What Do the Mango Trees Know?
In my Guam History classes this last month we read the poem below written by my pare' Julian Aguon, titled "The Mango Trees Already Know." The poem is written in the shadow of the impending military buildup to Guam, and is about how the warning signs, the possible dangers to our island and to the Chamorro people are all around us, but we seem to be incapable of doing anything to protect ourselves. Julian even discusses the death of his father to cancer, and forces an important connection between how Guam has become modernized and militarized since World War II and the alarming rates of cancer and disease. I asked my students this past week "What is it that the mango trees know, that we don't?" or "What is it that they know, that we refuse to recognize?" For me, in answering that questions, my mind quickly turns to the film The Happening, by M. Night Shamalayan. For those unfamiliar with the movie, people in the East Coast of the United States s