NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

"Blue" I’m trying to find something she left, A kiss that has long been taped to my mind It was left there long ago, by someone who had no business inside my skull But found her way there, during a sweaty afternoon, complete with grass stains and sword cuts that stretched like clues on puzzle pieces from her limbs to mine At one point that kiss was an itch, a scar carved upon my memories, that blocked the flow of daily traffic, always taking my thoughts through detours towards that afternoon, when without a moment’s notice, she planted that kiss upon my life I would spend days taping, rock hammer rapping at the side of my skull, splintering bone and feeding air to that starving scar. Desperate to keep it alive, to force feed nourishment into the scar, to keep it crisp, to keep it breathing, humming, dancing between life and death.  But I simply write around that kiss. As I reach into my skull, digging for that scarred memory, as my own irritated bone tears into my finger fles

I have been working for about two years now on a social studies textbook for UOG Press. This is a part of a project that aims to create locally and regionally focused social studies textbooks for each elementary school grade. In the past there have been a few different social studies textbooks, but often times they were aimed at multiple grades or were focused more on Guam History as opposed to being solid social studies texts. This project is exciting and challenging on many levels.  The grade I am working on is fourth grade, which is fortunate for me, since it is the grade when students are supposed to get their first focused taste of Guam History. It is, gi minagahet, very exciting. I get to use everything from Guam History, to Chamoru language, to legends and local parables to get students connected to the world around them and understand how to be an effective, productive and critical part of your community.  In the first two units, one thing that I have tried to use alot of are l

The issue of lockdowns, checkpoints, roadblocks, civil liberties and rights has been prominent lately in Guam (and in other places as well). I was looking at my bookshelf for different books and discussions on this sort of issue, wanting to just put some structure to the ways that people were talking about stricter measures to save lives, but others trying forcefully to argue that their rights wer e more important than the public health concerns. There were alot of ways to approach something like this, since it brings in philosophy, political science/theory, sociology, legal theory, etc. As I was scanning my bookshelf though, I saw a book I hadn't read in a while, but has one passage which I thought of as being relevant in the sort of "looking awry" way I like my critical analysis, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain. In it, there is the passage on the two "Reigns of Terror."  "There were two "Reigns of Terror"

Hagas umatungo' ham yan este na taotao, si Siñot Joe "Dågu" Babauta, un ma'estron Chamorro yan gof maolek na titifok yan danderu. Desde i ma'pos na såkkan hu ayuyuda gui' mama'tinas lepblon e'eyak para i ma'estron Chamorro gi GDOE. Hu kekeayuda gui' på'go mama'nå'gue klas gi UOG para i otro semester (Fañomåkan 2018). Halacha nai hu interview gui' para i website Hongga Mo'na , ya debi di bei edit yan na'funhåyan ayu. Estague un tinige' put guiya yan i bidadå-ña ginen i gasetan PDN. **************************** "Chamorro teacher Joe 'Dågu' Babuata keeps weaving tradition alive" by Chloe Babauta Pacific Daily News August 7, 2017 When Joe “Dågu” Babauta saw “Tan Maria” weaving a hat out of coconut leaves at 12 years old, his lifelong love affair with the art of weaving began. “Being that I was so young, I had to ask older friends who drove to take me down there from Agat, to wh

It is intriguing when we see epochs of time shift and change and replace each other. These are like grand markers in time, like huge arches that delineate when everything was one way and when it all changed and became something else. On Guam we have antes di gera and despues di gera which draws a clear line of memory between what existed prior to World War II and after. World War II survivors will tell you the smells in the air, the sounds of the island were different in 1940 as they were in 1945. Most people in the United States and elsewhere in the world mark recent memory with "9/11" as if to say that things were fundamentally different before September 11th, 2001 than they were afterwards. All of this is a fiction of course, but there is still a way that communities tend to lay out the stretches of time behind them in certain blocks, to make them easier to manage, but propping up these important moments as providing the keys to understand all those temporal tectonic shi

Every July Guam becomes transformed into an "island of massacres." As the collection memory of the island becomes focused around recalling and recounting the tragic final weeks of I Tiempon Chapones on Guam, the month seems to move from one horrific story to another. July 1944 was filled with more atrocities and more suffering than the 31 months of Japanese occupation that preceded it. Pale' Jesus Baza Duenas is killed. Chamorros are forced into concentration camps. Massacres take place in Hagat, Yigu, Merizo and Hagatna. War stories from war survivors build towards a brutal climax at this point. This brutal period however is the prologue to the happy end to Japanese rule. Within days or weeks of these atrocities taking place, Japanese guards have disappeared from concentration camps and stories of American troops being spotted are traveling around with lightning speed. War narratives at this point jump from opposite sides of the spectrum. They go from being