I'm Not Ready to Make Nice

There has been a small spike in the amount of hate mail that I get in the past two weeks, and its one of the things thats been slowing me down.

There's actually plenty of things slowing me down lately, but I'm slowly trying to get them organized and together. I'm trying to prepare to support my new baby for the fall. I'm working on getting my prospectus done by the end of the school year. I'm preparing for the 2nd Famoksaiyan conference which is scheduled for April 20-22. I'm also preparing for the conference Crossing Borders 2007: Ghosts, Monsters and The Dead which my department is hosting this weekend, where I'm also presenting a paper.

Hate mail, makes a hectic and crazy schedule even crazier. It sucks energy into the writing of nasty and hurried responses which sometimes make you flush with power and pride at the way you vanquished your nemesis' stupid points, but also makes you wrecked with anticipation for their response.

I have been getting hate mail for years, from different points. The first forms came in 2003 from my posts on the Chamorro.com message board. The spats on that board now take an eerily contradictory quality in my memories. While they seem almost childish in comparision to the sometimes very angry emails I get now, they also sometimes appear almost genuis-like compared to the very stupid emails I get now. In an interesting twist, Chamorro.com is one of the websites I'm now in charge of.

From 2003-2004, I started a number of websites, and this only increased drastically the number of points from which I would then receive hate mail. First in 2003 I started the website Kopbla Amerika and the collective the Chamorro Information Activists, which collected together a number of different writings from myself and others about many of the issues I deal with here on this blog, colonization, silences about contemporary colonization. I haven't updated this website in almost three years, yet every couple of weeks I receive an angry email from some idiot who wandered onto the website. I'll be posting about one such stupid email in a few days.

Then I started the zine Minagahet, which thankfully unlike Kopbla Amerika, is still going relatively strong. For those of you who don't know, this zine is dedicated to a number of things, primarily among them is Guam's decolonization. I'm in volume 5 right now, issue 30 in all, and the next version will be coming out this week. I'm just waiting for the final draft of the Call for Presentations for the Mina'dos Dinana Famoksaiyan to be approved.

After I started this zine, I was appalled to receive just as many angry, annoyed and over-critical emails, as I did emails of support. Often times the annoying emails would be from people who should have supported the zine, but decided that it was more important to nickpick at issues such as language. I have often complained about the differences between big and small languages. Big languages are ones which those who speak them, (regardless of how "big" the language actually is) feel that everyone should know or speak them. Small languages are those languages which those who speak them, become obsessed with not whether or not they are being spoken or used, but their miniscule, often times stupid details. You can see clearly the difference between these languages in the way they are taught. If you've ever taken a Chamorro language class, whether in high school, middle school, elementary or college, it is vastly different than taking courses for "big" languages. The teaching of big languages often feels like boot camp, and you are expected to take the learning of the language seriously, and often times you crammed with information You are to be overwhelmed with the language, since it is much much larger than you. The teaching of small languages, is far less serious, more laid back, you are often times not even taught how to make sentences or how to speak the language, but instead inundated with vocabulary lists, or speeches about how old, deep or profound the language is, without ever being seriously taught it! The language is perceived to be so small, that its almost as if you treat it as something to be protected/preserved from being destroyed by not treating it like a real language!

Over the years, one of my biggest frustrations has been from people who treat Chamorro as a small language, and become obsessed with correcting things which aren't incorrect, but almost as if a stupid game to play to keep one from actually saving the language. From Minagahet to this blog, I receive the most frustrating emails from Chamorros who say I am using a term incorrectly, or say that it is wrong to use a term simply because they haven't heard it before, or haven't heard it used that way before. It becomes very tiresome after a while, because these are people who speak the language, but whose kids do not speak the language, or are not actively teaching the language in ways which is keeping it alive, but insist on putting hours and hours or energy and time into writing stupid emails to me. And me, knowing full well that my Chamorro is not very good, actually entertain so many of these people. But so many times, what people write me has nothing to do with whether or not my Chamorro is incorrect, but with them trying to inflate their own egos, to prove that they speak the language really really good, and so just by proving that they have that superior knowledge, they can by default claim and feel that they are doing their part in saving and revitalizing Chamorro.

In the early years of Minagahet, I started a mail bag in which I responded to some of the angry or critical emails I was receiving, but after it the emails got more and more diverse, more annoying, more frustrating I had to stop it. The hate mail still bothers me, sometimes it can be extremely personal, and other times even if it has nothing to do with me personally, it can end up consuming my mind for several hours or ruining my day.

Since starting this blog No Rest for the Awake - Minagahet Chamorro in 2004, I've gotten more and more right wing, patriotic military hate mail, from Chamorros and non-Chamorros, and that has surprisingly been easier to deal with than that which is obsessed with proving that I speak bad Chamorro or people obsessed with proving to me that they speak fantastic Chamorro. The fortunate thing for me is that those who want to contest my points on this blog about Guam the history of the United States and Guam would need to know alot about Guam history, and certainly more than I do. Chances are, unless they've set aside alot of time to read about Guam, Chamorros, their history, their contemporary existence, then all the flag-waving, GovGuam sucks rhetoric doesn't mean very much.

So over the years, I've found different ways of mitigating the damage these emails have on me. One of them has been finding songs which I can listen to while I write, to remind me of the importance of the things that I do, and how there are so many people out there who are invested in different ways in keeping things the same. Whether it be American superiority and exportation of violence, the continued colonization of Guam, the egotistical stubborness of those who would rather feel special that they speak a language well and watch it die, than keep it alive and fluid, each of these positions represent those who want us to back down, to shut up, to simply play nice. To be good colonial subjects, to wave away our rights with their flags, to hurry up and die like the rest of the indigenous people of the world.

One song which has been helping me lately, deal with those who want the status quo, who want to maintain the structures of violence, inequality, colonization, is the song "I'm Not Ready to Play Nice" by the Dixie Chicks. I'm posting below a Youtube video of their Grammy performance a few weeks ago, as well as the lyrics. Si Yu'us Ma'ase, para i minesngon-miyu, ya ti en tinok pappa', ti en na'famatkilun maisa. Bai hu dalalak i hemplon-miyu, bai hu sigi ha' mumu, bai hu sigi' ha' mo'na.

Dixie Chicks, "Not Ready to Make Nice,"

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting

I'm through, with doubt,
There's nothing left for me to figure out,
I've paid a price, and i'll keep paying

I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

I know you said
Why can't you just get over it,
It turned my whole world around
and i kind of like it

I made by bed, and I sleep like a baby,
With no regrets and I don't mind saying,
It's a sad sad story
That a mother will teach her daughter
that she ought to hate a perfect stranger.
And how in the world
Can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Saying that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting