Dahilanan, I
Because I need to know who I am.
Because I need to claim myself. Because I am my own, and yet not my own. Because what I call my freedom is a farce and an indulgence; because what they say is my free will is only a choice between oppressions.
Because there is something in my blood I cannot name or put words to, because my tongue is cloven in two by birth and by sword, because the speech of my mother and my mother’s mother and those who went before her has been riven from me. Because I cannot remember the stories of my childhood, because I never had them to begin with, not the tales of children brown as earth and joyous as rivers, not the memories of conversing with monsters, not the unswerving clarity of all the grit of our contradictions and our fractures and our glory and our chains.
Because my country has been stolen, as have my symbols and my songs and the suns embedded in my skin. Because my heart’s eyes, like the eyes of my people, have been put out, and I can no longer recognize my kin except to cast them away. Because my spine is coiled in upon itself from the learned subservience of centuries, because the weight of the past is crushing immensity that must be struck and pushed against and defied if I am ever to raise my face, taas-noo.
Because I have been so long shamed into silence. Because the pain of speaking is tanikala and gapos and bilangguan. Dahil hindi abot ng wika ng kapangyarihan ang lalim ng mga sugat sa aking kaluluwa.
Dahil ako ay Pilipino. Iniibig ko ang Pilipinas.
Dahil hinihingi ito ng mga kuwento. Because there are so many stories hidden just under my skin, in the wrinkles of my palm, in the chords of my throat and the whorls of my ears and the dusty brown soles of my feet. Because my people and my country and my culture are bursting with stories, crammed full of them, the stories whispered between our cousins in the withering height of noon, the stories we tell each other in the dead of the night lit by a single candle (brownout kasi), the stories of the provinces unspooling beauty like endless blue thread and the cities skittering with jeweled chitin and concrete and wires, the stories we have stuffed into our mouths and held in all these years, the stories begging and raging and pleading to be told, the stories that make up our laughter and our music and our discord and our anger and sorrow and love.
Because I need to keep it all within me, because I need to scream it out. Because the Philippines is lodestone and salt in the heart and polar star. Because this, even this, is something to hold onto; because I will hold on to these thorns and these cliffs as long as I can rather than drop back into the weightlessness of apathy. Because these thorns are as much part of who I am and what my country is and the shape and texture and form and weight of my words and my language and my stories as its spines are part of the makahiya. As its smallness is part of the maya.
Because stories matter, because stories are precious, because our stories are ours.
Because the past is not ang nakaraan.
Because this is the way the world is.
That’s why I’m trying to fight it.
