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.