NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

 In his book Saina Chamorro poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez does something that really intrigued me. I recently wrote a review essay of his three poetry books hacha, Saina and Guma', and this was one thing that caught my eye. Throughout parts of the book he includes the names of soldiers from Micronesia, who will serving in the US military were killed in the Middle East, in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq. He lists them in the way that is customary for KIA lists, with their age and a hometown. He crosses out however everything except their names.  The tactic of crossing things out can be a beautiful strategy. I used to use it alot before, most notably in my article "The (Un)exceptional Life of a Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA. The act of crossing it out can mean that this doesn't really exist. It can be a way of de-emphasizing something. It can be a way of drawing attention to it, albeit in a circu...

Hollywood Cowardice A Deadline Interview with George Clooney Mike Fleming December 18, 2014 EXCLUSIVE : As it begins to dawn on everyone in Hollywood the reality that Sony Pictures was the victim of a cyberterrorist act perpetrated by a hostile foreign nation on American soil, questions will be asked about how and why it happened, ending with Sony cancelling the theatrical release of the satirical comedy The Interview because of its depiction of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. One of those issues will be this: Why didn’t anybody speak out while Sony Pictures chiefs Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton were embarrassed by emails served up by the media, bolstering the credibility of hackers for when they attached as a cover letter to Lynton’s emails a threat to blow up theaters if The Interview was released? George Clooney has the answer. The most powerful people in Hollywood were so fearful to place themselves in the cross hairs of hackers that they a...

Guam is on the edge of another large buildup of forces. The political stumbling blocks that existed in Washington D.C. for several years, stalling and slowing the US military buildup are now disappearing. The buildup isn't the psychotic, frenetic, diplomatic-cocaine-fueled nightmare that it was almost ten years ago when it was first announced and proposed. It is somewhat smaller and will take place over a longer period. At that time, the focus was on Pagat. Now, new locations have been mixed in, Fena, Litekyan, Pagan and Tinian. These sites were always there on the map of American militarization in the Marianas. There are maps that link them together. There are study documents that discuss and theorize them in tandem. There are lists of resources or assets in the regions that connect them. In some ways, when the US military and its analysts and its decision-makers look at the region, they do a much better job linking locations together than many activists or even average people...

I didn’t grow up singing any Chamorro Christmas songs. There was little to no Chamorro in my house growing up in Mangilao. We celebrated Christmas, but didn’t do it in the way that many Chamorros do it. Where it involves a bilen, the creation of a nativity scene, the making of bunelos dagu, or the singing of Chamorro Christmas songs, the majority of which are Catholic in nature. So learning about Chamorro Christmas experiences, the stereotypical, more general kind is bewildering in a way. I am coming into traditions that people who sometimes know far less Chamorro language than I do and much much less Chamorro knowledge or history than I do, know more intimately than I do. To them these experiences are commonplace, are normal, are kind of boring. For me they are interesting. While for most of my students the idea of gathering material for a bilen is irritating and frustrating, it is intriguing to me. Something I would like to do one day, not because of any affec...

Ti este i minagahet put i minalago'-hu para Krismas. Guaha mas malago'-hu para i familia-ku para i manguinaiya-ku siha. Lao gi este na tiempo, anai fihu manstrinessed hit todu, maolek na ta hahasso este na siniente, i nina'chalek gi kuttura-ta. Gi minagahet sen ti ya-hu bunelos dagu. Ga'o-ku todu i otro klasin bunelos kinu este. Ya-hu bunelos manglo, bunelos aga', bunelos manha, bunelos mangga, bunelos pina. Lao ya-hu na rumhyme dagu yan hagu gi fino' Chamoru. 

What's Going On This Is What It Means For Me To Teach Your White, Privileged Kids Written by Linda Chavers 11/30/2014 http://damemagazine.com/2014/11/30/what-it-means-me-teach-your-white-privileged-kids I'm an educator. I teach English at one of the top independent boarding schools in the world. I'm also a Black woman. With a Masters in English, which qualifies me to teach it, and a Ph.D. in African-American Studies from Harvard University, which, among other things, scares the shit out of everyone. Yet, here I am, in rural New England, teaching the literature of my choice and with an interdisciplinary bent (read: African-American) and how to write the personal essay to a mostly White, upper-class population. And this is a good thing. When applying to grad schools I wrote in my personal statement that my presence in a classroom is a revolutionary act. I fill a space of authority that is still very much White, male and very...

This semester I was very excited to offer a new course, Tiningo' Tinifok at UOG, which focused on teaching the basics for weaving. We had 12 students for the class, who learned how to weave a variety of objects in both hagon niyok (coconut leaf) and akgak (pandanus). I look forward to offering more courses like this in the future, which focus on material culture and traditional knowledge and make academic connections between the two. Here are some images from the class:

 Even though almost everyone in the world will probably tell you that democracy is the greatest system of government in the world, that doesn't mean that people don't loathe it. People will generally loathe their own particular forms of democracy and only praise or love it when its existence is being shaded or overshadowed by some competing alternative. But even though they may loathe the ideas of Senators, Mayors, Governors or Presidents as being positions that are often held by cheats and liars, they tend to either tolerate or like the people who actually hold those positions. In a purely commonsensical level you might assume that since Congress is so incredibly unpopular, people would be in a hurry to vote out all incumbents and bring in fresh blood. You may think that since nearly everyone on Guam complains about Senators or Governors as being self-interested crooks who don't do anything more than wave by roadsides, no one in Guam's history would ever g...

Body Matters   Keira Knightley's latest photoshoot is a protest against all the Photoshopping she's ever received   Kit Steinkellner November 4, 2014   When you think of a protest, you tend to think of picket signs, sit-ins, rhyming chants,and so on and so forth. What you usually DON’T think of is a topless celebrity photo shoot. However, that’s exactly what actress Keira Knightley had done with her recent photo shoot for Interview —she turned her shoot into a protest. She posed topless for the magazine on the condition that Interview would not enlarge her breasts in post-production, something that apparently happens to Knightley’s photographs constantly. Case in point, check out the (virtual) boob job Knightley received when she was featured as Guinevere on the poster of her 2004  film King Arthur. That is a cup size difference for sure. If I were Keira Knightley I’d be weirded out by my body always looking like someone else’s body ev...

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’m traveling this week and so it gives me quite a bit of down time on planes, with little to do other than get airsick. A few years ago I was watching quite a bit of anime and one thing I really enjoyed doing was taking anime theme songs, from shows like Gantz, Naruto and Cromartie High School and then translating them into Chamorro. Each translation was an interesting experiment, since although many of these shows are considered to be low-plebian culture, pop culture animated shadows on the cave wall for the masses, the lyrics to the theme songs tend to have a very epic and sophisticated feel to them.   These songs presented interesting challenges since translating them directly would be difficult and not necessarily match well with Chamorro. But finding ways of expressing similar epic thoughts in Chamorro, while trying to maintain a sense of the language would be fun and worthwhile. I still read manga regularly even...