13 minute read
GRACE TALUSAN
from April 9, 2021
by The Gatepost
ARTS & FEATURES
By Emily Rosenberg
Editorial Staff
As a Fillipina-American author, Grace Talusan said she’d never read a book with a protagonist similar to her until she read Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Warrior Woman.”
She said the books she consumed, which consisted of mainly white protagonists, made her see herself as unworthy of attention in literature and rare appearances of Asian “caricatures inflicte great shame an embarrassment.
“I didn’t even realize my profound absence and invisibility from literature until I saw myself appear,” Talusan said. “Because of Kingston’s work, I felt a space open up in my own imagination and my idea of what was possible in writing.”
Winner of the Non-Fiction Massachusetts Book Award and The Restless Book Prize for New Immigrant Writing, as well as a former university writing professor, she is only beginning her journey to show the world what is possible in storytelling.
Talusan shared sections of “The Body Papers” as a guest reader for the Miriam Levine Reading, April 6.
Prior to reading, Talusan said she writes because she loves following her curiosities and hearing others’ stories, but also knows that “stories have the power to create change outwardly [...] in both positive and negative ways.”
She read an excerpt about her visit to St. Louis, Missouri.
Talusan said Rudyard Kippling’s “The White Man’s Burden” encouraged the United States to become an imperial power. This burden was a “euphemism” for imperialism.
“It’s a silly thing to think, but before I met my husband and had only white boyfriends, I could not get the thought out of my head that I was the white man’s burden,” she read.
Talusan said that in college, she was constantly “refracting” herself and wondering how the world saw her, as well as how she saw herself. It wasn’t until she learned about double consciousness that she realized she was not the only person who felt that way.
She added that growing up, the joke she heard most about Filipinos was that they ate dogs.
“No insult felt worse than being called a dog eater. Even though I had never done this, I felt the shame of this practice tied to my body,” she read. “Perhaps this way of characterizing Filipinos began when they were displayed in living exhibits in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. These human zoos were evidence in support of the U.S. colonization.”
Talusan said when she visited the Missouri state archives, she found a scrapbook which included a photo of her great grandfather who immigrated to America in 1904. Unlike other Filipinos ho ere confine to the exhibit, her great grandfather walked around the fair freely and was a captain who marched in the Fillipino Constabulary band.
“He was the ideal outcome of U.S. Colonization. Christianized, educated, military - the embodiment of colonial success,” she read.
Yet, despite the higher level of respect her great grandfather may have been expected to receive, Talusan said the American mind could not move past the misrepresentations of Filipinos and what they did to dogs.
She added that when she went to the St. Louis Museum gift shop, someone whispered in her ear “big dogs.”
“Over 100 years later, this is the story about us that persists,” Talusan said. fter finishing the piece, Talusan said she had never learned about the 1904 World’s Fair in school and believes America wants to remain blind to colonialism, but its people are also “strong enough” to be honest about it.
“Some of what I try to do in my work is challenge the silences that I’ve been encouraged to keep,” she added.
Talusan then read an excerpt titled “Yellow Children.”
In the piece, Talusan began by detailing the special college acceptance programs for students of color that she was invited to in her senior year of high school.
She said that when she visited Harvard, Sara Lawrence Lightfoot gave a speech, which left her in awe, because she had only ever met or saw white male professors. Lightfoot gave Talusan hope that she could attend a diverse university.
She added the only teacher of color she had in her elementary or secondary education was an Asian American guidance counselor.
“The big joke - before he married one of the science teachers - was that I was going to marry him,” Talusan read.
“Sometimes I could forget who I was - that I wasn’t white. I acted like I was the same as my girlfriend. I wore the same bright blue eyeshadow and sprayed [hairspray] over my black hair as I tanned at the beach which bleached my hair the color of a mushy pumpkin instead of the sunkissed blonde my friends idealized,” she read.
“I was like everyone else until I walked by a plate glass window or a bathroom mirror or saw a photo of myself with my friends. Who - in that image - became my white friends.”
She said that during college admissions season, her white friends called her lucky for being a minority, and
claimed it was “too bad” she wasn’t Hispanic or Black because that would ensure her spot at one of the elite schools she had applied to.
“The subtext was that we did not deserve these spots that we were taking from white students who worked so much harder and earned it more,” she read. “I got the message.”
She added after she started to recognize how these racially charged offenses affected her, she began using the term person of color to describe herself. Shortly after, a school administrator showed Talusan his tan and told her he was no more a person of color than she was.
“Maybe I wanted him to be right. I also wanted to believe my life would not be negatively impacted by race. Even now, I wish this was true,” she read.
Another time, she discovered women questioning what she and her white boyfriend’s babies would look like. She said they asked her, “What is a half-yellow, and half-white anyway?
“These women had watched me grow up in our small town, a place I felt I belonged to. And perhaps, all along, I had only been a foreign exchange student,” she read.
Talusan wished at the time, she could have said, “Ladies, if I had children, they’d be human - just like yours.”
Talusan said she “surprised herself” at a graduation party when her best friend referred to Asian Americans as “Orientals’’ and Talusan asked her to stop using that word. She said that despite feeling she would lose her that night, they stayed friends throughout college and their early adult life.
She said after her friend got a job as a waitress, she could relate to Talusan’s feeling of invisibility.
“When I waited in line, sometimes cashiers looke behin me to fin the next customer,” Talusan said. “Police officers an other authorities oul ask if I could speak English if I paused too long before responding.”
She added her friend had also casually complained about Black customers not tipping well. “Did she see me as an honorary white person? Did she forget that the man I was going to marry was African American? Or did she feel a thrill to remember this fact and say it anyway?” she read.
The passage revealed more about the microaggressions and hate her husband has endured as a Black man. Talusan said people cross the street to avoid him, unless he has a dog with him. When he has a dog, it’s a “different world” - people will wave, and sometimes kids come up to pet it.
She added that when he was little, her husband was the target of racial bullying encased with the N-word, and one time two white men on the street attacked and beat him so badly, he was unrecognizable in the hospital.
Talusan said after her friend made that comment about Black customers, she felt hopeless about their dying friendship and abilities to overcome “obstacles in the conversation about race.
“I don’t believe my friend is a bad person. Nor do I think the school administrator, or the women gossiping about the so-called ‘yellow children’ or the many people I hear casually drop insinuating comments about race would believe it if I told them they harbored racist beliefs,” she read. “This is not about bad people. This is about a system of white supremacy that decent people, unaware of their power and privilege, enact and uphold.”
CONNECT WITH EMILY ROSENBERG
erosenberg@student.framingham.edu
Harvard professor sparks national reform
By Caroline Gordon
Editorial Staff
Arts & Ideas hosted “From Theory to Practice: Ethnic Studies to Make a More Just World” featuring Dr. Lorgia García Peña who discussed how ethnic studies can improve acceptance of diversity via Zoom, April 5.
With a doctorate degree in American Studies and a specialization in Latinx/a/o studies, she works as a professor in the department of romance languages and literatures at Harvard. García Peña is the author of the book, “Translating Blackness: Migrations and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspectives.”
In addition to teaching and writing, she is the co-founder of Freedom University, hich is a non profit school for undocumented students located in Atlanta, Georgia.
García Peña is also the co-director of Archives of Justice, a digital humanities project that aims to educate people on the hidden history of brown, Black, Asian, Indigenous, colonized, and immigrant people - focusing on those of whom are female, trans, binary, or queer.
She began the discussion by touching upon her “three points.”
First, we all have our own opinions.
Second, our perspectives on life are from eurocentric and heteronormative lenses. n finally, ethnic stu ies is a fiel that allows us to see the world from a different point of view.
García Peña described her own perspective on being an Afro-Latina woman who immigrated from the Caribbean at 12 years old.
“Some would call me a generation and a half. One foot here, one foot there,” she said.
García Peña discussed how like other immigrant children, she went to school to improve her family’s socioeconomic status.
Along the way, she said she discovered a passion for ethnic studies despite her parents wanting her to become a medical doctor or lawyer.
García Peña explained how while in college, she became informed of the space between academia and her background and that her socioeconomic status and immigrant identity created her “own belonging to the university.”
“I had two choices: I could try to fit in or I coul change the structure of the institutions that made it so my history was not in the books. I chose the latter,” she said.
García Peña touched upon how her academic experience was “profoundly personal” because of her own issue of her history being excluded from the textbooks.
She added despite not feeling included, her mother and aunt’s feminism and desire for social justice kept her motivated.
García Peña explained how her path to earning a doctorate degree and working as a professor allowed her to fin ans ers to uestions she had about her experience as an Afro-Latina immigrant confronting racism.
Then, she escribe her o n efinition of ethnic studies as, “a project of transformation which seeks to be colonizing the university to create reforms of learning for all. It’s a process of justice.”
She touched upon the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has unveiled the fragility of capitalism and resulted in hardships for those who were previously privileged.
García Peña added that social services have failed to provide people in need with necessities such as food stamps or unemployment benefits.
She explained how many essential workers are Latinx/a/o, Black, and poor.
García Peña described how capitalism has forced universities to lay off faculty and stop hiring.
She a e espite the financial crises the universities face, the integrity of education will continue and learning won’t stop.
García Peña discussed Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Black and Puerto Rican writer and historian who advocated for the development of Black history departments in schools.
“His proposal was to introduce that which slavery took away - the possibility of humanity and belonging,” she said.
García Peña explained that in order to work together, we need to appreciate every voice in the classroom while dismissing a dominant voice.
She posed the question, “Out of all your high school world history classes, how many were focused on African history, outside of a section on Egypt or U.S. history?”
García Peña explained how history is always studied from the “perspective of the empire” and the history of those who experienced violence is left out.
She added we could also learn about the direct relationship between immigration and colonialism.
García Peña touched upon the current “standard of education” that is built off colonial structures but is disguised as the truth as it stems from white supremacy, that we have been taught to understand as normal, she said.
“In the process, we have all been deprived of learning because we have all been brought up with this so-called idea of truth,” García Peña said.
She explained that when we think about the founding of a nation, we might not have the factual date or the
correct groups of people.
“We have constitutions that are the universal truth about those particular nations. All of those are partial truths. thnic stu ies are charge ith filling in the men’s gap of eurocentric education systems that dominate all of our institutions,” García Peña said.
She described the social environment of Harvard, noting how it is not an institution that mostly serves Latinx/a/o students.
García Peña explained how students who attend colleges that don’t have Latinx/a/o spaces, look to the classroom as an environment for them to “form alliances” to confront the racial adversity they face.
She discussed a course she created at Harvard called “Performing Latinidad” and said it served as a “sanctuary” for students of color.
García Peña described how the class is entertaining for all levels of students as it has a strong performance component with a curriculum that inclu es film, poetry, an music.
“Students would get excited to perform at the end of the semester because they became visible on a campus that constantly seemed to invisiblize students of color,” she said.
García Peña described how students made a Jennifer Lopez shrine one year, which brought the Latinx/a/o community together, but only for a week because the janitors removed it.
She also discussed the day President Donald Trump was elected.
“A scary day for many of the brown, queer, and undocumented students in my class. I simply did not have the words of comfort or wisdom that could assuage their fears even a little,” she said.
García Peña explained she still held a class the day after the 2016 election, despite many of her colleagues canceling. She opened the classroom for all students as a place to process their thoughts.
She described how students came in holding each other and crying, fearing deportation, and having to adapt to the new “Trumpian world.”
After García Peña and her students vented, she asked them, “What now?”
She described how one woman ran up to the board and began jotting down her peers’ thoughts.
García Peña said the students stayed an extra three hours, where they developed their main goal - to protect undocumented students.
Their plan was to make colleges sanctuaries for undocumented students, which is a title many colleges have adapted - but not Harvard.
She touched upon how recently, she reconnected with an old student and they discussed the post-election time period and their class.
The student said, “The syllabus gave us the tools, but the class gave us a community.”
