside and outside of it simultaneously. My lover isn't who I think she is. She is utterly alien. As she morphs into a Kafkaesque creature, I think calmly, "at least I loved her first as human. It will make the transition easier." 


There are fish adrift in their aquariums with whom I have more in common than most friends. I live under water again, open my mouth to unshaped sound. No one knows that I am utterly alien, that our world is occupied.  No one knows this because I can't speak the language. I can't escape, though I can fly. And no one understands me when I speak. Neither do I.
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Ang sakit nang kalinkkingan,

11/30/2014

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Ang sakit nang kalinkkingan,
Damdam nang buong katawan

The pain of the little finger is felt by the whole body

Our house on Basilan road is increasingly more empty. By 1972, Dad has taken a job in Chicago at McCormick as Director of the Institute on Urban-Industrial Society. He leaves with Margaret in at the end of school.  Margaret is adamant to stay with grandmother for the summer. We don't know until many years later the terrible sense of abandonment she feels at being left with grandmother when we traveled through Europe in 1967.  We all believed that Margaret's persistent prayer got Scott the 199 draft number. Johanna gets German measles the day before dad and Margaret leave for the United States. 

It's exhausting to remember that year now. Mom remains behind, once again, to close out our years in the Philippines: Poethigs 1957-1972. Johanna engineers the final sale of our items. Annie is looking for a post in Spain. I’ll stay with the Villaneuvas, Grinos and Palms to finish up one more semester of high school.

By July, Mom, Erika and Johanna are on their way to the Greek isle of Samos to meet up with Uncle David. Tense, unhappy Erika cries all the time. Mom says she calms down when she hears the names of all the people she knows - Annie Cresing Kerry Scott Margaret.  Johanna escapes to teenage exploits, Uncle David needs space.  

My mother’s letters are depressed and weary but she looks gorgeous and wind swept.

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Sapang Palay, Carmona, Tondo

11/30/2014

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I didn’t know dad knew about Elizalde. If Elizalde was no friend of cultural minorities, he wasn't much loved by Manila's urban poor either. 

Dad's idea of a family outing are visits to factories (steel, sugar cane, shoes) or squatter resettlements of Carmona in Cavite and Sapang Palay in Bulacan, thirty kilometers from the city. Not so much Tondo, a squatter area near the North Harbor. My father, "Dick," to his colleagues, is on all the urban-industrial committees:  Interchurch Committee on Urban Resettled Families at Carmona, Cavite, the Urban-Industrial Mission Committee of the National Council of Churches of the Philippines (NCCP) and The Philippine Ecumenical Council for Community Organization (PECCO). He teaches at the Asian Social Institute (ASI) and writes on these issues for Church and Community and Solidaridad.
 

The early 1970s is the heyday of Alinksy-style organizing and the Catholic base community movement. The ecumenical movement is strong. Rev. Henry Aguilan, a protege of Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, offers CO training coupled with Friere's conscientization in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  

Back to Elizalde and Tondo.

Of all these organizations, the best known is ZOTO, the Zone One Tondo Organization, a people's organization at the  Tondo foreshore land that uses Alinksy-style organizing.  PECCO brings seventy Tondo organizations together to create the Council of Tondo Foreshorelands Community Organizations (CTFCO). Dad,  Fr. Dennis Murphy and Fr. Blanco, both Jesuits, and Fr Ed Gerlock a Maryknoller, are among the advisers. Sometimes I think dad loves his Catholic "buddies" more than the Protestants. (Trinidad Herrera, a ZOTO woman organizer is my hero. I write a song about her after Martial Law.)

CTFCO tries to head off another government plan to relocate the squatters.  UCCP folks set up an appointment with President Marcos after their agitation to get land grants near the docks in Tondo.

Fr. Ed Gerlock regales us about their visit to President Marcos when he visits my father later in the month. About fifty of the Tondo organizers are allowed into Malacancang. They file into President Marcos's office.  He is sitting behind his magnificent mahogany desk. He listens, takes notes on their complaints against government officials, and offers kind words. Then he waves at an official for them to be escorted out.  Rev. Henry Aguilan speaks up, “But Mr. President, you haven’t answered our demands.”  In the end, President Marcos promises them the land, but they would have to take responsibility for overseeing its distribution to bona fide residents.

Two hours later, members of CTFCO call a meeting in Tondo. One thousand show up.   


For a while, priests, pastors, and community organizers wonder if the government is trying to subvert the movement; soon no one needs to wonder. The President assigns Elizalde to the Tondo project. Elizalde, the king of Panamin, creates a rival group. He then invites the officers of CTFCO without advisors to his yacht.  They return home well fed, with P1,000 each. But the president of CTFCO is guilt-ridden. He confesses to his priest and returns the money to Elizalde. Elizalde is enraged. He tells him to leave his house, curses the honest leader. 

Other officers won’t admit to receiving any money, so now the struggle is to keep the group from splitting up.  Of course, there are accusations floating around that their advisors are CIA agents. 


After Martial Law, life will turn worse for Tondo inhabitants and ZOTO organizers. 
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David's Tasaday adventure

11/30/2014

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When David Baradas visits again, he's been living in Cubao near his sister.  Can he leave his Maranao treasures with us? He's on and off to Mindanao. Mom can't hide her delight. She artfully distributes his cache around our Basilan house sala: brass pots, a sarimanok, a mother of pearl inlaid chest (he got one for us too), a full-scale kulintang, two large brass gongs, exquisite woven fabrics and a three-foot drum. And she mourns them when they leave us. 

David Baradas at our screen door, back from Mindanao. From where, he doesn't say. "Something's going on. " He's anxious. It's mysterious. He mentions Manuel Elizalde, who has discovered a “stone age tribe.”  Why is he so worried? He sits forward on the couch, he grips his hands. "Something's going on, Dick," he repeats like a novena. Then, "I have to get out of there" as if to warn himself.  We -- all of us with different levels of understanding -- are worried too. Elizalde is up to no good.  

Our anthropologist disappears. In July, news of the "gentle Tasaday" rips through the world. They are tool-using hunter-gatherers, lost in the south Cotobato rain forest, near the T'boli and Manobo, other "lumad," indigenous communities of Mindanao. Are they T'boli? In a matter of weeks, National Geographic, NBC, hundreds of magazines feature the “Lost Tribe of Mindanao." Elizalde founds Panamin for national minorities a cabinet-level position. Panamin is supposed to support research and protection of this stone age tribe. 

Eventually, after Martial Law, the hoax is unveiled by a Swiss journalist and the media circus has a second round. The story, retold, is more complicated. Elizalde escapes to Costa Rica with $35 million raised by Panamin. He squanders the money, becomes addicted, and dies impoverished in 1997. Instead of a hero, he's the perpetrator of the greatest anthropological hoax since Piltdown man.  


By this time, we are back in the States becoming 'Blue Seal.'  I am the first Poethig to return in 1986 - to work in the Bataan refugee camp. I finally track down David Baradas who has moved to Baguio. We are a little awkward, now that I am grown up and have brought my girlfriend. But he still looms larger than life. He consults on museum collections. In his  Baguio house, adorned with beautiful cloth and carvings, he serves red rice, mushrooms, fresh vegetables because he doesn't believe in a fridge.  We don't talk of the Tasaday.

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reunion

11/30/2014

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Margaret reunion with Annie and Cresing's family in the US.
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blancitude

11/30/2014

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 Franz Fanon didn’t mean us when in Wretched of the Earth, he wrote of “individuals without anchor, without horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless, a race of angels.”  We weren’t wretched or stateless, but weren’t we aimless, without anchor, horizon, root?

What is benevolent imperialist "white love"? And the love we receive, who is its target? Children of America’s Blue Seal Coca Cola power, kids playing white-skin-brown-mask.  Does it count, this angst as a postcolonial tax?

We, young girls growing up in public, privileged with whiteness when we'd rather disappear. For public space, the public face. Sometimes we're not Manila Girls. We're just missionary kids and I'm not hybrid, but a monstrous postcolonial invasive species.​ The blight of blancitude, the rage of angels.

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Noli mi tangere

11/30/2014

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“Why are they staring at us?”  Nedesna asks the question everyone is feeling. Our barkada is in Quiapo for a movie at Id-ee-al theater. My friends are made visible by me. It happens everytime; they don’t like it. Well, live with it for a while, I think unkindly. 

Take a seat in the park of our subdivision, Philam Homes. A man sidles up to talk. I move, another man comes over. Do I need a chaperone to sit? Every alone is an invitation. The only privacy is the Catholic church, eternally open for the Blessed Sacrament, so available for adoration. It offered some diversion.

Here's a secret to noli mi tangere: become invisible. The trick's to ignore all the people staring at me, just make them go away by turning off the outside world. This “trick” has allowed me to do very risky impulsive things, because I negate the world in order to live in it.

When no one is watching, others are waiting to share. That’s what we learn after so much exposure. “Help me, ma'am” he says. I’m in third grade, a good citizen, so I obey, because he asked. “Help me ma'am". Ma'am? I am seven and a half.  He’s in his car. He's jerking his cock. It's my first shame. Help him what? This is a world of matter-of-fact nakedness. Men pee on the side of the road, kids run naked in the rain, so have I.  But this is a deep, secret hiya. On buses, in movie theaters, anonymous hands spider under my legs, across the seat. Auntie Soli hrumphs, "what's new?" She tells about the anonymous hand that fondled her padded bra in a dark movie theater. She cackles, we cackle. It happens to any dalaga. Maybe, but we mk also know it's because we are white meat and not mahinhin.

And now, there's no way to be hidden, even my dreams break the barricade: military occupation, pools of shit, a black bird drags a broken wing.  What insurgency is this? I taste the dread in the night, but in the morning, best to disconnect, swallow the bile, smile.

By sweet 16, my psyche untangles its tether and pulls up the anchor.  I am in a safe harbor and can recognize the shore, but no one is watching as my boat lifts over the swell and out to sea. Not me, not the family, not experts, and, I don't know, does God?

Can't make myself belong here anymore, can't bend down and disappear, can't go along. Sick of small talk. Can't crawl into the hole. Now it feels like a forced exile, and I swim through a current of desire and resentment.  If I connect home to my passport, will I relieve this dread?

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1971 Erika's long hot summer

11/30/2014

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1958
1961
1967
1971
PictureMom organizing slides as Erika takes shape.
After the 1971 New Year, Manila bursts into flame —six big fires in one week, the worst in the city's history. In a demonstration over increasing oil prices, students and jeepney drivers blockade Sampaloc’s streets. They called it the “Battle of Mendiola.” Students press against a military blockade, capture a fire truck and ram it against the gates of the Malacanang Palace. Through the night they battle police and non-striking drivers. Six students are killed and students use TNT pillboxes which explode on impact. When a few backfire, three student dormitories burn to the ground.
This triggers a wave of student protests I've already told you about: the “first Quarter Storm."


Mom, weary and depressed, calls us to the sala.It’s not about the demonstrations, strikes, or fires.    
Even dad joins us. This is serious. So we act wenky.

“Could you settle down for a minute, I have something to say.” 

Oh, too bigat.
“You’re pregnant” I quip. She shoots me a dark look. My stomach churns. This is my 40-year- old mother.
“How did you know?”  

Oh.my.god. Mom is pregnant. 

We are already embarrassed by our budding and nubile bodies, with our pheromones in fruitless bloom. With a mother so thoroughly modest, let's call it an annunciation.  

“Wow, how many months?” Johanna. Someone had to ask. 

“Five.” 
In unison,
“Five?!” 
Scott calculates,
“Another Poethig by….May.”
She looks heavy-lidded and withdrawn. Jo and I relapse to silly Manila Girlness.
We can finally adjourn.

We get silly: "How about Raven Coal Black, or Edgar Allan Poe(thing)?"  Mom and dad settle on a long middle name. Sentimental: a Poethig scrap book for posterity in which we feature prominently. Then return to teen solipsism. I embark on my anthropological journey southward right after she arrives. 

It's so hot by April that the bomba (Rated X) film, "Erika’s Long Hot Summer" conquers our imagination. 
 
Erika Christy Peter Poethig arrives on May 3rd at St. Luke's Hospital. She's born before dad can get there.
The only Poethig born in the Philippines. 
Spunky Erika. 

This hot-hot-hot summer, Eleanor Palm, Johanna and I turn to swimming pools. There’s a pool at PhilAm, but it’s crammed with kids. We discover Sulu Hotel, an easy jeepney ride up Quezon Blvd. It's small, often deserted, and the staff are easy going, so we don modest bikinis and swathe ourselves in coconut oil. Johanna’s JASMS barkada joins us – Marilee, Nene, Marilyn, Valerie, wild happy burgis girls. Sometimes we bring Margaret, Margie Palm and their friends to convince our mothers we're generous. 

Hot-hot-hot politics are brewing a block from Sulu Hotel. At the "Concon,"  the Constitutional Convention, three hundred twenty delegates rewrite the Philippine 1935 constitution modeled after the American constitution. The cynics (almost everyone) say this is a Marcos ploy to extend presidential term limits to eight years. A bribing scandal to extend term limits proves it true. 

We think this hot convergence presages Erika's political acumen. 

Since it's an election year, the campaigns are equally hot and controversial. In August, at Plaza Miranda by the Quiapo Church, someone lobs a grenade onto the platform where Liberal party candidates are speaking. Our very own Protestant Sen Jovito Salonga is swept into the maelstrom. Marcos suspends the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. He blames the bombing on the communists, although the Liberal party is the opposition. In popular retaliation, three months later, the Liberals win a majority of the Senate seats, and only two Marcos candidates are elected.

It only promises to get hotter. 


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Halter gals
Meanwhile, in Makati with the burgis
My latest depressive composition begins, "everyone's on downers I don't need a pill to get me there."  
In June, at the start of the new school year, I glumly comply with parental demands, sentenced to American purgatory.
"OK, I'll go to International School." 
So, no bus-jeepney-through-Quiapo to UP Prep, instead I board the JUSMAG bus with military brats or take a taxi  from the Quezon Circle along Hiway 54 through Cubao, over the Guadalupe Bridge into gleaming, suburban Makati to the imperialist, burgis International School. 

At least I discover the existentialists. Camus lives with me on the dark side of my moon. I read The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, then Kafka's Metamorphosis.  But the Camus I love is, Lyrical Essays, drunk on the Mediterranean sun. 

To graduate early, I take additional correspondence courses so that by the end of December 1972. The plan is to go to college in the U.S.  So, I sign up for all the writing options at IS: the newspaper,  Kudyapi, the high school poetry journal for the second year in a row, the yearbook.  Mrs. Silverman, a New Yorker who has also introduced me to John Ciardi and Robinson Jeffers, suggests Rutgers, her alma mater. 

"It has a good major for Creative Writing." 
But Anthropology is my only love and there is no place in the world for Anthropology but the University of Chicago.
​I don’t say that back to her.

1970Scott leaves UP for College of Wooster,

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http://www.arkibongbayan.org/2011/2011-02Feb01-DilimanCommune/dcfeb
If 1970 was the Congress of the Streets, this year inaugurates the Battle of University of the Philippines, Diliman. When Sampaloc ignites, the Manila campuses catch fire.

Our "Brother Love" becomes a college freshman at University of the Philippines at Dilliman.  He takes a bus past Monumento to Quezon Blvd to the acacia-lined campus. He attends Hair as an induction. It may be the Age of Aquarius in America, but in his UP English class, they're comparing Vietnam to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. His classes are like sputtering spark plugs - bright, out, hot, dead. 


The Diliman tempest arrives in January. Radical students, led by 
Ericson Boculinao president of the UP Student Council, set up barricades along University Avenue to protest oil prices. When police remove the blockades, someone shoots. It breaks into all-out war returning bullets with pillboxes and Molotov cocktails. We hear that tear gas cleared out the ladies’ dorms.

Scott walks to Basilan Road, shaken. A UP professor, rebuffed at the barricades, had returned with three guns, a helmet and vest and began shooting at the students, killing one. UP students retaliate by burning the professor’s car,  bombing the UP guard house, and breaking windows in the Administration Building.  

At first UP President Lopez takes a permissive stand. He removes police from the campus on Wednesday to prevent violence, and negotiating with students and faculty.  Many of the faculty who live on campus were practically incommunicado since no phones worked, but they and other students are afraid to leave because of looting.  In the meantime, pressure groups call for a return to law and order in the university, the resignation of President Lopez and a police take-over. 

Gradually, the students take full control of the campus, and set up the “Diliman Commune”.  The Diliman Commune set up checkpoints in and out of campus. They prevented all traffic in and out, except for some who wanted to walk. They renamed the buildings, flew red flags from the roofs, manned the radio station, broadcasting revolutionary music and analysis all day.  We heard that they commandeered the Chemistry department for molotov cocktails and the Home Economics kitchens for baon for their kasamas at the barricades.

Diliman Commune posts this statement on Feb 13, 1971:
  • "WHEREAS, the UP Student Council has expressed solidarity with the Filipino people in their valiant struggle against the American imperialist oil cartel and its local bureaucrat-capitalist allies; 

  • WHEREAS, the UPSC has endorsed the barricade as a form of protest against such evils;

  • WHEREAS, the UPSC vehemently condemns the fascist-puppet State and its campus agents for employing brutally sadistic methods in suppressing legitimate dissent;

  • WHEREAS, the UPSC salutes the militant resistance put up by the broad United Front of progressive students, faculty members, non-academic workers, and campus residents who resolutely struggled to defend and liberate the University;

  • BE IT RESOLVED AS IT IS HEREBY RESOLVED, that the UPSC commend the revolutionary courage of the heroic defenders of the Diliman Commune against the fascist State and its campus collaborators.

An alumnus of UP Prep, Scott, no radical, is sympathetic. When the mayor of Quezon City and others negotiate with students to remove the barricades, he joins a “fire brigade” line to disentangle the barricade and return the chairs to their classrooms. 

The College of Wooster now seemed like his best option.  So my oldest brother applies to Wooster in February and is gone by July. 

When he turns 18 on July 13, dad takes him to the US Embassy to register for the draft. We hadn't thought about that, so St. Margaret prays for a high number. Mom tells grandmother, “I don’t think Scott has thought about leaving nearly as much as he has thought about getting his two papers in anthropology done.”   


He writes papers, continues to deny. Then finally, days before  the flight, he packs all his important objects: jeepney signs for Espana Taft Paco, his collection of bus tickets, 12th and 13th century porcelain bowls found at grave sites in Tala caves.  Forget the clothes.  “Here, take this,” he passes his record player to a surprised Johanna.  

Dad is going with Scott.  I wear my new copper-colored peasant blouse hipster pants and macrame belt. We chug happy Erika, pass her around from hip to hip. Scott’s the first to go and gets a real despedida send-off.  UP Prep friend Alex,  George Padolina, our SS Wright stalwarts. It’s crazy and hot at the airport terminal since the aircon is broken. We gather, mingle and talk about nothing, just to linger. 

We hear Philippine Airlines’ last call for Hong Kong and they haven’t gone through immigration!! “Go, go now!”  Dad trails Scott down through the closed doors.  We think they’r going to come back, but in the confusion, they don’t return.  So we dash to the departure deck and wave to the plane as it taxis, takes off, up into the smoggy air.  Like that, Scott’s gone.  We stand there watching a little longer, then go home. 

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It’s Christmas again (from Manila)

11/30/2014

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1963-64: Grandmother in Philippines as Peace Corps
  leaves for a world tour by mid-1964


It's Christmas again (from Manila)

And we’ve tried very hard
To get a family photo
For our Christmas card

We’ve tried it for years
But it never works.
Somebody cries,
And somebody smirks

The problem is not
Uniquely ours,
We see it as a world-wide
Clash of powers.

To get a smile
On the whole world’s face
Is a hope as old
As the human race.

So the picture in words
We present to you
Of the joys of life
We all go through

Merry Christmas
And a Good year too



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    Kerry (Kathryn) Poethig

    We were "fraternal kids", Americans in the Philippines from Magsaysay to Marcos. I thought our story needed elaboration.

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