NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Adios Siñot Torres by Michael Lujan Bevacqua Guam Daily Post October 14, 2015 I spent last week asking several dozen people about the favorite classical musical choices of an eighty-eight-year-old Chamorro man who had just passed away. It was a saddening, sobering, but also inspiring experience. Jose Mata Torres, a man I’ve spent the last two years working with, passed away on September 28. Through the Chamorro Studies program at UOG, I assisted him with the researching, writing, editing, and eventual publishing of his memoir “ Massacre at Atåte .” The book recounts not only his general wartime experiences but also a truly heroic event where he was among a group of men in Malesso’ who rose up and killed or drove off the Japanese in their village in July 1944. I feel privileged to have helped him publish this book, which, he joked, schoolchildren may be forced to read for generations to come. When I learned of his passing, I immediately felt the

It is now less than a year til Guam hosts FESTPAC or the largest cultural festival in the Pacific. I am involved in FESTPAC in a number of forms and there are some ways that we are clearly ready and on course and others where ai adai it seems like it'll take a miracle for us to make it on time.  Para i taotao ni' muna'la'la'la' yan chumochonnek mo'na i kuttura-ta (gi meggai na manera) este na dinana' i mas takhilo', i mas sagradu na tiempo. Kada kuatro na sakkan mandadana' i taotaogues i Pasifiku gi unu na isla, ya manafa'nu'i yan manapatte i kutturan-niha. Un sen dangkolu na onra este na para ta kombida taotao ginen kana trenta diferentes na isla siha magi para i tano'-ta.  For those of you who would like to receive regular updates about FESTPAC, its planning and organizing go on Facebook and LIKE the official FESTPAC page. Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/guamfestpac2016 Or, each Friday the Pacific Daily News i

--> English is my mother tongue, in the sense that it is the language that I grew up with and speak most comfortably. It is my first language. It is however not my favorite language, not the best language and certainly not i mas takhilo' para Guahu. I am a non-native speaker of the Chamorro language as I learned to speak it when I was 20 years old. It is natural for me in some ways, but still unnatural in others, primarily when talking about things that are difficult in general to express in a Chamorro lexicon. This is not only something that I struggle with, but as the Chamorro language has become more and more limited in how and where it is used, many people find themselves constantly switching to English since a potential part of their conversation is something few people have actually used the Chamorro language to convey. For example, on the rare occasions that I've tried to discuss Foucault or Derrida in Chamorro, when speaking in general about it, there

When I read the short story, "The Sun, The Moon, the Stars" by Junot Diaz, he had several lovely passages, and on the advice of my male' Victoria Leon Guerrero I used to use it when I would teach composition at the University of Guam. There is one moment towards the end where the narrator talks about when one reaches the end of one relationship it brings you back to the beginning. You see the first moments in a color that was more vivid than when you actually experienced them. That is the sign that a relationship is coming to an end, like when the brain starts to shut down and it is gasping for life, the another moment after the next and it fills the abyss of your mind with a maelstrom of desperate exploding stars. There is an obvious poetry and symmetry to this, but I haven't really felt it to be true. Each time I have come to the end of a relationship, or even like I do now, where I can see the end ahead like a depressing oasis impervious to this r