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1971 Erika's long hot summer

11/30/2014

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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She looks heavy-lidded and withdrawn.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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Manila Domestic Airport, 3:40am on just a regular day

11/20/2013

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PANATANG MAKABAYAN Reprised

7/24/2013

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After six years of Panatang Makabayan, I had a run at my other allegiance in 8th grade. 

It was 1968 in the land of my birth, the year Robert Kennedy was assassinated and President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. We lived in Ohio that furlough year in my grandmother’s beautiful stone mansion on Adirondack Trail. Dad, once again, lived far away in Boston at MIT on an Urban Studies fellowship. When he came for visits, he would regale us with stories of student sit-ins in Harvard yard, his eyes glinting with radical fervor. He appeared at Christmas with an
 Alan Ginsberg goatee and a maroon beret crooked French-like. Our father was bohemian and handsome, and we were just missionary kid dorks stuck in the middle of America. 

My siblings and I were sick with misery. We were lonely and cold, afraid of American kids, and awkward around the internecine wars between our mother and her mother. So I hid in my room, composing 13 year old songs about the mystery of myself, lost paradise, dying trees. Who was I, the American? I pored through The Autobiography of Malcolm X and memorized all three stanzas of the American national anthem, rocket fire illuminating a tattered flag. Race hatred. Vietnam war. Teen anguish. No stars, no pearls of the Orient or a salty warm sea; no glorious land that held us to her bosom. Each day in homeroom we pledged allegiance to the flag and the country for which it stands. I did not have to promise to love America, or say “faithfulness” and “obey.”  But I secretly wanted America to love me, with its "beautiful for spacious skies and amber waves of grain," its streets of clean unfenced lawns, its celebrity nationhood, and even in the worst of times, no want for rest of us. 

The next June, we drove past the squatter shacks from Manila International Airport to Malate. Scott brought me with him to UP Prep high school, which rented the dilapidated third floor of the old Supreme Court building on Padre Faura Avenue. As the “first quarter storm” gathered thunder and student demonstrations ripped Manila apart, I pledged with relief,  “Iniibig ko ng Pilipinas.”


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School Days 1962 - 67

2/20/2013

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Panatang Makabayan

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I am a Filipino patriot. 

Each morning at Union Elementary School, we dissolve from piko, jackstones, and habulan statue, to form long crooked lines under the acacia in the courtyard for flag cerémony. The loudspeaker crackles and blasts Bayang magiliw, perlas ng silanganan, as two designated boy scouts jerk our flag up the pole. 

We all know the blue means peace over blood. In the white triangle, eight sun rays are the provinces that revolted against Spain and the three stars are Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. We are the first generation to sing Lupang Hinirang this way. That’s because it was composed in Spanish in 1898, translated to English by the Americans in 1919 and to Pilipino in the 1950s by President Magsaysay who died in the airplane crash. We sing it this way:

Bayang magiliw, perlas ng silanganan.
Alab ng puso, sa dibdib mo'y buhay.
Lupang hinirang, duyan ka ng magiting
Sa manlulupig, di ka pasisiil.
Sa dagat at bundok, sa simoy at
sa langit mong bughaw,
may dilag ang tula at awit
sa paglayang minamahal.
Ang kislap ng watawat mo'y
tagumpay na nagniningning.
Ang bituin at araw niya
kailan pa may di magdidilim.
Lupa ng araw, ng luwalhati't pagsinta,
buhay ay langit sa piling mo.
Aming ligaya na pag may mang-aapi,
ang mamatay ng dahil sa iyo.

A magical nationalism wells up in me, and Gabriela Silang, the one who led her people into battle, reaches down to embrace her small white iha (younger sister) with her brown bayani (hero) arms. Like Jesus, a hero’s greatest joy is to die for you (ang mamatay ng dahil sa iyo). It is a national devotion we sing with the equatorial morning sun already burning a hole in our backs, and me the illegitimate daughter who wants to be forgiven for the sins of my fathers since I’ve been singing Bayang magiliw like a novena for so many years. And anyway, this is a Protestant parochial school, whose students and teachers practice the faith of my fathers after the Americans took the Philippines from Spain. We’re all just a bit illegitimate to the Catholic Filipinos anyway.

Then seven hundred right arms rise, palms forward, and seven hundred voices rumble like the sound of many waters,
Iniibig ko ang Pilipinas.
Ito ang aking lupang sinilangan.
Ito ang tahanan ng aking lahi.
I love the Philippines. This is the land of my birth, this is the home of my ancestors. 

As I say it, the words make it so: I love, my birth, my people. This Tagalog is too malalim —deep, as in over one’s head— so I stumble along. We make wonderful promises like Bilang ganti, diringin ko ang payo ng aking mga magulang. (I am a good citizen obeying everybody. I will heed my parents.) The country helps me to be strong, happy, and hardworking. I will serve my country with faithfulness and integrity. 
And finish with gusto: 
            Sisikapin kong maging isang tunay na Pilipino, sa isip, sa salita, at sa gawa.
I will try my best to be a true Filipino in thought, speech and deed.

And so we learn to be isang tunay na Pilipino. We excavate our colonial history and our origin tales, how the first man and woman were born out of the hollow bamboo. Bathala, king of diwatas, the teacher tells us, combines babae and lalake (female and male).  One wasn’t made from the other; they loved the earth.  

We recall how Tagalogs wrote baybayin, a graceful ancient script.  The Aetas and Negritos, our first peoples, arrived on our fair islands over land bridges.  We learn how these islands were comprised of sultanates like Maynilad, ruled by Rajah Sulayman, which was conquered by Spaniard Legaspi in 1571. He made it the capital, initiating 400 years of Spanish rule. So we memorize colonial key words for tests: encomendero system, friars, the galleon trade between Manila and Mexico, the Goburza priests who were garroted for defending "natives" (us), and various revolts. We aren't tested on the key words of American rule. 

We read about our heros: Apolinario Mabini, Emilio Aguinaldo, Gabriela Silang, Tandang Sora. We nurse a crush for handsome Jose Rizal, executed at Luneta (we think) who wrote our required reading Noli Mi Tangere and El Filibusterismo. But Princess Urduja of Tawalisi is my favorite and I'm awed by Andres Bonifacio's long-haired revolutionaries who founded the secret KKK: Kataastaasan Kagalanggalangan Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan ("Highest and Most Respectable Society of the Sons of the People").  

We say we learn this to be tunay na Filipino even though we don’t know what it actually means to be Filipino because we have been colonized so long. 

How the West was Won

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“How the West was Won” is the rage! The blockbuster movie of the year when I'm in third grade at Union Elementary School. It's three hours long and features flashy new “wrap around” Cinerama. People wait in lines around the block for the chance to see it. 
Classmates who had already gone, sing, 
"Away away come away with me 
where the grass grows wild 
and the wind blows free
Away away come away with me 
and I'll build you a home in the meadow," to the tune of  Greensleeves. They tell us the spoilers like, “…and the buffalo stampede over the mother and her baby.”

Finally mom and dad take us. We watch for two and a half hours before the buffalo trample the mother. Phyllis and I sing with earnest pioneer spirit for “a home in the meadow.” If I forget from time to time that I am the West seeking to settle, my classmates seem to forget that in this story, they are the West to be won. 


President Macapagal doesn't forget. In 1962, he moves Independence Day from July 4th (the day designated by the Americans, those sentimental imperialists) to June 12th when in 1898 General Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence for Filipinos in Kawit, Cavite. We return from our U.S. Furlough to find the country celebrating Independence on June 12 in Luneta with General Emilio Aguinaldo as the guest of honor. July 4 is now "Filipino-American Friendship Day."





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Hole to China

9/30/2012

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It’s hot season. I’m digging a hole to China with a kitchen spoon in our back yard. Laling is making plantsa just inside the ground floor where it's dark and cool. She puts the hot steam iron on a fresh banana leaf to keep the ironing smooth and sweet. The green toasts to brown. That acrid smell, I don't know then, is the aroma of my Malate home. When I return to Manila after years in the States, my first whiff of burnt banana leaves triggers nostalgia for a past thick with love and ambivalence.

Laling’s eyes have special powers. Her black irises glisten in clear white pools. She can see when we tell a lie. Her eyes fix on us and we confess. We perk up when she’s happy and wilt when she’s mad. Only Johanna is impervious to her “hwag!" (don't do it!) or "halaka!" (I'm warning you, watch out!). And Laling's eyes cannot stop a skirmish between Scotty and Jo. But Laling is Johanna’s yaya, so Johanna is forgiven 70x7.

Laling takes a break from plantsa. The concrete step near her offers evidence of chicken tonight: dry blood with feathers. Laling doesn’t notice me. She leans on the threshold with her hands behind her. She’s not smiling, not frowning, just looking faraway.  I think: she is tired of us and my heart hurts.

My blond big brother Scotty comes around the corner, “Whadaya doing?”
“Diging ta China.”
“Bobo, you kannat dig a hole ta China.”
“YES I can.”
“Bobo. No you can’t.” He kicks my pile of dirt a little.
I hit him with the spoon, “STOPET! Bobo ka!! Laling!” She looks at us wearily but doesn’t move.
Scotty sees Laling and changes tone. “You kannat dig a hole ta China. BeCAUSE. China’s beside da Pilpines.”
“So hwat!” I don’t get it.
“So you kannat dig der,” with the authority of a second grader.
“Oh,” in a small voice, “Hway?”
“BeCAUSE China’s beside da Pilpines!”
I look at him warily. I still don’t get it.
“How ‘bout da States. You kan dig to da States!” Excited, because he’s found a way for me not to be bobo, he tries to grab my spoon to help me. I whisk it away just in time.
“Ok!” I say happily. I'll dig to granmother’s house.
In my hole to granmother’s house, I find an old brass piece. 
“What’s dis, daddy?” I hold it out to dad in his downstairs study. 
“Hmmm,” he turns it over. “It’s a shell casing from a bullet, maybe World War II.” 

It goes into a special box that I keep under my bed.

PictureTutubi, by Johanna Poethig
Dragonflies, black ants

Phyllis Monteclaro is my best friend. We call her “Feelees.” She’s soft, round, and calm. I’m boney and too excited. Our unlikely union will follow us all the way through 7th grade. She’s a careful perfectionist; I'm quick and clumsy. Note the difference between our macrame bags in Mrs. Sayo's 6th grade Home Ec class. Her string bag could be merchandise at Rustan's Department Store; my knots are moody. "Well," says mom diplomatically, "yours is original."

Felees, two brothers and sister and parents and a relative or two live in the big rambling house beside us. Their father is an editor for Manila Bulletin newspaper  He's round and friendly like Phyllis, but when he's there, I'm shy. Feelee's mom is spry like her older sister. Her mom is warm and chattery and always gives us better merienda than at our house. They are Baptist and so they don’t attend Ellinwood church.

“Feelees, Feeleeeees, FEELESS, ” I call through our screen to her porch, “can I come ober?” Someone at her house tells Feelees that the kana next door is making a fuss again, so she waves to me from the porch, and I run over: down our steps past House #A, unlatch the big green gate of our compound, relatch, and run to her gate. Someone comes down to let me in. We play patintero on their driveway with her sister, brothers and anyone else. Or they watch Popeye on the b&w TV in the Airconditioned Room. We play hideandseek everywhere.

We begin our friendship at Harris Memorial School Kindergarten. A minibus picks us up. Mom ties my hair so it spurts off the top of my head. Raul and his seatmate snicker. But not Feelees. She climbs up and plops down beside me, then turns her wide calm face to mine and smiles. That’s when I decide that Phyllis is my best best friend.
At the Christmas pageant, Phyllis is Mary the mother of Jesus, and I'm an angel, cardboard wings slightly askew.

But let's turn to our favorite pets, insects. 


We love our Harris Memorial praying mantis in its terrarium.  
"See, Feelees,” I point to its spindly arms, “it's praying.” She nods. A pious insect.
The next week, a plumb yellow and black caterpillar appears in the terrarium.
“Kerry!”  Feelees urgently, “halika dito, bilis, bilis!”
“Titcher, titcher!” yells Ramon. Kindergarteners scamper towards the terrarium.
The praying mantis slices into the soft caterpillar. It squirms in its goo. 

“Kita mo yon!”
“Hoy, Boboy, singiting!” Boboy wiggles past Miriam to get closer to the glass.
“Titcher, titcher,” wails Miriam, “Boboy’s making singiting!”
“Titcher, the praying mantis, kinain niya ang catarpillar!”
We struggle with our first semantic crisis of faith: pray to prey.

But we fight for our place in a world of insects who share our meals, flesh, and homes. Langaw buzz the merienda, umok nestle in our Milo and powdered milk; delicate black lines of langgam bore through birthday cakes. Lamok suck up our blood, leave us with dengue. Our hair is the haven of kuto, and we share our beds with surot. We fear ipis, who prefer dark warm cupboards to our roach hotels. We loathe them without distinction—the little ones, the ones that fly, the speckled tan, the long-whiskered ipis. Our house sweats little piles of filings from anay and bukbok; we find alupihan and its cousin the silverfish under old boxes. Of the salagubang, there are jewel, rhino, stag beetles and marching weevils. Then there is the exotic stick insect, the moving leaf sasuma. Not all insects assault us. Magical alitaptap sparkle around palm fronds like Christmas, the fluttery paru paro bring us spirit messages, kuliglig jazz up muggy nights. And tutubi help me forgive them all.

This Saturday, the Monteclaro clan gathers in our yard. “Lets fly tutubi,” suggests Buster. “Dragonfly,” Feelees translates. We swing back the big green gate of the driveway and head up Wright Street to the field two blocks away.  Iridescent green and blue tutubi dive and rise through the kogon grass. We kick at makahiya, which means “shy,” and that’s how it acts. Its' low growing fronds curl closed when you touch them. Feelees’ brother catches a tutubi and ties a string to the tail. He lets it go.  It pulls away, rising high til the leash pulls it back. It's like a dog with wings or a living kite. The boys are deft. Soon, tutubi kites buzz over the grass, struggling to get free. We giggle. My blue one pulls, swerving in the air.  Suddenly, the string drops. It buzzes off. I pull up the limp string to see the end of its tail. “What will happen to it?” I ask Buster. He’s tying someone else’s tutubi to a string.  “It will die,” he says without looking up. He's kind. “Ito, for you,” he’s got iridescent wings between his fingers. The green tail curls. “Hwag na.” He shrugs and hands it to someone else. I gaze at tutubi freely diving in the grass. Only later do I pray that they don’t get caught.

It's Saturday. The Monteclaros are in the province. Johanna and I are bored.  "Let's go to our clubhouse!"  We have a clubhouse on the second rung of the concrete water tower beside our house. But Scotty's clubhouse is on the third rung, and he tosses a mud ball at us.
OK, we're not interested in the clubhouse anyway.
Johanna sighs, then brightens, “Let’s catch black ants!”
“Yeah!”
We don’t really hate them, but the big black army ants crawl in long columns up trees and through the yard and they’re easy pets: independent, plentiful, and disposable.
Our latest experiment is to see how long the army ants can swim. Johanna gets a metal can and fills it with water at the outside faucet and we set a big rock for the island. It’s easy to find the ants. They crawl up the concrete water tower pilings. We flick them into the water and watch them swim to the edge of the can. We pick them up and set them back on their island.

Boy saunters over to watch from the Monteclaro side of the fence.
“Ssst,” we know he’s there, but we ignore him.
“Ssst!” more insistently. He can’t stand it when we ignore him.
“Ano ba ‘yon?”
“Black ant,” Johanna says noncommittally. Boy already knows, of course, and has a battle plan ready.
“I can win your ant,” he brags in a loud whisper.
He holds out  a matchbox, tapping it open just a little to show that it’s full of wriggling hantik—I forgot to mention these—the evilest red ants. We check his fingers for hantik stings.
A surge of team spirit wells up. “Sige, war!” I cry.

Jo and I lug the tin can over to the fence. We try not to slurp the water. Boy is supposed to be on some errand or a house job, so he can’t come over. He glances over his shoulder to check the house. We won’t tell.

Boy can’t wait to unload his red army onto the rock island, a surprise attack on our black navy seals. The red ants look fierce. I feel a sudden surge of motherly worry about our insects, but it's too late to back down. The three of us squat by the can, watching the Jackson Pollock tangle of shiny red and black. Boy's hantik, jammed in a matchbox for too long, are ferocious. He clucks at his team like they're fighting cocks, to spur them on. After a while, it’s hard to tell which color is winning. It’s a gruesome battle of dismemberment. Body sections writhe without heads, legs.

We sit in silence until the last red ant is taken down.

“YEY!” Johanna and I jump up and dance, more relieved than jubilant. Boy laughs too. He’s an easy loser. After the hantik war, we treat our black ants with more respect. But I don’t want to play that ever again.

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Exile dreams

2/25/2012

 
New York, San Francisco 1999

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

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 clumsy, my nose was too high, a whiteness too bright like neon signs in Quiapo, Paco, everywhere. I

We grew up in limbo.  Home, a American family island in the Philippine Sea. The world teemed with queasy odors and sweet aromas, Tagalog puns, wind, sun and music wilder than the middle American life of my 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. It's the curse for white fright, colonial blight, American might.

There are fish adrift in their aquariums with whom I have more in common than some 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.

Expatriate

2/25/2012

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 Expatriate \Ex*pa"tri*ate\, v. t.

[imp. & p. p. Expatriated; p. pr. & vb. n. Expatriating.] [LL. expatriatus, p. p. of expatriare; L. ex out + patria fatherland, native land, fr. pater father. See Patriot.]

1. To banish; to drive or force (a person)from his own country; to make an exile of.

The expatriated landed interest of France. --Burke.

2. Reflexively, as To expatriate one's self: To withdraw from one's native country; to renounce the rights and liabilities of citizenship where one is born, and become a citizen of another country.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

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Remembrance as a sacrament. First Sunday of Lent 1989, Richard Poethig

2/25/2012

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I am telling you this story to remember, the way my father remembers and retells his childhood crafting like God on the sixth day, humans from mud.  Sometimes God must prefer the mud.   Remembrance is a sacrament, my father the minister reminds us.  I've posted his Lenten sermon below.  It’s a sermon he preaches when he returns to the pulpit. This is years after we’ve returned to the States, and he loses his job in Chicago, my mother takes a job as Executive Presbyter of Western New York and they relocate to Buffalo, the first place they go after seminary where my father, a new minister, establishes a church.  He preaches Remembrance  four years my mother leaves her job at the PCUSA national office when her contract is  not renewed due to some smoke-filled (more ghoul than spirit) backroom negotiation. After all that, he says Remembrance is a Sacrament.

Over the years I have wanted to indict someone -- Presbyterian mission staff for neglect, the "third world" nationalist critics of mission while asking for first world grants, the do-gooder missionaries so paternal,  the culprits who betrayed my parents after all their years of service to the church. I have wanted to indict those who blend hypocrisy with piety.  But Eric Chavez told me at my first Presbyterian General Assembly  to choose my battle fields.  “No different than the battles out there;  just more manageable in the church.”  It’s his voice I hear when I decide to return to the ordination process.  Ordination, a holy conscription?

I have written patches of this story in Chicago, Minneapolis, New York City, Manila, Dumaguete, Phnom Penh, Berkeley and Watsonville. But like Penelope, who weaves and unravels nightly, I cannot finish.  Can I speak of it all - the rage, sadness and quirky humor, a sweet smell of wet earth after the rains, an apologetic look at privilege and colonial ignorance, and yes, sacramental remembrance.

I was born in Buffalo, we left soon after for Manila.
I am writing this story to save the memory and then let go. 


----
Remembrance as a Sacrament
Sermon at First Presbyterian Church, Buffalo New York
First Sunday in Lent 1989

Rev Richard Poethig

“My father was a homeless Aramean who went down to Egypt with a small company and lived there until they became a great, powerful and numerous nation.” Deuteronomy 26:3

People have a way of forgetting who they are and where they have come from.  As the generations pass they get further away from the events which shaped them as people.  The newborn do not know the struggles which others have gone through to win for them the benefits which they take for granted.

On my wall at home I have the marriage certificate of my grandfather Richard Alwin Poethig and my grandmother Pauline Roch. It is gold engraved with appropriate Scripture written in German and dated 1883 in the City of New York.  Above the picture I have my grandfather’s hand carved pipe in which he smoked the ends of his cigars.

The certificate and pipe remind me of their struggles as newcomers to this land.  My grandfather was a cigar maker and he was a strong union man. It was out of the cigar makers union that Samuel Gompers, who was also a cigarmaker from England, built the American Federation of Labor.  One of the things that impressed me was that the union back 100 years ago had “Krankenkase” – that’s German for health insurance. They also had death benefits and social security.

When I look at that marriage certificate and the pipe I remember the heritage of my grandfather, who alongside many other working people, in their unions, fought hard so that we in this land could have social security, death benefits and health insurance.  The man whose name is on those laws, the hours and wage act and social security is Robert Wagner, who knew the history and traditions of those unions.

So we need to be ever reminded of where we have come from and the struggles of those who have gone on before us.  Forgetfulness is a problem for all of us.  We forget that the fabric of the nation depends upon moral and ethical beliefs which remind us of our responsibility to a Creator.

We are not good at history in the United States, particularly religious history. The land was settled out of religious motivations and a good part of the driving force to survive in the wilderness and in the settling of the country was religiously inspired.  Even the struggle for freedom against the crown – the revolution for independence—was fought by men and women who believed in a God who alone was sovereign and was the Lord of conscience.

Very early in their history, the Jews took care that they would never forget who they were and to whom they owed their existence.  As soon as they settled in the land, after their struggles in the wilderness, it was required of the Jew to stand in the holy place, after he or she had presented the first fruits of the ground and recite: “My father was a homeless Arameaen who went down to Egypt with a small company and lived there until they became a great, powerful, and numerous nation.”  It was a story of remembrance.

They were to remember from where they had come and how they had gotten to this place. It was the story of deliverance. The chief actor in the drama was never forgotten.  “We cried unto the Lord and he heard our cry and delivered us out of the hand of the Egyptians and gave us this land.”

The land was a gift.  It was not theirs to own.  Only God owned the land. The Psalms told them that, “The earth is the Lords’ and the fullness thereof…” And when they thought that the land was theirs because of who they were, the prophets reminded them what God wanted was that they do justly.  The Lord had given them the land in the first place.

This past week I read a moving remembrance written by a Native American. It was written upon his return to his birth place after many years. He told how deeply attached he felt to his town and to the land.  It was not as an owner, since he owned nothing, but because it gave his life special meaning.

“The land is everything,” he writes, “not just the soil, the ground as a specific location.  The landscape becomes a part of you, or more accurately, you are a part of the landscape, a living part of living creation.”

He went on to point out that the great difference between the American Indian and European when they came to this continent was that the Europeans were used to abstracting the land, making title for it, and buying and selling it like any other goods.  For the Indian this could not be: "The landscape cannot be appropriated to individual ownership. It is there for all people alike, as a dimension in which we have existence with other creatures.”

The relationship of the American Indian to the land, which is close to this morning’s Scripture is summed up in the classic words of Chief Seattle, the 19th century Indian leader:
“How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.
“If you do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

“Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.  Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory of my people.  The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory of the red man”

Israel was told to remember from whence they had come.  They were told that their very freedom was a gift from the God who had delivered them from the hands of those who had enslaved them.  The land became Israel’s sign of deliverance. The land represented wholeness…joy…well being.  Israel was reminded that the land could not be separated from God the Creator, whose it is.

This story is our story as well.  We remember all those who have brought us to this place.  We remember everything we have is only ours as we use it for the wellbeing of the earth.  We remember that our greatest gift is the freedom which we have to believe.  We guard even the right of those who choose not to believe.  But even they have to be reminded of the sacrifices made by those that they could have this freedom.

Remembrance is a sacrament.  When we engage in remembering we become a part of the history which has created us.  We cannot remember without reenacting the sacrifices which have been made for us to bring us to this place.

Jesus knew that.  That is why we have the Lord’s Supper.  At our Agape Meal this past Ash Wednesday we reenacted the sacrifice – the giving without asking.  So we would never forget…Jesus tells us: “This is my body…this is my blood…do this in remembering me. “

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arrival

2/25/2012

 
I was late; didn’t want to arrive on an even-numbered day.  Better the 17th or 19th of April.

Juliet, my grandmother, asked Eunice her daughter to schedule my birth around her League of Women Voters meeting. "I'll take care of Scott, if you can arrange it."  That's Scott, my hyper two-year-old brother. "I have to speak in Akron."

So Eunice packed for the hospital as if for PanAm. I was “induced” from her anesthetized body, a body she was never comfortable wearing, pulled out wet and wiggling into the florescent lights of the delivery room, held by my heels like a baby bat. My psyche's marked by celestial forces scrambling to congeal in the wee hours of the 16th, Neptune in my sun sign, spiritual but unmoored. I have my mother's black hair, my grandmother's spirit of travel, but neither of their discipline.


Picture
Four maternal generations, right to left. My great (maiden) Aunt May, grandmother Juliet Blanchard, mother Eunice, and me Kathryn Aileen Poethig. At Pine Knot, the family cabin on Archibald Lake, Wisconsin.

    Kerry (Kathryn) Poethig

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

    Picture

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