NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I have spent untold hours in the collection of the Micronesian Area Research center going through stacks upon stacks of newspapers looking at ads of those running for political office in Guam. Although I don't mention it much, when I began my masters thesis at the University of Guam in Micronesian Studies, my initial topics was actually political campaigns in Guam and analyzing Chamoru discourse in campaigns. I conducted around 50 interviews over several months, with a wide range of people. My intent was to reveal what role Chamoru "culture" or "language" or "identity" played in the organizing of political campaigns, the outreach, the strategizing or rationale. My own motivation for taking on this project was tied to the 2002 Guam gubernatorial campaign. I was a young Chamoru grad student, who had started learning speaking Chamoru the year prior and was functionally, albeit awkwardly fluent in Chamoru. I was spending most of my free time in MARC

Whether you call it the Muslim Ban or the Travel Ban, I cannot help but think of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer whenever the issue of Trump's poorly conceived executive order blocking immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations. It is intriguing the way that Trump's candidacy and now his presidency has ended up revealing so much of the guts of the political game in the United States, that it threatens to rend the whole thing asunder. What I mean by this is that politics is a game that is designed to keep anyone from fundamentally changing or challenging anything. A narrow range of ideological options are offered, neither of which would change much about the structure of society or the distribution of power. As long as everyone plays their roles, you could argue that revolution in both positive or negative sense is avoided. But Trump's refusal to be a typical politician or leader or even just a serious, mature person is leading to a crisis where the guts, the bones, t

Several years ago this poem was used in the Inacha'igen Fino' CHamoru at the University of Guam as part of the poetry recitation category. This is a Middle School category where students have to memorize and then recite a poem written in the Chamorro language. I was honored that year when the other Chamorro teachers, who were and continue to be far more versed than I am in the Chamorro language, asked me if I would be so kind as to submit something. I had written this poem years earlier, while I was in grad school and working my way through a few books by Indian poets and authors such as Rabindranath Tagore. At that point I was fluent in Chamorro, but constantly feeling alone in the language as I was staying in San Diego and couldn't always make it out to the Guam Club in National City for the senior lunches or the nobenas. During that period I ended up translating hundreds of poems and songs, some of which you can find archived on this blog, in an effort to keep my min

  I don't paint as much as I used to, but I'm still an artist gi korason-hu. Achokka' ti mamementa yu' kada diha, manhahasso yu' todu tiempo put pinenta yan atte.  I have been inspired by many artists over the years, especially when I was an undergraduate and graduate student at UOG. At that time, I was painting a great deal and displaying and selling my artwork around the island.  One of the biggest influences on me, and something which made me the butt of a great deal of "måtai na pepenta" na jokes, was my looking up to Jean-Michel Basquiat.  He was one of the consummate bohemian artists, who challenged artist norms in his time, was used by the artworld during his short life, and then died.  When I first created an email account for myself in 1998, I was so enamored with Basquiat, that I didn't use my name, but instead blended our names together. Rather than mlbevacqua, I instead entered mlbasquiat.