Pinay power Book

Part of why it took me so long to finish this book is that I kept having new insights about the immense-yet-unexamined impact of imperialism and racism on my life and on my communities--and with every insight, getting mad/disoriented and having to put the book down until I'd calmed down enough for another round.

"...The representation of the fish-hair woman...rests at the cusp of life and death, sustenance and destruction, human and godlike as she states, 'After I fished out a boy's body, which nobody claimed, the cracks began to show...I screamed, and for the first time the village that had forgotten how to cry, saw that perhaps I was beginning to remember how, behind all sockets, there can be no real drought for the eye. You who read this and shiver at this macabre war, may you never pretend that you have forgotten.'" - From "Fish-Hair Woman" by Merlinda Bobis, as quoted in "Through Our Pinay Writings," Marie-Therese C. Sulit, p. 368.

"To ask, 'The Filipina woman: who and what is she?' in a radical way is to see her status, and the state of affairs in which she holds that status, as in a state of emergency - indeed, a state of war" (p. 375).

"Being a Filipina American means being postcolonial--after colonization, but certainly not over colonization....'Decolonization is a psychological and physical process that enables the colonized to understand and overcome the depths of alienation and marginalization caused by colonization. By transforming consciousness through the reclamation of one's cultural self and the recovery and healing of traumatic memory, the colonized can become agents of their own destiny...' ...Being mestiza means struggling between physical and metaphysical cultural borders, struggling to maintain a consistent and coherent identity despite the fact that the dominant culture attempts to disaggregate you...You personify the colonizer at the same time that you are colonized; you participate in the colonization of yourself; and...you invoke the 'legacy of the ilustrados' grounded in elitist structures of Spanish colonialism. You embody privilege, which is considered either detestable or enviable--and sometimes both at once....your enviable status derives from privilege and marks you as complicit in hegemonic structures of racial and economic oppression...Through the process of decolonization, you come to realize that the aspects of your identity that you had long taken for granted are actually tied to global discourses of colonial imperialism. As you recover colonial history, you are startled at how easily it explains pieces of your life...You come to understand that your life, your family, your day-to-day actions that were once so personal are actually part and parcel of particular social constructions of race, gender, class, and nation. You inherit these structures by virtue of being born. And then--only after processing painful emotions, uncovering relevant historical context, and reocognizing your relationship to others in the trajectory of the past and present--you begin to comprehend your life. You are exhausted. But now you are ready to begin" (p. 32-34).

"Now I laugh when I look at the sea of brown and yellow faces that stare back at the white men. The hordes they have condemned have followed them back into their own house...Go ahead, order your brides from the catalogs. You think that Filipinas are the last dream girls in the world? How naive! No one has learned how to subvert and resist the colonial gaze better than the mail-order bride...Yes I know---there is anger and defiance in my voice. How can I help it? I have not spoken for centuries. I didn't know I had a voice. I didn't know I could speak...Move on--to where? There is no place I could go where there is an escape from my split self. For I know the white father has become a part of me and I am in his shadow. I couldn't return the projected darkness without being torn apart...This is also an attempt at simultaneous re-presentation: indigenization and multiculturality, the latter anchored in indigeneity in order to keep it centered..." (p. 25)