I begin this narrative in my native tongue because I want to celebrate and affirm the language of my people, the language that was taken away from us under colonization. In the cutting of our tongues, we were rendered mute. We were separated from our indigenous consciousness. We forgot how to think for ourselves. We forgot our epics, our myths and the stories of our ancients. We forgot that once upon a time we were a people that knew many deep, wonderful and mysterious things. We forgot that once upon a time we were brave; we had martyrs, heroes, and heroines who raised their voices and swords against the Spaniards and the Americans. "May the sun split my body into halves and may my womenfolk heap their hatred on me should I ever be a friend of the Castillian!" --- said the tribal king of Macabebe to Legazpi, the Spanish governor, hundred of years ago.^{1 (see footnotes below)} This kind of courage was buried deep enough under the "lahar² of colonization" that it was forgotten by most of us. I come from this tribe.

I haven't always known this. For a long time, I suffered from cultural amnesia I was unconscious about my cultural identity. I thought I belonged to a tribe called "little brown sisters" ruled by the "big white masters." The masters gave me their tongue, their ideas, their music, art forms, and their religion. They said the world I come from was dark, full of evil spirits, and they had brought the light with them to chase the ghosts away. With this light, they also chased away my memories. They said they had a divine right to conquer us and make us more human by cleaning up our slate and write new thoughts on it. And so without memories, I forgot who I was. I became a good colonial child. I became well-mannered, genteel, and civilized.

For a long time, I suffered from cultural amnesia I was unconscious about my cultural identity. I thought I belonged to a tribe called "little brown sisters" ruled by the "big white masters." The masters gave me their tongue, their ideas, their music, art forms, and their religion.

By fourth grade, I had memorized Gettysburg address (Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth...), Joyce Kilmer's "Tree" (I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as the sea...) and "Invictus" (Out of the night that covers me/black as the pit from pole to pole/I thank whatever gods maybe for my unconquerable soul)³. I sang about snow and corn fields and chestnuts roasting on the open fire without ever having seen snow, corn fields, or chest nuts. The world of Cinderella, Snow White and Rapunzel stamped a fantasy in my child-mind about the prince who would come and rescue me and make me a queen in his kingdom someday.

I wanted to be a proper queen and so all of my life was a rehearsal of fine manners and sensibilities. In later years, when men told me, "you are a fine woman," I felt as if I had accomplished something really important. I lived in this fantasy world in the midst of a world full of animist beliefs and brown mythical creatures --- aswangs. tikbalangs, duwendes, manananggal. ⁴

The incongruity of this make-believe world didn't occur to me even long after I had left college, left a first marriage, left a career, and left family and friends to come to the land of my white prince. But in the white man's kingdom, I became a princess who turned into a toad after being kissed by the prince. The fairy tale crumbled, just as Humpty Dumpty did, and it couldn't be put together again.

In the land of the white master, I came face to face with my split self. The cultivated outer self who believed she was white, too, except for the color of her skin, began to feel insecure as the mirror that she has always held up to her self proved to be someone else's image. She was not white, the real white people reminded her of that every chance they got. "Why are you here?" "Why do you speak our language?" "Why do you know our songs?" "Why are you married to him? Did he pick you out of a catalogue?" "Was he in the military?" They never let her forget that she wasn't one of them.

In my fantasy, I called this outer self, Vanessa. Vanessa is a white name, sensual, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. Vanessa wanted to prove to the white faces that stared at her that she was one of them. She went out of her way to make friends with them. She joined the choir, joined the library committee, joined a women's coffee klatsch on Friday mornings. She pretended that she liked to knit, mend socks, and swap recipes because she wanted to be accepted by them. She observed, listened, read women's magazines, and watched after noon soaps, so that when she was in their company she could at least carry on a conversation about the weather, about babies and husbands, and from time to time, about world problems and how America is going to solve them all. But nobody ever asked for her opinion, they just assumed that she didn't have any. She couldn't have any, how could she? She is a foreigner, and from a third world country at that. Some were more polite than others. In her presence, they were careful not to mention their disdain for Imelda Marcos because they weren't sure where Vanessa stood on the issue of the three thousand pairs of shoes. Her husband's uncle, who once tried to be cute and polite, said: "Your President Cory is kinda cute, I would like to date her sometime." She was sure he was being obnoxious, but Vanessa remembered to be civilized and well-mannered so she said nothing.

A few years of this charade turned Vanessa from being sweet into a brooding, moody, angry princess. The real self who lived in the basement of my unconscious began to assert herself. The choking hold of repression began to manifest itself in anger, confusion, and bitterness. Vanessa didn't exactly turn into a hag or a witch because there was something else that kept her from becoming so. It was her true self. This self wanted to be set free from the basement. Enough of this Vanessa! Stop! This is not who you are! Her voice kept getting louder, bolder until finally she was heard.

This other voice said: My Name is Leny. I am a Filipina. I am the grand daughter of a Katipunero ⁵. My grandfather fought in the revolution against the Spaniards. My father was an anti-Japanese guerilla. My mother is an artist. My uncle in the army survived the Bataan Death March. My grandmother was strong, determined, and brave.

She was a storyteller. When I was a child I used to visit her everyday after school in her little sari-sari store because she always gave me a treat. But I especially enjoyed the afternoons of picking sampaguita with her and stringing the fragrant buds into necklaces. And as long as I was by her side, she was happy. I was, too. I watched her mouth turn red from the betel nut chew and when she put the lighted end of a cigarette inside her mouth, I thought she must have some magic power that kept her mouth from getting burned. After all, I thought, if a woman could raise seven children by herself, she must possess some magic.

I had been digging up memories in the last few years, trying to resurrect buried bones. Searching for the authentic self is an archeological project for the colonized. The bones are submerged and need to be dug up, dusted off, rearranged, plastered with new flesh in order to reconstruct their original form. It is a process of re-creation and re-imagining. It involved peeling off the lay ers of colonial consciousness, calcified by time and mis-education. It means facing the unknown even if one is trembling in one's boots. One must find the tools, create them if need be, with which one is going to do the digging.

To return home is to return to the ancient, to our anitos ⁶ and our ancestors, to folklore and oral traditions which contain the indigenous wisdom of my people.⁷ Before the time of thieves and robbers. Before the time of oppression, before our thoughts were stolen, corrupted, submerged, and before we learned to deny and trade our wisdom for the other's knowledge.

So I went home. In this home of my imagination, I realized that I was not alone. Others have been on this road before. I learned about Filipino indigenous consciousness. I sought books written from our own perspective; I sought other Filipinos who have traveled this road and I began to immerse myself in those ever present symbols of our community — the dinner dances fiestas and the numerous fundraising events (where they always dance the tinikling 8 and where they always serve lumpia9. These events were always undergirded by a sense of community and a yearning to be with one's own kind; they are our ways of myth-making, of representing ourselves to each other; our ways of saying, "We are all Filipinos, in spite of our differences."

In the writings of other postcolonial writers like Freire, Fanon, Nandy and our own Carlos Bulosan, I found that this project was a world-wide movement. I also came to see that the christianity of my childhood was closely culture-bound to the West and culture-blind to Asia.

In understanding the rationale behind U.S. imperialism and Hispanic colonization, I came to understand that my feelings of alienation were caused by these grand narratives inculcated in my people, causing us to negate ourselves and by negating ourselves there was no other way but to embrace submission to the masters unquestioningly. Loving our conquerors and imitating them, often exaggeratedly, and the imposition of these western values on an indigenous consciousness manifests itself in a schizophrenic kind of existence which renders us all at once timid, aggressive, obsequious, obnoxious, brave, heroic, hardworking, and long-suffering.

We became confused players in a game where we didn't know the rules because they were hidden from us. We reaped punishments without the benefit of appeal or hope of justice. But we learned to subvert in many ways which often confused and confounded the other. Such was the game of colonialism. 10

We are scattered all over the world now like aimless wanderers in search of a home still. Many of us left the Philippines to follow the master to his home, to live in his world, misled by the promises of democratic ideals taught by the Thomasite teachers and later, the missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers who roamed our countryside with their civilizing mission. They said the U.S. was a country where any dream can come true but they did not tell us that we will pay with our blood, sweat and tears; that we will be stoned, spat at, reduced to the level of dogs. Signs that said "No dogs and Filipinos allowed" stared at those early farm laborers recruited to work the fields to produce profits for the master. They were accused of being immoral and lustful because they fancied dancing with white women.¹¹

Today, the neocolonial status of the Philippines has produced poverty which pushes Filipino women to sell their pictures to mail order catalogues; the yen, the deutschmark, and the dollar, lures women to sing, dance, and carouse with foreign men in love hotels and night clubs; the petrodollars lure men to leave their families and make a living in the sweltering heat of the desert. All these because we need to build homes, literally and symbolically, in order to have a roof over our heads, to live decently and with integrity.

Slipping into this collective voice, I feel the wrenching of our guts as a people, asking why this happened to us. Our forefathers have always longed to find the Lost Eden, the lost mother and father of Bernardo Carpio ¹², and here we are, still longing, yearning for real kalayaan.¹³ There is so much that has been lost, so much I/we will never recover. Some events I/we will never understand. Why do people uproot other people? Some questions I no longer expect to have answers. There is so much that begs for forgiveness and healing.

A few years ago, a white missionary woman who lived in Korea for thirty years, said that in Korea her eyes opened to see the ugliness of colonization and the scars it leaves in the lives of people. I approached her afterwards and said that I understood what she meant. She looked at me and said: "Will you please forgive me?" these simple words, struck me in a way that made me feel and realize how deeply I had been wounded, deeply violated, and betrayed. And there was nothing to do but to forgive. To forgive history, to forgive this white woman standing in front of me, to forgive everything so that I could begin to live an authentic life. So I could begin this journey of peeling off the layers of denial, ignorance, and blindness which has kept me from coming home.

I have shed many tears since. Tears that have washed my soul, blessed my wounds, tears that have led me onto a path of discovery that led me back to my grandmother and my people. The path that has led me to reclaim my voice, my tongue, my dignity. And it has led me into a wonderful fellowship with ancient heroes and heroines who, long ago, have been on this path, too.

They say we are a people who lived in a convent for 300 years and 50 years in Hollywood. Perhaps on the outside, it seems so. But underneath this veneer, the ancient spirits never died, the anitas never slept. We are a people that has managed to survive the harsh consequences of our enslavement. Perhaps we owe it to the strength of our indigenous imagination, which even in its repres sion manages to show its colorful side from time to time.

Ngayon at may pagkakataon na tayong huminga, dapat nating balikan ang nakaraan sapagkat ang karanasan ng kolonisasyon ay parang gabi ng pagk abuwang. Ang mga lihis no katangian ng Pilipino ay hindi likas sa ating sarili. Ito ay dala ng mga kalikuang dinaanan ng ating kamalayan sa mga panahong kailangang mag-survive sa isang marahas na kaayusan at kimkimin no lamang ang natatagong kulay at niloloob. Panahon na upang manumbalik sa sarili. (Now that we have the time to breathe, it is time to return to the past. For colonization was like a time of madness. Our sense of lostness and the negative traits we ascribed to ourselves are a result of a violent and repressive order imposed upon us. We have had to survive this violence and we had to repress our genuine and colorful selves. It is now time to return to ourselves). ¹⁴

And so as I returned to the memories of my Lola and Lobo who lived during the time of the Revolution, I also returned to the lessons taught by the peas ant revolutionaries --- Apolinario de la Cruz, Andres Bonifacio, Makario Sakay, and others --- that kalayaan is possible only through the transformation of one's loob (inner being) and by believing that God will honor the sacrifices of her children and bring about a free mother country.¹⁵ Kalayaan does not come from the outside, the colonial rule under the United States did not give it to us, as the Filipino elite came to believe.

How can the colonizer give that which he doesn't have? He is not free. He is not whole. For if he was, then he would not have needed to destroy others who were not like him. In retrospect, we understand it now. What he had to repress, he projected. The darkness he didn't want to own, he projected onto and the other. As he surrounded himself with "iron cages"¹⁶ in the name of disci pline and virtuous self-denial,, he repressed the other half of himself which was emotional, loving, irrational, intuitive, and sensual. As he disembodied himself, he was to compensate for such loss by destroying the Other who symbolized everything he didn't want to be. He thought if he could make us look bike a reflection of himself, he would suture the split in himself. But we did not give him that satisfaction.

Filipinos, after centuries of other-ing, have been seared, in the surface of our psyche, with Western notions which were foreign to our indigenous selves. In the depths of our psyche, we cling to that which we have always known intu itively --- the value of kalayaan, loob, kapwa; ¹⁷ the cycles and rhythm of Nature learned from ancient hunters and gatherers; the meaning of the pasyon ¹⁸ as surrender and suffering for the sake of kalayaan not only of mother country but the individual Filipino as well.

This is what being Filipino has come to mean for me. I have come home. And from this home, I could wander about freely, visiting other homes, other cultures. But I no longer have the yearning to live elsewhere because in my own home, there are warm hearts, arms always ready to embrace me, brave souls who laugh and cry with me, and folks who will always take me back as one of their own no matter where I've been.