"Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah. It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you." -Rumi
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Feminist Re/clamation of Orality
Walter J. Ong’s discussion in Orality and Literacy, of the power in what he calls “primary oral culture,” culture that is purely oral and does not use any type of writing or reading, brings to mind the ways the feminist movement, particularly feminists and queer women of color use and understand orality.
I am not saying that the feminist movement does not write – feminist, queer, and women of color writers have used the power of the written word, both academically and creatively to break down barriers in communication between other women, and to critique the oppressive institutions around them. However, orality, within the feminist/queer/women of color movements has found a place in the present day machinations of those political expressions.
Ong claims that orality is dead at the hands of literacy, and while we should mourn the loss of the “magical” orality, ultimately this is acceptable (and inevitable) because the point is that humans need to able to document their ideas. To be able to document our ideas frees and allows our minds to think abstractly and reach a higher level of critical thinking. Ong assumes that orality is not only obsolete, a remnant of an idealized past, but is also written off (excuse the pun) as unimportant and forgotten.
While I agree that pure orality is something that the dominant and literate culture cannot return to, Ong does not examine the groups of people whose political and personal locations do not allow them to forget about an oral past, while still existing in the hyper-literate present.
Feminists/queer/women of color writers and artists have always been thinking about their relationship to oral culture. Thinkers and artists who critique the linear narrative of history, who remember our relationship to past oral cultures, are changing our relationship to orality. Ong begins from a romantic place where “pre-literacy” has a “magical potency” but is in totality assumed inferior. There is a whole group of thinkers who do not believe this, and are doing work to make sure that oral histories, in all its transience and subjectivity are just as valid as written ones. These artists, scholars, and activists know that while society may not be purely oral anymore, we can take those oral modes of thinking and communicating, and enhance them using documentation.
Feminists/queers/women of color especially reclaim orality.
Cherrie Moraga is a queer Chicana poet and playwright. She writes about “social memory” and the power of “remembering and re/remembering.” Ong claims, “Literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedents and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory, is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore their memory, too” (15). Moraga’s work takes her ethnic and hybrid history as a child of immigrants, and by writing them down she is re/remembering the experiences of her ancestors. In the same way oral histories are subjected to the tears and frays of memory, so are the stories of diasporic cultures.
Moraga is also a playwright, and though she works with words on paper, her words are only alive in terms of sound and performance. While archived in books, plays represent a kind of hybrid existence, both in text and in “essentially evanescent” performance. This brings us back to the kind of “magic” that Ong uses when he describes the power of orality, and its “magical potency” because it is “spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven” (32).
Maxine Hong Kingston does the same, especially in her novel China Men. She is constantly playing with memory, writing down the oral histories her parents provided her, but is also re/remembering events and breaking down and not knowing, purposefully, what is true or not. Hong Kinsgton exposes the fear of “literate culture” in her literature – that what is “true” is always subjective and ultimately does not matter.
Because of her immigrant background, Hong Kingston takes from her ancestors oral histories, and with her heightened literacy is able to record it in writing. But then, in respect for oral culture and personal narratives, Hong Kingston must take responsibility for the permanency and “validity” of writing by “owning up” to her own location to it, as well as her original story tellers subjectivities and memories. Hong Kingston begins to merge orality and literacy by breaking down what is “real (factual and event based) truth” and “false memory,” and reclaiming it all as true – that every story and memory however changed or flawed is valid and real. This is very close to the pure orality that Ong has believed we have lost. Feminists of color attempt to give rise to it again in a new form.
The SPARROW, the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women, (http://www.sparrowonline.org/profile.htm) founded Dr. C. S. Lakshmi, Dr. Neera Desai and Dr. Maithreyi Krishna Raj, is a women’s history archive in India that includes both text and oral histories. Their Oral History Project documents and archives the recorded oral stories of poor and low caste women. Like many projects dealing with women and the poor, they have had a difficult time finding sponsors and supporters:
“One [government official] wanted to know what oral history was and when he was told what exactly it was, he exclaimed, ‘You mean you want to call chit-chat of women, history?’” (http://blog.world-citizenship.org/wp-archive/1254)
This attitude of the oral being “inferior” oppresses people of oral cultures, who are usually from indigenous and immigrant narratives and who are typically less economically privileged. There is also a feminization of orality embedded in this belief of memory and feeling not being sound and credible. Archives like SPARROW and women artists like Hong Kinsgton and Moraga want to reclaim the oral, which is also deeply indigenous, queer, hybrid, and feminist. They argue, with great grace, that these voices that have for so long been valued less because of its claimed subjectivity and place in memory (which is deemed unreliable) is not less than – simply because everything is subjective, everything is from memory, written words can be rewritten, and that history is at the mercy of those who SPEAK as well as those who write them down.
I begin to imagine a future for this kind of political expression in terms of what a feminist/queer/anti-colonial technological aesthetic will look like. How will we use this power to express non-linear narratives, to record, erase, re/record stories? How can we take the ideas of orality (never to return to pure orality) but to take the feeling and ways of thinking (non linear, memory based, power in transience and subjectivity, critiquing and questioning truth) and use technology to heighten those awarenesses and bring us to a more progressive, anti-colonial, queer, feminist place of thinking.
“Everything is gestation and bringing forth.
That alone is living the artist’s life – in understanding as in work.
There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like [a] tree…. It comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.
I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful…”
– Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
i want it now:
to Know.
just,
to Know.
to know what and why
who what where when how
am I doing…
how are you doing?
kumusta ka?
and the truth is I am fine – better than fine -
surviving thriving
making friends and drinking red horse
out til late or
having people over for
more
beer and a smoke
a few
laughs or a bootleg movie.
and the truth is I am well – what else could I be? when
there are weekends with family to
catch up on the years that drowned between
Manila Bay and L.A.
eating napping talking
and
eating again
countering questions on sex
returning auntie’s kisses
receiving another plate of pancit
and listening until the stark light
of bare bulbs flicker on
across the city.
but
you know,
my truth is also
hungry yearning needy impatient
inside tearing ripping clawing
a young bright wanting
frantic desperate heaving
striving trying looking searching for
who what where when
how am I really doing
here.
and the truth is that it was gorgeous today an orange evening clear for miles
and i wondered to myself in that same breath of awe
How am I doing Here?
kumusta ako?
and the truth is ‘di ko alam, po.
well, if you really want to know –
the truth is i want. every moment wanting
gasping awake sweating needing
answers to unsolvable questions
addresses to homes unknown or off limits
the truth is i hurt – more than hurt
i am ripped apart by my context and history and location
my fundamental selves at odds
bleeding
should i even be here?
the truth is i am dealing
coping negotiating my own issues
insecurities, identity
coming here to “find myself”
a me i have never seen
though
i am flesh and i exist
fractured and disparate yet sure and undeniable.
knowing that,
the truth is i cry.
weeping gratefully as the bare bulbs burn
“Everything is gestation and bringing forth.
That alone is living the artist’s life – in understanding as in work.
There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like [a] tree…. It comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.
I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful…”
– Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
i want it now:
to Know.
just,
to Know.
to know what and why
who what where when how
am I doing…
how are you doing?
kumusta ka?
and the truth is I am fine – better than fine -
surviving thriving
making friends and drinking red horse
out til late or
having people over for
more
beer and a smoke
a few
laughs or a bootleg movie.
and the truth is I am well – what else could I be? when
there are weekends with family to
catch up on the years that drowned between
Manila Bay and L.A.
eating napping talking
and
eating again
countering questions on sex
returning auntie’s kisses
receiving another plate of pancit
and listening until the stark light
of bare bulbs flicker on
across the city.
but
you know,
my truth is also
hungry yearning needy impatient
inside tearing ripping clawing
a young bright wanting
frantic desperate heaving
striving trying looking searching for
who what where when
how am I really doing
here.
and the truth is that it was gorgeous today an orange evening clear for miles
and i wondered to myself in that same breath of awe
How am I doing Here?
kumusta ako?
and the truth is ‘di ko alam, po.
well, if you really want to know –
the truth is i want. every moment wanting
gasping awake sweating needing
answers to unsolvable questions
addresses to homes unknown or off limits
the truth is i hurt – more than hurt
i am ripped apart by my context and history and location
my fundamental selves at odds
bleeding
should i even be here?
the truth is i am dealing
coping negotiating my own issues
insecurities, identity
coming here to “find myself”
a me i have never seen
though
i am flesh and i exist
fractured and disparate yet sure and undeniable.
knowing that,
the truth is i cry.
weeping gratefully as the bare bulbs burn
kanto fried chicken: a love poem in five movements
I.
sittin’ quietly
in a KFC
in a developing country
developing thoughts on the
Mickey D’s
among the trees
across
the street.
crowded jeepneys
drivin’ by looking fly
chrome virgens on the dash
painted jesus ridin’ past
blond hair n’ blue eyes
starin’ at
the unmoving traffic
He’s
stuck
in
prayin’ to his Dad
to forgive his sin
of wishin’ he was in
a private SUV
with the aircon on
blastin’ english songs
‘stead of this public mass
transport
breathing in soot
watchin’ rainbow jeeps
with his mama on the hood.
II.
the smog settles.
revealing schoolgirls on cell phones
texting secrets
to illicit suitors
on scooters
ferrying tourists to
and fro
the megamalls and barrios
where the deal’s a steal
when you play
be it ang mga batang kalye
sneaking away with
your wallet and cell
or a haggled discount price
over your proud prize
an authentic tropical
conch shell
or
your indigenously
meticulously
woven banig to hang on your
loft’s wall
while someone must be missing
a mat to fall
asleep on
It’s wrong
Isn’t it – I think?
while gnawing on
a chicken wing.
III.
lounging comfy
with Colonel Sanders
watching pusacals meander
domesticated predators
eyein’ the tasty thighs,
freedom fries
and ice cold Sierra Mist
this
domesticated preda/tourist
missed
during weeks of cultural immersion
a version
of trying to understand and belong
i think
can that be so wrong?
as i Purell my greasy hands.
IV.
the strays scatter away.
i eye the last fry and
someone takes my tray to
bus it for me
it’s weird to see
the service industry so
clearly.
i pause before i go.
V.
sitting anxiously
at a global chicken chain
urging my brain to
retrain
past the shame and blame
and heat and rain—
lookin’ past the glass exit
and the doorman with a gun
there are cocks
under cardboard boxes
hiding from the sun
their cry for the day to begin
lost earlier in
the wind
i caught ringing in my ears
along with my fears
this morning.
i count my fare slow.
handling each peso and centavo
while watching lolas
futilely sweeping the
uneven concrete
past carts selling buko and calling cards
the memory of the morning
bittersweet
i rubbed my eyes awake to
new skies and then
only to find myself in
the familiar again
and again
and again
unable to exit this air-conditioned
fluorescent haven/hell
conditioned to crave the
smell
of country comfort
cheap fast bright clean cool
the traffic light turns red.
jesus stops and above his
airbrushed head reads:
Quiapo
i get up and go.
kanto fried chicken: a love poem in five movements
I.
sittin’ quietly
in a KFC
in a developing country
developing thoughts on the
Mickey D’s
among the trees
across
the street.
crowded jeepneys
drivin’ by looking fly
chrome virgens on the dash
painted jesus ridin’ past
blond hair n’ blue eyes
starin’ at
the unmoving traffic
He’s
stuck
in
prayin’ to his Dad
to forgive his sin
of wishin’ he was in
a private SUV
with the aircon on
blastin’ english songs
‘stead of this public mass
transport
breathing in soot
watchin’ rainbow jeeps
with his mama on the hood.
II.
the smog settles.
revealing schoolgirls on cell phones
texting secrets
to illicit suitors
on scooters
ferrying tourists to
and fro
the megamalls and barrios
where the deal’s a steal
when you play
be it ang mga batang kalye
sneaking away with
your wallet and cell
or a haggled discount price
over your proud prize
an authentic tropical
conch shell
or
your indigenously
meticulously
woven banig to hang on your
loft’s wall
while someone must be missing
a mat to fall
asleep on
It’s wrong
Isn’t it – I think?
while gnawing on
a chicken wing.
III.
lounging comfy
with Colonel Sanders
watching pusacals meander
domesticated predators
eyein’ the tasty thighs,
freedom fries
and ice cold Sierra Mist
this
domesticated preda/tourist
missed
during weeks of cultural immersion
a version
of trying to understand and belong
i think
can that be so wrong?
as i Purell my greasy hands.
IV.
the strays scatter away.
i eye the last fry and
someone takes my tray to
bus it for me
it’s weird to see
the service industry so
clearly.
i pause before i go.
V.
sitting anxiously
at a global chicken chain
urging my brain to
retrain
past the shame and blame
and heat and rain—
lookin’ past the glass exit
and the doorman with a gun
there are cocks
under cardboard boxes
hiding from the sun
their cry for the day to begin
lost earlier in
the wind
i caught ringing in my ears
along with my fears
this morning.
i count my fare slow.
handling each peso and centavo
while watching lolas
futilely sweeping the
uneven concrete
past carts selling buko and calling cards
the memory of the morning
bittersweet
i rubbed my eyes awake to
new skies and then
only to find myself in
the familiar again
and again
and again
unable to exit this air-conditioned
fluorescent haven/hell
conditioned to crave the
smell
of country comfort
cheap fast bright clean cool
the traffic light turns red.
jesus stops and above his
airbrushed head reads:
Quiapo
i get up and go.
I don’t know my own name. I can’t pronounce the damn thing correctly. Twenty-two years old and my name sounds strange off my tongue.
Krystal Banzon.
CHRIS-tul BAND-zahn in the states.
Krrris-TAHL BAAN-SOHN in the Philippines.
So I end up mumbling it incoherently when people ask, which requires them to ask me again because they can’t hear or understand me. So I repeat it louder, my lips clumsily tripping over syllables that have belonged to me my whole life, my eyes shifting, embarrassed that I don’t know my own name. Humiliated that I can’t correctly pronounce the ethnic tones that formulate my Visayan last name, the letters that connect me to my father’s heritage.
“KRRRISTAHL BAANSOHN!! Oh, very formal!” people exclaim.
“Krystal” here apparently doesn’t have the same suburban cheerleader connotations it has in the States.
I’ve realized that a similar narrative exists with people who grew up in more than one culture, that some of my own friends have had to resign themselves to be renamed a similar, but simpler nickname for the comfort and ease of the dominant culture, or have had to fight to get their name pronounced correctly, rolled-R’s,long-A’s and all. And then there are the ones like myself, who mumble their birth name all throughout their lives, for some reason never asking their parents for the correct pronunciation, and muttering it inconsistently for years before finally settling on an mess of vowels that is easy to say, but difficult to claim.
Banzon. BAANzon. BanZON. BanSON. BENson. BenZON. BANDzon.
a predicament
of hybridity
of imperialist hegemony
a speech impediment
culturally,
sneakily,
imposed
like bank repos
taken and resold.
it’s the therapy of society
to help you fix
that confusing ethnic
lilt
to train
your brain
to enunciate
PRO-NONE-SEE-ate
For the convenience of the bank men
The understanding of white friends
To avoid bureaucratic dead ends
And prevent corporate interview
career-killing trends
Make it effortless.
No distress
No questions
No shame(?)
in that mutter
stutter
slur
that is Your Name
I don’t know my own name. I can’t pronounce the damn thing correctly. Twenty-two years old and my name sounds strange off my tongue.
Krystal Banzon.
CHRIS-tul BAND-zahn in the states.
Krrris-TAHL BAAN-SOHN in the Philippines.
So I end up mumbling it incoherently when people ask, which requires them to ask me again because they can’t hear or understand me. So I repeat it louder, my lips clumsily tripping over syllables that have belonged to me my whole life, my eyes shifting, embarrassed that I don’t know my own name. Humiliated that I can’t correctly pronounce the ethnic tones that formulate my Visayan last name, the letters that connect me to my father’s heritage.
“KRRRISTAHL BAANSOHN!! Oh, very formal!” people exclaim.
“Krystal” here apparently doesn’t have the same suburban cheerleader connotations it has in the States.
I’ve realized that a similar narrative exists with people who grew up in more than one culture, that some of my own friends have had to resign themselves to be renamed a similar, but simpler nickname for the comfort and ease of the dominant culture, or have had to fight to get their name pronounced correctly, rolled-R’s,long-A’s and all. And then there are the ones like myself, who mumble their birth name all throughout their lives, for some reason never asking their parents for the correct pronunciation, and muttering it inconsistently for years before finally settling on an mess of vowels that is easy to say, but difficult to claim.
Banzon. BAANzon. BanZON. BanSON. BENson. BenZON. BANDzon.
a predicament
of hybridity
of imperialist hegemony
a speech impediment
culturally,
sneakily,
imposed
like bank repos
taken and resold.
it’s the therapy of society
to help you fix
that confusing ethnic
lilt
to train
your brain
to enunciate
PRO-NONE-SEE-ate
For the convenience of the bank men
The understanding of white friends
To avoid bureaucratic dead ends
And prevent corporate interview
career-killing trends
Make it effortless.
No distress
No questions
No shame(?)
in that mutter
stutter
slur
that is Your Name
