NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Last year a graphic story that I wrote titled "I Sindålu" was published in the creative anthology Pacific Monsters edited by Margret Helgadottir. It was a fun story, that I thankfully got to write in the Chamoru language, with English translations. It tells the story of a Chamoru soldier who is dealing with the trauma of what he experienced while being deployed in a foreign land. He comes home to Guam and live in a ranch at the edge of the jungle, and begins to feel menaced by the spirits of his ancestors, the taotaomo'na. I really liked writing this story and was happy to see it in print, but I am terrible at promoting things, especially if I'm the one who created it ( ai lokkue'). Here is an interview that I did with the website The Future Fire.   ************************* Sunday, 6 May 2018 Interview with Michael Lujan Bevacqua The Future Fire http://press.futurefire.net/2018/05/interview-with-michael-lujan-bevacqua.html May 2018 I n th

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’m traveling this week and so it gives me quite a bit of down time on planes, with little to do other than get airsick. A few years ago I was watching quite a bit of anime and one thing I really enjoyed doing was taking anime theme songs, from shows like Gantz, Naruto and Cromartie High School and then translating them into Chamorro. Each translation was an interesting experiment, since although many of these shows are considered to be low-plebian culture, pop culture animated shadows on the cave wall for the masses, the lyrics to the theme songs tend to have a very epic and sophisticated feel to them.   These songs presented interesting challenges since translating them directly would be difficult and not necessarily match well with Chamorro. But finding ways of expressing similar epic thoughts in Chamorro, while trying to maintain a sense of the language would be fun and worthwhile. I still read manga regularly even if

It has been quite a white since my last installment of Fun With Footnotes, where I post on my blog some of my more excessive or informative footnotes from my academic work. I wrote a poem several years ago which described Guam as one "Big American Footnote," and that was in one way the first seed which later became my dissertation, various articles, some of my favorite talking points and numerous posts on this blog. The metaphor of the footnote was something I felt could help me explain Guam and its colonial predicament, and how it exists, it means something, it matters, it reveals something crucial or important, but like most footnotes it is assumed to matter in a way that doesn't matter. I remember when I was in grad school at UCSD and in one class, another student who had read a draft of my Masters Thesis noted that my long footnotes were irrelevant and pointless since she, like everyone else in the world didn't read them anyways, and to make them any longer than

The gof na'chalek lao gof na'triste lokkue' book Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut ends with the following paragraph. If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. For those of you who don't know the book, you should read it, it is a tragic commentary on everything from religion, to colonialism, to the fallacy of objective science. At this point the whole world has been radically altered by a substance called ice-nine, which when is touched to water changes its composition so that it can be solid ice even at room temperature. The protagonist is stuck on the island of San Lorenzo, surrounded by the once ocean, which is now a world of tornadoes. He ha

Un empe' finayi ginnen i kachido Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence : "Life and Death are both marrionettes wandering the same table. Cut their strings and they are easily ignored." Annai fine'nina humalom yu' gi iyo-ku Ph.D. program giya San Diego, hu kilili este guatu lokkue' gi i hinasso-ku. Sina na "estupido" este na sinangan, lao ti para Guahu. Este na sinangan yan otro na research na hu cho'gue, mana'dana' gi i hinasso-ku, ya chine'leghua iyo-ku idea siha put decolonization. Meggai giya Guahan, yan meggai na Chamoru gi lagu, ti ya-niha kumuentos pat humungok put decolonization, ya fihu ma na'chechetton gi iyo-niha resistance, chatguinife put mina'a'nao, minatai yan i madestrosa-na Guahan. Gi este na hinasso, achapiligro decolonization yan pinino' maisa ( suicide). I dipotsi na hiniyong este na kuentos, "mungga madecolonization, sa' siempre pon na'fattoigue hao ni' minatai yan dinestrosa para u t