בְנֵי־לֹ֣וט
— Manuel L. Quezon III (@mlq3) August 19, 2017
— Manuel L. Quezon III (@mlq3) August 19, 2017
— Manuel L. Quezon III (@mlq3) August 19, 2017
— Manuel L. Quezon III (@mlq3) August 19, 2017
— Manuel L. Quezon III (@mlq3) August 19, 2017
— Manuel L. Quezon III (@mlq3) August 19, 2017
Talah Turk: Amman’s Filipinos are the luckiest, with a whole area dedicated to their community. Manila Street, also commonly known as Little Manila, and Filipino or Egyptian Neighborhood, is an area with a large concentration of Asian and Arab immigrants. In the heart of Jabal Amman, Buhturi Street descends from Second Circle– which Filipinos refer to as the Panadol Roundabout – and is full of Asian grocery shops, discount clothing stores, as well as affordable restaurants and bakeries, some of which serve authentic Filipino dishes. Amman’s Little Manila is the place to go for Filipino delicacies such as crispy chicken skin and salted eggs, in addition to Asian products and the latest Filipino movies.The Filipino community is by far the most organized and active amongst all guest workers’ communities in Jordan. Filipinos are raised to be caring and considerate of others, which comes through in the type of events they hold and the way the UFO (United Filipino Organization) operates. If one person has a problem, it becomes the community’s problem.The Indonesian community is definitely the most private and, some might say, defensive.
Aaron Koller: Scholars have had difficulty identifying the precise borders of the tribes in Transjordan, and have suggested that one reason for the difficulties in pinning down the borders of the holdings of Reuben and Gad is that tribal identities were often fluid. This means that a town, or a group of people, may consider themselves to be Reubenites one century, but Gadites the next. These changes can take place through conquest, through political realignment, through cultural influence, and through other processes; it is a truism of modern research on ethnicity that identity is created through affiliation as much, or more, than it is inherited through genealogy.
Who is Gad? – was Gad part of Israel? an independent ethnic group? a subgroup of Moab? The anxiety over the stability of tribes settled in the Transjordan was well placed.
Throughout the history of biblical Israel, identity was never stable, and that the borders of the nation – defining who was and who wasn’t an Israelite – were constantly shifting, especially in the multicultural Transjordan. This historical reality provides important background for understanding the concern voiced by Moses about Reuben and Gad remaining on the eastern banks. We can only conjecture how these processes affected the Israelites as a whole, but it contributed, no doubt, to the Israelites’ growing sense that being a member of the people was dependent more on culture and religion than on biology alone.
#Kristallnacht event thanks Filipino community for saving Jews during the #Holocaust https://t.co/nqEG8S4e8s pic.twitter.com/5uuoZoxQX6
— Canadian Jewish News (@TheCJN) 12 Kasım 2015
"Manilaners”, a film about Jewish refugees who found refuge in the PH, during Pres. Quezon's presidency #IsraelinPH pic.twitter.com/gX1qa7l3ZN
— Embahada ng Israel (@IsraelinPH) 4 Temmuz 2014
Josh and I are watching a documentary on the Filipino-Jewish connection -… https://t.co/i6U5Ffe5Mr
— Primrose MK (@PrimroseMK) 10 Kasım 2015
Great evening to be in attendance for Kristallnacht, organized by the Jewish & Filipino communities of #Winnipeg pic.twitter.com/1NgA068jTH
— Jon Reyes (@jonreyes204) 10 Kasım 2015
Jacob Goldberg: I remember being chased around the schoolyard in second grade by two third-graders chanting “Chinese, Japanese!” Well, I wasn’t really being chased. I was just going about my business, and they were awkwardly following me around. I remember being more upset by the sneers on their faces than by what they were saying. I knew I wasn’t Chinese or Japanese, and I knew that it wouldn’t have been a bad thing if I were. And I was happy to be half-Filipino, the only half-Asian at my Orthodox Jewish school. I knew that it didn’t detract from my Jewishness, and even back then, when I probably didn’t know the word “diversity” yet, I still liked the idea that people learned something about the world just by meeting me.
From those moments until I returned from Israel a year after I graduated high school, I never stopped being the “Asian kid.” I was still an accepted member of the Jewish community wherever I went, but my connection to the world’s most populous Catholic country, a country of brown people, was widely known and acknowledged. I became the authority on all things Asian even before I decided to start learning about Asia. I was the guardian of Asian truths, pointing out when someone’s impersonation of Korean was sounded more like Chinese, explaining which countries used chopsticks and which didn’t, correcting my peers’ casual uses of Asian slurs, at least to make sure they were directed at the correct ethnic groups.
As Jewish as I was, I was still the most Filipino person around, and that’s how I came to be identified and valued.
The first time I visited the Philippines, as I walked through a shopping center in San Pablo City, my sister and I walked by a group of transgender women lounging on some couches in the mall. As we passed them, they began to touch my sister’s hair and smack my butt, exclaiming in thick Filipino accents, “So butipul.” My grandmother, who was walking with us, said that the women were envious of our light skin. It was one of the first times I ever felt white.
Throughout my stay in the Philippines, relatives as well as strangers would comment on my appearance, calling me “pogi,” meaning handsome, each time reminding me that to them, I was white. Among my Filipino family and friends, I have become the authority on all things white and Jewish. I am expected to know about American politics and pop culture as well as Jewish law and tradition. They all accept me as a member of their family and community, but I am also the perpetual white guy in the group, the embodiment of America, the definition of wealth and success in the eyes of millions of Filipinos.
Being immersed in strong, tight-knit ethnic communities but being bound to histories outside of those communities has positioned me in the margins of all of them. No matter what group I’m in, no matter how committed or involved I am, there is always a bungee cord of kinship pulling me elsewhere, always a stream of knowledge pouring into my brain from the outside, reminding me that there is another way to look at things. This cord pulls me into that small area when Venn diagrams overlap, the area that people in the other parts of the circles sometimes confuse for being on the outside. But I’m not outside, and I have the cultural capital within each community to prove it. I generally have no need to deploy this proof. I save it for instances when one community of another needs to hear from one of their own that there is more out there than just the Jewish way or the Filipino way of looking at things.
I live for moments when I get to use my marginality for the benefit of either of my main communities. They remind me that I have the blessing of being way more than just one thing, that I can be all of these things at the same time, and that doing so is a signal to the rest of the community that they exist within a larger community of people with different-sounding last name, differently hued skin, and different ways of solving the world’s problems.
Patrick Rosal: I’ll say this to close out: the role of a community is to protect the solitude of its individuals—I emphasize solitude rather than loneliness. At the same time, one of the roles of the individual artist is to trouble the community. It’s a paradox, this mutual relationship of trouble and support.
Patrick Rosal: Twelve years of school is just the tip of the iceberg; my father is an ex-priest. So among the first poems I was exposed to were the voluminous verses from scripture.
Patrick Rosal: My guess is that people survive wars by some combination of luck and invention. I’m a (very recent) descendant from that very fact. My legacy is making something (poems) from bits of evidence and fragments of history. My conscious material is language and the body. But every Filipino intuitively (and oftentimes consciously) constructs a mode of living that is made from disparate elements. For Filipinos that’s not a trick or a slick craft technique—it’s a strategy for survival. To me, that is a remarkable feat of intelligence and love. I’m trying to produce work that lives up to that tradition.
Patrick Rosal: My work is trying to figure out what these places and memories mean in the first place. I keep thinking of the official story—As a writer, I keep going back to it in memory.
Patrick Rosal: There’s nothing like watching a student wake up to her own gifts as a reader and writer. Sometimes it happens in front of you right in the classroom. Sometimes it’s many students at once; that is, it’s sometimes collaborative. Sometimes it happens in the nick of time at the end of the semester.
Patrick Rosal: The academic world isn’t always hospitable to things like play.
Patrick Rosal: There was a time in human history when the notion of art and work weren’t so clearly separated as they are in our culture. Music and songs especially were meant perhaps to make a request from the gods. Even if you don’t believe in that particular metaphysical dimension of art, songs were meant to record knowledge, questions, and names, and at the same time, they were meant to bring people together. There is no guarantee that art changes anything in us. But I like to think that I have inherited poetic traditions closely allied to a culture of work, and that culture at least partially consists of remembering, gathering, questioning, inventing, and naming.
'musta Patrick Rosal,
We fellowship-ed together, early in your Academic career, a little while after the release of your debut collection of poetry. At Konkrete Jungle, if memory serves. You just sorta stood there, all stoic and shiite, |0| I admired your casual demeanor (and acceptance to spontaneous invites), then. I gather, that's been a tad stifled by Academia's Debts and Obligations. So sorry, but I still think you're rad. What happened to the apls @ vinegar poem sa YouChoob? There is a photo of you, Mrs. Johanna F. Almiron-Johnson (also mired by Academic Debts and Obligations, but in the sovereign nation of Hawai'i), @ ako floating around space. Here's one link: http://asherleaks.blogspot.com/2014/05/ilocan-poets.html
As usual, I am keeping tabs on all high-profile Filipin@s, from both sides of the aisle. Yes, all of those I've encountered and have been promoted to higher seats of power are under greater scrutiny. I expect much from those that I write a personal message to from the pit of the very bottom tae heap. (< I've found Generational Memory Mediocre. I very much appreciate Jose Antonio Vargas's ||Brevity|| (akin to the late Samuel Menashe's style) and the severist of reminders, these days of Lot.
Good luck navigating the Indebted Academic terrain. And say hi to Ocean Vuong, along the thorniest Wei. I have.
Respecfully,
pst: I think Vanessa Hidary is da b@m, diba?
Bnei Lot are of an ancient origin. In the migratory tradition of Ruth begun more than two millennia ago, a remnant of David and Solomon migrated into Maritime Southeast Asia which comprises what is now Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, The Philippines, and Singapore, as well as Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, with a sizeable minority of Malays migrating back to their tribal allotments in Sephardic Judah, besides Terrestrial and Figurative Jordan.
