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So I hope I am not too late for the train. I just saw the movie “Avatar” yesterday. I swear I tried to keep an open-mind. During the Oscars night, there was a flurry of commentaries and posts on Facebook about the Hollywood formula and the continuing saga of “othering” in these narratives. Nonetheless, I pinched myself several times to make sure I didn’t mask with bias my attempt at openness and willingness to watch this movie. Even that didn’t work.

For Starters, Calling Hollywood Savages

Hollywood has a long history of what I would call the “savage genre.” Of this, King Kong is most famous. For decades, natives of other countries (and planets) were angry, grass-skirted, bone-ornamented, barefooted tribes who just had to be whipped into modern consciousness. Goodbye, tree worshippers. Hello, western capitalism.  And then, they were put on public display, in cages. 

Gone are the days of Hollywood’s manifest destiny. What we see in movies now is Hollywood with guilt.   From Pocahontas to Dances With Wolves to Avatar, the “savages” seem to be winning over the colonizers.   After decades of being portrayed as brainless, chaotic cannibals deserving of a tent at the World Fair, we slowly find out that these savages actually have some form of organization and an unfathomable connection to nature.  We also find out that they’re welcoming and nonviolent, that they’d be happy to break bread with a lost colonist and call him “Dances with Wolves.”   They’re also more than willing to share all their secrets to a “dream walker” named, ah, Jake, who goes unconscious once unplugged.   Nary a sense of suspicion of these infiltrators-turned- indigenous, the natives were more than happy to share their secrets (after all, being secret-friendly is the savage way), all their secrets at that, I mean, all. Their God Eywa even communicates with the impostor, in the tradition of Eywa-knows-best (Was she sharing her secrets too?).   Then one day, the natives get attacked.  Suddenly, everything is Hollywood-familiar: we see the same old savages of the King Kong days, a bunch of tribes fleeing from a burning tree with asses on fire.

They Can’t Save Their Gluteus Maxes

And so the story continues.  We find out that our dear savages can’t save their asses.   Infiltrator-turned-indigenous had to find a way to save them, because he had fallen in love with the leader’s daughter, our extraterrestrial Pocahontas who couldn’t find a good mate in her tribe, she had to go for someone that had to be plugged into an electric outlet. 

What are we learning from the highest grossing movie of all time?  

I am not sure what Writer and Director Cameron was thinking.  I can only assume that he was exonerating himself from the sins of his fathers.   He might have wanted a “more accurate” portrayal of native peoples.   He might want to show a planet with subconscious connections between land and people.   Also, he might have wanted to exagerrate the invading Americans by painting their characters with Blackwater ideologues of recent Iraq War memory.  However, his hero complex just couldn’t imagine the possibility of Pandora natives defending themselves.  Cameron’s message is clear, given all the exotic touches and beauty of native life and their complex ecology, they are too dumb to know that they are about to be invaded and have their asses set on fire.  

They need a hero.  Let’s see: Christopher Columbus, John Smith, Ferdinand Magellan, Fernando Cortes, um, ah, Jake.

Learn from Lapu-Lapu

In the Philippines, we have Lapu-Lapu.   He’s a warrior, after whom a fish was named.   He should have been the national hero of the country, because he would have given Filipinos a value to behold.  Every native country or planet needs a Lapu-Lapu.   If you don’t know who that is, well, he beheaded Ferdinand Magellan.  He belongs to a select group of warriors who stood up for themselves and their people.    Yet, his narrative is not known to many.  In his place, Magellan rises as the heroic figure.   Nobody ever mentions Magellan was beheaded; his true heroism was circumnavigating the world, as evidenced by the endeless references to his name.  True to point, while Magellan is the name of a strait, of countless avenues, and of proud Spanish last names, Lapu-Lapu’s claim to fame is a tasty fish in local Philippine markets (see picture). Is this what happens when you defend your turf? And oh, I don’t know of one Filipino named Lapu-Lapu. Guess who the late dictator Marcos was named after?

The World According to Avatar James Cameron

In his world of profiteering and invasions, there is always a price to pay.   The price is the betrayal by one’s own.   In Avatar, Jake had an epiphany and had to choose between a life on a wheelchair and a joyride on a pterodactyl.    He turned on his own people and saved the world of the natives. 

According to Cameron, natives can’t save themselves.   They are peace loving blue people whose heads are so deep in the roots of the land, they couldn’t process why there were foreign creatures on their planet.   They have a god named Eywa who had to call on animals to save Pandora, because it’s own humanoid inhabitants were too high on peace and kumbaya.  

According to Cameron, if there was no such a thing as betrayal, the blue people of Pandora would all have been deep-fried brown Lapu Lapu fish.  For people like myself, who have come from countries that have yet to recover from the deep roots of colonization,  it is message worth reinvestigating.   Beyond the glamor of new technology, the narrative content demonstrates the need of dominating cultures to regurgitate their power through this global Hollywood medium.  The movie itself, just like a BigMac, is mesmerizingly satiating, until one day we are all too fat with propaganda, we can no longer get up.

Related Reading: Dances With Aliens: James Cameron’s Avatar Movie and White “Saviors” (Updated), Avatar and Whiteness, A whole lot of Avatar and whiteness,
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A couple of days ago, I visited a school in the Bronx to talk about poetry to high school students who were majoring (!) in Creative Writing.   My visit was organized by a literary organization in New York City that brings poets and writers to schools.   My assignment was to offer a perspective on “political poetry.”  I had been pondering about politics long before I was given such assignment, thoughts triggered by the current state of health care reform in Washington, DC.   On facebook, I had also been posting on how we, as citizens, might influence congress on their decisions on this national issue, amid concurrent postings by other Fbers on less salient issues.   I have no health insurance.  I understand exactly what the health reform means to millions of Americans.

Political Person vs.  Political Poet

The latter makes me cringe.  The idea that anyone who reads my work would call me a political poet makes me wonder about the common denominator about these two identities–politics.   I have no qualms professing the former, Political Person.   Since my apolitical and naive college years, I have grown to be very engaged in things . . . of political nature.   I have made a working life out of fighting for social justice.  I have spent many breakfast mornings exercising my brain with online political commentaries.   My role models in life are totally immersed in social change.   Even the writers I adore–say, Jose Saramago–are very politically charged, not only on the literary page, but also, in real life.  I am a political person and there’s no debating that fact.  Label me, as you may, it’s the truth.

The discomfort I have about being called a political poet is the word, poet.

If there is a type of poetry that most poets, much less non-poets, don’t understand, it is political poetry.   I also know so many poets who would never enter the doors of political poetry, because the thought of politics is in essence, a dungeon of unknown prospects.   It is as if one needs to be equipped with a lighter, a white dove, fig leaves, or other symbolistic objects in order to produce a literary work remotely resembling social justice on paper.  There is also the tendency to write poetry that resembles a copy for a human rights propaganda or protest banners.   Worse, the disaster poetry in which some poets engage when a part of the world falls apart (think: Iraq War, Katrina, 9-11, Tsunami).   I don’t condemn such collectives. I question the intention behind them (and the sentimentality), especially when apolitical poets take advantage of these occasional environments of disasters for literary production and professional exposure.   I have not once contributed to such sad commentaries on the poetic life.   The most political anthology I am in, Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights, was a solicitation.   I was quite proud to be in those pages, albeit among dead people.  But I don’t seek them out.   When I get invited to these so called political anthologies, I think twice, thrice, and most often, ignore.

Political People

Many of my friends, not all  poets, mind you, are very political.   I have worked in many environments that attract think-alikes.  We don’t always agree on political view points, but we can agree on having very strong personal opinions.   I even know some folks who don’t call themselves political, but have buttons once pressed, liberate the most political soundbytes you would ever hear from these unsuspecting types.  My mother is one of them.   Don’t get her started.   She watches CNN every day.   She knows the pulse of the nation.

So Politics, Politics

I do have these secret wishes.  Let’s begin:  I hope that people won’t be ashamed to declare war against social injustice publicly, the way they post on facebook party pictures, NFL commentary, favorite movies, last night’s dinner, this morning’s breakfast, private illnesses not so private anymore, cryptic hate posts, and other fascinating tantrums suddenly made interesting because half your friends are experiencing the same (the full moon?).   I just really wish that everyone I know would call their congresswo/man and get Washington politics working like it should.   Yes, enough partisan politics.  Say No to the Tea Party.  And please pass Health Care Reform so living artists can work full time as artists and not endanger their full time MFA jobs by writing, um, political poetry. 

How many times can a man turn his head pretending that he just doesn’t see? The answer my friend is blowin in the wind. The answer is blowin in the wind.

Related Reading:  10 Actions You Can Take to Achieve Health Care Reform, NAACP 880 Campaign for Health Care Reform,

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I found the following in my previous website. It was how I introduced the reviews for my first book. After reading it again, I had a series of thoughts about the state of American writing, and the intersection of race and culture in the arts.

Following are reviews of the book in the U.S. and the Philippines. In reading them, please observe the almost staggerring differences between reviews from the two countries. It is not surprising that reviews in the Philippines contextualized the novel and placed it within a Filipino historical and literary framework; the reviews in the United States couldn’t seem to remove it from a catalogue of Asian American writing or some kind of ethnic potluck, within which many of us Filipino writers are unfortunately categorized. What becomes of a book (or anything) once removed from its original context? But then, only in the Philippines–the country of origin–can we create a historical and literary consciousness around Filipino and Filipino American writing. In the U.S., we will always be compared to precedent ethnic writers or worse, dead “white” American writers, completely ignoring the centennial of Philippine literature in English. I think there exist a possibility of a more thorough reading of Filipino text in the United States, if only one would devote enough time and effort to study the context from which it is written. In fact, a few Filipino American writers have taken on reviewing works of their own, breathing into such literary texts a living and profound historical insight without sounding esoteric (e.g. My reviewer for San Francisco Chronicle is in fact, Filipino-American).

My perspective on publishing has not changed in the past fifteen years.    After watching the Oscars last night, and noticing that the only Asians on TV were unknown faces next to male entertainment moguls, I felt that Asian-Americans have a long way to go.  When my friends and I started the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in 1991, we were addressing the dearth of Asian-Am writing in American publishing (you know, to tell our story, the way we wanted).  True, the numbers of published Asian Ams probably nearly doubled in almost two decades, but all of that came crashing down with the downsizing of publishing houses.   However, it is important to note that for Filipino-American writers in mainstream presses, there has been very little movement.   While literature languish in the backrooms of publishing houses, celebrity books seem to be taking an all time high.   Sometimes I ask, do we really need to read a book about the pilot who landed his plane on the Hudson River?   Is that moment, understandably phenomenal, worth expanding into 200 pages?   Well, according to HarperCollins, yes.  In fact, said pilot was offered a book deal worth $3 Million dollars. That’s enough to publish 50 literary writers in the U.S. But a choice between a future Pulitzer winning author and one of the decadent Real Housewives of New York, who do you think gets to bite the dough?

So what do ethnic writers in America get to settle with? If Oscars Night was any indication, the answer perhaps is to mask one’s ethnic identity, or write  for the demographic majority. Here’s a scenario:  forget you’re Asian, write a story about a football jock named Garth. Maybe he had an Asian girlfriend (there’s your guilt). The story is really about how he befriended a football player from a black neighborhood. There you go. It has that feel-good interracial flavor. Make sure though that Garth gets 95 percent attention in the book. Would Hollywood consider it as a possible project for Matt Damon? Perhaps.  And Lucy Liu.

Funny, last night, I was thinking, maybe I should write a screenplay. After all, I had my beginnings in playwriting in grade school and high school. I suddenly stopped myself with a thought: “but you really believe in writing the story of your people.”  I think Hollywood is still at the very early stages of representation of ethnic America.   The industry has yet to fully include blacks, much less the rest of us.  

On a positive note, because we do need to sleep at night with good vibes, things will change. There are the ingredients to success: perseverance, persistence, resilience. There are the cultural movements. There are the constantly shifting waves in American politics. But more than anything, there is the changing demographics in the United States. In the future, more and more ethnic Americans will demand their own histories in America.  While publishing and entertainment are very slow to reflect these changes, the work needs to be written now.

Related Reading:  Births to Minorities Are Approaching Majority in U.S.

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Spring is here.   And this website has the colors of a fecund earth.   I have wanted to redo my website for sometime now.  It was quite a static website, and just sat on the internet for the past four years, being visited by curious eyes, lost souls, and homework-ridden students.   Since I’m currently seeking employment (in this robust economy, no less!), I thought it would be a great time to clean house. 

Thanks Wordpress

I bought a wordpress template (think: buying a house) and renovated it inside and out.    For some time now, I had wondered about this wordpress.  I have seen it everywhere.  Many of my friends use it for blogs, but then occasionally, I would run into a website that looked like wordpress, but seemingly not.   As I have learned wordpress is now being used as a content management software and used as a framework for multipurpose websites.  Thus, I have finally managed to put my blog and my website in one place.   A few days of juggling words, images, concepts, and design, and here we go! I’m also very grateful to one particularly friend who handed me a software when I needed it most.   Yes, Photoshop is king. 

Water

It’s the third sunday of Lent.   The reading today was about the woman at the well who gave water to the thirsty Jesus.   In 2010, I am feeling the need to quench my multiple levels of thirst.   There is that thirst to start a new organization.  There is that thirst to finish my new poetry collection.  There is that thirst to work for an organization where I can make a difference.   I am at a new stage in life.   Post-graduate school.  Post-four decades.   There is much to be excited about.   That we are in a horrible recession should really scare me, but I have no fear. 

Today at least, I’m that woman at the well. 

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Today, I tackle a task:  get a new website.  That’s all.

Oh, I guess I say goodbye to my old blog:  the freirian goes to hahvahd.  I will keep that around for a while, until it’s forgotten.   I had quite a time at harvard.   I now know that I should have stayed there another year, get another graduate degree.   To look for a job in this economy is a mission made in Purgatory (not Hell, but close).   I could have used another year of planning for { We Speak America }.  But hey, I’m back in New York City.  No reason to fret.  I am as grateful as Thanksgiving Day. 

So toast to a new virtual home!  And of course, to blog again, which I’ve done off and on for the past six years.   Hello World, indeed!

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