process

My heart: Your heart: Our words

/ RCRuiz

The past few months have been very stressful and difficult months for me. Not only because I had to deal with health issues, but also because I could feel hostility from places that I had once considered safe. Friends who I had trusted chose to question me. People who I believed in turned their backs on me and left my side. It is only natural to feel pain when these things happen.

My first reaction is to defend myself in anger. To tell the world that I am not guilty and it is those who have chosen to throw my name out into the open who are to be blamed. I had, in fact, already written such a post.

But I am also deeply aware of what goes on in my heart, and I am thankful for the friends who lift me up and remove me from that place that demands vengeance and justification. People have questioned my friendship with certain white people and made this a reason to pass judgment on me.

I want to say: It is easy for us to pass judgment on others. If we hear a story on the wind that seems to contain the smallest kernel of truth, we are liable to think: Oh, it must be true.

But in the course of my journey, I have arrived at this point where I choose not to judge on hearsay. I choose not to judge on what has been reported to me or what the wind brings to my ears. Rather than passing judgment, I choose to know and to believe with my heart.

I think that brown women from third world nations understand what it is like to be judged. We know what it’s like to be judged by the color of our skin, by the country we come from, by the way we speak, by the way we act and even by what we carry on our persons.

It is because I know exactly what it’s like to be judged because I am a dark skinned Filipino that I choose not to judge people by the color of their skins. It is because I know what it’s like to be shut out of conversations that I choose to include others in my conversations.

If you are reading this post, I want to ask you to examine yourself and to examine your own heart. To examine ourselves and to own the truth about ourselves is not weakness.

When I was still a child, I became aware of the power that rests in words and how it was possible to use words to move people either to tears or to anger—to love or to hate. I also became aware how by using words in a certain way, it is possible to sway people and to make them see my side of things as being the only right side in any conflict.

Today, more than then, I am very much aware how words wielded with cruelty and powered by malice have the capacity to destroy the person on the receiving end of those words. So, when I see people excusing words wielded cruelly as being just words, I cannot help but wonder if they truly understand just how a word in the hands of the wielder can break a spirit or strengthen it—how words can bind us together or tear us apart.

I know exactly what it’s like to be at the receiving end of words meant to make you feel so small that you want nothing more than to crawl away and vanish from the face of the earth. For this reason, I do not wish to wield words in that way. I do not wish to use my words to destroy, to belittle, or to question the humanity and the heart of others.

I have been judged for many things. Among these things, I have been judged for my choice to remain friends with people others deem as not being the “right sort” of people.

But you see, in the time since I started my decolonization journey I have changed from the person I was. I see with different eyes and I look with different eyes at people. I have been called naive for my choice to continue to trust and believe in the goodness that rests in the hearts of white people. But this is my choice. Just as it is my choice to believe in the goodness that rests in all of our hearts. I choose not to see myself as being of more worth than a white person but rather, I choose to see myself as being of equal worth.

We are all prone to failure. If I distance myself because people fail, I would be left standing alone—bereft of family, without a single friend.

It is because I see and acknowledge my own flaws that I can see clearly the flaws of those I love and love them still. I know what it’s like to be judged, so I choose not to judge. Instead, I choose to welcome those who welcome me. I choose to see the good in the hearts of those who see the good in me.

It doesn’t mean that I no longer see injustices or that I am not angry about them. I am still angry and I am still capable of great rage—but when it comes to people, I choose not to dwell in anger, I choose not to dwell in hate.

Ask yourself this question: how do you choose to wield your words and who do you destroy when you choose to tear down and destroy the other?

Adding this note as it has been pointed out to me that my post could be misread on certain things. So to make things clear:

(1) I do not condone any abusive behavior towards anyone.

(2) I am not aware of and I do not condone whisper attempts or any attempts to blacklist or blackball any writers.

Thinking things through: Your story and the change you bring with you

/ RCRuiz

My online presence has been rather erratic as I’ve been having difficulties getting online. I waffled quite a bit about posting anything as it takes time to write a post and then it takes time to wait for connection to stabilize enough for me to publish the post. But what the heck. I’m here and I have time.

Thinking things through has helped me a lot, not only on the decolonization journey, but it’s also helped me to come to a deeper and better understanding of what’s needed if we are to create an environment that’s conducive to diversity. The question isn’t just a matter of getting people in the door, but what I’m concerned about is how to continue to nurture and support these writers so they don’t burn out, don’t feel isolated, don’t feel that they are a voice shouting in the wild that no one listens to. Nothing is more hurtful to the vulnerable spirit than to feel like you’re shouting into a vacuum.

It’s easy for me to say to a writer working in solitude that I hear their voice, but I think the writer needs much more than this. The writer needs to know that there is room for their work. I am of the belief that where you publish and how you publish all depends on what you want to achieve with what you write. If you want to become rich on writing, er…I think you may have chosen the wrong field. If you want recognition…again…er…wrong field. But if you want to write because you have this passion in you and you are bubbling over with things that you want to say to the world, there is no limit to what you can do and to who you can reach. Yes, believe me. There is no limit.

The point of diversity work is to make space so diverse voices can be heard. Not just one, not just two, but a variety of and a multiplicity of voices. I don’t believe there is one authoritative voice. There’s none. We all have very different stories and we all tell them very differently. I said this to a bunch of friends one time, it’s not a question of who rises the fastest or who shines the brightest–the thing is, we all rise at the kind of speed that we need to rise. We all shine as we were meant to shine. It’s not a competition and the awards are not the end goal. Someone once said that we change the world one story at a time. I think this is true. The story you bring with you is a story that will touch and change those in your sphere of influence. The question is: what kind of story do you bring with you? What kind of change are you bringing?

This may sound a little bit floaty, but I did want to share a dream that I had last night. It’s a dream that I believe speaks to the feeling that we all feel at one point or another. In my dream, I saw a group of women who had been cast out to sea in a little boat. They had been sailing and looking for land for quite sometime. Each time they sighted land, they would cheer and rejoice only to be devastated when they discovered that it was nothing more than an illusion. At the moment when they were about to give up, they saw an island in the distance. They looked at the island and they didn’t want to believe that it was real. They’d seen too many illusions and had been disappointed too many times. It wasn’t until their boat drew closer and closer to the island that they realized it was no dream. There before them was a beautiful stretch of beach and beyond that foliage. It was a vibrant country filled with color and life. It was a resting place.

I’m sharing this dream for no reason other than I felt that it was a good time to share it. I think that we all long for a paradise and we all long for a place where we can rest our heads. Don’t give up, it’s not yet the end of the journey.

Thinking things through: lessons learned on the journey

/ RCRuiz

Yesterday, I joined the chairman of the board of the org I work for at an event hosted by Stichting ZAMI. I had been cloistered in the house for quite a while and have been finding it difficult to leave the safety of my four walls, so she had to practically force me to get a ticket and go with her. Well, she didn’t drag me out of the house, but an older Filipina woman who is like family can be forceful in ways that don’t require any physical exertion.

In the end, I was glad that I went along with her because not only did I get to meet twitter buddy and all around awesome woman, Nancy Jouwe, but I also got to meet a whole bunch of awesome women. The conversations were positive and uplifting and listening to the speeches, the panel discussion and just engaging in conversation with these women was so inspiring and heartwarming that I came home feeling energized and strengthened and also more able to face the ugly truths about my own self.

I was most moved by Fatima Elatik‘s closing speech where she told us about her own experiences in the political arena. She reminded us, that facing the truth about ourselves, acknowledging our own weaknesses and embracing those weaknesses make us stronger. I had been feeling very badly about my lack of insight and about the fact that I’d allowed myself to ignore and break my own principles in certain matters and I had been beating down on myself a lot, but Fatima said: What else can you do? You just have to acknowledge that you have weaknesses. You’re not perfect. You’re only human. You fail. The important thing is to realize that the fails you did were things from yesterday and then you have to move on. You have to understand that the work you’re doing and the work you’ve undertaken to do is more important than the fact that people are talking about you and not everyone likes you.

I’m still digesting and processing everything I’ve heard and a lot of it jives with the readings I’ve done on the babaylan and the babaylan spirit. One of the women shared the UBUNTU philosophy which I really want to look more into. I believe that the way forward is not by shutting out people. I believe that the way forward is in working together. If we are to reach that better place of being, we all need to work together and move forward together

Looking at the way the system works ( particularly in publishing ), I don’t believe that gatekeepers are there to keep out diverse works or that gatekeepers aren’t interested in diverse work. One speaker said that it was to us to figure out our position in relation to the system. Gatekeepers don’t know how to do diversity work, but we who know how to do the work need to keep doing our work. We need to keep raising our voices on the need for diversity, but (and in particularly this is for PoC and non-western folks) we need to strategize in order for the system to work for us.

So, how do we do that? We do that by creating work that cannot be ignored. What are the things that we carry with us that will show the industry that they are the ones who need us? Instead of begging for scraps, we need to stand firm and take control of ourselves and of our work. We show them what we can contribute and how we can contribute towards building a system that is truly diverse and inclusive.

This is our work. Publishing our work brings something to the publishing industry that it didn’t have before. Diversity brings color and life to the book industry. Diverse work enriches readers because through reading about places and cultures that they don’t have access to, readers learn to be more understanding. Books teach us many things. They tell us stories that help us empathize with people from places we’ve never been to. Hopefully they teach us to be more mindful of each other and more understanding of the fact that despite our best intentions, we are all still human and we need each other on this journey.

More than ever, I’m convinced that we don’t need to adjust or apologize for the stories we tell or for how we tell them. These are narratives that the world needs. We tell them our way because no one has heard them told the way we tell those stories. Publishing needs us more than we need them and the way I see it, it’s up to us to make ourselves visible and show publishing that they just can’t go on without the presence of a diverse list of writers coming from different cultures and different places around the world.

Keep sending those stories out and keep writing them. You can do it.

What will you leave behind?

/ RCRuiz

I’ve been so behind on many things and I still want to write a report on the conventions that I attended. The second installment of the Movements column on Translations, Mother Tongue and Acts of Resistance has been published over at Strange Horizons and if you haven’t read it yet, do take the time to check it out.

I love how the conversations around translation and the conversations around use of language tie in with the vision for a more inclusive and diverse science fiction–with a vision of the sky that is so wide and broad that all of us fit into it.

2014 has been a really hard year on the SF community. We’ve lost a number of brilliant minds too soon and it fills me with sorrow to think of the conversations and the stories that are now taken away from us. There is a huge gap where these beloved writers have been and I wonder–who will come to fill in the gap and will those who fill in the gap be as generous and big hearted as those who left it behind?

While I didn’t know most of these writers, I knew them through their work and through the thoughtfulness of the work. I am thankful for the memorials that give me more insight into the spirit of these writers. Not only does it make me understand them better, it makes me also appreciate them more.

I think of the generosity and warmth that I have always received from the science fiction community and while we have our moments, I continue to be hopeful and to believe in the future. I find myself thinking of how no matter what awards or accolades we may gain in life, what matters is the memory that we leave behind. What kind of memories will people have of us? What relationships have we nurtured and built up? How have we given back or given forward?

A few days ago, I posted this status update on facebook: “Fully engaging in war against evil and malice, while fully engaging in healing and protecting the vulnerable spirit. This is what it means to me to be someone living fully in the spirit of my culture. And always, always to see and to acknowledge the other person as being human, to embrace them in their humanity and to love them nevertheless. This is how we upset the status quo, this is how we reject systems that seek to dehumanize and devalue us and the work that we do.”

I’ll elaborate on this more in a future blogpost, but for now, I wanted to leave this here as a reminder.

*Part one of the column on translations is here.

Thinking things through: kadkadua

/ RCRuiz / 2 Comments

In one of my brief forays into twitter yesterday, Corey Alexander tweeted out a link called: A Colonized Ally Meets a Decolonized Ally: This is what they learn.

I found myself reflecting on the word ally and what that word means. As I think on it, I find myself more and more disinclined to use the word ally. I don’t doubt that there are people who will tell me that I just don’t understand because English, but I want to think in terms that are rooted more in my own culture. I want to look deeper and find the words that are more meaningful to me and which I can use to refer to companions in my journey.

In recent work, I have used the word kadkadua, which is the Ilocano word for comrade and while the word comrade is a loaded word for some, I find myself thinking that it is a more human word than ally.

Where allyship is connected to causes, comradeship (in the sense of kadkadua) means companionship. In the literal translations for comrade, we see the words mate and friend connected, and to me this makes a world of difference.

In fact, if I think of what kadkadua means to me, it means someone who I consider to be the same as myself. We are bonded together not just because we share a cause but because there is mutual respect, understanding and love.

In this age where social media often functions like a podium, it’s easy to forget that there are people behind names. It’s true that the digital age has brought us much in terms of advantage, but it has also contributed to a certain mindset that does not allow for mistakes to be made, that does not allow for humanity, that does not allow for weakness.

To be a true comrade means that when you fall, I will lift you up. When you fail, I will still see you as human. When you are weak, I want to be your support.

As I read the works of indigenous writers, as I study the words of the babaylan, I find myself thinking of the harm inflicted not only on the colonized but also on the colonizer.

We damage the self when we rob the other of humanity. When we narrow down our speech to causes and forget the human element, we also wound our inner self. In justifying those wounds, we become callous and hard and bitter and when we do so we lose our ability to trust and to have faith and to hope for a future.

I acknowledge that I too have spoken out in anger, in rage and frustration. That I have also had moments where I forgot that the person on the other end is human. That the other person has a heart that can be wounded. I can only apologize for not being mindful and hope to be more mindful in the future.

Today’s quote

/ RCRuiz

“But writing in our language per se–although a necessary first step in the correct direction–will not bring about the renaissance in African cultures if that literature does not carry the content of our people’s anti-imperialist struggles to liberate their productive forces from foreign control; the content of the need for unity among the workers and peasants of all nationalities in their struggle to control the wealth they produce and to free it from internal and external parasites.”  – Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind

Thinking things through: process

/ RCRuiz

I have recently been engaging more in the exploration of what narratives emerge as I make use of languages that are closer to my inner self than the English that I formally learned.

In these newer works, I am interested in exploring the traumas inflicted on the colonized body. What movements does the body go through in order to break free of those traumas? How does the colonized body find healing when it is constantly reprimanded, tokenized, devalued, objectified and still treated as a being of lesser worth?

I think of the narratives that have been attached to brown bodies and I think of how we rob these narratives of poison when we take them and make them our own. This to me, is the transformative power of story.

During the Amsterdam Sci Fi Salon, Adrienne Marie Brown reminded us of the power of the erotic and the power of desire, and I thought of narratives where the brown body’s sexuality is shamed. Where desire is labeled as sinful and unacceptable. I think of the power locked up in the shamed body. I think of what is released when we break free of those shackles and take full possession of our own skins.

It’s not that I am no longer writing in English, but that I have chosen to let the narrative take its forward motion from lines or words that I associate with home. It’s possible that this choice has no meaning to the reader, but to me who writes it, this choice reminds me that the narratives I’m writing are not of lesser worth. They are of equal value.

And if language is a thing that stands in the way, it also becomes a reminder of how the brown body is often viewed as an object that stands in the way.

Is it even science fiction anymore? I really don’t know and to be honest, I’ve stopped caring about labels as I find that labels are only useful for commercial purposes. Labels have a confining and limiting function, and more often than not they are exclusionary.

If we talk about science fiction that comes from the West, we already know what we are talking about. There are narratives that belong and there are narratives that are allowed.

But the choice to depart from what belongs and what is allowed is also a deliberate choice. It is a choice that says, what exists is not what defines me or my work. Rather it is the work that defines itself. It is a choice to embrace and move towards a different kind of envisioning the future.

What else can I write? What other things can I explore? What waits around the bend? Where is the true body of my story?

These are questions I ask as I continue on my journey.