What my summer would be

Part 2 of 3 in our series on "What I am working on this summer"

To read Part 1 click here.

Sean Labrador y Manzano, Independent Scholar

Stormy Friday night, more tease than relief of the pending drought, February 6, 2015, the “Frank O’Hara ‘Lunch Poems’: 50th Anniversary All-Star Reading” at the McRoskey Mattress Company in San Francisco set the tone of what my summer would be, what my future should be. I count a handful of POC in the audience, a tendency of mine attending three readings a week for the past several years, betrays the demographics of the Bay Area. I count many friends, many instructors, many acquaintances, and many MFA students who have read for me at my monthly Mixer 2.0 at the Cat Club. After 3 hours, I catch up with a Professor and was asked how was the beginning of my year.

I offered the unusual, “I am feeling great!”

Then the, “Why?”

“I have been accepted to panel at two conferences.”

“And you’re going?”

“Of course not. I never do.”

To the obvious puzzlement, I explained how I fish through the UPenn Dept of English call for papers and as an exercise submit proposals to attractive panels. I mean why stop because I am no longer in grad school? When a proposal gets accepted, I wait a week before sending a letter sadly declining the invitation. Travel restricts participation. I have skipped several conferences.

The Professor says, “We will need to change that.”

First, The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies accepted my presentation, “From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant Garde” for its session on “Trauma and the Asian Diasporic Literary Imagination” at the 26th annual conference of the American Literature Association, May 21-24, 2015 Boston, MA. In the original multi-media proposal I claimed to present observations and conclusions, successes and inadequacies of a three-day symposium in August 2014 I curated at the California Institute of Integral Studies, “From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian-Avant Garde.”

However, watching through social media, mostly Facebook, the fallout of Kenny Goldsmith’s Michael Brown’s autopsy report reading and later Vanessa Place’s Hattie McDaniel—how friends turning against each other defining appropriation and racism, to the point where boycotts and threats against Vanessa Place and any institution or person accommodating her, for example the AWP 2016 Los Angeles and the much anticipated (50th anniversary) Berkeley Poetry Conference, June 15-19, I reacted to steer my presentation along the lines of a genealogical search for an Asian Avant Garde, whatever that means, and where are the roots in the San Francisco Bay Area. I paired text with the video of a waterboarding performance in which I am rendered by an anthropologist. Speaking English is like drowning. My English suspected. I was so amazed by how people who are allied in many areas of the social, the cultural and the political were fracturing because of the sides taken because of Vanessa Place. And yet we all dip from the same fountain?  Kelsey Street Press’ MG Roberts drove me to SFO. For last minute edits to my presentation, I borrowed her copy of Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets edited by Timothy Yu and released by Kelsey Street Press earlier that month. In exchange I was to write a review (didn’t) during my flight. Somewhere above Missouri, when the Lebanese Northeastern University engineering undergrad next to me finally fell asleep—we started talking about his Pilipina nanny, I read the fourth and final essay in which Dorothy Wang frames Bhanu Kapil in the context of Kenny Goldsmith. Kenny Goldsmith!—I rested my head on the tray figuring how to reconcile him in this essay written a couple years before his poetry reading of Brown’s autopsy. At the conference, on a sufficient diet of cocktail hour hors d'oeuvres and vodka cranberries, thankful that I did not hear the name Baudrillard or post modernism in any of the sessions I sat in attendance, I medicated myself from being an “Independent Scholar” and savored how much I wanted institutional affiliation and the resources to conduct research. From Boston, I watched the rumors that maybe the BPC would be cancelled.

Second, Professor Jim O’Louglin accepted my multi-media presentation, “The Person Sitting in Darkness Writes Back: Mark Twain’s Pilipino and Chamorro Poets in a Time of Terror” for his “Mark Twain and the North American Review” panel at the bicentennial anniversary of the North American Review, June 11-13, 2015, University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. I must have read Twain’s 1901 essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” in high school alongside Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the original proposal I claimed to discuss how Twain anticipated such writers like Barbara Jane Reyes, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Aimee Suzara, Lehua M.Taitano, and Craig Santos Perez. The result of teaching colonial subjects to speak and think in English, is a literati interrogating the very empire that supplied history. I would have needed more than the allotted time to do them justice.

Instead, in my exhaustion reading social media accounts of poets discrediting other poets or poets elevating other poets for being more socially acceptable, I decided to just emphasize how Twain’s essay is prophetic and timeless. I will return to these writers and their contributions another day. Furthermore, to include how the essay addresses current events, I was waiting for the Department of Defense to release official news reports and photography of the annual Balikatan exercise. While as much the exercise is about U.S. and Philippines military interoperability, it is also about humanitarian aid. The Seabees every year erect schoolrooms and the children are organized to dance their appreciation. In several of the photographs, marines landed on a familiar beach, identifiable by Camara and Capones islands in the background. In one telling pose, a marine points a rifle seemingly and harmlessly down range, I follow its barrel, to the direction of my mother’s property. Twain protested the Philippine American War, the seizure of the Philippines, the military atrocities such as waterboarding, and the growing fatigue and complacency of news reporting and lack of outrage.

I began the presentation with two US Navy recruitment campaigns. “America’s Navy: The Shield” was released in late 2014. I do not think a three-person family needs the protection of a huge military. With such comfort, the nation can go on the offensive. “U.S. Navy: Pin Map” was released early 2015. Notice the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan spearheading the Asian pivot. Towards the end, the view rises above Guam, then enlarges to include the Philippines, and China. Can a poet really stop the arms race in the East Philippine Sea?

Still with my professor’s support, I flew to Denver, then rendezvoused with three panelists in Boulder, from there drove 12 hours to Cedar Falls. Driving back on Sunday.  The road trip reminding of Futurist manifestoes past metallic tepees, I am more certain risking a late career PhD.

Between the two conferences, the BPC evolved in to “Crosstalk, Color, Composition: A Berkeley Poetry Conference,” one day less, and 10 featured writers fewer. When I returned from Boston, I wrote to the BPC asking it to not cancel, sharing many concerns that I will not go in to detail. When I returned from Iowa, I was assigned the Wednesday afternoon seminar, “Asian-American Avant-Garde.” Whereas the CAALS presentation was 20-minutes long and the Twain presentation was 15-minutes long, the CCC presentation was 40-minutes long, or a blending of the two. At the time of this blog entry, I am attempting to rerecord the audio portion of the presentation to be archived. It will lack the urgency, the anger, the palpitating speed, the improvisation, and the dark humor.

As a result of Boston, I will be leading a CAALS roundtable at the 2016 ALA conference in San Francisco. Hopefully, through CFP, and elsewhere, I will soon post a call for proposals on the Mixed-Race Asian Avant Garde.

As a result of all three conferences, I have amassed enough persuasive material, I hope, to enter a PhD program in Race and Ethnicity, Transnationalism and the Pacific Rim, and Militarism. So working on applications is next.

In the momentum, I had proposed an AWP 2016 craft panel on writing buried histories within poetry, inspired by Mark Twain’s outrage of the Moro Crater Massacre in March 1906—the newsworthiness only to be eclipsed by the San Francisco Earthquake. Three days ago the AWP rejected the proposal but I am still convinced I need to organize some kind of memorial reading of the 600+ Muslims killed because dialogue was not favored—because the United States is rebuilding its presence in the archipelago, and in that presence, a surge of radicalization, and the precedent for combat operations.

Sean Labrador y Manzano resists gentrification on the island off the coast of Oakland where on sunny mornings reenacts Caliban sleeping on unflagged beach.

Love/Whole in Summer

Part 1 of 3 in our series on "What I am working on this summer"

Stacey Gibson, Educator/Independent Consultant

The beautiful struggle of the CESA conference is the full-bodied volume of old world, save your soul ancestral directives tangled and tossed with the thick new growth of inquiry/answers and explorations. Having attended the Chicago conference in 2013 and the recent Toronto conference, I am left with wonders, both heavy and airy. I returned to Chicago eager to seek out conversations and practices that did not soft step what it means to inhabit, embody, exorcise, resist, and check for the tentacles of colonization.

To live in a ‘third’ world* seductively and nastily masquerading as a ‘first’ world ain’t for the faint. So for me one way in/out is to massage the sweet spots of creativity, drive, silence and such and allow them enough breathing room when they reveal and unveil themselves. One of the many sweet spots, at least for now, is the ink pen. Since returning from CESA, some recent short fiction pieces I have been editing, creating, and revising are a series of desire/love stories that are ripe with love giving, love taking, love sharing, love leaving, love making, and love movement. Some of the stories have been in process for a longer period of time and others are fresh blooms. Then comes another sweet spot of how to balance those love-ing stories with a second project which is writing a long overdue critical essay on colonizing intellectual experiences by race gazing and fetishizing the darker body in school classrooms.

While the bodies of writing are seemingly different, as I work on each project I am intrigued by the way closeness, proximity, and the negotiation of perceptions fold into each piece of writing. These developing projects are propelling me to read silences both with intense ferocity and tender eyes, for it is in the silences that unique and virtually untraceable manifestations of power are revealed, wielded, normalized, and enacted.

Recently I’ve been reading older interviews of James Baldwin and watching his televised debates. Among the many ideas I have formed based on his oration is that to write about and say ‘the thing’ that results from ‘the shattering’ is the practice and process of what I call “whole-ing”. There is a more whole truth to tell, say, and write than any digitally mutilated bits, bytes, and pics can offer. There reverberates a more whole sense of what is and is not happening on this planet; a sense that is just as much in the belly as it is in the mind as it is in energy meridians. And finally, there is a whole-ing of the self that is no longer negotiable. Much depends on being whole, full beings in a world of systems often trading on magnificent caches of that which is shattered. As I enjoy thinking about this process of “whole-ing” it is not to amplify victimization as much as it is to practice the most natural thing ever which is to be and love the whole entire self.

While there are a host of other projects and realities in my to-do queue (facilitating anti-oppression workshops, college tours with my child, writing conference reviews, rethinking relationships, writing proposals, reading my newly revealed Meyers Briggs profile (the hell?), visiting mountains), it is these pieces of writing that help me practice steadiness and manage the urgent necessity and natural inclination towards being my own whole self. Head nods and a raised fist to the daily grind of being true, whole, and free. That is what this summer has provided for me thus far.   

Notes: *Third world & first world references are, to me, false indicators, a textbook example of mislabeling in order to perpetuate tomfoolery and confusion.          

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Caribbean born Stacey Gibson is a Chicago area parent, educator, and consultant who is committed to whole story truth-telling.  Her teaching experiences with children, adults, parents, and administrators in both public and private schools provides her with unique access to vastly different educational models.  Though Gibsonholds a M.Ed in Educational Leadership, her deepest learning comes from ongoing discourse, incessant reading, and unapologetic questioning. Long live the cipher! She would like to thank the nameless ones who preceded her because she knows she could not be without them. 

A Year After the Ferguson Uprising, Reflections on Mauna Kea

Part 3 of 4 in our series on 'Resistance at Mauna Kea'

To read Part 1, click here. To read Part 2, click here.

Laurel Mei-Singh, CUNY Graduate Center

As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Ferguson uprising catalyzed by the shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Missouri, people are gathering from the summit of Mauna Kea to the streets of Waikiki to oppose the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the top of Hawai‘i’s highest mountain. We are demanding the protection of land, resources, and sacred sites across the islands. In this struggle, we are declaring: Kū Kia‘i Mauna! (Stand Protectors of the Mountain!)

What do the Black Lives Matter and the Kū Kia‘i Mauna movements have in common?

From Hawai‘i to Ferguson to New York City, we are arriving at a tipping point. In this post-9/11 era of endless war, environmental destruction, financial crisis, and gentrification, everyday people are facing a new degree of insecurity and precarity. In response, people are rising to reclaim our land, our streets, and our lives. We are also witnessing a new round of policing and enclosure to contain these movements for justice.

On August 7, 2015, the Wai‘anae Coast community (a poor and working class predominantly Hawaiian and Pacific islander part of the island of O‘ahu) hosted a community event on Mauna Kea. An audience member, Pake Salmon, asked why $1.4 billion is going toward astronomy research when we are barely surviving on the planet on which we live. UH Law School professor Williamson Chang later pointed out that we are living in a time and place in which we are mired in debt, most of us can barely afford a place to live, and it takes three hours to drive 23 miles on the H-1 during rush-hour. Not to mention that military bases continue to occupy nearly a quarter of O‘ahu’s land. Hawai‘i is becoming increasingly unlivable, and, in response, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) are rising up to reclaim their lands and lives, a driving sentiment behind the Mauna Kea struggle.

People brought this movement to Waikiki streets on Sunday, August 9, when thousands dressed in red participated in the Aloha ‘Aina march. In addition to the protection of Mauna Kea, demands included the protection and promotion of sustainable agriculture, specifically crops that do not rely on toxic pesticides and genetic engineering. After the march, community leaders spoke out against the hypercapitalism advanced by the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the illegal overthrow of Hawai‘i’s queen in 1893, calling for Hawaiian independence. Some wore T-shirts memorializing Kollin Elderts, an unarmed 23-year-old Hawaiian man, shot and killed by Christopher Deedy, an off-duty federal agent, in a Waikiki McDonalds during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Honolulu in 2011. After he shot Elderts, Deedy claimed he was "protecting" the other people in the restaurant and was acquitted of his crime, despite the fact that witnesses say he was drunk. So far, five people in Hawai‘i have died at the hands of the police this year, including a man tasered to death on March 16, 2015, which the Honolulu medical examiner ruled a homicide.

Across the world, police are increasingly using militarized law-and-order tactics to maintain racial and economic hierarchies in the name of “public safety.” According to an arrestee at the August 7 Wai‘anae event, the number of arrests conducted by the State of Hawai‘i’s Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) enforcement officers at Mauna Kea has reached 70. Hawai‘i Govenor David Ige signed new “rules” on July 10, blocking their access to the road at night and forbidding tent and other camping structures. The enforcers of these arrests and rules are the Division of Conservation and Resource Enforcement (DOCARE) officers of the DLNR who have “full police powers [to enforce] all State laws and rules involving State lands, State Parks…as well as…county parks.” In Hawai‘i, DOCARE officers police conservation areas, and they are increasingly harassing subsistence practitioners in places like Ka‘ena, a fishing ground on the westernmost tip of O‘ahu.

Many people in Hawai‘i—from fishers to hunters to activists—have remarked recently that DOCARE’s policing has amplified in recent years (even though one officer cried as he made arrests on the mountain summit). Lori Halemano, one of the arrestees from Mauna Kea, confirmed this amping of policing when I spoke to her after the Wai‘anae event. When I asked her why, she replied: “people are rising up.” They’re learning about Hawai‘i’s history and the ongoing illegal occupation and joining the struggle for Hawaiian independence. As DLNR and DOCARE claim to “protect public lands” through the arrest and removal of protestors who are challenging the very meaning of this concept, we must acknowledge that a major function of policing is the containment of the real threat that a movement of people pose to an existing social order.

Shelley Muneoka of the KAHEA: Hawaiian-Environment Alliance stressed to the Wai‘anae audience that the Mauna Kea struggle is about who has the power and authority to decide how land is used. Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movements in places like Ferguson, New York City, Charleston, Baltimore, Texas, and Oakland are fundamentally about who has power and authority over our streets, lives, and living space. As a diasporic woman of color from Hawai‘i who lived part-time on the islands over the last couple of years while making my primary home in Brooklyn, I see that both movements can learn from each other. For the movements against racist policing in United States urban centers, we must align ourselves with movements for indigenous self-determination, and the understanding that our relationships with land are fundamental to all of our survival. For the movements in Hawai‘i, we must acknowledge that we are fighting the same military and police machinery that working class people of color in the U.S. are up against, and we are not alone in our fights for justice and self-determination.

Laurel Mei-Singh is a doctoral candidate in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center earning a certificate in American Studies. She was born and raised in Honolulu near the base of Leahi (Diamond Head) and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The spaces between “us” (inclusive) and “them” – aloha ‛āina is a kākou thing

Part 2 of 4 in our series on 'Resistance at Mauna Kea'

To read Part 1, click here.

Karin Louise Hermes, University of Hawai‛i at Mānoa

Until early April when the first arrests happened on Mauna Kea, I was entirely uninvolved in the issue, despite having witnessed my friends and classmates protesting the desecration on the University of Hawai‛i at Mānoa campus back in the fall of 2013. Since my support began by writing and blogging for one of the Mauna Kea protectors’ media outlets, I have made so many new connections in this movement to protect Mauna Kea and in the over-all Hawaiian sovereignty and independence movement.

There is always the question of positioning and voice (and when not to have one) in this discussion. In the Facebook groups and in articles written, many state their ethnic background and connection to Hawai‛i before giving their opinion. Some Kanaka Maoli commenters then say there is no need to always mention this as a defense for speaking on Hawaiian matters, it’s “a kākou thing”. However, I find it is actually necessary as a sign of respect, as well as a statement of solidarity and mutual understanding.

Over and over again by the TMT and the media, the Mauna Kea protectors are described as a small group of dissenting and “backwards” Native Hawaiians, indigenous people protesting for their privileges and rights to animistic beliefs and practices. A small group of people putting “religion” before “science”, and “progress”, while the reasonable majority supports the TMT. Anyone who actually cares to be informed and doesn’t simply accept the racism and American imperialism perpetuated, knows how large the group of protectors on the ground and in virtual space are. This is not at all about being “anti-science”, but about standing for what is pono. The authors of many of the articles written or even those standing in the line of arrest are academics from the University of Hawai‛i and other universities, Kānaka Maoli or not, scholars of social studies or law, astronomers, engineers and other scientists. The protectors and community organizers online are based out of the US continent bringing in their kuleana, their responsibility for taking care of the ‛āina, long-distance.

This is where I state my positionality of not being Kanaka Maoli or even living in Hawai‛i at the moment. My motivation for joining in the kākou, the ‛ōlelo Hawaiian inclusive “us” pronoun against the pro-TMT “them”, is not only from answering the call of support from my friends in Hawai‛i, but even more, from feeling the need to step away and speak up against the group with a settler colonialist mentality counter to the protectors and aloha ‛āina.

Based on my ethnic appearance (Filipino/Chinese/Spanish and German) and a perhaps more culturally-aware outlook from Pacific Islands Studies, I’m more often than not Othered or invited into the kākou anyway. Although I hold an even more unusual position in the movement, as I can’t be called a settler colonialist “ally”, as much as I am merely a malihini, a visitor, since I am without any immigrant status to the Hawaiian Islands with my EU passport. Because I’m aware that I’m an outsider, not native, not “local”, I recognize I shouldn’t confront any Kānaka Maoli who are against the protectors. I would be a hypocrite and just as paternalistic as the pro-TMT crowd that claims they know what is better for the people indigenous to the land, than they can know for themselves. Fortunately, because I’m also not white, I don’t get called haole or fear falling into a white savior complex either.

Holding this middle ground or more nebulous position between Kānaka Maoli and settler colonialism, I chose my involvement. I choose to protect Mauna Kea with aloha ‛āina as the essence of respecting the culture and people indigenous to the Hawaiian archipelago. Expressing aloha ‛āina, standing for Mauna Kea, protecting sacred spaces and showing awareness and understanding of the injustice, that is what is pono for Hawai‛i. It’s what is right. I have since learned that aloha ‛āina is not only the “love of the land”, but can also be translated to “patriotism”, a word of pride for US Americans. Aloha ‛āina is what separates the kākou from “them”, either you respect it or you don’t. It might be the biggest cultural misunderstanding for settler colonialists in Hawai‛i towards Kānaka Maoli who regard and care for the land as family. Either you support what is pono, or you respectfully know your place and know that to perpetuate the colonial narrative of violence and oppression is against the life of the land.

The racist e-mails that came out of UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley by prominent astronomers showed disconnect to the issue at hand. Racist and paternalistic remarks confirm the disregard for the people of the land and voice the sense of entitlement to what is not theirs to own or change. The internet comments under mainstream media articles or letters to the editor, the new state legislations after the June 24 stand-off that now restrict Kanaka Maoli cultural practices and access to the summit road on Mauna Kea, the prolonged duration of the impasse and Governor David Ige’s mention of deploying the National Guard, these are all strengthening the resolve of the protectors. The thing is, for outsiders not in the know, anything that doesn’t actively involve them is seen as not happening, and the confused commentariat says “but why are they only protesting NOW?”

April 2, 2015, and the arrests of 31 protectors were covered by the mainstream media and social media when prominent supporters raised awareness to what was going on. June 24, 2015, and the arrests of 12 protectors were witnessed by over 700 people and private and independent cameras to counter the local media that has their own biased depictions. My own awareness was raised in October 2013, when I first saw my personal connections involved. The aloha ‛āina protectors of this generation know there were always protests against the TMT project and previous observatories constructed on Mauna Kea over the decades, only now the voices are becoming louder.

As a malihini I feel it is more of my kuleana to call out fellow malihini. Kānaka Maoli have no kuleana or obligation to educate or “enlighten” visitors who don’t care to understand. My purpose for writing this and other articles is not to speak for Kanaka Maoli or to give myself the title “ally”, my purpose is to clarify to settler colonialists, haole, malihini, that this is not an “us” against “them” along ethnic lines, but a division by aloha ‛āina. My intention is to show to “them” that there is a greater movement happening that they are not seeing. The protectors are not only sustained by the pōhaku in the road and by the strength of the koa that the warriors emulate, but also by the people who give their signatures on petitions and the hashtags of #WeAreMaunaKea in virtual space, and by the generations of kūpuna standing with them in the spaces (maybe as star particles that the astronomers hold so dearly) between the lines with the love of family, the aloha for the ‛āina.

Karin Louise Hermes is currently based in Berlin, Germany, 12 time zones away from Mauna Kea, to get in touch with her native German roots while writing on aloha ‛āina. She holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and Sociology from the University of Heidelberg and an M.A. in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawai‛i at Mānoa.