g i i r n o
static zine series. volume 2. issue 2.
letter from the editors Dear community, We are excited to present STATIC’s spring zine, themed “Origin.” So often, our relationships with our origins are ascribed to us by outside powers who wish to simplify complex concepts such as home, culture, ancestry, language, and ethnicity in ways that ignore our different experiences of them. Distinct family contexts are all assumed to fit into a nuclear, heteronormative ideal. Home is treated as a fixed geographical space in a way that erases experiences of diaspora and indigeneity. Language is treated as discrete, as opposed to fluid; race as intrinsic, as opposed to constructed; culture as fixed, as opposed to changing. In this zine, we showcase essays, stories, artwork, and poetry which narrate origins in ways that aren’t structured by normative ideas of what it means to be or to become. Here you’ll find elegies for homelands and the dances of gods; indictments of colonialism and ink drawn from rivers. Given this theme, we especially want to center indigenous narratives-- the fact that Stanford land is Ohlone land, and that the atrocities of settler colonialism continue today, both in the United States and outside of it. We also foreground the fact that indigenous resistance is ongoing - in the struggle for governance over water, land and other resources, in the fight for language and culture preservation, in the resilience of communities around the world. And we acknowledge the complexity and multitudes of these identities - many of us are in diaspora because of the global reach of imperialism; some of us who are settlers on this land are indigenous to another. This zine has been two quarters in the making, and we are grateful for all the people who have helped to make it happen - our contributors, who blessed us with their words and their art; our design team, whose hard work you’ll find in every page; and all the rest of STATIC, for keeping us grounded. We hope you enjoy!
With love and in solidarity, STATIC
Cover art by Momo Hoshi From a picture, they say you can’t tell the difference between a sunrise and a sunset. “Origin” can be the same--it is a beginning, a birth, a burgeoning, and at the same time it is an ending, a death, a fading away. Firebird, Tezuka Osamu’s “Hi No Tori,” is a symbol of immortality--but where does infinity start? from where does eternity originate? Perhaps eternity drips through layers of time, time that isn’t linear, time that isn’t singular, and that’s where it begins. Momo (they/she) is a 5th year undergrad double majoring in Music and CSRE. She is currently writing an honors thesis in CSRE on the topic of Japanese American diasporic identity as viewed through the lens of jazz history, Japanese American creative musicians, and improvisational music-making.
cont en
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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ng i n r wa
red exists, red sustains .............................................3
mia ritter-whittle
untitled ..................................................................... 4
pio thompson
mother tongue ..........................................................5
jamayka young
pinesol .......................................................................6
jamayka young
lychee ........................................................................ 7
juliana chang
self-portrait as a commoner girl in the joseon dynasty ............................................... 8
maddie kim
where language begins and does not end ............9
syd westley
pantoum ending in origin ......................................10
syd westley
rupture..................................................................... 11
vanuyen pham
upon eating coconut bread, grandma instructs me to say grace .......................13
lena blackmon
speaking over food ................................................ 15
ethan chua
the crane wives ....................................................... 17 the swath of sand we call river .............................. 18
yellow b!tches in the driver’s seat ......................... 19
jenai longstaff jenai longstaff janel lee
between memories and dreams ........................... 21
jacqueline ramos
roots .........................................................................23
morgan grant
......................................... 24
rachel lam
community survey: origin .......................................25 front cover art .............................................................
momo hoshi
back cover art .............................................................
janet chen
“red exists, red sustains.� this piece connects to the red river, a place that hasinai, or caddo, people have a deep connection to. it also plays on red as a word for blood, life sustaining substance within us, and red as a word for native people.
mia ritter-whittle is an older sister to three siblings. daughter of terra snyder, granddaughter of jodi ritter and marv ritter. daughter of joe whittle, granddaughter of beth franz, lillian whittle, tom whittle, and glen franz. daughter of jason snyder, granddaughter of claudine sharp and david sharp. mia is hasinai, lenape, and irish.
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heritage hurts most when it’s unspeakable unspoken when it’s bright yellow tape and chalk white outlines my mother doesn’t talk of her time before america she talks about birthdays and broccoli and what movies we’re going to see if we are one body then i am the forgetting if there’s no going backward then it must be a circle the circle is a wound is a gaping the memory map is fading is forgetting the unknowing is a weight is a needing nothing that summer i return to laos but by another route and i find another laos which is not the laos i’m missing i sit alone by the mekong watch the days float by not to remember: what was forgotten because the land doesn’t hold its past selves our forgetting i remember instead: so much has been forgotten it is hard to remember so much has been forgotten i return to laos but by another route i don’t find the laos i’m missing i find what laos has become what we have made of laos laos as we retell it
Pio Thompson (he) is a pretty tall dude who spends a lot of time talking to ghosts. He’s not the biggest fan of romcoms but does enjoy extended walks on the beach. High places are definitely his favorite. His roommates hate that he takes super long showers, but this is where he feels most like a rockstar.
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mother tongue I’ve got a history book in my mouth I hold centuries of Trauma between my teeth no amount of Black studies classes and woke Poetry can uncolonize my tongue. I try to speak the language of a land that birthed me and I choke my tongue curls into knots, tell me hush that devil speak tell me be thankful for what massa gave me tell me speak all proper like. I bite down so hard 400 years of blood trickle down my throat my stomach becomes Red Sea waves churning inside me big enough to swallow a man my body becomes nation a land even the white man cannot conquer I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams Black girl on fire kindling skin brown enough to burn to set this world ablaze purge all but the ashiest of embers We smolder but never die this burning is in our heritage if you put your ear to the belly of a Black woman, you’ll hear generations of my people screaming. you’ll hear the crackling of centuries of black bodies finding rest in the Pyer you’ll hear the whispers of envy of those left behind who know that smoke leads to Freedom you’ll hear the history of a People whose names will never grace my tongue but whose blood pumps through my veins you’ll hear the stories forgotten in the history books and the words I’ve never learned to say.
Jamayka Young (she) is a freshman at Stanford majoring in African and African American Studies. She is an aspiring writer and poet with a passion for social justice and a love for discovering, understanding, and writing about culture, place, and home.
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Pinesol my Mama says “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” so i scrubbed him clean from my skin, scraping at myself until i was polished like a spoon, ‘till i shined enough that he could see himself in me. i swept it under the rug before dusting the baseboards. i’ve never felt less holy. i am from a family full of fallen angels, full of Women who have always been reminded that the only way to deal with this messy life is to clean yourself up and keep going. from tears that smell like clorox, from men with filthy hands. i’m from Women who know how to keep their mouths shut, and men who talk too much i’m from dusty heirlooms from inherited hurt. i’m from oceans ripping apart families, and Water washing away the sin i’m from Savage pride from wolves from women who learned best how not to howl at the moon
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lychee
I. The li zhi my Mama likes to eat so much only grows in another country. When we go to visit Tai Bei she drags us to the local market, buys yi zheng tong of the fruit, starts eating them before we’ve left the stall. In our house in America, Mei Guo, she wrinkles her nose at the canned lychee jelly, tells us stories instead. II. Mama says in ancient times, li zhi was the favorite fruit of the Emperor’s favorite wife. The fruit she loved to eat only grew outside the capital, and so the emperor sent his armies to South China, brought back carriages of the fruit for his love. In a time when men wooed lovers with flowers, gold, threats, the emperor chose fruit. How far do you have to go before coming back becomes an act of love? III. Mama and Baba live across the world from their Mama and Baba. The family they love grows in another country, and Spencer and I grow here too. We whine about the fourteen hour plane rides every summer, dole out complaints every hour like clockwork, roll our eyes when we step off the plane into a wet heat thicker than syrup. Every time we visit, Yeye and Nainai like to tell us how much taller we’ve gotten, how the baby fat melts right off our cheeks, even when I think we look the same. IV. Mama says Baba went to school in Tai Zhong, an old dusty Catholic place that gave out lashes when you couldn’t recite the poems. His parents loved him enough to stop buying shoes and send him to college in Mei Guo, saved for ten years to get him there, didn’t see him for another five once he left. He goes to Chicago, Zhi Jia Ge, returns home long enough to marry my Mama, brings her to America. He buys a home, has children, visits every three years or so, tends the fruits of his labor far away from home.
Juliana Chang (she) is a junior at Stanford studying Linguistics and Sociology.
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Self-Portrait As Commoner Girl in the Joseon Dynasty Because I did not know the written word I drew a girl and said this is my name, pressed my fingers against hers until they flushed red because in Korean I am called 도둑녀 which means daughter, the same word for thief. I sat upright in my bed in the mornings, saw new mouths from beneath the sheets: my mother ducking from the low-roofed house into the blizzard, the wooden doors to the room where the men sleep. I unclasped my yellow dress and found my belly blank as a pond without silt. I traced with a finger my body’s dark harbors so that when I am married I will recognize the 출가외인 of my father’s voice, one who left the family and became a stranger my rechristening. In 1443 they say Sejong the Great invented an alphabet simple enough to grant all Koreans the privilege of naming themselves. So I wrote my name a hundred times, gave myself eyes as wide as my mother’s nipples in the summer. I wanted my future 도둑녀 to know what a mouth looks like when it is open. And what becomes of words hung too low in the throat: the knife tied to the coat strings of the hanbok. A future husband in a strange house rubbing my dark belly with darker ink.
Maddie Kim (she) is a sophomore studying English and creative writing. Her poetry and prose have been recognized by the Norman Mailer Center, Princeton University, the Sierra Nevada Review, and the Adroit Prizes. When she’s not writing, she likes tap dancing and taking blurry photos of her dogs.
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Where Language Begins and Does Not End
I was really interested in the ways that both public imagination and ancestral imagination coalesce, and how we, as inheritors, grow into and out of that. The words in black on the left image are taken from Executive Order 9066, while the words in blue on the left image are taken from interviews with my grandmother.
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pantoum ending in origin cont en
in another life i was with a boy. he called me his little Asian princess when he kissed me. he came in my mouth, came on my face.
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ua sex
he called me his little Asian doll. he learned that in porn they came in my mouth, came on my face. it has nothing to do with conquest, this
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doll. he learned that in porn they have an entire section called Japanese. it has nothing to do with conquest, this desire. it is not because of history that they have an entire section called Japanese: see these small bodies crushed and feel desire. it is not because of history that he gripped my arms so tightly, saw this small body crushed and felt hunger. i learned to like the way he gripped my arms so tightly. i asked him to bite me – called this hunger. i learned to like the way that he did. in a new life, i forget i asked him to bite me – call this mending. i kiss a girl and dissolve a history of what he did. in a new life, i remember nothing that has come before me. meaning, i kiss a girl and rewrite the story – tell it this way, beginning with us.
Syd Westley (she/they) is a queer and mixed poet. Syd lives for California poppies, clouds, and her 94 year old grandmother.
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The moments I treasured most when I was younger were the lazy afternoons, when I climbed onto the bed and waited for my grandma to finish her prayers. I don’t remember what started this tradition, but I remember her patient smile and the anticipation I felt, the way I held my breath as she started to speak. The stories my grandma wove in her gentle voice went something like this:
The legend goes that the mountain fairy princess Au Co and the sea dragon lord Lac Long Quan loved each other very much. But one being from the mountain and one being from the sea, their natures were so different from each other that their love for each other could not overcome their longing for their homes. So they divided their 100 children, Au Co taking 50 up to the high mountains with her, and Lac Long Quan taking 50 down to the sea. What I got from this story was that Vietnamese people are a union of two things that were never meant to be together. That we are a blending of things so different from each other like fire and water, and sometimes, as much love as we have for each other, we also repel each other. It makes sense of our messy, contradictory natures. I remember thinking it was funny to be considered the children of the mountain fairy and the sea dragon, because all I had heard about Vietnam before was war, war, and more war. I always thought it was beautiful in a way. That in the aftermath of horrible, human decisions, we still dare to dream that we are descended from gods. We have such a marked memory of pain, and still we desperately hold on to what precious good we can. Doesn’t it make sense though? That from the beginning, we were always meant to be broken apart.
Vanuyen Pham (she) is a fourth year at Stanford studying history, who seeks to understand how stories from our past can help us heal in the present and inform systematic changes in our future. She is proud to be a second generation Vietnamese American and is grateful for the enduring love and strength her family has taught her.
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Aren’t we separated now? Decades ago, we were separated on the same land by an artificial boundary, and then some of us did end up leaving for the seas, scattering away to different homes. Maybe that’s in our heritage. The push and pull of our natures. The need to pack up our bags and leave. But I guess there can also be light in the story. Even though Au Co and Lac Long Quan separated, they still loved each other, and their children were supposed to live together in harmony. No matter what elements we are made of, we were meant to survive. And we have survived. I think about sitting cross legged on the bed as a child, listening to my grandma’s stories. This tiny lady with the wrinkled, spotted hands, whose skin I would pinch to see the length of time it would rise and fall, hinting at the years and secrets it had seen. These were the hands that desperately buried my grandpa’s uniform in the ground as the neighborhood shook with rumors that the Viet Cong were approaching the city gates, and God help you if they found those things in your home. These were the hands that rose to take off the wedding ring she had worn for so many years and to deliberately place it in her mouth, Swallowing. I think about where I come from- a little piece of heaven and a little piece of earth, a long line of strong women and strong people- and I hope to make them proud.
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DA MOONupon eating coconut bread, grandma instructs me to say grace thinking about witches & “black girl magic” & god thinking about me & my grandma me & my grandma baking shit, thinking about how grandma turns coconut tintoo some lembas like you ain’t gotta tell me that’s magic thinking bout how she learned that shit from Euretha, how Euretha be out here feeding the whole island of Barbados thinking about us & Cleo & Lois & momMaria & my momma & Lois whipping down the street like we a coven thinking about the man who’d burn us & call us god [cause all he know how to do is lie] thinking about this femmeinity as a gift from god like god knows what’s up like god knows a bunch of femme bodies cracking up never hurt nobody like maybe that’s all an ocean is: just a femme body of water chillin like Cleo only gonna hurt somebody ______ if the man on the moon pushes them that way or pulls them then the ocean might get violent like Cleo might get fed up w/ the man on the moon’s bullshit & throw acid ondrown a motherfucker
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Questions: does the spacing work? am i redundant? are my themes coming across? ______say fuck you to the man on the moon say fuck you to that flaky ass nigga moon and still, the ocean be calm like Lois smoking a cigarette on her porch with her potted ivies thinking bout my inheritance like i’ve got a femme body too like my hands make magic or mayhem too like everything i do with this water is bequeathal: thinking bout me and my plants or my silence or my bread or my screams as the point, eventually, where the family line ends like all rivers lead to the ocean or some shit like i am nothing without a femme body or fed mouth: mom kisses me on the forehead like a cherry sized raindrop, says “i gave you life, i have the scars to prove it” look, the whole Caribbean ocean in a moment & thank femme bodied god for all of it god says “you can miss me w/ the bullshit” “i think that’s why they gave us darkness & the dark side of the moon gave us each other gave me my own version of femme so I can crack up w/ the ocean say fuck you to the moon say fuck you to the moon that i’ll drown a motherfuckersay fuck you to the moon that makes me bleed
Lena Blackmon (she) is a Materials Science major and member of Spoken Word Collective. She likes bread and her friends. You can find more of her work on True Culture University, Rookie Magazine, and previous STATIC editions.
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Speaking over food I. The northbound train goes all the way to San Francisco. Near Union Square, a gate with two small dragons. A table reserved, as well, for two. I ordered the dumplings you like. Carefully folded, soy sauce staining the rice paper a pale brown, hands of late grandmothers. Ferns and lanterns in the right places for good luck. II. Your mother was from Taiwan. Your father studied herbs. My grandmother’s herbs made me tall when I took them. Harvested during a particular phase of the moon. Auspicious as well for running from war. Do you ever think of your mother, cradled in prayers, the long sea. Century egg with scallion - a hundred days buried in soil. The problem of ancestry. Of duration. III. After the meal, red dates, plastic toys. Streetlight hanging on no-name sign. We see our families less and less. Still, they expect the same things of us. It is wrong to say we refused their designs, or their language. We always suspected old translations, missing truths.
Ethan Chua (he) is a Chinese-Filipino spoken word poet and fiction writer. He is the recipient of the 2017 Geballe Prize for short fiction, and his work has been published in the Philippines Graphic magazine, DIALOGIST, Strange Horizons and Hobart. His graphic novel, Doorkeeper, published last November by Summit Books, is available in Philippine bookstores. He sings while biking, narrowly avoids accidents, and has a lot of feelings. He is happily part of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective.
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We had in common our imitations of imitations. A pavilion on Market reminds you of a dress your mother owned.   IV. You were wearing a windbreaker, pale green. By the tea shop, black leaves steeped in milk. My uncle lived in Hong Kong, drank tea like this. Your uncle took the right boat but used the wrong calendar. My uncle was a ghost who drifted up to the moon. Round and pale, a lazy susan filled with strange dishes. V. Southbound, you look through the window. I see you in profile, and clouds. There is a connection here, you remind me of a home I do not have. A map of the coast at the front of the car. But which coast, which car. Both of us sailing through the stations, different burdens on our minds.
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the crane wives come from the indent left by freshly cut lavender, that indent of scar-skin which meets the morning air where we are born: the cracked crystal-chasm between salt and sugar. opening the sky-blue shutters, we clamber up from the underground, wrap our powder-sugared babies in threadbare rugs, licking the salt from their wounds until the sun rises and they finally fall asleep in the unearthly gray clouds. and we emerge again lips smeared, blood-blue. from each other’s scalps we pluck bleached feathers so white they’ve turned black as our lungs explode with UV rays that turn morning into night we cut bones, braid hair and sand down the wooden nails of our looms, lighting cinnamon-scented candles that we carry in the pockets of fur coats & denim, wax melted across our chests and ankles. our feathers don’t catch fire as we make a nest in the sun. glancing over to catch the moon’s eye, we press our mouths against dissected snake bodies that slither against cool stone and successfully nourish ourselves with the poison berries that grow along the fence out back. we know how to move our bodies through windows better than through doors, how to escape into the storybooks filled with woman after woman after woman tempted by the glossy red seeds of fruit. what does it mean to sew (sow) ourselves into something so deeply that when we come up for air we realize the whole time we’ve been knitting needles into our forearms, soil into our nail beds ? what does it mean to learn to breathe something other than oxygen, to carve beating hearts out of our own flesh, to bring them over in gift basket pie tins to the neighbors next door ? we know what it means to taste the blood of ripped tapestries and tapped maple trees. to bleed and feed all in the same place: a village taped together, rosemary leaves cutting into its throat 17
that swath of sand Wwe call river
An ocotillo plant stands proudly at sunset between Interstate 10 and El Rio, the dry river next to the house in which I grew up.
Jenai Longstaff (she) is a 23-year old desert creature born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. When not studying botanical remedies to supplement her emergency medicine training, she can be found running marathons alone in the redwoods or playing her accordion on the fire escape of her co-op.
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cont en
Yellow B!tches in the Driver’s Seat
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g I met eyes with a gajami in the freezer aisle.
A translation had been written hastily and taped above its section: Flatfish. Gajami is the crackling in the frying pan, stealing bites on the way to the dinner table, eagerly awaiting my mother to pick the crispy flesh off the bones and onto my rice, stained red by kimchi. “Flatfish” is gajami’s less magical counterpart. Encased in rock-hard ice, it is thrown aside by an ahjumma who reminisces of days when seafood weren’t so glacial. I was eighteen months old when I moved from Seoul to a small, dusty town in Arizona with sweet orange trees and a scorching sun. My father took me to see Star Wars (apparently the crew had filmed a scene in a nearby desert some years before), and the heat was more bearable when we imagined that we were rovers of the Dune Sea. On weekends, my mother would take me to the local library and read every children’s book, in English of course. Several years later, I would be dozing off on the ride to school as she listens to a civics CD, preparing to take a test that will grant both her and her daughter citizenship. The sweat and sacrifice of my parents gave me a place in our new home, but sometimes I wonder if I lost one in our motherland. When I visited Korea in middle school, I realized there had been a distance created between me and my family that was not only physical but also cultural. I was ashamed of my deteriorating fluency, not knowing what to say to cashiers or waiters or disrupting the flow of conversation with family members. My cousins and I would escape the summer humidity by staying inside to watch TV. I had a hard time keeping up with the speed of most talk shows on TV, so they suggested a music program instead. Have you heard of __? What about __? The names of boy bands and girl groups they mentioned were all in English, but never had the language felt so unfamiliar. There was one that stood out in particular. I’ll never forget the moment I saw BIGBANG. Yellow bodies on stage. Singing, dancing, performing. Expressing. To me, the sometimes haphazard English-Korean lyrics were heartfelt. The colorful, experimental fashion the essence of cool. Our 2D screen back home only had one-dimensional portrayals of “Asians”— was this the dimension I had been missing? K-Pop became a way for me to reconnect with my culture. I was enamored by the beautiful pop stars and glamorous concepts. My Korean steadily improved as I religiously watched interviews and shows featuring my favorite groups, hoping to one day communicate with my idols.
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lur s d
However, just as the glitz of celebrity comes with a dark underbelly, so too did K-Pop bring both empowerment and affliction for me. It’s an industry ridden with categorical beauty standards and a lack of agency given to women, especially girl groups who are often the products, not the producers of their music. My sense of self was divided across home and motherland; I could find more real, whole representations of Asians in Korea but identified more with my female friends and role models in America. I didn’t realize I needed something, someone at the intersection until Awkwafina.
“Yellow b!tches in the driver’s seat B!tch drive that Corolla right into the streets … We got that bomb pussy That Long Duk Dong pussy Make you call your mom pussy …You belong to me pussy” If BIGBANG helped me reclaim my identity as Korean, Awkwafina was my path to discovering what it means to be an Asian American woman. In her lyrics, she is unapologetic and in-control. She owns her sexuality and her voice. She is everything that the demure, docile Asian female stereotype isn’t supposed to be. Behind the scenes, she is Nora Lum, the daughter of a second-generation Chinese American father and South Korean mother. She grew up in Queens with her grandmother, who owned a Cantonese restaurant but forbade her from cooking. She played the trumpet and majored in journalism. She is, to many young Asian American women, a reflection of themselves, one who shares their stories but in a way that encourages all the loud, protruding, passionate parts of their identity. There are times when I feel like the flatfish. Imported from a foreign land, I introduce myself by an incomplete translation. Jihyeon means wisdom, brightness; Janel is short and easy to pronounce. The long travel has packed away parts of me in ice, frozen and soundless. Many unfamiliar faces examine me before throwing me back to the pile, one of many conveniently labeled by origin and appearance. It’s only when I’m surrounded by the warmth of family, friends, and those who enable me to proclaim my identity wholly and confidently that the ice melts, and I am recognized as the gajami within.
Jihyeon “Janel” Lee (she) is a junior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is passionate about creating spaces for women and people of color to be ambitious and seek achievement, whether it’s through section leading or the performing arts. She has a lot of uncertainty about the future but has made some progress in understanding herself, and she hopes her writing encourages others to do the same and spend time in (forgiving) reflection.
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when there are beige walls, fluffed pillows, soft sheets, and silence, the kind of silence in the suburbs that you can feel while typing in the glow of the laptop it is in those kinds of silences when i remember moments from the homeland ingrained in my muscles, my bones each one, bring me back call my heart back to the edge of the mountain stepping on stones, wary of each step ducks, dogs, chickens, smiles wander free the green verdant mountains gleaming, reflecting the stuff of dreams 30 minutes pumping and pumping and pumping water into buckets and buckets and buckets up down breathe up down breathe up down my body remembers side to side chopping out a banana, snacking, tossing it freely into the bushes as fertilizer 6am sun peeking through the curtains, poking me in my dreams vegetables fresh from the farm, family style, for breakfast makopa, fresh from the tree, in a bowl a kettle of sweet coffee, poured free the women and men lounging on the porch, resting from farm work as the afternoon rain pitter patters me into a nap
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one sabon bowl, sharing one plateful of rice and chicken one pitcher, swirling gin and Tang sitting in a circle, new friends, new family, shining eyes and easy laughter sleeping on a thin mattress fans humming in the darkness snores, breaths of the mother, sisters, the babies all of us dreaming in the same room in my homeland my body violently takes me back and my homeland calls out to me “was there ever a time that you were more alive” standing on the concrete amidst the honking, the dust, the heat waiting, squinting at each passing jeep’s signs sitting squished between brown shoulders 3 coins passed from palm to palm “bayad po” and “para po” clutching my bag as my kuya clutches my wrist wandering the streets next to the market I wonder now where my heart truly lies
Jacqueline Ramos (she/they) is a senior in Urban Studies who lives for making and drinking coffee with friends. Check out that Philippine coffee, the Ibaloi farmers, who are briefly in this piece, spend endless hours working on their craft in growing the coffee.
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roots What dance do your gods do? Do they twist their hips like a ribbon in the wind? Maybe their feet strike the beat of a drum into the ground from which we were raised. Do you dance for your gods? Show them thanks and love and every burden you bare? I will make no assumptions about the gods you either do or don’t see. But I will tell you of the ones that leak through me. I do not wear the skirts of Haiti, Though I wish I could wrap an ancestral home around my hips and waist as flowing as those. Those skirts curled into fists, wrapped around knuckles that are no stranger to labor. Not all labor is in a field, But the dance I praise has many roots in the fruits grown in a field. A field of glory and pain, of sorrow and survival, of fights and fiction. Martial arts become more like moving arts. Aggression is molded into a blade of grass whipping in the breeze. A single blade, a single arm. Stirring the world around it to match the roiling passion locked inside. Every isolated shoulder roll allows a little bit more of the pain I wish I could give back to seep through my pores. Guilt entwines itself with my fingers, freezing my bones in fear. How could I offer up a feeling I myself don’t even want? At the feet of the same gods that I try to channel, I hand over anxiety, anger, discomfort, and uncertainty. Yet they give freedom, happiness, calm and home back to my soul. What kind of exchange am I daring to make? My mistake is in making the ones above equivalent to the ones below. Some may share our shapes, but they are not the same as us. At one point, some might have been, But they have learned the lessons we have yet to face. The gods’ that snake their energy into my chest, my pelvis, my head? They can carry what I cannot. When I give them the weight of the world, They give my body the strength to stand a little bit taller the next time around.
Morgan-Me'Lyn Grant (she) is a Black Woman that walks with the Spirits. A radical revolutionary, her art intends to deconstruct and liberate. Open your mind and the soul will follow.
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(Medium: oil on canvas. Size: 30” x 30”). Phonetically this is pronounced: hatlv udohiyu dihegvi. In English this means, “where are you really from?” This is a question commonly posed to non-white Americans by white Americans. In this painting, I translate that into Cherokee to emphasize the fact that only indigenous North Americans are truly ‘from’ North America. On another note, after Trump’s executive order 13769, many white Americans rallied with words like, “but we’re all immigrants.” That kind of rhetoric erases many narratives, including, but not limited to those of indigenous peoples, descendants of African slaves, and war refugees. It’s very important for people to know where they’re from and how they’ve got to where they are now.
A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, of the United States, and a second-generation Malaysian immigrant, Rachel Lam (she) was born in Honolulu and grew up in Seattle. She both succeeds and fails at balancing her life.
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love that went beyond cultural differences
I identify as Chinese-Filipino, and see Manila as my first home; while not a refugee or immigrant myself, I hold as a part of my origins the journey my grandmother took as a refugee from Fujian province to the Philippines.
How did you come to be? Barbie dolls, pink Bullying, loneliness, worthlessness Fat, ugly Lying, denying Determination, resilience, love Acceptance
I come from a family of immigrants, of strong women, of stories retold and forgotten. Growing up, my favorite subject to talk about with my parents was how they grew up, what kind of world they came from, how they passed their childhood.
learning that music and dance bring me comfort, that people disappoint and exceed expectations, that it is easy to love others but not myself.
I have been blessed to have found those who bolster rather than censor me throughout my life
remembering that healing is hard and unintuitive but still happens, almost inevitably, even if not in the ways I expected; remembering that I have so much time left to live and I am allowed to be patient with my process
I come from a multiracial family with such a nuanced racial history that I am no more than one-eighth of any individual race. I thought heterogeneity was the norm... But in high school, people began asking me: "What are you?" I struggled with identifying a personal narrative that fully encompassed my life story. Sometimes, I claim all of my identities. Other times, I am just Hawaiian or Italian. Embarking on this cultural exploration into the broad diversity of humanity has been an eye-opening and motivating experience. I feel more in touch with my mixed-race identity and am more prideful of my roots.
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i think about my parents prayers that i would be okay, that i would grow up with more than them, that our family would be able to survive in this country. i think about my grandparents, my lolos and lolas who died before i was able to meet them, hoping that their grandchildren would have the world. who could have anticipated that in two generations, my family would transcend nations, eras and systems
Desert. Indigenous. Ancient Tradition. Timeless Culture.
Trace your journey from your origin to where you are now, in whole or in part. i come from my ancestors and from the earth. i come from an island that was colonized and put through slavery and genocide. i come from the people who, despite this colonization, were able to survive. i come from other practices of survival such as art and writing. i come from ownership of a queer body and with hope of a queer future.
I came to be from a home, detached yet united, and I am forever linked to my home, community, and family. My understanding of myself today surrounds my background, my ancestors' history, and the past to present.
family, sacrifices, and luck
I find my origin increasingly difficult to trace the more that I learn about my history. Does my origin begin in the countryside of Choson dynasty Korea of farmers and peasants and elites, where Confucianism ruled social relations? Or does it take root later, during Korea's colonization, in the burning of entire villages and the brutal torture of protesters? I am not sure if my family was killed in the post-Kanto Earthquake Korean massacre, if they were oppressive ruling elites in an earlier era, or how many of them now live in North Korea. I am not sure where to begin, in all this history, to define myself. 26
title: mosaic. 2018, collage on canvas when my family goes to the burial grounds each spring, we light incense and our ancestors traverse down the webs of smoke we create to eat with us. mom says this ritual, this fire, is what grants our ancestors passage to here. we bring sticky rice cakes, oranges and boiled eggs and i kneel by the tombstones as smoke ribbons to the sky, as dad once did in the foggy taishan mountains, as mom once did amid the bamboo and banana trees in the fields of her village. as a child of diaspora, it often feels like there are so many iterations of distance between me and the people, culture and land i am from. but i light my incense and collapse these temporal and earthly bounds of being. we inhabit another dimension of space together, all generations at once. by janet chen
the static team Zine editors Ethan Chua Janet Chen
Website editors Ali Zilversmit Tinuola Dada
Community Liaisons Becky Liang Reagan Walker
Zine design Heidi Chen Karissa Dong Momo Hoshi
Webmaster Heidi Chen
Financial officer Reagan Walker
Core Syd Westley Pio Thompson Ely Jay Nez Hee Joo Ko Eva Grant