Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Countdown to cutoff for Locks of Love.   Who’s in?

Press Release: Filipina Poets in Library of Congress Special Exhibit

First Annual Festival of Women’s Poetry (Wompherence) on the worldwide web. 

A collection of the published works of select poets in the list of “100 Filipina Poets”

Call For Submissions
**** Please Forward Widely ****

Walang Hiya … literature taking risks toward liberatory practice
Will be published by Arkipelago Press Spring 2009

Walang Hiya … literature taking risks toward liberatory practice is a
literary anthology committed to using the narrative as a departure
point for personal and political transformation. We seek to challenge
the boundaries and cultural norms, sharing our stories without shame.
Walang Hiya believes in the idea of Cultural Work or the use of
artistic expression as a form of education and community mobilization.
We feature emerging Pilipina/o artists, works that capture the spirit
of innovation and contradiction.
We pay homage to the literary roots of our Diaspora and with this
offering hope to embrace the future tense.
Walang Hiya seeks submissions in the form of prose, poetry and short story.

We are interested in the stories that move beyond the identity politic
to embrace other
forms of coming to oneself as individuals and as a people. We’ve read
the stories of
Pilipina/o pride and reclaiming our culture, but what’s next? We are
familiar with
characters caught in the culture clash hovering around notions of
identity and homeland
that helped shape the literature of our Diaspora, but what is on the horizon?

We seek submissions exploring the space of contradiction where our stories live:

What are the resiliency stories borne out of our legacy of colonization?
How do we as Pilipinas/os transform accepted norms, whether positive
or negative, in religion/spirituality, language and culture?
How do we practice a healthy forgiveness in order to sustain
relationship and community?
How do we practice everyday acts of resistance?
How do we keep our humanity in the face of unequal power dynamics … At
work? With the people you love? With institutions intending to help,
but do more harm?

We are interested in utilizing prose and poetry to creatively teach
and speak our
experience as first, second, third (and beyond) generations of
Pilipina/o’s in the Diaspora.
Walang Hiya will feature a study guide in the back of the anthology
for educators and
community groups to use as an entry point for dialogue and political engagement.
Guidelines

All submissions will be read thoroughly and with respect. If selected
for the Walang
Hiya anthology, additional editing may be required. The author(s) will
be contacted
directly for input.

Submission Deadline: December 5, 2008
Submissions should be no more than 3,000 words, double-spaced,
single-sided, 12-point font
Please include a bio of 100 words or less
Send works via email as an attachment in Microsoft Word to
walanghiya2009@gmail.com
Questions can be directed to Roseli Ilano or Lolan Buhain Sevilla at
walanghiya2009@gmail.com

Contributors retain all rights to their work and will receive two
complimentary copies as
compensation.

lolan buhain sevilla
www.lolansevilla.com

“they are even afraid of our songs of love”
– – carlos bulosan

…cuz it ain’t.  As long as one of the presidential hopefuls can call the President elect an Uncle Tom, we still got problems. Big ones.

If Joe the Plumber, the McCain supporting Ohioan who was the central force of the third and final presidential debate because of his tax questions and pursuit to buy his own business, got to meet Barack Obama, then it is TIME for Ann Nixon Cooper as well.

My social security number is a fun topic of conversation in the Midwest. My SSN reveals the deep east of my roots. The parts of me that peed on the NYC slides growing up, skipping down New Jersey sidewalks, and thinking Manhattan was this small dirty playground in my backyard.

I was eight when I moved to Ohio and hated every inch of the plains. The slow talkers, slow drivers, and no honking rule. In my dreams as a child, New York and Jersey were my pathways home. Now, twenty years later, most of my Filipino cousins who lived in Ohio with me eventually moved to the coasts, away from green lawns, suburbia, and conservatism. Oakland and Hoboken resonated deep in our Brown hearts of progress, diversity, and accessibility to culture with people of color.

Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Managua, and Manila have all been mailing addresses at some point in my life. A deep wound in my marriage has been reconciling geography, where to live means questioning exactly HOW you live and what you value. Three of my closest friends live in Manhatten and often remark, “Just move here already! You visit too much.”

So much of my twenties has been wasted on wishing I was in a different color state. Erroneous, so erroneous, is placing one’s identity with geographical surrounding. As if life is as simple as that: where you live is who you are. (Not what you DO or how you take action.) What privilege, I realize, comes in choosing state and that specific state’s government. How foolish, I see now, to measure my politics with the velocity of my state’s ability to align itself with my values.

I’ve returned to Ohio, the mirror of the United States, to the northeast region. I’ve lived 3 months now in Cleveland. A post industrial city with unsung heroes and gifts, Cleveland began to show its colors to me during this Autumn season, this election year. Slowly, without any noticeable wind, I began to understand how and why I must embrace my new state and its Purple identity. How fitting that I, once Republican, once Democrat, and registered Independent reside in a state that changes with the times. Sometimes disappointing, sometimes slow, but always reflective of the state of progress of the larger picture. Ohio is a continual work in progress.

Cleveland is the blue horse, a lover of Buckeye football, a city of trains and an empty downtown. Cleveland is a sorely unimpressive lakeside developer with stains of unemployment and unfulfilled projects. But, like the rest of the nation today, Cleveland is a site of promise. I saw it yesterday in a mother who said she was an at-risk pregnant mother who couldn’t walk, but showed up to volunteer to sit and make phone calls for the Obama campaign. I saw four children playing together, all different ethnicities and colors, yelling on a non-descript street, testing their knowledge of Spanish and Japanese words with one another.

Ohio, in its quiet strength of home and corn fields, is also home to a keen (buck)eye to recognize when change is needed. From Red, it turned Blue. The pundits keep calling it a traditionally Red state, but it’s not. There are many activists and progressive minds in the deep “South” of Cincinnati and fighting the fight of racism in Over the Rhine as found in the NGOs of Brooklyn. There are writers of every creed, bleeding their way to be heard, just as the dreamers of San Francisco. There are fresh bakeries, vegan chefs, sidewalks of Spanglish, and local farmers as there are in the coastal cities. We are mixed. We are Purple. This is why Ohio reflects the nation. There are skyscrapers in the distance of the harvest and the hues of yellow, orange, and red as the sun sets drops a majestic background of peace and negotiation between farming fathers and scholarly daughters.

There may not be an Empire State building, or even a red carpet invitation with a Midwestern zip code, but I can promise you this of Ohio: it always tells the truth, unabashedly, of where it stands. And I may not like it. I may rip the Ten Commandments billboards down and curse the SUV drivers roaming the flat roads, but Ohio reveals all the superficial and best parts of our journey.

I wondered last night, on the couch with Adonis, where I’d rather be in witnessing the first Black president win the general election. We contemplated a five hour drive to Grant Park or maybe even D.C. But when I saw the pundits claim Ohio blue, I smiled in the way I have when I reconciled stark differences with an old friend. Humbled, eager, and ready, I’ve reached a cheesy reconciliation with my state and realized that I do not belong in a permanent shade of blue region. That would be erasing my years as a pro-life marcher, the years of exploring Catholic dogma, the Clinton tears, and my controversial Bush vote of 2000. I don’t want to erase my Red. It’s changed, but it’s still me.

The color Purple has long been my favorite. And today, especially, I regard the mix of the two as I watch my beloved state hand the election to Barack Obama with the grumbling and rejoicing that can only be heard in the neighborhoods of mixed identities, my home, my state, Ohio.

O-H