then there are blackbirds

ephemere

I don't want to erase this blood staining my legacy. I don't want to forget, as if it never happened. I don't want to keep coming across, "I didn't know the Philippines was a U.S. colony!" as if I do not bear the damage of American occupation written in my nerves and across my tongue. I don't want to see "deathmarching" used as a verb, the same way I deplore how "imeldific" is used as an adjective -- as if history were an erasable thing and words slipping into common parlance an apology or a healing of all these wounds. I don't want people to go on using this in a misguided attempt to remove the blood in it, because forgetting is what gives the evil behind this more power, by allowing the word to go unchallenged and slip under the veneer of acceptability, lightness, cheapening, banality. I don't want the atrocities of war to become equated with mundane things.

I don't want common use. I don't want a sanitized history. I want my stories, past and present, these stories of my people that we have lost and that we're on the verge of losing, held close to my heart and remembered. I want these stories told over and over again, because the need for them will never lift, not the necessity for memory and not the blatant spitting on the dignity of it. I want to claim them though I may choke on tears and tongue in doing so, though I surrender on so many other things daily and remain one frail and weak person still grappling with the fractures in her present and in her past. Because this, too, is part of who I am. Because every story told and every careless use challenged is defiance, is struggle, is me raising my head and saying, this happened, this matters -- is yet another blow against erasure, silence, the unmarking of graves.

megwrites

manifesta

troisroyaumes

ciderpress

ciderpress

The carnival was intended to be *about* Asian women rather than an Asian women *only* carnival. This is partly because the global issues of race, identity, gender and class etc affect everyone and I think it is important to explore and discuss (and learn about) the intersection of communities, issues and common and uncommon experiences and listen to a diverse range of voices, all of which have valuable things to contribute to the discussion. It is also partly because Asian women are daughters, mothers, sisters, colleagues and friends. What affects our lives and makes us who we are in turn affects our relationships with our brothers and sisters, our parents, our children, our colleagues and our friends and changes them. I know I have things to say about my identity as an Asian woman. I also know that my brothers, my father and my friends all think about and have things to say about Asian women and how we relate to their own personal experiences and their views on race, gender and feminism etc. I personally welcome submissions and work by Asian women, Asian men and non-Asian allies, and hope that the conversations springing from the AWC can and will include all these voices, even within the narrow focus that the carnival has. I would also like, as both yeloson and deepad have both kindly suggested, in a (hopefully soon-to-be!) future edition, to have an Asian Women Carnival based on the theme of Asian men and children.

such_heights

copperbadge

markprobst

On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books? Is it just a major glitch in the system? Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening. As I am a publisher and have an Amazon Advantage account through which I supply Amazon with my books, I had a special way to contact them. 24 hours later I had a response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

copperbadge

luzdeestrellas

People imprint on what they know as they grow up. They can work to change that imprint, or to alter it. But growing up white in the U.S. isn't an automatic ticket to being racist.

What sets me off every time is the pity whine "You don't know what it's like to grow up (insert ethnicity here). You're white, so you don't understand my paiiiinnnnnnnn!" Yeah, whatever. Until you can understand

[airing out of laundry here, which I would empathize rather more with if not for the rest of the post]

I don't want to hear about how you've been prejudiced against all your life.

When I was in graduate school, I took an African-American lit course. I didn't make it past the second book that we had to read, not because of the topic of the class, but because I'd bitten off more than I could chew, and the other two classes were required. The two books I did read were Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man and Beloved by Toni Morrison. I loved the first and hated the second. Why? STORY. Ellison's book had so many shamanistic elements in it that fascinated me to no end, told in easy-to-understand prose. I loved the book. Very Taoist. Morrison's book...oy, the pain. The first 36 pages made absolutely no sense. The prose was beyond thick; it was incomprehensible. I kept reading, and fortunately the book got easier to understand from there, but by that time, I was completely turned off by the pretentiousness. What should have been a fascinating ghost story with powerful undercurrents in African-American culture became something that I rejected. Morrison talked down to me in that book, at a scholarly level. I won't read her again. I don't even care if Song of Soloman is a much better book. In Beloved, she did not respect the reader, or at least this reader. I have no time for authors who are like that.

Straight to that stupid meme that some people feel they should post in the fall-out of RaceFail '09. I'm not going to dignify its text with a copy here. Sufficient to say, I think the post itself is bigotry. I'm not going to turn into a Pharisee, sit in the temple, and wail that I've been bad, look how bad I am, look at how evil I am, and look at me trying to be good again. Excuse me, but no.

I've been studying and working my ass off to understand cultures, and one of the things I've learned is that prejudice is prejudice. If it isn't the color of your skin, it's your accent, it's your hair, it's your social status, it's the actions of the past or the suspicion of future actions. Every culture has its prejudice, and while it's a good struggle for each individual, to mea culpa in this manner is to hand power over to those who would make you feel guilty to give themselves power. It's not a sane or safe transfer of power. No matter the wording, this meme is being used as a big stick to keep any one of a number of categories down, and I refuse to participate.

I am not beholden to anyone or anything except my conscious in the matters of prejudice. My ethics and my morals are my guidelines, and while I will not claim to be perfect, I will claim that I'm already doing my damnest. Anyone who demands proof will never be satisfied with that proof. Nothing that I can say or do, up to and including posting that ludicrous meme, will be accepted beyond a begrudging "at least she's trying." That response is vile beyond belief, and I refuse to drown in it.