NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Don't get me started about Israel. Mungga mana'kuentos yu' put Israel. My blood is already boiling just thinking about it. Siempre bai kinahulo'guan anggen kumuentos yu' put este. A ray of hope was spotted recently for Palestinians, but like most things it could be short lived or meaningless since even the notion of "hope" in Palestine, like everything else is something Israel strives to control and quash. Their partial recognition by the United Nations is a big symbolic step, but how will it help stop the daily abuse and daily stranglehold that Israel has over The Occupied Territories? The resolution from the United Nations is pasted below. ***************** Status of Palestine in the United Nations The General Assembly, Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and stressing in this regard the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, Recalling its resolution 2625 (XXV) of 24 October 1970...

In the film The Matrix, the Agent Smith played by Hugo Weaving holds a short, but memorable philosophical session with his captive, resistance fighter Morpheus. He tells him about the first versions of the Matrix that were created in order to keep the imprisoned human population occupied while their energies were siphoned from them like batteries. In the early versions of the Matrix everything was perfect. It was like paradise, free of conflict and problems. It was a perfect world. That perfection is what made it impossible for humans to accept, and so when confronted with this perfect world humans rejected it wholesale and so those early versions of the Matrix were total failures. So instead of having the Matrix make people happy and give them a perfect world, the machines decided to give them a world similar to what they already knew. Imperfect, full of struggle, pain, loneliness, doubt and rejection. People accepted this and the Matrix continued to functi...

If any of you have ever wondered what a page of the manga Lone Wolf and Cub would look like translated into Chamorro, here is a page from one of my favorite issues. I wrote about this exchange a few weeks back in my post titled " Lone Wolf and Bamboo Spear ."

Articles on the brutal crackdown in Gaza by Israel from the website Common Dreams.    *************** Published on Monday, November 19, 2012 by the Independent/UK Journalistic Cliches: 'Surgical Air Strikes', 'Rooting Out Terror', and 'Cyber-Terrorism' Cannot Conceal Reality by Robert Fisk     Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Here we go again. Israel is going to “root out Palestinian terror” – which it has been claiming to do, unsuccessfully, for 64 years – while Hamas, the latest in “Palestine’s” morbid militias, announces that Israel has “opened the gates of hell” by murdering its military leader, Ahmed al-Jabari. Hezbollah several times announced that Israel had “opened the gates of hell” for attacking Lebanon. Yasser Arafat, who was a super-terrorist, then a super-statesman – after capitulating on the White House lawn – and then became a super-terrorist again when he ...

I feel like I haven't been posting much and I'm not sure how true this is.  I feel like I've been neglecting several things this month because of work and also because I'm participating in NaNoWriMo. The goal of National Novel Writing Month is to write 50,000 words of your novel before the end of the month. Right now, with five days left to go I am at 35,000 words. I am pretty certain I can make it, but with all my other obligations as well, I'm starting to feel the crunch.  I wanted to share an early part of my novel. It is titled "The Legend of the Chamurai" and tells the store of how Samurai and Chamorro warriors end up defeating a Spanish invasion of Guam in 1616. This story takes place over 600 years with different makahna or Chamorros with magical and superhuman abilities try to keep hope alive of defeating a mysterious force that will come to obliterate them. Part of the fun of this story is that I get to bring into a...

One of the high points of my life was the conference Famoksaiyan: Decolonizing Chamorro Histories, Identities and Futures. It was a gathering, the first of its kind, which I helped organize in San Diego in 2006. Chamorros living in the United States have for long held gatherings and formed organizations to keep their cultural and family ties. These organizations would focus around shared village ties or the Chamorro calendar, and so each year there are village patron saint fiestas and Liberation Day events from California to Nebraska to Florida. While these gatherings would be fun and help families keep their ties even across great distances, they were hardly political affairs. They were meant to celebrate Chamorros as a social, cultural and religious group, and so more serious topics affecting Chamorros weren’t usually discussed. Myself and several other Chamorros attending college in the states decided that we wanted to create a space where Chamorros, esp...

My pare' Julian Aguon always talks about people on Guam today having no imagination. How they cannot see the world as having any richness or possibility, especially in a local context. They see the world through dependency and inadequacy, and as such everything around them, especially the future is fearful and frightening. You feel like you can't do anything because the delicate threads that you depend upon might snap if you do.  I agree with this metaphor for understanding things on Guam, but I often use "dreams" instead. Dreams are closely related to imagination. Imagination is what you can see, how you can stretch what you take as given in the world and expand it and push it, and hopefully yourself further. Dreams are what you see as possible, viable or beautiful as you move towards the future. It is a question of desire and what you want. Imagination is what you can want, dreams are an indication of what you want and where you see yourself moving in order t...

I haven't been painting much lately, but I decided to do something about that last week and ended up painting several faces using watercolors. These are two that I submitted to the Creative Hands Exhibition at the Isla Center for the Arts. There titles are "Hot Woman" and "Cold Woman." I really like how they turned out. I hope they accept both pieces as I think they contrast each other nicely.

History has a way of reminding you that what you take for granted today did not exist in the past, and worse yet, there may have been a point in the past when what you take for granted today was unimaginable. There is one quote from Robert Underwood that sums of this strange way that history can haunt people and deprive them of a feeling of essentialness with the present. It comes from his essay "Teaching Guam History in Guam High Schools" and it talks about the position of Chamorros from 1898-1941 in relation to the United States. The Chamorro people were not Americans, did not see themselves as Americans-in-waiting, and probably did not care much about being Americans. The US relationship during that period was unapologetically colonial. The US didn't have a colonial office as other countries did, but instead just colonized Guam through the US Navy and racist and paternalistic rhetoric/policies. The US Navy preached the glories of its nation in Guam, but Chamor...