Identity and land

Why do I focus on the Philippines?
There are lots of countries
and identities that make up me
and the world.
am I ethnocentric to fixate
by gazing on a land I was never born in?

This question of who I am
tugs at this place my first cries
never echoed in
Yet somewhere within my cries
came from a voice who spoke a language
that I do not understand
but she continues to speak
and plead that I do.
She cries next to a rocky river
with little pebbles
and she holds herself
rocking back and forth
while a bundle of something
lies lifeless
In the warm embrace of the sun
She holds herself mumbling
to her hair that covers her face
in a mess
I watch her and her bark like clothes
that wrap her body
her face ape like
characteristic of what kids called me in
middle school.
Mono
monkey
Filipino

What is this memory
I gained from a sweat
Crying in the dirt
because of visions of me hating self
in front of a smoky mirror reflection

This memory is a desire
to see my unseen self
a self beyond my life
that I trace to roots within an unknown land
but with memories farther away
in another secret place
that I don't know
I have know allegiance to.
No access too because
they were burned and buried
underneath lies of identities
I took on
wanting to be who I am not.
A Hawaiian girl
An American Girl
A Something girl
An international girl

Why do I look to the PHilippines
for the source of some answer
some insight
some clue
to this shifting self
that is doomed to explode and rupture
as earthquakes are necessary
as transformation is the nature of this life

Can this Philippines be the magma
that moves me?
Can this PHilppines be the core
that has accumulated pressure
and thrown me across the globe
to another place of other rocks

What is this country that looks like me
But does not reflect me
But states think me of it.
I stand on histories,
intersecting histories
imaginations
dreams
fairy tales
art
culture
that is me
I am not a root
but a sprout from a long branch
that originated somewhere
where the root was burned to a stump,
but somehow this sprout of a branch
was fertilzed in a new soil
watered by cultures that taught me
different ways to quench
What a strange place for me to ask
What of this Philippines.

This Philippines that defines the way the structures
gaze on me
and teach people to look at me
When I look out in defiance
with snarled gaze
with wrinkled forehead
with unapproachable demeaner
An angry beast
Roaming the grid line streets
Bottled in a body of easy
justifiable target
What a peculiar place to be

This Philippines
tells me what to hope for
in myself
What can I grasp on
to define myself?
What can I relate to say
this is myself?
A land that is not itself
that is sold like a slave
to a market of condescending gazes.
A land that is primped and pomped
to be raped and dumped
by international boyfriends
who have allegiance
to wives of their nationality
What is this dream that paints my
imagination?

The past is not happy
But one we fled
The self we fled
The love we fled

To get used to separation
To survive on separation
And now to think about the pain of separation
as a way to resist its continuation

Wow, Philippines.
Thats how I think of you
This place I hate
but now learn to love
because mom told me to love myself
as a Filipino.
But in my imagination
I do not love it for the same reasons
you tell me.
I love it for reasons you
have no understanding of.

I look to the Philippines because
I want to find the reasons why I
can trace a proud ancestry
and not feel alone anymore
in this place where no mountains
reflect my hope and dreams.
I want to tell my reasons
why I do have an identity
that is sad and angry
because the fire still burns
although you are afraid to see it.
I want look at the Philippines
because it incites passion
to be
to think
to remember
to feel what was to be forgotten

Fuck you who asks me
Why Philippines
and not other countries in the world
Because Philippines is who I am
and who I am not supposed to be.
I want to tell you otherwise that
it is who I am and who I am going to be
and therefore
telling you that I will not be silenced