#galura draws | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

onesunandnight · 7 years

Text

Broadsheet

What separates myth from history? What is important in the distinction? Myth seems to be predicated on a lack of detail in context, specificity. No dates, no countries recognizable by legacies of peoples moved. Myth lends itself to a grand sense of narrative because it transcends time. What does that mean when shaping our own stories? Does it lend our personal histories virtue or positive judgment? Does it idealize? It would seem, at the very least, to elide the mundane and the complicated. A story begins this way. I become he. He is given a name and enters into the past. Nicholas wrote this passage and lost himself in the telling.

Acquired, Taken. 1898-1899, Aurora, The Philippines A small garrison, some fifty Spanish soldiers, barricade themselves inside a church in the municipality of Baler, Luzon. Rain pulls down from the clouds above. Rice, flour, beans, wine, sugar, more sit amongst them on the floor. They are a legacy, removed from the thread of long history, fulfilling orders down to the raw marrow. War is coming to an end. The garrison will not leave. Beyond, Mother Spain’s forces, in their proud attempt to save face amidst the prospect of ceding their colonial territory to the newly-found Filipino people they have held in contempt for some 300 years, strike a deal with the aroused American beast sitting on the islands’ shores. A battle between the Americans and the Spanish will be staged, the Spanish will acquiesce to the U.S., Spain will be allowed to withdraw with some measure of dignity. But the jungle separates the garrison in Baler, cut off as they are by thick tropical jungle and blocked on one side by the sea. Lieutenant Mota knows nothing of his country’s surrender. Filipino troops surround the church attempting to draw the Spanish out with letters written in the colonial tongue, with smoke and fire, with bullets, with testimonies from fellow Spanish countrymen there to facilitate Spain’s exit, and finally with Spanish newspapers that confirm what the garrison had always thought to be a ruse: the colony was no longer theirs, their resistance to the 11-month siege ultimately fruitless, the loss of some twenty men without justification. In 1904, Commander Martin-Cerezo publishes his memoirs. He was “without doubt influenced by the attractive illusion of glory and on account of the suffering and treasury of sacrifice and heroism and that by surrender, we would be putting an unworthy end to it all.”

Tracking family necessarily involves dusting the past. History comes underfoot, from west to east and the reverse, beneath Iberian conquest and American terror. The flesh seized in between has no trajectory, no guarantee of destination, except the ground. The question is only when and where it falls. Trade routes -between Manila and Mexico, between Africa and the Americas- saw millions perish and fewer return, setting down bodies displaced in homes not their own. Filipinos in Mexico, Africans in Louisiana, Chinese in Utah. A summer self is a refraction of chains, of the dominance of genes, that flares in red flecks beneath the sun.

A Decision 1857-1870, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas The slaver man is set to leave it all behind. He has sold his pen, purchased land near port center New Orleans. The girl before him, fair and blue-eyed, just might be his last speculation as a trader. She is sold to him at the top of the year. It will be nine months before he sees her again, under the roof of a Jefferson Parish court, when the 15 year-old Jane Morrison files suit against James White for the wrongful sale of a white girl into the shackles of slavery. In the five years between first suit and final judgment, the legal battle of Morrison v. White will pass before multiple juries, the Louisiana Supreme Court, the general public, and the crusted annals of muddy history. The fact of complexion is a simple thing to remember. You know who was cultivated, who yanked the undergrowth. And yet, you do not know the cannibalization of a power’s own value. The people market, after all, is divvied up and stratified. Jane Morrison belongs to that prized and prettied-up class of light-skinned women who are more valuable in the master’s house than outside of it. Whiteness is closest to godliness. At the top of the year, James White didn’t want the darkness that was said to be so resilient to disease, that darkness which grew worker’s muscles and assembly line childbearing hips. All James White wanted was his namesake and the entirety of civilized manner that came with it, but invisibly tainted by that very darkness so as to be made available for sale. Jane Morrison understood this, requesting as she did, to be placed under her jailer’s protection so as to avoid capture. Though the outcome, which ultimately leans in Ms. Morrison’s favor, seems assured and liberating, the truth is that she will not be free from her cell for more than 19 months in the five years it takes for the trial to reach its end. Within that time, she will be scrutinized under the gaze of her adopted class, turned over, measured, examined and touched, so that her true nature may be ascertained. Once the trial ends, the official record will have no way to find Jane Morrison, now Alexina, or the daughter she gives birth to while in jail. In 1862, James White’s lawyers appeal the Supreme Court and are delayed due to the Union capture of New Orleans. In 1865, slavery is dead and the appeal is docketed again days after the American President Lincoln is assassinated. By 1870, the docket is further delayed, is never picked up again.

Where are you finding yourself? Who can say to what degree the desert is a better place to belong than the jungle, the mountains, by the sea, the island? Do you wish to take to the road? The spirit of a place has never spoken to you. The connections others find in quiet reverence to a specific location have always evaded you. No location is specific enough. Where do you find yourself? Have you responded “black” to the eternal zoological question? You can’t remember, probably not. Where do you find yourself? I think it may be that you look the way you do. Would you agree? Would you mind if you weren’t “anything”?

The Is The 20th Century, Everywhere Danilo Galura, father of five, is born on May 22, 1941, the same day Allied forces capture the Ethiopian town of Sodo from the Italians. David Russell, father of two, is born less than three months later on August 16, sharing his birthday with Theoneste Bagosora, later instrument of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Teresita Angeles, mother of three and eventual wife of Danilo, is born the following year on September 14, just as the unfortunate presence of eugenicist E.S. Gosney, whose life work was praised by friend and fellow unfortunate Charles Goethe as playing “a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals” shaping Nazi Germany’s sterilization programs, fades. Shirley Jean Clark, mother of one and eventual wife of David, is born three years later on December 27, 1945 when the International Monetary Fund is established. Maria Josefina Ezpeleta, mother of two and eventual second wife of Danilo, is born on June 7 the following year, the day BBC TV returns to the air for the first time since World War II began seven years earlier. The women’s names will change. All but one will survive into the next century. Everyone is dwarfed by the world. Shirley, who will give birth to a son, will find out that her father was not her father, Clark giving way to Brown. Danilo and Teresita, parents to a daughter and a son and a son, will emigrate to the United States amidst the turmoil of Vietnam. Shirley and David’s families will have existed in America for decades, maybe centuries. Danilo’s daughter and Shirley’s son will have their own son before the century is over. He will ask a series of questions. None of this is history, none of this is myth.

Lately, I’ve been deconstructing names. I take a string, put it in alphabetical order, and pull. There’s no reason for this other than curiosity. I end up with words like “sunrise” and “sunset”, “ensnare” and “license”, by rearranging the letters of my name. I suppose one could make a tenuous connection to how this is reflective of the way we are made up, of different parts that give way to others, but that’s true of anything.

#broadsheet #2017 #to be deleted

1 note · View note