IN-between Worlds
In the sea of clouds
By Anito
In my blood are battles of many contradictories
Of power controlling another
of political to class hierarchies
between the dominant and the minority
I have the birthright to many dichotomies
of the oppressor and the oppressed
of the taken and the taker
of too many ironies
Creole, Mestisaje, Halo-Halo..
I am a walking citation to histories
Annotating sounds of yelps, mourns, wails, and silenced mysteries
I write this stream of consciousness as a testimony
I charge towards inquiry
Victory
conversations and curiosity
For I, Annielille Gonzales Gavino
stand merely 5 feet three, weighing 120 pounds
arrived in JFK with dreams of many possibilities
an immigrant from the Philippines is simply one of my many identities
in this body are sagas of too many opposing complex stories.
…….
Fuck.
Impetus
Western research methods question the validity and accuracy of oral histories. These stories are not given the same weight as Western scholarship. Research is considered pure hearsay unless it is inscribed, documented, cited, and proved.
I learned this pattern from the colonizers themselves. Gomes Eannes de Zurara was one of the first chroniclers to record the transatlantic slave trade, making writing a strategic tool to justify enslavement.
“On the next day, the 8th of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats and to take out those captives......others were less white like mulattoes, others again were black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear the images of a lower hemisphere.”
-Excerpt from the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea by Gomes Eanes de Azurara
Reading such texts and those from Eugenic writer Rudyard Kipling, a British writer of Indian heritage who justified US colonization of the Philippines and wrote the poem “White Man’s Burden,” compels me to write my own story from my lens.
Before our oral histories and legends are forgotten, I would like to describe and inscribe our stories through AniMalayaWorks Interdisciplinary Dance, Theater, Technology, and Kapwa.
