To Kiev with Love

These days I am a little stimulated. Yesterday or day before yesterday Germelina wanted to know where was I, still in Zamboanga or still in Jolo? I wanted to ask if they want for me to cover the escape from captivity of the Bansil sisters, hot copy that would be, but I don’t like melodramas, people who were not there suddenly turning up to congratulate the two kids whose dad they knew for escaping from hell?

I cover my own non-story of non-captivity and I would rather nobody reads me even after I survived.

Weeks before I went to Jolo, friends warned me against coming to Jolo. They kidnap anyone here, big time or small time, no discrimination. Don’t come around these days, they advised.

Okay, I said.

Do I fear the Abu Sayaf? I don’t know. I feel something akin to fear when I cross the street full of soldiers. What if someone took the notion of shooting at the exact moment that I put my body on his line of fire? 

I’d like to think they’re just like me. They’re just like anyone. A bunch of armed fucks trying to make out. It's not their fault if nobody taught them correct political lines. None of them perhaps cares about political lines or about God and whatever it is up there that looks down on them. Then, I do not really think hard before I get on to something. Like going to Jolo. Or doing work in Jolo. Or setting a program or an office in Jolo. Who wants me there? What could I want from there other than more of the same thing I already have in excess.

And I don’t really differentiate between big moves and small moves; high-risk or small-risk; they amount to the same non-sacrifice to me. They make so much of not going abroad earning dollars or euros in consultancy fees rather than doing social work among the poverty-reduction cuckoos, as though when they leave the godforsaken country they can make something out of their godforsaken social welfare careers. So much for migration. It’s a nice name for dissolution. Got that from Zadie Smith, not from Mariam Gagosh.

Weeks ago Kim poked me.I will put the Jolo girls online, she said. We are a bunch of illiterates when it comes to friggin' hosting and all this web thing and she said yesso, most of these lgbt ezines are so-so, people getting away with certain lifestyles in the name of advocacy. The Jolo guys had more to offer.

Whoaa!  I almost flew in my seat. I haven't told her as yet that I said something like that to her ex, that Mary whom the ex called alpha omega female was the sleuth not her and that did it. She never spoke to me again.  I also cannot tell Kim that the more I know, the less I feel for our kind. At times when I feel awfully down I fear that I will abandon all my beliefs, in lesbianhood and feminism included.

Fortunately for Facebook, it has its uses. I gloat at sightings of feminists into self-defense, demands for safe abortion, decriminalization of prostitution. Just a couple of years back, maybe three, Sara, a natdem gun from UP Diliman spoke in a women conference in Davao. It was March 8 if I remember it right. And she damned shopping-rights feminism, like feminism is all about that. Like what daphnie and carol appreciated with gender hogging the headlines. The flights of stairs of Ateneo de Davao are not gender-sensitive, they say. Girls in stiletto heels are bound to trip and fall. Oh let them fall. I wish they fall all the pretty girls in stiletto heels. A big comedic break that would be.

  

But the wind did change. I don’t know where it came from, Egypt or Uganda; Venezuela or America. There was Saira writing to me about the takeover of the neoliberal regime co-opting the feminist organizations in the US. We were not talking about the feminist movement, really. Because there was no feminist movement by then. We were talking about the peace movement in the US, the ones that put up schools of peace upon schools of peace in Mindanao and other parts of the world where conflict once mattered. And she said, I am out of here, I am going over to the other side of despair, and you know what, we have this org called Incite!

That was ages ago. And now here comes Mariam Gagosh refusing to say she is in solidarity with the protesters at Kiev. How could she say, she said, that she is there with them when her butt is in a couch in San Francisco? Damnit. Then I had to do some more tracking. I like tracking people, I tell you, their allegiances. Ruby with the striking workers in Camboadia, Germelina at Pete Seger’s funeral singing paeans to dead communists at a time when communists are no longer looked up as saints. Then Neldy coming at me with the news that Linda and Nadjoua escaped from capitivity after eight months of sitting it up with the Abu Sayaf. Then Cocoy from prison saying he is amazed beyond belief that his friends in Jolo could just let him rot in jail. When he gets out, he said, when he gets out the struggle will be more beautiful.

Lordgodalmighty he gone bonkers! When did people last remember struggle as good and beautiful? That there is joy in revolution? My consultant friends, erstwhile heroes of my lost youth, all they repeat to the last of their breath, a way to cleanse themselves of the guilt perhaps that sticks, is that let us be kind to ourselves.

Over what?!

Courtney, when I say I love you I am not ashamed, nor will anyone ever ever come close to intimidating persuading, etc me into thinking otherwise. I wear you on my sleeve. I spread you out wide open with the wing span of a peacock. Yet all too often with the attention span of a bullet to the head. I think its pathetic that the entire world looks upon a calm demeanor as the desired model citizen. Yet heres something to be said about the ability to explain oneself with a toned down, tune deal tone. And I will say it: I am the boy who is slow. how I metamorphosised from hyperactive to cement is for lack of a better knife to the throat uh, annoying, aggravating, confusing as dense as cement. Cement holds no other minerals. You cant even find fools gold in it. Its strictly manmade and you’ve taught me it’s ok to be a man and in the classic mans world I parade you around proudly like the ring on my finger which also holds no mineral. Love kurdt

Courtney Love

“[I]t makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.”

                                                                                             ― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Mariam Gagosh (take two)

Transgressive feminism:

... endeavors to take up histories, geographies, affective dimensions, and political stakes of various feminist insubordinations in the spaces they occupy: intellectual and institutional, local and global, public and intimate, by choice and under duress. Mobilizing the multivalent concept of transgression helps reframe interrogations and impositions into those locations where we labor, love, defy, resist, protest, play, create, and or celebrate.

Thus advertized NWSA in its call for proposal for a forthcoming conference in Puerto Rico.

But that's not what I what I want to announce here. I just want to mount these images I found on the wall of Mariam Gagosh. (Damn if she found out that I did this without her permission.)

Fall in love, darlings. It's a looong queue.

Mariam Gagosh

             this mask belongs to mariam gagosh

The first day of an international human rights conference near Oakland California, a conferencee, Mariam Gagosh, made the following rediscoveries (and this is a repost from her wall at FB):

1. I hate the country of my origin.
2. I hate the country I currently reside in.

Migration is beautiful and this wondering makes life worth my while; it also makes this feeling of non-belongingness bearable; it tells me that I am a nomad, a bird, or a butterfly; most of all, it reminds me that I’m just a Visitor. So are we all.

It struck me because 1) it has been a long while since I last heard a feminist (I assumed she is a feminist because I met her online through Frida)  use the word hate (it's out of fashion); and 2) in my world the only people who announce right on their outcast status are poets and artists and Captain Jack. It's refreshing!

But then the conference Marian Gagosh went to is a funders group, so I said she must be on the donor side, and therefore she can say what she likes without fear of loss of funding?  Plus Gagosh is not American or Afro-American or whatever it is that I associate with positivist feminism (wherever I got that ugly word).

(I am a psychotic, according to the women human rights groups in Davao and Manila who discharged me properly and duly. Coming from them, I say Thank you, glad to be rid of you.)

I have nerve to say that here right on because she has this mask and she wore it and called it angrywomanpower mask. In Jolo, I am all support for Mary because if she is angry she is angry and doesn't think twice about breaking bottles picking a knife a gun and kicking doors. I said you are like Thor, you derive your powers from anger. Cultivate it. Friends ordered me chained. Told the other dykes to keep away.

Back to Mariam Gagosh. Another surprise is the line about migration and country. Just today (as I said, I am light years away from everything that advances in the universe and on Facebook) I encountered for the first time critical race theory, and so I said, thank you, feminism (because it's in a feminist website that the encounter happened), thank you science, thank you empirical research, for how come people just assume that because you support right-to-self-determination of peoples you therefore is on their side.

Not saying I am not on the side of the secessionists of Sulu; only that I am in Sulu with or without help from the secessionists of Sulu and their girlfriends in the NGO community. But what struck me more is the realization that I actually went to Jolo on some set of NGO-HR informed assumptions. Like even if I am working among young street nomads like the lesbians and transguys, I have this idea, this demand in me for them to stay and save their country, rather than find another way using their own agencies. 

These street nomads have no stakes in the Islamic state being brandished by the nationalist Tausugs, they do not give a shit about human rights and all their lives it's slash and burn hit and run. They are indeed butterflies in their pursuit of pleasures, birds in their longings for other shores. And there I am waxing feminist activism and island economy when I could do better conniving with the Dutches talking shipping industry.

   

hard to think in the belly of the beast.
is that why i have not been writing had not been reading?

today dex called. are you still here in jolo? she asked.
to ask that when she herself is in jolo.

i wanted to just scream fuckoff stop following me but she's one kid who has poor stamina that if i said another word to injure her, she would be comatose by the time i got back to jolo. then i will have no one to speak to.