NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I've been working on my dissertation for about three years now, but have only spent the past year or so writing it. I could easily take another year to finish it, and sort of slowly and lazily work on it, but I'm in a hurry to get out of the graduate student phase of my life. Menha yu' ni' student debt, esta o'sun yu' nu i lina'la estudiante kolehu, ya guaha otro na malago bei cho'gue gi i lina'la'-hu. So I'm pushing myself to finish and have a tentative date for the first week of June to actually defend this damn thing. Right now I've written the first drafts of three chapters and am almost done with my fourth one. After that I've got one quick chapter left and then a conclusion and I have my sprawling, insane, crazily written first dissertation draft done. Este nai i guinife-hu, na bai hu (put fin) na'funhayan este na tinige', kosaki sina bai hu na'hanao mo'na i karrera-hu ta'lo. A few months ago one my frie

Thought I'd try out something new, because I was having trouble falling asleep because of my brother's trombone playing. Since I was living in the states for so long and often had little space to practice speaking or listening to Chamorro, in order to keep fresh my Chamorro language skills, I often came up with quick and easy practices to help keep building my vocabulary. One of these practices that I've shared regularly through this blog has been the taking of songs in English, Hindi and Japanese and writing lyrics to their tunes. The lyrics are sometimes related to the original words, but not always and sometimes I change the theme completely to accommodate my own interpretation of the mood of the song's music. Some examples are " Hum Aapke Hain Koun " from the film of the same name, " Call Me, Call Me " and the anime Cowboy Bebop/Cowboy Bopeep, and " Wave of Mutilation " by the Pixies. Another practice I sometimes do is when I'm li

Last week I gave six talks, at the Mina'tres na Konfrensian Chamorro in Saipan and in different classes at the University of Guam. I hiniyong este na afagao yu' gi este na simana. Before I lost my voice though, I was speaking about thesis topics and writing for different audiences and picking a topic which will benefit the communities you are tied to in one class. Throughout my discussion I brought up my own work on decolonization, and also used events taking place on Guam such as the impending military buildup to illustrate my points. One of the students didn't like my points or where I was coming from. He explained himself as attending UOG a decade ago, and emerging from some classes, fired up, angry wanting to change the island, wondering why we cling to this colonial relationship with America, when they have mistreated us and the Micronesians around us so poorly. Achokka' ta guaiya i Amerikanu siha, yanggen un atan i estorian i islas Micronesia, annok na ti pareh

Yesterday the prospective students for my department came by, and so naturally the discussions always inevitable in an Ethnic Studies Program took place. The origin of Ethnic Studies is a mixture of explicit politics and academics, and so the eternal struggle in any such department is how to balance the rigors of both life spheres. What are we to do with the divisions between the "abstract" world of academia and "concrete" world of real life? I should point here that my point here will not be that these divisions are false, but that how we position ourselves in relation to them is what makes all the difference on whether we will implicitly/explicitly accept them or transgress them. A crucial mistake that I see students make when posing philosophically these problems, is that rather than narrating a relationship to this particular division, which might in some way reveal its contingency, they instead narrate themselves into an interpassive state, whereby the divis

I recently received a call for papers on the topic of "film remakes." The abstract for papers is due the beginning of March and there's a possibility it'll turn into a book. As a lover of movies and other pop culture artifacts, and an academic who actively attempts to incorporate this love into my more supposedly serious work this edition excited me. I should note though that alot of times this incorporation doesn't go over very well. Last week for example, I received incredulous looks from a Native American girl when I said that Gayatri Spivak's question of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" can be answered through the song Don't Speak by No Doubt. If you think that's out of control, wait until you see me and my friend Madel try to show how Micronesians operate as American Viagra in producing American patriotism and sovereignty, through the lyrics to Weezer's El Scorcho. For most people these topics are intensely serious and therefore should be