NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

One passage that has long stayed with me in terms of understanding ethics is from one of Slavoj Zizek's books, where he mentions the Egyptians being swallowed up by the Red Sea as they trail the escaping Israelites. According to Jewish tradition he writes, when the Israelites celebrate the death of their long-time enemies, God chastises them. He tells them, how dare they celebrate that which he created. Who are they to celebrate the destruction of something that comes from God. Even if they were opposed in the drama of life on earth, they come from the same source and they have right to celebrate something which is equal to them in its origin. This type of repositioning is the basis for many types of ethical engagement. The idea that there is always some deeper level, some deeper intersection of humanity that we can and should appeal to in order to create something that is more just and more moral. But we can become so comfortable in our identities, so stuck in them, that it

I have spent the past few weeks meeting with people who are running for political office here in Guam this year. Some for senator, some for governor. This year promises to be an exciting one in terms of campaigns and candidates. With five teams running for governor (4 Democrats and 1 Republican). More than 80 packets for senatorial candidates have been picked up, with only 15 possible seats in the legislature. Mampos meggai na månnok manmalålagu gi kånton guma'! What is different this year however is not just the amount of candidates, but also the diversity in terms of their background. More and more, people are running for office who haven't been in formal government service before. They haven't worked in a political machine. They are outsiders, activists, educators, working class people, lawyers, professionals, veterans, journalists and more. The question remains however, and I will acknowledge from the very start of the conversation, that there is nothing intrinsic

For those of you who don’t know, my dissertation in Ethnic Studies dealt with sovereignty, most specifically Guam’s role in producing America’s sovereignty, or what role its invisibility or nothingness plays in producing America as sovereign. This may sound confusing, but what makes it difficult for most to wrap their heads around, is the simple fact of saying that something which has been for hundreds of years produced discursively as being “small” or “faraway” or “faint” or “owned by the US” as somehow creating something as great and grand and mighty as the United States of America. One frustrating aspect of writing my dissertation was the preparing of a literature review, which is a sometimes helpful, sometimes useless review of what others have written about your topic of choice and how you will either use and build on them or defy them. If you are familiar with the bulk of work on sovereignty it all basically says the same thing nowadays, drawing mildly different c

When I left Guam in 2003 to start graduate school in the states I knew I wanted to research and write about Guam and Chamorros, but wasn't sure what angle to take exactly. My tagline for my research while in grad school was "everything Chamorro, anything Guam" and sometimes "everything Guam and anything Chamorro." Decolonization was something I was becoming more and more interested in in scholarly terms, even if it was something I had already been advocating and working on in an activist context. Would I do something more cultural? Something in your typical social movement, social science way? Would I do a historical project and come up with my bounded bundle of time and go from there? I ended up taking a more philosophical route and I'm grateful that my committee was willing to let me engage in that way. I ended up using my "data" and my evidence in a more philosophical way, or the way that philosophical essays and arti

  In my continuing efforts to ensure that I destroy myself I have started up yet another blog. This blog on the website Team Liquid, which is the largest community site for things related to the game Starcraft, will be naturally dedicated to things dealing with the limited amount of time I get to spend gaming every week. This blog will join the scattered and rag tag band of social online media that I try to run. I have this blog that I do not update as frequently as I used to. I have 3 tumblrs. A Twitter account I don't use much anymore. I have a Chamorro email sentence list I send out every day or so. I also have a weekly column in the Marianas Variety. In addition to all of this I am also doing National Novel Writing Month this month and although I already have 3000 words, I feel like I am behind. The title of my Starcraft blog is " The Bamboo Spear. " I love writing about nerd-related things because I like to combine that aspect of my life, with my love fo

I remember many years ago hitting a wall in my learning of Chamorro. I had gotten the basics and could carry on conversations with people. I could express myself in a casual and sort of everyday way. The basic topics of how is this person doing, how is this going, weren't any problem at all. But when the conversation would become a little bit more complex, when the subject matter got more detailed or more sophisticated the Chamorro language would politely be set side and English would prevail. Chamorro would make cameo appearances afterwards, but never ever truly gain control over what was being said, until the "adios, esta agupa." For me this would happen because I was still learning the language and there were still plenty of thing I wasn't sure how you were supposed to talk about in the Chamorro language. But what depressed me was that sometimes it would be the other person, the one who was far more fluent than myself in the language, who would switch to Engl

My brother Kuri recently graduated from UOG and one of the last classes that he took was a philosophy of religion class. I’ve always enjoyed it when Kuri takes philosophy classes because he’ll talk to me about his readings and I’ll share my ideas with him. Although I would probably never be hired into a philosophy department, my social scientific training was primarily philosophical. Philosophers created the foundations of all social sciences. When I was in Ethnic Studies, it was frustrating having to read so many long dead white Europeans pontificate about the world, but later on I realized that such is the power of knowledge. Their ideas became part of the regimes of knowledge we know today. They moved from being the rantings of a particular person into the universal ways in which we are supposed to see the world. One discussion we had recently was over the issue of Pascal’s Wager. Here is the gist of what Blaise Pascal proposes: 1.      There either is a God, or t