danabelle

[danabelle]

Tonight at Longing for the Void that took place in @noorriyadhfestival programmed by @alserkal_advisory with the lovely @rasha_alduwaisan I am so grateful that I am able to share my work in this city, gutted that I have to leave in the morning, but I’m hopeful that one day I’ll be back. Riyadh, you have been ever so kind. Thank you! 💖✨ (at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) https://www.instagram.com/p/ClHdtUkrxb2/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

Yesterday, I checked a box from the New York list of things to do while I’m here and performed at the open mic at @nuyoricanpoetscafe 💖 So grateful to be able to witness the open mic scene in NY and most especially thankful for @gracebejosano (whose very steady hands came into play for the video! Tripod? Who needs one?) and also hubby and friends who came to watch and support. 💖💖 Also, also!!! Link in bio for the latest episode of #DanabelleReadsPoetry which is the same poem I performed last night, but at Bus Boys and Poets in DC, with extra special thanks to poet and archivist @i.am.anis for the footage. (at Nuyorican Poets Cafe) https://www.instagram.com/p/CgM_1RQJS3P/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

I am obsessed with these DC streets and buildings. 💖 Love. 📷 @gracebejosano https://www.instagram.com/p/CfXBe0nJQOk/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

Serious RuPaul's Drag Race reference on the title. Hey hey Tammy Brown. Held the first in a series of poetry workshops happening throughout the @smithsonianfolklife Festival. Everyday at 12pm. Come through if you’re in town. Confession: I actually designed 3 different workshops, one specifically for kids. However for this edition, the kids came in a few minutes after we started, and we were already doing the adult workshop. I was a little worried they might not be able to participate, but I tried my best to work around it. Andbutso!!! Holy wow! WHAT ARE WE FEEDING CHILDREN THESE DAYS? These kids were like 8 and 10 and are much better poets than most adults I’ve taught. They were absolutely brilliant. Mashallah. So yes, yesterday was a good day. @i.am.anis heading the workshop at 12pm, and the usual suspects performing poetry at 2pm. See you at the National Mall later? 💖✨️ (at The National Mall Washington DC) https://www.instagram.com/p/CfOw4gLLCXv/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

🇺🇲🕊 https://www.instagram.com/p/CfHihU8pQIs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

🇺🇲🕊 (at United States Institute of Peace) https://www.instagram.com/p/CfHhygqp2Y4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

Hello America! 🇺🇲✨️💖 So grateful to be a participant of @smithsonianfolklife Festival representing as a Filipina artist in the UAE. 🇦🇪 This summer, the @SmithsonianFolk Festival returns to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to explore the UAE and @earthoptimism We’re excited to take part and invite you to join us, June 22–27 and June 30–July 4! Learn more: festival.si.edu #2022Folklife Mark your calendars and don’t forget your sunscreen! https://www.instagram.com/p/CfE2BOrJJ_y/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

Hello America! In exactly a week, my Twin Chapbooks: Eventually, The River Surrenders and Softer will be available for sale in the Marketplace at the 2022 Smithsonian Folklife Festival! Inspired by an Arab souk, this open-air gift shop will be open every full day of the Festival, June 23–27 and June 30–July 4, 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., on the National Mall side of the National Museum of Asian Art. The Marketplace is a great opportunity to bring home gifts and souvenirs from the Festival, its participants, and a global network of artisans, including items you may not be able to purchase online or anywhere else. Purchases there support the Festival’s mission of cultural sustainability and individual artists and their communities. #2022Folklife #FolklifeMarketplace https://www.instagram.com/p/Ce0Unh7r5DC/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

2nd edition of Page to Stage Workshop (Meditations on the Mundane) at @pausdxb happened this weekend with this lovely and lively group of ladies. Open Mic on Saturday 18 June with featured artist Dr. @afraatiq DM me if you'd like to perform. 💖 Love, light, and all things sweet! https://www.instagram.com/p/CevVHQdr51X/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

Today at @pausdxb was the first day of the second edition of the workshop series From Page to Stage with the theme of Meditations on the Mundane. 💖✨️ https://www.instagram.com/p/Ceq-qRbLBch/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

First episode of That's Not Cute is out! Head on over to @justentertainment.inc and see all of our shenanigans. Like share and subscribe! https://www.instagram.com/p/CeTurHsIMtz/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

Tomorrow at 8pm. You know what it is. 💖 https://www.instagram.com/p/CeMekHUL09T/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

My Sad Republic Redux

Sometime around the late 1980s, I traveled to the island of Calauit in Palawan. Ferdinand Marcos had gifted the island to his only son, Bongbong, and had populated the island with exotic animals from Africa.

After the People Power uprising deposed Marcos and the US airlifted the family to Hawai’i in 1986, there was some concern about the zebras, gazelles and giraffes that had been abandoned there, and an ecological preservation project was underway.

But the island still reminded me of the excessiveness of the Marcos family, who had all but turned the entire country into their personal playground—a kingdom they would rule forever.

When I learned that Bongbong Marcos had won the Philippine presidential elections, I felt a flood of confusing emotions wash over me. Anger and depression, mixed with overwhelming nausea. I felt helpless—for something that was out of my control. I felt a sense of failure—not mine alone, but shared with my entire country.

To understand how traumatic Bongbong’s victory is for those of us who lived through his father’s dictatorship, imagine a Spain with Franco’s family or Chile with Pinochet’s progeny winning national elections.

Jose Rizal famously warned us that “those who refuse to look at where they’ve been will never move forward.” We studied his works in school ad nauseum but time and again, when I see what’s been going on in our country, I realize his words have hardly sunk in. I have always suspected that our country is caught in an endless loop, a sinister Möbius strip where we are doomed to relive our nightmares over and over.

I am only 11 months older than Bongbong Marcos, so we belong to the same generation—the lost generation whose formative years were spent under his father’s repressive regime. I knew of Bongbong as the privileged son who could easily receive an entire island to serve as his own private safari, while the rest of us struggled to make ends meet. But that was all he was, the country’s spoiled but not especially bright brat. No one ever imagined him following his father’s footsteps. Today, some people imagine that Marcos 2.0 would be a benevolent, enlightened version of his father.

That may be wishful thinking. Bongbong has been quoted as saying that his father’s dictatorship was the “golden age” of the country. Golden for whom? His family, no doubt, whose reign had the political and military support of the United States, and who are still alleged to have siphoned nearly 10 billion dollars off the country’s coffers to their private accounts. Or their cronies, who benefited from his father’s largesse and the culture of corruption he had led. But not for the hundreds of thousands whose lives were destroyed, who were incarcerated, tortured, assassinated, or disappeared. Not for the millions of Filipinos who wallowed in deeper penury while his family hosted lavish festivals, mingled with celebrities, and lapped up mansions across the globe.

By denying his family’s culpability and showing no remorse for the suffering the people had endured, he appears as deluded as his own mother, one-half of the rapacious couple who ruled by fear and terror during the martial law years, who had said, without a hint of irony, that she wanted her epitaph to read, “Here lies love.” We can blame this landslide victory on voter ignorance, or a naïve nostalgia for the past, or a desire for radical change. I understand when our political analysts say this is the result of decades of exclusion, of unkept promises, of frustration with the country’s entrenched oligarchism. But to choose a dictator’s son and hope he would make us “rise again,” as his campaign promised, contradicts everything our revered national hero had told us. We have moved backwards fifty years.

I have been researching on some of the major events that had shaped our country since the beginning of the 20th century and through the 21st for a new novel, and I am amazed at how resilient we always were, if not simply lucky. Our great-grandparents lived through the cholera epidemic of 1902, where over half a million died. World War I left us practically unaffected, and we quickly bounced back from the Great Depression, thanks to a thriving middle class. The Japanese Occupation was possibly the most traumatic episode in our history, three long years of excruciating suffering under a fascist power. This was followed, a couple of decades later, by the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship. We endured all that, and proudly picked up the pieces after. We remained hopeful that we would see the last of Rodrigo Duterte after his term (a hope that has proven false, alas), and we appear to be somehow managing to contain Covid 19, despite shoddy resources.

But another Marcos presidency? Led by a man who has shown no inclination to correct the wrongs done by his family? Who continues to delude himself and his followers about a fabled “golden age”? Would he revisit his private safari in Calauit, and would it remind him of that golden age when his family was virtually omnipotent, their opponents either jailed or dead, their bank accounts awash with the billions they had bilked from us?

The Marcos dynasty might rise again, as Bongbong has promised during his campaign. I don’t believe he will “save” the country, but he will certainly save his father’s dubious legacy and continue to rewrite it until we get used to the lies, just as his father once tried to do.

It will be another dark chapter of our sad republic.

[danabelle]

#softer 📸 @brentgalotera 💖 https://www.instagram.com/p/CcXt4GnJN80/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[danabelle]

I am so grateful to live in the city where I not only get to exercise my artistry as a writer, but also get to celebrate with other women, the freedom to be ourselves. I was initially brought into this project to write the copy for the manifesto. But somehow I ended up in the video with my voice reading said manifesto. Thank you to Athlete’s Co. #TeamACO @rudstine for tapping me to be a part of this project. 💖✨ To all my girls out there: Happy International Women’s Day! I hope you always remember that “I AM” is a full sentence. You are. Whatever you choose to be. You are. #repost • @athletes_co I am me and I am free. A message from #TeamACO to all the women out there. This is a message of celebration and encouragement to face today and daily. To show your potential and express yourself no matter how you are built. You are your own choices. Fall in love with who you are. Featuring @danabellegutierrez an established poet, author and actress along with other women (@reysignatureblog @luna__mingming @henrietta.peter @anisha.shetty and Angel from @apparelgroup) from all walks of life, fighting somehow similar battles, living the life they chose to be free. Our Manifesto: Today, I feel like wearing a tight dress that hugs my curves just right. I will workout if my body tells me this is how it wants to show its strength. Or, I'll sleep in for 10 more minutes, dream a little more, longer, higher. Because only I can tell what's best for me. Today and daily, I accept  that I am perfectly imperfect. That thin, fat, tall, short, young, old are descriptive, not derogatory, nor dirty. That I am not too much or not enough. I am my own choices. https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca1sCFwrQVw/?utm_medium=tumblr

[danabelle]

I am so grateful to live in the city where I not only get to exercise my artistry as a writer, but also get to celebrate with other women, the freedom to be ourselves. I was initially brought into this project to write the copy for the manifesto. But somehow I ended up in the video with my voice reading said manifesto. Thank you to Athlete’s Co. #TeamACO @rudstine for tapping me to be a part of this project. 💖✨ To all my girls out there: Happy International Women’s Day! I hope you always remember that “I AM” is a full sentence. You are. Whatever you choose to be. You are. #repost • @athletes_co I am me and I am free. A message from #TeamACO to all the women out there. This is a message of celebration and encouragement to face today and daily. To show your potential and express yourself no matter how you are built. You are your own choices. Fall in love with who you are. Featuring @danabellegutierrez an established poet, author and actress along with other women (@reysignatureblog @luna__mingming @henrietta.peter @anisha.shetty and Angel from @apparelgroup) from all walks of life, fighting somehow similar battles, living the life they chose to be free. Our Manifesto: Today, I feel like wearing a tight dress that hugs my curves just right. I will workout if my body tells me this is how it wants to show its strength. Or, I'll sleep in for 10 more minutes, dream a little more, longer, higher. Because only I can tell what's best for me. Today and daily, I accept  that I am perfectly imperfect. That thin, fat, tall, short, young, old are descriptive, not derogatory, nor dirty. That I am not too much or not enough. I am my own choices. https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca1qhIvr015/?utm_medium=tumblr

[danabelle]

I am so grateful to live in the city where I not only get to exercise my artistry as a writer, but also get to celebrate with other women, the freedom to be ourselves. I was initially brought into this project to write the copy for the manifesto. But somehow I ended up in the video with my voice reading said manifesto. Thank you to Athlete’s Co. #TeamACO @rudstine for tapping me to be a part of this project. 💖✨ To all my girls out there: Happy International Women’s Day! I hope you always remember that “I AM” is a full sentence. You are. Whatever you choose to be. You are. #repost • @athletes_co I am me and I am free. A message from #TeamACO to all the women out there. This is a message of celebration and encouragement to face today and daily. To show your potential and express yourself no matter how you are built. You are your own choices. Fall in love with who you are. Featuring @danabellegutierrez an established poet, author and actress along with other women (@reysignatureblog @luna__mingming @henrietta.peter @anisha.shetty and Angel from @apparelgroup) from all walks of life, fighting somehow similar battles, living the life they chose to be free. Our Manifesto: Today, I feel like wearing a tight dress that hugs my curves just right. I will workout if my body tells me this is how it wants to show its strength. Or, I'll sleep in for 10 more minutes, dream a little more, longer, higher. Because only I can tell what's best for me. Today and daily, I accept  that I am perfectly imperfect. That thin, fat, tall, short, young, old are descriptive, not derogatory, nor dirty. That I am not too much or not enough. I am my own choices. https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca1qLvNrrWT/?utm_medium=tumblr