“I’m not colon-cleansing. I’m decolonizing. Tiny difference”, I said to my friend. It’s amazing how small nuances in language can beffudle the conversation, especially because I spoke in English, and after a lifetime of being taught this in schools from Day One, it is still foreign to us. My grandmother used to teach me A is for Apple reinforcing what I learned in school. I had begun to read when I was 3. She had started to build me a library. When I began to go to school, my classmates didn’t know what an Apple is. They were imported and they cost 4 times the local fruits. She had to learn A is for Apple. And she was passing it down to me. And she could afford an apple.
When my grandmother passed away when I was 18. Her eldest daughter, my dad’s eldest sibling, became my new strong woman model. She reminded me often of the women generals of our revolution against the Spanish in the 1890s. But she is about 85 now. I called her last night, she had refused to eat in 3 days and she was confined. She told me she was fine but she had been wanting to die. I asked, “Are you feeling sad?” She said, “No. I’m just ready to go.”
This woman doted on me for most of my life. Streams of planned death I recently learned in the West began to flood my mind. We should let her go. But there is no way in our culture that would let her. Then again, which culture? The Spanish conquered us for 400 years. When they came to the Philippines, we had Muslim religious and political structures that didn’t force themselves upon us. But the Spanish forced Catholicism upon us, almost wiping out even our pre-Muslim history and our claims to Sanskrit, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
Growing up, I learned about romantic love from sad songs. Filipinos have a knack for sad, sappy, melodramatic, really cheesy songs. We like looking to each other for affirmation. We are happy to need each other and be there for each other. We know that needing is a human experience and is a humanizing experience. My grandmother needed me when I was 3. My grandfather had just died then. And as I was introduced to her during the wake, she saw my light. The little me, in her home, stumbled upon the tallest staircase I had seen in my life, and I was trying to climb the very first step when I muttered, “Why, I’m just going to fall already!” From that moment on, everyone saw my grandma’s face light up and they never wanted me to leave her. So she brought me up, taught me to read, played word games with me so patiently, and for heaven’s sakes, she gave me my first Raybans when I was 6 because I had contracted conjunctivitis.
Decolonizing, like colon-cleansing, is not a painless process. It’s as painful to learn, when I was in my adolescence, that when other families welcomed me and my grandmother into their home, it wasn’t because I was a bright kid, although she would constantly show me off. But I was in grandmother’s shadow. Like I was my grandmother. But slowly as I was growing up, I would feel that they were looking at me more as a separate person. Separation is painful. But in a way, I have to separate myself from my grandmother’s Eden. I’ve had to feel my nakedness without her cloak of unconditional approval. I’ve had to fumble and fail and experiment with who I am.
Jiddu Krishnamurti was brought up to be Messiah. His real mother died when he was 10 and he grew up under the tutelage of Annie Besant who schooled him in the Great Britain to be a Messiah and she founded an institution for it. Upon Krishnamurti’s homecoming to India, he disengaged from the movement and said, “A Messiah is someone who leaves a whole mess behind him.” With regard to separation, he said it is violent. “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of humanity. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So anyone who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; they are concerned with the total understanding of humanity.”
Am I separating myself with violence when I’m decolonizing? I still grapple with the concept of a People of Color meeting. It’s basically a group of people who know they belong to races. Don’t we all belong to one race or another? Are we presupposing that a People of No Race must exist outside of a People of Color meeting? And why are most of the People of Color stuck with lower ranking positions? Is race a stigma? And is White an illusion of no race? Why don’t we call it People of Races and welcome everyone and see how that works? Can we talk about theories and not just about discrimination? Can our imagination for a better world be seen as a formidable option and heard without having to be seen as marginalized or having to invoke patronizing approval?
Yes, we can.
We have done it in the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists. It is a living People of Races conversation. Two months ago, our last convention was in the Netherlands. All six continents are represented about 100 delegates from like 40 countries. And we all feel heard.
Aristotle probably started problems when he wrote “Categories” around 400 BC to become what Stanford notes as “a singularly important work of philosophy”. Now the West needs to put everything in boundaries and boxes. Meanwhile, the Filipino doesn’t even have an English word for privacy. When I met a Filipina here recently. I immediately let her in my apartment and as we talked and she found me dozing off, she let me nap in her presence. That’s the trust we give. Nothing was stolen. We are still friends.
Now grappling with my second mother’s wish on her death, I have to move outside of my culture and see how she could be pleased with her own death. I am happy “planned death” is a concept that has not been forced upon us and has not colonized us. I can be comfortable with that option. Sadly, I don’t think anyone else in the family will support her. They have been colonized by Catholicism. They can’t even make sense of my religion, my sexuality, or my personality. Meanwhile, I find the West most welcoming to my spiritual wranglings and theological propositions, except when some White people talk over me or appropriate my ideas as if they had spoken it. As if I did not earn my status as project manager for projects of Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Iberia, and Obamacare.
I’ve been Westernized. And yet not enough.
Inside me, there’s the islander who constantly travels among the 7,107 islands of the Philippines encountering 110 languages. There’s always a beach in my soul. The humor of the breeze and the surf are embedded in my spirit. And for the West, that is not a good platform for formidable challenges in thought.
How can anyone be angry in those islands dripping with gold, platinum and nickel deposits and oil? How can anyone think of conquering other countries within such abundance of wealth, joy, love, and cultures? Such privilege must be shared, they would say. But our answer is : Only reciprocal love can muster consent. Reciprocal being the operative word. Meanwhile, no means no. They have awakened an angry Filipino. And he won’t be speaking for himself but for the rest of the disgruntled world. And many more will be angered until we learn to listen to those who are not angry.
In the West, the icon of the limitless man, symbol of neoliberalism, spared from scrutiny for being fabulous, able to pontificate for speaking the language of the dominant, conquering hearts and minds by inspiring us to aspire for more and more and more, is not healing the world.
The world wasn’t meant for any one to be always right.
It is a broken world. A broken long-Westernized world.
The work of social justice does not begin with remedying an injustice. Let not an injustice begin that work. It begins by listening, empathy, and being aware that one needs limits. No means no.
Change works only through people. Change first inhabits conversation before it can inhabit the world. Change loves the margins. Let’s listen more intently. And be led from the margins.
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