Reading fiction on Mindanao

After reading the memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" I was forced to rethink the way I've been perceiving fiction and in turn the way I've been understanding reality. Two hundred pages into that book I saw the two shift. I had set the book down and wandered out into an empty field in the "urban" poor community where I was spending most of January. I grazed the tips of the high grass with my fingers and let the sun pour onto my pale skin like language flowing over a page turn.

What is to live? Is it to only live for the revolution? Whether for wealth or for change, is living for one physical concept any different than another? Most revolutionaries think themselves to be superior to capitalists because they live for the cause, not for money. But what is a cause in the realm of the ancients? Causes fade, as does justice, just like money. Surely I will keep fighting and will only further dedicate myself to the rights of the people, the katawhan but where are the people in the context of the universe? I did not see them in the field, only the grass and a goat and the sky that was busy hiding the stars. The revolution did not warm my face or dirty my shoes. The field did not speak, but it was not silent. The reality could not contain its beauty and its desire to be known.

Fighting for something hardly means we should live for it. Seeking truth hardly means we should be bound in it. The foil of truth is not always lies, sometimes it's unreality- the parts of being that cannot be contained on such a fragile planet. Or really, just cannot be perceived by our weak sense. Because the beauty of fiction and the neverworlds can be right in front of us, as it was when it wrapped around my galoshes in an empty field almost swallowed by the foliage. And its pull is nothing I resisted, I grasped onto it and wept for it.

"I'm sorry I'd forgotten you," I said with my toes curled up inside the rubber boots. Toes don't talk and fields don't answer but that's why the most important things in life never really happen.

Colonized mentality

My host mother, Cita, never tries to explain. Whenever I don't quite understand her Visaya or she doesn't understand mine, instead of trying to work through the gap between us, she immediately runs to get someone who knows some English. Often I just need her to speak slower or gesture, so her helplessness in communicating with me is very frustrating. And her helplessness comes with shame; shame that she doesn't speak English, shame that she is wasting a white woman's time. And the insanity of it all is that we we're in HER country, in HER house and yet she feels at fault for our lack of common speak.

It's moments like this that I feel the sadness creeping back in, ever-present, ever-ready to take over one more time. It tempts me with the safety and familiarity. Do I like being depressed, do I like the feeling of utter loneliness? It's a drug. A drug I know because it served me well for such a long time. And in this country of color-based isolation and overwhelming poverty, it's an easy script to fill.

And I want it to fill me. I want to slip back into the place I know and clothe myself in my long-time companion. I love it, I hate it, I want it because it's frightening to not know the woman who shows up in the mirror. And that woman is changing everyday as I grow here. The girl with puffy eyes and the empty smile is my friend, the woman covered in mud and talking about small-scale revolution is from another planet.

Successful colonization is when the oppressed willingly give their souls to the colonizer because they don't know who they are without the foreign invader. Cita and I hide our eyes for different reasons, but our mutual darkness fills the air in leaky two-roomed shack. It slips in from the holes in the ceiling and the cracks in the floor. It seizes our hearts and creeps into our dreams as the soft rain on the rusted tin roof.